I really like how this 2nd season opening. For some reason I like the characters more….despite that they haven’t really gotten any moments to shine.
Oh yeah we need a doujin with Setsuna dragging Sumeragi who is complaining like a child

Well my only complaint with this episode was “It needs more Soma” then I saw the episode preview and stopped complaining.

“Not only is his so called “cell” more like a padded hotel suite, he also get loli-room service and free Haro internet. Saji lives like a king while the poor oppressed denizens outside of the Federation in places such as the hell hole of Azadistan starve and die of exposure.”

Not to mention his suite has NO GRAVITY, lucky SOB.

while yes i’ll admit he’s in it for the money, to me Ali also seems more interested in fighting (or more accurately killing) for the sake of it (as evidenced when he deliberately told kinue about the GN drives, who he was, what he does and why he does it so he had an excuse to shank her in an alleyway) he could be definded as a psycho for hire, like during the plan to capture the gundams by wearing them out, if he was in it for just the money alone he would’ve offered his services for a price to any one of the big 3 powers like a whore, instead he used his foreign leigion identity to get in, effectively avoiding getting as much pay as he would from a mercenary job, but on the flipside gave him a better chance of taking on the gundams, and the fact that he used used the aggrissa’s plasma field to torture setsuna while slowly killing him also hints to a sadistic side in ali.

of course, a simpler example would be to view him as an expy of gauron from FMP

Uhh.. 1 of the characters Ali killed was a civilian, not even a combatant so that doesn’t even count. Another one was completely defenseless and unarmed that he shot in the chest while pretending to be an ally.

So, really, the only “combat” kills he has are Lockon and Johann Trinity. A whole big ONE more “named” kill than Setsuna. That really isn’t impressive, especially for someone who’s supposed to be a “badass” villain.

characters in a gundam show then honestly friggin Kira Yamato would have the highest fucking kill count I mean 2 seasons of him pressing a single button and wiping out entire armies come on I think you haven’t watched it but if you admire the destruction of helpless grunts with the push of a button then there you go.

I haven’t watched SEED or SEED Destiny because they’re garbage. I won’t have a clue as to what you’re saying if you bring it up.

Plus even if Ali is a coward he still could take on (sort of) a gundam with uber hax GN particles with a cheap mass production enact so coward or not he still is a great pilot.

Oh? Is that why he ran from the Gundam Thrones? Is that why he hid behind rocks in the final battle? For someone who has such “great” piloting skills, he sure seems scared.

Who ever told you that running in the middle of a battle field with uberhaxness screaming and taking on 1000 people all by yourself is brave think again.

By yourself? He had a full squadron with him during the final battlefield and he sent them ahead of himself while he hid behind a rock. That’s not “great” piloting.
There’s been at least one other occassion in which he sent his squad in ahead of him to, basically, die while he stayed behind and then joined the fight after the fact.

He’s a sorry excuse for a villain and I’ll be glad to see him get axed by either Lockon or Setsuna F. Awesome.

Also besides the gundam battle you can’t confirm that Setsuna has been in the front lines when he was a child all we know is that he joined Ali’s group killed his parents and that battle that we see he fell in love with Gundam 0.

Well, the OPening of Season 2 pretty much shows Setsuna fighting as a child. And the first episode of Season 1 also shows Setsuna fighting as a child. There are numerous clues that Setsuna was a front line soldier in Ali’s camp when he was a kid.

For all we know he was running around scared to death with a gun in his first battle and Gundam 0 came in and saved him.

That wasn’t his first battle. See above.

Setsuna just makes a good anime a traumatized teenager with uberhaxnes. Sure what Ali does is cheap and underhanded but that’s war to ya there is no honor there is no mercy there is only a Winner and a Loser and victory must be achieved by any means necessary.

LOL If you think victory is achieved by any means necessary then why do you complain about HAX suits? If anything goes doesn’t that mean HAX suits also?
You can’t say it’s okay for Ali to do whatever he wants to win, and then complain about Celestial Being having HAX suits to win. It’s either all or nothing. You have to pick a side.

What CB does is also nothing short of underhanded taking uberhax suits and throw the world into turmoil to remake it.

Every Gundam, since the first Gundam has had hax suits and teenage pilots. Amuro Ray was a 15 year old engineer in the first Gundam before he got his Gundam prototype.

Sure it’s a good idea in theory you get rid of the military and people will learn to solve the problems another way but we all know this is impossible as humans we will always fight.

The idea behind CB was not to dismantle the military. It was to prevent Wars. CB only intervened once there were armed conflicts. They didn’t go into peaceful countries and try to take away their self-defense force. They only attacked countries that were ALREADY fighting to STOP them from fighting.

Everyone will live happily ever after. So LONG LIVE CB MAY YOUR UBERHAX GN PARTICLES MAKE GN RAINBOWS OVER THE WORLD AND WHEN THE GN PARTICLES FALL ON EARTH MAKE EVERYONE HAPPY AND FORGET ALL OF THEIR PROBLEMS. Ali just needs to be around to reduce the cast size so the ending can be a lot more precise. As long As there are less than 10 named characters left I’ll be happy. There probably won’t be.

As long as Setsuna F. Awesome rains delicious TWIN GN Particles all over Ali’s face I’ll be happy. ^_^

That and some delicious fan service would make this series 10/10

@blind_dead_mcjones

while i cannot speak for crusader, i can say that my reason for liking the bad guys is that they are generally far more interesting characters (and often cooler looking) than the good guys, they are also the catalyst for the events to take place and without them you wouldn’t even have a story now would you. if prince ali hadn’t been around, jihad-kun would probably be living a boring and average life herding cattle or something rather than ‘becoming gundam’, and both he and lockon probably never would’ve joined celestial being in the first place.

The problem is that Ali isn’t interesting at all. He’s a mercenary. He has no other motivation for being involved other than money. He’s a very shallow character and as a villain he’s pretty lame. Alejandro Corner and Ribbons were/are mysterious characters with more complex motivations and methods. That makes them interesting characters to watch. Ali is really just a plot device for Lockon and Setsuna. Other than that he serves no purpose. The entire reason he exists is to make the other characters look more interesting by comparison. Hell, even robohomo Tierde looks interesting compared to Ali. If Ali was the evil version of James Bond in the show, it’d be different but he’s not suave or cool he’s just some bishounen written in to pander to the yaoi fangirls.

i kinda like the fact the fact that Ali is a opportunistic, cunning and devious pilot, it’s makes him more believeable as a character, he’s knows when the odds are in his favour, when to attack, and when to retreat, and he also knows where to attack from in order to press the advantage

all the ‘ace pilots’ in Gundam, and mecha anime as a whole can grouped into one of four combat styles, steamroller, bushwacker, sniper, and plugger

Steamrollers are aggressive types who favor in-your-face frontal assaults, raining blows on their enemy to keep them off-balance. Experienced pilots can almost always dodge a frontal attack, but if you keep pressing the attack, sooner or later they might slip up and take a hit.
Char, for all his acrobatics, basically sticks to this tactic.

Bushwhackers are cunning, devious pilots who eschew easy-to-evade frontal attacks in favor of taking potshots from the rear or other blind spots. When engaged in a duel, they try to wriggle out of it and drop out of the enemy’s field of view so they can come in from another direction and catch the foe off-guard. Frequently, bushwackers will sacrifice spare weapons as decoys, distracting the enemy so they can ambush them from behind.
Amuro Ray and Anavel Gato are masters of this technique.
As was Norris Packard, a major enemy in 08th MS Team whose Crowning Moment Of Awesome seemed designed specifically to show how much more dangerous this form of Ace was compared to “standard” soldiers.

Snipers are similar to bushwackers, but lack the skill to escape a duel. Instead, they hide behind asteroids and colonies, popping up to take potshots at their targets, and try to avoid close combat and running battles at all costs.
Camille Vidan, a textbook example, frequently has to be rescued by his teammates when he gets stuck in a duel and can’t get away to launch surprise sniper attacks.

Pluggers – for want of a better term – are defensive players, who manage to stay calm and collected even under continuing attacks from bushwackers or steamrollers. By continually dodging and deflecting enemy attacks, they can tie up otherwise dangerous foes in time-wasting sparring matches, and may even be able to sneak in the occasional counterattack.
This tactic is typically the province of secondary characters like Emma Sheen and Mavette Fingerhut, but Victory Gundam hero Usso Ebbing also fits the profile.

Many real-life fighter aces used tactics that broke down along these general lines. Boelcke, Immelmann and Manfred von Richthofen himself were all strict tacticians who disdained fancy aerobatics as a fools errand, insisting that combat was all about lining up the shot. By contrast, aces like Lanoe Hawker, Frank Luke and Richthofen’s brother, Lothar, were insanely aggressive, disdaining tactics in favor of brutal, reckless all-out attacks. René Fonk would stalk enemy aircraft for hours before striking, and was such a good shot that he once downed six enemy aircraft with a mere 56 rounds- making him both a Sniper and a Bushwhacker. Werner Voss was both a steamroller and a plugger- in his final fight, he began by engaging eight enemy planes single-handedly, and then managed to not only keep attacking, but keep one step ahead of all of them before finally being brought down. “Pluggers” are more common in reality then fiction, as many dogfights are decided by who makes the least mistakes.

in the case of Gundam 00
Setsuna and Graham are steamrollers
Ali and Allelujah (or more accurately Hallelujah) are bushwackers
lockon stratos is another text book example of a sniper (no brainer really)
and tieria is a plugger

while i cannot speak for crusader, i can say that my reason for liking the bad guys is that they are generally far more interesting characters (and often cooler looking) than the good guys, they are also the catalyst for the events to take place and without them you wouldn’t even have a story now would you. if prince ali hadn’t been around, jihad-kun would probably be living a boring and average life herding cattle or something rather than ‘becoming gundam’, and both he and lockon probably never would’ve joined celestial being in the first place.

@CJ
Prince Ali! Mighty is he!
Ali al-Sarshes!
Strong as ten regular men
Take it from me!
He faced the Thrones Trinity
Who’d make a saner man flee
But whos Gundam kill-count’s now three?
Why, Prince Ali!

i never once said they were innocent, or that i sympathised

and my comments about your use of the word terrorism are mainly directed at your responses to halcyon, zentari and various others, black humour or not, you still come off as very high and mighty and it gets more than a little tiresome after a while, and bear in mind that for some it has become impossible to tell if someone is being serious or not anymore

I always have this embedded picture of space-opera (in every kind of forms of entertainment, anime or film) with someone on the top of pseudo-Reichstag, be it puppet-loli-ruler, a masked dictator *cough anakin cough*, the destiny plan guy (whatever his name) in Fukuda-phail-show… it’s always this war with these kind of people

Now I see a pattern moving from villains as not being instrumental as it were before. It’s more on war of ideas (or maybe because Seiji Mizushima is a post-modernist director, unlike many others?); which we just saw the end (or beginning?) of it as Code Geass takes it closure. Like Code Geass as a equivalent (oh alright, a rip off) for “V for Vendetta” in anime medium.. Maybe G00 will experiment on importing more elements of Hollywood. But I should know better that Sunrise is like a Hollywood pop-cracking studio in Japan for anime industry right now. Good stuff ahead (lol, as if).

I just thought that if only they could make A-Laws guys more depth just like Matt Damon in Good Shepherd… Hey even psychopath in anime is not as ingenious as Joker. I’d like to make this comparison with Hollywood, since I thought that although the medium is different, the technique (not the format, but characterization) is not mutually exclusive. They could import something here and there.. What’s your take on this?

@randome Hero
My rules of engagement have legal precedent as well and to be honest I think your legal definitions on terrorism are incorrect if you consider Lichty and Christina “innocent” civilians. I apologize for being patronizing, but your insistence on Christina and Lichty being poor “innocent” civilians who were doing perfectly innocent activities that were not causing the deaths of UN soldiers and were “murdered” led me to believe that your definitions were incorrect. I also found it galling and insulting that two characters who were aiding in the destruction and death of UN Soldiers, not to mention the saving of the last Trinity Nena, were all of a sudden innocent when the bridge to their warship was hit by a well aimed shot. Even if you claim to have lost faith in humanity the fact that you bothered to sympathize with those two gives reason to doubt your cynicism. None of them wore a standard uniform and honestly any person found on a hostile warship is liable to be killed in a combat situation. I reiterate the UN fired on the bridge of a hostile vessel that was firing on them and they had neither the technology nor the means to identify anyone sitting there. They were not murdered they were killed in the line of duty, had they not been part of CB which was in a state of war with the UN then they were merely collateral damage who had no business being on that warship in the first place.

You started off you post with a hint of hostility by putting words in my mouth about “with us or against us” and going on a spiel about childish and narrow mindedness. Don’t insinuate that I am ignorant on the subject of terrorism, opposing it will claim the best years of my life. I hope it will not be the case with you. High cynicism entreats a sort of black humor, I am sorry it was lost on you.

in the last half of your rebuttal you make the mistake of assuming that A) i am under illusions as to what war is like and B) that i have any faith in humanity to begin with.
and those weren’t moral platitudes they were legal definitions.

I am more than aware that human beings are not nice, and have often suffered at the hands of other people, be it physically, finanically or mentally, I am also aware that war nothing more that two groups of people trying to kill eachother for either territory, resources or because they don’t see eye to eye, a.k.a barbarism at best, (hell the whole of human culture is barbarism) so don’t try and patronise me, ever.

What exactly was Sumeragi’s contribution to this battle? They act like she made a great plan, but really Setsuna just pwned everyone with his overpowered Gundam with 2 GN Drives in an SLI config. Still, I love me some emo Sumeragi.