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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

#131

Post by dluan »

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…

You have to be more specific because "Eastern" here does not include Chinese thematic tropes.

https://x.com/xlr8harder/status/1962768298153521202

Sun Wukong is the original "normal guy who grinds to greatness", which was the original plot of Dragonball before it turned more into Harry Potter (you are the chosen one).

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

#132

Post by terribleperson »

nemomarx wrote: post #35
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.

The memes around Fate were especially annoying for this. Anything but a "dated" entry, I guess.

I think fate is a fair one to struggle with because not only is it a complex franchise, none of the Fate anime are even close to perfect. Zero tells an interesting story but you have to put up with Gen Urobuchi and it spoils parts of Stay Night. Stay Night is the classic, but calling the original anime dated is an understatement. Unlimited Blade Works (Ufotable) is very shiny and a lot of fun, but I think it's less interesting and more straight up shonen.

I started with Zero, and I feel it was a good way to start, but a lot of people disagree.

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

#134

Post by [deleted] »

gabriel666smith wrote: post #36

"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a robot suit to ride around and fight things with." I was visiting Jane Austen's House Museum last year and it always gives me pleasure to see how wildly popular her work remains. There always seem to be tourists there visiting from all over the world. That is really heartening. She was very innovative. Maybe…

[deleted]

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

#135

Post by ifh-hn »

baruz wrote: post #97
ifh-hn wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not well read, and don't think I'd be able to finish any of the classics. As such I have no clue what "slipping from prose into a soft Iambic pentameter" means. I came here for the robots.

Not with that attitude you won’t! But dip your toe in, _Pride and prejudice_ is pretty light and breezy while having some depth to it.

I don't know. All I remember from school is absolutely hating being forced to read, and understand/interpret, thing like shakespeare and Jane Austin. But then again I now like a lot of the vegetables I used to hate as a kid...

My daughter loves the classics, me, science fiction and fantasy.

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

#137

Post by Tanoc »

arjie wrote: post #49
rKarpinski wrote: post #46

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" This probably has more to do with the type of content you are consuming. If you watch things for young adults, it will probably follow "the Heroes Journey" - wether it is LOTR, Harry Potter, Star Wars etc. (the West) or Naruto, Pokemon, Dragon Ball/Journey to the West (the East)

That's the point. AFAIK Gundam is a mecha-anime for young adults - the same audience as Marvel movies or the average Oscar winner. It's not East of Eden or The Remains of The Day .

The original intended audience for Gundam was supposed to be college students if I remember correctly and not highschoolers. 1976 was the real start of when you had this massive wave of engineering finesse in Japan that overtook everything else in the world. It was the time when Japan was forming an obsession with mechanics, with model kits of everything from fully articulated 1:36 scale 50cc scooters to giant 1:20 scale warships that would take up an entire table. Kids couldn't afford these models as they were priced strictly for adults.

Gundam definitely fit into that "engineering fantasies for young professionals" niche, at least until ZZ came around in 1985. Gundam has the root word of "gun" because they were originally these more grounded fantasy weapons instead of man made demi-gods that appeared in shows like UFO Robot Grendizer. They weren't supposed to be superheroes, they were what engineering minded young men thought would be cool to have if they were given an unlimited budget to create bipedal tanks that could do the job of bomber aircraft, navy destroyers, and orbital bombardment satellites all in one. That's why Gundams, especially Zaku units, move slowly, pivot in unnatural ways, and use jets and wheels for locomotion, because they're giant tanks with manipulators that hold guns and not suits of armour. BattleTech also comes from that same origin, although it and Mechwarrior's development went all in on the "tank but with legs" idea instead of slowly losing their identity to the super robot genre.

The melodrama they mixed in as framing to discuss Japan's post-war military pacifism was incidental to creating and populating the backstory for an engineer's dream unlimited budget mobile weapons platform. So they weren't the Marvel equivalent back in 1979, they were more like Japan's answer to some of Robert Heinlein's militaristic concepts in Starship Troopers and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, where the concept came first and the story was just an excuse to see that concept in action.

G Gundam and SD Gundam are more like the Marvel movies, in that they strip away most of the issues being discussed and coast on the aesthetic similarities and caricaturized versions of themes from the source material.

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

#138

Post by gabriel666smith »

FreakLegion wrote: post #124
gabriel666smith wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course! This is my favourite example, from Sense and Sensibility, because it announces itself with "burst", and that's the novel where she deploys it most: "Elinor could sit it no longer. She almost ran out of the room, and as soon as the door was closed, burst into tears of joy, which at first she thought would never cease." She 'tends towards Iambic' in literary criticism terminology. So it's not a strict Iambic…

> "Till this moment I never knew myself." - Sense and Sensibility again? I can't remember off the dome. That's a gorgeous strict Iambic. "Till this moment I" and "I never knew myself" would be trochaic and iambic, respectively, but they don't strictly scan when you overlay the 'I's. You can of course get them to by e.g. eliding 'moment', or adding a line break and taking '-ment' as a feminine ending, or just scanning…

+1! Hanson is one of the gold-standards on this. It is idiosyncratic, you're right - to the speaker / reader as much as the writer (is my contention with their work).

Personally, I do take 'ment' as a feminine ending there, or - more specifically - the T sound runs into the I sound when I read it, the way it would in the predominantly Italian stuff she's likely referencing.

I'm very much with Gordon Lish on Shakespeare's monosyllabic drift words - that he was educated in Latin, and integrating Germanic vocabulary into that structure relatively freely, and further analysis is almost impossibly complex. That said, there's a lot of moments in those where I'd kill to hear where the stress landed when first performed.

This specific area is really one of those "What if?" moments in literary criticism, I think - I believe it would be incredibly beneficial for the form if this was the dominant focus of critique, rather than thematic stuff. On the rare occasions I teach at universities, this is all completely new to students, which sucks - it's entirely possible to approach prose theory with the same rigour as music theory, and it seems (in the UK, at least) to be very quickly becoming a lost art!

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

#139

Post by HelloNurse »

Weapons and violence in Jane Austen's novels include characters hunting with shotguns and (remotely implied) armed Navy ships.

Nothing comparable to treating a mobile suit like an extension of the body, or killing people, or both at the same time (e.g. the "duel" between Char Aznable and Kycilia Zabi).

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