Gundam Wing

Now I will be asian and talk about anime :P Gundam Wing would be about the 3rd anime I had ever watched, and also the reason why I also started listening to music... I think it was grade 8 or something... 2003... was when it was first released in australia on cartoon network. Also the same time Linkin Park first came out big time with their Hybrid Theory album. Invariably, Linkin Park's song Crawling was used for the trailer for the anime. I liked the music (which would explain why I have all their albums :P) and was intrigued by the sci-fi setting of the anime. Although at the same time was other sci-fi stuff like cowboy bepop or some crap like that, it was the whole war philosophy and stuff that really got me into it. Although I have become an avid Gundam fan, I still don't think that the storylines of the newer Gundam series can even match up to the depth of the story in Gundam Wing, although I haven't watched Gundam 00 yet so I could be wrong. The anime shows so many different perspectives on war in light of all the other opposition around them, hardly any of the characters have only 1 sole desire to fight or to prevent fighting. It actually gets hard to identify who is really on the "bad" side until extreme measures begin to get taken near the end of the series. While GSeed simply tries to obtain pacifism and for people to drop their weapons and live in peace. Gundam Wing and Gundam Wing Endless Waltz go even further than that to show the weaknesses of each perspective on fighting and the how's and why's for fighting. I reckon this sets it far above any other war anime out there although I haven't seen enough to be sure of it.

As you can probably tell, I am a massive fan of this series :P Rather than your typical "civilian" character somehow getting his hands on military equipment during a distinct enemy raid on an experimental mobile suit factory and becoming the hero while learning how to fight on the field (which btw is virtually impossible as you will die the second you step outside lol) and inevitably being a civilian doesn't want to be there and takes the deaths of his friends extremely hard and breaks down, eventually finding the pacifist girl (most likely someone influential on the opposing side) and falling in love and then breaking away with a few close allies to stop both sides from continuing their conflict by neutral intervention or by defending the oppressed,(massive sentence) Gundam Wing is more realistic about well planned revolutions, governments, corruption, ulterior motives, indirect approaches to a long term goal of domination as well as your direct, take over the world goals and with people debating constantly about ethics and sacrifices of war with romance taking a relatively backseat in obviousness and shows only very subtlely but extensively :P For the less philosophically and politically minded of us, this might be boring cos we just want to see things blown up and straightforward character development/relationship development between characters. But for people who like to think... or like to know reasons and impulses behind the actions of others then I say this is the best anime ever :P