Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury – Ep. 1

And so begins The Witch from Mercury, for real this time.

It’ll probably take a while before the puzzle pieces neatly line up but I’m curious as to how the show connects to its prologue. Right now, it looks like we’ve skipped time by a little over a decade. The protagonist of Witch from Mercury is Suletta Mercury (Kana Ichinose), a teen girl from…Mercury (I can’t tell if the last name is intentional or straight up lazy). While not explicitly confirmed, Suletta does resemble Eri if she was in her mid to late teens and the two do share the same voice actor. Delling makes a reappearance in the series premiere, though he looks much older now and he’s now in charge of a highly influential conglomerate known as the Benerit Group. He also has a daughter named Miorine (Lynn), who may or may not be the deuteragonist of the story and may or may not be a love interest for Suletta. More on that later.

Barring some technicalities, Suletta is the first female protagonist in a mainline Gundam (which had been running for 43 years at the time Witch from Mercury aired). I think that’s a neat development on principle but I must admit that I don’t champion stuff like this unless the character or work in question is actually good. Fortunately, Suletta makes a strong impression in this episode. Being a socially anxious person myself, I easily gravitated towards Suletta panicking and mumbling her way through almost every interaction she has with someone else. It’s also an interesting far cry from Eri. Eri was very talkative so I wonder what happened in the years between this episode and the prologue.

The story begins with Suletta transferring to the Asticassia School of Technology, an space-station based academy where students study and develop their own Mobile Suits. On her way to the school, she rescues an astronaut drifting in space, only to then meet a very angry Miorine who was trying to escape Asticassia for reasons elaborated later in the episode. Upon arriving on campus, Suletta witnesses a Mobile Suit duel won by Guel Jeturk (Yohei Azakami), Asticassia’s top student and the “Holder”/reigning champion of the duels. Apparently, students engage in duels to gain all sorts of stuff such as money, power, and even someone’s hand in marriage.

I want to say the school setting is unique for Gundam but I’m not super familiar with the franchise so I could very well be wrong here. Frankly, the whole duel element sounds really stupid to me. I mean, should any of these kids really be allowed to wager so much and fight so dangerously with another? It just seems like a flimsy excuse to have giant robots fighting in a school setting. Then again, I want to see giant robots fight and I don’t see a war brewing (for now) so maybe I should look the other way.

Apparently, Guel and Miorine are engaged because of a duel though their relationship is far from romantic. Miorine has no interest in Guel and Guel sees her as a trophy and gets violent when she disobeys him. The Jeturk family and their company, Jeturk Heavy Machinery, also values the engagement in terms of business as marrying Miorine would set Guel up as the future head of the Benerit Group. There are also a couple of scenes where Guel’s father Vim (Tetsuo Kanao) plots to assassinate Delling so that the engagement can’t be challenged by him. It sure would be really awkward if someone ruined it all…

Upon seeing Guel harass Miorine, Suletta stands up for the latter and gets challenged to a duel by the former. If Suletta loses, she has to leave the school. Funnily enough, it takes a while for Suletta to actually attend the duel as Miorine somehow commandeers her Mobile Suit, the Aerial, to fight Guel alone. Suletta eventually gets to the arena with help from a new friend, Nika Nanaura (Yume Miyamoto). It’s a bummer that Miorine standing for herself doesn’t go very well but the Aerial is Suletta’s Mobile Suit so this first fight ought to belong to her. The stupid Duel system aside, this fight is very entertaining. Part of it is seeing Guel get his comeuppance but it’s also cool seeing all of the Aerial’s abilities and weaponry…all of which reminds me an awful lot of a mech from the last episode.

So yeah, the Aerial is in fact a Gundam. If the familiar and iconic color scheme wasn’t a dead giveaway, some of the students overseeing the duel identify the Mobile Suit as a Gundam (it’s a pretty epic name drop, actually). I’m very curious what will happen to the Aerial from here on out because the Gundam technology was banned during the prologue. Is the Aerial going to spark a huge debate among the faculty and students? Or will it be kept under wraps and part of the story is people investigating the matter?

Oddly enough, the Aerial being a Gundam might not be the first thing that catches your attention at the end of the episode. Apparently, being engaged to Miorine is the prize for anyone who is currently the Holder. Since Suletta just beat Guel, she is now the Holder and that also makes her Miorine’s new groom. You of course have Suletta pointing out that she and Miorine are both women, though this doesn’t bother Miorine in the slightest as same-sex relationships are apparently very common out in space. So not only is Suletta the first mainline female Gundam protagonist, she’s also the first one who is LGBTQ. There’ll likely be a lot to talk about this relationship during these reviews, particularly with a certain controversy that I am aware happened after the show aired, but I’ll save those for some other time. For now, I’ll just chuckle at Suletta’s confusion over the situation (and also, her feelings towards Miorine).

ED: “Shukufuku” by YOASOBI

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Watch Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury on Crunchyroll