Now that it’s almost halfway through, Gundam GQuuuuuuX is setting the stage for a fascinating story between its young trio of protagonists and the forces at play beyond them in the show’s vision of an alternative version of Gundam‘s beloved original continuity. But something has become clear about the series with every episode: this is a series that is made by creatives who are absolute sickos for the original Gundam.
Set in an alt-future re-imagining of what Gundam could look like if the Earth Federation lost the One Year War depicted throughout the original 1979 anime, by its very nature GQuuuuuuX has had plenty of opportunity to include tons of familiar characters. It’s pulled out some big guns: Char Aznable, arguably one of the most famous Gundam characters of all time, if not the most, has both appeared and left an indelible shadow over the series’ whole narrative even as he has become largely absent from it. You might have expected, in some ways, for the series’ cast to be peppered with oodles of other prominent characters from the original show, from series protagonist Amuro Ray, to Char’s sister Sayla, to Bright Noa, or other members of the White Base crew that could’ve been, if Zeon hadn’t won the war.
But GQuuuuuuX‘s primary cast is both blessedly largely original, and filled with 1979 throwbacks… just the wildest, weirdest choices imaginable. Challia Bull, an important yet one-off character from the 1979 show—paradoxically both fundamentally vital to that series’ early explorations of one of the franchise’s most fascinating concepts, Newtypes, and also unimportant enough that he was killed off in his debut appearance, and even left on the cutting room floor of the original show’s movie compilation trilogy—is a major figure and potential antagonistic force in GQuuuuuuX, radically re-imagined as an incredibly close partner of Char now in search of his missing friend and the Red Gundam he piloted. But he’s a major character in a sea of what the internet would otherwise affectionally call “blorbos” (or Glup Shittos, if you take your fandom parlance from Star Wars): incredibly minor one-hit wonders whose invocation is for the most diehard of fans.
We’ve had Cameron Bloom, a minor bureaucrat from the original show who mostly existed to get in the way of Mirai’s burgeoning relationship with Bright and be subject to one of the funniest punches in Gundam history, in one of several weekly appearances of a random minor character in GQuuuuuuX‘s narrative. That’s a list that has included Mosk Han, a Federation scientist who appears in a single late episode of the original to upgrade the Gundam’s response time; and Dren and Denim, Char’s stooges (and most hilariously by absence Gene, a Zaku pilot who’s presence on the mission to scout out the Gundam is apparently the decisive turning point of GQuuuuuuX‘s entire timeline). This week we got Gaia and Ortega, two-thirds of the Black Tri-Stars, a trio of Zeon ace pilots best known for one extremely cool attack maneuver that they then proceed to immediately whiff when they try to use it on Amuro more than once. Next week, we’re getting Kycilia Zabi, a member of the fascistic ruling family of Zeon whose main plots in the original show were executing her Nazi-loving brother and then getting gruesomely blown up by a Char bazooka headshot in the series’ closing episode.
The vast majority of these characters are not ones you would expect an alternative retelling of Gundam‘s primary “Universal Century” timeline to even mention, let alone give prominent plotlines to. And yet, for as incredibly referential and reverential of the original Mobile Suit Gundam as GQuuuuuuX is, its story is not beholden to a cameo fest. GQuuuuuuX never slams the breaks on its narrative to grab its audience by the shoulders and scream “look! a reference!”, or make awareness of the original Gundam vital knowledge to that narrative’s logic. Anyone watching the series without prior knowledge of a 46 year old anime is still getting a compelling story, one built largely on entirely new characters (or characters like Challia, so drastically re-imagined that they might as well be new). Anyone who does know? Well, they get to delight in whatever Little Guy of the Week will show up next.
It makes the fanservice not the point of the series, but a shared language between the creative team and diehard audiences that reminds the latter, every week, that the former adores all this weird stuff as much as you do. There’s a kind of absurd sincerity to GQuuuuuuX in that sense, that invites trust: come along this wild ride with us, the show asks, wherever it takes this remixing of Gundam‘s fundamental world. And you kind of want to, because you can tell just bursting from every seam is a creative team that understands all the flavor and minutiae that made that world so compelling in the first place.
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