30-Day Gundam Challenge Day 16 - Least favorite character
Right away, one character sprung to mind - Neo Roanoake, for reasons that will be obvious to anyone that has read my earlier “worst series” post about Gundam Seed Destiny.
However, I feel I’ve talked about that a lot, so the next three characters who spring to mind are Shinn Asuka, Aina Sahalin and Quess Paraya.
It isn’t so much the character they have, or their particular traits - it’s more their role in their respective shows and how they’re underdeveloped.
I actually really like elements of their characters. I think Shinn had a great start, Quess’s presence in CCA offered a chaotic element that could’ve been fun, and the idea of the “star-crossed lovers” in 08th MS (of which Aina is one of those lovers) is great on paper (romance on the battlefield is a great source of drama).
However, Quess suffers because CCA was, being a movie, quite brief, and I don’t think they have quite long enough to develop her character. She can be annoying - which is fine, she’s meant to be a petulant teenager - but over time, that could’ve been developed into something really cool. CCA just didn’t have the run-time to do that with anything but a protagonist.
Aina has similar problems. I don’t dislike the idea of her, and she has some great moments in the show, but I feel the love-story between her and Shiro feels forced. I think, personally, that she needed to both have a more developed romance story and she needed to do more of her own volition, giving her more of an “inner life”. However, as 08th MS Team was focused on the actual team, I suspect Aina got squeezed out during the writing process.
Shinn Asuka’s problems were more systemic; I believe that the creators of SEED Destiny genuinely “lost faith” in the character mid-way through the show, as a contemporary rerun of SEED on TV was extremely popular, and Kira, Lacus and Athrun shot back up to the top of the NewType “favourite character” chart in Japan, which influenced them to make changes to the plot of the show during production. They consciously sidelined him and brought Kira back to main character status, which always felt like a missed opportunity.
Personally I’ve always felt that Gundam has some wonderful characters, from the badass Karen Joshua…
… to characters like Relena, who like Quess, started off as something of a spoiled brat but developed over a long arc into a very interesting character:
… or Sayla Mass, a character who just seems to be getting better and better as more of Gundam The Origin is made, showing us her character before she was the person we would later come to know in MS Gundam…
… and this serves to make characters like Shinn, Aina and Quess stand out a bit.
So in a sense, my least-favourite “character” is a character who has wasted potential, and three good examples, purely in my opinion, are Aina Sahalin, Shinn Asuka and Quess Paraya.