I built the Master Grade Turn A Gundam from April 19th through April 26th. After (hopefully) getting past my writing logjam, I’m ready to talk about it.

Spoiler Preface!!!

This post contains spoilers for the story of ∀ Gundam.

I wrote a ton of pre-build introductory material for this build. It was at least three separate posts worth of content, with each one getting bigger and bigger over time. At a certain point it became untenable. I probably would have needed a full working day to do additional drafts, editing, gathering screenshots, etc, which means in practice that it would have been a multi day (week?) effort.

What exactly compelled me to write so much in the first place? Passion was definitely part of it. Turn A (the show) is quite possibly my favorite Gundam story of all time, and the Turn A (the mobile suit) is also one of my favorite mecha. I tend to write a lot when I’m talking about something I love.

But that alone isn’t the answer. If it was just excitement, I would have written a lot, done some light editing, and pushed it out. Instead I found myself constantly trying to reorganize my thoughts and expand my research. At a certain point it felt like I was prepping for debate club, or building a legal case, and once I realized, that the lightbulb went off in my head.

One of the reasons why I love Turn A is that it’s so confident in being itself. While it never forgets the core themes of Gundam, it ditches a lot of the franchise’s common tropes in order to be its own thing.

For example, Turn A doesn’t have Newtypes, or any sort of Newtype equivalent. It doesn’t have a midseason mobile suit upgrade for the protagonist. It has people that live on the moon, but no traditional space colonies. I could go on, but you get the idea.

And it works. By jettisoning some of the tropes, the show stops being weighed down by gravity tradition and expectations. It’s free to focus on its characters and its setting, and is all the richer for it.

However … a lot of people don’t like it when Gundam ditches Gundam tropes. No, seriously. Apologies for generalizing, but there seem to be a lot of people who define Gundam by its tropes, and if they don’t show up, they get weird about it.

It’s like they have a compulsion, where they cannot let it be and let a work exist as-is. To use a bad metaphor, it’s like they have a Gundam-shaped box that they expect all the stories to fit into, and when something like Turn A comes along that doesn’t fit, they take it and file it down until they can cram it in there.

Right now you’re probably thinning ”Oh come on, what can these fans possibly do?” Well what if I told you that some of these fans work at Bandai and Sunrise? And what if I told you that ever since the show finished, they’ve continued to create supplemental lore and material that adds all the tropes back in?

There’s supplemental material that adds Newtypes back into the setting (even if we don’t see them on screen, they apparently exist). There are explanations about how the Turn A’s internal systems work, which we absolutely did not need to know (more on that in a bit).

And perhaps worst of all, they’ve continuously tried to explain the show’s concept of the Dark History and how it works, despite the fact that it’s bleedingly obvious to anyone with half a year of college level English Lit classes (or a few good bucks under their belt) that the Dark History is supposed to be metaphorical

And of course, plenty of civilian fans have glommed onto this additional lore, warping and distorting it further still¹. Or sometimes they’ll exaggerate and make memes out of minor scenes in the show, giving a distorted perception of what it’s really like and what it’s about.

This - all of this - was my motivation. I felt a need to clear things up, to make it known what is and is not part of the text of the story, and what came after in the expanded lore. I wanted to explain what is actually known, and what is merely speculation. But in the end it was too much for me to handle.

So here’s how this build is going to work. I’m going to give you some brief info on the mobile suit, and then we’ll get on to the build. If you’re curious to learn more, I suggest trying to find some way to watch Turn A. And if you still want more info after that, read this website from top to bottom.

Outside of that, ignore everything else you read about the show.

About the Mobile Suit

Here’s why I don’t like the idea of trying to describe the inner workings of the Turn A. This is a mobile suit made out of ancient, unknowable, and possibly alien technology. It can do a lot of things, but none of the characters in the show are exactly certain of everything it can do, nor about how any of it works.

And that’s good! I truly believe that there are situations where the details are better left unsaid, and this is one of them.

However, I’ll throw you one bone, and at least discuss it’s most notable special ability, the Moonlight Butterfly. This is when the Turn A dispenses nanomachines (which take the shape of butterfly wings) that can eat away at technology (and possibly organics).

Basically, if you activate it, and you let it cook for long enough, it is going to destroy all civilization and send humanity back to the stone age, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

It’s an extremely scary capability, especially when artists draw the Turn A in its “Dark History form” where it’s eyes are all red and glowy:

It’s also the main reason why many fans argue that the Turn A is the most powerful mobile suit ever made.

I’m not saying I agree one way or another. I’m only mentioning it because it comes up a lot. You would’nt believe how much online Gundam discourse is just debates about whether the Turn A can beat the Qan[T]

A Softer, Gentler Mobile Suit

While the Turn A may be scary on paper, that’s not how it’s used or portrayed in the show. On the contrary, the main case often use it for all sorts of non destructive, non combat tasks:

It’s one of the many reasons why I and others find it to be so charming.

About the Visual Design

Turn A (the show) is notable for being the first (and as far as I know only) Gundam show to have an American work on the mecha design. And not just any American, but legendary industrial designer and concept artist Syd Mead:

Mead worked on a lot of things in his career, including doing designs for a number of big sci-fi films. If you’re familiar at all with his particular style and aesthetic, then the look of the Turn A will immediately make sense to you. It’s got all of his signature elements: swoopy curves, thick sketchy lines, and a strong attention toward mechanical detail.

I personally love it, and lots of other people do as well. But not everyone does. Not even close.

This is something I want to be very clear about. Nowadays there are a lot of people who have warmed up to the Turn A, and are very fond of it. You don’t have to go far on Facebook or Youtube or Reddit to find members of the Turn A Army.

But that wasn’t always the case. When the show first came out, and for many years later, there were a lot of people who were turned off by Mead’s mobile suit designs, to the point where Yoshiyuki Tomino himself once mentioned it in an interview.

Even today there are still people who dislike it, though sometimes it seems they aren’t as vocal as they used to be². And I want to be clear that I think it’s perfectly fine to dislike this design. In fact, I think it makes a lot of sense.

Syd Mead was an industrial designer. Most of the time his job was take an idea or a concept and sketch out a rough idea about how it might look and work. I don’t believe anyone was expected to take his sketches and drawings and implement them verbatim:

Here’s a good example from his Hollywood work. Mead did the design for Johnny 5, the legendary robot from the film Short Circuit. Here is one of his sketches:

I mean, that’s basically it. That’s Johnny 5. But it’s also … not. It’s a little bit too cold and robotic, dareisay scary. So when they made the actual prop for the film, they tweaked the design to make it look much more human and emotive:

Mead did his job in figuring out how the design should work, but other artists had to come in and help make it a proper character.

I bring this up because there is evidence that the production team on Turn A either didn’t push back enough on Mead’s ideas, or that they were too afraid to modify them into something with more mass appeal. You can tell by the fact that the official lineart really doesn’t deviate much from some of Mead’s final sketches:

Tomino himself is on record in saying that it was a mistake not to have exerted more control the design process. From what I’ve gathered from various interviews, it seems that he personally still likes most of Mead’s mobile suit work, but at some point he also recognized that it probably wasn’t going to resonate with fans.

Which seems to have turned out to be true. Regardless of how many internet fans like me wax poetic about the Turn A, the fact of the matter is that the show has one of the most anemic Gunpla lines in the entire franchise. There were a handful of No Grade kits when the show was on the air:

And then two Master Grades and a single modern High Grade:

That’s it.

Contrast that to G Reco, a show that it’s disliked far more than Turn A, yet still has at least 17 High Grade models to its name:

All evidence points to the fact that Turn A mobile suit designs just aren’t that popular with the mass audience. That breaks my heart to say, but it’s what the evidence points to. So if you’re someone who doesn’t like the look of the Turn A, don’t feel bad: you’re hardly alone.

About the Model Kit

This has the distinction of being the 100th Master Grade model. The Collective Internet will tell you that this was the result of a fan poll to decide what the 100th MG should be. I can’t find any direct evidence of this; the closest I can get is Tomino’s forewward from the instruction manual, in which he says that “it was the younger generation who pushed for the Turn A to be a milestone position in this series”. That’s not a smoking gun, but it does imply there was some sort of fan desire to make it happen, so a poll would make a lot of sense.

But then there is another interview (actually the same one I linked to earlier) in which he claims that it was purely chance that it became the 100th Master Grade. Make of that what you will.

As for the details of the kit, it’s got some good stuff. You get all the basic weapons, as well as a Gundam Hammer (yes, it uses a Gundam Hammer, just like the one from the original show. No, I am not going to elaborate further).

It also comes with a ¹⁄₁₀₀ scale cow figurine, to recreate that one scene where it transports a cow:

It also has a few more tricks up its sleeve, but maybe we’ll talk about those during the build.

The only bummer about this model is that they didn’t include the Moonlight Butterfly wings in the box. Well, that, and also the fact that the wings have only been sold on Premium Banda. Thankfully there are third party knockoffs out there that work just as well: