There's a reason why Victory Gundam is among the darkest Gundam series to date.
- Deaths in this series are not only very sad and very common, but often are utterly anticlimactic. Mueller Migel, Uso's mother, got the worst: Being decapitated by a mech's tire in the middle of a Hostage Situation? In front of your kid and his friends, right before a ceasefire, and the only thing that remains is your helmet with your severed, bleeding head inside, which is then recovered by your 13 year old son!?
- The mere concept of the massive Mind Rape device known as the "Angel Halo" is terrifying. Think of it... First of all, there is absolutely no reason for the military not to use it since it produces no collateral damage, cannot be defended against and there is no chance of a mutually assured destruction scenario as with colony drops or nuclear weapons: in other words, it's the perfect weapon. Second, consider the terrible positions of everyone involved on the Halo itself — highlight, read, and have sweet dreams:
- Are you one of the "psychickers" working on it? Enjoy being put in a constant trance, locked inside a capsule, and treated mostly as psychic fuel for the Newtype who's controlling you. Oh, and if the Halo gets damaged (even if it's by the same woman who took you there), you'll be thrown out into space without protection. And if you're a child "physicker", you'll still die.
- Are you the Newtype directing it? You'll be responsible for massively mindraping either one person or everyone on earth while "feeding" on the powers of 20.000 "psychickers". Oh, and if the psychickers die, your empathic powers will make you feel these people's pain and deaths even if you're passed out, due to the strain of merely being the Halo core (Poor Shakti.) And we're not counting all of the psychological damage you will sustain as well...
- Are you the target of the Halo? You'll be forced to relive your worst and/or best memories to screw up with your psyche, and then will be reduced to an infantile state of mind and go off to die, completely unable to take care of yourself. All due to the Halo's power and the Zanscare Empire behind it.
- SD Gundam G Generation heavily implies that the plan for usage of the Angel Halo was plan B. Aside from Zanscare working on their own Gundam equivalent mobile suit, called the Zanspine, before Tassilo Vago was vaporized, they initially intended to cover more ground using mobile suits called Rig Rings. It'd not only equalize the distribution of the waves created by the Halo, but it had enough destructive power in its funnel arms and physical strength that if the Angel Halo left any resistance left, the Rig Rings would gladly take care of those.
- Mobile Suit Crossbone Gundam: Ghost, set around the same time as Victory reveals that the "Angel Halo" was also intended to deliver a payload of an alien microbe called "Angel's Call," which can turn human bodies into a nondescript black mass of matter. So imagine all of the above while the victims are simultaneously mutated to death.
- The mere concept of the massive Mind Rape device known as the "Angel Halo" is terrifying. Think of it... First of all, there is absolutely no reason for the military not to use it since it produces no collateral damage, cannot be defended against and there is no chance of a mutually assured destruction scenario as with colony drops or nuclear weapons: in other words, it's the perfect weapon. Second, consider the terrible positions of everyone involved on the Halo itself — highlight, read, and have sweet dreams:
- Episode 7 gives us the chilling scene of Count (one of the old guys of the League Militaire)'s public execution by guillotine. We don't see the decapitation but the close up of Uso's horrified face expression that ends the episode is more than enough.
- In the next episode, Uso has a nightmare where he's placed in the guillotine where the crowd chants for his head.
- Fonse shows off why he's the actual Big Bad of the series when he manipulates Maria's goodwill to instigate the rampant fanaticism of Zanscare's citizens. After Maria demonstrates her healing powers as a Newtype, Fonse uses this an example of why the enemies of the empire deserve to be executed by the guillotine. He effortlessly gets the same people who were just praising and thanking Maria for healing their illnesses and injuries to scream for the blood of those who would oppose Maria's rule. It's quite chilling, and demonstrable of why Fonse is so vile.
- The series goes out of its way to highlight that the Zanscare Empire are far worse than the Principality of Zeon or the Axis, and even the former Earth Federation's Titans faction. At least those had mostly select corrupt and twisted individuals out for their own personal power, gain and beliefs, while the soldiers on the ground were far more mortal and often disillusioned. The Zanscare? You get a handful of the disillusioned, surrounded by the criminally insane and brainwashed faithful believers that genuinely want to wipe out every single force of resistance for their "rightful" total power. From Katejina's gradual Sanity Slippage and the infamous bikini suicide squad, to most of the command wreaking havoc without a second thought, there's no line they won't cross to get their way, and no such thing as a convention clause or the ethics of warfare they'll bother with outside of very rare circumstances.
- The Big Bad Fonse instituted the idea that an officer who fails to complete their objectives are to be summarily executed. And most of those officers easily fit the bill of the aforementioned insane, like Lupe, who effectively attempts statutory rape on Uso and then when he critically damages her Mobile Suit, she opts to instead turn on her own commanding officer and take their entire force with her in death solely due to her obsession with the kid. This is just one example of how batshit dysfunctional they are.
- The windows on a Zanscare ship being coated in blood when the Angel Halo breaks apart, along with the high pitched ringing/screeching that accompanies it
- The mangled corpses of the psychickers, including young children that lie impaled on the broken sleep capsules in the same scene.
- Lupe's obsession with having Uso, and her repeated attempts to rape him, don't bring anything to the overall plot of the battle against Zanscare other than giving the poor kid an entirely different reason to be traumatized.
