The Witch From Mercury #00 — Gundam Ate My Baby

October 1st, 2022

 

Did you just plug a child into a WMD just to do it?

Yes, I know this came out months ago, and was actually broadcast last Sunday. I'm not a Gundam fan, so we'll call that the excuse for procrastination, but upon reviewing the schedule, there's basically nothing but this on Sundays, and even this is prime time in Japan, which is about 2am my time. So I'm getting it in just under the wire for the next episode, though I'll be asleep and may not much be interested in it anyway.

Impressions:

The above should probably make it clear that I'm probably not coming into this with a love of the storied history of Gundam in my heart. It's not even the mecha that always turns me off, though Gundam definitely has a lot less flair for dramatic dogfights than even stuff like Cross Ange or Back Arrow. I've come to learn that I can tolerate the dumb tropes of real type robots. Not so much super types. They're clunky and boring. I know my nomenclature. 

It's that except for the iteration with the giant horse robot, Gundam is always so deadly serious despite being so ridiculously over the top, but not in the fun way. In the Synderverse kind of way. There's literally one child here, and they're throwing a party for her while a dude is giving a speech about the evils of technology that stresses people out. Then SWAT forces kick in a door, assassinate the nobodies brutally, but upon reaching the big boss, stop to deliver a philosophical diatribe and have a moralistic debate. Really? Really? This is in between blipping through the neatest toy robots to buy for only 4,000% markup while said child just points at things and they explode because she is the chosen one as her mother looks on in horror of the nightmare she has wrought. Does nobody else roll their eyes at any of this? It's not even a good action scene. It's just indistinct robots shooting vaguely off into space, and/or lasers popping in from off-screen. You could cut and rearrange almost any of the little sequences around without any difference.

Well, enough screaming at the void. Maybe the first actual episode where we see the character grown up (relatively speaking) will be different, but I'm certainly not historically a Gundam fan, and this didn't do anything to change my mind on that. It's so serious that it hurts. I need a little fun, or at least some charisma to latch onto. 

Posted in Witch From Mercury | 2 Comments »

2 Shouts From the Peanut Gallery

  • Anonymous says:

    It takes a good amnesiac with a gundam to stop a bad amnesiac with a gundam.

  • DP says:

    The little girl blowing up enemies while thinking they are like pretty birthday candles was a nice bit of horror.

    The episode, overall, was decent enough late-period pseudo-Gundam, though none of this really compares to the quality of the old One Year War era stories like the peerless War in the Pocket OAV series, with its much more honest look at the cost of war.