Forum - View topicEP. REVIEW: Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury
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ScruffyKiwi
 Posts: 681 Location: New Zealand |
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I think the thing that people who have been clamouring for a wedding scene need to consider is that Suletta might not have been in any condition for quite a while to have one. It’s 3 years later and she’s still on crutches and has facial scarring. My guess is she was a serious invalid for at least a year and they might have not even had a formal wedding!
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jdnation
Posts: 2012 |
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Well this 2nd half was at least more interesting than the first. But this does not even make it a good show, at least by Gundam standards.
Anyway, now that this thing is over, we can focus our attention on that Unreal project, SEED movie, and there'd better be an update on the sequel to Hathaway! |
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kgw
 Posts: 1077 Location: Spain, EU |
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My final opinion: as some others pointed before, some issues (war on Earth, discrimination, Corporation's politics) were barely developed, just in some momenta, almost as if someone would have said the writers "It's a Gundam series so there should be a war".
Everything for The Tempest and the dilemma of Ericht-Prospera-Suletta which wasn't really solved at all (instead of in a Gundam, she's now in a plush toy, everything is fine!) I'd say that even the relationship of Miorine and Suletta is not quite as developed, too. We started with Suletta sincerely shocked for becoming Miorine's fiancee, to her developing feelings for El4n, Miorine not being the kindest of girlfriends. And then, 3 years later, they are toghether. Of course, No kiss, no wedding, nothing, just them holding hands. We don't want to enrage the public [won't they think about the children?] in a country where same-sex marriage is not allowed. So in the end, nice MS. So-so story and characters development. I feel bad for all the people who died in this series. They were some chapters away from having a happy ending. EDIT: apparently, I am the only one who saw the homage to Gundam F91 (Cecily-Seabrook / Suletta-Miorine) and, maybe to Turn A Gundam (butterfly wings effect). |
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Gem-Bug
 Posts: 1223 |
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But then the counter-point would be "Why 3 years? Why not 5 or 10?". There was nothing special about the amount of time they chose if they were just checking in with everyone without anything to give any sense of change. People got haircuts and artificial limbs. It just seemed arbitrary, but as more time passes I'm not as bothered by what we didn't get VS the complete feeling of what we ended up with. |
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tintor2
 Posts: 1866 |
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The gathering of ghosts kinda reminded me of Zeta Gundam though whatever Suletta did seemed more like those psychoframe stuff from Char's Counterattack. I never thought about it but this series was mostly about teenagers. There were one or two adults but just like Miorine's dad, they took a backsit. Prospera was at first fun due to her manipulative but at the end her characterization and ending felt forced as she doesn't seem to return her own daughter's feelings (Suletta). For a second I thought Miorine's dad's actor died for his lack of screentime.
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Mami-kouga
Posts: 173 |
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Oh yeah I almost forgot, in the end nobody was actually able to do a thing to fix any of the issues with gundams. The only thing we got out of GUNDArm were those robotic legs and seemingly nothing else
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zalminar
Posts: 36 |
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Not even that, really. Prospera's prosthetic limb seemed perfect, and that was decades old technology. Then Olcott also had a seemingly flawless prosthetic, which he was able to maintain even while working as a guerilla fighter--it's clearly a robust, mature technology and not some one-off. I think Cardo was just a sick fraud looking for an excuse to put people's brains in a blender--she never even advocated for the tech as a medical device for injuries, but some nebulous space-wasting-disease that we never saw anyone suffer from aside from Ericht. To the extent there ever was any promise of the GUND, it was largely achieved by Eri inside Aerial, a truly complete mechanical body, but they ditched that and shoved a conscious human mind into a keychain instead. |
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Key
Moderator
 Posts: 18227 Location: Indianapolis, IN (formerly Mimiho Valley) |
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These "x months/years later" epilogues are almost always arbitrary in their lengths. In this case, they could have chosen to go with three years for three reasons I can think of: 1) It gives all of the major characters time to graduate and legally become adults while still being "newbies" at it. 2) That was the term of Nika's prison stint. 3) That was the minimum time it took for Suletta to be up and walking around again. Probably it was a combination of all three. |
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jr240483
 Posts: 4385 Location: New York City,New York,USA |
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on the bright side, it wasnt forced upon the viewers to the point that it may turn off newer anime fans from the yuri genre altogether which is what tenten kakumei aka the magical revolution of the reincarnated princess did! (and it is why it tend to be dislike among the older generation of the yuri community that started watching the genre since the days of utena!) that series is a prime example on how to do a series THE WRONG WAY and in my opinion is definitely one of the more disappointing series for 2023! |
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Nigel Planter
Posts: 72 Location: London, UK |
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True, they established they were both married at the very least, but we never see who their husbands are, so we don't know who exactly they married to. Just random no-name guys or named characters we know? They could have at least shown us that. |
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Beltane70
 Posts: 3907 |
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Please tell me you’re being sarcastic since it’s pretty obvious that they’re married to each other considering that Eri told Miorine to “listen to your sister in law”.
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dm
 Subscriber Posts: 1379 |
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When Miorine EVAed to the motionless Suletta-and-eye-blinking-cellphone-mascot, when Suletta finally stirs, Miorine says something about "Idiot! Say something sooner!"
Was that a callback to an earlier scene? Maybe that Zero-G hallway reconciliation... was that at the beginning of this season (post splat), or halfway through the first season (after some earlier failure at communication)? I'm guessing the cellphone mascots are also high capacity USB thumb-drives. Maybe Permet thumb-drives..... |
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MyMasterMatthew
Posts: 130 |
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I was so turned off by the (unnecessarily fast) pacing in the second cour that I honestly wasn't feeling motivated to finish it at first. I finally got around to watching the final 2 episodes today, and honestly, they were better than I expected. Of course, I still feel incredibly bitter about Witch From Mercury, but that's because I held it to a much higher standard than I do other shows. Watching a story that never reached its full potential... that hurts more than watching a show with a crappy story.
This is one of the few times where I think a movie conclusion would have been justified. The series needed more time, but 12 extra episodes would have been too much. I think Episode 22 kinda breezed through some of the show's loose ends, so perhaps the anime could have concluded with everyone leaving the school. More time was needed to flesh out the Assembly League, too, if they were supposed to be a compelling final hurdle. Overall, I'd rate this show 7.5 out of 10.... but it could have easily reached 9 out of 10 under different (better) circumstances. |
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 392 Location: PA / USA |
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It's pretty much exactly what I was thinking when the credits rolled - I hold Gundam shows to a higher standard and everything was just such a mess. This feels like the whole show was written and paced out by ChatGPT. There's a story here, and it's certainly more coherent and watchable than Reconquista ever was, but its execution of any singular element feels like an Ai slapped together various archetypes and Gundam tropes, and only ever touched on surface-level character development or surface-level conflicts. Suletta is a background character to Mio and Guel, and pretty much every other character in the show, at any given moment, any other character onscreen is 9 times out of 10 doing something more interesting than her. The school-Gundam-arena format is tiring and predictable each week. When they switch in Part 2 to active combat, it feels like we're missing an entire season's worth of context or backstory to justify any of the violence onscreen. And it's that lack of context on every level, that makes it feel like this all got ran through ChatGPT pulling a show's worth of archetypes, tropes, and Gundam moments to string together with little to no development or context. Mind you, I'm binging these back-to-back. The pacing and shallow conflicts/character development issues are more visible in such a format. If I was younger, and less-discriminating a viewer, this likely would have been a big deal to watch unfold each weekend on Toonami in between worrying about other aspects of life. If this is any particular viewer's first Gundam series, if you liked this then I cant really say you shouldn't like it, I'm just having trouble as a longtime Gundam fan parsing the fact that this was essentially a CliffsNotes version of my favorite show. I was watching the ANN Aftershow and they mentioned "at least the sapphic couple is alive and married at the end". I legitimately almost-missed it. It's practically THE most bare-minimum they could have done with a same-sex relationship in 2023. In the grand universe of all anime series, yeah, it's remarkable that future Gundam games might have Suletta and Mio making love-love eyes at each other, but as-is this was the barest of minimums-business-first relationship between two characters with practically NO onscreen real-world tangible meaning to it that the studio could have churned out. I already have my suspicions, but time will tell if folks look back on this series in a positive or negative light once all of the fanart and buzz die down. I feel like I've been seeing more positive fanart than actual coherent storytelling driving the fanbase on this one. I'd liken the buzz G-Witch got to the fandom that surrounds something like Sonic Frontier - the end product is the bare minimum to keep the series alive so that the rights to it don't dissolve after so-many years of sitting dormant. Was development of the series in turmoil? Was this a 50+ episode show that got cut short by the studio? Were plans for these characters all different before the show went to air? I really wonder what I'll be hearing in the coming years. |
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TJ_Kat
Posts: 368 Location: Saskatoon, Canada |
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I sat down and re-watched it start to finish and I'm actually even more disappointed that it only got 24 episodes. Several points in the first season seemed to be laying the groundwork for a much larger story. This continued right through episode 15 (Guel's vacation to Earth) and then it really feels like someone showed up at the studio and said, 'oh, by the way, you're only getting 24 episodes, not 50, so wrap it up by then.'
So allow me to put forward my tinfoil hat theory (DISCLAIMER! Every theory I've had about G-Witch has been wrong, so this most certainly is too). What if Bandai didn't want G-Witch to succeed? What if they wanted it to flop so they could say, 'hey, you know how you've been begging for a female lead for years? Look how bad that did. We're never doing that again.' Then even though it wound up being a surprise hit for them, they stubbornly stuck to the original plan to pull the plug after 2 seasons. |
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