Review: Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury

Current mood: pride month is not over, SULEMIO WINS!!!!!

I don't follow the Gundam series at all, mostly because it's all war, child soldiers, politics and fantastic racism. Never touched it since SEED, and even then I managed to stomach all of it because of shipping (Destiny ruined the ship but they patched it back up later, as I've mentioned before). Then the internet (was it tumblr or the bird app??? idr) just had to show me the wham scene from the first episode, and I was sold. Lesbians???? Count me in!!!! But don't let the cute art style and sapphics fool you; this is a Gundam story first and foremost, so things are bound to be fucked up.

To sum it up: imagine The Tempest by Shakespeare crossed over with Revolutionary Girl Utena. An unusual combo, but it works.

The Witch from Mercury stars the series' first (?) female protagonist Suletta Mercury, from, you guessed it - Mercury. Her partner is Miorine Rembran, Delling's daughter and the prized 'bride' of the Benerit Group. We have supporting characters like Guel of the Jeturks (and his posse, which includes his younger brother Lauda), Shaddiq of the Grassleys (and his posse), Elan of Peil (he doesn't have a posse), the Earth house students (most notably Nika and Chuchu), and also the Dueling Committee (Guel, Shaddiq and Elan used to be members of this body until very bad stuff happened). We have Suletta's mother Prospera and the other kids' parents whose names I can't be bothered to remember.

The stage is set in Asticassia School of Technology run by the Benerit Group, where children duel each other with mechas to resolve conflicts every other day. These children are also running multi-million dollar companies alongside their parents and planning conspiracies and assassinations. What are kids in Gundam even.

Suletta transfers to the school with her trusty childhood mobile suit Aerial and has a meet-cute moment with Miorine, who was in the middle of her escape plan (and Suletta ruined it). She then accidentally participates in a duel for Miorine's hand in marriage and wins. Literally an episode of Utena.

It doesn't look like a Gundam anime at the start; everything's somewhat of a slice-of-life romcom... until the tail end of the first season (episode 12) and you realize -- this is Gundam. "It's ok, we still have lesbians!" you might think, but nothing is sacred in this mecha franchise so we have a divorce between Suletta and Miorine in season 2, even though it's clear as day that it's not what they truly want.

Turns out Suletta is one of the many clones of Prospera's actual real daughter Ericht, who died years ago and now lives as an entity in Suletta's iconic gundam Aerial. Man, talk about weird Evangelion parallels... Prospera has plans to use her space superweapon to obliterate everyone who wronged her family, war breaks out (kinna), but Suletta and Ericht save the day with the power of gay (literally, it was kinna rainbow colored).

The alt text for this image refers to sulemio as wives. By the official twitter account. Love wins!!!

Impressions:

If the intro didn't already make it obvious, I started this whole thing because of the Utena shout-out, despite having never seen the sapphic anime (at the time). The art style is appealing and the music is pretty good, so overall not a bad experience. I was expecting the sapphics to be forgotten soon, with Suletta having some.. thing going on with Elan (the 4th) and Guel (later in the story), even though it's mostly one-sided on the guys' part. But the bait-and-switch DIDN'T HAPPEN. In fact, the writers put them right next to the politics plot, emphasizing the girls' relationship and also putting blatant ship tease in the OP and EDs. They've gone and invested too much in SuleMio to the point they can't even bait-and-switch it so late into the series, but they can always go the 'bury your gays' route so we were all praying hard!

There's a lot of references and parallels to other media, the most blatant of which is of course, Shakespeare's play The Tempest, but only if you're a literature buff or come from a primarily English-speaking country (I am not both of these, we never had to read Shakespeare). The revenge plot, the character names, it has the audience predicting what happens next using the play as a reference and we still get surprised every episode. The second is Revolutionary Girl Utena. This one is easy to catch for anime fans because it is so fucking obvious, especially in the first episode. No anime really does the dueling-for-a-bride trope like Utena, especially if it's a sword duel. Later episodes have some references to the anime and movie here and there (the greenhouse, Suletta's first loss, "someday"), some more direct than others, but people still managed to pick up the subtleties.

It also has the gundam staple tropes like classic white, red, blue protag MS, politics, asshole adults, PTSD, big fucking laser in SPACE and the helmet 'kiss', but it also subverts some tropes like having two characters fight to their certain death with MS in space, but then have another third character extinguish the impending explosion and calling out how stupid it is. That was an actual surprise. They even showed Suletta and Miorine as happily married the show really said SHOW YOUR GAYS!

There was also a time when Peni from Across The Spiderverse got herself the Shinji in a chair treatment, followed by Miorine in the same week because of a particularly heavy episode. That was a wild time in the bird app...

Nothing catches my eye more than good lesbians in media just look at 2018 She-Ra (another sapphic story with Utena references, funny how that works), I was so obsessed with it I literally had a god moment and made three masterpieces, then ever did it again. I'm still waiting for my gwitch god moment... still waiting...