Techno-Halflight

Like, it's a brand irl. A huge multimedia franchise with the classic grandpa Gundam and it's descendants as mascot. Internationally recognisable and extremely valuable.

But "Gundam" is also a brand in universe as well. A Gundam is a type of mobile suite that it's developers have decided to call a Gundam because Gundams have an in universe reputation as highly advanced, heroic, tide turners. Having a brand new state of the art mobile suite on the team is great but having a brand new state of the art Gundam is a statement.

In UC they descend from the design of RX-78-2 of course but the biggest similarity between various Gundam predecessors is they gave it the Gundam color scheme and stuck a V-fin on it.

Don't get me wrong, I like Tomino's work. He tends to tell stories that have deceptively deep characters and politics (If we could get him to be normal about women that would be great tho). But his stuff tends to suffer in its comprehensibility.

Characters act strangely, say bizarre things seemingly unprompted, and have seemingly overblown or contradictory reactions to things. I feel like you can almost always sit down and puzzle out how that behavior actually makes sense for that character afterwards. Which gives them a real feeling of depth and interiority; just like real people their actions make sense to them even if they aren't rational or obvious.

After War Gundam X on the other hand still has well realized characters and ideas it wants to communicate but it's much more willing to just tell you.

I just finished it, my favorite non-ova Gundam thing I think

I don't really have a dog in this fight, since I haven't watched unicorn yet. But it's been out for 16 years