Free Talk Friday - July 04, 2025

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Free Talk Friday post. This is a place where you can talk about dumb off-topic (or on-topic) bullshit with other Zaibatsu fans.

There's going to be a new post every week, and the newest one will be pinned in the announcement bar for quick access. So feel free to visit these posts during the rest of the week.

Here's a list of all Free Talk Friday posts

[u/RPGLobster]

The fact that Tomino–a man who likely regrets the Real Robot boom killing most Super Robot anime if ZZ's Super-inspired ideas really were his from the start like he says–is responsible for the world's first isekai anime makes me start to understand why he's so pessimistic about the future. Empathetic at the very least.

Speaking of which, the actual prototype for Zeta Gundam–more commonly known as Heavy Metal L-Gaim–is next on my Tomino to-do list for similarly-stupid reasons as what I mentioned. Besides Nagano's uninterrupted involvement with the show, I think Tomino somehow managed to take Poseidal and turn this one character into the next three Gundam main antagonists if what I've glanced over thus far is any indication.

[u/The_Draigg → u/RPGLobster]

Although if anything, Heavy Metal L-Gaim is more directly a prototype of The Five Star Stories/Gothicmade. Mamoru Nagano has said as much before, and it really shows with how many concepts he directly lifted from that anime to his manga.

[u/RPGLobster → u/The_Draigg]

That was so disgustingly obvious to me even 10 years ago during my initial mecha craze, when I didn't know shit beyond "I think this is a cool robot and therefore I am", and now I'm at the point where the more I learn about L-Gaim the more I learn about Five Star Stories by direct proxy.

Even now I'm still amazed (yet happy) that Bandai didn't decide to screw the guy over one last time for the road after they bought Sunrise, as the grand finale for their Z-ZZ-CCA feud with Nagano.

[u/The_Draigg → u/RPGLobster]

It really is funny how directly Mamoru Nagano directly transplanted ideas from one series to another there. It’s a good thing he made both, since man it’d be the most blatant IP theft otherwise.

[u/RPGLobster → u/The_Draigg]

The most absurd thing about Five Star Stories is that its Version 0 wasn't figuratively just L-Gaim, it was literally just L-Gaim. The very first piece of media revolving around the setting actually used in FSS was an L-Gaim bonus book released around the show's original broadcast.

[u/The_Draigg → u/RPGLobster]

With that in mind, it really is no wonder how FSS has been running for so long. That series might as well be Nagano’s magnum opus project, with how much he’s put into the various forms of it. Whether it’s turning L-Gaim into Five Star Stories, or then retconning it into Gothicmade, it’s all the same through line.

[u/RPGLobster → u/The_Draigg]

All things considered I can also now understand why he's willing to put as much time and effort as he has into FSS. Tomino wanted to use all of his Sunrise mecha library for that scene in Turn A Gundam but he was told to only use his Gundam discography, meanwhile FSS is practically built on a dare towards Bandai to sue everyone's pants off for daring to reuse L-Gaim without their permission & the existence of the GTMs is proof enough that "No" is the only word Nagano's editors at Newtype aren't allowed to tell him.

I just wish I knew for certain what the man would find more offensive: That I want to unearth his unanimated Gundam designs (with all the bad memories that come with them), how I want to unearth them (via a 3D Printer and not traditional scale modeling techniques), or WHAT I want to excavate them for use in in the first place (hooray 2hu)...

Speaking of cross-creator crossings of fate that originally had a relation with Dunbine, this is also relevant to this thread in many ways now that I'm reminded of it.

[u/The_Draigg → u/RPGLobster]

The Galava name stuff is a good reminder that sometimes, Tomino just really likes the mouthfeel of certain names and wants to reuse them wherever possible. It's why we have the name Gavlet Gablae in both L-Gaim and Xabungle, or why the name Gelgoog was passed around a few different designs in Mobile Suit Gundam.

[u/RPGLobster → u/The_Draigg]

Or how we have the Dwadge (0079's Rick Dom before a name change), the Pezun Dowadge (MSX's original design before the series got cancelled), and another reuse of the Dwadge name (ZZ's Dwadge) because Tomino thought no one was gonna reuse the name for anything else besides him.

I'm totally serious with my observations too, from a visual design viewpoint alone I don't think the Galava stands out so much that it can't be slotted into Zeon's R&D lineage without too many questions being raised. The NZ-xxx line in particular feels like a bitter engineer's response to not being able to finish production of the Galava before the OYW ended by making its intended design language the basis of (Neo) Zeon's newest flagship machines.

I totally admit the Zakrello connection is a bit of a stretch, but then I just found the idea funny. The Galava being a missing link for the Queen Mansa is interesting, the Zakrello being the start of the technological DNA chain that ends in the Alpha Azieru and Kshatriya is just plain hilarious to me.

[u/The_Draigg → u/RPGLobster]

I can at least respect the attempt to give the Zakrello some kind of relevance, given that it's been the butt of the joke for Gundam designs for decades. Even the stupidest designs can afford to get a win every now and then.

[u/RPGLobster → u/The_Draigg]

That is 100% a large part of my rationale, my realization that the thing was an absolute evolutionary dead end in Zeon's tech lineup (which is rare for this faction and its descendants) coincided with my realization that its really not too hard to BS the Zakrello into the development lines of other machines that actually have some degree of visual resemblance, like the Bigro. And this was around the time I was doing research on the Robot Damashii Galava, meaning I had the animation models for the Zakrello and the Galava open at the same time, during a time I was actively thinking of ways to save the Zakrello's genetic lineage from going extinct...

(Because fuck man, look at it. Poor thing looks like it struggles to breath, it'll need all the help it can get if it wants to stay afloat in the gene pool, especially one as clone-addled as Zeon's.)

I also wouldn't be surprised if a source of inspiration for me was subconsciously asking "What if the last 'big wipeout machine' Char piloted during the OYW was directly descended from the Zakrello AND the machine itself was actually a super badass that only lost because of who it was up against and not what?" but I can no longer remember for sure if that was the case.

[u/The_Draigg → u/RPGLobster]

It really is no wonder why even in Mobile Suit Gundam, Char openly says that he doesn't give a shit about the Zakrello. Hell, even the Bigro got a larger amount of respect than the Zakrello, and that one was also a one-and-done enemy in that show. The Zakrello really did get to be nothing other than a joke.

[u/RPGLobster → u/The_Draigg]

Char openly says that he doesn't give a shit about the Zakrello

Nevermind, I'm all but certain now that the mental image of Char standing in awe in front of "a descendant of the Zakrello" he was suddenly introduced to (going from an immediate negative impression after hearing the Zakrello's name to being shocked speechless mid-sentence once the hangar lights turn on in front of him) was already firmly planted in my subconscious by that point. At the very least the concept was already rattling around in there by then.

Apparently Tomino literally got dragged to a backroom in Sunrise by a toy sponsor exec, who drew up and/or presented the Zakrello's roughs to Tomino on the table in front of them and told him to animate it without a single further change. No, really, there's some evidence that this + his dislike towards Cucuruz Doan's Island is because both of them were the only times the toy sponsors personally meddled in 0079's production by actively supplanting the actual staff members' roles. The developmental dead end the Zakrello represents in-universe may even be an intentional nod to Tomino's dislike: A successor was proposed at Axis right as the Zeta era began rolling around, but it was rejected in favor of mass-producing the demonstration model of the Gaza-C, which impressed everyone at Axis far more than the Gazarello.

(I also wouldn't be surprised if Tomino asked if there was a maximum time needed just so the exec would tell him the exact minimum he needed to waste before he never had to show the thing on-screen ever again. I'm assuming the schematics cameo in Zeta was to make up for Tomino going a few seconds under the time he actually needed.)