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NikkolasKing
Apr 3, 2010



ninjewtsu posted:

good art has never been made by an artist in the middle of a major depressive episode

(i have not seen victory and do not intend to)

Isn't that the story of original Evangelion? Or is all the "Anno is off his meds" a meme?

A buddy was telling me to check out Rebuild precisely because of how much more hopeful it is as a counter to original NGE's pessimism. (which I did not care for)

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Gaius Marius
Oct 9, 2012

NikkolasKing posted:

Isn't that the story of original Evangelion? Or is all the "Anno is off his meds" a meme?

A buddy was telling me to check out Rebuild precisely because of how much more hopeful it is as a counter to original NGE's pessimism. (which I did not care for)

They were being sarcastic.

NGE isn't pessimistic at all, it's a very hopeful work in the end

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



Gaius Marius posted:

They were being sarcastic.

NGE isn't pessimistic at all, it's a very hopeful work in the end

Counting or not counting End? Because that changes the tone a lot, even if it doesn't change the message. The final Rebuild is much more straightforwardly upbeat by the end. Also lots of nice farming.

chrome line
Oct 13, 2022

RevolverDivider posted:

Rau's fun and a great character, Victory is dogshit that is at least pretty funny to watch with a group which is more then some other bad shows.

It's also a good show to huff your own supply on and insist it's a misunderstand masterpiece and not a bizarre creator breakdown in slow motion stuffed full of bugfuck insanity and Tomino's weird off branch of misogyny in its final evolved form before he got it out of his system for a while to do Turn A.

Victory is a pretty good show. The misogyny drags it down a lot, but outside that (and I find Victory's bad gender politics a lot easier to ignore than something like Zeta) it's a very well made show that has some cool stuff going on.

ImpAtom
May 24, 2007

chiasaur11 posted:

Counting or not counting End? Because that changes the tone a lot, even if it doesn't change the message. The final Rebuild is much more straightforwardly upbeat by the end. Also lots of nice farming.

Even EpE ends with "It is important to connect with others, even if you open yourself to pain and sadness."

NikkolasKing
Apr 3, 2010



ImpAtom posted:

Even EpE ends with "It is important to connect with others, even if you open yourself to pain and sadness."

To live at all is pain and sadness in Eva. We desire relationships, which bring suffering, but to avoid relationships is equally miserable. Even the bonds we form with others are inherently exploitative, everyone is just looking to gain some selfish need out of the relationship they form with other people. Misato is a better person than Gendo for sure but even a mostly good person like her is just using Shinji because that's what it means to have a relationship in the misanthropic Eva universe. I think this is also why Kaworu exists, as a non-human he can actually care for Shinji in a fully selfless manner.

But hey, it's been ten years since I watched Eva. But I have since read a lot of the sources for these ideas, assuming Anno read anything(after he told an interviewer he never actually read the namesake of Sickness Unto Death, I have no idea). Schopenhauer and Sartre are two of the most unquestionably pessimistic philosophers of all time. If you are explicitly drawing from them, you're probably gonna have a very negative view of existence. And it's not like I'm the first person who saw Eva in this bleak light.

ninjewtsu
Oct 9, 2012

tsob posted:

If the first reading is "Reccoa wanted a relationship" and the other reading of "Reccoa wanted to gently caress" is an alternative reading then yes, they are mutually exclusive. They only wouldn't be if the alternative was "Reccoa wanted a relationship that included both emotional and sexual components"; the problem with that being that that's just a relationship, making it mutually exclusive again.

what?

i do not understand how a connects to b or how c connects to d in this chain of logic i must be honest

ninjewtsu fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Nov 17, 2023

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



NikkolasKing posted:

To live at all is pain and sadness in Eva. We desire relationships, which bring suffering, but to avoid relationships is equally miserable. Even the bonds we form with others are inherently exploitative, everyone is just looking to gain some selfish need out of the relationship they form with other people. Misato is a better person than Gendo for sure but even a mostly good person like her is just using Shinji because that's what it means to have a relationship in the misanthropic Eva universe. I think this is also why Kaworu exists, as a non-human he can actually care for Shinji in a fully selfless manner.

But hey, it's been ten years since I watched Eva. But I have since read a lot of the sources for these ideas, assuming Anno read anything(after he told an interviewer he never actually read the namesake of Sickness Unto Death, I have no idea). Schopenhauer and Sartre are two of the most unquestionably pessimistic philosophers of all time. If you are explicitly drawing from them, you're probably gonna have a very negative view of existence. And it's not like I'm the first person who saw Eva in this bleak light.

Yeah, there were some positive themes, but gently caress's sake. End of Evangelion ends with the two known surviving humans on a beach only not murdering each other because one insulted the other. Then the film cuts to black.

People saying it's feels upbeat have lost all contact with the film's emotional impact after too many years of reading essays about it.

The Rebuilds, by contrast end with Shinji as a grown man, flirting with the woman who showed up to save him when he figured he was trapped and alone, before they run off together into a bustling city smiling to happy music as the credits play. Bit of a different last impression!

As for Victory Gundam, I'll admit I only got a few episodes in, but I agree with Tomino's comments on the DVD. That is, it wasn't very good. The show has a very weird tone, where the actions match with the more comedic shows like Turn A or ZZ (Uso runs after people because they stole his ham! There's a goofy flailing fight in a MS cockpit!) but the show drowns the whole thing in Zeta style bleakness to ensure the viewer doesn't think it's funny, instead just going in for a parade of random misery where the most important thing is that it feels bad, rather than that it makes sense with what came before.

Gaius Marius
Oct 9, 2012

chiasaur11 posted:

Yeah, there were some positive themes, but gently caress's sake. End of Evangelion ends with the two known surviving humans on a beach only not murdering each other because one insulted the other. Then the film cuts to black.

People saying it's feels upbeat have lost all contact with the film's emotional impact after too many years of reading essays about it.
I've never read an Essay about Eva and I never will, the works are not worth the effort. End and TV are both Shinji, the loserest loser to ever lose still rejecting solipsism because even for as self serving, selfish, and vicious human relations can be they are still worth striving for to complete the self. A mirrored person does not exist until a person steps into a mirror's frame; so to does the self not exist without others.

Not related but you can see an echo of this in the final chapters of Mishima's Sea of Fertility. When Honda after all of his searching and cataloguing finally finds another whom he can reminisce with about his three time friend Kiyoaki only for Kiyoaki's lost love to reject the very notion of his existence, Honda is left with only the thought that perhaps he does not exist.

NikkolasKing posted:

To live at all is pain and sadness in Eva. We desire relationships, which bring suffering, but to avoid relationships is equally miserable. Even the bonds we form with others are inherently exploitative, everyone is just looking to gain some selfish need out of the relationship they form with other people. Misato is a better person than Gendo for sure but even a mostly good person like her is just using Shinji because that's what it means to have a relationship in the misanthropic Eva universe. I think this is also why Kaworu exists, as a non-human he can actually care for Shinji in a fully selfless manner.

But hey, it's been ten years since I watched Eva. But I have since read a lot of the sources for these ideas, assuming Anno read anything(after he told an interviewer he never actually read the namesake of Sickness Unto Death, I have no idea). Schopenhauer and Sartre are two of the most unquestionably pessimistic philosophers of all time. If you are explicitly drawing from them, you're probably gonna have a very negative view of existence. And it's not like I'm the first person who saw Eva in this bleak light.

Too bad he hadn't read Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard does a very interesting job in dividing between the various flavors of despair and self alienation. It actually does have resonance with the Eva story even if unintentionally.

Kanos
Sep 6, 2006

was there a time when speedwagon didn't get trolled

chiasaur11 posted:

As for Victory Gundam, I'll admit I only got a few episodes in, but I agree with Tomino's comments on the DVD. That is, it wasn't very good. The show has a very weird tone, where the actions match with the more comedic shows like Turn A or ZZ (Uso runs after people because they stole his ham! There's a goofy flailing fight in a MS cockpit!) but the show drowns the whole thing in Zeta style bleakness to ensure the viewer doesn't think it's funny, instead just going in for a parade of random misery where the most important thing is that it feels bad, rather than that it makes sense with what came before.

This is an extremely common throughline in many of Tomino's shows. As recently as G-Reco you have "lol he pooped in the mobile suit toilet while other people were in the cockpit" and leopards doing cartoon faces as they fall off tree branches within an episode or two of Aida being horribly traumatized because her boyfriend was obliterated by a beam rifle and she's forced to cooperate with his killer.

I don't think that a show really needs to stick to one tone constantly to be coherent. Sometimes the goofy stuff is meant to liven up the dark stuff and give the viewer a breather.

Kanos fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Nov 17, 2023

Gaius Marius
Oct 9, 2012

Vladamir Nabokov posted:

the difference between the comic and the cosmic depends on just one little sibilant.

We start with the epigraph because to no one's surprise Nabakov is a hell of a lot better prosaist than I. The point being that a work that strives towards greatness must include humor. No work that believes it's expressing the spectrum of human emotion can avoid one of the most powerful.

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



Kanos posted:

This is an extremely common throughline in many of Tomino's shows. As recently as G-Reco you have "lol he pooped in the mobile suit toilet while other people were in the cockpit" and leopards doing cartoon faces as they fall off tree branches within an episode or two of Aida being horribly traumatized because her boyfriend was obliterated by a beam rifle and she's forced to cooperate with his killer.

I don't think that a show really needs to stick to one tone constantly to be coherent. Sometimes the goofy stuff is meant to liven up the dark stuff and give the viewer a breather.

That's the thing with Victory. It doesn't play the jokes as jokes. It has the structure of a comedic scene, but it plays it as pure drama, creating a weird disconnect that makes it hard to appreciate the scenes as either.

Like, Turn A juggles Loran getting hit in the balls with Will Game dying in atomic fire, and they add to each other. Victory feels like if Tomino had everyone doing comic double-takes during Midnight Sunrise, but otherwise played it out exactly the same.

GodFish
Oct 10, 2012

We're your first, last, and only line of defense. We live in secret. We exist in shadow.

And we dress in black.
Overall I found most of Victory's humor worked pretty well with two exceptions. One of them is a scene very early where Uso and a bunch of civilians are hiding in a shelter that gets collapsed on top of them. For some reason it plays out as a jarring scene of Uso trying to escape and running into the dead and dying bodies of crushed civilians as a comedy sequence.

The second is setting a light, goofy wedding plot in a prison camp that looks remarkably similar to the Japanese internment camps. I feel that it was trying to say something with this one but I sure don't know what.

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
https://www.tumblr.com/roguemaki/734297582859436032/english-translated-version-of-noto-mamikos

An English translation of a magazine interview Mamiko Noto did about the world's best/worst amoral mother Prospera. She knew the assignment.

Runa
Feb 13, 2011

Arc Hammer posted:

https://www.tumblr.com/roguemaki/734297582859436032/english-translated-version-of-noto-mamikos

An English translation of a magazine interview Mamiko Noto did about the world's best/worst amoral mother Prospera. She knew the assignment.

A fascinating and incredibly unconventional villain for a gundam series, top marks for her performance and her character.

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
Great performance in making me simultaneously root for her while also absolutely despising her.

Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Nov 18, 2023

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
Gonna try and word this carefully considering thr last time I had this particular discussion.

I got into a Twitter back and forth over revolution in G-Witch and what that entails, mostly around the topic of who is or should be afforded sympathy (suffice to say my stance is that Earth should fight back however thry can but Shaddiq and his crew can gtfo for targeting students). I got wondering how forms of resistance vary in depiction and endorsement across different series.

For a contemporary comparison there's obviously IBO's Tekkadan Martian revolution. Revolution comes in many forms either through Atra's defiance and willing to lie for the cause or through Mika's straightforward "I resist by clubbing your face in" methods. Tekkadan cuts deals with the space mob, they get their hands dirty and it bites them hard when they back the wrong candidate in McGillis. There are voices of reason against their violence but Biscuit's death sent them down a spiral and none of them listened to Merribit trying to urge restraint. Violent resistance in IBO is presented as a positive right up until it isn't, which is around the time Tekkadan realizes they can't just brute force their way to a better future. I don't know if I'd exactly call it a condemnation of violent resistance as much as showing the limits of how far it can take you on the path to revolution.

You've got Hathaway's Mafty revolution which is more straightforward terrorism as resistance. He's following in Char's footsteps of trying to push humanity into space but he grapples with his morality vs his intended goals. Targeting Federation bigwigs in Davao is one thing but the street battle that ensues is terrifying and isn't much of a comfort to anyone involved thinking "yes this is a good course for humanity". The film makes Hathaway's inner turmoil the central conflict and asks whether his ends justify the means, rather than debating whether, morally, it was right or wrong. It being a character piece the longterm ramifications of the Mafty movement are secondary to how it affects Hathaway in the present.

I'd have to go back and watch 00 again to freshen up on its particular stances in the show itself but "Peace Cannot be Kept By Force, only achieved by understanding" is a pretty succinct statement.

Like I said this stuff is as old as the franchise itself but I'm stuck in a bit of recency bias so I don't really want to do a big write up on the way the AEUG during the Gryps War deals with revolution. WFM made it a bit more visceral for me by directly making the oppression corporate in nature rather than ideological or national so it's still raw in my brain, while also making that tall of sympathy for certain characters or groups tricky.

Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 19:46 on Nov 18, 2023

ninjewtsu
Oct 9, 2012

i think WfM taking tekkadan and essentially transplanting them into the setting as antagonists via dawn of fold was a pretty interesting move. anyone who watched IBO has seen things from their perspective and has a deeper understanding of the moral complexity and culpability behind their resistance actions, and there's a bit of a challenge in asking how that holds up when you aren't following them from the beginning or when circumstances are a little less kind and convenient for letting them stay clear-cut justified in their actions.

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
There is also taking the setting context into account. Child soldiers are a common sight in Post Disaster thanks to the human debris diaspora and Tekkadan's success only saw the number of organizations employing youth soldiers expand. From what we know of Ad Stella it's not really common at all, with Norea and Sophie really being the only exceptions to Dawn of Fold's otherwise adult combatants. Tekkadan being a youth mercenary group is a logical next step for some backwater companies, child soldiers in Ad Stella turn heads because it's still outside the normal expectations for the setting. Something that would be normal combat in Post Disaster is shocking in the more low-intensity conflicts of Ad Stella where kids are for the most part still expected to be kids; even earthicans go to school (if they can get admission to the Grassley academy, but its there nonetheless).

So when it comes to resistance, an IBO-styled group operating in a WFM setting while also being portrayed as antagonists paints a very different light on their actions. The show doesn't condone what Dawn of Fold is doing as it's shown repeatedly that their attacks on the Benerit Group only deepen the unfolding crisis but it also goes out of its way to have an episode dedicates entirely to showing the daily hell that earthicans endure. It doesn't shy away from the harsh reality of earth life that pushes them to fight back. It doesn't excuse the awful stuff they do but it does explain why.

This is where my offsite discussion hit a block because it veers into the question of what is a socially acceptable course of action when you choose to resist oppression with violence. Is it okay to target children when fighting? Is using child soldiers to fly pilot killing gundams a justifiable sacrifice for the sake of your goals? Considering the past year and especially the past month this kind of discussion has been on my mind with how real world groups play the optics in their respective conflicts. And it's hard to come off with a stance of "people should be allowed to defend themselves and their right to exist without resorting to targeting innocents" without it coming off all hollow when the follow up question is "so what would you do instead?" and there really isn't a good answer that doesn't sound like a milqutoast armchair response from someone who isn't stuck in a situation where all the available options are bad ones.

So while I can respect and even support the kind of resistance a group like DOF represents I just can't condone the way they go about it. And this is all before you consider that their earthican independence fight is just a front for another spacian group trying to knock out the Benerit Group so they can instead exploit the earth for themselves. Same as how Tekkadan's fight for Martian rights turns them into a gun for Arbrau or the Turbines or McGillis to point and shoot their their own problems rather than Tekkadan's. It's a grim reality where the desire for representation is weaponized by someone richer who just wants to stuff their pockets. It happens in fiction, it's happening right now. Independence, freedom, safety, human rights. They're goals for the people fighting but they're collateral for the people backing them, if the backers even bother to go that far when the fighting ends.

Arc Hammer fucked around with this message at 01:14 on Nov 19, 2023

ImpAtom
May 24, 2007

My viewpoint remains "If you try to argue that killing innocent people or using children to kill is justified, then you should personally be out there doing it and be willing to be executed or imprisoned after everything is over for your horrific crimes because they are so necessary." If you set up some situation where your only option involve horrific crimes and you feel it is absolutely no-argument that necessary then you should be willing to sacrifice your own life along the lives you are taking, and if you won't then it can't be that necessary, can it

If, in IBO viewpoints for example, you absolutely MUST use innocent children to pilot your horrifying death machines because of whatever, and there's simply no other choice, everything has conspired together to force it, then you can do it but you should at minimum spend the rest of your life in prison and your actions should not be glorified.

Obviously that won't happen because anyone who is okay with mass murder of innocent people to get their goals isn't going to be self-sacrificing enough to die for the cause unless they're Trieze Kushrinada.

Plastic_Gargoyle
Aug 3, 2007

https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2023-11-18/bandai-namco-filmworks-reveals-gundam-silver-phantom-feature-length-vr-anime/.204548

And today on the subject of "ideas 3 years or more out of date"

Gaius Marius
Oct 9, 2012

WTF is wrong with this company

Babysitter Super Sleuth
Apr 26, 2012

my posts are as bad the Current Releases review of Gone Girl

Sxtremely backwards dipshit executives buoyed by multiple properties that print so much money they will never risk serious financial consequences

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



Gaius Marius posted:

WTF is wrong with this company

Made more money than they'd ever seen during the pandemic, invested it in every crazy idea they could get in on the ground floor for.

If they worked, they'd see more massive growth by dominating an emerging market. If it failed, they had enough staple stuff to take the hit.

Kanos
Sep 6, 2006

was there a time when speedwagon didn't get trolled
I think IBO is pretty pro-violence, even with Tekkadan's ending. The issue they ran into wasn't violence being unwise or ceasing to be effective, it was a combination of Orga's gambler's greed and him failing to vet their employer to realize that said employer was a complete lunatic selling them a total con. If they hadn't bit on McGillis's "kings of mars" bait, they could have continued securing their prosperity through violence functionally indefinitely. Biscuit and Merribit's cautionary statements weren't really "we should stop fighting", they were mostly "we should stop taking suicidal long shot gambles where the failure state means everyone dies".

Additionally, all of the actual positive political change we get in IBO is a direct result of Kudelia exploiting Tekkadan's capacity for violence. Kudelia succeeds in her push for Martian mining rights in Arbrau because Tekkadan shoots their way in to pick up Makanai, shoots their way into Edmonton to deliver Kudelia and Makanai to the conference, and then fights off an illegal Gjallarhorn mobile suit in the city, all of which she exploits to further her political goals. At the end, Kudelia manages to leverage Tekkadan's final violent stand and their sheer capacity for destruction as an incentive to push to overhaul the system to ensure that another Tekkadan cannot come to be by outlawing human debris. These are non-violent goals that are accomplished entirely through the facility of violence.

Kanos fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Nov 19, 2023

Nuebot
Feb 18, 2013

The developer of Brigador is a secret chud, don't give him money
So what's the "Silver Phantom" even going to be? Will they reveal yet another zeon ace, this time with a silver zaku who was always just slightly off screen for the entirety of the one year war?

Supremezero
Apr 28, 2013

hay gurl
The gently caress's vr anime

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?

Nuebot posted:

So what's the "Silver Phantom" even going to be? Will they reveal yet another zeon ace, this time with a silver zaku who was always just slightly off screen for the entirety of the one year war?

A VR game where you play as one of Banagher's Silver Bullet Suppressor's replacement arms so he can shoot his beam magnum.

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



Supremezero posted:

The gently caress's vr anime

Anime, but closer to your face.

Sam Sanskrit
Mar 18, 2007

Kanos posted:

I think IBO is pretty pro-violence, even with Tekkadan's ending. The issue they ran into wasn't violence being unwise or ceasing to be effective, it was a combination of Orga's gambler's greed and him failing to vet their employer to realize that said employer was a complete lunatic selling them a total con. If they hadn't bit on McGillis's "kings of mars" bait, they could have continued securing their prosperity through violence functionally indefinitely. Biscuit and Merribit's cautionary statements weren't really "we should stop fighting", they were mostly "we should stop taking suicidal long shot gambles where the failure state means everyone dies".

Additionally, all of the actual positive political change we get in IBO is a direct result of Kudelia exploiting Tekkadan's capacity for violence. Kudelia succeeds in her push for Martian mining rights in Arbrau because Tekkadan shoots their way in to pick up Makanai, shoots their way into Edmonton to deliver Kudelia and Makanai to the conference, and then fights off an illegal Gjallarhorn mobile suit in the city, all of which she exploits to further her political goals. At the end, Kudelia manages to leverage Tekkadan's final violent stand and their sheer capacity for destruction as an incentive to push to overhaul the system to ensure that another Tekkadan cannot come to be by outlawing human debris. These are non-violent goals that are accomplished entirely through the facility of violence.

I agree with this. I think it makes the point that revolution does always go well for revolutionaries without saying the revolution should not have occurred.

chrome line
Oct 13, 2022
IBO is of the opinion that they made some poor choices in how they went about it and it cost them, but we're still clearly meant to root for Tekkadan as they fight Gjallerhorn

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



Midjack posted:

Anime, but closer to your face.

If I had to guess, only skimming the article... well, one thing it could be would be kinda cool. There's some videos (including the official music video for the High Score Girl ED "Unknown Road Map", for an example I've actually watched in full) which have full 360 renders, not just the area immediately in front of the camera. You can spin around, see everything around you. With mid-to-late UC panoramic cockpits, you could render the whole battlefield, then play it in VR so you could look everywhere.

Basically just an amusement park ride of an anime project, but that could be a fun time.

As for Iron Blooded Orphans and violence, I think it takes a kind of nuanced position by Gundam standards. It basically treats violence as an acceptable last resort, but it should be used to open a non-violent continuation. When it's treated as the way to conclude things outright... it doesn't work as well.

We see it over and over. The initial Gjallarhorn fights leave Tekkaden Ein and Gaelio to deal with, turning people who weren't actually after Kudelia initially (that was Coral's agenda, since he was being bribed by Nobliss Gordon) into problems later on. Meanwhile, by using violence to open negotiations, Tekkadan made a valuable alliance with the Turbines.

The Dort arc is a bit of a slog, and it hurt the series ratings when it was airing, but it provides another microcosm of the situation. The union leader wanted to have guns and tanks to be able to negotiate with less risk of hostile force. (Tekkadan, reasonably, got antsy when the gunplay kicked off, because that always carries risk itself. Dead men still have friends, after all.) Gjallarhorn forced them into actual combat with a false flag, and that lead to the Dort union getting slaughtered, and Tekkadan nearly getting wiped out itself, before Kudelia played politics to tie Gjallarhorn's hands, allowing the union to secure decent terms at the bargaining table.

Season 2 had Tekkadan trade patrons, and that was a big part of their downfall, because Kudelia was always looking to switch to a political solution at first opportunity (while acknowledging and regretting that those opportunities sometimes came slow) while McGillis, ultimately, believed in force as an end itself. It put Tekkadan in situations like the War with No Name where all they could do was fight and fight, which was explicitly called out as something that could continue forever, and the battle with Rustal's fleet, where they had no out except hoping at the last minute that their enemy would surrender with their leader dead. (We never find out if they would, thanks to Julieta's miracle throw, but considering how Tekkadan kept going with Orga gone, well, no guarantees in life.). Meanwhile, Kudelia kept exploiting the past violence to advance without direct force, channeling her victories into small but steady improvements to Martian standards of living, and her return is what lets Tekkadan save what's left, turning from "If you win, you live. If you lose, you die. If you don't fight, you can't win!" to a more practical and political angle.

Fighting and even killing can be the right call, but when it is it's a tragic necessity, and something that should be done with an eye on the overall goal.

(As for rooting, Tekkadan's in an interesting place, since it was meant for the viewer to get tunnel vision right along with them, only getting the distance to go "Oh, they hosed up, didn't they?" towards the end. We have it signposted in episode 1, and interviews talked about it before season 2 even aired, but the idea was that viewers would only really feel how bad things got at the same time Tekkadan did.)

ninjewtsu
Oct 9, 2012

chiasaur11 posted:

As for Iron Blooded Orphans and violence, I think it takes a kind of nuanced position by Gundam standards. It basically treats violence as an acceptable last resort, but it should be used to open a non-violent continuation. When it's treated as the way to conclude things outright... it doesn't work as well.

Is that really an unusual stance for gundam?

Gaius Marius
Oct 9, 2012

Chi gets tunnel vision over IBO, what they say might be thought out but it's viewed through a heavy lens of bias.

Runa
Feb 13, 2011

despite not needing an answer to this question, I'm going to quote it in solidarity

Gaius Marius posted:

WTF is wrong with this company

Gaius Marius
Oct 9, 2012

ninjewtsu posted:

Is that really an unusual stance for gundam?

That said it is an explicit theme in IBO whereas in most other Gundam it is implicit. Making it the main theme changes the way the viewer considers the very question, in effect making it a dialogue that one can agree or disagree with, when it's tertiary like in Zeta, AEUG would clearly prefer a non civil war solution to the Titans but trying to do that ends with colonies gassed and Blex assassinated, the viewer is already being taken along with the notion before one can question it.

chiasaur11
Oct 22, 2012



Gaius Marius posted:

That said it is an explicit theme in IBO whereas in most other Gundam it is implicit. Making it the main theme changes the way the viewer considers the very question, in effect making it a dialogue that one can agree or disagree with, when it's tertiary like in Zeta, AEUG would clearly prefer a non civil war solution to the Titans but trying to do that ends with colonies gassed and Blex assassinated, the viewer is already being taken along with the notion before one can question it.

Yeah, I kind of regretted the phrase as I went on with the post. "Violence sucks, but it's sometimes necessary" is a Gundam staple, after all. (I actually thought about the scene in War in the Pocket where the professor talks about how war is sometimes a necessary evil)

That said, I also agree with you that IBO makes it more explicit. There, the protagonists engaging in violence is presented as an escalation rather than a default. But even that is something that 00 plays with in that Celestial Being often makes situations go hot in order to shut them down. I'd say that Iron Blooded Orphans feels more comfortable with the idea its heroes could be the villains from another prospective, but at the same time, 00 presents a more complicated situation in many ways.

Nuebot
Feb 18, 2013

The developer of Brigador is a secret chud, don't give him money
It took me way too long to realize SEED has ZuOOT suits.

EDIT: lmao the instant this nicol kid says goodbye to his family you know he's going to die.

Nuebot fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Nov 19, 2023

Arc Hammer
Mar 4, 2013

Got any deathsticks?
https://twitter.com/SEED_HDRP/status/1726186053235888257?t=eii5RDyhradF2D8un9f4ZA&s=19

Featuring SEED Freedom's new song, er, "Freedom"

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Waffleman_
Jan 20, 2011


I don't wanna I don't wanna I don't wanna I don't wanna!!!

god it looks even worse in motion

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