Neutral, Until Neutrality Stops Being an Option
Cagalli's Home, Kira's Adopted Country
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED
機動戦士ガンダムSEED
Action
Mecha
Sci-Fi
Drama
Details & Synopsis
The Cosmic Era. Humanity has divided itself along a new axis: Naturals, humans born without modification, and Coordinators, humans whose genetic potential was engineered before birth. The technology exists. The resentment it produced exists in equal measure. The war was always coming.
It arrives on February 14th. The Bloody Valentine, a nuclear strike on the Coordinator colony Junius Seven by Natural forces. Three hundred thousand dead. The conflict that follows is what the series inherits.
Produced by Sunrise and directed by Mitsuo Fukuda, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED aired on MBS from 2002 to 2003. Fifty episodes set in an alternate Gundam timeline, not the Universal Century, not After Colony, something new, built to bring a generation of viewers to the franchise who had either missed Gundam Wing on Toonami or been too young to catch it. It worked. SEED was one of the most downloaded anime of 2002 and 2003. The fansub community turned it around fast because the demand was there and the official release was not.
Kira Yamato is a Coordinator who has been living among Naturals, comfortable in the gap, until the war finds him and he ends up in the cockpit of the Strike Gundam by necessity rather than choice. His childhood friend Athrun Zala is on the ZAFT side, flying for the people Kira is now fighting against. The series is smart enough to make both of them right and both of them wrong simultaneously, and patient enough to let that contradiction sit.
The Freedom Gundam. Lacus Clyne. The moment the show stops hedging about what it is and commits. These are the things people remember.
A sequel series, Gundam SEED Destiny, followed in 2004. Its reputation is complicated. SEED's is not. Fifty episodes of the best entry point the Gundam franchise has produced since Wing.
It arrives on February 14th. The Bloody Valentine, a nuclear strike on the Coordinator colony Junius Seven by Natural forces. Three hundred thousand dead. The conflict that follows is what the series inherits.
Produced by Sunrise and directed by Mitsuo Fukuda, Mobile Suit Gundam SEED aired on MBS from 2002 to 2003. Fifty episodes set in an alternate Gundam timeline, not the Universal Century, not After Colony, something new, built to bring a generation of viewers to the franchise who had either missed Gundam Wing on Toonami or been too young to catch it. It worked. SEED was one of the most downloaded anime of 2002 and 2003. The fansub community turned it around fast because the demand was there and the official release was not.
Kira Yamato is a Coordinator who has been living among Naturals, comfortable in the gap, until the war finds him and he ends up in the cockpit of the Strike Gundam by necessity rather than choice. His childhood friend Athrun Zala is on the ZAFT side, flying for the people Kira is now fighting against. The series is smart enough to make both of them right and both of them wrong simultaneously, and patient enough to let that contradiction sit.
The Freedom Gundam. Lacus Clyne. The moment the show stops hedging about what it is and commits. These are the things people remember.
A sequel series, Gundam SEED Destiny, followed in 2004. Its reputation is complicated. SEED's is not. Fifty episodes of the best entry point the Gundam franchise has produced since Wing.
Alt Title
機動戦士ガンダムSEED
Studio
Sunrise
Network
MBS / TBS
Aired
2002 - 2003
Episodes
50
Genre
Action, Mecha, Sci-Fi, Drama
Status
Completed
Orb Union
A Nation Built Around Refusing to Pick a Side
The Founding Philosophy
Orb's entire national identity is built on a single doctrine, articulated by its Chief Representative Uzumi Nara Athha: do not invade other countries, do not allow other countries to invade, and do not intervene in other nations' disputes. In a war built entirely around forcing everyone to pick Coordinator or Natural, Orb is the one place trying to refuse the question altogether.
Uzumi Nara Athha
SPOILER!Orb's leader and Cagalli's adoptive father, a man whose entire political career is built on keeping Orb out of a war neither side will let it stay out of forever. His decision to stay behind and destroy Orb's critical facilities rather than let them fall into Earth Alliance hands is the doctrine he spent his life preaching, taken to its final, literal conclusion.
Cagalli's Real Identity
SPOILER!Spoiler: family reveal
Cagalli isn't just Orb's princess, she's Kira Yamato's biological twin sister, separated from him in infancy and raised by Uzumi specifically to keep both children safe from Blue Cosmos. Neither sibling knows this for most of the war. Uzumi tells Cagalli the truth in the same conversation where he tells her he's staying behind to die, which is exactly the kind of gut-punch timing this show specializes in.
When Neutrality Fails
Orb's doctrine works right up until the Earth Alliance decides it doesn't care whether Orb wants a side or not. See the Battle of Orb entry on the Combat Ledger, this page explains why that battle happens and what it costs the country's entire political identity, not just its territory.
