#and other people vary in terms of what they view as a dealbreaker too! and that's fine!

[fangirlinglikeabus]

hello, here is part three of ‘i decided to read every dr who novelisation and now i’m making it other people’s problem’

galaxy 4 by william emms see, i like the tv version but even then i kinda had an inkling that this dude just Does Not Like women, and unfortunately the book only confirmed that! not just through the weird obsession with the drahvins’ beauty and the way the characters think about them, but i’m pretty sure there’s some added dialogue about it too. rip steven, whose character is assassinated once again by an author arbitrarily deciding he’s going to be a misogynist. also, bizarrely, this is the second novelisation where he’s been described as blond (or ‘fair’, this time). like, what? absolutely don’t recommend this one lol, which is a shame because i do actually like the whole idea of having a sympathetic alien race which looks really horrifying from a human point of view, and everything around that. uh...maybe if you’re super into reading the few references to regeneration that william emms put in?

the myth makers by donald cotton not quite as Out There as the romans which i thought was a shame but the myth makers is a fave of mine so even though there are a few points that i didn’t like (cassandra’s compared to a man in drag, pederasty is referenced in the context of achilles/patroclus, there’s a reference to rape which might seem blasé, there’s a conversation where the trojans are sarcastically called reactionaries and the greeks progressives which left me a bit ???is this an attack on progressive politics??) i still had a lot of fun. it’s told from the point of view of homer, taking some of the role of cyclops in the original, and as such we get his sarcastic commentary and slightly rejigged elements of the plot to explain how and where he’s getting his information. he even gets a bit involved at points, although he is by and large a commentator. this also leads to an epilogue that i really liked, personally. one random comment: it’s a bit bizarre that the dr’s trying to get vicki and steven to the 60s - maybe there was a bit of miscommunication there from production team to writer on where they’re from? anyway despite some reservations i do think this one’s worth reading, if only for the most...original description of the tardis materialising that i’ve come across yet. oh, and the terrible chapter puns. 

mission to the unknown by john peel two parter baby! despite its flaws, there’s something in me that finds an obnoxiously long dr who story fundamentally appealing, so i am a Fan of the daleks’ master plan. and for the most part this is a solid novelisation! however, john peel has decided to get Weird about women in it, which manifests in an uncomfortable number of comments on their attractiveness and the decision to make 1) katarina’s dress skimpier 2) sara’s uniform a form-fitting catsuit, so there were lines in this that made me cringe in on myself and hindered my enjoyment more than i’d’ve liked. plus there’s a line where mavic chen’s like ‘he had never felt the attraction of women himself’ so ig we’re getting queercoding added to ‘cruel compassionless and megalomaniacal asian man out to destroy  the planet which is otherwise exclusively represented by white people’ in terms of Unfortunate Tropes he embodies. other than that, we get a recap of the escape from troy, a few things that are slightly expanded on like bret’s confrontation with sara, her argument with steven ‘he was my brother’ scene in a cave instead of walking, and For Some Goddamn And Slightly Disturbing Reason, the implication that at least FOUR separate characters have been/are about to be eaten by native wildlife. 

the mutation of time by john peel this had less creepy stuff with women (although that did pop up occasionally) so it’s already better in my book. sara’s explicitly been travelling in the tardis for a few months and i liked that the story kept her thoughts of bret a bit more central than on tv! steven has a crush on sara which i’m uh. indifferent to and basically goes nowhere except for being mentioned in like 2 scenes. there are a lot of little things there, like a few references to earlier stories, a change in the egypt stuff so that one of the daleks gets killed, naming the police officers after z cars actors. dr who no longer wishes the audience merry christmas and steven doesn’t list the names of the dead at the end but we do get 2 extra scenes, one on skaro with the dalek prime and one where chen’s collaborator gets arrested. a few continuity points: the reason the tardis keeps going to earth is that the doctor spent so long trying to get ian and barbara there that it got stuck in a pattern; the doctor claims he’s over 700 but this directly contradicts the second doctor in tomb of the cybermen so i guess we’ve got more evidence of dr who lying about their age for the records. 

the massacre by john lucarotti oh this one is interesting. i know there was behind the scenes stuff in the 60s that led to this one being rewritten - did not realise that with the changes undone we’re given an entirely new plot thread! and it’s one that explains the burning question of the television version - where the hell was the doctor for all that time? he gets caught up with the huguenot apothecaries as they flee to the catacombs, and ends up being roped in to impersonate the abbot in order to gather information, all while steven is mostly kept in the dark. also, the tardis gets burned at the stake now. i think all that added stuff definitely makes this one worth reading, although honestly i don’t like the ending so much as the one on tv - the intensity there works better for the subject matter, imo, whereas here it’s bizarrely upbeat for a story about a religious massacre where several characters we meet are confirmed dead. the doctor does definitely intervene to save anne though, so that’s nice. oh, and the time lords get an appearance in both the prologue and the epilogue, in case you wanted to see those guys.

the ark by paul erickson ngl was not a fan of this one. it tries a bit to emphasise the monoids being mistreated and the dr criticising it but really this highlights a problem with the original: an ‘everyone was wrong’ moral doesn’t work when one side is ignorantly patronising and the other wants to commit genocide. like, the guardians are wrong, yeah, but the monoids are too over-the-top villainous for it to ever feel balanced. there’s a lot of expansion on the world (both on and off ship) in the first half that’s mildly interesting (even if the statements about genetic engineering are a bit disturbing - you bred aggression out of predators?), including a trek to several different ‘zones’, but after that all the stuff added in the second half just drags the plot (and also has this weird bit where the refusians adopt earth names? i guess aliens are just rushing to assimilate with the earth culture that’s going to colonise their planet). plus there’s way more criticism of the way dodo speaks, which i don’t like. this does technically mean that dodo never gets an introduction in the target books though, because her entrance was cut out of the last one and it’s not here either - instead there’s at least one line that gives the impression she’s been around a while.

the celestial toymaker by gerry davis and alison bingeman  this is written by two whole people and it’s still one of the most unremarkable novelisations i’ve read since an unearthly child. on the one hand, you’ve got a book that seems largely to have been churned out at an industrial speed (although i do like the description of the toymaker’s study as merging with space, and it gives us some nuggets of information like dodo being a ballet fan and steven reading military history books). on the other hand, at least they don’t include the racial slur this time? there’s this one line about soldiers liking the fair sex though, and i’m like...she’s sixteen. i don’t particularly recommend this one, but i do feel compelled to tell you all that one of the few significant and easily marked on changes to the original is that the dance floor now compels dodo and steven to dance to several different styles of music, including tango, foxtrot, and, uh, disco. 

the gunfighters by donald cotton it’s a deep tragedy in my life that they didn’t work out a way to keep the ballad of the last chance saloon, but after the last book i was glad that this one at least had a distinctive prose style to it - although the narrator’s slightly less remarkable, since he’s just someone writing up an account of what happened after interviewing the dying doc holliday. like cotton’s other works he plays a bit fast and loose with what happens on screen (expanded/altered dialogue, there’s a few scenes added to or curtailed, some stuff summarised, extra background) - and there’s like, sex jokes in this one?? they’re not particularly extreme at all but given that kate’s also allowed to say the word bastard as an insult i do suspect the bbc had stopped caring about overseeing these children’s books. there’s a few uncomfortable references to people thinking dodo might be in relationships with grown men (it’s 1881, i guess, so that might explain it cos they’re all made by 19th century characters but i don’t think it needed to be there in this light-hearted dr who book) which i didn’t like. wyatt is super religious now, also? highlights include johnny ringo, classicist; the phrase ‘steven, who had not hitherto realised he had a jib to cut’; dodo deciding that love doesn’t seem all that great and she’s just fine without it, thank you, which made my aro heart happy. not my fave of cotton’s novelisations and there’s definitely bits that made me go Um, but i don’t think you’ll be wasting time with it either!

the savages by ian stuart black my notes are so lacklustre for this because basically nothing of note gets changed. i like black’s prose when he writes it, but this is another one with large swathes of dialogue and not much flourish to them. not even things that the original could do with, like a more focused justification of steven’s stay, are there. steven says ‘not even dodo could be that silly’ instead of ‘stupid’, which is good because he already spends a fair bit of time delegitimising her viewpoint in this without attacking her intelligence so directly. i think having the narrator refer to the oppressed underclass as savages kinda undermines the moral - sure, they’re called savages by the people who want to view them as inferior to justify the way they treat them, but why does the neutral voice have to when we know what the implications of the word are? mainly i just wish black had written more, because there are some genuinely nice moments when he’s not just using what was there in the original.

the war machines by ian stuart black it was fun reading this back to back with the savages because it definitely doesn’t have the same problem: this feels like an actual proper novel with thought put into it, rather than a script with some bits added. i really liked the fight scene, it actually makes an effort to substantiate dodo’s departure (although she still doesn’t get to say goodbye, it mentions the doctor suspecting she’s wanted to go home pretty much since steven left), and ben no longer accuses polly of leading on a man who was harassing her - a minor victory, i guess, but there are definitely novelisations that haven’t cut dodgy parts of the original out even when they were written years later, so i’ll take what i can get. ian gets referenced too, which is nice, although given the progress he’s made in his career and references to things he did ‘at the beginning of the decade’ and the doctor’s belief he’ll have trained today’s scientists, it gives the bizarre impression that black’s backdated ian and barbara’s travels slightly. aside from this weird line near the beginning that implies ‘womankind’ value the ‘primitive safe space’ more than ‘mankind’ (???) i would really recommend this one. 

[brittanyyoungblog]

How Virginity Became a Stigmatized Status in the U.S.

It wasn’t that long ago that virginity was a highly coveted trait in a romantic partner. Sexual inexperience was valued, whereas being sexually experienced was often considered a dealbreaker, especially for marriage. How times have changed!

Research suggests that virginity has lost its coveted status in many Western cultures (note that views on virginity vary cross-culturally and that virginity is still considered a prized status in many parts of the world). 

In a recent study of 5,000 heterosexual adults in the United States, both men and women reported that they would be unlikely to enter a relationship with someone who is a virgin—and, in fact, men (compared to women) said they would be even less willing to date a virgin [1].

Also, people who were virgins themselves said they would be less willing to date a virgin than someone who is sexually experienced. In other words, even virgins said they didn’t want to date other virgins. 

In a second study of over 500 heterosexual adults, those who had not yet had sex felt the most stigmatized about their sexual history, whereas having more partners was not linked to feeling more stigma (which is an interesting finding in and of itself, considering how much we hear about the concept of “slut shaming.” This isn’t to say that slut-shaming doesn’t exist, of course—more on that below. It’s just that, at least in this study, being inexperienced was linked to feeling more stigma than being experienced). 

So why has there been such a major shift in attitudes toward virginity? In part, it’s due to the fact that sex outside of marriage is now considered normative. The vast majority of people today do it, and few people are sexually inexperienced by the time they get married.

Plus, people are waiting longer than ever to get married (and many are choosing not to marry at all), so it’s no longer considered feasible to wait until marriage to have sex. This is especially true when you consider that the average age of first marriage in the U.S. is now approaching 30. This probably helps to explain public opinion polls showing that the vast majority of American adults (about three-quarters) now say that sex outside of marriage is morally acceptable. 

What people today want in a marriage partner has also changed to some degree. Our expectations are higher than ever. People don’t just want someone who will be their best friend, but also the best sex partner of their entire life. As a result, having a partner with at least some experience tends to be seen as desirable.  

The results of this research are consistent with other studies that have come out recently. For example, in a study where people were asked to rate their willingness to start a relationship with partners of varying levels of sexual experience, participants rated those with 0 partners and those with 8+ partners as less desirable than those a partner count in between. 

In other words, most people say they want a partner who is experienced—but not “too experienced” (remember what I said earlier about “slut shaming?”). There seems to be a Goldilocks phenomenon at play here—people want someone with just the right level of sexual experience, not too little or too much. 

With all of that said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with being sexually experienced or inexperienced—and being experienced doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re more sexually skilled. Having had sex and being good at sex are different things. Also, keep in mind that being “sex positive” means not judging people with different sexual attitudes, behaviors, or values.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that the term “virginity” itself is falling out of favor for many reasons, including because it implies that something is “lost” when someone has sex, or that having sex somehow makes you less “pure.” For this reason, the term “sexual debut” is increasingly being used instead, especially in scientific writing on the subject. I still use the term virginity in non-academic writing like this sometimes only because “sexual debut” isn’t as widely recognized and understood yet—but I don’t subscribe to the idea that having sex for the first time necessarily mean you lose something or are “changed.” So what do you think? How important is sexual experience in a relationship partner to you? And have you ever felt judged before due to your level of sexual experience?

Want to learn more about Sex and Psychology? Click here for more from the blog or here to listen to the podcast. Follow Sex and Psychology on Facebook, Twitter (@JustinLehmiller), or Reddit to receive updates. You can also follow Dr. Lehmiller on YouTube and Instagram.

[1] Gesselman, A. N., Webster, G. D., & Garcia, J. R. (2017). Has virginity lost its virtue? Relationship stigma associated with being a sexually inexperienced adult. The Journal of Sex Research, 54(2), 202-213.

Image Source: 123RF

You Might Also Like:

Sex Question Friday: How Many Sexual Partners Have Most People Had?

Why Abstinence and "Purity" Pledges Don't Work

Is Your First Sexual Experience The Most Important?

from Meet Positives SMFeed 8 https://ift.tt/3ugYexk via IFTTT

[ellenlucasonlinedatingblog]

How Virginity Became a Stigmatized Status in the U.S.

It wasn’t that long ago that virginity was a highly coveted trait in a romantic partner. Sexual inexperience was valued, whereas being sexually experienced was often considered a dealbreaker, especially for marriage. How times have changed!

Research suggests that virginity has lost its coveted status in many Western cultures (note that views on virginity vary cross-culturally and that virginity is still considered a prized status in many parts of the world). 

In a recent study of 5,000 heterosexual adults in the United States, both men and women reported that they would be unlikely to enter a relationship with someone who is a virgin—and, in fact, men (compared to women) said they would be even less willing to date a virgin [1].

Also, people who were virgins themselves said they would be less willing to date a virgin than someone who is sexually experienced. In other words, even virgins said they didn’t want to date other virgins. 

In a second study of over 500 heterosexual adults, those who had not yet had sex felt the most stigmatized about their sexual history, whereas having more partners was not linked to feeling more stigma (which is an interesting finding in and of itself, considering how much we hear about the concept of “slut shaming.” This isn’t to say that slut-shaming doesn’t exist, of course—more on that below. It’s just that, at least in this study, being inexperienced was linked to feeling more stigma than being experienced). 

So why has there been such a major shift in attitudes toward virginity? In part, it’s due to the fact that sex outside of marriage is now considered normative. The vast majority of people today do it, and few people are sexually inexperienced by the time they get married.

Plus, people are waiting longer than ever to get married (and many are choosing not to marry at all), so it’s no longer considered feasible to wait until marriage to have sex. This is especially true when you consider that the average age of first marriage in the U.S. is now approaching 30. This probably helps to explain public opinion polls showing that the vast majority of American adults (about three-quarters) now say that sex outside of marriage is morally acceptable. 

What people today want in a marriage partner has also changed to some degree. Our expectations are higher than ever. People don’t just want someone who will be their best friend, but also the best sex partner of their entire life. As a result, having a partner with at least some experience tends to be seen as desirable.  

The results of this research are consistent with other studies that have come out recently. For example, in a study where people were asked to rate their willingness to start a relationship with partners of varying levels of sexual experience, participants rated those with 0 partners and those with 8+ partners as less desirable than those a partner count in between. 

In other words, most people say they want a partner who is experienced—but not “too experienced” (remember what I said earlier about “slut shaming?”). There seems to be a Goldilocks phenomenon at play here—people want someone with just the right level of sexual experience, not too little or too much. 

With all of that said, there’s nothing inherently wrong with being sexually experienced or inexperienced—and being experienced doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re more sexually skilled. Having had sex and being good at sex are different things. Also, keep in mind that being “sex positive” means not judging people with different sexual attitudes, behaviors, or values.

Also, it’s worth mentioning that the term “virginity” itself is falling out of favor for many reasons, including because it implies that something is “lost” when someone has sex, or that having sex somehow makes you less “pure.” For this reason, the term “sexual debut” is increasingly being used instead, especially in scientific writing on the subject. I still use the term virginity in non-academic writing like this sometimes only because “sexual debut” isn’t as widely recognized and understood yet—but I don’t subscribe to the idea that having sex for the first time necessarily mean you lose something or are “changed.” So what do you think? How important is sexual experience in a relationship partner to you? And have you ever felt judged before due to your level of sexual experience?

Want to learn more about Sex and Psychology? Click here for more from the blog or here to listen to the podcast. Follow Sex and Psychology on Facebook, Twitter (@JustinLehmiller), or Reddit to receive updates. You can also follow Dr. Lehmiller on YouTube and Instagram.

[1] Gesselman, A. N., Webster, G. D., & Garcia, J. R. (2017). Has virginity lost its virtue? Relationship stigma associated with being a sexually inexperienced adult. The Journal of Sex Research, 54(2), 202-213.

Image Source: 123RF

You Might Also Like:

Sex Question Friday: How Many Sexual Partners Have Most People Had?

Why Abstinence and "Purity" Pledges Don't Work

Is Your First Sexual Experience The Most Important?

from MeetPositives SM Feed 4 https://ift.tt/3ugYexk via IFTTT

[jessgartner]

Leaving Facebook Part III: Goodbye to All That

Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point. 

I'm in the final countdown to deleting Facebook, and not a moment too soon.

TL;DR:

Primary posts will be here

I'll be sending out a monthly Life Olympics newsletter

If you want email, mail, and/or newsletters, let me know where to find you

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.

The Wind-Down

I've backed up my data, I've collected contact info, and I've explored a variety of new platforms with varying degrees of success.

I've reached a tentative consensus on my plan for moving forward. It's a little more complex than I would have liked, but I'm settling into some new habits and I'll continue to iterate and refine over time. Here's where I've landed:

Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about. 

Consuming

I chose: Apple News. I slept on this for a while, for reasons I can't totally remember. I revisited it and spent some time customizing it and decided it's the best newsfeed for me for now.

Pros:

Free

UX is good and it's easy to follow publications/topics

iCloud syncing across devices + desktop app is hard to beat. The next best product I looked at (Thread News) only had a mobile app, which was a dealbreaker for me.

I follow mostly mainstream-is publications and there's a full database of sources that are easy to follow.

I haven't tried News+ yet but I like the option of it - a while ago I had a similar magazine aggregator from Conde Nast that I loved and this seems similar or better.

Cons:

Initially, I didn't like the Top Stories on the home page. I don't really love the CNN/ABC/CBS-type focus on 24-hour headline news and wish this was better curated from my interests and favorite publications. I finally figured out that you can limit the Home Page to publications that you follow, but it's not an obvious setting.

I hate that share/copy link produces an apple.news url instead of the native url; this is obnoxious.

Runner Up: Thread News had a really nice Daily Digest feature that curated from your favorite publications.

I chose: Pocket for random articles that I come across on Twitter, in Slack, or recommended through text messages, I save them to Pocket to read later.

Pros:

Free (with premium paid option)

Syncs across desktop, mobile, iPad app; app UX is nicely optimized across devices

Tagging (good for saving favorites)

"Article view" that clears out web junk for a streamlined reading experience

Chrome extension for easy clipping/adding

Cons:

None yet; it's simple and works the way I want it to

Runner up: Instapaper. It has very similar functionality to Pocket, I just slightly prefer the design of Pocket. If you like a really minimalist reading experience, Instapaper is for you.

Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss.

Creating

This one was a beast. I struggled for weeks to parse out exactly what I wanted on this front and which criteria were most important to me, because it became clear quickly that I wasn't going to get everything I wanted in one place.

I chose: Tumblr I initially wrote this off because the homepage/discovery can be nauseating without the right default settings. A tour of the mobile version convinced me to give this a second look: the mobile app is great and the posting experience is (pardon the cliche) delightful. I decided to give it a deeper dive behind the scenes and found that I was able to customize a lot of what I initially disliked. The auto formatting for photo, quote, link, and chat posts is charming and simple.

Pros:

Customizing themes is simple and there are a lot of choices.

I can use my personal domain

The posting experience is easy and relatively error-free

The tagging! I love my tags and they work so nicely. I was also able to find a theme that features tags so you will always have easy access to the latest photos of Darwin.

Great for multimedia posting

Built-in share buttons

Cons:

Not very good at importing content from other platforms; I manually recreated a few favorite posts, but otherwise pretty much had to start from scratch on content

No built-in analytics, aside from follower counts, which is not something I expect to care about or track. I set up tracking on Google Analytics, but I'll miss the built-in analytics that WordPress had. Since WP bought Tumblr, I'm hoping that they may eventually add these features to Tumblr

I just don't care about the social/discovery components here and I wish I could turn them off

Ads. I wish I could pay to make them go away.

Runner up: micro.blog For the first couple of weeks, I thought this was going to be my choice. I had a solid experience importing and archiving a lot of my content from WordPress, Instagram, and Medium. Unfortunately, once I started trying to use the platform on a daily basis, I ran into a lot of issues and challenges that gave me pause on using and recommending the platform. To be clear, a good number of these issues were either user-error or bespoke preferences due to my personal quirks on how I want to organize and share content on the Internet. Some of this is a result of it being a new-ish platform that still has some blind spots for non-developers; it's not a mainstream product yet and I'm not sure it's trying to be. Based on my personal preferences, I felt Tumblr was slightly better equipped for my use case. I'm still going to keep using micro.blog for a while in tandem with Tumblr to see if my preferences change and/or if the platform adopts some of the feedback I shared with regard to cross-posting and UX.

I chose: Drafts. One big challenge for me in this process was the desire to cross-post some content in multiple places while limiting where I post other content. I didn't want to fill my Twitter feed with cat pictures, but I wanted some little corner of the Internet for Darwin's biggest fans (my mother). Drafts is basically a universal text editor that pushes drafts of text to a variety of services, including micro.blog, Twitter, Day One, Google Drive, Evernote, WordPress, Gmail, and even text messages. It's highly configurable and I'm only just scratching the surface of its power. Creating text drafts here allows me to easily push drafts to a variety of different places with just a few keystrokes. It syncs with iCloud, has really robust tagging and filtering, and has mobile, iPad, and Mac apps. It's very cool.

He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. "New faces," he said finally, "don't tell me about new faces.” 

Engagement

I chose: Twitter I've increasingly found Twitter to be a place where my friends/followers care about what I care about. The messages I care most about sharing are amplified. I can choose to unfollow, mute, or block people who are harassing or distressing me. I can follow people whose expertise I value. It can still be a cesspool at times but Twitter leadership seems to be taking steps to improve the platform - identifying misinformation, a conversation feature that limits replies, etc. For now, it stays.

Coming Soon: Substack I haven't officially started this yet, but I'm going to start a monthly newsletter that (allegedly) goes out the first Sunday of every month. I'm going to use roughly my annual Life Olympics format except there will be fun and exciting recommendations. Teaser: new Life Olympics categories will make their debut in the first installment on July 5! If you want it, make sure you give me your email address and you'll receive the first edition.

It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends.

All quotes by Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Many, many thanks to Jason Becker for his recommendations, patience, and tech support on this project.

[dewbond-blog]

Shallow Dive: Mobile Suit Gundam Seed

There is probably fewer series in the realm of Anime that have as long and varied history as the Gundam Franchise. Starting in the late 1970s, Mobile Suit Gundam has become a cornerstone of Japanese culture and animation, often seen by some as Japan’s version of Star Trek or Star Wars. Regardless it has spawned well over a dozen different series, several OVAs, an armful of video games, and quite possibly a literal mountain of Gunpla model kids.

With so many series, Gundam has had it’s fair share of hits and misses, as almost all franchises do when they have such length. People will argue to the end of time what is the best series, but almost all can agree that only a few have left major marks on both of the franchise, and anime in general. Today we are going to take a look at once such series, one that remains surprisingly controversial among its fans. After the cut, let’s take a look into the 2002 series Mobile Suit Gundam Seed

To understand the Gundam series, it is important to know that only SOME of the series are connected through a single MCU like timeline. To make it easy to understand, Gundam can be divided up into two separate sections.

The first is the Universal Century, which consists of probably 60% of the Gundam anime series, including the original 1970s series and its sequels. While sometimes telling different stories with different casts, they all take place in the same universe and follow the same general rules and timeline.

The second is the Alternative Universe, which consists of every other Gundam anime series that does not take place in the Universal Century. These shows are often (but not always) stand-alone ventures, with no connection to each other. They take place in similar, but a different version of the earth using a different dating system in order to separate themselves from other shows (After Colony, Correct Century, Anno Domini, Cosmic Era, etc.)

Mobile Suit Gundam Seed is an interesting show to look at, mostly because it is probably one of the most beloved, and hated among the fanbase, and there are several reasons for that, some justified, others not. However, my personal view is that Gundam Seed is a well-done series, that helped set the stage for the successful runs of Gundam 00, and Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans.

To understand what Gundam Seed is, we need to take a look at the overall general plot point of the majority of the Gundam universe. Most shows can often be boiled down to a simple equation.

There is an Earth, and there are Space Colonies. The Space Colonies want more freedom, the Earth doesn’t want them to have it. Therefore, teenagers in Giant Robots fight each other.

Almost every single Gundam Series can be boiled down to that premise. Dress it up however you want, 95% of the Gundam Series is pretty much that same story told and retold again.

Gundam Seed, however, is a bit different. While it follows that above premise, it itself is also a modern retelling of the original 1970 Mobile Suit Gundam, albeit with a few overall world and plot changes to set itself apart. Much like how The Force Awakens can be considered a retread of A New Hope with some changes, Gundam Seed is very much a reboot retelling of the first Gundam Series.

Honestly, I really liked that. Having watched both the 1970s series and SEED. I have always found both the original and the Universal Century hard to get invested in. A lot of the overall conflict is implied and philosophical, with the Colonies wanting their freedom because of more grounded, geopolitical reasons that can be hard to get invested in. (Along with a healthy dose of random space telepathy through “Newtypes”) SEED, however, opts to go for a more simple and easy to digest version, with the Colonies being populated by genetically engineers “Coordinators” (think designer babies) and the Earth filled with normal born and bred “Natural” humans. The conflict is portrayed as two variations of the human race fighting to wipe the other out, whether it be out of fear, jealousy, or a Nazi-like feeling of superiority. While the Universal Century is not bad in the longshot, it has always been something harder to sink my teeth into, and SEED wisely does the same thing, but with easier to understand themes and ideas.

Furthermore, SEED has a great cast, with characters like Kira Yamato, Athrun Zala, and Lacus Clyne bringing a layer of depth and understanding to the story. While Kira is a divisive character among the fanbase (though I would argue he only really gets bad in the sequel to SEED), him being stuck between loyalty to his Natural friends and crew, and his true Coordinator People is a good hook to bring you into the story. Additionally SEED lets Kira go through the motions of a young man thrown into a war, having to deal with the reality of killing people, fighting old friends, and then coming to terms with the world and fighting to change it in a satisfying character arc that few other Gundam man have; and fewer have done well. While he’s no Amuro Ray, Kira has enough going on with him to make him an interested and well done main lead.

Animation wise, SEED was the first to opt to be completely animated via the computer. While this leads to come beautiful shots (that look even better in the HD remaster), it also led to a rather surprising amount of recycled animation and shots that is only brought up to 11 in the sequel series. Seriously, you will start noticing the same fighting shots being used over and over again so much that you’ll wonder if any money was spent on his series. While it is not a dealbreaker for me, and future series 00 and Iron correct this with next to no recycled animation, it remains a black mark on the show. However, I can’t blame them too much for it, at least in the case of SEED as it was the first in Gundam to embrace the computer.

Mobile Suit Gundam Seed is a series loved and lauded for introducing a new generation to the world of Gundam. It is also hated by older fans for “dumbing down” the story and themes of the 1970s show. I love Gundam Seed, and it very much was my second welcoming into the franchises (the first of course being Mobile Suit Gundam Wing) I won’t tell you how to think, but I suggest anyone on the fence of jumping into the Gundam world start with this show. You’ll find it easy to understand, chalk full of wonderful action and awesome robots and some catchy music too. I would suggest SEED to anyone looking to see what Gundam is all about. It’s a perfect gateway opening, and there are plenty of even better Gundam series just waiting after if you want to keep the itch going.

Just avoid Mobile Suit Gundam Seed Destiny. There is next to NOTHING redeemable about that pile of crap. 

Next time, we’ll take a look at an anime that is quite simply, joy and innocense distilled into pure perfection. Don’t miss it.