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 appreciate your opinion, but I love Zeta the most so I'm gonna go yell in a corner now lol
i liked it! i just think the misogyny was bad and most of the show wasn't as good as the last ~15 episodes
i just think the misogyny was bad and most of the show wasn’t as good as the last ~15 episodes
This is pretty much all pre-Turn-A Tomino-directed anime, lmao
it wasn't 0079, or at least the pacing issues weren't there and the misogyny was way less prominent
I think 0079 got cancelled mid-run, which probably made a snappier show. A 10 episode stretch where nothing really happens tends to be a staple in the series from Zeta onwards.
Zeta and Victory Gundam are probably among the worst for the misogyny (from what I've seen). He seemed to sort his shit out around Turn A, thankfully.
ZZ does have some :bruh-moment:s, including a character who is named after a :libertarian-alert: magazine, but it's a solid show if you can get past the questionable parts.
it got canceled at like episode 40 and they got a few more to finish up, so they could have had 10 episodes of nothing in the middle if they wanted
Awesome! I also finished it just a few months ago and thought it was pretty neat
definitely not perfect though.
Yeah I'm not qualified to touch on the misogyny so I won't, but the constant fridgeing is pretty egregious. Also I'm pretty sure I'm like 20 episodes behind you because I got sidetracked by Nier Automata lol.
I think in terms of the shows politics/setting- this is made in 85/86, we're just in the middle of Reagan's run, and the New Left is reeling. The Titans are this weird mish-mash of NATO and Soviet aesthetics, with their mecha being basically Operation Paperclipped versions of their Space Nazi counterparts, in what is a very pointed critique of American Imperialism (and to a much lesser extent, Soviet authoritarianism). If the OG MSG was a rather faithful retelling of WW2 by those who lived through the war as children, what Zeta Gundam is is a power fantasy for Leftist student radicals of the time, made by frustrated Leftists, of the idea that you can just quit the student movement and jump into your giant robot and perform REAL revolution and stop imperialism in its tracks- the AEUG is that romanticised, unproblematized ideal of a resistance force like the Rebel Alliance is in Star Wars (and Char is basically Che in this show). And maybe that's the issue- to reflect that power fantasy of the ease of resistance, the show doesn't depict firm geographical borders- everything is porous and transitory, from which points in space the spaceships are in to the factions the characters side with, so what's left is just the vague outlines of ideologies and goals. Without the steady guide of history, the storytelling becomes muddy.
Char's Counterattack spoilers
Char's arc in CCA is that he's gone from the born again Leftist he is in Zeta to burnt out Post-Left and he becomes so black-pilled that he thinks the only way he'll be able to achieve his (ultimately noble) goals is to revive fascism. :doomer: Watching Zeta now is retroactively making everything in CCA and beyond even more tragic for me, because I only knew him as a space nazi and not this fucking hero. :doomjak:
that reading works for me, and it does feel like it explains why the show feels so blurry when it comes to geopolitical details
early Zeta
The episodes where Emma first joins really fucked with me cause they just kept going back and forth between the two ships so much I lost track rofl
yeah i really wish they made the insides of the radish meaningfully different from the argama. put up some wallpaper or something, i can only tell which is which if i see henken, and that isn't a guaranteed thing either
I think they were going with the lack of visual distinction to hammer home that it was a civil war and the sides were sorta interchangeable, but my god is it confusing when the only meaningful difference is the uniforms when one factions dress code is basically 'anything goes'.
the radish and argama are the 2 aeug ships lmao. but the titans ships are also basically the same. at least axis looks distinct
Oh lol right! Yeah later on I had to keep a running tally of shipboard personnel, which I clearly didn't do a good job of since I can't even remember the ship names :data-laughing:
lets see, there's the argama and the radish, there's the jupitris... that's all i can remember. i know there was another titans ship that kept showing up, but whatever.
details kept changing from episode to episode, and i don't think of myself as too detail oriented but it got to be a bit much
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.
The best of ZZ is also its Earth arcs. It has some notoriously rough space bits.
that was it!
i will say the back end has some really good stuff in space
There is nothing more soul-wrenching than a terrible show with redeeming qualities
i wouldn't even call it terrible, it's a decent show that just isn't nearly as good as 0079
