That fell off quick.
I really wish that I could recommend The Witch From Mercury to newcomers of Gundam, as the franchise is somewhat of a need for something that draws in a new generation of Gundam fans. Unfortunately, TWFM is not that show.
The main appeal of Gundam are the high stakes mecha fights and the nuanced political clashes between opposing factions, and well constructed characters that often clash with each other based on their differing worldviews. TWFM brings none of these things to the table. Of the two people who wrote this iteration of Gundam, I get the feeling that Nakanishi must have really enjoyed his time working on Kaguya-sama and Ookouchi must have suffered a bout of amnesia and forgotten his past experiences working on good mecha series. I suppose that Sunrise came to the conclusion that young people just don’t like mechas, and the only way to usher in a new viewer base was with yuri bait.
My expectations were high after watching the prologue- sick 2D mecha animations, cool sound design, and a world and setup that seemed fairly promising. Right after that must have been when Ookouchi suffered his severe head injury and forgot how to write. We are torn from high intensity stakes and an interesting setting with rife with tragedy and loss, into a bog standard highschool romcom setting. Characters with their own backstories and aspirations are replaced with cookie cutter -dere characters. Different iterations of Gundam can be criticized for different reasons, but partaking in the incestuous writing style that comes from romcoms copying romcoms copying romcoms is not one that should ever be present. This marks the first time the tone and feel of the show are completely thrown off course, which is something you should get used to should you choose to watch this atrocity.
This show doesn’t want to know what it wants to convey. It wants to appeal to every audience and in the end appeals to no audience. It can’t commit to anything. It can’t even commit to it’s pseudo lesbian and pseudo feminist themes. It wants to appeal to old time fans, yuri fans, western and eastern fans, and in the end it appeals to nobody (except maybe the sakuga community who’s been starved of 2D mechs for far too long). The Witch From Mercury could have been the series that brought in an audience who would be interested in Gundam for what actually makes Gundam special.
I find it baffling that anyone could get attached to these characters. There is absolutely nothing compelling about them. Even within the bastardized romcom world, how am I supposed to care about the relationships of characters when I don’t care about the characters to begin with? (It’s not like this can’t be done, go watch Eureka Seven for a great mecha romance anime) If someone asked me about Amuro Ray or Char Aznable, I would have a lot to say about those characters- who they are, what the care about, what their worldviews are, etc. If someone asked me about Suletta or Miorine, it would be more like “Suletta is the one from Mercury and pilots the Gundam. Miorine is that white haired girl who likes tomatoes.” These aren’t the sort of characters that act and think in their own unique way. These are characters who will bend and break in order to act out whatever the script requires of them to do, character consistency be damned. It’s boring, tropey character writing, and there’s no amount of good animation or music that can save you from that.
Speaking of good animation and music, the mecha fights were pretty to look at and hear. I wonder why I didn’t care about what the outcome was going to be… might be because it didn’t matter either way, why would I give a fuck who Miorine marries? Most of the fights in this series are stupid practice battles with either no stakes, or ones that had been lazily shoehorned in about 20 minutes prior because the writers realized that they had gone too long without a mecha fight. It really would have been nice if all those awesome 2D mecha animations had been used over on Hathaway’s flash instead, but whatever.
I know it’s an overused word in today’s discourse about writing in fiction, but Suletta is a Mary Sue character, through and through. I don’t really care about that too much, but it’s a symptom of a larger disease: the infiltration of the modern western writing style. The final episode is a great example of this. A lot of people forgave the 11 episodes of slow tedious garbage because they got to see some blood and explosions in the final episode. I felt like I was watching a JJ Abrams movie, with lots of movement and flashy shit on screen to distract you from the fact that the story is a hot mess. Add in the shiny lighting effects and play the dramatic music and make the audience have a pavlovian response so they think that it’s a cool moment. “Oh, you see this gore? Bet you didn’t see that coming, did ya?” Gone are the days of substance, of the large scale space operas, spanning across the galaxy with nuanced politics and interesting military strategies. This is the era of meaningless spectacle.
