Preamble

So I'm a Gundam fan. It imprinted itself way back ~2000 with Gundam Wing (which has aged terribly, but I insist still has a lot of great stuff in it). Somewhere around or after college, I dug it up to see if that awesome show I remembered was actually awesome, or if I was just too dumb to know how dumb it was. Then I kept watching, and right now I've seen probably more than most fans. But I was in it for the ahead-of-its-time anti-war messaging, not cool robots. It's only recently I started building the model kits when I was looking for a pandemic hobby.

That's enough for now. Someday I'm sure I'll talk about this more, but for today, I just want to copy down some thoughts on the last two shows I watched: G no Reconguista, and GQuuuuuuuX.

G no Reconguista

Rundown

This is a show I've bounced off more than once, including while it was airing. I couldn't even make it through the movie compilations when they were briefly available. This time I have finally succeeded. I have thoughts. None of them are very strong. Maybe that's the most damning thing.

Story

The plot itself takes you on a tour through the distant future of UC (~1000 years iirc). Throughout the trip, you'll encounter strange and interesting new places that fill a vital role in the status quo, usually accompanied by the introduction of at least one new military faction to complicate the current situation. Then you move on and repeat the cycle before having a final battle on Earth. All in just 26 episodes. It's a bit overstuffed.

I actually already made a post (on reddit) to check my comprehension when I reached the halfway point of the show. It was necessary. This show is filled with blink-and-you'll-miss-it casual exposition that drives the world building and informs the conflict, but also for some reason is hardly worth repeating. There's subtlety and then there is not wanting people to understand what your show is about.

Not only that, the show seems to actively fight viewers who are trying to get a sense of the story purely from context: as I said previously, everyone is so polite and civil to one another that it can be hard to get a sense of the relationships between people and organizations, which are constantly being introduced. The final arc is a battle between at least 6 different factions with at least 3 different alliances consolidating them.

And then they refer to the home base ships all by name, so you need to know which faction is in the Megafauna, the Rattle Python, the Full Moon ship, the Crescent Moon ship, etc. Which Earth faction is the G-IT faction allied with. Which faction is the Mynoritte Towasanga faction allied with. More than any other Gundam I've seen, this one needs a reference card you can refer to.

Characters

Something I said previously is that I love the designs and overall aesthetics of the series. That certainly extends to the character designs. Unfortunately, there's just not a ton to latch on to when it comes to personality. Mask (the Char clone) is one of the better defined characters, belonging to a downtrodden minority, he fights for his own pride and hates protagonist Bellri because of the advantages and legacy he was born with.

After that, we probably spend the most time with Aida, but it's difficult to assign her a personality. She takes on kind of a leadership role, but we don't get to see her do a ton of leading (there was that one time she attended a meeting on her own).

Same with protagonist Bellri himself. The two share a bond (spoilers: they did a Star Wars ) but outside of that... I think they can best be summed up as being part of a youthful next generation who when confronted with the realities of war fight to put an end to the fighting (as opposed to defeating an enemy that needs to be defeated or poses an existential threat like Zeon or the Titans). Klim Nick is a reportedly a genius (yet to be confirmed) and has a fan-girl. Raraiya spends half the series crazy before becoming a real character in the second half. And Noredo... is also there too! (She has a slingshot)

Far and away my favorite character is Steer. If you've seen the show, that probably says something to you. She's the helmsman (helmswoman?), and all she does is shout things really loud in awkward English like she's supposed to be an English speaking foreigner compared to everyone else in the show. She is perfect.

Random Thoughts

(Some spoilers here maybe)

• The best part of the show is the aesthetics. It's super colorful with expressive characters and world building designs
• Building on the aesthetics, there are some great mobile suit and ship designs in the show, not to mention the architecture. They are phased out early, but I love the monkey-faced suits, or the ones with computer monitor heads. The early rival suits (the tall ones that transform for flight) were a favorite too. And the G-Self itself is a great design. (The G Arcane is fine; I might have liked it more but I don't remember it doing all that much despite being a constant presence)
• The animation feels a bit... cheap? Lots of elements on screen feel like they're just still images that are being shifted, shrunk/enlarged, rotated or manipulated in other ways on a moving background. (take a look at the ending credits to see what I mean) It's passable, but it also doesn't impress very often. (Similarly, the openings are made up largely of clips of the show itself)
• I was not expecting casual mass destruction patricide in the epilogue.
• Nor for Bellri to abandon his friends to go climb a mountain on a robot walker (like a cheater!) . I get that he had had his fill of fighting, but it's not like he ever gave up on the Capital Guard or anything.
• The Blu-Ray release was kind of terrible. No worthwhile special features or trailers, and the episode selection menu didn't have episode titles, which made it hard to know which episode I'm on to resume.

In Conclusion

I can't really say this is a must-see. It didn't leave me with much to think about after it was over. It demands a super-human attention span to get the details of the story on the first pass (with imo not a ton of narrative pay-off). If a show like 00 can be called overly dramatic in its story delivery, I think Reconguista has the opposite problem: it's underly dramatic. But it's certainly colorful and can be entertaining to watch though. Perhaps best enjoyed with your brain turned off.

If I ever watch it again, it will probably be via the movies (which afaik have no physical release or permanent streaming home; you can only watch them when they're rotated onto Gundaminfo). I've heard that neither the movies nor tv show is outright superior to the other, so I'm curious what the differences will be. Perhaps it will make the plot a bit more digestible.

GQuuuuuuuX

Rundown

The newest series in the franchise, it just recently finished debuting on Amazon Prime. I don't have Prime, so it took me a while to find an opportunity to watch it. It has Mr. Evangelion attached and the second traditional series (for a certain definition of "traditional") to feature a female protagonist in the starring role (A long overdue innovation in my opinion). It's short at just ~12 episodes, but it's not the first or only series to do this

Story

This show made the controversial choice to be alternate history of the franchise's flagship ongoing story set in the "Universal Century" timeline. Smart and handsome people will know this isn't totally unheard of (shoutout to all the Gundam X fans out there; you can see the whole thing free and legal for almost the first time on Tubi right now!), but while in the past it's been technically not UC with a wink and a nod, here it is explicit. It's a "what-if" story, and (spoilers!) it leans into that.

There's not much to say on this one for me, so... ** In Conclusion

It was fine. Not for me, and strays a bit from what I think a Gundam "should be" (much like when 00 introduced aliens), but it falls nicely in line with what I expect from projects with Hideaki Anno attached post Eva. Seed isn't for me either, and while I'll never not voice my opinions on the series when invited to, I do wish the many fans out there all the best with it, as I will with GQX (I don't think it needs a sequel though).

It did have some nice music and animation, but I wasn't really a fan of any of the new/revised MS designs. The characters designs are fine, but as for the characters themselves... I prefer Suletta (the underrated first female protagonist of the franchise), thanks, and that's all I'll say about that.

GQX, being so closely tied to 0079, falls somewhere around "The Origin" for me. I go back and forth on whether I consider it better or worse, but both make 0079 worse imo. I wonder if I'll ever bother to watch either again

But not bad at all! Just… not for me