##!THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS!
So I admit I haven't seen a lot of Mech shows before. I've been an anime watcher for roughly 15 years now and so far I've only seen Full Metal Panic, Code Geass, TTGL and NGE. I also had never yet seen a Gundam. Until now.
As I'M on a bit of a binge on shows that Gigguk added "gay girls innit?" to describe what makes them interesting or special, I decided to, after rewatching Lycoris Recoil and MagiRevo, to take the plunge into G-Witch.
First things first, the actual Yuri was not as pronounced as I hoped or wanted. Suletta and Mionire make a very cute couple, but the latter half of the show sadly didn't really give them a lot of time to really get a relationship going. At least not a romantic one, their friendship relationship is plenty strong.
Speaking of time... The entire show needed at least another season more. I read that Gundam installments usually run for 50 episodes instead of the 24 we got here, but for what it's worth, it was a real rollercoaster. While it didn't really scratch my Yuri-itch, it definitely scratched my scifi/cyberpunk itch.
Now, into detail!
The story itself is well done, tho, like I said. We have our main cutie-pie-country-bumpkin Suletta come from Mercury to a prestigious school only to in her first day piss off the head honcho of the school and steal his bride. Said bride, Miorine (aka Mio-Mio), is all but enthusiastic about that cause her uber-powerful dad set up a business-marriage between whoever is the head honcho at the school. And cause Suletta defeated said guy - Guel - in a duel, she's now the big girl on campus. Before long, Suletta and Miorine strike a deal - Suletta keeps suitors off Mio-Mio's back so that she can flee the school and remain unmarried until she's 17, and Suletta can stay at school and live her best high school girl life, which is something Suletta, who'd never been to school, had been yearning to do. However, Suletta's Mobile Suit, Aerial, draws ire fromt he megacorporation Benerit who runs the school, as it's very similar in technology to the banished and condemned Gundams that sap their pilots lives. And thus, the Benerit corporation internally fights itself to get Aerial into its grasp and become the dominant force of interplanetary weaponry. And as if that weren't whack enough already, we have casual terrorism, mommy issues, and it only escalates to a point of where an interplanetarian threat is emerging that our heroes need to stop. Two, actually. It doesn't take a lot to threaten all out war between the powderkeg that is Earth and the rest of Space. I think the show overall did a really good job of shining a light on contemporary issues like colonialism, extortion, war (olr the threat thereof), injustice, racism, companies with much too much power, greed... It's a mature tale and I really liked it.
Besides the pacing issues I had with it I really liked it, even if, like I said, the romance between Suletta and Miorine fell too flat for my tastes. Much too flat. But I guess for a series as legendary as Gundam it makes sense to take babysteps into the realm of prominent queer love. Correct me if I'm wrong please.
The main difference and source of further conflict is that Suletta doesn't know just how much her mother, Elnora aka Prospera, actually manipulates her. She's a happy go lucky, friendly and cute to a fault girl with very strong morals guided by the seemingly innocent motto of "If you move forward you gain two, if you run you gain one". It guides her through hard decisions because of "running gives you a temporary advantage or gets you out of danger but daring to push makes you achieve greater results", at least that's my interpretation of the motto. Well, it's been that motto that made Suletta do such fun things as brutally squash a terrorist into pulp and then smile about it because even though she was scared she thought she did the right thing and blindly followed her mother's suggestion. The issue with that is that Suletta isn't an idiot but she doesn't think for herself; so in a sense, come to think of it, she's the opposite of Miorine but the result - being under their parents' thumbs - is the same. I did like Suletta as a character, she wasn't a candle in the wind, but she's not the best character in the show imho.
The other lead, Miorine, is strategically very gifted and thinks on her feet quickly. She's excellent in business and luckily doesn't shy from calling people out who wronged her or her loved ones; however, she is a bit of an ice queen insofar as that it takes her a good long while to thaw to anyone that isn't Suletta as she's all but been raised as a price, a trophy wife. But even though I just praised her for thinking on her feet, that's her fatal flaw - she's rash and reckless. She has great ideas but often doesn't think things through. Also, I'm not sure if that's just me, but she's not all that great at reading people. Her plans are solid, but she often forgets about the human component. Such as during her ill-fated visit to earth. Miorine to me felt like there was a lot of potential but something just didn't reaaaaaally click for me. Something was missing and I don't know what. Still, she was an enjoyable character, especially when she was all cute around Suletta.
Now, Aerial aka Ericht. Yes, the main Gundam is a character and rather a tragic one at that. She's the consciousness of Suletta's older sister (as Suletta is her clone) who's all but protected her sister for all of her life and her time at the school. Her original body died due to overuse of the Gundam she was having a bizarrely strong link with as a kid and her mom made the decision to fuse her into one of the Mobile Suits lying around. She's got a very strong tendency to protect her family, but the issue is that she always protected her mother that bit more, as Prospera promised to build her a world where she could materialize again out of the strings of data she'd become. Well, doing so might've endangered a vast part of the universe, so that's a no-no.
And now for Prospera aka Elnora, the real star of the show. She's a BITCH. But you gotta admit she has her reasons and that her motivation is an almost perfectly executed tale of revenge. Her husband, friends and mentor were killed in a raid on the research institute she was living at by the Benerit Group who decided to put an end to the "witchcraft" of using Gundams as they whittle away at their Pilots' health. Ericht showed a superhuman capacity to withstand said effects and casually slaughtered the attacking Mobile Suits while Elnora fled with her. After fusing her daughther Ericht with a Mobile Suit, she sent Suletta to the school where most things happen, all in an attempt to get Suletta somehow closse to Miorine and via her to her father, Delling Rembran, the man responsible for her misery as he orchestrated the raid. Over the course of the show, it's shown that she's behind most of the things that go wrong, all in an attempt to get rid of her nemesis and in a quest to build a space for Ericht to actually exist (like I said, including the whole "danger to the universe" bit). She's ruthless, cold and manipulative and excellent at playing others to their whims. It seems like she always has something another party wants and if that fails, she has plans within plans. She's infurating to watch most of the time but you gotta give it to her, she's GOOD. And in the last two-and-a-half-episodes (yes, AGAIN) her motivations and humanity become much more evident. It just really doesn't sit well with me that she was pretty easily forgiven.
The rest of the cast is also thoroughly solid and covers a large amount of good executions of archetypes. The suave middle eastener in Saddiq, the brash big man on campus in Guel, the mysterious Elan, the aggressive small powerhouse with a big heart in Chuchu, the unjudgmental open-minded senpai in Nika etc.
Yeah, solid characters. But like with the story, I really really wish we'd gotten more time with them.
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