Making our peace with Gundam Unicorn.
Mar. 24th, 2026 09:32 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gullwingdoors"Banagher Links saw the world."
Recently, we finished Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn, and we've had a lot of thinking to do about it since.
... Harutoshi Fukui's original light novels, to be clear. Translations of those novels, to be clearer. We might be one of the few currently English-only fans to have primarily experienced Unicorn novels-first instead of going for the OVA (which we've yet to see outside of the odd clips and B-roll elsewhere), and I think that's kind of, uh, novel.
Gundam Unicorn is, I think, very good. I do not like or agree with everything the series goes for or expresses - for some examples, we went in a critic of the chunk of the Box reveal we knew and we did not leave much more convinced of its contents; the larger or fatter members of the cast are often described pretty unkindly appearancewise, and it does leave a bitter taste in our mouth; we are not fond of the air of gender-essentialism that hangs around so much of the whole thing, especially - but it has a lot of things to go for and express, and I think it does a lot of them pretty well. Gundam Unicorn is also, maybe more importantly, deeply entrenched in its in-universe context and out-of-universe inspirations, deeply enough that I can't help but feel like I'm going crazy reading folks talking about Unicorn elsewhere and it feels like they've missed so much of it.
It's frustrating.
Maybe that's why we're writing this. We've got a lot of thoughts and ideas and connections we drew to vent, and you're all our audience for this. Thanks for reading.
Spoilers for Unicorn ahead.
We have stuff to note before we reach talking about Unicorn itself.
Until very recently, the only translations these books had lived on Baka-Tsuki, and they're... well, I do trust that they are serviceable at the literal job of "takes the text and brings it into another language", of course, but it feels really *poorly edited* - it could have seriously used a second pass-over by someone else more familiar with English fiction writing, cleaning up a ton of *very* strangely-specific or repetitious word choices and a lot of off-feeling formatting. It kind of felt like we were having to play editor in our head the whole time.
Luckily, Byston Well Stories is doing their own translation of the books, and have finished the first one as of the time of writing. I think their book-1 translation is wonderful - I don't think it would be a lie to say that knowing how well this text *can* be brought over to English really helped us parse the older and much shakier translations for everything else much easier, and see the writing quality under the haze.
Unicorn's deeply tied to a lot of things, in letter and in spirit, and I think it's important to have a sort of recommended reading-watching list laid out before I get into the weeds of line-drawing. It's mostly Gundam, sure, but you gotta keep a bit of a leash on these things.
Real, actual required watching
Full recommendation
Medium recommendation
Light recommendations
Read after
Unicorn's got a lot it touches upon, but I think there's two other Gundams that touch upon similar subjects and do those ones better, and I want to talk about that too.
I don't like what's in the Box.
Let me be clear. I really like the idea of Laplace's Box. I like that its power to the factions at each other's throats for it comes from it being sealed. I like that its contents have long since become ineffectual to the world they live in. I'm even down for its nature as a gesture of good will towards the future denizens of space.
I just specifically don't like what's in the Box.
After War Gundam X's final arc bears a striking similarity to Unicorn's - at the precipice of another war kicking to life at both ends, the battered-but-fighting main cast - independent of either major party - sets off together to the place where the main Gundam originated (the DOME facility on the moon in X, the Magallanica and the Vist mansion in Unicorn) to learn the truth that can stop it.
The thing is, though, in Gundam X, what's in its box - DOME, the lingering consciousness of the universe's "first Newtype" - is the conclusion that there is ultimately no such thing as a Newtype, no new kind of humanity you can control the idea of to direct the future. The developing psychics aren't Newtypes, the space residents aren't Newtypes, none of the main cast are Newtypes. It's just people.
And I don't... necessarily think Unicorn disagrees with the premise of that. Fukui lays out in his essay on how he concieved of Unicorn's Newtypes that he doesn't think any of the people for whom the title is bandied about are Newtypes, and the only thing that could be a true Newtype would be something that cannot physically exist - a transcendent, collective-conscious being unshackled from our time and space.
But the spanner in the works here is Laplace's Box, the original Charter of the Universal Century, with an extra article that the replica in Dakar deliberately excludes - a provision that, should a new, space-adapted kind of human come into being, their inclusion in the government is to be a priority. It's stated in-fiction that it couldn't possibly have applied to Zeon's specific political-spiritual ideal of the Newtype, and that it was more included as hope for the future than anything, but... despite intentions, it just falls flat, coming off as a bit of an overstuffing of Newtype stuff in a work already deeply concerned with them, a final push to say that the future was entrusted to the space magic psychics instead of to everyone.
I don't think it would've taken much tweaking to make it feel better - just shift it such that it points at better inclusion for everyone living in space, mark it a little more as a sign of an egalitarian hope that has long since deserted the Federation, and it still doesn't come up to much but folks hating them more for it. Even if it's kind of a minor point in the grand scheme of the thing, it just... sticks in our craw that X did a similar thing and got the ideas it believes across better.
I don't think Unicorn offers enough future to inherit to pull it off like Turn A does.
That's not to disparage Unicorn doing its thing too much. I respect the conditions of its existence meaning it cannot result in much and what it then takes away from that, but we'll get to that elsewhere. The point is that, because it does such a good job cleaning itself up, there's not a lot of room for the next generation to make their world a measurably better, different one, outside of the bit they successfully manage (whose scope lives firmly within the walls of Unicorn itself, or else was already a condition fulfilled by the pre-Unicorn UC).
As the mythological end-times of Gundam as a whole, however, Turn A isn't shouldering that burden of needing to wrap everything that happens within it so it doesn't crash into the following pre-existing works. When the god-machines that are the Turn A and Turn X seal themselves away within the cocoon along with walking-embodiment-of-warfare Gym it really, genuinely feels like it symbolizes a change - the eternal cycle of conflict fueled by the Mobile Suit, of the Gundam, is well and truly over, and the new world will move on and be better. Mankind has officially left the Dark History behind.
In Unicorn, though it never happens within the time these pages occupy, the rainbow Unicorn - or at the least, the collective spiritual existence manifested into it from Banagher's temporary transcendence - understands the Unicorn and its sister unit, too, are to be bodily sealed away soon, and accepts this, for mankind will find a different way into the future for themselves. It too allowing itself to be reduced back into stinky little Banagher and sealed away rings as symbolic of hope for humanity's future, faith in its ability to pull itself together, but that change is going to take a long time coming - the most it can do is have the last Zabi and those closest to her join her colony-ship and exit the setting stage right to do its own thing if it wants, removing some of the last coals keeping the fires of specifically the Earth Sphere neo-Zeon movements burning (especially with Monaghan likely being taken away from creating new Fake Chars) before the autonomous Side 3 republic's dissolution in the year 0100 and preventing the paranoid factions of the Federation established within Unicorn from acting on their purging instincts any further, while setting up increasing non-Zeon anti-Federation sentiment followed up on in the future.
It's something, but we know nothing much changes and thus it doesn't quite land as something enough, y'know.
I am, again, glad it tries. I do think it is, at least, a nice capstone to what has at this point been a long-since-artificially extended stretch of powers-that-be replaying the One Year War's implications over and over again. It does a final pass to tie up that dangling thread, but - knowing where it's definitely drawing from - you can't help but feel it ultimately rings a little hollow.
If there's one thing Unicorn is incredibly pointedly About that its sisters aren't, it's this.
Being drawn into the battles your family fights and having to decide what you do about it runs deep through Unicorn. Banagher is drawn to fulfill his absent father's dying wish, and through his trials and tribulations he eventually decides that he will - not out of obligation to Cardeas and the Vist family, but because he decides for himself it's the right and responsible thing to do. Riddhe, his mind and soul slowly eaten at by his father's expectations of him and the burden of his lineage to keep the Box closed, is eventually devoured by that burden and is spiritually reborn when he finally decides to shed it and follow his heart alone. Marida is taken in as a surrogate daughter by Zinnerman, and in him and what he fights for she finds the strength to become a person of her own, and she trusts in his goals fully enough to take them on of her own will even when he doesn't want it. Audrey - Mineva Lao Zabi - is the last of her bloodline, and as experienced as she's grown playing the political game she wants nothing more than to escape from the legacy of bloodshed and supremacy that carries.
It does a lot of exploring in this space outside of them directly, too - with Alberto and Martha and Cardeas's shadow, and with Ronan and his own binding to the Marcenas curse, sure, but also with Mahdi's pushing of the rest of the Garveys during the battle of Dakar and (if you squint at the details) with Monaghan's going against his father's spot as leading the post-armistice Republic of Zeon and building the Sleeves under his nose.
All together, I think it ultimately ends up concluding that, as important as family matters may be, the only way you won't get swallowed by them is by choosing to either separate yourself from them or take them on of your own free will, not just because it's what you have to do as family. Even the characters that are offed after finally deciding for themselves how they want to handle their family's burden - Loni and, later, Marida - are able to express, after their death, that which is needed to fulfill these beliefs of theirs.
I... guess I wanted to get this out there because... well, I may be running around in the wrong circles here, of course, but I don't think I've incidentally passed by anyone discussing this much in my own net-surfing. Honestly, I've seen a lot of folks say that Unicorn isn't really about much of anything, which... well, now that we've read it, just feels more dismissive than it already did. Which, I guess, leads into our next section nicely.
I see a lot of people say things about Unicorn that bug me. I wanna get that off my chest.
I've been getting at this for a while at this point, but one of the big things hanging over Unicorn is that nothing really changes because of it - and, more importantly, that nothing can change from an event this tightly, narrowly focused. In the end, the point of the whole Box hunt was that - even if it does nothing major - people deserve to know the truth of this history of bloodshed, and to not have to have their lives ensnared by one more secret power struggle they don't know about. That's fine. It neatly cleans itself up, gives the world a reason to forget about Newtypes and the Psycho-frame, and walks away.
That's also... text. That is, like, textually true in the work here. I don't know how clear it's made in the OVA, but I kind of have to imagine that either they don't make it anywhere near as clear that Unicorn doesn't and can't change how the rest of the UC happens, or a lot of people watching it had their brains just glaze over that fact.
Something I see happen a lot in discussions of Gundam Unicorn is folks on *both sides* missing this pretty clear point - folks who love Unicorn decrying things not changing in the wake of everything that happened within it and pitching how everything could still be shaken up by it, and folks who loathe it decrying Unicorn for trying to change things too much, for potentially attempting to throw off the rest of the UC to come. It feels so surreal to see people slinging so much mud over the fate of the late UC when Unicorn was specifically designed to not get in its way.
A relevant sentiment I've seen slung around is that the novel was considered non-canon even prior to the OVA, which... I don't know where that comes from, but it feels like an incredibly silly statement in a setting this full of side stories playing fast and loose with the facts to tell better stories and inform future works' iterations of their subjects and concepts, and especially silly with one this committed to taking many of the loose ends established across the whole thing and tying them together. It's silly either way to go It's DEFINITELY Canon or It's DEFINITELY Not Canon, but it does slot very nicely into the gap it was written to fill and this seems like it dismisses that.
I think the problem with people and powerscaling the Unicorn is most of them haven't realized that, at a certain point, that's not the Unicorn doing it anymore.
Don't get me wrong - the Unicorn is a greatly capable machine. There's a lot about it I think you really can fairly attribute to it - the beam magnum and the I-Field projecting shield, the NT-D and IAS, even the psycho-frame's unnatural durabiity and strength and reactivity when supplied with the necessary intent. But then I see a lot of folks dragging "fully awakened Unicorn" into "strongest MS" discussions, given the kind of shit it's said to be capable of both inside the fiction it appears in and outside with Fukui bouncing around wild things it could do, and I just... I guess maybe it's easy to miss outside the novel, but the Unicorn is (past the point where it swallows Banagher) essentially another being entirely simply manifesting its will (and, to a less strong extent, the will of humanity) through the medium of the psycho-frame, a transcendent collective-conscious being grown far beyond Banagher and the Unicorn's selves simply happening to be born into the body of the Unicorn through the circumstances, the kind of being Fukui addresses in his contemplations as a "true Newtype".
It can manifest actual miracles doing this, but that's... not the Unicorn as a machine being capable of it, really. Given the nature of the frame and whatever inhabits it for that brief time, I genuinely think you could reasonably do the same things with a big slab of frame and a cockpit so long as you had the context within which the transcendence is made possible. You're trying to credit the miracles that are in-spec for the being happening to be living out of its bones to the Unicorn itself, which... is a different guy. You are powerscaling a different guy and I think that's silly when you have other machines for whom impossibilities are part of the machine itself.
This is where I rattle off a bunch of little things that bug me to see folks do I assume are probably from the OVA-only experience.
A lot of characters get a lot of flak I don't think they deserve, at least in the proportion folks give it to them. Riddhe especially gets the short end of the stick, he's just kind of a loser swallowed by expectations he never liked but felt obligated to.
Everyone keeps mapping the Sleeves to Frontal, which... I mean, I get, but it's pretty obvious he's just Monaghan's puppet in the novel.
Banagher's not some kind of super-Newtype from the whole dad making him train his pilot instincts as a toddler thing, he just happens to be in the right places at the right times surrounded by the right people to encourage the Unicorn to react to him and to help him get a better handle of what he can do.
I know the OVA merges Dakar and Torrington, and skips the entire stop at L1, but... man, I think that sucks.
... Uh, I dunno. I think that's it.
... If you made it through all this, uh... thanks for letting us ramble. We had to exorcise our brain itching somehow, and I... hope you found all this enlightening or informative or at least enjoyable to see. We love thinking and talking about media, but I feel like it's rare for us to get quite this activated on thinking and talking about a work with others, and if nothing else... I'm genuinely glad Unicorn drew enough dots between stuff we already experience or have been wanting to experience and awoke those impulses. It's fulfilling and enriching to do, and it broadens our pools just a little more to do.
Recently, we finished Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn, and we've had a lot of thinking to do about it since.
... Harutoshi Fukui's original light novels, to be clear. Translations of those novels, to be clearer. We might be one of the few currently English-only fans to have primarily experienced Unicorn novels-first instead of going for the OVA (which we've yet to see outside of the odd clips and B-roll elsewhere), and I think that's kind of, uh, novel.
Gundam Unicorn is, I think, very good. I do not like or agree with everything the series goes for or expresses - for some examples, we went in a critic of the chunk of the Box reveal we knew and we did not leave much more convinced of its contents; the larger or fatter members of the cast are often described pretty unkindly appearancewise, and it does leave a bitter taste in our mouth; we are not fond of the air of gender-essentialism that hangs around so much of the whole thing, especially - but it has a lot of things to go for and express, and I think it does a lot of them pretty well. Gundam Unicorn is also, maybe more importantly, deeply entrenched in its in-universe context and out-of-universe inspirations, deeply enough that I can't help but feel like I'm going crazy reading folks talking about Unicorn elsewhere and it feels like they've missed so much of it.
It's frustrating.
Maybe that's why we're writing this. We've got a lot of thoughts and ideas and connections we drew to vent, and you're all our audience for this. Thanks for reading.
Spoilers for Unicorn ahead.
Section 1. Warming up.
We have stuff to note before we reach talking about Unicorn itself.
1. A note on those translations.
Until very recently, the only translations these books had lived on Baka-Tsuki, and they're... well, I do trust that they are serviceable at the literal job of "takes the text and brings it into another language", of course, but it feels really *poorly edited* - it could have seriously used a second pass-over by someone else more familiar with English fiction writing, cleaning up a ton of *very* strangely-specific or repetitious word choices and a lot of off-feeling formatting. It kind of felt like we were having to play editor in our head the whole time.
Luckily, Byston Well Stories is doing their own translation of the books, and have finished the first one as of the time of writing. I think their book-1 translation is wonderful - I don't think it would be a lie to say that knowing how well this text *can* be brought over to English really helped us parse the older and much shakier translations for everything else much easier, and see the writing quality under the haze.
2. Things to watch, things to read, things to know about.
Unicorn's deeply tied to a lot of things, in letter and in spirit, and I think it's important to have a sort of recommended reading-watching list laid out before I get into the weeds of line-drawing. It's mostly Gundam, sure, but you gotta keep a bit of a leash on these things.
Real, actual required watching
- Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) and/or their compilation equivalents, MS Zeta Gundam, MS Gundam ZZ, MSG: Char's Counterattack
- This is the material you need to actually know to have a clue about any of what's going on, in a literal sense, as their events are the spine of the time and place in which Unicorn is set. Watch in full, or at least be aware in majority.
Full recommendation
- Turn A Gundam
- Fukui was entrusted with writing a novelization of Turn A prior, and you can see its fingerprints all over Unicorn where he likely wanted to explore a lot of similar territory himself - the mystic nature, the god-machine rising beyond understanding, the reflections on Gundam's past, the wish for the endless cycle to break. Once you know it's there, it's impossible to miss Turn A's scent in Unicorn. Watch.
- After War Gundam X
- Though Fukui had no direct hand in an iteration of X, it feels so much like Unicorn's close sister series as much as it does Turn A's - with Turn A, the post-apocalyptic reconstruction and the moon obsession; with Unicorn, the high emphasis on the Newtype and eventually the treasure hunt; with both, its eye to the future and those who would inherit it, and the pettiness of those who would leave us shackled to the present. Watch.
Medium recommendation
- Early-Mid UC Gundam side works
- Too many to name, of course. Unicorn draws on many threads left by other writers and creatives in the million stories just to the left of the core Universal Century stories, and it'd do you good to get familiar with the kind of tales told out here building upon the core conflicts, learn better of the horrors of both sides and develop that well-rounded understanding of the setting Unicorn wants from you. Watch or read a few of 'em, get familiar with the contents of others.
- Sonnets to Orpheus
- Rainer Maria Rilke's famous collection of sonnets, reflective of his increasingly personal and obtuse views on the world and on being. The fourth verse of the second part is the direct basis of the titular Unicorn, and - knowing Fukui's interpretation of Newtypes - I wouldn't believe you if you told me it didn't go deeper than thinking it was a cool evocative poem. I think you can draw a line joining Fukui's Newtype-hypothesizing of an atemporal and boundary-less ascended state of being in-setting and Rilke's single great atemporal event of existence in which one transcends from the material and brings with them the immaterial after death. At least read some excerpts and some background.
- Yoshiyuki Tomino's post-Gundam pre-Z shows (esp. Space Runaway Ideon)
- Fukui cites Ideon as a point of reference for his understanding of the Psycho-frame as first presented in Char's Counterattack, especially, and the Unicorn (machine) being frequently written as alive or having a will of its own I can't see as anything less than drawing upon that well. That aside, Tomino's other work is clearly a big influence upon it all, too. Be aware of it, at least - maybe watch, too, fuck knows we oughta.
Light recommendations
- Late-UC Gundam (MS Gundam F91, MS Gundam Victory, G-Saviour if you're a freak like us, maybe Gaia Gear, relevant side works)
- Chronologically after Unicorn, but it was made with awareness that it could not change them. Watch the Federation stagnate and crumble in the future, but also watch the Newtype fade from the public awareness alongside. Keep them in your mind at least.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion
- ... well, it's impossible to throw a stone at the field of recent mecha media that dips into the mental and mystical and not strike something that smacks of Evangelion's influence. Hideaki Anno's horror-toned meatmech classic about a cast who cannot understand each other for shit and the messy and complicated desire to try to form that human connection anyway has a long reach, and you feel it here in some of the beats and ideas. Watch if you feel like, ask a friend about it if you don't.
Read after
- "A Personal Theory and Contemplation on
Newtypes", Special Contribution by Harutoshi Fukui - As excerpted from Gundam UC Testimonial Collection: What Was
Inherited and What Will Be Entrusted, translation available from Zeonic Scanlations. Fukui makes it very clear that this is just his interpeting of established Newtype stuff (and wilder more baseless speculation besides) and that you should not treat it as any kind of canon, but it's a good lens to look at the Newtypes of Unicorn and the rest of the UC through, and some interesting contemplation of the concept. We'll be talking more about it later, and indeed we've already talked about it before above.
Section 2. Unicorn and its sister shows.
Unicorn's got a lot it touches upon, but I think there's two other Gundams that touch upon similar subjects and do those ones better, and I want to talk about that too.
3. Understanding the past: Unicorn, Gundam X, and the future of the 'new type'.
I don't like what's in the Box.
Let me be clear. I really like the idea of Laplace's Box. I like that its power to the factions at each other's throats for it comes from it being sealed. I like that its contents have long since become ineffectual to the world they live in. I'm even down for its nature as a gesture of good will towards the future denizens of space.
I just specifically don't like what's in the Box.
After War Gundam X's final arc bears a striking similarity to Unicorn's - at the precipice of another war kicking to life at both ends, the battered-but-fighting main cast - independent of either major party - sets off together to the place where the main Gundam originated (the DOME facility on the moon in X, the Magallanica and the Vist mansion in Unicorn) to learn the truth that can stop it.
The thing is, though, in Gundam X, what's in its box - DOME, the lingering consciousness of the universe's "first Newtype" - is the conclusion that there is ultimately no such thing as a Newtype, no new kind of humanity you can control the idea of to direct the future. The developing psychics aren't Newtypes, the space residents aren't Newtypes, none of the main cast are Newtypes. It's just people.
And I don't... necessarily think Unicorn disagrees with the premise of that. Fukui lays out in his essay on how he concieved of Unicorn's Newtypes that he doesn't think any of the people for whom the title is bandied about are Newtypes, and the only thing that could be a true Newtype would be something that cannot physically exist - a transcendent, collective-conscious being unshackled from our time and space.
But the spanner in the works here is Laplace's Box, the original Charter of the Universal Century, with an extra article that the replica in Dakar deliberately excludes - a provision that, should a new, space-adapted kind of human come into being, their inclusion in the government is to be a priority. It's stated in-fiction that it couldn't possibly have applied to Zeon's specific political-spiritual ideal of the Newtype, and that it was more included as hope for the future than anything, but... despite intentions, it just falls flat, coming off as a bit of an overstuffing of Newtype stuff in a work already deeply concerned with them, a final push to say that the future was entrusted to the space magic psychics instead of to everyone.
I don't think it would've taken much tweaking to make it feel better - just shift it such that it points at better inclusion for everyone living in space, mark it a little more as a sign of an egalitarian hope that has long since deserted the Federation, and it still doesn't come up to much but folks hating them more for it. Even if it's kind of a minor point in the grand scheme of the thing, it just... sticks in our craw that X did a similar thing and got the ideas it believes across better.
4. Living for the future: Unicorn, Turn A, and breaking the cycle.
I don't think Unicorn offers enough future to inherit to pull it off like Turn A does.
That's not to disparage Unicorn doing its thing too much. I respect the conditions of its existence meaning it cannot result in much and what it then takes away from that, but we'll get to that elsewhere. The point is that, because it does such a good job cleaning itself up, there's not a lot of room for the next generation to make their world a measurably better, different one, outside of the bit they successfully manage (whose scope lives firmly within the walls of Unicorn itself, or else was already a condition fulfilled by the pre-Unicorn UC).
As the mythological end-times of Gundam as a whole, however, Turn A isn't shouldering that burden of needing to wrap everything that happens within it so it doesn't crash into the following pre-existing works. When the god-machines that are the Turn A and Turn X seal themselves away within the cocoon along with walking-embodiment-of-warfare Gym it really, genuinely feels like it symbolizes a change - the eternal cycle of conflict fueled by the Mobile Suit, of the Gundam, is well and truly over, and the new world will move on and be better. Mankind has officially left the Dark History behind.
In Unicorn, though it never happens within the time these pages occupy, the rainbow Unicorn - or at the least, the collective spiritual existence manifested into it from Banagher's temporary transcendence - understands the Unicorn and its sister unit, too, are to be bodily sealed away soon, and accepts this, for mankind will find a different way into the future for themselves. It too allowing itself to be reduced back into stinky little Banagher and sealed away rings as symbolic of hope for humanity's future, faith in its ability to pull itself together, but that change is going to take a long time coming - the most it can do is have the last Zabi and those closest to her join her colony-ship and exit the setting stage right to do its own thing if it wants, removing some of the last coals keeping the fires of specifically the Earth Sphere neo-Zeon movements burning (especially with Monaghan likely being taken away from creating new Fake Chars) before the autonomous Side 3 republic's dissolution in the year 0100 and preventing the paranoid factions of the Federation established within Unicorn from acting on their purging instincts any further, while setting up increasing non-Zeon anti-Federation sentiment followed up on in the future.
It's something, but we know nothing much changes and thus it doesn't quite land as something enough, y'know.
I am, again, glad it tries. I do think it is, at least, a nice capstone to what has at this point been a long-since-artificially extended stretch of powers-that-be replaying the One Year War's implications over and over again. It does a final pass to tie up that dangling thread, but - knowing where it's definitely drawing from - you can't help but feel it ultimately rings a little hollow.
5. Sins of the father: Unicorn itself and familial responsibility.
If there's one thing Unicorn is incredibly pointedly About that its sisters aren't, it's this.
Being drawn into the battles your family fights and having to decide what you do about it runs deep through Unicorn. Banagher is drawn to fulfill his absent father's dying wish, and through his trials and tribulations he eventually decides that he will - not out of obligation to Cardeas and the Vist family, but because he decides for himself it's the right and responsible thing to do. Riddhe, his mind and soul slowly eaten at by his father's expectations of him and the burden of his lineage to keep the Box closed, is eventually devoured by that burden and is spiritually reborn when he finally decides to shed it and follow his heart alone. Marida is taken in as a surrogate daughter by Zinnerman, and in him and what he fights for she finds the strength to become a person of her own, and she trusts in his goals fully enough to take them on of her own will even when he doesn't want it. Audrey - Mineva Lao Zabi - is the last of her bloodline, and as experienced as she's grown playing the political game she wants nothing more than to escape from the legacy of bloodshed and supremacy that carries.
It does a lot of exploring in this space outside of them directly, too - with Alberto and Martha and Cardeas's shadow, and with Ronan and his own binding to the Marcenas curse, sure, but also with Mahdi's pushing of the rest of the Garveys during the battle of Dakar and (if you squint at the details) with Monaghan's going against his father's spot as leading the post-armistice Republic of Zeon and building the Sleeves under his nose.
All together, I think it ultimately ends up concluding that, as important as family matters may be, the only way you won't get swallowed by them is by choosing to either separate yourself from them or take them on of your own free will, not just because it's what you have to do as family. Even the characters that are offed after finally deciding for themselves how they want to handle their family's burden - Loni and, later, Marida - are able to express, after their death, that which is needed to fulfill these beliefs of theirs.
I... guess I wanted to get this out there because... well, I may be running around in the wrong circles here, of course, but I don't think I've incidentally passed by anyone discussing this much in my own net-surfing. Honestly, I've seen a lot of folks say that Unicorn isn't really about much of anything, which... well, now that we've read it, just feels more dismissive than it already did. Which, I guess, leads into our next section nicely.
Section 3. Unicorn and the talk around it.
I see a lot of people say things about Unicorn that bug me. I wanna get that off my chest.
6. Nothing changes, and that's okay.
I've been getting at this for a while at this point, but one of the big things hanging over Unicorn is that nothing really changes because of it - and, more importantly, that nothing can change from an event this tightly, narrowly focused. In the end, the point of the whole Box hunt was that - even if it does nothing major - people deserve to know the truth of this history of bloodshed, and to not have to have their lives ensnared by one more secret power struggle they don't know about. That's fine. It neatly cleans itself up, gives the world a reason to forget about Newtypes and the Psycho-frame, and walks away.
That's also... text. That is, like, textually true in the work here. I don't know how clear it's made in the OVA, but I kind of have to imagine that either they don't make it anywhere near as clear that Unicorn doesn't and can't change how the rest of the UC happens, or a lot of people watching it had their brains just glaze over that fact.
Something I see happen a lot in discussions of Gundam Unicorn is folks on *both sides* missing this pretty clear point - folks who love Unicorn decrying things not changing in the wake of everything that happened within it and pitching how everything could still be shaken up by it, and folks who loathe it decrying Unicorn for trying to change things too much, for potentially attempting to throw off the rest of the UC to come. It feels so surreal to see people slinging so much mud over the fate of the late UC when Unicorn was specifically designed to not get in its way.
A relevant sentiment I've seen slung around is that the novel was considered non-canon even prior to the OVA, which... I don't know where that comes from, but it feels like an incredibly silly statement in a setting this full of side stories playing fast and loose with the facts to tell better stories and inform future works' iterations of their subjects and concepts, and especially silly with one this committed to taking many of the loose ends established across the whole thing and tying them together. It's silly either way to go It's DEFINITELY Canon or It's DEFINITELY Not Canon, but it does slot very nicely into the gap it was written to fill and this seems like it dismisses that.
7. Powerscaling the wrong guy.
I think the problem with people and powerscaling the Unicorn is most of them haven't realized that, at a certain point, that's not the Unicorn doing it anymore.
Don't get me wrong - the Unicorn is a greatly capable machine. There's a lot about it I think you really can fairly attribute to it - the beam magnum and the I-Field projecting shield, the NT-D and IAS, even the psycho-frame's unnatural durabiity and strength and reactivity when supplied with the necessary intent. But then I see a lot of folks dragging "fully awakened Unicorn" into "strongest MS" discussions, given the kind of shit it's said to be capable of both inside the fiction it appears in and outside with Fukui bouncing around wild things it could do, and I just... I guess maybe it's easy to miss outside the novel, but the Unicorn is (past the point where it swallows Banagher) essentially another being entirely simply manifesting its will (and, to a less strong extent, the will of humanity) through the medium of the psycho-frame, a transcendent collective-conscious being grown far beyond Banagher and the Unicorn's selves simply happening to be born into the body of the Unicorn through the circumstances, the kind of being Fukui addresses in his contemplations as a "true Newtype".
It can manifest actual miracles doing this, but that's... not the Unicorn as a machine being capable of it, really. Given the nature of the frame and whatever inhabits it for that brief time, I genuinely think you could reasonably do the same things with a big slab of frame and a cockpit so long as you had the context within which the transcendence is made possible. You're trying to credit the miracles that are in-spec for the being happening to be living out of its bones to the Unicorn itself, which... is a different guy. You are powerscaling a different guy and I think that's silly when you have other machines for whom impossibilities are part of the machine itself.
8. Miscellaneous bugbears.
This is where I rattle off a bunch of little things that bug me to see folks do I assume are probably from the OVA-only experience.
A lot of characters get a lot of flak I don't think they deserve, at least in the proportion folks give it to them. Riddhe especially gets the short end of the stick, he's just kind of a loser swallowed by expectations he never liked but felt obligated to.
Everyone keeps mapping the Sleeves to Frontal, which... I mean, I get, but it's pretty obvious he's just Monaghan's puppet in the novel.
Banagher's not some kind of super-Newtype from the whole dad making him train his pilot instincts as a toddler thing, he just happens to be in the right places at the right times surrounded by the right people to encourage the Unicorn to react to him and to help him get a better handle of what he can do.
I know the OVA merges Dakar and Torrington, and skips the entire stop at L1, but... man, I think that sucks.
... Uh, I dunno. I think that's it.
Afterword
... If you made it through all this, uh... thanks for letting us ramble. We had to exorcise our brain itching somehow, and I... hope you found all this enlightening or informative or at least enjoyable to see. We love thinking and talking about media, but I feel like it's rare for us to get quite this activated on thinking and talking about a work with others, and if nothing else... I'm genuinely glad Unicorn drew enough dots between stuff we already experience or have been wanting to experience and awoke those impulses. It's fulfilling and enriching to do, and it broadens our pools just a little more to do.