The point of the early battles in 00 is the same as in the early battles in Wing and the early battles in CG. Namely to establish what badasses the heroes and their mechs are. So that when they start having trouble later on it helps to establish how badass their opposition is. They're not supposed to exhibit dramatic reversals.
Well, I know that is the point. However, there are different ways they could have handled those battles so that they would be a little more interesting. You need dramatic turns of events, unexpected outcomes (or the illusion of such), and the like in order to make the day-to day battles of any series interesting, regardless of the narrative purpose of any battle. So far, the battles have served their purpose, but they have not quite been as interesting as they should be, for all kinds of reasons.
But relevant to my point. That the mech isn't as important as the character who's flying it. The reason why the Barzams always got creamed was that no named characters were flying them, just nameless grunts. The reason why Zechs was able to take down Hero in the wing was to establish how bad ass he was.
Then you are arguing something I agree with completely, that is mostly something assumed in all of the arguments I have been making. Yes, pilot matters a lot, and in Wing it does so more than in many other series, actually. However, that is unrelated to what I thought we were discussing.
Anyways, this entire thread of discussion has been about what I considered to be the least important of my complaints about the series so far, precisely because I know that it will improve given a bit more time. My other complaints, about the quality of dialog, narration, and other such things, were much more important to me.
I don't understand how you can say there's no resemblence between the last story arc in Wing and CCA. It seems almost as blatant and clear to me as that Terry Brooks ripped off LotR for "The Sword of Shanarra".
Well, ignoring the LotR/Shanarra comparison (it has been far too long since I read Shanarra for me to even comment), I will say that you probably misinterpreting what I said. I never said that there was no resemblance between the two. Of course there is, they both feature someone trying to drop a gigantic structure onto the Earth, a battle between the lead rival figures, and countless other similarities. However, my argument was that these similarities were not enough to call Gundam Wing a "retread of UC Gundam", because they differ so much on so many other fundamental points that it places the similarities in a totally different context and the similarity is more a nod to what came before than full emulation.
I mean, you can make many similarities across the board, such as comparing Marimeia Barton to Minerva Zabi, but that is totally ignoring the countless differences. I mean, Treize Kushrenada, Lucrezia Noin, Lady Une, and most of the actual Gundam Pilots, and all of the Gundam engineers have no counterpart in UC Gundam at all, and there are no easy equivalents between Gundam Wing and UC characters like Paptimus Scirocco and Haman Karn. The stories being told rely heavily on these characters, and they simply don't transfer at all. Beyond that, the very structure of the stories, and the themes and ideas of the stories being told, differ completely between Gundam Wing and UC Gundam in a way they don't between individual UC series. Even the nature of the Gundams as distinctly invincible mechs that can only be matched by other Gundams is completley foreign to UC Gundam series, and the vital role of the Mobile Dolls to Wing is equally alien to the UC timeline.
You mean there's no similarity to how the Feds were the good guys in MSG and the bad guys in Zeta?
The Titans were the villains of Zeta, and they were distinctly kept separate from the general Earth Forces in the same way that OZ was distinct from the Earth Alliance in Wing. Besides, OZ switches from being the bad guys to being the good guys (which is a gross simplification), and even if you include the Titans as part of the earth forces they go from being the good guys to being the bad guys, the opposite direction. This is totally ignoring the complexities of Zeon, the AEUG (which is comprised of both earth forces and former Zeon soldiers), Neo Zeon, and the like as well... It doesn't easily compare.
Or how Char went from the villian to the hero, just like Zechs did?
Char goes from villain, to villain who fights other villains, to heroic mentor, to something (I never saw ZZ), to ultimate villain. Zechs pretty clearly sticks in the "honorable enemy of the main hero" role from the beginning to the end of Gundam Wing. The forces he fights for change from time to time, but his actual role is constant (and he never is the heroic mentor like Char/Quattro was to Camille).
Or how he then decided that humanity needed to be destroyed and tried to drop a large object on the earth to cause a nuclear winter, just like Char did and then his plan was stopped by a suicidal last minute heroic stand by the main character? Just like Amuro did?
Admittedly Heero did get to survive.
The survival thing is important (both Zechs and Heero survive that one, unlike Char and Amuro who both die, and this is an incredibly important detail for story theme and character development), but equally important is the different motivations for that battle and the actual mentality both both characters brought into the battle. Even more important is the way Gundam Wing and Char's Counterattack portray the battle itself differently. The similarity is superficial, but the differences are at the core of the different series themes and ideals.
Actually, now that I look at what I just quoted a little more carefully... Char decided that humankind needed to be destroyed (at least on earth, in some kind of twisted eco-terrorism plot gone insane), but Zechs was not. Zechs intended to be defeated, and his whole plan was based on trying to teach a lesson to mankind in order to prevent future war. They are very different plots, rooted in different stories. If nothing else, Char had no faith in mankind, while Zechs had at least some. further, only Amuro was suicidal, unless you count Heero yelling "I will survive!" during his final shot suicidal... The very point of that was that Heero finally got
past the suicidal tendencies he suffered through the entire first part of the series.
Also, the simple fact that UC Gundam is built around the story of Newtypes and the evolution of mankind, while Gundam Wing pretty much ignores that entire line of thought, is more than enough to say that they are very different.
