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For someone who is very fond of mecha anime, I have seen very, very little of any Gundam series. The most important reason is that I never had access to the original Gundam series when I got into anime, and everything that came after presumed that you had all this background knowledge. It’s admittedly the same with the Macross series, but I got to experience that as it came out, giving me the information I needed to understand what ‘protoculture’ and ‘fold-sensitive gut bacteria’ meant. Without that knowledge, you can appreciate the series for the cool mecha battles, but you can’t really understand what it is about.

And there is so much there: Gundam shows a deep history with nuanced political scheming — it’s certainly not a case of “these are the bad guys, these are the good guys.” So it was hard for me to enjoy any Gundam series without knowing the setting all that well. Some Gundam spin-offs don’t require knowing the setting, such as Gundam Build Fighters, and I did enjoy those.

So I’ve tried slowly getting into it. Not with the original series, because that is now so dated and slow-moving that I just can’t appreciate it. I think I watched one episode and just found my attention slipping.

But I’ve watched more modern Gundam iterations, such as Gundam Unicorn RE:0096, which shows some of the background but is pretty stand-alone as well. I’ve really liked it (gave it an 8 out of 10), so I have been looking for other things to give me more of that background.

Recently I found a 13 episode series that was called ‘the origin’ (but it’s weirdly not the 6 episode series that are called ‘the origin’ that also exists?) that focuses on what happened before the original series. And it is delightfully character-focused: for the largest part, there aren’t any mobile suits in it because they had not been invented yet! You get to see the descent of Zeon into fascism (hint: if your side’s cheer starts with ‘sieg’, you’re not one of the good guys), but the Earth Federation is not much better either. The series leads right up to the start of the original series, featuring characters that I (obviously) didn’t know in advance, but now know where they are coming from.

After that, I went on to Gundam SEED, and I’m now five episodes into that.

And I think the crux of every Gundam series is that there is someone (or a small group) is caught between two fascist factions that are at war. The only thing that keeps them safe is the fact that they can pilot the/a Gundam. And for the rest of the time, they’re kind of trying to keep people safe while the whole machine of war rolls on around them.

This is a stark contrast with the Macross series, where the main characters really decide the course of the main conflict. In Macross, the characters have much more agency than in Gundam, where the main characters’ actions seem to be more dictated by necessity and the actions of others.

I wonder if Gundam (which is much older than Macross) is more of a reflection of how the Japanese seem to regard their own role in WW2: as innocent bystanders in this whole big conflict. (Which might be true for the average Japanese citizen, but we know that Japan as a nation was certainly not innocent in WW2. Critical self-reflection on the nation’s past is not a cultural value that is deemed important by the right-wing governments of Japan…)

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.