F#%k it - it’s time to build my final Witch from Mercury kit. Ironically, it just so happens to be the Witch from Mercury kit, the one everyone knows and loves (and seemingly owns):
Yes, I’m building Aerial last, which is kind of funny considering is appears at the start of the show. But that’s just the way things played out.
Spoiler Preface!!!
This post contains CRAZY MEGA spoilers for Witch from Mercury. You may want to skip it if you haven’t watched the show.
About the Mobile Suit
It’s Aerial. She’s the main protagonist’s personal mobile suit (and yes, characters in the show refer to it as a “she”). She’s on all the promotional art. She’s in almost every episode. And she likely instantly became the favorite mecha for a legion of new Gundam fans who came to the franchise via GWitch.
Everything I said about Ilfrith - everything about her weapons, her capabilities, etc - applies to Aerial, since (spoiler alert!) Aerial is literally Ilfrith with some new armor and some upgrades.
Oh, and she also now contains the consciousness of a four year old:
So she’s got that going for her.
Appearances in Media
Witch from Mercury was only a 24 episode show, and as is tradition, you pretty much new Aerial was going to get a midseason upgrade.
That being said, I figured she’d last in her original form until episode 12 or 13, but that would be wrong. Aerial has her last meaningful battle in Episode 10, at which point she gets so badly damaged that her owners decide she needs a complete overhaul:
In any case, one of my issues with GWitch is that, as a whole, Aerial (in both her original and Rebuild forms) is ridiculously overpowered. Gundams are usually one of, if not the most powerful mobile suits in any given show, but Aerial takes it to another level.
She only really has one loss in the entire show, and that’s only because she was remotely disabled - if not for that, she’d have a perfect record. And if she doesn’t completely curbstomp her opponent, then she’ll win with some sort of ass pull ability or technique that was previously unknown.
Basically, even when she’s beat up or otherwise damaged, you know she’s not going to lose, because the show conditions you over time to expect yet another miracle ability that completely renders other mobile suits worthless. Unless you’re watching the show for pure power fantasy (and I’m sure some folks do), it gets boring.
THAT BEING SAID, sometimes those curbstompings are beautifully animated, so it’s not all bad. And hey, if this leads to a generation of new Gundam fans who insist that Aerial could beat all the other Gundams, I’d say that that’s already happened with other modern Gundam shows, so I’m not going to hold it against her.
In any case, that’s Aerial, for better or for worse.
About the Model Kit
I don’t know this for a fact, but I’m 98% confident that Bandai intentionally prices model kits for Main Character Gundams cheaper than they otherwise could.
My theory goes that they know people are going to see the Main Character Gundam(s) plastered on ads, and appearing in the opening episodes of a new show, and that viewers may start to get Gunpla-curious.
And if you have a shiny new model to sell them when the show premiers - and if it happens to be priced low enough that it can become an impulse buy - you now have an “in” to potentially get new people hooked on Gunpla.
I say this because kits like the Revive version of the Granddaddy Gundam, the High Grade Barbatos, and Aerial herself are all priced at under $15 here in the states - which means they were/are even cheaper in Japan. Even the Earthree Gundam, with its fancy Core Change gimmick, costs only slightly more than that.
Meanwhile, the High Grade Ilfrith - depsite being extremely comparable to Aerial - costs a few bucks more. I believe this is closer to the “true” price that Aerial would go for if she wasn’t the star of the show.
In any case, I do expect this build to be highly similar to Ilfrith and Calibarn, so I don’t expect any trouble. In fact, I expect this one should be a breeze.
Other Thoughts
Back when GWitch was on the air, a lot of its fans paraded around the claim that the kit’s sales were singlehandedly responsible for an increase in Bandai Namco’s profits. As far as I can tell, this is entirely based on this English language newsletter, in which it is claimed that Aerial was the fastest selling Main Character model kit in history.
I have no doubt that it sold extremely well, but it doesn’t mean that the Aerial kit (which is priced at 1,430 yen, roughly $10) was juicing those profits, if it was even generating much in the way of profit at all. For all we know it could have been priced to be a loss leader. In that case, it’s high sales could simply have led to an increase in general demand for Gunpla and other hobby products (which still means it did its just, just in a different way).
To be clear, this isn’t a knock on the kit or the mobile suit. This is mainly a personal rant against people on the Internet parroting talking points without ever looking into them. It drives me nuts sometimes.
One last thing - most people believe that, just like Ilfrith and Calibarn, Aerial has a female-coded silhouette. It’s a claim that’s hard to argue against when the mobile suit is drawn with manicured nails:
Or when it’s drawn like this in the actual show
Or when someone does a sketch that compares its proportions to that of a generic modern anime girl:
No seriously - according to my phone’s translation app, that’s literally the title of the image:
Not a judgement or a criticism, just a funny observation.