30-Day Gundam Challenge Day 16 - Least favorite character
Right away, one character sprung to mind - Neo Roanoake, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone that has read my earlier âworst seriesâ post about Gundam Seed Destiny.
However, I feel Iâve talked about that a lot, so the next three characters who spring to mind are Shinn Asuka, Aina Sahalin and Quess Paraya.
It isnât so much the character they have, or their particular traits - itâs more their role in their respective shows and how theyâre underdeveloped.
I actually really like elements of their characters. I think Shinn had a great start, Quessâs presence in CCA offered a chaotic element that couldâve been fun, and the idea of the âstar-crossed loversâ in 08th MS (of which Aina is one of those lovers) is great on paper (romance on the battlefield is a great source of drama).
However, Quess suffers because CCA was, being a movie, quite brief, and I donât think they have quite long enough to develop her character. She can be annoying - which is fine, sheâs meant to be a petulant teenager - but over time, that couldâve been developed into something really cool. CCA just didnât have the run-time to do that with anything but a protagonist.
Aina has similar problems. I donât dislike the idea of her, and she has some great moments in the show, but I feel the love-story between her and Shiro feels forced. I think, personally, that she needed to both have a more developed romance story and she needed to do more of her own volition, giving her more of an âinner lifeâ. However, as 08th MS Team was focused on the actual team, I suspect Aina got squeezed out during the writing process.
Shinn Asukaâs problems were more systemic; I believe that the creators of SEED Destiny genuinely âlost faithâ in the character mid-way through the show, as a contemporary rerun of SEED on TV was extremely popular, and Kira, Lacus and Athrun shot back up to the top of the NewType âfavourite characterâ chart in Japan, which influenced them to make changes to the plot of the show during production. They consciously sidelined him and brought Kira back to main character status, which always felt like a missed opportunity.
Personally Iâve always felt that Gundam has some wonderful characters, from the badass Karen JoshuaâŠ
⊠to characters like Relena, who like Quess, started off as something of a spoiled brat but developed over a long arc into a very interesting character:
⊠or Sayla Mass, a character who just seems to be getting better and better as more of Gundam The Origin is made, showing us her character before she was the person we would later come to know in MS GundamâŠ
⊠and this serves to make characters like Shinn, Aina and Quess stand out a bit.
So in a sense, my least-favourite âcharacterâ is a character who has wasted potential, and three good examples, purely in my opinion, are Aina Sahalin, Shinn Asuka and Quess Paraya.