What is the Best Entry Point to ‘Gundam’ Brought to You by ‘The Sorcery of Nymph Circe’

Five years ago, Netflix announced that they had acquired the rights to the anime adaptation of the Hathaway’s Flash novels in the form of an animated trilogy. Given that the Netflix catalog does not include the original Mobile Suit Gundam series, they released a five-minute primer that did a reasonably good job of explaining the complex sociopolitical dynamics that are inherent within the Gundam universe.

It, however, does not fully convey the totality of the complexities surrounding the Universal Century, something that you’d need to watch Mobile Suit Gundam (43 episodes), Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (50 episodes), Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ (47 episodes and a 2-part OVA), and Char’s Counterattack (a movie, and the most direct prologue to the series) to fully understand. If that sounds exhausting to think about, take some comfort in the fact that I have not watched all of these episodes. My base understanding of the Amuro Ray and Char dynamic comes from a vague memory of scattered episodes on Toonami and Adult Swim and a lot of deep dives into Wikipedia. I fell in love with the franchise with the least Gundam of all Gundam shows: Mobile Fighter G Gundam, which in fairness is still very Gundam coded. It is a story about humans resolving political conflicts via proxy in individual combat as the young soldiers are forced into psychologically distressing situations and have to wrestle with their own personal feelings and attractions to the …