Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt vol. 18

The previousvolumes have been ping-ponging back and forth between Darryl and Io’s perspectives along with their respective factions.  Mangaka Yasuo Ohtagaki has also made it clear that you’re supposed to be sympathizing with whoever’s in the protagonist role for those volumes, regardless if one of them is doing the work of a terrorist organization.  The point of view changes again for this volume, only now we’re seeing things through the eyes of the noncombatant members of the Nanyang Alliance.  Over three thousand of them have fled Earth and are trying to make their way to Side 6, a neutral colony that has agreed to grant them asylum.  There are just two catches:  First they’ll have to disarm themselves.  Second is that they’ll have to cross an open region of space without getting blasted by the Federation forces that are hunting for them.

While I view the Nanyang Alliance as the Bad Guys in this story, you’d have to be truly heartless not to feel some sympathy for the refugees here and the hand they’ve been dealt.  Even so, Ohtagaki still decides it’s necessary to stack the deck a little by making the Federation forces that are pursuing them truly excited about the chance to take out these enemy combatants.  He’s even made one of them an overweight woman who loves to drink milkshakes in the cockpit of her mobile suit to really show you how bad these people are (from a Japanese perspective).

Clumsy as the mangaka’s attempts to play with my sympathies may be, I can’t fault his presentation of the action when the Alliance makes their move.  The tension is high as Billy, one of Darryl’s former comrades, has to fly solo interference between the two forces with only a retrofitted construction mobile suit to do so with and the refugees have to fly to Side 6 in a ship strapped to four ballistic missiles.  It’s gripping stuff that will keep you invested in the struggle at hand, up until the end with its too-pat resolution.  That makes this volume a decent one on balance; though, after three volumes of setup I’m ready for some movement on the main story and see what the Alliance’s plan to take on Anaheim Electronics entails.