Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam

I've been stewing with Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam on my brain for little over a couple of years by this point. Initially I was frustrated a lot by it, considering my first experience with the Universal Century was through Unicorn (a series written by the man Tomino despises the most, Harutoshi Fukui, aka Japanese Tom Clancy). Kamille was annoying to 18 year old me, a lot of the dialogue felt stilted(?) and people had the wackiest decision making I had ever seen (until I saw Code Geass). It was a frustrating experience initially, but as I started mulling over it while continuing my marathon of the rest of the Gundam series, I became significantly less harsh on it, and now I think its the closest we'll ever get to an objective anime masterpiece (outside of One Piece or Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood).

Zeta Gundam picks off almost a decade after the original series left off. With General Revil's death days before the battle at A Baoa Qu, the Earth Federation quickly spiraled into corruption and decadence, and by UC 0083 (beloathedly thanks to Stardust Memory), the Titans private army is established to snuff out future resistances against the Federation government, effectively acting as a publicly funded and heavily armed group of bullies traveling around the Earth Sphere shoving people into lockers (the Colonies). This is what leads to a bunch of people from all corners of life, Federation, civilian life, the private sector, and even former Zeon, to band together and form the Anti-Earth Union Group, or AEUG, to combat the Titans' shenanigans and actually restore sanity to the Earth Sphere once again. They get mobile suits of their own to do combat against the Titans in various pockets across Colony space, and one of those conflicts arrives on Kamille Bidan's front door step on the Titans HQ of Green Noa in Side 7. Kamille very swiftly does the Gundam protagonist thing of hopping into the conveniently nearby Gundam Mk. II and escapes with the AEUG strike team to take the fight back to the Titans.

Zeta very quickly retreads the steps of the first 12 episodes of the original series within the first 5 episodes to get people back into the feeling of Tomino's writing, and then as soon as we're back in step it immediately devolves into a really dark kill em all fest with bits and pieces of black comedy sprinkled all throughout. Zeta Gundam was birthed right in the middle of Tomino's "Kill em All" character arc, when Sunrise and Bandai's executives made him feel suffocated and strung along with their antics. He even wanted Gunpla to just not be a thing, even though it was the reason Gundam got a sequel in the first place. So Tomino during Zeta's (and Victory's) production had a LOT on his mind, and he was letting loose right out of the gate. Multiple character deaths happen all across the series, and they kill off

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Kamille's parents as well as a couple of Titan girls that Jerid rizzes up

to send the message that everybody is expendable right off rip. And they continue killing, over and over and over again. Kamille arguably sees way more body bags than Amuro ever did, and the only Gundam protagonist that experienced as much death as Kamille was Uso in Victory. This series, and I have to emphasize this, is NOT for the light-hearted in any capacity whatsoever. On the same coin, this series is also not for the neurotypical in any way whatsoever, since Kamille Bidan himself is anything BUT neurotypical.

Where do I even begin with Kamille Bidan… I guess I’ll begin straight from the horse’s mouth.

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Yeah Kamille is a like, really special case. And he's also the main reason Zeta is such a god tier show. Through inadvertently (or not, I have no clue how accurate the autistic child sub actually is to the original Japanese) making him the most blatantly autism-coded/neurodivergent-coded protagonist ever, it acts as a sort of allegory for how suffocating it feels being a high-functioning autist, in a world where nobody tells you the rules and then yells at you for breaking them as if you kicked their dog. Having gone through Life™ for the past 2 years after finishing Zeta, I began to draw similarities between Kamille's suffering in Zeta, and my own personal hell. It's nowhere near the same mind you, I've never actually seen people die in front of me in real life, but I still feel incredibly sympathetic towards him as a character. He, like Amuro, is just a normal teenager with pent up emotions fighting through a situation that brutally punishes him for wanting anything else. Even if unlike Amuro he chose to enter the war on his own volition, it STILL ate his soul away all the same as the series progressed. By the end

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when he's about to finally end the conflict and be free of it all, the universe itself chooses his enemy in their final moments, and fucking zaps him into a vegetable.

Its so... fucking... depressing. It's also so emblematic of the experience of being a high functioning autist. Just constant suffering until the end because nobody is able to understand your desires at all.

Also SAO tried copying Zeta's flow by having Kirito suffer the same fate as Kamille for like a minute before being powered back up beyond comprehension in the final arc lmao. Reki'll never be like Kill Em All Tomino.

Anyways uh talk to me on my profile! and watch Zeta it's peak fiction idk this was a short ramble that went nowhere.

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