Kilian Eng, Silver Surfer

Kilian Eng, Silver Surfer

Ah! Something that I have just realised.

In regards to the Gundam Hyperion and Dreadnought Gundam from X Astray, my description of them may have misrepresented what the plot is actually about.

*Spoilers follow for the plot of SEED X Astray*

The plot of X Astray primarily concerns their pilots Carnard Pars and Prayer Reverie. Lowe Guel and the rest of the characters from SEED Astray show up, but they’re really not there for much other than to effect repairs to the Dreadnought and Provide Prayer with a nice home base and someone to talk to.

Canard Pars (left, in a rare moment of calm) is a failed attempt to create the Ultimate Coordinator, which would eventually result in Kira Yamato. Because of this, Canard wants to find and kill Kira , in order to prove once and for all that he isn’t a failure. He’s essentially your standard “fighting is all I know” character. Since the ultimate coordinator project was destroyed by blue cosmos, Canard gets picked up by the Eurasian Federation of the Earth Alliance and is used as one of their test pilots. His obsession with defeating Kira leads to both an obsession with power, and him fighting with any Gundam-type unit he comes across.

Prayer Reverie is the pilot of the Dreadnought Gundam. I *think* he’s one of Al Da Flaga’s clones, like Rau le Creuset (he states he’s a clone of a EA pilot with incredible spatial awareness) but I can’t find a source that explicitly backs that up. Prayer’s kinda weird honestly, since a lot of material treats him as an actual bona-fide newtype, in a setting that doesn’t *have* newtypes. Regardless, he’s presented as a counter to Canard - he also has the genetic disposition towards combat, hence why he’s the pilot of the Dreadnought, but he’s chosen a life of pacifism. Canard wants to fight him to steal the N-Jammer Canceller, which would enable the Hyperion to run its Umbrella of Artemis infinitely, and thus become nigh-unbeatable, granting him the power to match Kira Yamato.

Most of the manga is spent establishing who and what the players are and building up to the final confrontation between Canard and Prayer. This includes the Eurasian Federation ceasing Development on the Hyperion Gundam’s and (attempting to) betray Canard due to the events of the main series happening:

1. The Atlantic Federation recover the Data from the Strike, leading to the deployment of the mass-production Strike Daggers as the main force of the Earth Alliance. This essentially invalidates the Eurasian Federation’s Hyperion project, since there’s no point furthering development on the units when they already have the Strike Dagger.

2. The Earth Alliance (specifically the Atlantic Federation) acquires the N-jammer canceller technology when Rau le Creuset leaks it to them from ZAFT. This makes the Eurasian Federation’s efforts to recover the Dreadnought Gundam Pointless (Canard wants it for power, the Eurasian Federation wants it to increase their standing in the Alliance) and makes Prayer’s plan to take the Dreadnought’s N-Jammer to earth to solve the energy crisis a moot point.

So, while the Eurasian Federation Jockeying for Power and Prayer’s efforts are certainly part of the manga, they’re not exactly the main focus.

They are however, baked into the mobile suit backstories, which is why I like the Dreadnought and Hyperion as additional Gundam’s to SEED (well, that and the fact that SEED’s already got a lot of additional units running about).

@gremoria411​ - hope you don’t mind, I’m going to pull out the response to your comment as a post since I’m not sure I can answer in the word limit!

Would you mind expanding on how you believe Wing and Iron Blooded Orphans effectively managed multiple Gundams in a single show?

It’s not a fully-formed idea, but what I mean is something like this:

In Gundam Wing, the Gundams retain their special status right the way through to the end of Endless Waltz. They’re unique, deadly, practically indestructible and it’s a really big deal that Wing Zero and Epyon even exist, because it’s well established you can’t easily build more of them. Dumb as the word is, the idea behind gundanium is pretty smart. These things are never going to be mass-produced and they’re not going to be equaled in battle, either, because the reason they can blast through hundreds upon hundreds of mobile dolls is literally built into them at the conceptual level.

Iron-Blooded Orphans plays with the same kind of thing regarding these machines being a cut above everything else, but ultimately establishes the opposite situation: Gundams weren’t originally ‘rare’ (72 ‘suits is a very high number by IBO standards), they’re palpably not exceptionally resistant to harm, and in most people’s hands, they don’t perform that much better than the machines they’re fighting. The thing that turns them into kill-everything monsters is gate-kept behind very severe conditions, so it never feels like battles will become trivial by simply having more of them in play.

That last point is why I felt it worth mentioning. What struck me about SEED is that by the time you have Calamity, Raider and Forbidden on screen, it is very hard to take them seriously. They’re Gundams (implicitly, I know the term is not actually used widely in SEED) and unique (not mass-production models like the Astrays), so they should feel like a big deal. But they don’t. They get their backsides handed to them *repeatedly*, because the narrative has to pile on the specialness of Freedom and Justice so they stand out in a swarm of similarly ‘main-character-coded’ ‘suits. It’s trying to have its cake and eat it in terms of how significant Gundams are.

It’s interesting to consider how the different shows chose to handle that, with the extreme ‘only a single Gundam’ model from the 79 series and Turn A at one pole and G Fighter’s complete genericising of the term at the other.

(There’s probably another axis to this thought which is ‘does introducing more Gundams in a spin-off cheapen the original?’ For Wing, the answer is obviously ‘yes’, because of the aforementioned rarity and the colonies not being able to roll them out by the hundreds. For IBO, it’s ‘no’, because the uniqueness is offset on to the pilots. Argi Mirage rolling around in Astaroth isn’t a big deal because Argi is so far below Mika’s level, it’s almost funny. A SEED spin-off could introduce as many Gundams as it liked [and I believe they did] to no effect because the term is already relatively diluted.)

Alrighty so, Gundam the Witch from Mercury episode 20. Kinda hits rather hard. Another one to add to the list.

Finding hilarious that Judau appears in the battlefield shouting "i'm skipping class".

Alright so Tumblr’s apparently putting recommended posts in my following feed now.

I know they’ve been doing this a while, but my feed’s suddenly like 70% recommended posts.

Which’d be fine, if it wasn’t repeating the same posts, so I’m just staring at the same post about a cat repeatedly and when I refresh my feed, it’s still there with all the other duplicate posts.

(Like yeah, I can dismiss the ones I don’t like, but some of them are good, it’s just I only need to read them once)

Garrod "i know what you are" Ran.