#but if you're into STARGAZER? and not mainline CE? you're a real one

[haropla]

Nat, as a person who absolutely loves Gundam Seed and got into gunplay by building the HG strike: yassssss go off

oh MAN I blast Seed every opportunity I get and then some and you're still following me? you're an actual diamond.

anyway, far be it from me to criticize anyone getting into gunpla because they liked the story/characters it's tied to or even because it was formative. my first gunpla was an HG revive guncannon because 0079 was my first series and I love kai so damn much. but I just cannot look at this manga with cute girls creating mainline cosmic era gunpla with any sort of good faith or just look at it in a vacuum.

with seed having its 20th anniversary next year, this is very much a deliberate decision, a ploy in order to scrape together every little scrap of attention they can get for the very nationalistic, misogynistic parts of the franchise. this series that, on the surface, is meant to be cute girls bonding over a hobby normally considered embarrassing weird otaku stuff, did not just appear out of nowhere independent of literally everything it's attached to, be it seed/destiny, gunpla, or gundam as a whole. if IRL people still like gundam seed while still acknowledging it's got some real problems, that's fine! absolutely no one is immune to liking bad media or liking media others really hate. but these characters are constructed for the sake of marketing and drumming up attention for some real terrible series that are are still bizarrely popular, and that is a fact regardless of how un/popular this manga will be.

for how unreliable gundam wiki is, it at least tells me that the older lady (she's 30, apparently) didn't touch gunpla before the manga started. so presumably that one got into gundam seed for...its writing? like. you're telling me that this lady got sold on seed's fujobait when amuro and char are right there?? (and garma. holy SHIT garma's stupidly popular. there's an entire au manga I'm convinced was created for the sole purpose of shipping him and char without it being problematic). and if it wasn't for fujobait reasons, then was it really just deep (tm) themes about self-determination and pursuing pacifism? I've already gone on at length about how horseshit the writing is on basically every level, so that means she either doesn't mind or outright likes the nationalism and very rampant misogyny that goes on in mainline cosmic era. and even if it frames seed as a formative experience--again, this character was deliberately created to be shaped by a terrible series. I'm very much not interested in following a character like that, regardless of how irrelevant it is in the manga. not to mention characters like this are meant to be "relatable." Do Not Want.

at least with og build fighters, there's an emphasis on sei and reiji really making the build strike their own, especially when there's a big character beat that has sei break apart from what he likes about gundam so he can come up with something original. but in the official art for this gunpla manga, you have the girls holding up straight builds of the strike and destiny, which are framed and built up as symbols of Japanese imperialism overcoming every obstacle in the way of hypocrisy-laden pacifism by way of violent, merciless conquest.

basically the only way this manga will actually redeem itself is if the high school girl slaps that destiny kit out of her hands and slams down a stargazer in front of her instead.