Mobile Suit Gundam Wing Quotes

Placed in almost any other series this is a standard declaration of resolve. Here it is the position of a boy who was raised as a weapon by people who never appear on screen, deployed as a terrorist, and who has spent twenty episodes being told by every faction that his cause is a different cause than he thought. He has no adults, no reliable information, and a self that was assembled by handlers. Believing in it is not confidence; it is the only remaining reference point after every external one has been shown to be someone's operation. Wing is often dismissed as posturing, and the posturing is real, but the underlying situation is bleaker than its reputation suggests: five child soldiers deciding what they are for, unsupervised.

Elegant, and the series is quietly building a case against it for forty-nine episodes. He is a man who has swapped names and faces to keep fighting a war his family lost, and who requires the stakes to stay lethal because a lesson learned any other way would not settle anything for him. The formulation is self-serving in a way he never notices — it converts a personal need for combat into a general principle about knowledge. Set it against Relena, who is doing the opposite work with none of the glamour and considerably better results. The show's actual position is that the lessons available at the risk of your life are a narrow and expensive subset, and that most of the ones that matter are not on it.

The least fashionable line in the series and the one it ultimately agrees with, which is worth saying because Wing's reputation rests entirely on the five boys in the machines. She has no mobile suit, no combat ability and no faction, and she is the character who actually ends the war — by absorbing hostility without returning it, in public, repeatedly, at real risk. The pacifism is not presented as gentle. It is presented as a tactic requiring more nerve than piloting, performed by a teenager with a title and no army. A genre built on the premise that conflicts are settled by whoever has the better weapon spends its finale conceding that this one was not.

A code with one clause, chosen by someone who grew up on a colony's streets and in a church that was destroyed around him. Notice which virtue he keeps and which he explicitly gives up. Courage is discarded openly (he will run, he says so first), and honesty is retained, which is the inverse of the priority every other pilot in the series holds. For boys whose entire function is covert deployment under false papers, refusing to lie is close to professionally disqualifying. He does it anyway, and calls himself the god of death while doing it, which is either a joke or the most honest thing about him depending on the episode.

A definition offered by someone who badly needs one. Note how narrow it is: not the enemy nation, not the ideology, not whoever his handlers designate — only people currently attempting to kill him. For a boy deployed as a weapon by a faction whose politics keep turning out to be someone else's operation, a purely reactive definition is the only one that cannot be manipulated from outside. It is also, functionally, a refusal to be aimed. Every adult in this series wants these five to inherit a cause. He declines by shrinking the category to whoever is in front of him, which reads as coldness and is closer to the only available form of autonomy for someone who was raised without one.

He named himself this, which is the detail that changes it. A boy who watched a church and everyone in it destroyed picked the grandest available title for the thing that kept happening around him, and then wore it as a joke he never stops telling. Read as bravado it is adolescent. Read as management it is more coherent — if death is going to follow you, becoming its proprietor is at least a position with agency in it. The series never asks him to drop the act and be sincere, which most shows would. It simply lets the act be load-bearing, and lets the one time he tells the truth about it land harder for the contrast.

Standard menace, and the series spends forty-seven episodes contradicting it. He does not, in fact, kill everyone who sees him — he takes prisoners, he lets people go, he is visibly troubled by casualties and says so. Set against Trowa, who makes the identical threat in the first episode and means it, the difference is the whole characterisation. Both boys were handed the same doctrine about operational security and only one of them can carry it out. The threat is a costume, worn early and loudly, and what makes the character work is that nobody in the story ever calls him on it. He is simply allowed to be worse at atrocity than his cover story requires.

The most common criticism of her is that she is a bystander with a title who lectures soldiers. This is the rebuttal, and she is making it about herself as much as anyone. She inherited a pacifist kingdom, a dead father's politics and a name she did not choose, all of which were given to her, and the series is careful to show that none of it worked until she started doing something expensive with it. Peace here is not a state that follows victory. It is an ongoing administrative and personal cost, absorbed by someone in public, repeatedly. That is an unglamorous thing for a giant robot show to conclude, and it takes the entire runtime to arrive at it.