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fostersffff · 2 years ago

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The Big Gundam Watch, Part 13: Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory (+ The Mayfly of Space)

At the end of my previous post on Gundam F91, I talked about how I had never really heard anything meaningful about 0083: Stardust Memory. Which is weird, because it takes place in a pretty under-explored time period (within animated canon anyway), which should make it perfect for exploring the changes that happen in the Universal Century between the original Mobile Suit Gundam and Zeta. But what actually happens in the story is never what people talk about, on the rare occasion it's even referenced: it's almost exclusively that Cima Garahau is one of The Character Designs of All Time and that it's an OVA from the golden age of that format, which means it has top notch designs (see the previous point about Cima Garahau) and animation.

Of course, that's not necessarily indicative of a bad story. Hell, a lot of the time plot is the least talked about thing when it comes to media, outside of "it's good!" or "it's bad!". Plus, considering that this was an interquel, it was a possibility that it would be difficult to even discuss plot elements outside of the context of how they relate to 0079 or Zeta. At the very least, my hope was- and I quote- "even if it’s bad, it should at the very least be interesting."

Consider the finger of the monkey's paw curled.

THE STUFF I LIKED

Despite that intro, 0083 did have a bunch of good stuff. The most compelling part of the story was everything having to do directly with the Delaz Fleet. Specifically, the way that Delaz and Gato were genuine believers in the stated cause of Zeon. Like, they're explicitly established as Gihren Zabi Loyalists, deciding to drop out of the fighting at A Boa Qu once they learn he was assassinated by Kycilia, but to these people, "Gihren Loyalist" just means "True Believers in Spacenoid Independence". And that makes sense: we as viewers know Gihren was just a power-hungry despot, but that wouldn't really be known for a fact even in the upper echelons of Zeon leadership. And up to the bitter end, both Delaz and Gato believe that the mission and its purpose is greater than their own lives.

On the flipside, and equally as good, I love that Cima Garahau is exactly what I thought she would be: An Unrepentant Scheming Bitch. Not only is that fun to watch on its own, she has such a unique panache with the fan and the trenchcoat cloak and the zebra print captain's lounge chair, she really contrasts nicely with the (for lack of a better word) "purity" of Delaz and Gato's mission.

The burst of endorphins I got from seeing Axis Zeon hemming and hawing over how much support to give the Delaz Fleet while a sulky teenage Haman Karn goes "this sucks, I hate this" cannot be overstated. I love seeing Haman Karn.

If you asked me my opinion of the Alpha Azieru from Char's Counterattack, my response would be "it's alright", but I was genuinely stunned when I saw the Neue Ziel in the second OP. Less because "oh boy it's my favorite mobile armor" and more "HUH? HUH? HUH?!" Like, what the fuck is this thing doing existing literally a decade before Char's Counterattack? It made for a very convincing final boss in that way.

Similarly, when they did the "big reveal" of Unit 03, I was extremely underwhelmed because it was A Gundam, Again. But then they cut to what it looks like fully armored up and I popped off because I fucking LOVE Gundams Inside Giant Armors, and this this was literally tucked into a fucking Metal Gear. It's also the first time the flower naming scheme feels appropriate, because it was designed to defend the La Vie en Rose (the Gundam is the "Stamen", the armor is the "Orchis", and the combined form is the "Dendrobium").

I can't include every single instance of incredible animation here, because the fact of the matter is that every single action setpiece in this OVA series is top-of-the-line. I'm just gonna highlight this one, where a Dom swooces up to a GM, grabs the barrel of his gun and fires its own bazooka into the GM's cockpit point-blank.

Besides the incredibly high quality of animation due to the fact that this was a 90's OVA, we were also blessed with a bounty of Beautiful Wamen. The random mechanics on the Albion, the random engineers at Anaheim, Lt. Burning's wife, the engineer at the La Vie en Rose- throw a fucking dart and you will hit a Beautiful Wamen.

There's also some stuff that just looks good in general, even without animation. When Gato is en route to the Naval Review and flying through the remnants of the battle of A Boa Qu, it cuts to a shot of the inside of a Zaku where a Zeon soldier's corpse has just been sitting stagnant for the last three years, not even getting the chance to rot away because there's no atmosphere for the bacteria to survive in. It'll just be there forever as space debris.

When the first episode had Keith trying to hit on Nina, only for Maura to cut in and him to react like "oh no, this beautiful woman is tall and slightly muscular...", I was ready to decry him as The Worst. But to my pleasant surprise, he gets his shit together and goes "wait, no, this beautiful woman is tall and slightly muscular!" and capitalizes. Truly, the MVP of 0083.

Sad as I was to see her go, I am glad Cima got, like, the most metal death possible. (There was a video here, but I couldn't include more than one in this post, and the other one later felt more important to include/didn't work as well as an isolated post, so check it out!)

THE STUFF I LIKED LESS

So before I get into my actual biggest problem with this story, the plot issue has to come first: why was the true objective of Operation Stardust to hit North America and not Jaburo? Up until the confrontation inside the colony, the sequence of events was that Cima conspired with Jamitov Hymen (who was subordinate to some other guy and not an admiral himself?) and Bask Ohm to co-opt Operation Stardust. But then it turns out that Delaz's original intent for Stardust was for Gato to make one final secret change to alter the colony's course to hit North America. I get that Jaburo couldn't be destroyed, because it had to be destroyed in Zeta, but they literally already had an out! Even if the Solar System succeeded in destroying the colony, the destruction of the Naval Review and a barely averted colony drop would have been plenty of pretext to form the Titans. The only explanation I could find online- with no sourcing- is that the intent was to disrupt the Federation's food supply, which... I guess? But this was a tremendously elaborate operation with a numerous points of failure for the ultimate goal of supply line disruption.

Ok, let's get into it now: you may have noticed that I didn't talk about the protagonists of this story, Kou Uraki and Nina Purpleton, at all in the first section. That's on purpose, because these two suck, and it's not just a matter of them being unlikable- although a lot of the time they are- it's that the way in which they suck is inconsistent because of bad writing. Let's start with the relationship between them, and why this is quite possibly the worst romantic plot in Gundam as a franchise.

We'll go from a specific example: in Episode 7, Kou and Nina, who at this point each know they are romantically interested in one another, have a falling out because Kou can't screw up the courage to actually ask Nina on a date. At the end of the episode, Kou is engaging a Zeon mobile armor and getting his shit wrecked. Nina, who was planning on giving up everything and returning to Earth to live with her parents after she was reassigned from Kou's ship, goes out to the surface to try to beg the Zeon pilot to stop fighting, because she has some unexplained history with him. She's caught in the crossfire, and it seems like she may have been killed. This incenses Kou to rally, and he defeats the Zeon mobile armor before going to check on Nina. It turns out she's alive, but the thought of nearly losing her gives him the courage he needs to say something that can only be read as a love confession. They embrace as the instrumental version of the sensual R&B ending song plays, and the camera zooms out, showing them standing atop Unit 01, on bent knee. Romance.

It's been tumultuous to this point, but that's it, we're locked in, Kou and Nina are together. Fast forward to the start of the next episode: Kou is returning from a successful training mission. Nina spots him in the dock, and...

A cool secret handshake? Ok... that's weird, but maybe you want to keep it professional-ish at work. So they chat about how cool and great the Gundam is and tease each other a little bit, which then leads to Kou saying this:

What the fuck?! You can't double back to "aha we're like brother and sister" after something so explicitly romantic! The rest of the episode then plays out with Kou right back to where he was in the last epiosde, where he just can't with girls, and has a hilarious scene where he drops a bunch of self-help books he took from the library to try to understand women better.

So it stays at this level for the remainder of the series, and that would be bad enough: that despite the fact that Kou and Nina are significantly older than Amuro and Lalah or Kamille and Fa (or Four, or any other girl who smiled in Kamille's direction), the most romantic thing we see between them is hugging in moments of extreme duress, and otherwise it's secret handshakes and awkward stumbling.

But wait, there's more: to try to inject some drama into this tepid subplot, they reveal that Nina used to be shacked up with Gato! And the reason she doesn't want them to fight isn't just because she loves cares about Kou, it's because she also still loves cares about Gato! Which culminates in Nina holding Kou at gunpoint in the final episode so she can try to keep Gato alive.

All of this Fucking Awful Romance is symptomatic of that fact that neither Kou nor Nina are particularly well defined. As described above, Kou fluctuates between a Fresh Faced Baby Boy and a Hot Blooded Mech Pilot, but neither really suit him. Like, the first few episodes imply that he's just a tech nerd who got in over his head- not unlike the protagonists who came before him- but he's a commissioned officer of the Federation Armed Forces. Maybe the idea is that he only joined up so he could satisfy being a tech nerd by getting to play with mobile suits, and that would be fine if he ever developed from that starting point.

Like, there's an alternate version of this story where all of the plot beats they set up actually pay off and stick. If his encounter with Gato really altered the trajectory of his life in a meaningful way, realizing he doesn't have a grand purpose the way that Gato claims to, and he spends the series trying to find one. If his butting heads with a shithead like Monsha, who is a living example of the excess of the Federation Gato was talking about, led him to realize that just being a Federation officer doesn't have any meaning in and of itself. If his encounter with Kelley, whose purpose isn't as grandiose as Gato's but still inspiring by virtue of how passionate he is about it, makes him realize that it's not about doing something big, it's about doing something he cares about. Then the end of the series delivers the same devastating blows: that the Federation brass knew all along about Operation Stardust and were going to let it happen as a false flag, and he realizes that Gato was right all along and the Federation really cares for nothing but consolidating its own power, and comes to a decision about what to do with his life from that point on. Instead, what's actually presented is that after a certain point all he cares about is fighting Gato because he's a Hot Blooded Mech Pilot, but also just a Fresh Faced Baby Boy when not fighting Gato.

Nina has largely the same problem, where she just feels kinda aimless. The shorthand version is that she's like Metal Gear Solid's Otacon, but somehow even more naive. If you're unfamiliar, Hal "Otacon" Emmerich is an otaku who got helped build the titular Metal Gear because it was just like his Japanese Animes, and was horrified to learn that it's true intent of it was to serve as a mobile nuclear weapons platform. Nina, on the other hand, not only knew Unit 02 was going to be used to launch nuclear weapons, but literally supervised the loading of the nuclear warhead, and was stunned at the idea of the nuclear warhead being used for war, and not just data gathering.

Beyond that, Nina's most consistent trait, unfortunately, is that she's selfish, in a frankly bizarre way. That's what makes her decision to tend to Gato in the finale so aggravating; it's not that she cucks Kou (because frankly that's kinda funny to me), it's that all she cares about is making sure Gato and Kou live. There's no consideration for the fact that the colony they're standing in is going to crash into the Earth when the very first scene with her in the series is Captain Sinapus/Synapse explaining that they're not flying over the ocean, they're flying over the crater made by the Operation British colony drop. That doesn't matter though, because she hooked up with Gato a few years ago, so she really wants him to survive even though he's committed two Super War Crimes in as many months.

I could go on, but this is already way longer than normal, and I think I got my point across. Just in case: Kou and Nina suck and the story is dragged down by the virtue of them being Point of View characters.

OTHER OBSERVATIONS

Those auto sentries in Episode 9 feel like they should've shown up way more often in everything. An autonomous weapon system that requires maintenance but can track targets as accurately as it does feels way more useful than the minefields and other traps we see in other UC stories.

I like how the Anaheim Electronics Uniform for women has the little seifuku cape, despite the fact that it's clearly a blazer: business in the front, schoolgirl in the back. Although Nina's second outfit also has the seifuku cape so I think someone on the design team was just enamored with integrating it into the clothes characters were wearing.

This has a pretty mid dub: generally speaking I think most actors are doing a good job and are well cast, but this is one of those times where the direction specifically stands out as bad. The prime example is in Episode 5, where Nina turned up the heat in the shower, and Maura starts doing the jig you do when the shower is too hot, but her English VA reads it like "Ow. Ow. Hot. Hot. Ow. Ohh, that's too hot, Nina.", instead of short little yips someone would actually make in that scenario, which is actually what her Japanese VA does. Compare and contrast for yourself:

On the subject of this scene: upon hearing Maura, I went "hey, that sounds an awful lot like Kaori Makimura from City Hunter... but they couldn't have possibly done the absolute most perfect casting for this character, could they?" and sure enough, it was Kazue Ikura, and my heart soared.

Also speaking of Japanese Voice Actresses, Cima's VA Mari Mashiba may have the funniest credits page in history:

I would be remiss not to point out that 0083 apparently plagiarized a bunch of music, but the one I actually noticed was a song from Ennio Morricone's score for The Thing, which was later used by Quentin Tarantino for The Hateful Eight.

I will never not get a kick out of Japanese media going "but how do we make sure the audience understands this character was an American?"

I understand the realities of disposing of human waste in space, but it's so fucking funny that in this scene where Maura is trying to get Kou to snap Nina out of of her Love Triangle Induced Stupor is taking place while there's a big box labeled URINE COLLECTION prominently in frame.

THE MAYFLY OF SPACE

So, there are two shorts titled "The Mayfly of Space" included with the 0083 blu-ray. Both of these are partial adaptations of an audio drama about Cima Garahau, but the first one is literally 3 minutes long and is tells you absolutely nothing about anything, except that Cima has been having nightmares about... something.

The Mayfly of Space 2, in contrast, actually provides more insight to the character, but nothing especially revelatory. Cima felt that her superiors telling her to surrender herself to the Federation at the end of the One Year War was a betrayal, which is what led to her conspiring with the soon-to-be Titans. It also shows why Gato was skeptical about Delaz working with Cima, because he had to fend her off from murdering the superior who gave that order to her and her unit.

At least, that's what I gathered from watching it. If the wiki is to be believed, there's actually a way more compelling story than what was conveyed here. In fact, it's one that would have actually tied in perfectly to the main story, as a very specific and direct contrast to what Delaz and Gato's understanding of the ideology of Zeon is. Literally the only insight we actually get to what's described on that wiki page is this single line from Episode 12:

But, I can't really complain about getting more Cima, especially when "more Cima" in this case includes "Cima sad and drunk with her titties out".

IN CONCLUSION

I have to wonder if War in the Pocket wasn't as well received at the time as it is today, because I feel like that should have opened the floodgates to "the Gundam franchise is capable of supporting stories that don't have the same framework as the original TV series", especially OVAs that would by nature be aimed at an older audience. Like, I think if the focus on Kou and Nina- and the Albion's crew in general- was significantly reduced so that Stardust Memory was more of an ensemble story, it would have been improved dramatically. And you can still have all the slick action that actually appeared in the story as it exists with that setup, it just would mean that all the stuff in between would have a better chance of being compelling instead of just... bad.

I was actually originally planning on watching the compilation version of this series, The Afterglow of Zeon, because my initial hunch was that trimming the fat would make this story a lot better. I think that's still possibly the case, but I don't really think they can fix the core issue of the Federation cast being uninteresting. I might still check that out someday, and if I do, I'll certainly post about it, but for now, I'm pretty done with 0083.

Next up: the last of the original set of stories set in the Universal Century, Mobile Suit Victory Gundam. I think this was the blu-ray set I held out on picking up for the longest time, on account of not being sure if I'd ever bother with the future UC stuff and the fact that opinions on Victory tend to be even more volatile than ZZ. But over the course of this, I've become a tremendous fan of Yoshiyuki Tomino and his weird-ass brain, and I could've sworn that I read that someone on the production team for The Witch from Mercury said their favorite Gundam was Victory, which is all the recommendation anyone should need (if true).

#Gundam 0083 #Gundam #Mobile Suit Gundam #Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory #The Big Gundam Watch #anime #blu-ray #long post

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