#but its from macross plus

[why485]

I went down another dubbing rabbit hole. I am utterly fascinated by Glitter Force right now. Glitter Force is a hacked up Americanized and censored localization of Smile Precure. Before I continue though, I need to preface with: I have not watched Glitter Force or Smile Precure. I am not an expert! This is all coming from what I've read while researching the topic and hearsay!

Just like Robotech for Macross fans, the majority of Precure fans seem to hate Glitter Force. In fact, many cheered when it was announced that it was to be removed from Netflix, sentencing it to "abandonware" oblivion. However, just like Robotech, there are a decent number of fans who were introduced to Precure (or anime in general!) through it. Similar to Robotech, it's also arguably an interesting historical artifact and so on some level worth preserving.

So despite all that, there is a bit of nostalgia for it even if the Precure fandom generally regarded it as terrible, creating legal issues, and totally botching the franchise's introduction to the west.

What's most strange to me about this whole story though is that an anime getting this kind of treatment would be normal 20+ years ago (i.e. the 4kids era), but this is so recent. This was only 2015, but they went the whole 9 yards with "4kids names", changing many scenes around through edits, cutting many episodes (48 -> 40 episodes), and a totally new soundtrack. I know less about the Doki Doki sequel, but apparently that one got even worse treatment (49 -> 30 episodes!) from Saban, who were obligated to make the series due to a deal with Toei.

Glitter Force wasn't the first Precure dub though. Ocean dubbed the original series, Futari wa Precure, for Canadian YTV. I actually have seen a couple episodes of that one, and it's honestly pretty good? I mean, it's still very localized with the changing of names (Nagisa -> Natalie) and food (e.g. Mepple wanting "chicken noodle soup"), plus other random lines occasionally get a different meaning but it's nothing like, too crazy, and as far as I know nothing is censored/cut.

I really like Nagisa's VA in the dub. She does such a good job, and the way she bickers with Mepple is fantastic. From what I've heard (shout out to Plum🌸Rose!) the OG Precure dub is considered a bit cheesy, but it's really not that bad, especially considering what came later.

From what I can tell, Toei and friends have no interest in further dubbing Precure. It's a pretty niche series in terms of the west, and I'm sure they're doing just fine with their many other massive properties to not feel like they need to make any more inroads.

If this post somehow finds its way to people who have watched Glitter Force or the OG dub, I'm curious to hear your thoughts!

[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.

[weirdunclegamer]

ZENTRADI GERWALK MODE! ZENTRADI GERWALK MODE!

So this was my promise to myself... I would get the partner Macross Plus kit, the YF-21 here, to go with the YF-19 I already had, and I am NOT getting other Macross kits... (unlesstheyfinallydothefirstone) Just so I don't fall down yet another rabbit hole of kits.

Guld Goa Bowman's take on the next potential Advanced Variable Fighter is... BLUE! It's also different looking, more alien, as in the lore its developed from Zentradi tech, the Zentradi being the "evil" alien faction, of which Guld is half of (and half human). Hence the unit's less earth-jet-but-a-robot robot mode.

The kit is again very good, though due to its different physical shape, it feels a little less poseable then the YF-19 was, and there's a weird inconsistency in the joints, some are very tight and others are almost loose, which made posing the thang ding for the pictures a little frustrating at times.

The parts forming decision Bandai made was the right choice all day every day. These kits look just fucking correct in all three modes, and constitute some of the only kits where I kind of want to display them in "vehicle" mode, because the jets look so good, which is something I don't normally do. Also gerwalk mode is always a treat, and the kit's balance is so good it can pose under its own power quite well even in that silly silly mode.

[emonewtype]

Top 5 non-big three mecha (Gundam, Getter, Mazinger)

oh shit I forgot to answer this in a timely manner! Assuming you mean shows/games as a whole, not individual mechs? If thats not what you meant just tell me and I'll try and make a list of those as well. Anyways:

5) Martian Successor Nadesico: one of the first mecha I ever watched, and something I'll always respect for its ability to run both comedic and dramatic stories so intertwined without much unintended whiplash for the viewer. I ended up never finishing it due to IRL circumstances

4) Armored Core: While the settings are universally pretty dark by my standards, FromSoft's usual storytelling leaves things vague enough for me to tolerate it. Gen 2 AC greatly influenced how I feel a mech "should" move in a 3d space when I imagine one.

3) Patlabor: Like Nadesico, is a fascinating premise able to run both comedic and dramatic storylines, though Patlabor keeps them largely separated. A lot of the designs have that elusive "just unrealistic enough to be fun" quality to them that makes me find Real Robots so interesting. The soundtrack has quite a few hits as well. Didn't finish the TV series due to streaming services changing, but love the OVA and first 2 movies.

2) Macross Plus: A part of me wants to put the whole franchise here, but considering how variable the musical style, animation quality, and overall tone can get between different entries, I chose the one I'm most familiar with. Its mysteriously nostalgic to me, something about the music, something about that late 90's early 2000s era its from, I'm not fully sure.

1) Super Robot Wars Original Generations (Games, Not Shows): It almost feels like cheating, putting this here. SRW OG has a little of everything the mecha genre has to offer while remaining both legally and tonally distinct from all of it. But an aspect I love it for that I rarely hear talked about is how well it Gradually Escalates from a reasonably grounded (for a sci-fi) setting to the Rule Of Cool Shenanigans its more well known for without the player really feeling a big disconnect until more than a few games into the saga. And for something that is still technically a crossover, that is no small feat. Also the soundtrack is consistently incredible, especially comparing the GBA versions to other games on the system.

(Honorable mentions to the Front Mission series and Dai Guard, FM doesnt make the list because every game I've played has some irksome mechanic that annoys me, Dai Guard doesn't make the list because I've only watched like 3 episodes so far)

[usagirotten]

AnimEigo to Launch Kickstarter Campaign for Macross II Anime Release

AnimEigo's Robert Woodhead announced at the Animazement event last week that AnimEigo will launch a Kickstarter campaign for the release of the Super Dimensional Fortress Macross II original video anime film this summer. The company will reveal more details at its panel at the Otakon event, which runs from July 28-30. #Macross2 Kickstarter is coming later this summer. Details at @Otakon panel. We announced this at @animazement but somehow I "spaced" on tweeting about it. If you have interesting ideas for stretch goals, tweet away! — Robert Woodhead (@AnimEigo) June 5, 2023 Biggest announced in July 2022 that AnimEigo would be releasing the anime on Blu-ray discs. At the time, Woodhead revealed on Twitter that his release of Macross II would be a high-definition transfer and not a resolution bump. The six-episode anime premiered in 1992. The story is set eight decades after Space War I and follows a civilian news reporter who meets a mysterious singer from a previously unknown alien race. Studio Nue began the Macross franchise in 1982 with The Super Dimension Fortress Macross, a television anime series featuring the themes of a love triangle, music, and transforming fighter jets. Studio Nue worked with advertising agency Bigwest and anime studio Tatsunoko Production as production partners. The franchise spawned three other television series (Macross 7, Macross Frontier, and Macross Delta), several theatrical films (beginning with The Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love?), and several video series (including Macross II, Macross Plus, Macross Dynamite 7 and Macross Zero). Macross Delta aired from April to September 2016, after a trailer for the first episode in 2015. The latest animated work in the Macross franchise, the feature film Gekijōban Macross Delta: Zettai LIVE!!!!!!, opened in Japan in October 2021 along with the short film “Gekijō Tanpen Macross Frontier Toki no Meikyū” (Macross Frontier Film Short: Labyrinth of Time). Sunrise is releasing a new Macross animation project. via Anime Networks Read the full article

[yakdeculture]

Macross Frontier Review

This was so fucking peak. So far this is the only Macross thing I've seen that actually has a good love triangle. To be fair to Macross 7 they basically didn't even try Basara never cared like that and Gamlin is a loser but in Macross 1 and 2 are just really mid because of good ol misogyny so you probably aren't really going to be rooting for anything etiher way because they're all losing, and then in Macross Plus Guld is a creep. That being said it's not like having a non interesting love triangle made the other series worse but having a good love triangle really makes Frontier hit so good. The romance is always an important plot element in all the series but this show does the intersection of romance and music really well, yes all the shows are like a montage of love songs but this one just hits okay. Now granted some of the side character romances are stupid, actually like all of them except for Ozma and Cathy, but that's okay. I appreciate this show only being 25 episodes. Like I said in my  Macross 7 review, I don't have a problem with shows being 50something episodes, but I think you mechafans don't seem to understand that 50ish episodes is not the standard show length that should be aimed for. Could the writers have thought of things to do and ways to make this 50 episodes? Probably. But if you're going to add episodes just for the sake of something being longer and having more of it I think that is a mistake. A lot of times in these shows, espicallys one that are often driven by the relationships characters share with each other, you end up having moments basically repeated because you can't change the core idea of their relationship too much from what you want it to be but also you need things to change at least a little bit for things to stay interesting. Let's use Rain and Domon from G Gundam as an example. Their relationship follows a very clear line where the feelings that share for each other essentially exist from the beginning but they have to go through some things to both realize this and vocalize them. And it's great it makes for a really engaging and satisfying storyline. However, it is hurt a bit by the fact that the show is like 48 episodes so Domon has to learn the "his feelings of love he shares with Rain are his strongest source of power" like 3 different times, and sure each time he understands what's going on a little bit more, but generally he spends the whole show getting more emotionally intelligent, until all of a sudden that thing where Allenby gets kidnapped makes him immediately turn back into a gremlin and be basically tells Rain to go die in a hole and he haters and she's a big fat meanie poopoo head and it's like so obnoxiously over the top and because the show is so long it kind of feels like Domon really should know better than to not overreact that seriously. It's fine that he got mad it's understandable and it kind of had to happen for the story to do what it wanted to but because it's so long but with that core storyline being relatively short the final inciting incident of Domon making Rain all emo happens way too late resulting in a moment where Domon has to act even worse than a similar episode earlier in the show. Like he wasn't even that much of a dickhead in the episode with Rain's ex yuou know what I mean.

Anyways to actually talk about the show I love it. The core characters of Alto, Ranka and Sharon are just so good. Their dynamic together is just great. And you know the story kind of gets a little Metal Gear Solid in the second half and its like pretty crazy but it was so fun. Like I said I don't love some of the side characters, most of the SMS crew is good, but Luca is just kind of there and he kind of turns into a creep because at least from what I remember he never confessed or started going out with the purple girl but he still acted like they were together in the hospital scenes while she was unconcious which is like really weird man. And also I don't like Michael but honestly he never stood a chance with me you can't be the oh I'm like a playboy because I'm scared of commitment or whatever and also share a voice actor with Shinji Fate/Stay Night it just can't happen man. The music in this one is great, Ranka and Sharon have some amazing songs. I like all of Ranka's songs pretty much about the same, I love her cover of Do You Remember Love, and Sharon's Northern Cross is an all time banger. I highly recommended this to anyone interested in an Idol-Mecha-Romance Drama show. I encourage you to check out all of Macross but honestly I don't think it really matters that much where you start, sure they reference stuff that has happened in older shit but most of the time its just "I like Minmay Songs" "I like Fire Bomber" " I want to fuck a Zentradi baddy while she's not a Micron"

[osakanone]

🎵 4Aesthetics

I don't believe they did copy his older works given how much of a departure most of the designs are and how much osmosis has happened since Kawamori's last contribution to Armored Core prior to 6 was Armored Core For Answer and only the NEXT, White Glint in 2008.

AC6 went in to development in 2018, which puts a full decade between Kawamori's prior work and the nature of mechanical design is like that of horizontal gene transfer: there's an enormous amount of contact inheritance, so much so that you can't really use terms like copy and instead iterate or explore is better -- which 100% happened given the length of the timegap.

Mecha evolution is parallel, as many have said before and Argonbolt recently reiterated -- though from a presentation standpoint the taxonomic format of the video feels shitposty, I think taxonomic-adjacent descriptors are a really good way to think about mechanical design, and design as a whole.

I haven't yet gotten around to a translated read of ARMORED CORE VI FIRES OF RUBICON OFFICIAL ART WORKS as I'm busy with other projects right, and I'm a lot less enthusiastic about 6th gen than 4th gen so its kind of on the backburner.

tl;dr of why I'm less enthused: I very much agree with the Steam page that AC6 is based on the concept of Armored Core, but I wouldn't say that it is Armored Core, truly since it lacks the fundamental combat calculus defined by rates which is why AC6 is so statistically biased over being mechanically balanced. This is why the combat doesn't resolve in a satisfying way, and why the meta keeps dancing around its fundamental problems. I noticed this before the game was released based on the motion footage we got that was leaked. Following the game, my suspicion was confirmed by Inveigh and SilverGlint who felt the same way, who I consider far more hardcore players of the game than me, and I got a few apologies from people who thought I was exaggerating the design issues. I'm still very sore about AC6, both its gameplay and its story. <grievences>

Moving along:

To my understanding, Kazutaka Miyatake, Takayuki Yanase, and Ikuto Yamashita were staff designing for Armored Core 6?

Kawamori only designed IBC03/HAL826 and IB07/SOL644 afaik.

Like he gets a lot of credit, but the idea that he does "all of the design" for Armored Core is a massive misconception.

I don't know if Makoto Kobayashi or Wataru Inata, Masahiro Miki, Akihiro Goto, Kaichi Satou or Tetsuya Taniyama have returned.

I don't understand the capacity Kawamori functions under when he staffs at FROM, but if I had to make an educated guess I'd say he either briefs other designers, or serves as a means of keeping other designs cohesive in design reviews. There isn't a lot of discussion about this.

Like Okawara, he's a designer who needs very strong direction to produce good outcomes, and I get this might be heracy but his newer work while more mechanically cohesive in terms of the ability to execute on it as a physical product like a model toy is far less stylistically ambitious with its forms.

It has a far more passive appearance which in 2024's design climate (especially that of twitter or pixiv) feels very strange in a post-Syd Mead and post-Yuzo Kojima era.

This is characterized by narrower hips and a greater emphasis on chasing a more humanoid form which ironically is less characterized, less recognizable and less iconic.

I consider this kind of strange, given that Kawamori's original trick was that audiences were really really forgiving of what a robot would look like despite being somewhat strict about vehicles, and he used this to his advantage throughout many of his transforming designs.

It feels like the problems of the mechaical designs and how hard they are to realize into functioning models in Macross Plus kinda... Haunt him? Like he girlbossed too close to the sun?

My personal theory is there's a habit of mechanical designers who get typecast or trapped into redesigning the same problem for a really long time: Just like neural networks can hallucinate or hypernormalize values beyond norms to chase a utility function the same is often true of design.

I think this is what Takeshi Murakami was trying to say in his sculpture, Second Mission: Project Ko^2, which is an anime style naked girl of the era and style of Studio Nue (when Kawamori afaik got his start) transforming into a fighter-plane in an act of fascinating if grotesque body horror.

aside: I wonder how Kawamori feels about Second Mission Project Ko^2 almost daily, and if I go to Osaka Expo 2025 (which two people want to take me to) I want to ask him since he has a booth but I feel it would be really impolite???

This is how you get really strange gangly forms, or structures which don't make a ton of sense, and is honestly the work image collaging AI systems were most interesting doing.

Human designers replicate this too:

You see it with the recent BMW car designs with their giant snouts, and you also see it in Apple's fetishistic obsession with less buttons reducing to one button with the iPod nano 3rd gen which was considered unusable since users had to memorize tap sequences to use it.

Its like a kind of Fisherian Runaway but for design

I think too, we also see this in some of Mamoru Nagano's work on GothicMade, where his reinterpretation of Mortarhedds has become hypernormalized.

I'd really need to think more on this.

I don't know why this giant discussion fell out of me, and I'm not even sure how "factual" a lot of it is.

I feel a lot of what I'm saying is probably rude or perhaps even parasocial on some level, and the thought of actually testing any of this or publishing properly would insult an entire industry of wonderful people I hold nothing but the deepest respect and admiration for.

That said, I still feel compelled to write.

Its very vibes based and while I'm providing evidence, I'm probably either making a massive mistake and confabulating information/hallucinating linkages as a mentally compromised individual with autism who thinks far too hard about fictional robots and the schools of design that link them together or I'm making an insight that people will talk about long after I'm dead if my blog survives.

Then again, maybe the fact I'm even contemplating that I might be wrong might mean I'm actually covering my bases and I might actually be right? That's... The feeling I have? I wish I were brave enough to make video essays.

The thought that someone might actually read any of what I write, and even enjoy it is one of the seven thoughts that helps me keep going through my depression.

Take care.

Remember, the ask button exists.

Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon Official Art Works

[poobit]

YOURE FUCKING WITH ME THERE WAS A “WANNA BE AN ANGEL” SHARON EVENT IN THE MACROSS DECULTURE GAME SUPER RECENTLY. THEY REALLY SAW MY ASS LIKE “WHOS THIS BITCH WHO BEEN LISTENING TO THIS SONG ALL YEAR WOW! LETS GIVE EM SOMETHIN” 

[plutomango]

Starting a series on Macross Plus. This article is a spoiler-free intro to Macross Plus.

Macross Plus was the unofficial predecessor to Cowboy Bebop with the same creators (it launched their careers) and for me personally stands out in some ways even from the rest of its franchise, though I love Macross.

This will include a detailed comparison between the OVA and movie, analyses on key themes, creator influences, character analyses, a look at the larger franchise, and resonance with its successor Bebop.

Not sure how many people would still be interested in something that old but oh well. I love it and feel like spending some time with it.

[judgeanon]

Plastic Skies - Model 3: F-14A Tomcat

Last time, I’d run into my first proper obstacles and managed to come out on top but feeling like some changes had to be made. It was time to spread my wings a little in more than one way. I was feeling the need. The need for quality.

With my usual supplier still struggling to get some of the stuff I needed, namely decal solution, I decided to start looking elsewhere. Buying supplies online was fine but I preferred checking out actual shops, not just for the items but for the chance to talk with experienced people and get some tips on how to use all these new tools. Eventually I settled on a couple of places inside two shopping galleries, which turned out to be an incredibly amusing dichotomy: one shop had every possible tool I needed but a relatively small amount of models, while the other had barely any tools but like six different displays and three walls absolutely brimming with kits.

I went to that second one first. Due to some miscommunication and a little embarrasment, I walked out with two cans of enamel paint that I don’t really use because I’m more of an acryllics guy (so far). But more importantly, I also got a small 1:144 Revell Tomcat. A price hike from my last ones, but not a particularly steep one. And I figured, if I wanted quality kits, Revell was the way to go. As for the model, well... it’s a Tomcat. You show me someone who doesn’t like the Tomcat and I’ll show you the miraculous man without a heart.

The second shop yielded a much better bounty. There, I finally got my decal solutions, plus a bottle of varnish (which I’d seen on tutorials was the final step to a good decalling) and a box of red paint that I wasn’t gonna use for the Tomcat but figured I’d have around for possible future projects. This would eventually represent another small turning point in this whole new hobby, but more on that later. For now, I had work to do.

Right out of the box, I could tell these German motherfuckers were not fucking around. My last two models’ instructions had been a single sheet of photocopied paper. This one had a whole 12 page booklet, plus a second health warning booklet, plus a decal sheet twice as big as the last two combined. This was the proverbial Something Else. And if there was any doubt in my mind, that changed quickly the moment I looked at the instructions and started building the cockpit. The damn thing has decals for the control panels, despite the fact that you can’t see them even with a magnifying glass in the final build. And then there were the wings.

I’d seen them in the instructions booklet so I understood the general idea, but I still found myself smiling like a baby once I put them in. Such a simple and elegant solution that brought this closer to a toy than a model. If I didn’t love it yet, I was ready to buy this model dinner and a drink now.

Funny enough, while my brother and I never built a Tomcat as kids (we didn’t see Top Gun until we were both in our teens, so our only real attachment to the plane for years was just Afterburner and Macross’ Valkyries), I do remember owning a pretty well-made toy plane, with the swing-wings and all, that I proudly displayed next to all the other models. It was at least three times bigger than the one I was building now, but as I pushed those little wings back and forth, I could feel its spirit coming back to me.

The rest of the construction went mostly well. Lots of silent admiration for the hyper detailed panel lines and little details, most of which managed to survive even my clumsy brush strokes (and the darker-than-recommended shade of gray I used). Things only really started to get annoying once I tried to decal the plane’s six missiles. A combination of inexperience with decal solution and abject terror for the safety of the decals themselves (which turned out to be mostly unfounded because Revell decals are sturdy motherfuckers) meant that the process was slow and excruciating, and the results rather shoddy.

Likewise, the landing gears were a small big nightmare. Revell and a few other companies really like making these small parts that you can then slice into two or three or four even smaller parts to complete, for example, the landing gear doors. Which is theoretically great because it offers more of that sweet sweet customization, but in practice is a recipe for a horrorshow. You can see its results on the monstrously mangled doors of the frontal gear of this pure plane, and while harder to notice, there were two pieces of the back gears that I straight-up didn’t even try to glue in. I value my sanity more than the presence of a half-inch piece of plastic.

Slowly, painfully, I managed to complete the main build and reach the final stage: the full decalling. To my amusement, the instructions included two options. One was an actual real life Tomcat from the USS Nimitz, pilot names and all. The other turned out to be a Tomcat from a movie I’d never heard before, THE FINAL COUNTDOWN, about the aforementioned USS Nimitz travelling in time back to Pearl Harbor in 1941 and... I actually haven’t seen the movie yet and reviews say it’s kinda meh, but it’s absolutely on my Lazy Sunday list.

However, I settled for the real life decal sheet, mostly because the other one had a couple of extra decals and I wasn’t feeling like doing even more work. I was already quite frustrated by the missiles and landing gear, and decaling the tailfins/canopy didn’t help. Decal solution was certainly making things easier, but not exactly easy enough. Silvering was becoming very noticeable. And those damn wrap-around yellow tops kicked my ass pretty hard. But at least I got the Jolly Rogers on... somewhat.

I finished those late at night on a Friday, then went to sleep dreading what was going to come next. The tiny names, the sneaky corners, the endless work that would surely stretch for hours and hours. It was going to be a pain in the ass. But when I actually got down to it the next morning, something... clicked. Something happened. Maybe I just needed the rest or the extra daylight, but decaling the sides of the plane wasn’t a pain at all. In fact, it ended up being downright fun. And more importantly, tremendously satisfying.

Each new decal that I placed just peeled away at the layer of fear that used to cover them. Even the really small ones, the ones that went in some tiny corner of the plane right behind the missiles I’d already glued on, ended up being a ball to just softly slide around with a toothpick. Maybe it just spoke to my inner desire for visual order. I’m 100% the kind of person that straightens picture frames and orders his shelves by publisher. So moving these strong decals around until they were at the perfect position was deeply soothing to me. Even the tiny red stripes gave me almost no trouble. And before I knew it, I was putting in the final coats of varnish. It was done.

Of course, a new finished model meant another round of pictures to show to family members and friends, who I’m sure by now were beginning to get a little tired of my constant droning. Still, as previously established, nobody with a heart can resist the allure of a nice Tomcat. And now I had far more angles to show off.

And then there was that turning point I mentioned. Because while I was varnishing the F-14, I realized the varnish, the decal solution, these new things I had... well, no reason why I couldn’t use them on the two older models. No reason why I couldn’t give the Mirage’s decals some solution to try and get the silvering out, or why I couldn’t try to polish that poor misshappen MiG-21 with some varnish. Which was exactly what I did before the Tomcat had even finished drying.

Like doing the decals, it was another moment of great satisfaction to use the tools I’d tried out and the experience I’d accumulated to make those previous kits shine a bit more. To know that a lot of the things I learned could be applied not just to the current model but to all of them. It was a notion that made me want to try even more new things, even the really intimidating ones. I found myself locked into the best kind of feedback loop that any hobby has to offer, where you can see yourself improve in real time while also receiving physical, empirical evidence of that improvement. I was getting better. I was getting braver.

And on the next model, I told myself, I was really going to test myself.

[grailfinders]

Fate and Phantasms #175

Today on Fate and Phantasms we’re entering the Dead Heat Summer Race! That’s right, we’re finally doing some Summer servants... in the Summer! We’re still a year off, but at least they’ve got the spirit!

As an added challenge, I’ll make sure all the teams get their own car! Fran & Maid Alter get a pass since they’re teamed up with people that already have cars (Babbage & Nero, respectively), but the others will all have their own vehicles to ride!

Anyways, today we’re building Nero Claudius... again. I promise this is... probably(?) the last time. She’s a Creation Bard to build up her golden theater on the sea as well as a sick car. She’s also a Draconic Soul Sorcerer to grab those giant guns she’s got on her back.

Check out her build breakdown below the cut, or her character sheet over here!

Next up: Team Electric Steam feat. Papa!

Race and Background

Nero is still a Human Noble. This gives her +1 to any two stats, and her Constitution and Charisma will need rounding up in a second, so go with those. She also gets proficiency with History, Persuasion, and Performance, plus the Lucky feat to re-roll her attacks, saves, and checks plus incoming attacks three times per long rest. You might be in a bikini, but you’re still the emperor. You get what you want, and what you want is just about everything.

Ability Scores

Surprising no one, your Charisma is your highest stat. The race was basically a popularity contest, and you won almost every leg of it. Second is Dexterity- you’re fighting in either a dress or a swimsuit, but in either case it’s definitely not armor. Your Constitution is next, races take a while and there’s no time to stop for snacks, so you’ll have to toughen up a bit. After that is Intelligence. You’re flighty, not dumb. Your Strength isn’t amazing, you don’t really need big muscles to look good, but we’re dumping Wisdom. It wouldn’t be high at the best of times, and the caster class suits you to a dangerous degree.

Class Levels

1. Sorcerer 1: Starting off as a sorcerer may get you less health and fewer proficiencies, but you still get Constitution and Charisma saves, as well as Arcana and Religion. You’re a caster now, it’s time to act like one.

The big reason we’re starting here right away is for the goody you get from being a Draconic Bloodline sorcerer, Draconic Resilience. Thanks to your great-great-great-great-great-grandparent Dragon Ancestor being a red dragon, you get an extra 1 hp for each level of this class, as well as a doubled proficiency bonus on charisma checks involving dragons.

You also get an unarmored defense of 13 + your dexterity modifier. Now you can wear a swimsuit anywhere you like without issues. I’d still recommend you don’t meet the king dressed like that, but you’re a noble, I’m sure he’s already expecting a bit of eccentricity.

You can also cast Spells using your Charisma, grab Light and Minor Illusion to put on a good show, Sword Burst so you can actually use a sword (we’ll get better options later), and Magic Missile and Create Bonfire for some quick shots from your cannons. You also get Absorb Elements, because this and Blade Ward are the easiest to get “weakness nullifying” spells, and this one’s actually good.

2. Bard 1: Bouncing over to bard real quick gives you another set of Spells that also use Charisma. You also get Bardic Inspiration, d6s you can hand out as a bonus action to allies. While they have one, they can add it to an attack, save, or check they have to make. You have Charisma Modifier inspiration dice to give out per long rest.

You do whatever you want, and while Prestidigitation isn’t quite that open-ended, it’s still pretty good for a single spell. You also get Friends, Command and Charm Person to be your usual charming self. Grab Cure Wounds for just a touch of healing, and Feather Fall. You’ve got giant metal wings, they should be good for something, right?

You get proficiency with Animal Handling as well.

3. Bard 2: Second level bards are Jacks of All Trades, adding half their proficiency bonus to all ability checks. You can also perform a Song of Rest on short rests, adding 1d6 to healing done. Your dulcet tones inspire everyone around you! (Usually to put as much distance between themselves and you as possible, but hush)

Your inspiration also turns into Magical Inspiration- creatures can use your inspiration to add to their spell’s damage or healing potential.

Finally, you get the spell Unearthly Chorus, which doesn’t have any damage or healing potential! It just makes you even better at charisma checks. It’s also very flavorful for someone about to open a theater.

4. Bard 3: Third level bards graduate from their college, and the College of Creation will one day allow you to afford a car! For now, you only have a Note of Potential, adding extra effects to your inspiration depending on how they’re used. Adding one to an ability check gives the user advantage on the die roll. Adding it to an attack roll deals thunder damage to the target and each creature next to it that fails a constitution save. Adding it to a saving throw adds temporary hp to the user equal to the roll plus your charisma modifier.

You know how I just said you only have the note? We lied. You can also make a Performance of Creation once per long rest or by spending a second level spell slot. You can create any nonmagical item, as long as it is worth less than 20 times your bard level in GP, and medium or smaller. Neither of those restrictions will help you make a car, but they’ll improve as you level up.

Finally, you get Expertise in Animal Handling and Arcana, doubling your proficiency bonus in both skills.

For your spell, Enhance Ability makes it easier to do whatever you set your mind to, giving advantage on one kind of ability check for the duration.

5. Bard 4: Use your first Ability Score Improvement to bump up your Charisma for stronger spells and more inspiration.

You also learn the Dancing Lights cantrip so you can put on even better shows, and Pyrotechnics for pretty much the same reason. You need an existing source of fire to set it off, but you can always combo it with Create Bonfire in a pinch.

6. Bard 5: Fifth level bards are a Font of Inspiration, recharging your inspiration on short rests instead of long ones. Also, your inspiration grows to d8s.

You can also make a Motivational Speech with a third level spell slot, giving your party temporary HP, advantage on wisdom saves, and advantage on its next attack if it gets hit by an attack.

7. Bard 6: Countercharm is okay, spend an action to give advantage to your party on charm and frightening saves, but we’re really here for your subclass specialties. Your Performance of Creation can make Large objects now, and you can spend an action to make an Animating Performance, turning a large or smaller (gee, that worked out nicely) object into a Dancing Item for up to an hour. It’ll only dodge on its turn unless you use your bonus action to command the thing, but you can inspire people and command it in the same action. You can make a dancing item once per long rest, or by using third level spell slots. Also, you can only have one at a time. I’m pretty sure a functional car in a medieval setting is worth more than 120 gold though, so we’ll work on it some more later.

For your spell, I’d suggest Suggestion, it’s very useful for making the world revolve around you.

8. Sorcerer 2: Second level sorcerers become a Font of Magic (you are just becoming a font for all sorts of crap, huh?), giving you sorcery points equal to your sorcerer level. You can turn spell slots into points, or points into slots, or even cooler stuff next level!

For now, the big new thing is you can cast Shield. Those giant metal wings make it harder to hit you than you’d think.

9. Sorcerer 3: Third level sorcerers get that cooler thing I was just talking about, Metamagic! When you get it now, you get two metamagic options that can alter how your spells work; Heightened spells force disadvantage against their save on one creature they effect, and Twinned spells target two creatures instead of only one (Note: twinned spells only work on spells that target a single creature.)

You also get Scorching Ray, giving you a macross missile massacre of fire out of those organcannons you’re hauling around with you.

10. Bard 7: We’re stopping back in bard real quick to grab your fourth level spell, Hallucinatory Terrain. Somehow you always bring the waterfront with you when you use your NP, and now you really can do that!

11. Sorcerer 4: Use this ASI to max out your Charisma for the best spells possible. Speaking of the best spells possible, you can cast True Strike now for advantage on an attack next turn! You can also cast Shadow Blade so you have a sword you can attack with. A cool, spooky sword that deals psychic damage and has advantage against targets in the dark. Yes, it took us half the build to get a sword, that’s what happens when you’re a cavalry class.

12. Sorcerer 5: Fifth level sorcerers are even better at skill checks now thanks to their Magical Guidance, using your sorcery points to reroll failed checks for, essentially, permanent advantage on whatever you do.

You can also cast Water Walk. Eventually your NP will involve actual water, so you’ll want to be prepared for that. Forcing your whole party to do the doggy paddle every time you want to cut loose isn’t a great look, be a team player here.

13. Sorcerer 6: Our last stop on the sorcerer train is sixth level, giving you an Elemental Affinity for fire. All your fire damage spells get your charisma added to their damage, and you can spend a sorcery point after casting one of them to gain resistance to fire damage for an hour. Always remember to apply sunscreen throughout the day. Now more than ever, that shit gets hot.

To take advantage of this new affinity, you can cast Melf’s Minute Meteors, launching chunks of those cannons off and firing a couple per turn at your enemies, dealing fire damage in a small area around their destination. Creatures have to make a dexterity save, and if they succeed they take half damage. Like scorching ray, these are multiple instances of fire damage, so add your charisma to each one.

14. Bard 8: Back in bard for good now! Use this ASI to bump up your Dexterity so you can start being good with a sword. Just in case that’s still not enough, you can cast Charm Monster now too. You have enough gravitas to bend the authors to your will, I’m sure you can handle a manticore or two.

15. Bard 9: Your Song of Rest grows to 1d8 now, but more importantly you get fifth level spells! Animate Objects is another way to build your car (we’re still 5 levels away from performance of creation building it) or to get your cannon bits into position.

16. Bard 10: Tenth level bards get another cantrip! Honestly, we probably should’ve gotten Mending earlier. Adventuring in an outfit where a single snapped string can completely remove your top isn’t a great idea. You also get Magical Secrets, giving you two spells from any spell list. Flame Blade gives you a more thematically appropriate weapon, and Fireball is a big boom you can fire off.

On top of that, you get another round of Expertise, doubling your proficiency in Performance and Persuasion.

You also get a bigger inspiration, letting you hand out d10s.

17. Bard 11: Eleventh level bards get sixth level spells, like Mass Suggestion. It’s like Suggestion, but for the masses.

18. Bard 12: Use this last ASI to bump up your Dexterity again for a higher AC and better swordplay.

19. Bard 13: Your song of rest increases to a d10 as well, and you get the seventh level spell of champions, Mirage Arcane! If you make an illusion you can really feel, is it still an illusion? Anyways, you can make your golden theater now and the ocean surrounding it, and it all lasts for 10 days!

20. Bard 14: Your capstone level of bard lets you hit a Creative Crescendo, creating up to five items at once when you use your Performance of Creation. One of those objects can be Huge, the rest all have to be Small or smaller. You also don’t have to worry about cost when making objects, so that car is finally within reach! 

You also get Magical Secrets again for two more spells. Prismatic Spray gives your golden theater some big ass cannons, creating a 60′ cone of light that deals different kinds of damage and effects. You also get Tenser’s Transformation, turning you from a full caster class into a proper fighter once more. You get temporary HP, permanent advantage on weapon attacks, you deal extra force damage, gain proficiency with all weapons as well as strength and constitution saves, and you can attack twice per action. The downsides are you can’t cast spells and after it ends you have to make a constitution save afterwards to prevent exhaustion, but I think it’s appropriate that we finally gave Nero those migraines she’s always complaining about.

Pros:

As usual, nero’s build is pretty adaptable, with a little bit of everything to help out any dedicated role in the party. She has healing, dps spells, utility, social graces, pretty much all skill checks, and also literally the ability to make whatever item she might need in a given situation.

Tenser’s Transformation is meant to turn wizards into melee fighters, and you’re (more or less) a bard. With almost 200 HP thanks to this spell and the ability to make your own armory, you can turn yourself into a terrifying war god practically at will.

Elemental Affinity can be really scary if you game the system right. Max out a casting of scorching ray to deal 20d6+50 damage to a single target. That’s better than a 9th level fireball. It also gives resistance to one of the most common damage types!

Cons:

Fire is one of the most common damage types, so it’s also one of the most common resistances. You have other stuff to fall back on, but it’ll put a crimp in your style if you go up against fire elementals. Or water elementals. Or fiends. Or- you get the picture.

We don’t improve on physical stats until level 14, which means you’ll be stuck with an AC of 15 for a majority of the game, and your sword skills won’t be that useful until very late in the campaign.

The big moment where the build really comes together as Nero is around level 19-20, meaning most players will never actually reach that point. Sorry guys, Nero is a luxury few can afford.

[floatingcatacombs]

Macross Zero Gets Me To Blog About Macross Here and It’s Honestly a Surprise How Little I've Done That Considering How Much I Like Macross as a Whole

12 Days of Aniblogging 2023, Day 7

What is Macross fundamentally about? Why is anyone drawn to this mecha franchise that’s played second fiddle to Gundam for nearly every step of its existence? The classic answer is the interplay between idols, mecha, and romance that Macross offers, with each iteration tweaking the balance to new results. But I think this viewpoint misses one of the most unique aspects of the original Super Dimension Fortress Macross anime, which is the culture war at the center of everything. The Zentradi are an alien race raised solely for battle, which gives them overwhelming firepower but leaves them deeply vulnerable to soft power. It's not the cool transforming ships that win the war, but romance and pop music and consumerist culture and pluralism and sickening amounts of gender. The Zentradi are literally humanized by the end of the show, as the nine-episode epilogue of SDF Macross is about the surviving humans and Zentradi trying to coexist in a new society built on the ruins of Earth, and the conflicts that arise from assimilation. For the most part it’s handled shockingly well for a 40-year-old show.

you bet your ass I'm just using macross baby throw instead of looking for a more relevant screenshot

Most of the later Macross installments downplay the contact narrative aspect, moving the continuity forwards and introducing new enemies that are either comically evil or uncaring hive-minds. And that’s fine! Instead, we get the insanity of Fire Bomber in Macross 7, and some of the best mechanical animation ever put to cel in Macross Plus. But as Macross Frontier and Delta go all-in on idols and sell ungodly amounts of CDs, eventually you start to feel like something’s missing.

Macross Zero is the one series I hadn’t gotten around to until this year. The only things I knew going in were that it was a relic of the early digital era, the first Macross to use CG for the dogfights, and focused primarily on native Pacific islanders. This all had me a bit worried! But what the setting actually entails is contact at the forefront of a Macross series again.

This is the first Macross chronologically, so it even though it has some alien tech that crash-landed to Earth, it predates actual alien contact and space war. Instead, all the major powers are wrapping up the Unification War, the “and then the Earth formed a world government to combat the imminent alien threat” narrative handwave of SDF Macross. We don't see much of the actual conflict on-screen, so instead it manifests as the settling of the frontier. The war is almost over and the fighting has been pushed to the fringes of the world, which means even nonaligned native islanders are at risk of being caught in the crossfire.

there's a real painterly nature to the backgrounds in this show, which helps the CG integrate quite well. Easily one of the best looking anime from the early 2000s.

Though the immediate problem is the military helicopters landing on the beach, it’s clear that the tribe has been facing the pressure of cultural imperialism for a long time now. Previous encounters have brought radios and generators to the island, and many members of the younger generations are leaving for mainland Asia to seek greater opportunities. This conflict manifests in the central love triangle as well. Sara Nome is a deeply religious traditionalist, while her younger sister Mao is the one interested in technology and anthropology. Macross Zero pulls no punches in depicting cultural isolationism as stifling and authoritarian. But the alternative is the end of their way of living, with only the potential for fragments of culture to persist through assimilation. And either way, the military being right at their door may soon render all this moot . The series grapples with hard problems in much better faith than most anime I've seen, which have a nasty tendency to advocate for colonialism.

Blood samples are one of Zero’s narrative through-lines, depicting the whole range of ethical hazards endemic to this kind of contact. The UN-sponsored cultural anthropologist who lands on the island takes indigenous blood samples under the half-truth that she’s going to test for diseases and treat the sick. Sara sees the writing on the wall, but can’t stop her from bribing the tribespeople with hard-to-get food and drinks. Of course, what the military scientists actually want to learn is how the islanders are linked to a suspected dormant protoculture superweapon, and to take advantage of it before the Anti-UN forces do the same.

After discovering this, both the United Nations and the self-proclaimed anti-imperialist Anti-UN do not hesitate to use the island as a battlefield. While there’s plenty of sci-fi and magical macguffins during the last act, the show’s intentions remain firm. The can of worms opened when a UN fighter pilot first washed ashore reaches its inevitable conclusion, and everything burns and everyone has to be evacuated. Sara Nome reawakens the bird superweapon representative of her culture and ultimately uses it to open a portal, vanishing to parts unknown. That’s about the best this particular narrative can offer her viewpoint. Macross Frontier goes on to reveal that her sister Mao moved to the mainland and became a protoculture researcher, eventually becoming the grandmother of idol Sheryl Nome. It’s a fitting callback.

Zero is the most grounded and least optimistic Macross, and manages to avoid falling into pro-colonialist or noble savage viewpoints with its clear narrative focus. I would compare it to one of those UC Gundam side story OVAs, deliberately limited in scope but well-executed. One of the better ones.

Speaking of, Sunrise is going to be animating the next Macross anime! There’s a lot of possibilities, but first and foremost I hope they opt for a soft or hard reboot. Watching the most recent Delta movie left me to conclude that the internal chronology of the franchise has gotten far too messy, and it’s time to clean the slate so that culture shock can be brought to the forefront again. Of course, I’m also praying that they try to shamelessly cash in on G-Witch’s success by making The Gay Macross. God, what I would give for The Gay Macross. I could fill an entire second post with my ideas for The Gay Macross, but I’ll spare you for now.

[sugarcomatosed]

On Miyuki Inaba and Macross:

I’ve heard nothing but love for wave 2-10 of destruction; but I’ve realized that the scene loses some of its magic for western audience because they don’t know it’s a shout out. 

So today I want to break down for you today the biggest reference in 13 Sentinels you most likely missed out on; Miyuki Inaba, Lynn Minmay and The Super Dimensional Fortess Macross.

Join me under the cut for massive spoilers for Sentinels of course, and a nearly 40 year old anime you’ve never seen.

I think everyone knows Sentinels is chock full of sci-fi shout outs. From War of the Worlds, to Terminator, The Matrix, heck even GroundHog’s day, the list goes on and on. Most western audiences will be able to spot the bulk, so why haven’t you heard of Macross?

Simply put, copyright battles. In 1985, Hamorny Gold stitched together three unrelated animes to create Robotech. One of the anime series involved was Macross and Harmony Gold has kept a tight leash on the copyright preventing the series from ever getting a real proper English release ever since.

...so what is Macross?

Well, in super blunt Wikipedia stolen summaries:

Macross (マクロス, Makurosu, English: /məˈkrɒs/) is a Japanese science fiction mecha anime media franchise/media mix, created by Studio Nue (most prominently mechanical designer Shōji Kawamori) and Artland in 1982. The franchise features a fictional history of Earth and the human race after the year 1999, as well as the history of humanoid civilization in the Milky Way. It consists of four TV series, four movies, six OVAs, one light novel, and five manga series, all sponsored by Big West Advertising, in addition to 40 video games set in the Macross universe, 2 crossover games, and a wide variety of physical merchandise.

If you asked me to boil the series down to it’s three staples I’d pick the following three elements. Big robot fights, love triangles and music, usually all interplaying together to make some of the most exciting fight scenes in anime.

The series is going strong in Japan ever since its 1982 release, with the most recent series Macross Delta’s newest film “Absolute Live!!!!!!” getting its first teaser trailer days before I sat down to write this post. It’s insanely big in Japan and you’ve probably seen a half dozen Macross references if you’ve watched a sci-fi anime before. Most likely the signature missile blast.

Sentinels pulls specifically from the 1984 film: the Super Dimensional Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love? The story is largely a shortened version of the first tv series which aired in 82 and is considered in canon a film retelling of the events.

The film focuses on a colony ship adrift through space suddenly being attacked by an alien race called the Zentardi, it’s both a war film and a very quiet drama all tangled up in the three central characters of Hikaru Ichijo, the young pilot, Misa Hayase, one of the bridge officers and then Miss Macross herself; Lynn Minmay.  An idol singer aborad the ship who has during its journey become a huge celebrity after starting as a simple waitress at her family’s restaurant. 

Minmay is considered something of the face of the series and while other characters may never come up again in its extended universe, the story of Lynn Minmay is akin to legend in later entries in the seires. 

When mankind was faced with these invaders, there was one simple thing that managed to send the enemy into disarray, the music of Lynn Minmay shocked the Zentardi who had no concept of culture and music. They end up capturing her and the other two leads during the course of the film and while the others manage to escape; Minmay is trapped behind with the Zentardi.

They eventually ask her to look and exam a relic they’ve kept on board their ship, and Minmay discovers it’s of all things, a song.

So, if isn’t obvious enough by this description alone, Miyuki is modeled after Minmay. It’s not a 1 to 1, but the curls in her hair and the style of her outfit make it even more obvious.

They have a lot of the same general vibes too, Minmay over the course of the film becomes a tragic melancholic figure and a symbol of the war effort against her will. Her sweet dreamy smile and glittering energy become subdued as she faces set back over setback. She remains strong up until a point behind her facade of confidence until she discovers Hikaru now has feelings for Misa. Culminating in the finale of the film where a despair filled Minmay refuses to sing because it all seems pointless.

Miyuki foils this of course with her journey from the plucky Tomi Kisaragi of a prior loop to a ghost in the machine; a somber beautiful figure but a changed person. She only has this role she’s taken on in the end. All she can do to impact the out come of this fight is sing and hope Shu hears her.

In the finale, Minmay is given a wake up call and asked by Hikaru to sing her song and try to save the lives of everyone left aboard the macross. Roused from her despair, Minmay agrees and the final battle is set to the tunes of the song the Zentardi had shown her, now with lyrics Misa had translated. At long last reaching them and halting the conflict.

This is of course, what 2-10 is a direct reference too. Miyuki sings Seaside Vacation until she can’t be heard any longer.

Even if you’ve never seen the film, the clip alone is a treat in itself. It’s a lovely piece of animation 

But Macross’s influences go deeper than just Miyuki and the original Macross. In Macross Plus, the primary idol is the artificial intelligence Sharon Apple. She is also it’s major villian as her AI becomes destabilized during the course of the film.

With the illegal modifications installed in Sharon takes control of the capital of Earth with her music and nearly destroys the city. Miyuki’s character is all Minmay, but her role in the story is a heroic Sharon Apple.

And outside of Miyuki, Macross references and influences can be spotted in Tomi’s story in which she and Nenji are trapped in 2025 and he begins to fall for her mirrors the arc that occurs between Hikaru and Misa after they escape the clutches of the Zentardi. The pair find themselves trapped on a mysterious planet, which turns out to be Earth rampaged by the Zentardi. Misa and Hikaru’s hostility towards each other fades as they try to come to grips with this truth. They spend a long time alone in the ruins and eventually fall in love before eventually being saved by the Macross. Which, is roughly what occurs in Tomi’s story between her and Nenji.

Shu’s story as well, with the minor focus on his confusion of his feelings towards Tomi and Yuki are also arguably a tongue in cheek reference towards the series many Love triangles, which aren’t always true triangles but always remain a corner stone of the series. 

Does Shu actually have feelings towards Tomi? No but she’s showing up everywhere and it’s left him a little out of sorts and plays into the misinformation sentinels feeds you, leading you to think there’s a triangle of some sorts:

Maybe they’re stretches, but considering it was stated in an interview the film was a huge inspiration for the game, I wouldn’t be shocked. I found the interview on twitter back in November but can’t track it down now and I’m v. sad

There’s also the matter of the Protoculture.

The Macross is a massive colony ship, sent out into space with the goal of returning to earth after a long space voyage to insure humanity’s survival, much like the probes the 2188 colony sent out. Misa and Hikaru return to find this was the only thing that’s had prevented humanity from being wiped by the Zentardi.

While on earth, Misa and Hikaru manages to discover a set of ruins of a highly advanced civilization that had created both humanity and the Zentardi. The protoculture.

The logs they manage to Find reveal that their inventions grew too great and they have all but disappeared from the universe, but humanity in the end are aliens as well. The invading Zentardi were just tools used by the Protoculture to wage war on itself and contributed to the death of their people.

The song Minmay sings is a relic of the Protoculture, an ancient highly advanced civilization from thousands of years ago.

Now Hm. Why does that sound familiar? What was it Fluffy said about 2188 and the Deimos code....

They’re obviously not 1-1 references, but Sentinels was such a labor of love that pulled from so many genres it’s nice to see such an iconic series get a well thought out reference. 

I hope this was something of a fun read and gives you a better love of Miyuki and 2-10.

I don’t know if I’d recommend getting into Macross if you liked Sentinels, but if you’re interested send me an ask and I could probably give you a helpful breakdown. I love both series so much and consider them my top two sci-fi! 

[lechevaliermalfet]

The Tip of the Spear – A Long Look at Mobile Suit Gundam Wing

Note: Some spoilers ahead

When it comes to the general anime fandom, I was here before the rush.

I don’t say this to be some kind of hipster, to brag that I was into anime before it was cool (I mean I was, I guess, but that’s irrelevant).  I’m just establishing a context.  I was here for the rush, and I got to watch it happen.  It was pretty interesting.

For myself, I came in during the Fox broadcast of Ronin Warriors (known in Japan as Yoroiden Samurai Troopers), somewhere back in the mid-90s.  I don’t recall exactly how old I was, maybe 13 or 14 at the time.  At any rate, I was at an age where I was starting to get the impression from other people that I should be done with watching cartoons, so I was very self-conscious about my interest in the show. But something about it grabbed me despite that.  I caught most of the episodes out of their proper order, as I dipped into it here and there as I could throughout its multiple runs.  Meanwhile, my friend Josh taped the whole thing; those tapes are either gathering dust in his parents’ attic, or more likely lost by now.

It wasn’t technically the first anime I’d ever seen – that honor goes to the hacked-up 1980s American version of Voltron – but it was the first one I ever saw while explicitly understanding that it was Japanese in origin.  (When I was watching Voltron at age five, I probably didn’t even know what Japan was).  From there, I got swept up into the uncensored and uncut stuff: Ninja Scroll, Macross Plus, Ghost in the Shell, and a whole host of others.  Back then, everybody was talking about Ranma ½ and lamenting the absence of Rumiko Takahashi’s earlier classic, Urusei Yatsura, in English; there were arguments and flame wars about which of the three different Tenchi Muyo! continuities was best, and perpetual laments about how the OVA series at the time remained unfinished and with no ending in sight; the classics of the day were movies like Akira and the original Vampire Hunter D, and I was developing a weird soft spot for Fist of the North Star; I was recording shows like Fatal Fury: The Motion Picture, Galaxy Express 999, and Green Legend Ran from the Sci-Fi Channel, movies which tend to be forgotten today for one reason or another.

I was new to the fandom, I was excited to explore it, and I was at that stage of fandom involvement where I was beginning to build up a store of experience and my own knowledge regarding what was out there, while at the same time having little enough of said knowledge that everything was still new and exciting.  It might have been my favorite time as an anime fan.

If you were at that stage of the fandom – progressed past just watching whatever was on TV to buying stuff at stores and looking up new things online – then Gundam was something you just kind of heard of.  It was hard to really get into at the time, given that none of the various series (and there was just over twenty years’ worth of series by the time Gundam Wing began airing Stateside) had yet been licensed for U.S. release.  Anything you were going to get, you had to get via fansubs, and this was at a time when those were pretty much exclusively viewed via VHS cassette (which had been copied from laserdisc and sent by mail).  You were aware of the show, and its influence could be felt throughout the medium, but for the average fan who only had access to what was licensed for U.S. release, it was basically never more than the background radiation of the mecha genre, and of anime in general.

That all changed in 2000 with Mobile Suit Gundam Wing.

The Crest of the Wave

There were a lot of factors that led to the anime boom of the late 90s and early aughts, and I don’t think you can single out any one of them as being solely responsible.  But if there’s one that was mostly responsible, it would be Cartoon Network’s afternoon Toonami block, and a bit later on, the late-night Adult Swim block.  At the time, Toonami seemed to be largely dedicated to shows that had been popular in the 80s – Voltron, Robotech, and Thundercats, to name a few – whether this was the general intent, or just happened to be the schedule when I first tuned in just prior to the boom, I’m not sure.  But there were two shows that appeared later which launched Toonami into the stratosphere of popularity.  One of them was Dragon Ball Z.  The other was Gundam Wing.

Of the two, Dragon Ball Z showed up on the block first, in August of 1998.  It had aired on network TV before this, but Toonami was where it finally took off.  It was (and remains) the more popular by a fairly wide margin, having introduced Western audiences to the long-running shounen fight shows that have been a staple of the fandom ever since.  Bleach, Naruto, One Piece, and countless others all probably owe their success in the U.S. directly to Dragon Ball Z’s run on Toonami.  And its popularity makes a lot of sense, when you think about it.  There’s a large cast of characters with easy-to-understand motivations and personalities that are expressed in their dialogue, their actions, and the way they fight.  Really, it’s like pro wrestling, just with a different aesthetic.

Gundam Wing, which originally aired in 1995 in Japan, began airing in the U.S. about a year and a half after Dragon Ball Z, in March of 2000. It catered to a very different mindset than Dragon Ball Z’s martial arts fantasy.  While it also had a crew of varied and easily identifiable characters, it coupled this with a convoluted plot, complex and changing motivations among its cast, moral quandaries, philosophical soliloquies, and giant robots.  And it is a fundamental law of the universe that you can almost never, ever go wrong with giant robots.  Basically, it zeroed in on the audience that likes their anime complex, weird, and melodramatic.  

Of course I was a fan.

And while it didn’t quite enjoy Dragon Ball Z’s stratospheric success, it certainly did well enough.  Bandai supposedly sold out of Gundam Wing model kits in the wake of its Western debut, and they were so impressed at how Toonami handled the series that they borrowed some of their promotional materials when it came time for Bandai to give the series a home video release.

For reference, this was around the time that Bandai was entering the Western market directly, and Gundam Wing (produced by their subsidiary Sunrise, Inc.) was part of an impressive opening salvo that included, all in the span of about a year, Outlaw Star and Cowboy Bebop (two of the three “cowboy shows” that were huge at the time), The Vision of Escaflowne, and of course, Gundam Wing itself.  When it came to the American market, Bandai came out swinging.  The strength of these shows contributed to the rising popularity of the medium.  With its position in the Toonami block and an additional late-night broadcast, Gundam Wing was probably the most prominent of all of these.  

Now, you can argue that other shows from around that time were better, certainly.  I’d personally argue that Cowboy Bebop is a better show, and certainly a more consistent one.  Escaflowne might also be in the running, though it lacks the weight of cultural phenomenon, doesn’t quite stick its landing (thanks to being greenlit for fewer episodes than originally planned), and its soap-operatic melodrama might be offputting to some.  And The Big O was more of a cult success in the end.  

But Gundam Wing was in the sweet spot.

For one thing, its content was the most TV-friendly.  Cowboy Bebop couldn’t really be aired in an afternoon programming block, on account of the violence and mature themes of the show; it would either be inappropriate for or uninteresting to the younger-skewing segment of Toonami’s audience.  It was popular right out of the gate in the U.S., but it was popular with the usual anime crowd, which meant home video only, which sort of precluded it from being a gateway show in quite the same way.  Outlaw Star, for its part, had to have some footage removed here and there, including an entire episode late in the series run which was essentially just a half-hour of cheesecake (but also, frustratingly, host to one very important plot point).  Escaflowne likewise needed some censoring (and had been grabbed by Fox, anyway), and The Big O was a little too cerebral to have universal appeal.  Gundam Wing, meanwhile, was very TV-friendly, with most of the censoring needed for afternoon airing amounting to a few tweaks of dialogue here and there.

But in addition to the above, its qualities came together in a way the aforementioned shows’ didn’t, or at least not as visibly.   It had a complex plot that kept its viewers guessing, and it reached for a certain sense of depth (the level of success it achieved is debatable, but…). Yet I think what it really comes down to is how it portrays its characters.  

All of the main characters are what I can only describe as “catchy”.  On a superficial level, they are all immediately distinct and iconic. Their designs are simple and basically distilled down to something that’s instantly recognizable (even if it’s as ridiculous as the main character’s usual outfit of bike shorts and a tank top). Their personalities are likewise distinct, with each one embodying certain archetypes and tropes.  At a glance, with a superficial or “zoomed-out” view, you can get a basic handle on the characters. Their design, body language, attitude, and way of speaking immediately marks each of them out as a particular “type”.  At the same time, they have some actual nuance to them when you look closer.  It’s not super deep, but it’s there.  And they play off each other well, once they meet and start interacting.

In addition to all of the above, Wing also helped kick off the Cartoon Network’s much-loved and fondly remembered Adult Swim block late at night.  Very little of the material shown in Gundam Wing could be considered really objectionable, but some of the dialogue wasn’t quite fit for an after-school cartoon block whose target audience included children and young teens.  It might be fine for Japanese audiences in that demographic if the main character made repeated and explicit (and guaranteedly ineffective) death threats to various people throughout the show, or if another character gleefully proclaimed himself to be the God of Death, but American audiences had (or were perceived to have) different ideas.  But since most of the objectionable material was a matter of dialogue, the problem was as simple as making a few key alterations to the script, all of which were ultimately inconsequential.  The one character now threatened to destroy people, and the God of Death was now the Lord of Destruction.

So the Cartoon Network got to have it both ways.  They got to air the slightly bowdlerized dub during the day to access the younger audience and build popularity, while at the same time earning credit with the purist crowd by airing a more true-to-the-original version of the dub late at night, during what they then called the Midnight Run.  I will bet cash money that this was directly responsible for the birth of the Adult Swim block not much later.

Overall, Gundam Wing served as a more complex, slower-paced, and character-driven yin to the bright and colorful slugfest of Dragon Ball Z’s yang.  The two together propelled the popularity of Toonami, and helped add momentum to the building anime boom.

The Times They Are a-Changin’

The greater Gundam franchise is comprised of a multitude of TV shows, OVAs, and movies

Gundam Wing positions itself as an alternate continuity to most of the preceding Gundam series, with the lone exception of Mobile Fighter G Gundam (which was itself another continuity).

G Gundam aside, the multiple classic Gundam anime that had come before Wing were set in what’s known as the Universal Century timeline, with several different series belonging to it.  Per Wikipedia, we have:

Mobile Suit Gundam (43 episodes, or a trilogy of compilation movies)

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (50 episodes, or a trilogy of nigh-incomprehensible compilation movies)

Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ (47 TV and 2 OVA episodes, and no compilatio movies, because fuck you, I guess; also the “ZZ” is sounded out as “double zeta”)

Mobile Suit Gundam: Char’s Counterattack (theatrical film)

Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket (6 OVA episodes)

Mobile Suit Gundam F91 (movie)

Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory (13 OVA episodes, or a compilation movie)

Mobile Suit Victory Gundam (51 TV episodes, and once more no compilation movies, because fuck you still, I guess)

That’s… kind of a lot, really.  You can tell where the people who say that Gundam is Japan’s answer to shows like Star Trek or Doctor Who are coming from.  And this is just the Universal Century stuff that came out before Gundam Wing, running on and off through a period that lasted from 1979 to 1994.  Wing was followed not long after its initial Japanese airing by a twelve-episode OVA titled Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team, which – you guessed it – resumed the Universal Century timeline.

Anyway.

You can probably understand how it might be difficult to keep existing fans tuned in and also draw in potential new fans. At some point, you start to see diminishing returns.  You’ll have fans who love Gundam… but how many are hardcore enough to follow it through the literal dozen-plus various TV series, OVA series, and movies that have been made up to the present in order to be able to make sense of the next thing that comes down the pipe.  Each new show will inevitably see you shedding some of the fanbase as more and more people hit their limit for Gundam and tap out.  And that’s just talking about the existing fans.  Try to imagine bringing new fans into this increasingly byzantine saga.  And yes, they are in fact making more Universal Century series (and have been the whole while).  

Intimidating really is not the word.

So that’s another reason Gundam Wing was perfect to open the American market up for the franchise as a whole: accessibility.

The older Gundam shows wouldn’t have found much of an audience in 2000.  The first Mobile Suit Gundam series is very much a late-70s product, and it shows in every frame.  Even for the standards of the day, production quality wasn’t always up to scratch, with one episode forbidden by series originator Yoshiyuki Tomino from ever airing again.  That’s not to say that there would never be a market for it in the States, just that there wouldn’t have been enough of one in 2000 (or before) to keep the series going.  The timing was wrong.  Mobile Suit Gundam looked old and stilted because it was old and stilted, and that wasn’t going to fly at the time.  I suspect that for a show of its vintage, you’d ideally want a considerably larger fanbase than what existed at pretty much any point before the turn of the century, so that you could actually rely on a large enough number of people within it to be interested in older anime, and turn a profit by selling it.

Gundam Wing, meanwhile, was only about five years out from its Japanese airing when it hit the Toonami block.  This was in a day when most anime came to the U.S. a year or more after their original Japanese release in the first place.  It wasn’t quite the best-looking anime out there, but it was up to the lower end of the standards of the day.  And it stood alone, so there was no need for the audience to try to understand everything that came before it.

So it came to pass that America’s introduction to Gundam – and the West’s in general – came not from Amuro Ray and Char Aznable’s battles in the wide tapestry of honor and brutality of the Universal Century setting, but from a team of five handsome and improbably young terrorists sent to Earth with little more than the initial objective to fuck shit up but good.

The Bishounen Who Fell to Earth

With high expectations, human beings leave Earth to begin a new life in space colonies. However, the United Earth Sphere Alliance gains great military power, and soon seizes control of one colony after another in the name of justice and peace...

The year is After Colony 195…

So begins almost every episode in the front half of Gundam Wing, outlining the uneasy and uncertain unity between Earth and the space colonies.  Earth’s seizure of the colonies involves, among other things, a communications blackout between them in an effort to divide and conquer.  But Earth’s will is more directly imposed by their military, which occupies most of the colonies.  Prominently featured in its arsenal are the intimidating mobile suits.  These large, single-occupant, generally humanoid manned robots strike a balance in military terms between the mobility and maneuverability of infantry, and the strength and firepower of artillery.  A sort of metal gear, if you will, connecting these two parts of the overall military machine...

Hang on, I’m writing about the wrong giant robot-featuring anti-war franchise.

Anyway, the mobile suits render most conventional weaponry trivial, and the expertise and training needed to pilot one ensure that no scrappy resistance movement is likely to be able to get their hands on them and use them effectively to meet the Alliance on an even footing.

But the colonies have had enough.  Acting separately according to a previously agreed-upon plan, five of the colonies develop mobile suits called Gundams, so named for their construction from an alloy called gundanium, which can only be made in space – as opposed to the “mere” titanium or neo-titanium of the rank-and-file suits – and send them to Earth disguised as meteorites.  This is the opening phase of a larger resistance plan called Operation: Meteor.  The Gundam pilots’ purpose is to destroy a variety of military targets and generally wreak havoc, ultimately to distract from the real final objective, which remains a mystery for much of the series.  

Each of the five pilots of these Gundams is initially unaware of the others.  They are, in effect, terrorists, each operating as a cell of one.

The five pilots are very young, with an average age of about fifteen. When I watched with @squeemcsquee, she joked that they make up a sort of “boy band of mecha anime”.  And, really, I can’t even be mad, because she’s not wrong.  Even the show’s creators acknowledge it:

Heero Yuy: the Leader or “face” of the band.  Interestingly, though he’s the main character, he’s not really the strategic leader of the group.  Easily the most damaged, and probably the most completely dedicated to his mission, to the point that he attempts self-detonation two separate times during the first half of the show (one of these being the first episode) with zero hesitation. He deals with his emotions by essentially denying that he has any. He pilots Gundam 01, “Wing Gundam”, which has an overwhelmingly powerful beam cannon, beam saber, and shield, and transforms into a jet mode for optimal aerial combat maneuvers.

Duo Maxwell: the Funny One.  Easily the most personable of the group, and the one whose reactions are the most consistently like a sane and normal person’s.  He jokes, he flirts, and generally has a positive attitude the whole way through.  In contrast to his generally upbeat outlook, he frequently calls himself the God of Death (or Lord of Destruction if you were watching the daytime dub). In keeping with the grim reaper/shinigami aesthetic, he pilots Gundam 02, “Deathscythe”, and its later rebuilt version “Deathscythe Hell”.

Trowa Barton: the Cool One.  Cool both in just generally being cool and in his constantly calm, collected, and logical approach.  Despite his detached demeanor, he’s one of the more compassionate pilots. Extremely acrobatic (the show gets a lot of mileage out of that stock footage of him twirling through the air).  He also has a knack for infiltrating enemy organizations so convincingly that the other pilots worry that maybe he really is with the enemy.  Pilots Gundam 03, “Heavyarms” and the upgraded “Heavyarms Kai”, with a fighting style that basically amounts to “stand there and fire all the guns”, and let me tell you: Heavyarms has a lot of guns.

Quatre Raberba Winner: the Sensitive One.  Probably the leading (or at least most frequent and consistent) candidate for Innocent Cinnamon Roll status.  Quatre is a rich kid whose inherited wealth somehow hasn’t gotten in the way of his sense of justice and his compassion for others.  He frequently asks his enemies to come to their senses and surrender before the fighting breaks out, and feels immediate remorse over the consequences when they inevitably don’t. Has a tendency to ask “Oh God, how did I fuck up?” whenever anything goes wrong, even if it isn’t his fault, and even if that really shouldn’t be the first priority.  Despite blond hair and green eyes, is understood to be Arabic (it’s been pointed out that there are Arabic peoples that can have this appearance).  He also has a small private army at his disposal, known as the Maguanac.  Pilots Gundam 04, “Sandrock”, which has a pair of shotel sickle-swords as its main weapon, and virtually no long-range capabilities to speak of.  

Chang Wufei: the One Nobody Likes.  A martial artist whose picture should be at the top of the TV Tropes page for Arrogant Kung Fu Guy.  He is obsessed with his idea of justice, and of wiping out evil wherever it may hide; naturally he’s the perfect arbiter of these qualities.  He has a hard-nosed and overly simplistic notion of honor, preferring to engage his enemies face-to-face, and perpetually (and loudly) agonizing about how battles against weak opponents leave him feeling unfulfilled.  He’s willing to resort to a variety of dirty tricks if needed (at one point proving one character’s assertion that their soldiers are so well-trained that they’ll never die in combat horrifically true, by blowing up their barracks while they sleep), but angsts about it severely whenever it becomes necessary.  Pretty blatantly sexist at various points in the story.  Pilots Gundam 05, “Shenlong” and its rebuilt version “Altron”, both of which he calls “Nataku”.

But although the pilots are the focus of the story, their Gundams are also a vital part of the show.  Cynically, you can easily point out that the various mobile suits make for countless merchandising possibilities – and you’d not be wrong.  One of franchise creator Yoshiyuki Tomino’s longstanding headaches whenever he was at the helm of a series was balancing his own need to tell a serious story and convey a message against the producers’ demands for more robots to help sell model kits.  And Gundam Wing certainly didn’t disappoint in that regard.  Off the top of my head, I can think of ten different distinct mobile suits featured in the series (if we count upgrades), not including the rank-and-file mobile suit models.  But the appearance and abilities of the Gundams are important in how they help express the personalities and natures of the characters who use them.

Wufei’s Nataku has the greatest agility and maneuverability of the lot, with a high enough degree of articulation and focus on up-close combat that it can replicate Wufei’s own martial arts skills.  More to the point, it emphasizes his need for face-to-face confrontation.  Its primary weapon is a spear, with its ranged capabilities limited to its “Dragon Fang”, an extendable arm on the right side that can strike quickly at unexpected distances.  After the Shenlong version is scrapped, its mid-season Altron rebuild has two dragon fangs with improved reach, and more ranged weaponry, but these are essentially in place to supplement the close-combat capabilities that his fighting style favors.

Quatre’s Sandrock Gundam, meanwhile, is also focused on close combat, but in a different way.  It lacks Shenlong/Altron’s speed and maneuverability, instead relying on careful planning and a deliberate approach to combat, reflecting its pilot’s more methodical and careful nature.  Its lack of ranged weaponry makes it impossible for the pilot to distance himself from combat or the effects it has, preventing him from deadening his response to the horrors of battle by repeatedly exposing him to them.  Its largely defensive capabilities hint at it being better-suited for a commander rather than a front-line fighter, and Quatre eventually emerges as the natural fit for this role among the five pilots.  It also is designed to allow the pilot to escape when put into self-destruct mode, making it unique among the five.

Trowa’s Heavyarms and (and the minor Heavyarms Kai upgrade), meanwhile, are all about long range, to the point that its one real close-combat option is an arm-mounted knife.  It’s instead designed to use overwhelming firepower to obliterate foes at range, which seems superficially fitting for the pilot’s detached, hyper-pragmatic approach to fighting.  This also allows it to act as long-range support for the other Gundam units when they’re fighting together.  However, its overwhelming force seems in some ways to be at odds with the pilot’s personality.  Trowa himself is highly acrobatic where Heavyarms is very much a “stand and shoot” kind of machine, and he’s much more subtle than his Gundam’s design might suggest, with highly developed skills at infiltration and espionage which come in handy throughout the series.  However, when it’s eventually brought to light that there was a different pilot intended for Heavyarms – a man whose limited camera time suggests a personality perfectly in keeping with the Gundam’s sheer force – this begins to make much more sense.

Duo’s Deathscythe (and the later Deathscythe Hell rebuild) is the fastest of the five, though it lacks the maneuverability of the Shenlong/Altron.  It compensates for its lack of ranged options with stealth capabilities which include radar jamming and, later, outright cloaking.  To the extent that any giant robot might be capable of going undetected, Deathscythe manages it nicely.  Its capabilities allow it to sneak into the middle of enemy territory and then wreak havoc with a suddenness that matches the spontaneity of its pilot.

And finally, the Wing Gundam piloted by Heero Yuy is, like the pilot, the most balanced of all models in terms of combat ability.  Equipped with a powerful beam cannon for long-range work, a beam saber and shield for up-close battles, and the ability to transform into a jet mode for aerial combat as well as its anthropoid form for fighting on the ground, the Wing Gundam has an answer for every problem, a perfect match for its pilot’s own adaptability.  Both the pilot and the machine are best suited out of all of the five for operating entirely on their own.

The Gundam pilots’ real enemy is not the United Earth Sphere Alliance, but rather the Organization of the Zodiac – OZ for short.  OZ serves as the military arm of the Romefeller Foundation, which is a sort of openly acknowledged illuminati.  Romefeller is operated by aristrocrats and other assorted obscenely wealthy oligarchs who all dress in military uniforms that, in the real world, went out of fashion sometime before World War I, and these elites run pretty much everything that happens within the Earth Sphere.  But OZ is the tail that seems, by the time Gundam Wing opens, to be wagging the dog.

OZ is headed by the improbably young and impossibly charismatic Treize Khushrenada, whose number one soldier and sort of personal champion is a young man with long, platinum-blond hair going by the name Zechs Merquise.  Known here and there as the “Lightning Baron” (and later on, “Lightning Count”), this enigmatic masked figure is a warrior among soldiers, obsessed with battle and with the notion of fighting with honor and principles.  But his sense of honor has plenty of room for ruthless efficiency, and he’s known for this as much as anything else.  Zechs is Treize’s ace in the hole, the only soldier in his ranks capable of meeting the Gundam pilots on an even footing.  In fact, he makes his introduction taking on Wing Gundam with nothing but an OZ Leo and essentially coming out on top, a truly remarkable feat given that the Leo’s defining characteristic is the way the audience becomes rapidly accustomed to seeing it blown up again and again (and again, and again, and…).

In the middle of all the fighting, though, there are those with more high-minded ideals.  Enter Relena Darlian, a young lady of an age with the Gundam pilots, and the daughter of the Alliance’s Vice-Foreign Minister Darlian.  The elder Darlian pushes for peace and disarmament of the Earth Sphere Alliance, and reconciliation with the oppressed colonies; naturally, he isn’t long for this world.  But upon his death, Relena learns that she is his daughter by adoption, not by blood.  Before he was the vice-foreign minister of the Alliance, he was a member of the senate of the former Sanc Kingdom.  Said kingdom was ruled by the Peacecraft family, who, as their name somewhat implies, were dedicated to total pacifism.  The kingdom was wiped out some years ago by the Alliance military for opposing their expansionist policies.  Relena, as it turns out, is the daughter of the now-dead king of that nation, orphaned and adopted upon the Sanc Kingdom’s destruction at such a young age that she can’t remember it.

She’s also in the awkward position of having witnessed Heero and Wing Gundam making landfall.  Since she’s seen Heero and can positively identify him as a Gundam pilot, he’s obligated to kill her.  Yet he’s interrupted by the ambulance she calls (thinking him to be just a regular downed pilot at the time), and ultimately escapes.  When they meet again – because of course they would; it’s that kind of show – he promises to kill her, marking the beginning of a pattern we’ll come to identify as the show goes on.  To wit, that any named character Heero explicitly states he’s going to kill is guaranteed to live.  Unaware that she’s protected by narrative contrivance, and perhaps due to all of the recent turmoil in her life, Relena actually invites Heero to make good on his threat more than once, and repeatedly protects him from other dangers even as he’s sworn to end her life.

As a divisive character in an already-divisive show, Relena takes a little getting used to.  Her behavior in the beginning of the series is… erratic, let’s say.  But strangely, it didn’t seem as bad on my most recent watching of the series as I had remembered from the first broadcast.  Perhaps she just came across wrong at the time the show was made, and values (or at least opinions) have changed.  At any rate, she evens out as the series progresses, and it does seem fair to attribute her strange behavior early on to the fact that she’s definitely going through some things.

In the meantime, the Gundam pilots go about their mission of destroying OZ targets in an effort to cripple Earth Sphere’s war machine.  Enemies who go up against the Gundam pilots get wrecked over and over again.  The audience quickly grows familiar with panicked shouts of “It’s a Gundam!” followed immediately by the enemy getting obliterated in curb-stomp battles.  The Gundams’ durability and strength makes them more than a match for the run of the mill mobile suits fielded by OZ.

Then Zechs Merquise gets his hands on a prototype Gundam named Tallgeese, whose design inspired the more standardized and mass-produced OZ suits seen throughout the series.  You can even see the Tallgeese’s “DNA” in the Leo, which is ultimately a kind of stripped-down and simplified take on the elder mobile suit’s design (this is more obvious in a brief shot of the Tallgeese with its “helmet” removed).  Once Zechs gets his hands on this prototype, the odds are considerably more even.

Each of the Gundam pilots, having been given no information about the larger plan, are initially wary of the others when they eventually meet, occasionally coming to blows before they manage to sort things out.  Gradually, friendships emerge, and the fandom in due course promptly launched fleets upon fleets of ships. However, the weakness of the colonies’ approach of sending their pilots without any view of the larger operation becomes horribly clear when the pilots are manipulated into sabotaging a burgeoning peace effort within the UESA by decapitating their leadership in the mistaken belief that they are eliminating OZ’s leaders instead.  The resulting coup allows the Romefeller Foundation, and in particular OZ, to essentially take control of the entire Earth Sphere government.

The result is a shifting of alliances, where OZ position themselves as peace-bringers after the UESA effectively collapses, and the Gundam pilots are painted as terrorists, which... isn’t exactly wrong, but certainly lacks some nuance.  With their actions now disavowed by the very people for whom they fight, the pilots are caught between a rock and a hard place.

Further complicating matters is the introduction of mobile dolls, a new variety of mobile suit guided by limited artificial intelligence rather than human pilots.  OZ’s wide adoption of these mobile doll units seems a humane move in the short term, sparing the lives of soldiers who would otherwise be at risk in combat.  But in fact, this merely means that now the only people who die in war are almost always those caught in the crossfire and collateral damage.  In fact, this problem threatens to grow worse.  The perceived humanity of using the mobile dolls instead of human pilots encourages the elites to more readily embrace war as a tool of statecraft, ignoring the harm done to noncombatants since that has no impact on the elites’ bottom line.  Waging war becomes an almost trivial, rote affair.

But there is a faction within OZ which finds this to be abominable, and which views the risking of human lives to be absolutely vital to warfare.  There is a matter of honor, but perhaps more than that, a notion that it is the commitment by soldiers of their very lives that ensures wars are not lightly waged.  And so the true nature of the conflict that emerges is less about why this war is fought, and more about how and why wars are fought at all.

And the Gundam pilots, and Relena, and even Zechs Merquise in his way, all struggle against this backdrop to find a path to peace through some means other than conquest.

“The Three Beats of War, Peace, and Revolution Continue...”

Set about a year after the end of the TV series, Mobile Suit Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz serves as a sort of coda for everything that’s come before.  It was originally made as a three-episode OVA series, then recut with added footage into a movie.

I watched it recently for the first time in a decade or more (I had the original Bandai release on DVD from years back), and it’s much more entertaining and interesting if you have a good working knowledge of the series.  It doesn’t stand alone very well, unfortunately. There’s a ton of fanservice – not the cheesecake kind – for people who have seen the series, and it relies on the viewer’s prior knowledge of people and events involved.  So of course, it all kind of falls flat without the benefit of familiarity.  The budget has also been ramped up, to the point where I found myself thinking that this was what the original series had always seemed like, in the rosy view of fond memory.

Notably, the Gundams have all been redesigned with a much greater amount of detail (and with some details changed, always for the more elaborate), though this is presented as being the way they’ve always really been meant to look.  This is reinforced by later materials (mostly released in Japan only) which showcase them in their new designs during the events of the TV series.

Endless Waltz is set around Christmastime, with the wars between Earth and the colonies over and a new age of peace dawning.  Of course, it wouldn’t be much of a Gundam movie if this was really the end of things.  So we see that a new faction of soldiers have risen up under the guidance of one Dekim Barton, head of the Barton foundation which originally funded the construction of Trowa Barton’s Heavyarms Gundam.

Their “real” leader is ostensibly a young girl named Mariemaia, presented as the illegitimate daughter of Treize Khushrenada, who had orchestrated the conflict that played out during the TV series.  Whether she really is Treize’s daughter is questionable, a situation made all the more worrying because of her youth and the malleability that tends to come with that.  Of course, Mariemaia is a figurehead and nothing more, but she exists as a powerful symbol for her followers.  She proposes to finish carrying out the desires of her late father by reigniting the war between the colonies and the Earth, recently unified as the Earth Sphere United Nation.  The soldiers following her are those who feel cast aside; having fought in the wars prior to this point, they now find themselves without a place in this new world of peace, and are filled with resentment.  

For added political power, the Mariemaia Army also kidnaps Relena.  She is once more going under her adoptive father’s surname as Relena Darlian, rather than Peacecraft, and, as he served the UESA before her, she now serves as the vice-foreign minister of the ESUN.  She mirrors Mariemaia in a way.  Both were used as political symbols to help unify the world during a major conflict.  The difference, of course, is that Relena was perfectly aware of what was happening, and was able to turn the tables on her manipulators.  Mariemaia, at seven – young even by the standards of this show’s movers and shakers – isn’t.

Interestingly, Relena spends most of her time talking to Mariemaia as if they’re on the same level.  Whether it’s an act or an honest attempt to engage her as an equal, either way it ensures that Mariemaia is more willing to listen, though she usually ignores Relena’s advice in favor of her own dangerously black-and-white view of things.

Meanwhile, there are also the Preventers, a group dedicated to putting out the fires of smaller insurrections before they break out into a conflagration of rebellion.  But the Mariemaia movement seems to have popped up without their knowledge, and they find themselves ill-equipped to handle it by the time they become aware.  Thankfully, the Preventers are led by Lady Une and Lucrezia Noin – capable figures from the TV series who worked closely with Treize and Zechs, respectively, and who are very familiar with the shenanigans of the Gundam pilots – and they know just who to call…

Naturally, it can’t be quite so easy.  The Gundam pilots have chosen to send their Gundams into the sun for final disposal, feeling that there is no purpose for such fearsome weapons in an age of peace.  Or at least, four of them have.  Chang Wufei, proud warrior that he is, sympathizes with the Mariemaia soldiers’ feelings of being cast aside, and joins their cause.  The remaining pilots, then, have the difficult task of trying to infiltrate and sabotage the Mariemaia Army while also retrieving their mobile suits before they reach their final destination.  And in so doing, they discover the true final intent of Operation: Meteor, of which their deployment to Earth was the first phase, in what seems to be another age.

If Endless Waltz has a greater theme or purpose, it’s to highlight that peace cannot be given, and must not be taken for granted.  It must be earned, and it must be maintained, often at no small expense from those who seek to enjoy its benefits.  It’s a simple message, and it tends to get a little lost in all the giant mecha battles and explosions, of which there are very, very many, all highly enjoyable. For the most part, it often feels like “The Boys Are Back In Town”: Gundam Wing Edition.

Of course, that means it’s still a lot of fun to watch, with its embellished Gundam re-designs and much improved animation.  It’s a little like a victory lap for the series.

The Glory of Losers

Gundam Wing had and continues to have its detractors, and they are nearly as loud (and often as obnoxious) as the worst of its fans.  This is pretty standard in any kind of geek circles once a thing reaches a certain relative threshold of popularity, and Gundam Wing definitely hit it. 

Among other things that set Wing apart, there’s the fact that the show’s planners and creators have been open about the fact that they wanted to target more of a female audience than previous series had (and previous franchise entries had a surprisingly large contingent of female fans in the first place).  The cast isn’t full of very pretty boys and young men who occasionally take rose-scented baths just because, after all.  So it’s tempting, in light of this knowledge, to point out the phenomenon of how we generally tend to view media marketed at girls and young women.  But beyond pointing it out, that line of argument goes a little outside my areas of expertise, I think.

That said, there are valid criticisms to be leveled at the show.

One of the most common ones has always been that Gundam Wing is primarily focused on five overpowered bishounen (six, after Zechs Merquise gets his own Gundam and takes his mask off) who get into frequently pointless over-the-top battles in a borderline-nonsensical plot involving characters whose personalities seem at times almost like satires of popular mecha anime tropes and archetypes, and whose allegiances can and do shift seemingly at random.  Then you top that off with some very awkward acting from the English dub cast (largely the fault of direction rather than the actors’ ability; most of them have done much better work in other shows before and after this), and that doesn’t help.

There’s some truth to this.  Gundam Wing was designed very commercially at least in part.  Any time a show is engineered specifically to capture a particular demographic, you should ask yourself why.  (Spoiler: The most frequent answer is so that the show’s creators can sell them shit).  And the Gundam pilots (and Zechs) do seem a little overpowered compared to the rank-and-file OZ soldiers and other conventional military types who spend most of the show getting blown up.

But despite the truth of the above, that criticism does somewhat gloss over the fact that despite being ostensibly overpowered, the main characters frequently lose the battles they fight, to the point that Duo mentions during the course of Endless Waltz that they’ve gotten pretty good at fighting losing battles.  It also ignores the fact that, well…  I want to say that the villain wins, but it’s more nuanced than that.  

Gundam Wing doesn’t really have an overarching villain in the strictest sense.  There absolutely are villainous characters, but they all wind up being pawns of some kind.  Many of them, almost always the most prominent, come to a sticky end, having been given exactly the right amount of rope with which to hang themselves.  As for the chessmaster orchestrating all this, the closest thing the series has to an overarching villain, he wins.  He gets absolutely everything he was working for, and the heroes basically fit themselves – unwittingly, perfectly – into his grand plan.  

In that way, it’s strangely reminiscent of Watchmen.

So while the main characters come off well in battles – their arrival pretty consistently inspires an immediate collective pants-shitting on the part of their enemies, followed by a decisive and comprehensive beatdown – the net effect of their actions hovers so close to zero that you’d need some high-precision instruments to measure it.

Their victories are moral, and mostly immaterial.  

Another criticism has often been that Gundam Wing isn’t really representative of the series as a whole, which prior to this tended to be more sober and down-to-earth in tone, more focused on the nitty-gritty of warfare.  And perhaps it was difficult for most of Gundam Wing’s fans to see how it was out of keeping with the broader messages and themes of the overarching franchise, since it was the first part of said franchise ever to be licensed for the Western audience.  And being set in an alternate continuity from those series, it was self-contained enough that there was nothing obviously “missing” that anyone felt a need to go looking for in search of a more complete understanding, or a better idea of “what Gundam is really about”.  So for a substantial part of the Western anime fandom, especially at the time, Gundam Wing was Gundam, full stop.

There’s some truth to this criticism as well, but as more and more time has passed, my answer to that has increasingly become summarized by three simple words: So fucking what?

The existence of Gundam Wing as some kind of aberration from the main or “true” Gundam series does not in any way detract from the larger franchise’s messages.  It does not somehow render all of the previous series nonexistent or irrelevant, or misrepresent some crusty neckbeard’s notions of What Gundam Is Really About (tm). It’s just a Gundam show that’s different from the pre-established norm.  Most of this criticism reeks of either “Liking the ‘wrong’ parts of Gundam” or “Liking Gundam in a way I disagree with”, either of which amounts to the same ugly, ugly thing: fandom gatekeeping.  That’s a shitty attitude to have about anything, and I say this knowing that I’m just a poor sinner like everyone else, and have been (and probably am now, and certainly will be in future) guilty of this exact thing about something at various points in my life.  But that doesn’t make it right, and doesn’t change the fact that good, bad, or otherwise, there’s no harm in just liking a thing.

If anything, the broader-scope Gundam nerds should be thankful to Gundam Wing.  Its success opened the door for more of the franchise to come westward when it would have been largely unable to do so on its own merits, thanks to the combined problem of age and complexity that I mentioned earlier.  From a business perspective, Gundam Wing was the perfect stepping-stone to get the rest of the franchise some exposure in the West thanks to its broad appeal and self-contained nature, the lever to wedge into a gap and pry it open.

So what do I like about the show?  Well, I’ve had a fair amount of opportunity to think about that recently.  

As a brief aside: One thing that jumped out at me as I watched this time around – the first in literally twenty years – is that there’s little to no detectable cheesecake fanservice throughout.  Nobody in this show is designed to titillate, save perhaps for the pilots.  It’s a breath of fresh air compared to a mecha show like, say, Darling in the Franxx, which is shockingly dull for an anime that is so blatantly about sex that I keep being surprised when it doesn’t transition into flat-out pornography.  

While the cast is overwhelmingly male, its focus on male characters was (as previously mentioned) designed to appeal to a female audience.  So the characters’ relationships take precedence over any notions of power fantasy – a fact further reinforced by the previously mentioned tendency of the main characters to regularly lose battles.  And the women in the show all give a good account of themselves when they’re the focus of the action.  Sally Po is a competent operator who always has a level-headed approach to whatever situation she finds herself in, fighting smarter rather than harder, and never getting in over her head. Lucrezia Noin, Zechs Merquise’s right-hand soldier, is a ferociously skilled mobile suit pilot who could probably go toe to toe with the Gundam pilots themselves were it not for the fact that she never gets to use anything but the bog-standard mobile suits which, in less capable hands, spend most of the show getting blown up.  And even then, she gives far, far better than she gets.  Lady Une might be an absolute bastard in the beginning, but she has a plan and sticks to it, and let’s be honest: Anyone who eliminates a man who’s outlived his usefulness by throwing him out of a plane midair and then shooting him in the head on the way down is a special kind of badass.

And then, of course, there’s Relena.  Poor misunderstood Relena, who spent the entire early aughts in the anime fandom being the butt of multiple jokes and memes that all essentially boiled down to “Durr hurr, she’s crazy!”, expressed with varying levels of cleverness. Relena, who spends the show’s 49-episode run going from inviting Heero to kill her as a way of getting his attention and trying to get him to open up, to being perfectly willing (and surprisingly able) to personally take down her father’s assassin, to becoming an absolute badass pacifist.  When she’s maneuvered into a position of absolute power in order to act as Romefeller’s puppet late in the series, she neatly manages to turn the tables on her manipulators, and shows that she holds more of the strings than they think.

And people wonder why Gundam Wing was “inordinately” popular with a female audience at the time.

All that aside, there’s the show itself, taken as a whole, to consider.

At AnimeIowa in 2019, I actually won a copy of the deluxe Blu Ray boxed set in a raffle at the Right Stuf panel, which was one of the highlights of the convention.  I’d been wanting to get the series on DVD or Blu Ray for years by that point, but that’s never exactly been a cheap proposition.  So the windfall was a very pleasant surprise.  It was also a nice bit of synchronicity, as that same convention, nineteen years prior during the height of Gundam Wing’s popularity, was my first ever.

More pleasant still was @squeemcsquee ’s interest when I won it.  Not that we differ hugely on the things we enjoy, but there are a fair number of places where the Venn diagram of our interests has no overlap.  Shows about giant robots have been traditionally a bit outside her wheelhouse, though she was game to go with me down the rabbit holes of Neon Genesis Evangelion and Gurren Lagann (themselves a kind of yin and yang of mecha shows), and enjoyed them both.  But I was worried when it came to Gundam Wing.  It was rougher around the edges in some ways than either of those two shows, and that made me anxious to show it to her. 

(Evangelion is weird and awkward, no question, but its weirdness and awkwardness are, however questionably executed, entirely premeditated).  

I was nervous about her reaction to the iffy dub, the occasional ridiculousness of the characters, the way the show tends to take itself very, very seriously, even as it borders on the absurd…

Eventually, we started watching the series together, and I remained nervous for a while, and occasionally touchy when it came to her jokes about the characters. 

I have always been highly self-conscious about the things I like when other people are around to see them, and perhaps judge.  And although I knew better than to expect judgment in this case, the part of my brain that ramps up the anxiety doesn’t, and never has, reckoned with such trivial concerns as reason, logic, or the lessons of more recent experience.  And I suppose it doesn’t help that I come from the tail-end of a generation whose reaction to most media of any kind was deprecation and ironic detachment.  The reaction I was used to getting from Gundam Wing, even from its fans, was “Oh, that show with the five pretty boy robot pilots and the crazy chick,” accompanied by much snickering and rolling of the eyes. But that kind of thing tends to go down easier for me when I know it comes from someone familiar with the item in question, from a place of real appreciation.  This is partly because, for myself, I tend to enjoy things sincerely.  I’ve never quite gotten the hang of liking things ironically.

And as we watched, I was rapidly reminded that I liked Gundam Wing sincerely, while she was still feeling it out, and so her jokes came across wrong.

To be honest, a certain amount of my liking Gundam Wing has nothing to do with messages or storytelling craft, and instead comes down to a matter of pure nostalgia.  It was a big deal to the fandom at large, at the beginning of a time when anime fandom in general was an especially big deal for me.  I can’t recall any particular aspect of the show that especially impressed me when it was new in the U.S., except maybe for “Rhythm Emotion” by Two Mix, which is used for some of the more momentous battles in the back half of the series.  The nostalgia is more a matter of a sort of general warm, rose-tinted memory of the times.  I remember friends hyping it to me, and I remember sitting downstairs at my parents’ place watching it late at night, or else having it on in the background while I tried to teach myself how to write – really write.  I remember catching the episodes all out of order, having a very, very general idea what was happening, while still being foggy on basically all of the particulars.  

I remember buying Gundam model kits at that first AnimeIowa in 2000, which at the time was a small convention that Wikipedia tells me had around 300 attendees.  Which is really, really weird, because I would swear blind that there were at least 500 Duo Maxwell cosplayers alone.  Later still, I remember playing RayCrisis: Series Termination on the PlayStation when I came home to my parents’ house in the winter of 2000, and realized some of the sound effects from it had been lifted from Gundam Wing (or perhaps both things lifted from a common source).  

All of that was very positive, and when I started to hear @squeemcsquee​‘s jokes, all of it felt in some obscure way like it was under attack.

But as we pressed on through the series, she went from interest in it as a kind of historical artifact to enjoyment of it for its own sake.  We shotgunned the last dozen episodes or so, and if I had any doubts about her disposition after that, the cheesy grin that greeted the reappearance of a presumed-dead character in Endless Waltz put them to rest.  And that made it easier to joke about the show, knowing that the teasing came from a good place.  And that, in its turn, made it easier to just plain enjoy it, and like it for what it was and is.

There is a core of real quality to Gundam Wing.  Buried under all the questionably telegraphed character turns and out-of-nowhere plot developments are the twin messages about how, win or lose, wars must be waged with a certain decorum, and also about how war is terrible, perhaps the most terrible thing there is.  And it is because of these things that, perhaps paradoxically, the human factor must not be removed from it.  We risk cheapening it, otherwise.  And this is not the cheapening of something great and noble into something tawdry – though noble acts can and do occur on the battlefield, and they say something important about humankind – but rather the trivializing of something horrible to the point of forgetting its horror, and thus risking the pursuit of it to our own lasting harm.

And this is no idle message.  It’s a rare work whose ideas are more relevant to later generations than to those contemporary with it, but Gundam Wing, of all things, finds itself in that unlikely position.  In an age of increasing drone strikes killing civilians and failing to kill their targets, it seems as though Gundam Wing’s message about the automation of war is more relevant than ever.  And so once again, we see Treize proven correct, that – good or bad – war is perhaps a fundamentally, unavoidably human thing, and it is only fitting that humans should fight in it.

[recentanimenews]

DEEP DIVE: What Caused Cardcaptor Sakura Fans To Be So Upset In 2003?

  If you’ve spent any time being a fan of anime, you’ve probably heard some rumblings about Cardcaptors, the localized American version of Cardcaptor Sakura. With localization and genre changes, it became a show fans of the original weren’t happy with and didn’t quite draw an audience like Kids WB hoped for. However, there’s more to the story. What caused such a drastic shift in excitement for Kids WB before the show first aired with regard to bringing the show to American audiences, to only being briefly mentioned by the network? How much of an investment was it to bring over the series? Why did the show not catch on over here like it did in Japan? And, most notably, why were fans still angry about the show’s localization nearly three years after it aired?

  This tale, like most about anime at the beginning of the 21st century, begins with Pokémon. In 1999, Pokémon debuted on Kids WB and began to break record after record when it came to viewership and ratings. The series became a cultural touchstone in America, baffling people right and left, and entrenching itself into pop culture. Later in 1999, Nelvana Ltd., a Canadian animation company known for making children’s shows, acquired the rights to Cardcaptor Sakura from Kodansha. With how much success Pokémon had brought Kids WB, the network began to come up with an idea to bring a second anime series over with the hopes that it would also break out and become another hit. In the summer of 2000, Nelvana and Kids WB would come together to hopefully do just that when Cardcaptors debuted on June 17, 2000.

    Prior to that June 2000 start date, Warner made sure people knew that Cardcaptors was coming to try and drive up hype around it. Their first unveiling of the series came in an April 2000 press release where not only could they brag about Pokémon ratings, but also that the company had their second Japanese series coming in the summer. The build on Cardcaptors’ debut continued when Warner unveiled their summer schedule, and several newspapers made mention of the series coming. With how much Warner had spent trying to build anticipation for what they thought would be their next anime hit in America, how did Cardcaptors fare in its debut?

  At first, everything seemed to indicate that Warner had yet another hit on their hands. In its first month, ratings were solid in the general kids 2-11 demographic, with both boys and girls tuning in to see the show. There was even a piece in the Chicago Tribune dubbing Cardcaptors “the next big thing.” A good majority of people seemed to be predicting and expecting that there was going to be a new wave of anime merchandise hitting store shelves because of Cardcaptors, which was certainly evident by Nelvana getting 21 commitments for various forms of merchandise. Yet, despite the excitement after the first month, throughout the rest of the year, Warner started to talk less and less about Cardcaptors as the series fell down the press release mentions at the time.

    In terms of business, one of the reasons Cardcaptors never truly blossomed into the “next big thing” was that, well, it wasn’t Pokémon. That’s a bit of an unfair critique to make since nothing airing at the time in terms of anime was doing the numbers Pokémon was consistently doing. It was the marquee show for a reason — in fact, nothing would come close for Warner until Yu-Gi-Oh!’s debut. But when you’re pushing the next Japanese series after you’ve already had a mega success, it would have been hard for Warner to feel that they had another success on their hands. When Cardcaptors’ second season launch came around, Warner again began promoting the show heavily, citing that it was in the top ten of broadcasts on Saturday morning and weekdays along with top five for girls on weekdays. While those are good statistics to flaunt, it wasn’t like when they could tell the media — and everyone else — that Pokémon was the number one show in multiple demographics. It also didn’t help that the growth of Cardcaptors hadn’t been nearly as substantial in its first year as Pokémon. The most they could muster up about Cardcaptors was that it was sixth behind multiple shows airing on the network.

  Schedule shuffling didn’t help the series either. In 2001, the series would make its way to Toonami for a brief period, and later in the year would get pulled briefly from Kids WB, only to come back after a few weeks away. A series losing its spot in any context can be a scary thing as it immediately brings up questions about whether the series is getting canceled or not. Plus, it’s hard to maintain an audience when the series is shuffling in and out of the schedule. To be clear, Cardcaptors maintained a level of popularity well after its debut. If not, it would’ve been shelved by the network like what happened with Escaflowne. It also helped that Nelvana had a sizable financial interest in making sure the show was at least somewhat profitable and on television.

    After the success of Pokémon, everyone wanted in on the anime pie. In order to do that, networks and production companies had to adhere to who they thought they could easily market anime to — American kids. That meant editing the source material to make it easier for that audience to understand and to air on television as Cardcaptor Sakura was originally a 70-episode series. While all of those episodes did not make it to air in America, Nelvana mentioned around the debut of the series that they were spending “roughly $100,000 on each episode to incorporate new music, scripts, and vocal tracks.” That seems like a lot of money, but with how much editing was happening to anime in this time period, it probably isn’t absurd, as other companies were potentially spending roughly the same. Al Khan, chairman and chief executive of 4Kids Entertainment at the time, told the Los Angeles Times in 2001 that “We spend a fortune on localization ... We may spend another 50 percent of what we pay for them [in rights] just to localize [episodes].” To put that into perspective, if Nelvana maintained that same average per episode, they would’ve spent roughly $3,900,000 on the series with 39 episodes — a little over half of the actual series — that made it to air.

  Even though Warner proclaimed that Cardcaptors was a top ten show for Kids WB, that didn’t mean fans were happy. A year after its debut, fans on message boards and around the internet were still upset with Nelvana’s changes to the series. That anger extended well past when the series was on television because around the final release of the non-broadcast version of Cardcaptor Sakura on home video in late 2003, fans were still upset as highlighted in an article in the Los Angeles Times. The lede of the article gets right to the heart of the matter: “Anime fans complain that WB has changed the characters and plots of the ‘Cardcaptors’ series to broaden its appeal in the U.S.” All things that were true.

    As mentioned earlier, localization changes for anime during this time period were the norm. Large-scale edits had been an issue even before the boom with series such as Robotech/Macross, and of course, Sailor Moon, another magical girl series that was a prime example of a show that was heavily localized. Nobody would have allowed unedited/unlocalized anime to air on their children’s programming blocks. For fans who wanted to view the source material in its original form, other routes had to be pursued. The problem that occurred with Cardcaptors is with how much localization they did to the show. 

  Other shows could get away with occasional localization changes to make it more understandable for American audiences. A name change here, a different joke there, and it’s easy to help adapt a show to suit new viewers without completely revamping everything. Cardcaptors went above and beyond by changing names, plot points, the episode order, removing any instances of homosexuality in the plot, and attempting to completely change the genre from magical girl to action and making boys the main target of marketing rather than girls. This issue was so bad the series had two different home video releases — one of the broadcast version and another that was an attempt to bring over the original version of Cardcaptor Sakura to appease fans. It certainly makes the $100,000 figure make sense but is also a lot of work to completely overhaul a show for young girls to a series for young boys. 

    At the time, John Hardman of Kids WB insisted that the changes to the series were minor, but confirmed that they explicitly marketed the show to young boys, saying, “We asked them to take the female hero’s name out of the title and turn it into a more gender-neutral title that wouldn’t turn away our core boy audience.” Along with that, there were marketing images that showed Syaoran front in center with Sakura behind him. From a business standpoint, that makes sense. The demographic that was coming out to watch other Kids WB shows at the time was boys. Kids WB, Fox Kids, and Cartoon Network were all vying for boys to watch their shows. They weren’t going to change that philosophy to appeal to girls because they weren’t coming out in droves to make their shows incredibly popular. To the networks, girls were just an added bonus to help drive numbers up, and that’s it.

Cardcaptors certainly became the show that personified fan passion and outrage — it also was one of the first shows of the anime boom period in America to pose the question of how we should localize anime. It’s a show that’s become infamous for the wrong reasons and is almost a folk tale at this point as more modern fans that want to see the show can watch the original version, while the original Cardcaptors broadcast is slowly becoming lost to time. Cardcaptors was never going to become as big as Pokémon, but it’s possible it could’ve done well if it had stuck to its magical girl roots. It might not have drawn as much of the boys demographic by doing so, but maybe it could have brought more girls to watch anime and created a world where more anime targeted to girls got a chance in America. The reality we live in, though, is that Cardcaptors was an attempt to make the next big anime series after Pokémon, but ultimately, it wasn’t.

    You can watch Cardcaptor Sakura in its original form as it was intended right here!

    Jared Clemons is a writer and podcaster for Seasonal Anime Checkup and author of One Shining Moment: A Critical Analysis of Love Live! Sunshine!!. He can be found on Twitter @ragbag.

  Do you love writing? Do you love anime? If you have an idea for a features story, pitch it to Crunchyroll Features!

By: Jared Clemons

[sol1056]

hey! i noticed that you’ve written a lot about how voltron fails as a mecha series, and it got me curious about what a GOOD mecha series looks like. do you have any recs for someone whose only experience with the genre, quite literally, is voltron?

note: that is NOT where I wanted the cut. who knows what the devs are doing over there at tumblr hq.

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Welp, there’s more than one kind of mecha. There’s super robots -- where (in general) the robots are ultra-powered and relatively indestructible. Then there’s real robots, which will break down and/or run out of ammunition at the most dramatically critical moments. And then there’s a category that at best might be nearly-sentient robots, which have minds and motivations of their own -- but I wouldn’t say that’s a true category (in terms of the genre) so much as a distinction I've noted.

I’ve never been big into the super robot series (with a few exceptions), and I mostly find the combining robot genre to be frustrating. Former mechanic and engineer who currently works with AI, so a lot of the hand-wavey aspects are frustrating for me, especially in super robots where things mysteriously repair themselves and there’s never a struggle to upgrade/repair. (And don’t even get me started on the idea of controlling a bipedal reactive machine with only two foot pedals and a damn joystick.)

Which is all to say, I suppose I should recommend that you watch the classics, except I’m not really sure what they are because I’ve forgotten most of them. And frankly a lot of them are really shoddy animation by today’s standards, and life is too short to waste time on that. I’ll need to refer you along to other mecha fans to add their recommendations, instead.

Well, I can at least recommend Gundam and Macross, but that’s kind of like saying I recommend Doc Martens and Aididas -- that barely narrows it down, since there’s so many options within each brand. Everyone’s got their favorites in each, as do I, but any mecha series that’s stayed with me is one that found a way to either twist the core trope, or explored implications that other series glossed over.

Note: I’ve never seen any version of Eva, and never felt the urge to, either. Sorry. Ask someone else for input on that. Plus there’s also ones I’ll leave off here ‘cause they’re veering over into AI/robots/tech and less what would usually be called mecha, but they’re still worthwhile: Battle Fairy Yukikaze, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, Broken Blade, Last Exile, and Voices of a Distant Star all come to mind.

Gundam

For me, I adore the technical geeky touches in Gundam F91, but the story is total spaghetti, so you might want to skip that until you’re more familiar with the gundam tropes. (It was meant to be a series, iirc, got shut down, and they took the pieces and made a movie from it, so it’s... kind of compressed, to put it mildly). 

Gundam Wing and Gundam 00 are considerably less geeky on the technical (though they do satisfy the mechanic itch, with a bit more real robot, at least on the technicalities). I like the international core cast, and the way each series explores geopolitical dynamics. (That said, skip the second season of Gundam 00. It just goes totally off the rails into some really wild and wacky directions.)

A long-running concept like Gundam is recognizable across the series thanks to core concepts, and in Gundam’s case it’s the conflicts between imperialism and colonialism, war versus justified rebellion, and pacifism versus a first-strike as self-defense. What I liked with Wing and 00, in particular, was its central pilots felt more tied to (and aware of) the political ramifications of their actions.

I did watch about half of Iron-Blooded Orphans, which struck out in a new direction by having Mars as the colony instead of the lagrange points, but didn’t bother finishing. From what I hear, watch it with a box of tissues, as it’s a return to the classic kill-em-all perspective of the original Gundam series.

Macross

I’m sure someone else will tell you to watch the original Macross (the american version being Robotech, albeit highly edited). I know lots of people adore the first Macross series, but it’s just too late-80s for me. (The hair, my god, the hair.)

Personally, I prefer Macross Frontier -- the amination is much improved, though the fact is I also adore the voices of Yuuichi Nakamura and Aya Endō. Macross has some politics, but it’s mostly internal -- that is, the opponents aren’t human, so whatever debate there is about who’s right or wrong is mostly one-sided, since we only ever see humans doing the talking.

I tried to watch Macross Delta but it just didn’t do it for me -- and therein lies some of the issues (for me) with both Gundam and Macross. Because both have some core elements that they tackle in every series, it can start to feel a bit repetitive.

For Macross it’s always music, Valkyries (the mecha type for Macross), and a love triangle -- which sometimes isn’t even resolved. (I’ve read all kinds of debates about whether Alto ends up with Sheryl or with Ranka, but the series leaves it open.)

A good writer can explore these themes over and over, but between the two, I personally think Gundam has done a bit better of pivoting to take a new angle with each series. But at the same time, Gundam is pretty consistent about not building on a previous series -- with a few notable exceptions, most of its series are alternate-universe stories to each other. In Macross, they’re all continuations of the previous -- so if you’re not into its setup about aliens and weird diseases and whatnot, you’re only going to get more of the same in the next series.

Everything else

So here’s the series I like, but I’m not sure all of these would be counted as ‘true’ mecha by other fans (a debate I mostly ignore, so I’ll leave it to others to argue about that).

Escaflowne -- one of the rare breed of fantasy-styled mecha (Broken Blade being another one that comes to mind). The animation is strongly 80s, but the voice acting is superb, the story (originally meant to be longer, then budget cuts forced a much longer story to squeeze into half the episodes it really deserved).

[It’s also a series I’d call a harbinger, similar to tripping over little-known movies from twenty years ago and realizing every single actor including walk-on parts went on to be massive names. Escaflowne’s got that, but that also extends to its animation team, its director, its composer, on and on. All of them went onto work on some of the greatest hits of anime. That makes Escaflowne immensely (if quietly and somewhat subtly) influential, both for the genre and animation overall.]

Eureka Seven -- another not-on-Earth story. At first the mecha movement -- almost like surfing in the sky -- was odd, but they took some interesting physics concepts and made them not just worldbuilding, but integral parts of the story. Okay, I’m not keen on how the female lead gets successively down-graded as the hero ramps up, but there are some emotional implications of Massive Destructive Machines where Eureka Seven lingers that a lot of other series gloss over.

Fafner in the Azure -- another aliens-against-humans, but first off, I’m gonna say it: you either love Hisashi Hirai‘s character designs or you want to torch them with total prejudice. If you can get past that, Fafner is brutal to its characters well beyond most other series, excepting the earliest Gundams. Although (of course) the pilots are all kids, there are in-story reasons, and there are still adults running the show. And there are consequences, small and large.

Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion -- because what would life be if we didn’t have at least one mecha series with character designs from CLAMP. (Which, admittedly, I loathe, but somehow it worked here.) Can’t speak for the second season, but the first season played up something a lot of mecha bypass for just plain banging on each other, which is strategy. It caught me at the time, at least.

Full Metal Panic -- watch this after watching Gundam Wing and/or Gundam 00, to get the tropes they’re playing on with Sousuke Sagara (the ostensible protagonist who just cannot seem to relate to real human beings). I saw one description of him as “about as well-adjusted as a feral child” and that kinda fits. It’s more real robots, and of course parts require some hardcore suspension of disbelief (the commanding officer who looks 14, sounds like she’s 12, and has boobs that never occur in nature on a frame that teeny). But all told, a lot of fun and plenty of explosions.

RahXephon -- this is another oddball one, because the mecha aren’t mecha, they’re golems (as in, creatures made from clay). For all that, there’s a lot of significant mecha influence and tropes at work. It’s held up pretty well, animation-wise, considering its age (from 2002). and while it’s the same ‘strange aliens attack earth’ plotline, it spins all that off in a completely different direction.

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann (aka Gurren Lagann) -- don’t watch this one until you’ve seen plenty of others, though, because it’s a fondly affectionate send-up of nearly every possible trope from combining to super to real robots. Cranked up to eleven.

Knights of Sidonia -- of all the ones on this list, KoS is possibly my most favorite. It was an early all-CGI series, and a lot of people were turned off by that, but once you get used to it, the story can carry you along. Like Macross Frontier, it takes place in deep space, where a colony of humans fight for survival with an incomprehensible (and nearly unstoppable) alien foe. But KoS is true science fiction, with a lot of solid science driving its dramatic points. Also--unlike most of the others series--although the characters are technically human, they’ve also evolved as a result of their time in space. For one, they have three genders, for another, they don’t eat; they photosynthesize.