Okay, this is the order in which things went: I saw a news article about Gunpla (
Gundam
Plastic model kits) being sold out in hobby stores, because people were looking for good time-consuming quarantine activities. I thought that sounded like fun, and it turns out Barnes & Noble carries Gunpla, and the local one was doing curbside pickup.
Since I had a great time building this little purple robot, I figured I should probably take a look into the series that gave rise to it. If a show sells enough model kits that they make *
a whole show about the model kits*, there's probably something there.
After some hemming and hawing about where to start in a 40 year series with 18 TV shows, and dozens more OVAs/movies, I decided to start at the very beginning, with the original Mobile Suit Gundam, from 1979.
(Strictly speaking I watched the compilation movies rather than the TV series, which I understand removes some of the sillier/more toyetic aspects of the show. Plus, the show got terrible ratings on its first run, and most Japanese people probably experienced it for the first time seeing the movies anyways, so I feel it's an authentic way of watching it).
ANYWAYS, Gundam is really good!
In the future, a significant fraction of humanity lives in big cylindrical space colonies, and one of these colonies has declared itself the 'Principality of Zeon', and started a war of independence from the Earth Federation. One year into the war, about half of humanity is dead.
There are a lot of little world-building details that add to an uncompromisingly bleak vision of war: most of the military officers are either 16 and under, or 35 and older. Pretty much everybody in the middle is dead already.
There aren't really any cartoony cackling villains, everybody on both sides of the war has distinct and unique motivations for why they're doing what they're doing. The protagonist Amuro Ray isn't particularly heroic, he just happens to be supernaturally good at piloting giant robots.
Here are some fucked up things that happen to Amuro Ray:
Amuro returns to Earth to find his mother living in Zeon-occupied territory. In order to avoid being caught by Zeon soldiers, Amuro shoots a man in cold blood right in front of his mom, who proceeds to disown him.
Amuro's father is MIA after the initial attack on his home colony. When Amuro finally does find his father, he has brain damage from oxygen deprivation after floating in space in his suit for too long. He hands Amuro a bunch of wires and junk all crammed into a box and tells him it's a super-charge module for the Gundam, and that it'll surely win the war for them.The show is heavy, but it's a good kind of heavy.
Now, lastly, the most important reason you should watch Mobile Suit Gundam is so you can appreciate the English-language FMV game that came out in 1996, a full three years before any Gundam show was released in the US.
It's like seeing Turkish Star Wars, or that
Saturday Morning Watchmen parody. Just by watching it you get that it's bad, but to get
just how bad it is you have to see the good version of it first.