#anyway the next time some goofy ass white fan is like 'its just shipping its just fandom it isnt that serious!!'

[honeylikewords]

They took a perfectly good start and turned it into the white evil guy is just misunderstood and needs the love of the right woman crap, completely screwing up pretty much everything else. Poe deserved better. Finn deserved better. Rose deserved better. Heck, even Rey deserved better than being shoved together with him. It sucks, and I'm over it. And all the actors didn't deserve a single second of hate because they weren't white.

Yep.

I’ve been very vocal about my feelings on the many failings of the SW sequel trilogy, both as failures politically and failures as just cohesive narratives, but hearing firsthand, straight from John, exactly how much he endured because of not only the story-based racism perpetuated against him but the actual on-set and directorial racism that was also active against him is just...

Like, I want to be shocked. I’m horrified, I’m disgusted, and I’m angry, but what more can I expect from people who tokenize, dismiss, and humiliate Black people as an industry? These people don’t value him as an actor, as a talent, or as even a human person to treat with basic social dignity. I can’t fake surprise when I know that this industry, this country, this world runs on the fuel of delegating Black people to “less-than” status. Christ.

I really don’t know how to get through to people that rooting for R*ylo from the get-go was just such an insidiously white-centric, shitty move. I won’t even deny it with “let people ship what they want” politeness anymore: the narrative was setting up a FinnRey endgame, and people pushing so hard for a white, abusive, Neo-N*zi character to “earn his redemption” by being “loved better” by a white woman, shutting the Black male lead out of the film and out of the relationship he was supposed to build over the course of the coming films, was racist. It is racist.

I don’t care if people like Adam Driver. I like him too-- he’s a great actor and, from all accounts, a nice guy-- but liking him or thinking he’s handsome doesn’t excuse narratively rejecting a Black man in favor of a violent, totalitarian, abusive, white man who was a LITERAL NEO-N*ZI PARALLEL. 

And the creative teams, LucasFilm, Disney, whoever listened to all the petulant white fans demanding to see the white people kiss caved to racism. They fed the fire and look where it got them. 

It’s vile, it’s low, it’s degrading, it’s nothing less than a hollow placation of white fantasies at the expense of genuine progress and of even the most basic structures of storytelling.

We were promised a growing dynamic between a female Jedi and a Black Jedi. We were supposed to see their bond grow and evolve. We were supposed to see their characters develop and strengthen and watch them tear down a fascist empire.

But what we got was pandering to white people, pandering to heteronormative expectations, and racist action taken against the very small handful of Black and brown actors who had finally broken through in a heavily white-dominated fandom space. 

Kelly Marie Tran was bullied off of social media, harangued and harassed, and had her character relegated to brief blips in the following film because the team behind the film caved to the racist mudslinging perpetrated against her.

Oscar Isaac had his character reduced to a heteronormative DRUG DEALER, despite having CHANGED HIS LAST NAME so that he would stop being typecast in drug dealer roles. He has even said that if he knew what was going to happen to Poe, he would have let them kill him off in the first movie like JJ Abrams had originally suggested. 

And John.

What else can I say except that my heart burns and breaks and aches for him and everything he’s been through? What could I say that he hasn’t said?

I’ll drop this quote from his interview: “His primary motivation is to show the frustrations and difficulties of trying to operate within what can feel like a permanently rigged system. He is trying, really, to let you know what it feels like to have a boyhood dream ruptured by the toxic realities of the world.”

He has been so strong in his push back against this system and the people who seek to harass and belittle and dehumanize him and for that I am so grateful and I look up to him with intense admiration, but, God, I wish he didn’t have to. I can’t imagine what this must have been like behind closed doors. What must have been going on for him in private, in his heart and head and soul as he had to just sit there and smile and watch his big break get smeared in front of him, as vitriol and hate and death threats flooded his inbox for no reason other than him having the audacity to be Black.

I love the characters. I love parts of the movies and I’ll rewatch them and cobble together my own canon and enjoy what brings me love and warmth and happiness, and continue to support and promote characters like Finn and Poe and Rose and, hell, even my own version of Rey. Force Awakens is still an objectively great Star Wars film and a comfort of mine and a window into the future we could have had with these amazing characters.

But absolutely fuck every single person who contributed to tearing down the people of color in this series, and fuck every single person who harassed their actors, and fuck every single person that put all their energy into supporting Kylo Ren and his goddamn waste of a ‘redemption arc’ instead of giving a single thought to the Black man who should have been given his due depth.

And go John Boyega; every new project he takes on, I’m gonna be there watching and supporting as best I can. He’s more than damn well earned it.

[bearxclaws-archive-blog]

We know what Anita's relationship is with Sanji, or how she feels towards him at least. What's her relationship with the rest of the crew or how does she feel about them?

🐻; anonymous

Sorry in advance if this gets a little long, but there are quite a few Straw Hats. I’m including Jinbe and Carrot into this as well, whether or not Carrot actually becomes a Straw Hat too. Meaning these will all be her feelings as of the current arc even though I haven’t quite gotten to the rest of those rambling posts yet.

LUFFY ;

She, like most of the crew, respects and adores her captain. 

When they landed on her island and most of them were captures, I can guarantee you that Luffy shrugged it off at first in his usual ‘they’re stronger than they look, so they’ll be fine’ way. But when she sees the anger in his eyes knowing they might not be okay, she quickly comes to admire how protective of his friends he really is. The fact that he got them back and relented when Anita argued with him about who got to take down the Vice Admiral gave her more respect. I realize Luffy might not like that she begged at his feet for her to join, but it was only because she wanted to get stronger with them and save her friends and family that she did.

Anita is a big goof, so Luffy is one of the ones that she gets along with the best, along with Chopper and Usopp. Especially when I consider all the silly headcanons @xstrawhat and I have come up with. They argue over food and who the real alpha bear is, but I feel like Anita is totally and completely loyal to him. He’s her captain, and no one else can take that position. She owes him everything for giving her the chance to be better than she is.

They’re basically brother and sister.

ZORO ;

Zoro is her favorite drinking and work-out buddy. He’s the one that shows her tough love when she needs it. You know the kind; she’ll be moping about something or feeling sorry for herself like she does on occasion, and he’ll sass her out of her. Tell her to pick her sorry ass up and do something about it rather than being a baby. At least he does when he knows it’s appropriate. There are some moments when he knows it isn’t going to help because he isn’t totally heartless. He does care for his crew, and that includes her. So when she’s having those really bad days and being verbally slapped doesn’t work, he’ll sit there with her and share a drink.

He’s also the one that helps her bulk up the most. The strength she gains in her human form does translate to her bear form, so he’s the one she goes to when she wants an intense workout and wants to get beefy like him.

Okay, maybe not exactly like him ‘caus the boy is ripped, but she’s pretty muscular.

Zoro is also a good nap partner, especially when she’s in her bear form. The two nap together often.

NAMI ;

Anita was intimidated by her at first, honestly. She was sexy, smart and damn good with that Clima-tact— still is! But she’s gotten over that and come to highly respect Nami’s intuition and ability to sense the weather. As a bear, she can sense some things and she does have a good sense of direction on her own, but Nami’s skills are far beyond that and totally worth admiring.

Plus, she’s the reason why Anita’s wardrobe is so different in her Straw Hat verse. I know that doesn’t seem like a significant thing, but it is. In her Main Verse, she’s all dark and earthy colors and baggy clothes. Nami likely wouldn’t allow that and help her find things that still fit her style but aren’t so dirty looking. Grunge is still her style more than anything else, but a little blue and white and other nicer colors start to slip in. Anita starts to feel a little more confident in her looks because another pretty woman is showing and telling her that she’s actually kind of pretty and not a dirtball.

She’s also nice to snuggle. Can’t tell me for one second the girls don’t just get into a sleepy cuddle puddle sometimes and end up drooling on each other.

USOPP ;

Because Usopp is the most chill in her opinion, Usopp is probably the closest thing she has to a best friend. She loves the rest of the crew with all of her heart, she really does, but there’s just something about Usopp that makes her want to go to him first if she has a problem.  .  . especially if that problem happens to be Sanji.

He can be quiet and understanding one minute, then playful and goofy the next. He has such a vast personality that she feels like she can count on him for just about anything. And she kind of hopes she’s been giving him the impression that he can count on her because she’s not so selfish that she doesn’t want to be there for her friends. Especially since the two of them likely have the lowest self-esteem on the ship, next to their cook ( but that’s just my personal headcanon since I write him too. )

I’ve said this a billion times too, but SHE LOVES TO LISTEN TO HIS STORIES! Doesn’t matter if it’s a new or old one, she still sit from start to finish and ask for another one every single time. Doesn’t matter if they’re made up, either. Each story is different in its own way and she adores that he’s so creative. It’s the same with his art too. She isn’t the least bit artistic, so she can easily praise everything he does because he has a talent she doesn’t and loves it.

SANJI ;

…..MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM.

CHOPPER ;

Chopper is the baby of the family, so Anita is very quick to defend and protect him. When she knows there isn’t any way for her to distract or tank the way she’s meant to, her job is then to protect Nami, Chopper and Usopp. She doesn’t think they’re weak in any way because even at the circus on her home island, the smallest part ( whether it be in an act or something technical ) was important, but she knows that they aren’t as strong as the Monster Trio.

But she’s one of the one that frustrates Chopper the most when it comes to people sitting still during recovery. Sitting still makes her antsy, so she ends up getting up anyway. She won’t work out or remove her bandages like Zoro does, but she does walk around or attempt to sneak food from the kitchen.

I can see them training together, though, animal versus animal. Nothing that will get either of them too hurt, of course. But there’s something drastically different about how two animals fight that helps them with their different zoan forms.

Also threatens to eat him from time to time because she’s a shit. Sorry, Chopper.

ROBIN ;

I feel like Robin would be the one Anita interacts with the least because even after all this time, she’s still intimidating. Robin just exudes this alpha female aura in Anita’s opinion, and she’s way too smart. Because she is a ‘all brawn and no brain’ cliche, Anita feels like she can’t talk to their archaeologist casually without it turning into a lecture or a history lessons that she won’t remember. That, and she can’t read. She’ll have tried to avoid them knowing as long as she possibly could, but it’ll be obvious once she’s been around them for a while.

She didn’t feel much when Robin said she was going to leave, but she does relate to her a little knowing Marines destroyed her home. Parts of her want to get closer to Robin because she is amazing and powerful, but Anita assumes too dumb for that.

I would kill for some Robin and Anita interactions because I want to see if any of this would change with interaction. ‘Cause I’m not the least bit good at understanding Robin ;;

FRANKY ;

RO-BRO!!

Okay, listen. She is 100% into the super pose and does it every given chance, and it brings Franky to tears. She sees him as the dad of the crew and has more love for fatherly figures than she does motherly because hers was awful. Might be another reason why she’s not sure about Robin.  .  . Huh.

Anyway! She appreciates all of his hard work and is is genuinely impressed and amazed at the things he creates. I realize there’s the running gag that females aren’t impressed with his creations and have that flat look on their face, but?? Honestly, she would get sparkling eyes and wheeze over it. Might not freak out the same way they do, but she adores his creativity and talent in working with machines and building Sunny.

Sometimes, if she’s bored and has literally nothing else to do, she’ll ask if she can watch him work for a bit. The sounds his work are sort of comforting. Reminds her if Gus and his tinkering back home.

BROOK ;

Brook is her source of jokes, bad puns and nostalgia. Because he can play several instruments and is skilled at different kinds of music, I feel like he would know how to play songs that have a carnival or circus tone to them. Her home-sickness can get pretty bad sometimes, as well as her doubt over whether or not she’ll be able to beat the Marine that took over. Brook will be there with a song and soft, calming words and she’ll be fairly alright.

She wasn’t sure how to feel about him at first, but she’s watched him go from a creepy, talking skeleton from an afro to a still creepy, talking skeleton with an afro that can use a swords pretty damn well and do cool things with his soul.

Probably the biggest fan of Soul King’s music on the crew. None of them really seemed to notice he had a whole career during the two years ;; I mean, they noticed, but do none of them like the music he made during that time? Or is it just an ‘off-screen’ thing. Anita will listen to his music religiously because it’s right up her alley.

JINBE ;

Doesn’t know much about him aside from what she’s told and having met him at Fishman Island. She has no bias against Fishman so she doesn’t dislike him, but she’ll have to get used to how serious he is. Will make every attempt to make him crack a smile and likely fail every time. She’ll be a little surprised when she finds out he’s their helmsman because she thought he already had a crew. Slightest bit conflicted about him leaving his crew to join them, but doesn’t ask questions because Luffy agrees with it.

CARROT ;

Anita’s not a Mink, but I feel like her and Carrot would get along so well. Ahha, actually.  .  . Now that I’m thinking about it, she’ll probably dislike her a little at first because she hardly knew Sanji and snuck in to save him anyway and did more than she could, while she was being upset and petty over him leaving. Yeah, there might be a little tension there until Anita realizes that they lost someone during that whole mess.

Carrot is cute, and seeing her even slightly upset when they mention Pedro died will kill her inside. They can kind of share the ‘I lost my mentor / a man I admired a lot’ feelings. Plus, I can see them hard-core training together and going all out.

OVERALL ;

She loves them. They’re her nakama. She would do damn near anything for them. She’s as greedy as Luffy, determined to be strong like Zoro, appreciates food like Sanji, likes to have fun like Usopp, Chopper and Franky, can be calm and collected like Robin and Brook. I didn’t really think she’d have a place with them until Rachel said Luffy would want her aboard, so I really owe this verse to her and a few other people that encouraged me.

Thanks for asking!! And sorry it’s so long ahhhaa

[blessuswithblogs]

On the anti-imperialist roots of the Super Robot genre

Tadao Nagahama is probably not a name you're familiar with. I won't reproach you for it, it's been a while, I had to look it up myself to help me remember. However, Nagahama is an extremely important person for my current subject of discussion: the anti-imperialist, anti-war roots of the Super Robot genre. Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister of Japan, probably most widely known in the west for wearing a Mario hat to promote the next olympic games, has been in his own quiet (and not so quiet) way contributing to the rise of hard right nationalism, historical revisionism, fascism, and a whole bunch of other nasty isms that have found traction in today's sociopolitical climate. Recently, I saw in passing a tweet about how the ever-popular, ever-mystifying Kancolle had an episode where Japan ended up winning the battle of Midway. Propaganda in media is nothing new, but that was quite egregious, even by my desensitized standards. It got me thinking a little bit about my own niche anime interests and how the common perception of the mecha genre is probably one either of random Gurren Lagann bullshit or simplistic, thinly veiled pro-Japan ideology packaged in a kid friendly, larger than life veneer. In a lot of ways, early Super Robots shared more in common with classical American Super Heroes than actual Japanese Super Heroes like Kamen Rider, which evolved into their own tokusatsu genre quite distinct from either paradigm.

I cannot rightly dispute these preconceptions as wrong, but I do want to at least bring up that some early, influential franchises rejected this narrative. One of the first of these, of course, is Mobile Suit Gundam. While now we have the distinction between Super Robot (robots that are like larger than life super heroes) and Real Robot (robots that are presented in a realistic context as weapons of war using standardized technology employed by military and paramilitary forces to project force) for tedious nerds to bicker over indefinitely, in the days of the original Gundam, that distinction did not exist. Indeed, to play for ratings, Yoshiyuki Tomino, famed creator of the Gundam franchise, had to make many concessions to his sponsors and make Amuro Ray's Gundam more like its more popular contemporaries, with goofy mid-season combination upgrades and some extremely anachronistic weaponry like a beam trident and a huge, MS sized ball and chain. On the back of his later success, Zeta Gundam and the seemingly never ending number of side-stories like War in the Pocket and Stardust Memory, Tomino would actually go on to revise the original series in a definitive movie compilation that cut out a great deal of filler and blatantly unrealistic (or at least immersion breaking) elements. This version is extremely good by the way. Give it a watch if you're interested in the genre's history or if you just like old sci-fi.

The reason I bring this up is sort of my roundabout way of arguing that while the Gundam of today is made of entirely different stock than Super Robots, the original article deserves a space in this discussion. The discussion being, of course, the distinctly anti-nationalist bent of a lot of early Super Robot shows. In all of its many incarnations, good, bad, and inbetween, Gundam is a story about war really sucking and how tragic it is that we fail to understand one another because it's easier to just kill one another instead. Now, of course, a lot of fans are either too thick to understand this subtext (and text-text) or simply willfully disregard it because they like cool robots that shoot lasers. Basically think of Dan Ryckert's relationship with Metal Gear. While certainly not all Gundam series have been good, they have always been faithful to these ideas, which is laudable. In broad strokes, anyway. SEED Destiny was pretty weird in spots.

Mobile Suit Gundam 079, which chronicled the One Year War, was not at all shy about this. The One Year War began as a movement for Spacenoid (a slightly ridiculous term for a person living in a space colony or on the moon) independence from the hopelessly corrupt Earth Federation. Naturally, the Federation did not take kindly to this and moved to suppress the movement, but found itself overmatched by the Principality of Zeon's advanced Mobile Suit weapons. To keep an even footing in the war, the Federation resorted to using nuclear weapons and other atrocities on largely civillian colonies to buy time as they developed their own brand of Mobile Suit. In retaliation, Zeon counterattacked with an even more devastating new weapon: dropping space colonies on earth. All told, the One Year War was not a good time to be alive, and nearly half of the Earth Sphere's total population died in one way or another. While all this was happening, the original founder of the independence movement died under suspect circumstances and power was seized by the Zabi family, who were Really Bad News. The Federation, meanwhile, turned to conscripting child soldiers in a desperate bid to keep pace.

This all culminated in the creation of the Gundam by Tem Ray, Amuro's emotionally absent father. Due to Circumstances, Amuro finds himself in the cockpit and becomes the most important soldier in the war overnight because the Gundam is several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything Zeon can field. The character of Amuro is explored most fully in Char's Counterattack, when he is a fucked up adult instead of a fucked up kid, but from the outset, Amuro is defined by forces completely out of his control and his fatalistic acceptance of his own lack of agency. Despite his nigh legendary piloting skills, Newtype powers of precognition and telepathy, and status as hero of the One Year War, Amuro might actually be the most passive motherfucker in the god damned galaxy. This puts him immediately at odds not only militarily but interpersonally with the dreadfully overambitious if mostly well-intentioned Char Aznable, his lifelong rival. Their entire history of conflict is based entirely upon the simple irony that they both want the same thing but, despite being Newtypes, lack the ability to understand this. The One Year War's violence and brutality defined them and their relationship to another, because of a petty twist of fate that put Amuro in the Gundam's pilot seat instead of some other sap.

Gundam uses many more overt methods of conveying that the One Year War is not glamorous or cool or just. Characters die regularly on both sides of the conflict, oftentimes for no real reason other than "this is war, sucker." Tomino developed quite a reputation for this style of storytelling, earning the moniker Kill-'em-all Tomino, especially in some of his non-Gundam works like Aura Battler Dunbine and Space Runaway Ideon. The entire continent of Australia got rendered uninhabitable by colony drops. The White Base, the federation battleship housing the Gundam, is crewed and staffed almost entirely by people who have yet to reach 20 years of age and they've got a pack of prepubescent toddlers running around on the ship because they've got nowhere else to go. I personally find the interpersonal conflicts acting as microcosm for ideology and war to be the most interesting, and most intrinsically Gundam thing about the franchise, but you don't have to go looking between the lines to find evidence of the show's ardent anti-war, anti-nationalist proclivities. The intensely nationalistic Zeon is surreptitiously usurped by a power-mad dictator without anyone even catching on after Ghiren Zabi uses a giant ass space laser to kill both his father and an influential Earth Federation general while they're trying to broker a peace deal. The death of that general, in turn, allows the worst elements of the Federation government to run amok and eventually create the deeply fascist Titans in Zeta Gundam, who make it a point of policy to oppress spacenoids as brutally as possible.

So Gundam, at least, has profound roots in the denunciation of military power as a metric of moral superiority. That's not really news to most people. Oddly enough, it's the most obsessive of fans that tend to miss the memo because they're presumably too busy making sure Mobile Suit measurements are exactly as documented and all character motivations are completely rational and logical, like them. Let's dig a little deeper for some more surprising examples of this kind of ideology in unlikely places. It should be noted, of course, that I am not heralding Gundam as some sort of bastion of progressive thought. Tomino's sexual politics are located roughly in the Stone Age until about 2000's Turn A Gundam, where they progress to about on par with inudstrial revolution social mores. Progress, I suppose. This is a problem with a distressing amount of media, especially in the 70s and 80s, but I'm trying to look at the bright side of things. At least it's not Cross Ange, right?

Moving on, when we look at the genesis of Super Robots as a genre of animation, we will invariably look to Go Nagai. Though a number of shows about large robot men fighting evil like Tetsujin 28 and the live action Giant Robo came first, the seminal Mazinger Z had the popularity and iconic staying power to define everything that came after. Though I could write a great deal about Go Nagai and his Dynamic Robots, they don't really pertain to my particular topic of discussion today because Go Nagai was about as progressive as a sack of bricks. His work was largely apolitical, at least in the sense that he did not intentionally make his stories about contemporary political issues, so at very least Kouji Kabuto never waxed nostalgic about the time Japan was allied with Nazi Germany. In fact, one of the show's major villains, Count Brocken, is a reanimated SS officer cyborg who carries his head around with him because of a decapitation in a previous life. Generally speaking, not a good or sympathetic guy, despite his protests to the contrary. Go Nagai focused on themes of brotherhood and being outcast by society for just being too damn hotblooded and having sideburns that were just too damn thick, though these mostly manifested in his manga. The TV adaptations of Mazinger, Getter Robo, and Grendizer were largely sanitized and inoffensive.

I mentioned Tadao Nagahama at the beginning of my piece, and it is now with him we come to a very important point in the genre's history. Nagahama was the director of three particular Super Robot shows: Combattler V, Voltes V (here the V is treated as the roman numeral, so it's really Voltes 5), and Toushou Daimos (roughly, Brave Leader Daimos). Colloquially, these three are known as the Nagahama Romantic Trilogy, and they are denoted not only by the iconic designs of the robots themselves, towering, blocky things made out of many constituent parts in a fairly sensical way (as opposed to the famously Unpossible Getter Robo), but also by the injection of genuine interpersonal and ideological drama into the proceedings. They were also super popular in other areas of the world, much like Go Nagai's Dynamic Robots. Voltes V in particular was popular in Southeast Asia. Combattler V was instrumental in cementing the notion of The Honorable Rival in the genre, a character aligned with evil that still conducted themselves with decorum. While you would find few such characters in the ranks of Dr. Hell's armies or King Vega's invasion force, in the Romantic Trilogy, they were critical to the show's success. Combattler V was not especially revolutionary, but it laid the groundwork for Voltes V, which in many ways was.

Voltes V is the tale of the Boazan Empire, an interstellar civilization with an expansionist streak and a highly stratified caste system. Unlike previous villainous organizations, the Boazans are noteworthy for being three dimensional and not painted in shades of black and white. The Boazans invade earth for the purposes of annexing it to their growing empire, with the crown prince Hainel leading the charge. Their battle beasts are too much for earth's military (and the militaries of many other planets), but the super electromagnetic robot Voltes V, piloted by a team of five headed by Kenichi, appears to beat them back. Things become interesting when we learn about Kenichi and his two brother's lineage. Their father, the brilliant scientist behind Voltes V's construction, is actually a Boazan expatriate. Not just any expatriate, but former royalty, no less. Boazan's strict caste system is based solely upon whether or not a citizen has horns. If they do, they're nobility. If they don't, well, uh, sucks to be them. Such a system, already untenable, is exacerbated by the fact that the vast majority of Boazans don't have horns. It's a rare genetic mutation. The whole Boazan war machine is powered by a gigantic underclass of slaves-in-everything-but-name. Kenichi's father believed that this was morally reprehensible and that reform was necessary. Unfortunately, this was not a popular opinion among the nobility, and he was disgraced, de-horned, and ousted for his ties to rebellion movements.

Complicating matters even further, he had a son while on Boazan, the aforementioned Prince Hainel. After relocating to Earth to escape persecution and devise some way of bringing change to the empire, Kenichi's father settled down and had a family. Now bereft of horn, he was largely indistinguishable from the average earthling. Parallel evolution is a concept emrbaced heartily by old sci-fi in both Western and Japanese media, probably because people thought alien babes were hot. Fair, honestly. At any rate, Kenichi engages in mortal combat with his half-brother's forces on a regular basis, which creates interpersonal tension mostly lacking in earlier shows. Sometimes Duke Freed got snippy at Kouji for being all love and peace at the Vegans but that was usually resolved at the end of the episode. Hainel himself gradually changes, too, starting out as arrogant, dismissive, and openly ashamed of his connection to a disgraced expatriate and his sons but gaining more depth as time goes on. The end of the show takes place on Boazan itself, with Voltes V spearheading a hornless revolution while Hainel turns on the emperor, vengeful and disgusted by his cowardice. Or maybe it was a movie. Look it's been a long time and I'm going from memory give me a break.

For a kid's TV show at the time, this was honestly pretty wild. Voltes V was not shy about displaying its moral core: people are not defined by the circumstances of their birth, and systems of government based upon the oppression of an underclass deserve only to be destroyed. Voltes V is not as morally complex as Gundam, but it is leaps and bounds ahead of many of its Super Robot contemporaries. Nagahama believed in a sort of fusion of genuine human drama and moral complexity with the more simplistic, bombastic style of storytelling common to his predecessors, and it resonated with viewers all over the globe. At the time of airing, a number of Southeast Asian countries were under the thumb of repressive dictatorships, and the final episodes had to be heavily censored and edited so as not to promote seditious ideas. That, more than anything to me, is the mark of something that is genuinely anti-nationalist in nature. Who would know better than fascist dictators themselves?

The final entry in the Romantic Trilogy, Toushou Daimos, continued the trend of creating morally and politically complex circumstances in which the karate robot made of transforming trucks must punch bad guys. The aliens of the day are the Barmians. The Barmians, however, buck convention and come to earth in genuine peace. Their story is a tragic one - their planet was destroyed in a catastrophe, and the survivors were evacuated on the aptly named mobile space city Small Barm. Due to severe space and resource constraints, a billion Barmians have to remain in cryogenic sleep while a skeleton crew of nobles and military officials keep Small Barm afloat as they search for a place to live. Naturally, they find earth to be a charming place as any to settle down (as it must have seemed in the early 80s before the environment started collapsing) and initiate negotiations with the governments of earth to try and accommodate their people. Expert martial artist and principle protagonist Ryuzaki Kazuya is the son of a brilliant scientist who created the robot Daimos and the special Daimolight energy that makes it so scary strong. Said scientist is part of the diplomatic delegation sent from earth to Small Barm (in some universes alongside the illustrious Rilina Peacecraft, but that is a story for another time entirely) and is a major proponent of the Barmian's request for peaceful integration into earthling society.

Regrettably, this all goes awry when the Barmian hardliner military faction assassinates the King of Barm during the meeting with poison and blames the earthling delegation on it, engineering their own perfect casus beli for a war of domination against Earth. Fascists are remarkably bad at sharing and getting along with others, as has been demonstrated. Prince Richter, the honorable if somewhat dim and hot tempered son of the King wasn't too hot on the assimilation idea because of his prideful belief that the superiority of Barm's culture and technology should allow them to dictate more favorable terms, but was ultimately loyal to his father above all else and acquiesced to the idea. When his father is assassinated, of course, he flies into a rage and declares earth to be the enemy of Barm and kills Kazuya's father. So there's a lot of bad blood between the two of them. Kazuya and Daimos stand up against Barm's battle beasts and prevents the invasion from progressing. He eventually meets and falls in love with princess Erika, Richter's sister. Where Richter is brash and hasty, Erika is intelligent and patient, and much more compassionate. These qualities allow her to see that the circumstances of the King's death, and any motivation the Earthling's might have had to assassinate him, were extremely suspect. They part ways, but Erika eventually joins a resistance faction on Small Barm against the military hardliners who had assumed power. Richter continues to dance to their tune, too consumed by misplaced anger and vengeance to see what is really going on. Erika's relationship with Kazuya only makes him more unreasonably mad.

Of course, Earth has its own hardliners, and in his battles, Kazuya not only has to contend with Barm's battle beasts, but General Miwa, an odious Earth-supremacist convinced that all Barmians, regardless of their disposition, must be eliminated immediately and without mercy. If we want to talk about more alternate universe scenarios, for reference, Miwa was a fucked up enough dude to cast his lot in with the Blue Cosmos organization after his Barmian extermination ambitions never panned out. He really fucking sucks. Ultimately, Kazuya and Erika manage to uncover the plot to assassinate the King, defeat the military holdouts, and bring the peace their fathers wanted about. Where Voltes V presented a scenario of a civilization run by ultra-nationalists needing to be restructured from the ground up, Daimos offers the inverse: a peaceful, tolerant civilization in a time of crisis gets hijacked by a few selfish, warmongering fascists and nearly destroys itself. Coming to understand and love one another, even when from different planets entirely, is an even bigger theme in Daimos than Voltes V, and is in many ways a more personal story. A romance, if you will, for a romantic trilogy.

Nagahama's Romantic Robots were well loved around the globe and left a lasting impact on their genre, encouraging those who came after to experiment with more complex themes and characters, even in the larger than life universe of Super Robots. While not all (or even very many) of these successors live up to this high minded ideal, it's an important part of the history of Japanese animation, proving that drama and politics were not just for Gundam or more "serious" shows. We can see the legacy of Nagahama in a number of more contemporary titles. Evangelion is so much more about interpersonal conflict than actual robots that the final episode of the TV series didn't even have any fighting in it (albeit mostly due to budget constraints). People hated it, of course, and Hideki Anno went on to make End of Evangelion to either appease or piss off further the angry fans, but it happened nonetheless. Gun X Sword represents an evolution of the genre into that of a pseudo-western, where heroes and villains are separated by the thinnest of ideological margins despite the fantastical robots and setting. Gurren Lagann briefly flirts with political complexity before promptly imploding on itself (maybe this one is a bad example). Even Shin Mazinger, an unabashed love letter to older Go Nagai properties, managed to create a surprisingly affecting and compelling character (dare I say, Protagonist?) in its reimagining of Baron Ashura.

The Mecha Genre used to be, and still kind of is, one of my big guilty passions in life. This essay is more personal in nature than a lot of my others, because from time to time I feel like I have to justify to myself why I like this garbage even when it's weird regressive shit. I guess the compromise I have found is that, in certain circumstances, it can be weird progressive shit, too.