Gundam Thread 5: That's no Anime, boy! No Anime!

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Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Despite its non-anime status, I feel that ZZ Gundam is, in fact, very good and entertaining.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2023 19:03

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 05:10

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Gripweed posted:

ZZ is extremely good, and a lot of that is because it's willing to veer so far away from the standard UC style established by MSG and ZZ. More Gundam series should take cues from ZZ

It also meant, in the case of ZZ, that you could actually mark a path on things getting more serious from the relatively lighthearted antics of young morons on both sides at the beginning, to the severe battles at the very end.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2023 19:41

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Arc Hammer posted:

https://twitter.com/_HeirToTheStars/status/1699074620744462776?t=e7qk6WGrUDy6aS4N3e2tEg&s=19

Apparently Kudelia's office is also based on Don Draper's office from Mad Men. But I like the implication that Frank Lloyd Wright houses survived the Calamity War.

Just like Edmonton. And Scotia Bank Bank.

Hey, why not? Racine WI doesn't seem like an epicenter of Mobile Suit warfare.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2023 14:19

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Quark visits G Witch and attempts to buy out Peil. Rom hangs out with the goat. Worf goes four rounds with Chu Chu (TKO).

# ¿ Sep 9, 2023 20:53

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And for NEO-SLOVENIA, the IDEOLOGY GUNDAM.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2023 04:23

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PhoenixFlaccus posted:

Yeah she�s an exception unless I�m forgetting something. Don�t remember exactly how the Glemy stuff went but iirc she was like �flattered but nah�. She is the Lt Emma of ZZ. Probably the coolest character in the show.

She ruthlessly exploits Glemys feelings and seems strained about having to murder him with a beam rifle at the end.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2023 22:59

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War is inherently political! So is pacifism. If Fukuda means in the sense that Gundam is not ultimately "about" the ideologies that the necessary war or Gundam Fight center upon, I think it has some sense; Gundam characters tend to be pretty near the ground and to have motives of their own, rather than wanting to take a principled and full-force Anti-Skub stance.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2023 02:29

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Isn't South Burning from Australia? Might just have been sunscreen shortages.

# ¿ Oct 21, 2023 03:13

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I liked the part where Suletta's option part thruster thingy towards the end looked like a broom she was riding.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2023 03:10

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Gripweed posted:

I just read Thunderbolt volume 20, and holy poo poo does that manga kick rear end. It just keeps building on itself in such an exciting way. When they busted out the goddamn Jet Stream Attack, I whooped. I also really liked that at some point after the events of the original series the Federation came up with specialized anti Big Zam weapons especially since what they came up with was so simple and clever.

I'm not crazy about the guy being able to straight up Professor X people but this series for a while has been imagining what if the development of Newtype technology and abilities went along a more productive line instead of how in the original UC timeline they went all in on just torturing children for little to no gain. So it's not a huge problem for me

"You lost me at 'don't torture children and dice their brains,'" Bask Om replies, thinking of killing people with mirrors again.

# ¿ Nov 29, 2023 05:01

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Arc Hammer posted:

UC suits can also use point of contact to relay messages, i.e. if your MS physically touches another MS it'll link the comms systems.

I thought you could get some control room bants because they had tightbeam lasers or something, the problem being you have to have a laser pointed at the MS.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2023 15:41

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I thought the George Glenn program in SEED was (according to the vision of ~~Big Boss~~ George Glenn) that the Coordinators would pioneer new realms of experience but would become part of humanity and hook up with Naturals, eventually mixing all the good stuff into humanity at large.

Which has problems given the, uh, eugenic overtones, but be that as it may.

# ¿ Dec 16, 2023 20:18

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Yeah, "a governmental system does not ever recover from a military action by an enemy which kills half of its citizens and destroys huge swaths of its arduously-built infrastructure" is more like, it'd be surprising if it did.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2024 19:56

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Begemot posted:

There's only one faction in UC that are portrayed as being universally fascist bullies, down to the lowest recruits, and that's the Titans.

The Federation are shown as cynical and corrupt even in MSG. They leave the White Base without support and use children as test pilots in the middle of a war. The message of the show is "war is bad" not "zeon is bad and the federation is good actually".

yeah it's more "the federation being bad doesn't retroactively make the Principality of Zeon in any way right," or suggest the feds "had it coming," given the scale of the slaughter and its heavy emphasis on, indeed, the people who Zeon were purportedly fighting to liberate.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2024 20:04

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brainwrinkle posted:

Who put the all the poor people in space in UC? Hmmm good question. Could it be the Federation? Could Zeon have some legitimate grievances about a negative peace imposed upon them? Alas, we will never know, as they are the Bad Guys.

Indeed, that definitely justifies Zeon killing mostly those poor people in space. I am convinced. Is there any reading I might do?

# ¿ Jan 4, 2024 21:46

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Like if Zeon had NOT nuked and gassed a shitload of their fellow colonies as like, their literal day one strategy, it would be a very different conversation even if Operation British had still gone off target.

You can say it's lame as poo poo that Tomino wrote it that way but that's pretty unambiguous, imo. And that's before getting into Zeon being ruled by an openly fascist aristocratic family.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2024 21:49

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golden bubble posted:

OYW is pretty nakedly modern Japanese government (Feddies) VS imperial Japan (Zeon). One of them is corrupt, servile, and completely unresponsive to the needs of the common people. The other one is psychopathic government by assassination with a literal state recognized aristocracy that claims to be an anti-colonialist force at the exact same time it is hyper-murdering the oppressed people it claims to free while engaging in its own special brand of colonialism and suppressing all the local poor with maximum violence.

What I always thought was interesting was that the Federation never did crack down hard on Side 3 directly. Or at least, uh, nowhere near the same way Zeon, uh, cracked down on other colonies. There may have been stuff in Zeta I missed though.

brainwrinkle posted:

I agree that the leadership of Zeon is unambiguously bad and fascist, but extending that to claim that every story featuring Zeon grunts is fashy is a stupid stretch. Mobile Suit Gundam goes out of its way to show that people fight for Zeon for real reasons beyond a fascist ideology. The core ideology of Zeon is co-opted by the fascist leadership.

Yeah the problem here is that I think the closest thing you get to "good Zeon" - Zeon Deikum's ideas are not necessarily bad in the slightest - is the AEUG/Karaba in Zeta.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2024 22:02

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brainwrinkle posted:

Quattro Bajeena can�t beat these fashy allegations

Lt. Bajeena? He's an honorable AEUG officer. Some way he might have been in the Zeon forces but he couldn't have done anything that remarkable. He certainly didn't execute a grudge that decapitated their leadership or anything.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2024 22:10

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ImpAtom posted:

Yeah, I feel like it needs to be clear here:

They get to sit around a comfy mansion which is well-stocked and throw holiday parties and poo poo in between going off on killing missions, which they go on entirely and 100% eagerly. If you replaced them with grizzled 40-something dudes it would both be hilarious and really drive home that they are not drafted soldiers but a super-elite black ops squadron.

Yeah I think some of why this stuck in the craw was because it was moe-moe poo poo over people doing literal Zeon warcrimes, not some hypothetical "hey, none of us are that passionate about the war and we found this mansion, let's do the bare minimum to not get court-martialed and live it up!" -- a bunch of borderline deserters and gold brickers would be a lot more sympathetic imo.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2024 23:32

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While you do not have to hand it to Zeon, the institutional setting of UC Gundam does not seem particularly explicitly sexist (although many characters sure have, uh, views about women) and it would not seem unreasonable to see plenty of female MS pilots on both sides. The main reason you don't seem to see more is directorial focus; by the end of ZZ Gundam the Gundam Team is one male, two female, with everyone else warming a bench on the ship.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2024 15:55

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chiasaur11 posted:

The One Year War, usually there was a pretty emotional situation before it happened.

Gryps, that situation was "a day ending in Y".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAJhEuKOzro

# ¿ Jan 6, 2024 02:48

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I think the subway car people in CCA could be taken as, basically, revanchist sentiment breaking out. Like it must have been pretty wild if you were just a phlebotomist in a hospital in Zeon since it was like: Zeon Deikum starts a project which is basically nationalist, dies somehow (probably killed by the Feds!), replaced by the Zabis, more nationalist stuff with a more explicit turn towards fascist behavior, your government killing half of the human race and losing the war anyway, some degree of national humiliation whether or not there was a large military occupying presence, an interval of several extremist/remnants groups making decent stabs at conquering the Earth Sphere while your government sat by, and then hey, it's Char! The guy who gave that big speech at Dakar! The hero from the war, the one with clean hands! Hell yeah! Char!

# ¿ Jan 6, 2024 22:35

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I suspect Tomino just turned into an old fart and a super adult and forgot the dream of space. Most of the problems with living on space colonies seem to involve factors not inherent to space colonies, except in so far that living on space colonies means that some things aren't a problem (difficult to get a land invasion when your land ends at the end of the cylinder and there is, at minimum, hundreds of kilometers of vacuum between you and the next habitable space) and some things are (it is possible for the air to leave through a hole in the floor).

The big problem is more that the UC just can't loving end because the plastic must flow, and it isn't a semi-open-ended thing like Star Wars or Star Trek.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2024 08:20

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Fivemarks posted:

I do like how Jupiter's bullshit is never about Contolism or Zeon Again. Jupiter's bullshit is even dumber and more petty, and can be boiled down to "The people who live on Jupiter that life around Jupiter is Hard, and want to kill everyone living in the Earht Sphere, Earth and colonies, for this"

They were such assholes that even Judau Ashta could only stall them. I assume he just ran around beating people's asses, but there were just too many assholes.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2024 08:47

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Motto posted:

In his later work tomino cares less about being consistent with prior presentation of tech or whatever than messaging to kids that earth's problems need to actually be confronted rather than put off with tech fantasies

In an ironic twist, the willingness to directly and realistically confront the challenges of environmental problems has been channeled into a giant brain laser aimed at the planet Earth by Jupiter.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2024 09:56

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Stairmaster posted:

that's because the cast is rich kids + compradors. of the three "working-class" space denizens we see: one is chromed up to heck (prospera), the second died in childhood and is a ghost in the shell, and the third is suletta.

Aren't you forgetting someone, you piece of poo poo spacian?? But I guess she was born on Earth.

I suspect the 'look how hard it is living in space' is a rhetorical pose, although there would be genuine difficulties; there would probably be a few things that would be difficult or more difficult to stand up without access to Earth. For instance you could get tree seedlings and poo poo from Earth trivially; swiping topsoil samples and seedlings and ocean bacteria water is going to be negligible, like drawing a tiny drop of blood from a human body.

There would be the question of Access to Resources, but a lot of fiction treats "RESOURCES" as a big block of Thing which you either have or you don't, and Jovians would be able to move an asteroid around for mining purposes just as readily as the Earth Sphere people could. I had remembered something like the Jovian colonies taxing residents for air, which was explicitly something that Earth Sphere space colonies did not do.

Witch from Mercury does not present the same kind of space colonization environment (the Fronts seem to be anchored in stony asteroids with large centrifugal areas for pseudo-gravity) but we don't get a lot of deep inspection of that. It does seem like a more rickety way to do things, but it would also probably be far more defensible than open-type colony cylinders in terms of "one guy with a ten-shot beam gun could evacuate most of the air inside the colony easily."

# ¿ Jan 7, 2024 20:29

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Arc Hammer posted:

Presumably there's poor working class spacians too besides the drone miners at Mercury. Not everyone in space can afford the rich corpo rat lifestyle and not every company mobile suit pilot is a corporate scion who went to Asticassia. They'd be the ones who I could see needing prosthetics, like Olcott has.

Besides Olcott the only other spacians seen post-porlogue who aren't rich kids are presumably the Elan body doubles, and that depends on of the show intended for them to be Spacian orphans or not, since it doesn't confirm where they came from, just that they took Peil's assignments.

The story's implication seems to be that spacians, while they may vary, are privileged as a bloc contra the earthnoids. WfM doesn't really go deep in how this thing is meant to make space safer and comfier: does it mean that it's NBD if you lose your hand or leg because you can get a GUND format prosthetic? (People did not seem agitated at Prospera's arm.) Or is it something like 'if everyone's living in the data storm then space colonies are easy!'

# ¿ Jan 7, 2024 20:37

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Kanos posted:

Sarius could have been an interesting illustration of the concept, but they don't put his illness down to space-itis and his generational contemporaries in the same income bracket(Delling and Vim) are both just fine when they'd almost definitely have similar maladies since you can't really resist the kinds of diseases that space living is supposed to inflict on people by being built different.

I figured his rear end was just old. I'm not sure how old they were supposed to be.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2024 05:29

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Arc Hammer posted:

Sarius is just Uncle Ruckus.

I did think he bore a resemblance to Grandpa Freeman, but I don't think the Freeman Gundam is something that Bandai is ready for.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2024 21:57

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Caros posted:

So this afternoon a friend told me gundam seed was mid-gundam. I agreed that it is in fact quite mid, until he explained that we are roughly as far from gundam seed (22 years) as gundam seed was from 0079.(23 years)

I do not like this fact. It weighs my soul by gravity.

Have you tried going beyond the time and embracing Suletta Thought

# ¿ Feb 12, 2024 22:34

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Warmachine posted:

Bit of an oxymoron there no?

Exactly.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2024 22:50

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Arc Hammer posted:

Was scrolling reddit and someone said that 2045 CE is the year that the space colonies began construction in the UC timeline before the new calendar was established. Anyone know where this number actually comes from? I always thought the UC was supposed to be further into the future. Far enough to be a nebulous "future" setting while still retaining familiarity with the present.

69 years after O�Neills book with the clear visual inspiration for the Sides. Probably seemed plausible at the time.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2024 15:21

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chiasaur11 posted:

One of the best things in Zeta is how Quattro basically sits backwards in his chair to say to Kamille

"You ever heard of a cool guy... a cool guy named Char Aznable?"

And Kamille goes

"Oh, Char. I know him. He's cool, but also he sucks, right?"

Heard he had an eight pack

# ¿ Mar 18, 2024 21:53

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Iriscoral posted:

One can see this in Cardeas/Syam Vist passing their respective torches to Banagher/Minevra when you contrast with the world at large. The children are trusted with ideas and concepts of renewal hope, but aside from the barest of goodwill, there isn't the transfer of material resources or concepts of aid, just good words and a pat on the back. The kids don't even get a giant robot to try to fix the world with.

Now I understand what you're saying here and I don't think you're wrong in your general thrust, but I sat down and watched Gundam Unicorn and I believe it was fairly clear that Mr. Banana did in fact get himself a giant robot. I think it came up a couple of times in the story.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2024 14:39

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Gripweed posted:

The idea of humans changing due to space travel has received serious scientific thought now, when space colonization isn�t even a live possibility. I think it�s reasonable for the people planning the opening of the first space colony to have it on their mind. Which is not the case for the founding fathers and Martians. Iirc life on other celestial bodies was not a seriously discussed scientific topic at the time. And the concept of Martians wouldn�t be popularized until the �discovery� of the Martian �canals� a century later.

And, the American colonies separating from England did not increase the likelihood of contact with Martians. But I think we can all agree that space colonization does increase, however remotely, the possibility of space people.

The Native American comparison is much stronger. Y�all just don�t want to admit it because that would mean Unicorn is a little less dumb than you thought.

The analysis that came to me when I saw Unicorn, which seemed to get some assent from my friend group, is that it was an awkwardly and ambiguously phrased thing along the lines of "if humans start to speciate due to space colonization impacts, the Earth Federation shall strive to include the new human specieseses as well." Sort of a pre-emptive anti-racist statement, and given that this was a hypothetical to them at the time (if a plausible one to consider) it makes sense that it's kind of wishy-washy.

You could of course argue whether Newtypes are in fact a 'new type of human' in the sense that some kind of Homo sapiens spaceman subspecies adapted to life in microgravity might be, if they're just ordinary humans on the far end of a bell curve for a particular set of talents that were particularly important for piloting Mobile Suits, or if it's entirely cultural vs. genetic.

Nessus fucked around with this message at 15:19 on Mar 28, 2024

# ¿ Mar 28, 2024 15:17

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I think an alien first contact/invasion story in UC Gundam could work but you'd kind of need to flag it explicitly as "what if/elseworlds" because it doesn't work in general. However, part of the appeal would in fact be the outside context problem. Newtype business also allows a way where you can make a cross-species connection.

A hack would probably also make it out like the aliens are responsible for the Fed/Zeon conflict, as opposed to simply showing up or possibly using the chaos as cover for -- whatever they want to do.

# ¿ May 2, 2024 17:27

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chrome line posted:

They did it bad that time, but they could have made it good! They should do like, spaghetti western Gundam or hardboiled noir Gundam or something

They should just co-fund the return of Big O

# ¿ May 2, 2024 22:19

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# ¿ May 13, 2024 05:10

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

A friend of mine who works in games says that in a lot of ways, what matters about a character is their visual design, because if people like how a character looks they will forgive poor writing or evil behavior -- perhaps not to an unlimited extent, but incredibly far. Anyway, Cima did nothing wrong.

# ¿ May 5, 2024 22:16

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > VEGETA > Gundam Thread 5: That's no Anime, boy! No Anime!

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