Review - Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury

Why a mecha anime is your must-watch show of the season.

May 30, 2023

Welcome to Tongzhi Tuesday, a series where I’ll be reviewing queer Asian and AAPI content in whatever form that may come in, whether it be movies, TV, music, or the occasional manhua. Subjects and tone will range from comical to serious, depending on my mood. Yes, this is a veiled excuse to talk about the things I like. Want to suggest something for me to review? Leave me a comment below or email me at lindaiyupro@gmail.com.

tongzhi (同志): lit. “same aspiration,” meant to denote “comrade” but has been adopted by the Mandarin-speaking LGBTQ+ community to mean “gay” or “queer”

If you have spoken to me in the past week, you’ll know that I have been unable to shut up about Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury, and that I have been attempting to proselytize everyone I know into watching this show. So here is my wider-scale plea, that even if you do not typically like or watch anime, you must catch this one, because it’s not just about lesbians in love trying to fight their way out of a web of corpo-political conspiracies laid down years before they were even born. It’s also a timely, incisive, and necessary critique of neo-colonialism, and how we are complicit in this system of oppression, even if we think so otherwise.

The Witch from Mercury’s lead screenwriter is Ōkouchi Ichirō, best known for writing Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, another mecha anime with a biting critique of class and power. He’s also penned two of the Revolutionary Girl Utena light novels, and the influence of these earlier works are apparent in the DNA of Mercury. Functionally, the show is also an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, pitting several factions against each other in a dizzying plot for revenge and power, and introducing a complex cast of characters with intersecting motivations. All that being said, no prior knowledge of these titles is necessary to starting the show. Mercury is a stand-alone installment with a premise unique to the Gundam series — these Gundams are a specific model of mobile suit that require a neural link, at great cost to the humans who pilot them. In the show’s prologue (or episode 0 on streaming), the Gundams are outlawed, and the research team who created them — mostly women — are branded “witches,” out of fear for the “cursed” technology that steals their pilots’ lives.

Twenty-one years after the Gundam ban, our teenage protagonist Suletta Mercury arrives at Asticassia School of Technology with her mobile suit, Aerial, to study piloting and engage in a blissful, carefree school life. Things won’t be so simple for her, though. Asticassia isn’t just any school; it’s founded and run by the Benerit Group, a conglomerate of three mobile suit manufacturers that sometimes compete against each other but are ultimately aligned in controlling the market in their favor. Disagreements between students are settled by dueling in mobile suits, and when Suletta wins a duel against a particularly pompous boy, she finds that she also won an engagement with the daughter of the Benerit Group’s president, Miorine Rembran. At first, it seems like the two girls have nothing in common. Suletta is naive, honest to a fault, and more importantly, a total outsider to Asticassia’s social strata, being the only student from the planet of Mercury (the others are “Earthians” and “Spacians”). By contrast, Miorine is cold and condescending to everyone around her. But she desires to be free from her father’s machinations, which have trapped her in this engagement-by-duel that she never asked for, so she decides to enlist Suletta’s help. Suletta will continue to win duels against the challengers for Miorine’s hand in marraige, and in return, Miorine aids Suletta in navigating the vicious and cutthroat environment of Asticassia.

This is my first real dive into a Gundam series, and I’m told that “war crimes and tragedy” are par for course in Gundam. Knowing this, I’m still impressed by Mercury’s very explicit condemnation of the real developed world’s exploitation of the Global South, especially of the military industrial complex, war profiteering, and resource exploitation. There are scenes of this show that are downright gruesome and horrifying, and that’s the point. The Witch from Mercury forces its many more-sheltered characters — and by extension, us, the viewers — to come face-to-face with the devastation and the human cost of war that many of us are privileged enough to avoid. Moreover, it’s not afraid to imply that we who live in the peace and comfort of the developed world are complicit in this violence, that our peace and comfort is possible because we allow the exploitation of others to continue. Even the characters who mean well, whom we’re meant to root for, make decisions that result in cruelty or, worse, death. I won’t spoil much, but I think one of the more clever tricks of Mercury is the way it stages the mobile suit dogfights in early episodes as battles of triumph, taking beats directly from the typical shounen anime playbook. The musical orchestration is thrilling, and the animation is breath-taking in its artistry. You, the viewer, become complicit in admiring the beauty of violence. As the episodes progress, the cost of this violence is finally revealed, and you, the viewer, start to feel sickened at the admiration you once held. You, like the teenaged characters, were tricked into thinking that the violence you watched was “cool,” or bloodless, or maybe even a necessary evil.

Given that The Witch from Mercury revolves around the Succession-like political drama between three corporations, I can't help but wonder if the narrative is a bit of a self-reflection on Gundam’s cultural impact. The impact that the series as a whole has had on Japanese pop culture and the landscape of mecha anime can’t be understated; even casuals will recognize the word “Gundam” as a metonym for “mecha.” But the original Mobile Suit Gundam series was not a success when originally aired — in fact, it was the commercialization of plastic model kits based on mecha from the show, known as “Gunpla,” that claimed Gundam’s place as a pop-culture mainstay. In other words, the transformation from a piece of cautionary media about war violence to a franchise that could be easily consumed by us gullible anime nerds was what saved Gundam from cancellation and obscurity. This is Gundam’s uneasy legacy, itself perhaps an allegory of how (to quote oft-quoted Mark Fisher via Disco Elysium) “capitalism subsumes all critique into itself.”

I had a moment of weakness myself when I made a cursory search for Aerial’s Gunpla model, and halfway through, I had a moment of self-reckoning: what am I doing? Mercury had made it clear to me that Aerial, despite the warm feelings we develop towards its pilot, is a weapon of violence. What does it mean to divorce that message from this product, made solely to capitalize on our desire to own physical bits and pieces from the intangible media we consume to escape from the everyday dread and violence of capitalism? It made me feel sick — again, complicit. But this is just part and parcel of Gundam’s own complicity. The Japanese government has, at various points since the first series exploded in popularity, expressed its desire to develop real-life Gundams. These intimations are often brushed off as a simple-minded ploy to appeal to younger voters, but to me it’s also a clear demonstration that technology (or even the idea of a new technology) in the hands of the powerful is almost always used to maintain their power. Anti-war messaging be damned, it’s the sheen of cool pop-culture robots that will recruit impressionable youth into supporting or joining the war machine. Capitalism gets to subsume all critique into itself, especially the critique of violence it uses to uphold itself, because violence is flashy. Violence is entertainment.

Whether this self-critique is purposeful or not, the violence of capitalism is the specter that haunts the narrative of Mercury. As a Twitter user

astutely pointed out, Asticassia was built by a corporate conglomerate, so runs on a corporation’s rules. Duels and even school assignments are never fair shakes; part of the required “work” includes having the resources to tilt results in your favor to begin with. The Earthian students, having been subject to exploitation and proxy wars back home, are forced to reprise their role as a permanent underclass at Asticassia. Throughout the show, they frequently complain of not having enough money to pay for the same caliber of equipment as the Spacians have, or being barely able to afford food. And all of the students, regardless of class or origin, are of course receiving their education in the expectation that they will one day sell their labor to the Benerit Group. When Mercury breaks apart the machinery of war, it also interrogates how the youth are primed into becoming its cogs. And it dares to ask: even if you become aware of all this, is there any hope of escaping the role that those in power have conscripted you into?

All this may seem too heavy to sit through — and it is. I won’t sugarcoat it, though there is respite from the doom and gloom with the sweet and touching scenes of Suletta forming genuine friendships with the other students. And though the series hasn’t yet finished airing at the time of writing, I do think the heart of Mercury lies with Suletta, Miorine, and their connection with each other. Even if the show doesn’t come with a neatly-wrapped happy ending (I did say the Gundam series was known for tragedy, after all), it’s ultimately their idealism that drives the narrative and that the show ideologically stands behind. Suletta and Miorine, as our deuteragonists, are easy to root for. They’ve each shown their willingness to step out of their comfort zones to help not only each other, but those less fortunate around them. On a larger scale, they both want to see an end to the suffering that plagues humanity. We’ll just have to see if Mercury lets them achieve their shared idealism, despite all of the obstacles they face.

Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.