Forum - View topicThis Week in Anime - Getting into Gundam (and Other Long-Running Anime)
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shonenanimefan
Posts: 2 |
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Sochie Heim. Greatest Gundam character ever. A character deeply in love with the very thing that she hates most, even to the point of blaming it for ruining her life and family (and truthfully she's not actually wrong on that point). Too bad we will never get characters like Sochie Heim or Shinji Akari again. Just vanilla self-inserts and tsunderes.Only downside was that Heim, a supporting character, was far more compelling than the actual main characters, which is probably one of the reason why her Gundam series wasn't one of the bigger hits.
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Wyvern
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Compared to massive western shared universes like Marvel, Star Wars, and the like, getting into any anime franchise is pretty darn easy. One Piece, My Hero Academia, Demon Slayer, etc. may have a ton of episodes, but it's still just one story told completely within a single series. You start from the first episode and just go from there. You don't have to worry about having to watch a bunch of spinoffs and movies to follow what's going on; in fact, anime is pretty friendly in this regard since the spinoffs and movies are almost always noncanon and thus totally optional.
It's almost refreshingly simple compared to the way most American media franchises seem determined to build up sprawling shared universes that span a bunch of shows and movies. |
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Turtleboy76
Posts: 144 |
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Availability helps a lot.
I'm 570 episodes through Detective Conan and man i cannot wait until im up to the Crunchyroll licencesed episodes instead of sourcing episodes from elsewhere as 123-765 still arent available legally. |
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Top Gun
 Posts: 4622 |
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It's funny, I stumbled into my anime fandom by catching the last few episodes of shows like Cowboy Bebop, GITS, Wolf's Rain, and Big O rerunning on [adult swim] Saturday nights. And if you know anything at all about any of those shows, you'll know that I was thrown straight into the deep end.
 But that was part of the joy of it: I had no real context for what was going on, but I knew it was serious big-stakes stuff, and I immediately wanted to know more about what I was seeing. Eventually I was able to go back and give those shows a proper watch from the beginning, and the rest as they say is history.
I do understand the reluctance to dive into a particularly-convoluted franchise like Gundam, since to a complete outsider they can seem so complex as to be nearly impenetrable. (In contrast, I think the issue with single long-running series like One Piece is usually more along the lines of, "How many years of my life will it take me to finish this?") It helps to have a general sense of how the different pieces fit together. In the case of Gundam, it took me years of osmosis as a general anime fan to get the gist of the UC-vs-spinoff divide and such. The first series I wound up seeing was 00 when it aired on SyFy, which I think is a good first choice given its good looks and fairly compelling plot, and then I saw Iron-Blooded Orphans on Toonami later. Amusingly the only two UC titles I've seen were Unicorn and Origin, both of which very much rely on knowledge on prior events, but even I was able to muddle my way through without too much trouble. (And then there's the Fateverse: I don't have much interest in getting into it myself, but I've had multiple people attempt to explain it to me and just come out more confused than when I started.) |
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 408 Location: PA / USA |
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Back in the days when I was wrapping up Naruto (Boruto hadn't been announced yet... I think?) there was a really nice guide using criteria for filler like "content was not contained in the original manga storyline" or "this is a one-off episode where everyone forgets it happened tomorrow". It made specific notes when partial manga content and plot progression was peppered into a story/situation made up for the anime, and then lastly listed anything else that was good/featured character moments or combats (or returning filler plots) as their own color-coded indication throughout the guide. Gundam is a very interesting case because the original series was chopped down to fit a highly successful movie trilogy. By and large, the movie trilogy is the higher-quality way to watch it, but some of the "filler" moments that got cut from the episode-to-episode monotony actually did pretty well to pace out how exhausting Amuro's journey was; like the small or otherwise insignificant moments of humanity where an enemy soldier is offered water or a more comfortable death. By now, I think most viewers universally regard Bleach's use of filler to stall for time so that the manga could catch up as borderline-ruining the show. There's a distinct difference between a story that was come up with just for the purpose of stalling, and one that might be pacing out the more action or plot-intensive moments week to week. A good "filler" episode is one that gives you more of something, like more time with a character, a smart/interesting what-if, a fun idea that otherwise doesn't fit into the narrative of the rest of the show. Doan's Island made for a pretty solid Gundam movie, I don't think those sorts of stories should be written off entirely. When looking for some sort of watch guide or filler list, not everyone picks up on the nuances of the episode-to-episode pacing, and I think part of successfully immersing yourself in anime as a genre is building the skill & media literacy to recognise when something is outright wasting your time or when the writer of a guide is simply just throwing out content because they disagree with it or did not personally enjoy it. |
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Dumas1
Posts: 77 |
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That's an interesting point, and I feel that introducing someone to anime franchises is a lot like introducing someone to, say, Star Trek or James Bond. Some installments are more episodic, some are more serialized or form a tighter continuity (say, the Daniel Craig era vs Sean Connery). The original Star Trek (and early Next Generation, for that matter) had some great moments and some... not-so-great ones, so I'd probably want to start with a good standalone episode to test the waters and go from there. As someone who got into Gundam through incomplete runs of Gundam Wing and 0083 on Toonami, I understand the feeling that it's a complicated franchise with lots of potential entry points that might need a knowledgeable introduction, if only to explain which series are related to which others, or to choose a series that stands on its own better. Something like Lupin III, on the other hand, is episodic enough that almost any random episode or movie/OVA is a reasonable starting point to see whether someone likes the formula and characters. Though I'd probably just point them at Part IV/Italian Adventure since it's a relatively new series with a nice mix of episodic stories and overall arc, perhaps a bit like X-Files except that it wraps itself up in a reasonable time. |
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LinkTSwordmaster
Posts: 408 Location: PA / USA |
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Outlaw Star and .hack//SIGN would be good additions to that list. What's fascinating about all of those aforementioned shows is that there is a lot of buildup & mystique of a central question or mystery (maybe less-so in Bebop) that are back-loaded to the later episodes. Being forced to wait an entire week between episodes really enhanced that tension and mystique to figuring out who or what The Laughing Man was, or Fei Valentine's past, or what the Galactic Leyline actually wound up being. These were all central themes and plots to the show, but ones each show usually only explored towards the tale's end. I bring these examples up because I think a lot of these shows that aired originally on Toonami (and I look at Outlaw Star and Wing specifically for this next point) tragically no longer carry such a "wind behind their sails" now in the era of binge-watching. Outlaw Star and Wing were amazing weekly shows back in a time when anticipation for the next episode was part of the excitement. Watching each episode back-to-back, those particular series don't really hold up because you quickly start to see the pacing problems and the spots where the writing went thin, when there's no longer a weeks-long gap to haze up your memory just enough to allow you to forgive an episode that might have hit an off-beat. Back in those times, .hack//SIGN was a pretty amazing mystery with a pretty amazing reveal, but when you watch the whole thing in an afternoon or two now, it is a LOT of characters standing around and talking. I lament I miss the simpler times of Toonami when that weekly wait & lack of internet predicting or spoiling things enhanced some of the magic. |
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Saeryen
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I guess this is as relevant a place as any to promote my fave big shoujo franchises. Everyone please watch Pretty Cure and Pretty Series!
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BadNewsBlues
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All well and good until you have both that may have reboots &/or retellings lurking therein. Not to mention going by release order isn’t perfect either given the existence of prequels and interquels that tend to come years after the stories that they’re supposed to precede or take place between.
In the interest of fairness even without the filler you’d still have moments in the series that could potentially ruin the series for you. |
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Covnam
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Good thing with Gundam is that most of it can be watched on it's own without any prior knowledge. Other than some of the more connected UC series/movie like ZZ & Char's Counterattack, even the UC OVAs work just fine on their own. 0080, 0083, 08th MS Team all work fine on their own (iirc).
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BlueFoot
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Even more so when you look at the comic book versions. Marvel and DC have such convoluted and confusing universes that I couldn't imagine getting into them decades ago. Every time I look up a character on Wikipedia to see what elements the movie counterparts are referencing, it's something along the lines of "There are four characters who went by that name..." and it goes on to tell about how each one died, was resurrected, changed identities, died and was pulled from a different timeline, died again but was retconned into being saved by a wizard, died but later escaped from hell, retired, and was then retroactively wiped from the timeline by another wizard. Um, right. As was previously mentioned, growing up with scheduled broadcasts makes jumping into the middle of a show pretty easy. You expect to miss things when episodes get preempted by football, get aired out of order for sweeps, or just get missed because you had something else to do at 8:30pm on Wednesday that week. I think I missed the first part of every Star Trek Voyager 2-parter because they always aired them back-to-back and started an hour earlier. I would change the channel at the usual time and the "Previously on..." would clue me in to my mistake. You just had to roll with it and hope to catch a rebroadcast later that week or a rerun a few years later. I started Gundam Wing just before the recap episode at the start of the second half when it was running two episodes per day on Toonami. After the initial whiplash, I just accepted the confusion and went with it, enjoying the novelty of finally seeing another mech anime after nearly a decade and a half. That got me interested in the original Gundam because the confusing plot points at the end of Wing were too specific to be random. They were clearly pulled from something and condensed into the resulting mess. It all made a lot more sense after seeing Gundam and Zeta Gundam. And that's really the benefit of watching in release order - everything will have some sort of reference to what came before that you only catch if you are familiar with where the franchise was at that specific time. It could be cameos, themes, jokes, or condensed plots that don't work well on their own. But that just makes the experience richer, you can always skip it and read the wiki if it's not that important to you. What you can't get though is the feeling of experiencing something with a particular mindset. Like how big spoilers that have become part of our culture and are familiar to people long before they ever see the source material change how that material is seen by new viewers, you can't replicate the feeling of seeing something in the context of the original airing without going in full release order. Enter Dragon Ball... Dragon Ball was running on weekdays on Toonami when I first encountered it, so I waited for it to loop around to the beginning and started there. It was a decent adventure show like some of the cartoons I watched as a kid, so I watched a bit of it before I lost interest. I picked it back up at the last episode and then started on Dragon Ball Z from the beginning. I doubt I lasted more than an episode or two. I came back to it a few months (or about 200 episodes) later and was looking forward to a nice tournament arc. Which got derailed. I checked back occasionally for another 60 or so episodes before finally giving up. When Dragon Ball Super came out, I figured it was time to go back and slog through Dragon Ball Z. Or at least the abridged version, Dragon Ball Z Kai. How bad could it be? All I really remember from that experience was episode after episode of mind-numbing boredom and thinking "There are HOW MANY more episodes???" It very nearly came to a reasonable stopping point that neatly subverted all expectations of the genre, then went back to nonstop hopeless fighting for what felt like an eternity. But I suffered through it so I could, um, watch more of it. I am not smart. Luckily, someone out there had learned a lesson from Dragon Ball Z and excised all of its worst tendencies when making Dragon Ball Super. Except for the last one, the arcs were mercifully short without excessive padding, a persistent sense of hopelessness, or never-ending fake-outs. Every time it looked like things were falling back into the trap of Z, the matter resolved itself quickly and it was on to the next adventure. Characters were allowed to develop, even if their old habits remained. And Krillin didn't get sidelined for a huge chunk of it. Sure, the final arc stretched a few minutes out to a year's worth of episodes, but that was split across many concurrent fights instead of a single hopeless battle. So what's my point with all that exposition about a show that I only really had a passing interest in? Dragon Ball Super on its own is fine. It tells its stories, introduces new characters, and brings back old favorites from whatever part of the saga you might be familiar with. At worst, it's dumb fun that doesn't overstay its welcome. But watching it after Dragon Ball Z (either version) adds a new dimension - the contrast between the two. Dragon Ball Super creates tension by bringing back bad memories from Z and then releases it effortlessly. It becomes more enjoyable because it could have been so much worse. It's not high praise, but I can appreciate a neat trick that plays with expectations. But it's something I really only need to experience once. If One Piece or Naruto pull it off, I won't be there to see it. Since then, I've developed an appreciation for tight little 12-episode shows. Not sure how that happened... |
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Glordit
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Oh, I worded it incorrectly, I was implying that G-Reco is just a terrible series. Even the films could not fix its problems. I do agree that some series can be watched in a non release oder. Off the top of my head, Dragonball comes to mind. I think most people watched Z before DB and still enjoyed it. Like with Gundam, watching it slightly out of order supplements the story which will still give you all the details, just not in order.
Funny you mentioned that, it seems that the Marvel Multivrse seems to be too big now and Disney's is not seeing the numbers they once did for many of their films. I can't imagine needing to watch 10 different franchises to catch up on just 1 or 2 films. Then again, I'd rather watch 500 episodes of anime instead of 5 Marvel films. |
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Fluwm
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You know, I've heard the refrain that "Gundam Wing was too confusing" many times over the years, and never really understood why -- because I never really thought of it that way. Although the plot was convoluted, I think the series overall did an excellent job using narration to keep the story moving at a brisk place. But in the context of kids watching it on TV, and not necessarily seeing every episode in sequence? Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. Things can change a lot more in one episode of Gundam Wing than is typical for, well, anything.
Though it was a bit weird to see that excellent point followed up by a comment about character motivations in Gundam Wing changing so frequently, because... that really wasn't a thing that happened. Rather, the opposite -- Gundam Wing was never very clear with about the motivations of any of its characters. It liked to keep their motivations relatively vague and leave the audience guessing -- this wound up being, in fact, one of the major themes of the show. Rather than the characters' motivations constantly changing, I'd say the most confusing element was their goals constantly shifting. I'm not sure I can think of a single character from Wing was was trying to accomplish the same things in the last few episodes that they were trying to accomplish in the first few. It's a far cry from the 1979 series where, from the very opening scene, the singluar goal of defeating Zeon was very clear. ..... Anyway, yeah, TWFM was fantastic and it was really lovely seeing so many new fans introduced to Gundam because of it. Really kind of bummed it was, by Gundam standards, only a half-length series. I'm still holding out some hope for a sequel series, but... not much. And if I'm being totally honest, the main draw is the cast -- I'm not convinced the setting itself has enough to it to warrant more stories. |
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omiya
 Posts: 1834 Location: Adelaide, South Australia |
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...and for a completely different take I have yet to watch any Gundam, but have had my favourites amongst the songs and soundtracks.
Some of my favourite Gundam singers include Chiaki Ishikawa both solo and as part of See-Saw, Lisa Komine, Chihiro Yonekura. |
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invalidname
 Contributor Posts: 2458 Location: Grand Rapids, MI |
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I know Chris has already seen it, but there’s a really good video out this week that digs into how BanG Dream! It’s MyGO!!!!! makes itself easy to get into for newbies (going so far as to call it a “soft reboot” of the franchise), while also using its cameos and references to provide a secondary layer of meaning to existing fans who know all the old band members. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDguvD296XA
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