Forum - View topic

This Week in Anime - Is Gundam 00's Craziness a Bug or a Feature?

I really enjoyed Gundam 00 in the beginning, but it goes into what I like to call Gundam Stupid halfway through -- where it feels like it just wants to tick off a bunch of checklists on things that were in other Gundams, including the terrible ones, then slaps them all haphazardly into itself until it becomes a giant clusterfrick of nonsense by the end that has nothing to do with its original conception..

I love 00 in its entirety, including its second half and movie. In contrast to its occasionally mixed reception, I honestly find it to be the most competently directed of any of the Gundam AUs (aside from maybe Build Fighters and Build Divers - Re:Rise, which are very different animals), with the strongest narrative follow-through.

I've recently had the opportunity to espouse on this elsewhere, so it's a bit coincidental for this topic to come up now, but I enjoy being able to go at it all over again.

What I find that people miss is that 00 isn't just a typical "war is bad" story as exemplified by the franchise at large.

Instead, 00's themes extend further into the transhumanist undercurrent that also runs alongside. Its message is more along the lines that the constant cycle of war and conflict is actively holding humanity's development back.

00 owes a lot to the works of Arthur C. Clarke. Essentially, it's a near seamless merger of the typical Gundam trappings, crossed with the likes of 2001 and its novel sequels (and updating the science for the 21st century, while of course adding a heaping dose of anime spectacle). I have the inkling that that's why the AD calendar system was chosen in the first place, as a subtle nod to 2001. Gundam 00 is in some ways almost a companion piece to that novel series, as it acknowledges the numerous political and social upheavals it would have required to achieve that particular vision of the future.

spoiler[The Innovades with Veda are thus a stand-in for HAL9000. Setsuna's evolution to True Innovator status mirror's David Bowman's ascension as the "Star Child". The ELS are the Monoliths in a more visceral and seeming aggressive form. The 2001 novel series are one of the works of fiction that brought to prominence the concept of the space elevators in the first place.

And just to hammer home the Clarke connection, the stinger ending to the TV series showed the ELS awakening at Jupiter (also a key location in the novel series), accompanied by the text "Humanity's childhood ends". Childhood's End was Clarke's first novel, about a seemingly benevolent race of aliens that come to Earth and guide humanity's development towards the stars, which Aeolia Schenberg's plan forms a close parallel to, later completed by the ELS.]

00's second season and movie aren't meaningless fluff, but absolutely critical to the true nature of its narrative. The executive meddling that accompanied the second season's release muddle it only slightly.