|
Takahashi and anti-war messages are interesting to me, because personally I don't believe the man is a pacifist. Bear with me here. There's a type of character in Takahashi's work that I call the Doomed Idealist. He sees a world that is fundamentally broken and corrupt, whose continued existence only brings sorrow and misery to his people. The Doomed Idealist is not into it for glory or wealth, but for the salvation of his own, and he chooses war as the means to do so. He is not blind to the costs his chosen method will make his own people pay, but he believes there simply is no other alternative, and rejects the possibility of a peaceful way out. You see this in Dougram when Samalin rebukes Rick: "You are alone!" The path to Deloyeran independence does not end with Very Serious People around a negotiation table, it ends when the rebel forces remove Federation forces from the entire planet and take over the spaceport to block reinforcements. But in spite of Gasaraki's Nishida, I don't think this puts Takahashi with revisionist right-wing shitpiles: even the most righteous of causes for war still means that the innocent and the weak suffer needlessly. Sometimes UNDERSTANDING just isn't going to solve our troubles, sometimes war might be necessary, but it is never glorious or right. The other half of the equation is that the Idealist is Doomed. Ultimately, his world is even more twisted than he realizes, and he is betrayed or blindsided and his cause left in the dust. Sometimes he sees this coming (OVA Marder) and sometimes the way he is checked is simply unbelievable (TV Marder); Gasaraki is special in that Nishida is defeated because the world is actually better than he thinks it is, and America will take the immediate prestige hit rather than plunge the world into WW3. Ultimately, though, there are forces working beyond the Idealist's control that he cannot hope to counter even with his intelligence and strength of will; foreign interventionism, particularly that led by the United Nations, is something Takahashi seems to outright despise. This is more obvious in Dougram and FLAG, but even in Galient you have the spandex spacemen that would erase the cradle of galactic civilization rather than allow 'corruption' to upset the status quo. Traveller fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Sep 29, 2015 |
#
¿
Sep 29, 2015 18:22
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 7, 2024 02:24 |
|
|
Oshii does seem to prefer the status quo, as inane and dreary and protective of iniquities as it can be, to the uncertainty and chaos of full-blown rebellion. ("I share your disgust for just wars.") In a way it's as if he has given up on the possibility of the Japanese public (and by extension, the world) to effect meaningful change on the system, and therefore looks to technology and transhumanism as the harbingers of change. But then he and other cyberpunk authors run into the great flaw of the genre: we already live in a cyberpunk world to an extent, and we are still dealing with issues we thought settles ten, twenty, fifty years back even though third-world farmers are using smartphones in their daily lives and Anonymous had its heyday. By contrast, Takahashi does not meander on the implications of giant robots all that much - Gasaraki is probably his most technofetishist work and even there the robots are powered, in the end, by funcional magic.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2015 00:19
|
|
|
Fukuda is the Michael Bay of anime is what I would say if I were feeling SMG about it Going back to Takahashi talk: another blow against the attempts at painting him as Yukio Mishima With Robots is how he puts laying the sword down as a great act of maturity. You can give your very best, join forces with your friends and push forward with your cause but sometimes you will lose badly and you must not let defeat define you. The doomed idealists that I mentioned come to that realization, in the end, and Dougram in particular being a bildungsroman means that Crinn can only truly become an adult when he realizes his life is not to be thrown away for selfish pride. Considering that Takahashi is of the post-war Japanese generation, I think that's a powerful message.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2015 02:19
|
|
|
TNG posted:I really don't think Takahashi's a fascist either. It's just that he has to deal with robots as part of the territory of working in the genre, and that I think his way of dealing with it is very interesting. You still hear it from some quarters because of his work on Gasaraki and Konpeki no Kantai. From what I understand, the latter is more "what if we had been the good guys we claimed to be instead of what we actually were?" but I haven't watched it myself.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 30, 2015 04:00
|
|
|
The only physical change that really feels planned is Crinn getting a proper Deloyeran tan after he's been in country for some weeks.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 20, 2015 03:00
|
|
|
Ever so slowly, Macross II makes its way back to canon.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 26, 2015 04:37
|
|
|
The first episode sort of doesn't really happen. It has no actual place where it can happen in the timeline. Just think of it as a pilot episode, and treat the story as going from 2 to 75.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2016 07:23
|
|
|
What did you make of the ending?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2016 20:14
|
|
|
FLAG is cool and good, and short. Watch it. In Vifam news:  LAS NALGAS 
|
|
#
¿
May 22, 2016 01:00
|
|
|
Kanos posted:
And to general hilarity, they're finding out that taking a planet and yelling "our rules say we're now the eternal masters of the universe, now bow before us" doesn't mean anybody has to, you know, listen. ilClan is fun times.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 21, 2023 23:47
|
|
|
Does Battletech count?
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2023 00:42
|
|
|
Aerial slaps
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2023 02:31
|
|
|
From ancient interviews translated in /m/ some fifteen years ago ( ) I think I remember that there wasn't like a big picture plan for Dougram, they worked on the plot episode by episode. So you had the mandated endpoint with Dougram destroyed in the wasteland, but after that it was whatever Takahashi and company had cooked up for that week's episode.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 8, 2023 15:28
|
|
|
I managed to find the relevant posts. They were from 2011, so not 15 years ago...quote:A few interesting details from the staff commentary which was included in the DVD box: quote:Second part of the staff commentaries:
|
|
#
¿
Jul 9, 2023 04:40
|
|
|
Arc Hammer posted:I can't speak for Fang of the Sun Dougram but it's apparently also a good watch. Dougram is definitely more Battletech than Armored Core, and not just because all but four of its mecha designs ended up as BattleMechs - chunky ground pounders shooting and punching the crap out of each other. It's also very long at 75 episodes, but it's a fun ride.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2023 23:00
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 7, 2024 02:24 |
|
|
Jank as the animation could be, there was a classic war movie sensibility to Dougram's combat scenes that I really liked. There's a lot of episodes that boil down to "the gang advances a little and Crinn blows up three Soltics and a couple of Dueys", but even then there's some oldschool action with the Fang of the Sun fighting off Federation platoons, disarming mines, crossing bridges under fire and so on. It helped set up some stuff that you don't get to see normally like the good guys simply failing at a job without it being the end of the world, or that bleak episode where they're meticulously planning an assault on a Feddie base only to find out that they seriously outgun its weak garrison and kill them all without any real opposition.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2024 04:29
|
|