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I do like a lot of Non-Gundam Mecha as well. Gundam’s just the series I have the most experience with and am best able to convey my feelings on.

Just off the top of my head (and I suppose a general thesis statement); I like when the mecha are clearly-defined in universe. I like when we know (or can at least infer) what they’re for, why they were built.

For Example, in Gundam, we have the mobile suit. It’s designed principally for space combat in visual range, due to the jamming effects of minovsky particles. It’s original purpose was ship-killing, Zeon designing it in order to get an edge over the Federation’s fleets. To this end, it is fast (to dodge enemy fire), well armed with weaponry suitable to strike at its intended targets and manoeuvrable (its entire humanoid design is to allow maximum capability for the AMBAC system to assist it with zero-g manoeuvres). Once it was realised that both sides would be using mobile suits, it was armed with melee weaponry for close-quarters fights. Mobile suit development follows with better weaponry (beams, shot lancers etc.), better mobility and better survivability (shields, anti-beam coating, beam rotors etc.). And while this is just Universal Century, most of the other series follow a similar(-ish) design trend (the only exceptions off the top of my head are Build Fighters, G Gundam (both for obvious reasons) and New Mobile Report Gundam Wing (which seems like a bunch of conflicting visions in-universe). Sure, mobile suits are effective in colonies and on Earth, and several are even built with that in mind. But they were designed for space first and foremost, so that’s always going to have an influence. There’s solid, defined reasoning for why they’re there, it’s not just “well we’ve gotta have giant robots”.

But moving on to other series mecha, there’s some I like and some I don’t. I’ve only really seen a smattering of non-Gundam mecha series (and even then, sunrise shows up a lot), so this is mostly just on the mecha designs.

First off, Five Star Stories and it’s Mortar Headds;

I could talk about the forms or the knightly aesthetic or the fact that the hero wins his first fight by pimp-slapping his opponents in a mecha made of gold, or I could just put up some of the designs and let them talk for me. I will fully admit I haven’t read that far into the manga because I absolutely adore what I have read and want to take my time with it (they said, not having looked at it in at least three years). Mortar Headds are bespoke artisanal war machines, each one a tribute to its craftsman as much as a means of destruction. It’s so gorgeous I started work on a Mekton setting based directly on it (which I also haven’t touched in a while, should really get back in that).

Next, Neon Genesis Evangelion

Which for the record, I really liked (though I’ve yet to watch Rebuild). The Evangelion units do look very similar in comparison to other series, but I really can’t fault the design. The Evangelions are built to kill angels and require pilots born post-second impact (so, young). They’re humanoid because they’re essentially piloted as extensions of the pilots own body (hence the synch ratio). As such there’s a visceral, desperate nature to their movements, a sense that any fight they’re in is Kill-or-be-Killed. It illustrates a manic frenecity to the fight against the angels and why such tactics are ultimately necessary. They’re somewhere between humanoid and bestial, almost an abomination unto themselves, which plays into the series very, very well.

Pacific Rim - Jaegers:

As a movie, I found Pacific Rim pretty good. It wasn’t amazing, but I would definitely recommend and it was good enough for me to be interested in the wider franchise. The Jeagers however, were fabulous. Each of them has a unique construction, selling that these are recovered machines thrown together as a strikeforce. It also illustrates them as a multinational team, since while I wouldn’t specifically state that they represent their country of origin, you can certainly understand the expense and I suppose pride at their construction. They’re also really, really weighty. Each blow has power, each movement testifies the massive strength inherent in them. It takes no introduction or explanation that they’re built to fight kaiju, you can tell just from looking at them. And yet, you can also understand that they’re expensive things. You can buy, that no matter their effectiveness it’s just not sustainable as a standing force. But they’re not foolproof. Victories are hard-fought, losses near-irrecoverable, not just in terms of machinery, but also of pilots. Drift compatibility further establishes the titanic weight of these things, humanoid as they are, the mental strain alone is a threat. It just all works together so well.

(I have not seen Pacific Rim Uprising, and I don’t want to. Everything in there just looks too light and floaty, and it hasn’t the spark of the first movie, it’s financial motivation clear as day. The Netflix Anime, Pacific Rim: The Black, isn’t half-bad though).

Darling in the Franxx - Franxx

I feel like Studio Trigger gets a lot of leeway simply because when they make a hit, it’s a *hit*. The Franxx have very feminine designs since the female half of their piloting duos essentially fuse with the Franxx during normal operations. I’m not as big a fan of Argentea and Genista (pink and green, respectively) as the rest, but Strelizia and Delphinium (red and blue) are lovely. Strelizia mostly because it’s top-heavy, lending it’s Lance a lot of impact. The existence of the Franxx is also pretty solid - fight klaxosaurs, because (*spoilers*) they’re essentially reverse-engineered from them. They’re obviously a lot more humanoid and personable than other designs here, simply because they also communicate for their pilots, not just the mecha themselves. I think I like the big heads, since I’m also a fan of the model used by the 9’s force (not pictured, but essentially a slimmed down Strelizia without a face). I also quite like the emphasis on agility, with the multiple skirt thrusters on Strelizia and Delphinium.

Code Geass has its Knightmare Frames

Alright, I have a lot of complicated feelings towards Code Geass (the fact I feel I should mention the fanservice here, but didn’t feel the need to mention it for Darling in the Franxx is one of them) that I’ll probably do a post on eventually, but my feelings on Knightmares are actually very solid - they’re nice, they were the hook that got me into it, but they’re really only here to make some cool action scenes and probably because sunrise felt uncomfortable making something without giant robots in it. You’re not really here for them, per se. Most of the designs I can take or leave, however there are a few I have opinions on. I really don’t like the Vincent (not shown above, the one Rollo uses), since it looks far too much like a Gundam for my liking. The Alexander (top row, white, without wings) is wonderful in pretty much all its forms, suitable for Guerilla warfare behind enemy lines, owing to its light, mobile build and wide variety of equipment. I can also believe it’s easy enough to build that it could be used by “expendable” forces. The Vercingetorix (Second row, gold) is utterly gorgeous, not just because of its gold colouration, but also because it turns into a centaur. Its build is also comparatively simple, favouring mobility and a hefty melee weapon. I do like the variability of the designs, since Knightmare frames run the gamut of one-off custom jobs intended for ace of aces (basically anything built for a Brittanian Knight), Mass-produced units designed for large-scale warfare (Sutherlands, not shown above), to units desperately pressed into service against Brittania (the aforementioned Alexander and the Gekka, top row, teal/green). In summary, they’re nice, but they’re really not the focus (and they start dropping like flies when the superweapons come out).

(I’ll do a separate post on some specific designs I like sometime)

Finally (for now), we come to The Big O’s MegaDeus

Which I’m “currently” watching, and the series that inspired this follow-up post (no spoilers please). While I haven’t seen enough to come down on the “thesis” of the MegaDeus, all the ones I’ve seen are built along roughly the same lines - Titanic pieces of machinery, long hidden away (though I do wish it was easier to find some of the designs, we only get tantalising glimpses of some of them, like Osrail). But they fit in with the city around them, despite their disparate designs, and of course the weight of them is well-communicated. They’re surprisingly evocative designs - the one held by a criminal organisation (*spoilers* Dorothy-1) has a skeevy, untrustworthy design, with lots of underhanded weaponry, whereas Big O itself is stern and its armaments are very direct (so far, anyway).

Most of the Mecha listed here are humanoid, but I do like other mechanical designs too, these were just the options that sprung to mind off the top of my head.

With all the things you've posted looking at the mobile suits of various series, I wondered if you had any specific tastes in mecha design. Are there particular details or design cues that you're especially fond of?

@wordsandrobots, I fully expect to follow this up at sone point (and likely run out of pictures/want to ramble even more), so I’m going to pull it out as a proper post:

That is an *excellent* question, actually, since I hadn’t considered my tastes in such a broad scale before (and well-timed too, since I’ve got a post talking about Gusion in the works). It’s why I typically like talking about design series, since I can compare and contrast within that scope.

I typically focus on Gundam, since I generally like it as a series and there’s a massive variety of designs to appreciate, with a broad range. I’m largely influenced by the Anime, model kits and occasionally videogames, though in a lot of cases I can like a character, and that can lead to a greater appreciation of their mobile suit.

Specific design notes…. I tend to notice them more in the context of an artist - I adore a lot of Ippei Gyoubu’s design touches, from the bright colours to the detailed hands to the panel lines and little touches that you’d never notice. Kazuhisa Kondo has the organic shape and uniquely rounded weaponry and it’s styled in such a way as to apprear blurry, almost ephemeral, like you’re glimpsing it through a haze of smoke and gunfire and dirt, while frantically turning to get away, get away from the conflict. And yet the designs are still recognisable, and in a lot of respects draw from contemporary sources.

I’m similarly fond of Makoto Kobayashi and Kuino Okawara, though I typically struggle to explain how (Makoto Kobayashi tends to have really good composition? I think. So they look simple and detailed all at once, and they’re part of a scene, so it’s what you choose to focus on? And Okawara just makes it look so…. Effortless)

Hajime Katoiki I do like as well, I just struggle to nail down why. I suppose it’s because of how clean his designs look.

Moving away from the preference of artists (and honestly, it’s only that some of their design hallmarks are very distinct), I often have a preference for specific “types” of mobile suit. I talked about this a little in regards to the Code: Fairy designs, but I often find myself drawn to specialist mobile suits over generalist ones. From a modelling perspective, I often like each one to be distinct in a lineup in some way (unless they’re similar models, then I just put them together so the differences show). Often this can just be a distinct weapon, but it’s just as often the form of the mobile suit (the Gusion’s a good example here, since it draws the eye due to its heavyset build, understated colour scheme and giant hammer) or even the colour (see: the Infinite Justice being bright pink). This tends to encompass a lot of close-quarters units (like the Pixy and the Efreets) simply because there’s a lot of ways to do that well. Another reason is that whereas generalist suits tend to show up in large roles throughout the series, specialist ones tend towards “monster-of-the-week”, typically being an obstacle to be defeated or just having one or two cool scenes (like the Efreet Schneid). So I find they stick in my head a lot better.

I can like a lot of designs from a series as well, but of course I tend to have a lot of different criteria as to what designs I like, depending on the suit’s billing and purpose (what makes a great grunt suit and what makes a great protagonist suit are quite different after all). I do very much like a lot of the UC Grunt suits (though I’ll probably touch on that in more detail at a later point), for example, but I only really like one from Anno Domini, the Tieran (since it looks so much like a walking tank as opposed to the spindly nature of the Flags and Enacts). That said, I don’t think that the Flags, Enacts and GN-X’s are bad designs, they’re just not really the sort of thing I like.

In fact, I reckon that’s why I’m particularly fond of Iron-Blooded Orphans’ Aesthetics, since a lot of the units from that series would be close-quarters specialists in any other series. But because melee is so common in Post Disaster, virtually everything carries a nice solid sharp stick. The only exceptions I can think of are Gusion Rebake (which is more of an all-rounder), Flauros (and even that has hatchets that leave cqc a viable option) and Dainsleif Grazes (which only have one arm, so….).

My it sure is nice how, because I clearly tag things, tumblr has no problem with finding my old posts, isn’t it?

Sure is great when you want to return to an old topic, you can easily reference an older post, isn’t it?

Anyway, I was thinking about some of my favourite mobile suits recently, and more specifically how they fight.

The Sinanju and Sinanju Stein (strictly speaking that’s unit 2 above, but the Sinanju Stein Unit 1 only shows up physically once anyways, so I tend to conflate the two) from Universal Century, and the Gundams Bael and Zepar from Post Disaster. The Bael and Sinanju’s are thematically and functionally similar, if not so much visually, since they’re piloted by the series resident Char Clones, Full Frontal and Mcgillis Fareed respectively, and thus have a similar fighting style - high mobility and very flashy, typically dodging with minimal effort and taking out scores of foes near-effortlessly. The Sinanju Stein (Unit 2) certainly could fight like that, but its pilot Zoltan Akkanekan is…… not in a great place mentally, and as such he tends to be more brutish, always pushing the attack and closing ranks with his enemy very quickly (we only see him fight once in the Sinanju Stein before it docks with the Neo Zeong II, so it’s possible that his aggression is more due to the enemy being a Gundam, as opposed to any real strategy). The Gundam Zepar we have even less information on, but since we know both that it doesn’t have any ranged weaponry, and that most of the emphasis seems to be on the shield, we can guess it would want to get close fairly quickly, and would be well-prepared for a reprisal.

And this reminded me of something I mentioned previously when discussing non-Gundam Mecha series - I like when we know the “thesis” of the mecha. I like when we know why they were built and what the in-universe theory was in their construction (Or at the very least, we can guess, as with The Big O). It makes the world feel realer to me, and don’t get me wrong, I love giant robots, but it feels wonderfully cohesive when there’s an in-universe justification. I don’t typically forget the out-of-universe justification “to sell toys” but it feels less “Johnson, quarterly earnings aren’t looking good, make a property we can merchandise things out of” and more “Hey, this guy’s got an idea for a cool show about robots, maybe there’ll be a market for cool toys there?”.

Weird tangent on the relationship between entertainment and merchandising aside, I like Universal Century because it’s got a strong “thesis” - mobile suits were designed primarily as an anti-ship weapon that would engage at visual range, due to the effects of Minovsky particles rendering most long-range weapons difficult to aim. They’re fast, and carry handheld weaponry both for ease of use, maintenance and operability and they’re an extension of “armoured space suits”. There’s even the military angle of “a secret weapon to to win us the war against a foe that could beat us conventionally”, and I’d assumed that, with a few exceptions like Wing and G Gundam, most of Gundam followed that same thesis.

However, I realised that’s perhaps not quite true with Iron-Blooded Orphans (or at least it’d be interesting to consider why it might not be true). The above graph is an illustration of the breakdown of forces used in the calamity war, and how they were deployed depending on the field. Quote: The unit formation deployed against the mobile armors depended on where the battlefield was. On Earth and Mars, the Gundam Frames served as the main fighting units, and they destroyed the mobile armors one by one with assistance from other mobile suits and supporting units. In space, the Dáinsleifs were used as the main weapon, and were assisted by mobile suits, including Gundam Frames, and other supporting units. On the Moon, mobile suit teams like the one deployed on Earth and Mars were also used in addition to the aforementioned use of the Dáinsleif.

So I got to wondering if Post Disaster (or I guess Current Disaster) mobile suits had a different development ethos, since they were deployed largely terrestrially.

Mobile suits were only used during the Middle and Late stages of the war, which implies they were developed during it. The above Rodi and Hexa Frames were developed first, with the Gundam And Valkyrja Frames following in the later stages of the War. It’s also stated that, quote: The beginning of the Calamity War was the result of AI-equipped, self-sustaining weapon systems going out of control. Before the outbreak of the Calamity War, automated machinery was a symbol of wealth and abundance, and humans were actively promoting the automation of wars. With the risk of losing valuable soldiers reduced as the weapons were AI operated, and the introduction of the semi-permanent Ahab Reactor as a power source, mobile armors became the ideal weapon that can fight efficiently and persistently. So, it’s possible that after the Mobile Armours were unleashed, there was a rush to adapt previously autonomous weaponry into something human-controlled, with the Rodi and Hexa Frames representing these early steps. Furthermore, it’s stated that Mobile Armours acquired Nanolaminate Armour, so beam weaponry would presumably have been used in the early stages of the war.

So, could Mobile Suits in IBO be autonomous weaponry adapted for human use, as opposed to the Universal Century’s “Armoured Space Suits” line of thinking? We know that Alaya-Vijinana works best with forms closer to the human form - hence the Gundam Frames being constructed as close to the human form as possible. Another angle might be that of upsized Knights, here to slay the mechanical monsters that threaten humanity.

So it’s an interesting angle compared between the series - in one, mobile suits were built for wars in space, fought between nations. In the other, mobile suits were built to be used terrestrially, in response the threat of extinction by mechanical foes humanity unwittingly unleashed upon itself.

(Also, it’s interesting to look at how common mobile armours and automated weaponry were in the pre-post disaster setting, since I just imagine Treize Kushrenada from Gundam Wing being distinctly unhappy)

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