Forum - View topicMobile Suit Gundam: Where to Start and What's Worth Watching [2024 Edition]
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Glordit
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I found this a bit strange too. There are far more annoying/shocking writing choices they could have chosen to critique, and I'll happily shit on 00 all day long for its faults but it's still one of my favorites. |
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oilers2007
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Of course girls always watched the same stuff boys did, but Wing seemed like the one that seemed to attract a lot more female viewers to the franchise thanks to the pretty boys and it was the one all the girls I knew at the time got into as opposed to G Gundam which aired in a similar time. Granted, the Gundam fandom is still 90% male today but even just a little headway is kind of impressive, no? |
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Lord Geo
Posts: 2578 Location: North Brunswick, New Jersey |
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They meant in Japan. Gundam was always being watched by girls ever since it first aired in 1979, and while the reruns were what helped make it popular overall back then it was still usually the female fans who were the most hardcore. Even Tomino has admitted this in interviews. |
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Avec ou Nous
Posts: 119 |
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I think that's stretching the facts a bit. I'm not sure what you're classifying as a "hardcore" here fan but to clarify Tomino once said in the Making Gundam: The Inside History documentary that 1/3rd of the fan letters he received early on in the show's production before it got popular were from girls who liked the drama aspect of the White Base crew. Even if we say people who write letters are the true hardcore fans and no one else is that would still mean the majority of them were men. |
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ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor
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No I meant it universally. Especially when someone is claiming the fandom is “90% male” which is a ridiculous statistic for any piece of media, much less Gundam where women have always been a major part of it. Like whatever space he’s used to where it’s only men is more indicative of the outlier spaces he’s discussing Gundam in and not actual reality. |
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light turner
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It's probably not as ridiculous as you might think. According to the December 2023 issue of Nikkei Entertainment Gundam skews very heavily male with only Yurucamp and Yu-Gi-Oh beating it down in terms of the amount of male domination in the fandom. Only IPs that got at least 50,000 responses were tallied. Similar polls in the past like one from NHK showed a similar male dominated results in a poll of 1.7 million respondants. I doubt anyone but Bandai knows the exact numbers, but I didn't think it'd be controversial for someone to say Gundam skews heavily towards guys given all the info we do have. Unless you have your own data that shows otherwise, of course. |
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kae kurono
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Both amuro and char are self inserts for tomino. Anno and oshii in interviews pointed this out. Anno was even inspired by CCA for him to create shinji as a self insert for himself. Unfortunately, the movie's subtext is lay too thick that its deeper themes go over the heads of most fans. The pacing is very erratic and quick. It is a movie that works better through re watches. |
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cardVendor8935
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Yugioh almost certainly beats anything down in male domination. Just one visit to a local card shop pretty much confirms it. You are pretty spending hours in a shop playing with other guys. Gundam is also a very merchandise driven show meaning people who are in are are into gunpla. Which means you have to spend money. Also unlike shows with moe or bishojo, you don't have much cosplayers. So no Asuna, Kurumi, Rem, Cosplayers Girls are more likley into fashion so they certainly don't have the money to spend on both that and model kits. Where guys don't really buy fancy clothes. |
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ANN_Lynzee
ANN Executive Editor
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There are so many levels of sexism in this post I don't even know where to start.
The extremely old "women only care about clothes" is too tepid and stale to really acknowledge beyond a mild inquisition. Are you a time traveler from the 1970s? Have you encountered any women or girls outside of a stereotypical teenage rom-com? As a woman with probably more investment in my wardrobe than most, I can tell you that most women you're encountering are not spending a boatload of cash on high-end fashion, and the basics are comparable in price for men and women unless you're buying everything off the rack at Wal-Mart. Your sexist assumption about women's fixation on fashion laughably extends to cosplay, as if the ability to cosplay a character is the foremost reason why women would engage with an entertainment property. Most fans, including women, are not cosplayers. Most people watch a TV show because they enjoy the story; it's funny, exciting, or thought-provoking. There are surely professional cosplayers who do focus on popular characters to help them make a living, but this is a small percentage of your average fan and not characteristic of female fans as a whole. Also, it is an extremely strange assumption that women cannot afford Gunpla and clothes simultaneously. Or, more to the point, you've assumed that women don't have hobbies other than purchasing clothing and that their sole interest absorbs all their expendable income, which is, frankly, a baseless and asinine conclusion. You've managed to paint women as some sort of singularly focused, shopping-obsessed creature. It's regrettable that we have to be confronted with, much less entertain, these kinds of attitudes still. It's exhausting. |
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Top Gun
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Thank you for the article Lauren. I've seen only a comparative few Gundam series, though I have at least passing knowledge of most of the rest, and I have a bunch of Sunrise/RightStuf's releases sitting in my backlog. It's funny how opinions can differ, because out of what I have seen, I think most of my views were flipped from yours. The first I saw was 00 when it aired on SyFy many years ago, and I enjoyed the hell out of it, even through some of its second-season weirdness. The mech designs were great, the action was fantastic, and the overall premise felt remarkably plausible for a future political setting (I'm ignoring the movie I haven't seen yet). I broke into the UC with Unicorn on Toonami, which I know isn't ideal given its status as something of a capstone of that entire timeline, but I knew enough about the UC through general fandom osmosis to keep up with most of it, and I thought it was fantastic. Definitely would recommend. I likewise enjoyed Origin, though I know it'd obviously work better with prior knowledge of the original series. It was fascinating to see the backstory of one of the most iconic antagonists in anime history.
The only other full series I've seen was IBO and well, that one I'd put it as a "maybe" at best. I haven't been exposed to much else of Mari Okada's work, but between this and her general reputation I'm not sure I'd consider myself a fan, or at the very least I don't think her style meshed well at all with a Gundam series. The characters' emotional interactions were overwrought to near self-parody levels, and many of the plot developments seemed to rely on one of the characters jumping headlong into an idiot box. The worst part were the deaths, which were either blatantly telegraphed or so needlessly cruel as to be unintentionally hilarious. I know that part isn't all that far outside of Tomino's own wheelhouse, but come on, there are limits. Maybe the worst bit was the culmination of Atra's character arc: spoiler["C'mon Kudelia, let's both marry Mikazuki and have his babies!"]. Oof. Going forward, finally watching the OG series is definitely on my anime bucket list, but as far as other UC series go I'm most eager to get to the trio of "8" OVAs, which seem to get nigh-universal acclaim. Turn A has always seemed interesting too, but as far as non-UC stuff goes my must-watch is absolutely G, because I know it'll be a total blast. I know there's a general school of thought that Wing doesn't hold up all that well anymore, but I still plan on giving it a look for the sake of its status among US fandom. About the only series I have next to no interest in is Seed, and that's largely because I don't think I can bring myself to stare at Hisashi Hirai's character designs for that long. I have no idea how that man kept getting paid to draw people like that...ugh. |
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GWOtaku
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Because Turn A Gundam is arguably the best work from creator Yoshiyuki Tomino, I unironically think that's a very good choice for the first or second thing. The "best" thing to start with is going to depend. If you just want to start at the beginning, the film trilogy adaptation of Mobile Suit Gundam is a winner. If you've mostly been taking in Shonen Jump action shows up until this point, G Gundam is a perfect candidate. For "I just want to see what the fuss is about", I'd say don't overthink it and pick whatever the most recent TV series is - that'd be Witch From Mercury right now.
It doesn't matter what the "best" or most representative Gundam is. The best first Gundam is the one that seems like it's most aligned with what your current interests are. Then if you like that you're through the door and can move on to the other works that seem interesting. I actually do think Gundam 00 and Gundam Wing both still operate very well as rule-of-cool mecha shows with their share of interesting Sci-fi concepts, for whatever it's worth. That said even though Wing is a personal favorite of mine I wouldn't recommend it for a first these days, for the aforementioned reasons. I can love it and still realize that what was seminal to me on March 6, 2000 when it was around 5 years old isn't going to quite look the same way to someone here in the moment in 2024. Like, sure, get around to it. But if I wanted someone to watch and Gundam and STAY invested in Gundam, that's not what I'd pick. The best place to start isn't necessarily your favorite or even necessarily the most important Gundam. |
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JPBB89
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I'm a bit puzzled. When does this topic came to this? |
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