Character · Mobile Suit Gundam
Amuro Ray
The best pilot of the war got the job by reading a manual he was not supposed to have.
In Otakana the clue reads: Civilian teenager who climbs into the prototype
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Mobile Suit Gundam
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Amuro Ray is fifteen, lives on the colony Side 7, and spends his time building small robots because his father is never home. When Zeon mobile suits attack, he climbs into the prototype his father designed, reads the operating manual on the way up, and kills two of them. The Federation gives him the machine permanently, which is less a promotion than an absence of alternatives.
What follows is not heroic in the way earlier robot shows were heroic. Amuro is sullen, frightened and frequently insubordinate. His commanding officer slaps him for it, he deserts once, and he comes back. Yoshiyuki Tomino built the series around the idea that the person in the cockpit is a conscript with a talent rather than a champion, and that the talent is a burden of its own.
He is also the first Newtype, a human whose perception has widened in response to living in space, which the show treats as both the next step for the species and a very convenient way to aim a gun. Mobile Suit Gundam aired in 1979, was cut short over its ratings, and then found its audience through reruns, model kits and the compilation films of 1981.
Spelling AMURO
AMURO is five letters and the game wants the given name rather than Ray. The Japanese R is a tap, so it lands somewhere near a D and gets typed as one. Vowels do the work: A, U and O sit in the odd positions with M and R between them. No long vowel, no doubled letter, nothing dropped in AMURO.