Mobile Suit Gundam Wing is pretty okay, I guess

I get to be in an ELITE vantage point here, having not seen Wing at any point in my life, save one random episode in the middle I caught while home sick one day. And, since it’s so far removed from its heyday during its Toonami broadcast, and everyone’s opinions are pretty much settled on it one way or the other, it’s an interesting time to be watching it for the first time. Now, Wing is the series that catches the most flak from Gundam fans, and from non-Gundam fans it’s the only one that they feel will ever be good. So, it’s kind of in this real weird balancing act between two camps with vehement opinions on the series.

So, that said, I think it’s a fairly decent series so far (I just watched episode 7) and it’s still in its Sunrise larval stage, so it’s not quite fair to judge the 49 episode whole on 1/7th of the entire series. It’s certainly not my favorite Gundam at the moment, and I’m not expecting it to be the greatest, but on the whole a lot of the flak it catches is (as is usually the case with Gundam fans) rather undeserved. It’s no better or worse than any Gundam series at this juncture (by which I mean at this episode), and the idea of having five independent Gundam pilots run amok on Earth without knowing that the other four exist is pretty nifty (although they’ve just made them all aware of each other). It’s actually had some really good moments thus far–the assassination of Relena’s father, and the episode I just watched, where Heero and the rest kill all the Alliance pacifists in a trap laid by the kind and gentle souls at OZ.

On comparisons to 00: I can see where they’re coming from, but they’re approaching the concept in a much different fashion. Wing has the five acting as almost terrorists, with no organization whatsoever, save the magical mission-giving fairies. In 00, the “private military organization” Celestial Being is organized and hierarchical. Wing also has a clear antagonist in the form of OZ; in 00, it’s Celestial Being versus the world. There’s also probably more subtle differences in tone and setting and themes that I’ll get a bigger dose of as I watch both series more, so I’ll talk more about that kind of thing later. Maybe. For now, it suffices to say that Wing is better than I feared, but a series would have to try really hard to be what I fear they will be.