#Gundam Fix Figuration

[vdrawsrobots]

Hello tumblr Gundam people :) !! I am desperately trying to remember how this website works so please be patient with me but in the meantime here's some art I drew for Gundam's 45th anniversary back in April!

(uploading it kinda made the image crunchy, still figuring out how to fix that...)

[morkitten]

GIANT GORG BLU-RAY SUBTITLES

Recently, this wonderful 80s anime received a Blu-Ray HD release in Japan, but there are no English subtitles available for it. So I took it upon myself to rip the English DVD subtitles for Giant Gorg, run them through OCR transcription, fix line by line machine transcription mistakes, and re-time the whole thing to sync to the Blu-Ray rips online! To do that for 26 episodes was a big, often boring task, but if it makes anyone else watch and enjoy this series as much as I did, it's worth it, to me. Here's the link! Click on Keep Reading below if you wanna know more about this series before jumping in:

Giant Gorg was directed by the legendary Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, known as the character designer of the original Mobile Suit Gundam and Dirty Pair, and the director of the recent Gundam movie, Cucuruz Doan's Island, plus the creator of several manga, anime and film works like Gundam: The Origin, Arion, Jesus, Venus Wars, and many others.

Giant Gorg is kind of a precious baby of his that unfortunately never took off in popularity the way it deserved to. It's a wonderful series in the style of old adventure serials like Johnny Quest, about a boy named Yuu Tagami who, through a series of events, ends up joining/founding an exploration group to research the mysterious tropical island of New Austral, that is also on the aim of an evil corporation called GAIL, who'll do whatever it takes to claim the island and its secrets its exclusive property.

Yuu ends up finding and seemingly befriending a mysterious, ancient, and extremely powerful golem residing in the island, the titular GIANT GORG, deepening the mysteries of the land. The expedition group juggles surviving the island's natural and less-than-natural perils, managing internal conflicts, scraping by GAIL's assaults and dealing with other parties interested in the island for themselves. Plus, they now have to figure out just what the Giant Gorg is, if it can be relied on, and what is its intent. Whether this incredible being really is a Messenger of the Gods, some cataclysmic ancient weapon, or something else entirely. If I had to reduce it to something, it's old adventure serials mixed in with Mobile Suit Gundam and the Iron Giant. That's kind of what Giant Gorg is. The expedition group has a similar feeling to a much more scaled down White Base in Gundam, a group of people mostly barely related to one another forced into becoming a found family, relying on each other and surviving the strikes of a much bigger military force that's after them, with their own bureaucratic conflicts and machineries. Giant Gorg even has its own Char, in the form of Rod Balboa, a hotshot heir of GAIL that has been given control of its New Austral initiative. He's voiced by the same actor and everything!

What's truly great about GIANT GORG is how it creates a real, powerful sense of danger as stakes change and things escalate, both materially and emotionally. Characters feel like truly strong individuals that develop and peel out layers of complexity as the series goes on, and it tests your faith heavily in who they are and whether they'll do the right thing for themselves and the people they care for. There's such a great mix of excitement, sentimentalism, danger, discomfort, comedy, that makes this series feel like a truly all-encompassing and fullfilled Adventure.

So yeah, and the Blu-Ray looks fantastic, especially as someone who had to watch it originally in dim, blurry 420p resolution. So please give it a try!

[zanarkandfayth]

Would love to read your answers to questions 3, 9, 13, 17, 18, 26, 29, 31, 32, 50, and, if there's another number (or several) you really wanna answer, please add those too ✨

thank you for the ask!! <33 I wrote you novels in return gjdskglj

3. In your opinion, what’s your best fic?

oooh this one is so hard because I love most of my fics for different reasons, even my older ones (at least the ones on ao3. we ignore the ones left behind on ffnet lmao). hhhh, of completed ones that are posted, imma have to say monsters honestly, because damn did I put some heart into that. but the one I'd probably consider absolute best is the still ongoing, not yet posted 600K+ beast of a fic I usually refer to as "nanofic" that I've been working on since 2019. it won't be everyone's cup of tea, but it just gets so deep into noct's trauma that I inflict on him and his slow recovery from it, more than I've done for any other fic, and I've poured so much blood sweat and tears into that thing, it's kinda everything to me.

9. Have you ever written for a fandom without watching/reading/playing the source material?

written, no. been tempted to in the past, but it was too much effort and I already had too many fics for my main fandoms. I have read fandom blind for both harry potter and supernatural in the past though, like lates 2000s into mid 2010s. both were kinda on accident. supernatural in particular is because it kept getting crossed over with MULTIPLE of my fandoms. psych, house md, and criminal minds. so I started reading non-crossover supernatural fics in self-defense gsdklgjdks

13. What’s the biggest change between your style when you started in fandom and today?

I mean… this is the first paragraph of one of my fics from my first fandom when I was fifteen. you tell me 😂

"Relena smiled as she sipped her tea and mentally reviewed the day's schedule. 8:00 am- peace talk to the world. 10:00 am- conference with Romefeller. 1:00 pm- try to convince Dorothy to become a pacifist because she was to stupid to understand that Dorothy loved war. Rest of the day- annoy the HELL out of Heero Yuy. Smiling happily again (PLEASE! Her smile is SO annoying), she stood up and was just about to take a step when …. suddenly a freak falling cow killed her!!! =^.^= The gundam boys all burst out of closets around the room and rejoiced."

the biggest change is probably that I actually write well now lmao. and don't character bash. and don't throw author's notes and emoticons in the middle of fics, and have learned to format better, and, and…

17. In your opinion, what’s your most overrated fic?

oh god. let me hide before I answer this. hands down, it's shadows growing. like let me be clear, it's not bad by any means. I'm still fond of it. but I did not have a clear plan when I started writing it, and I really feel like that shows. it was not meant to be a fix-it fic. it was not meant to be a longer fic. it was not meant to be much of anything, tbh. I saw the prompt on the kink meme and the prologue literally started writing itself in my head and I was like "nah idk what I'd do with that" and I scrolled past, but I couldn't focus on reading other prompts and so I went back and just started typing the fic in a reply to the prompt. honestly I figured I'd write whatever I could and then when I left it unfinished, no one would know because I was anon and I had like one fic posted on ao3 for ffxv at the time and I was used to being a complete fandom nobody. the fact that shadows growing got me even somewhat noticed was unexpected and I was not prepared gdjskgjdskl

it definitely affected the fic because once the readers started picking up it made me feel suuuuper stressed and I was so afraid to stray too far from canon because I thought people would hate that??? for some reason??? no there's logic there. I was just overwhelmed. and I do get why people love it, because the whump and the friendship between the boys is really good. but I cannot help but look at it and remember how out of my depth I felt at the time and wish that I had been brave enough to diverge more from canon and smart enough to come up with a better ending. I still suspect there were quite a few people who felt let down by the ending and that's fair honestly. anyways, yeah, it's a good fic and I'm fond of it and most of the attention and the recs it got were in the first couple years of the game being out and I don't begrudge it being my most popular fic, I just. have better ones now I feel like gjsdgjskgsj but maybe not ones as many people would want to read. which is fine with me tbh.

18. What’s your most underrated fic?

the gladio oneshot in my "fayth's daddy issues week" series! (I wrote all those fics so back to back that I can't remember the titles for any of them whoops.) I adore that fic and it got so little attention compared to most of the other fics in that week, or my fics overall tbh. the only one that got even less was the one about iris 🤣 but I don't care much for the iris one either, even though I think it has some stellar banter between the boys and cute/funny prompto/gladio moments. I really love the gladio one though, because it was fun to revisit gladio's pov in a fic and I got to develop a bit of backstory for him that's been evolving into headcanon and there's a good chunk of ignis and gladio friendship that was the precursor to all their friendship in monsters, plus I got to make gladio cry, so. I love it <3

26. What aspect of your writing do you most enjoy to see praised?

characterisation, for sure. it's the one thing I agonise over and actually worry about what readers might think at times, especially as I get further away from having played the game to keep it fresh in my mind. so anyone commenting that it feels right makes me roll around on my bed in glee. the other aspect I equally enjoy is people commenting on the emotions. like, that the ones I wrote the characters having feel real/deep, that it made the reader feel them too, etc. stuff like that. cos the emotions are literally why I write fic lol.

29. Does the division of your writing across fandoms line up with your reading? What’s the biggest discrepancy?

I am dumb and am struggling to understand what this question is asking, tbh. is it like, do I write for as many fandoms as I read, or something? because fuck no in that case, haha. the only fandoms I've done major writing for (more than one or two fics) are gundam wing, digimon adventure, final fantasy x, and final fantasy xv. and I've read for something like 100 fandoms, idk. at one point I had a list but I stopped keeping track eventually.

31. Who’s the one character you’ve just never managed to get perfectly right?

well… I didn't really understand the concept of characterisation for fanfic until a little before I started writing for ffx. so uh, it's kinda non-existent in my gdw and digimon fics. but once I actively started trying for it… honestly maybe just yuna from final fantsy x. I had some things featuring her meant to be longer fics that were set during the game (most of my posted stuff is set pre-canon, with no yuna in sight) but I never finished and/or posted them because I always felt shaky on yuna's characterisation. I don't think I've majorly struggled with anyone in ffxv to the point that I've felt too dissatisfied with characterisation to post. but at the same time I'm sure none of them are actually perfectly right xD but they FEEL more or less right to me, which is all I care about.

32. Who’s the one character who shines without you even trying?

noct. I mean. he's my blorbo for a reason xD my beloved, I relate to him so much and the rest of it I just project lololol. I make a point to not actually just write myself as noct, cos I personally ain't about that, but it feels very easy to write him without needing to think too deeply about his thoughts/feelings/reactions most of the time. they feel instinctual to me, even when it's something that would differ from my own thoughts/feelings/reactions if I was in a similar situation.

50. Has writing fanfic had a significant impact on your life? Would you say it’s entirely positive?

YES and the answer to this question is one of the reasons antis/purity culture upsets me so fucking much. it's a personal/sensitive answer though so skip if you don't want to read that xD but. reading rape/sexual abuse & aftermath fics as a teenager is what helped me to understand that, even though there was no outright rape happening, I was still being abused. seeing my favourite characters have the courage to tell someone about their abuse and get help is what encouraged me to tell one of my friends during an AIM conversation late one night when I was sixteen, and she convinced me to tell my therapist at my next appointment, who then told my mom, and yeah let's just say that was a very significant and eventually positive impact (it was a rocky road) on my life. if none of that had happened I genuinely think the CSA would have continued escalating into eventual rape. so thank FUCK for fanfic and I seethe with rage every time some shitfuck anti tries to claim there's no good to be found in such fics. plus in general it just helps with my mental health and I've made plenty of friends through fic over the years, even if they come and go I'm still grateful to have known them for that time, and writing fic is the one thing that gives life any meaning for me, etc. so yeah I'd say at least 99% positive.

and now, I will add a few to answer, because you said I could lmao

7. What’s the fic you most want to continue (unfinished or no)?

it is a toss-up between horizon road, an ffx fic featuring a toxic, fucked up relationship between tidus and auron that I still really love, or endless skies, a really self-indulgent digimon fic. they're both old at this point, horizon road I started in 2005, and endless skies was in 2016. horizon road suffers from me having no solid ideas for it beyond the three chapters I wrote, and endless skies is painfully fully outlined, but it was such a hard, research-intensive fic to write for a number of reasons, and now looking at it also just reminds me of an ex-friend who I feel very negative towards (because I talked to them a lot while plotting/writing and they even wrote some of the smut scenes for me, though I've since removed those) and even if I wasn't still deeply entrenched in ffxv, I don't think I could bring myself to ever work on it again :/ which sucks because I did adore it very much.

35. Have you ever written a ship into a fic without meaning to?

…okay, I think anyone who has read shadows growing and then has also read or even looked at my ignoct fics knows that the ignoct is very much present in shadows growing gjdskgjsk as much as I will swear up and down it's platonic, and people certainly can take it that way if they want, like. come on. it's there. at a point, it very much was intentional. BUT. it did start out accidental. the og prompt asked for either gen or OT4 and I don't ship OT4 so I was gonna do gen but noct and ignis kept blurring the lines when I started writing scenes with them gdsjkgdjkl aaaaand actually I didn't start monsters with the intention of it being ignoct either. (the ignoct bits in the first chapter I actually added in a rewrite of that chapter lmao.) nor the tiny little epilogue in heavy is the burden that nudges into hinting at ignoct territory. fuck, even the ignoct in my very first ffxv wasn't meant to be so overt as it was gjdsklgjks there's also tiny hints of it in some of my fayth's daddy issues week fics (not counting the one that's deliberately and stated to be ignoct).

…actually now that I'm writing this I'm realising very little of my ignoct has been deliberately planned at the start 😂 the sequel to shadows growing, grey skies, was planned, at least xD the promptio that shows up towards the end of the fic was an accident though gjsdkgljslk it just. happened??? I didn't even LIKE promptio when I started writing that fic. huh. maybe accidental shipping is just my thing in writing ffxv fics.

40. Do you feel like you put out enough content?

wanted to answer this one, because, I'm NOT talking in terms of other people here. I don't mean to sound dismissive or ungrateful, because I do appreciate the people who read my fics, it makes me happy, but like. it's not why I write OR post. I'm not "producing content" for people; if someone is unhappy with me for not posting more fics, that's their problem. but in terms of myself… yeah, I do wish I had more to post. not because I feel like I've got some kind of arbitrary quota to meet. like, quite frankly, I have over a million words of fic posted on ao3, and given that I have a single unposted fic that's over 600K alone, I'm positive I have at least 2mil total words written. it's just that I wish I could write more consistently/frequently? I feel like I never write as much as I want to, and I know a lot of it is because of my worsening health, so maybe that's why I just feel so frustrated and dissatisfied with my output, but man, sometimes I look at my number of posted works on ao3 and feel like it's such a low number for how long I've been writing ): both for ffxv specifically and for all my fics total. I know it's silly, but the feeling persists nonetheless.

thank you again for the ask!! I feel happy getting to answer questions and ramble about my fics :D and it was really fun to think about my answers and realise a thing or two haha.

[md-guel]

HE'S HERE!! HE'S HEEEREEEE!!! the long-awaited shfiguel is finally here and by here, I mean his pre-orders are going to open on Friday, June 21 at 4pm!! his release date is scheduled on December of this year and he'll be going out for 9,900jpy.

and he looks so good??? they fixed his yaoi neck and yaoi shoulders!! I'm a little sad we'll never get his white shirt unless we paint him, and I think his arms have a tendency to look kind of giant, depending on the angle. but his expressions!!! and his hair and his articulation oh my god

I'm gonna post more pictures under the cut but I got these all from his p-bandai page! requires a VPN to access

his jacket looks a bit stiff here but we'll call that a system limitation, I think

he looks soooo good in this pose!! I can't believe they'll add a flappy jacket version

I love the configuration choices of his arms so much I'm so excited

a deleted scene I wish we had!! and gosh, the color of his skin. I'm so grateful!

and then here's a machine-translation of the specs along with a really long picture to show us the ~possibilities~ (he even has a phone???)

From SHFiguarts, the long-awaited "Guell Jetark" is now available!

His active role in "Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch of Mercury" has been turned into a three-dimensional action figure! Two impressive head parts are included, so you can pose him in various ways!

Appeared in Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch of Mercury

Main product contents

・Main body

・3 types of interchangeable wrist parts (left) and 5 types (right)

・One set of interchangeable head parts

・4 types of interchangeable facial parts

・Crossed arms part

・Student handbook

Main product materials PVC, ABS

Product size Height: Approx. 160mm

Target age 15 years old and up

[unhinged-comics-screaming]

Bravern Ep 9 thoughts! Oh my god this got so long I'm sorry

I think if I was more genre aware the transformation/level up shouldn't be a surprise. I am actually fine having to remake the decal because I had to lift it up to fix how I applied it so its already lifting lol.

I'm glad that the theories are right like, a plot twist that can be predicted via foreshadowing isn't bad plus it helps my "keep shows weekly" fight. I honestly think the ramp up of hint dropping is done well like "oh he has lewis vibes, oh he knows a thing about Lewis, oh here's a direct showcase that they have the same gunpla hobby" (btw I love that they got an actual gundam box artist to do the ones in the show, such commitment to the bit). The final nail in the coffin being the Lewis flashback where his favorite toy looks a whole lot like Bravern.

For how mysterious Deathdrives were for a while, I like that the limbo zone reinforces the kind of importance in passing on on their terms for them. Just like, restating that this is the core motivation for them. Like yeah this is Cunty's goal death but Lewis isn't satisfied yet so he's in their loading zone going like "hey no this isn't right for me". My only complaint is that I wanted whole ass. No glowy cowardice. Full naked and just enough to keep it aired on TV.

The like, entire thing that gets me though is that Isami is now living thinking that Smith is dead. And he like. Is. If we consider the overly uh horny parts of Bravern to be from Cunus then he's not 100% himself in the end. Like he sees himself as Smith but is it wholly him? Like Smith is happy he can protect and save the world and have Isami inside him. But especially with Bravern/Smith being all shady Isami is just going to have to mourn him.

I hope that this makes Lulu get closer to Isami and she ends up revealing it somehow. Ooooor Isami is on such a wavelength with Bravern he figures it out on his own. I just want him to know. Bravern has a mouth to be kissed after all.

I don't have any idea what Lulu is cooking but I wanna see it. I like that she's getting agency which, apparently to Deathdrives, is totally unheard of.

The alternate timeline theories slap. Everyone who is able to point out proper discrepancies between episodes I love you keep it up. I don't have the mental capacity for that. I kind of want to go with "world without Bravern" ED/promotional art stuff to be like, final loop maybe? I don't know what kind of time loop that needs to work but like, maybe he takes Lulu with so he doesn't need Isami and can defeat the Deathdrives really early on.

Which. Interesting thought. Before Cunus' proposal she yeets one of her Lulus but appears to have two spots. Lewis, also a two life form system yeets his Lulu so you'd think the resultant mech is a two life form mech, the Lulu from Cunus + Lewis himself makes it whole but he clearly isn't in top form unless he has Isami. Bravern is also more than a Deathdrive/Special TS so who knows how that maths out.

Ugh okay sorry this got so long congrats on getting this far. I like, clearly don't have anime friends to scream about this irl except my partner who watched me go through the spectrum of "gay sex wins" to crying for Isami.

[gotjacobian]

Travel journal-type posting, just describing some of the stuff I've gotten to do in Japan.

Day 1: Got off the plane, got through passport control and customs with minimum issues (I fucked up my entry date bc time zones and had to hold up the line while I fixed it whoops). Took the subway to Yokohama, also screwed that up because I was hopped up on benadryl and still only managed to sleep for 2 hours at a time max on the plane. Unscrewed it up with the help of a very patient attendant, made it to the hotel. I bought takoyaki and a highball from a place across the street from the hotel, which reminded me that I don’t actually like takoyaki. It’s too mushy. Then passed out.

Day 2: This was my full day in Yokohama before the conference. I beelined for a 7-11 to get the canned coffee I like and can only get here (and some pastries), then went to a park by the baseball stadium to eat it. Then I took off to try and at least see the (closed :( ) gundam factory exhibit. There was a triathalon in the way, so I spent awhile wandering through parks to get around it and get close enough for a picture. There were tons of beautiful gardens, and lots of people taking photos of their costumed dogs there? Like, 3 dog photoshoots for every presumed child/romantic partner photoshoot. They all seemed very happy to chill in the flowers and get fussed over.

In general Yokohama is really well suited to my kind of travel wandering - going along the harbor coast takes you through a couple different gorgeous parks and past a few museums, and also gives you a great view of the water. I ended up going into the doll museum, and immediately learned I had vastly overestimated the amount of english they’d have on the exhibits based on their website. I speak basically no Japanese, so used an image translate app a lot. That’s wasn’t an option the last time I was in Japan in 2019 - it was really useful! I drained my battery using it on basically every single plaque in the museum. The style of the exhibit captions felt different than I’d expect from a US museum. They were often more anecdotes from an artist or curator than they were descriptions. I’m curious to what extent that was cultural or was something lost in translation? The translations I got definitely weren’t perfect, and seemed to get worse the more anecdotal or conversational the material was.

The exhibit that attracted me to the doll museum was called “Why do we create objects that look like humans?”. It had exhibits of historical dolls and sculptures, as well as installations from modern artist and dollmakers. A lot of it touched on an inherent alienation in recreating the human in the nonhuman, and the ways all depictions of the human form are exaggerated in ways we sort after the fact into “beautiful” or “grotesque.” I liked it, but honestly wanted it to be more like, embodiment philosophy-y. Very much a me problem.

On the way back, I stopped by Yokohama’s Chinatown. I feel like it was much more of a tourist attraction than the equivalent in Boston or SF - lots of street food stands and people hawking specific restaurants or palm-reading services. Lots of panda-themed merch. It was VERY crowded. I bought a single pork bun for lunch, wandered through a few stores, and then ditched to try and find somewhere calmer.

A friend recommended that I check out Kaganecho, the arts district about a half an hour walk along the canal from where I was staying, so I went that way. I immediately saw a lot of signs advertising an “Art Bazaar” that was supposed to be happening in the area. There were people wandering around with tickets and brochures. It took me an hour to figure out how to get one - I was saved by stumbling on a performance piece that was part of the exhibit, a woman playing a song by hitting a series of bowls with wooden mallets, that just happened to be scheduled right then. It was right under the train line, so you got the loud rumbling drowning her out every few minutes, and also the ambient city sounds of bikes and children and wind under her playing. When she finished, I stalked some people who were watching with me and finally found the office that could sell me a ticket.

The “art bazaar” is a yearly exhibition in a series of apartments converted into studios in the few blocks around a particular train station. You’re given a ticket and a map where some of the buildings were marked. You wander around to find them, go in, and there’s Art there. I’ll probably post separately about this, honestly. It was one of the coolest gallery experiences I’ve ever had. The theme of the exhibits was “The world through no art”, and a lot of the material directly engaged with the history of the area - a neighborhood that housed a lot of bars, brothels, etc starting from the US occupation in the city post WWII, which were forcibly evicted in the 2000s, then later replaced with the studios as part of a city initiative to ‘rejuvenate’ the area. I went to every single exhibit that was open and stayed until I was about to pass out from the combination of walking and art feelings. I chickened out of going to a restaurant alone when I was already exhausted, and instead grabbed a katsu sandwich from 7-11 to eat in my hotel room.

Day 3: Start of the conference. It was raining horribly, and I have big fears about walking in the rain with my laptop, so I skipped the first couple hours until it calmed enough that I felt okay buying and using an umbrella. The conference was in this giant exhibition hall on a peninsula in the city that was all fancy hotels, shopping centers, and an amusement park. My maps app kept trying to get me to walk THROUGH the amusement park to get there, which was a kind of ominous experience when it was empty and raining. I met with some friends and labmates, we got Singaporean food for lunch (chicken and rice), and went to some of the afternoon talks. There was a welcome banquet where a guy performed with Kendamas (japanese toy/prop with a wooden ball attached to a wooden thing with cups and a spike). He did a bunch of poi tricks with them, and seemed to be having the time of his life. They also opened the expo, where I discovered they did at least have the gundam head from the gundam factory exhibit left over (still cannot believe they would close it a month before the robotics conference). Me and one of my former labmates got dinner at a katsu place that claimed to be the oldest in the city. We had to split from the group to get it, since there weren’t any vegetarian options there, but it was really good. I discovered that my hotel is like 1/10th as fancy as any of the other conference hotels, idk what happened. Very jealous of the main venue hotel people who had a room overlooking the harbor.

Day 4: Got there in the morning, did some conference stuff. We got sushi for lunch in this giant mall right next to the venue. I ditched for half an hour in the afternoon to wander through a different park by the harbor, which was also very pretty. All the greenery is very green and the water is very blue. I took another break to try and work some on my paper, since I feel bad for not doing more of that, but finding a place with decent wifi is hard. I meet back up with my labmates to get dinner, at a nearby ramen place with vegan options. I got their signature yuzu shio ramen, which was good, but I still prefer the pork-based styles.

Day 5: Is the day I’m helping present. I go to my coauthor’s presentation and then stand with him at the poster session, and get to talk to a few people. I’m surprised how fast the paper comes back to me, even though I haven’t really thought about it for at least a year at this point. I get lunch with another labmate at a milk-themed restaurant in the mall. I’m weirdly charmed that in Japan, “milk” is a flavor? And that there are prefectures proud of their local milk? The restaurant has both western-style food with cheese or cream as ingredients, and a milk and cheese bar where you can get bread, spreadable cheese, and toppings. I run back to the hotel before the conference banquet, get lost in the other hotel the banquet is in, finally arrive and realize all my labmates are either ditching or got a different banquet venue, so I sit with a very nice person from the university of edinburgh I met at the poster earlier that day. I talk about firespinning and mugs because I’m incapable of not doing so. Every one of the venues has a different style of food and performance - ours performance is actually a lion dance, which is notably… not japanese, put on by students from a school in the local chinatown. It’s still really impressive, especially given that they did it between the tables people were eating at. Like, I’ve attempted to be a base for a cheerleading toss once, and it was hard for 3 people to hold one up - these performers were jumping on each other’s shoulders the whole time, while puppeting the giant lion. They kept having it pretend to eat the heads of the people it walked past, it was a good time.

I spend an hour or two that night on my Quest, which is that I saw some kind of peach jelly drink in exactly one vending machine early in the trip and didn’t buy it. Now I want it, so I’ve been wandering through the city inspecting vending machines to try and find it again. Tonight I wander up and down this shopping center street that has a lot of them, in the rain, but no dice. I buy peach flavored ice cream at the 7-11 instead and reaffirm my mission.

Day 6: I wake up feeling bad, in both a stress and a physical way. I stay at the hotel and work on my paper, then go to a nearby cafe and try to work on my paper, but they don’t have wifi. I go back and end up sleeping, which I feel bad about, but probably needed - I can get disconnected from my own tiredness levels when I’m doing extended crunch time for a project, and I’m trying to be more aware of that. I don’t go to any of the conference stuff, but do leave at one point to get the local kind of ramen from a place I saw recommended online. The style is called ie-kei, and is an emulsified mix of pork broth and shoyu with chicken oil, served with pork, seaweed, short noodles, and spinach on top. I redeem myself by ordering and eating in the restaurant alone. It’s good in a comfort food way. I go back to the hotel and alternate working and sleeping, and end up skipping dinner with my labmates because I still feel gross.

Day 7: I feel better when I wake up, but have already committed to skipping this day of the conference because I’m going to Osaka. I find another cafe that actually has wifi, and eat there to do some work in the morning. Tangent - people really go nuts for the egg salad sandwiches here, and I don’t get it. I tried one and thought it was tasteless and had that bad cooked egg yolk texture. Super not for me.

I check out of the hotel and take the subway to Tokyo station. I get there an hour early because I forgot when my train was, so wander around the station for a while. It is SO crowded and there are SO MANY stores selling train bento, souvenirs, boxes of desserts to give as gifts, etc, and every single one has a designated salesperson shouting into the void. It is the most sensory-overloading, maze-like place I have been in my entire life. I take great pride in managing to eventually actually find the internet-recommended places to get ekibento for the train. I buy one with more traditional food, and one kids one that comes in a fake JR train freight container, because I really want the fake freight container. I also get an apple-custard pastry and a crepe with cream and melon ball topping. And then I am exhausted, and still too early for my train, so I stand by the platform and am extremely confused when someone asks me for directions (correctly assigned english-speaking person who knows where the ekibento are at the tokyo shinkansen station, I guess).

I do get on the train eventually, and eat one of the bento (I save the second because I am worried the person sitting next to me is gonna judge me for eating 2 bento, one of which is definitely meant for children, but I will eat it eventually). I said I was gonna do work but instead I’m writing this and watching out the window of the train. I feel like everyone has their travel fixation - my grandparents laugh about how when my mom and brother would go on trips as kids, they’d get disposable cameras. And when they developed the photos, all of them were of ponds, lakes, coastlines, because they grew up in the west texas desert. I grew up in the flat, flat Texas plains, and now I’m like that about mountains. This train goes straight through them, and right past Mt Fuji. It gets to me how distinctive the landscape in japan is - I’ve looked at a lot of traditional japanese art as like, a precursor to modern styles in comics, because I find it interesting. And I feel like I looked at some elements of that style - atmospheric perspective, depth through stacking flat layers of scenery, the specific abstract-seeming way Mt Fuji gets drawn - and assumed it was entirely an artistic choice. But like… Mt Fuji just looks like that. The landscape just looks like that, with the fog and the layered mountains. The green is such a specific shade of green, and the blue is a specific shade of blue, and the buildings are all such a particular faded palette in a way I feel like must make Japan instantly recognizable on geoguessr, a game I am very bad at. I love looking at the cities and buildings, too - I wish I knew the words to describe the specifics of the style and design. I feel like I'm getting increasing city architecture obsessed these days, despite not having that language. Getting to see it is the bit of travel that really makes me feel like I'm experiencing something I couldn't anywhere else. I'm gonna find my hotel in Osaka once I get there, hunt down some food, then will probably try and do some more work before bed. Then tomorrow, in theory, Osaka castle and whatever else seems compelling.

[diamondwerewolf]

how about sharing uour worst pikmjn head canons. thry can be any thing aslong as they are.. the worst..

Here are my worst headcanons and a few mid tier ones:

louie likes olimar's wife just a little too much. she encompasses everything he usually likes: edible (smells good), plush or comfortable, and very fun.

Tarrey can get louie to do things that usually warrant a non- response for anyone else.

louie, like some other decided characters, is the alien person equivalent of 7ft tall. so he looks more awkward round others, and because i said so

Olimar keeps gundam-like and fantasy figures on a shelf in his garage where he usually works. Pal, his son, is actually named Paladin. Nerd...

Olimar's previous time as a leafling had/has more subconscious and physical affect on him than he realizes. Which is partly why he has a third child baking. Paraphrasing: '...don't lose. Only make more. Basic Dandori' (this is by far the worst because I'm a freak who loves breeding)

Louie unfortunately knows Tarrey's father, one of the few peoples faces he can clearly remember. Tarrey's father was the one who carved those scars into the side of Louie's face. Lou owed him money at one point. He has since paid off his debt by working odd jobs and selling treasure. Probably one of the few instances where he worked really hard to fix a problem he caused.

Olimar is terrified of Tarrey's father, but Tarrey's father actually likes him. He can breathe a sigh of relief (sort of) if the space pirate ship sizing him up has a 'BULLY' tag. Olimar usually has something he can show them so they know who his wife is. Doesn't save him from other pirates though.

Tarrey has considered getting the Bully tattoo on her right shoulder removed, but it prevents her from being approached by weirdos and solicitors. Otherwise, she usually has it covered up with something like a scarf.

Louie is only 23 and he's wrecked at least two motorcycles.

Glow sap is just spilled mountain dew

[candycryptids]

I'm in need of enrichment so...

what are their ideal forms of enrichment for Tangy, Chuu, Tuesday, and Mochiie?

UuHuuhuu… ENRICHEDMENT… Putting a pumpkin full of ground meat down in the enclosure for you to roll about

(つ•̀ᴥ•́)つ*:･ﾟ✧🎃

Tangy’s ideal form comes in like, physical exertion. Y’know when a dog gets out and they start playing chase with you, and the more you run after it the further it runs away, but if you sit still it’ll eventually come to you? Yeah. Tangy WILL play chase/tag. She’d also love to learn more moves, especially in grappling? Lyse knows a lot about Kicks but sometimes you just gotta. Grab somebody. And TOSS EM! (Into a body of water; she doesn’t mind getting wet so payback isn’t so much a concern to her)

Chuu is enriched, as you mighta guessed from A’vyra, when she’s got some kinda mechanical thing to solve. A gun she’s never seen before is jammed or broken and she has to figure out how it works, take it, fix it, and murder who/whatever it is that’s running across the snow to stop her. Or getting some sort of data bank dropped into her lap, with new research and schematics for something she hasn’t encountered… 🤔 and then going out of her way to try and build it. She’d really like building Gundams; small and fiddly.

Tuesday is tricky… I think… having the time to sit and people watch and [sonder] about people he doesn’t usually have the chance to give any considerations for in his day-to-day is enriching for him. Granted, his conclusions about people can be wildly incorrect, working from only that which he overhears or sees. It’s more about the exercise than actual results >>; the Baker is NOT in a romantic tryst with the Dyemonger-

Mochiie finds enrichment being able to teach someone something new, so long as they’re willing to learn. It helps his own understanding to explain it to someone else in a way they can understand. (I’m thinking specifically about the early Conjurer quests, where you keep trying to [show Sylphie the elements], and why she should [appreciate nature], lmfao.) He also finds Chocobo racing to be enriching; a new way to bond with man’s best friend, training and working together towards a common goal- not to mention the rush of going fast and the adrenaline of victory (or even the near win).

[certified-stupid]

OKAY. That new persona 5 x game looks like dog shit imo. But that’s not because it’s a reskin of persona 5 made by a different Chinese company, or that it has no original music, or that it’s probably gonna be a gacha game, because it is. It VERY MUCH is gonna be exactly that. But because the designs in the game are actually REALLY cool. Like, the MC looks pretty bland outfit wise, but their persona is cool as hell, like, Axe guns. The mascot character is just owl Morgana, and that’s fine, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but his persona is a LITERAL SD Gundam figure, which is honestly really inspired! And the blonde girl with the yellow hood is really cool, and her persona looks like a real, actual atlus monster! Like, one that I could see in a mainline SMT game!

These are banger designs! Too bad it’s on a mobile gacha game with micro transactions.

[andmaybegayer]

Last Monday of the Week 2024-09-23

I have a normal number of tabs open

Listening: Went to a metal show I knew nothing about because my partner was going and I figured it would be a good way to hear what they're into.

Nest of Plagues is a Hungarian outfit, which I liked a fair amount. Bad mix from their sound engineer but otherwise fun. I have no idea what any of the songs they played are so here's a random one:

Next up, Lone Survivors, a French prog metal group. Really fun, great bass

Then Science of Decay, Swiss group. Probably the most consistently good.

And the headliners who were Orphaned Land, an Israeli pan-religious peace themed band? Bizzare on many levels. What is the point of non-blasphemous metal.

Pretty good show all around, I'm not a huge metalhead so other than like "pretty good, some of this is nice" I have very little to say.

Reading: A Desolation Called Peace which is a delicious little thing. A really different book from Memory, and makes very efficient use of its scenes to handle a lot of information very deftly.

It's a bold move to do the like, barest intimations of a relationship in book one, ends with a single kiss. Book two: starts with them deeply estranged on the other side of the galaxy from each other, midpoint fucking, endpoint ???????.

The Eight Antidote scenes are clever! The sanitized self-concept of the empire in this one kid. There's a bit about the "Atrocities Teixcalaan had smartly given up committing" it's such a great line

Watching: Finished Mobile Suit Gundam. which was interesting and educational for multiple things, for one just as a reference for a bunch of other media I've consumed.

I want to compare it a little to Avatar, which is good but suffers heavily from the constraints of being a Western Children's Show, Gundam is a toy advert like Transformers but it doesn't feel the need to lean into "here is your moral lesson of the week" stuff so it can do some really thoughtful storytelling about war and duty.

The instrumentalization of the whole White Base Crew where they're just taken on as an expendable force by Earth is so great because it keeps them at a distance from both sides while still putting them on A Side.

The Newtype stuff towards the end both focuses the story and sort of weakens it? It moves you away from the drama and struggle of the crew into building this universe lore.

I'm probably going to jump ahead to Witch from Mercury and then maybe watch some of the past seasons.

Making: Some abortive microscope stuff, ran into weird power issues, need to fix that. Fiddling with VR projects but nothing meaningful, I wanted to try and work on some 3D curve visualization stuff but I mostly got bogged down remembering how VR on Linux works again.

Playing: Fell off Tactical Breach Wizards but I'm back, pushing through the final act. It's going well and I'm getting Rion under me, he's pretty finicky at times but very powerful.

Tools and Equipment: A consideration for you: if you have weird neck pain check your pillow. Ever since my partner spent a few nights at my place they found their neck pain gone because I use good normal pillows made of firm foam rather than bullshit sad feather sacks that compress down to one centimeter thick and do fuck-all for your neck. I do not know who thought down pillows was a good idea, stop doing that. You need to keep your neck supported!

[layingeggs]

Wow. I always thought the original Gundam was foundational to mecha anime specifically. I didn't realise that it was just foundational to anime.

I will discuss spoilers in this post but I'm not spoiler tagging for a show that's old enough to fulfill a lesbian fantasy about getting hunted by a cougar.

So yeh, anime. We've got kids becoming Akira. We've got Rei Ayanami and Anthy Himemiya. This show is crazy, it has everything.

And you know, we've all heard people saying that Neon Genesis Evangelion is a deconstruction of the mecha genre. I always thought that that was wrong, but I think I'm reconsidering!

I believe the popular take is that NGE is deconstructionist because unlike other mecha anime it highlights the harsh realities of being a child soldier.

So obviously that's completely wrong. Perhaps the biggest thing that Gundam focuses on is the harsh realities of being a child soldier.

But then you have Lalah. A beautiful mysterious quiet girl child soldier who is made to fight by an older male commander. She fights because she loves him dearly. He shares a gentle and affectionate side with her, where otherwise he is only ever seen being formal and withdrawn and rough, even to his own family.

The beautiful mysterious quiet girl child soldier and the begrudging hurt naive lead protag boy child soldier come into conflict with each other over this male figure. The former seeing the soft side and the latter seeing the rough side.

Eventually they come into an understanding with one another when their minds collapse into the singularity that human evolution is either rising or falling to.

It's Rei Ayanami, isn't it? *Points at her* Look! It's Rei Ayanami! It's her! It's Rei! It's Rei Ayanami!

I get this sense that Hideaki Anno watched Gundam and became fixated on her. That NGE is his fanfic where she not only takes on a more major role but the ending of her character arc, one of apotheosis, is shown with more detail and fervour. What is implied in Gundam is made textual in NGE.

He watched Gundam, and he understood the underlying ideas being put forward by Lalah's character, but still felt it wasn't properly done justice. And so he sets out to fix that, and show what Gundam really could have been.

NGE isn't deconstructionist because of what it has to say about mechs, it's deconstructionist because of what it has to say about young girls who are made to embody utopic ideals. And the way that the dream becomes the nightmare becomes the dream. The utopic and the dystopic collapse into each other. All of this is filtered through the lens of how the girl sees herself and how she is seen by others.

These are themes that Gundam itself touches upon, but never fully explores, at least in regards to Lalah herself.

And so you have the setting of Gundam being a catastrophic near future war because the story at its heart really is about us and about war.

But the setting of NGE is the extinction of humanity under a greater unpredictable threat, because the story there at its heart is about the self and the world and girlhood.

The core thesis of NGE as a work of deconstruction then is that Gundam doesn't talk about girls enough. An idea that I personally have some mixed agreement and disagreement with.

[hambrababy]

A Journey Through an Internet Anime Rumor on Takeyuki Kanda

There is a rumor that’s spread about anime director Takeyuki Kanda’s sudden death in 1996 that has nothing to back it up. As best as I can tell, it remains unfounded and almost certainly false. The rumor is that he died in a car crash, but the only available information on Japanese sites doesn’t mention that at all. The oldest source I could find for that rumor was an uncited English Wikipedia article written by an account later banned for bad edits.

The only confirmed detail on Kanda’s death is that he suddenly passed away at the age of 52. That much, at a minimum, is confirmed by an official interview on the VOTOMS website with Ryosuke Takahashi that mentions Kanda’s passing, specifically in its third footnote.

I was (and still am) working on a separate, more fun article about a series of anime image albums, but I got sucked into this rabbit hole over the last few days. I figured I’d tell the story of how this unraveled, as well as share some thoughts on anime rumors in general.

Hey, Maybe Someone Should Check Wikipedia

I was chatting with people from Inka Subs about Vifam, and Ralem, one of the staffers, posted the credits of its 1920’s Chicago gag spinoff OVA short. The credits are in English and contain a bunch of names and inside jokes on the staff involved, and one of them was for the director “Drunkard Kanda”.

Takeyuki Kanda was a seasoned anime director who worked on many shows over his career, and he was Vifam’s series director, hence the shoutout. A tidbit I’d heard through the years and repeated myself was that Kanda died while directing the Gundam: The 08th MS Team OVA because he got into a fatal car accident. Because other staff noted his tendency to drink, that carried the implicit connotation of an alcoholic car crash, which would explain why the OVA had a director change part way through. It’s a short, somewhat dramatic story that gives a grim flourish of sudden crisis to the production of The 08th MS Team.

Except I thought for a second and realized that I wasn’t sure where that detail actually came from. I’d heard it so often, but where did it come from originally? Just to double check, I went to his English Wikipedia page to see if it was sourced there.

It was soon apparent that something was wrong. The Wikipedia page for Kanda was barebones, and it hadn’t been updated since June 13th, 2021. The article at the time had this as its bio paragraph at the start:

None of this information was cited whatsoever. There were no formatted citations, no in-text descriptions, and no links of any kind except external ones to IMDB and ANN. The page had a huge “this article needs additional citations for verification” warning slapped right at the top since 2019, but nothing had been done to fix anything.

I switched over to JP Wikipeda to see if it was listed there. I don’t know Japanese myself, but even from cautiously using both Google Translate and DeepL with the page, there’s no mention there of any sort of car crash, which was also checked by the Inka people who knew Japanese.

I looked back through the history of the page to see where that detail could have possibly come from, and it turned out that unverified detail was there from the page’s inception in 2015. That’s also where I noticed that there was an additional unverified detail about Kanda being “heavily inspired by Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spilberg [sic]” (and 20 days later even added Nicolas Roeg). The user who made that page had not only received warnings from other Wikipedia editors for adding unverified information even before the article was written, but was repeatedly blocked and later permabanned for sockpuppeting, unverified malicious edits, and personally attacking other editors.

Needless to say, the car crash detail is very suspect and unreliable. There’s no reason to believe it’s real based on the existing current evidence. Other Inka members checked through JPN sites with pages about Kanda, and none of them mentioned a car crash. Checking on my own, it’s not mentioned in the Pixiv encyclopedia, the NicoNicoDouga encyclopedia, nor even a fan-site Sunrise encyclopedia. All of those are user generated and don’t have sources themselves, so even the details that are there are unverified.

There is official interview on the VOTOMS website with Ryosuke Takahashi in 2010 where mentions Kanda. The third footnote only confirms that he suddenly passed away at the age of 52 in 1996, with no mention of the cause of death. The note does mention he shared drinks, but there are no further details beyond that.

It’s possible somewhere out there, there’s some obscure contemporaneous Japanese article or coverage where something like that maybe happened. But until any actual proof emerges, there’s no reason to believe the car crash rumor is true, or any of the other details on those JP sites for that matter. The only verifiable detail is that Takeyuki Kanda suddenly passed away at the age of 52 in 1996. If anyone has more reliable information to add to this, please share it.

Other Wrong Listings

The next “official” source I could find for that car crash rumor was ANN’s encyclopedia page on Kanda. The detail has no information on its source unless logged in, but I initially thought it could have maybe had some reputable source.

After logging in, its only listed source was that same Wikipedia article. AniDB's page also has that detail but again only lists Wikipedia as its source.

With all this looking like a mess, I decided to remove that detail from Kanda’s Wikipedia page myself. I also submitted an error report to ANN and to AniDB, both of which are pending at the time of this post.

I decided to later check the 08th MS Team Wikipedia article to correct the information there as well, and that’s where another oddity popped up. It had “citation” on Kanda dying in a car crash, but it was an anime blog that gave me a fake virus warning pop-up ad upon opening. That blog post had no source listed. There was also a link to a different anime blog saying that the episodes were delayed after of Kanda’s death (though they don’t mention the rumor, good on them!), which is at least a more plausible inference based on the release schedule, but still not confirmed. I deleted those sections as well.

I think that rumor is now at least dead on Wikipedia and hopefully soon ANN and AniDB, but by that point it had likely spread for years. I’m thankful people shared my description of this on Twitter, but that’s still a small subset of a niche of a niche on an unrepresentative website. Who knows how far that unconfirmed detail has spread?

Something Was Wrong on the Internet

Despite my attempt to tell this somewhat as a story, all of this was rather basic. Checking a Wikipedia article to see if it has a citation takes seconds. Even with blunt use of auto-translator software, which itself is very imperfect even in the most narrow and careful possible circumstances, checking JP Wikipedia and other bio sites had no mention of anything close to an auto accident. Finding reliable anime information is a thankless task, but doing the most basic fact-checking to see if a detail has a confirmed source is relatively simple. Anything unsourced on Wikipedia is always suspect, and even things with sources there need checking to see what they’re linking too.

It’s commendable that English staff databases and editable encyclopedias even exist, but those also have structural issues. On ANN, you can’t see the source listed for something unless you’re logged in, which seems like a rather serious flaw for a public encyclopedia that’s the most public-facing source of Anime staff information aside from smaller sites like AniDB and AniList. Having an editor manually approve changes is a good deterrent from false info getting posted, but it does make it harder to speedily correct things aside from using error reports to put tiny red warning circles.

As much of a weird obsession this has been for me over the last few days, and as much as it feels good to see this attempt at a correction getting shared, it is still emblematic of a larger problem.

Wrong and misleading information is a longstanding issue in English anime fandom and companies, especially when communication was more limited, but even the long-debunked ones remain nigh-unkillable even now. How many times has the “Ghost Stories flopped” rumor been spread even though it was totally wrong? Or the rumor about where Toriyama “intended” for Dragon Ball to end that’s not only inaccurate across the board but also includes outright hoaxes? Or the lacking knowledge about the anime production process as a whole?

Even from my own experiences, small details can cause these kinds of issues if they remain unchecked. A few 0079 mecha on the Gundam Wiki had to have their articles reformatted because their model numbers were lifted from made-up details posted to Japanese Wikipedia years ago from a doujin site, including the Gaw and the Dopp (thanks to editors MatokoLee and SuperFeatherYoshi for pointing these out!). The Dopp one was copied into the Wiki in 2011, but no one had bothered to verify them for so long because there was no immediate reason to suspect they were wrong. This isn’t as egregious as the prior examples since all the tech specs for mecha are fictional (and sometimes contradictory), but even the tiniest pieces of incorrect anime info can linger on for years.

I won’t give other specific rumors any more oxygen, but this still happens with tons of recent shows. One detail from an interview or one comment from an animator on twitter can get spun into something totally unfounded from the original basis of what they were trying to say, and then those misconceptions only get more repeated and exaggerated the more users and sites they pass through.

To some extent, a certain amount of this is inevitable given the language and cultural barrier for English anime fandom. But since anime has grown far wider from its initial niche, it’s almost even easier for bad information to spread quickly while corrections and actual well-researched information can’t catch up. Running actual news and press sites is challenging as online news faces many economic struggles, and there’s little incentive for individuals or influencer-type people to concern themselves with accuracy. It’s easy, and frankly more entertaining, to mythologize about so many aspects of anime production and history, to spread speculation, or to share funny or gripping details that sound true enough while never bothering to do the most basic checking on any of them.

I sometimes wonder if it is possible to make some kind of website cataloging and debunking common anime misconceptions and rumors. Kazenshuu’s rumor guide is the most comprehensive in debunking anime-related rumors, even if it’s only for Dragon Ball. Wikizilla’s misconceptions page (thanks Chungris!) is also another good example, as is TFWiki’s  “urban legends” page. But there needs to be a way more centralized way to broadcast these kinds of rumor-debunkings rather than individual people happening to find them years later.

The obvious takeaway from all this is for people to be more cautious, which seems straightforward enough, but that only gets so far. My blither takeaway is that more people, myself included, should just learn Japanese. There’s a whole world of anime magazines, interviews, websites, and more that could clear up tons of longstanding rumors and even provide new details never accessible beyond Japan before, but so much remains untranslated. I have paid people to translate things I really wanted to access before (thanks Windii!), but realistically that’s an expense I can’t incur that frequently.

Life is already getting busy for me, but I think there’s merit to devoting enough time to learn some Japanese. Anime is a hobby, but it’s a hobby I love and want to learn as much as I can. Relying so much on secondhand info spread through random people, having to use flawed and unreliable auto-translate programs to skim websites, or being lucky enough to know fansubbers with actual Japanese knowledge isn’t a sustainable substitute for actually knowing things.

Learning Japanese wouldn’t fix everything. Bad information and rumors still spread among JP fans too. Even official sources from companies can intentionally mislead, while faulty memoirs and recollections from animators can get things wrong. But the English anime community needs more serious, verifiable (and far less scattered) work on sourcing anime history and news. If any of us can move that needle and stop wrong info from spreading, then that’s already more valuable than any amount of casual waffling, opinionating, and speculation that only begets more wrong information.

So be the annoying pedant who asks where someone got the detail they’re sharing. Don’t spread something that sounds too neat and simple without bothering to check. Don’t take anything for granted. Learn Japanese and look things up yourself. Demand better of others and yourself.

By the way, this shouldn’t overshadow Kanda’s extensive career in anime. I haven’t finished Vifam yet, but I highly recommend it. Watch the shows Kanda worked on and played a huge role in shaping. Let that be his legacy.

Postscript: Some Better Sources

This is by no means an exhaustive list and I don’t mean to snub anyone, but I figured I’d at least post a few people I know are more thorough with things to steer this post towards a better direction.

Regarding Gundam, I can recommend Mark Simmons’ UC-focused website, Feez’s Turn A blog, and the translations on the Zeonic Website. They have lots of old interviews and production details translated that are invaluable for understanding the behind-the-scenes of Gundam.

For anime production information more generally, I can recommend the Full Frontal team and the SakugaBlog/Booru team. They’re doing some of the best active work in covering current anime creators and detailing the current state of the industry with high quality translations and original reporting of their own.

Windii has been an immense help for me in the past, and she’s actively soliciting to translate and preserve tons of anime (and lots of Sonic) related stuff.

This is with the clarification that I don’t watch anime youtubers, but I can at least say MercuryFalcon has some very well-sourced videos, especially his Toei Fushigi Comedy one.

None of these are perfect, but they do a solid job of translating information that I’d like to see more of. Again, apologies if I forgot or don’t know about other people, but I figured I’d shout out a few of the ones I do know.

[argumentalist]

My first Real Grade kit was Char's Zaku II - so, of course that had to be my first Master Grade kit too.

I've been kind of hesitant to try a Master Grade kit for a while. They're bigger, more expensive, more complicated... It's a big step up from the High Grade kits I usually build. It's kind of intimidating.

But, at the end of the day, it's still just gunpla.

I don't like painting miniatures much. They're so tiny, my eyes are bad, and my hands shake. I hate waiting for layers of paint to dry. And then I feel frustrated when it doesn't all turn out the way I want.

But it felt wrong to leave these pilot figures completely unpainted. I think they turned out OK? They look fine from a couple feet away.

This K-runner quickly became the bane of the build.

It's a neat idea. The grey is some really soft, flexible, polycap-like plastic. The pink is normal, hard plastic. They're molded together so you just have to slide the pink bits into place.

But that pink plastic was stuck pretty tight. It didn't want to move. And there isn't really any good way to grab the individual pieces. I cracked two fingernails working with this runner.

The internal details are fantastic.

Of course there's the seated pilot figure in the cockpit... But there's a tiny little reactor that I'll never see again now that the kit is built. And there's terrific detail all over the inner-frame.

Unfortunately that inner-frame is almost entirely ABS, so I couldn't do any panel-lining on it. Although, given how detailed it is, that's maybe a good thing. It probably would've taken me a month just to panel-line that inner-frame.

I used my favorite metallic pink Gundam Marker on the monoeye. I just love how that looks. And it seems perfect for Zeon monoeyes/cameras.

This kit again has the neat gimmick where the monoeye moves when you turn the head - just like the RG.

I really didn't love the simple, clean, anime-accurate aesthetic.

I guess that's what it's "supposed" to look like... But after building the RG and the Origin kit - this one just looked awfully plain.

This kit came with some sticker-style decals and some dry-transfers. I tried one try-transfer, but I wasn't happy with it. I used one of the stickers on the reactor, but I didn't want to use them all over the place.

So I picked up some G-Rework waterslide decals.

So many decals!

I thought it would be easier since the MG is larger? But they're still just as tedious. And since I was using third-party decals there wasn't a nice guide to follow. Just lots of squinting at pictures and agonizing over which decals to use where.

I think I like the G-Rework decals better than the Bandai decals I've used. They released from the paper much faster. And the decals themselves seem thinner. I didn't have to use any Mark Softer at all - they all stuck great and conformed to all the curves fine.

Very fun build.

The MG is obviously bigger and more complicated... But it really isn't any harder. It's still just gunpla. The instructions are fantastic. Everything went together just fine.

It's very nicely articulated. Very poseable. Maybe a little too articulated? It's got the articulated hands, which I don't love. I'll probably wind up buying some fixed hands to replace them eventually. But it still feels very solid. Much less fragile than the RG.

And it looks fantastic up on my shelf.

[starlightshadowsworld]

Danganronpa 3 Hope arc Episode 1

Thonks.

I have no idea how we're gonna just fix everything in this episode.

But I'm looking forward to seeing it.

There's an ultimate assault team? Sure why not.

... Hajime?!

And he still has Chiaki's clip.

I'm glad Hajime learned with great power comes great responsibility.

And ayy his eyes being one his and one Izuru's, good choice. He figured it out and embraced both parts of himself.

Good for him.

Phew Asahina's okay.

Idk if giving Makoto an armed escorts is a good idea because brainwashing.

But also, Byakuya's face when a group someone pointed their guns at Makoto is probably a lot more haunting than a hope video ever could be.

You don't mess with his friends, he'll kill you.

Also horribly outmatched.

... Nevermind a rock hit another rock, hitting a giant one which squished all these guys.

Talk about lucky.

And it was Nagito, nice.

Speaking of lucky.

Okay so the 77th class saved Byakuya and Hiro when the original building fell.

Aw yay I love this, everyone's back.

YASSS imposter! And he's dressed as Munakata.

Love it.

"How dare you mock me Remnant, what is the meaning of this?"

"Overdue atonement."

Yess.

Peko kicking ass with a bamboo sword.

Gundam! My boy! Yess. The hamsters are back.

Soda made mini robot nekomaru's, that's cool.

Woah Akane catching knives in her mouth wow.

Awh even Hiyoko is being nicer to Mikan.

Ibuki putting on a great performance, and Mahiru helping too.

It's cool seeing everyone fight to help Makoto.

"Step aside" ohhh even Hajime in on it with his now glowing eyes.

He just waltzes in, definitely retained Izuru's flair for dramatic entrances.

I love Hajime just breaking this argument down, cool motive Ryota you're still brainwashing people.

And the whole class pulling up.

It is sweet tho because if anyone knows regrets it's Hajime, it's the entire class.

His class mind you.

Imposter back in the Ryota get up, because out all of them they had a bond.

This is genuinely sweet with them wanting him to join them.

And Nagito has a prosphetic arm, a lot better than the erm... Yeah.

Soda just like yeah you can join look at Hajime he's from the reserve course, that made me laugh.

And he stopped the video timer.

Aww Ryota hugging imposter and just letting it all out.

Makoto just leaving them to have privacy.

The nod between Hajime and Makoto, no words needing to be shared that's sweet.

Also damn Hajime is tall.

Nagito meeting Makoto is everything I expected to be and I love it. Nekomaru and Akane just carrying him away is the best.

Didn't know I needed that but yup.

Oh boy what's the video.

This is... Creepy.

But I guess they made themselves the scapegoat for the future foundation.

Makoto hun I get you but you did help this happen, a lot.

Imposter immediately chastsing Ryota for not eating enough. And everyone having a meal on a boat.

"The burden of being the hero falls on you Makoto Naegi"

Wasn't it always.

Man can't catch a break.

But that's nice from Munakata.

And a good hope speech from Makoto.

Wait..... Wait... No... The antadote from the poison....

And they're rebuilding... Hope peak.

Kyoko's back... Sure okay. I kinda wish they kept her dead but it's not like I didn't expect them to possibly bring her back but still that was crazy.

Talk about lucky.

I don't mind tbh.

What I don't like is that Makoto becomes the principal.

Talk about clickbait "The end of hopes peak academy" apparently not.

But I already knew about that.

And that, is the end.

[wordsandrobots]

IBO reference notes on … the Gundams (part 1)

[Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Addendum 1]

Or: a spotter’s guide to the Calamity War.

[Note: I tried to post this twice today before figuring out that one of the images was causing it to be consigned to Tumblr oblivion. Apparently a shot of Lt. Crank's gloved hand was too racy for this site. Yeah.]

I said at the time that the fanfic Of Obsessions and Erotemes was written as an alternative to writing an essay expanding on my thoughts regarding the Gundams in Iron-Blooded Orphans. This is probably not strictly accurate, however, and I've been struck by the urge to take a figurative walk through the canonical examples out of the 72 Gundam frame type mobile suits.

I want to focus on the Gundams as they started out during the Calamity War, as far as that is possible, and what this says about the nature of the conflict. I will probably follow up at some point with notes on the mobile armours too, since they are the flip-side of this narrative. As I’ve had cause to mention before, I’m generally content with not knowing too much about the historical event that serves as the basis for IBO’s world-building. I think that adds rather than subtracts from the story. Still, it is fun to play with what we get and piece together an impression of what happened three hundred years prior to the series’ beginning.

For the purposes of not writing a post ten thousand words long, I’ve split the Gundams into three groups based on numerical position in the master list, which is of course taken from the Ars Goetia. Here, I will be drawing on Crowley’s edition.

All images shown here are either borrowed from the Gundam Wiki or are my own screenshots.

As with all my posts like this, spoilers are present for everything.

The Gundam frame

Let’s start with what is under the hood, to whit: the Gundam mobile suit frame.

I covered some of this in my post on the aesthetics of the mobile frame concept, but the most important detail about the Gundam type is how human-like its proportions are, in both limb structure and eye placement. Unlike other frames, this is intended from the start to be used with an Alaya-Vijana system, so designing it to more closely approximate the human form makes a great deal of sense.

At the same time, there is something fittingly demonic about the skeleton, down to the claw-like fingers. However it must be noted that this is specifically Barbatos’ frame; the talons on on the feet are not reflected on the others. Indeed, based on the design work for Kimaris and Flauros, the feet are the part that varies the most from machine to machine.

A Gundam’s power – both in the sense of motive force and superior strength – comes from the twin Ahab reactors making up its torso. It’s the only mobile weapon in Iron-Blooded Orphans confirmed to have multiple reactors, with the implication that this boosts the output beyond simply adding the two together. Indeed, when operating at full capacity against a mobile armour, Barbatos seems barely able to contain its own energies.

Ancillary material states Ahab reactors are made ‘on a plant near a fixed star’, implying a difficult process to begin with (or at least a factory in orbit of the sun). Synchronising the reactors so they run in parallel is adding extra complexity on top of that, which is one of the reasons Gundam construction is a lost art. These things are the peak of mobile suit design and have never been equalled since they quite literally saved the world.

A Gundam, then, is not merely another weapon. It is the maximisation of human capacity, allowing a pilot to exceed their bodily limitations to destroy an inhuman enemy. We don’t know for sure the Calamity War pilots ended up in the same sorry state as Mikazuki (though the taleof Agnika Kaieru’s spirit residing inside Bael carries some interesting implications). But we do know the Alaya-Vijnana places extraordinary pressure on human physiology by its very nature, and the Gundams themselves come with competing limiters as a result. One that disengages in proximity to a mobile armour, allowing the full force of the reactors to be unleashed; another that switches on at that point, to stop this burst of power immediately overwhelming the operator. Only by accepting the danger can the pilot proceed with their attack.

It’s a duality of ultimate strength and ultimate risk that makes the Gundam frames seem like suitably desperate creations. They are the demons that prevented total apocalypse, while consuming their pilots body and soul.

ASW-G-01 Bael

The first king of the Hell, and therefore presumably the first Gundam to have been constructed. From latter machines, there is the suggestion that deployment order did not match the numerical codes, so it isn’t entirely clear if we can solidly say they are numbered in the order they were built. But it seems reasonable to assume that this represents the start of Gundam operational history.

If we can take Bael to exist in the present exactly as it did in the War, it is a relatively simple affair, sporting nothing more flashy than a pair of wing-like boosters (I say wing-like purely because they are not functionally wings; they’re more an elaborate jet-pack). From a design point of view, Bael otherwise matches exactly to the template set by the series’ hero machine, Barbatos: the armour and thruster placement is identical and we may take this to be the default.

The combat philosophy behind this machine appears to be the same too: strike fast and strike sharp. It follows that Agnika Kaieru was the kind to lead from the front. Indeed, kit manual text makes it clear he was self-sufficient in battle, taking down mobile armours solely with his twin swords. Given McGillis holds his own against an entire fleet for a while, this doesn’t feel like a stretch and it certainly explains why the man became such a legend.

The symbol on Bael’s left shoulder is the original Gjallarhorn logo, which more directly presents the source of the organisation’s name: the horn that sounds Ragnarök. This would later be elaborated into the flag used in the present while remaining as a some sort of badge/pin or medal on officers’ uniforms. I find that fitting, that something simple would be built up over time into a grander image, disguising the root truth. In many ways, that sums up Bael’s place in history.

From the Ars Goetia:

The first Principal Spirit is a King ruling in the East, called Bael. He maketh thee to go Invisible. He ruleth over 66 Legions of Infernal Spirits. He appeareth in divers shapes, sometimes like a Cat, sometimes like a Toad, and sometimes like a Man, and sometimes all these forms at once. He speaketh hoarsely. This is his character which is used to be worn as a Lamen before him who calleth him forth, or else he will not do thee homage.

Notably, the sigil used for Gundam Bael’s interface does not simply replicate the 'canonical’ seal from the Ars Goetia but rather reinterprets it.

Clearly OG Gjallarhorn had graphic designers on staff. Also, Bael’s main console screen is of a uniquely narrow design, in a rather elaborate housing. It would seem the cockpits were refined for later models, simplifying things towards a standard pattern seen in Kimaris and Gusion that would itself go on to become the standard for Gjallarhorn 'suits.

ASW-G-04 Gamigin

Pretty much all we know about Gamigin is that it exists, it was originally piloted by Kalf Falk and it made it out of the Calamity War in one piece. Oh and someone in the armoury department was having a laugh the day they issued this Gundam its weapons.

Seriously though, if Bael is the default, this is a heavy-duty model. Gamigin looks a hell of a lot less manoeuvrable, even accounting for the extra thrusters built into its skirt, and its standard-sized arms appear positively weedy compared to the heft of the body and legs. Clearly though, that was a trade-off deemed acceptable for the sake of destructive capacity.

The giant Gatling gun speaks for itself, but the revolver axe is the more interesting item here. As silly as it looks, it’s represents the (presumed) earliest incorporation of Dàinsleif weaponry into a Gundam frame mobile suit.

'Dàinsleif’ is a term used to refer to anything that launches javelin-like projectiles at high speed with the intent of puncturing nano-laminate armour. It’s unclear if the present ban on their use extends to smaller-scale versions like this, which is a point-blank deployment of the technology.

The blunt side of that axe is designed to strike an enemy and fire a spike straight through it. Crude but effective. Or so we can assume given this machine was piloted by one of the first Seven Stars and therefore must have destroyed a great many mobile armours.

From the Ars Goetia (Samigina/Gamigin):

The Fourth Spirit is Samigina, a Great Marquis. He appeareth in the form of a little Horse or Ass, and then into Human shape doth he change himself at the Request of the Master. He speaketh with a hoarse voice. He ruleth over 30 Legions of Inferiors. He teaches all Liberal Sciences, and giveth account of Dead Souls that died in sin. And his Seal is this, which is to be worn before the Magician when he is Invocator, etc.

This is one of several demons with multiple names listed in the Ars Goetia. There doesn’t appear to be any pattern to which was picked as the ID for the corresponding Gundam.

ASW-G-08 Barbatos

Teiwaz are stated to have restored Barbatos to its original state so we can assume the 4th form represents the version that fought in the Calamity War. Given this, it likely used a katana in battle, as the sword Teiwaz provides bears the same logo as the 'suit and we know from their work on Flauros that Gundams store information about their own weaponry (see also Mikazuki’s sudden competence with it when he connects deeper to Barbatos).

Intriguingly, with the retroactive introduction of predecessor designs, it appears Barbatos takes cues from both Bael and Gamigin, which ties these three low-numbered models together nicely. It is also relatively unspecialised in comparison, lacking the features that mark out the previous two. When found, it had a small buckler shield built into a gauntlet on its left forearm, similar to those the 5th form in the series would use. However, there’s no indication if this was used as a mount for mortars like the later version, leaving us with a machine that appears to have been a simple melee combatant.

The absence of gimmicks showcases just how powerful Gundams are in comparison to other mobile suits, at a baseline. In any given fight during Season 1, Barbatos is faster, stronger, and more adaptable than its opposition, and while we see it built up with add-ons over the course of the series, those often seem to get in the way or provide only passing advantages.

Since my focus is on the Calamity War, I’m not going to go into any detail regarding the Lupus and Lupus Rex forms. But I will posit the idea Barbatos’ original pilot was of a different temperament to Mikazuki. If it is indeed their 'ghost’ who comes to his aid in Edmonton – some trace left behind in the system that allows him to understand the katana in the nick of time – they seem to have been a master of that weapon, favouring lethal precision, in stark contrast to Mikazuki’s gradual transformation into an animalistic, living weapon.

(The mace that Mikazuki leads with seems to have been something Maruba bought for possible use if he could ever get Barbatos running, rather than a relic of it previous operations.)

From the Ars Goetia:

The Eighth Spirit is Barbatos. He is a Great Duke, and appeareth when the Sun is in Sagittary, with four noble Kings and their companies of great troops. He giveth understanding of the singing of Birds, and of the Voices of other creatures, such as the barking of Dogs. He breaketh the Hidden Treasures open that have been laid by the Enchantments of Magicians. He is of the Order of Virtues, of which some part he retaineth still; and he knoweth all things Past, and to Come, and conciliateth Friends and those that be in Power. He ruleth over 30 Legions of Spirits. His Seal of Obedience is this, the which wear before thee as aforesaid.

Again, we see a redesign of the seal for Gundam Barbatos’ start-up sigil.

I like the choice to make the lines more dynamic.

ASW-G-11 Gusion

We don’t know if this is what Gusion started out looking like. Gusion was found in a debris zone and passed through various hands before it reached the Brewers, and we know the Brewers’ Man Rodis are custom jobs, more heavily armoured than standard Rodi frame models. On balance, this is probably something they cooked up to fit their requirements.

But gives us an idea of the limits of a Gundam frame’s flexibility. The arms and legs have been stretched outwards from the main body to accommodate the armour load-out. You can see a glimpse of the piston that operates the hip joint under the skirt in the image above, providing a sense of where the legs have been moved. Quite how this works is unclear since we only see the head exposed when the Turbines start deconstructing this form. The fact it does work emphasises just how far the Gundams can be reconfigured. The Turbines even go so far as installing extra arms into the Rebake version given to Akihiro, seemingly with no issues at all.

Gusion also provides an example of the fate suffered by quite a number of the Gundam frames: that of being lost and forgotten after battles during the Calamity War. The figure provided for how many frames are known to have survived is 26, but it’s unclear where that sits in the timeline of IBO canon, throughout which several Gundams are uncovered from previously hidden resting places. Certainly it appears only a minority of such 'suits remain in Gjallarhorn’s custody. While some have most likely been destroyed outright, many may still be drifting among debris fields or buried at the sites of battles from three hundred years ago.

It’s a neat conceit, leaving fertile ground for fanfiction or spin-offs to play on, and underscores that these machines belong to a bygone era most have forgotten about.

From the Ars Goetia:

The Eleventh Spirit in order is a great and strong Duke, called Gusion. He appeareth like a Xenopilus. He telleth all things, Past, Present and to Come, and showeth the meaning and resolution of all questions thou mayest ask. He conciliateth and reconcileth friendships, and giveth Honour and Dignity unto any. He ruleth over 40 Legions of Spirits. His Seal is this, the which wear as aforesaid.

The connection between the machine or pilot and the Ars Goetia descriptions is somewhat variable throughout this list. In some instances there’s nothing obvious at all. However, I love that Gusion bestows honour and dignity because of how beautifully it ties into Akihiro’s arc. This said … I don’t actually know what a 'Xenopilus’ is. My first thought was 'Xenopus’ and a frog motif certainly would explain Gundam Gusion’s appearance. But I don’t think that’s right? Answers on a postcard, please.

That’s where we’ll leave things for today. I will probably post the next instalment sometime tomorrow.

Other reference posts include:

IBO reference notes on … Gjallarhorn (Part 1)

IBO reference notes on … Gjallarhorn (Part 2)

IBO reference notes on … Gjallarhorn (corrigendum) [mainly covering my inability to recognise mythical wolves]

IBO reference notes on … three key Yamagi scenes

IBO reference notes on … three key Shino scenes

IBO reference notes on … three key Eugene scenes

IBO reference notes on … three key Ride scenes

IBO reference notes on … the tone of the setting

IBO reference notes on … character parallels and counterpoints

IBO reference notes on … a perfect villain

IBO reference notes on … Iron-Blooded Orphans: Gekko

IBO reference notes on … an act of unspeakable cruelty

IBO reference notes on … original(ish) characters [this one is mainly fanfic]

IBO reference notes on … Kudelia’s decisions

IBO reference notes on … assorted head-canons

IBO reference notes on … actual, proper original characters [explicit fanfic – as in, actually fanfic. None of them have turned up in the smut yet]

IBO reference notes on … the aesthetics of the mobile frame

IBO reference notes on … mobile suit designations