#g wing

so like, before rly getting into ft, the most that I know of it is from snips of bad translations from years ago with missing/dead links so the only thing I know about it is that the characters are ooc, with much of the hate directed towards duo's characterization ofc, and that... i think only the hiiriri (which I often spell out as hirr) fans were happy? admittedly I only started digging around bc I wanted to know what happened to trkt lmao and that was also my primary motivation for reading it

but man oh man that complaint doesn't even cut it. like one other thing I often heard about ft is that it's like bad fanfiction? but like there is bad fanfiction and there is bad writing and this is just bad writing through and through 💀

and thinking back to it now idk if maybe this just got affected by my impatience and frustration (and disappointment!) with the whole thing but the quality just got soooo much worse sooooo much so much worse the longer the whole thing just went. and like you'd think that the last volume is like THE volume to look forward to??? like that's where everything culminates that's where all the loose ties get tied up you know??? but gods it was the Worst

like the whole thing started up as this... quirky exploration I guess??? of a kind of future after the broadcast and ew like it was just very "lol" or "sumizawa what were you smoking" which I would say is just part and parcel of a challenging project?? and it's been decades since gw's last big show so some unfamiliarity, change of trends and wanting to break through new terrain is just to be expected.

like I even gained an appreciation for the kind of stories he wanted to tell about, for instance, 2, 3 and 4 but it was more like... so duo had this bit where he was just riding all over Mars and I called that his cowboy au, and then quaterine was obviously the "what if quatre was female" au and trobos was ummm I forgot but no, trobos and quaterine were definitely the no-homo versions of trowa and quatre so like... "what if trowa and quatre were straight-passing" I guess

and especially during the first few books I really thought ft was sumizawa's way of like writing all the AUs and the what-ifs and the stories he wanted to write and then stringing them all into one novel which like I really understand, as storytellers, we really don't have forever to tell all the stories we want and like, he probably saw this as the opportunity to finally fulfill that dream bc who knows how much longer gw has before everyone decides they don't wanna fuck with that thing anymore right????

but then even after he laid out all the groundwork for his new characters, the new circumstances of the first cast, the new conflict and politics and stuff he just kept adding and adding more cement on top of the cement??? so then the basic premise, the very basic point of the whole thing just got buried and buried underneath several layers of whatever and it all just got so fing convoluted. like I would say actually that the whole book was maybe 60% groundwork 40% actual point

and like by the end of it I have no fucking idea who half of the new cast even are or like what happened to the original cast or how did they get to where they are or what happened to them fuck. it was all just an endless wikipedia article and add to that, several pages worth of like attack formations, mech and ship specs, geography and stuff and like those things blow over your head if you do them one after the other!!!! which sumizawa did!!!!!

and just when you think he's finally done talking about the past the fucking past that nobody even gave a shit about like literally it's a "nobody: nobody: literally nobody:" meme, he actually manages to unearth some more fossils in the dirt like even if you try and wrestle the shovel, the spade, idk from him, he'll keep finding some spoon hidden in his coat, his jeans, his undies idk and he'll keep. fucking. digging. like just when I thought that the furthest this wikipedia article was gonna go was like treize's youth, I'm sorely mistaken and find out that the peacecraft siblings' mother??? grandmother????? actually had a twin which like why? what the fuck was the point? (I know the point but it's still so why)

but I think as an effect of sumizawa's verbal diarrhea, the thing that became really clear to me is that frozen teardrop as a whole is super fabricated like none of its conflicts would have existed if he hadn't a) invented some inconvenience in the distant distant past that has absolutely no trace or link to the original broadcast or even ew, and b) nerfed his fucking characters. which, to me, is honestly the biggest disappointment bc this is such a huge pet peeve of mine bc I'm so sure I would have written frozen teardrop sooooo much better without fucking with the integrity of its foundations just to make the story work, and I would have done it for free, without all these fancy resources sumizawa had access to

yeah I guess that's what's caused me to be quite upset about this spinoff? bc as a plot, it's very narrow-minded, very brittle, and it just doesn't stand as a good story, much less a readable one! like yeah its structure is fucked, the fucking quality of this thing is a first draft still stewing in the pot but sumizawa served it to his diners even with all that scum still floating on the surface! and the kombu's even still there! like no one even fucking thought to at least fish it out or skim all that scum off before they poured it into our bowls!!! like I once mentioned on bsky that sumizawa needed like at least five editors to look at his work before they published it and he probably had no one reviewing them for him so imagine my surprise that he did have five fucking editors and this is still the kind of product people got and paid for.

like honestly I spent some time—a lot of time maybe—rationalizing why this was the kind of story we got and that was how I decided that frozen teardrop was sort of like... a darker version of gw which, like, that's interesting!!! that's an interesting exploration!! what if quatre just lost his compassion, what if duo just lost his whimsy, stuff like that. like in ffxv, depending on ignis' decision in his dlc, you get the verse 1 and verse 2 ending. verse 1 is obviously the canon ending, the darker one so to speak, and verse 2 was the official au, the happier one, etc. I came to the conclusion once that ft was gw's verse 2. and then somewhere in the middle books, it was revealed that sumizawa had stopped writing for a long while especially bc of his wife's health and ft was his comeback so like... ft was him breaking the rules of writing and rediscovering them for himself which like... yeah I can understand that! time and burnout changes us, especially our circumstances at home, at work, etc.

but man none of that really can defend much less explain the kind of flimsy writing ft was given. like honestly the whole premise does really have potential I think. if there's one thing I remember enjoying about ft, it was its world building. i liked the parts that talked about the hardships of Martian society, its looks, its atmosphere, the rugged terrain and all that and the student uprising(??) during the og heero yuy's time!! I really liked the political tension at that time, the kind of changes heero yuy went through until he became the heero yuy of legend, and I would have wanted to soak up a bit more on that!

but like... I'd say those are the only good parts for me. the bantering too—the bantering between older trowa and older quatre and younger duo and the long clan, I really enjoyed those parts. but none of them even justifies half the direction that the whole novel took. like what do you mean just to have some semblance of a conflict, they had to induce some form of amnesia on heero and relena just so they couldn't go like "waaaaait a minute this has happened before I know how to fix this" which I guess is a great way of saying, if a bit too on the nose, that people who can't look back will end up repeating history or whatever

but also like just... why is everyone a clone! why is he still alive! (this applies to more than one character holy shit) why is there a cat! why do I have to care about the fucking cat! what do you mean they've met before! what do you mean they've always known each other all this time! (a popular trope I think among the Japanese audience—and even the Korean audience! judging by how often it gets used on k-dramas but honestly I'm not such a fan of the whole small world thing)

towards the end of the whole series, yeah, I just gave up reading. I just flipped through all the mech battles, flipped through all the geometrical geographical not to mention the mythological and biblical and fairytale shit and honestly, I don't even know if sumizawa even still had a grasp of the kind of story he wanted to tell bc the whole thing is just... whatever. like especially around the 11th? 12th book? it just became a series of cameos of like everyone who came out in the broadcast, including the g-team. which like idk I guess it's fan service? like idk like some big celebration that the series is finally coming to an end but damn, the execution is just not it. like it's very unbelievable that all those things happened in the past but none of it was ever referenced outside the fucking spinoff and that really affects the way you get invested in a story you know?

I've heard it a lot that ft was basc retconning gw and actually especially towards the end of the series, the evidence really becomes glaring that ft really isn't a sequel of gw in any official capacity and that's why we don't see merch of the 2nd gen cast being sold even when the 30th anniversary frames are already being sold on face towels and stickers and stuff. and also why mdrkw calls it as spinoff bc the whole thing just... it just doesn't match the proper definition of a sequel, I'd say. in terms of timeline and universe, it really really stands on its own and it breaks easily if you sort of put it in the same context as like the original broadcast. and I think that's partly where all the creative freedom is coming from bc this is a series with no consequences, this is just... this is just marketing, this is just contractual obligation

by the end of the series, I don't remember half of what happened in ft's history or even half its new characters. they all have the names of generic drugs and they are all just so fucking unmemorable and I do wonder if that was a huge part of why sumizawa ended up killing them all anyway bc it was the final book and he has to do some housekeeping so that the broadcast and ew could still maintain some form of integrity even after all the shit he pulled! but like even their deaths were so fing unmemorable, vol 13 was p much just a bunch of "so and so died like this" and you're just left to say "ah ok"

so like if ft was supposed to challenge gw, like sort of be an edgy version of it, I think it just ended up being a huge fucking nuisance, honestly. i do appreciate how it tried to capitalize on a lot of characters who let's just say didn't get as much screen time during the original broadcast. so like hilde schbeiker, iria winner, a bunch of oz officers, like particularly the characters who, if you remove them completely from gw and replaced them with other characters who already have enough screentime, gw would remain unchanged. but the way sumizawa did it is like "uhhhhh I need someone to be evil" then he'd throw a blind dart and he'll go "ok it'll be hilde" for pretty much no fucking justifiable reason aside from why the fuck not you never know

I'd say the whole thing actually started much stronger than it ended. ft started with dufei trying to revive heero for reasons and immediately getting into a fight while they're at it and while the whole kill relena thing is a cliché at this point, I still think that was an effective way to set the tone of the story! but so to end it all with old milliardonald ranchcraft and heero and relena retiring to the country side and only them, while 2 to 5 continue to fight the good fight along with their ickles, it just feels like such a betrayal? not just against 2 to 5, but also against their very characters! in a way I guess hirr making the decision to retire while everyone else won't and can't feels very selfish of them and I'm not sure I'm convinced they would have taken that route just so they could start a family? I mean why not! neither hii nor riri were ever given the chance to be selfish when they were kids so like this is actually good for them! but idk there was no sort of hint of like everyone agreeing that this is for the best which I mean not that there needs to be! hirr are allowed to exist outside of the g-team and stuff but yeah idk i know what convinced them to make that decision to finally step away from all the fighting but knowing other things about them, it just felt very weak and "oh ok"

ANYWAY oh my god I've been at this thing for HOURS but I wanted to sort of like pull all my thoughts about this series together that aren't just me screaming in my #ftliv hashtag so here it is. I've gone and done just that and I think I can finally forget about frozen teardrop for fing good 💀💀💀

There’s a kind of electric that wakens him as he winds his way around Sandrock, putting himself front and center of his attention.

“Let me.”

The same kind of giddiness seizing him as he unfurls all of Heavyarms’ gates and expends every damn projectile within. The Leos may have tried to panic, but they’re all gone in a roar of light.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.” Even just through the comms, Quatre’s relief is already palpable. “Thank you, Trowa. I’m sorry for being careless.” Trowa isn’t.