the bad:
- god this show has a problem with women. everything with reccoa really sucked, but also every woman jerid met died, they did all that stuff with four and just decided to do it again but way worse in the same show with rosamia and kind of sarah, and there's all the flipflopping about whether fa is allowed to be a pilot. it's all really bad! emma and haman karn are the only female characters i can think of who don't have anything egregious attached to them, but emma still dies to motivate kamille for the final battle. also sayla doesn't show up and mirai and fraw bow are both housewives. and that's without getting into the things the characters say
- in general the pacing was really weird. scirocco shows up and is mysterious but doesn't do anything or even get named for 10 episodes. it never really makes how strong the titans are or what they're doing clear. there were several points where i had no idea what was happening. it feels more or less like the show is just spinning its wheels for about 20 episodes. unlike the misogyny, none of this was in 0079! the pacing wasn't perfect, but i was never this confused about anything and the white base always had a clear goal it was moving towards that i understood
i don't feel like being too negative, so i think i'll leave it at that. but those are much bigger complaints than anything i had about 0079
the good:
- i like most of the characters. kamille is pretty interesting, and most of the female characters i like even if the show doesn't. especially fa and emma. the legacy characters are almost all really well handled. i love amuro just kind of wallowing in his self pity after the war. he's earned it! but life goes on, and so he needs to get back in the robot. char trying to fight for something instead of purely for revenge is really great stuff as well, though i have no idea how char's counterattack makes any sense. the more minor ones are good as well, kai and hayato got really great bits. you'll notice that i didn't mention the women. i also didn't mention bright, because he shows up and is kind of a nothing character in this. the only thing i remember with him is him telling fa she couldn't pilot anymore and then just changing his mind randomly, which sucks
- jerid was also great. most of the other antagonists were whatever, but jerid eternally failing upwards never failed to entertain me. and when axis and haman karn come in i start to enjoy the titans way more. every time she's not on screen the other characters should be asking "where's haman" both because i want to see her, and also because if you can't see her she might be about to shoot you
- the actual plot stuff aside most of the actual show was decent at worst. whenever haman karn was around they became really good for the most part, which makes me hopeful for zz
- the show does have a lot of stuff that's interesting to think about, and the politics and science fiction stuff probably appealed a lot to a lot of people. but ultimately i think the show had a lot of promising ideas that it mostly didn't stick the landing on
I went to look it up because it was bugging me, I think it's the Alexandria? Tbh I only remember the Argama because it's the hero ship. Hilariously Zeta is probably better earthbound, when in most Gundam series spacebound is always more interesting.
that was it!
i will say the back end has some really good stuff in space
The best of ZZ is also its Earth arcs. It has some notoriously rough space bits.