Prewatching:
so at first i was like "a new Gundam show? oh, well it'll probably be another UC based spinoff that doesn't add any-... ...what? NOT A UC SPINOFF? then... ... then... wait... .... oh god, no... .... ....wait... aliens? ... no. no. nononononononononnonononono"
i've watched just about every Gundam show ever. i'm watching this.
still, i'm more than a little broken up inside. it honestly feels like this franchise has lost touch with so many of the things that made it great (insight on war, politics, technology and the interplay between the three), in order to stick with the things that made it popular (middle school boy got the coolest robot ever).
it really sucks that i'm going into this knowing that i can't honestly expect it to be any good, or to hold it up to any high standards. that's exactly what i used to watch Gundam for, to have a "standard". sure, it was often overly serious, largely nonsensical philosophical drivel combined with color-gradient censored montages of naked teenagers adrift in the cosmos, but it was more than entertainment. it was trying to be something more important.
tl;dr
Gundam was serious business.
Now it's Pikachu in space.
Tomino needs to come back
and be deprived of his anti-depressants.
11 Random Things That Masa Found When He Went To Watch Gundam AGE Episode 01: The Savior, Gundam and Wept
00:10 - Pew pew pew. Pew pew pew. Even the sound effects are already phoning it in. And we're ten seconds in.
09:40 - ah, the faceless enemy. and they even make animal growls... i am somehow not impressed. then again, Char's awesome red suit and cape didn't wow me either at first...
10:54 - "what are the UE really?" ... ... well... that may be a mystery i can get into. it could add a wrinkle or two into this seemingly overly simple story.
06:08 - Doctor Robotnik's parallel universe goody-two-shoes brother is so going to deus ex machina the shit out of this show
20:55 - Rule 1 of the UE: Leave no dead. And that answers a lot of my questions about how humanity sucks so hard against these alien guys.
15:45 - i Lol'd. that Largan guy is so fucking stupid. i'm going to laugh so hard when he finally dies and they try to pass it off as serious, because this cretin deserves to be dead before the first ED even rolled.
14:14 - they CENSORED OUT the Feddy mobile suit getting cut up. too graphic for this audience? not in last century it wasn't, right?
16:42 - "flit will be fine. his determination is as good as a soldiers." <-- if you can figure out what is wrong with this sentence, you know why i'm not in love with this show.
22:00 - red ship and single slit eyes. they really have turned Zeon into Zombies... Alien zombies...
17:48 - a female character who might be the only character i like in a Gundam show? this whole thing is backwards
20:14 - but the kid can carve up the CharZaku with three nasty stabs to the cockpit (is he trying to explode the nuclear reactor, or is that never going to happen in this show?) and it's the triumphant moment of the episode. yuck.