|
relena tries to kill une, disappears for a long stretch, and when she shows up again she's been ruling sanc kingdom for a while and running a school. i don't think any detail of this transition was ever explained.
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 04:14
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 20:34 |
|
|
However...
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 04:19
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/feezy_feez/status/1558595235965386752 rip l gaim also never saw wing but the card getting ripped up scene indirectly got me into mecha i think so, seems cool
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 04:24
|
|
|
gimme the GOD drat candy posted:relena tries to kill une, disappears for a long stretch, and when she shows up again she's been ruling sanc kingdom for a while and running a school. i don't think any detail of this Between that she actually found out about her parentage and what her family had stood for. She was angry and stricken with grief at first but later realized such lashing out was useless and an insult to her family name. I seem to recall she's all bloodthirsty when Heero fights Zechs and Noin snaps her out of it. That talk happens at some point for sure. It might have been nice to see more of this but re-establishing a long dead kingdom and the minutia therein isn't really the kind of thing Wing could ever do well.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 04:30
|
|
|
gimme the GOD drat candy posted:relena tries to kill une, disappears for a long stretch, and when she shows up again she's been ruling sanc kingdom for a while and running a school. i don't think any detail of this It's never explained and the audience is just expected to swallow it, the same way the audience is expected to swallow the fact that for some reason even the politicos pay lip service to, and average grunts hanging around all but worship, this random pacifist~ girl from a dead country. Relena's offscreen rewrite is the weakest and dumbest part of Wing. At least they gave it to Noin so I can handwave part of it as a one-two punch of Noin being obsessed with Zechs and his/the Peacecraft legacy + already being shown at indoctrination (training her troops), but it doesn't explain everyone else's ridiculous responses.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 05:05
|
|
|
Me: I'm sure sick and tired of all these woowoo Newtypes I wish we had a Gundam series about normal people Wing: I got u bro
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 05:47
|
|
|
taichara posted:It's never explained and the audience is just expected to swallow it, the same way the audience is expected to swallow the fact that for some reason even the politicos pay lip service to, and average grunts hanging around all but worship, this random pacifist~ girl from a dead country. That's the whole show and it's actually rewatching it like right now, much more reminiscent of how I feel about random tomino actions in MSG and Zeta. People doing things. and they are done! now we just examine what happens next not explore how it happened \.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 06:02
|
|
|
Treize is also a bit of a weirdo, though at least Treize knows that about himself. Given his philosophy is basically "Man war is great when done right and I love it. But also it's kind of terrible and I should try to end it."
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 06:11
|
|
|
dude thinks about war more than the rest of the cast combined thinks about anything
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 06:14
|
|
|
taichara posted:It's never explained and the audience is just expected to swallow it, the same way the audience is expected to swallow the fact that for some reason even the politicos pay lip service to, and average grunts hanging around all but worship, this random pacifist~ girl from a dead country. Wing's story is that of heightened melodrama like a stage play, it's characters are congruent with that form. People shouldn't have to act "Realistic" in a setting that is unrealistic, the problem is when the form and the actors aren't congruent so when you see people say things like "This actor felt like he was in a different movie, or this subplot felt tacked on" a lot of that criticism is that the form and actors/plotting was at odds. e.g. anytime Jared Leto opens his loving mouth in House of Gucci since he decided to play some sort of lobotomized clownman in a relatively grounded setting.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 06:14
|
|
|
Jared Leto cast to play Treize Khushrenada in live action Wing. Scott McNeill plays Duo, proving once and for all that a fifty year old man can convincingly play a thirteen year old.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 06:30
|
|
|
Dear god no, If I never see Leto again it can only be too soon. Tom Cruise as Treize, I think he can do it
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 06:36
|
|
|
Gaius Marius posted:Wing's story is that of heightened melodrama like a stage play, it's characters are congruent with that form. People shouldn't have to act "Realistic" in a setting that is unrealistic, the problem is when the form and the actors aren't congruent so when you see people say things like "This actor felt like he was in a different movie, or this subplot felt tacked on" a lot of that criticism is that the form and actors/plotting was at odds. e.g. anytime Jared Leto opens his loving mouth in House of Gucci since he decided to play some sort of lobotomized clownman in a relatively grounded setting. Yeah, it is absolutely fine for something to be like that if it was the series is going for. Wing is nothing but insane melodrama from insane people but that is exactly what it is aiming for. Everyone is exaggerated and theatrical and what they do depends as much on the emotion of the moment than anything else. SEED is somewhat similar in that 95% of what it cares for is soap opera melodrama and it generally sticks to that because that is what it wants and that is why it goes for evil twins and sudden twists and so-on. Doesn't make it good writing but it's consistent writing that everyone in the series is going to be melodramatic as theater students. 0079 follows its own logic where it is attempting to capture the lack of logic inherent to humanity so people act weird and stupid and sometimes crazy but that is all part of the show because it is consistent with *why* they act that way. People are loving dumb but (usually) they are dumb in ways that make sense for their characters. It falls apart when the writing gets so bad that characters aren't acting weird in the ways the series stands for. 08th MS Team falls into this sometimes where it can't decide the exact tone it wants, Destiny and *especially* Age are ripe with it, etc, etc. You can have characters act weird and it's fine as long as the series knows what it is doing. It doesn't mean it will be *good* writing but it will fit.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 06:36
|
|
|
I have always thought of Wing as a response to G Gundam in a way, a bridge between it and the original universe and tone. It is a middle-ground of the two, not as cartoonishly over-the-top as G but still featuring a larger-than-life cast. Heero is not Amuro or Kamille, a kid who has lived a pretty recognizable life until it was turned upside down. He's not even Setsuna (despite both of them being thoroughly traumatized child soldiers) because 00S1 is a very grounded story. Heero is a guy who apparently broke more bones than a body possessed. Heero and everyone else are exaggerated, hyperbolic, melodramatic - and it rules. That's what people like about it from what I've read in all these years since I first watched it; all those larger-than-life characters in this much more gritty setting than G's weird shounen battle thing NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Aug 15, 2022 |
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 06:48
|
|
|
wing takes the energy of kamille doing whatever the gently caress he wants in the first episode of zeta with no regard for nor any clear conception of consequences to his actions, and extends that to every member of the cast it's awesome and i wish i had more anime to watch with plots and characters that nuts
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 07:05
|
|
|
NikkolasKing posted:I have always thought of Wing as a response to G Gundam in a way, a bridge between it and the original universe and tone. It is a middle-ground of the two, not as cartoonishly over-the-top as G but still featuring a larger-than-life cast. Heero is not Amuro or Kamille, a kid who has lived a pretty recognizable life until it was turned upside down. He's not even Setsuna (despite both of them being thoroughly traumatized child soldiers) because 00S1 is a very grounded story. Heero is a guy who apparently broke more bones than a body possessed. I don't agree tonally or thematically for Wing being a middle ground between MSG and G. G certainly takes a very different tone to MSG or the Tominian sequels, but thematically it is very in line with them. The earth has been devastated by humanity, we need to make a concentrated effort to heal it as sentiment being hijacked by political groups trying only for their own power and watching that spiral out of control into full on genocide accurately describes the Zabist politics and the Dark Gundam. Further the mental clarity and special understanding that one obtains by fighting can be seen as analogous to Newtype thought, and the false hyper mode Domon obtains and the Rage mode of Allenby are similar to cybernewtypes. Rain being used to complete the Dark Gundam is also similar to early Tomino and his views on Women and the importance of their life giving nature. Imagawa deserves a lot of credit not just for making a fun Shonen anime, but in translating Tominian concepts in a way that is usually not successful, as in Unicorns or SEED's case or only in part in 00's case. Wing meanwhile is almost less grounded than even G, characters feel detached from reality and operate only the plane of their own thoughts rather than that of the worlds. And thematically Wing attempts at a lot of thoughts, but they're very tossed off and half finished, their is no real core hypothesis to the series the way Tomino does for his, or IBO, 00, G do.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 07:21
|
|
|
Wing, particularly its more accelerated earlier parts, always felt to me like a TV version of F91. Not in terms of characters, themes, or any of that, but in that Wing has that same "WHAM! Now something's happening, immediately, it's going to be important before we rush into the next thing" energy that F91 has. The key difference is that Wing is a TV show doing this as that much more of an active creative decision, so we do actually get to see all the steps we need to see, rather than it being an editing necessity to get all of F91 into a movie of its runtime.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 07:28
|
|
|
MonsterEnvy posted:Treize is also a bit of a weirdo, though at least Treize knows that about himself. Given his philosophy is basically "Man war is great when done right and I love it. But also it's kind of terrible and I should try to end it." Big Boss
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 07:45
|
|
|
Gaius Marius posted:I don't agree tonally or thematically for Wing being a middle ground between MSG and G. G certainly takes a very different tone to MSG or the Tominian sequels, but thematically it is very in line with them. The earth has been devastated by humanity, we need to make a concentrated effort to heal it as sentiment being hijacked by political groups trying only for their own power and watching that spiral out of control into full on genocide accurately describes the Zabist politics and the Dark Gundam. Further the mental clarity and special understanding that one obtains by fighting can be seen as analogous to Newtype thought, and the false hyper mode Domon obtains and the Rage mode of Allenby are similar to cybernewtypes. Rain being used to complete the Dark Gundam is also similar to early Tomino and his views on Women and the importance of their life giving nature. Your analysis of the ideas is spot on but I think I'm right on tone and I apologize for not clarifying that all I meant is tone. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H0RcTC7Z624 Everything about this scene is weird as hell and that's why people like it. But it's weird because these are recognizably human people in a recognizable setting. Weird is a relative thing, none of this would be weird if we didn't expect something else. G Gundam meanwhile... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hexQPDW7s5g This would all be pretty weird too if we hadn't established early on that Domon can catch bullets and his brother is like a ninja and all this other zany over-the-top poo poo. (sorry it's been like 15 years since I watched it) Thus it's not weird, it's just what this setting is. I was promised DBZ with robots by a friend in high school and he was right, only this is good. So if we had a scale of Realism with original 0079 being the Most Realistic, G goes in the total opposite direction and is the Most Unrealistic. Wing dials it back a decent bit but is still far removed from the more grounded Universal Century stuff. I dunno, maybe I'm wrong, this is just my interpretation. None of this is a values judgment on which is better, I just think Wing is indeed very melodramatic and features larger-than-life characters but it seems obvious to me that it didn't go as far with all of that as G did. Coming on the heels of G, being the second AU Gundam, it makes sense it would be reacting to G's massive changes. NikkolasKing fucked around with this message at 08:19 on Aug 15, 2022 |
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 08:16
|
|
|
Neddy Seagoon posted:Unlike Build Fighters Try, where they completely sabotage that aspect with a neeedless gimmick to ensure no serious harm may ever befall the protagonist's robot because I'd say the bigger problem with Build Fighters Try and it's choreography for battles is that it makes what was previously a story focused mostly on two people fighting, and thus able to focus it's choreography on them completely with no extraneous actors to animate into a 6 person battle by having 2 teams of 3 people. Which even the show recognized was kind of a bad idea I think, given the number of times that the other 2 people on a team with one major face just kind of disappear in battle; even the times there are full teams battling, a lot of it is just broken down into focusing on smaller subsets at any given time. It meant that not only could the main characters units not be damaged significantly, but that the choreography had to account for 6 people at once and animate a lot more stuff happening at any time when focusing on the team aspect. Endorph posted:iirc theres about 2-3 cut episodes around the middle (hence the recap episode) so some of that stuff might have been in those Yeah, the original director, Masashi Ikeda, left the show for, as far as I can see, health reasons, around the half way point and was replaced uncredited for the show's original run by a new director, Shinji Takamatsu. The show put in 2 back to back clip shows in it's place while Takamatsu retooled a lot of the show's direction, but the original plan was to have two episodes focusing on the history of the pilots around about then, so far as I know. Which eventually got published as manga stories in the "Episode Zero" manga. It's worth noting that, while as far as I know the original director left for personal reasons on amicable footing, that the show's ratings did pick up a bit in the second half after some shifting of direction in terms of the show's story, so it's possible the replacement was actually planned as part of a desire to push the ratings a bit. I'd have thought if it was entirely amicable the guy wouldn't retool the story too much, but it's possible he did despite an otherwise agreeable transition. Gaius Marius posted:Wing is an odd duck. The whole atmosphere of the show is so heightened and theatrical that characters can do things that are absolutely insane, but still make perfect sense in terms of character motivations. A lot of the commentary on the automation of warfare and the removal of the human element from it and how that effects peoples willingness to go to war and fight is more and more prescient. Gundam Wing and Macross Plus are often cited as becoming more pertinent over time because of their themes, but they have so little focus on that aspect and so little to say on them beyond "it's bad" that I personally don't think they're worth really mentioning. I'd love a Gundam or Macross show that focused on those themes, because they're definitely worthy of exploration and a minefield of interesting or pertinent information, but I just can't see either as actually exploring them in any meaningful way personally. Endorph posted:honestly i dont really get people calling wing boring or dreary because every like 7 minutes something completely insane happens. like wufei arguing with that rebel lady and then mid-argument he just steps on a canoe and kicks it out to sea and stands there silently while she keeps yelling at him. or the 5 episode arc of trowa infiltrating lady une's base while her second in command loses his loving mind about how trowa is obviously a spy and literally nobody believes him It doesn't really matter how insane anything happening is if you have zero emotional investment in the characters or stakes the story is setting, I guess. Which it's easy for a lot of people to brush off in Wing's case because of the melodramatic way that the story itself brushes off a lot of things. MonsterEnvy posted:Treize is also a bit of a weirdo, though at least Treize knows that about himself. Given his philosophy is basically "Man war is great when done right and I love it. But also it's kind of terrible and I should try to end it." I never got the feeling Trieze loved war from Wing; only that he admired soldiers.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 15:57
|
|
.
|
tsob posted:Yeah, the original director, Masashi Ikeda, left the show for, as far as I can see, health reasons, around the half way point and was replaced uncredited for the show's original run by a new director, Shinji Takamatsu. The show put in 2 back to back clip shows in it's place while Takamatsu retooled a lot of the show's direction, but the original plan was to have two episodes focusing on the history of the pilots around about then, so far as I know. Which eventually got published as manga stories in the "Episode Zero" manga.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 16:04
|
|
|
also thematically i think wing does have a core idea. theres a quote from some random military tech guy whos explaining the drone technology bitterly and he goes 'we made a big show of how strong this all would make us, but really, we made it because we were scared.' basically every antagonistic force in wing is acting out of fear. romefeller and oz fear losing their control over humanity, treize fears himself and other soldiers becoming irrelevant, zechs fears, well, everything really, the mans a bit hosed up. the zero system fucks people up because it shows them the future. a drone is preferable to a soldier because its controllable and reliable, that lines repeated a bunch by all the antagonists. quinze wanted the most reliable, certain plan for the rebellion, just dropping colonies all over earth. he didnt trust that they could win through subterfuge or negotiation, he just wanted to blow the earth up cause that was a sure-fire method. basically wing is about learning not to fear uncertainty or the possibility of the future being worse, and it communicates this via the show itself being really all over the map to the point that you the viewer cant really predict where its going. the shadowy illuminati figures are trying to pull the strings but everything goes off the rails before long. intentional or not its a pretty clear throughline that is baked pretty deep into the shows dna. thats why they send their gundams into the sun at the end, the futures uncertain but theyll face it themselves, not with their megadeathmachines that provide safety and security. ofc endless waltz fucks that final beat up a bit, also frozen teardrop existing makes the future less 'uncertain,' but still, taking the tv series by itself it works imo Endorph fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Aug 15, 2022 |
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 16:13
|
|
|
Endorph posted:Wing seems to have been written in an extremely fly-by-night way, there's an interview with the lead writer where he talks about walking into work and being told about the plot twist of an episode that is already being animated, that he's unaware of. So its possible the writing/direction shift was just because with the original director gone nobody knew where they were even going with anything. While that's new information to me, it's not really shocking. It is a little odd though, I suppose, given Sumizawa (the writer) has talked in the past about how he, Ikeda and a few others came up with a lot of the setting, characters and plot for Wing in one or two really productive meetings at the start of production. You'd imagine they'd have had a little more set plan in that case. Endorph posted:also thematically i think wing does have a core idea. Sure, but I said that Wing (and Macross Plus) had nothing of substance to say on drones and drone warfare beyond "it's bad"; not that Wing had no core themes or messages at all. I don't really think a message of controlling fear or letting it control you really says anything about drone warfare specifically.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 16:28
|
|
|
to be fair, i do think fear and drone warfare are pretty closely related given that the first famous use of drone warfare, the point where it was marketed to the larger public, was literally called the 'war on terror'. drones are often marketed or spun as a less bloody, more 'efficient' solution to warfare that doesn't have to 'sacrifice' troops, and they can also be deployed much more precisely than large numbers of troops. put those things together and i do think there is actually a throughline between fear, uncertainty, and the 'appeal' of drone warfare.
Endorph fucked around with this message at 16:35 on Aug 15, 2022 |
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 16:31
|
|
|
here's the interview, btwquote:ANN: Amazing. What's the most challenging thing you've ever written? The script that gave you the most trouble? the libra and peacemillion crash is from the finale, so its possible only the finale was a scramble, or maybe its just endemic of the rewrites after the director swap.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 16:34
|
|
|
tsob posted:I never got the feeling Trieze loved war from Wing; only that he admired soldiers. It’s both Trieze posted:I believe that true beauty and nobility comes only in battles with others, and human life should be given the utmost respect. I truly love and respect every person who have died in battle. I don’t believe an absolute and crushing victory is what we humans need. I believe that the fight itself and the attitude of warriors are what we need. The guy also wanted to die in the last war cause he felt he would hate living in the peaceful era he was trying to create. Guy just had a messed up mentality. MonsterEnvy fucked around with this message at 17:28 on Aug 15, 2022 |
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 17:22
|
|
|
Endorph posted:to be fair, i do think fear and drone warfare are pretty closely related given that the first famous use of drone warfare, the point where it was marketed to the larger public, was literally called the 'war on terror'. drones are often marketed or spun as a less bloody, more 'efficient' solution to warfare that doesn't have to 'sacrifice' troops, and they can also be deployed much more precisely than large numbers of troops. put those things together and i do think there is actually a throughline between fear, uncertainty, and the 'appeal' of drone warfare. I think attributing the use of drones to "fear" is really superficial honestly, because it's not so much fear of death that drives it as a practical consideration of "yes, lots of people will die if we use soldiers; not all, but a lot". The individual soldiers might feel a dread about their job or even fear in the moment when stuck in the midst of poo poo, but that is not what anyone actually advocating for or using them cares about. The people advocating for and using them are far more often driven by practical concerns, not just based on loss of life either, but cost of training, transport etc. for actual infantry. Dermail's contempt for soldiers and desire for a controllable troop is more pertinent than attributing fear as a factor in the use of drones, honestly and even then I don't think it's explored in enough depth to really care. The only scene where I even recall it being actually explored is Treize attacking in his Leo to demonstrate the value of troops that can selectively obey or interpret commands over drones that just follow them mindlessly. MonsterEnvy posted:The guy also wanted to die in the last war cause he felt he would hate living in the peaceful era he was trying to create. Guy just had a messed up mentality. I thought Treize wanted to die because Epyon showed him that he had no future, and he interpreted it as meaning he had no place in a peaceful society, as opposed to him hating the idea of living in one?
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 18:13
|
|
|
i recall there being a similar situation with the wing gundam getting destroyed in episode 13 or whichever it was, director just told the writer "hey so change of plans i decided to make the main gundam blow itself up excited to hear what you come up with for next week"
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 19:12
|
|
|
ninjewtsu posted:i recall there being a similar situation with the wing gundam getting destroyed in episode 13 or whichever it was, director just told the writer "hey so change of plans i decided to make the main gundam blow itself up excited to hear what you come up with for next week" This is how they wrote Breaking Bad
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 19:19
|
|
|
the thing wing had to say about drone warfare was that by removing the human cost of going to war, the decision to go to war or not becomes trivialized to those in power. thus war becomes nothing but a political and economic game with no meaning past "does it make romefeller's numbers go up" - you can see this in how the treize faction rebels against romefeller based on their philosophical conviction and ideals as soldiers (which they scream about constantly), contrasted against how romefeller mopping up the treize faction is just step 1 to global economic dominance while dermail and his buddies clink champagne glasses. they also turn the camera and directly state all of this like 3 times.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 19:20
|
|
|
The scene where treize shows tuberov how to "beat" the mobile dolls by just walking at them in a leo firing haphazardly, only for the drone control crew to pull a gun on tuberov rather than allow their ideologue to be murdered, is very important here. You need some manner of ideology to control soldiers, while drones have no such need for a philosophic justification for their actions.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 19:29
|
|
|
Gripweed posted:This is how they wrote Breaking Bad Not quite, judging from the interviews I've seen. On Breaking Bad, they at least talked to the writers about the crazy twist they just came up with and how to work with it, rather than treating it as a fait accompli.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 20:25
|
|
|
from what I can tell, it seems as if the writers room in gundam wing was more like riverdale than breaking bad.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 20:33
|
|
|
ninjewtsu posted:the thing wing had to say about drone warfare was that by removing the human cost of going to war, the decision to go to war or not becomes trivialized to those in power. thus war becomes nothing but a political and economic game with no meaning past "does it make romefeller's numbers go up" - you can see this in how the treize faction rebels against romefeller based on their philosophical conviction and ideals as soldiers (which they scream about constantly), contrasted against how romefeller mopping up the treize faction is just step 1 to global economic dominance while dermail and his buddies clink champagne glasses. The problem with that is that as a thing to say is that...well, it's kind of bunk. The people in charge pretty much never care about the human cost when deciding whether to go to war or not, and to the people in charge war often is essentially just a game with no meaning beyond "am I winning"? That was basically the leadership in the original Mobile Suit Gundam, as an example. Not just the Zabis either, but the people we saw in Jaburo were much the same. The politicians in charge might care about the optics of going to war politically or socially, but removing human soldiers doesn't actually change that as a consideration. Not only that, but when using drones or AI they have to be monitored by a human element and that human element often does feel a cost even if they're not in direct danger. There is a comparable rate of PTSD for drone operators as for field infantry, at least partially because (a) they have to compartmentalize doing such horrifically violent things during a job in a comfortable, safe environment before going home to families they can't talk to this about, and who couldn't really understand the scope of it even if they did and (b) because the operators often have to watch video footage of the drones killing people several times apiece in order to record it, write reports etc. So there actually is a human cost; it's just a different cost. The leadership might care about the cost of war when it's a total war scenario where the entire population and economy is diverted to support the war, so not only is everyone sacrificing for the war and needing it over as fast as possible so they can return to some kind of normalcy, but they themselves are in a lot more direct danger because the war is threatening the home nation. They don't generally care so much about it when the war is taking place somewhere overseas though, and doesn't really affect day to day life for most people. Which is probably part of why America (and to a slightly lesser degree, it's European allies) have gotten embroiled in several, almost consecutive "endless" wars that the population were generally okay with dragging on for a decade+ with no win in sight. tsob fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Aug 15, 2022 |
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 21:29
|
|
|
ninjewtsu posted:the thing wing had to say about drone warfare was that by removing the human cost of going to war, the decision to go to war or not becomes trivialized to those in power. thus war becomes nothing but a political and economic game with no meaning past "does it make romefeller's numbers go up" - you can see this in how the treize faction rebels against romefeller based on their philosophical conviction and ideals as soldiers (which they scream about constantly), contrasted against how romefeller mopping up the treize faction is just step 1 to global economic dominance while dermail and his buddies clink champagne glasses. and heero himself is kind of a drone at the start of the series. he does what hes told as effficiently as possible. this is most blatant when he ices that peacemaker politician because he got orders to do so without questioning them. his arc for a while after that is reckoning with the human cost of what he did
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 21:31
|
|
|
tsob posted:The problem with that is that as a thing to say is that...well, it's kind of bunk. The people in charge pretty much never care about the human cost when deciding whether to go to war or not, and to the people in charge war often is essentially just a game with no meaning beyond "am I winning"? That was basically the leadership in the original Mobile Suit Gundam, as an example. Not just the Zabis either, but the people we saw in Jaburo were much the same. The politicians in charge might care about the optics of going to war politically or socially, but removing human soldiers doesn't actually change that as a consideration. idk man disagree with the message all you want it's pretty plainly there and describing wing as having nothing more to say about drones than "they're bad" is incredibly dumb when to a fault wing goes out of its way to directly tell you exactly what it's trying to get across on the topic of your actual disagreement the point is that, typically, to go to war you have to convince your civilian populace to go to war, as if nothing else you need those same civilians to sign up to be soldiers. the civilian populace has "we don't want to die" as a primary reason for avoiding frivolous wars and it's a hell of a lot harder to convince thousands of foot soldiers to potentially throw their lives away than it is to convince a handful of drone operators to be physically safe if ultimately psychologically traumatized. thus the human cost of war acts as a deterrent that mobile dolls entirely sidestep, along with other safeguards against the powerful becoming tyrannical like the soldiers rebelling i.e. the treize faction it's definitely not perfect but also it was like almost decade before actual drone warfare was a thing so come on
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 21:42
|
|
|
The message can be clear, but also fail to address the actual causes of war. That's usually where my beef with Wing comes from, and why I like that the UC has moved in the direction of Anaheim being double-dealing war profiteers actively stoking tensions to sell more mobile suits with things like 0083 and Unicorn. I don't think Zeta/ZZ/CCA actually address this because it came into the canon with 0083. I think it's more salient to look at Wing's message in the context of a post-Vietnam era of an all volunteer military. Part of the buy-in from folks in the United States is that the military is a pretty distant thing for most people. There are plenty of career military families, but it's a far cry from the WWII era or Vietnam Draft eras where everyone knew someone close to them who was shipped off to fight a hell war. As fewer soldiers are needed as a proportion of the population, that distance grows and the military becomes almost mythological through propaganda. "Support our Troops" is more a prayer and a shield against criticizing the military, and detractors can be easily vilified because they aren't part of the military--they don't have skin in the game and don't know what it is like. I think G-Reco and Turn A come closer to addressing this phenomenon than Wing did, but when I watch them I see shades of this kind of criticism present. Just never direct, it's always something I'm reading in as someone living in 2022.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 22:06
|
|
|
ninjewtsu posted:idk man disagree with the message all you want it's pretty plainly there and describing wing as having nothing more to say about drones than "they're bad" is incredibly dumb when to a fault wing goes out of its way to directly tell you exactly what it's trying to get across A lot of nations have a standing army, and the leaders can and do declare war without consulting the populace, so acting like you need to convince the populace to get the go ahead is just silly. They might need to get the civilians on side with any plan once the war has been going a while, especially if it's not going well, but the leaders of any nation can and will manufacture cause if they require it. They also definitely do not have to convince the troops to throw away their lives. They order it, and the troops will do it, because that's how chain of command works. It's very, very rare that there's such wide spread mutiny against a specific view that the entire army will refuse command or need to be brought around by the people in charge even when war is in progress; never mind before a war starts. I stand by my statement that Wing has nothing of substance to say about drones beyond "they're bad" because what little it says is either generic to warfare as a whole rather than being specific to drone warfare or is just plain untrue and thus not a case where Wing is becoming more relevant over time. If Wing does say something then it's that at least soldiers can refuse orders, but that's true of drone operators too and the one scene that really highlights that, the scene of Treize going against Tuberov, actually highlights that since Treize gets the guys operating the mobile dolls to disobey Tuberov. This might not be true of AI warfare, but drone warfare and AI warfare are not one and the same thing; and honestly, even with AI, you'd have to be stark raving crazy to not have any kind of human leash on the AI anyway. Warmachine posted:I like that the UC has moved in the direction of Anaheim being double-dealing war profiteers actively stoking tensions to sell more mobile suits with things like 0083 and Unicorn. When do Anaheim stoke tensions in 0083 or Unicorn? They're just doing the same profiteering they've always done in them; not helping create it. I can't say as I like that as a direction for UC either honestly, because it comes close to pretending that companies like AE are the ones creating problems rather than just profiting off them when the entire setting was predicated on Zeon being so bereft of resources and weapons they invented a whole new military platform that revolutionized warfare and then started firing their homes at people as giant missiles to boot. People do not need arms companies to start wars that can and do devastate the entire planet in UC, and placing AE as the major problem is starting to steer things towards a point of saying "Oh Zeon weren't the real problem; it was all those guys; get them!".
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 22:15
|
|
|
tsob posted:I stand by my statement that Wing has nothing of substance to say about drones beyond "they're bad" because what little it says is either generic to warfare as a whole rather than being specific to drone warfare or is just plain untrue and thus not a case where Wing is becoming more relevant over time. what the gently caress lmao neither of these things is "nothing of substance" it can be of substance and also wrong/not useful you describe it like wing only uses the mobile dolls as set dressing or something but it doesn't, they are a frequent topic of discussion and the implications of unmanned warfare are a consistent subtheme. just because you don't like it doesn't mean it isn't there dude
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 22:19
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 20:34 |
|
|
"wing actually doesn't really talk about drones" is such a bizarre take for a show that has characters frequently monologue on the wider implications of unmanned drone warfare and how that changes war over the previous use of human soldiers. like just on a fundamental level wing goes well out of its way to talk about unmanned warfare, specifically. whether or not it's a salient or useful discussion is its own thing but wing very undeniably discusses drone warfare in depth, what a nutty thing to say about it
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2022 22:26
|
|