Fire at Perihelion: Gundam Wing

The manner in which a lot of people describe the characters has started to surprise me a bit. Having taken a look at the various expressions our GW people are drawn with, I began to wonder why so many people said that Heero was expressionless, that Duo was unfailingly cheerful, that Quatre was always sweet and so forth. Having acquired the ability to make screencaps, I decided, what the hey, I’ll make a page that catalogues as many of the characters’ expressions as I can find. Here is the result. This page covers the unexpressive characters: Trowa, Wufei and Treize.

Trowa

The most expressionless of the pilots is not Heero. Trowa and Wu Fei tie for this one. I have more pictures of Trowa because he shows more variation than Wu Fei, but Wu Fei’s expressions tend to be more extreme then Trowa’s, thus the tie. I would say they both have a stronger tendency to express some form of anger than, say, happiness or relaxation or…well, you get the point.
Trowa’s default expression is a bit on the depressed side of neutral.
When he’s getting ready to do something dangerous, the grimness is slightly intensified. For instance here, a shot from when he’s planning that suicidal circus act with his gundam (inspired by Heero, of course).
Check the line of his mouth and the angle of the brow.
He is capable of significant expression, though. Up through volume Five, Heero seems to be the one who elicits the most of these. The most famous is his surpise and then laughter at Heero’s comment that death hurts. (I suppose strange things are funny when you’re under pressure.)
There’s also his look just before he leaves on his very own self-destruct mission, which is rather odd. The mouth and brows look almost angry, but the eyes read as something closer to hurt, to me. I named this picture “depressed” for the sake of easy reference, but I think it’s more complex than simple depression at the Gundams’ three months of ineffectiveness. Remembering that this expression is directed at Heero, I think I would interpret it as awareness of just how unlikely Trowa himself is to survive this stunt combined with a measure of respect for how little that mattered to Heero and a measure of contempt for himself that it does matter to him. On the other hand, it could be just a lucky stroke of the artist’s pen.
At any rate, the third expression Trowa shows in connection with Heero is concern. This example is from the moment when Trowa, having infiltrated OZ, has just been obliged to catch Heero in order to maintain his cover. I don’t think he looks very happy about this.
Last (well, not last because the previous example comes later, but last in this list anyway), we have the moment when Trowa offers to lend Heero his Gundam with which to duel Zechs. I should note that this is one of the times we see Heero showing surprise; as I point out on the next page, that’s a curiously common expression for Heero. Trowa, here, seems rather amused at Heero’s startlement. He’s not the sort I would normally expect to enjoy hitting his associates with zingers–Heero really does seem to bring out his sense of humor.
Now, Trowa does also have an nice range of expressions for anger. You want a deathglare? I’d say this on the right qualifies. It’s more vicious than anything I could catch on Heero. This particular example is directed at some OZ soldiers flying them toward Antarctica, and their decision to disobey Noin’s orders not to come back and help her fight the Romefeller squad trailing them. Contempt seems to put the strongest edge on his anger.
This second shot is directed at Quatre, when they encounter each other on the way to New Edwards. Quatre gets the milder version, from which I infer that Trowa considers him a potential interference but not an incompetent one.
He directs a somewhat similar look at Noin when she tells him to take it easy and worry about himself and not about Heero. This is just after Trowa has toasted the suits trailing them to the South Pole, doing some damage to his joy-stick hand in the process. He doesn’t seem to think much of Noin’s advice at this point.
When Trowa’s focused on something his expression actually seems to relax. Not into the neutral expression that looks so…doomed; his eyes are wider when he’s in neutral.
But they’re not narrowed enough here to qualify as a glare. Close, but not quite.
This is an interesting shot, I think, because aside from the tears themselves, Trowa’s expression is so close to neutral. The dialogue confirms that he’s not really aware of crying until the tears float across his gaze. This is one of those moments when I wonder whether the producers weren’t counting Trowa as a survivor, at least subconciously, from the start. The way he manages to supress any physiological signs of stress, even to the point of not knowing himself that his emotional reaction is leaking around the edges fits right in.
His less troublesome emotional reactions are still fairly subtle. This shot shows puzzlement more in the tilt of the head and a faint quirk of the mouth than with any of the more overt cues.
This shot actually looks disgruntled, but again it’s mostly the angle of the head that contributes this effect. This particular shot is from when the OZzies decide to surround him at that base where Tallgeese was archived.
One of the gentlest expressions I captured is actually directed at Wu Fei. This is just after the let’s-kill-Treize debacle, when Trowa and Wu Fei are holed up at the circus. Wu Fei, if I recall, says something about what an utter failure this makes him, and Trowa more or less says ah? But the look that goes along with the monosyllable is actually sympathetic. See the tiny smile? It’s an “I’m listening” sort of look.

The look Wu Fei trades him back is, likewise, one of the calmer and less arrogant we get to see on him.
Wu Fei’s default expression is just as expressionless as Trowa’s, as we see here. He spends an awful lot of time in default, as noted above. This particular shot is from the end of Endless Waltz, and it rather appears that he and Sally have just blown something up quite spectacularly. His expression seems to say, All in a day’s work. When he breaks out, though, it’s very noticable.
Here, for example, we have his expression of gleeful destructiveness. That’s not just a “psych myself up” expression, he’s good and invested in whatever mayhem he’s perpetrating.
Here’s one of him taunting Duo. This is during the drive to return to space, when Duo and Quatre are getting the very short end of the stick. Duo, in fact has just gotten mushed into his screens as Deathscythe takes a fall. Of course, once Wu Fei shows up and tells him that it’s perfectly all right to quit, because the others can take up his slack, wild horses couldn’t get Duo out of the fight. Can’t you just see the snideness in the set of Wu Fei’s brows?
He does uncommunicative very well, as witness this shot of Sally asking what’s wrong and Wu Fei thoroughly ignoring her. (He can be such a little prick.) For all that arrogance, though, he does respond to Sally’s rather draconian efforts to snap him out of his funk.
He listens to what she has to say after that fight, and eventually shows her a brighter face.
Eventually. For Sally’s side of this conversation, see the G-Ladies.

While we’re on the subject of characters with minimal expression, Treize fits in here too. The vast majority of his expressions have to do with the line of the mouth. He tends to look pretty detached when he’s concentrating. This picture, for instance, is from the time at New Edwards; Treize waiting for his trap to spring.
This one is from that episode with the baby; he’s waiting for it to lose interest in the butterfly and come away from the edge of the dock. Distant sort of expression. At the same time he strikes me as a bit smug in his certainty that he knows what’s going to happen. See the little quirk at the corners of his mouth?
One of his other standards is a faint smile. This seems to be a pretty all-purpose one. I would characterize it as his thinking-about-work expression, rather than his working expression (shown above). Here he’s directing Une to go make nice with the colonies in order to secure control. I might also mention that this moment, when he’s taken her hand down from salute and is holding it through his directions is one of the times I see him exercising a propensity for…well, tormenting his staff. He can’t possibly be oblivious to how she reacts to him, after all.
Here we have his expression when Wu Fei comes to duel with him. As far as Treize is concerned, this is playtime, but I would also suspect that he sees it as a moment to further assess the opposition. And, of course, yet someone else to bait.
Opposition does seem to make his day, witness this shot of his response to Relena’s declaration to Romefeller that the Gundams are going to kick their collective ass. He’s definitely the character who loves a fight just for its own sake.
Such an overt smile is rare, but his expression while provoking Zechs with his old name gives us another. He really is a horrible tease.
There’s a third variation, in which the way his eyes are drawn change. Here, for instance, he’s just let his caged birds go and is watching them depart. Their flight seems to downright fascinate him.
Then there’s this shot, which features, coincidentally enough, his response to the birds’ return. A more tender expression than we usually see on him. We could take this as a personality key. He’s fascinated by things that escape him and fly free, thus his lack of true hostility toward his opponents. On the other hand, his affections are only engaged by the things that come back to his hand.
On rare occasions, we can capture Treize actually frowning. This shot, for instance, is his expression when the Alliance officials start to take what he calls “the wrong path”. This seems to be his expression at moments when the world isn’t acting the way he wants it to.