No Fucking Way.

No fucking way.

Ahahahahahahahahahaha

Ahhhhhh……

Just for fun, let’s think up a list of reasons as to why Mcgillis chose not to use the Fareed Family Gundam.

It was destroyed/lost in the calamity war.

It reminds him of Iznario, and he wants to reject that connection.

It’s got a very specific way of fighting (like Flauros) and he wants something with a more generalist bent.

He feels a greater kinship with Agnika Kaieru than he does the Fareed family founder.

It was the 72nd Gundam frame built, and was completed postwar, thus running counter to Mcgillis’ ambitions to be like his idol.

It’s been chained up in a similar manner to how Bael eventually will be.

It was scrapped to repair another Gundam frame.

It’s biometrically locker to a blood member of the Fareed family for some reason.

The previous pilot was an amputee, and didn’t so much pilot the Gundam in so much as they were “plugged in”. (Think Gundam Thunderbolt).

Iznario (or a prior member of the Fareed Family) sold it, or parts of it, for bread money (as the Warrens did).

It was stolen by Gundam thieves.

It requires three pilots.

The colours clash horribly with his hair.

Despite their great combat skill, the Fareed family founder was just kind of a prick, and nobody looks on their history with much fondness.

The Fareed family founder was very small by modern standards, and the cockpit’s uncomfortable to sit in for any length of time.

The hands were damaged, and are now in the permanent pose of throwing up gang signs.

Bael’s just, like, so much cooler.

It’s really, really uncomfortable to look at for a significant period of time.

Any time it’s activated, the Fareed family founder’s custom mixtape of post-calamity rap starts playing and nobody knows how to turn it off.

It’s haunted.

Iznario lost it in a poorly conceived bet.

It’s likeness was bought out by a prominent snack food corporation some years back, and as such it legally is not allowed to be viewed by anyone.

The door to it in Vingolf is stuck, and nobody ever noticed until Mcgillis came along.

Somebody spilled drink on the controls, and now they feel weirdly sticky.

The cockpit’s stuffed with body pillows, and nobody can bring themself to clean them out.

It’s lying at the bottom of the ocean after someone took it for a joyride.

It’s got an absolutely awful paint job that Norba Shino would be proud of.

It’s uninsured.

It was mounted on the prow of the Fareed family ship, and it’s exceedingly difficult to remove.

It’s stored in multiple separate locations. All Vingolf has is a pair of legs and the right hand.

It’s currently being used as a soundstage for a prominent punk-rock band on Jupiter, and no-one’s sure when the lease ends.

It has the words “free ice-cream” prominently painted on it somewhere.

It achieved sentience and promptly grabbed some popcorn.

The Fareed family never had a Gundam, and just killed that many mobile armours with conventional tactics.

It’s covered in rust.

It doesn’t have nanolaminate armour for some reason.

It’s being used as a power source for Gjallarhorn’s premier health spa and resort.

The Fareed family threw it into the sun when the war ended, believing they wouldn’t need it anymore.

It’s been repaired really badly, and the duct tape and welding really doesn’t inspire confidence.

It’s off starring in its own, less successful show.

It’s got a hit play on broadway.

It runs off a subscription service, and nobody’s been paying it for the last 300 years.

Mcgillis has really poor gatcha rolls, so he just got 26 common rarity grazes instead.

It’s really a Leo somebody scotch-taped a v-fin to.

The entire Gundam is made of cardboard.

Mcgillis forgot the password to get into the hangar, and he can’t ask Iznario.

Somebody doodled angry eyes and a handlebar moustache on it, and nobody can look at it without cracking up.

It was taken apart, then reassembled incorrectly. (It’s got a leg sticking out of where it’s head should be, and nobody’s sure where the sword ended up)

He can’t activate it without deleting the entire Fareed family’s Doom highscores.

It’s currently being used to hold a massive tv that the rest of Gjallarhorn use to watch the hockey.

It is currently on fire.

When he went to pick it up, two of the engineers were using it to hold a romantic candlelit dinner and he felt awkward interrupting so he hasn’t been back since.

A head of the Fareed family used it as the site of a drunken party and when everyone came round from their hangover it was just gone, and nobody could remember what happened to it.

It looks exactly like the Gundam Dantalion, and records have been lost as to why this is the case.

It’s currently being used as a scarecrow.

Feel free to add any more in the comments!

Masamune Shirow

This week, instead of rewatching Gundam Narrative, I finally got around to watching Gundam Breaker Battlogue, all 45-ish minutes of it.

Consider me cooled right the fuck down to Gundam Build Metaverse. Admittedly I didn’t expect much, but I would have found watching paint dry to be a preferable experience. There’s so little to it that I don’t even feel like expending the energy to even discuss it.

I’m reluctant to write off Gusion Rebake Full City’s Scissor armour purely because I have a history of looking at IBO’s odder weaponry and thinking it silly, then realising that it was designed to fight Mobile Armours, which are rather unique foes. That’s not to say that I genuinely think it was used in the Calamity War (mainly because I personally consider Gusion’s Long Range Sensors a more likely strength for the machine), but given it’s role as absolutely crushing armour, I imagine it wouldn’t be completely ineffective (Good angle on looking at the wider gundam configuration’s though, I hadn’t thought of that). The Gusion Rebake Full City’s manual regarding Akihiro though - looking at it now, I’d wager it was a word order snafu. “He previously belonged to the brewers and proposed that boys that do not have a family name should refer to themselves as Altland” to “He proposed that boys who previously belonged to the Brewers and do not have a family name should refer to themselves as Altland” (I’m no scholar of Japanese, but English has a fairly unique sentence structure compared to a lot of other languages, so at a guess that’s where I’d expect mistakes to happen).

I don’t really have much to comment on Deira Nadira and Mina Zalmfort - I haven’t read more than the first arc of IBO Gekko, and while I can suppose and guess about MS Designs, I find it significantly harder to do so about character motivations. Deira and Mina’s coupling probably wouldn’t preclude any heirs - it’s just that where the other half of that bloodline came from wouldn’t evoke much scrutiny (Deira is House Nadira’s heir, after all, of similar importance as Gaelio and Zadiel to their respective houses, so they’d require an heir of some description). It’s possible I’m overestimating the importance of the House Heirs, given what you said about how Gjallarhorn’s aristocracy likely propagates. I did think it was odd that Carta was explicitly the only Heir to House Issue earlier, but given that her death leaves the seat empty I can’t really see another alternative (McGillis’ and Iok’s deaths also take their respective houses out of the running as well, implying that they could not recover where Bauduin could, though considering that Iznario’s out of the picture, and Iok’s predecessor is established to be dead, it may be that it was Gallus and Almiria that kept the Bauduin House from being Heirless). I’d read Mcgillis as being officially adopted into house Fareed, though Iznario faking a blood relation seems very plausible. The blonde kid in the car has been irritating me ever since the series ended, because we have absolutely no idea who they were and what happened to them. Are they a prospective heir to house Fareed? Where did they go when Iznario was exiled? Was Iznario’s other dirty laundry exposed with them?

The houses operating under a “as long as it works” philosophy in regards to their lineages makes perfect sense, since it feeds into the Seven Stars (and thus down into Gjallarhorn’s) power base - even through direct descent, the Seven Stars position comes from actions taken by their ancestors on a meritocratic basis (mobile armour kills) so it’s unlikely they’d be too picky about their heirs, since the beginning of each lineage was founded through merit.

Heck, looping back around to the start of this, it’s possible there hasn’t been this much of a threat to the lineages until recently. If not for McGillis and Tekkadan, then Carta would likely have continued the Issue line and preserved the order of Gjallarhorn (though it’s possible the Kujan family would have always faced an uphill battle for continued existence). It’s even a possibility that until the events of the series there was never such a loss of Heirs in Gjallarhorn (Kujan, Issue, Fareed and the loss of the Zalmforts and possibly the Jizin’s in Gekko (and the Nadira and Warren families being pushed out prior). Suddenly the single line of succession isn’t cutting it anymore, and they can’t course-correct in time.

Sorry about the last-minute edits, Tumblr didn’t save the final changes until after I’d already posted it.

So I realised something - two things in fact, today when thinking about Iron Blooded Orphans again.

So, Gaelio, having realised that his Schwalbe Graze isn’t enough, pulls out the Bauduin family Gundam, the Kimaris, with which to fight the Barbatos. Mcgillis (as Montag) expresses amazement that Gaelio did this, and surprise that Gundam’s are fighting one another. However, his tone is rather dry, suggesting that, while surprising, such a situation is not an unthinkable one.

So, could there have been other fights between Gundam’s post-calamity war?

The other thing is that, while we’re told that there’s 26 Gundam’s known to still exist in P.D. 323, at the start of the series (I *think* it gets pushed up to 31 by the end, since Flauros, Gusion, Vual, Asmoday and Hajiroboshi get unearthed or revealed over that timeframe, but I might have forgotten one), we don’t know for certain that all of the missing ones were destroyed during the calamity war. It’s possible some were destroyed in the intervening 300-ish years, whether by politicking (think the Warren’s and Nadira’s being shoved out along with their gundam’s) or by some other conflict (it’s of course possible that not everyone was completely willing to accept Gjallarhorn’s rule postwar, no matter what the state of things).

So it’s possible that other Gundam’s have been discovered or lost since the calamity war, and they could have intervened in numerous other conflicts in that time. Mcgillis himself notes that Gundam’s “have appeared numerous times at historical turning points and have been a great influence on the history of man”. Not “the machines that won the calamity war”. It’s of course possible that Mcgillis’ romanticism makes him a biased source, prone to flowery descriptions. But. It does seem to indicate that the Gundams have had influence beyond the Calamity War already by P.D. 323, thus implying other conflicts they’ve been involved in.

I don’t know, it’s just cool to think about (and possible fodder for sidestories set prior to tekkadan’s formation in 323).

Masamune Shirow - Black Magic