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What is weird is you have a perfectly good Hitler Zabi right there too!
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Dec 31, 2016 07:00
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Stop it Cernovich, the deplorables are watching. or Cernovich, you betrayed me! Cernovich!
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Dec 31, 2016 08:32
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Guy Goodbody posted:OK, we all know about the Seravee Gundam 3G, which is the Seravee Gundam but with two more Mobile Suits trapped to the back, right? this is just like that guy from star wars with lightsaber knees
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Dec 31, 2016 12:14
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The only way I can see that Mobile Suit being able to fight with all of those swords is if it either spends most battle spinning, or it has the same fighting style as Killer Bee.
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Dec 31, 2016 12:19
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Hunt11 posted:The only way I can see that Mobile Suit being able to fight with all of those swords is if it either spends most battle spinning, or it has the same fighting style as Killer Bee. All but four (knees and arms) are technically in the grasp of remote controlled drones that are merely docked with it, if that helps.
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Dec 31, 2016 12:33
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Guy Goodbody posted:I'm not really sure the connection to Gundam is strong enough for that to be appropriate for the Gundam thread. So you're saying keep politics out of it? Okay sure Race Realist, Internally: don'tmentionhisrapsheet don'tmentionhisrapsheet
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Dec 31, 2016 19:05
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Watched Encounters in Space again tonight. I'm still under the impression it may be the best piece of Gundam media.
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Jan 1, 2017 05:33
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(sorry, wrong window)
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Jan 1, 2017 15:18
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Is there much material that tries to expand on the F91 time period in UC? I know Crossbone is a sort of sequel, but was there any manga made that expand on the early years of late UC?
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Jan 2, 2017 02:36
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I think you're looking for Silhouette F90
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Jan 2, 2017 02:38
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However stuff from that period tends to get overlooked because the invasion of Zeon holdouts from Mars was a dumb idea.
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Jan 2, 2017 03:11
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Raxivace posted:Well I bet he's not as pretty as Garma is. Why are you saying this? Like nobody is. Garma is the prettiest.
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Jan 2, 2017 20:35
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If you guys haven't watched The Expanse on SyFy / Amazon Prime you should. It's basically the best live action space drama I've seen in a bit, and it almost feels like an alternate storyline mashup of 00: Trailblazer and IBO If they added mobile suits to this show I wouldn't even be slightpirate fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Jan 4, 2017 |
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Jan 4, 2017 18:57
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slightpirate posted:If you guys haven't watched The Expanse on SyFy / Amazon Prime you should. It's basically the best live action space drama I've seen in a bit, and it almost feels like an alternate storyline mashup of 00: Trailblazer and IBO 1000% agree and have been thinking the exact same thing.
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Jan 4, 2017 20:11
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I read the first book in the series and I think it did actually have a worker mech
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Jan 4, 2017 22:11
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The second and third books also mention various mechs(one military and one basically a future wheelchair) but it's never been set up in a way where they're somehow super dominant in battle. Also the mech from the book didn't make it into the show. Edit: that being said it's an amazing series and really does do the thing most Gundam series can't, which is make the politics compelling or sensible in any way. The Muffinlord fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Jan 4, 2017 |
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Jan 4, 2017 23:45
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Like most kids of the 90s, I was into Wing, 08th MS Team, and G. I watched Char's Counterattack without much context in college in the 00s, but liked it. My memories of it, much like War in the Pocket and Stardust Memories, are kinda fuzzy at this point. I recently finished the Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin manga (which is brilliant and balances a dozen different appealing facets like it's no big deal). That series has put the Gundam jones in my bones, and this thread has been a huge help in gathering some Gundam opinions and recommendations. I'm currently rewatching 08th MS Team, should get a copy of Zeta soon (80s animation is rad), and will try to hunt down Char's Counterattack before moving on to Unicorn. The positive vibes over Thunderbolt have me interested in that, too. I tried the first entry of the Origin anime, but retracing the manga's steps wasn't doing it for me. 08th, Zeta, Char's, and Unicorn - is that a good UC viewing order, or should I put more in the middle? I'm not trying to be completionist, just looking for high-quality entries in the One of The Greatest Anime Sagas of All Time.
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Jan 6, 2017 05:06
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The only real viewing order in Gundam is Mobile Suit Gundam/Origin manga -> Zeta -> ZZ -> Char's Counterattack. And, honestly, you can skip ZZ if you want. All the other side stories were made at random times later, so you can watch them whenever.
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Jan 6, 2017 05:11
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ZZ is good but be warned that it isn't an anime if you decide to watch it.
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Jan 6, 2017 05:17
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Raxivace posted:ZZ is good but be warned that it isn't an anime if you decide to watch it. That's literally the first thing they tell you when the show starts, it's not much of a spoiler.
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Jan 6, 2017 05:22
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Space Fish posted:Like most kids of the 90s, I was into Wing, 08th MS Team, and G. I watched Char's Counterattack without much context in college in the 00s, but liked it. My memories of it, much like War in the Pocket and Stardust Memories, are kinda fuzzy at this point. You should check out 0080 at some point as well, it's one of the best gundam things period. Also as mentioned you can skip ZZ, but I don't think you should.
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Jan 6, 2017 06:02
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Space Fish posted:Like most kids of the 90s, I was into Wing, 08th MS Team, and G. I watched Char's Counterattack without much context in college in the 00s, but liked it. My memories of it, much like War in the Pocket and Stardust Memories, are kinda fuzzy at this point. 0080: War In The Pocket is the must see and, arguably, the best Gundam's ever been. Short six episode OVA that focuses in on a Zeon special forces team trying to destroy a secret Federation project and how the war changes the life of a civilian kid named Al. Where a lot of Gundams focus in on how both sides have a lot of assholes, I feel War In The Pocket does the best job of showing both sides of the immediate conflict as good people doing what they think is right while acknowledging that, in the larger war, there's still very much a wrong side. It's also brutal in the right way, where it earns all the pain it causes by making you care about the characters instead of just slathering on the grim. Beyond that, and outside the UC, I've liked Turn A (A more sedately paced AU set in a pseudo-turn of the century America invaded by mechs from the Moon), Stargazer (A very short SEED spinoff focused on the lives of a civilian scientist doing deep space research and a ruthless Earth special forces team raised from childhood to destroy genetically modified humans with a pitch perfect ending.), and the currently airing Iron Blooded Orphans (Desperate child soldiers seize a chance to better their lives by escorting a politician to Earth and murdering anyone who gets in their way). They're all pretty different in tone, and they have their problems (unlike 0080, which I'd say is pretty near perfect.), but I think they're all more or less worth watching, depending on how IBO wraps up. They've done enough smart things that I trust they know what they're doing, but I've been burned before.
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Jan 6, 2017 06:04
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Gundamn Thunderbolt: December Sky is an excellent OVA that takes place during the OYW but is otherwise independent of existing plots or characters.
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Jan 6, 2017 06:06
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Recommending anyone skip ZZ is like recommending you skip the Jabba part of Jedi cause it doesn't relate much to the overall story. Also the best answer is to watch everything in chronological order of release.
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Jan 6, 2017 07:05
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Thunderbolt is also very divisive. Some people like myself find it fantastic, while others don't, for a ton of reasons. Also, apparently the next chapter being adapted is where things start to get stupid. I'd be perfectly happy letting it end where it did, fittingly with a "we're all damned" statement to top it off.
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Jan 6, 2017 07:28
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Improbable Lobster posted:Gundamn Thunderbolt: December Sky is an excellent OVA that takes place during the OYW but is otherwise independent of existing plots or characters. Ehhhh... I'm kinda tepid on Thunderbolt, myself. Like, it looks slick as all hell, and I love the jazz soundtrack, but the actual story and characters don't work. It's nihilistic and empty grand guignol. It's a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing. Bad things happen to people we don't care about until such time as the film hits the end of its run-time, and then it closes on someone promising MORE TO COME, with brief snippets neutralizing the limited real plot progression so far over the credits. The treatment of women is weird, the narrative revels in violence while proclaiming how messed up it is, and there's this attempted moral equivalency between the Federation and Zeon when the Feddies just want to remove the genocidal maniacs who slaughtered their friends and families from the burned out wreck that used to be their home, while Zeon wants to murder everyone else, and maybe themselves, but Io is a jerk, so it's like both sides are the same. And, I know it's based off a manga, and there's going to be a sequel, but just as a standalone it feels like it would have been a much better story if everyone had died. If you're going nihilistic, have the balls to play through to the end, instead of keeping people alive to sell more merch later.
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Jan 6, 2017 07:30
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chiasaur11 posted:Ehhhh... I would disagree with the moral equivalence but I definitely agree that its female characters aren't good.
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Jan 6, 2017 08:46
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It's a depiction of how war ruins the humanity of the soldiers. It's not nihilistic for the sake of being nihilistic, the point of thunderbolt is "these otherwise normal people have been turned into violently rabid animals by war," either immediately in the case of io or as a gradual descent over the course of the show in darryl. Like most gundam, the point is "war is bad, here is why" I don't know how it glorifies violence, tbh the point of every violent scene except the last one is "violence is actually really awful and extremely uncomfortable to watch and not really exhilarating or entertaining so much as just plain kind of terrifying." Zeon doesn't hold the moral high ground if the plot events are examined with any degree of scruitiny. Zeon is really really bad, the federation gets pretty ugly on occasion as well. It's not shoved in your face constantly that Zeon represents genocide and fascism because the story is way more laser focused on the characters in a conflict and not the broader events of the conflict itself. A Zeon soldier doesn't necessarily see his own side as being genocidal maniacs, for various possible reasons, and that doesn't make the individual soldier himself a crazy heartless wackjob. At the scale of a single person, so far removed from the broader politics and greater context of the war in question, each side might as well be one and the same, because what each soldier experiences is similar-ish level of atrocity (zeon's greatest crime, afterall, was the mass extinction of a civilian population). Even then though, in thunderbolt zeon starts off obviously the more reprehensible side by getting cripples to fight its war, the federation arguably achieves moral equivalence by sending kids to the frontline, and then zeon just becomes way uglier when you find out that all along karla is only doing the work she does (and suffering great emotional trauma for it) because her father was charged with the crime of thinking war is bad and if she doesn't help weaponize cripples her father will be executed. Both sides are portrayed as bad, but zeon is definitely portrayed worse, which makes that criticism appear (to me) as being unhappy about the federation not being portrayed as the indisputably morally perfect side in this conflict.
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Jan 6, 2017 10:10
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It's kind of interesting to me that most gundam is pretty transhumanist because of newtypes, but thunderbolt could be read as somewhat the opposite. Darryl's gradual distance from humanity and his increasingly cybernetic body represents a massive "step back" from humanity in its negative portrayal. I don't think that's intentional and it probably isn't an interpretation that holds up under closer examination of the source material, but it was an interesting thought that I wanted to share
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Jan 6, 2017 10:14
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I'd also note that the later arcs are actually a little lighter - Io in particular gets to slowly, awkwardly learn to play the hero, and both sides are racing to take down a common, none-too-sympathetic enemy (a Newtype cult built using psycommu technology that's presenting an obstacle to the Federation's reuinion of Earth after the One Year War and has tech that both sides want) rather than ripping each other apart. The Thunderbolt Sector is kind of the traumatic prologue to the whole story, the nightmare that brought both men to their lowest point and still hangs over them today, and the main thrust of the manga is whether they can heal and move past it.
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Jan 6, 2017 11:17
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ninjewtsu posted:It's a depiction of how war ruins the humanity of the soldiers. It's not nihilistic for the sake of being nihilistic, the point of thunderbolt is "these otherwise normal people have been turned into violently rabid animals by war," either immediately in the case of io or as a gradual descent over the course of the show in darryl. Like most gundam, the point is "war is bad, here is why" See, I get how someone could arrive at that prospective, but I can't agree. First, we don't enough of a view of what people were like without the war to mourn for what's lost. But even beyond that, it's the easy out. It shows empty characters, and uses "WAR" as an excuse for it. For a point of comparison, you could look at Fury. World War II tank film, not exactly the kind of flick that gets a G rating. Fairly early on, the squad's rookie is assigned to clean the tank. He finds his predecessor's face on the seat. People are burned to death, prisoners get shot in the head, bodies are strung up in front of town, a horse gets stabbed in the neck, you know. Fun times all around. But the characters are still shown as human, which is important. If a person who is still recognizably like the viewer does something monstrous and terrifying due to the hosed up circumstances he's in, that's a message, and you weigh it in the balance when considering that kinda thing in the future. If you just get "War fucks you up and makes you a crazy kill guy!", then five minutes with a combat veteran who isn't particularly hosed up (not a rare breed, or even a minority) renders it kind of... stupid. Yes, it's nodding towards "WAR IS BAD", like all Gundam, but where the good stuff has some subtlety and depth (Like 0079 and 0080's "War is bad and leads to good people killing other good people, but sometimes it's necessary, and that's the tragedy of it." or Turn A's "War is often a result of misunderstanding and an unwillingness to compromise by people who actually have a lot in common... but sometimes it's caused by crazy fuckers who need to die yesterday.") Thunderbolt is just "WAR IS BRUTAL!" which leads to point 2. To me, at least, Thunderbolt seems... well, there's more than one way to approach ugliness, and Thunderbolt revels in it. Horrible things happen, but they're stylish and cool horrible things, and you're meant to enjoy them, with a token nod towards how awful they are. The awfulness just enhances the energy. It's not like Come and See or something where the evils of war sink in your gut and leave you feeling sick. It's more like (again) Fury, which acknowledges that something being horrible doesn't stop it from being kinda cool and fun to watch. Actually, Fury goes further in showing how these things are kind of horrible, since we get enough showing people are still people to keep some sense of scale. (It also ends with a small but pivotal moment of mercy and decency in the midst of human evil, allowing for contrast.) Thunderbolt, not so much. As for moral equivalency, it's not just what people do, it's how we're shown them doing it. We don't get a view of Zeon high command, except at the end when they send reinforcements to save a lost battle, classic cavalry move. The Zeon captain is a gruff but fair father to his men type, as opposed to the Federation captain's... look. We all can agree that poo poo was hosed and move on, right? Any moral high ground from not sending crippled vets out is lost when they send kids out as a suicide squad in a move I've complained about at length before. And we get emphasis of how Io killed a dude's friends and see Karla weep over the corpse, while the poor GM pilots don't get a second's screentime. Daryl even gets the moment of humanity in the last fight with "You were my miracle.", while the Federation side gets one of the grunts shooting Claudia because she's one of the corrupt upper class who got them into this mess. Like, in actions the Feddie side is definitely the less scummy, but in framing, they're treated as equivalent. The monstrous thing is WAR, not treated as a logical outcome of human decisions and conflicting ideologies, but as a force on its own. So what if the Zeon soldiers are suicide bombers against people who just want to get back alive and who'd let them live otherwise? This is war. Bad is normal in WAR. Thunderbolt wants to look like it has something to say, but if you poke at it, all you get is "War is bad! (and also cool because it's bad.)" No character depth, no tension to most of the action, no deeper meaning. Just jazz and slick animation trying to dress up a story as mature that, at heart, is anything but. chiasaur11 fucked around with this message at 11:57 on Jan 6, 2017 |
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Jan 6, 2017 11:49
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chiasaur11 posted:See, I get how someone could arrive at that prospective, but I can't agree. There is one important thing to mention here - the Living Dead are specifically treated as Zeon's victims as much as the Moore Brotherhood, which is why they're sympathetic. Darryl is a decent kid turned into a monster on his superiors' orders, and the rest of them end up suiciding (or otherwise dying messily) for superiors who do not give the slightest of shits for them. Karla' boss, who runs the Reuse [P] experiments, is the single least sympathetic character in the arc, and the commander of the elite Zeon fleet who arrives at the end to clean up is nothing but cold and contemptuous towards the Living Dead. Zeon is the overarching villain, even when Darryl and his buddies (who are fighting for it) are slightly more traditionally heroic.
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Jan 6, 2017 12:16
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I don't really think Thunderbolt has fuzzy morality. The Moore Brotherhood are fighting to reclaim the ruins of their home that was entirely annihilated by Zeon in an unprovoked manner whereas the Living Dead are a forgotten group of casualties fighting a holding action with junk equipment because they're viewed as something between useful guinea pigs and expendable trash by their superiors. Daryl is kind of a nice guy and Karla is working under duress but they're fighting for a horrifying cause that cares nothing for either of them and have pretty much no moral standing beyond "just following orders". The Io vs Daryl thing isn't really clear cut in Daryl's favor, either. While Daryl has it significantly worse off on a personal level due to being the subject of a monstrous loving Doctor Mengele experiment that happens to actually yield useful results, Io is the way he is because of incredibly heavy past trauma, specifically being a child and watching his father loving kill himself and his entire home be eradicated; he retreats into bellicose boasting and being an adrenaline junkie as a coping mechanism, not just because he's an rear end in a top hat. In effect, Daryl is physically broken while Io is mentally broken. It's just really easy to assume Io is the "bad guy" of the pair because he makes smartass remarks and is a rude dick who insults people. The only part of the OVA that strikes me as a pointless attempt to create moral equivalency is the idiotic child soldier battalion. There's some very paper thin justifications for why it might exist(Federation is devoting most of their regular forces to Star One, it's an experiment to see if they can make the White Base lightning strike twice, etc) but the new pilots being literal children instead of untrained rookies just screams "LOOK SEE BOTH BAD!!!" rather than actually contributing anything of note.
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Jan 6, 2017 13:16
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Kanos posted:I don't really think Thunderbolt has fuzzy morality. The Moore Brotherhood are fighting to reclaim the ruins of their home that was entirely annihilated by Zeon in an unprovoked manner whereas the Living Dead are a forgotten group of casualties fighting a holding action with junk equipment because they're viewed as something between useful guinea pigs and expendable trash by their superiors. Daryl is kind of a nice guy and Karla is working under duress but they're fighting for a horrifying cause that cares nothing for either of them and have pretty much no moral standing beyond "just following orders". Do remember that they're visually presented as being about the same age as Amuro, Kai, Hayato, and the gang, not, like, IBO-style pre-teens wired into giant death-machines. The Feddies just recruit their soldiers young, is all. Mind you, Darryl 's buddy with the grey hair also looks suspiciously underage, so that may just be a OYW thing in general.
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Jan 6, 2017 13:24
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The thunderbolt fights don't really look cool to me. I love them, but in a "that's a really good way to visually present a soldier clutching to his last moments of life in absolute terror" kind of way. Yes, they made it look well animated, and I wouldn't fault them for wanting their show to look nice. The choreography and framing definitely over-emphasize brutality and de-emphasize "woah look at those sick jukes and that was a nail-biting narrow miss and this fight is really neck and neck wow!" Like they pull Actual Cool Fight Choreography for the final duel, which I appreciated as an emphasis on how both io and darryl have just been totally consumed by violence, and the show is reflecting that. The characters are both enjoying it, so the audience enjoys it. The difference between that fight scene and the rest of the violence is honestly pretty stark.
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Jan 6, 2017 15:20
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Darth Walrus posted:Do remember that they're visually presented as being about the same age as Amuro, Kai, Hayato, and the gang, not, like, IBO-style pre-teens wired into giant death-machines. The Feddies just recruit their soldiers young, is all. Mind you, Darryl 's buddy with the grey hair also looks suspiciously underage, so that may just be a OYW thing in general. I don't know, they look really, really young to me...  ...and the scene where they're introduced has them playing in zero G and toying with their cell phones and taking photos and stuff instead of prepping for a military operation. They're children. Even assuming you're right, that still makes them pretty much children(~15 years old), and it's even worse than the White Base crew. Amuro and the gang were accidentally pressed into service and kept there through circumstance, whereas the Thunderbolt Kids Crew is being shipped into combat as part of a deliberate reinforcement/supply run. I just feel the scene would have worked just fine with them being raw adult recruits but they made them children to attempt to add pathos/moral equivalency.
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Jan 6, 2017 16:58
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At the end of the OYW both sides were shoving as many "pilots" into whatever deathtraps they could produce at the last minute.
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Jan 6, 2017 18:32
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Belzac posted:At the end of the OYW both sides were shoving as many "pilots" into whatever deathtraps they could produce at the last minute. In previous stuff, that was the Zeon move at the end. The Feds were doing that earlier (The Origin continuity has Tem Ray discussing how kids Amuro's age are getting drafted), but once they had the GM, pilot survivability was good enough they started building up veteran corps. It's listed a lot of places as why the Gelgoog didn't turn the war around, despite it being the first mass produced Gundam level suit. GM pilots were experienced vets, Gelgoog pilots were kids fresh off the streets. The Federation was winning, which is why you got desperation moves like the solar ray. The "Look! Kids!" thing in Thunderbolt was pretty much just for shock value and moral equivalency, far as I can tell. Not like any of them exactly impacted the plot.
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Jan 6, 2017 19:33
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See what I mean about TB being a divisive subject? (I actually love this debate because each side has a valid point)
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Jan 6, 2017 19:45
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Gundam thunderbolts bugs me if for no reason then why some nobody like Io fleming gets such a kick rear end gundam, while amuro's still fighting in the old rx-78. Also I don't like the the animated stuff all that much and it gets REALLY dumb in later chapters. TheManSeries posted:Watched Encounters in Space again tonight. I'm still under the impression it may be the best piece of Gundam media. It's definetly in my top three. It's bugged me forever, but I really want to know the name of the song that plays when lala and amuro fight. It's the song that comes to my mind whenever I think of newtypes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Pz-30wBxao Monaghan fucked around with this message at 19:54 on Jan 6, 2017 |
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Jan 6, 2017 19:51
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