Gundams and their pilots are here to remind us all not to lose faith in our shared humanity.
Over on the GundamInfo YouTube channel, which usually hosts an ever-changing lineup of episodes and movies from the series’ decades-long back catalog, a video titled “Message from Gundam ‘Beyond’” recently went up, full of trippy visuals and hopeful words about the future. Basically, it uses the premise of the series’ recent Gundam: Beyond 4oth anniversary celebration to have a bunch of characters from the anime wish people well during the ongoing global pandemic, and it’s exactly the pick-me-up I needed this week.
In Gundam: Beyond, the hero of Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn breaks through the boundaries of space, time, and fictional continuities to encounter the protagonists of all of the Gundam anime, and sure enough “Message from Gundam ‘Beyond’” has a bunch of Gundams working together to move a giant battleship asteroid-looking thing while the original Mobile Suit Gundam’s Amuro Ray and Char Aznable wax poetic about the human condition.
Here are some of the highlights:
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While the whole world is grappling with covid-19, things have been especially bad in the US for reasons that shouldn’t be all that surprising at this point, including a President who literally just can’t be bothered to give a shit with almost 5 million confirmed cases and over 150,000 dead.
Cartoon robots can’t fix that, but they can remind us to be better to one another and not settle for this bleakest possible timeline we are currently living through.