I haven't watched it yet, but I heard that the director did some Warhammer 40k fan film before this, so my full expectation is "Wow! Cool Space Prussians!"
So many UC spinoffs miss out on the interesting bit about Zeon - that they were a colonized people whose anti-Imperial movement got co-opted by monarchists and fascists. There's space for Zeon to be sympathetic, like the Africa arc in ZZ, but I think the 0080 and 0083 OVAs dialing up the Zeon aesthetics = super German/nazi really pushed the gross military otaku obsession with them.
Also - the new show looks like total ass, and I say this as someone who enjoyed MS IGLOO lol
Lord Inquisitor was good, especially since it leaned into Inquisitors are often no more than crooked cops. So I figured Requiem might have a similar tone. LOL nope.
But yeah. Zeon is so on-the-nose Imperial Japan: a country fighting off European colonizers only to become colonizers themselves that carried out some of the worst atrocities in human history. Like you say, though, this has attracted otaku and wehrbs. Bandai isn't going to chase them away because they buy merch.
I haven't watched it yet, but I heard that the director did some Warhammer 40k fan film before this, so my full expectation is
"Wow! Cool Space Prussians!" 
So many UC spinoffs miss out on the interesting bit about Zeon - that they were a colonized people whose anti-Imperial movement got co-opted by monarchists and fascists. There's space for Zeon to be sympathetic, like the Africa arc in ZZ, but I think the 0080 and 0083 OVAs dialing up the Zeon aesthetics = super German/nazi really pushed the gross military otaku obsession with them.
Also - the new show looks like total ass, and I say this as someone who enjoyed MS IGLOO lol
Lord Inquisitor was good, especially since it leaned into Inquisitors are often no more than crooked cops. So I figured Requiem might have a similar tone. LOL nope.
But yeah. Zeon is so on-the-nose Imperial Japan: a country fighting off European colonizers only to become colonizers themselves that carried out some of the worst atrocities in human history. Like you say, though, this has attracted otaku and wehrbs. Bandai isn't going to chase them away because they buy merch.