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ImpAtom posted:You're not going to have it happen because a lot of characters in Gundam exist as references to other Gundam shows. You may not like it but the franchise has long since descended into metacommentary where even the shows that explicitly are trying to break away from Gundam's OYW heritage end up rooted in it. (See the final battle of 00 being RX-78-2 piloted by Amuro Ray or McGillis's very very blatant Char elements.) It's a real problem only emboldened by the fact that the most popular Gundam shows tend to be the retreads. (Unicorn and SEED being blatant examples of it.) Don't forget Mr Bushido! 
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Apr 15, 2017 03:45
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Thats a dumb name
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Apr 15, 2017 03:51
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Neddy Seagoon posted:Don't forget Mr Bushido! I wish I could. Honestly, Gundam's completely inability to move away from being a commentary on Gundam is probably the franchise's biggest flaw to me. They keep retreating to safe elements and obviously a lot of writers are frustrated by feeling obligated to do so (or just want to comment on Gundam) and so we keep getting the same trend of either aping the original shows or trying to be a metacommentary on the original shows and in doing so repeating the same basic elements over and over with a vague "what a twist" turn on them. And even if the twist is good (and I think McGillis was handled well) it's just tiresome. Obviously a franchise has to have some similarities to feel like part of the franchise but I think the last Gundam shows to really have their own personalty was like... G Gundam? Yet at the same time like... I can't admit that I didn't find McGillis and Gaelio probably the single most engaging part of IBO so going "this makes it worse" isn't true because I don't think it did.
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Apr 15, 2017 03:50
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ImpAtom posted:I wish I could. See, I'm fine with it in IBO (and Turn A), since it commenting on Gundam felt intentional. It drew on past Gundam because it had something to say about past Gundam. Art responds to art, and that's been true since the first cave paintings. More than that, though, just being a Gundam series says something. If you just want to do a story about giant robots and war, you can make something new, like VOTOMs or summat. Being a Gundam show means carrying a legacy, and there's an argument you need to justify its weight, even as you do something new. That said, there's definitely a level where the legacy can become a loadstone. Commenting on Gundam because you have something you want or need to say about its themes is, in theory, good. It gives useful shorthand, and lets you engage past authors in discussion in a way the viewers understand. IBO's argument that reshaping the world with rapid bursts of violence ends in nothing carries more thematic weight when it's able to compare the imagery with serieses where it more or less works. On the other hand, things like Mr. Bushido are using themes, not because the show has something to say, but because it feels obligated. It's not so much engaging with the past argument as it is repeating it, hurting its own voice without adding anything to the chorus.
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Apr 15, 2017 04:41
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ImpAtom posted:You're not going to have it happen because a lot of characters in Gundam exist as references to other Gundam shows. You may not like it but the franchise has long since descended into metacommentary where even the shows that explicitly are trying to break away from Gundam's OYW heritage end up rooted in it. (See the final battle of 00 being RX-78-2 piloted by Amuro Ray or McGillis's very very blatant Char elements.) It's a real problem only emboldened by the fact that the most popular Gundam shows tend to be the retreads. (Unicorn and SEED being blatant examples of it.) It also had the best mom:  The problem is that newer Gundam shows also tend to recycle the lovely stuff, including the "HE IS A CHAR!" with ALL of the baggage that implies. chiasaur11 posted:Truths about Harry Ord  portrayal still warm my heart.
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Apr 15, 2017 04:53
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I don't mind the meta aspect something but I do mind how it's become so much of what the show is about these days. It's not just that it is done but that it feels like almost every Gundam series is a metacommentary on Gundam. I honestly don't mind repetition of elements because to some degree that is what Gundam is going to have to be. It's more when it comes "this repetition is only there to be in commentary about another Gundam series." I admit it's due in no small part to Unicorn which I don't dislike but which is basically the ideal of "Let's just make a Gundam series about Gundam series."
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Apr 15, 2017 05:09
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The_White_Crane posted:I actually found McGillis' overall arc quite satisfying. You start out seeing him as the noble young revolutionary prince, out to overthrow the corrupt system with his pure ideals and true heart, and as the show goes on it's increasingly clear that's how he sees himself... because he's living out an elaborate fantasy plan he devised when he was an abused child. I said this before, but I feel like it bears repeating: I felt that the way McGillis was presented was actually a very good bit of storytelling. Throughout the season one, he was pushed at the viewer as this pure-hearted hero -- sure, he's kinda underhanded, but he's pretty much a Reinhard Von Lohengramm kinda figure, out to overturn a corrupt system from within by hook, crook or knife in the spleen. And we, as viewers, know how this story goes. But then it doesn't go like that. It goes the way it would in real life instead. And McGillis is revealed as a damaged man grown from a broken child. And while I loving love watching a story about noble heroes fighting the cruel status quo, I did enjoy seeing someone go "Yeah, but really what would happen..." Mind you, I never watched any of the previous Gundam shows, so I don't have the same perspective on him as a rehash of Char that most of you seem to. *shrugs*
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Apr 15, 2017 23:54
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I don't really buy the pure hearted hero thing in season one
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Apr 15, 2017 23:58
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Manatee Cannon posted:I don't really buy the pure hearted hero thing in season one I mean, he did turn one of the underclass he was supposedly fighting for into an icon of system-wide horror and revulsion.
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Apr 16, 2017 00:10
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Manatee Cannon posted:I don't really buy the pure hearted hero thing in season one Pure hearted hero, no. But he definitely seemed like a guy who wanted a better tomorrow for gjallarhorn. He just neglected to explain how he wanted to get there.
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Apr 16, 2017 00:15
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McGillis always fought to 'reform Gjallahorn' which was a fantastic tagline but entirely devoid of actual content. For a very long time we had no idea what he actually meant by that and I figured it was just being kept a mystery but really it never did have any great meaning beyond a desire for a meritocracy under his personal rule. Still, as a slogan it served to motivate a lot of people in the setting into following him to their deaths.
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Apr 16, 2017 00:41
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I'm not surprised this exists. But I am happy it exists. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwLLG-Qu1Nw
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Apr 16, 2017 05:36
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ImpAtom posted:I wish I could. Reconguista in G was pretty different. They should just put Tomino back in charge of Gundam.
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Apr 16, 2017 06:22
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Caros posted:I'm not surprised this exists. But I am happy it exists. man i can't actually be happy about that in the end like, Iok's crimes were ridiculous levels of naivete and a drive to prove himself even though he didn't know a loving thing about what he was doing and putting a lot of people in danger but he really gets...one really grisly, long, drawn-out, horrifying to imagine death, I'd argue the most painful and stomach-churning in the whole show
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Apr 16, 2017 08:16
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hey at least it's better than that one time Akihiro did the same thing to a child
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Apr 16, 2017 08:37
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Gyra_Solune posted:man Akihiro slowly cockpit-crushed at least three people off the top of my head: Galan Mossa, that human debris kid, and Iok, so Iok isn't special in dying in this particularly horrific manner. Iok's crimes weren't just being dumb and naive, he is directly responsible for some serious crimes that deserve some real repercussions besides Rustal slapping him on the wrist and telling him to sit in the corner. His decision to uselessly shoot at the Hashmal spoiled the ambush Tekkadan and McGillis set for it and led directly to it leveling that farming complex and killing all of those innocent people. During the assault on the Turbines, he ordered his troops to fire illegal superweapons at unarmed fleeing, surrendering civilian transport ships while actively ignoring their attempts to stand down. He's actually one of the most despicable people in the show in terms of what he actually does wrong, and it's only made worse by the fact that he's too naive and up his own rear end to realize it. Of course, no one deserves to be loving trash compactored to death, because that's a nightmarish and torturous way to die.
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Apr 16, 2017 10:58
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He's a pampered aristocrat who got all of his own men killed by the mobile armour on Mars out of lordly pride, as well as all the civilians in the farming fields. Then he followed it up by using this world's equivalent of napalm or poison gas on transport ships and escape pods while ignoring their surrender attempt. He ends up being the embodiment of the self-righteous cruelty of Gjallarhorn, so he had to get the guillotine. EDIT: ^^^ Yeah, that. ^^^
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Apr 16, 2017 11:02
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Mind you, while Iok's death was pretty disturbing, it did seem somewhat necessary, if only so we could be sure he was actually dead this time.
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Apr 16, 2017 11:13
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Guy Goodbody posted:Reconguista in G was pretty different.  (In my mind, Tomino sounds kinda like a mix between Colonel Stinkmeaner and Steven Blum)
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Apr 16, 2017 15:40
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Wark Say posted:Isn't Tomino semi-retired? Though if he works on anything for the 40th Anniversary, I'm all for it. Hopefully if he saw IBO, he can say "Oh, so you think you know how to make people wince, you ain't seen nothing yet, bitch". There'a gonna be at least one G-reco movie directed by him.
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Apr 16, 2017 15:42
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Guy Goodbody posted:Reconguista in G was pretty different.
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Apr 16, 2017 17:34
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While I don't feel bad about Iok's death. I am not happy about it ether. Honestly I am just gasping at his stupidity. He was already injured and was told to stand down. Instead he stupidly rushed off again after being told not to for like the 8th time. Though his men who failed to save him probably should have aimed for the Gusions arms instead of cockpit to stop the crushing.
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Apr 16, 2017 18:35
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G reco was different but that doesn't mean it was great.
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Apr 16, 2017 18:59
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Raxivace posted:G-Reco did feel pretty different but even then it still has the final battle take place in the ruins of Jaburo. Yeah, i like G-Reco but even then it wanders back over old material a fair bit. It's less standoutish I think because it's Tomino but hell, even Turn-A ends up being about the infinite cycle of Gundam War where the ultimate villain is a literal Gundam fanboy who focuses on the cool fightman aspects and not the actual deeper themes. I mean it's a hard line to walk to do a Gundam series with recognizable Gundam elements without descending into either extreme of metacommentary or Doing it Because It's Gundam and even doing that doesn't mean it will be good, I just sort of feel like the AU Gundam concepts have gotten needlessly bogged down in the History Of Gundam. (See 00, AGE and IBO all having "the legendary protagonist Gundam from long ago" as a thing.)
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Apr 16, 2017 19:14
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If anything I think a decent amount of non-Gundam mecha anime are better at being Gundam AU's than the actual AU's are. Like the original SDF Macross might as well have been a Gundam AU to the point there's a thinly veiled 0079 character with a name change as a part of the cast in Roy Focker, but its still very much its own show with its own ideas and themes that none the less takes influence from Gundam.
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Apr 16, 2017 19:42
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Droyer posted:There'a gonna be at least one G-reco movie directed by him. Though honestly the best UC anime in the last decade was the Renho Arc in Gintama (prove me wrong, 2nd Season of Thunderbolt).
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Apr 17, 2017 00:13
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Raxivace posted:If anything I think a decent amount of non-Gundam mecha anime are better at being Gundam AU's than the actual AU's are. A Gundam character based on Rocky Balboa. And it's kind of got some problems if you're arguing for it as a Gundam AU. Like the aliens. One of the big things that made Gundam Gundam rather than being like its super-robot kin was that everybody doing the fighting and dying was homo sapiens sapien. Instead of going with the usual and having aliens that were basically humans with a color filter, so you had an excuse for the scrap from the jump, the line between Feddie and Zeek is basically arbitrary, accidents of birth that left one side fighting for a monstrous philosophy. (Reinforced in Zeta where Char is working on the side of the angels, and the Feddies were funding the Titans). It's a trend the series kept up, too. (Let's ignore Trailblazer for the moment.) It's important because, in Gundam, poo poo's hosed and there's no-one to blame but us. Macross has a lot riding on the aliens and the tech coming from outside. Whole plot rides on Us and Them being fundamentally different and the struggles to get past that. If Gundam is about things falling apart, Macross is about things coming together. It's absolute garbage as a Gundam AU, but it's good as a separate thing that takes inspiration from it. Of course, does kind of lead to the question of what makes Gundam Gundam. Cynical answer is branding, and cynical ain't all wrong. If Sunrise called a show about magic robots teaming up with plucky human kids to fight invaders from another dimension and called it Gundam, they'd be in their rights. But franchises tend to have things that stick and things that fade, new cloth that combines better with the old. For Gundam, some things that have stuck, both for merch and for narrative reasons? 1) Relatively small scale, for space opera. Gundams tend to take place in one solar system, if not pretty much entirely between Earth and its satellites. Where most shows with spaceflight go with FTL and travel speeds that make a romp across the galaxy 2) Connected, Gundams are about humans killing humans. Even AI is mostly restricted to one-off superweapons and sidestories. Usually, the beef is between people on Earth and people who aren't, but the exact nature of the conflict varies. The important thing is any poo poo that breaks is entirely the fault of the species that's been breaking poo poo most impressively as long as its been recording its own history. 3) Super-robot heritage means the protagonist's mech isn't just a slightly better grunt. It's a badass poo poo kicker, a notably above everyone else, even if things level off as it goes. Where Gundam's descendants often move away from the trend (Chirico Cuvie's mechs kick rear end because Chirico Cuvie is the pilot. Anybody else in them dies at the standard speed), in Gundam shows that's not the case. Even 08th gave the protagonist a custom jobbie that could outperform its peers. 4) Weird enhancements for at least some of the pilots that tie into the show's themes. Newtypes, whiskers, X-rounders, kickass martial arts... there's usually something that makes the protagonist special and explains why an usually untrained teenager is kicking everyone's rear end. There's also a number of aesthetic repeating themes (Gundam designs, mono-eyes for the main enemy grunt, char masks on an enemy pilot, Haros), but I think that's a lot of the core Gundam repeating beats that don't (directly) comment on Gundam. Kind of an odd franchise, looking at it from outside, but I don't think the secret to figuring out how it works is to label every show with robots in it a Gundam AU and wonder why the core series isn't as diverse. Limitations define a thing as much as its freedoms, and eliminating them tends to leave you with an amorphous mess. chiasaur11 fucked around with this message at 00:34 on Apr 17, 2017 |
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Apr 17, 2017 00:30
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Guy Goodbody posted:Reconguista in G was pretty different. G-Reco felt like it was re-treading a lot of Turn-A's ground to me. It was a show with a plot about the rediscovery of technology after a cataclysm and how that affected the people using the new technology, societies that hadn't known war in ages playing at it, it was about people from space wanting to come back to Earth because living in space was kind of lovely, it had a main villain who thought conflict would re-awaken people's drive and reinvigorate society and so on. It was of course a very different show in many ways, and had a much more vivid color palette, more dynamic animation etc. but it had some striking parallels to both Turn-A and Gundam as a whole (including Tomino playing around with the masked antagonist Gundam trope using a guy called Mask).
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Apr 17, 2017 03:26
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chiasaur11 posted:A Gundam character based on Rocky Balboa. The best non-Tomino Gundams like G and 0080 are the ones that stray furthest from the franchise's cliches. Gundam (and to a lesser extent mecha, and to a lesser extent anime as a whole) has an incest problem, where old ideas are retread or are introduced to the detriment of original storytelling. The best parts of IBO (the first arc, the last arc, and the earth branch arc) are the ones where it's doing it's own thing instead of being A CHAR, A GARMA, a peace princess, and an endless stream of faceless grunts yelling "IT'S A GUNDAM" and being blown up by our hyper-competent teenage protagonists. The only things I'd say are necessary for a Gundam series are 1. There is a robot called "Gundam" somewhere in the setting 2. Militarism is bad
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Apr 17, 2017 06:09
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Microcline posted:The best non-Tomino Gundams like G and 0080 are the ones that stray furthest from the franchise's cliches. Gundam (and to a lesser extent mecha, and to a lesser extent anime as a whole) has an incest problem, where old ideas are retread or are introduced to the detriment of original storytelling. The best parts of IBO (the first arc, the last arc, and the earth branch arc) are the ones where it's doing it's own thing instead of being A CHAR, A GARMA, a peace princess, and an endless stream of faceless grunts yelling "IT'S A GUNDAM" and being blown up by our hyper-competent teenage protagonists. I don't think Build Fighters had anything to say on the subject of militarism.
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Apr 17, 2017 06:26
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Caros posted:I don't think Build Fighters had anything to say on the subject of militarism. It's about gundam toys, which is the antithesis of militarism.
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Apr 17, 2017 08:01
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Limited edition bluray's gonna come with some interesting art https://twitter.com/g_tekketsu/status/852824245243494400
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Apr 17, 2017 19:57
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Caros posted:I don't think Build Fighters had anything to say on the subject of militarism. Build Fighters explicitly had the message that enjoying this combat was fine because it wasn't real and there was no consequences while painting the villains as people who actually tried to take it seriously and hurt people because of it. For a toy series that's as close as you can get without being Iron Leaguer. (Iron Leaguer is the best anti-militarism sports anime ever.)
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Apr 17, 2017 20:00
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Guy Goodbody posted:Limited edition bluray's gonna come with some interesting art That's, uh.
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Apr 17, 2017 20:58
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Guy Goodbody posted:Limited edition bluray's gonna come with some interesting art TheBossFigmaFiringDavyCrockett.png
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Apr 17, 2017 21:03
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Guy Goodbody posted:Limited edition bluray's gonna come with some interesting art
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Apr 17, 2017 21:04
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Turn A Blu ray had some interesting cover art I think.
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Apr 17, 2017 22:52
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Guy Goodbody posted:Limited edition bluray's gonna come with some interesting art So instead of the limited edition bluray having some cool looking shot of the barbatos, we get.... that.
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Apr 17, 2017 23:12
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You think if we did a twitter campaign we could get Right Stuf to use that as the cover for the American bluray release?
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Apr 17, 2017 23:25
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Kingtheninja posted:Turn A Blu ray had some interesting cover art I think. This one? 
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Apr 17, 2017 23:30
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