Mark T. TomczakThe "Gundam Effect" is when you tell a story that has significant weight and meaning to it, but you use a framing device so intrinsically appealing that the message gets lost in it. The horrors of war and how it's not an atrocity a thinking species should commit on itself, but you told us with cool robot fights so that's what we notice.
... perhaps no greater example than A Christmas Carol though.
"See, the modern way of urban thinking is fundamentally dehumanizing! Scrooge makes those around him miserable by keeping a personal austerity code and demanding no more than everyone around him adhere to it!"
"Got it! It's about buying a goose for poor people."
"No, it's about the notion that there is so much surplus wealth in this damn city, but people suffer because it's locked behind the walls of people who can't even use it. Scrooge has a room for his spare furniture! He lives alone!"
"Ah, got it. It's about how greedy bastards are the real problem."
"No! He's not greedy, he's a product of the fundamental rules of this Victorian era that have supplanted a more collectivist understanding of how to treat each other! How much better this grim and finite existence would be if we could recognize our shared experience of it and~"
"... and be well-liked so you get into heaven instead of being tossed into a hell-pit or experiencing living cremation."
"That's the movie adaptations!!!"