Mobile Suit Gundam has a real way of ripping someone’s heart out of their chest and stomping on it for good measure. With so many beloved characters, it’s only a matter of time before someone truly wonderful is going to die in the name of drama.
Plus, it’s a franchise about war, so if only the characters no one liked died, the themes of pointlessness and devastation wouldn’t hit home quite as hard. Still, it’s difficult to see a favorite character die, and some of the choices made in Gundam about how the characters die are truly heartbreaking. Here are the 10 most heart-wrenching character deaths in Mobile Suit Gundam.
10 Lucifer
This one might seem like a small one, but no one can keep the tears from flowing when a beloved pet dies. Artesia’s cat Lucifer dies soon after the death of her mother in Gundam: The Origin. Compounding the pain is that shortly after both of these deaths, Artesia comes to believe that her brother Casval has also died, though she learns later that he’s still alive and living under an assumed name.
Artesia’s heartbreaking reaction to the death of the pet she brought all the way to Earth from Zeon, the last piece remaining of her homeland, is almost too much to bear.
9 Ryu Jose
Ryu is one of the supporting characters who lives and works on White Base and pilots one of the mobile suits alongside Amuro.
Ryu's sacrifice, in which he crashes his mobile suit into Crowley Hamon’s ship in order to stop her from destroying the Gundam and killing Amuro, is one of the most shocking moments in Mobile Suit Gundam. While he wasn’t a main character, Ryu was one of the mainstays of White Base, and everyone on board the ship is devastated by his loss.
8 Garma Zabi
Garma Zabi is technically a bad guy in that he’s a member of the Zabi family and fighting for the Zeon forces. But the series spends a lot of time humanizing him, showing viewers he has a fiancee he loves and is looking forward to marrying and making everyone sympathize with him because of his horrible family.
Char’s betrayal of Garma, when the latter had always thought of the former as his best friend, came as an incredible shock, especially since Char had nothing against Garma specifically but just hated his family so much that he wanted to see them all dead.
7 Hilda Bidan
Hilda Bidan has one of the most genuinely shocking and horrifying deaths in any Gundam series. She’s put in a capsule and left to drift out in space in order to lure her son Kamille out in a mobile suit to rescue her.
A Titan, Jerid Messa, has orders to blow up the capsule if Kamille tries to approach it, though he doesn’t know there is a person inside of it. Kamille naturally does, prompting Jerid to shoot it, leaving Hilda to be sucked into the vacuum of space, mere feet from her teenage son.
6 Carta Issue
Carta Issue has the most legitimately surprising death in Iron-Blooded Orphans. She challenges the members of Tekkadan to a duel, but Mikazuki, devastated and angry by the loss of his friend Biscuit at the hands of Carta, ignores her request for fairness and slams into her, dismembering her Graze.
Carta dies almost immediately, with little fanfare, despite being the big bad of the series.
5 Orga Itsuka
Orga Itsuka is the leader of the Tekkadan in Iron-Blooded Orphans. He looks after the younger members of the team and is always trying to encourage and inspire them. He’s gunned down in a drive-by shooting in the last couple minutes of an episode.
The heartbreaking part of Orga's death is the way that he tries to keep walking and, as he finally falls, succumbing to his injuries, he continues to point forward, toward the future he dreamed for them all.
4 Ramba Ral
Ramba Ral is painted as one of the few people in the Zeon military who has honor. He rejects Zabi's leadership and fights for his colony out of a sense of duty, and he never follows orders that he thinks are unjust or generally not the right thing to do.
Ramba and Amuro meet face-to-face on Earth. Though the former doesn’t know that the latter is a Federation pilot, the two form a bond. So when Amuro kills him in battle later, it’s the first time Amuro has really seen that the enemy forces are made up of people who are just like him.
3 Treize Khushrenada
Treize Khushrenada is the main antagonist in Mobile Suit Gundam Wing. He dies in battle while fighting Wufei, who first asks him if he understands how many people have died for him.
Treize responds with an exact number, implying that he feels more regret for the blood on his hands than one might have imagined, considering all the pain he’s been responsible for. He rushes at Wufei, who impales him, and Treize tells him it’s been an honor battling him and the other Gundams. This strangely noble death befits the character and makes it a difficult one to forget.
2 Astraia Tor Deikun
This list began with the death of Artesia’s cat Lucifer in The Origin. While that death is impossible to forget, it’s nothing compared to the death of Astraia Tor Deikun, Artesia and Casval’s mother. She dies on Zeon, far away from her children, who are hiding on Earth from the Zabi family.
The loneliness of her death, since she is being held captive by the Zabi family, and the fact that her children never get to see her again, despite her promise that she will soon join them on Earth, is one of the many reasons for Casval’s dark soul and hardened spirit.
1 Degwin Sodo Zabi
Degwin Sodo Zabi is the head of the Zabi family and the person leading the charge against colonization by the Earth Federation. He leaves most of the actual military work to his children, taking a backseat where he acts as a figurehead and offers advice where necessary.
Degwin is killed in battle by his own son, Gihren, who chooses to stage an attack on Federation forces without waiting for his father’s ship to get out of range of their guns. This death is a big turning point in Mobile Suit Gundam and shows how far from the end of the war everyone is, even with the death of the Zabis.