#gquux

12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 3

A new year, a new Gundam to politely complain about. All is as it should be.

The first thing that should to be said about GQuuuuuux, tabling any snide remarks about the title, is that the theatrical preview event was a fantastic way to kick things off. None of us really knew what to expect going in, and then we got slapped in the face with half an hour of lovingly-rendered 0079 fanfiction where Char found the Gundam instead of Amuro and how this singlehandedly changed the outcome of the war. Then, a sharp artstyle pivot to half an hour of girls running around and getting in illicit mobile suit money matches and having emotions at one another in a gigantic colony-city built up in the aftermath of the Zeonic victory. Both halves are excellent work from the industry veterans at Khara, who succeed in both paying homage to the original Gundam as a legendary work and presenting their own unique and modern spin on it.

Most people immediately put forth Hideako Anno’s name when talking about GQuuuux, but he ultimately ended up with fairly limited roles in cowriting and production oversight. This is a work that truly feels like the product of an auteur smashing their favorite toys together, so I do get why people think it’s all Anno, as he’s spent the last decade doing exactly this for Godzilla and Kamen Rider and all his other childhood obsessions. But director Kazuya Tsurumaki of FLCL fame is the one calling the shots here, and once you know that, pretty much everything falls into place. The manic animation, the otaku deep-cut callbacks, the wildly escalating plot, the romantic freakouts – it’s all been done before, though not with this much color and this many robots.

The biggest consequence of their approach is that GQuuux absolutely demands prior Universal Century knowledge. The One Year War flashbacks are there as fanservice, not elucidation, and if you don’t know who Kycilia Zabi is or what Char Aznable did then you’re just not going to get much at all out of this show. It's building directly off of tons of disparate elements from the first few Universal Century entries, especially 0079 and Zeta. The good news is that GQuuuux’s adherence to being Universal Century fanfiction through and through can be a genuine strength! From a Glup Shitto perspective, this show is fantastic, constantly dredging up unimaginably deep Universal Century characters and mobile suits and giving them major roles. They even gave us a third major Char Aznable yaoi option in the form of Chalia Bull, who in this timeline developed such a close bond with him that they had to coin a new term for coupled mobile suit teams – MAVs.

It’s funny, because I remember this show originally being pitched as a bridge between old and new Gundam fans back when it was first announced. The promotional videos heavily featured two-on-two Gundam arena fights and the colorful cutesey character designs of Take, the modern Pokemon character designer. This was originally supposed to be The Big Gundam 45th Anniversary Show! In contrast, the prior Gundam anime, The Witch From Mercury, was originally intended as just a minor stopgap try-new-things show in the leadup to GQux, and it ended up becoming huge. Not just among existing Gundam fans, but as an onboarding vehicle to Gundam at large (I technically fall into this category!) They didn’t seem to change anything about GQuux in response to G-Witch’s massive success, which is objectively a good thing – seeing through an artistic vision rather than just cashing in on trends and whatnot. It does lead to some conceptual overlap between the redheaded female protagonists and “witches” as an underlying theme, but it’s all so different in execution that it's not an issue.

Amidst all the Gates Capas and Gyans and Gelgoogs, Gquux has a very strong central trio of characters in Machu, Nyaan, and Shuji. Machu is a wildly different female protagonist than G-Witch’s Suletta, being spoiled, impulsive, and assertive. In contrast, Nyaan lives a fragile life, doing odd delivery jobs to make ends meet and constantly praying that she doesn’t get deported. She has to work for everything she does, and the class resentment between her and Machu definitely bleeds out. This is especially true in each of their relations with dreamy slut-boy Shuji – Machu coasts on her MAV dynamic and latent newtype flashes to feel close to him, and ends up stunned and incensed when Nyaan also develops a crush on him, expresses herself, and slides in. It’s cool to have a genderswapped version of the Char-Amuro-Lalah love triangle, with two people fighting over a third who is lost in a world of their own, dreaming of hopeful futures that will not come to pass. It’s less cool when Lalah actually shows up to hijack the narrative from them!

Even for those of us who have done our homework, the veneration of the Universal Century goes from a strength to a massive weakness by the end of the show, as the writers become completely lost in the sauce. As Gquuuuuuuuux comes to a head, it becomes increasingly clear that the they don’t want to do anything new within the framework they’ve concocted specifically to do new things. Once Lalah Sune is introduced and spouts her lore-dump (coincidentally one of the episodes written by Anno), the walls begin to close in and we’re stuck litigating old, buried conflicts in this new world.

GQux is GFucked like that. Most of the standalone episodes in the middle stretch of the show are solid – I really like the one about Xavier’s possibly-boyfriend Miguel being revealed to have poisoned at least three of his classmates and friends in an attempt to keep them from becoming Cyber Newtypes and losing themselves. It’s a twist of the knife in a way that feels very classic gundam, as does Lady Kycillia grooming Nyaan, taking advantage of her precarious status as a space immigrant. Meanwhile, the one with the feddy ace “witch” is not a Gundam episode – it’s an Utena episode! I know a Juri duel when I see it. It doesn’t have much lasting impact, and could have stood to be cut if that would have freed up some for Machu and Nyaan interactions, but it’s good on its own too. We eventually get two great episodes where Nyaan and Macchu find themselves on opposite sides of an Zeon internal power struggle, both given guns and a Mission at the same location. It’s the perfect setup for our girls to finally fight and attempt to kill each other! What could have been the coolest scene in the whole show is rudely interrupted by Char Aznable crashing in after being long-presumed dead, Lalah spouting some more doom, and Gundam showing up. Seriously, the literal RX-78-2 Gundam from 0079 arrives via spacetime portal to rain hell down on the world of GQuuuux for daring to exist. After being MIA for half of the show, Shuji goes from being his own character to merely acting as an avatar of the Gundam. Fucking Beyond the Time from Char's Counterattack plays as the penultimate ED. It’s all unearned, and completely derails anything interesting the show was doing prior.

Even at this late stage of GQuuuux, with just a single episode remaining, there was a way to put everything back on the rails, which would have been Macchu and Nyaan teaming up and saying No We Are Not Doing This and blowing up the gundam without hesitation in order to return to their own story. This is not the outcome we get. The Gundam does an Ultraman size transformation because the fine folks at Khara are just dicking around at this point. Shuji lectures from the Gundam about multiverse shit that would be bad in a Marvel movie and is bad here. Shuji and Lalah and Char argue with each other about the sanctity of the timeline, wasting valuable minutes. Chalia Bull himself asserts that he was trying to be the Char archetype of this world, and that Char doesn’t need to be here! But nonetheless, Char is here.

Instead of a decisive “fuck that”, the only reliable cure to last-minute plot bullshit, the fight ends with a heart-to-heart and a kiss between Shuji and Machu in the kira-kira. It completely invalidates Machu and Nyaan as the true emotional core of the show when they don't get to interact in the final episode. Not as friends, not as piloting or romantic rivals, just... nothing. Also, the epilogue reveals that Zeon just… let Char wander off and do community service? You gotta keep this man under lock and key, especially with two timelines worth of knowledge on being a Fucker.

I am a database animal at heart, and a Gundam otaku at that. I love when a show references a previous show, when I can trace the lineage of a character archetype or a robot design. I love narrative callbacks and creative reinterpretations. I should be the target audience for Gquuuuux. And yet, I left unsatisfied, because I am also a Feminist, and I wanted to see so much more with the Women who are ostensibly the main characters. Khara’s toy time has obstructed this.