The Official Gundam Unicorn Re: 0096 Anime Thread Mk I

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BrentD15
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Re: The Official Gundam Unicorn Re: 0096 Anime Thread Mk I

PowerdGNFlag wrote:
BrentD15 wrote:Well, Unicorn started airing on Toonami last night. (Yay! :D)
I just wanted to know: is it the RE version we're getting aired?
Yes. The episode was not an hour long, and had a proper OP/ED, right? Content wise there's very little that changed from the OVA version, though we've already gone through that when it originally aired, and I assume that the dub would be the same as that used in the OVA (recut as well), so that discussion doesn't really need to be repeated now.
I see.
Well, at least now we get an excuse to air Unicorn on Toonami for an extended period of time. :P
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Areku
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Re: The Official Gundam Unicorn Re: 0096 Anime Thread Mk I

Hi, guys. I've got something I want to get off my chest that you may or may not find interesting.

I first watched OVA 7 when it was new, was several kinds of ticked off most of the way through for narrative reasons, most prominently the parts where Riddhe didn't die when he really should've. Or rather, when I wanted him to. A lot.

Finally got around to rewatching it a few days ago, and while the passionate distaste I felt has long dissipated, I feel like I was more attentive to the other plot/narrative flaws. I've seen many of them discussed at length, but I'll share one of the ones I haven't seen brought up.

So, you guys remember how ~1/3rd of OVA 7 is spent on the firing of Gryps 2, be it the actual event or the various discussions in the Cheyenne base or the "something's targeting us" Newtype necromancy? Well I do, and aside from ~30 seconds of genuinely impressive spectacle, it was all a complete waste of time. And I'm not talking about how Bright/Londo Bell should've been able and willing to prevent the firing (or how Bright waits 4 whole minutes before deciding he wants to call the Nahel Argama and warn them), or how Alberto waited until after Ronan initiated the sequence to mention Riddhe, or any of the other things that should've happened to prevent Ronan from sending the order to Gryps 2 (and with personal experience operating Really High Output Military Equipment (TM), I can assure you that no one in their right mind would attempt the systems dismantling needed to bypass fire control authentication of a colony destroyer at "95% operation critical output", in case Gryps 2 got word that Ronan had been compromised ^^).

Finally, to my main point. The distance between Gryps 2 and Industrial 7 was ~666,840km, so distant that the beam is visibly curved by the Earth's influence. I'm going to be extremely liberal and say that Gryps 2 would destroy anything within 80km of its beam. This makes the shot the equivalent of hitting a mock human target at about 0.53miles/0.85km, approaching the range considered "long-range sniping". By the T-60 mark, Ronan has clearly decided he wants to abort, but is told it's too late and that aborting would kill 1,000+ personnel. So here's a novel idea: if you can't stop the laser from firing, how about you just miss? In that final minute, if you could rotate/pivot/turn Gryps 2 just 0.00043 degrees, you'd completely miss your original target. That's a rotational speed of 1 degree in 1 day 15 hours!! That's nothing! And it gets better: in the background, you can hear operators reporting on Gryps 2's attitude adjustment, automatic tracking and final target adjustment; any one of these could be terminated or adjusted to achieve the desired miss.

This is just one of the things I find extremely off-putting in OVA 7, albeit the most technical. As a whole, OVA 7 had tons of great spectacle and music, but goddamn was it stuffed full of meaningless babble, nonsensical events and narrative flaws.

Of course, maybe I'm being way too critical and the show deliberately filled the command center with duplicitous Titan sympathizers and poor Bright just had a bad case of main character-itis that day.
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Re: The Official Gundam Unicorn Re: 0096 Anime Thread Mk I

Areku wrote: Thu Feb 23, 2017 4:41 am Hi, guys. I've got something I want to get off my chest that you may or may not find interesting.

I first watched OVA 7 when it was new, was several kinds of ticked off most of the way through for narrative reasons, most prominently the parts where Riddhe didn't die when he really should've. Or rather, when I wanted him to. A lot.

Finally got around to rewatching it a few days ago, and while the passionate distaste I felt has long dissipated, I feel like I was more attentive to the other plot/narrative flaws. I've seen many of them discussed at length, but I'll share one of the ones I haven't seen brought up.

So, you guys remember how ~1/3rd of OVA 7 is spent on the firing of Gryps 2, be it the actual event or the various discussions in the Cheyenne base or the "something's targeting us" Newtype necromancy? Well I do, and aside from ~30 seconds of genuinely impressive spectacle, it was all a complete waste of time. And I'm not talking about how Bright/Londo Bell should've been able and willing to prevent the firing (or how Bright waits 4 whole minutes before deciding he wants to call the Nahel Argama and warn them), or how Alberto waited until after Ronan initiated the sequence to mention Riddhe, or any of the other things that should've happened to prevent Ronan from sending the order to Gryps 2 (and with personal experience operating Really High Output Military Equipment (TM), I can assure you that no one in their right mind would attempt the systems dismantling needed to bypass fire control authentication of a colony destroyer at "95% operation critical output", in case Gryps 2 got word that Ronan had been compromised ^^).

Finally, to my main point. The distance between Gryps 2 and Industrial 7 was ~666,840km, so distant that the beam is visibly curved by the Earth's influence. I'm going to be extremely liberal and say that Gryps 2 would destroy anything within 80km of its beam. This makes the shot the equivalent of hitting a mock human target at about 0.53miles/0.85km, approaching the range considered "long-range sniping". By the T-60 mark, Ronan has clearly decided he wants to abort, but is told it's too late and that aborting would kill 1,000+ personnel. So here's a novel idea: if you can't stop the laser from firing, how about you just miss? In that final minute, if you could rotate/pivot/turn Gryps 2 just 0.00043 degrees, you'd completely miss your original target. That's a rotational speed of 1 degree in 1 day 15 hours!! That's nothing! And it gets better: in the background, you can hear operators reporting on Gryps 2's attitude adjustment, automatic tracking and final target adjustment; any one of these could be terminated or adjusted to achieve the desired miss.

This is just one of the things I find extremely off-putting in OVA 7, albeit the most technical. As a whole, OVA 7 had tons of great spectacle and music, but ZOINKS was it stuffed full of meaningless babble, nonsensical events and narrative flaws.

Of course, maybe I'm being way too critical and the show deliberately filled the command center with duplicitous Titan sympathizers and poor Bright just had a bad case of main character-itis that day.
Hah! Wish I'd thought of the idea for them to just "miss". Of course, they would also have to make sure that they don't hit something else along the botched trajectory, and it's entirely possible that once they've started charging the laser they can no longer move it.
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Deathzealot
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Re: The Official Gundam Unicorn Re: 0096 Anime Thread Mk I

Yeah. Wasn't there other colonies around the area since I7 was in a Side after all.
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Amion
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Re: The Official Gundam Unicorn Re: 0096 Anime Thread Mk I

I don't recall Gryps being all that stable an object from my memories of Zeta, and then it disappears after the Conflict named after it, presumably for extensive repairs. That's no real excuse for any of the less than thoughtful flaws in 7's narrative surrounding the laser, but it might, just might, give some kind of logic that moving it could be disastrous. Maybe all that pent up energy could make moving it wonky or something?

Of course, let us not forget that Titan sympathizers are likely the best excuse we have. It's not that they couldn't miss, it's that they didn't want to...

EDIT: and yes, I know the very ever so slight adjustments Areku mentions should be well within the operational capacity of Gryps, so yeah... there's really no excuse, save that Industrial 7 might happen to be in some convenient location where firing at anything BUT the colony would result in unintentional targets being hit... which doesn't make sense either, as we've have been shown that the laser has more than enough power to blast through a colony and keep going for a substantial amount of time...
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Areku
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Re: The Official Gundam Unicorn Re: 0096 Anime Thread Mk I

Another thing that bothered me (more than it probably should) that I haven't seen brought up.

Siam Vist goes off on Full Frontal about how it should be the children who decide what is done with the box. This comes shortly after Minerva accuses FF of being a person made in Char's image (heavily implying that he's a clone), to which he has a candid (but characteristically obfuscated) response about how he now has fundamental doubts about who he is and where his desires come from, suggesting that he's (confusedly) beginning to regard himself as a "true" individual rather than simply being Char's replacement.

As a clone of Char, would he not be, at the absolute oldest, the same age as Minerva? I find it difficult to believe that an effort to clone Char would've started early enough for that not to be the case. And with that in mind, FF's response sounds remarkably like what I'd expect a child/teenager who's been infused with Char's "memories" and mannerisms to sound like when he begins to really process that he can be his own person, so you couldn't simply dismiss him as a bizarre extension of Char's life and individuality.

So by Siam's reasoning of "let the children decide", shouldn't Full Frontal have a seat at the table? And if any of my interpretation of the dialogue between Minerva/FF is mistaken... well, then we're back to the old hat "what's with all the 'empty vessel' babble?"
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BrentD15
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Re: The Official Gundam Unicorn Re: 0096 Anime Thread Mk I

From what I heard, Full Frontal isn't actually a clone, but more of a Neo Zeon soldier that agreed to go through a transformation into a Char clone, including facial reconstruction surgery, memory wipes, and cyber-newtype enhancements.
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Areku
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Re: The Official Gundam Unicorn Re: 0096 Anime Thread Mk I

BrentD15 wrote: Fri Feb 24, 2017 10:15 pm From what I heard, Full Frontal isn't actually a clone, but more of a Neo Zeon soldier that agreed to go through a transformation into a Char clone, including facial reconstruction surgery, memory wipes, and cyber-newtype enhancements.
Hmm... Welp, I think that raises more issues than it addresses. For starters, the process of turning a grown-ass man into something that could even charitably be called a "clone" would be an extremely laborious effort that doesn't seem to align with other medical/enhancement tech Gundam's ever shown*; at least "accelerated growth" has been demonstrated with Rau le Creuset and sounds like it would be plausible in UC.

Then there's the missed opportunity of internal-conflict/self-realization between 1) the man he used to be 2) the implanted memories/soul (which isn't properly explained anyway) of Char and 3) another personality that might emerge from the cognitive dissonance that he isn't actually Char. All of which sounds like a sci-fi concept that could easily carry its own story and would be way more interesting than "supreme nihilist who babbles about being an empty vessel, but he talks like Char while he does it so that makes it okay". As the OVAs are, there's a glimmer of that potentially interesting story, but it's immediately swept under the rug.

And of course there's Ye Olde "don't depend on supplementary/source material for your story to make sense/be consistent".

* I've yet to watch ZZ, so apologies if something like this is present there.

Edit: Another fun observation: What's with Riddhe's visor exploding while he takes the Gryps blast? Do visors just randomly explode in 0096? (Marida and Gael also had some instances of questionable visor QA, to name a few.) Is Riddhe a superhuman who never needed the visor in the first place and can shrug off normally-fatal blasts of radiation/thermal-flare? Or has the franchise finally acknowledged that random electrical arcs through the frickin' air are incredibly dangerous?
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BrentD15
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Re: The Official Gundam Unicorn Re: 0096 Anime Thread Mk I

Areku wrote: Sun Feb 26, 2017 9:22 pm
BrentD15 wrote: Fri Feb 24, 2017 10:15 pm From what I heard, Full Frontal isn't actually a clone, but more of a Neo Zeon soldier that agreed to go through a transformation into a Char clone, including facial reconstruction surgery, memory wipes, and cyber-newtype enhancements.
Then there's the missed opportunity of internal-conflict/self-realization between 1) the man he used to be 2) the implanted memories/soul (which isn't properly explained anyway) of Char and 3) another personality that might emerge from the cognitive dissonance that he isn't actually Char. All of which sounds like a sci-fi concept that could easily carry its own story and would be way more interesting than "supreme nihilist who babbles about being an empty vessel, but he talks like Char while he does it so that makes it okay". As the OVAs are, there's a glimmer of that potentially interesting story, but it's immediately swept under the rug.
I presume this is the case if there's resistance to having ones memories wiped (i.e., Four and Rosamia). If one willingly gives up their previous life to serve a new purpose, the possibility of that internal identity conflict considerably shrinks.

In fact, I wouldn't mind seeing a Unicorn prequel about Full Frontal's rise to power after the Second Neo Zeon War. Certainly seems more interesting than this "Rising Sun" or whatever it's called. :P
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Re: The Official Gundam Unicorn Re: 0096 Anime Thread Mk I

BrentD15 wrote: Mon Feb 27, 2017 10:40 am
Areku wrote: Sun Feb 26, 2017 9:22 pm
BrentD15 wrote: Fri Feb 24, 2017 10:15 pm In fact, I wouldn't mind seeing a Unicorn prequel about Full Frontal's rise to power after the Second Neo Zeon War. Certainly seems more interesting than this "Rising Sun" or whatever it's called. :P
I could definitely go for a side story in this line! Cue the "no shit Uncle Zeo :roll:" reaction from all members here.
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BrentD15
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Re: The Official Gundam Unicorn Re: 0096 Anime Thread Mk I

Well, it's been over a week since Unicorn ended its run on Toonami.

And my impression from it? I like it.
To be honest, the biggest issue that caused me the most trouble with this series is Riddhe, mostly near the end in which his character development is realized by killing another character because of his insecurities clouding his judgement.

I even liked how they dealt with Loni's character, in spite of being different from the novel.

Other than that, I really liked it.
"To you who will watch, I offer a heart filled with gratitude." -Yoshiyuki Tomino, Gundam Reconguista in G, Episode 25
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