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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

#71

Post by kibwen »

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 .

I think this erases some interesting nuance. The original Gundam is unabashedly a toy commercial--ostensibly marketing to children in the exact same vein as the OG Transformers--except apparently nobody told the director, so it's an extremely emotionally mature show (more so than nearly all YA fiction) where the main character, a teen soldier, is narrowly escaping death, is killing people, is watching everyone around him be killed, is suffering the effects of PTSD, is being openly used as an expendable tool by his superiors, is on the run for his life being hunted by half the world, is coming to terms with the costs of war and the throngs of innocent bystanders being reduced to burning ash for the sake of cruel and ambitous men, and did you know you can buy his cool robo-flail accessory at Toys 'R Us today?

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

#72

Post by exBarrelSpoiler »

FuriouslyAdrift wrote: post #10

Glad they mentioned Iron Blooded Orphans... the best gundam (and very cynical and dark)

This essay about it is a good watch- it concludes that IBO might be a cynical and dark show rooted in realism, but the ending is hopeful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNRjwktvPV8

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

#73

Post by frmersdog »

ge96 wrote: post #63

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

GBF is a love letter to the franchise and to the gunpla subculture. Its animation quality is high, the characters are fun, and Easter eggs are fun to look out for - including more than one where characters who met unhappy fates in their original series seem to be living happily in "our" world. Highly recommended.

The Build Divers series is not very good, but I still recommend it to people who have some time to spare, because Re:Rise retroactively makes it so satisfying. Re:Rise itself is deceptively sophisticated, and touches on some mature themes that even most serious Gundam series don't get to.

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

#74

Post by ge96 »

frmersdog wrote: post #73
ge96 wrote: post #63

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

GBF is a love letter to the franchise and to the gunpla subculture. Its animation quality is high, the characters are fun, and Easter eggs are fun to look out for - including more than one where characters who met unhappy fates in their original series seem to be living happily in "our" world. Highly recommended. The Build Divers series is not very good, but I still recommend it to people who have some time to spare,…

Alright I'll try GBF again

I forgot to mention the hype of that Zgok lol in Seed Freedom

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvyAa4CgaOs

ugh I don't like these 60FPS things on YT makes it look worse my bad, updated

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

#75

Post by brendoelfrendo »

isk517 wrote: post #51
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…

And to your first point, the "good army" did become the "bad army" by the time of the sequel, Zeta Gundam. Once they're no longer on the back footing, the "good army" becomes a ruthless occupying force, operating almost entirely without oversight and under the direction of officers who are all too willing to cover up war crimes. But it still makes sense because you can see over the course of the show how such shift could happen in the inter-war period between the One Year War and the Gryps Conflict.

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

#77

Post by OneDeuxTriSeiGo »

kibwen wrote: post #71
arjie wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

I think this erases some interesting nuance. The original Gundam is unabashedly a toy commercial--ostensibly marketing to children in the exact same vein as the OG Transformers--except apparently nobody told the director, so it's an extremely emotionally mature show (more so than nearly all YA fiction) where the main character, a teen soldier, is narrowly escaping death, is killing people, is watching everyone around…

It's not that nobody told the director. It's that the director knew nobody cared what was actually in the show as long as the end product moved units on the shelves.

It's part of the reason the names are so wild. He was actively pushing the envelope with outrageous names during pitches to see how far he could go before producers would stop nodding along without paying attention.

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

#79

Post by exBarrelSpoiler »

underlipton wrote: post #57
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 h…

G Gundam might've been the most uncomplicated, yet wrong, series to introduce the American mass market to the franchise.

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

#80

Post by gabriel666smith »

fellowniusmonk wrote: post #67
macleginn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's because Austen had sense and not sensibility. She herself never married, she absolutely rips on the state of affairs in her time but she wasn't going to advocate in her pop fiction that the women of the time make a move that would almost certainly ruin their prospects. Austen was insanely clever and pragmatic at making her point and having it shared, as much credit as she gets it isn't nearly enough. In some o…

She was such a good marketer of ideas, and at sneaking them into more palatable constructs.

The opinion you replied to frustrates me when I encounter it.

She was only doing "magical thinking" in her narratives so much as her novels are marriage comedies, and this is required.

The reality of her life was that she was incredibly uncompromising. She had to publish her early work under an androgynous pseudonym to profit from it.

She didn't marry cynically despite having opportunities to. She was a realist, and a strain of that runs through her work. There are many moments where she anticipates the great Russian realists. She managed to turn a good profit on her art in spite of her period's circumstances. She genuinely advanced the idea of who is allowed to make art, and who is allowed to profit from it.

Generally the novels have nuanced but happy endings. She was writing for an audience. She was a shrewd businessman at a time when there weren't businesswomen. In her personal life, she was genuinely uncompromising. She's a GOATed artist. You can't ask much more of a human!

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