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Now, when I watched the first few episodes of Turn A, watching the WaDom burning the turn-of-the-century style landscape seemed, at least to me, very evocative of of the Martian tripods burning the Horsell Commons in H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds. (And I do mean the novel, not any of the various adaptations.) Now, we already know that in canon Gundam, mankind has made it out at least as far into the solar system as Jupiter, and one of the various Gundam mangas (F-90?) had the Oldsmobile Army, a Zeon remnant, based on Mars. If so much animousity can be had between those living on Earth and those living on the moon or in orbital space colonies, all within the Earth sphere, how much more so between the Earth and Mars? If a major war were to occur within the Earth sphere, one large enough and with enough casualties to limit mankind's capacity for space flight, Martian colonists would be left to fend for themselves. And perhaps the years of seperation would create very different societies with different values, and different technologies which would make the two sides seem alien to each other... even as the resource-strapped Martians eye their native home with envious eyes. 340573[/snapback] What you just described is basically the exact plot of Turn A, with Mars substituted for the moon.

Aside from Talia, Rey, and Dullindal, I don't think any named characters were killed off...and no one even came close to it, either. Shin and Lunamaria both got owned pretty hardcore (Shin especially), but they were completely non-fatal attacks (since they both came at the hands of Athrun), a lot like when Kira tore Savior apart in episode 28. I mean at least in SEED, Buster got ruined, Freedom got pretty torn up, Justice got destroyed, etc. In this, the only real damage was sustained by ZAFT. Not only that, but it looked like Messiah was taken down just by Freedom and Eternal. It was really a half-assed ending. A half-assed ending for a half-assed show.

Well it was one that I had just seen someone post, so it was the easiest for me to grab. Apologies to anyone that's offended by it.

He was referring specifically to a set of pictures of looters that were released a few days ago by the AP. Two pictures were of black looters, and the caption specifically referred to them as looters. The third picture was of white looters, and the caption said that they "found" their food. The picture has long since been pulled, but you can still find screen captures of it:

I've never had the misfortune of watching Pearl Harbor in its entirety, but I don't really think Day After Tomorrow was inspired by Titanic. Titanic was basically just a romance that happened to take place against the backdrop of a historic tragedy. Day After Tomorrow shared much more with other action movies like Independence Day, Armageddon and Deep Impact, Speed, etc (some of which predate Titanic) where the romance is merely a subplot while the action is the focus of the movie. I mean, when I think of Titanic, I think of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. When I think of Day After Tomorrow, I think of freakish weather; ID4, aliens; Armageddon and Deep Impact, asteroids; and Speed, the bus. I think a more apt comparison might be Shaun of the Dead, which bills itself as a romantic comedy with zombies; but even that's a somewhat tenuous connection, since that movie was obviously heavily inspired by past zombie movies (with very little influence from any specific romance films) and, despite its self-billing, really does feel like a zombie movie first and a love story second, much like the aforementioned action films. Still, it's an important distinction to make: two movies may both include the elements of action and romance, but they aren't necessarily members of the same genre. It depends on which of those elements takes center stage and how they work together. In Day After Tomorrow, the romance between Jake Gyllenhaal and that girl seems kind of tacked on, as if the filmmakers just figured, "Well we have a young guy and a young girl so they've got to get together." That's not a love story, that's just a superfluous romantic subplot. Titanic, on the other hand, is a love story that could have taken place anywhere that a poor working man like Leo might conceivably run into a blue blood like Kate and hit it off. That it happened to take place on the Titanic is just an unfortunate coincidence for the would-be couple. Not to say that Cameron isn't still an important and influential filmmaker. But let's not give him too much credit.

There's really only two groups doing it. Anime-Gundam does good work, but they're very slow because they're basically down to one guy who does almost everything. They're about to release only the 19th episode, while Hero-Legends is almost finished with the show (recently released episode 47). I haven't seen HL's Turn A, but their Gundam X, which I wanted to replace my old fansubs, wasn't too impressive. The quality of the encoding sucked and I don't think they translated it themselves. It looked like they just lifted the subs from older fansubs and put them on an HK rip. AG actually translates it themselves, and their encodes are well done from R2 DVD rips. If I were you, I'd get everything AG has released so far, but after that, you'll have to settle for HL for the rest of the show (unless you're incredibly patient). Maybe HL has gotten remarkably better since they released X, though. I always thought that Heavyarms was kind of bland, personally. I've heard people call the Gundams in Wing the sports cars of the Gundam franchise, but I think Trowa was just driving a Ford Escort. All the other Gundam designs in Wing stick out in some way, but I feel like Heavyarms is pretty forgettable.

Well, I don't know about using real aliens. Gundam is about human conflict. Almost every show so far has in some way made the point that there are good people on both sides...it's one of the many themes that runs through every show and every universe. It's a little harder to work something like that in if we're all just fighting against aliens together. Of course, in the Turn A backstory, the returned colonists were regarded as aliens, but they weren't really aliens. But isn't that your fault for judging shows without watching them? Frankly, I don't care if new fans decide not to watch purely because they think the mobile suit designs are ugly or silly. If someone's going to dismiss a show he hasn't seen based only on that, it's his loss. I didn't realize X's popularity had suddenly surged. Has there been anything else besides the DVD release and that manga, or are you just saying that because of those things? As far as I know, X is still just the series that couldn't hold the timeslot Gundam had been in for the past three years before eventually becoming the first show since the original to get axed. I think it's a better show than its ratings would indicate, but I don't think that it's suddenly become popular enough to warrant an animated sequel. Really, I think that we should probably consider G, Wing, and X to be dead universes at this point. There's a slim chance for a TAG continuation and a little better chance for UC...other than that, I think all we're likely to get in the future as far as animated shows go is more SEED or even more new universes. I don't see why not. G Gundam was a much better show than some people give it credit for...it's certainly a lot better than some of the crap that's been jammed into the UC timeline. I don't know about a Turn A sequel. I loved the show, but I think it did a pretty good job of closing the door on any possible sequels. A new Turn A story should be a prequel that deals further with Black History.

I've got to agree with Panon -- leave UC alone. Haven't those poor people suffered through enough wars already? Unless you keep placing new shows in the far flung future like Victory was, you're just going to be stepping all over previously-established continuity anyway. UC is way too crowded as it is, and we definitely don't need another series to further flesh it out. CE has laid the groundwork for some potentially interesting stories, if we can get a competent staff to work on the series. If anyone here reads the GML, you may recall a couple years ago when Mark Simmons put forth an idea for a SEED sequel (obviously, before there was Destiny) that focused on deep space exploration and maybe an investigation of Evidence-01 (the space whale) instead of a war. I think something like that could be interesting. A follow up to Turn A would be nice, too. I've heard bits and pieces about the back story that's provided in the novels, and it sounds pretty intriguing. Basically dealt with a war between Earth and some of the space colonists who we saw leaving the solar system in TAG ep 43, who apparently later returned and were regarded as aliens. The "aliens" are the ones who built Turn A and Turn X, I guess. Keilas Guilie was also somehow involved in this whole thing. Sounded cool, and if this is all really in the novels, I'd definitely like to see this show made. Other than any of that, I'd be happy with another alternate universe that's actually an alternate universe, like G and TAG were. Not like Wing or SEED, which were firmly rooted in UC stories. X was an interesting idea, but since it's been done now, I don't really want to see it done again. Something that's just totally different (even if it's different in an off-the-wall way, like G Gundam was) would be nice.

I don't think the preview really points to that. It showed her crying a little when she was out in the hangar or whatever, but the only shot we got of her in the cockpit looked like the launch sequence where she identifies herself and her MS. She always cried because she was upset to see Orb's ideal of not participating in foreign wars corrupted. If Orb itself is actually being attacked, I imagine she'll fight without a second thought. And I suspect she'll do just fine, since she's a main character and consistency doesn't really apply to them. She'll definitely cry next episode, but it'll only be until she gets in the MS and takes off.

There aren't that many PLANTs. About two dozen? Not much. According to the background info that came out way before SEED even started, there are about a hundred PLANTs. Not sure if any other info has since overridden that. We certainly haven't seen that many PLANTs in the actual animation, but then again, we've also seen Aile Striker replace Force Impulse, so this is clearly a staff that likes to take shortcuts and doesn't worry about details. I wasn't suggesting that the missiles needed phase shift, I was simply using the example of Blitz not being able to run both at once to show that mirage colloid requires a pretty healthy amount of energy to maintain. I'm not trying to defend the Alliance in general here, I'm just saying putting mirage colloid on each individual nuclear missile might be impractical. We can make assumptions that it's not that expensive or that we can just make the missile a little bigger and it'll all fit, but they're just assumptions. I'm just kind of giving the show the benefit of the doubt here...but with as incompetent as the Alliance has been throughout the series, it's entirely possible that mirage colloid missiles would work fine and they just haven't done it. All I'm saying is, maybe there's a better reason we haven't seen a mirage colloid missile yet -- such as, maybe it's impractical or impossible to build.

The problem with putting mirage colloid directly on a nuclear missile is that mirage colloid requires tremendous energy to maintain (which is why Blitz had to turn off its Phase Shift when it went invisible). How do you plan to generate the energy to shroud each missile in mirage colloid? I imagine that a mirage colloid system and a power source to maintain it would be prohibitively expensive if it could even feasibly be installed to begin with. In fairness, Azrael and the Alliance couldn't reasonably have expected that Freedom and Justice would show up and be able to pick off the individual missiles, and earlier in Destiny, the Alliance had no idea that ZAFT had developed a weapon that could cause nukes to explode prematurely. Adding mirage colloid to the whole missile barrage would have seemed like incredible overkill at the time, so it's tough to blame them for just lobbing naked missiles at PLANT. Loading up a mirage colloid-equipped ship with missiles is more feasible, but then you'd have to send separate ships on suicide missiones to each and every space colony, which also seems rather excessive.

I don't know why people have this idea in their head that Katoki is some sort of mecha god who can make any design better. Have you seen Katoki's Turn A? It's terrible. It just looks like a malnourished Turn A. I really love the regular Turn A design and I'm glad they didn't call Katoki in to ruin it. The rumor I heard was that Turn A Space wasn't necessarily a direct sequel to Turn A, but that it was basically the Turn A idea applied to all Tomino shows. As much as I loved Turn A, I'm not really sure I want to see Gundam vs. Zambot 3 vs. Ideon vs. Xabungle vs. Dunbine vs. King Gainer vs.... Of course, if they made it, I'd still watch it.

Tannhauser and Lohengrin are positron cannons. They don't typically react with air because it's anime, but they do fire a positron beam, which has been acknowledged for plot purposes before (the whole "positronic interference" BS that allowed Archangel to launch back into space during the Orb battle late in SEED). It's obviously wildly inconsistent to only bring it up when it suits the story, but it's not out of the question. So the question here is not whether or not the Tannhauser is a positron cannon, but whether the explosion was Fukuda conveniently remembering matter/antimatter reaction or not. That seems like the most believable way to explain Kira's survival.

Except for the fact they showed Freedom's shattered remains before Shinn. I'm really interested to see how Kira survived this one. Him and Mwu are holding a survival competition: who can survive the biggest blast in one piece. I do want to see where the explosion came from. I hate it when they do that. I once again show the pic from 2 pages back. There isn't very much debris in that picture -- certainly not enough to make up very much of Freedom, probably not even enough to account for all the pieces of Impulse that are missing after the explosion. I'm pretty sure Freedom is relatively in one piece. Probably used the chaos of the explosion to pull off of the sword and drop into the water. Remember that Kira was just trying to escape with Archangel the entire time, so he wouldn't necessarily attack Shin right there; he may have seen a chance to slip away and he took it.

I definitely wouldn't say Shin is evil. He's misguided and incredibly self-righteous, which is a pretty nasty combination, but he's not evil. He may have been an idiot about it, but he cared about Stellar. He seems to fully support Dullindal's plan to wipe out LOGOS (at least, he was smiling approvingly throughout the speech), who he understands to be the ultimate source of all the warfare and violence. He's definitely an a-hole, but evil he is not. Doesn't mean he won't still become a villain, but villains don't have to be evil. He could end up like G Gundam's Master Asia, playing for the wrong team because he erroneously believes that it's the right thing to do. Rey is something of a mystery. At this point, he could either be evil himself, or he could just be blindly loyal to Dullindal, with whom we've already seen he has a very close relationship. He's also shown some loyalty to Shin, though; he's stuck his neck out for him on a number of occasions now, most notably when he helped Shin return Stellar to the Alliance. He could either be a really good person who's intensely loyal to his friends and is being manipulated by Dullindal, or he could be evil as well and working with Dullindal to pull Shin to their side. This of course all assumes that Dullindal is evil. The immediate assumption from day one has been that he's got something up his sleeve. The show hasn't yet confirmed that he's evil, though. That's still very much up in the air. I would be surprised if it turns out to be the case, but there's still a chance he's a genuinely good person.

Honestly, why does it really matter whether or not EA is shown as competent? I think there's more drama and more potential to tell a good story in having former comrades face off against each other. Now that Neo is safely aboard Archangel and his three Extendeds are all out of the picture, EA can't offer that. Focusing on ZAFT and Orb, the story becomes about Athrun and how he's being pulled in two different directions. A character who's conflicted about what he should be doing, which side he should be on, which group of his friends he should align himself with, has much more potential than fifty episodes of back and forth battles between ZAFT and EA. As long as Fukuda manages to pull a decent story out of this mess, I'll be happy, and I don't see any particular reason why the Alliance absolutely has to be a part of that. What does the Alliance really add to anything at this point? This is a story about Shin, Athrun, and Kira. Throwing a bunch of Alliance aces into the mix would only further muddle an already confused situation, and the only reason I can think of to do it is out of a sense of obligation that the Alliance must be depicted as roughly equal to the other sides if it's going to be depicted at all. As we know from real life conflicts, that's total nonsense; sometimes one side just completely outclasses the other, and as long as the core of the show isn't "Watch ZAFT beat the crap out of the Alliance again," that's not necessarily a problem.

Yeah, it's kind of funny to hear it called childish since it was actually by far the darkest Gundam series. Zeta gets hyped up a lot, but it wasn't really any darker than a lot of other Gundam shows until everyone just up and died in the last few episodes. On the other hand, Victory Gundam is just one long bloodbath.

That was the second time and was pretty unavoidable. The first time however when Neo grabbed Shinn and told him that Stellar was the pilot, she had stopped firing... and Kira promptly pressed the attack and hit her almost directly in the cockpit, yelled at Shinn for not continuing to attack, then took down Neo when he defended Stellar, which of course sent her into a rage again. Okay, I was thinking of the later part. When you mentioned that Shin was trying to stop her non-lethally, I only thought of the part where that was actually going on, since she stopped firing all on her own (presumably because hitting Shin would have also meant hitting Neo) at the time you're talking about. So that's my mistake. Yes, I suppose you can't be a completely condescending a-hole until you play the "This is only a cartoon!" card, as if you're not the one that came up with this whole thing in the first place. Obviously, piloting skills aren't absolute, but that still doesn't change the fact that putting Shin ahead of Kira, based on any encounter between them, is illogical. My mistake confining it all to episode 32, though; I confess to sometimes only skimming past the first line or two of a post to get to the meat of its content, so words like "most recent" are the ones that stick out in my mind and I don't pay attention to the rest of it (ie, that it referred to "most recent MS" in any episode, rather than just "most recent episode"). That's my fault, but it only really matters as far as peripheral points like Athrun and Cagalli go. Doesn't change anything about the main point of contention, that your Shin/Stellar/Kira ranking is messed up.

Yeah, but that ignores all the prior evidence we've gotten that contradicts your hierarchy, which is based only on a battle with a mobile suit that even I could use to take out some enemies. And besides that, even based on that one battle, you still can't justify putting Shin ahead of Kira, because when he tried to attack Kira, he didn't even come close to hitting Freedom. The one on one matchup should trump their comparative performances against the same enemy. And if it's only based on that one battle, you can't really rank Athrun or Cagalli at all, since Athrun didn't have a MS and Cagalli, as azrael mentioned, only shielded civilians without fighting herself. It was Kira vs. Stellar, Sting, Neo, and even Shin (if only briefly), and then it was Shin vs. Stellar. The only other MS that ever fired in Shin's general direction was Neo's Windam, and he did it to get Shin's attention, not to actually hit Impulse. Shin tried to shoot Stellar and saw that Destroy deflected the beams. Kira tried the same thing when he first showed up. Unlike Kira, Shin wasn't getting triple-teamed, so he just went straight in with his beam saber. When Kira tried the same thing later, he took out Destroy (although based on your original post, you would argue that doesn't count since Stellar was really screwed in the head right then, and perhaps that's a valid argument, but I digress). All I'm "implying" (more like, saying it straight out) is that Shin had a much easier time against Stellar because he was only fighting Stellar, while Kira was fighting at various times or even simultaneously, four different people. But she hadn't stopped firing. She was about to fire again, and Kira went in and stopped her before she took out Shin and whatever was left of the city. He can't really help it that she went crazy again; she went crazy just because she saw him, because of everything Neo had already told her. Truth was, he didn't kill Neo, he wouldn't have killed Sting if he had been fighting him, and he wasn't going to kill her if he could avoid it. But she saw Freedom, remembered Neo being nonlethally disabled (but didn't realize it was nonlethal), and went crazy when Neo's death programming kicked in. We know Kira's not completely beyond killing if it can't be avoided, so I didn't see this episode as a tremendous departure from his normal character. He doesn't kill grunt suits anymore because a GINN or a Murasame doesn't really pose any threat to him or anyone else, but taking out Destroy's chest cannon was imperative even if it meant Stellar's death.

Since I don't speak Japanese, I wouldn't have caught it if she specifically said in the show that she wasn't firing the Lohengrin for fear of the city. I just assumed she knew that it was useless because the positron deflector would block it. Did she say she was trying to protect the city by not using it? It wasn't the first time he realized it, either. Like azrael hinted, let's just say Kira's...special. Or at least, he's showing lots of signs of it. As azrael mentioned, it was done a few times in later episodes of SEED (only by Kira, I think). I also could be wrong, since it's been a while since I watched either show, but I think I remember it coming up at some point in Victory Gundam and/or Turn A Gundam. It wasn't quite as Jedi-ish as in SEED, but I think we saw beam vs. beamsaber at some point in those shows, too. Or I might just be thinking of the time Usso crossed his beamsabers to create a beam cannon-ish weapon. Looked to me like next week is going to be a down episode. Dialogue, reflections, etc. If there's going to be a fight, it'll probably be pretty short, since there wasn't a hint at all of it in the preview. Unless the magazine previews say differently (I haven't been reading them, so I wouldn't know).

I don't know how you can reason that Stellar is as good as Kira. When she was in Gaia, Kira batted her away as easily as he moved through everyone else. When she was in the most massively over-powered mobile suit ever with barriers that deflect any attack while Kira was getting triple teamed by her, Sting, and Neo, Freedom still didn't sustain any damage; the best you can say for her is she was also undamaged, which is more a virtue of her MS deflecting everything that came at it than her own piloting skills. So far, we've seen Kira completely own Shin once (episode 23), and we've seen Shin go toe to toe with Kira while he's in seed mode and Kira's not (episode 28). In episode 32, we saw him charge at Kira and swipe at Freedom a few times with his beamsaber, never once coming even close to landing a hit. Aside from one slash at Destroy with his beamsaber while he was going one on one with Stellar (ie, not getting attacked from three sides), Shin didn't do any better against her than Kira did, and he's never done anything to show that he's better than Kira is one on one. I don't think there's any reason to put anyone but Kira at the top of the hierarchy. I also don't really know about putting Athrun that low, but I really can't come up with anything to argue against it. I think it's still just good will from the job he did in SEED that I feel like he should be higher, since I have to admit he's not really shown anything in Destiny. In any case, we haven't been shown anything to suggest that Kira's not the best MS pilot in the whole damn Cosmic Era world, and particularly not that he's lower than someone who has never so much as scratched Freedom in three confrontations so far.

From Gunota: There's also a summary of the plot, which runs up through episode 14, but I didn't really read much of it because I don't imagine a whole lot has actually been altered and frankly I'm too lazy to read several paragraphs about a story I already know.

Six? More like two.

An alternate perspective would be, the writers wanted to drag it out as long as possible, so they made it this much of an issue just to get it open. It was several episodes after they found it before they even tried to open it with that thing that Locke and Boone built. Then they just kind of dug out around it without really trying to open it again. Then they finally blew it open. If the writers wanted to address it, it would have been opened the day it was found. They wanted to just keep stringing us along without ever actually doing anything, so it took this long. You don't really know how well-equipped the others are, though, or how well they know the island. If you try that on the beach, you run the risk that maybe they have sniper rifles or whatever, and while you're sitting there inside your dynamite perimeter with your four or five pistols, they're off on a mountain picking you off. Or whatever else, since there are lots of possibilities for people who are just sitting on an open beach. And if you try it in the caves, you run the risk that they come in through some way that you don't know about. Charlie and Jack managed to dig their way out through a previously-unknown passage. What if the others just march on in through one of those and bypass the permiter entirely? Hiding was probably the best option. Hiding in the hatch, however, was...not. "Well, we know there are other people on this island, and they're apparently about to kill us, so let's use a big explosion to open up this artificial structure that's locked from the inside. They probably won't hear the explosion, and they certainly don't know this hatch is here." If you really think three main characters are all going to be killed off in one shot like that, I think you're going to be in for a shock when season 2 starts. You're watching a TV show about a magical island where polar bears roam and black mysts act as security systems, so you're already in the wrong place if you want realism. Four or five characters have been killed off so far, and only one of them -- Boone -- was even remotely important (unless you want to count Ethan, too). One way or another, Sawyer, Jin, and Michael will all be fine.

I like the show quite a bit, but it's getting ridiculous just how long they've drawn out this whole thing with the hatch. They discovered it way back in episode 11 or thereabouts and then ignored it for a while. Even when they finally came back to it, it took them this long to finally open it. It's kind of felt like the story really hasn't moved much in a while. Now with the hatch finally open and Walt abducted, there should be quite a bit of story development at the beginning of season 2, but that means we still have to wait at least four or five more months for any sort of resolution on this hatch situation that we've already had going on for five months. It'll also be interesting to see what happens with Michael, Sawyer, and Jin. Certainly looked like the raft was intact enough that if they can put out the flames, they can still ride it, but it's basically gone from vehicle to lifeboat now. I can't see them killing off three main characters like that (frankly, I was a little surprised that they iced Boone, after we were promised a death during Ethan's rampage and it was just some faceless extra), so we'll see what happens there.