i like gundam seed

mostly oc posting

[lulurimi]

I got my hands on the SEED Destiny pyjamas series and wanted Cagalli, Athrun, or Shinn

my luck said “everything pink”

[lulurimi]

my friend got me one, i have shinn now too

[lulurimi]

guess who now has the twins cagalli and kira too now

all i am missing now is athrun (and ig the secrets but idrc)

[fostersffff]

I have a horrible feeling neither of you are making it out of this series alive, so can at least one of you lock in and kill him so I can go "well yeah they did a lot of horrible things, but at least in the end they killed Elon Musk"

[lulurimi]

I got my hands on the SEED Destiny pyjamas series and wanted Cagalli, Athrun, or Shinn

my luck said “everything pink”

[lulurimi]

my friend got me one, i have shinn now too

[fostersffff]

I've heard people say SEED/Cosmic Era Gundam is the most misogynistic Gundam, which seems like it would take a lot considering Gundam's pedigree, and by God I think they've done it with "the biggest roadblock to True Eugenic Supremacy is Women" and then just letting that hang unexamined.

[lulurimi]

gundam SEED vs addressing what their constant comments about “a girl???” could mean for the world they live in

[lulurimi]

I got my hands on the SEED Destiny pyjamas series and wanted Cagalli, Athrun, or Shinn

my luck said “everything pink”

[lulurimi]

flowers for SEED genesis girls

i am assigning all the girls a flower

to my knowledge, cagalli kind of has canon ones, so i went with the lily

first, the main four

Cagalli Yula Attha

Casablanca Lily

Celebration and Renewal

Ciri Gardel

Lily of the Valley

Return to Happiness and Good Luck

Noë Kohsenel

Yellow Primrose

Youth and Love

Finis Lachlan

Wisteria

Longevity and Endurance

dont really appear but i have something

Lacus Clyne

Deep Purple Rose

Intrigue and Majesty

Flay Allster

Marigold

Farewell and Bliss

i will be giving the other girls flowers too, but these are the ones i got rn

[canidlike]

bringing this back for their big day

[mandatory-blog-stop-asking]

gundam seed rant send post

so I finished Gundam Seed and I'm trying to figure out my exact problem with it, and I'm doing this because I've been a Gundam fan for a few years now, and I've noticed that Gundam hatedom is very, very performative-- people just know they have to hate on Savior, people just know they have to have on Seed, on IGLOO, on whatever. It's not very honest and it doesn't add much. But I don't really like highly controversial yet extremely successful show Gundam Seed, and I want to talk about why without getting teamed up with the sweatiest weirdos this side of old anime fandom.

I'm leaning toward my disappointment with it being the fact that it's barely got a point to make, and the ones that it makes aren't really well-made? Like, it doesn't know the difference between a race war and a Star Trek Eugenics war. It doesn't know how to build up tension between its actual characters. It doesn't know how to escalate conflict by following the story it's telling, instead of just twisting it at the end so we can have a space fight. But if its themes still reached a satisfying conclusion, that would matter a lot less.

And the themes are... not there, they're nothing. No character really embodies any idea or ideal, and no character has much of an opinion aside from the literal meme that War is Bad. A sentence which the translators for my subs really had to work overtime to try to figure out ways to say over and over again in different words, because that's essentially all Cagalli and Athrun say when you get them talking for long enough.

And it really feels like a weird turbo version of Gundam Wing, where the priorities of each characters are wrong and don't further their own stories. I was kinda shocked when the big Le Creuset reveal had nothing to do with the story so far, I was even more shocked when the fucking final fight was between him and Kira, two characters who do not care about each other nor know each other very well. Athrun should have taken that fight, and Kira should have taken the bomb run; what the fuck? Why are we doing this like this?

Lacus just becoming the captain of a ship is so fucking wild considering how much they made Natalie Badgirl go through in order to become captain of her own, it's so funny, she is the absence of characterization. She just does whatever the show needs her to do at any point, and it doesn't matter what she has already accomplished because she can just do whatever she needs to accomplish next. Why would she be captain? Am I losing my mind? What the fuck?

The only characters I really appreciated for any period of time were Flay and La Flaga, the former because I thought the idea that someone in this team completely cracked right away and started fucking the main character to emotionally manipulate him into killing his own people fucking ruled, what a million dollars conflict. And the latter because La Flaga is the only character I don't mind, I think he's charming and I think he's cool.

And then not only did Flay do a 180 masquerading as character development and became just another kinda pure-coded Gundam Lady, complete with the fucking Newtype Space Ghost death scene where all her sins are forgiven and she comes up naked to the protagonist telling him it's daijobou and she'll mamoru him, but then they also didn't give La Flaga a fucking Gundam until the end of the show! At which point they had to invent a reason for him to have a rival, because Athrun was now part of the crew!

it just feels like nothing happens for 50 episodes, because the events that do happen barely feel like they connect to each other. Like, yeah, they literally have a cause and effect relationship, but... it really feels like nothing before the Freedom pops up matters, at the end of the day. It really feels like most characters don't have a thesis behind them, it really feels like the conflict is extremely artificial. At some point we're asked to care that Kira is a testtube baby and I just, why, man, who cares, I certainly don't, it would be 2003 when this came out, be so for real.

I also... this is more of a me thing, but this is the first Gundam show with like, modern fansevice, I would say. Turn-A still had some light nudity, and I think literally every Gundam show before it also did-- usually just showing the girls' breasts every once in a while, like anime used to. But it wasn't... it was oogly, but it didn't make me feel kinda grossed out.

Meanwhile I felt that scene with Lacus stripping to get in the space suit on episode 1, with the back shot of her panties hit me like a fucking truck, because I grew up with that exact style of fanservice, and I fucking hate it; I despise it, I cannot stand it, I need it to perish and I'm glad it more or less died outside of actual ecchi. It sucks and it happens every once in a while, and it just makes the whole thing so off, moments that I'm supposed to take seriously have these fucking shots of the girls' tits bouncing like balloons, and they're shots they repeat all the time.

Specifically the Flay death scene really suffers, because they do the Lala ghost thing, but she's posing naked for the camera as she tries to convince Kira that it was a good creative decision to make her actually start to have feelings for him. It's incredibly distracting and it doesn't help that I think all of these character designs low-key suck. These faces look like they're melting and I'm not attracted to them. They only look good when they're making really ugly, angry faces, like when Miria tries to stab Dearka.

Who, speaking of which-- these are the worst enemies by far in any Gundam show, specifically they are the most incompetent fucking people in the franchise. Not because they're not Char or anything, but the fuckboy brigade Athrun leads at the beginning of the show just feels like they never win, and then the three stooges that replace them actually never win. It's honestly really funny that they tried to fix the problem the show had, and gave more people Gundams, only for the fucking new guys to lose even harder.

It's just so vapid and so superficial in all the ways that it shouldn't be, and it got me kind of sad, because I was not having fun at the beginning at all, and then by the latter half I thought oh, this ORB arc is heating up, I'm enjoying some of these developments, I think the show might be good now, only for every single plot thread and revelation to disappoint me.

No villains have actual relationships to the heroes (WHICH IS WILD BECAUSE ONE OF THEM IS THE DUDE'S FATHER). The Coordinators' superiority is only informed to us, in practice they're basically the exact same. The moment everyone gets their nukes back, we get great fights and a killer Final Weapon in the form of the Genesis, but then it just goes the way Gundam always goes when someone pulls out the Final Weapon. The show stops pretending Coordinators aren't just Newtypes and weird psychic shit starts happening. At some point cloning is introduced but it only matters for one character. it's nuts!

If I was a kid I would be all over it, though. If I had never seen other Gundam shows, or just shows in general, I'm sure I would ride or die this shit til the end of my days. It has excellent mecha designs, cool fights, stellar music (except that last opening), and it's very well-acted... for the most part. But... fuck, if you want anything out of your stories, it's just not here.

Anyway, justice for Cagalli, she was a real character for like 2 episodes there and then they put her on a dress. Fuck me. Onward to IGLO-- wait what do you mean "Gundam Seed Astray"? It's 2 5 minutes OVAs? hang on a second.

....

OH MY GOD THAT'S SO MUCH FUCKING COOLER WHAT THE HELL

[lulurimi]

no because those were really also my exact problems with the show too— only difference is that i got so obsessed that i am stuck here now LOL

so honestly this is why i have been writing my own installation for the series (gundam seed genesis), but it gets really hard sometimes as the characters in the originals have such bland and undiverse opinions that giving them more of a variety of feelings/goals/opinions gets more and more like that meme of “day 1, fanart of anti cosmo … day 587, this is my oc koz king of vampires”

this show lwk sucks at addressing the problems they INTENTIONALLY set up, which makes it seem very stupid

honestly the sexualisation of the girls is so irritating in the seed franchise that i literally made sexualisation of women (especially women during times of war/conflict) an entire thing to address

about the coordinators being better, it was highkey just kira (and maybe athrun) could flex on naturals every so often, but then kira flexes on all coordinators too because he is the “special one” too ig

[mandatory-blog-stop-asking]

the spite-project-that-becomes-the-life-project pipeline is impossible to escape, godpseed i wish you well.

Kira being the Ultimate Coordinator is so stupid in hindsight, because the idea that people wouldn't have known or noticed beforehand both when he lived with other Coordinators and when he lived in Heliopolis is crazy. He's not good enough as social interactions to understand how to fake being bad, and he was doing the work of entire teams of Gundam specialists on a whim, in the middle of a firefight.

And like, ultimately the only difference between a Coordinator and a Natural is that the Coordinators don't need Windows 11 to pilot Gundams, they can do it on Windows 98 just fine. And then Kira updates the OS and all of a sudden La Flaga is doing tricks on it.

If it had anything to say about eugenics, it would have been fine, but it treats it like a race war from day one. It seems to eventually realize that's stupid and then says people are wrong to think of Coordinators as a different race, but... but like, why did they even think that in the first place? it's quite literally impossible to tell them apart if you don't announce yourself, and they keep getting punked by regular people regardless.

Media that's mediocre in specific ways will stay with you forever, fuck.

[lulurimi]

gundam seed doesnt give characters equal treatment and the character they do focus on are “developed” mainly through plot twists and thinking about the female character who was written entirely to center around them— this is very heavily about kira, maybe tiny bit athrun (they just fucked up shinn, kira literally took bro’s whole series, it was so stupid— like you set up the audience to care about shinn and see his development when halfway through, nope! kira time!)

i feel like they shouldve added the racial problem of eugenics to the coordinators in regards to “eurocentrism” (as sometimes when parents edit genes, they also ask for fair skin, light hair, light eyes— colorism and racism) as that is a major part of why a lot of people are against eugenics and actually engage with the nuance of why people originally thought the concept of coordinators is bad

it could be that it was originally a take on anti-ableism, anti-racism, and stuff like that, but it slowly gathered more and more supports and maybe those supporters just wanted an excuse to hate or maybe they weren’t as educated as people who originally argued against eugenics

they definitely play coordinators out to be this racial other (despite having no traits that differentiate them from naturals)— honestly, the series portrayed coordinators’ hate as coming from decades of abuse and the while junius seven/bloody valentine tragedy despite simultaneously trying to convince the audience it is mainly the “superiority”

like yes, the superiority can be an aspect but its definitely not the main cause for the hate…

honestly i also found it funny that kira is played as being the “greatest coordinator” while also being so emotionally stunted?? like while i do agree trauma can stunt you emotionally, i wouldve assumed that the coordinators would also be changed to have emotional intelligence, not just physical and informational stuff.

but kira 100% shouldve been clocked as a coordinator from day one, the skills he is written to have didnt just come out of the blue

i like to just pretend that a lot of the naturals we did see were the “best of the best” which is why they were able to compete with the average coordinator because maybe the higher skilled ones were off doing other things (this is completely false, seed just sucks in showing the difference)

[mandatory-blog-stop-asking]

gundam seed rant send post

so I finished Gundam Seed and I'm trying to figure out my exact problem with it, and I'm doing this because I've been a Gundam fan for a few years now, and I've noticed that Gundam hatedom is very, very performative-- people just know they have to hate on Savior, people just know they have to have on Seed, on IGLOO, on whatever. It's not very honest and it doesn't add much. But I don't really like highly controversial yet extremely successful show Gundam Seed, and I want to talk about why without getting teamed up with the sweatiest weirdos this side of old anime fandom.

I'm leaning toward my disappointment with it being the fact that it's barely got a point to make, and the ones that it makes aren't really well-made? Like, it doesn't know the difference between a race war and a Star Trek Eugenics war. It doesn't know how to build up tension between its actual characters. It doesn't know how to escalate conflict by following the story it's telling, instead of just twisting it at the end so we can have a space fight. But if its themes still reached a satisfying conclusion, that would matter a lot less.

And the themes are... not there, they're nothing. No character really embodies any idea or ideal, and no character has much of an opinion aside from the literal meme that War is Bad. A sentence which the translators for my subs really had to work overtime to try to figure out ways to say over and over again in different words, because that's essentially all Cagalli and Athrun say when you get them talking for long enough.

And it really feels like a weird turbo version of Gundam Wing, where the priorities of each characters are wrong and don't further their own stories. I was kinda shocked when the big Le Creuset reveal had nothing to do with the story so far, I was even more shocked when the fucking final fight was between him and Kira, two characters who do not care about each other nor know each other very well. Athrun should have taken that fight, and Kira should have taken the bomb run; what the fuck? Why are we doing this like this?

Lacus just becoming the captain of a ship is so fucking wild considering how much they made Natalie Badgirl go through in order to become captain of her own, it's so funny, she is the absence of characterization. She just does whatever the show needs her to do at any point, and it doesn't matter what she has already accomplished because she can just do whatever she needs to accomplish next. Why would she be captain? Am I losing my mind? What the fuck?

The only characters I really appreciated for any period of time were Flay and La Flaga, the former because I thought the idea that someone in this team completely cracked right away and started fucking the main character to emotionally manipulate him into killing his own people fucking ruled, what a million dollars conflict. And the latter because La Flaga is the only character I don't mind, I think he's charming and I think he's cool.

And then not only did Flay do a 180 masquerading as character development and became just another kinda pure-coded Gundam Lady, complete with the fucking Newtype Space Ghost death scene where all her sins are forgiven and she comes up naked to the protagonist telling him it's daijobou and she'll mamoru him, but then they also didn't give La Flaga a fucking Gundam until the end of the show! At which point they had to invent a reason for him to have a rival, because Athrun was now part of the crew!

it just feels like nothing happens for 50 episodes, because the events that do happen barely feel like they connect to each other. Like, yeah, they literally have a cause and effect relationship, but... it really feels like nothing before the Freedom pops up matters, at the end of the day. It really feels like most characters don't have a thesis behind them, it really feels like the conflict is extremely artificial. At some point we're asked to care that Kira is a testtube baby and I just, why, man, who cares, I certainly don't, it would be 2003 when this came out, be so for real.

I also... this is more of a me thing, but this is the first Gundam show with like, modern fansevice, I would say. Turn-A still had some light nudity, and I think literally every Gundam show before it also did-- usually just showing the girls' breasts every once in a while, like anime used to. But it wasn't... it was oogly, but it didn't make me feel kinda grossed out.

Meanwhile I felt that scene with Lacus stripping to get in the space suit on episode 1, with the back shot of her panties hit me like a fucking truck, because I grew up with that exact style of fanservice, and I fucking hate it; I despise it, I cannot stand it, I need it to perish and I'm glad it more or less died outside of actual ecchi. It sucks and it happens every once in a while, and it just makes the whole thing so off, moments that I'm supposed to take seriously have these fucking shots of the girls' tits bouncing like balloons, and they're shots they repeat all the time.

Specifically the Flay death scene really suffers, because they do the Lala ghost thing, but she's posing naked for the camera as she tries to convince Kira that it was a good creative decision to make her actually start to have feelings for him. It's incredibly distracting and it doesn't help that I think all of these character designs low-key suck. These faces look like they're melting and I'm not attracted to them. They only look good when they're making really ugly, angry faces, like when Miria tries to stab Dearka.

Who, speaking of which-- these are the worst enemies by far in any Gundam show, specifically they are the most incompetent fucking people in the franchise. Not because they're not Char or anything, but the fuckboy brigade Athrun leads at the beginning of the show just feels like they never win, and then the three stooges that replace them actually never win. It's honestly really funny that they tried to fix the problem the show had, and gave more people Gundams, only for the fucking new guys to lose even harder.

It's just so vapid and so superficial in all the ways that it shouldn't be, and it got me kind of sad, because I was not having fun at the beginning at all, and then by the latter half I thought oh, this ORB arc is heating up, I'm enjoying some of these developments, I think the show might be good now, only for every single plot thread and revelation to disappoint me.

No villains have actual relationships to the heroes (WHICH IS WILD BECAUSE ONE OF THEM IS THE DUDE'S FATHER). The Coordinators' superiority is only informed to us, in practice they're basically the exact same. The moment everyone gets their nukes back, we get great fights and a killer Final Weapon in the form of the Genesis, but then it just goes the way Gundam always goes when someone pulls out the Final Weapon. The show stops pretending Coordinators aren't just Newtypes and weird psychic shit starts happening. At some point cloning is introduced but it only matters for one character. it's nuts!

If I was a kid I would be all over it, though. If I had never seen other Gundam shows, or just shows in general, I'm sure I would ride or die this shit til the end of my days. It has excellent mecha designs, cool fights, stellar music (except that last opening), and it's very well-acted... for the most part. But... fuck, if you want anything out of your stories, it's just not here.

Anyway, justice for Cagalli, she was a real character for like 2 episodes there and then they put her on a dress. Fuck me. Onward to IGLO-- wait what do you mean "Gundam Seed Astray"? It's 2 5 minutes OVAs? hang on a second.

....

OH MY GOD THAT'S SO MUCH FUCKING COOLER WHAT THE HELL

[lulurimi]

no because those were really also my exact problems with the show too— only difference is that i got so obsessed that i am stuck here now LOL

so honestly this is why i have been writing my own installation for the series (gundam seed genesis), but it gets really hard sometimes as the characters in the originals have such bland and undiverse opinions that giving them more of a variety of feelings/goals/opinions gets more and more like that meme of “day 1, fanart of anti cosmo … day 587, this is my oc koz king of vampires”

this show lwk sucks at addressing the problems they INTENTIONALLY set up, which makes it seem very stupid

honestly the sexualisation of the girls is so irritating in the seed franchise that i literally made sexualisation of women (especially women during times of war/conflict) an entire thing to address

about the coordinators being better, it was highkey just kira (and maybe athrun) could flex on naturals every so often, but then kira flexes on all coordinators too because he is the “special one” too ig

[cxsmicbrownies]

natarle badgiruel is a lesbian

[sakurakirathrun]

flay and kira might have actually been meant to be because why do they have the same insane belt fashion sense

what are you two thinking,,,,,,,, what is this,,,

[lulurimi]

what if kira saw flay buying things with belts so he started buying things with belts and then it slowly just became his typical fashion sense

[mandatory-blog-stop-asking]

getting up there in gundam seed and while it's been getting much better in this latter half, i have to admit a lot of it runs into the same problem as Victory's Shrike Team storyline-- when you have a full team of people whose entire purpose in the story is to lose and to lose badly, it's incredibly difficult not to make them look ridiculously incompetent, and the Athrun fuckboy brigade was just not ready for this.

more than that, usually these 4v1s get to say the hero wins because he's a Newtype or something, but in this context they're all Coordinators. I'm sure they'll expand on Kira further, but, like, man, you guys just... you're just not very good at this. You're bad pilots when it all normalizes, there's no other explanation for this performance. It's really funny to see characters that should be much stronger seething and malding over losing to the protagonist over and over again, and there's no in-universe justification other than, well, they must suck I guess.

this would have been avoided if they had just given more of the cast the equivalent to GMs, which I'm sure they will at some point, instead of just planes.

[lulurimi]

kira needed to lose against rau’s boy band, he is so unbuilt as a character that it is irritating

like you can see the beginnings of what they couldve done RIGHT THERE but its just always the most basic surface level

just very minimal exploration, the show definitely focuses on aura moments and what makes a gundam show classic instead of locking in and making the story just as good as some other gundam shows

[fostersffff]

[lulurimi]

gundam seed genesis relations

i felt like creating a small showcase into what goes on in my mind when i brainstorm for this

blue is proper couple

green is bio family relation

yellow is family figure

red implies crush

green is i kind of make scenes because it amuses me

pink is sapphic because highkey everyone in seed genesis likes girls

no one understands the utter amount of yuri potential all of them have

[lulurimi]

gundam seed oc finis lachlan

it wasnt as nice as the ciri one, but i will take it

[lulurimi]

gundam seed oc ciri gardel

highkey started locking in and letting the artstyle come naturally

[lulurimi]

the best thing about having just a mild allergy to hazelnuts is that i can tell people im allergic and then scare them by eating some

my throat only hurts a little bit so its a win