The Unicorn-related media kind of posits that whatever lies on the other end of "Newtype Evolution" might very well be some Childhood's End Scenario where a handful of Newtypes ascend into full psycoframe mobile suit godhood and fly off into the vastness of the stars for eternity, leaving the oldtypes to writhe and die in the mud and rocks of their forefathers.
Lieutenant General Gundam
- Thread starter Number3124
- Start date
- Anime
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That was also the ultimate end goal of lunatics like Scirocco, CCA Char, Hathaway and probably Kagatie, which was a big reason I found them detestable - this deranged belief that if all humanity was purged from the earth, the remaining ones would be guaranteed transcendence. It still ended up as Tomino's endpoint philosophy in Turn A, too - all of the Spacenoids rocketing their colonies off into the stars while the ones still bound to Earth have fun eradicating themselves in constant cycles of apocalypse. Unicorn painting that kind of philosophy as this awesome enlightenment that made you into The One from The Matrix is one of the dumbest things the franchise has ever done.
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- He/They/She
Yeah that isn't even kind of what Turn A is about.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
That is literally what the Black History is.
- Pronouns
- He/They/She
And the entire point of Turn A is about how it's possible, and desired by most people in the setting, to break that cycle of violence. That it's possible to look back at humankind's history of mass self-inflicted violence and take the lesson of "we should stop doing that". Newtype or Oldtype, Earth or Space, people can choose peace. Some do, some don't, but the overall arc of human communication will, Turn A posits, eventually turn away from war. That's what the whole show is about, start to finish - a rejection of Tomino's prior cynicism and exceptionalism and a portrait of what it would look like if human beings simply chose not to obliterate each other. It's still complex and dramatic but reducing the whole show to "the Black History happened and therefore it's still about how humans will just keep murdering each other" is the precise opposite point of the show as a whole.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Turn-A certainly tells a way better, more optimistic story about how there's a lot more to humanity than violence and high-minded ideals, but the Black History itself still reads like a fulfillment of Zeta-esque New Age derangement where all the space people transcend their earthly shackles and disappear to the stars while those whose souls remain bound to Earth's gravity suffer eternally.
Last edited:
The vague interstellar civilization of newtypes is a feature of Turn-A's background, but not really relevant to the plot.
- Pronouns
- He/They/She
But it's a show about how that isn't eternal. Newtypes removing themselves from the equation and going off on divergent speciation adventures in alpha centauri or whatever are a background detail that's more or less irrelevant to the people still in the Earth sphere (which depending on your interpretation still includes some newly-arisen Newtypes - I've seen some good arguments that Kihel and Diana represent the ultimate Newtype paradigm of two people who understand each other so much they basically share a brain, but that doesnt really extend to any other abilities or specialness.) But bracketing that, humanity "advancing" or "not advancing" is now irrelevant to humanity breaking its cycle of apocalyptic war. It's about ordinary people from all sides choosing life over death. The Black History and Newtype space civilization are the background upon which this new story plays out, but they aren't the story.
If anything, you could put a spin on it about how peace and a real end to the cycle of destruction don't come about due to some psychic evolution or grand totalizing ideology but simply thanks to the faith in human goodness and the willingness of people to eventually, in a time after time, finally learn to put down their arms and walk away.
Maybe a Newtype Empire or whatever is colonizing distant stars and throwing planets around with telekinesis. So what? They're way over there; the earth sphere is here and now, and here and now is where we know people chose to be better.
- Location
- Elendel, Scadrial
IRC absence of newtypes in Turn A is less a serious worldbuilding thing a more of a meta result of Tomino growing older and wiser. The whole idea of Newtypes grew out of the psychedelia and "human potential" strains of the 70s, but it turns out the IRL equivalents of Zeon Zum Deikun were just as full of shit as he was. For the themes Turn A was exploring the Psychic thing was judged to be narrative dead weight and thus discarded, even if it slightly undermines the continuity twist.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I remember the explanation Tomino used for why there were no Newtypes in Turn A being something like "I used to believe that people could evolve to be more peaceful and understanding, but now I've realized that's a lie and given up on that ideal". It's phrasing a narrative course change like he's condemning all of humanity as irredeemable sinners.
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Newtypes are real, and strong, and my friend.
tankdrop24
Tread First into Hell
- Location
- The Center of the Universe: Toronto, Canada
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I also, I am once again saying that I'm kind of sick of people acting like Gundam X has to be the last word on Newtypes as a concept.
- Pronouns
- He/They/She
Okay.
Greener.
Tomino is not God, nor does he particularly seem to believe he's God. You've really got to stop reading his work as a megalomaniacal condemnation of humanity just because some of his antagonists are megalomaniacs.
Especially when you're talking about an out of context sentence translated from Japanese - in a really direct manner if you'll permit me a bit of speculation on the source. "That's a lie" is a literal translation of Japanese phrasing that comes off a lot harsher in English, where we might convey the same sentiment with "I was wrong" or "that turned out not to be true".
Then again it's Tomino, sometimes he just says out of pocket shit that plays great in a magazine interview. "I've given up on that ideal" seems like particularly Tomino-y phrasing for why his thematic thrust changed between 1979 and 1999.
- Pronouns
- He/They/She
I put this as kind of an aside on the last page but I really think every AU has its own take and spin on Newtypes, each addressing one or more parts of the idea.
G Gundam probably has the least to say about it since it's more about martial arts cultivation, and the closest we have to anything like a Newtype paradigm is Allenby standing in for the parade of exploited child soldiers with go-crazy buttons in their cockpit. This was the first one though and wanted to be as different as possible from the UC.
Wing also only sorta has nods in the direction of Newtypes with Quatre's special abilities and the "Heart of Space" shtick. It doesn't really answer any questions but does use the motif of a kid learning to understand the other on a holistic level as a character arc element, and just kind of lets that simmer while greater geopolitics are resolved through...mainly optimism about humanity as a whole getting exhausted about war. Interestingly, there's a "Deikun equivalent" in the original, backstory Heero Yuy, but his ideology was entirely unrelated to anything that could be considered a Newtype parallel.
X was the first AU to really focus on Newtypes and as far as text in the show goes the only one to refer to them by name, which is why it's easy to do the frustrating thing tank mentions. It's also very stark and on the nose in its refutation of the subject, as I mentioned earlier, but gives an optimistic spin in saying that the real Newtypes aren't the ones with special powers, but the ones who actually show kindness.
Turn A we've been discussing at length but I personally feel it's good to look at it as a distant epilogue of UC that takes a similar stance to Wing and X in saying that people can choose to be better regardless of any power or ability and that looking to the powerful to "guide" humanity is needless and a mistake.
SEED does a sort of interesting thing where there's exactly two literal Newtypes (called something else) but the actual conflict of the story centers around humans self-uplifting through gene therapy and whether those genetically optimized people should rule the world or be purged as abominations, with the continuity eventually reasonably settling on "neither" while the antagonists are more about fantasy eugenics in one direction or the other than even the most rabid UC contolist.
00 is perhaps the most unironic and idealistic in its embrace of Newtypes as an ideological aspiration, with Deikun's words effectively transferred to Aeolia Schoenberg as a means of humanity transcending its limits, not just to create peace amongst itself, but to be able to join interstellar, interspecies civilization, as seen in the movie. It's very much a deliberate homage to the novel Childhood's End where humanity is indeed destined to evolve into something greater, and that's treated as a positive and aspirational thing for the whole species, rather than something to divide humanity into haves and have-nots. (Also hilariously Aeolia and Celestial Being suppressed space colonization in the backstory because they new that major space settlement before mass Innovation would divide humanity further). Also there's separately not-Coordinators masquerading as the not-Newtypes which is the ACTUAL main conflict of the series which to me muddied the waters a fair bit. Also really not clear what separated the precognitives from the Innovators other than no one writing Allelujah's plot talking to anyone else in the writer's room. 00 is weird.
Gundam Age is just extremely funny because they did Newtypes again down to the letter and then the big bad proclaims that rather than evolution, X-rounders are exhibiting atavism to a pre-civilized state because all those boosted combat abilities are surely adaptations to a law of the jungle situation, right?
Finally we have both IBO and G-Witch going back to the SEED well of rather than "evolution", the special powers of the setting being a result of mild transhumanism, in these cases cybernetics rather than gene therapy. In both settings, the power granted to the cyborgs is vilified, but for different reasons. IBO ends up being mainly a commentary on UC's glorification, in and out of universe, of empowered child soldiers and the consequences of that, while G-Witch doesn't really have a political message about its "witches" per se other than perhaps pointing out that getting mad at the people using brain eating cybernetics for dying is kind of victim-blamey and its really (obviously) the military industrial complex's fault and we should all just calm down and stop turning every technological breakthrough into a new kind of gun.
Last edited:
ApocalypticFish
Been reflecting lately.
Sorry for bringing it up, then?
Anyway, when it comes to its aspects that are in conversation with UC, I feel that G Gundam is most focused on the idea of whether humans should all move out to space and leave Earth alone or not than Newtype stuff. Though it's admittedly been more than a few years since I've watched it.
Anyway, when it comes to its aspects that are in conversation with UC, I feel that G Gundam is most focused on the idea of whether humans should all move out to space and leave Earth alone or not than Newtype stuff. Though it's admittedly been more than a few years since I've watched it.
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- He/They/She
I guess the best way to phrase G Gundam's take is that it's more concerned with the inherent divide in material interest between space and Earth rather than different physical categories of human beings, with a large side order of Contolism's OTHER major pillar, the preservation/restoration of Earth's biosphere (although in UC everyone agrees on that, they're just wildly divided on how to go about it and who should benefit from it).
Like, G Gundam has by far the largest cast of superhumans besides MAYBE the SEED continuity, but it's implied anyone can reach that level with no real downsides just by training really, really hard at karate, so it's not really a race thing like Newtypes or Coordinators inevitably are. Maybe a class one if you squint.
Like, G Gundam has by far the largest cast of superhumans besides MAYBE the SEED continuity, but it's implied anyone can reach that level with no real downsides just by training really, really hard at karate, so it's not really a race thing like Newtypes or Coordinators inevitably are. Maybe a class one if you squint.
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I think in particular it's worth remembering that the intention with 'Newtype' in X is that it stand in for Gundam as a franchise.
- Pronouns
- He/They/She
The person delivering most of the hot takes we're repeating here is the preserved consciousness of a guy who got literally vivisected and plugged into the core of a superweapon GLaDOS-style. That then didn't even work as intended.
Going off this interpretation, I think someone in the writer's room was probably upset about doing back to back 50 episode shows for four years running, and then getting canceled for low ratings.
Geckonator
Occult Materialist
There's something to be said about how IBO and G-Witch kind of form a dialogue all on their own for a newer generation where the original Newtype concept is increasingly seen as played out "space magic", where more modern ideas of cyborg transhumanism are seen as the main possible sources of both pilot superpowers and social change.
IBO is incredibly cynical about this prospect, as while Gjallarhorn/Earth's revulsion at cybernetics is depicted as close-minded and weak, Alaya-Vijnana doesn't exactly have peaceful uses. Maybe it can save someone's life like in the case of Ein but that's at the cost of devoting him entirely to revenge sealed into a big Mobile Suit like a Space Marine Dreadnought. Given the naming scheme of the Gundam Frames, it's fair to call this a deal with demons; it's the pursuit of power and revenge for their own sake and it's ultimately self-destructive as Mikazuki sacrifices the capacity of his own body piecemeal at the altar to Barbatos. Ironically, this makes Alaya-Vijnana users closer to the theological and pop-cultural idea of a witch than anyone in G-Witch. The whole series also ends very "historically," as Alaya-Vijnana is just another technological tool put to bed by political change and new developments, and the world sort of goes on with the possibility of more conflict even if things are momentarily better from the reforms forced by the wars in the show.
G-Witch instead positions cybernetic Human-machine interfaces as a wondrous medical technology that has to be consciously perverted into weapons, and even then at the end its ultimate realization is as a godlike hacking mechanism that shuts down and literally dissolves all weapons associated with it to basically end the series as the most bloodless of any mainline Gundam. Ericht even gets to continue to live on in digitized immortality with seemingly no downsides or resentment of not having a body. It's all super optimistic and basically uses cybernetics to play the original Newtype ideal entirely straight as a happy end to the whole universe. I can't imagine Ad Stella ever naturally flowing into a Black History style cyclical reset without some entirely new problem or conflict cropping up.
(You could also look at the fact that this difference in tone and interpretation is extremely gendered, as are the general ethos of both series: IBO is all about Tekkadan basically becoming a warlord's personality cult driven by the emotional but violent masculine bonding of a bunch of teenage boys locked in a series of escalating conflicts together, while G-Witch is a yuri story about ending a period of continual warfare started and fought by other people. Mikazuki dies at the end and leaves his girlfriends on their own because he feels a sacrificial obligation to brotherhood and like he'll never be a complete Human being again after too many battles; whereas Suletta can leave well enough alone to live with her wife, go through rehab, and never touch a robot again after maybe only three situations where she ever had to pilot with her life on the line.)
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- He/They/She
The original ideation of a Witch, at least in the context of Christianity, was a woman who gave herself over to the devil. I don't know if that was part of the original concept of Witch from Mercury given its very long development time and multiple ground-up rewrites, but it does make the dialog with IBO more fun, in the same way that the demonic Gundams make IBO' dialog with 00 and its angelic Gundams more fun.
Also while everything you say about the extreme gender comparisons between IBO and G-Witch are true, it's kind of funny to me that IBO's lead writer was a woman and G-Witch's was a man. Food for thought there when it comes to who wants to tell what kind of story (anyone can want to make anything. That's the thought.)
(Also I'm pretty sure I'd argue that G-Witch's ending is more the millennial power fantasy of just finally getting all the boomers away from power than anything else, or whatever the equivalent is in Japan).
- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'm out of the house at the moment but I'll see about finding the interview with Takamatsu where he talks about Newtype as a stand in for the series, it's a pretty interesting perspective.
Kuja
I'M A SQUIIIID
- Location
- AZ
- Pronouns
- He/Him
I'll die on the hill of George de Sand being a newtype, I don't care what anyone official says. His gundam uses bit guns and there's a whole spiel from the characters in one of the later episodes about "the power of his mind" during one of the battles.
Geckonator
Occult Materialist
Also interesting that despite IBO being written by a woman it doesn't have very strong female characters.
I'm watching IBO with a friend who hasn't seen it before (she's on SV but I'm pretty sure she's not checking this thread…) and she's become very strained, actually finding it difficult to continue watching at all with the show's handling of female characters as basically afterthoughts to the Tekkadan boys. It keeps coming up that Kudelia keeps saying she's going to do important things then keeps being basically an observer and speechgiver channeled into stereotypically feminine, soft interests homemaking for Tekkadan, and the whole Turbines group/subplots don't help with that. She also actually had to walk out and quit watching five minutes before the end of the episode with the famous scene where Mikazuki wrecks Carta because she'd basically spent all of Carta's screentime getting increasingly pissed at a woman being the exemplar of Gjallarhorn incompetence and serving as a punching bag for it.
I guess I'm kind of inured from having watched the show when it originally aired and taken it on its own terms with all the hype that builds from watching in real time with a community, but I do have to admit that she's not wrong on any point of criticism. If you can't stomach the gender politics of women being almost universally soft caregivers (I am wondering if getting to Julietta in the second season will shift some of these perceptions, but it would not be by much...) who are worse at the central violence-doing of an action show, you'll probably see IBO as irredeemably misogynistic and a blight on the series that G-Witch exists to purge.
And it's fascinating that that's the show written by a woman known for a lot of romance and grounded drama anime, whereas the guy known for Code Geass and Devilman Crybaby wrote the soft, almost entirely non-lethal yuri wish fulfillment Gundam that followed it.
Last edited:
- Pronouns
- He/They/She
The secret sauce is that before Okouchi ever wrote for anime (according to his wiki page anyway), he wrote novelizations for Revolutionary Girl Utena.
And Okada really, really, wanted to write a mafia story.
And get that sweet Shinzo Abe money for telling teenagers to get pregnant.
Probably don't show your friend season 2 actually.
(I will say that IBO, while textually downright hostile to women, is ripe for more feminist retellings with only slight tweaks from fandom. It's not too hard to ignore half the things coming out of Naze's mouth and interpret the Turbines as a genderswapped Tekkadan - a mostly-mono-gender mutual aid group of violent fringers with one token member of the other legally recognized sex to serve as something of a face, as with Tekkadan and Kudelia in season 1. Kudelia herself is an easy rewrite into a more active character without changing the plot at all, which makes it all the more frustrating how she was handled in the text. Julietta can't not be a tool of the government as Mikazuki's foil, but we could at least comment more on the complexity of a young woman being a living weapon for a bunch of old men vis-a-vis the mirrored relationship of Mikazuki's fucked-up brotherhood with Orga. The fact that I've run out of women who aren't dead well before the end of S1, under the age of 10, or Atra already is probably the most damning thing about the text, though.)
And Okada really, really, wanted to write a mafia story.
And get that sweet Shinzo Abe money for telling teenagers to get pregnant.
Probably don't show your friend season 2 actually.
(I will say that IBO, while textually downright hostile to women, is ripe for more feminist retellings with only slight tweaks from fandom. It's not too hard to ignore half the things coming out of Naze's mouth and interpret the Turbines as a genderswapped Tekkadan - a mostly-mono-gender mutual aid group of violent fringers with one token member of the other legally recognized sex to serve as something of a face, as with Tekkadan and Kudelia in season 1. Kudelia herself is an easy rewrite into a more active character without changing the plot at all, which makes it all the more frustrating how she was handled in the text. Julietta can't not be a tool of the government as Mikazuki's foil, but we could at least comment more on the complexity of a young woman being a living weapon for a bunch of old men vis-a-vis the mirrored relationship of Mikazuki's fucked-up brotherhood with Orga. The fact that I've run out of women who aren't dead well before the end of S1, under the age of 10, or Atra already is probably the most damning thing about the text, though.)