People are going to be divided on this gundam entry. To say it's rushed or that it's story beats are undeserved isn't wrong per se, but it isn't exactly right either- it's just paying off things from 40 years (and 100+ episodes) ago, just not things that are introduced or explained within this series. And that's a shame- with more episodes that could entirely have been avoided and this show made more self-contained, but from what I read so far in interviews I guess that wasn't the show Tsurumaki and Studio Khara had in mind when making it.
See, Tsurumaki is making a show that's almost entirely coasting on subtext and vibes, but unlike FLCL you need to have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of a fictional history that rivals the complexity of the real world, and I'm not sure that works at all- when something surprising or unexpected happened in FLCL you, as the audience, just kinda rolled with it, whereas here you kinda need to place everything either in a (fictional) socio-economic political context, OR you need to parse what the characters represents based on their archetype established in a series of 40 year old Japanese cartoons. Because at the end of the day, going "oh, there's a metatextual reason why I've written my main character to just be yanked around by events beyond her ken or understanding" doesn't exactly change the fact that following your main character getting yanked around isn't exactly compelling storytelling in-and-of itself. And that level of metatextual-ness is why I'm having a hard time evaluating GQuuuuuuX- as the target audience a lot of this show works for me because I can follow the same storytelling shortcuts Tsurumaki is taking (at least on some level), but I keep wondering if absent that preexisting context I would feel the same. I suspect not.
(Although, if I do have one complaint it is that the ending is entirely too hetero for my liking. WHERE'S MY SLOPPY CHARxCHALLIA MAKE OUT SESH KHARA! YOU HAD ONE JOB!)
What I can say with certainty, is that this show is a fitting love-letter to the Universal Century and Tomino's work in general, and a way for a character whose legacy, whose "curse of Gundam" was to be eternally fridged for the character development of the two male leads, to finally regain her agency and her dignity.
And in that, I can say that I'm more than a little moved.
Yeah the "Newtype" thing has always rubbed off (to me at least) as Imperial "Japanese master race" shit, so it's kind of jarring seeing it played straight here, devoid of allegory or irony. The original series left enough room for us to be unsure about whether newtypes are real or just Zeon eugenics.
Another W for After War Gundam X tbh
The original term came from Adorno, but there in theory it's just a boring term for people subject to a post-mass communications era, and a theoretical exploration of the kind of social changes that can be expected to come about from that. The important idea that sorta carries over is of a kind of ego-less "New Type" of human being capable of new forms of social relations.
Tomino using Newtype ideology in the original show was him using a flashy sci-fi allegory to depict historical materialism- everyone who goes to space will eventually become a Newtype, because human material conditions have changed and that in turn forces humans to adapt, but then the Zabi family takes that idea and debases it for their own political ends. "Everyone" instead becomes "the chosen few", and fascism is reborn.
A Newtype's superpower isn't in being ubermensch, but in having an increased capacity for understanding and empathy. The idea is that they're the harbingers of a Communist future, where people are better able to understand and work together towards common goals, and the recurring tragedy of U.C. Gundam is that that future keeps being thwarted by Newtypes being held back by the ideologies of the Oldtypes, whether that's the Earth Federations capitalist liberalism or Zeon's fascism.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: