devilrules666 said:
why is zeta.0080 ur fav? i am interested to hear why.
Zeta: camp value.
Oh ok, it also has a bunch of cool mecha designs and the characters aren't completely repulsive. Completely.
0080: Whilst Gundam has always tried to be about more than a bunch of colourful - available in the shops - toy robots beating each other up, it tends to fall-short of its ideals when:
- Likeable characters are usually only likeable because they're 'cool', 'idealistic' and/or the next stage in human evolution.
- Relationships between the characters are rewarding only because you feel the heroes deserve them for being all round amazing.
- The Sci-Fi setting is always in awe of itself, so no matter how harsh and oppressive political powers are, you never find it too sincere, because all any young man has to do to improve his life, is to jump into the nearest prototype robot and star in his own gee-whizz show.
- Atrocities are so commonplace, you get entirely desensitized to death in all its forms.
> After an initial few episodes of token war-is-hell-I-don't-want-to-kill-people hesitation, the increasing pile of faceless-grunt bodies usually stands as an unacknowledged counter-point to whatever the protagonist is supposed to be fighting for.
> Worse still, Gundam-shows have a bad habit of making the claim that mistreated, misguided 'born for war types' deserve to be mourned for several episodes
even if they've just destroyed a half-continent's worth of human life.
0080 is great because it's not trying to be epic; because it has a small-cast of flawed characters neither totally good, no bad, but mostly simply unfortunate; because no one is a super-prodigy transhuman uber-pilot, and they're more likely to actually suck at it all; because the sci-fi futurama of space-colonisation is a seldom-mentioned backdrop; and because the unnecessary death of a decent, well-developed character is incalculably more convincing than blowing **** up and saying "Iza thinkin' lotsa people gonna die!"
08th MS Team had a similar philosophy starting out, but even that descends into pantomime villiany and genocide machines at the end.
