Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans II

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Microcline: Jul 27, 2012

Dulkor posted:

Season 2 opening post timeskip on a point of 'objectives achieved, but...' gives me more faith than the s1 finale did. I'll be following the release to see if it can really dig in on some of the themes it's flirted with in the past now that we're heading into the second half.

On the other hand, it's another example of the show's tenuous relationship with show, don't tell.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2016 04:29

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 17:53

Microcline: Jul 27, 2012

Kanos posted:

Well, at least if anyone was worried that the final episode of S1 meant they were toning down the brutality on display, this episode should put that to rest pretty conclusively.

No one ever doubted the series' willingness to repaint cockpits with jets of anime blood. The problem is every arc ending with unfitting, unambiguous happy endings.

Merribit: You're outnumbered 10-to-1, you have to retreat. Think of the children!
Orga: That would be an insult to our dead comrades.* Deploy the toddler division.
And then everything works out anyway

*I can't even remember who's died in Tekkadan apart from Biscuit and those nameless redshirts from the space pirate filler arc

It remains to be seen whether this arc will have consequences, as McGillis luring them into the space pirate ambush in this episode was just a setup for the stakes being raised by the arrival of a larger Gjallarhorn faction.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2016 01:09

Microcline: Jul 27, 2012

chiasaur11 posted:

I'd say the Dort arc ended on a bit of a bummer. Tekkadan got out alive, and Kudelia managed to get a message out, but Fumitan bought it, the revolution ended with the slaughter of the Dort union and no changes, and later we'd find out Biscuit's brother committed suicide. Not exactly one for the scrapbook.

But more importantly, you're misreading Orga's lines in this one. Even ignoring that they were 'only' outnumbered 10-3, with friendly reinforcements known to be inbound, it wasn't about people who were already dead. It was

"We can minimize our losses by retreating now"

"But we'll still take losses. I'd rather lose a little more in exchange for a major win than let our people die for nothing."

Different argument.

Plus, fight's still going. We'll see how it works out soon enough. I mean, yeah, IBO's been a bit light on named fatalities, but it's a little early to say this season's keeping up the trend.

Yeah I'm engaging in a bit of hyperbole and the jury is still out on S2. The problem is that when this keeps happening Meribbit comes off as a wet blanket instead of a voice of reason for being the designated "war is bad" character. Second, if IBO was able to show the consequences of violence it wouldn't need a specific character to tell us that war is bad.

Ethiser posted:

Everyone in the Earth branch feels like they are marked to get wiped out midseason for the dramatic turn.

It's the same problem the Turbines had in S1. There's not much character development to make us care about them and it won't be shocking when they die because their sole purpose in the plot is to die to raise the stakes.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2016 03:53

Microcline: Jul 27, 2012

Kanos posted:

We've already had multiple opportunities for the show to take a more critical turn about the Turbines and they've never taken it, so it's not going to happen at this point. Naze has pretty consistently been shown by the writers to be so nice and pure and selfless and good that doves nest in his fedora. The closest thing to Naze actually demanding anything from Tekkadan in exchange for his tireless support was him saying "OK, Orga, I smoothed over you embroiling your organization in a massive power struggle in the government of the solar system without discussing it with any other member of the organization you're supposed to be a part of by promising to kill myself if you gently caress it up but I swear guys next time you do that you're grounded young man!!!"

I actually dislike Naze specifically because the show has basically portrayed the man as so weirdly spotless he might as well be Jesus H. Christ, Mafioso Harem Master.

To be fair he hasn't had much screentime in S2 yet, and the dumber parts of his character are from after S1 took a nosedive into The Adventures of Princess Kudelia and her Noble Knights.

Given the direction S2 has taken with re-framing things from S1 I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and suspect that we may start seeing a monster beneath the nice guy facade.

I wouldn't put money on it though. This is a Gundam second season of a show that's known for starting strong and then falling apart.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2016 10:30

Microcline: Jul 27, 2012

Darth Walrus posted:

We're not going to see a monster. What we are going to see is what he's always been - an older Orga, a good, well-intentioned person who took way too much upon themselves and was naive and weak-willed enough to accidentally turn their movement for liberation into a personality cult that cannot exist without them. He tied himself to the worst deal in history, and that one mistake means that he'll die and his girls will be right back to square one all over again, being abused and fought over by a bunch of petty, cruel warlords.

You're probably right. You can only walk back so far without completely disowning season 1 so we're most likely going to end up with Space Pirate Mobster Polygamist: Too Pure for this Sinful Galaxy.

It's a shame because even if season 2 ends up being good the advice for season 1 is going to be "watch the first few episodes and pretend there's a time skip".

# ¿ Dec 2, 2016 07:04

Microcline: Jul 27, 2012

Neddy Seagoon posted:

If that were true, there'd be some kind of parameter for friendly forces and locations. These things had to have all come from a single source or faction to be utterly indiscriminate in their genocidal slaughter. If they were "conventional" military superweapons, you can be certain after 300 years Gjallarhorn would have archived IFF signals or faction banners to use.

Does a doomsday device need an off switch? If the retaliating party makes a precommitment to perpetually depopulate a given area, potential aggressors will know that if they attack, regardless of winning or losing, there would be no way to negotiate deactivation afterward.

# ¿ Dec 14, 2016 09:12

Microcline: Jul 27, 2012

The show's moral seems thoroughly un-Gundam. A big stupid clusterfuck war with no political coordination manages through nebulous contrivance to fix every problem in the world. All of the survivors (including the shady mafia don) turn out to be good guys except for the ruthless businessman, who gets conveniently assassinated.

There are the elements of a good 12 or 24 episode show but there's so much filler and plots that don't go anywhere that it ends up a thoroughly mediocre 50-episode show.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2017 23:35

Microcline: Jul 27, 2012

Kanos posted:

What about it is "un-Gundam"? What Gundam are you referring to? There's a lot of Gundam series with different and often conflicting morals and themes. IBO's approach to child soldiers dovetails nicely with UC Gundam's take on newtypes and cyber newtypes, for example.

I'd say that there's a general trend that while violence can resolve specific, immediate threats it can't fix (and tends to make worse) big political and societal issues. If directed carefully it might be able to stop the Titans but it won't fix the Earth/colony divide and it might come at the cost of a resurgent Neo-Zeon. The show never contradicts Orga's belief that if you keep fighting aimlessly everything will work out.

# ¿ Apr 3, 2017 02:37

Microcline: Jul 27, 2012

Kanos posted:

Except this ending explicitly does contradict that. The group that lashes out aimlessly at all of their problems is brutally smashed into the dust and scotched from the face of history after achieving absolutely nothing of worth. The "victory" they achieve in the end is that some of them get to run away and live while hiding their true identities for the remainder of their lives. The actual winner of the entire battle is the only one who was fighting with a clear objective in mind.

I'd agree if the episode ended halfway through. The problem is that the second half makes it clear that reform was only possible due to Tekkadan's participation in McGillis' coup. It would work if they said that it happened in spite of it, but what we got was a change in message from "blindly follow a charismatic leader and at best your death might allow the others to escape" to "blindly follow a charismatic leader and your glorious sacrifice will fix all the world's problems".

# ¿ Apr 3, 2017 05:47

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 17:53

Microcline: Jul 27, 2012

chiasaur11 posted:

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.

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

# ¿ Apr 17, 2017 06:09

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