YMMV / Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt

• Awesome Music:
  • The soundtrack has a mix of jazz, blues and pop. Bonus points for the composer who happened to be the saxophone player and member of Yoko Kanno's The Seatbelts (of Cowboy Bebop fame).
  • The "Hone Kudaketemo" is great homage to Nina Simone's "Feeling Good" and is used as the end credits of Episode 6 which is really fitting.
• Common Knowledge: The majority of casual fans believe that the unique "Thunderbolt Versions" of the mobile suits are units adapted for use in the Thunderbolt Sector. This is not the case, as the series actually exists in an alternate continuity and these versions are just how the units exist in this microcontinuity.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Bianca Carlyle is quite popular among viewers do to her fun personality and all around sexyness. She's also one of the Federation's more competent female pilots. Her introduction in Bandit Flower is her being thrown around A Baoa Qu by a Bigro, and using her GM's beam saber to destroy it. And she'd already had seven kills before! She later pilots a Guncannon Aqua and holds her own against the much bigger and more powerful Gogg. She even rescues Io and his Atlas Gundam from sinking into the ocean, after her Guncannon suffered heavy damage!
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Episode 6 unknowingly answers the question of how amphibious mechs are expected to function when the water is all frozen over in Gundam Build Fighters Try.
• I Am Not Shazam: Io's Gundam in the initial arc is called the FA-78 Full Armor Gundam (usually shortened to Full Armor Gundam) but many still refer to it as the Thunderbolt Gundam (especially seeing as there's been a few previous Mobile Suits with the same name). The Manga is named after the sector that the factions fought over in contrast to many other Gundam series (e.g. Zeta, ZZ, Unicorn) who're named for their main Mecha.
• Narm: Daryl's reaction to one of his comrades' apparent death in Episode 2 (eng. dub) can be a bit hard to take seriously when you remember the Heavy Rain glitch.
• Unexpected Character: The Zanny, an early prototype GM made mostly from salvaged Zaku parts that previous only appeared in an obscure StarCraft-clone PC game known as Gundam Tactics: Mobility Fleet turns up in the hands of the South Seas Alliance (rechristened the Dahle in the anime version, possibly due to rights issues with the game's publisher).
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: The Principality of Zeon were the ones who destroyed Side 4 and are currently fighting among the mass graves of their billions of victims, something they exhibit a breathtaking lack of self-awareness for, with the local forces possessing the usual self-righteous attitude and hypocrisy many Zeon loyalists have become infamous for. This can make it difficult for viewers to root for them even as the writers bend over backwards trying to make them sympathetic, with Io’s mockery and derision after killing one of them while the others watched coming across less as a Kick the Dog moment and more an understandable act of lashing out at the people responsible for murdering billions of innocent civilians.