[exhumet]

gundam is probably one of my favorite pieces of media ever created, and yeah id say you nailed it! BUT this is pretty much true for almost every gundam show. They will usually end with a "but at what cost" or with 75% of the main cast dead and the protag in a worse position then they started. but yeah what you said rings true, it really is a special piece of media that is more than the genre/anime its made in but can only exist with anime if that makes sense.

[expedition32]

Yeah original Gundam is about a never ending war in which the protagonists are just cogs in the machine. And it turns out every side is led by immoral scumbags.

[hibikir]

Yep, and splatter around some talk about the horrors of being a combatant in those wars, as if you don't fight, your loved ones die anyway. You can see how Evangelion is doing a lot of riffing on Gundam. In some ways it's not Jane Austen, it's Full Metal Jacket, or Rambo: First Blood. The different series might have giant robots all over the place, but there aer serious stories barely hidden underneath.

Even when a story starts as mostly lighthearted adolescent fare (see, The Witch of Mercury), it tends to end in trauma, injustice and many war crimes.