For context I've just gotten into Gundam and after finishing 0079 I decided to watch all the oyw stuff before moving onto Zeta to keep following Amuro.Thunderbolt, War in the Pocket, 08th MS Team, having a great time but then I get to this scene in The Origin where this thing rolls up to oppress protesters and I lose my mind.For the sake of my sanity I'm going to treat the classification of this thing as retroactive like with the irl Tsar 'Tank' and pray they never call it a Mobile Suit in the anime prior to the oyw.
The origin is it's own separate universe. It can have all the mobile suits it wants.
I can't decide if I love or hate the way mobile suit development goes in Origin. It's much more fleshed out than mainline UC is but the Federation having MS at all just feels odd.
>>23520848Counterpoint: Designations are entirely arbitrary even for irl military hardware.M26 Pershing was originally designated a heavy tank, then later reclassified as a medium tank.
>>23520903>The origin is it's own separate universe.I don't like it, I can't necessarily explain why since I'm conceptually fine with What ifs or fully reimagined AUs but I don't like it.You get a prequel to a hypothetical different slightly 0079 instead of the prequal to your 0079 that'd be mostly the same barring the weird differences?I also heard Thunderbolt is it's own universe but it was enough of it's own thing that I could ignore that (it's own problems not withstanding).>>23520934Reclassification is the fix, 'we had these things that we weren't really using as mobile suits but after we developed mobile suit doctrine these things can fill the role enough they fit the definition'That is enough for me to watch it and enjoy it now without me being bothered by contradictions (or the annoying alt universe excuse)
>>23520848You should have just watched Zeta instead of watching stuff made four decades later if you wanted to follow Amuro.
It's been ages since I read it, but didn't the manga BS it that the Guntank and Guncannons weren't "real" Mobile Suits because they didn't have proper Minovsky reactors or something?
>>23520955I meant I wanted to finish up the oyw stuff before I progressed with the setting by following Amuro into Zeta, poor phrasing on my part.
>>23520954>You get a prequel to a hypothetical different slightly 0079 instead of the prequal to your 0079 that'd be mostly the same barring the weird differences?Yes, gslop confirms that there are multiple UCs, thunderbolt is another UC AU and not taking into account vydia, mangas or novels that are their own thing too.
>>23520957The Origin rewrites the Federation's mobile suit program as evolving from the Guntank through to the Gundam, instead of having them as three contemporary designs intended to complement each other.
>>23520957No, the Guncannons always had minovsky reactors. The OVA muddies up the Guntank a bit by backporting the base design to before portable minovsky reactors existed, but in any case the later model of the Guntank will have minovsky reactor anyway.The main reason why they were not considered "true" mobile suits in Origin animation is a little bit of fuckery, in that the Feds did not truly embrace the "mobile" in "mobile suit", the Federation classified their weapons as something stupid like "humanoid main battle tank" and the pilots were therefore trained to operate their Guncannons and Guntanks that way. There's supposed to be some kind of dichotomy where just like how tank warfare and blitzkrieg tactics proved the superiority of the tank in modern combat due to their mobility being the deciding factor, mobile suits are supposed to be superior to tanks in the age of warfare of minovsky particles since their mobility is also a generational leap forward. That's supposed to be why the battle in Origin OVA episode 4 is a disaster for the Feds where 4 Zeon MS end up wiping out 12 Guncannons without taking any damage in return.In reality it's just Yas trying to rewrite the battles so that the Gundam is more important and Zeon MS are more of a threat, so the Guntank and Guncannon are considered primitive pieces of shit. Even in the Origin manga, Guncannons with beam rifles are somehow considered inferior to Zakus with bazookas.
>>23520991Here's some more of that initial Fed\Anaheim stubbornness in accepting the potential of MS.
>>23521004You know if you read this as Tem being aware he's in a mecha franchise and everyone else trying to apply real world logic to it, it's more fun.
>>23520961You basically did by watching the original, everything else after is fan service.
>>23520848The official site says those early Federation mobile suits are actually classified as "Main Battle Tanks".https://www.gundam-the-origin.net/en/mechanical/0400.html
I don't understand the people who watch things out of production order I really don't. Do people really start Star Wars with Episode I and not Episode IV?
>>23521082Silly anon, anyone starting with star wars today would start with one of the disney abominations.
>>23521007I want more series like that than Knights & Magic
>>23521082They just want a more coherent story (rookie mistake)
>>23521007>use all your real world mech anime knowledge to build the part that will turn the RX-78 into the Turn A so Amuro can end all wars forever>he doesn't understand it and assumes it's junk, tosses it away>UC still a warzone a million years latergrim
>>23521254>a more coherent storyMore coherent than what? The way it came out? How does that make any sense? No wonder zoomers think metal gear is complicated.
>>23521082>Do people really start Star Wars with Episode I and not Episode IV?Would you believe that Lucas himself advocates for starting from Ep I?It's not a totally unheard of thing for someone to come along and add a new work to a series with the intention of it being read/watched/whatever before previously released entries. Though it's definitely uncommon with film and TV, more of a thing with long-running book series. Like how Lewis favoured The Magician's Nephew (6/7 in the series) as the 'proper' starting point for the Narnia books, or the Hornblower novels usually being printed in chronological order these days, when the original publication order jumped back-and-forth across the character's careerThe issue with doing it with something like Gundam like this is just that later OYW Gundam entries really aren't intended for it. For something like a series of novels, they'll typically be the work of one author, and when you interpolate those later entries into earlier positions, it fits neatly into that single author's big overview of the story. Even with something like Star Wars, that whole original saga was formed by Lucas, and he put the Prequels together with the idea in mind that they should work as the first half of the story. UC Gundam is much less coherent, so many different writers and directors trying to do so many different things, trying to tell their own stories rather than be part of some grand overarching narrative, and often making references to other stuff which is chronologically later, but was released earlier, so taking them in chronological order tends to be quite messy
>>23520991>>23521077Alright I got to a part where they outright call it an MBT, I apologize for making a fuss about it.
>>23520966>gslop confirms that there are multiple UCs
>>23521254Less is more.
>>23521082>I don't understand the people who watch things out of production orderI hate it when people claim this doesn't matter thats why so many new fans get confused
>>23523272>>23521082Did my confusion have anything to do with watch order?Is there a scene in Zeta explaining 'while the Federation didn't consider them Mobile Suits at the time technically they did have MBTs that can be thought of as primitive versions of the concept' or something like that?If there is the yeah I should have watched Zeta first, but if that isn't the case watching release order would have only delayed my confusion.
>>23524219Yes, because The Origin isn't canon to the main shows at all. The Guntank is a contemporary of the other White Base suits, not a precursor to, with interchangeable components and core fighters.
0079 anime is told by Tomino.The Origin is the exact same story told by Yasuhiko. To dumb this down its Toby Maguire Spiderman vs Andrew Garfield Spiderman. It is the exact same shit with the exact same characters but the story is being told by a different director this time.
>>23524413If it's not canon it doesn't matter if I watch Zeta or Origin first.
>>23524439It doesn't, but watching things out of production order is still absolutely overcomplicating things for no absolutely reason and provides zero benefits to anything. Enjoy Gundam your way and all the jarring leaps between cell animation and digital. Don't forget to start The Sopranos with The Many Saints of Newark.
>>23524452>Enjoy Gundam your way and all the jarring leaps between cell animation and digital.I was actually, I'm an animator so seeing how different eras depicted the same subject matter going from 0079 to Thunderbolt to War in the pocket and so on is interesting to me.
>>23524506Oh man that sounds way more interesting than going from 0079 to Zeta to ZZ to CCA and seeing the same director progress over a decade! Good for you! You continue to be retarded!
>>23524439It does, because it leads to conflating different works and wondering why things created decades apart have different interpretations of things, or even worse not understanding when you're looking at those deviations.Regardless of in-universe chronology, the works are designed to be seen and understood in their real-world production timeline.
>>23524515And I will see how that same director progressed with Gundam in the order they were released, but I also watched different anime in between.Is watching any anime that did not come out between 0079 and the Zeta a problem, I also watched Takopi's Original Sin and I started watching an episode Detective Conan a night, does this also offend you or would they have been fine since they don't have the name Gundam?>>23524649I get it the optimal way to watch anime is to start with Astro Boy and watch everything in release order from there. In fact you should read the Donald Duck comics before even starting with anime at all.
>>23524655Anon, I think you might have brain damage if you don't understand the concept here.
>>23524656Alright then, in your opinion when watching Gundam in production order do I need to watch everything or just UC? Can I finish UC before starting the AUs or should I have watched G Gundam and Wing before The 08th MS Team?
>>23524699My opinion is that at the very least, you should tackle 0079 through to CCA. At that point you've 'seen UC' for most purposes, those are the things that everyone else is riffing on or referencing and that's where the core identity of both UC as a setting and Gundam as a whole is formed.From there, go nuts honestly. It's still interesting to go through the AUs in order and see how they navigate trying to be Gundam but not Gundam in various different ways over the years.As for the OVAs, chronological would be a nightmare if you wanted to be anal about it. They came out alongside other projects because they were meant for the hardcore UC fanbase and 08th had a troubled production cycle that stretched it across four years.To go back to the Star Wars analogy, to go by in-universe chronology is less like starting at episode 1 and more like getting to the end of episode 2, watching the 2D Clone Wars, watching 3D Clone Wars, then watching RotS. Later supplemental works aren't part of how the originals were conceived or intended to be understood and even if you know this in your head it'll still affect how you end up understanding the original. Zeta might come after 08th, 0083, 0080, Rise from the Ashes, Requiem for Vengance, Code Fairy and a dozen other things but it was written as a sequel to 0079 and meant to be watched as one.
>>23524718My first watch order for Star Wars was 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 3, 2d clone wars, some of 3d Clone Wars, a confusing mess where at some point I watch Rouge One and Force Awakens and eventually finishing Clone Wars, then finally Visions 1
Origin is retarded. The Federation should be long gone from Side 3 by the time it starts.
>>23524726What a truly confounding order. At least you didn't have the OT broken up, I guess.Did a whole saga (movies) watch-through before RoS came out with some friends, it felt truly insane having Solo sandwiched between the incompetently executed but conceptually solid melodrama of RotS and the war drama vibe of Rogue One. Even funnier when you consider that if you've only seen the films, the Maul cameo is absolutely incomprehensible.Think it'd be interesting to do the last arc of Andor into Rogue One, into ANH though. Since they all back onto each other, maybe a day tops between events of each depending on travel times.
>>23522973But I actually like the idea, the only thing I won't personally accept is that ALL universes were created by Lalah because it sounds lame.
>>23520991Yas is in a lot of ways a dickhead when it comes to Gundam, he might be the only steadfast "Zeta is not my Gundam" guy to ever be in a creative position in the franchise. So instead of making forward conscious retcons like people might expect of a remake, the Origin has basically no intention of making sense with anything but rather just being his chance to change everything he disagreed with Tomino on when they were making the original.
>>23525026To be fair he's not saying it's the definitive version of the original Gundam, it's just his.
>>235209660083: Rebellion is also a UC AU as well
