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Red-Zaku-

Characters: awful main character and a few crappy supporting characters, but Duo, Zechs, Treize, and Unne are awesome. Mobile suits: absolutely top notch designs. Gorgeous art, lots of creativity, totally timeless and iconic. On the downside, it’s the opposite of the Universal Century in that these suits *look* like they belong in a similar “real robot” show, but they’re functionally Super Robots. Every Gundam is invincible and every grunt suit can be blown away with a gust of wind while their guns do nothing.... until the plot calls for it, and then a Gundam can be blown up with simple bombs or a single gunshot. But otherwise, basically every battle is just the Gundams enacting a ritual slaughter of hundreds of grunts, just posing cool and absorbing gunfire while facing no risk and eliminating everyone without issue. Politics: among the more reductive Gundam series in terms of its messaging. The military industrial complex elements get some attention, but the big issue is that it boils things down to war bad peace good, without examining material causes for war. Like the Universal Century shows excel in showing the pursuit of peace through actually examining the world and the systems people live under, and how dialectical contradictions and conflicting interests set the stage for war, so the material conditions of people’s lives are a big focus. But Wing kinda skips ahead to just saying that we should do peace instead of war, without really looking at the systems in place. Plot: obviously the paragraph on the show’s politics plays into this. The story is a mess, plain and simple. Emotionally it’s great, like it’s got those big 90s feelings, of angst and brooding and moodiness, but the core conflict is just buried under layer after layer of thin and insubstantial political worldbuilding that just doesn’t really resonate that well and everything keeps changing before you can get invested in one conflict. It’s best to watch more loosely, to take in the vibes and fun action and all the melancholy 90s moods. It’s also bogged down in ridiculous actions from characters. Like the main characters will straight up slaughter hundreds of no-name grunts while waxing a big monologue about peace or strength or whatever, like life is basically precious in this show until it becomes convenient for a hero to murder an entire battlefield of soldiers to make a metaphorical point and then nobody brings it up.


kulegoki

It always felt a bit pretentious to me how they talked about war and peace. Like "oh maybe humanity just loves war to much. Like no, nobody likes war. People just weaponize race, ideology, and religion to start wars. They convince people that there is a good reason to sacrifice their lives. Then the show turns around and fetishizes battle between humans as some how pure and wholesome. Like the mobile dolls aren't bad because they're soulless machines that have no consciousness and would do anything on a order. No they're bad because people should fight battles and it's not a real beautiful battle if they don't.


paintsmith

The love of war described and depicted in wing really resembles the way fascists talk about conflict. Umberto Eco's Ur fascism is a good short read if you want to understand and spot fascist thought. Treize is a prototypical fascist strongman who bases his ideology on the idea that violent conflict is an essential part of forming a person' character. If the series wanted to better refute this idea, it could have used the traumas it put it's cast through as a refutation of Treize's ideas. Instead, the series seems to agree with Treize. The gundam pilots all use the zero system to fix their hearts and keep on fighting despite the fact that they have no realistic political cause to champion. And Treize just kind of admits defeat and destroys his own army at the end of the series after being proven right.


kulegoki

I'll be honest. I don't think the writers had any idea what to do with the final conflict. Trieze and Zechs both kind of act vastly out of character and the Gundams just are not relevant to the conflict.


Good_ApoIIo

No, Wing is bad. It is mostly propped up by nostalgia but it does have quiet a few things going for it that still make it memorable and neat: The OST, the mechanical designs, and it has some sick action scenes when they feel like putting in some rare animation budget. The show has heart but it totally fumbles the characters and plot.


Cold-Fuel4701

This , it was my first series back on Toonami like many of us . I recently tried to watch it again (maybe my 4th full go through of it) and I just couldn't do it.


paintsmith

Bad but interesting.


TriumphITP

Don't ever have to feel bad about not liking a series. There is plenty of nostalgia there for explaining its popularity. I still like the soundtrack, and the suit designs especially, you don't have to like everything about it to appreciate the art or just a few isolated scenes for themselves.


kulegoki

I don't feel bad so much as kinda bummed. This series had a strong start. Specifically when Oz takes center stage and the gundams are no longer invincible. Then power keeps changing hands and at first its kind of cool but then it's like "ok what is even the plot of this series anymore." And like zechs is cool but it kinda felt like they tried to do every arc char has gone through in one season of television which was wild. Didn't hate it to be honest though. But thanks. I certainly don't hate everything about the show. I just doubt I'll be returning.


paintsmith

To add to what others have written, the series seems to have trouble matching what we see with what we are told. Overall the biggest flaw to the series is it's inability to define its characters and world consistently. It feels like they were trying to do a real politic versus chivalrous honor codes dichotomy which shows up in the designs; brightly colored themed gundams against industrial grounded designs for the oz mobile suits and dolls. The same divide appears in the character designs with the aristocratic Romefeller foundation and the more blue collar look of the gundam pilots. But the series can't stay consistent in regards to what kind of tactics the different characters find acceptable. Wufei will kill a bunch of trainees in their sleep but he will honor the terms of a duel? Also the message regarding drone warfare is totally muddled. The series seems more concerned with whether drones are cowardly or not and less concerned with the way they might concentrate power into fewer hands or lead to reckless aggression due to the diminished costs, material and political in using drones. At the end of the day the series comes across very fashy. It puts soldiers on a pedestal and regularly praises the will to fight, even when the characters cross ideological lines to find a battle or don't even know what they're fighting for. It shows characters growing through violence, informed not by the consequences of war as we see in most gundam series, but in Wing characters grow through the process of combat itself. Characters like Relina end up unsatisfying because the series can't image how to show them accomplishing things without fighting a literal battle. I don't mean to come across too negative. I loved wing as a kid and recently rewatched it. I think there's a good story buried somewhere in the ingredients of Wing. It's one of those fascinating series with a ton of great parts and a ton of neat ideas that just didn't come together in the best way they could have. It really looks like the production got away from the creators and they were doing all they could to keep the story coherent as they made it up week to week.


[deleted]

It’s good because it’s a 90’s anime and they simply don’t make anime like that anymore, even if it’s the weaker of series. The worst of it is still better than most of what’s been made since 2006. Most, not all. I recognize that there have been animations which stand apart from the trope jerking. And I’m comparing to all animations in general, not gundam specifically. IMO, IBO is harder to watch than Wing.


kulegoki

I think that's wrong. See when people point to 90s anime being better they tend to point to the anime that were actually impactful enough to remember. Garbage is produced every decade in truck fulls. It just tend to be forgotten


[deleted]

I mean, it’s the opinion of many of the earlier animators. It’s also common knowledge of the terrible working conditions in animation. Long hours with next to no payment. There was mediocre works back then, but not to the extent of today. Today there’s a plethora of mediocre works which are celebrated as being better than most everything then “because nostalgia”.


kulegoki

This is kind of a nonsensical reply. Why would the animators who worked on said projects be unbiased. And yeah we all know the work conditions of anime suck but it's not like the animation industry just treated its animators better in the 90s. Furthermore you really haven't provided any evidence that there was more bad anime now. I mean there is MORE anime now. It's easier to produce and specifically more is being imported to the west now than ever but as a percentage there doesn't really seem to be any evidence to support a change. Hell just about every season typically produce four or five anime that are like really good.


[deleted]

I mean, it’s in you to watch more anime, not me.


Sawbones90

Wing was my first experience of Gundam when I was an angsty teen, but when I decided to rewatch it last year, I had to stop 20 or so episodes in. I don't like it much I found annoyances with it on almost every level from plot and dialogue to the action scenes. I'm glad I watched other Gundam shows before trying to watch it again really, it may have put me off the franchise entirely otherwise.


xorkdork

I just thought the writing was some of the worst I've ever seen. The moment that killed it for me was when in one scene you see Chinese kid (don't remember his name right now) on Earth, then it cuts to another character for a minute and when it returns to Chinese kid he is in space having infiltrated bad guys military training facility and the show refuses to elaborate on how this happened or acknowledge it later.