I'm away from home for the weekend due to stuff and that means away from my computer where the draft of the next part of my Universal Century Breakdown is, so this week take a shorter article that doesn't require hours of research to tide you over.
I don't typically play mobile games, I dabble here and there, but I don't play them for the same reason a lot of people don't like them. That freenium model of content where you have to buy stuff with a hard to obtain in game currency, the endless grind to get the best stuff and the fact that they actively limit how much you can play with some kind of stamina meter or something of the like. However if you are familiar with me you know I have dedicated unhealthy amounts of time to this franchise ever since I saw Stardust Memory back on Toonami lord knows how long ago, and I am probably obsessed or something. So make a Gundam version of one of these games and I will try it. That one is Gundam Wars and the appeal of it is that you can basically create a dream team of your favorite Mecha from across the series and put whatever pilots and support characters you want in them. I have my all time favorite character in all of fiction: Four Murasame, as a super OP pilot who beafs up the stats of whatever she is piloting by a huge amount of points. However in preparation for the article I wanted to originally post this week I got a suit called The Anchor from Crossbone Gundam, and I put one of my best pilots (in terms of upgrades and stats) I had in the game inside it, Katejina Loos. Katejina is a character I have tons of mixed feelings on and I don't mean that lightly, and this brings me to this week's subject, that subject is Katejina Loos. Warning there are minor spoilers for Mobile Suit Victory Gundam ahead. If you haven't read my Victory Gundam review than you can find it with this link here. it is highly recommended you check that out first, as this article is kind of a companion piece to that one.
Mobile Suit Victory Gundam stands as one of the best works in the entire series and my main piece I use for examples in arguments with Evangellion fans. It's a show that is often ignored by the show's younger fan base and western fanbase for being very dark, not having an official western release outside of a DVD set released a couple years ago, and being one of four main Gundam shows to not have a dub. Despite victory literally being in the title the show is very dark and there is an oppressively depressing atmosphere throughout a lot of the show. They spend time developing so many of the minor characters on the enemy side so that when they die you don't feel happy the protagonists killed whoever was after them, you're instead asking why it was them who died and not someone else. Because war is not satisfying, good people on both sides die and that's just the truth of the matter. Victory is a show I have talked extensively about in part 4 of my Universal Century breakdown, so don't you worry about that, I saved a lot of my thoughts and opinions on that show for that article. Think of this as an appetizer or a side dish to that one. The main reason I brought up this point is because this pertains to Katejina Loos, who is someone I felt like rambling about today. Warning spoilers for Victory Gundam ahead, skip to the final paragraph to avoid spoilers.
Victory has our youngest protagonist in the entire Gundam franchise, rivaled in that position only by Mikazuki from Iron Blooded Orpahns and Asemu from Gundam Age. Uso is a literal prepubescent child, which was something Sunrise wanted Tomino (creator and writer of every Gundam show up to Victory) to put in the series because they thought it would appeal to kids, who at the time were more interested in SD Gundam and the chibi model kits. Throughout the series we see Uso want to save everyone and grow to want to fight, while killing as little people as possible, even if it comes back to bite him in the rear end eventually. He's a good kid, who gets scared when in battle. Like any kid he has a crush, that being his penpal Katejina Loos. Known among fans as one of the most hated Gundam antagonists in the franchise's storied history, and a crazy bitch.
Early on in the show the Zanscare Empire continues their invasion of earth in hopes of wiping out all the factories of the resistance movement: The League Militaire, bombing and obliterating entire cities just to be sure they destroyed them, and then lying to their queen about taking measures to minimize civilian casualties. Uso steals a Zanscare mobile suit and goes to the nearby city in Prague where Katejina lives. He is unable to stop Zanscare's bombing of the city, and only manages to save Katejina and a baby who's mother was killed in the bombing. If it wasn't for Uso, Katejina and the baby they saved would both be dead. This event gives Uso the motivation to join the League Militaire and pilot their Gundam, which Katejina keeps telling him not to do because he's a kid, it's not his war, and he could become desensitized to all the violence or get hurt out there. She is afraid Uso will lose his childlike innocence and hope if he keeps doing it, that he will become someone scary, but despite this Uso keeps doing it because that League Militaire squad's only capable pilot has a serious injury that prevents her from piloting, meaning he needs to consistently take up arms to protect everyone. Katejina warns him not to become a scary person.
Eventually Uso's self declared rival from Zanscare: Chronicle Asher, who has had enough of Uso's BS, kidnaps Katejina and the leader of that League Militaire squad. Initially he spares Katejina from execution unlike his other prisoner who was sent to the guillotine in a public execution, and Chronicle basically uses her as a maid before developing feelings for her. Katejina slowly develops Stockholm syndrome and learns that Zanscare's Queen, who is also Chronicle's brother, is a benevolent ruler who doesn't want all the violence. This ultimately lead to Katejina allowing herself to get corrupted and twisted by Chronicle into his puppet and ultimate servant.
What makes Katejina a hard character to watch the fall of, is that unlike other characters like Four Murasame, Rosamia Badam, Ple Two, etc. Katejina's is her fault. She mistook Chronicle's physical attraction to her and his act of mercy as love, it's her fault for allowing herself to become the way she has. Throughout the first half of the series we see Katejina with Chronicle, with Chronicle going to great lengths to keep her from Uso for the sake of "protecting her", which she totally believes. As we see her go further down into this corruption we see her do things to Justify the Zanscare Empire's cruelty, like saying executing people with the guillotine in a grand public display is necessary to suppress the will to fight in people who want to fight against Zanscare's ideas of peace. This all culminates in the discovery she is a newtype (Newtypes are people who can use 100% of their brain and can understand others on a cosmic level. They also have unnatural precognition and adaptability that makes them great pilots) and Chronicle trains her to become a pilot. When Uso escapes in the Victory Gundam at his execution ceremony (Yes, Zanscare had no problems making a celebration out of beheading a prepubescent child.) Katejina in her frustration shows up to kill Uso herself in their first of many battles. In their battle she even says she would deliver Uso to the guillotine herself, because it's necessary to scare off disruptive and ignorant people like him who disrupt Zanscare.
Now during my Universal Century Rewatch that spurred my late UC era breakdown I created multiple bingo cards to make watching these more fun. Having an intimate knowledge of the series I knew what tropes and stuff to make each card about. I had a "minor character" focused bingo card, I had a card focused on the mobile suit battles and more. However this show never gave me a bingo on the "main protagonist's love interest" bingo card. Katejina follows many tropes a Gundam protagonist's love interest falls into. She joined the enemy side against her own will, she is a newtype, she is someone he has to fight multiple times, the protagonist doesn't kill her because he loves her. However Katejina breaks this mold quite heavily. She manipulates the fact that he loves her during every one of their encounters. She willingly makes him suffer all for the sake of protecting Chronicle's pride. Despite her undying loyalty Chronicle does not reciprocate these feelings the same way because he is just too focused on the war at hand, with his attention on Uso and what to do about him. She actively tells Uso his very existence is a threat to Chronicle because Chronicle fears Uso and how Uso has never been beaten. She tells Uso no child should have the level of power that he does, meaning she has to kill him. Chronicle fears Uso as the only threat to him and his ego and Katejina is determined to make him suffer and break him if she can't defeat him in combat. She continues using this kind of mental warfare against him throughout the rest of the series because time after time she proves unable to best him in combat, leaving her to go to great lengths to protect Chronicle's pride and try to mentally damage and scar Uso. She is a scary antagonist because will do anything to achieve her goals no matter how ridiculous, and she knows the protagonist intimately, using what she knows about him to play all the head games and psychological warfare she can. Remember, Uso is just a kid. Having the surrogate older woman figure in his life that he looked up to use her intimate knowledge of him to try and make him suffer and die is such a horrible thing he can't grasp the reasoning of.
I felt bad for Katejina because she was being manipulated and corrupted this whole time, but it was her fault and she was willingly giving into hatred and anger towards Uso that Chronicle harbored for him. She also contributed to Chronicle getting worse by inflating his ego and supporting his blatantly horrible ideas no matter how morally bad or overall stupid. She warned Uso that a soldier's life would strip him of what made him a good kid, but in all irony, him being a kid and thinking like one was what allowed him get as far as he did despite the traumatic experiences he went through in the series. She told Uso not to become someone scary early on the series, but he only scared Chronicle, her actions and lengths she went through to make him suffer only strengthened his resolve and determination to stop Zanscare. This strengthened his resolve further in his battles against Chronicle, making him stronger and much more of a threat, someone Chronicle feared and loathed more and more. Every horrible thing she did to try and make Uso suffer made him stronger and strengthened his resolve. Katejina was actively making Uso a scary person, and she didn't realize a lot of it was her fault. She is so in love with Chronicle that she has adopted his inability to take accountability for his actions as one of her own character traits. Chronicle blames Uso for everything, every annoyance and threat to him is Uso's fault in his mind and he had no fault in anything. Naturally Katejina wants to kill Uso because of how Chronicle sees him as the source of all his problems. She just thinks if Uso dies the war will be over quickly and Chronicle and her can rest easy together. Katejina's mind games and attempts to kill Uso and everyone he cared about was what started stripping him of his innocence. Her actions forced him to watch so many of his most beloved friends and family die and she still insisted everything was his fault, refusing any accountability because if Chronicle can't hold himself responsible for atrocities than neither should she. This all manifests in the final battle between Uso and Chronicle. They duel while Katejina watches and declares that two boys fighting over her is the ultimate experience. She yells that she will love the winner with all her soul and that the battle will determine her fate. All while this happens the Zanscare empire is on it's last legs, with it's leadership all facing their last stand in a disastrously failed invasion of earth.
Even after Uso emerges victorious and Chronicles has to use his escape system to get out of his mobile suit before it blows up, Katejina refuses to accept the outcome. She only said she would love the winner because she didn't believe Chronicle had any chance of losing. THERE WAS NOT A SINGLE MOMENT WHERE SHE THOUGHT CHRONICLE COULD POSSIBLY EVER LOSE. She blindly thought so highly of him she fully believed there was no possible way Uso could ever win against him, because she has justified everything Chronicle has done and sees Uso as the representation of everything she is fighting against. He was fighting against Zanscare, who justified their atrocities with their intention to cleanse the world of the corrupt government and hateful people among those on Earth who keep starting conflict. She believes in Mariaism and more importantly in Chronicle Asher. He opened her eyes to this cause, he saved her from a possible death sentence (one he knowingly brought her to), he allowed her to serve him and assist in his goal, to join his forces despite her prior affiliation. Her Stockholm syndrome and mental instability have gone so far. She has done dozens of things her old self before the war would have detested, all in the name of Zanscare and for making Chronicle happy, Chronicle is her world, and the person blinding her to reality. She has allowed his ego, his inability to accept consequences for his actions, his holier than thou attitude and delusion of inability to all effect her and how she views the world. She only said that because she thought there was no way Uso could win, and the fact that he did win shattered her entire world view, it shattered everything she had believed in and what she had been doing. Queen Maria is gone, Chronicle lost, there is no reason to keep fighting, Uso has overcome everything. Everything she did to destroy him and ruin his life, all the hell she knowingly made him endure, it only strengthened his resolve and childlike optimism that it has allowed him to end Zanscare. Her entire delusion of Zanscare's righteous infallibility and invincible power was shattered in that single moment. Every justification for her horrible actions gone, everything in her new life gone, everything she was so confident about gone. Uso winning in her mind was proof he was scary and too powerful and had to die. She is so far gone she doesn't care that Zanscare has lost and the war just ended mere minutes before, she promises to hunt down Uso and kill him in Chronicle's place, not even caring for what she said about loving the victor of the duel anymore. Katejina is still blind to the fact that all her torturing Uso only made him stronger, she unknowlingly made him the perfect weapon against Zanscare. In the end she is about to gun him down. She has a clear shot and is dumbfounded by his actions, those that only a kid would make. She has become so lost and desensitized she says that he is acting like a child and is insulted by his behavior, Right when she is making the killing blow to Uso, she is literally blinded by the light of the childlike hope, optimism and compassion that Uso represents. She is unable to keep going in this state as she is swept up in the light. Uso even then after everything she has done refuses to kill her because he doesn't like killing people and doesn't believe she should die for her horrible actions, because in spite of everything he is a kid, and he still thinks and acts like one.
Tomino has said in interviews that Katejina was a character he had a hard time writing for because of how far gone she was by the end of the series. The mature girl who Uso risked his life to save, who was like a big sister to him, she was the person who vitriolically hated him the most by the end of the series. Tomino has said he never wanted Katejina to be redeemed and love Uso because that would be too happy of an ending for her considering what she has put Uso through and the things she has done, but he didn't want to kill her because reuniting her with her Zanscare comrades in death was too nice an ending for her too. Gundam isn't a series where everything works out in the end and people live happily ever after once the horrifying war is over. So he settled on something in between. Katejina survived, but she was blinded by Uso's light and as a result all the hate and all the feelings she experienced up to that point were expelled from her. She made it out of the incident as a broken women with nowhere to go, just a blind vagrant with no memories of the war or anything leading up to it, not even remembering Uso or Chronicle. Tomino said living with the price of her actions weighing her down for the rest of her life without even any memory of said actions was what he thought would be the most fitting sentence for her. Broken by the very thing she swore Uso fighting would take away, and becoming the very person she originally feared Uso would become. Broken by the very thing she tried to snuff out for Chronicle. It's sad, but her actions brought it upon her. No matter what you might think, if she never fought, if she never blindly gave in to Chronicle's manipulation, if she never let her heart get consumed by absorbing Chronicle's hatred for Uso, if she never fell for such a wicked man, she may have gotten a happy ending. Unlike many tragic characters in Gundam Like Four, Rosamia or Quess (I don't want to talk about Quess, her biggest character traits are just mental disorders, and I don't think that's good writing.) Katejina's tragedy is her own fault, and she has to live with the consequences of it. The "what could have been" for Katejina is so lovely because so many things in the series would have turned for the better, but instead making Uso suffer and killing so many people he holds dear only made her punishment fitting. I can't complain about how cruel her whole story was, because it ended justly, no matter how nice she was at the beginning of the show before being manipulated, she had become Chronicle's servant, and someone lacking in empathy, making it completely reasonable why she is one of the most hated antagonists in the entire series, and a character a lot of fans seem to despise. It seems like Tomino had every intention to make you despise her. She is introduced as the love interest for Uso, the surrogate older woman figure in his life and one of his only two friends. By the end she has centered her whole life around Chronicle and his hatred for Uso, to the point that she couldn't resume life as a person after the war. Chronicle is gone, Zanscare's entire military forces and governing officers were hurled into space with no hope of survival, Zanscare's Queen who's ideology convinced Katejina to join Zanscare was gone, there is peace, and she still insisted on killing Uso until the very end, no matter how pointless it was. This fate short of just flat out dying. was the only one where she could ever find peace.
In the end though, Katejina made for one of the most compelling main antagonists in the series history, just because we saw her slowly fall and become worse and worse throughout the entire series and though I feel bad about what happened to her, such a hateful soul being forced let go of everything that defined it as a result of its own actions serves as a fitting reminder for what happens when we let others manipulate us and let hate dictate our actions. When you're seduced by the Devil, you yourself can become something far scarier than the devil without even realizing. She was digging her own karmic trench in the last half of the series, and now she has to live in it. I hope you enjoyed this week's article, it's shorter than usual, but I'm glad I got to write something more opinionated and directly from my point of view than something like say reviewing an entire series in the span of a a dozen lengthy paragraphs. Stay tuned for next week's article, where I continue the Universal Century Breakdown. Yes the name sucks, but I'm not changing it, I've made my bed with that name, now I must sleep in it
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