171–180 of 194 posts
> A friend recently asked how to get started watching Gundam So what is good order to watch Gundam in 2025? What should be skipped? Are mangas/novels worth it or is it better just to watch anime?
Love the lore in gundam, usually ends in sadness but yeah Watched almost all of them except igloo/build fighter type Hathaway had a great fight sequence where you felt the scale of Gundam and the violence/heat the soundfx tooo ahhhh https://youtu.be/oiiIkSuiios?si=ylHdAqVnE2pPeSKv&t=202 Thunderbolt has great graphics too and the jazz And unicorn the bell pepper gundam
Also lol @ kshatriya being called bell pepper. It's probably my favorite non-gundam mobile suit. I wish they'd make an MG kit for it despite how massive it is.
When reading Jane Austen you learn a fair bit about the English upper classes of that time period. What do you learn from Gundam?
Learning stuff is a weird primary motivator to read fiction. (I’m not sure you learn as much as you think; I mean some context leaks through but Austin’s characters aren’t necessarily _that_ archetypical. If you want that you might be better with a social history.)
Also, Austen was definitely commenting on society of that time, though sometimes you need other background knowledge to get the reference.
In the end, almost everything has a soap opera in it somewhere. People have a hard time processing stories that don't have a soap opera in them somewhere. For some people it's just impossible. There's really only a minority of people who are interested in stories that have no personal relationship stories in them at all. That's not to say that the parts that aren't soap opera aren't meaningfully different. I disagree…
When reading Jane Austen you learn a fair bit about the English upper classes of that time period. What do you learn from Gundam?
You learn a lot about post-War Japan and the New Left. Just because a writer dresses their story up in futuristic or fantastical trappings does not mean that they aren't writing about their own cultural milieu. Tomino is explicit about this in the interviews compiled for the supplementary material in the Gundam Origin manga. They are a fantastic read (and the manga is a masterpiece).
Pretty good quote from the article and a succinct way to sum up the human dilemma of existing in a society.
When reading Jane Austen you learn a fair bit about the English upper classes of that time period. What do you learn from Gundam?
You learn a lot about post-War Japan and the New Left. Just because a writer dresses their story up in futuristic or fantastical trappings does not mean that they aren't writing about their own cultural milieu. Tomino is explicit about this in the interviews compiled for the supplementary material in the Gundam Origin manga. They are a fantastic read (and the manga is a masterpiece).
I am curious how people 100 years from now will perceive art from the last 20 years, much of it feels like a thinly veiled commentary on whatever hot button social issue was prevalent at the time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a lot of character-centered conflicts boil down to the same set of problems, regardless of the setting. For instance, you often see "keep the status quo and die a slow death" vs "expensive, risky gamble". Sometimes the setting is a small midwest town, sometimes it's a spaceship on the way to Beta Virginis. Sometimes the solution is actually unique to the setting but often it's just "find a compromise, prevent…
The Expanse (both a recently completed book series and a cancelled yet mostly complete TV adaptation) is pretty good at this; it sets up a world with complex political dynamics, and lets things mostly evolve as a result of those dynamics, with the main characters largely just along for the ride. It takes the science parts super seriously too: ships have to worry about acceleration and debris fields during battle, com…
"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…
I recall this from one of Donald Westlake's books: "He stopped on a dime and collected 5 cents change."