Ah! Something That I Have Just Realised.

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.)

Alright, it’s probably too early for me to be doing this sort of analysis (I normally like to wait until things are a little more concluded) but

I wonder if the grudge between Renee Costa and Lillique Kadoka Lipati being comparatively petty (Lillique refused an invitation from a boy, Renee viewed this as a insult to him, and by extension her, since he was “number 12 on her list of back-up boyfriends”) is supposed to illustrate that the students settling these thing via near-lethal duels is a bad idea?

(Even weakened beams can still easily kill, as shown by Suletta’s fight against Elan 4)

Furthermore, it enforces the idea that power (in this case Mobile suits) is the deciding factor. Any student on the MS course will have an advantage, regardless of the effectiveness of their support team, since the pilot’s skill matters most. It’s entirely possible for one strong pilot to dominate the house, any duels being passed back to them to resolve, as seen with Guel and Suletta (With their losses greatly impacting the house). It also weakens them against the kind of soft power that Shaddiq and Miorine employ.

I do find it interesting how it’s only Grassley that goes all in on Duelling, with 6 suits compared to Jeturk’s 4 and Peil’s 2 (though that’s mostly suppositions both, since they could have had more off-screen, and that Shaddiq was likely stockpiling materials for his move.).

If nothing else, Renee and Lillique’s duel provides a good contrast to the corporate machinations of Peil and Prospera.

No thoughts,only bride.

Hm weird thought.

So Al Da Flaga in Gundam SEED.

(Right is the best picture we have of him, but left is more representative in my opinion)

He commissions multiple clones of himself from Dr Hibiki in order to inherit his wealth and power, and the way Rau puts it, in order to achieve a form of immortality.

Thing is, how many clones does he commission?

Because we know that Rau le Creuset(Top Right) is his clone, who eventually ended up killing him and from who we know most of our information about him (Rau is in the middle of his Big Villain Speech when he says most of this, but he’s essentially recounting his origin so I trust what he says here). Rey Za Burrel (bottom left) is also a clone and was made later, most likely as a replacement for Rau once Al found out he was a flawed clone. Thing is, Al was dead before he had much of a chance to impact Rey’s development (Mu doesn’t remember Rau, so Rau must have murdered Al and burnt down the estate when they were both quite young), so it’s implied that Rau and Durandal were the primary influences on Rey’s life, as shown in this image:

Mu La Flaga (top left) is, by all accounts, Al’s biological son, who he hated because he believed that Mu’s mother had tainted him in some way (though I’ll be honest, I’ve accidentally read Mu as the successful clone multiple times prior).

And then, finally, there’s Prayer (bottom right), who’s a “clone of an EA pilot with excellent spatial awareness”. Which sounds to me like the EA found a Al clone and accidentally read it as a clone of his son Mu (which would imply that disinheriting Mu was pointless, since he’s already a really close genetic match). I mean, that makes more sense to me than the EA commissioning a one-off clone, something they despise on the same level of coordinators, just to reproduce a single good pilot. However, I can’t find anything that explicitly states this, so it’s just weird.

But apparently Rey was just one of multiple clones? So prayer could have been part of the same “Batch”? And/or there could be a bunch more Al Da Flaga clones running around, this turning them into an expy of Puru?

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