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Potential mild spoilers, mostly for describing tone.

The first cour of Gundam: The Witch From Mercury is both a nice departure from and lockstep partner with the formula Sunrise has been polishing for so long.

Coming directly to this series from a marathon of Iron-Blooded Orphans, I was pretty conditioned to that level of dark grittiness. While the prologue certainly matches it, the early parts of the series instead wander through the more innocent school lives of our deuteragonists Suletta and Miorine, only giving glimpses into the darkness surrounding the isolated oasis of their school.

Without going into too much detail, taking the innocence of the young leads ... in their school lives and underscoring it with an admittely sometimes shallow brushstroke of political corruption, corporate espionage, and the brutality eagerly linking them together makes for an effective way to paint the world for viewers and allow the characters to gradually develop their relationships.

As the cour progresses though, the depths of that darkness and brutality become more and more apparent, eventually culminating in an excellent finale that actually made me write this review.

I can definitely see this show not being every Gundam fan's cup of tea, given its initial pacing and setting, but it's been a refreshing and enjoyable slow burn so far. I'm very much looking forward to the second cour, though I'm somewhat worried about how well they'll be able to explore everything they've set up in the amount of episodes remaining.


--Getting into spoiler territory--

Something worth addressing outside of the show directly, reading some of the posts on here really cements the duality of preliminary reviews to me. On one hand, it's good to know quickly if the airing show you're curious about is actually something you'd watch. On the other, popular preliminary reviews will sometimes overshadow newer, more complete ones, leaving complaints about plot elements, characters, etc. that are laughable to someone who finished the season to linger in the forefront of potential new viewers' minds.

Most of the complaints I've seen have revolved around the school setting and its mechanisms (i.e. the duels), the show somehow queerbaiting, or it being "woke" or "for children" (which actually made me laugh out loud). Almost all of those types of reviews are preliminary for a reason. Ignore them and watch the whole season, it's worth it.