chiasaur11 posted:

This is where you go from "controversial" to "actual madness". Zeta and ZZ both have their flaws, but Victory's just bad.

There's moments where Victory is terrible in a funny, crazy way, and even a few times it's outright good but more often it's just... dull. And bad.

It's a slog of a show.

Onmi posted:

chiasaur11 posted:

This is where you go from "controversial" to "actual madness". Zeta and ZZ both have their flaws, but Victory's just bad.

There's moments where Victory is terrible in a funny, crazy way, and even a few times it's outright good but more often it's just... dull. And bad.

It's a slog of a show.

Onmi posted:

While it's true man's abused the environment, I always took that message to mean humanity needs to respect the land it came from, rather than leave it. For me, ultimately, the message of Gundam felt like it should have been "Whether humanity stays on the earth or leaves is entirely dependent on the people, it's not for anyone, be it the Federation Government, Zeon or anyone else, to determine all people should be anywhere." I feel like the idea of "Your soul is being weighed down by gravity" to be kind of the justification of people unwilling to accept others, nominally, newtypes. Char and Haman both say it, and neither of them can accept others. It's less I feel that earth 'weighs people down' and more that Space is cold and cruel. Haman describes the harshness of the asteroid belt and her justification really reads as "I wanted to return to the comfort and warmth of the earth." than, "Earthnoids are awful and are polluting the world."

Nessus posted:

While it's less popular now, I always read a lot of the idea was that in space you can have as many humans and as much industry and as many big parties as you want, because it's in space, which is notable for being empty and relatively short on delicate ecological treasures. It would also be possible for humanity to develop as they wished with (fewer) natural hazards; a space colony takes nothing save its starter material from Earth. Humans could migrate throughout space. It would only be a matter of patience to travel between the stars and bring home with you. "The Earth is the cradle of life, but you cannot stay in the cradle forever."

One of the interesting subtexts in UC to me is that it seems like all the colonies and places like Von Braun were made before the One Year War, and afterwards they sort of struggle to build even a couple new colonies. They have turned home itself into a weapon for political ambitions.

Nessus posted:

While it's less popular now, I always read a lot of the idea was that in space you can have as many humans and as much industry and as many big parties as you want, because it's in space, which is notable for being empty and relatively short on delicate ecological treasures. It would also be possible for humanity to develop as they wished with (fewer) natural hazards; a space colony takes nothing save its starter material from Earth. Humans could migrate throughout space. It would only be a matter of patience to travel between the stars and bring home with you. "The Earth is the cradle of life, but you cannot stay in the cradle forever."

One of the interesting subtexts in UC to me is that it seems like all the colonies and places like Von Braun were made before the One Year War, and afterwards they sort of struggle to build even a couple new colonies. They have turned home itself into a weapon for political ambitions.

quote:

"At the dawn of the universal century, mankind, after a period of war, looked towards the stars and asked, "What lies out there for us?" with this in mind, all the way to Jupiter, we colonized space, we moved our burgeoning population in a great movement, we knew hardship and prosperity... But in space, humanity rediscovered its fear, not just of the unknown, but of ourselves. We feared what we could become, and we feared what we had left behind.

Our yearning for our motherland grew with each passing day, as those who departed before us passed on their legacy to their children, a new generation of humanity, the 'Spacenoid'. But in the creation of 'Spacenoid' and the definition of 'Earthnoid,' an irreparable divide was born of our people. A deep fear that one would annihilate the other, in this fear was born Contolism, Newtype Theory, Desidism. Humanity lost its reasoning, turning upon one another, seeking a greater answer to this growing expanse."

drrockso20 posted:

Of course part of the problem is Tomino has a VERY bad understanding of how Space Colonies would actually work despite how central they are to Gundam as a franchise

Onmi posted:

To be real, I also have fuckin' no idea how a Space Colony would actually work.

Nessus posted:

Perhaps the terror is not so much that you can never feel the real sun or the real rain from the far-distant clouds, but the prospect that in time - and perhaps very soon - there would be descendants of humanity for whom such things were normal, expected, just the way it is. What would those people be like?

Answer: They would take a lot of baths.

Onmi posted:

To be real, I also have fuckin' no idea how a Space Colony would actually work.

Onmi posted:

To be real, I also have fuckin' no idea how a Space Colony would actually work.

chiasaur11 posted:

Counterargument: Tekkadan.

Nessus posted:

Those nerds were born on Mars and Mars is basically just the Philadelphia to Earth's New York. You're not going to go beyond the time that way!

chiasaur11 posted:

Not all of them.

The former Brewers kids were born in space, not afraid to die in space.

They also smelled just as bad.

Endorph posted:

tbf their bosses were literal warhammer orks, would they really care about giving the kids time to bathe

drrockso20 posted:

There's some good literature out there on the subject, I'll admit I've only read little tidbits but it's enough to see the holes and errors in how Gundam handles it(including but not limited to what I've discussed in the past about how Gundam underestimates the durability of a Space Colony by an absolutely ridiculous extent)

Arcsquad12 posted:

If I could find the video of the Barzam song I'd be posting it because you don't talk poo poo about my abdomen-lacking chonk boy.

Arcsquad12 posted:

If I could find the video of the Barzam song I'd be posting it because you don't talk poo poo about my abdomen-lacking chonk boy.

chiasaur11 posted:

As for Tomino, I feel like I should throw some gas on the fire by mentioning that Mari Okada praised dialogue in Tomino shows for how natural it felt. That is, it feels like things someone said more than things someone wrote.

Spelling Mitsake posted:

Zeta's designs are really cool as a sequel. It really shows how the world has evolved since the last war. The problem is literally every show after going back to "Gundam head = good guys, Mono-eye = bad guys"

Onmi posted:

Gihren was a diehard Contolist

Onmi posted:

Space may be infinite, but nothing can beat a real breeze or the real sun on your skin, true rain, not an artificial simulation.

Nessus posted:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O%27Neill_cylinder describes them more - Gundam doesn't show them as linked pairs, but otherwise they match pretty closely.

drrockso20 posted:

There's some good literature out there on the subject, I'll admit I've only read little tidbits but it's enough to see the holes and errors in how Gundam handles it(including but not limited to what I've discussed in the past about how Gundam underestimates the durability of a Space Colony by an absolutely ridiculous extent)

Argas posted:

I feel like Gundam depicts space colonies as fragile for the war metaphor. It's not other individuals, society, or even the military. It's the specter of war. Obviously war is tied to all those things but at least in early Gundam, war's this special escalation of conflict past normal bounds. And it's only in war that you see this kind of wholesale destruction of people's homes or what is effectively their entire world. I might be reading too much of WW2 into this.

tsob posted:

I think it's kind of a moot point whether Tomino writes realistic or unrealistic people to a large degree because Tomino is generally not the main writer on his own shows. He's a director, not a writer. He certainly has input on how the characters are written, but he also generally leaves the actual writing, including dialogue, up to other people. He has other duties as director, and usually goes above and beyond those anyway, doing a lot of the storyboarding himself but also contributing to music, mechanical design and other areas too according to various staff. Okawara credited him for much of Zeon's mechanical design during the original show in his biography for instance, and there age pages he says are Tomino's original sketches, which aren't far from the finished units he did clean up on.

I think G-Reco might be the only show he was the principle writer for every episode on. Which isn't a surprise, since G-Reco was his baby a lot more than any other Gundam show. It's the only show he ever approached Sunrise to make too, so far as I know, where I'm pretty sure he made every other show in his oeuvre after they asked him to make a show that fulfilled certain stipulations as part of his job. He pretty famously only wrote one episode in the original Gundam for instance, which was "Time, Be Still", the episode where a group of guys try to plant bombs on the Gundam with the promise they can go home if they succeed. Which is probably one of the best episodes in the show, in my opinion. I'm pretty sure Akinori Endo was the principle writer for Zeta and ZZ too, though Yumiko Suzuki may have been his equal going off some interviews. He certainly talks about the writing in ways that imply he's the one making a lot of the decisions during interview.


Wait...are you implying that Zeta did something different? Because that's exactly what Zeta did. Good guys = Gundam heads, at least for the most part, while bad guys = monoeyes. The Rick Dias was an exception, but most of AEUG's suits had human faces and not mono-eyes.


I doubt it. Gihren was just using Contolism as a cover for his own ambitions and philosophy as far as I can see. He thought the Earthsphere could only support so many people, and wanted to reduce the human population so that there would less strain on resources, which I don't recall being a part of Contolsim. I'm not sure why he thought that mind, since space is chock full of mineral resources and if you have mini fusion engines in all your military machines, then you basically have unlimited energy too. Contolism as far as I recall though is basically (1) Everyone should abandon the Earth, because it gave birth to us but now we're destroying it and everyone should live in space instead, with each Side being self governing and (2) maybe people will evolve if they live in space, because the distances are so great?

The infamous Hitler scene in the third movie has Gihren all but admit that he's just using the concept of Newtypes to rally the people, and that he doesn't actually care about them personally, but if Degwin is so concerned about them, then they can await their arrival once they've won the war. He isn't actually concerned about them himself, and doesn't even seem to believe that Challia is a real Newtype, but he's happy to use people's conception of them and invoke them as propaganda if it'll help him. Which doesn't really sound like a sincere adherent to me. I think even that philosophy of resource management was probably at least partially just something he said to justify his own desire for power though, and that Gihren was the ultimate end result of Degwin's own actions. Degwin killed Deikun because he thought he could lead better, but there was probably some personal desire in there too and his son saw that and took just the power hunger element of it and ran with that. Degwin created the monster that killed him, even if he told himself it was for good reason at the time.


I personally doubt anyone raised in that environment would be too fussed about the difference, and think it's possible that some of them may even prefer the simulacrum to be honest.


Oddly enough, there is one Gundam entry that fixed this and it's G-Saviour. The people making that took the time to place their colonies into linked pairs when animating the movie, even if nothing else in UC (or any AU) did.


Gerard K. O'Neill's original book on the subject, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space is probably still the best source on it. If you can get your hands on it. It's not something you'll see around too often, but Amazon show a digital copy for €12, and the hardcover for €40, so it's still possible to get a copy even 44 years since it first published. That's the UK store though, not sure about other store fronts.

drrockso20 posted:

That's probably part of it, though I think it mostly comes from them not realizing that a full size Space Colony would be way more durable than anything we've constructed in real life for space travel or exploration, if just from the sheer scale we're talking about, let alone the materials they'd be made out of(like even the glass* would probably be dozens of feet thick at the absolute thinnest, something like the Zaku blowing up in the first episode of MSG would barely even scratch it, not the giant gaping hole we see it make), like I'm not going to rag on Gundam too hard about this, but it would be nice to see them be more accurate about it in a future AU(kinda like how IBO heavily boosted the durability of space ships)

*which probably wouldn't even be actual glass and instead some sort of super advanced polymer or alloy


Yeah that's the book, I think I read a chapter or two of it back in High School and I should get myself a copy someday

Also on the topic of concepts from famous science authors, Gundam really should include an Astrochicken in a future series

drrockso20 posted:

That's probably part of it, though I think it mostly comes from them not realizing that a full size Space Colony would be way more durable than anything we've constructed in real life for space travel or exploration, if just from the sheer scale we're talking about, let alone the materials they'd be made out of(like even the glass* would probably be dozens of feet thick at the absolute thinnest, something like the Zaku blowing up in the first episode of MSG would barely even scratch it, not the giant gaping hole we see it make)

Hogama posted:

By your request.

tsob posted:

Did they? They created the single most ambitious social housing scheme in history by building dozens of space colonies that mostly consisted of pastoral countryside and suburban housing, along with multiple types of free public transport around them and then moved billions of people to them. They did so for at least partly selfish reason, and there seems to have been some measure of force and corruption involved in the effort even sticking purely to the animations, but the end result is still a socialist measure that dwarfs anything else in history.

tsob posted:

Did they? They created the single most ambitious social housing scheme in history by building dozens of space colonies that mostly consisted of pastoral countryside and suburban housing, along with multiple types of free public transport around them and then moved billions of people to them. They did so for at least partly selfish reason, and there seems to have been some measure of force and corruption involved in the effort even sticking purely to the animations, but the end result is still a socialist measure that dwarfs anything else in history.

Maarak posted:

G-Reco by the end makes it explicitly clear humanity cannot make a permanent in home in space. It puts the entire franchise under question, but especially the mid-Cold War utopian vision of space colonization the original series builds from.

Stairmaster posted:

No, their failure to adapt is what lead to zeon, the titans, neo-zeon 1, neo-zeon 2, the crossbone vanguard, and the zanscare. that's the barbarism part.