Gundam Quuuux is a bit of a tricky series to recommend. First, it has the continuation of a problem that appears to have started with Witch From Mercury of series that just didn’t have enough time for their plot and characters to breathe, and not (as was the case with First Gundam) because it was cut short due to poor ratings or sponsors bailing. Second, it’s an alternative universe take on the Universal Century that doesn’t provide a lot of hooks for people who are new to that timeline. I enjoyed it, but I wonder how much of that is due to my own familiarity with the events and characters it’s playing with.

Gundam Quuuux’s timeline zigs where the main timeline zags with the first episode of First Gundam. In this timeline, Char Aznable went on the fateful reconnaissance mission to investigate the White Base, and in the process, ends up stealing both the Gundam and the White Base. This leads to Zeon winning the war, but in a last act of desperation, the Earth Federation tries to crash the captured asteroid base of Solomon onto the city of Von Braun on the Moon, only to be stopped by Char (after he encounters his sister, who currently is a Federation ace) through what in the main timeline we’d call an Axis Shock event, but here is called a Zeknova (because Zeon).

We then jump to around the time the main timeline has Zeta Gundam, where Zeon is on the brink of a civil war between Kycillia and Gihren, junk scavengers are picking up the pieces of the last war to be recycled for the next, and former soldiers, who have received no assistance reintegrating into society after the war by the fascist Zeon government, engage in underground mecha fights called Clan Battle (or ClanBat for short). Into this we meet Machu and Nyaan. Macchu is an ordinary high school girl on the ostensibly neutral colony of Side 6, and Nyaan is a teenage girl and refugee of the same age who works as an underground courier. The two end up falling into ClanBat when Machu helps the Nyaan out of a scrape with the cops, and they both run into ditzy teen boy street artist Shuji… who also has Char’s custom Gundam. When Machu ends up stealing the prototype Zeon Gundam Quuuux and unlocking the power of its Psycommu unit, and teams up with Shuji, the three end up starting to tip the precarious chain of dominoes. And watching over all of this is Char’s former wingman (or “Mav”), Challia Bull, who wants to complete Char’s designs on the Zabi family.

So, that’s a lot of plot there. Unfortunately, we only have 12 episodes to manage it. That is deeply frustrating because the characters who suffer the most from this are Macchu and Nyaan. They become witnesses to the machinations of the characters around them, as the plot goes from a political power struggle to a larger narrative involving characters who are trying to shape alternate universes to create their ideal world. In a way, this ends up becoming the Gundam series that is most a story about stories, and the expectations and baggage that come with shared universes.

By the end of the series, the story becomes more about learning an alternative universe version of Lalah Sune created this universe as, effectively, a fix-fic to make a universe where her beloved Char doesn’t die, with a penultimate episode reveal that Shuji is here to stop Lalah and push the timeline back onto the right path (with a second twist that her universe isn’t actually the universe from First Gundam either). Instead, Machu and Nyaan become an argument for the validity of alternative interpretations and parallel universe stories, because as far as they’re concerned, this is their universe and they think their existence is valid.

Now, I’m not the guy who starts from a perspective of not caring about characters – I start emotionally invested, and a series has to work to take that emotional interest away. That said, the series doesn’t take enough time with our new characters to make them feel developed. We spend far more time in the heads of existing characters. Even if Macchu and Nyaan are meant to serve an R2-D2 & C-3P0/Tahei and Matashichi analog, they don’t have a lot of dialogue to establish their interiority over the middle portion of the series, before their wants come to the fore at the show’s conclusion.

Taken as a whole, I did enjoy the series, but it also feels a lot like a series meant for my generation – people who weren’t around for when First Gundam aired, but who came to it later, and came to it contemporaneous with the shift to more woman-led (or at least woman-centric) series getting into the 2000s. The writing works for me, and the performances play well, but those acting performances for Machu and Nyaan have to do much more heavy lifting than the performances for Challia Bull, Char, or Kycillia.

As a story, it feels like an argument for the Gundam audience, taking the Doctor Who approach to Continuity: whatever needs to be canon for a particular story is canon, and whatever doesn’t need to be isn’t. Stories and the worlds they inhabit can be flexible, and requiring some grand unified timeline for series shared across multiple creators and over decades does a disservice to the stories and the people who make them.

It’s just a bit of a bummer that, because of the lack of length, the characters in this story ended up taking a backseat to Hideaki Anno reminding us, once again, to touch grass.

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