The New Gundam Show Is Here, Queer, and We’re Already Very Used to It

Welcome to the way forward for Gundam, my associates: we’ve obtained a robotic faculty, we’ve obtained megacorporation politics, and we’ve obtained women defending one another’s honor by participating in large mecha duels for the precise to be wives.

This weekend noticed the debut of Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch From Mercury, the first mainline entry within the legendary mecha anime franchise since 2015’s Iron Blooded Orphans. Set in a brand new timeline throughout the Gundam continuity, the sequence follows the franchise’s first feminine protagonist, Suletta Mercury, who grapples with the trauma of her childhood after being thrust right into a battle over the way forward for Mobile Suit growth and her new life on the Asticassia School of Technology. An academy for Mobile Suit pilots and engineers managed by the domineering Beneritt Group—a conglomerate of weapons growth producers who maintain huge financial and political energy over humanity’s nascent colonization of house—Asticassia is dwelling to the scions of those corporations, and the long run mechanized troopers of battle.

Suletta, largely naive to the advanced relationships and rivalries she finds herself put into arriving Asticassia, finds herself instantly drawn to at least one scholar particularly: Miorine Rembran, the daughter of the Beneritt Group head Delling Rembran (the identical man, unbeknownst to Suletta, chargeable for her childhood trauma). Witch From Mercury opens with Suletta and Miorine actually bumping into one another in house, when the previous discovers the latter apparently making an attempt to flee Asticassia, and the duo’s connection solely deepens when Suletta finds herself compelled to return to Miorine’s support when she finds out that Asticassia’s most celebrated Mobile Suit pilot, Guel Jeturk, is betrothed to Miorine. Guel is Asticassia’s “Holder,” a title given to the pilot on the high of its courses achieved by way of mecha-on-mecha fight in school-sanctioned duels. But as Miorine’s father is the top of Asticassia’s faculty board, the title grants him Miorine’s hand in an organized marriage, doubtlessly combining the political powers of not simply Delling’s standing within the Beneritt Group with one its most influential corporations, Jeturk Heavy Machinery, run by Guel’s father Vim.

Much to Suletta’s shock and eventual frustration, Guel treats his relationship with Miorine as disposably transactional, and about their standing as inheritors to the Beneritt Group’s energy greater than something romantic. Bordering on abusive, his pompous angle and mistreatment of her is the thrust behind Miorine’s apparently repeated makes an attempt to flee Asticassia. When Suletta discovers that that is what she by chance impeded by “rescuing” Miorine within the opening of the episode, she instantly leaps to her new buddy’s support, difficult Guel to a Mobile Suit duel.

Although Miorine makes an attempt to take her future into her personal fingers by standing in for Suletta within the duel—going so far as to take out Suletta’s swimsuit, the Gundam Aerial, herself—the tide is rapidly turned towards Guel when Suletta races in to assist, demanding Miorine let her pilot Aerial. Allowing her to, Suletta instantly accesses Aerial’s highly effective core know-how, the GUND Format—a semi-illegal human/MS interlink—that empowers her to rapidly overwhelm Guel’s personal mecha with a blinding remote-drone assault. Winning the duel, Suletta learns that she is now has the title of Asticassia’s Holder… and with it, Miorine’s hand in marriage. Although Suletta is stunned, Miorine casually tells her that girls marrying one another is commonplace—noting that Mercury, Suletta’s obvious dwelling colony, have to be fairly conservative based mostly on her unfamiliarity—and accepts her new “groom” on the episode’s climax.

Gundam has performed with the politics of organized marriage and unwilling suitors loads of instances earlier than, however centering Miorine’s marriage in each the micro scale of its private drama and the macro of its wider worldbuilding like this—we’re proven Vim Jeturk making an attempt to assassinate Delling Rembran within the background of the episode, with a view to completely seal his son’s marriage to her—after which instantly flipping the swap by making Suletta her new match is fascinating. The informal nature of its queerness is shocking for a franchise as previous as Gundam. Nothing is performed for comedy, and though Suletta is initially shocked, it’s made clear she is drawn to Miorine all through the episode, and Miorine is likewise as accepting of her “groom” no matter their gender.

It’s not like Gundam hasn’t tackled queer parts earlier than. Although by no means textually a pair, authentic franchise deuteragonists Amuro Ray and Char Aznable are a foundational pillar in Yaoi transport for his or her intensely intimate relationship as rivals-turned-allies-turned-rivals, whereas each 1999’s Turn A Gundam and Witch From Mercury’s speedy predecessor Iron Blooded Orphans engaged with homoromantic attachment in each Guin Rhineford’s infatuation with sequence protagonist Loran Cehack and the connection between Yamagi Gilmerton and Norba Shino, respectively. It’s simply by no means centered these explorations in the best way The Witch From Mercury has, not to mention so instantly.

Time will inform simply how Suletta’s new connection to Miorine will play out over the sequence—in any case, the title of Holder and subsequently Miorine’s hand in marriage is clearly transitive, and it’s laborious to say simply what number of suitors there had been earlier than Guel and now Suletta. But their connection as displaced outsiders wishing for extra past the programs of energy trapping them—Miorine and the political capitalism of her father’s work, Suletta and the trauma of her childhood and the GUND format that powers the Aerial—makes the duo an extremely compelling pair to look at already. The Witch From Mercury seems to be putting the burgeoning relationship between Suletta and Miorine on the coronary heart of its story from the get-go, and if it’s keen to make this organized marriage blossom into one thing deeper, there’s the potential for us to haven’t solely Gundam’s first major feminine protagonist within the sequence, however its first explicitly queer one too.

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