Before we go on to building discussing the High Grade Jesta Cannon, I’d like to take a detour and talk about its “predecessor”, AKA the standard Jesta. It’s not strictly necessary, but it will help me excise some emotional demons. I hate the Jesta for a long time, and it was only recently that I realized that this anger was grossly misplaced.
About the Jesta
In most Gundam stories set in the Universal Century, the enemy faction (Zeon or otherwise) tends to have the largest variety of mobile suits. But in Gundam Unicorn the opposite is true. The Earth Federation fields a ton of different mecha, far more than the Zeon Remnants (unless you count all the old ones that got pulled out of storage for the battle in Episode 4, but, well, they’re old, so I don’t count them).
Some of these mobile suits have a clear purpose. The Jegan is the standard grunt suit. The ReZel can transform into a Waverider mode, so it’s the “fast one”. The Loto is a special forces unit that can transform into an APC to transport ground troops. The Gustav Karl is a brand new design that was mainly meant for combat bn the Earth’s surface.
So where does that leave the Jesta? Supposedly it is a souped up version of the Jegan, but it doens’t really look like one. Also, there already is a souped up version of the Jegan - namely the Stark Jegan.
On the surface, the Jesta seems like little more than a tactical-looking gunt suit that exists to fulfill a “Rule of Cool” quota. And this really bugged me, for a really long time. To be fair, it’s not like the Gundam metaseries has never committed such a sin. Far from it. But Gundam Unicorn is so often regarded by fans as among the cream of the crop, a modern Gundam story that does away with a lot of the silliness of the old shows in favor of serious themes and a sleek visual aesthetic.
And yet in reality, the show is just as goofy and tropey as anything else to come out of the franchise. In my mind, the Jesta was one more superfluous mobile suit design that didn’t really have an in-universe justification for its existence. And that made me hate it.
Coming Around
Eventually I came upon some additional research that revealed that the Jesta did, in fact, have a purpose. Namely, it was designed to serve as an escort unit for the Unicorn Gundam.
Basically, the Unicorn is really fast, so much so that standard Federation grunt suits can’t really keep up with it. Furthermore, the Unicorn is designed to use its “Destroy Mode” to power up and defeat other Newtype weapons, but this mode has a limited runtime - and once time is up, neither it or its pilot is in any condition to fight. That means it needs something to protect it as it heads back to base.
Finally, I learned that the Jesta was designed in secret alongside the Unicorn. That explains why it feels so incongruent with the rest of the Federation forces. They were all designed without anyone knowing the Jesta was a thing. This also explains why it wasn’t just replaced with something like the Stark Jegan. It may even be a plausbile explanation for why it doesn’t quite look like any of the other grunt suits. If it feels like it is its own thing, that’s because it is.
Once all of this clicked into place, I began to warm to the Jesta, though I still didn’t quite like it. That would require me to get over one more hurdle …
F*#k the Jegan
The final step in the process was to realize that a lot of my anger towards the Jesta was misplaced anger that should have been directed towards the Jegan.
Of all the mobile suit designs that I’ve yet come around on, I think the Jegan is the one I am least likely to change my mind about. I don’t like anything about it. I hate its general shape. I hate the weird thrusters on its back. I hate it’s “not quite a GM” head. And I hate its Aquafresh-looking color scheme.
The Jegan is the one grunt suit in the Earth Federation’s military history that doesn’t feel like a natural extension or evolution of previous designs. It’s just there, as it’s own thing, and that drives me nuts. Normally I’m not a stickler for continuity porn, but this is an exception.
And it really is an exception. Look at the Heavygun, which appears later on in the UC timeline. It is clearly based on the Jegan, but it also manages to look a lot more like the GM in comparison:
Heck, even the Jamesgun - which shows up much later in the UC timeline - feels like it has more in common with the mobile suits of the past than the Jegan does.
On top of all of that, the Jegan gets absolutely clowned in every story I’ve seen them in. They don’t do much in Char’s Counterattack, despite being brand new at the time. Then they barely show up in Unicorn (and when they do show up, they mainly exist to get kicked around). But despite this seemingly poor service record, we are meant to believe that they remiained in service for approximately thirty years, at which point we see handful of them get curb stomped in the opening scenes of Gundam F91.
I know grunt suits are meant to be cannon fodder, but some of them are given at least a little bit of time to shine. And yet none of those designs got anywhere close to three decades of service life. How did such a crappy mobile suit become a fixture in the history of the UC?
And that’s when it hit me. The reason I was mad at the Jesta was now clear. It stemmed from the fact that deep down inside, I unconciously wished that it could have been given the Jegan’s role in the UC timeline.
Obviously that is impossible, since the Jegan was illustrated several decades before the Jesta. But from a continuity perspective, I think it would have worked very well. Think of it this way - if you combine the bulk (and the head) of the GM Custom with the color scheme of the GM Quel, you’re basically on your way to the Jesta:
If this bad boy was rolled out in lieu of the Jegan in UC 0089, it would have made so much more design sense. Alas, that didn’t (and couldn’t have) happened, and I directed my anger at the wrong target. The Jesta doesn’t deserve to be a footnote in UC history, inextricably tied to the fate of the Unicorn Gundam. Alas, it is, and likely always will be. Such is life.
And that’s all I have to say about the Jesta. It feels really good to get all this out of my system. I feel at peace with my past mistakes, and even better, I’m now ready to properly talk about the Jesta Cannon.