Musings on Gundam Wing
Jun. 13th, 2020 05:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tiggymalvern
So following on from this post, I did go back and rewatch Gundam Wing. Conveniently it turned out to be on hulu, which was a big improvement over me digging out my bootleg DVDs with the bad subs. (And can I just say that I absolutely LOVE hulu for making all their anime available as subs? I still get hives when I remember buying a Black Butler OVA stream from Amazon and then discovered it was a dub only. Ugh.)
And funnily enough, Gundam Wing was better than I was expecting it to be. Okay, my expectations were appallingly low - just because you loved something around the year 2000 doesn't mean it's held up well, and it had obvious flaws even then. So I went in thinking it would be terrible, but I really enjoyed it all over again.
All the stuff I loved about it the first time is still there. Not just the characters I adore who grab me, but the factionalism of it. The way that the Alliance splinters off into Oz, and then Oz splinters off into the Treize faction, and the colonies splinter off into White Fang. And in the middle of it are these child soldiers who just want to defend their home, but by half way through they can't even figure out who they're supposed to be fighting and who are supposed to be allies anymore. The way the series handled the war so it was messy and all shades of grey was always the best thing about it. The tone of it starts out all anime-typical, 'Yay! We're the good guys!' and then goes a long way down from there.
I understood Zechs rather better this time round. At least until the very end - his decisions over the last eight or so episodes still don't gel, whatever explanations he gave for them. He was a smart, patient, manipulative guy who was willing to do bad things for a good cause, until suddenly he turns all megalomaniac. Oh well.
Treize - yeah, he was batshit the first time I watched it, and he still is. A rich, entitled guy living in his bubble of rich entitlement, surrounded by people just like himself, and spouting crap that could ONLY ever make sense to someone with no connection at all to the real world. Just how the hell could anybody listen to that dude and put him in charge? But hey, here I am in 2020 living in a world where people elected Trump as President, so I guess it's not as far-fetched as it seemed back when I first watched...
Dorothy - see also Treize. The two personalities of Lady Une - hmmm, frankly the less said about that, the better.
Relena - for the fandom laughing stock, she's not so bad. Almost everything she does makes sense in her context and given how she was raised (that rich sense of entitlement is poking through again, but at her age I can forgive it. She does get better.) Everything except for her totally unreasonable crush on Heero. Okay, she's 16, and everybody has inappropriate crushes at that age, it's part of the deal. But NOT to that extent. When you find a young soldier unconscious and call him an ambulance, and then he wakes up and beats the shit out of the medical team and steals the ambulance, I don't care how good-looking he is - wondering who he is and longing to see him again isn't how even a 16 year old would respond.
The ending song still cracks me up - it's so staggeringly off tone for the whole series. Relena's cutesy POV on how much she's in love with this mildly irritating guy. Irritating? He spends about a fifth of the anime plotting to kill her...
I remain unimpressed by Endless Waltz, sadly. I wish the creators had come up something different, instead of having the bad guys try to do exactly the same thing as Zechs tried to do at the end of the series. I know the point of the OVA is about history repeating itself and nothing changes, but they could have made that point without recreating the story exactly. There are a few good things to take away from the OVA, like more of the background on the original Operation Meteor before the Gundam teams subverted it, and the attempts to show something of the effects of PTSD on Heero, but on the whole it's not great.
So yeah, all the flaws I remembered in the series itself are there (although time does seem to have given Treize a pass actually), but in the end the good stuff still outweighs it all and I had a really entertaining 49 episode rewatch. Fun times!
And funnily enough, Gundam Wing was better than I was expecting it to be. Okay, my expectations were appallingly low - just because you loved something around the year 2000 doesn't mean it's held up well, and it had obvious flaws even then. So I went in thinking it would be terrible, but I really enjoyed it all over again.
All the stuff I loved about it the first time is still there. Not just the characters I adore who grab me, but the factionalism of it. The way that the Alliance splinters off into Oz, and then Oz splinters off into the Treize faction, and the colonies splinter off into White Fang. And in the middle of it are these child soldiers who just want to defend their home, but by half way through they can't even figure out who they're supposed to be fighting and who are supposed to be allies anymore. The way the series handled the war so it was messy and all shades of grey was always the best thing about it. The tone of it starts out all anime-typical, 'Yay! We're the good guys!' and then goes a long way down from there.
I understood Zechs rather better this time round. At least until the very end - his decisions over the last eight or so episodes still don't gel, whatever explanations he gave for them. He was a smart, patient, manipulative guy who was willing to do bad things for a good cause, until suddenly he turns all megalomaniac. Oh well.
Treize - yeah, he was batshit the first time I watched it, and he still is. A rich, entitled guy living in his bubble of rich entitlement, surrounded by people just like himself, and spouting crap that could ONLY ever make sense to someone with no connection at all to the real world. Just how the hell could anybody listen to that dude and put him in charge? But hey, here I am in 2020 living in a world where people elected Trump as President, so I guess it's not as far-fetched as it seemed back when I first watched...
Dorothy - see also Treize. The two personalities of Lady Une - hmmm, frankly the less said about that, the better.
Relena - for the fandom laughing stock, she's not so bad. Almost everything she does makes sense in her context and given how she was raised (that rich sense of entitlement is poking through again, but at her age I can forgive it. She does get better.) Everything except for her totally unreasonable crush on Heero. Okay, she's 16, and everybody has inappropriate crushes at that age, it's part of the deal. But NOT to that extent. When you find a young soldier unconscious and call him an ambulance, and then he wakes up and beats the shit out of the medical team and steals the ambulance, I don't care how good-looking he is - wondering who he is and longing to see him again isn't how even a 16 year old would respond.
The ending song still cracks me up - it's so staggeringly off tone for the whole series. Relena's cutesy POV on how much she's in love with this mildly irritating guy. Irritating? He spends about a fifth of the anime plotting to kill her...
I remain unimpressed by Endless Waltz, sadly. I wish the creators had come up something different, instead of having the bad guys try to do exactly the same thing as Zechs tried to do at the end of the series. I know the point of the OVA is about history repeating itself and nothing changes, but they could have made that point without recreating the story exactly. There are a few good things to take away from the OVA, like more of the background on the original Operation Meteor before the Gundam teams subverted it, and the attempts to show something of the effects of PTSD on Heero, but on the whole it's not great.
So yeah, all the flaws I remembered in the series itself are there (although time does seem to have given Treize a pass actually), but in the end the good stuff still outweighs it all and I had a really entertaining 49 episode rewatch. Fun times!
no subject
Date: 2020-06-14 02:35 am (UTC)The ending song still cracks me up - it's so staggeringly off tone for the whole series. Relena's cutesy POV on how much she's in love with this mildly irritating guy. Irritating? He spends about a fifth of the anime plotting to kill her...
Okay, so I had to go look the ending song up. I remember not really liking it, as far as it being catchy goes. Annnnd, I see that it's title It's Just Love. *headdesk*
OTOH, this show did introduce me to the group Two Mix, which I still love.
no subject
Date: 2020-06-14 03:25 am (UTC)I've had both the Gundam Wing openers plus the one from Endless Waltz in my anime playlist for years. Oddly enough, Just Love never made it in there XD
no subject
Date: 2020-06-14 07:19 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-06-15 12:27 am (UTC)