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Ethiser posted:Hey now Soma was cool. Now that Marie person who happened to look just like her, she sucked. Yeah, the thing is I really didn't like her too much at the beginning of Season 1 and I couldn't stand her after the whole Marie thing started happening. There was about 8 or 9 episodes where she was pretty cool with me though in the last few episodes of S1 and first few of S2.
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Nov 8, 2013 14:35
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Soma's arc would have been better if she'd ended up offing Allelujah in the fight where both their suits crash onto that island. Imagine if Marie resurfaced at that moment and realised she's killed the person she shared such a deep bond with, and went on to join CB and pilot a rebuilt Kyrios to carry on her and Allelujah's shared desire to put an end to people being used as super soldiers. It'd set up a neat contrast with Andrei being so eager to kill Sergei, and she'd probably do more with the Gundam than Allelujah did, since she's a better pilot and all. Plus no MARIE MARIE MARIE MARIE MARIE
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Nov 8, 2013 15:08
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Soma wasn't even an ace pilot. She was a super soldier, yes, but she didn't actually accomplish anything in the cockpit in the series prior to cashing in her chips and joining Celestial Being. There's seriously a scene in season 1 where the GN-Xs drive off the Thrones for the first time and Soma has to ask Sergei why the people on the base below them are cheering because she's never experienced actually winning a battle before.
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Nov 8, 2013 15:11
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Darth Walrus posted:Honestly, ZZ really isn't as bad as its rep suggests. Moon-Moon sucks, sure, but the series as a whole is a lot less dull than SEED and a lot less terrible than Destiny or AGE. I mean, it has Haman as the main villain, for a start. I didn't really mean to lump ZZ in with the other two, though I'm still definitely left with the lower tier stuff now, which is a shame. OAV wise I've still got 8th MS Team to go and and Unicorn, but there's not much point watching Unicorn before ZZ.
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Nov 8, 2013 15:17
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TARDISman posted:Now I want to start showing my girlfriend some Gundam stuff, since she's super interested in the modeling and we've been watching a bit of Build Fighters together. I'm thinking we do the original movie trilogy followed by Zeta, CCA and then Unicorn? Yeah, that's the way to go I'd say, although I'd say consider throwing in 0080 and the 08th MS Team for a bit of extra flavor. Sure, they have zero impact on UC history and are just little side stories, but they're good. 0080 is only 6 episodes long but it's fantastic and hands down my favorite Gundam OVA.
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Nov 8, 2013 15:33
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I always saw Quattro as Char trying to work within the system to make things better, see if Amuro's point of view would work, at the end he realizes that would never happen and went with his plan in CCA.
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Nov 8, 2013 15:39
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Darth Walrus posted:Honestly, ZZ really isn't as bad as its rep suggests. It kind of is. It's not outright bad like Destiny or AGE, but there's an abrupt tone shift (I can seriously name the exact moment the show went from a comedy to standard Gundam), the plot drags on, the characters show very muted reactions to death, and CCA's announcement gutted its ending. It has its good moments for sure (it really picks up near the end), but there's a whole lot of mediocre/bad to sift through. And if you don't like Beecher or Mondo immediately, man you are going to hate ZZ. BlitzBlast fucked around with this message at 16:59 on Nov 8, 2013 |
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Nov 8, 2013 16:53
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Azubah posted:I always saw Quattro as Char trying to work within the system to make things better, see if Amuro's point of view would work, at the end he realizes that would never happen and went with his plan in CCA. It's the other way around, really. Amuro is rather apolitical until he gets stirred up by Char and essentially takes Char's reformist position in Zeta until the end of CCA.
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Nov 8, 2013 17:05
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BlitzBlast posted:It kind of is. It's not outright bad like Destiny or AGE, but there's an abrupt tone shift (I can seriously name the exact moment the show went from a comedy to standard Gundam), the plot drags on, the characters show very muted reactions to death, and CCA's announcement gutted its ending. It has its good moments for sure (it really picks up near the end), but there's a whole lot of mediocre/bad to sift through. I think the exact moment I stopped thinking "this show is unwatchable" was during the desert arc around episode 25. The lowest lows were definitely early-show shenanigans and moon-moon, but I feel like most of the show was just completely unmemorable. All in all I think ZZ was pretty mediocre/bad with a few moments of cool thrown in, like you said. It was really hard to go into coming off of Zeta, especially seeing Bright and Yazan turned into clowns after how much of a down note zeta ended on.
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Nov 8, 2013 19:46
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The best comedy part of ZZ Gundam is Tigerbaum because of the cross-dressing resulting in everyone calling Judau the ugliest girl they have ever seen.
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Nov 8, 2013 19:55
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Meow Tse-tung posted:I think the exact moment I stopped thinking "this show is unwatchable" was during the desert arc around episode 25. Haha, you should've stuck it out. I'd say the best part of the show starts towards the end of the desert arc and lasts until they go back to space.
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Nov 8, 2013 20:04
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ZZ is objectively the best Gundam.
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Nov 8, 2013 21:18
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Gammatron 64 posted:Back to the Char business, I'm pretty sure Full Frontal is a clone, but it's ambiguous enough that it's open to interpretation. I could believe that Char survived CCA and as time went on, his ideals became corrupted. Although, if Full Frontal is Char, then how come Amuro's dead but he isn't? It's interesting how he remembers CCA, but maybe they implanted him with Char's memories, or maybe he's just lying. He's pretty obviously not Char, Minerva made that much clear last episode, and he isn't even really a clone of Char in that regards. He is interesting in that he's a "Char clone" without being a Char clone. He mimics Char on the surface level but isn't at all like Char beneath.
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Nov 8, 2013 22:11
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Spelling Mitsake posted:Haha, you should've stuck it out. I'd say the best part of the show starts towards the end of the desert arc and lasts until they go back to space. Oh, I did. I meant that's the point where I thought it became decent.
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Nov 9, 2013 00:43
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I know people complain about the tonal shift from Zeta to ZZ, but I appreciated it more than anything. I had fun throughout ZZ from beginning to end, though I will concede that Beecha and whatshisface are the worst.
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Nov 9, 2013 02:04
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Shinjobi posted:I know people complain about the tonal shift from Zeta to ZZ, but I appreciated it more than anything. I had fun throughout ZZ from beginning to end, though I will concede that Beecha and whatshisface are the worst. Beecha and Mondo. From way, way beyond-o.
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Nov 9, 2013 03:49
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At least they led to the greatest scene in all of Gundam. "The Gundam is coming!" "AND IT'S COVERED IN BOMBS!" "And it's actually using them to surprisingly great effect, wow."
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Nov 9, 2013 05:17
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The fact that AEUG basically become the Titans seems to be key to understanding Char in CCA. In Zeta AEUG is espousing sort of a revolutionary rhetoric. Its not altogether different from what Char says in CCA just without all the killing of everybody on earth. But by the time CCA comes around, all of Char's AEUG buddies are all basically the enforcers of the status quo. Sure its way better than the fascist Titans running everything, but they don't really seem to be working towards the revolutionary ideals of Zeta. The problem is that all of this stuff happens off screen in ZZ and in between ZZ and CCA.
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Nov 9, 2013 09:04
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JoeCL posted:Its not altogether different from what Char says in CCA just without all the killing of everybody on earth. This isn't even what Char wanted in CCA. He called his shot long enough in advance that, if the Federation was interested in saving lives, they could have evacuated. If you've seen ZZ though, you'd know they absolutely weren't; once again they suppressed the warnings so only the chosen elite could get out of dodge. Char's goal was to render Earth uninhabitable, but in such a way that the people living on it could survive long enough to leave for space. It's all way less insane than it looks at first blush.
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Nov 9, 2013 11:26
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If Char had succeeded the OYW would be a brief footnote next to the genocidal bloodbath that would have followed immediately after everyone realized what had just happened.
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Nov 9, 2013 11:31
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Evacuate...the entire Earth. Seriously? Do you actually believe yourself when you say that? Even if he'd given them several months worth of warning it's just not feasible to be shipping that many people off, especially given the panic such an announcement would generate and the fact you'd have to try and locate and round up many people in less technologically savvy areas like the rainforests and deserts. The cost of it would be pretty mind boggling as well I would imagine, given how many ships would have to be in constant use ferrying people up to space along with getting them to the jets. It'd probably bankrupt the EF and every major travel company besides. And that's even if they were flush with cash, which they explicitly aren't. They'd have to forcibly take money from all the richest companies and people to afford to do it more than likely. Char's offer was never sincere. He knew they couldn't do it even if they wanted to and would have ripped themselves apart in the effort if they'd tried. If you really believe it was, that they could have actually gotten everyone, or even close to everyone off the Earth I have no idea what to say to you. It's exactly as insane as it sounds. Edit: Just to give an idea of how silly this is, there were apparently about 2 billion people left on Earth around the time of the One Year War. Which killed half of them. So let's say the population of Earth around the time of Char's Counterattack is 1 billion to round it out, even though it'd presumably have grown a bit in the intervening years. Now let's say you just abandon people in less hospitable and traveled areas, go with kids first, city folks only etc. so that you pare the number down to 1/4 of that at 250 million - at 10, 000 trips a day using planes carrying 200 people each you'd still need 125 days to evacuate them. 4 months to evacuate even a quarter of the population at frankly ludicrous numbers of trips per day. Yea, totally feasible. tsob fucked around with this message at 12:16 on Nov 9, 2013 |
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Nov 9, 2013 11:42
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Heck, even ignoring the logistical problems, what about people living out in the mountains in a log cabin, eating off wild bears? There are people that the governments and databases of the world either have no record of or lost track of decades ago, and even if we assume that by Gundam's era every group of uncontacted peoples has been, well, contacted and chose to become part of modern society, there's still individuals who would leave society for one reason or another.
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Nov 9, 2013 11:59
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Speaking of earth, what happened to it between unicorn and V gundam? V is the only UC series I haven't seen (Only 15 episodes or so) and it almost seemed to me like earth was messed up pretty badly. From what I saw, I remember lots of overgrown scenery and the earth federation seemed to have no real power. Was there some sort of natural catastrophe, or just the eventual shift in power to space as earth gradually lost its influence?
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Nov 9, 2013 12:18
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The EF had been on a downward slope ever since... the OYW, really. The evnets of Unicorn is supposed to explain the remaining shift over to Victory-verse, but I don't know what the ending is exactly.
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Nov 9, 2013 12:23
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Meow Tse-tung posted:Speaking of earth, what happened to it between unicorn and V gundam? V is the only UC series I haven't seen (Only 15 episodes or so) and it almost seemed to me like earth was messed up pretty badly. From what I saw, I remember lots of overgrown scenery and the earth federation seemed to have no real power. Was there some sort of natural catastrophe, or just the eventual shift in power to space as earth gradually lost its influence? A couple of things. Overcrowding and the ecological effects of WMDs like nukes and colony drops during the OYW and its successor conflicts had horrific consequences for Earth's biosphere, to the point where ZZ has Europe being terraformed into a continent-sized rainforest to slow down the CO2 buildup and Victory shows us a planet that's almost dead, with the skeletons of sea creatures piled on the shoreline, smog covering the sky, and all the vegetation an unhealthy shade of brown. As for the political situation, the Federation's corruption and incompetence slowly catches up with it over the Universal Century, and the events of Unicorn and F91 seem to have weakened it enough that it collapsed completely before Victory. As a result, the Earth Sphere of Victory is an anarchic place squabbled over by a dozen petty nationlets (the remnants of the Federation among them), and the new dominant political force is the Jovian empire-cult of Zanscare.
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Nov 9, 2013 13:22
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JoeCL posted:The fact that AEUG basically become the Titans seems to be key to understanding Char in CCA. In Zeta AEUG is espousing sort of a revolutionary rhetoric. Its not altogether different from what Char says in CCA just without all the killing of everybody on earth. But by the time CCA comes around, all of Char's AEUG buddies are all basically the enforcers of the status quo. Sure its way better than the fascist Titans running everything, but they don't really seem to be working towards the revolutionary ideals of Zeta. The problem is that all of this stuff happens off screen in ZZ and in between ZZ and CCA. The AEUG doesn't become the Titans because there is no more AEUG by the time Quattro makes his exit. They're pretty much totally obliterated by the end of Zeta and the only survivors are Char, Amuro, Bright, and the remainder of the Argama's crew at the beginning of ZZ. Bright, Amuro, and the remaining crew of the Argama do end up in Londo Bell, but that's because their primary interest is to try to prevent another OYW or Gryps Conflict that will kill another billion people. Char as of CCA is a total psychopath who doesn't give a gently caress about anything anymore and is masking it with a bunch of bullshit.
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Nov 9, 2013 13:40
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Let's not forget CCA Char gave us lines such as "Amuro, I am about to do something truly terrible." and that one about being fine with becoming the worst murderer in history if it meant realizing his ideals. He never believed for a second it wouldn't be a massacre, because he knew very well how the Federation would react, and that was part of the reason he went ahead with his plan in the first place.
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Nov 9, 2013 16:09
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Honestly, I don't even blame the EF for not announcing it in this case. What are they supposed to do, let people panic and tear society apart for the couple of days or whatever that Char had given as warning? Hold a lotto and evacuate a lucky few percent while the rest of society descended to anarchy? They wouldn't have been able to do poo poo anyways, and Char knew it.
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Nov 9, 2013 16:23
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tsob posted:Evacuate...the entire Earth. Seriously? Do you actually believe yourself when you say that? Even if he'd given them several months worth of warning it's just not feasible to be shipping that many people off, especially given the panic such an announcement would generate and the fact you'd have to try and locate and round up many people in less technologically savvy areas like the rainforests and deserts. There aren't that many people actually on Earth, is the thing. The majority of the resources and population is in Space; the Earth is pretty much the home to the elite and those who are subjugated by the elite. The Earth was a glorified slave-state that not only enslaved its own populace with its finances, but the colonies as well. The EF had the finances and time to evacuate the Earth many times over, the issue is that they didn't care. This same thing happened during ZZ Gundam when the Axis Zeon dropped a colony on Dublin. The EF had all the time in the world to warn people, but they didn't since "hey, who cares about a bunch of rubes?" poo poo, let's not forget that they literally sell the asteroid to the Zeon in CCA because "hey, SPACE GOLD". Kanos posted:The AEUG doesn't become the Titans because there is no more AEUG by the time Quattro makes his exit. They're pretty much totally obliterated by the end of Zeta and the only survivors are Char, Amuro, Bright, and the remainder of the Argama's crew at the beginning of ZZ. Londo Bell IS essentially the AEUG. There was more to the AEUG than just the Argama's crew; there was background elements and what not. Londo Bell's staff is largely made up of former elements of AEUG. This is something they've called attention to. The irony that they're now doing the TItans' job is pretty palpable. Amuro and Bright become "peacekeepers" that enable an inherently evil regime, with their influence limited by the fact that the EF doesn't trust them at all anymore, and with no chance to change the situation. Bright's own son ends up becoming an anti-Earth rebel who Bright is forced to execute, making his failure to affect any change on the system all the more complete. Zorak fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Nov 9, 2013 |
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Nov 9, 2013 17:49
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tsob posted:Evacuate...the entire Earth. Seriously? Do you actually believe yourself when you say that? Even if he'd given them several months worth of warning it's just not feasible to be shipping that many people off, especially given the panic such an announcement would generate and the fact you'd have to try and locate and round up many people in less technologically savvy areas like the rainforests and deserts. The cost of it would be pretty mind boggling as well I would imagine, given how many ships would have to be in constant use ferrying people up to space along with getting them to the jets. It'd probably bankrupt the EF and every major travel company besides. And that's even if they were flush with cash, which they explicitly aren't. They'd have to forcibly take money from all the richest companies and people to afford to do it more than likely. Earth was pretty thinly populated by CCA, probably a few hundreds of millions and almost all of those were the one-tenth-of-one-percenters that probably had their own spaceplanes anyway. (Imagine CCA as the continuation of OWS rather than OYW for some fun head games - pretty sure EF would nationalize everything in an elite evacuation effort.) I don't remember where Axis was going to hit exactly, but it would be simple to predict and get away from. The resulting "nuclear winter" would kill everything on earth over the following months, yes, but not immediately. The remaining population could survive on heavy coats and decreasing amounts of fresh vegetables/food dropped from space in evacuation shuttles making the return trip until their number came up for evacuation into space. Edit: Zorak says it better.
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Nov 9, 2013 18:04
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tsob posted:Evacuate...the entire Earth. Seriously? Do you actually believe yourself when you say that? 80% of humanity lives in space.
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Nov 9, 2013 18:17
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This is all utterly inconsequential anyway when you remember that the whole reason Char is dropping a colony on Earth is as the ultimate symbol of his failure to escape his past and the influence of the previous generation, and has thus been doomed to repeat their mistakes both figuratively and literally. Logistics Analysis is kind of missing the whole point of the thing in that Char has more or less become the same as the Zabis because he hasn't been able to strike out "on his own."
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Nov 9, 2013 18:41
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Raku posted:80% of humanity lives in space. Yea, I know. Which is why I gave actual numbers based off the best information I could find for population numbers in UC, which, not surprisingly aren't too detailed. There's apparently 10 billion or so living in space, to 2 billion on Earth around the time of the OYW. I wasn't able to find any numbers for anything after that and I certainly don't recall anything saying that there was more pushes to get even that number down to the hundreds of millions Midjact is claiming, though if you've got a different source set of numbers I'm happy to see them. mr. stefan posted:This is all utterly inconsequential anyway when you remember that the whole reason Char is dropping a colony on Earth is as the ultimate symbol of his failure to escape his past and the influence of the previous generation, and has thus been doomed to repeat their mistakes both figuratively and literally. Logistics Analysis is kind of missing the whole point of the thing in that Char has more or less become the same as the Zabis because he hasn't been able to strike out "on his own." Logistical analysis is there to prove that even with forewarning the idea of evacuating the Earth in time to avoid large death tolls is pretty silly and that Char never meant to avoid those tolls in the first place. He just didn't care one way or another. All that mattered to him was his ideals, drat the people it cost to see them through. tsob fucked around with this message at 19:00 on Nov 9, 2013 |
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Nov 9, 2013 18:52
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mr. stefan posted:This is all utterly inconsequential anyway when you remember that the whole reason Char is dropping a colony on Earth is as the ultimate symbol of his failure to escape his past and the influence of the previous generation, and has thus been doomed to repeat their mistakes both figuratively and literally. Logistics Analysis is kind of missing the whole point of the thing in that Char has more or less become the same as the Zabis because he hasn't been able to strike out "on his own." Not quite sure where you're getting that? Plus Char never dropped a colony. The whole point was more or less to try to force humanity to exit the cycle of wars over the Earth which had cost billions of lives for really no point, as well as to eliminate the political bodies that were profiting off of it. He's essentially trying to end the stupid wars in total, what since literally every war in the Universal Century is a rather pointless tug of war over a planet that humanity at that point had largely out-grown. The population of the Earth had been further sapped by the One Year War, and had become even more of a playground for the elite. The Zabis wanted to conquer the Earth in order to establish their regime. It was always a power play, there wasn't any idealism. If anything, Char's aligning more with the ideals of his father, Zeon Zum Deikun, the fellow the Zabis assassinated in order to seize power. The Zabis were always about seizing military power even in their various "resurrections" (ZZ Gundam, the remnants in Unicorn). Char meanwhile in AEUG made it pretty clear his goal was to overthrow the Earth-ruled political system and allow the colonies to govern themselves. At first in AEUG he basically ran away from this by throwing away his influence to just pilot and fight, since the kind of thing needed to pull that off is, well, incredible. By the end he finally assumes that role, and by CCA he's actually acting on it. Unicorn further expands on this. Remember: Anaheim were willing to give away the Laplace box now if the Zeon remnant had actually intended to follow Char/Zeon Zum's path, their fear however was that they wanted it not to end the power structure but to seize it by walking the path of the Zabis. Zorak fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Nov 9, 2013 |
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Nov 9, 2013 18:53
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Zorak posted:There aren't that many people actually on Earth, is the thing. The majority of the resources and population is in Space; the Earth is pretty much the home to the elite and those who are subjugated by the elite. Not to defend the plutocratic 1%, but there is a wonderful Lincoln quote for this: quote:But you will not abide the election of a Republican president! In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, "Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!" The idea that he is somehow not responsible for the deaths that are going to result because the federation 'makes him' do it, is pretty... disgusting honestly. Char effectively gives up on the idea of accomplishing his goals through anything short of mass murder, and once he reaches that point he really is abdicating the high ground, particularly since he has no proof that everything will suddenly be better once everyone is up in space. Its entirely possible, in fact likely that even if the federation collapses a new group will spring up and find new ways of oppressing humanity. Also, its a little disingenuous to say that Char buys axis for SPACE GOLD. Yeah he pays for it, but the more important part is that he agrees to fully surrender and disarm his troops to the Federation in exchange for axis. Are they pretty stupid for giving it to him? Probably. But then again, I don't think anyone in UC up to that point would have thought someone would be crazy enough to take a giant fuckoff asteroid, steal and then load it with every nuke they can get their hands on, and then attempt to throw it onto earth to kill every living thing on the planet. That is pretty loving nuts after all. quote:Not quite sure where you're getting that? Plus Char never dropped a colony. He does drop 5th Luna on Federation headquarters in CCA, leveling a decent sized city and killing probably a million or so people in the process. quote:Logistical analysis is there to prove that even with forewarning the idea of evacuating the Earth in time to avoid large death tolls is pretty silly and that Char never meant to avoid those tolls in the first place. He just didn't care one way or another. All that mattered to him was his ideals, drat the people it cost to see them through. Its pretty much this in my opinion. Keep in mind that Char's Counter attack takes place over the course of two weeks. Char declares war on February 27, 0093. On March 3rd he captures Fifth Luna and throws it at Federation headquarters. Three days later the Federation signs a peace agreement with Char, to disarm his troops in exchange for Axis. Char fakes disarmament on the 12th of March, attempts to drop Axis, and is dead by the 14th. Char never gives the Federation any chance to evacuate the drop zones (not that it would be reasonably possible) and the best possible case is that roughly One billion people are forced to relocate from the planet of their birth into space, assuming that the Federation has the capability of transporting and housing all of those people, and that the resulting nuclear winter doesn't make travel into space significantly more dangerous/impossible. Edit: Also I think some posters underestimate the effects of nuclear winter. A bad nuclear exchang for exampel, would imperal food supplies for the planet. Its not a matter of eating less vegtables, so much as that the weather would be below freezing in the summer in major agricultural areas. Food would be incredibly scarce unless brought down from the colonies, which they'd probably have to do considering how long it would take to evacuate earth. To give an idea, at the height of colonization of space, it took ten years to move four billion people into space, from UC 0040 to UC 0050. Even in Gundam its not easy to move than many people. Then again, a lot of them would probably be dead... so that would help. Caros fucked around with this message at 19:41 on Nov 9, 2013 |
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Nov 9, 2013 19:24
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Zorak posted:Not quite sure where you're getting that? Plus Char never dropped a colony. The responsibility of the next generation to grow beyond the last one, as well as the dangers of the past generation forcing their control upon the next, are pretty constant themes in Tomino's Gundam work stretching all the way from MSG to Turn A (the villains of Turn A are literally a bunch of history otaku who want to recreate the wars of the Black History.) Also Axis is basically a space colony in all but name since about 30,000 people were living there for about a decade. quote:The whole point was more or less to try to force humanity to exit the cycle of wars over the Earth which had cost billions of lives for really no point, as well as to eliminate the political bodies that were profiting off of it. He's essentially trying to end the stupid wars in total, what since literally every war in the Universal Century is a rather pointless tug of war over a planet that humanity at that point had largely out-grown. The population of the Earth had been further sapped by the One Year War, and had become even more of a playground for the elite. Thing is, it's a pretty logical deduction that a forced exodus by way of violent action is going to do more or less the exact opposite of "stop war." People are going to be pissed off and resentful and are going to take it out on the people they feel are responsible, even if it makes no logical sense to do so - This is another thing that pretty consistently carries through Tomino's work, that people are not loving rational when under stress, that people do not behave predictably to outside stimuli, and more than a few characters have ended up dead because they refuse to acknowledge it. Char's plan in CCA would have done nothing but perpetuate the same cycle that had been existing because in the end, Earth is just a symbol, and senseless wars and violence would have continued with just a different choice in reasons. quote:The Zabis wanted to conquer the Earth in order to establish their regime. It was always a power play, there wasn't any idealism. If anything, Char's aligning more with the ideals of his father, Zeon Zum Deikun, the fellow the Zabis assassinated in order to seize power. The Zabis were always about seizing military power even in their various "resurrections" (ZZ Gundam, the remnants in Unicorn). The key flaw in your argument here is that in Char's character arc, his stint as Quattro represents the only time in his life that he was actively trying to throw off the shackles of his past. Throughout MSG he's trying to gain revenge for his father's death and in the end all it gained him was separation from his remaining family, the death of the few people he called friends and one of the only women he ever cared about, and the realization that he basically solved nothing by killing the Zabis. In Zeta he's thrown away his family name, refuses to acknowledge that he's related to the founder of Zeon, and actively resists using his past to further himself, and instead tries to help purely through his own methods and reasons. At the end of Zeta he's essentially been pulled back in, had the role of Char of Zeon pushed back onto him, and come CCA he's literally committing atrocity in his father's name, even though Deikun himself would have never supported action that drastic. Compare Amuro, who pretty much casts off his ties to the past at basically every turn and refuses to impose his will upon those who follow after him, and as a result actually inspires people to transcend being mere humans at the very end (his choice to sacrifice his life leading both Neo Zeon and Londo Bell forces to join together, creating the psychoframe energy field that pushes Axis back,) as opposed to Char's method just leading into the same cycle that has been happening all along despite his claims to the contrary.
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Nov 9, 2013 19:47
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Quattro wasn't about forging a new identity and trying to find his own path; it was him running away from his responsibilities. Char truly believes in his father's ideology and believes in forging the path for the Newtypes to flourish, but as Quattro he can't do that. He's "just a pilot." He gets bossed around by bureaucrats and corporate executives. By not once again taking up the mantle of Char/Casval and taking responsibility himself, he's basically betraying himself and his ideals. In Zeta he is repeatedly called a coward for this.
Mecha Gojira fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Nov 9, 2013 |
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Nov 9, 2013 20:31
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The thing about Char is that he's a hosed up dude. He has his own strong motivations and ideals but they were damaged by the fact that he was raised by Jimba Ral effectively as an anti-Zabi guided weapon of revenge. He's not really in a good position to be a leader because deep inside he's still that hosed up guy even if he really really doesn't want to be, and almost everything he does is distorted by that lens. Both the original Gundam novels and The Origin kind of drive home that Jimba Ral hosed Char up but good. The original series is a little less obvious about it but still focused on the idea that Char is so focused on his revenge that it has kind of distorted everything else about him as a person. Char really wants, to some degree, to be Casval but he can't quite pull it off due to his own problems. In the end he lives and dies as Char Aznable. The "Casval" aspect is also kind of what Full Frontal is missing and which Minerva calls out. Full Frontal is a Char clone but he lacks the other elements that make up the real Char. The real Char was a hosed up guy but he was a hosed up guy with an ideology at his core. Full Frontal is just all the bitter 'gently caress those guys' elements of Char without what lies beneath. Char's a pitiable character because in another world, with less hosed up people, he could have done something amazing. He comes remarkably close at times but in the end he just can't do it. It's partially the Zabi's fault, partially Jimba Ral's fault, and partially his own excesses and weaknesses. I don't think we're ever supposed to believe CCA would have had a positive effect if it succeeded because Char, the hosed up guy he was, was at its core. Like everything else Char does, it's unfortunately corrupted and eventually destroyed by his own flaws. ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 22:47 on Nov 9, 2013 |
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Nov 9, 2013 22:31
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Does G Gundam even have a Char clone? Would it be Schwarz Bruder? Maybe Urabe?
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Nov 9, 2013 22:51
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| # ? Jun 10, 2024 14:55 |
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Sonata Mused posted:Does G Gundam even have a Char clone? Would it be Schwarz Bruder? Maybe Urabe? Schwarz is usually used as the "Char clone" for G whenever they do joke pictures or whatever and thematically is the closest character although he has a hell of a lot of differences. Urube is basically a Zabi with a shiny half-mask.
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Nov 9, 2013 22:55
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