what's old gundam is new gundam???

2025/04/18

hi! it's been a few months since my last blog post, i've had an immense workload and updating the site just tumbled to the back of my priorities so for regular site readers i hope you don't mind the wait. it's april, and i've been on a (much-needed) break for the past few weeks during which i've been able to process my thoughts and feelings on various media, including my ongoing MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM obsession.

last month i put out a video developed from the ground up as an excuse to talk about CHAR AZNABLE, the dastardly sopping-wet rival of the original gundam series' AMURO RAY and thus an iconic character across pop culture. char is the reason i got into gundam, and char is the reason i made a video about professor layton, whose own villain is a distinct clone of char built and designed by a team who were simultaneously working on gundam AGE (which i've gathered is one of gundam's overall low points (a fact that does not even slightly surprise me after playing every professor layton game). it was indulgent and silly, and i thought it'd be the final time i'd think so extensively about char, a personal ultimatum on gundam, but then gundam GQUUUUUUX started airing.

as of writing, only two episodes of GQUUUUUUX have been released and so i don't have all too much to critique or dive into yet. though based on only the second episode, which aired a few days ago, i think i'm not the only one who's been unhealthy about char aznable.

while i'm wary on how reliant this show is on an existing series, positioning itself kind of like "shin gundam", i'm not opposed to how it experiments with its alternate timeline of events subverting our familiarity. it is also only one episode that directly replicates & twists story moments from the original mobile suit gundam to give background on the premise of this series. what's getting me about GQUUUUUUX is the way it looks backwards while moving forwards, fiddling around with details to do its own thing. everything does this, to some extent.

i would not have felt as unsettled by this if it wasn't for how i began watching TURN-A GUNDAM this week, the first show in the franchise detached from the original UNIVERSAL CENTURY timeline that i've watched, produced for gundam's 20th anniversary in 1999. being a celebrative reboot it's interesting to see what concepts are adapted and altered for its own setting and how, like many things produced in the year 1999, it looks eagerly forward. i'm hit particularly by the series' opening and its lyrics,

Who decided that time should move forward towards the future?

The lives that erase this stigma will rewrite history

reflecting on how gundam as a brand will move forward into the new millennium, pondering how it will break apart from shackles of precedent and affect its own legacy. more time has passed since turn-A aired than the time between it and the original gundam series.

i'm still largely new to gundam, but it seems like the question of "how do we redo gundam?" has been answered repeatedly by a range of writers and artists. turn-A (ten episodes in, at least) seems to be wholly stylized around this dilemma -- the gundam itself is an ancient machine hidden underground, and the series' setting is old-fashioned in technology & architecture while contrasting with high-tech machinery, sci-fi concepts like a race of humans that inhabit the moon and the obvious giant robot warfare. it brings to mind the kinda stuff you see in FINAL FANTASY and, especially thematically, it reminds me of MOTHER 3.

currently, we are seeing notorious otaku HIDEAKI ANNO's answer to "how do we redo gundam?", in which gundam is literally redone with altered historical events that set up a new storyline (roughly replacing the events of ZETA GUNDAM). it's elaborate char aznable fanservice, but it feels about as reflective as turn-A was so many years ago. at least, so far it does. wherever this show leads from here, it's built on the foundation of a well-beloved narrative (much like other STUDIO KHARA projects) and that is impossible to ignore.

i might follow up on this article and talk about the rest of GQUUUUUUX, but that won't be until the end of june and my head might be rotten from the oncoming culture storm of DELTARUNE chapters 3 & 4. if i'm right about this, and i forget to make an article on the ending to GQUUUUUUX, it'll be pretty funny.