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timepiececlockG00 - 02
There's a lot of elements here that remind me of Gundam Wing, one of my first anime experiences.
You've got the stern and broody brown-haired main character.
You've got the princess.
You've got the pilots as very pretty boys... though here they're older, look less like anorexic children, and are even more "pretty". God, that's going to take some while to get used too. I just don't like overly effeminant male characters in anime, unless they're supposed to be, ike Ayame Sohma or Emperor Hotohori.
You've got the gundam pilots starting as a terrorist cell... that's very similar to Gundam Wing, though in this case they know each other and know their mission. I rather miss the fucked-up-edness of GW that meant each boy was trained like a weapon experiment lab rat and dropped onto the world to be a one-man cell, totally unaware of each other's existence or larger purpose. I liked the dark implications of what it meant that the pilots were basically human experiments walking (this explained why they kept going crazy and were violently suicidal). Okay, that was mostly Hiro, but I got the impression that a lot of them went through a lot of shit in their "training" before being abandonned whole-sale and left to wreak havoc then die/disappear. I mean... Hiro was violently suicidal, Trowa was just creepy as a stone-cold killer, Quatre went literally psychotic after one of the suits forced him to face his suppressed rage, Wufei was like a walking bomb waiting to explode (and he turned traitor in the OVA because of it), and Duo... Duo was both incredibly normal and at the same time totally whacked, because he freaking laughed as he killed other pilots and even created a second "personality" to hide under when he went on missions...yet he passed for normal better than the other four.
I wonder if we'll get any crazyness here? Probably one, at least. I hope we get the wacky whose-side-am-I-on team jumping, at least. I'm all for conspiracies and betrayals in my Gundam anime.
:::watching the credits::
Everyone's got great hair in this series, don't they? Especially the Celestial command lady, with the long brown-red hair. I like how they designed it.
"Special Particles" ...ah, anime science. Even Hollywood science quivers in your wobbly presence.
It's hard for me to not roll my eyes at the fact that the main boy's named "Setsuna"... that's the name of Sailor Pluto from Sailor Moon, my very first anime.
Ahh, the angst. They're such killers for the cause, angst away!
I can't tell them apart in their suits... they all have long bangs and their helmet colors are different from their hair colors, and hair is how I usually tell these kinds of characters apart.
"We are the pain that's required to bring about change." Aahhhh, I see they're going for a Zechs Marquis approach to peace: kill everyone who doesn't think pacificism is a neat idea. Become the monster to save the others... it's a stupid philosophy, but one with a long history in the giant robot anime.
So many anime series take this extremely negative approach to wartime conflict and the consensus approach to the idea of a perfect peace. I wonder if it's a holdover from WWII? In a lot of anime I've seen, the solution is the same: total pacifism is achieved when everyone realizes how foolish and pointless war is. That's an extension of the Mutually Assured Destruction philosophy of the Cold War Era. In fact, the "gundams" appear to be basically just really big guns; in effect, they are the "nuclear missiles" or weapons of mass destruction of this futuristic society. But societies change, and the last 20 years have shown that the M.A.D. approach only works with dueling superpowers and can't work with a more complex world with smaller but sharper enemies and little revolutions aided by weapons proliferation.
So what the Gundam 00 series has done is set up a three-superpower world design, and proposes to use the gundams for Mutually Assured Destruction as a deterrent. Just like GWing used the dual superpower set-up of Earth v. Colonies.
Hmmm... it's a bad idea.
There's a lot of elements here that remind me of Gundam Wing, one of my first anime experiences.
You've got the stern and broody brown-haired main character.
You've got the princess.
You've got the pilots as very pretty boys... though here they're older, look less like anorexic children, and are even more "pretty". God, that's going to take some while to get used too. I just don't like overly effeminant male characters in anime, unless they're supposed to be, ike Ayame Sohma or Emperor Hotohori.
You've got the gundam pilots starting as a terrorist cell... that's very similar to Gundam Wing, though in this case they know each other and know their mission. I rather miss the fucked-up-edness of GW that meant each boy was trained like a weapon experiment lab rat and dropped onto the world to be a one-man cell, totally unaware of each other's existence or larger purpose. I liked the dark implications of what it meant that the pilots were basically human experiments walking (this explained why they kept going crazy and were violently suicidal). Okay, that was mostly Hiro, but I got the impression that a lot of them went through a lot of shit in their "training" before being abandonned whole-sale and left to wreak havoc then die/disappear. I mean... Hiro was violently suicidal, Trowa was just creepy as a stone-cold killer, Quatre went literally psychotic after one of the suits forced him to face his suppressed rage, Wufei was like a walking bomb waiting to explode (and he turned traitor in the OVA because of it), and Duo... Duo was both incredibly normal and at the same time totally whacked, because he freaking laughed as he killed other pilots and even created a second "personality" to hide under when he went on missions...yet he passed for normal better than the other four.
I wonder if we'll get any crazyness here? Probably one, at least. I hope we get the wacky whose-side-am-I-on team jumping, at least. I'm all for conspiracies and betrayals in my Gundam anime.
:::watching the credits::
Everyone's got great hair in this series, don't they? Especially the Celestial command lady, with the long brown-red hair. I like how they designed it.
"Special Particles" ...ah, anime science. Even Hollywood science quivers in your wobbly presence.
It's hard for me to not roll my eyes at the fact that the main boy's named "Setsuna"... that's the name of Sailor Pluto from Sailor Moon, my very first anime.
Ahh, the angst. They're such killers for the cause, angst away!
I can't tell them apart in their suits... they all have long bangs and their helmet colors are different from their hair colors, and hair is how I usually tell these kinds of characters apart.
"We are the pain that's required to bring about change." Aahhhh, I see they're going for a Zechs Marquis approach to peace: kill everyone who doesn't think pacificism is a neat idea. Become the monster to save the others... it's a stupid philosophy, but one with a long history in the giant robot anime.
So many anime series take this extremely negative approach to wartime conflict and the consensus approach to the idea of a perfect peace. I wonder if it's a holdover from WWII? In a lot of anime I've seen, the solution is the same: total pacifism is achieved when everyone realizes how foolish and pointless war is. That's an extension of the Mutually Assured Destruction philosophy of the Cold War Era. In fact, the "gundams" appear to be basically just really big guns; in effect, they are the "nuclear missiles" or weapons of mass destruction of this futuristic society. But societies change, and the last 20 years have shown that the M.A.D. approach only works with dueling superpowers and can't work with a more complex world with smaller but sharper enemies and little revolutions aided by weapons proliferation.
So what the Gundam 00 series has done is set up a three-superpower world design, and proposes to use the gundams for Mutually Assured Destruction as a deterrent. Just like GWing used the dual superpower set-up of Earth v. Colonies.
Hmmm... it's a bad idea.
