2 days ago
The Specter Hanging Over the Nostalgic Climax of ‘Gundam GQuuuuuuX'
The final episode of Gundam GQuuuuuuX asks its characters, new generations and remixes of familiar faces alike, to imagine new possibilities and futures for themselves free from the established ideas and histories of the Gundam shows that came before them. But while doing so, one nostalgic allowance exposes that GQuuuuuuX itself was unable to let go of that past in a singularly damning 12th and final episode of Gundam GQuuuuuuX is largely built on the revelation that its entire setting, a re-imagined vision of Gundam's Universal Century setting, has been made by a version of the Newtype Lalah Sune from a reality where she was saved from death in battle against the Gundam by the sacrifice of her version of Char Aznable, sending her into a despair that shattered reality, as she mentally searched for, and created, timelines that tried to imagine a possibility where Char survived.
Already itself an alternate imagining of similar events in the original 1979 anime, where Lalah perishes at the Gundam and its pilot Amuro Ray's hands, this information is relayed to the audience and GQuuuuuuX's young protagonist Machu alike by a psionic flashback in the form of a modern yet retro recreation of scenes from the 41st episode of the original show, 'A Cosmic Glow.' As the recreation of Char, Amuro, and Lalah's battle plays out, familiar voices fill in their roles: Char and Lalah are once again voiced by their original actors from Mobile Suit Gundam, Shuichi Ikeda and Keiko Han, respectively, but Amuro is left oddly silent. (In a fun twist for the English-language dub, Keith Silverstein and Lipica Shah, who voiced Char and Lalah in the adaptation of Gundam: The Origin, briefly reprise their roles for this sequence.)
That is, until later on in the climax of the episode, where Tōru Furuya—who has played Amuro across anime, films, games, and more for 46 years—reprised his role once more. It's for a singular line of dialogue, acting as the spiritual voice of the titular Gundam GQuuuuuuX to express its desire to not see Lalah suffer any further. But regardless, it's new material from the original voice of Amuro Ray. At one point, that might have been a triumphant huzzah, but in 2025, hearing Furuya having recorded new material strikes a much more complicated tone for Gundam fans.
In May 2024, in an interview with the Japanese tabloid Shūkan Bunshun, Furuya (who was 70 at the time) revealed that he had engaged in an extramarital affair for four and a half years with a woman almost 40 years his junior. In the same interview, he also admitted getting into a physical altercation with the woman, as well as pressuring her into terminating a pregnancy during the course of their relationship.
The reaction to the scandal in Japan was immediate. Furuya is perhaps one of the most famous voice actors in the country, known for his role not just as Amuro, but also as Sailor Moon's Tuxedo Mask, Dragon Ball's Yamcha, Sabo in One Piece, Pegasus Seiya in Saint Seiya, Rei Furuya in Detective Conan, and many more roles in a career that spanned almost six decades of work. Within a month of the release of the interview and Furuya's public apology on Twitter (which has since been locked), the actor had been dropped from a role in the then-upcoming Atlus RPG Metaphor Re:Fantazio, and Furuya announced that he would step down from his roles in One Piece and Detective Conan. Later that same year, Toei announced that Ryōta Suzuki would replace Furuya as Yamcha in Dragon Ball: Daima.
But Bandai Namco, the owner of Gundam studio Sunrise, stayed quiet over whether or not Furuya would continue to voice Amuro Ray, as he had across dozens of Gundam works. In June 2024, the company sent a statement to Yahoo Japan's Meikou Kawamura stating that the company was undergoing 'a careful consideration to deal with [the situation around Furuya],' declining to comment further. In October that year, Bandai announced that Furuya would reprise his role as Amuro alongside Ikeda's Char once more in Gundam ALC Encounter, a short film to be broadcast as a special wall projection by the life-sized statue of the Nu Gundam in Fukuoka.
GQuuuuuuX had been in development for several years before Furuya's scandal had emerged—planning on the series, in collaboration with Evangelion studio Khara, began as early as 2018, potentially even before Furuya's affair had even begun. It's likewise difficult to know if any part of the series was rewritten to move focus away from Amuro appearing in any capacity: the character is explicitly absent from GQuuuuuuX's remix of the events of the original Gundam and never actually named when allusions are made to the character, only referred to in passing as the pilot of the Federation's white Mobile Suit, while GQuuuuuuX focuses instead on Char and Lalah as its primary legacy characters. And again, even when Amuro would've naturally had dialogue in the finale's recreation of the events of 'A Cosmic Glow' alongside Ikeda and Han's return as Char and Lalah, the character is silent. But from what's publicly known about the development of the series at this point, we can't definitively say if these were intentional creative choices or necessities born out of attempting to distance from Furuya.
But if they even were the latter, it would make little sense to then bring Furuya back to provide a single line of dialogue anyway. The new versions of Char and Lalah in GQuuuuuuX recast new actors in place of Ikeda and Han, and, with Furuya's scandal breaking months before GQuuuuuuX had been publicly announced, there was plenty of time between it and the final episode's broadcast to cast a replacement actor, even if it needed to be a soundalike to still communicate to audiences the connection to Amuro and the original Gundam. Was that connection so vital that there was no other choice?
It seems simply instead that, unlike other studios, Bandai was simply unwilling to let go of Furuya's link to the legacy of Gundam yet—in spite of GQuuuuuuX's own thematic messages about the need to move on and imagine new possibilities for the series' past and future, leaving a conflicting mark on an otherwise forward-looking end to the series.
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