Kyuzo Aoi wrote: ↑Fri Feb 12, 2021 4:23 pm
I have no choice but to write this article.
FactCheck says: Mostly False.
Kyuzo Aoi wrote: ↑Fri Feb 12, 2021 4:23 pm
"
The only Gundam is the "True Saga" of Yoshiyuki Tomino, not any of the bandai approved modal kit toy commercials disguised as television created by hacks and corporate shills. The only thing conceivably worse than bandai Gundam would be disney Gundam
I do not want to tar the people with the same brush as this fellow [who happen to be an Ideon fan], but how come that many UC Gundam fans have this mentality and contempt for AU Gundam series? Was it because Bandai or Tomino did not give them what they wanted? Or because jealousy?
So, to be brutally frank - because that's my favorite way to be - this is just something that comes with the territory when a previously single-creator work evolves into a "shared universe" with multiple creators collaborating on it.
When stewardship of a beloved IP passes from the hands of its original creators to a new generation of creators as a result of losing interest, retiring, being forced out, dying, or any of a hundred other causes, there will inevitably be some subset of the fanbase that resents the new staff and will insist with increasing vehemence that the ONE TRUE <blank> is that which was created by the original author, even if said author opened that work to others entirely of his/her own accord. The reasons vary widely. One of the most common is the vague and nebulous indictment that sequels and spinoffs by other creators in some way violate the original author's intent for the property, especially if the original creator was forced out or not invited to return or in some way comments that the new project doesn't follow some plan he/she had for it.
The highest-profile instance of this kind of thing in recent years was the
Star Wars sequel trilogy, which some (many) die-hard
Star Wars fans loudly condemned for several interrelated reasons including:
- Disney not inviting George Lucas onto the project in an advisory/supervisory capacity, something they saw as an affront to him as the creator of Star Wars.
- Disney disowning/decanonizing the Star Wars Expanded Universe, which they saw as disrespectful to those many writers who collaborated on it (even though they had previously been engaged in viciously arguing what parts of that deserved to be called "real" Star Wars) and as a waste of good material.
- George Lucas mentioning that he had provided an outline for a sequel trilogy that Disney decided to ignore, the fans having seemingly forgotten that they were previously outraged over George's terrible writing in the prequel trilogy.
- Disney writing new characters and stories that displaced or changed the significance of existing, established characters.
Almost any franchise that gets big enough experiences this to some degree, and if they're around long enough they will get to experience it several times over.
For instance,
Star Trek has had at least SIX separate bouts of "new
Trek is not real
Trek" over the franchise's 55 year history... the most vehement being the first (TNG), fifth (J.J. Abrams reboot movies), and sixth (DSC).
Macross, my main mecha passion, had a very vocal group of incredibly toxic fans who used to troll all kinds of different fan forums and chatrooms hating on the OVA
Macross II: Lovers Again because Shoji Kawamori didn't have any involvement in its development or production. To them, that made it "not real
Macross, though we got a happier ending when that group was publicly shot down by no less than Shoji Kawamori himself, who insisted that
Macross II was just as valid as any other
Macross story. Even more unusually, that group has more or less abandoned its toxicity and become reasonably upstanding members of the fan community. We're seeing a lesser form of it with
Macross Delta, but only because the series was such a letdown, being a mediocre and kind of poorly-paced TV series that followed the franchise's biggest-ever smash hit.
The mecha franchise that has it the worst is probably
Robotech. Every serious attempt to continue the TV anime has been met with fan outrage over perceived slights to "Carl Macek's vision" even though Macek himself openly admitted he never had any vision for the series, and there were multiple competing camps of fans which argued venomously over what school of post-cancellation print media was "real
Robotech", followed by the fans outright rejecting the new creative staff that took over after Macek finished flying the brand into the ground c.2000.
Gundam inevitably gets shades of that same problem because the Universal Century is
Gundam's main source of merchandising income and the part of the franchise that's marketed to die-hard fans. This is somewhat compounded by several factors like:
- The executive meddling in Victory Gundam in preparation for Sunrise's pending sale to Bandai, which was a source of frustration for Tomino.
- That Tomino's plans for the next UC Gundam series were thrown out as a result of Victory flopping and Sunrise's subsequent shift to an alternate universe story (G Gundam).
- That Tomino was not invited back for the AU stories or subsequent UC stories until the Zeta compilations and the mediocre-at-best Reconguista in G.
- The admittedly very blatant increasing emphasis on gunpla sales that led to Gundam's most recent major ongoing AU property being a literal gunpla commercial.
So I guess you could say a big part of it is likely that they're salty about the way we ended up with the AUs in the first place being something you could interpret as a betrayal of Tomino's professional trust and their respect for him as the franchise's creator. Of course, the next most likely large part of it is that they simply don't like those AU stories for reasons of personal taste which cannot be objectively weighed. I confess I can sympathize with at least some of it WRT the
Gundam Build AU, since that is so blatantly merchandise-driven that I simply can't stomach it because it feels like a barely-there excuse plot wrapped around a toy commercial as was common with kid's shows in my own youth (e.g.
Transformers and
GI Joe).