Thoughts on Gundam Unicorn

After almost a decade, I finally, finally got around to watching Gundam Unicorn. It was not worth my time.

Unicorn is by far one of the most beloved Gundam stories in recent memory, and if I’m being honest, I’m not entirely surprised. In this modern geek culture, pleasing fans is like shooting fish in a barrel. They are easily pleased by very specific (read: lazy, superficial, and sometimes disturbing) tropes and creative decisions, and Unicorn has these in spades.

Phantom Menace Syndrome

Gundam Unicorn introduces technologies that are far beyond what we’ve seen in Universal Century stories that take place before, and in stories that take place decades later. The titular Unicorn Gundam literally has the ability to control time and revert the parts of a mobile suit back into their component elements. It has the strength to wrestle with a mobile armor so large that this is its 1/144th scale model kit:

It also has a shield that can block the equivalent of the Death Star laser.

There is a scene where its pilot summons it by calling its name.

In case you still haven’t gotten the point, Gundam Unicorn is a story in which the most powerful mobile suits are basically Super Robots. No earlier tech - not even the most capable mecha in Char’s Counterattack - is anywhere close to what we see here. Not even the mobile suits from Gundam F91 or Victory Gundam would stand a chance. It feels so out of place that it I’d assume it was an Alternate Universe “what if?” scenario if I didn’t already know it was canon.

This is why it is all the more sad that many critics consider Unicorn a “love letter to fans”. They say this because the OVA makes countless references to people, places, and things from older Universal Century shows. The thing you have to keep in mind is that in modern geek culture, all you have to do to win people over is make references to things that only “true” fans would understand. It doesn’t have to be a reference that is relevant, or well timed, or well executed. It just has to exist, and make geeks feel special for understanding the reference. Unicorn does this in spades, at the same time that it takes a dump on everything that makes the Universal Century tick. “Fish in a barrel” indeed.

Hot Mobile Suit on Mobile Suit action Torture

When it comes to mobile suit fight scenes, I am of the opinion that the best ones are the ones that put some thought into it. That means battles where pilots are keenly aware of how speed, position, and distance affect their chances to survive, and where even the lowliest grunt mobile suit is capable in the hands of a good pilot.

The folks who made Gundam Unicorn clearly see things differently than me. With the exception of a handful of scenes within a handful of battles, this show is obsessed with one sided fights in which mobile suits are destroyed in the most brutal, torturous fashions imaginable. If this level of violence was committed against humans, rather than robots, the show would never have been released. Call me a softy, but I was genuinely disturbed at some of the things shown on screen. When you consider that each of these mecha contains a human pilot inside, it is hard to imagine what was going through their minds when this was happening to them:

Beyond that, these fights simply have no tactics. No one dies because they got sloppy or moved too fast. No, they die because they came up against some special, one-off mobile suit that tears through grunt suits like tissue paper.

If all you are looking for is a show in which bit robots blow up real good, then Unicorn has what you are looking for. As for me, there is only so much the (admittedly) exquisite animation can do when it is in service of such violent, mindless spectacle.

Zeon Revisionism

This is a complicated topic to parse through without going into a lot of detail. I will try to be brief.

There is a cohort of Gundam fans (myself includeD) that believe that series creator Yoshiyuki Tomino always meant for Gundam (or at least stories that take place during the One Year War) to be about two things:

• The general horrors of war
• A clear and unambiguous critique of Imperial Japan (and Nazi Germany)

In other words, in UC Gundam, both sides of the war have good people and bad people, but at the end of the day, the Zeon were on the wrong side of history. Period.

However, as time went on, the Gundam metaseries was increasingly handed over to new, younger artists who were steeped in a very different kind of Japanese society, one where many things - including anime - amplified nationalistic, imperialistic, and otherwise conservative values¹. As a result, non-Tomino Gundam stories have slowly but steadily trended toward revisionism regarding the Principality of Zeon. Over time, Zeon was increasingly shown in a sympathetic light, while the Earth Federation was increasingly shown as not just incompetent or corrupt, but downright evil.

This cohort of fans (myself included) find this to be extremely disturbing. If a writer or director wants to tell a war story that has even more shades of grey than the One Year War, where both sides are that much easier to blame, they have options. They can come up with a new Alternate Universe, or even set the story far into the future of the Universal Century. By instead setting these stories during the OYW-era of the UC, these artists are making a deliberate choice, one that is hard not to interpret as anything but a deliberate attempt to soften the image of fascist regimes, by softening their appearance in pop culture. After the events of January 6th 2021, I don’t think there is any more room for debate that softening the image of nationalism and fascism in one’s culture can and does make it more appealing to certain individuals. That’s why this is so disturbing.

So what does this have to do with Unicorn? In my opinion, it is the nadir of this Zeon revisionism. The story dedicates a lot of screen time to Neo Zeon characters so that they can explain and justify their actions within the story (actions which, I must add, lead to a fair bit of collateral damage and civilian deaths). None of their excuses past muster, but the show continues to let them drone on, completely oblivious to the fact that the civilian deaths they inflict will only perpetuate the cycle of violence.

Normally, I would interpret all this as a scathing critique of Neo Zeon, but the way in which the show so frequently returns to their point of view makes it hard to believe this is the intent. It really does feel like the show wants us to sympathize, if not downright agree with them. That’s an impossible pill to swallow.

The story also introduces the concept of a “Side Co-Prosperity Sphere” into the Universal Century, which is an allusion to a very real, very dark part of World War II history. Once again, it looks as if the heroes of the story denounce the concept, but they do such a bad job at it that one cannot help but wonder if the story is trying to argue in favor of it. The fact that this is so ambiguous is, again, disturbing.

It doesn't help that _Gundam Unicorn_ is based on a series of novels written by XXXX, who most of the internet describes as a writer with strong right wing, nationalist, and even Imperialist tendencies. I've been trying to learn more about him (and whether people outside of the anime community feels this way about Fukui), but I haven't been able to find much.

For me, the bottom line is that Unicorn is either extremely pro-Zeon, or a really bad attempt at denouncing them. Either way, it falls on its face.

Bad Mobile Suits

I plan on diving into this in another post, but the mobile suit designs here are by and large terrible. They tend to reuse the same colors, with little contrast, and they have an overall aesthetic that is too realistic and militaristic for even the Universal Century.

Obsession with Nostalgia

Gundam Unicorn is the Gundam equivalent of Memberberries. It has nothing new to say, and isn’t even interested in telling a new story in a familiar setting. Rather, it is obsessed with bringing us back to old places, showcasing old mecha, and even going so far as to introduce fake versions of classic characters. It is a remix of things you’ve already seen before (and a bad remix at that).

Conclusion

Gundam Unicorn is a show filled with lazy references, extreme mecha violence and spectacle, and a dash of right wing nationalism for good measure. No wonder this thing did gangbusters among anime fans.

If, on the other hand, you have some semblance of standards - if you care about seeing artists at least try - then there isn’t much to recommend here. I can only hope this is a mere bump in the road, and not a sign of things to come. The Universal Century is a rich setting that deserves so much better than this.

Parting Thoughts

• Perhaps the most damming thing about Gundam Unicorn it is binned into irrelevance by the 2018 film Gundam Narrative. It finds a way to get rid of the Unicorn Gundam and its equally powerful cohorts (thus explaining why their technology doesn’t show up in later stories), and it reveals that Unicorn’s major narrative conceit - the secret of Laplace’s Box - ended up being a nothingburger to the people of the Universal Century. I guess someone at Surnise agreed with me that Unicorn feels out of place within the grander Universal Century timeline. Thanks to Narrative, it ends up having zero impact on - or repercussions for - the future of the UC. It is now a meaningless story, which is exactly the fate it deserves.
  • Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that fans of Unicorn hate Narrative, and vice versa.
  • I made no remarks on Laplace’s Box, despite it being the primary motivation of the story. This was intentional - I find the secret of the Box to be so insultingly stupid and poorly thought out that I refused to give it the time of day. I apologize if this sounds mean, but the people who consider the secret of the Box to be somehow meaningful or deep remind me of Freshman undergrads in a 200-level English literature class.