12 Days of Anime 2025, Day 4This was supposed to a fun little aside included in my Gquuuux writeup, but I went mad with power working on it, so here it stands on its own.I’ve seen Char’s Counterattack thrice now – it’s a fun little puzzle, similar to The Adolescence of Utena where the visuals are magnificent and the symbolism rushes by at a mile a minute and the story is completely inscrutable at face value. There’s layers to this shit, and engagement with the prior text is all but necessary for valid interpretation. I should know, since the first time I watched this movie, I had practically zero Universal Century experience, and couldn’t walk away with anything better than just “why the hell is Char doing all this, that’s stupid, come on man”. But catching it in a historic theater earlier this year, with the original Gundam and Zeta under my belt, my sinuses freaking the fuck out having just gotten a septoplasty two weeks prior, I fucking got it. Char’s Counterattack is about how the rot of the world drives individual relationships to their breaking points.Some political background: after watching 0079, you know that the rich have pushed most of humanity off of Earth and are hording its splendor and its spoils to themselves. The remainders are the rich, the powerful, and the truly impoverished who couldn’t even manage to leave in the first place. Then Zeta shows how even with this sharply reduced population, the Earth is still succumbing to massive environmental devastation due to the lifestyles of the Federation elite and the pollution from near-constant warfare. Char meant every word of his speech at Dakar, that humanity has proven itself thoroughly incapable of protecting its cradle, and that the only way out is via total abdication. It’s his last breath of hope and idealism. But since Zeta is about the death of the future, his dream is extinguished once it becomes clear that the Federation will never willingly relinquish their holdings or their lifestyles, and that these earth-space conflicts will continue on in perpetuity. There’s a scene where Amuro offhandedly tells Char that he needs to fight and die for his beliefs, and Char essentially responds with “okay ❤️ yay ❤️”, takes his words to heart, and spends most of CCA wondering why Amuro is so unhappy with him for trying to kill himself for his beliefs! Of course, Char has discarded every virtuous part of himself to get there, willingly taking on the fascist mantle of Neo Zeon as a last-ditch attempt to achieve these ends by force.So now you have the political background for why Char wants to drop a meteor on the Earth and render it fully uninhabitable. A lot of it is just ecofascist defeatism, but if you’re approaching CCA with only the material perspective, it will still feel far too extreme and out-of-character. You need to open your cuckoldry third eye.Everyone in Char’s Counterattack is getting cucked, both romantically and metaphysically, and all of it revolves around Char. Amuro is getting cucked out of retirement by Char’s doomsday camp antics. Char is getting cucked because Amuro won’t return his bids for attention or genuinely try to understand his beliefs, and just fights against him with grim determination. Nanai Miguel is getting cucked by Char because she’s stuck as his beard; this man is far more interested in Amuro than her. Quess Paraya is also getting cucked by Char, who is just stringing her along as he grooms her for battle the same way he groomed Lalah fourteen years prior. And Gyunei and Hathaway are both cucked in their romantic pursuits of Quess, who is hopelessly infatuated with Char. Everyone acts in their own interest and nobody gets what they want and everyone is mad about it forever.This is the essence of the fascism conveyed in the film! Sure, Char also assumes the role of Zeon MegaHitler and puts on the cape and epaulettes and everything, but the justifications behind that can be endlessly argued over in a way that the raw emotions simply cannot. Tomino is poking at cuckoldry, whether real or feared, being a driving force behind the right-wing politics of resentment, something which most of us only caught up to around 2015 or 2016. The emasculation of being told no, or getting shrugged off, and imagining getting to take revenge and launching a damn colony drop in response. Cuckoldry is painted as weakness and self-hatred, a pathetic surrender, and god forbid you partake in it willingly.If this whole thing smacks of gender, or if you can almost smell the Mishima, then you’re on the right track. Char is an all-time Repressor in this movie – it’s why he’s cut his hair short and taken up drinking and entered into a sexless and loveless relationship with a woman. It’s all for show, to try and mask his desperate, pathetic, doomed love of Amuro and what they could have been in a better world. Instead of a genuine romance with Nanai Miguel, we get a bunch of Char brushing her off and then eventually an alarmingly psychosexual scene where he buries his face in her breasts and asks for support because being a man is sososo hard and the sword of damocles hangs. And we haven’t even dug into his dynamic with little orphan Quess.“They say Char Aznable is a lolicon” is a line that floors me anew every time. The worst thing is that he’s genuinely not! His wretchedness would be so much more narratively simple if he was. But no, he has a pattern of grooming young girls (and Kamille…) and sending them to their deaths in combat. He is weaponizing newtypes to an end, just like everyone else does with newtypes. But what is Char’s end here? Maybe in Zeta it was a dream of a better future, but that’s long gone by now. In CCA he’s just taking Quess under his wing so she can be a disposable element in his self-imposed mission. This man sees no future. He just wants one last time with his ex. People have been debating the politics of this movie for nearly forty years because they refuse to acknowledge the cuckolding angle that consumes the whole thing. They want it to be just ideology and scheming, for Char to be a rational actor operating on principled convictions. That’s what he says he’s doing, but he is being dishonest to himself, and he knows it. Self-hatred runs through CCA, and it outright consumes the movie in its last act.Char’s infamous last words are every one of his psychosexual impulses laid bare. They’re also fully foreshadowed earlier in the movie during that Nanai scene. Gay men often have mommy issues, you know. You cannot treat this man as a well-reasoned idealogue, nor can you dismiss him as insane. He is a Char.image that came to me in a visionUltimately, the meteor is destroyed, the apocalypse is forestalled, and most of our main cast is dead as a result. None of the material circumstances that led to this crisis have been resolved. All that’s been bought is a few years of peace. Everyone will repeat these same mistakes again and again in the Hundred Year’s War that is the Universal Century. It’s all very, very Disco. “TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE ONLY IN THE NEXT WORLD — FOR NEW TYPES. IT IS TOO LATE FOR US. WREAK HAVOC ON THE EARTH SPHERE.”And that’s why Beyond the Time playing during the credits is such a sick joke.“You can change your future” – history will repeat.“You can change your destiny” – the die is cast.“We can share the happiness” – only in death.Suffice it to say that GQuuuuuux did not earn that needle drop.
Dec 17, 2025 • Subscribe
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