Character · Mobile Suit Gundam
Char Aznable
A red mask, a red mobile suit, and a nickname earned by moving faster than anyone thought a machine could.
In Otakana the clue reads: Masked ace in a red machine that moves three times faster
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Mobile Suit Gundam
- Letters
- 4 · Normal
Char Aznable is Zeon's best pilot and the reason the Federation learns to dread red paint. His custom Zaku runs faster than the production model, which the show puts down to tuning and to the pilot rather than to magic, and the kill record he builds in the opening weeks of the war earns him the name Red Comet.
The mask is not there for style. Char is fighting his own war inside Zeon's, and the identity under the helmet is the point the story turns on halfway through. He is polite, theatrical, patient, and entirely willing to spend other people's lives on a plan they know nothing about. Amuro is a boy with a talent. Char is an adult with a grudge.
Yoshiyuki Tomino named him after Charles Aznavour, the French singer, and built a rival who outlasted his own war. Char returns in Zeta Gundam and drives the plot of the 1988 film Char's Counterattack. Half the mecha antagonists made since owe him something: the mask, the sports car of a machine, the personal quarrel dressed up as ideology.
Spelling CHAR
CHAR is four letters and the sound is no help at all. Japanese シャア reads shaa, so the ear says Shah while the tiles want C, H, A, R. It is a French surname's spelling laid over a Japanese name, which is what happens when a character is named after Charles Aznavour. Four letters, one vowel, nothing doubled in CHAR.