The Witch From Mercury Proves Gundam Is Capable Of Growth

WItch from Mercury mech

Last year, Gundam was graced with a new anime series, Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury. It was the first major production for the Gundam franchise since 2015’s Iron-Blooded Orphans, which became somewhat of a fan favorite at the time. Its popularity, though, is nothing compared to The Witch from Mercury. Let’s take a look at why.

One of the biggest reasons for The Witch from Mercury’s success is its brilliant choice in protagonists. The series follows Suletta Mercury, a young, timid and pathologically helpful girl and Miorine Rembran, an outgoing and rebellious young girl whose care for Suletta is second to none.

It’s the first series to feature girls as its protagonists, and that’s a bold, but very smart choice. It’s a bit of an open secret in the Gundam community that girls and women are a huge part of the audience, but Gundam media is rarely aimed towards them. Boys and men who enjoy the franchise will tune in no matter what, but there’s a growing audience of girls who strive to see representation on-screen, and putting those girls front and center is a brilliant choice — one that has seen similar success in Pokemon Horizons, in fact.

In a bold move, Suletta and Miorine are romantically involved, too, and even get married at the end of the second season. LGBTQ+ representation is very rare in anime, and in Japanese media as a whole – Pokemon, for example, has had barely a handful of openly queer characters in its 25-year history – so having queer women at the forefront of one of the most iconic and culturally important franchises in Japan is a bold, important step.

But there’s another thing that I think has helped The Witch from Mercury thrive, and that’s its mech designs. For a long time, Gundam has felt very committed to a specific aesthetic — big, bulky, bold lines adorning an 80s Walkman-esque design philosophy. It’s a nice aesthetic for robots, for sure, and there were some departures even in the earliest of the series like the Zaku series, but for the most part, it was variations of the same boxy aesthetic.

The Witch from Mercury represents the biggest shift in design language for its mechs, with almost all of its mechs being a lot sleeker, a lot smoother, and a lot more bubbly. Make no mistake, the heart and soul of Gundam’s culturally significant aesthetic is still very much alive. The DNA of 40 years of Gundam is apparent in all of its designs, but it feels fresh in a way that it never has before.

It seems to have been a huge hit with fans, too. Model kits featuring the mechs from Mercury were apparently some of the highest-selling kits in the franchise’s history, and anecdotally, every time they come into stock, they sell out just as quickly. I’ve tried to buy Mercury model kits probably a dozen times now, and never managed to grab one in time. It’s frankly wild.

The Witch from Mercury has ended its two season run, and it’s not known if there’s much of a future for the series. With how wildly popular Mercury has been, it would be easy to see the justification behind it. More mechs means more model kit sales… but that can happen with another series. Still, everybody loves Mercury’s characters, and season 2 left things open for a potential future.

Whether or not we’ll see that future is anyone’s guess, but if nothing else, The Witch from Mercury showed us that there’s still room for growth in the Gundam franchise. Not just in terms of its mech designs, but also in its characters, representation, and storytelling.

Related: One Of Gundam’s Most Popular Anime Series Is Making A Return