He's not a Scirocco; he's a Jamitov. He's the bland top-dog who is there to be a symbol of overconfident power that gets toppled before revealing the real threat. Being good at what he does doesn't make him not bland. If this guy were to wind up being the big threat of the series, that would be a ma...

Still looks to be setting up the paradigm shift I hypothesized. McGillis has some wildcard up his sleeve; it's going to outright destroy Rustal and his fleet, and then it/he is going to be a threat to Mars, making McGillis the final big-bad that he's obviously been since the tail-end of Season 1, an...

You keep reframing what I'm saying into something I haven't said, and then responding to that. Clearly I don't expect Rustal to remain the primary villain. He's bland, he's uninteresting, and he doesn't make for a satisfying antagonist. So if he's all there is to it, that is the curveball for me, be...

And there is also a possibility for a not so satisfying ending for IBO, very few anime especially Gundam have good/satisfying endings especially within the last decade... Excluding Build Fighters and Try, only 00 has had a pretty decent ending in both season 2 and the movie but that was also a long...

Rustal is sort of portrayed as the villain, but he's too bland to be a primary villain. He strikes me as the red-herring villain, sort of like Jamitov in Zeta, who is replaced toward the end by the charismatic, ambitious, sociopath Scirocco. Not to mention Rustal isn't a pilot, and primary antagoni...

Well, I look at any other possibility, and all I see are side-characters. Rustal is sort of portrayed as the villain, but he's too bland to be a primary villain. He strikes me as the red-herring villain, sort of like Jamitov in Zeta, who is replaced toward the end by the charismatic, ambitious, soci...

I'm not saying McGillis is worse than Rustal. He may be, but we really don't get enough of Rustal to say. But check it out, his gripes with Gjallarhorn hoarding power among an elite few, and treating everybody else as expendable don't amount to anything when his entire plan involves 1) hoarding powe...

I'm also judging them based on their actions. McGillis throws his allies under the bus in order to grab power. He's an actual outright sociopath. Yes he has a tragic history--most Gundam villains do--but his actions are not the actions of someone who is looking to actually make progressive change, a...

His goal is not to reform Gjallarhorn though. That's the reasoning he gives everybody to make them sympathetic to his cause (and to be frank, I suspect the writers earlier on intended that for him and later changed their minds), but he's outright said that what he's after is complete power. He wants...

Hey, thanks for posting this. It seems to end pretty abruptly, but lots of great info on the production there.

I think we're going to have one last major paradigm shift. As it stands right now, one of two things happen: A) Tekkadan + McGillis win. This is really unlikely, because McGillis is clearly a backstabbing dirtbag; it just doesn't play into his character arc so far at all to have him just be on the v...

First half is worse than second half for sure, but the second half doesn't even come close to redeeming it. The characters still aren't characters; they just get their three seconds of token humanizing to con an audience into thinking they are. There have been a fair few less than stellar Gundam ser...

For sure; I think the tech design is mostly great.

Finally got around to watching this yesterday. Absolutely hated it. Possibly my least favorite piece of Gundam so far (though I haven't seen G-Savior). It tries so god-damned hard to be "dark," but dark storytelling lives or dies by its characters, and Thunderbolt doesn't have any . Oh, it...

Like the setting a lot. It looks to be taking a somewhat Post Apocalyptic approach, but without leaning too heavily on the tropes that often entails. Of course, who knows; we may see those tropes take effect later on, especially when the cast gets to Earth. Mecha design is really great. Looks much b...

Well the angle isn't perfect for looking at the lower torso. It could be that there's a central support column and the two smaller pistons are just the actuators. I agree it's unlikely, and that "unfinished" is the most plausible explanation, but something to keep in mind. Or perhaps inste...

The inspiration might be this https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekketsu_Kinn%C5%8Dtai Japanese Army division made of children used in WWII, most of them died I was going to point out exactly this. I'd be very surprised if that isn't the inspiration for the title, given that Tekketsu Kinnotai was a uni...

Mother issues are definitely more pronounced in Tomino stories, though certainly there are father issues as well, even though in some cases it may just be there accidentally rather than intentionally subtle.

Honestly, I never saw why "spatial awareness" was treated as a newtype-level superpower. Unlike the UC timeline, CE's remote weapons aren't controlled by special newtype-only brainwaves, and the phrase "spatial awareness" basically means "being aware of where things are in ...

The junk like full-armor moniker, the Unicorn having a magical-girl transformation sequence, mobile suits performing combat-knife CQC, and other stuff like that are minor quibbles that I'd happily poke fun at even if I'd loved the series, and wouldn't have mattered if the meat of the series was good...