Mobile Suit Gundam SEED/YMMV

• Alas, Poor Scrappy: Flay, after her emotional breakdown and ensuing Redemption Equals Death.
• Base Breaker: Flay is certainly a polarizing character.
  • Americans Hate Tingle: Not so much in Japan, where she's generally well-liked. Which is ironic since the director had actually thought she'd be the type of character to appeal to Western audiences, but things ended up reversed.
• Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch: Probably gets the most flack (not counting Gundam SEED Destiny) from UC fans than any other series, and most of them will readily admit they have never watched an episode of it.
• Complete Monster: Muruta Azrael. Racist. Misogynistic. Condescending. Arrogant. Spiteful. Wants to murder every Coordinator that breathes in order to protect the Naturals. Only wants to defend the Naturals from an ideological standpoint, and cares little for individual lives. Uses drugs to turn children into brainwashed super soldiers and send them into combat. Classifies said children as equipment and considers them expendable. Basically, Azrael is every negative human emotion imaginable, all wrapped up in an expenisve blue suit. Without a doubt the most evil character in the series. Made worse by how childish and friendly his voice sounds.
• Conspiracy Redemption: More than one, but the Battle of JOSH-A is the metaphorical straw that breaks the camel's back.
• Deader Than Disco: Seed's success spawned a sequel and a manga spinoff series, and even started talks that the CE timeline could become the new UC. However, Destiny didn't work out so well, and a planned movie to wrap up the saga is in Development Hell, making creators and fans give up on the saga and move on to Mobile Suit Gundam 00. Today, if you ask Gundam fans of their opinion of Seed, you will get plenty of contrasting responses, and you certainly won’t find many fans of Destiny.
  • Though the new remastered version of Seed that's currently coming out may change that
• Downer Ending: Depends, as the ending is considered a Bittersweet Ending mostly, until you remember that while the heroes managed to end the war and Rau Le Creuset's plan to bring about the end of the world; most of their friends and loved ones are still dead; Natural/Coordinator tensions are still high and will escalate into another brutal war in two years; and both Kira and Athrun are left scarred and broken in the aftermath, along with most of the surviving cast. Sure, they get better eventually, but it's still pretty depressing in hindsight.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Muruta Azrael. Fangirls either downplay or handwave his atrocities in the show because he's so pretty and hot.
  • Shani, Clotho, and Orga get the same treatment. Yes they're Slave Mooks forced into the war by Azrael, but that doesn't make them any less vicious or insane.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: Although being The Faceless, The Voiceless, and a bigger Sacrificial Lamb than everyone else put in the series together, Rusty Mackenzie has a bigger fandom than you'd expect. Supplementary materials have helped a lot, revealing him to be a friendly guy who was the only Redshirt of the Le Creuset team who didn't have a parent on the PLANT ruling council.
• Evil Is Cool: As the show's resident Char Clone and Malevolent Masked Man, everyone knew Le Creuset was going to be cool. Then the reveal comes in, and he turns out to be not only an Ace Pilot and a total Badass, but an impossible combination of Char, Emperor Palpatine and Hannibal Lecter. Muruta Azrael also gets this treatment, both from fangirls who give him leather pants, and others who find that his enthusiasm, dark sense of humour, and status as a Complete Monster with ADHD make him a lot of fun to watch.
• Evil Is Sexy: The fangirl opinion of Azrael. Feel free to be ill.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Fllay hating the genetically-modified Coordinators. Her English voice actress goes on to voice the genetically engineered super-soldier Soma Peres.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks: This series is the AU series that is the most like the UC shows, due to the similarities between the Earth Alliance/ZAFT and Federation/Zeon conflicts, which might be a factor into why it's a frequent target from UC fans.
• Love to Hate: Rau Le Creuset, who is incredibly popular due to his brilliance, Badassery and ability to give a speech.
• Magnificent Bastard: Rau Le Creuset fits this trope incredibly well. He does have a Villainous Breakdown but not much of one, goes out with a smile, and most importantly is a fine Manipulative Bastard and Chessmaster. When you talk the world into self-destruction, manipulating a pair of very high-functioning Smug Snakes in the process, you count.
• Misblamed: As mentioned many times on this page, many of SEED's detractors take Destiny's flaws and put them onto SEED instead of focusing on SEED's own flaws. In fact, even though there were a lot of changes in production just like Destiny, they improved the overall quality of the series. Not that the Fan Dumb will listen when you bring this up, of course.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • It's easy to lose respect for Rau Le Creuset when he nonchalantly uses his DRAGOONs to kill Flay Alster, who had by this point redeemed herself.
  • And then there's Patrick Zala shooting Athrun. And pretty much everything Azrael does, most notably using Psycho Serum to turn kids into Super Soldiers, and using nuclear weapons as though they were going out of style. Captain Sutherland and the Earth Forces as a whole crossed it after the incident at JOSH-A with the Cyclops system.
  • Depending on who you ask, some members of the fanbase feel that Yzak Joule crossed this when he shot down that shuttle. Even taking what he thought was going on into account, he still believed he was firing on fleeing soldiers, a less than admirable act.
• Never Live It Down: If fandom is to be believed, then Kira's a bad pilot and Flay's an irredeemable bitch.
• No Yay: It isn't hard to interpret Azrael's interactions with Natarle Badgiruel as an attempt at hitting on her. Squick!
• Tear Jerker: See the Gundam page and make sure you have a tissue with you.
• Rooting for the Empire: Some fans ended up rooting for the Earth Alliance because of the insane disparity between the kill ratios between the Alliance and ZAFT. Especially since many sympathetic POV shots indicate that most of those poor Earth Alliance bastards getting killed are just doing their jobs at the behest of raging bigoted lunatics instead of being raging bigoted lunatics themselves.
• The Scrappy: Flay Allster, for those who don't see her as a Jerkass Woobie. Her manipulation of Kira combined with her blaming him for her father's death, her racism, her bitchy personality, her treatment of Sai, and her general uselessness make her a pretty difficult person to like.
  • For some, Lacus, given her status as an idol singer, which some fans feel doesn't fit really well with the series' tone. Her turning out to have a large political clout while being a teenage idol singer also pushes Suspension of Disbelief a little thin. Not to mention the way her relationship with Kira is handled almost pushes it into Strangled by the Red String territory given how little scenes they have to develop it.
• The Woobie: So, so many.
  • Iron Woobie: Go ahead life. Torture Kira. He'll get over it, eventually.
  • Jerkass Woobie: Flay Allster, especially once she has her Heel Realization and tries to redeem herself.
  • Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: Rau Le Creuset. The man's life has sucked, to the point where he's convinced that we all gotta go.
• X Meets Y: The beginning of the series looks like Mobile Suit Gundam meets Gundam Wing.

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