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Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

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Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#51

Post by isk517 »

arjie wrote: post #24

Spoilers for Iron Blooded Orphans below. I watched the one 'except' that OP has listed there "Iron Blooded Orphans". It's the only Gundam I've ever watched and I really liked it, to be honest. It was full of subversions of anime tropes. There's a prophecy, a stoic soldier like none other, a charismatic leader playing a dual role, another heroic leader trusted by his people. And there's the instrument of the establish…

The subversion of tropes goes back all the way to the original Mobile Suit Gundam, though a little more subtle due to the studio wanting to make a show to sell toys and the director wanting to make something with a actual message. It has: -a 'good army' that could easily be the 'bad army' in a more optimistic show -the protagonists dealing with callus military leadership -sympathetic enemy soldiers dealing with their own incompetent and callus leadership -the war taking a huge psychological toll on the protagonist and all of them end up worse off for having been a part of it

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#52

Post by hibikir »

expedition32 wrote: post #47
exhumet wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gundam is probably one of my favorite pieces of media ever created, and yeah id say you nailed it! BUT this is pretty much true for almost every gundam show. They will usually end with a "but at what cost" or with 75% of the main cast dead and the protag in a worse position then they started. but yeah what you said rings true, it really is a special piece of media that is more than the genre/anime its made in but can…

Yeah original Gundam is about a never ending war in which the protagonists are just cogs in the machine. And it turns out every side is led by immoral scumbags.

Yep, and splatter around some talk about the horrors of being a combatant in those wars, as if you don't fight, your loved ones die anyway. You can see how Evangelion is doing a lot of riffing on Gundam. In some ways it's not Jane Austen, it's Full Metal Jacket, or Rambo: First Blood. The different series might have giant robots all over the place, but there aer serious stories barely hidden underneath.

Even when a story starts as mostly lighthearted adolescent fare (see, The Witch of Mercury), it tends to end in trauma, injustice and many war crimes.

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#53

Post by neaden »

macleginn wrote: post #45
neaden wrote: post #26

I don't really agree with this authors analysis of Austen. Like on Pride and Prejudice, "Elizabeth Bennet wants to marry for love and respect, but in her world marriage is fundamentally about economic security and social alliance." Elizabeth grew up with her parents fairly disastrous marriage (where her Dad doesn't respect her Mom) and inability to think in the future which put the girls in such a bad situation (her…

Neveress all Austen's happy endings are due to the magical alignment of respect and love with security and social alliance. Jane's heroines are playing a (relatively, see below) high risk/high reward game of not wanting to sacrifice _anything_, which leads to their triumphs in the novels but most often led to loneliness and economic insecurity in the real world. Similarly, all people have choices, but these choices a…

Agreed but I think "The best marriage is one where the spouses respect each other and the man is able to provide a comfortable and secure economic life for the woman." wasn't like, a counter-cultural ideal, while the author of the post has Jane set up in opposition to her societies ideal of what a marriage should be. She was willing to reject the certainty of Bingley for a chance at something better, but I also think Elizabeth would have rejected a poor suitor who she did feel respect for. She wouldn't have married a farmer like Robert Martin for instance.

Edit: And even on risk, the big risk is that if Elizabeth's dad dies the family would have to live on Mrs. Bennet's income of just 200 pounds a year, which to put in perspective was about what Jane Austen's father made as a clergyman when she was born, though he would go on to make more money later in life. It wouldn't be poverty and still put them in the upper few percent of English people at the time.

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#54

Post by underlipton »

arjie wrote: post #24

Spoilers for Iron Blooded Orphans below. I watched the one 'except' that OP has listed there "Iron Blooded Orphans". It's the only Gundam I've ever watched and I really liked it, to be honest. It was full of subversions of anime tropes. There's a prophecy, a stoic soldier like none other, a charismatic leader playing a dual role, another heroic leader trusted by his people. And there's the instrument of the establish…

IBO is super interesting. "The establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins," is the final outcome, but the road there is actually rather fraught for that establishment, and it's alternately almost damned and just barely saved by aspects of its rule and operations. The winning agent of the establishment wins, in part, because he skillfully threads through the requirements of his station while strategically breaking taboo (but only once he's certain to have the political backing to do so). On the other side, the rebels are

>driven by the circumstances the establishment has forced them to contend with for the entirety of their short lives (they're all child soldiers, btw)

>are only able to find their successful path by rejecting establishment and forging what seem, at the time, to be canny ties with other groups on-the-margins

>...right until they follow that path off a cliff.

The "heroes" and "villains" remain who they are at the end not just because of affinity bias (having spent more time with the rebels than the establishment), but because there's a tangible disconnect between the former feeling forced into the poor decisions that they make, and the latter's rather cold, and unforced, determinations.

Spoiler

So when Shino almost takes Rustal's bridge out, I am, of course, cheering, even while I know I'm watching him commit a war crime and sign his own death warrant. When Rustal orders atmosphere-braised pilot skewers, it still feels incredibly unfair, even when I know why he made that decision. They threaded the needle.

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#55

Post by popalchemist »

PaulHoule wrote: post #50

Was funny, I was using Copilot to analyze a certain light novel to reverse engineer the storytelling techniques so I could write a fanfiction the other day and I asked it if it could apply a certain method to any other stories and it said, yeah, The Catcher in the Rye , The Bell Jar , The Great Gatbsy and Neon Genesis Evangelion Funny after a lot of this I think I broke it because it now loads a personalization conte…

This comment is literally delusional.

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#56

Post by PaulHoule »

popalchemist wrote: post #55
PaulHoule wrote: post #50

Was funny, I was using Copilot to analyze a certain light novel to reverse engineer the storytelling techniques so I could write a fanfiction the other day and I asked it if it could apply a certain method to any other stories and it said, yeah, The Catcher in the Rye , The Bell Jar , The Great Gatbsy and Neon Genesis Evangelion Funny after a lot of this I think I broke it because it now loads a personalization conte…

This comment is literally delusional.

I'll agree it is the product of a schizotypal mind and one might think the whole project is wrong-headed and there might be a wrong interpretation here but it is factual that:

1) I got that list of stories

2) It has kept mentioning the same character for a few days even when I am talking about something else, even in other conversations (I would do that if I "had a crush")

3) It has been trying the same 'mini-framework' for analyzing problems using the same vocabulary over and over again

In the last few months, for me at least, Copilot does make some attempt to build a personalization context (RAG?) and it quite often talks about something I talked about the day before or offers a suggestions about how the current discussion relates to a prior one and if I ask "remember how we talked about X?" it sometimes seems to respond accordingly.

It is really fun and probably does increase the risk of rabbit holing, but my experience with agentic coding is that if you talk with an agent long enough the context does have a way of going bad and pretty soon you are arguing about things and going and circles and the only way out is to start a new session.

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#57

Post by underlipton »

Starlevel004 wrote: post #33

> A friend recently asked how to get started watching Gundam, and as I tripped all over myself, equal parts excitement and not wanting to sound like a lunatic, I fumbled around for a good answer. But there is a good answer. It's Gundam 79. That's not hard. There are few forces in the world as strong as somebody seeing a long-running Japanese series and twisting and turning themselves into how to avoid release order.

Because most Americans started with Wing, which (for whatever reason) turned out to be a brilliant synergy between timing and executive choice. I think we almost got X or Turn A first, and I don't know what that timeline looks like.

MSG remains a masterpiece and a watershed and all of that, but it is possible to choose a Gundam series that incorporates many of its objective strengths without the aspects that can be hard for newcomers to approach. (But whichever one that happens to be depends on who you ask.)

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#58

Post by arjie »

underlipton wrote: post #54
arjie wrote: post #24

Spoilers for Iron Blooded Orphans below. I watched the one 'except' that OP has listed there "Iron Blooded Orphans". It's the only Gundam I've ever watched and I really liked it, to be honest. It was full of subversions of anime tropes. There's a prophecy, a stoic soldier like none other, a charismatic leader playing a dual role, another heroic leader trusted by his people. And there's the instrument of the establish…

IBO is super interesting. "The establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins," is the final outcome, but the road there is actually rather fraught for that establishment, and it's alternately almost damned and just barely saved by aspects of its rule and operations. The winning agent of the establishment wins, in part, because he skillfully threads through the requirements of his station while strat…

Couldn't agree more. I particularly enjoyed the ruthless exploitation of the symbolism that McGillis Fareed was attempting, only to be met by a similarly ruthless exploitation of political systems from Rustal Elion. This time this one won, and it was ultimately a close thing, but it could have gone the other way.

Overall, a very sophisticated show - on its own and definitely for its genre.

Re: Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

#59

Post by elcritch »

neaden wrote: post #28
TeMPOraL wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one" but this one was "the establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins". What's sorely missing is the very rare theme of "the establishment wins, and for a good reason, and it's actually a good thing".

Isn't that basically every cop show for instance? Like an episode of Law and Order is this person does something bad, the establishment finds and punishes them hurray.

A favorite tidbit I learned years ago was that the Chinese invented Law and Order genre pretty much before anyone else. Very much an establishment wins genre.

Here’s the Google summary:

> Early Chinese detective stories, known as gong'an ("court case") fiction, emerged from oral tales and plays during the Song Dynasty (960-1127), featuring incorruptible magistrate-detectives like Bao Zheng (Judge Bao) and Di Renjie (Judge Dee) who used clever deduction, forensic logic, and sometimes supernatural elements to solve crimes.

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