Gundam Wing Ending, Explained

Gundam Wing has two endings and they disagree with each other on purpose, which is unusual and is the most interesting thing about it.

How the series ends

The final crisis is Libra, the colony battleship, under the command of Zechs Merquise, who by this point has dropped the alias and stands revealed as Milliardo Peacecraft, heir to a pacifist monarchy destroyed by the very alliance he later served. His plan is to force peace by making war unsurvivable: an attack on Earth so total that humanity has no option left but to renounce fighting.

Treize Khushrenada opposes him, with his own army, and dies in the fighting. That matters, because Treize spent the series as the closest thing the show had to a villain while arguing continuously that war is a human choice with a human cost that leaders should pay personally. He is given the chance to be wrong and instead pays as promised.

The pilots stop Libra. What settles the war is not that victory, though. It is that Lady Une announces the World Nation's surrender to the colony leaders, who agree with her that the war must end.

Why Endless Waltz exists

Because the series ended on disarmament and the epilogue does not believe disarmament is the same as peace.

A year later the pilots, all but Wufei, send their Gundams into the sun, which is the correct symbolic act and turns out to be premature. Mariemaia Khushrenada, Treize's daughter, is installed at the head of a rebellion by her grandfather, Dekim Barton, and the peace collapses more or less immediately because the grievance underneath it was never addressed, only disarmed.

So the pilots come back, and the story ends a second time, and this ending is careful to be about people rather than machines. Zechs, meanwhile, has done the same thing in miniature: presumed dead, he has been working quietly for the Preventers under the name Wind, which is what a soldier looks like when he has stopped wanting to be a symbol.

What it adds up to

Most mecha finales are about whether the right person wins the last fight. This one argues that the last fight is a distraction: that weapons follow from politics rather than causing them, and that a peace which depends on nobody having a Gundam is a peace with a countdown on it.

It is also why the series destroys its own machines twice, once for real and once for good. The second time it makes the point that the first time was theater.

For where the OVAs and the film versions sit, see the watch order. Heero and Relena's lines are on Heero's page and Relena's.