#Kanuka Clancy

[himejoshi-phd]

when women look at each other like this, it means they are in love

[punk-63]

[urotoramannekusus]

[darklordofnightmares]

[in-the-nights]

[yoshimickster]

Okay correct me if I'm wrong here, but did Kumagami appear in the manga BEFORE Kanuka in the OVA? I was so confused why she replaced Kanuka in the TV series, TURNS OUT-the god damn OVA writers wrote a different universe from the get go because they didn't coordinate with the manga writer!

[kasperl-ruprecht]

[lion-sensei]

you can't be saying that patlabor

[melleonis]

rewatched patlabor: the movie (the good one) and boy that sure is a mamoru oshii film! a criticism i often have of some of the giants of cyberpunk (and i am here thinking specifically of oshii and gibson) is that their characters are really quite uninteresting, being at most a flash of cool attached to a stock motivation in which the story is uninterested, and the majority of them don’t even get the flash.

but then like. sci-fi is - or used to be - a genre that can do without characters, isn’t it? dune or foundation or 2001: A Space Odyssey. the driving forces here aren’t individuals but organizations and nations and planets and ideologies. and they’re still worth something (even foundation presumably) because my G-d they can be fecund with new ideas and ways of thinking about the world, like. does anyone really have Duncan Idaho as a blorbo? but anyone who’s read Dune has the idea of the Bene Gesserit, of millennia-long culture-seeding mission projects, of power accrued purely through influence and vision, and that is not an idea easily come by.

so is this, then, a difference in how we consume media in general now? the - i’m so sorry - the blorbofication of media? where we expect character psychology and interiority to matter in everything we read and watch? could someone make Columbo today without giving into the temptation to explain him? give him a backstory and relationships? (judging from modern adaptations of Sherlock Holmes, likely not!) all of our cartoon characters have trauma now - is this better? i’m genuinely asking here. i don’t know.

we need our characters cognitively sticky. we need to have something to sink our teeth into. we need to be able to go feral about them. and that’s not new, right, like, people engaged with the King Arthur myths this way, yeah? homer is character-heavy in his own ancient way, the bible even frequently has these fascinating character moments, but it does seem like we require it almost universally of our media these days, and we’ll manufacture character depth ourselves if, say, Marvel doesn’t give it to us (which they won’t. i don’t want to get into a tangent on the Winter Soldier fandom here but what a fascinating phenomenon that is, hi waffle).

the above is a half-baked par-thesis i would expect to crumble in one direction or another under reasonably-expert examination, but i am unfortunately addicted to escalating to sweeping pronouncements by the time i hit the third paragraph in a post that was initially just “oh hey the patlabor movie is still good.” sorry, i’m gifted at bullshit and would have made for a meteoric hack academic if i’d stayed in school. what i do actually want to say and stand behind is this: there are still characters in dune. there are still characters in patlabor or ghost in the shell. they aren’t the people. oshii spends so much slow time looking at the construction and refuse of industrialized cities. the detritus neighborhoods, the places left behind or consumed in the need for constant ever-expanding growth. the overreach of man, and what it costs him. i’m rotating that in my head.

[floatingcatacombs]

Patlabor is On Lock

12 Days of Aniblogging 2023, Day 3

While Gundam is the most recognizable mecha anime I got into this year, most of my time was really spent working my way through the Patlabor franchise, and it’s quickly become one of my favorites. I’ve always loved the quiet moments in mecha shows, which makes sense considering I started with Macross and live for the bridge bunny gossip and off-duty downtown hangouts. Patlabor is built with this downtime at its core, operating with more of a slice of life mentality than anything else.

A lovable cast is crucial for making this work. Thankfully, Noa Izumi is a wonderful and unique protagonist, a scrappy soft butch who’s in it for the eroticism of the machine. The first Patlabor opening is a love letter from Noa to her mecha, and I get it! The AV-98 Ingram is an iconic design, with its asymmetric bunny ear antennae and shoulder lights and comically oversized revolver that requires the right hand to pop out in order to draw, exposing the arm wiring in the process. This is a show clearly written by first-generation mecha otaku, and plenty of time is dedicated to showing how the Labors have to be transported and recharged, how the movement software depends on reinforcement learning, showing off corporate model revisions, and of course repairs in the hangar.

Going back to the human characters, Noa’s work partner Asuma is clearly the more passive one within their dynamic, and it’s sweet to see that played out sincerely. And then there’s Kanuka Clancy, the stern weirdo badass from New York who’s constantly swearing and dropping one-liners in English. She’s the obvious breakthrough character of the show, and also the perfect opposites-attract pairing for Noa if you’re the kind of person whose yuri meter went off the charts during their drinking contest episode. Most of Patlabor’s cast seem fairly one-note at first, and one of the great tricks of the show is giving them just a little bit more depth than you would expect. Pretty much everyone, even the most jokey characters, eventually get a standalone episode or two that further sketches them out and offers real interiority. Captain Goto is another fan-favorite, and it’s definitely his mixture of laziness and wicked perceptiveness that does it, plus his main character billing in the movies.

SV2 may be a law enforcement unit, but this really isn’t a police procedural at the end of the day. These guys are the bum department out in the sticks who everyone hates, and the upside of that is that SV2 gets stuck with the oddest of jobs instead of cop work. Sometimes that’s dealing with a runaway military prototype, other times it’s arguing with the insurance company. The best kind of episodes are the ones that take almost entirely on base as everyone tries to solve a problem of their own making, like an Ingram falling into the sea or the mechanics getting into a fight with the only restaurant that delivers to them.

A main plot does eventually emerge, with a shadowy company developing a mysterious jet-black Labor piloted by a child who is the girlish boy to Noa Izumi’s boyish girl. The Griffon is sleek and curvy and has superiority in the water and air – it’s a machine designed to defeat Ingrams, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Yoji Shinkawa looked here when designing Metal Gear RAY. Automation is a fundamental ideological enemy of mecha – faceless mass production and artificial intelligence mean an end to the era of personal combat. Even Patlabor, a warless series, dips its toes into this idea in the later episodes, with Noa and the mechanics alike worrying that the neural networks in their new Labor models will make them redundant.

Overall, this show is hilarious and sweet and clearly loved by an older generation of otaku. So why didn’t I hear about it earlier? Partly it’s on me for not hanging out with the right mecha fans online for a while. But if I had to guess, it’s also because Patlabor is one of those works that’s straightforwardly, unobjectionably good in a way where it already says everything there is to be said about it. You can have near-infinite arguments about Zeon ideology or mobile suit powerscaling online, but there’s only so many times you can say “yeah, Noa Izumi, love that girl” precisely because everyone agrees. It can also be hard to pitch things by their vibes in a genre known for adrenaline and intrigue. Patlabor’s vibes, for the record, are immaculate.

I'm probably gonna be chasing the high of cel-era sunsets forever

Mecha’s also a bit looked down upon from the outside. Anything that makes it into the larger conversation has to be understood as “elevated” or a “genre deconstruction”, even if the very first Mobile Suit Gundam is already about Amuro’s trauma and PTSD from being made into a child soldier. This elevation is actually happening to the second Patlabor movie as we speak - it’s becoming increasingly discussed as a major component of Mamoru Oshii’s filmography, divorced from its source series and instead compared to his subsequent Ghost in the Shell movie. Funnily enough, Oshii’s contributions to the Patlabor TV show are actually the more lighthearted gag episodes.

A lot of recent Patlabor retrospectives have drawn attention to the artist’s collective Headgear, established and owned by the series creators so they would be able to retain the rights for the franchise. This structure is fairly unique for the anime industry and probably only makes sense for established creatives, but it does seem to have worked out great for them, providing financial stability and strong creative control over the franchise. This allowed Patlabor to thrive in the relative wasteland of late 80s TV anime, a time when even Gundam had fled to the OVA market.

That being said, it does take Patlabor switching back to OVAs to truly spread its wings. The New Files are a conclusion and continuation of the TV series that are willing to move at their own pace, resulting in some dramatic and surprisingly thoughtful stories. It’s genuinely touching to watch Goto and Nagumo try and fail to communicate their feelings for one another in a very restrained episode as thick with long-stewing emotions as it is empty space. Of course, the very next episode has half the cast get stuck in the sewer labyrinth underneath their base and there’s a bunch of Wizardry references. Oh, Oshii.

The Patlabor movies fully lean into this melancholy and uncertainty, and it’s a welcome evolution for the series. The first movie still ends with an all-out action set piece in a half-built mecha factory that stands in for the Tower of Babel, but the second one stays serious the whole time through, going as far as pivoting to a more realistic artsyle. It’s a challenging film. The politics are all-encompassing but fairly straightforward, as Oshii effectively infodumps a presentation on the postwar history of the JSDF throughout. Instead, what the makes the movie so difficult is its willingness to face the end of an era – the Cold War is over, the bubble economy has popped, and the former members of SV2 have all gone their separate ways. The conditions that have created Patlabor, both internal and external to the show, have dissipated. And the movie makes it clear by having the military stage a raid on SV2’s headquarters, tearing their Labors to shreds with gunfire in a beautifully animated act of desecration.

After watching her be a lovable mecha dweeb for 50 episodes, it hurts a bit to hear Noa Izumi say that she doesn’t want to be that girl obsessed with robots for the rest of her life! These characters are growing in such a way that will remove them from the focus of the narrative, and it’s a movie about letting go just as much as it is about looking towards an uncertain personal and national future. I love Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso, but the fact that Oshii put this out just one year later paints a delicious contrast between the two directors with regards to escapism versus reality with regards to militarism. There's some great interviews from the era where they're just taking potshots at each other about all this.

[multiversal-pig-outing]

extended muse list part 9

Loki odinson - weight - 2,800 lbs

Dragon attendant - feeder - weight - 136 - lbs

Android 17 - feeder - weight - 690 - lbs - all located in the ass.

(body ref for 17)

Kagami Tsuguri - feeder - weight - 890 lbs - muscle

(body ref for kagami.)

silent magician - feedee - weight 3,500 lbs

Harpy lady - feedee - 1,988 - lbs

Gagaga girl - feeder - 134 - lbs

Yubel - feeder - weight - 145 - lbs - futa - same has ranma

L-motive - feedee - weight - 1,361 - lbs

(l-motive body ref.)

Kanuka clancy - feeder - weight - 134 - lbs

Sabi - feedee - weight - 1,200 - lbs

Chi chi jr - feedee - weight - 6,990 - lbs

(jr body type)

xuanzang sanzang - feedee - weight - 20,990 - lbs

Nuwa - feeder - weight - 999 - tons

[himejoshi-phd]

🥺 the three types of women 🥹

[punk-63]

[urotoramannekusus]

[immloveanime]

Mobile Police Patlabor

[therosecrest]