People always search for things they know they won't like. I play Final Fantasy XIV - Balmung Server. This blog is OOC but I do reach out to make RP connections and respond to interested parties/anons. Politics occasionally stop by and raid the fridge here. Blogs main interests include: Roleplay, Gaming, Opinions. Various Fandoms. Mind Fuckery. The only flag I will ever pledge allegiance to is the United Federation of Planets.
Mobile Suit Gundam Wing is a formative, fan-favorite entry in the long-running mecha franchise, but it's not without its share of frustratin
You'd think an article calling Gundam Wing the show that walked a generation into anime would, at some point, say what the show did right. This one doesn't. Eight entries, all deficits, and the omission gets dressed up as clear-eyed honesty. A fair piece keeps both columns open. Here's where it breaks, here's what it did that nothing before it had, now weigh them yourself. Cherry-picking the faults and headlining them as a public service is a different genre. It's clickbait.
I've been in this fandom since it ran on Toonami. The piece reads as an insult to everyone who found anime through this show, the fans who were there in 1995 and the ones still here thirty years later. So here's my response:
Fine. The article can have everything it wants.
The pilots brood so hard they loop back around into comedy. Heero tells a schoolgirl "I will kill you" in the first episode and it lands like a threat from someone who has never once spoken to a human being. The pacing falls apart after the director leaves. There's recycled animation. Two recap episodes get stapled together at the worst possible moment. Zechs is Char with the serial numbers barely filed off. All true. I'm not going to sit here and pretend Wing is a clean piece of work.
Here's the move the article makes and hopes you won't notice. It lists things a show does imperfectly, then calls that a reason to stop watching. Those aren't the same claim. Every ambitious anime from that decade is a pile of concessions. Evangelion ran out of money and ended in a folding chair. The article knows this, it even links to its own roundup of "unwatchable" 90s anime, which is its own tell.
What stings isn't the criticism. It's the conclusion tucked underneath it, that if you've loved this show, you've been loving something beneath you. Pretty boys. Fangirl bait. A starter Gundam for people who don't know better. I've heard that tone my whole fandom life and I finally have something to put in front of it.
The people who made Wing sat down for the 30th anniversary, talked, and released a whole special issue of interviews in 2025: "GREAT MECHANICS G 2025 AUTUMN". To the author of this article, I say — read what they had to say.
That "pretty boys pandering to fangirls" label, the one the article treats as the show's actual DNA? Series composer Katsuyuki Sumizawa says it came from a padded pitch document, written to get the project greenlit, describing a series he and director Masashi Ikeda "never had any intention of actually making." It leaked to a magazine before a single episode aired. The image welded itself to a war story they were fighting to make grim. The thing the article mocks Wing for being is the thing its writers spent a year trying not to make.
The "messy, contradictory political messaging"? That's 1995 getting into the water supply. Wing aired the year of the Kobe earthquake and the Tokyo subway sarin attack, months apart, in a Japan where the clean old story of two superpowers had already come apart into a tangle of civil wars and militias. So the show splinters OZ, then splinters the splinter, turns the colonies against the pilots and the pilots against each other. The article counts that as too many warring factions. The creators counted it as the actual shape of the decade they were living in. Dislike how hard it is to follow, sure. The incoherence is pointed.
The recycled animation filed under laziness? Ikeda used the animation banks on purpose, to pull weight off a staff that was drowning. Wish he hadn't if you like. It wasn't a shortcut nobody noticed.
And the big one, the thing the article keeps circling without naming: Wing is uneven because it was made alive. Ikeda built it on what Sumizawa calls "lucky happenings," ideas that showed up mid-production and rerouted the whole story, the way Wing self-destructing in episode ten blew up the plan they'd started with. Ikeda didn't leave partway through because he fought with anyone. He ran dry on those sparks. He'd poured out everything he had. Thirty years later Sumizawa still won't tell you what the show finally means: "I can't draw any conclusions," he says, about a series he wrote and then kept writing for another decade.
That isn't a flaw to apologize for. A show made that way lurches, yes. It also does things a tidier production sands right off. The characters "burst out," in Sumizawa's word, because nobody had them fully boxed in yet. The lines no real person would ever say, like Relena's "Heero, hurry and come kill me," survive because Ikeda could make an unhinged line carry weight that even he couldn't explain. You don't get that from a show with itself under control. You get it from this one.
While we're on the pretty boys. The anniversary retrospective makes a case the article would choke on, that Wing's real legacy is the "unisex turn." Gundam had spent years hardening into a boys' club built around model kits. Wing was deliberately built as a Gundam women would come to as well, and it became the most profitable entry in the franchise since the 1979 original, a record it kept until SEED. Every alternative Gundam after it carries that fingerprint. The boy band the article finds embarrassing is why the franchise reopened to half its audience. Be embarrassed if you want. History isn't.
Which brings me to the headline itself. A show that's genuinely hard to watch does not get new animated material three decades on. It doesn't hold a fandom that still argues about it, still draws it, still writes it, still shows up loyal to the original anime over every sequel and retcon that came after. When the new material was announced, we didn't groan. We celebrated, because it meant the interest was still there, enough of it to be worth Sunrise's time in the years to come.
Some of us are bracing too. If "new material" ends up meaning Frozen Teardrop, a lot of us will have opinions, and none of them soft. Notice that Sumizawa himself won't call Frozen Teardrop the true sequel. So this fandom the article pictures squinting at something it can't defend is discerning enough to reject a bad continuation of the thing it loves. We're not uncritical. We've just done the reading. We've done the thinking. We've had 30 years to think this through.
I've personally written tens of thousands of words about this show, specifically about how one of these "pretty boys" thinks. Not that the show handed me a finished psychology, but because it left enough real material on the floor that you could build one and have it hold.
You don't do that with something that plays as "unintentional comedy." You do it with something that got under your skin and stayed. For. Thirty. Years!
A show nobody can stand doesn't get redrawn thirty years on. It doesn't get argued about at 2 a.m. by people who know exactly where it breaks and stayed anyway. That's most of us fans, both in the past and the ones remaining in the present. Knowing where it breaks was never a reason to drop it. It was a reason to build, and oh how this fandom built over the years!
Been a fan for eons but sorta flutter in and out now that I'm old. Afaik Sumizawa wrote Frozen Teardrop. Is it just because of its reception they won't say its the sequel?
so cool how advanced the algorithm has become, it literally only takes like a decade or more of spying on all my internet activity and then it can expertly curate a selection of 15-20 youtube videos that i don't really want to watch, and then keep showing me those videos over and over again for a week so i can scroll past them again. the future is now
Raoul's part gets drowned out in the three-melody fugue of everyone screaming at each other, which is too bad because Christine's part is basically “are you kidding me?!? i am so over you, i hate this” (which yeah feel your feelings girl) and Erik's part is basically “let me restate my motives for making this situation and also i shall describe the situation” ( Constance from Ride the Cyclone voice: “I’m usually more of a melody person, less of a lyric person, truthfully…” ) so like Erik's part is melodically necessary I'm not knockin' Erik's part...
But Raoul's part is really emotionally complicated, like, “If you save my life by choosing him then my life is over anyway. You should absolutely let me die if it means that you're free to live your life the way you want—” sir?????
And when he's not drowned out by the two others shout-singing at each other then everyone laughs at Raoul's “i fought so hard to free you” when our boy couldn't even keep his hand at the level of his eyes, so like...that’s fair enough, laugh it up...
but really Raoul literally would do everything for Christine's freedom whether or not his own neck was in a noose; he doesn't simply want to possess her or accessorize himself with a waifu, Raoul wants Christine to be as independent and free as she wants to be (in before “but he started out as a stalker fanboy in the book” it's called Character Development ! He changes personality during the course of the story in a way that coheres with the events of the story and how he grows in understanding — this used to happen a lot in old books. )
the year is 2035. the new beauty standard is for women to cut their ears off, as ears are a masculine trait which make the face look too big and hearing isnt necessary as it doesnt align with being demure. evil feminists say perhaps this is unnecessary and ears are natural. women are agressively proclaiming they are cutting their ears off due to sensory issues
I need you young people to know it was almost never this hot when I was a child. Millennials and Gen Xers are all nostalgic and excited about summer because it was about ten to twenty degrees cooler to experience it back then!
I cannot express to you how FAST it has gone. I grew up in a world that does not exist now.
We're starting on the path to reverse it, globally. You might not know how much solar has EXPLODED in the last decade or two. It's gone from a side thing, a weirdo novelty that was just Not Viable... to whole countries investing in infrastructure.
but we have to keep fighting big oil and fascism everywhere we can in order to keep on this road to a new better less scorching burning earth.
But any time you wonder wtf the weather is doing- THIS IS NOT NORMAL, NO. THIS IS NOT WHAT IT WAS EVEN TWENTY YEARS AGO.
I am a writer. Not a content-producing machine.
I am a writer. Not a content-producing machine.
I am a writer. Not a content-producing machine.
It’s okay if I don’t have time to write.
It’s okay if a chapter is delayed.
It’s okay if my words come out messy.
It’s okay if I need to take a break.
It’s okay if I don’t update every week, every month, or even every year.
My value as a writer is not measured by how fast I post.
My worth is not defined by kudos, bookmarks, or comments.
I am allowed to be slow.
I am allowed to rest.
I am allowed to write for joy, not for an algorithm.
[“Emotionally immature people crave attention to their needs, yet they’re actually hard to give to. This trait has been called poor receptive capacity by researcher Leigh McCullough (McCullough et al. 2003). Emotionally immature people want others to show concern about their problems, but they aren’t likely to accept helpful suggestions. They reflexively reject efforts to make them feel cared about. They pull others in, but when people try to help, they push them away. In addition, these people seem to expect others to read their minds and are often quick to anger if people don’t anticipate their wishes fast enough (McCullough et al. 2003). They dislike having to tell people what they need and instead hold back, waiting to see whether anyone will notice how they’re feeling.
The classic unspoken demand of the emotionally immature adult is “If you really loved me, you’d know what I want you to do.” As an example, one woman described her mother’s habit of sitting in the den and waiting until a family member came back from the kitchen to complain angrily that the person hadn’t thought to ask her if she wanted anything. Instead of speaking up about what they need, emotionally immature people create a malignant guessing game that keeps everybody uneasy.”]
Lindsay C. Gibson, Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents
Am I just not following the right people or did the other Fanfest Berlin news overshadow the BIG news that we might soon get about HOUSING??
Like... Yoshi-P is implying some possibly insane stuff to happen that we will "be much happier about". I feel like, if it were just more wards, he'd simply say so. And for simply a new area, he wouldn't have mentioned WoW.
Am I the only one outside of some people on Twitter being all 👀👀👀 about this?
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