“WOW!! Cool Robot!!!” How Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury Exploits the Trope.
This piece contains spoilers for the Prologue and light discussion the themes in the first half (cour) of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury (G-Witch).
Continuing my thoughts regarding Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury. For the time being the Prologue and first cour of the show remains free to watch on YouTube outside of Japan. The second cour started unlocking as of 8th July 2023, with new episodes premiering every Sunday.
Put succinctly in the classic meme above, “Wow!! Cool Robot!!!” Is a concept that dogs the Gundam franchise throughout much of its four-decade history to a greater or lesser extent. It is frequently employed to describe a type of fan who glosses over the deeper subtext about the human cost of conflict.
I’m going to be discussing this from my personal perspective, that of a white, middle-class, person living in the Global North, the UK specifically. People watching who don’t have that as a baseline for their lived experience may have a different interpretation and, honestly, I’d be excited to hear about it!
The first impression most people have of a Gundam is a stark-white mech, accented in bright, primary colours, armed with a laser sword and laser rifle. The lasting power of Gundam has been driven, of course, by the sales of merchandise, most notably the thousands of plastic scale-model kits that dominate hobby stores in Japan and cover convention table stands round the world. In recent years, Bandai, the toy company who owns the rights to the Gundam franchise, had a problem: Gundam was regarded as being a stale brand, with an audience of mostly older adults, skewing male in the demographic. Part of this perception may have been tied to the monolithic Universal Century timeline (for a comparison with a Western franchise, think about the original Star Wars movie trilogy and how many side-stories, TV shows and novels focus tightly on the periphery of those characters and events).
Multiple alternate timeline shows had been made in the 2010s but neither the generation-spanning Mobile Suit Gundam: AGE nor gritty war drama of Moblile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans (IBO) had provided explosive boosts in sales. After the almost literal blunt instrument approach of the latter (in contrast to other Gundam shows it features no beam weaponry and unflinching depictions of mech combat), clearly a new approach was needed. While G-Witch opens with a violent purge, by virtue of the temporal distance between the Prologue and Episode 1 (in release dates and within the universe), it parks this brutality away from the audience and the protagonists’ immediate attention. The small-scale nature of the school conflicts such as feeling out-of-place, dealing with teasing and bullying, making friends, etc, is brought to the forefront, these are ordinary, if mostly privileged, teens, going about their days. We get glimpses of the wider world, but to start with they’re sanitised, an odd news article, a call home where adults try to protect their child from hearing the worst. The students in the piloting and engineering departments engage in mock battles and duels, dreaming of being future aces and heroes and the plucky mechanics backing them up.
The sense of security felt by the majority of students at the school is designed to mimic that of how most relatively privileged people experience war. It is an abstract concept to most people in the Global North, events that play out on traditional and social media. We may interact occasionally with people who have experienced it directly, grumble about the effects on the economy or protest politicians and arms manufacturers based in our home countries, but nonetheless, it is not our daily lived experience. Military technology is presented in news bulletins as flashy and exciting, there are glamorous recruitment ads served on video game livestreams with huge production budgets. “Wow!! Cool Jet!!!” Indeed.
G-Witch, therefore, plays with themes of privilege and security during times of conflict. This is not dissimilar in many ways to Mobile Suit Gundam 00, broadcast in the middle of the second Iraq and Afghan wars, which directly took inspiration from the contemporary conflicts of the time. G-Witch draws from the world political stage following “The War on Terror,” leaning fully into rendering some of the coolest robots in the franchise history to make us forget about the darkness until it’s too late. Its early episodes map out an almost 1980s, Transformers-style show-come-toy commercial, with an antagonist-of-the-week, a new mobile suit and then of course the accompanying announcement of merchandise. A stroke of genius on the part of the series producers was to assign each of the major corporate players a different lead artist/designer for their respective mobile suits. This lends each faction a distinct flavour, such as the chunky, yet flamboyant Jeturk Heavy Industries suits, versus the sleek, almost-ethereal models produced by Grassley Defense Systems.
When G-Witch decides to pull out the “War is Bad” it has been hiding behind its back and slap the audience square across the face with it, I felt it actually landed harder than in a lot of previous Gundam series. I had watched the prequel, I had been made aware that this was a world built on violence, lies and intrigue and it still caught me, marvellously, off-guard. Reflecting on how things play out overall, if the show had not spent time developing characters, having the “slice of life” interactions and lower-stakes conflicts in the early episodes, it would not have been nearly as effective.
As summarised effectively by one user comment on Twitter:
Next time: Protein for your Eyes and Ears — Audiovisual design in Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury.
Proofreading and editing help by: KC
Corrections and Clarifications: On the Know Your Meme wiki the “Wow!! Cool Robot!!!” comic is attributed to user @Random_Factor on Twitter, who in turn says it was created by “Oleg.” It was, in fact, originally created by illustrator Titas Antanas Vilkaitis. A follow-up comic for the 40th Anniversary of Mobile Suit Gundam can be found here: https://moneygoldpower.com/art/wowcoolrobot.html
Thank you to reader VA who pointed this out and Mr Vilkaitis for confirmation. The attribution above has been corrected.
