Gundam loves itself a war crime. That is partially the point of it all—it is a series built on acknowledging the horrors of catastrophic, large scale conflict, the cycle of war and the potential for what humanity’s future could look like as it yearns to reach out and better understand its place among the stars beyond that cycle. But it also just means that, as an almost inevitability at some point, a Gundam series in need of a dramatic stake finds itself in need of a very big war crime. And this week Gquuuuuux allowed itself that moment… and of course, did so through an echoing from the first Gundam‘s past.
There are, in fact, several war crimes going on in Gundam GQuuuuuuX‘s 10th episode—even putting aside the deployment of child soldiers as standard, as both Challia Bull and Kycilia Zabi shape Machu and Nyaan respectively into the weapons of their ideological intents—but of course the biggest is the deployment of the Solar Ray. Introduced simmering in the background like a perpetual Chekov’s Giant Orbital Laser Cannon the past few episodes, Gquuuuuux‘s imagining of the Solar Ray in its remixing of the Universal Century has been as a climate project, a way to help rejuvenate Earth’s damaged ecosystem in the wake of the environmental damage brought about by nuclear winter.
Of course, anyone who’s watched the first Gundam knows that you don’t put the name “Solar Ray” on something that is in fact for the betterment of humanity: in the 1979 show, the Solar Ray is one of Gihren Zabi’s most heinous ideas of the series, a space colony where its inhabitants have been violently resettled from so it can be carved out into what is essentially a giant gun barrel. At the dramatic climax of the show’s final few episodes, the audience and our heroes are like witness its horrifying activation—the “light of hatred,” as an almost-delirious Amuro Ray puts it—as it disintegrates a huge chunk of the Earth Federation’s fleet and its top commanders, the Federation’s own weapon of mass destruction, the similarly named “Solar System,” as well as Gihren’s father and the supreme leader of Zeon, Degwin Zabi, who was meeting with the Federation to attempt to bring an end to the One Year War peacefully.
The Solar Ray of Gquuuuuux has its own similar intent. It’s a giant WMD, this time wielded by Kycilia rather than Gihren after she successfully poisons him, and we get to watch as it beam-slash-black-holes most of Gihren’s forces as well as Zeon’s giant battle station, A Boa Qu. What’s interesting about Gquuuuuux‘s Solar Ray, however, is that it has a different, but mirrored, thematic heart. If the Solar Ray of the 1979 show was a hollowed-out Colony, a symbol of humanity’s ascent from the cradle of Earth and into a life in space now turned into a weapon of terrible and awesome power, Gquuuuuux‘s Solar Ray speaks to another broad idea at the crux of Gundam storytelling in the Universal Century continuity that many of its series belong to—the weaponization and exploitation of the Newtype, humanity’s evolutionary step, to usher in a new age of violence over that of a new age of peace.
Powered by Nyaan and her own mobile suit, the GFReD, at the behest of Kycilia, as well as the recovered “Rose of Sharon” and its mysterious alternate Lalah Sune, Gquuuuuux‘s Solar Ray is less of a giant laser beam, but a weaponized blast of Newtype power. It operates on creating a “Zeknova”—the same psionic, temporal anomaly that mysteriously vanished Char Aznable and the Gundam at the climax of the war, the same energy field that Newtypes see visions of worlds and times and possibilities beyond normal human comprehension. UC Gundam stories have rarely been subtle about taking the advent of Newtypism and turning it into the latest extension of armed conflict, but in Gquuuuuux it’s about as literal as it can be: the most prominent and most advanced of Newtypes in Lalah being used, against her will, as a battery for mass destruction. That the next generation of humankind must be wielded like a cudgel to maintain the bitter conflicts and hegemonies of those the generations before them.
Of the show’s many mirrors to the original Gundamit’s one of Gquuuuuux‘s most potent and interesting so far, in terms of the scope of its destructive power, and the distinct unsubtlety of its commentary. Gquuuuuux has already played a lot with the idea of what it means to be a Gundam series, and more specifically a Universal Century Gundam series. For all the potential answers it has fielded, sometimes the most valid one is to have a really big laser gun doing war crimes while you practically scream its symbolism at the audience.
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