The Witch from Mercury is the My Hero Academia of Gundam
Both cheery and dark, The Witch from Mercury is an example of the duality of Gundam.
Don’t let the title of this review fool you – Gundam fans have spent decades waiting for a new and interesting fresh take on the franchise that will help push the good name of Gundam to the masses.
Within anime fandoms, Gundam exists in a cautious and often overlooked bubble; the 100ft of distance that weebs give the community isn’t malicious, instead it’s merely a reverential and respectful separation that is comparable to the separation of Star Trek fans among the western sci-fi fan community.
“Oh, that’s for boomers.”
Gundam is seen seen as being complicated and a little up its own ass, it relies a lot on its own lore and it’s the anime that your dad probably watched when he was a teenager.
In reality all of these things are true and also untrue – Gundam is the Schrödinger's cat of the anime world, existing in a limbo state that is both known and unknown, where it will dually remain in your mind until you finally crack open the box and peer inside. Once you do the entirety of the history of the Universal Century will flash before your eyes, revealing a blustering set of sequences that involve space colonization, national sovereignty, deadly technology and the eventual evolution of humanity.
While all of this may seem daunting, truth be told once you master the basics of Gundam you adjust your perception of the franchise and you begin to understand that every series can be summed up in the most basic fashion: some dorky teenagers, usually with some kind of father issue, jump into the cockpit of a Mobile Suit Gundam and discover they can save the day from an evil enemy attack.
Rinse, wash, dry and repeat for the next 40 years. It’s the Colonel’s 11 herbs and spices of anime; sure we’ve seen it before, but why change the formula when the product is so finger lickin’ good?
This is why The Witch from Mercury is such a revelation for the Gundam fandom, because it seems to have actually succeeded where classic series like Gundam Seed and Gundam 00 faltered. Of course, these series never failed in a technical sense - both of these series are incredibly popular among the fandom and both were financially profitable. Instead, they failed to capture the audience they were hoping for in a space where a classic mecha megalith series like Code Geass succeeded.
Code Geass was more than a mecha combat show, it was story of revenge, we actively cheered for a main character that acted more like an antagonist than a hero and that was a little weird. Lelouch was a psychopath, but our emotional investment in his story was worth far more than the cool robot designs and the constant action. In a way, when he double crossed his own friends and used them as stepping stones to power, just like naughty little bitches, we actually liked it.
Gundam however spent a long time trying to find that balance between teen drama and appeasing the warlike nature of the universe it existed in. Even a classic series like Zeta Gundam felt more like watching child soldiers fight each other to the death than the usual commercialized action romps with magic girls that has been the template of anime for decades. While Gundam’s combat and complicated technology has always been awesome, there is no doubt that over time each series started to feel a little glum and depressing.
That isn’t to say that The Witch from Mercury has thrown all of those core Gundam principles out of the window, absolutely not: it has beautiful, I mean absolutely beautiful combat animation, some bone-chillingly opulent Mobile Suit designs and most importantly our main hero is more than just a cookie cutter archetype of the reluctant teen turned savior.
As we follow our protagonist Suletta Mercury around the Asticassia School of Technology, each episode explores her ongoing struggle to make friends, her desire to be accepted into an order of nobility she feels she needs to appease and she is given the opporunity showcase her skills behind the wheel of Aerial, her super advanced Gundam frame.
You see the Asticassia School of Technology is more than just a normal high school (of course it is, this is an anime series released in 2022), it’s an academic institute run by one of this universe’s biggest megacorporations. It’s Hogwarts for gifted children, although instead of Expecto Patronus-ing their way to the top of the school’s pecking order, the students instead battle it out in lavish Mobile Suit duels as a way of establishing prestige and prominence.
Suletta, drawn into a duel on her first day of school, upsets the balance and fragile ecosystem of the school by challenging Asticassia’s top pilot to combat. From here her entire school life begins to unravel and her challenge to stay decent and moral in a world filled with self serving egotists becomes exceedingly more difficult.
Set in its own Gundam universe, The Witch from Mercury doesn’t require any previous buy-in from any of the other series of Gundam that came before it - an issue that has affected most modern Gundam adventures that are set in the Universal Century. Sunrise’s latest movie adaption, Hathaway (an incredibly awesome entry in the series), is probably a confusing maelstrom of political ideology and established character histories for anyone flicking through Netflix and just “giving it a go because it looks cool”.
Suletta is a great protagonist and her friends, albeit feeling like templates lifted directly from established anime canon instead of new interesting IP, make a great vehicle to explore the new universe on display. It’s a starkly different solar system to what we are used to in previous outings, in this universe the development and production of Gundam’s are prohibited, with the GUND-ARM frame (clever) existing as a piloting system that connects directly with the user via the brain and nervous system. While we have seen this kind of thing before in a series like Iron Blooded Orphans, it’s still incredibly interesting to see the moral implications of this decision play out in a public forum and the concept of the Gundam being cast as an immoral weapon of destruction.
In all, The Witch from Mercury is a great starting place for new Gundam fans, the action on display is first class and while Suletta feels like an overly used anime stereotype, the writers have done a great job making her a shining beacon of goodness in what is usually a cold and warlike universe.
The Tokyo 5 gives this series a 7 out of 10.
~ Andrew Archer