Why You Should Watch Gundam 00

I’ve been trying to think of a way to convince people to watch this show for a while.  I even tried to make one of those goofy PowerPoint things, because people need to understand.  This show is incredibly cheap on Amazon and the legal GundamInfo Youtube Channel puts it up and pulls it back down again every so often, on top of that.  Besides, you all know where to find anime if you really want to watch it. The only reason you haven’t at least tried watching it is that no one has tried to convince you yet. Allow me to at least make an attempt.

 

So you don’t like giant robots–because that is the argument I get, when I try to talk people into watching this show.  You don’t like giant robots, they’re not really your thing.  That’s fine. Gundam 00 is about the Gundam robots, like Fullmetal Alchemist is about alchemy, or Supernatural is about the supernatural, or the Captain America movies were about superheroes.  It’s there, and it’s important, and there are even people that watched it only for the robots, or those other things only for those other elements.  But the people in those fandoms kind of cringe to think about that fact, because there’s so much more to those stories than just the fantasy set pieces.  Gundam 00 is the same way.

 

Gundam 00 is about Setsuna F. Seiei, a teenager who’s a robot pilot for Celestial Being, an armed organization that’s determined to eradicate war—by attacking everyone who tries to start a conflict with their more advanced weapons.  But it’s also about Saji Crossroad, the ordinary civilian who lives in the apartment next to him and doesn’t really care about Celestial Being when they first appear.  Setsuna enters the show with firsthand experience with the horrors of war; Saji does not. While contrasting these two, Gundam 00 turns the usual line of questioning about “the costs of war” on its head, and asks the viewer what price they’d be willing to pay for peace.  As the show continues, they make that question more complicated by showing us the rest of the cast and their range of opinions—and the range of backstories they got those opinions from. Everyone takes their stance, and those stances have consequences—except when what happens isn’t a consequence at all, and the world is just random and cruel, because this is a show about war.  

 

There’s no mistaking this show for one made before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  Not only are terrorist attacks and accusations of terrorism all over the show, there are also some things that are definitely supposed to be drones, and some pretty messed-up prison systems.  The entire plotline is shadowed by the past Solar Energy Wars, a past war over energy resources that was part of many of the characters’ backstories—and parallels real events in the Middle East’s recent past.

 

Gundam 00 has high aspirations, and the only reason it gets anywhere near them is the fact that the huge cast is also terrifically written. I could go on and on about the character relationships and the nuances the writers took time to add, but I really think my favorite is the fact that Celestial Being’s four robot pilots, our main characters, do not get along in the least at the beginning of the show. Not screaming rivalries, either—two of the characters approach this, but for the most part it’s just that they’re all awkward and a little too different from one another.  It takes character development for that to change.  I’m also very fond of the standout side characters, such as the Unbeatable Patrick Colasour, who you’ll meet in the first episode.

 

The battle choreography is pretty great, too.  The person who does it also worked on Evangelion briefly, doing an episode where two characters had to fight a monster in sync.  In Gundam 00, he does the opposite—using the four main characters’ robots, all of which have different weapons, he has the robots fight in ways that are more interesting than just them shooting the same kind of beam canon at each other repeatedly (which is what happens in the badly-done robot shows). The Exia Gundam, in particular, uses mostly knife-type weapons and looks like something out of a martial arts movie.  Just, you know, big and metal.

 

The cast is not only well-written, but visually well-designed, and incredibly diverse for an anime. The main protagonist is Middle Eastern, and the cast has people over forty, as well as lots of awesome ladies.  There are characters with disabilities and ones that don’t identify along the gender binary, too (though in both cases the characters are spoilers).  

 

I know some people have reservations about Gundam series, or giant robot series, or anime in general. And I can’t promise that you’ll love this anyway.  But I can promise it’s at least worth giving a shot.

Originally posted 9/01/2015, with 197 notes.