i have a lot of complicated feelings abt char and lalah (and amuro, completing the triad) bc i feel like they’re a lot of things at once…like their interaction and relationship is sweet, especially sort of imagining that in the newtype realm at the end of CCA/Unicorn they finally all find peace together in some impossible-to-define way, but it’s also undeniably not equal and manipulative and lalah is too young for all of this shit.
lalah is really cool as a character, but she also mostly exists frozen in time as a perfect girl and a memory to make men sad, and doesn’t get to have any real independent interactions with anyone other than the other two boys in the triad. she sort of struggles to be a person of her own, and also knowing she was the basis for Anthy in Utena adds a particularly dark tone to that as well.
they’re held up as kind of the ur-example of newtype communication crossing boundaries, except it’s also kind of debatable whether they all ever really understand each other (and that’s also fully part of the point, imo, that newtype communication isn’t infallible or magic perfect and tragedy still strikes.)
as a huge fan of gundam Archetypes they are really compelling to me as this sort of mythological trio, the devil-comet-swan, and yet i sometimes fear im just reading too much into it and applying a sort of overaffectionate shipper/fandom brain onto something that’s a lot more tragic and ultimately futile or even meaningless in the end of things (when you consider that even after CCA, the world—and war— keeps turning, and in the far future, no one remembers their names.)
idk. i do like that it’s a complicated situation. i don’t think they’d be as compelling or interesting to me if they were simplistic. but it’s just always turning over in my mind. That’s Orbit Babe
