Tag: Mobile Suit Gundam

Posted on in The Weekly Orbit

The Weekly Orbit [3/4/25]

The Weekly Orbit is a weekly(-ish) column collecting and refining my more casual anime- and manga-related thoughts from the previous week. Mostly, these are taken from my tumblr blog, and assume familiarity with the works covered. Be wary of spoilers!

So, just to be very honest dear readers, this one was a struggle to get finished. I think I’m in the middle of a depressive period again and, without getting too into it, getting this together at all was pretty tough. I hope you can forgive the relative lack of images once again this week. (I couldn’t even do a banner image this time, as something is wrong with WordPress’s image processor at the moment, seemingly? Sigh.) I’m not sure if I’ll be back to do this again next week or not.

Ave Mujica – Episode 9

In this past week’s episode of everyone’s favorite fun time girl’s band party, Uika thinks about murdering her former coworker. Ain’t it nice?

At this point, I’ve sort of run out of things to say about individual episodes of Ave Mujica beyond doubling back on praise I’ve already given it. The only issue with a show like this is that saying the same things about it over and over can get a bit dry: nonetheless, I will say that the psychodrama is on point as ever this week. Uika returns, gaining some actual focus for the first time in quite a while. This pays off magnificently since, well, yeah, she does in fact get a pointed intrusive thought about throwing Mutsumi down the stairs when the two meet for the first time since Ave Mujica’s breakup. If you’re worried about Mutsumi’s safety though, you should really be keeping more of an eye on Mortis, who accidentally “kills” her in headspace this episode. (She’s probably fine. Probably. Ignore that Mortis spends the rest of the episode pretending to be Mutsumi.)

The real highlight for me is actually the final scene of the episode, where, for the first time, every single member of MyGO and AveMuji have gathered in the same place: Livehouse RiNG, naturally. This feels like an absolute tempest waiting to happen, and Nyamu gets the final word of the episode in with a visceral reaction of disgust. Not an inappropriate response to “Mutsumi” (actually Mortis) bending to Umiri’s plan to get Ave Mujica back together. When part of your show’s central narrative has been compared by its director to a “double suicide,” you have to account for these things. Next episode looks like it will be even worse. (And thus even better.) What can I possibly say at this point? It’s simply great.

Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX – Episodes 1-3*

The ridiculously-titled GQuuuuuuX is set to celebrate Gundam’s 45th anniversary when it premieres in April, but, as is common these days, the first three episodes have been stitched together and released as a theatrical film ahead of time to build hype for the series’ premiere. I happened to have the opportunity to go see this movie—a subtitled release, no less—in theaters here in Chicago. (I went with my girlfriend and we had a lovely time. Hi, CC!)

There are obvious disadvantages to the three-episodes-as-a-movie structure, but for the most part they’re not really a huge problem with the GQuuuuuuX film. But it is notable that the first third thereof is pretty different from the rest. The opening act is a broad-strokes, impressionist what-if of the original Mobile Suit Gundam, in which behelmeted antagonist Char Aznable [Shin Yuuki] steals (this continuity’s version of) the original Gundam before Amuro ever so much as shows up. From there, the entire One Year War that makes up the original series’ plot goes wildly differently, and this culminates with Char’s mysterious disappearance at the end of the first act. Evidently flung through time, Samurai Jack-style, after a plan goes awry and he’s confronted with Some Newtype Bullshit.

I’ll admit, as someone who’s very much a Gundam neophyte, the first act here was a little bit of a tough sell. It’s excellently-directed, and the faux-retro look works shockingly well, but from what comparatively little I’ve seen of 0079 I was not super attached to Char, so him being the viewpoint character for most of the film’s buildup did not immediately excite me even if I can recognize that it was well done. Instead, it is the remainder of the film that most interests me. GQuuuuuuX here pulls off the impressive trick of drawing a direct line through the original Gundam, through the “Daicon Spirit” school of anime—that’s the zeitgeist of Gainax and her stylistic descendants, if you need a refresher—up to the present day. The most surprising thing about this is that it’s not more common: a full-color illustration that “real robot” and “super robot” are just points on a graph, it’s what you draw between them that matters.

Once we leave the original 0079 setting behind, we set off for something that is decidedly this show’s own thing, and the obvious ambition on display here clicks into place. Izuna is a burned-out space colony patrolled by Zaku in police deco, and there’s a theme of class warfare run through the whole thing. Our main characters are a schoolgirl, Yuzuriha “Machu” Amate [Kurosawa Tomoyo], driven and curious, who is eventually drawn into a world of underground mecha fighting and hijacks a Zeon test unit, the titular GQuuuuuuX. a “courier” (read: smuggler) she falls in with, Nyaan [Ishikawa Yui], her tie to that world. Joining them for the movie’s final act is Itou Shuji [Tsuchiya Shinba], a graffiti artist who’s somehow come into possession of what used to be Char’s Gundam. The movie only just came out, so I don’t want to spoil too much beyond what I already have, so instead, I’ll just say that the presentation and atmosphere here is absolutely fantastic. Especially with regard to the action, you can really tell that the Diebuster guy [Tsurumaki Kazuya] is directing this.

Manga

Destroy It All & Love Me in Hell – Chapters 1-19

The girl band golden age has coincided with toxic yuri as a subgenre—or strain, or whatever you want to call it—of girls’ love media gaining about as much attention as it ever has. This, I feel, cannot possibly be a coincidence. While the girl band characters use their medium to entangle themselves in each others’ neuroses and, hopefully at least, eventually come to some kind of resolution, the toxic yuri manga needs no such pretense and no such happy ending.

A year and a half ago, I talked about the then-seven chapters of Destroy It All & Love Me in Hell, explaining the general idea and appeal of toxic romance as I did so. My opinion has more or less not changed now that I’ve caught back up with it quite some time later. I am really just in awe of how compelling this series makes two girls ruining each others’ lives. Since that initial post, Kokoro has gone off the deep end as well, becoming obsessive to the point of forcing herself on Kurumi at one point. We’ve also met a new character, a hanger-on of Naoi’s who is enough of a masochist that she resorts to trying to bribe the girl into treating her badly. All this to say, it’s as toxic as it’s ever been. This is really more of a PSA than anything else: yes, if you want to read the girlies despairing, it has remained very good at delivering that. There’s also something to be said, though, about Kurumi’s quest to live free of expectations, and how every step she’s taken, seemingly toward that goal, has ended her right back where she started. I may review this manga when it finally finishes, whenever that will be, since I’m very interested in how this story ends.

That’s about all for this week. As always, I ask that you make a contribution if you enjoyed this column and are able to do so.

In lieu of the usual Bonus Image, have two, taken from this unofficial translation of an event from the BanG Dream! game, where Tomori says that Taki reminds her of a coffee bean. It is cute enough that I may die.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text is manually typed and edited, and no machine learning or other automatic tools are used in the creation of Magic Planet Anime articles, with the exception of a basic spellchecker. However, some articles may have additional tags placed by WordPress. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: Spring 2023 Stragglers

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

This article’s header image comes from Insomniacs after school.

One consequence of a season being so packed is that I didn’t actually get to do a full writeup on everything I would’ve liked to cover. At this point, it’s impractical to do full columns on the eight other anime I started watching this season, so instead, here are some short mini-writeups, to give you at least a general idea of what I thought of them. Mostly, I think this season is pretty good! There are a couple exceptions, as you’ll see.

KONOSUBA: An Explosion on This Wonderful World! – I’ll be honest, 99% of the reason I didn’t cover this in full was because I don’t really know much of anything about the series it’s a spinoff of. Sure, I’m vaguely aware of KonoSuba, mostly in the form of heavily compressed meme images that kick around reddit, but that’s not exactly a fair impression of the show itself I’m guessing. In any case it doesn’t really matter, since Explosion is a prequel; the origin story of one Megumin the Witch, who seeks to become the master of the ill-regarded explosion magic. This is mostly a comedy, all told, and it’s one that’s more intermittently amusing than laugh-out-loud funny, but if you dig fantasy settings and nicely-animated explosions (and who doesn’t?) this seems like a solid pickup to me.

Insomniacs after school – Now this is really just a lovely thing. A soft-hued midnight friendship between two actual chronic insomniacs who hit it off at school one day after running into each other while taking a nap in their school’s old observatory. As both a fellow person with a pretty serious sleeping disorder and someone who absolutely lives for lavish nocturnal scenery in my anime, this is an easy highlight of the season so far. (Honestly, there’s a touch of And Yet The Town Moves in here to me. A surprisingly relevant reference point this season, given that Heavenly Delusion is also airing.) Plus, the leads are really cute together. Enough so that when this takes its inevitable turn for the romantic, I’ll be cheering them on. Sidebar: between this and last year’s Call of The Night, the revamped Liden Films seem to be developing an incredibly specific niche for themselves. But if the shows keep looking this good, they have absolutely no reason to stop any time soon.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury – I’ve been pretty open about why I don’t cover Gundam in more detail on this site. Somehow, I just feel underqualified. But the cold fog of betrayal that lingers over Witch From Mercury‘s first episode since its hiatus doesn’t need intellectualizing. More than anything, it demonstrates the space that’s grown between Suletta and Miorine. Hence the latter’s almost total absence from this episode until its epilogue. The two new characters—who aren’t really new at all, we met them at the end of the last cour—are steering things in a distinctly darker direction, and it’s not clear how long the façade that the school and its dueling system provides will last. It’s already creaking under the pressure; in Witch From Mercury‘s second season, we get to watch the cracks form.

Otaku Elf – Going by this first episode, this is a cute—if maybe a bit slight—magical realist goofball comedy anime, of a kind that used to be very common, went away for a while, and is now making something of a comeback. It’s a solid first showing, even if the core concept of a JRPG-style blonde elf taking up residence in a Shinto shrine (because she used to be friends with Tokugawa, even!) might strike some as a little strange. References to assorted geekery abound, bolstered by honest-to-god product placement in the form of a Redbull plug. In addition to all of the Otaku Humor™, there are some nice emotional beats, too. Enough to at least suggest that Otaku Elf has legs and isn’t purely a procession of gags with no further point. A decent one to keep an eye on, if you want a more lighthearted pickup this season.

THE MARGINAL SERVICE– Well, they can’t all be winners. We have here an almost impressively shitty action anime from the usually good to great Studio 3Hz. I don’t mean that in terms of its production values, which range from fine to exceptional over the course of its first episode. I’m talking about the writing, a hateful, vitriolic ouroboros of xenophobic rhetoric smeared twice over with two incongruous sets of storytelling tropes. One from American police procedurals and the other from tokusatsu team shows (and the latter really only shows up in the episode’s final few minutes). There’s the seed of a marginally (ha) interesting idea here, but it’s wrapped in so much “what if the phrase ‘illegal aliens’ referred to like actual space aliens” garbage that it’s impossible to disentangle from the problems. When we get into some primo anti-Semitic dogwhistles like our utter prick of a protagonist calling the episode’s villain of the week a “lizard bastard”, we’re well removed from my ability to evaluate anything “on its own terms.” I just can’t do that when the terms in question are clearly so awful. Oh, and it manages the impressively awful trick of introducing a named Black character and then killing him within its first sixty seconds. In some seasons, the “boring” is worse than the “bad.” This is not one of those cases, as this easily limbos below Kizuna no Allele for the season’s worst premiere by a massive lead.

Tokyo Mew Mew New, Season 2 – The kids’ magical girl pastiche that isn’t actually a kids’ show returns for round two. Honestly, there’s not a ton to say here. It’s more Tokyo Mew Mew New, following roughly the same contours as both its first season and (presumably) the original. New to its triumphant return are some minor plot twists and yet another potential love interest for Ichigo. That and some updated environmental talk make it at least worth watching if you’re a fan, but if you’re not already onboard the Tokyo Train, this is probably a skip for you. You’re not missing nothing, but you’re not missing too much, either.

TOO CUTE CRISIS – Picture the headlines! An alien assault on our planet stalled indefinitely, not by heroics or diplomacy but by the sheer overwhelming adorability of our planet’s animals. Yes, TOO CUTE CRISIS imagines a world where Earth’s cats and dogs are impossible, irresistibly adorable by intergalactic standards. For the most part, this is a zany comedy without much further thought to be gleaned from it, but not only are the protagonist’s gleeful freakouts over the cuteness of dogs and cats pretty relatable, they also give way to a few moments of actual sweetness. (Punctuated by more gags of course. Dig the orbital malnutrition beam she calls down to punish a jackass ex-cat owner that left his little guy in a box on the street.) Comedies like this tend to be overlooked, but for my money this is one of the season’s stronger premieres. It knows exactly what it wants to do, and it does it well.

World Dai Star – Contemporary ‘actor girl’ anime are barely plentiful enough to be called a genre. Yet, when I used that phrase, you almost certainly knew what I meant, given the existence of the likes of Kageki Shoujo (not to be confused with Revue Starlight) or, on the other end of the quality spectrum, CUE. There aren’t a ton of these things, but they’re distinctive. To most, what will jump out about World Dai Star isn’t its premise or writing but its hyper-detailed, almost uncanny character animations. This is a series that truly puts the “acting” in “character acting,” as it were. And that’s important, because after a very dry setup, the show abruptly springs to life as soon as we get to an actual stage. A glowering veteran actor plays a wicked witch and frightens most of the young auditioning aspirants off the stage, and our lead unexpectedly blossoms into competence by capturing and perfectly recreating her best friend’s take on the prince from The Little Mermaid. (Somehow, “can effortlessly copy anyone else’s performance but struggles to come up with her own takes on things” is a plot point that both this and Kageki Shoujo from a few years ago came up with independently. Unless this is simply copying that, which would be so outrageously meta that I almost hope it is true.) Props for having a lead that’s not a total amateur (even if she is annoyingly self-deprecative) and for the bizarre “Sense” talk that reminds me weirdly strongly of Revue Starlight‘s conceptualization of star power. Unfortunately, this and Kizuna no Allele form a duo that’s not unlikely to get totally buried by Oshi no Ko, which touches on some of this same subject matter in a very different way. For Allele, I couldn’t really care less, but Dai Star surely deserves at least a supporting role in the season.

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All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.

Posted on in anime, Seasonal Impression Roundups

Seasonal First Impressions: MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM: THE WITCH FROM MERCURY is The Season’s First Must-Watch

Seasonal First Impressions is a column where I detail my thoughts, however brief or long, about a currently-airing anime’s first episode or so.

Every so often, an anime comes along where simply by virtue of what it is, writing about it feels more than a little surreal. Such is the case with Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury. You can probably guess why; the series bears a supertitle with some very long and very heavy history in this medium. It is the first mainline Gundam anime in nearly a decade, and while I’m sure lifelong Gundam aficionados will have plenty to say about the series, I am coming at things from a different angle as a relative neophyte. I’ve only ever seen one other Gundam anime; 2007’s Mobile Suit Gundam 00, and when I saw it, it was only a few years old.

The legwork of worldbuilding and basic plot setup already done in an “episode 0” prologue that aired a few months back, The Witch From Mercury instead opts to open with our protagonist, Suletta Mercury (Kana Ichinose), rescuing an apparently-adrift astronaut from the inky depths of space as they float away from the space station / military academy that will presumably serve as the series’ primary setting. But less important than what happens in these opening minutes is how it happens; she’s a panicked bundle of nerves the entire time, with her demeanor contrasting sharply against the soundtrack; a bundle of whirling synthesizer swells.

Things establish themselves in stages. Our setting is a military academy where absolutely anything can be settled via duel (the “space Utena” comparisons write themselves) under the watchful, sinister eyes of a shadowy council of CEOs. “Anything” happens to include marriage, which means that when Suletta runs into Witch From Mercury‘s other protagonist, Miorine Rembran (Lynn), it’s mid-escape attempt, since Miorine is attempting to flee from the academy and her duel-decided future husband, Guel Jeturk (Youhei Azakami). Or, as you will come to think of him, This Fucking Guy.

Jeturk is, to put it politely, not a nice man. To put it less politely; he’s a conniving, self-centered dillweed who’s an abusive ass to his to-be wife, going on a performative “man rampage” at one point while smashing up a garden she keeps because it reminds her of Earth. His only real redeeming quality is an admittedly impressive head of two-tone hair. (Sidenote; a couple other characters with wonderful hair show up, including an evil CEO whose beard and hair combine to give him the same silhouette as Mac Tonight, and a girl with astronomically huge puffball hair.)

The good thing about Jeturk being such an ass is that he makes an ideal episode one villain. He spends most of his screentime either being terrible to Miorine or peacocking his status as the “Holder”; that is to say, the school’s ace pilot. Naturally, when Suletta, despite being all nerves, challenges him to a duel, he accepts and thinks he’ll win easily. Some complications (like Miorine hijacking Suletta’s mobile suit, the Gundam Aerial) aside, this setup of dominos naturally comes crashing down.

It’s worth noting just how badly Jeturk gets his shit utterly rocked. His purple mecha is pretty impressive in its own way, but it’s not a Gundam (contextualized here as being a portmanteau of “GUND-ARM”). The Aerial is a truly sublime piece of deadly artwork in Suletta’s hands, and her capability with it comes across as a mecha pilot analogue to performance composure. Some people come alive on the stage; Suletta, on the battlefield, for better or worse. The thing’s weapons spin and reconfigure themselves in a floating ring that is an absolute visual delight. The rest of the episode looks, variably, solid to pretty good, but the entire fight scene here is just astonishing. In particular, a shot where the Aerial’s shield deflects a laser strike, only to make it scatter and scintillate into the air behind it, is just beautiful.

Suletta and Miorine also bicker while inside the Gundam, of course, and Suletta’s philosophy that pushing forward at all times, because even if you don’t win you’ll have “experience and pride”, is certainly something that the series seems like it will loop back around to before too long. But here, and for now, it carries her to an inarguable victory, as Jeturk’s purple mobile suit ends up in a tattered pile of laser-cut scrap on the ground.

The Witch From Mercury‘s premiere then concludes with what is perhaps one of the all-time great end-of-first-episode revelations, which I cannot comment on except to reproduce it here in its entirety, in screencap form.

Really, what could I possibly add to that? Are you, dear reader, surprised that I’m going to tell you that I think you should watch the sapphic giant robot show that seems to be taking at least a few cues from Revolutionary Girl Utena? You shouldn’t be. The Witch From Mercury delivers what is thus an early high-water mark for premieres in an already absurdly stacked season; competing with this one will be hard.

Like what you’re reading? Consider following Magic Planet Anime to get notified when new articles go live. If you’d like to talk to other Magic Planet Anime readers, consider joining my Discord server! Also consider following me on Twitter and supporting me on Ko-Fi or Patreon. If you want to read more of my work, consider heading over to the Directory to browse by category.

All views expressed on Magic Planet Anime are solely my own opinions and conclusions and should not be taken to reflect the opinions of any other persons, groups, or organizations. All text, excepting direct quotations, is owned by Magic Planet Anime. Do not duplicate without permission. All images are owned by their original copyright holders.