Welp, if last episode was a basically an 80's Tomino episode of Mobile Suit Gundam, this episode is straight out of 90's Gainax... right down to the egregious fanservice. Bleh...
Also, I was joking about the problematic polycule with the Space Ghost of Char Aznable I didn't think they'd actually go for it lmao
speculation
If Machu and Nyaan are the Amuro and Char of this love triangle (Shuji being Lalah makes waaaay more sense in retrospect) then we can add toxic Yuri to the genre tags here, it's been kinda amazing seeing the ED make both more and less sense as the show goes on
(that visual storytelling through blocking tho)
A lot of people are going to draw comparisons to FLCL here for the first half, and yeah I see it. Teenage angst isn't what interests me in the show though, it's the political commentary: here's hoping Tsurumaki can connect the dots successfully to make the personal political (as I suspect is his intention), but also I get nervous when a character like Nyaan gets depicted in this way since I'm reflexively expecting The Swerve: I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt and wait to see how it plays out tho.
Next week: we assassinate a fascist!
I'm wondering if Machu and Nyaan are going to become pilots for both gundams and Shuji fucks off to Earth or something. Nyaan seems like she had better control of the gquux, so what if Machu tries piloting the red one and ends up better than Shuji?
IDK I'm pretty bad at gundam lore and like building models.