Review of Mobile Suit Gundam: GQuuuuuuX
1) GDucks (It's pronounced "Quacks." Why not?) is a fragmented mess from the the beginning (Literally, from "-Beginning"). If I put my analysis goggles on, I can sort of see a story about the old guard making the "worst timeline" throttling the ability for the latest generation to make their own story, but its doesn't make the show resonate in any way. Anno's content-neutral, slick version of Mobile Suit Gundam where the bad guys win (I know, I know, it's more complicated than that) does get in the way of the FLCL-styled, "lofi beats to relax/study to" new characters, and there's a lack of emotionalheat from the latter to begin with. The first few episodes do give a good base to their quiet desperation, but once they get into the illegal fighting, it loses the emotional story threads of the leads. The emotional center of the latter half is tied around Shuuji, who is more in execution a plot device than a person. Which leads us to...
2) There's the feeling Bandai installed a hard "NO HOMO" button on this series after their P.R. got clowned claiming Witch from Mercury's ending was "ambiguous" in the ways D-rank pick-up artists try to hit on my wife who's clearly wearing a wedding ring. Having seen the the whole series and its reveals, that's not necessarily the case; it sure as hell feels like it, though. Not everything has to lean into "the gay," but Machu and Nyaan are clearly working off a similar dynamic to Witch from Mercury where the naive redhead with drive partners with a girl who's trapped within a system with no way to get out on her own. Shuuji is a zoned-out character who feels separated from everyone, and that he becomes the center of a love triangle in the middle of the series is baffling. It's not there, and making it the emotional center of the latter half of the series makes it seem like the characters are being dragged forcefully through a plot they're not interacting with. It's supposed to lead to hard-hitting moment between the leads, but the characters themselves admit fairly quickly that what they've been doing is "stupid." Finally, that brings us to...
3) The series simply amounts to "stuff happening." Once everything comes together, there is no emotional companion with the plot, so everyone feels like they're stumbling into each other than this being the natural outcome of the journey; and sometimes they ARE literally stumbling into each other. It cuts out half the new characters in the middle and then just forgets about them until the epilogue. It doesn't do the work that this feels like a culmination of the story instead of the medium ending of a choose-your-own-adventure novel. I didn't dislike this series, but I'm completely at a loss about what I'm supposed to get from it, thematically, emotionally, or whatever.