Character · Gundam Wing
Heero Yuy
Sent to Earth to fight a war, spotted on a beach by a schoolgirl, and his first act is to tear up her party invitation.
In Otakana the clue reads: Pilot of the Wing suit sent to Earth
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Gundam Wing
- Letters
- 5 · Hard
Heero Yuy is one of five teenage pilots dropped from the colonies to Earth inside Gundams, each sent by a different engineer with the same instruction: hit the Earth military hard enough that it stops. He arrives, is seen, and spends his first episodes trying to erase every trace of himself. When his mission looks compromised he reaches for the self-destruct, which he does more than once and survives more often than the physics allow.
The name is borrowed. The historical Heero Yuy was a colonial pacifist leader whose assassination started the whole conflict, and the pilot uses it as a codename, which tells you what his handlers think subtlety is. His actual Gundam, Wing, converts into a bird-shaped flight mode and carries a buster rifle that removes whatever it is aimed at. Neither the suit nor the pilot is built for half measures.
Gundam Wing aired in 1995 and became the show that put Gundam on American television five years later, running on Toonami in 2000 for an audience that had never seen the earlier series. Heero's flat delivery, the trench coats, and the five-pilot format all landed at once. Hikaru Midorikawa voices him in Japanese at a register that barely moves, which is most of the joke and much of the appeal.
Spelling HEERO
HEERO looks like a typo for hero and is not one. The Japanese runs hi-i-ro, three beats with the I sound held, and the official English keeps that held vowel as a double E. So it is HEERO, five letters, not HIRO and not HERO. Two E's side by side in a short word is rare enough that finding them usually finishes the row.