A record of Sosatsu Chieka watching the original Gundam after starting with G-Ax

From June to July 2025, I watched the original "Mobile Suit Gundam" anime series in one go on Amazon Prime, sparked by my first Gundam experience watching "Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX" (hereinafter "G-Ax"). The following is a record of my thoughts. Most of these thoughts are reprinted from the thread of the following tweets.

My thoughts on G-Ax can be found in the following article.

I finished watching the first Gundam series. I can see why it became a national anime. I think the characters' expressions and lines eloquently, if indirectly, convey changes in their emotions and human relationships. I interpreted the first half as depicting the complexity of war, and the second half as depicting the possibility of New Age-style spiritual communication.

The first half emphasized that neither soldiers nor civilians are monolithic in any camp, meaning that nationality and national identity do not necessarily align. On the other hand, since they are in a situation where they will die if they don't fight, the position of the White Base crew is skillfully used to depict the conflict of not being able to simply shout for non-violence.

The attitude of not being able to subscribe to simple non-violence is well expressed, for example, in the conflict between Amuro and his mother. Whether there can be a happy ending other than settling down with one's parents or fulfilling a romance with the heroine is still an unresolved problem, and I think it would have been difficult to land it well even if the story after the Battle of A Baoa Qu had been depicted.

Since I can understand both Amuro's arguments and Bright's position, it makes sense that Bright would collapse from overwork. There is a lot of information that is not explicitly stated, such as Bright's feelings for Mirai (this is a different method from how shows like Eva don't explain their source material), and I think it's amazing that they were able to pull this off in the 80s, and conversely, it might be impossible to do so today.

Along with the White Base crew's increasing proficiency, the process of Amuro becoming a Newtype is depicted with surprising care, making it clear that this is an extension of acquired combat skills. While connecting this to Zeon's Newtype project is a bit abrupt, there is enough buildup to make it convincing when it finally manifests in Kikka and the others.

What appeared to be an extension of combat skills when it was just Amuro is reinterpreted as an expression of a more universal "ability to communicate information regardless of the constraints of physical space" through its use in conversations with Lalah. And the message of the final scene was that everyone potentially possesses this.

Viewing a new, unknown space (outer space or cyberspace) as a means to pioneer new possibilities for the human spirit, and setting freer communication as the goal of that pioneering, was one of the cores of New Age thought in the 1960s-80s. Lalah's Indian-style appearance is likely influenced by this. We social VR users are also descendants of that.

One could argue that this is because outer space is simply a new environment for the human body, or to compensate for the difficulty of face-to-face communication, but humans seem to have a tendency to superimpose unknown spaces onto the unknown parts of their hearts even before that; this is why magic and religious rituals have been performed in caves since prehistoric times.

Whether or not one acknowledges a spirit world where the souls of the dead reside depends on the school of thought, but I interpret Lalah saying she can "play anytime" even after she dies as "if information can be communicated regardless of physical space, then the will that is the subject of that information also spreads into this world in some form, regardless of the body."

What I am reminded of here is the novel "The Testament of Magdalen Blair" published in 1912 by the occultist Aleister Crowley (The Equinox Vol. 1, No. 9, 1912; Japanese translation: "Daughter of Black Magic" translated by Yukitaka Eguchi, Tokyo Sogensha, 1991). This is a story about a woman who continues to read her dying husband's thoughts with an ability similar to telepathy or psychometry. Here, Crowley conceives of "thoughts by a decaying brain" and "thoughts after being cremated" seamlessly connected from thoughts by a living brain, and thought about how it would be verbalized if read by extremely developed telepathy. As far as I know, this idea is found in Tibetan Buddhism, and I think Crowley got it through Allan Bennett, a predecessor in his magical order who had studied Yoga, but in my own words, it amounts to the anthropomorphism of the dead. I think the view of communication behind the depiction of Lalah is similar to this.

At any rate, the fact that Lalah was not only the first person Amuro could deeply communicate with, but also the bearer of the "innovation of communication," which had been a long-cherished wish of humanity since the dawn of time and was likely the key to stopping the war, must have led to the line "I've done something irreparable" when he lost her. This is essentially the same as what the late Takeshi Shudo, the screenwriter, said about the scene where the Pokémon cry at the end of the Pokémon movie "Mewtwo Strikes Back."

It is a pity that Char's actions have been spinning their wheels ever since he was demoted, but I can accept that as human nature. It's not that Char was incompetent; it's just that the momentum of the times did not allow him to crawl up from the front lines and get closer to the center of power.

Since that momentum was indirectly brought about by Amuro, it was good that Char was put in a Gundam in G-Ax, but even so, the result might not have been much different if not for the Zeknova accident. I still don't fully understand how much of the aftermath of capturing the Gundam was Lalah's doing, but at least Machu's actions must have been unplanned by Lalah, and the fact that such actions by Machu solve problems that existed in the original work seems to inherit the awareness of the problem from the TV version of Eva: "In an age where anything you do becomes a parody of someone else's past achievements, what value can we create ourselves?"

After watching the first Gundam, it's fun to re-watch episodes 2 and 8 of G-Ax and understand so many things. It was properly mentioned that Solomon was captured by the Solar System. And the voice actors are all perfect. Like M'Quve, who values practicality...

I think another pleasure of Gundam is memorizing the mecha, and I'm grateful that they are all different colors, making them easy to remember. Conversely, for a while, I couldn't tell the difference between a Gogg and an Acguy. The Gelgoog is also hard to grasp the characteristics of. I think the difference between a Dom and a Rick Dom is about the same as that between a Kadabra and an Alakazam.

Also, it was a junkie experience to ingest a large amount of memes used in the Japanese manga and anime scene at high speed. I thought they would be scattered throughout the entire Gundam series, but there are a huge number of famous quotes just in the first one. What is that scene where M'Quve dies and even the screen features a vase?

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