Neon Genesis Evangelion...

[seawasp]

... the ridonkulously popular anime, is the subject of today's (Not) On My Shelves!

Comments

[seawasp]

I don't think of Escaflowne as a mecha series. It's... itself and pretty much unique, as my prior review of it discussed.

Similarly, Macross Plus, while in the Macross continuity, isn't a mecha show, it's a sort of a personal drama with some combat.

GWing just worked better for me than any of the other Gundam shows. It wasn't really an "angsty bishounen" show; Duo Maxwell has few moments of angst; Heero doesn't have many, either. Quatre is almost entirely angst-free until things come apart, and then he gets better. Trowa tends to be so quiet his angst's hard to pick up. Chang WuFei does indeed loudly angst about various things. But mainly it's a show about politics and the choices made and costs of war, which is, basically what the real Gundam shows have ALWAYS been about.

My wife likes it a great deal and wrote significant amounts of fanfic in that universe (I added some stuff to hers, and some of the concepts actually ended up being incorporated into my own main universe).

[bunny-m.livejournal.com]

But mainly it's a show about politics and the choices made and costs of war, which is, basically what the real Gundam shows have ALWAYS been about.

Now this I absolutely cannot argue with. I think part of my problem, one of my issues with it, (apart from finding myself unable to empathise with anyone other than Relena early on,) is the more toy-like mecha designs of GWing, especially when compared to the better Universal Century* Gundam series.

Another one is the feeling that the entire story and somehow the entire world orbits around the cast and their plot, as opposed to the UC works, which have always felt to me like stories going on as a (sometimes tiny,) part of a much bigger, much more complex and ongoing universe.

I do love the GWing OP though.

(*) MS Gundam, Zeta Gundam, Char's Counter-Attack, 0080, 0083, 8th MS Team and MS Igloo, to be precise.