Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam is a peculiar and frustrating series. Still, there are some things in it I do like. First of all, I admire the audacity of following up the relatively straightforward war story of Mobile Suit Gundam with a conflict that's much thornier and more complex and ideological. The Earth Federation are placed in the roles of antagonists this time round, the domineering attitude they had towards the colonies in the original MSG evolving into a more imperialistic outlook, which nicely reflects the establishment of America's place in the global order following WW2. I also like that the Federation's new mobile suits incorporate a mixture of Federation and Zeon design flourishes, which demonstrates how Zeon's technology has been folded back into Federation R&D without having to say it outright. There are moments where the terrible impact of war is demonstrated in quite a chilling, visceral manner, although I would have liked more of them. The animation is very much improved from MSG, as you would expect with the six year gap between the start of this and the start of the original series, with both a lot more frames of animation and detail within those frames, which does a lot to show off the excellent technical design, which is just as good as it was before, and arguably better having shed some of the more toyetic elements from MSG. Much as I did not particularly like the series that bears it's name, I have to say that the Zeta Gundam itself is a great setting out of the stall for how the central Gundam in a series can radically depart from what came before while still retaining enough recognisable design language such that you can look at it and instantly think "Gundam". The Zeta is bigger, sleeker, and more elaborate than the original, as befits the leap in animation quality.

Here, unfortunately, the positives end. There are a couple of significant points which I think mostly contribute to why Zeta Gundam didn't work as well as the original series. The first, and more severe of the issues, is that Yoshiyuki Tomino can write character drama about as well as a fish can juggle chainsaws. I had problems with the character writing in the original MSG and sometimes found it hard to follow characters motivations or understand their actions. This is much worse, with a lot of characters acting in ways that cross over from irrational into truly unfathomable. Kamille is a more impulsive and emotional protagonist than Amuro, and I like that he is different from his predecessor, but an increased emphasis on the protagonist's feelings and relationships exposes the flaws in the character writing a lot more than Mobile Suit Gundam, and it does unavoidably feel jarring that the writing hasn't increased in quality in line with the look of the thing. The female characters get it particularly badly, there's more than one subplot that made me feel like I had been cornered at a party by an elderly relative who wanted to tell me about "what the deal is with women". I think this was actually made worse by the fact that there were some female characters like Emma and Haman who weren't like this because it reminded me of what I wasn't getting from most of the others. I'm sure the quality of the translation on Crunchyroll's subtitles didn't help but the dialogue has all the zip and spark of unflavoured jelly. Zeta Gundam also places a much larger all around focus on the emergence of newtypes and the psychic experience of being a newtype and the intensity and strangeness of this power is absolutely not conveyed well at all by characters staring directly into the camera and saying that they're having a psychic experience. Char is back, but he's a protagonist now, which instantly makes him less interesting because he has less things to do and you don't get as much of the cunning thought processes that made him a compelling antagonist in the previous series. Also it feels like a character expresses anger in a professional context by beating up a subordinate at least once an episode which goes from shocking to laughable to aggravating to both aggravating and laughable as the series goes on. The second main problem is that the plot in general, while it contains several interesting ideas, feels wildly haphazard. The series feels bloated at 50 episodes and the characters spend a lot of time fucking about, moving from place to place not really achieving anything. If the intention was to get across the crushing futility of a long term low-level conflict, it achieved that and I hate it. If the intention was to show a vertical slice of the different theatres more like MSG, it's more of a failure. The White Base's long, treacherous journey back to friendly territory in MSG helped string a lot of bits of that series together into something approximating a compelling narrative and without the help of that framing device you're lost here from the get go. Speaking of conflict, I feel like there was overall much less of a focus on combat tactics in the action scenes this time, and a lot more of mobile suits just flying at each other in a disorganised brawl, which did make a lot of them feel repetitive compared to MSG. Also much like MSG it just sort of stops unsatisfyingly at the end, although I think the last two episodes are overall some of the best of the series. Still, the road to get there is so arduous that by that time I really just wanted it to stop.