i like gundam seed

I'm leaning toward my disappointment with it being the fact that it's barely got a point to make, and the ones that it makes aren't really well-made? Like, it doesn't know the difference between a race war and a Star Trek Eugenics war. It doesn't know how to build up tension between its actual characters. It doesn't know how to escalate conflict by following the story it's telling, instead of just twisting it at the end so we can have a space fight. But if its themes still reached a satisfying conclusion, that would matter a lot less.

And the themes are... not there, they're nothing. No character really embodies any idea or ideal, and no character has much of an opinion aside from the literal meme that War is Bad. A sentence which the translators for my subs really had to work overtime to try to figure out ways to say over and over again in different words, because that's essentially all Cagalli and Athrun say when you get them talking for long enough.

And it really feels like a weird turbo version of Gundam Wing, where the priorities of each characters are wrong and don't further their own stories. I was kinda shocked when the big Le Creuset reveal had nothing to do with the story so far, I was even more shocked when the fucking final fight was between him and Kira, two characters who do not care about each other nor know each other very well. Athrun should have taken that fight, and Kira should have taken the bomb run; what the fuck? Why are we doing this like this?

Lacus just becoming the captain of a ship is so fucking wild considering how much they made Natalie Badgirl go through in order to become captain of her own, it's so funny, she is the absence of characterization. She just does whatever the show needs her to do at any point, and it doesn't matter what she has already accomplished because she can just do whatever she needs to accomplish next. Why would she be captain? Am I losing my mind? What the fuck?

The only characters I really appreciated for any period of time were Flay and La Flaga, the former because I thought the idea that someone in this team completely cracked right away and started fucking the main character to emotionally manipulate him into killing his own people fucking ruled, what a million dollars conflict. And the latter because La Flaga is the only character I don't mind, I think he's charming and I think he's cool.

And then not only did Flay do a 180 masquerading as character development and became just another kinda pure-coded Gundam Lady, complete with the fucking Newtype Space Ghost death scene where all her sins are forgiven and she comes up naked to the protagonist telling him it's daijobou and she'll mamoru him, but then they also didn't give La Flaga a fucking Gundam until the end of the show! At which point they had to invent a reason for him to have a rival, because Athrun was now part of the crew!

it just feels like nothing happens for 50 episodes, because the events that do happen barely feel like they connect to each other. Like, yeah, they literally have a cause and effect relationship, but... it really feels like nothing before the Freedom pops up matters, at the end of the day. It really feels like most characters don't have a thesis behind them, it really feels like the conflict is extremely artificial. At some point we're asked to care that Kira is a testtube baby and I just, why, man, who cares, I certainly don't, it would be 2003 when this came out, be so for real.

I also... this is more of a me thing, but this is the first Gundam show with like, modern fansevice, I would say. Turn-A still had some light nudity, and I think literally every Gundam show before it also did-- usually just showing the girls' breasts every once in a while, like anime used to. But it wasn't... it was oogly, but it didn't make me feel kinda grossed out.

Meanwhile I felt that scene with Lacus stripping to get in the space suit on episode 1, with the back shot of her panties hit me like a fucking truck, because I grew up with that exact style of fanservice, and I fucking hate it; I despise it, I cannot stand it, I need it to perish and I'm glad it more or less died outside of actual ecchi. It sucks and it happens every once in a while, and it just makes the whole thing so off, moments that I'm supposed to take seriously have these fucking shots of the girls' tits bouncing like balloons, and they're shots they repeat all the time.

Specifically the Flay death scene really suffers, because they do the Lala ghost thing, but she's posing naked for the camera as she tries to convince Kira that it was a good creative decision to make her actually start to have feelings for him. It's incredibly distracting and it doesn't help that I think all of these character designs low-key suck. These faces look like they're melting and I'm not attracted to them. They only look good when they're making really ugly, angry faces, like when Miria tries to stab Dearka.

Who, speaking of which-- these are the worst enemies by far in any Gundam show, specifically they are the most incompetent fucking people in the franchise. Not because they're not Char or anything, but the fuckboy brigade Athrun leads at the beginning of the show just feels like they never win, and then the three stooges that replace them actually never win. It's honestly really funny that they tried to fix the problem the show had, and gave more people Gundams, only for the fucking new guys to lose even harder.

It's just so vapid and so superficial in all the ways that it shouldn't be, and it got me kind of sad, because I was not having fun at the beginning at all, and then by the latter half I thought oh, this ORB arc is heating up, I'm enjoying some of these developments, I think the show might be good now, only for every single plot thread and revelation to disappoint me.

No villains have actual relationships to the heroes (WHICH IS WILD BECAUSE ONE OF THEM IS THE DUDE'S FATHER). The Coordinators' superiority is only informed to us, in practice they're basically the exact same. The moment everyone gets their nukes back, we get great fights and a killer Final Weapon in the form of the Genesis, but then it just goes the way Gundam always goes when someone pulls out the Final Weapon. The show stops pretending Coordinators aren't just Newtypes and weird psychic shit starts happening. At some point cloning is introduced but it only matters for one character. it's nuts!

If I was a kid I would be all over it, though. If I had never seen other Gundam shows, or just shows in general, I'm sure I would ride or die this shit til the end of my days. It has excellent mecha designs, cool fights, stellar music (except that last opening), and it's very well-acted... for the most part. But... fuck, if you want anything out of your stories, it's just not here.

Anyway, justice for Cagalli, she was a real character for like 2 episodes there and then they put her on a dress. Fuck me. Onward to IGLO-- wait what do you mean "Gundam Seed Astray"? It's 2 5 minutes OVAs? hang on a second.

....

I'm leaning toward my disappointment with it being the fact that it's barely got a point to make, and the ones that it makes aren't really well-made? Like, it doesn't know the difference between a race war and a Star Trek Eugenics war. It doesn't know how to build up tension between its actual characters. It doesn't know how to escalate conflict by following the story it's telling, instead of just twisting it at the end so we can have a space fight. But if its themes still reached a satisfying conclusion, that would matter a lot less.

And the themes are... not there, they're nothing. No character really embodies any idea or ideal, and no character has much of an opinion aside from the literal meme that War is Bad. A sentence which the translators for my subs really had to work overtime to try to figure out ways to say over and over again in different words, because that's essentially all Cagalli and Athrun say when you get them talking for long enough.

And it really feels like a weird turbo version of Gundam Wing, where the priorities of each characters are wrong and don't further their own stories. I was kinda shocked when the big Le Creuset reveal had nothing to do with the story so far, I was even more shocked when the fucking final fight was between him and Kira, two characters who do not care about each other nor know each other very well. Athrun should have taken that fight, and Kira should have taken the bomb run; what the fuck? Why are we doing this like this?

Lacus just becoming the captain of a ship is so fucking wild considering how much they made Natalie Badgirl go through in order to become captain of her own, it's so funny, she is the absence of characterization. She just does whatever the show needs her to do at any point, and it doesn't matter what she has already accomplished because she can just do whatever she needs to accomplish next. Why would she be captain? Am I losing my mind? What the fuck?

The only characters I really appreciated for any period of time were Flay and La Flaga, the former because I thought the idea that someone in this team completely cracked right away and started fucking the main character to emotionally manipulate him into killing his own people fucking ruled, what a million dollars conflict. And the latter because La Flaga is the only character I don't mind, I think he's charming and I think he's cool.

And then not only did Flay do a 180 masquerading as character development and became just another kinda pure-coded Gundam Lady, complete with the fucking Newtype Space Ghost death scene where all her sins are forgiven and she comes up naked to the protagonist telling him it's daijobou and she'll mamoru him, but then they also didn't give La Flaga a fucking Gundam until the end of the show! At which point they had to invent a reason for him to have a rival, because Athrun was now part of the crew!

it just feels like nothing happens for 50 episodes, because the events that do happen barely feel like they connect to each other. Like, yeah, they literally have a cause and effect relationship, but... it really feels like nothing before the Freedom pops up matters, at the end of the day. It really feels like most characters don't have a thesis behind them, it really feels like the conflict is extremely artificial. At some point we're asked to care that Kira is a testtube baby and I just, why, man, who cares, I certainly don't, it would be 2003 when this came out, be so for real.

I also... this is more of a me thing, but this is the first Gundam show with like, modern fansevice, I would say. Turn-A still had some light nudity, and I think literally every Gundam show before it also did-- usually just showing the girls' breasts every once in a while, like anime used to. But it wasn't... it was oogly, but it didn't make me feel kinda grossed out.

Meanwhile I felt that scene with Lacus stripping to get in the space suit on episode 1, with the back shot of her panties hit me like a fucking truck, because I grew up with that exact style of fanservice, and I fucking hate it; I despise it, I cannot stand it, I need it to perish and I'm glad it more or less died outside of actual ecchi. It sucks and it happens every once in a while, and it just makes the whole thing so off, moments that I'm supposed to take seriously have these fucking shots of the girls' tits bouncing like balloons, and they're shots they repeat all the time.

Specifically the Flay death scene really suffers, because they do the Lala ghost thing, but she's posing naked for the camera as she tries to convince Kira that it was a good creative decision to make her actually start to have feelings for him. It's incredibly distracting and it doesn't help that I think all of these character designs low-key suck. These faces look like they're melting and I'm not attracted to them. They only look good when they're making really ugly, angry faces, like when Miria tries to stab Dearka.

Who, speaking of which-- these are the worst enemies by far in any Gundam show, specifically they are the most incompetent fucking people in the franchise. Not because they're not Char or anything, but the fuckboy brigade Athrun leads at the beginning of the show just feels like they never win, and then the three stooges that replace them actually never win. It's honestly really funny that they tried to fix the problem the show had, and gave more people Gundams, only for the fucking new guys to lose even harder.

It's just so vapid and so superficial in all the ways that it shouldn't be, and it got me kind of sad, because I was not having fun at the beginning at all, and then by the latter half I thought oh, this ORB arc is heating up, I'm enjoying some of these developments, I think the show might be good now, only for every single plot thread and revelation to disappoint me.

No villains have actual relationships to the heroes (WHICH IS WILD BECAUSE ONE OF THEM IS THE DUDE'S FATHER). The Coordinators' superiority is only informed to us, in practice they're basically the exact same. The moment everyone gets their nukes back, we get great fights and a killer Final Weapon in the form of the Genesis, but then it just goes the way Gundam always goes when someone pulls out the Final Weapon. The show stops pretending Coordinators aren't just Newtypes and weird psychic shit starts happening. At some point cloning is introduced but it only matters for one character. it's nuts!

If I was a kid I would be all over it, though. If I had never seen other Gundam shows, or just shows in general, I'm sure I would ride or die this shit til the end of my days. It has excellent mecha designs, cool fights, stellar music (except that last opening), and it's very well-acted... for the most part. But... fuck, if you want anything out of your stories, it's just not here.

Anyway, justice for Cagalli, she was a real character for like 2 episodes there and then they put her on a dress. Fuck me. Onward to IGLO-- wait what do you mean "Gundam Seed Astray"? It's 2 5 minutes OVAs? hang on a second.

....