Immediate Thought While Watching The Opening Of Witch From Mercury Episode 22:

Immediate thought while watching the opening of Witch From Mercury episode 22:

I wonder if this is a metaphor for how lack of oversight into corporate dealings will eventually lead to them becoming untouchable monoliths, where oversight is pointless because they can either absorb losses or just overrule them.

If I may, I’d like to use this sentiment as a springboard into the question of “Why are Zeon used as Protagonists so often in Universal Century Works?”

Enemy soldiers in Gundam were always shown to have some form of personality and even humanity, making them personable, affable and giving their deaths tragedy and meaning - emblematic of real-world wars, where there are heroes and tragic deaths on both sides. By humanising Zeon and establishing them as fighting for their own cause, it demonstrates that the “other side” is motivated by the same things as our protagonists, furthering the notion of war being this uncontrollable, hopeless thing that man is drawn into, as opposed to being master of.

So, Zeon then. They’re the villains of the piece, and obviously have heavy influence from WWI and WWII Germany (aesthetically they’re more WWI, but Gihren and the Island Iffish Gassing place them firmly in WWII territory). The fact that the Iffish Gassing is downplayed compared to Operation British proper (IE the Colony Drop) is something I would like to see addressed at some point, but a lot of our series protagonists are from Earth, so the Colony Drop itself affected them more. (I think Shiro Amanda from 08th MS team is stated to be an Iffish Survivor, but I don’t really recall it ever coming up). I think it’s main failing is that it’s typically a background detail (with the notable exception of The Origin), and thus very rarely addressed. Island Iffish is also particularly important because it demonstrates that Zeon’s lofty Ideals of Colonial Independence from the Earth Federation are not held on all levels, seeing the colonies as tools to be used in their war against the Earth Federation, not brothers in arms. In brief; Zeon Footsoldiers yelling about independence? Probably Genuine, since they would likely believe in Zeon Zum Deikun’s philosophy. The Zabi’s or Zeon High Command yelling about it? Probably a motivational smokescreen and nothing more. Both Zeon and the Earth Federation also used nuclear weapons during the early stages on the One Year War, which is the main thing that led massive population losses, in addition to Operation British. I bring this up specifically to illustrate that while neither side are angels, Zeon has more atrocities to its name.

(Note: it was later revealed that at least some of the forces (IE Cima Garahau’s team) carrying out the Iffish Gassing were lied to by their commanders, being told that they would be using sleeping gas to allow the colonists to be freely evacuated. It’s not clear how prevalent this was though, so I’m only noting it here to cover all my bases)

So. We have a large army of idealists, fighting for what they believe is a just cause, in an unfamiliar environment, with command that ranged from the incompetent to the fractious. We can neatly contrast these characters to other members of Zeon who are considerably more kill-crazy, showing how war affects some people (and providing an opportunity for our characters to stick to their ideals). Alright, alright, what else?

Speaking of Zeon High command - while they are full of personality that makes them fun to watch, they’re not really that important to Amuro’s story. With the sole exception of Dozle (Garma is killed largely by accident), he never really meets any of them. They’re comparatively a background element. As such, this provides an excellent opportunity for expansion. Garma’s Forces are young and Idealistic, Dozle’s forces are tough and Honourable, Kycilia’s forces are cunning and sneaky, while gihren’s forces are wild and fanatical. There’s also ample opportunity to sneak in a Zeon commander working under one of them, and have them take actions (Kycilia sponsored Noisy Fairy, the Invisible Knights and the Midnight Fenrir Corp, and that’s just off the top of my head). It works very well from a storytelling perspective if you want a small, tight-knit commando team with varying skillsets and some fancy units (IE Efreets). It even has historical precedent, way waaaaay back in the early Gundam setting books, we learn about Johnny Ridden and the Chimera Corps, Zeon’s own, personal squadron of Crack-aces, who got the Early Production Gelgoogs.

Okay okay, so cool Mobile suit designs (so we sell lots of models), interesting and conflicting commanders, which enables us to say something about the personality of our force in shorthand. Historical precedent of a *Bunch* of prior special forces teams (even with mobile suits, the Earth’s a big place, plenty of room for others), even a doctrine that favours them (The Earth Attack force does brilliantly until the Battle of Odessa, whereupon they’re soundly beaten on Earth. Any forces that couldn’t evacuate would be largely cut-off from support and forced to adopt Guerilla tactics. Furthermore, they’re fighting defensively against a superior foe, since by this point the Federation has mobile suits of their own, and that’s the sort of adversity that can make for an interesting story. It shows a reversal of fortunes of the characters part, mirroring the wider problem that Zeon is having). But surely it wouldn’t be such a stretch to apply some of this to the Earth Federation forces too? Gundams and GM’s are cool too after all.

Ah, and here (in my opinion) we come to the crux of it, the reason why Zeon are protagonists (or at the very least, interesting antagonists a La 0083, so often).

Pathos.

We, as the audience *know* that Zeon will lose the one year war. The absolute best fate for these characters is to retire once the war is over and never pilot again. But it throws everything they do in a new light. The bright-eyed, young pilot who is horrified by the war? All the more tragic, because it was all for nothing. The political officer who’s a hard-line Gihren-loyalist? Well, they’re in for a rude awakening. One of my favourite Gundam manga with Zeon as the protagonists is Acguy: 2250 Miles across America. Because it shows these two characters just trying to reach evacuation off earth before they’re stuck. It’s not one of the many things detailed above no, but it casts them as human above all else. They don’t decide to go out in a blaze of glory fighting the federation. It’s the story of their evacuation, and the adventures they get into on the way there.

It’s a lot easier to sell the tragedy of war if the situation is already bleak for our characters. The Earth Federation starts out bleak, then gets better with the introduction of mobile suits. Zeon starts off great, then gets bleak with the introduction of enemy mobile suits. However, on a small-scale, the introduction of Zeon’s new, shiny and highly-marketable advanced mobile suits (IE Efreets) can tip the tide on a small scale, enabling them to appear badass even as Zeon is losing the wider war.

I’m excited for Requiem of Vengeance, but I really wish we got more Universal Century content that wasn’t the One Year War.

*Spoilers for Witch From Mercury Finale Follow*

Oh! I do just want to call out dead quick - Ericht is in the little red iceman, and they state that Suletta moved “them” out of the Gundam. Assuming that they don’t mean it in a “we are legion, the one who is many” way, this implies that Elan 4 has been moved to the little blue iceman.

And now we come to my feelings on Zeon’s mobile suit designs in Mobile suit Gundam Code:Fairy. After my feelings on the Federation’s MS were…… broadly positive, my opinions on Zeon are a tad more divisive.

First up, the Zaku II Sniper type. Honestly, I get it, you want a sniper unit, but you don’t want to deal with the Zaku I sniper type being unwieldy, so you make a new Zaku variant and give it a fancy rifle. Honestly, it’s just fine. No real strong feelings here.

The Zaku high mobility ground type Alma Stirner custom annoys me perhaps more than it should, because the more I look at it the more I think that a Gouf with a rifle would have been a better choice. My main quibble is that the standard version was one of the best mass-production ms of the entire war, being agile and exceptionally suited to combat on earth, in addition to retaining the regular Zaku’s wide range of armaments. So a fancy custom version of one of the best units available as the unit you start with….. it feels a little much. If you’d started with a regular Zaku then upgraded, then sure, that’d be fine. But knowing how good that suit likely is really makes it ring hollow when the plot tries to say that Alma’s outgrown it.

Right, right, enough complaining. What do I think of the design? I do like the basic High Mobility Ground Type, and Alma’s is essentially an up-armed version of it, being equipped with a heat sword, shotgun, missiles and Vulcans in addition to the normal armaments. I do very much like the Vulcan placement, and the missiles pleasingly evoke the Zaku Desert Type, but besides that it’s really just an ace custom unit with some different shoulders. It does do a good job in-game of being the close-combat specialist to the other two’s ranged firepower, but again, I think a Gouf with a rifle would have been similarly adequate.

I’ll probably cover the Zaku Half-Cannon if I ever do anything about the Zaku Cannon, but I honestly don’t have a whole lot of opinions on it, so I’m just gonna skip.

The Dom Gnomides. HATE. I usually find it difficult to express how much I dislike this design. The base unit being a Dom Tropical Test type? Fine, no problems there. But shackling a giant box to its back? The whole in-universe point of mobile suits is that they’re supposed to be agile units that fight at close range, where visual contact is key and the have to be able to dodge enemy fire. The Dom Gnomides can dodge fire about as well as a slug can dodge salt pellets. In-game, it’s difficult to identify incoming fire because the suits so massive it gets in the way. They took a Dom, a suit known for its high speed and mobility, and turned it into something that would struggle to outrun the Zock. But surely, that massive cannon must make up for it, right? Oh, you mean that massive cannon they obtained by

Grave Robbing?

The Dom Gnomides Pilot, Mira Brinkman, obtains the main cannon from the wreck of the Hidolfr, the mobile tank from Gundam Igloo.

In-game, they justify it with “well, at least we can give commander Sonnen (the pilot) a proper burial” but Mira’s primary concern is obviously the cannon. It’s just quite creepy, because at this point, they’re all sunshine and cheers about the whole thing “oh boy, let’s get a cannon for our suit and bury our fallen comrades along the way”, so knowing that in order to build this, they had to hose the remains of Commander Sonnen out of the Hidolfr just feels…… off? At odds with the tone? I know in war you should strive to recover equipment wherever you can, It’s just a massive tonal whiplash if you’ve actually watched igloo. The Dom Gnomides is armed with other weaponry, but honestly, they’re just fine.

The Efreet Jäger is the only one of the main three mobile suits to get a HG model, most likely because they’d already made a bunch of Efreet Variants. Honestly, it’s one of those rare models I would buy purposefully to mod. Paint some camouflage on there, maybe hook a ghille cloak or something over its shoulder, swap the odd weapon or two and I think it’d look really really good. The Efreet Line is another design series I’m very fond of, simply because the basic Efreet and Gouf are both designed to do the same thing, but approach it from different angles. Both are designed to be CQC suits par excellence, so are armed with heat swords, but whereas the Gouf fights more like a Gladiator, with its sword and shield it’s primary weapons, and then the Heat Rod and Vulcans to trip up the enemy; the Efreet fights more as a raider. Armed with two heat swords, trading defence for offence, and smoke discharges to temporarily blind the enemy to its movements- a fatal mistake in a sword fight. It’s typically also armed with a shotgun, for when something’s just out of range of the swords (though in GBO2, you can swap it out for a bazooka or Machine Gun). The Efreet Jäger is a sniper, unheard of in such a melee-focused line. This is essentially my only real criticism of it, another suit that is absolutely amazing at one thing being pigeonholed into yet another generalist. There are good sniping suits available, like the Zaku I Sniper, so an upgraded unit would fit very well. But instead they took a close-quarters unit and handed it a sniper rifle. I will fully admit that maybe something different for the line would be a good idea, but when it’s entire identity is built around one speciality, shifting to a different one just feels wrong.

The basic suit design is quite nice, the chests been modelled nicely and the asymmetry really plays up that this is a suit built for sniping and guerrilla tactics - asymmetrical warfare if you will. The rifle is gorgeous, and I like how it’s got grenades as part of it’s loadout. If I were to say the Efreet jäger is my least favourite Efreet, that’s more about the strength of the Efreet line as a whole than the weakness of the jäger on its own. I will say that, in game, the Efreet jäger is the best thing since sliced bread, purely on the strength of its sniper rifle having two settings. All my quibbles melt away after using it in-game, since you can just pop out of cover, nail an enemy with either single-shot, or explosive bust ammunition, then move on, with chaff and spotter abilities if you feel like playing support, and a heat kunai and shotgun if you need to fight up close.

Finally, we come to the Titania. It shares its name with the fairly obscure PMX-004 Titania designed by Paptimus Scirocco and is based on the absolutely fantastic Kämpfer (another of my all-time favourites). I do very much love the design, a little overarmed maybe (it’s got Vulcans, so I don’t really think it *needs* the arm gatling, and I consistently forget about the Beam Machinegun when using the Titania in game. GBO2’s decision to make it an optional weapon was, I think, a wise one), but the actual design of the mobile suit itself is wonderful. It’s slightly more heavily armoured than the original Kämpfer (so we’re told, anyway) and this is reflected in its remodelling, squaring off the Kämpfer’s smooth lines with blocky armour. The shoulders are just splendid, giving it a good silhouette along with the fuel tanks (which give the impression of wings). The choice to keep the original Kämpfer’s backpack was also a good one, since it effectively breaks up what could have been a rather boring back, and the extension of this design philosophy to the leg vents is also lovely to see. The legs appear to be slightly dainty, but none the less armoured for it, a design I appreciate. The head is gorgeous, it looks like it belongs one one of the Zabi’s royal Guard and evokes the design sensibilities of the Sleeves. Does it suit a Guerilla unit? No. Do I care particularly? Also no. All in all, it’s just a wonderful design variant on the Kämpfer.

However. The rationale behind its creation in-universe bothers me in the same manner that the Dom Gnomides does.

So, upon receiving the Kämpfer frame, unarmoured (and really missing a trick to tie it into the prototype Kämpfer, but whatever), the chief mechanic looked at it and decided “this design promotes recklessness, and is built for speed and power at the expense of armour”. Yes….? It’s an assault suit, designed to get in, cause as much damage as possible, then get out. Heck, the “E” in the Kämpfer’s model number is stated to stand for “Einhauen” - one strike in German. It’s not built for protracted combat, because it was never designed to be. So looking at the Kämpfer, a very specialised unit, and deciding that that specialisation is, itself, wrong is just kinda dumb. Like, they could have been sent the wrong materials, it could have only been intended to be used for one mission and Noisy Fairy managed to keep it running beyond that, it could have been an indication of how desperate Zeon was getting. Heck, the Kämpfer itself is stated to be one of multiple units built of the prototype Kämpfer each tuned for specialist uses, maybe they could simply use a different unit in the line? All of these options would have been better than “well it promotes recklessness and that’s BAAAAAD”

My other criticism is that it’s stated that they added extra thrusters to the design to offset all the extra weight of the armour and weapons (since the Titania doesn’t cast off its weapons like the original). Really now. You’re telling me you added “extra thrusters” to a unit that was already roughly 60% thruster by volume? I know it’s petty(ier) but it still bothers me.

However, none of this detracts from the fact that the Titania is a pretty sweet design, even if I do think I could’ve been integrated better (glances meaningfully in the direction of the Prototype Kämpfer).

So, the day after Witch From Mercury Ends, we get actual announcements for both Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance AND the SEED Movie!?

What the hell bandai, give us a chance to breathe.

I guess they’re just riding the hype of Witch from Mercury’s finale, so announcing some other stuff to keep in the news cycle?

I kinda want to do a post about my feelings on Mobile Suit Gundam Code: Fairy, but I’m just gonna start off with the MS designs, since I’ve got a lot to say on those relative to everything else.

First up: the Earth Federation Forces

I do like the Black and White Riders. Of course, they’re pale rider variants (prototypes in-universe), but I think they do a good job of looking and acting good. They both continue in the theme of the early rider units being patterned after the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse, being pestilence (the white rider with a bow and crown) and famine (the black rider with a set of scales). Though I don’t really have a favourite of the two, (the white rider has a wonderfully Gundam-like face and the crown is gorgeous, while the black rider actually kinda nails the whole “tacticool” look with its faceplate and arms) I will admit that the black rider opens up a whole can of worms because it has an actual stealth system. Not like, just weapons suited for stealth or sloped armour to reduce visibility like the Efreet Nacht, a genuine cloaking field.

For context, those (to the best of my knowledge) just straight-up are not really a thing in Universal Century. Minovsky particles kinda nix most long-range weaponry, hence why mobile suits are a thing. If you want to be stealthy, you typically go the route of removing emissions (as the Efreet nacht does with its lack of heat weapons) or having camouflage to reduce the chances of visual detection. Spotters are a big thing in lots of UC works. So the Black Rider being able to just “*poof* invisible” is a really odd thing in context. I can only assume (in-universe) it wasn’t practical at all, or it only worked early on, and improvements in technology eventually made it infeasible.

Even putting that aside, they’re not perfect. Heat weaponry is…. Basically nonexistent on Federation suits, so it’s inclusion here is a little odd. But the main flaw with the suits is that they’re just not well utilised. They essentially function as expendable grunts for the main villain. They don’t even have named pilots. Furthermore, Rider units are kind of a big deal, being very rare and quite powerful. So this one random force just having them - even if they are former prototypes - is just kinda odd, and it’s never addressed why they have them.

Note: I am aware that the Manga has put a face to the pilot of the white rider. But that and the fact that the manga exists are literally the only facts I know, so I’m not counting it.

The GM Spartan’s then.

Honestly, they’re nice, but they’re not really my thing. I do love a lot of the Fukuchi Mobile Suit Station designs, but I honestly prefer the original artwork (below) to the design they went with here. It’s not bad, but it’s obviously taking just as much influence from the GM Sniper II (if not more) than it is from the original artwork. It’s not equipped with any specialist weaponry in-game however. The unit on the left is the RG version, customised by use of the Game’s villain, Renato Germi (I would spoiler-tag that, but it’s very obvious). I actually like this design, since it could’ve been a very effective use of visual storytelling - Gundam-style parts are higher-quality than regular ones, so could have been used to signify that Renato has friends in high places that can get him fancier equipment. Or it could’ve been used as an effective contrast to the other Gundam pilot in the game. However, unfortunately, neither opportunity was used. It does however, remain a nice design.

The Gundam Pixy/Pixie is, has and always will be, one of my favourite designs in Gundam. Granted, I have a lot of favourites (as I’ll get to later), but the Pixy is just wonderful. Something about a close-quarters focused, lightweight, light cost version of the RX-78-2 with a decent weapons loadout just appeals to me.

The problem with variations on your favourite designs is that you tend to be a lot harsher on them, since they’re trying to improve on perfection. The Gundam Pixy Lilith Aiden Custom is very very good. I wouldn’t say I prefer it to the original, and I do think it’s a smidge overarmed, but the design of the mech itself I think was handled very well. It’s easier to see when comparing them in-game, but the entire chest and head area has been remodelled and a small shield has been added to the arm. It’s really very well-done, giving the impression of adding armour to something that was originally lacking it. The fact that it makes it look slightly closer to the original art is a bonus in my book.

The original Pixy is armed with Vulcans, two beam daggers, then either a bullpup machinegun or two 90mm machine guns that look like Uzis. It’s a very light armament for a suit that specialises in getting in close. The Pixy LA is armed with Vulcans, two beam Sabers, a twin beam spear (shown in the above image), a rocket bazooka and a handheld beam gun. Two of those weapons are quite large and unwieldy, so I don’t really think such a machine can still be called lightweight. This is the first of a trend of taking established, specialised designs and making them more generalised, which I’m personally none too fond of.

I don’t really think it needed to be red, since honestly the pilot has very little in common with char, so it only serves as a “rival” unit.

And with all the unique Earth Federation units out of the way, let’s move on to our protagonists in Zeon in the next post, because I ran out of pictures.