Your souls are weighed down by gravity!!
I was going to post about school, but the computer froze up while I was writing a nice long rant about by boring and ineffectual instructional design professor so that will have to wait. But clearly any moron can get a degree in education because there are plenty of morons teaching it.
Brace for fan whining.
I hate "Newtypes." I think the idea of humans "evolving" into quasi-espers has been the weak point of the Gundam franchise from the beginning. I'd have to break the laws of physics to suspend my disbelief when some Newtype teenager who has never piloted before can hop into the cockpit of the giant robot his estranged father built and instantly become an ace who holds the entire military in thrall and proceeds to spend the next 50 episodes making stupid, adolescent mistakes that the supposedly capable, responsible adults around him either fail to prevent or actively support, all because he's "special."
Yeah, I'm watching Gundam Unicorn. Clearly I am a masochist. Actually, some parts of it aren't that bad. Some of the mecha concepts are nice (I'm in the minority of fans who think Katoki's artwork is too cluttered) and the animation is glooooorious save for a couple of moments when the old-fashioned character artwork looks QUALITY. The setting is fairly approachable even if you haven't seen all of the other UC Gundam series. And actually, it's better if we pretend ZZ Gundam never happened.
It's the characters that suck. Banagher Links has even less personality than Kira Yamato, which is saying something because Kira was basically a male moeblob. I don't know if it's an animation quirk or what, but during scenes where I'd expect to see some intensity in his character, he sort of looks to the side and makes a sad puppy face. It gets kind of annoying after a while. Especially when he suddenly goes from somewhat apathetic student to OMG MYSTERIOUS GIRL I'VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE I WANT TO PROTECT YOU WITH MY LIFE!!!111. I'm guessing that's one of those Newtype things - clairvoyance allows you to sense the plot relevance of other characters, and "coincidentally" turn up just in time to rescue them. And take them to your dad's house, only you somehow forgot that he was your dad. But it's cool, because he's been building you a giant unicorn robot for the past decade. Plot, what? I mean, it's hardly the first time this exact same storyline has happened in the Gundam universe, but I really wish they'd break new ground instead of forever rehashing the same story with new characters. Gundam 00 fell apart the moment the director started injecting out-of-place UC Gundam tropes. The masked man! The whiny engineering student who becomes a pilot! The improbably secret organizations! The philosophical musings on evolution! The doomed romance! The crazy girl! Oh, you like crazy girls with no character development? Here, have four of them!
Anyway, rounding out Banagher's good guy group at this point are the Peace Princess who will probably sing something at some point, an annoyingly jealous sorta-girlfriend who will get foisted off on someone else ASAP just like Frau Bow, and a guy who looks so much like Sam from Terra E that I'm already prepared for a Bad End. So, characters we've already seen before in Mobile Suit Gundam, Zeta Gundam, ZZ Gundam, Gundam Seed...
But the character the fandom really cares about is Marida. She pilots what is arguably the best looking mecha in the series, and she blows a lot of things up. She's cool, she's capable, and she can kick ass. Marida pisses me off, because what could have been a really interesting character is weighed down with moe baggage to make the fanboys drool. She's a another clone of Puru, the creepily sexualized preteen from ZZ Gundam, only grown up, legal, and sporting an mullet straight out of the 80s. That would be bad enough given the skeevy fetishization of Puru in ZZ. But no, Marida was sold into prostitution as a little girl, gang-raped again and again, and given so many abortions that she can no longer bear children. Okay, that's a terrible story, but... there's no way Unicorn is going to give child sexual abuse the sensitive, responsible treatment it merits. This is an anime targeted towards older male fans, a significant percentage of whom have spent their lives jerking off to underaged Puru porn. Marida's traumatic backstory is nothing more than "Damaged Goods" moe, which will invariably make her fall in love with the first saintly man who can look past the fact that she's not virginal breeding stock. Fanboys insist that Marida's portrayal isn't offensive because she gets to be a good pilot (if female characters in Gundam do get to fly a mecha, they're almost always bad pilots or they rely on some kind of gimmick, like mind control). You can't tell me that's not offensive. And we already know that in Gundam shows, women who have sex are punished by death so they can become "character development" for the hero, so poor Marida probably won't live long enough for her infertility to be an issue. Never mind the fact that it's the future, so there's no reason a brothel would be performing repeated surgical abortions on one of their prostitutes when birth control pills are available right now...
Ugh. I want to like UC Gundam, because it's how you get your mecha fandom street cred. But the UC series, even more so than the AU spinoffs like Turn A, Seed, 00, X and Wing, seem to be written by and for adolescent males. UC teen heroes plow blindly through overly contrived political subplots, freed from the constraints of parents (always dead), authority figures (always incompetent), and friends (always adoring), fueled by the deeply held Newtype conviction that they're special, damn it! They're right! Every problem can be solved by shouting as loudly as possible! Once a few bad people are killed, everyone else will live in perfect harmony and humanity will reach the next stage of evolution!
That was why I liked Gundam 00 season 1, despite its flaws in execution (the second season of 00 is another one of those things I'm going to pretend never existed.) Most of the main characters didn't come from a morally upright, middle class background, and the one who did (Lockon) was possibly the most screwed up and hypocritical of all of them even if it wasn't obvious at first. For once, people acknowledge that "fighting for pacifism" is a really stupid idea, and that political leaders have responsibilities beyond being pretty figureheads. There's a sense of desperation and frustration in the heroes, because they don't know what's right but they do know they're not accomplishing it. You get the sense that they're not fighting for their ideals, but to shape their ideals. Of course, instead of building on season 1, season 2 of 00 systematically undid everything the first season awkwardly accomplished by effectively replacing the reflective and insecure Middle Eastern main character with moralizing Japanese student, letting the Peace Princess who was previous condemned for being ineffective spend a good 20 episodes hiding in a cave while her country fell apart, and sidelining all of the other interesting characters so the whiny Japanese guy could bulldoze his way through the plot. It was painful to watch. It was like watching UC Gundam.
So while Gundam Unicorn is really, really pretty, and I'll probably keep watching it because I like mecha... so far it's not trying to do anything different. I guess that's what people want.
Brace for fan whining.
I hate "Newtypes." I think the idea of humans "evolving" into quasi-espers has been the weak point of the Gundam franchise from the beginning. I'd have to break the laws of physics to suspend my disbelief when some Newtype teenager who has never piloted before can hop into the cockpit of the giant robot his estranged father built and instantly become an ace who holds the entire military in thrall and proceeds to spend the next 50 episodes making stupid, adolescent mistakes that the supposedly capable, responsible adults around him either fail to prevent or actively support, all because he's "special."
Yeah, I'm watching Gundam Unicorn. Clearly I am a masochist. Actually, some parts of it aren't that bad. Some of the mecha concepts are nice (I'm in the minority of fans who think Katoki's artwork is too cluttered) and the animation is glooooorious save for a couple of moments when the old-fashioned character artwork looks QUALITY. The setting is fairly approachable even if you haven't seen all of the other UC Gundam series. And actually, it's better if we pretend ZZ Gundam never happened.
It's the characters that suck. Banagher Links has even less personality than Kira Yamato, which is saying something because Kira was basically a male moeblob. I don't know if it's an animation quirk or what, but during scenes where I'd expect to see some intensity in his character, he sort of looks to the side and makes a sad puppy face. It gets kind of annoying after a while. Especially when he suddenly goes from somewhat apathetic student to OMG MYSTERIOUS GIRL I'VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE I WANT TO PROTECT YOU WITH MY LIFE!!!111. I'm guessing that's one of those Newtype things - clairvoyance allows you to sense the plot relevance of other characters, and "coincidentally" turn up just in time to rescue them. And take them to your dad's house, only you somehow forgot that he was your dad. But it's cool, because he's been building you a giant unicorn robot for the past decade. Plot, what? I mean, it's hardly the first time this exact same storyline has happened in the Gundam universe, but I really wish they'd break new ground instead of forever rehashing the same story with new characters. Gundam 00 fell apart the moment the director started injecting out-of-place UC Gundam tropes. The masked man! The whiny engineering student who becomes a pilot! The improbably secret organizations! The philosophical musings on evolution! The doomed romance! The crazy girl! Oh, you like crazy girls with no character development? Here, have four of them!
Anyway, rounding out Banagher's good guy group at this point are the Peace Princess who will probably sing something at some point, an annoyingly jealous sorta-girlfriend who will get foisted off on someone else ASAP just like Frau Bow, and a guy who looks so much like Sam from Terra E that I'm already prepared for a Bad End. So, characters we've already seen before in Mobile Suit Gundam, Zeta Gundam, ZZ Gundam, Gundam Seed...
But the character the fandom really cares about is Marida. She pilots what is arguably the best looking mecha in the series, and she blows a lot of things up. She's cool, she's capable, and she can kick ass. Marida pisses me off, because what could have been a really interesting character is weighed down with moe baggage to make the fanboys drool. She's a another clone of Puru, the creepily sexualized preteen from ZZ Gundam, only grown up, legal, and sporting an mullet straight out of the 80s. That would be bad enough given the skeevy fetishization of Puru in ZZ. But no, Marida was sold into prostitution as a little girl, gang-raped again and again, and given so many abortions that she can no longer bear children. Okay, that's a terrible story, but... there's no way Unicorn is going to give child sexual abuse the sensitive, responsible treatment it merits. This is an anime targeted towards older male fans, a significant percentage of whom have spent their lives jerking off to underaged Puru porn. Marida's traumatic backstory is nothing more than "Damaged Goods" moe, which will invariably make her fall in love with the first saintly man who can look past the fact that she's not virginal breeding stock. Fanboys insist that Marida's portrayal isn't offensive because she gets to be a good pilot (if female characters in Gundam do get to fly a mecha, they're almost always bad pilots or they rely on some kind of gimmick, like mind control). You can't tell me that's not offensive. And we already know that in Gundam shows, women who have sex are punished by death so they can become "character development" for the hero, so poor Marida probably won't live long enough for her infertility to be an issue. Never mind the fact that it's the future, so there's no reason a brothel would be performing repeated surgical abortions on one of their prostitutes when birth control pills are available right now...
Ugh. I want to like UC Gundam, because it's how you get your mecha fandom street cred. But the UC series, even more so than the AU spinoffs like Turn A, Seed, 00, X and Wing, seem to be written by and for adolescent males. UC teen heroes plow blindly through overly contrived political subplots, freed from the constraints of parents (always dead), authority figures (always incompetent), and friends (always adoring), fueled by the deeply held Newtype conviction that they're special, damn it! They're right! Every problem can be solved by shouting as loudly as possible! Once a few bad people are killed, everyone else will live in perfect harmony and humanity will reach the next stage of evolution!
That was why I liked Gundam 00 season 1, despite its flaws in execution (the second season of 00 is another one of those things I'm going to pretend never existed.) Most of the main characters didn't come from a morally upright, middle class background, and the one who did (Lockon) was possibly the most screwed up and hypocritical of all of them even if it wasn't obvious at first. For once, people acknowledge that "fighting for pacifism" is a really stupid idea, and that political leaders have responsibilities beyond being pretty figureheads. There's a sense of desperation and frustration in the heroes, because they don't know what's right but they do know they're not accomplishing it. You get the sense that they're not fighting for their ideals, but to shape their ideals. Of course, instead of building on season 1, season 2 of 00 systematically undid everything the first season awkwardly accomplished by effectively replacing the reflective and insecure Middle Eastern main character with moralizing Japanese student, letting the Peace Princess who was previous condemned for being ineffective spend a good 20 episodes hiding in a cave while her country fell apart, and sidelining all of the other interesting characters so the whiny Japanese guy could bulldoze his way through the plot. It was painful to watch. It was like watching UC Gundam.
So while Gundam Unicorn is really, really pretty, and I'll probably keep watching it because I like mecha... so far it's not trying to do anything different. I guess that's what people want.