[Wesley84]

Originally Posted by Dean_the_Young

This ignores, however, the many supporting parts of why someone could like 00:

-High-quality fights with a bare minimum of stock footage

Short fights as you've pointed out. However if I had to watch stockfights of mechas and battleships fighting vs. characters standing around with hundreds of dramtic pauses between sentences...

-An excellent and varied supporting cast of antagonists who are actually more sympathetic than most of the main characters. Graham has more balls and charisma than any three Meisters, noble Sergei never wavers in ability or moral resolve, rogue Ali who lives and fights for himself, stoic Soma who we all keep waiting to learn some humanity. Even comic relief Patrick.

Except for Ali, who is Setsuna's storyboard bitch, I agree.

-A refreshingly new attempt to actually look at and work with global politics and power relations overall, rather than the half-extended generalizations of Seed and Destiny. ("Everyone in PLANT loves Lacus, instant POWER!" "the EA (AF) wants to kill coordinators," "PLANT is good when not trying to kill everyone," "No one cares what happens in Asia or Africa," "Orb is always neutral, even when it fights one side or another.") I don't even hold that against Seed-verse (much), because I don't watch Seed with expectations of a viewpoint being the leaders in power. Seeing it in 00 is a nice change, even if it could be done better here or there.

Actually Seed's backstory made the situation a little more complicated than any of that. Destiny certainly took alot of things for granted and over simplified global politics. Seed, not so much. There were economic reasons for why there was a war, and the whole Natural/Coordinator thing was simply one aspect of it, even if it served as a rallying cry for some people.

Seed was about war escaluating out of control, while Destiny was about...Strike Freedom?

OO presenting a standing balance of power, rather than a large-scale war is interesting, but the show doesn't really use it much as it should. Especially since I'm dying for Graham, Sergei, Soma, and Patrick to be in a room together.

-Watching the fallacy of a group try to end war through war play itself out, especially when the group is such a collection of f'ed up individuals who are still working it out

The individuals don't seem too interested in working things out though. They're happy being Meisters. That's the problem. I think the absent of social skills is simply an excuse to keep any interesting discussions about their beliefs from happening.

The fact they don't really believe anything before launching their global crusade is what pisses me off the most.

-The director's mastery in driving the audience to feel one way about a person (say, Louise), only to spring an abrupt turn of events to give a character an entirely new deminsion (Setsuna killing his parents in the name of God? Louise amputated? Super-computer Veda actually being not only infalible, but a deadly weakness?) It has been almost as amusing watching the audience feel near uniformly about one character or another, and then have a complete switch; Louise went from useless b**** to everyone's character of the hour.

Not too sure about this one since I detach myself from characters that I hate so their special little emo scenes tend to only matter to me as far as substance is concerned. Louise's was one of the best in series, bar none, but Setsuna murdering his parents and him not caring about it, well, apathy is as apathy does.

As for the shift in attitudes towards character amongst the audience, I don't really like it myself. To suddenly feel bad for Louise, while not trying to understand her in the first place annoys me.

- Effective use of techniques such as foreshadowing and dramatic effects with music and images, while also not falling into the trap of simply revealing past histories in a single monolog. Setsuna's past was flashes here and there, Allelujah took his own episode a dozen eps in, Lockon is mostly out now, and we still have no f'n clue as to what the Incident was with Sumeragi, what exactly happened for Graham to be called on fratricide, what the hell Tieria even is, etc.

This is actually an annoyance. I'd rather know nothing than wait to learn something. Especially since they like to re-use flashbacks GSD-style without actually telling us anything new.