It's Still a Gelgoog, Gundamn it!

It is the year 2025 of the current era, and the new Gundam series called GQuuuuuuX is on the horizon. Upon hearing rumors of this series taking place in an alternate Universal Century where Zeon won the One Year War, my interest is piqued beyond belief. The preview movie comes out in Japan, and it turns out the rumors are true. Char in a red Gundam? Mobile suits with awesome industrial designs? The Federation mass-producing the Guncannon as their mainstay mobile suit? I must know more! One thing that really caught my eye was reading that upon capture of the Gundam, Zeonic's engineers reverse-engineered its technology to create the next generation of mobile suit, while canceling their existing plans. I frantically look up all the art I can, while cautiously avoiding any big spoilers for the most part. 

The day finally comes, and there I am in the theater with the Gundam fam I recently assimilated back in 2023 and my buddy Mike. I'm also high off my ass because I wanted to truly experience the Kira-Kira. I'm enjoying the hell out of myself, and we get to the scene that would become the first half of episode 8, "Falling on the Moon", where the Federation attempts to drop Space Fortress Solomon on Zeon's moon base Granada. Char deploys the forces from the repurposed Pegasus cruiser, now painted in Zeon greens and named the Sodon. The forces are mostly Zakus and Rick Doms, easy to identify for even a casual fan. But alongside them was something I couldn't pin down: it looked like a GM! It had a turquoise visor, with beam pistols in each hand. I turned to Mike and whispered, "What is that?!" and he wasn't sure either. Regardless of the name, I knew that this had to be the mobile suit Zeon developed based on the Gundam's data.

This is one of only two times where the Gelgoog is seen in its standard mass-production colors.

No information on what this machine was called, or even its model number, was revealed before it appeared in the series proper. We caught a glimpse of a new machine in the trailer for the series, which looked not unlike that mobile suit I saw in the theater, now sporting a color scheme like the classic GM. Many of us speculated on what this machine was, some thinking this was the GQUC's version of the GM, but I knew that wasn't possible. Sure enough, episode 4 of GQuuuuuuX rolls around, they make their appearance, and we hear the line:

"That's a Gelgoog! Those are mass-produced Gundams!"

Of course! It makes perfect sense! Of course Zeon would repurpose the name they were going to use for their existing beam weapon-equipped mobile suit. Why wouldn't they? Mobile suit names, especially Zeon ones, are total nonsense. "Gouf" is taken from "gufu", which is Japanese onomatopoeia for laughter. "Asshimar" is taken from "aa, shimatta" which basically means "ah, damnit!" or "oh, shit!" The new version of the Gelgoog even came with a new model number, gMS-01, indicating that it's the first mobile suit Zeon derived from the Gundam. It may look completely different from the prime UC's Gelgoog, but its role in Zeon's military is the same. Heck, while the Prime UC Gelgoog is this big, beefy boy, these ones are small, smaller even than a GM!

This came from the pre-series trailer, before we knew its name.

Despite it being pretty obvious when you think about it for more than five seconds, there was an utterly bizarre backlash to the design. People did not understand why it looked this way. "Why is it called a Gelgoog when it's clearly a GM?" Well, one, it's not a GM, because GM is a Federation name. Second, even accounting for how different the designs in GQuuuuuuX are from their prime counterparts, it doesn't have enough design commonalities with the Gundam to be considered a GM. Third, did you not catch the part about Zeonic canceling their existing next-gen MS plans in favor of mass-producing the Gundam? The gMS-01 makes perfect sense from a narrative standpoint. 

In the most literal sense of the word, the Gelgoog is a GM, assuming we use the term "GM" to just mean "mass produced version of the hero mech". That's what I've been using as shorthand for years now. Some examples would be the Ichinana from Mazinger Z Infinity or the Grapearl from Gurren Lagann. I've always been a fan of these kinds of designs. It feels like a logical evolution of the hero designs, and visors just look cool.

That said, I think Bandai/Sunrise/Khara made a mistake by having the first Gelgoog that's seen in full in the series be the one that's colored like a prime-UC GM. This is probably the biggest source of confusion, and I do have to wonder that if they gave it an all-new name, nobody would have been confused. When you see the machine in Zeon colors, even with a visor, it's pretty clearly a Zeonic suit. It even has the characteristic "snout" all of Zeonic's machines have.

The Zeon colors make the snout more visible.

I think what ultimately bothers me here is the lack of critical thinking. If it looks like a GM, it must be a GM, right? Well, what about the GM Camouf? That isn't even pronounced the same way. (Oh, by the way "GM" is pronounced "Jim" and the GM in GM Camouf is pronounced "Gem" with a hard "G" sound DO NOT @ ME.) There's a bit more nuance to the naming of vehicles. If the US stole the prototype for the Soviet MiG and made their own next-generation aircraft from that design and called it the Tomcat, would it still be the MiG? No! It would be the Tomcat, because the name is just what they thought would be cool at the time. That's all there is to this. Also that's probably historically inaccurate but you get the gist.

At the end of the day, the gMS-01 Gelgoog is a design I fell in love with at first sight. I'm a sucker for industrial design mecha, mobile suits with visors, and I love painting kits of Zeon suits. This thing gave me all three in one package. It should come as no surprise that I've already built and painted two of the damn thing. Between this and the F80 Gunraid, 2025 was a good year for fans of visored mobile suits.

I'll get into my thoughts on this series as a whole later, but for now I just wanted to get this one off my chest. I love you, tiny Gelgoog.