In some ways, I feel like I'm the ideal audience for a show like GQuuuuuux. I've only watched two Gundam series before: The Witch from Mercury, which Quuuuuux's modern sensibilities and redhead protagonist are clearly hoping to capture the audience for, and the original 1979 classic, which Quuuuuux is an alternate-universe sequel to. It's a show speaking directly to the very oldest and very newest entries in this nearly 50-year franchise, trying to achieve some kind of synthesis between them. So you'd think someone like me who only knows Gundam through those entries would be an easy mark for that.

But at the same time, I feel like I'm in no way the ideal audience for GQuuuuuux. Because it's not just Gundam 79 and G-Witch this series is indebted to. It's Zeta, Char's Counterattack, arguably the entire Universal Century and possibly the franchise's entire history. This series doesn't just use previous Gundams as lore-building, but emotional and thematic context that assumes you've been marinating in these rainbow-particle waters for years and years on end. It's a turbo-nerd project speaking to the most fervently devoted, to the point that even if you can understand basically what's going on if you're familiar with the original, you have no context why you should care unless you've spent the last couple decades obsessing over Char, Lalah, newtypes, and what they represent in the grand tradition of storytelling. I can't imagine Gquuuuuux making emotional sense to anyone who hasn't been steeped in All Things Gundam the way its creators clearly have.

But on a third level, I don't think there's any ideal audience for this show. Because, you know, it kind of sucks.

It's a headache to make sense of where to start, in so small part because the show itself is conflicted on where to start. If you watched the movie prologue that aired earlier this year (which I did not), you know the chronological start to this story is an alternate take on the original series, in which Char is the one to get his hands on the white Gundam instead of Amuro, leading to Zeon winning the war against the Federation. And if there's any reason to watch GQuuuuuux, it's this part of the story. It's a note-perfect mirror of the visual pacing of Gundam 79, every single musical cue and sharp edit in perfect place. As an artistic achievement, it's as flawless a re-creation of an older animation style as I've ever seen, and I have nothing but respect for the team at studio Khara for pulling it off. Yes, it's little more than a nostalgia rush at the end of the day, but it's genuinely delightful seeing what the start of this franchise might look like with enough time and polish to push its aesthetic to the peak of its power.

But while that's where the movie starts, it's not where the show starts. In fact, this prologue is, for some unfathomable reason, split up throughout the show- episode 2 is entirely dedicated to it, then episode 8 covers the last chunk of it. It's a choice I can't make heads or tails of: why start the movie this way if the actual show doesn't? Why split it up over such a long stretch of time? Just that on its own ensures that audiences are going to come into this show with wildly different contexts depending on whether they've seen the movie or not and how much information they have about what to expect. Especially since the rest of the show is so viciously modern in presentation and sensibilities, from its character designs to its CG-assisted cinematography, that every cut back to the 70s way of doing things feels like an intrusion from an entirely different show. Which might honestly be part of the point, considering where Quuuuuux's story ends up going, but, well, we're getting ahead of ourselves.

The point is, the real story picks up years after Zeon has won the war, on the supposedly neutral space colony Side 6 that's buckling under the weight of the new regime. There's over-policing, war refugees being mistreated, and the general malaise of living with a fascist boot always seconds from stomping down on your neck. It's no wonder Amata Yuzuriha, better known as Machu, feels such intense teenage ennui about the whole situation, dreaming of going to Earth to see a real sky and a real sea, free of this political malaise. But her chance might come sooner than she thinks when she ends up in possession of the titular GQuuuuuux, a prototype Zeon suit that crashed on Side 6 in a scuffle. Suddenly, Machu has a taste of the freedom she's been dreaming of, and alongside a refugee girl named Nyaan and a mysterious fellow pilot named Shuji, she starts exercising that freedom, first in an illegal dueling ring called Clan-Battle, and then... things start spiraling out of control, in more ways than one.

Whew. That's three paragraphs of this review just to explain what the hell is even going on in this show. And that should clue you in on the big issue here: this is a Gundam show with only twelve episodes to tackle all that story. Twelve! A single goddamn cours! Even G-Witch's twenty-five episodes felt like they were scrambling to fit all their story beats in, and that show wasn't trying to be a nostalgia-bait sequel at the same time it was telling an original story! There are some potentially interesting ideas in here, with the new characters' freedom contrasted with the legacy characters being bound by their past failures, the nature of newtypes and their evolution into a new world, but all these ideas are jammed together, shoving each other for space and cutting off each other's sentences, and nothing has the time it needs. I can barely even follow the bizarre high-concept quantum mechanics that take over the plot at it spirals into alternate timelines and colliding realities, let alone care about what it means for the characters I've barely gotten a chance to know in a world relying on endless references to previous Gundam entries to fill in the gaping holes in its construction.

Which, again, maybe all this works better if you've been a Gundam super-fan for years and can catch all the Glup Shittos who pop up episode after episode. But even if the sight of Baz Kroll or whoever showing up is enough to make you giggle in recognition, what point does it serve this story? So many of these references just exist for their own sake, eating up time cheekily calling back to other shows instead of developing the story we have now. And as a result, Machu's story- what should be the heart of this show- is completely and utterly gutted. Never once does she feel like an agent in her own story, someone making her own choices, following her own path. Neither does Nyaan, or Shuji, or any of the scant few new cast members tossed into this melange of legacy heroes and villains. Every time the show turns to focus on them feels like it's doing it out of obligation, begrudgingly putting down its Char and Challia Bull toys to put in some token acknowledgement of this other story it's pretending to be invested in.

And I want to drill down on that point, because what little skeleton of a story GQuuuuuux ends up telling with its new cast is so condescending and disrespectful it kind of makes me angry. Machu's entire motivation is defined by crushing on Shuji, a boy she has basically zero interactions with for the entirely of the show. Every single choice she makes- and there are frustratingly few of those- revolves around some space-case weirdo who shows zero interest in her or her life or, really, anything besides his Gundam. But even that makes more sense than Nyaan deciding to get a crush on him out of nowhere. Like, where the fuck does that come from? I wasn't even expecting this to be as gay as G-Witch but this half-assed contrived piece-of-shit love triangle is everything wrong about Obligatory Straight Romance, shoving characters of opposite genders together without bothering to justify why they should be drawn to each other. Even in a more fleshed-out version of this story, I can't imagine this being any less belittling toward its female characters.

Really, it's the contradiction at the heart of this show. GQuuuuuux clearly wants to be about "freedom" in some nebulous sense- freedom from war, freedom from fascism, freedom from the expectations of an unfair world that seeks to define who you are and what you do. But Machu and Nyaan spend the entire show at the whims of every other character. Choices are made for them and they comply. Plot twists fall into their lap and they're pulled along. It's not until the final two episodes they even start making their own decisions, and again, none of those decisions amount to anything besides wanting to bang this complete nothing of a male love interest because Man and Woman Want Kiss. And every cute reference to another Gundam, every callback, every fanservice moment, is time taken away from doing anything to make this new story more than an unfinished draft. Why should I care about these new characters when GQuuuuuux so clearly doesn't?

Look, this is not a show made without passion. The people responsible for this mess clearly love Gundam, and they're having so much fun playing with all the parts of this franchise on the biggest scale possible. But if there's one thing I've learned over my many years, being a fan of something does not mean understanding it. GQuuuuuuX is a show made by people who love this franchise too much to realize they're choking the life out of the story they're supposedly trying to tell. It's a show swallowed by its own context, so drowned in its connections to other stories that it has no time to create anything new and meaningful from the refuse. I don't even particularly hate GQuuuuuuX; really, I just think Tsurumaki should've cut Machu's story entirely and just focused on a legacy sequel with all the old characters at its core, because that's clearly what everyone involved was really invested in. Trying to staple on this pathetic excuse of a teen rom-com just devalues the whole project. Because if you were going to tell the story of a girl struggling for freedom against the literal and symbolic burdens of history? It deserved so much fucking more than this.