Do People Genuinely Like Gundam Seed and Destiny?

Mobile Suit Gundam Seed and its sequel Seed Destiny are some of the most influential and popular Gundam works in their native Japan. But I find them absolutely unbearable to watch, and can’t begin to fathom how there are people who legitimately enjoy these two. Between its slow pacing, irritating characters, and sheer number of mobile suits, it is one of the weaker Gundam entries that doesn’t even have the ridiculous campiness of Code Geass to make it entertaining.

Before we start, I’d like to acknowledge that Destiny in particular had a very troubled production. Chiaki Morosawa, the head writer and creator of the Cosmic Era, became very sick in 2002 after the production for Gundam Seed. Due to treatment often taking her away from her duties and leading to delays, a lot of Sunrise staff members had to fill in for her, thus explaining the large number of flashback and compilation episodes in Destiny. Morosawa was the wife of Mitsuo Fukuda, the director for Seed and Destiny. I wouldn’t be surprised if Fukuda was also absent from the studio or if he was not able to work at his best performance considering his wife’s illness.

It is admirable how the core staff managed to even get over fifty episodes of the show out considering the circumstances. But while I can acknowledge and sympathize with the difficulties behind the scenes, most of my core issues have nothing to do with flashbacks. Even if Sunrise had a smooth time with Destiny, I doubt that it would have been any better when Seed was already like that.

There is always a positive in a situation, and despite my general dislike of the Cosmic Era, I have things I like about it! The music is great, the cast all gave amazing performances, and Athrun is so funny. I bring up Athrun apropos of nothing in conversations about Gundam because he’s one of my favorite butt monkeys in the franchise. He’s kind of ridiculous between his indecisive nature and meme-able lines, as well as his tendency to self-destruct his expensive and advanced mobile suits. Shinn Asuka is my best boy in the Cosmic Era though, and I love the Super Robot Wars series for redeeming him. My stanning of Shinn Asuka is a hint as to why Destiny in particular riles me up way more than Seed does.

The thing about Seed and Destiny is that both shows are very melodramatic. Most Gundam shows can be serious bummers considering they focus on the horrors of war, but Seed and Destiny in particular seem to dial it up to eleven. That’s saying a lot considering they came after Wing, which was also ridiculously dramatic in its own right. The drama of Wing comes from the situations that the characters are in though, whereas so much drama in Seed and Destiny revolved around relationships. The Kira-Flay-Lacus love triangle (?) situation took up so much time, as did the Athrun-Cagalli enemies-to-lovers dynamic. I’m neutral on the ship, but Athrun and Cagalli at least had that very interesting background.

Kira and Lacus are so boring. I really don’t care about what happens there, except apparently the Freedom movie is all about that. They don’t have any real wants or fears or motivations for anything. Once Kira and Lacus became a set, they were like a pair of anglerfish who’d fused together during mating. What makes Kira a lame protagonist and a pretty cool antagonist (but NOTa final one!) is that the world seems to bend around him. He’s always right and he’ll let you know it with his laser beams of death. Why does he do the things that he does? Oh, for peace, he says. How does that translate into peace? Shut up, Kira’s got gaudy Gundams to dismember.

My biggest beef is with Destiny. Between his past, grudge against the Freedom, and personality, I found Shinn to be a far more interesting protagonist than Kira was. Athrun being a terrible superior to him was kind of the icing on the cake. Seed’s popularity and influence meant Sunrise could’ve never portrayed Kira and Athrun in a really bad light, even if they wanted to. But I loved how Shinn’s perspective highlighted a lot of their hypocrisy and self-contradictions. It helped make them more dynamic by extension, since these flaws make them feel more rounded as characters.

And then Shinn started appearing less and less after Athrun defected from ZAFT. Once Kira fully returned to the spotlight, it was all over. I still remember the shock of seeing Shinn’s name third in the credits as opposed to when he was always top billing. Kira and Athrun had overtaken him. Even the Freedom movie—the Kira and Lacus movie—is coming out on Shinn’s birthday. He just cannot win.

As a kid, I heard rumors that people hated Shinn so much in Japan at the time of Destiny‘s airing, they’d straight up boo Kenichi Suzumura on the streets. That sounds a bit too ridiculous to be true and I sure hope it isn’t. But honestly, Shinn’s not that bad. I don’t get why people think he’s annoying. Sure, he could be prickly, but his idealistic attempts to do good, even if that meant going against orders, made him so much more endearing than Kira and Athrun ever were. Sometimes it felt like people only disliked him because he was antagonistic towards those two and honestly, who wouldn’t be? Athrun was a terrible boss to him.

If Kira was just kind of boring in Seed, he was full on annoying in Destiny. Let’s skip past Seed for a second to take about Gundam 00. I bring up Gundam 00 because soon after Celestial Being appeared on the scene, we see civilians and military personnel react with derision and disbelief at Celestial Being’s methods. Peace through violence, and by inserting yourself into fights that don’t concern you? Ridiculous. But that’s exactly what Kira kept doing for the first half of Destiny.

Kira blowing up the Destroy Gundam even though Shinn talked Stellar down is understandable. It’s not like he knew that Shinn succeeded and in Destroy’s case, Stellar had been rampaging through Berlin and was a real, genuine threat to thousands of people. But in all the incidents prior to the Destroy, Kira’s attempts at stopping people from fighting consisted of indiscriminately destroying machines. Like Athrun said, Heine died as a direct result of Kira’s interference, even if Stellar had been the one to actually kill him. He could barely verbalize his motivations when Athrun was yelling at him, making Kira come across less a force of justice and more like an irrational tyrant.

Some franchises are popular because they happened to be at the right time in the right place. Genshin Impact breaking into the normie market is due to it coming out right during COVID-19 quarantine, for example. Perhaps the way that Gundam fans seem to place Seed and Destiny on a pedestal is due to them having fond memories of watching the show. Nothing beats nostalgia, after all. In any case, I’m very excited for Freedom to be on streaming platforms. I have a bottle of soju in my fridge with that movie’s name on it.

Gundam Seed and Seed Destiny are available to watch via services like Crunchyroll. The Gundam Seed Freedom movie will appear on Netflix from September 1, 2024.