Despite my reputation as an anime sommelier, I’m still developing my palette for all things Mobile Suit Gundam. As a show of receipts, I’ve watched all of the very yuri (despite Bandai Namco’s protests) Revolutionary Girl Utena spiritual successor, Witch From Mercury, Iron-Blooded Orphans, Thunderbolt, 08th MS Team, Hathaway’s Flash, stray episodes of G Gundam on Toonami, Netflix’s Requiem For Vengeance (regrettably), roughly 13 episodes of the OG anime, and the first episode of Wing. All that to say, I have yet to even scratch the surface of Gundam’s 45-year history.
Don’t get it twisted: The above is not a flex. It’s a cry for help from someone with intermediate-level Gundam enjoyer status desperately reaching across the aisle on behalf of the rest of the anime community, who’ve collectively asked themselves how the hell you pronounce the name of the new Gundam anime movie in theaters.
Back in December, Bandai Namco, Studio Sunrise, and Studio Khara jointly announced their three-way team-up on the next mecha series in the Gundam franchise. If the sheer aura of the aforementioned studios weren’t enough, it is co-written by anime juggernauts like Neon Genesis Evangelion’s Hideaki Anno and Yoji Enokido of FLCL, Revolutionary Girl Utena, and Sailor Moon fame. It’s directed by Kazuya Tsurumaki (a director for numerous Evangelion episodes and assistant director on FLCL and Diebuster), mecha designs from Ikuto Yamashita (Evangelion and Metaphor: ReFantazio), and character designs by Pokémon illustrator, Take. The only problem is that the anime (and the compilation film of its early episodes) is called Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX.
Capital GQ, six Us, capped off with a distinguished capital X to tie the whole vowel-heavy thing together. Is it pronounced “jee-kuuk-ecks” like “Jeez, anime and those kooky mechas?” Do you have to have watched more anime to get it, or is there some untapped phonetic diction unuttered by meager English-speaking tongues to make sense of how to say this anime’s goddamn name? The fuck.
To make sense of this mess, I asked io9's deputy editor James Whitbrook to teach me how to say GQuuuuuuX and SparkNotes the significance behind its esoteric name.
IC: So, what is up with the new Gundam anime's vowel-heavy title? How do you even pronounce that?
JW: The katakana for the series title is “ジークアクス”, which is pronounced “Jīkuakusu”–we don’t have an English dub yet to see how it’s specifically pronounced, but it’s basically “G-Kwux” as we’d understand it.
IC: Is there lore significance behind the name, or is it simply anime nonsense?
JW: It’s actually kind of both! The title itself is just a bit of stylization–it’s the official designation of the suit, but no one in the series is saying “G-Kwuuuuuuuuuuuuux” as long drawn out thing or anything. But the name itself comes from a computer science term, Qux, a metasyntactic variable in programming. “Qux” itself is a common placeholder word in coding designed to be replaced at a later date for regular use.
It makes sense for the show–not to get too deep into spoilers, but the G-Qux itself is a prototype mobile suit when we first encounter it, being used in testing a special piloting interface when it crosses paths with the protagonist, Machu.
IC: Is Gquuuuuux's pronunciation ever brought up by the mecha animation warlords behind the series or the characters in the movie for reference?
JW: Yes! It’s referred to by name quite a few times, and is referred to as the G-Qux more than it is a Gundam so far. In fact, there’s a few characters we meet early on that are also confused about its name, so it’s not just us viewers who need to get used to it.
IC: Are there any other Gundam anime with strange names worth explaining, or is Gquuuuuux in a u-shaped league of its own?
JW: The GQux definitely stands out as particularly odd for a mainline Gundam, but there’s tons of mobile suits across the franchise that have peculiar names that have just become part of the franchise, like the Palace Athene, The O, the Agguguy, the Gelgoog, the Hamma Hamma… The Universal Century shows (those set in the same continuity as the original 1979 Gundam) in particular love some odd names.
My personal favorites come from Turn A Gundam, the series’ 20th anniversary mainline entry. It’s set in a timeline heavily implied to be a far future of the original Gundam, so a couple of familiar mobile suits appear in the show, but the characters have no clue what their names are, so they give them totally new ones–the Capule became the Kapool, the Zaku became the Borjanon. And that’s even before you get to the show’s actually wildly-named suits, like the “WaD” Walking Dumpling, or stuff like the Mahiroo and Muttowooo. I love Turn A, more people should watch it.
Mystery solved, and then some. Now go out onto the internet and “Um, actually” your peers into submission with your shiny new insight into the orthoepy of the new Gundam anime that you acquired from the good website Aftermath.
