Quote:
Originally Posted by Alastor Mobius Toth
I assume, this is in no way, shape or form relevant?
|
But I'm not asking how the first two episodes are relevant. I'm asking why people think two whole episodes, which revolve around Yui's backstory that's not even part of the source material and a bunch of side characters who don't exist outside of the Japan plot, are
required at the
beginning of the series to get the plot of the TV show to work.
That's the argument that I think is pretentious as hell because, again, you're essentially saying Muv-Luv is the first story to ever involve a bug war and we would be utterly hopeless and lost in the storyline if they opened the show with anything other than a disproportionately drawn out 1-hour history lesson. I have some major objections to that.
Do you know what kind of setting Gundam X takes place in? A horrifying post-apocalyptic environment where a ridiculous percentage of humanity has already been wiped out by the mass extinction event that ended the previous war.
Do you know who one of Gundam X's supporting characters is? A socially distant war veteran haunted by massive survivor's guilt and his perceived failure as a child soldier during the war.
Do you know how the first episode of Gundam X opens? Narrator generally explaining there was this war and a fuckton of people died, *smash cut to opening credits introducing viewer to the proper main cast*, *transition to modern time with the relevance of the opening prologue being gradually explained through Jamil's flashbacks and character development over the course of the series.* It also helps that many of the elements of Jamil's backstory (Lancerow, the Lorelei girl, various fanatical Newtype experiments, etc.) are at least things the show's main cast are also directly exposed to.
Do you know what Gundam X DOESN'T do? Introduce the series with several full-length episodes shoving Jamil's entire war era backstory down your throat in one take with no subtlety or sense of pacing before randomly jumping 15 years into the future and suddenly turning it into Garrod's story. Yeah, that type of introduction WOULD work if the entire point of the show was to be a brutal, in-your-face account of Jamil's psychological misery, but it's not. If they DID do that, it would completely misrepresent what the main crux of the show is about and anyone invested in seeing Jamil as the teenage main character going through shit in the Seventh Space War would be left behind. And that's exactly what the Total Eclipse anime's problem is.
Yeah, the comparison isn't spot-on since Gundam X doesn't have bugs that eat you, but fuck me if Jamil and Anime Yui aren't polar opposite examples on how to write that type supporting character. For everything Jamil's character pulls off well, Yui's character does it catastrophically poorly.