Stuff You Can't Believe You Just Figured Out

[Amion]

I always thought the third squid became the Reinforce Junior. Am I wrong? If so add that to one of the stupid things I just realized.

[Outlaw]

Several months ago, having just finished watching Unicorn ep.4, I was laying in bed mulling the episode over in my head and I thought: "Might there be some minor symbolism hidden in all that mecha porn?" I watched it again the next day and I think there might just have been.

Spoiler

Over the past couple episodes there had been a lot of work humanizing the Zeon side and making them look very sympathetic. This (arguably) reaches its peak in episode four with Zinnerman's story about the Federation butchering an entire town. Shortly after we have the underdog Zeons pulling a major upset at Torrington against the comparatively superior Federation.

However, things start going wrong when the Shamblo goes berserk and starts slaughtering civilian wholesale. Banagher wants to launch the Unicorn to stop the fighting and Zinnerman... flatly refuses. By the end of the scene Banagher has been roughed up a little and had a gun pointed at him, at this point his (and presumably the audience's) sympathy towards the Zeons is likely gone. The next scene we see, almost as if on cue, the Byalant Custom comes tearing out of its hanger and proceeds to turn the fight around by opening a serious can of whoop a** on the now high ground-less Zeons.

Granted it could just be coincidence but, it does synch up perfectly.

[2NA Fish]

My thoughts after Unicorn Episode 1 and I'm absolutely serious:

"Lol! Who's this Audrey girl? Another Zeon Princess? Hah! Other than Minerva, how many other princesses can there be? Man, that Audrey's hair looks so familiar... where have I seen that hair before?..."

Imagine how stupid I felt?

[DuelGundam2099]

After all these years it turns out Turn X wasn't a gundam.

[Sume Gai]

This may not quite go here since it's pretty recent but I feel I should have noticed sooner.

AGE homages UC quite heavily even musically on occasion, Senkan Diva takes chunks from Gundam on the Earth

[InjuredPelican]

Although it may be common knowledge, I did not truly understand the significance of the "Turn A" symbol until I took a Discreet Mathematics course. I then learned it means "all in a set". Each element can be different, but they're all apart of the same group. So I got to nerd out with math and Gundam at the same time. Unfortunately, such knowledge did not make the class any easier.

P.S. Cool to find out what the Titan's symbol represents. Always thought they had the snazziest uniforms and logos, and now their clothes are even cooler in my mind. Ditto on Yazan as Sting.

[Fritz Ashlyn]

So I try to improve my crappy Japanese skills by looking up obscure Gundam information in my free time - it's what led to my turtle tattoo discovery, after all. Here's a couple of recent things I found interesting, one more than the other:

(1) I saw the beloved crappy magician that attempted to entertain some Zeon pilots on Earth in MSG referred to by the name Edwin, which I'm going to take as canon because come on. He looks like an Edwin.

(2) The anti-Federation organization usually referred to as EGUM or EGM in English (from High Streamer, usually referred to in passing alongside NSP and Colorde from Under the Gundam) may not be exactly what we think. Allow me to explain that cryptic and poorly constructed sentence:

The EGUM (as we know them) is a breakaway group of hardliners that left the AEUG when they were being reabsorbed into the Federation Forces because they continued to oppose the government (and were secretly backed by Neo Zeon). When they're referred to in Japanese, a good 90% of the time or more I simply saw "エグム" (Egumu); "EGUM" is used on one or two sites I saw, but for the most part it's simply エグム. I found a conversation on a Japanese site in which somebody pointed out that in the High Streamer story itself that's the manner in which they are referred to. Someone else suggested that (if I read it right) publishing company Tokuma Shoten's High Streamer novel part 1 explains that エグム comes from "反地球連邦政府運動", or "Anti-Earth Federation Government Movement". That's very similar to the AEUG's "反地球連邦組織" ("Anti-Earth Federation Organization") name, which makes sense. The Prior refers to "chikyū renbōseifu" which I interpret to refer more specifically to the Earth Federation government as opposed to the latter's standard-for-Gundam "chikyū renpō" Earth Federation.

That makes me think the name エグム/Egumu may be like エゥーゴ/Eūgo for the AEUG. In other words, the "name" Egumu may not be the proper acronym - EGUM, that is - I figure something along the lines of "AEGM" would make more sense, but EGUM does show up on Japanese sites (and in an Entertainment Bible, I think) so who knows. Was it a Japanese staff member taking a shot at making an English acronym and giving us another wonky AEUG situation? I need Mark Simmons or somebody to school me here.

[toysdream]

I think your conclusions are generally on the money. A lot of early sources (books, kit manuals, etc) actually included the "seifu" part in the AEUG's name as well, writing it in Japanese as 反地球連邦政府組織, or "Anti-Earth Federation Government Organization." Since this was before Sunrise had officially established the "Federation" terminology, the most likely explanation is that "AEUG" was meant to stand for "Anti-Earth Union Government".

On this basis, as you suggest, "EGUM" should probably be something like "AEGM" or "AEUGM". I think the EGUM spelling first appeared in Entertainment Bible 3 - it doesn't look like they use it in the actual Hi-Streamer novels.

-- Mark

[Angelo Sauper]

Spoiler

However, things start going wrong when the Shamblo goes berserk and starts slaughtering civilian wholesale. Banagher wants to launch the Unicorn to stop the fighting and Zinnerman... flatly refuses. By the end of the scene Banagher has been roughed up a little and had a gun pointed at him, at this point his (and presumably the audience's) sympathy towards the Zeons is likely gone. The next scene we see, almost as if on cue, the Byalant Custom comes tearing out of its hanger and proceeds to turn the fight around by opening a serious can of whoop a** on the now high ground-less Zeons.

Granted it could just be coincidence but, it does synch up perfectly.

This is a lot more prominent in an episode of The 08th MS team that I viewed today, I'm sure these timings are intentional to create a mixed reaction from the viewer instead of leaving it a 2D Protagonist/Antagonist divide.

The episode is where Shiro Amada and a guerilla village take on a squad of Zakus. The pilot of a Zaku I has her comrades killed and is shot down, refusing to surrender she continues to fight until her mobile suit is completely out of action. An angry mob of villagers proceeds to presumably kill her violently, which is when the audience starts to sympathise.

Spoiler

As soon as they reach the Zaku, the pilot launches anti-personnel shells and kills the entirety of the mob, this is when the audience realises how 'rooting' for either side is futile since both sides will suffer and die, and are ultimately the same. Such as what Shiro has been saying throughout the episode.

[Dark Duel]

I actually started to sympathize with Topp (that was her name) a lot earlier than that, around the time when she essentially threatened to kill that one guy in the Zaku II for being an a-hole. Kind of a pity what happened, really.
Other than that, I largely agree with what you said.

[AmuroNT1]

Something tying into Crossbone, since I just completed that massive file dump Sunday!

So, as you may know, most of the Jupiter Empire machines derive their names from Spanish or Portuguese words. But then we hit the odd case of this ugly little fella, a battleship Karas commands that takes a giant chunk out of the Mother Vanguard in Volume 3. It presented two mysteries to me:

1) What the heck was it supposed to be?
2) Though its name is written in Japanese as ジビア (Jibia), some sources rendered it as "Llivia".

Well, the answer to #1 came when I was hunting for information, and the profile in SD Gundam G Generation starts with this: イカのように異形フォルムを待つ宇宙戦艦. This translates out as "A space battleship with the unusual form of a squid". Mystery solved!

As for the second, one thing I do when translating Katakana names is search places like Google and Wikipedia to see if they haven't already been translated. Popping "ジビア" in there took me to the Japanese page for Víctor Paz Estenssoro, former President of Bolivia. It seems that his precursor was one Hugo Ballivián, whose surname is rendered in Japanese as "バジビアン", neatly explaining where "Llivia" comes from.

On an unrelated note, that method I described above lead to another odd revelation when I was looking over information for the Code Geass spinoff Oz the Reflection. The protagonist of the manga, and pilot of the Lancelot Grail, is named オルドリン, literally Oldrin. So I popped it into Wikipedia, and what did I get back? Buzz Aldrin, the second man to ever set foot on the moon. Understandably, I settled on "Audreen" as the young woman's name.

[Kuruni]

Some time ago, when I did some research on TAF-M9 Eagail, and found out that its main cameras are on the collar. Geez, they're very visible and logical place, I can't believe I miss that for years...

[Fritz Ashlyn]

So I saw a couple of things earlier that made me think. Nowadays we know the Nahel Argama as, well, the Nahel Argama in English, but it's one of those names where every once in a while in the past before it was officially translated you'd see somebody render it differently - usually involving a combination of one of Near/Nel/Nahel and Argama/Agama.

Well I'd read something before that suggested Argama comes from the Sanskrit term Āgama referring to scriptures in Buddhism and a couple of other religions, but earlier I saw these two comments:

"ちなみに艦名「アーガマ」はサンスクリット語で、漢訳経典では 阿含 （あごん）と表記される言葉。伝承された教説、またはその集大成の意味がある。"

"「ネェル・アーガマ」とは「アーガマに近いもの」という意味。"

So am I reading that second one right in the context of the first - are they really suggesting that "Ne~eru Āgama" is more or less literally supposed to be... "Near Āgama"?

[The Green Flame]

When giving my friend a crash course of UC Gundam we burned through Zeta fairly quickly and he quite liked it. Whenever he asked certain things I pointed it out to him. So we get to late in the series where Jamitov has just died, AEUG failed to kill Haman, and Psycho MK II is attacking Argama when my friend points out he hasn't seen Jerid in awhile.

I try to explain where he is without spoiling up until Reccoa shows up with Scirocco's troops to kill Jamitov and he suddenly points out the Byalant in the group with Reccoa. My mind was kinda blown at how I saw Zeta quite a few times by then and only just noticed that Jerid willingly joined up with Scirocco against Bask before getting the Baund Doc.

It's always the little things that get me.

[Kyuzo Aoi]

I also noticed that the Gundam X's mobile suits are somewhat named after months. The Febral, Octape, and Septem seemed to be February, October, and September, respectively.

[Khandri]

^ And there's also the Jenice and Juracg, for (presumably) January and July.

On top of that, the model numbers for many of the SRA mobile suits are direct references to Zeon MS model numbers, not to mention that the designs are very similar to their Zeon counterparts (Jenice/Zaku, Juracg/Gouf, Septem/Dom, Octape/Gelgoog, etc.).

[toysdream]

The SRA mobile suits in Gundam X are actually named from the calendar months that correspond to their model numbers. Thus RMSN-002 Febral from February (the second month) and RMS-009 Septem from September (the seventh month), but the RMS-014 Octape is from October plus April.

Likewise for the RMS-006 Jenice (from June) and RMS-007G Juracg (from July). The Bertigo and Crouda seem to be exceptions, though.

-- Mark

[HellCat]

^ And there's also the Jenice and Juracg, for (presumably) January and July.

On top of that, the model numbers for many of the SRA mobile suits are direct references to Zeon MS model numbers, not to mention that the designs are very similar to their Zeon counterparts (Jenice/Zaku, Juracg/Gouf, Septem/Dom, Octape/Gelgoog, etc.).

To say nothing of G where the Neo-Japan military uses designs which are homages to such an extent their armour material directly references the specific machine they're homaging.

[toysdream]

Likewise, the specs for many Gundam Age mobile suits are borrowed from those of their closest U.C. analogues. For example, the AGE-1 has the height and base weight of the original Gundam; the AGE-1 Titus has the same base weight as the Full Armor Type; the AGE-2 has the same base weight as the Zeta Gundam; the AGE-3 weighs as much as the ZZ Gundam, and the AGE-FX weighs as much as the Nu Gundam.

And it's not just the Gundams. The Genaoce has the height and base weight of the original GM, and the Genoace Custom has the same base weight as the GM Custom. The G-Exes has the same base weight as the G-3 Gundam. The Desperado has the same base weight as the Zaku I. The Gala has the same base weight as the Zaku II. Et cetera...

-- Mark

[Arbiter GUNDAM]

My gosh, as if the show didn't already have enough ham-handed UC references...