dorchadas | (Reply)

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Sadly for most older Gundam, sailing the high seas is needed.... Nyaa has pretty good fansubs. Zeta is available on Blu-Ray but I get not wanting to part with $ for something that you don't even know if you'll like or not.

I like this writer's review on it, but they don't go too much into spoiler territory. Without getting too spoilery:

- Earth's population has exploded so people have migrated to space colonies (the basic premise of all Gundam series--G Gundam even takes it a step further by making the Earth a polluted wasteland, and tossing in some class-based stuff in that wealthy people can afford to leave Earth to live in the colonies, but poor people can't)

- Earth rules the colonies with an iron fist.

- Originally, Side 3 (a subsection of colonies--so basically, in reality there are points around the Earth that have stable gravitational positioning; in 0079 and Zeta, these points are called "Sides" and clusters of colonies are built at these points) wanted to declare independence under a particular ruler named Zeon. He was killed and power usurped by the Zabi family, who run the Zeon faction now. They declare independence and wage a war against the Earth Federation.

- The Earth Federation is developing a new weapon to fight Zeon, called Gundam. The Gundam comes to the defense of the flagship for 0079, the White Base, and becomes its primary offensive and defensive weapon.

- The story follows the White Base and the shit it has to deal with. The characters grow and mature and of course deal with all the shit of being suddenly forced into a confined space indefinitely and having to work together. Sadly, the plot can really drag in relation to this--there was a whole episode devoted to finding table salt for the food for the crew, and they kept saying "You can die if you don't get enough salt!" While yes, you can die if you don't get enough sodium, it's very unlikely that you'll die from not having enough table salt to season your food. Dumb shit like the salt episode is why I recommend the condensed movies over the actual series.

- Eventually, some of these people involved in the battles develop extra-sensory powers that help them in combat. These people are called Newtypes. Newtypes feel strong connections to other Newtypes. Late in the plot, a Significant Event™ happens due to this.