Yoshie Kawahara linked to her blog article on Twitter in response to a random user going off about female fans supporting Gundam being nonsense. Below is their exchange and the article that follows:

masked_elone: Claims that Gundam was popular among girls from its original broadcast are total nonsense. Okay, maybe not ‘nonsense,’ call it a Mandela effect. Back in my school days, there were only a handful of people who ever talked about Gundam. I mean, really (laughs), I was practically the only one in class… it was suffocating, dizzying, ugh.

Kawahara: Oh, give me a break. I was THERE. Even during the broadcast, the studio was flooded with fanzines, most of them from female fans. They piled up on the meeting tables like mountains. Girls swooning over Char and Garma were all over the early Comiket back when it was still held in Mizonokuchi.

WERE WOMEN THE REAL DRIVING FORCE BEHIND THE GUNDAM BOOM?
Why the “Low-Rated” First Broadcast Won the Hearts of Female Fans

Even today, many still think of Gundam as a franchise made “for men.” But if we look back to the original Mobile Suit Gundam broadcast, the truth is the most passionate early supporters weren’t boys at all, they were women.

GUNDAM FANDOM BEGAN WITH WOMEN!

There are few who haven’t heard the name Gunpla: the plastic model kits of the mobile suits featured in Mobile Suit Gundam. Beloved not only throughout Japan but around the world.

In recent years, many women have also taken up plastic model building, but the hobby is still largely viewed as a male domain. Because of that, it’s easy for people to assume that the main audience for Gundam, a story centered on giant robot warfare, is and always has been men.

Yet the historical reality was quite the opposite. When the original Gundam series aired in 1979, its very first and most devoted fans were, in fact, women.

They were drawn not by the robots, but by the characters, especially those designed by the now-celebrated manga artist and animator Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, whose work remains in the spotlight today thanks to projects like Mobile Suit Gundam: Cucuruz Doan’s Island.

Before Gundam, Yasuhiko had already made his mark as a rising star among female viewers. Working for Nippon Sunrise (now Bandai Namco Filmworks), which had handled subcontracted animation for series like Brave Raideen (Tohoku Shinsha) and Combattler V (Toei).

“Handsome Characters with Female Appeal, Emerging in a Boys’ World”

At the time, most TV animation aimed at boys demanded rugged, muscular, and overtly masculine designs. Against that backdrop, Yasuhiko’s characters stood out: slim, sharp-featured, strikingly handsome, almost with the refined air of a shoujo manga hero.

It was these qualities that caught the eyes of high school and college–aged young women, the very audience the production team had not initially envisioned. Drawn in by the “pretty boy” characters Yasuhiko designed, Amuro, Char, Garma, and other strikingly beautiful men, they threw themselves wholeheartedly into supporting the series.

They produced doujinshi, exploring the drama, and world that the series hinted at. Through their devotion and their own expressive works, they helped spread the word about Gundam, long before it became a household name.

Around the same time, publishers began to recognize the growing interest in anime and launched specialized magazines devoted to it. These magazines eagerly covered Gundam, rapidly expanding its reach among young animation fans and fueling the developing anime boom.

The first Gunpla kits, meanwhile, didn’t arrive until about six months after the TV series had already ended. It became widely known several months later, when a news story broke that eager fans, rushing to buy new Gunpla models, had caused a pile-up accident on an escalator.

From these facts, if we were to ask who the driving force behind Gundam’s popularity was, the answer would be: first and foremost, the female anime fans, and then the male Gunpla fans who elevated it to the national stage.

Source: Yoshie Kawahara (Magmix, 2022.09.16)