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I’m down with thunderbolt because the action is largely actually choreographed and I can tell what’s going on at each stage of a battle, as opposed to lines of lasers with no vanishing point or origin flying randomly with explosions somewhere. Edit: also war is bad.
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Apr 2, 2018 17:23
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Monaghan posted:You're right in that me calling it trash is taking it kinda far, but I cannot believe the amount of praise that thunderbolt gets. That goes towards my hyperbolic reaction. It's very visually impressive and has a unique soundtrack. It's very different from most other Gundam series. Sorry it's not your cup of tea but hyperbole is a pretty immature reaction to other people liking a thing.
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Apr 2, 2018 18:12
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 All three of them are basically this picture by degrees, but MS IGLOO throws all subtlety away and becomes unironic fascist apologia with whatever designated doomed pilot of the episode monologuing about how glorious it is to die for Zeon, and ends with a literal SS commandant heroically sacrificing himself to save a bunch of other doomed pilots. I would say of the three, 0080 is the strongest simply because while it does use the nihilism of violence as a deliberate aesthetic like Thunderbolt and IGLOO, it does so to present a clear message. December Sky and MS IGLOO (and especially Gravity Front) demonstrate the bleakness of war but without a clear message underpinning the ultraviolence, it becomes parodic rather than poignant. Also the character animation in IGLOO is really bad. 
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Apr 2, 2018 19:07
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3 posted:I would say of the three, 0080 is the strongest simply because while it does use the nihilism of violence as a deliberate aesthetic like Thunderbolt and IGLOO, it does so to present a clear message. December Sky and MS IGLOO (and especially Gravity Front) demonstrate the bleakness of war but without a clear message underpinning the ultraviolence, it becomes parodic rather than poignant. I thought Thunderbolt had an extremely clear and constant message that war dehumanizes people. Io metaphorically and Daryl literally. And Claudia and Karla are emotionally destroyed by what they have to force the men they care about to do. War strips away all positive things about humanity and turns people into weapons. That's the message of not just the plot but literally all of the character arcs.
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Apr 2, 2018 19:16
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Yeah Thunderbolt wasn't exactly subtle
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Apr 2, 2018 19:20
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The "wow cool robot!" Picture also doesn't really apply to 0080 because as far as I know it's the only Gundam series to really criticize the franchise's toyetic aspects (well maybe the mobile dolls from Wing). I can't watch the ending with the kids trying to comfort Al with the knowledge that there will be new cool robots in the next war without viewing it as something of a condemnation of the gunpla scene.
Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Apr 2, 2018 |
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Apr 2, 2018 19:41
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ACES CURE PLANES posted:Thunderbolt is amazing. You and me forever in this thread brother. FOREVER. I also agree with your other two takes.
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Apr 2, 2018 19:41
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Arcsquad12 posted:The "wow cool robot!" Picture also doesn't really apply to 0080 because as far as I know it's the only Gundam series to really criticize the franchise's toyetic aspects (well maybe the mobile dolls from Wing). I can't watch the ending with the kids trying to comfort Al with the knowledge that there will be new cool robots in the next war without viewing it as something of a condemnation of the gunpla scene. I was never on board with this reading. The point of that scene is that all the other children view the war as entertainment because they see it as someone else's problem whereas Al is fully aware of the tragedy of war. This doesn't apply to Gundam beacuse it is entertainment. It would be another thing if Gundam was some kinda docudrama about a recent real-world conflict selling models of tanks or whatever, but it's not.
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Apr 2, 2018 19:54
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Yeah the finale doesn't seem to bash making model kits of giant robots, since, you know, the characters who died aren't real. What it does is effectively illustrate how Al's views of war have grown up. In the beginning of the show he's all about what's cooler, zaku's or gm's. They aren't effected by the war since they are a neutral colony and as far as we can tell, the kids personal lives are untouched by the OYW. However, when Al gets to experience how bad war can be first hand, he doesn't join in and just cries. That's why I adore 0080. It's one of the very few gundam series that shows, not tells that war is bad.
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Apr 2, 2018 20:07
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Droyer posted:I was never on board with this reading. The point of that scene is that all the other children view the war as entertainment because they see it as someone else's problem whereas Al is fully aware of the tragedy of war. This doesn't apply to Gundam beacuse it is entertainment. It would be another thing if Gundam was some kinda docudrama about a recent real-world conflict selling models of tanks or whatever, but it's not. Yeah, maybe you could make a kit for the toy rank badges being an analogue for Gunpla, because the kids were all excited about collecting them and buying them at a Dagashi shop, but there was also stuff like the kids wanting to look for shells after the battle, and Al playing the video game. It was just general "was as spectacle" stuff. iirc the line the kid had at the end was something like, "There'll be another war, a bigger war!" not referencing Mobile Suits specifically at all.
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Apr 2, 2018 20:07
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Guy Goodbody posted:I thought Thunderbolt had an extremely clear and constant message that war dehumanizes people. Io metaphorically and Daryl literally. And Claudia and Karla are emotionally destroyed by what they have to force the men they care about to do. War strips away all positive things about humanity and turns people into weapons. That's the message of not just the plot but literally all of the character arcs. Pretty much this. Thunderbolt is extremely, virulently clear about how absolutely terrible war is and how it completely ruins people. In that way I think it's even more effective than 0080 at being a criticism of war; in 0080, Bernie and Alex are portrayed as fundamentally good people who are forced into an awful situation by the conflict and would presumably be able to return to being good people after the fight war over if they survived, whereas in December Sky Daryl, Io, Carla, and Claudia are all broken down at the core level as people and lose their humanity in various ways. The war is so terrible and has been so damaging to them that there's no going back for any of them even if they make it through, because the decisions and sacrifices they have made to survive can't be forgotten or undone. Gundam as a whole franchise is famously anti-war, but in the vast majority of entries the war is portrayed as the doing of some evil puppet masters or corrupt government organizations and if only some good people would stand up and beat up all the bad guys everything could go back to normal; the protagonist could go settle down with his sweetheart, a new and less evil government could take power, and life could go on. Thunderbolt is possibly the only entry in the franchise that addresses the horrible reality that war changes people, often permanently and irrevocably, even good, kind people who have nothing but the best of intentions. It's extremely dark, depressing, and nihilistic, but I think that tone is appropriate when making a strong critical statement about how terrible something so life-altering can be.
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Apr 2, 2018 20:09
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I guess I'd like it more if we actually saw this character progression, not just plopped down into . Claudia starts off a mopey drug addict and doesn't change. Io starts off as some rear end in a top hat who loves war and ends up as some rear end in a top hat who loves war, but I guess he's pissed off about losing to a cripple? All we are told about the guy is that he is the kind of guy who likes to push himself to the extreme and he saw his dad blows his brains out. Daryl is the only one who kind of changes, but not by much. He'll always to anything to save his comrades. He never seems to question just what the hell they are doing. He does come to the realisation that he likes the rush war gives him. So credit where credit is due. Carla doesn't like war and ends up as some weird crying infant at the end. We're told they used to be better people but we don't actually see anything. We see Bernie and Al change. We see the disruption that happens to their lives. Seeing the changes makes a better story. Monaghan fucked around with this message at 20:35 on Apr 2, 2018 |
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Apr 2, 2018 20:33
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Daryl loses his arms, dude.
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Apr 2, 2018 20:36
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Guy Goodbody posted:Daryl loses his arms, dude. I know, but people talk about changes, I am talking about mental changes, not physical ones. Getting the additional injury didn't really change his character all that much.
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Apr 2, 2018 20:37
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Mind you, the story has left an option of redemption and recovery open for Io - I don’t think it’s a coincidence that he ends the first arc by emerging naked and bloody from a dark room.
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Apr 2, 2018 20:39
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Monaghan posted:I know, but people talk about changes, I am talking about mental changes, not physical ones. Getting the additional injury didn't really change his character all that much. But you can't just talk about mental changes. "Daryl doesn't change that much, as long as you don't consider the fact that he loses an arm and then willingly gives up another so that he can become literally a part of a warmachine" is a really weird thing to base your analysis on. You're just refusing to interact with his arc because it's mostly physical. And he does mentally change, remember his fantasies of running along the beach with Karla, and how they start off as just fantasies because he had already lost his legs, but the fade away completely after he loses his arms? like, literally fade away, the screen goes dark around the edges, literally cutting off his arms and legs in the fantasy. I mean, Improbable Lobster posted:Yeah Thunderbolt wasn't exactly subtle
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Apr 2, 2018 20:42
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ManSedan posted:I’m down with thunderbolt because the action is largely actually choreographed and I can tell what’s going on at each stage of a battle, as opposed to lines of lasers with no vanishing point or origin flying randomly with explosions somewhere. I recently went through a couple of battles in various Tomino Gundam shows to webm them minus all the cuts to the pilots in the cockpit talking; mostly to help illustrate the actions of the pilots, and was impressed by how well choreographed the actual action is in them when you see them as just fight scenes and not constantly cutting back to the talking heads. Plus, I think even without the constant cuts to the inside of the cockpits a lot of the character of the pilots themselves shows through in their actions. https://my.mixtape.moe/dvwtim.webm https://my.mixtape.moe/sdkvte.webm https://my.mixtape.moe/mbubkt.webm https://my.mixtape.moe/clmfnc.webm https://my.mixtape.moe/gboawy.webm There's no sound in most of them by the way because I was making them for /m/ and 4chan doesn't allow you to post webms that have sound. I only included it with the last one because I couldn't make the file size fit under 3MBs while including all the action so I just made it for YouTube instead. The G-Reco file for instance gets across Bellri's reticience to fight without any cuts to the pilot simply by his constant retreating and use of non-combat systems like the photon searcher, the Char/Haman/Scirocco stuff gets across that Haman doesn't really want to kill Char while Char is mostly out of his depth and on the back foot and so on. I find the action very easy to follow in those fights as well, with the location of various elements always clear. Arcsquad12 posted:The "wow cool robot!" Picture also doesn't really apply to 0080 because as far as I know it's the only Gundam series to really criticize the franchise's toyetic aspects (well maybe the mobile dolls from Wing). I can't watch the ending with the kids trying to comfort Al with the knowledge that there will be new cool robots in the next war without viewing it as something of a condemnation of the gunpla scene. I don't really get the argument itself honestly, because I don't see how "war is bad" is mutually exclusive with "this is a commercial product". Almost every single anti-war piece of art or entertainment has some degree of "now buy our poo poo" contained inside and if it's not toy robots and model kits it's ticket sales, copies of the book or film itself etc. Plus, people not directly involved in a war have always viewed war itself as cool and lots of people who have been in war talk about how they joined up because they thought of it as an adventure or a way for them to see the world, impress people or just get to kill people because it'd be cool and the reality of it only set for them when they were within the mire of the war itself. Making a war seem superficially cool is really just true to the actual experience, because war does seem cool to many from the outside and they have to experience it from the inside to find out why it isn't. "War is bad; Wow, cool robot" might as well be "War is bad; Wow, cool tank", "War is bad; Wow, cool plane", "War is bad; Wow, cool sword", "War is bad; Wow, cool gun" or about a dozen other things because every anti war piece of media I can think of, about WWI, WWII, Vietnam, Iraq, older wars or fictional ones makes something within them look cool even if it's trying to make the war itself bad simply because you can't make a story look good without making the internal elements contained within that story look good too. I don't think that invalidates the message; it just gives the show two messages. Which is fine, because humans can process more than one message at a time. You won't if you don't want to see the message that "war is bad", but only if you're already predisposed to not want to see or acknowledge that message. In which case, nothing would make you acknowledge it anyway.
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Apr 2, 2018 20:51
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Thunderbolt is bad and you're better served by just watching the psycho-zaku vs FA78 fight on youtube as an isolated piece of choreography. Its easy to talk about Thubderbolt having themes of ~war dehumanizes people~ but that falls apart real fast when you realize that the narrative is structured very specifically in a way that frames Io and the federation as comically evil supervillains while almost every piece of hardship and dehumanization Daryl goes through is framed as a ~sad but noble sacrifice~ hes making to save other people. Also the Living Dead unit is basically "unit 731 but all the subjects were actually willing participants," so gently caress Thunderbolt sideways.
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Apr 2, 2018 21:08
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Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:Thunderbolt is bad and you're better served by just watching the psycho-zaku vs FA78 fight on youtube as an isolated piece of choreography. Thunderbolt takes place in the shattered remains of the Federation characters’ home, and you get horrific details underlining this every couple of minutes. Plus, the guy responsible for the Living Dead Division’s mutilations is far and away the worst person in the story, and the crippled war vets’ loyalty is tragically un-reciprocated throughout (the Zeon fleet who show up at the end clearly don’t give a poo poo, and after the timeskip, Darryl is being blackmailed into fighting for the remnants so he can pay his girlfriend’s medical bills). The Moore Brotherhood may be less immediately sympathetic than the Living Dead, but Zeon as a whole is consistently the main villain.
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Apr 2, 2018 21:19
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The "comically evil" federation acts in the show are restricted to sending child soldiers into combat with poor leadership with exceptionally poor results. That's hardly out of line for OYW stories.
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Apr 2, 2018 21:38
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Arcsquad12 posted:The "comically evil" federation acts in the show are restricted to sending child soldiers into combat with poor leadership with exceptionally poor results. That's hardly out of line for OYW stories. Io Fleming is a cartoonish serial murderer who executes one of the walking dead pilots while deliberately and cruelly mocking the rest of them as he does it. This happens in like the first 15 minutes of the show/movie. My issue with Thunderbolt isn't that it doesn't demonstrate that war is dehumanizing; my issue is that it does not do anything meaningful with this demonstration and instead just shows us a parade of human misery in which people get poo poo on and then die horrible deaths (I'm going to use Claudia as an example in a vacuum because even though I know she actually isn't dead, her entire character arc in December Sky is her being a nervous wreck for the entirety of the film and then her subordinate murdering her for no reason other than spite). If Thunderbolt's moral was that war is a tragic waste of human lives, it lends no weight whatsoever to that moral by making the characters it dehumanizes thoroughly unheroic piles of garbage.  0080 on the other hand uses the unquestionable heroism of the immediate protagonist/antagonist, in this case Bernie and Chris, to create a driving counterpoint to the morality of the war. The only true villain in the story is Killing, whose plan is stopped ultimately with no input from the main characters whatsoever. The ultimate tragedy of 0080 is presented as the fact that the faceless robots actively remove the humanity from their operators and then reduce it to twisted metal and charred hamburger. When Mikhail gets shredded in the Kampfer, it's sudden and horrifying because we get to see it happen from both perspectives, and we can understand the mentality of both Mikhail as he dies still trying to fulfill his objective and Chris as she justifiably tries not to get killed by an enemy combatant. In Thunderbolt, by contrast, there's no effective counterpoint to the chararcters' suffering, there is only suffering. Arcsquad12 posted:The "wow cool robot!" Picture also doesn't really apply to 0080 because as far as I know it's the only Gundam series to really criticize the franchise's toyetic aspects (well maybe the mobile dolls from Wing). I can't watch the ending with the kids trying to comfort Al with the knowledge that there will be new cool robots in the next war without viewing it as something of a condemnation of the gunpla scene. To be clear, in the case of 0080 anyway I was using the picture not as a condemnation of the plot but a concise summary of its themes. Al's classmates thoroughly misread his state of mind at the end of the series because they are so enthralled by the cool robots that they've failed to grasp the full implications of a tragedy that literally happened in their backyard. 3 fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Apr 2, 2018 |
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Apr 2, 2018 22:03
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3 posted:The ultimate tragedy of Thunderbolt is presented as the fact that the faceless robots actively remove the humanity from their operators and then reduce it to twisted metal and charred hamburger.
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Apr 2, 2018 22:11
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Io Flemming is also a sociopathic product of nepotism with a rebellious streak that was not improved with his father's death. There's plenty of bad eggs within the federation, he's just on the more extreme edge of things. Considering his role is to be the foil to Daryl and show what Daryl could become if he didn't step back from madness, what exactly would be gained by softening Io's image as shown in December Sky? He kind of needs to be a psychopath for the dichotomy to work. And even then he does have humanistic points and Cornelius's insistence that he's still the same person, but the show makes it clear that Io is so thoroughly broken that he lacks the ability to be that person anymore. His response to Claudia's drug abuse is to punch her because that's what he's best at. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 22:19 on Apr 2, 2018 |
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Apr 2, 2018 22:12
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It's hard to show how war strips soldiers of their humanity when you're introduced to said characters as either sociopaths or neurotic headcases and then offhandedly told "they were probably good people once."
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Apr 2, 2018 22:15
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Io was Cliff Secord, robots turn him into thrill killer. Daryl was sweet kid who liked radio and beaches, robots seduce him into giving up ability to run on beaches in order to kill more. Lady scientist liked growing plants, robots turn her into weapon scientist using biology to kill instead of cultivate. There was actually a lot of pain and crying involved in these transformations, inviting the audience to wonder whether maybe war is bad. Thank you for listening to my TED Talk.
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Apr 2, 2018 22:22
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Except there are instances in the show where that former person seeps through. You see Io's breaking point in the flashback to Moore's destruction where he saw his dad's suicide, and then you see his failure to properly care for Claudia when he discovers her drug overdose, because he can't think like normal anymore. His lover is nearly dead an all he can do is yell at her for being a bad leader. Daryl literally has a good quarter of his screen time dedicated to showing the person he was and wanted to be to contrast with what he'd become. Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 22:26 on Apr 2, 2018 |
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Apr 2, 2018 22:23
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Thunderbolt isn't subtle, how are you people not understanding it
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Apr 2, 2018 22:31
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Improbable Lobster posted:Thunderbolt isn't subtle, how are you people not understanding it see: 3 posted:It's hard to show how war strips soldiers of their humanity when you're introduced to said characters as either sociopaths or neurotic headcases and then offhandedly told "they were probably good people once." I understand what thunderbolt is trying to do, but it's not doing it very well.
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Apr 2, 2018 22:34
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I think you can make a good argument for thunderbolt not making a compelling case for io not being a shithead before he joined the federation but I don't think you can say that it doesn't do it at all
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Apr 2, 2018 22:36
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Presentation seems to be the make or break for Thunderbolt.
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Apr 2, 2018 22:36
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Arcsquad12 posted:Io Flemming is also a sociopathic product of nepotism with a rebellious streak that was not improved with his father's death. There's plenty of bad eggs within the federation, he's just on the more extreme edge of things. Io is not a real person, he is a fictional character. There is a very particular reason why the lead representative character of the federation is introduced and portrayed as a bloodthirsty psychopath with only the most bare and perfunctory redeeming elements while the primary representative of zeon is shown as a put-upon young man who has never done anything wrong in his life and is only suffering because of either events outside his control or his own pure messianic impulses.
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Apr 2, 2018 22:41
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I'm just thinking about Unicorn as that bit in Monty Python where Hitler comes back and runs for local government now. Classic.
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Apr 2, 2018 22:47
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Babysitter Super Sleuth posted:Io is not a real person, he is a fictional character. There is a very particular reason why the lead representative character of the federation is introduced and portrayed as a bloodthirsty psychopath with only the most bare and perfunctory redeeming elements while the primary representative of zeon is shown as a put-upon young man who has never done anything wrong in his life and is only suffering because of either events outside his control or his own pure messianic impulses. But there's more than those two characters. Like, there's the setting, which is literally the remains of a Zeon genocide. There's also the fact that almost everything Daryl is subjected to is because of the monstrous Zeon officers who see the Living Dead squadron as guinea pigs at best.
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Apr 2, 2018 22:48
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Thunderbolt is an experiment to determine the maximum amount of edge you can put in a Gundam show. It's entertaining but the viewer doesn't care about any of the exploding robots because war is hell(a cool). 0080 is the exact opposite, going zero edge and all heart. You feel bad every time a robot explodes because someone you care about has died and someone you care about has lost an innocence they'll never regain. 3 posted:
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Apr 2, 2018 22:55
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Monaghan posted:see: You clearly don't, actually
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Apr 2, 2018 23:16
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Io is a person who by chance happened to be on the right side of the war, who was instantly turned into a monster because his personality is very compatible with what war demands of him. It's tragic that even though he's the "good guy" he's still an awful monster because that's what war does to people, no matter what side you're on Darryl is a person who by chance happened to be caught on the wrong side of the war. Despite having a personality that isn't terribly compatible with war, war still found a situation where normally positive qualities (self sacrifice, care for your friends) were twisted and turn against him gradually until, at the end, he's practically indistinguishable from Io, and gets to participate in the only "cool" fight scene in the movie. Io was going to be a monster no matter where he lived (and therefore no matter which side of the war he wound up on) because his personality basically doomed him from the start. Darryl wasn't doomed from the start, but zeon was so awful that it chewed him up and spat out a monster anyway.
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Apr 2, 2018 23:19
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I've asked people who I showed thunderbolt to "who were the good guys" and the answer was always, even from several people who have 0 experience with gundam, the federation. Crying zeon apologizism is weird to me when I've never actually seen anyone who came away thinking they were supposed to be rooting for zeon. But I think one of the messages from thunderbolt is "there's not really a good and bad guy if you're a soldier. There's just the people in charge of you and the people you shoot, and both of them are awful people."
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Apr 2, 2018 23:24
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ninjewtsu posted:Io is a person who by chance happened to be on the right side of the war, who was instantly turned into a monster because his personality is very compatible with what war demands of him. This 'by chance' seems more 'by design', because I always took Thunderbolt to be examining 'what if Amuro and Char swapped sides?'
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Apr 2, 2018 23:24
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Improbable Lobster posted:You clearly don't, actually well thanks for being a condescending dick because I have a different viewpoint of a show than you, despite you giving me poo poo for using a hyperbole earlier. Thunderbolt is trying to show how war turns people into monsters. But as others have said that doesn't work when you only show them as monsters, and there's almost no frame of reference for what they were like before the war or some other life altering event. Some throw away line by some minor character about how Io was a good person before or a flashback of Daryl running through the goddamn beach isn't going to change that. Monaghan fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Apr 2, 2018 |
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Apr 2, 2018 23:27
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The "by chance" I more intend to mean "it's not like io looked at the federation from a neutral perspective and, weighing their ideology and political position and philosophic worth against zeon's, objectively decided they were the side he was going to fight for." That decision was made for him, when zeon attacked his home. And it's not exactly like he chose to live there either! It's just where he happened to be born. Being on the good side or the bad side isn't the fault of the individual soldier, that's not really a choice they themselves actually made. So, yes. Io's kind of an awful person who is fighting for the federation. I think that's a deliberate decision made to zero in on how little "good guys" and "bad guys" actually matter when you're zoomed in on the perspective of individual soldiers, rather than the big picture. There's bad people in the federation and good people in zeon. It's still clear that zeon are scum if you want to take a step back and look at the big picture, but that's not really what the movie is about. ninjewtsu fucked around with this message at 23:30 on Apr 2, 2018 |
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Apr 2, 2018 23:28
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