You're listening to season eight of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci-fi mega franchise, Mobile Suit Gundam, researching its influences, examining its themes, and discussing how each piece of the Gundam canon fits within the changing context in Japan and the world from 1979 to today.
Monster. This is episode 8.16. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here, and we are your hosts. I'm Tom, Gundam fan and very happy to have shared another Gundam series with all of you.
And I'm Nina. And while I finally understand why so many fans hate other Nina, my final verdict is that she catches an inordinate amount of flak, given what so many other characters in this show get up to. Molesuit Breakdown is made possible by our 721 paying subscribers. Thank you all. And special thanks to our most recent signups, rob H, emily H, mountain Dew Kickstart Black Cherry Enthusiast, maka 85 and Jeff G. You keep us genki. Starting next week, Tom and I will be working on a translation of a piece of Never officially Subtitled Gundam animation. SD Gundam festival. It released before Victory Gundam, and because we are nothing if not committed to the bit, we are going to discuss it, even if that means translating it ourselves. Support this and the rest of our mission to cover all of Gundam in release order by becoming a paid subscriber today@gundampodcast.com slash patreon.
The next work on our watch list, as Nina said, is St Gundam Matsuri or SD Gundam Festival. It's a series of three episode length shorts totaling around 81 minutes, that started playing in theaters on March 13, 1993, one month before Victory Gundam began its run on TV. This will be the third time we've translated an SD Gundam work, and we've learned a lot doing the first two. That should make this a somewhat smoother process, but on the other hand, SD Gundam Festival is more than twice as long as Musha Knight Command Emergency Scramble and Adventure Girl Artesia Dawn of Papal episode 103 Bride of Suganom put together. So we're not sure how long this translation process is going to take, but we won't be disappearing completely while we work on it either. In the meantime, we're going to be putting together a series of extra episodes focused on research questions or discussion topics that we didn't have time to cover back when they were relevant. We've got a whiteboard here in the studio, totally covered with great ideas. I know you can't see it, but trust me, they're great. You're going to want to hear them. Now, without further ado, let's get into our wrap up discussion about 83, including some responses to questions submitted by listeners and our own final thoughts.
Before we get to our own last minute end of the series. Thoughts. We asked our listeners to submit any questions they had about the series and about our thoughts on it and got some really interesting questions back. So thank you everyone who wrote in. First up, Stevie MCD hopes we can shed some light on 80 three's reputation. He says as a Gundam fan, I often hear people call stardust memory the Top Gun of Gundam or anime. Having seen both, I don't really get that comparison. I was wondering what your thoughts on the matter were.
Stevie is quite correct. Everyone says that this is top Gundam. It's generally taken as an article of faith that Top Gun did inspire 83, and I think there's a lot of good reasons to think that. A lot of the characters look suspiciously similar. Nina Purpleton is a pretty good match for Kelly McGillis from Top Gun. Mancha and Goose look very similar. Ko is a good match for Tom Cruise. It also seems like Top Gun kicked off a vogue for flight jackets in Japan with all the patches and everything. And we see those outfits depicted in the show co's like pilot wings that feature briefly in the Kelly Laisner episodes seem to be taken from the pilot wings in Top Gun. And the team that made 83 is going to reunite in just like, a year or two after this to make Macross Plus, which is even more like Top Gun than 83 is.
I also think certain aspects of Cole's character are similar. Cole is younger and more clueless and less flirtatious, certainly, but he also has that rule breaking streak, that love of piloting and of pushing a machine to the limits, particularly in the early part of the OVA. I think this gets less and less true over the course of it, but it has a similar sense of vagueness about who exactly their enemy is and what threat those enemies pose. Though it's worth remembering that although it's late in the day, Top Gun is still taking place kind of in the shadow within the memory of the Cold War. And that sense of looming threat would have been there even without being explicitly stated. And we get that same looming threat in the OVA once the nuke is stolen.
A lot of Top Gun is about the training program. It's really about pilots challenging each other, the young pilots overcoming the older, more experienced ones, the competition between different US fighter jets. And while Gato isn't a member of the Federation forces, he does steal a Federation Gundam. And a lot of the action of W 83 is about Gundam versus Gundam combat.
They have similar vibes in that whole, like, look at these cool planes and what they can do. Look at these cool mobile suits and what they can do. Put into a context that makes it more of an abstraction, more about neat technology and skillful pilots than about war specifically. And to some extent, the through line on the main character is that it's about him growing up. Tom Cruise's character in Top Gun has this huge chip on his shoulder, which it comes out that there's some suspicion around his dad and his dad's death. So he feels like he has to be extra showy, extra aggressive all of the time because of his dad's reputation. Ko is not carrying that baggage, but does grow up a lot as a person and become much less naive.
On a vibes and themes level, the vibe of Top Gun and the vibe of 83 is like, let's depict this cool military tech with the utmost realism. Obviously, the mobile suits are not real in W 83, but they are presented with the aura of real military technology. So there is that similar vibe of what they're trying to go for. And Top Gun clearly was made by people who really love planes and flying and fighter jets and dog fighting. 83 was also made by people who clearly really love planes and pilots and fighter jets and dog fighting. Kawamori Shoji is really into them. Then on that thematic level, here things actually get really interesting. And here I would call W 83 not a ripoff, but a response to Top Gun, because Top Gun very early on has this one line that really defines so much of the movie, and it's during a briefing, one of the officers says, your job is not to think about politics. You are an instrument. I'm paraphrasing, obviously, but what that does is it pushes all the political questions out of the movie, but it also locks them to the movie. The politics are always standing right off screen. They are always present in the unseen commanding officers who are giving the orders. 83 sees that and then it says, okay, what if you could see those political decision makers, the Tom Cruise level people. Co is still there. Co is not really making political decisions. He acts as an instrument of those above him who are making those decisions. So W 83 hears that line in Top Gun and then expands the frame to include those bigger questions. Again, very early in W 83, there's a parallel but opposite line where Gato says, soldiers have to think about politics. If you don't think about politics, you're never going to be more than a grunt and you will never be able to defeat me.
Brayden Kay wrote in what would you say was your favorite scene? Could be for narrative reasons, artistic composition, or just simply the emotions or impact of it. This was difficult for me. I have a couple of scenes that I very much enjoyed for different reasons, but I think my absolute favorite has to be the scene in which Captain Synapse tells Nina that she can go, that she should get in. One of their smaller craft and get away from the battle because there are so few lines other than him saying that to her and her saying, no, I think I'm going to stay. Nobody says anything but the music and the way all of the faces are animated around the room, the way everyone looks at her. There is so much emotion in it without anybody saying anything. And I found it very moving and really beautifully done. Like a really great example of how powerful animation can be. One of my other favorites, when I can ignore the narrative aspects thereof, is the extremely goofy chase scene around the hangar when Keith has those photographs of Nina and Mora starts chasing him around because of it. It's so madcap and silly. It feels like something out of Looney Tunes and was so funny. It was, for me, one of the most funny scenes in the whole OVA. And again, mostly because of how the animators thought out the kind of movement and who was doing it and the pacing of it. Whoever storyboarded that I think did a fantastic job. And it's not even very detailed or very sharp. The animation is a bit the figures are certainly very simplified at points in that scene, but the sense of movement is so dynamic and fun that I didn't care.
I believe that episode was boarded by Casse, who comes over from City Hunter, which I believe has a lot of really good movement based animation. My favorite scene, even after watching this whole OVA, my favorite scene is still from episode two, when Nina and Mora are standing on a cliff and the mobile suits of the burning team walk past them.
OOH, that's another very good one. Yeah.
Walking into the mist on the way to the final confrontation with Gato. And like the scene you pointed to, this really shows off W 80 three's biggest strengths its ability to convey so much emotion in the animation without any dialogue, its willingness to give things time to breathe, to build tension, to show these big establishing shots and to compose really beautiful interactions between the people and the mobile suits. There's a bit here as the mobile suits are walking by in their kind of jerky mechanical walking pace, and the head of the unit one turns to look at Nina and Mora. Now, a mobile suit would not necessarily need to turn its head. Co could just activate whichever sub camera looks in that direction. But here the mobile suits are given human like movements, yet with that little bit of mechanical friction, that makes it more interesting. And it echoes another great scene from the end, when Co looks up at the Gelgoog and it looks down at him and flashes him the peace sign.
And for purely narrative and characterization reasons, the reveal that Keith and Mora are going on a date. So great. I loved it so much.
But I think my second favorite scene is the one between Ko and Lucette when she comes to visit him in his quarters. From the way it opens with the match cut between Gato like raining destruction down on Federation ships, and then cuts to Koh emerging from what has clearly been one of those arguing with yourself in the shower showers and then the way, like, slinks into the room, the dim lighting. This episode was boarded and directed by Akane Kazuki, who is going to go on to direct Escaflone, which is, AsTime listeners know, one of my favorite anime of all time. And I think you can see in this scene similar compositions, similar use of light and shadow to the things that he's going to do in his later work. So as a fan of him, particularly, this scene really got me.
David MCE asks, on the whole, how would you rate or how much did you like or dislike the music in this series? I liked it. I don't know that any of them were all time favorites, but by and large, I liked the music a lot. I mentioned multiple times during this season that I especially liked the sort of spooky, slightly discordant feeling music that they would play during dramatic moments. There was one song that I didn't particularly like, but it was extremely catchy. I think that might be part of why it bothered me so much. If it hadn't been catchy, it would just be like this song that I don't care for, but it was this song that I don't care for that is now going to be stuck in my head all day.
I could sing it.
Don't you do it, don't you do it.
I could ruin the rest of your day.
You could do that anyway, I liked.
The music as well. I will agree with you. The bits of discordant, creepy, eerie music, those are the best by far. Those, I think, are a cut above that kind of music. In other shows, the more like traditional, heroic, orchestral bits. Hooray, the ship is going off to fight. Oh, a difficult battle, but Co will prevail those pieces. They're fine. They're sort of par for the course for Gundam. Like, the level of Gundam music is high already, and there isn't much in W 83 that really rises above that. I do love back to paradise. It's a banger and I listen to it all the time. The problem 83s music has, besides the plagiarism and the fact that a bunch of tracks had to be removed for different releases. And so things get a little bit wonky as stuff is getting moved around. The problem 83 has is sometimes they don't put the right music in the right scene. There is a disconnect between the emotional tenor of the scene and the music they choose to use there. We pointed this out a bunch during our coverage of the movie that certain songs are different in the movie than they are in the show, and the ones in the movie don't convey the right emotion. But I feel like this came up in the show as well, but more rarely.
Clay C had two questions and one thing that's more of a comment, but I'm going to read them all together because Tom says his response will address all of them. Clay writes I've always seen the Birmingham as a callback to the rejection of the supremacy of air based combat in naval engagements during World War II and holding fast to the big gun battleship. This is because it doesn't have mobile suit carrying capabilities. The description of Green Wyatt as very British seemed to corroborate that. Would you agree with that line of thought? Not a question, but I had a realization about something from the second part of the GPO Two s Atomic Bazooka research piece. Tom mentioned why the weapon was developed, that it may have a purpose as an antifortress weapon axis might be far away, but it is still a potential threat. Closer to Earth are the sides. That weapon could deal significant damage to a colony and would be a big stick for the Federation to threaten the colonies with. And if the GPO One and GPO Two were potentially designed to deploy together, would the GPO Three and GPO Four be deployed together or what do you think a theoretical GPO Five, GPO Six duo's purpose would be?
So thinking about this question actually gave me an interesting angle on the GPO Two and why it exists that I didn't have before. So thank you very much for this. I think your characterization of the Birmingham as representing the big gun naval strategy is totally spot on. And so I think we should view the GPO Two and the Birmingham as directly opposed, not just in the drama of the series where they attack each other, but literally in the Federation's Naval Planning Department. These are two different doctrines for how the Federation forces should reconstitute themselves after the One Year War with the Birmingham and the Naval Review representing this idea of overwhelming fleet power. Big ships, big guns, lots of them. And then on the other side is the Gundam Development Project, which let's assume that the Albion, or ships like it are part of that. Small ships, lots of mobile suit capacity. Highly advanced individual mobile suits. Not swarms of gyms, but small squadrons, hyper specialized, long range, high speed, high power mobile suits like the GPO One and the GPO Two. So in a hypothetical future conflict, let's say there's a revolt of some colonies, just like there was during the One Year War. The Federation can either send out a big fleet, totally dominate the space, eliminate any enemy fleets, and then they could use the big guns on the Birmingham to shoot holes through the colonies if that was the thing that they wanted to do, or to intimidate the colonies into surrendering. Alternatively, with the GPO Two you don't have to maintain it's not air supremacy, but space supremacy. You can just send in the mobile suit and they can't stop it. This is kind of like how strategic bombing worked in World War II, or at least prior to World War II. There was this idea that it was not possible for interceptors to stop strategic bombers. There was this idea that the bomber will always get through, and so the GPO Two represents that strategy. Don't bother trying to control the space, don't bother trying to have the biggest possible fleet, you just need a couple of Gundams with a couple of nukes and then you can do enough damage to any rebellious colony cluster that you don't even need the big fleet.
I don't see that the show gives us enough of a sense of the GPO four's capabilities for me to really speak to how those two, the Three and Four work together.
I would assume, given the ungainliness of the Unit Three and its sort of its overwhelming power but its extreme uselessness in close combat that the Four would be assigned to essentially guard the Unit Three while the Unit Three is doing its fortress defense mission.
It's an escort ship to sort of fend off attacks like the one that Gato makes. As for a potential GPO five and six and further developments in the Gundam project, given the political turn things have taken, I think if the project had survived, it would have been much more focused on space combat and potentially on colony infiltration crowd control within colonies, assuming that they even try to do that. And don't just gas them like we know that they wind up doing later.
Looking at it from the perspective of what are the gaps in capabilities, repeatedly in this show, we saw that none of the Gundams are good at defending a ship. So if you're going to send out small carriers with little support like the Albion, you probably need some specialized defense units to hold down the fort while the other ones are out doing their thing. And maybe some kind of fire support to replace the gym cannons that Keith and Chap were using to let's be honest, not very great effect during the course of this show.
I know this runs counter to how these shows work, but it seems to me that if you wanted to create some kind of defensive capability for ships, you would be better off using detect and defend satellites. Like there were around Solomon, sort of drones that are made to spot and attack enemy mobile suits. They were pretty effective. And if you had an array of those that you deployed from your ship, that's your first line of defense. And then you only need a couple of defensive mobile suits or defensive guns for the closer in fighting. You rely on that screen of drones as your initial defense and probably considerably less expensive. Not just because since they're unpiloted, you don't lose years worth of training if you lose the pilot. They're also just smaller and less complicated than the mobile suits are. And so cheaper to replace, cheaper to outfit a ship with them.
You could even do them on Tethers, like the Brabro from first Gundam, where it shoots off its all range attack guns in different ways, and then they're controlled from the Central Command Center by humans. But on Tethers, something like that could be really interesting. Our first answer really should have been, well, they're going to put new types in it. They're going to make a special one just for new types. Because what do they always do in Gundam? Eventually the Arc of the Universe bends towards making a mobile suit specially for new types.
Not in 83, it doesn't.
There's only one new type, and maybe two.
You don't know.
And they never let Nina pilot a Gundam. Even if she does get into that Core Fighter that one time, she would have been too strong. That's why they had to keep her out of the Gundam. It is actually very funny to think about 83 with new types in it. Like, how long do we realistically think Gato could have held out against Say Amaro if he were piloting the Unit One? This show would have ended in the first or second episode.
Adam S wants to know, how do y'all think Shima Garahao compares to the major female antagonists of earlier Gundam shows like Kaiselia Zabi, Haman Khan, etc. What hopes do y'all have for cool villainous women in future Gundam anime? I hope there are lots of them. That's my hope.
I'll co sign that. Yeah, she's great.
She's one of my favorites. She's absolutely one of my top villainesses of the Gundam we've watched.
I was thinking back through all of the Gundam we've watched, and I think the last time that the two of us had such a positive, immediate reaction to a female villain was Crowley Hammond from First Gundam. It's that far back, but it's hard to think of anyone else who has had the same level of consistent, understandable, even relatable character motivations who has had so much personal physical agency in the show. I love Cecilia Zabi as a villain, but she spends most of the time lurking in the background, being ominous. And while that's good for a final boss kind of villain, it doesn't do much for her as a character. She kills Girin, and that's sweet, but that's like the only thing of that kind she does.
And beyond the impression that she's doing it to garner power for herself, it's not clear in what ways her views are any different from Girin's, if they are at all. I think what makes Shima really stand out and is also true of Crowley Hammond in some ways, but I think in Shima they do it even better. Her goals are understandable. What she's doing to achieve them makes sense to us, but it doesn't sort of excessively win over our sympathy. She's still obviously a villain, and she has style. She has such style.
She makes her mark on the show. It even feels like the writers are a little afraid of her. She has intimidated the people making the show. She is not their puppet.
I often felt a bit confused by Haman Karn. And when I talk about style, I don't just mean cool outfits or cool hair. I mean the whole demeanor. I often described Shima as sort of Oozing bravado. She has a personality. Haman just hates Shar and is manipulating Minerva. I didn't get much grasp of her beyond that.
Like Casilla in First Gundam, Haman spends most of Double Zeta lurking behind the scenes or giving orders to her minions. When she actually shows up on screen, it's often to leave just before the Gundam team arrives, or run away from them or drive them off. But, like, she herself personally does very little in the show. And if we view the mobile suits as expressing a person's power agency, their ability to affect the story, I think it's very significant that Haman does not pilot her Kubele until the last episode of Double Zeta, whereas Shima is out there all the time herself piloting. She has that agency, and she uses it. Where Shima fails as a character is that I feel like there's about an episode's worth of Shima content between episodes twelve and 13 that is missing. Her death is too abrupt. The way she dies, it feels like the one point at which her behavior is not really consistent with what we would expect from her.
I feel like adding a bit of connective tissue that involves Shima's fleet working with these Federation fleets in space, and then somehow the reveal of, or the moment of realization of wait, but she's the one who caused the death of my mentor would have given more Oomph to that final battle. I can't remember if I said so in an episode or not, but I definitely did wonder, wait, how does Cole know that she was responsible? How does he know that Shima was the one who fought Burning right at the end and damaged the mobile suit so that it blew up a little while after the fight? It's unclear how he knows that, especially.
Since by that point, she's in a different mobile suit entirely.
Yeah, so some way of connecting the dots there in front of the audience would have been helpful.
And of course, the show does a really poor job of conveying that the Gerber etra is the mobile suit that Anaheim had promised her way back in the Kelly Lazner episodes.
Yeah, I didn't realize that until we watched the Mayfly of Space shorts.
That's the thing. I think that connective Tissue, that extra episode of Shima content we are looking for is in Mayfly of Space.
From Axel S, we received the following congratulations on finishing Gato's magical adventure in space. My question is, is there any character that you would want to see more of in a continuation, and if so, who, and in what situation? I assume that by continuation they mean chronologically after the events of 83. So, like, who would we want to see after this show closes, what happens to them? And in what sort of situation would we want to see them? For me, the answer is no. There isn't really anyone I would want to follow. What I am most curious about in between Universal Century 83 and the beginning of Zeta in 87, I believe. Or something like I'm interested in all of these underground anti Titans groups, the people Camille gets grilled about because he's been receiving their newsletters or whatever. And I don't really see anyone in this show being part of that.
I'm going to combine my answer with the next question, which is from Chris H, who said, given the more nihilistic tone of 83, what are your thoughts on some of the crew of The Albion becoming Titans? Given the events of Zeta and how the majority of the cast do not make an appearance, how would you imagine Co's or others careers in the Titans? How would Co's already tumultuous relationship with Nina continue, if it will at all? And I want to say, I don't actually think that Ko joins the Titans. I imagine him sort of trying to stay in this test pilot, not actively engaged in combat. Kind of zone.
100% agree. I think he wants to become Burning.
And I think probably for Keith and Maura and Nina, that's what they're all going to try to do, too. I see the four of them more or less sticking together in the military, but far from combat for the rest of their careers. And honestly, I don't see the brass wanting to bring any of them back into it. They're too tarnished. They're just not worth it. Would you trust Ko in your unit? I wouldn't. And I can kind of imagine if Ko did join the Titans, it's funny to imagine him on grips or Green Noah being part of the Mark II Gundam testing program and like, standing there and watching Camille steal one of the Mark II's. And for a moment Ko is like, oh, I should get another Gundam and go after him, and oh, nope, I'm not going to do that. I didn't see nothing.
Been there, done that, bought the T shirt. Yeah. With the ship mean, assuming that they stay in the Titans, and how quickly the Titans efforts at suppressing the Colonies ramp up, what is there to show? What is there to do? Are they just putting down minor rebellions, gassing recalcitrant colonies, menacing axis?
Sure.
I do think Cole may sort of model himself on Burning, on becoming a mentor figure, someone who can shepherd younger pilots along and kind of teach them how to grow into their role for basically all of them. I picture a general cluelessness about what the Titans are doing in space. They were so clueless about space before, even Nina, who's from the moon, doesn't necessarily seem like she knows much about, or cares much about what goes on in other sides, on other colonies.
There's probably some Anaheim Chemicals engineer who thinks that she's just working on a new perfume, but actually it's a deadly gas.
As for Cole and Nina, I kind of picture them getting back together, if only because they are both so go with the flow about so many things that it's like, oh, well, you're here and you know, Nina wants her career and wants to be in a relationship. Not that she doesn't like him or who that relationship is with is entirely irrelevant, but it doesn't seem to be of primary importance to her. And she's already sort of vetted Cole, as it were. And while Cole has grown up quite a bit, it's hard to imagine he has grown up enough that he wants to begin that process of getting comfortable enough to kiss a woman all over again from Zero. I'm not saying it would be a particularly healthy relationship, but I can imagine the two of them just sort of falling into it out of force of habit and staying in it for the same reason.
I clearly have a more positive view of this than you do. You have ignored the fact that Ko himself also prefers Gundams to girls. Not that he doesn't like girls, but he prefers the Gundams. So the two of them have that in common. It's part of what drew them together in the first place, and it'll be good for their relationship in the long run. Yes, both of them care more about the machines they're testing than they care about each other, but that's fine as long as it's okay with both of them. Their relationship will always come second. But some relationships are like that.
I don't disagree with anything you said just there. I'm just saying I don't see that as a particularly healthy or good relationship. But fine, whatever good for them.
I mean, I think it's also hard for us to predict their future relationship based on this because a lot of relationships overcome some kind of major issue early on. Some break up and get back together or something like that. So if they get back together, they will find new terms for their new relationship and we can't really predict that based on the old one.
They're also both still very young and people change a lot in their twenty s and thirty s. I mean, people change a lot always, but especially in their twenty s and thirty s, so who knows?
Yeah. As for which characters I'd actually like to see more of, I want to see more of the high ranking Federation guys who became so prominent in the political machinations in the latter half of this show. I want to see a direct sequel in the vein of The Godfather Two about all of the folks in the faction that just won like the anti Cowan Pro Titans group. Gene, Colini Jamatov, Hyman all of these admirals. I want to see them going into a low grade civil war, killing each other off to determine which one of them is going to be the top guy. We already know it's going to be Jamatov Hyman. We know he wins, but I want to see it. I want to see all the backstabbing, all the dirty deals, all the assassinations car bombs, like, give me the worst people in the Federation being horrible to each other.
You sound so gleeful describing it.
Would you not enjoy that?
It could be fun. I grant you, it could be fun. Scott W asks, given that Stardust Memory is at least partially a sequel to First Gundam and partially a prequel to Zeta, has watching it added anything to what you think of either series? Do the cameos from Basque and Haman add anything to this series?
Having watched Zeta, Haman is just there, so you can do the Leo point and go, hey, I know that character. That's Haman. We love her. Basque actually does serve an important role early on, because he's one of the first indications you get of like, oh, the Federation is well on its way to becoming the thing that it is in Zeta. You see him and you immediately go, oh, no, it's that guy.
I actually feel that way about both of these cameos, that they really emphasize that what happens in Zeta has been years in the making, that it didn't just spring up out of nowhere, that these are very old plans set in motion years and years ago. 83 also clarifies that disconnect. I've mentioned before that these populations really don't understand each other. People on Earth have no idea what's going on in space or what life is like for space noids. And vice versa. They truly do not understand each other, and for the most part, don't care to. There's very little mutual curiosity. And while it was pretty easy to connect the dots from the end of First Gundam to the beginning of Zeta, and to kind of say, like, oh, okay, this is how the Titans came to be, this fills in some of that gap. Further clarifying, it wasn't just the one year war that caused the Titans to emerge. There were these other conflicts, other attacks, briefer periods of unrest that aided the rise of the Titans, along with the internal conflict in the Federation, some of which we saw in First Gundam, but which it's made clear that internal conflict also continued outside of war and in fact, got worse once they were not at war anymore. Mark S sent us two questions. The first is now that Takashi Imanishi has more or less emerged as the second Multipurpose Auteur in the Gundam series, he brainstorms, he writes, he storyboards, he directs, he names mobile suits and gives interviews. What's your take on his creative style thus far? Obviously, he didn't do everything on this series, especially not in the first half. But is there anything about 83 that seems like a new development for Gundam and which you'd be prepared to dubiously attribute to Imanishi. For my amusement, I'm going to let Tom answer this one, since he has a much better grip on who did which tasks for which shows than I do.
Imanishi himself claims that a big part of the reason he was brought on to the staff for this is that they wanted a more realistic military feel, and that was kind of his specialty at Sunrise. Now, Imanishi himself was never a real soldier, so he brings a realistic rather than a real approach to depicting the military. But I think it's fair to describe W 83 as more realistic in that sense. He is, I think, something of a military Otaku and brings that energy. He's definitely not the first person to work on Gundam who is a military Otaku. I mean, I remember an interview with Nagano Momoru, who did a bunch of designs for Zeta and Double Zeta and Shar's Counterattack, at least very early ones, and he described himself as possessing a abnormal level of interest and knowledge about tanks. So that energy has always been there. Imanishi is the first guy to take on that lead director's chair to do the writing, the naming, etc. To come at it with that attitude. And I think that is very new, very different, and it is going to remain a major through line for Gundam going forward. He's also the first to tell a story that doesn't have kids or teenagers in the limelight. Ko is functionally an adult. There's no Camille, there's no Amaro, there's no trio of orphans running around. Even Shar's Counterattack had Quest and Hathaway, who are pivotal characters in the story. That evolution to focusing on Gundam as a story for by and about adults. That's definitely new. You could even say Iminishi is the first director to make a Gundam show that is about the mobile suits. This is a common joke that we all tell, oh, unlike other Mecha shows, this one is actually about the characters, but really unlike other Gundam shows, this one is about the robots. You can, if you construct it kind of loosely, view the first five episodes of this show as Cole really wants to pilot the Gundam and has to overcome various obstacles in order to do so. That's like his driving motivation, and that's the point of the show for those first five episodes, episodes six and seven, Ko doubts whether or not he's worthy to pilot the Gundam, and then meets Kelly, who teaches him that piloting is the most important thing there is. In episode eleven, the whole action of the show stops so that Ko and the Albion can go and get him a new robot. And his final resolution at the end of episode 13 is he's so happy and excited. He's been released from jail, and now he gets to pilot robots again. And then, I guess, finally this last one, I think I don't know how much of this can be attributed to Imanishi and how much of it can be attributed to just like the necessary format of doing an OVA that takes place between two other shows. But W 83 is the first one to attempt to tell a really big story with Earth sphere wide implications and history changing effects that can't actually change anything because we all know how Zeta goes. Everything that happens here, the colony drop, all of it, all the death, all the disaster, all of that can't really go anywhere. And I think that is something that future Gundam projects are going to struggle with, especially with that big gap between the end of Shah's counterattack and the beginning of F 91, where, like, clearly a lot of things happened, but none of them can actually change anything because we all know where things end up. And whether we can attribute this to Imanishi or not, he is the first one to really deal with that problem.
Mark's second question is for me, quote as someone both uncontaminated by decades of fanlore and gifted with uncanny powers of new type insight, I'd love to hear your impression of what exactly Xeon's ideals are. It seems like these get referenced a lot, but it's seldom spelled out what they involve. Based on the animated works thus far, what would you say Xeon is basically about? This was very fun to think about. The first, most obvious, and I think primary thing Xeon is about is fascism. Because definitions thereof can differ. I will lay out sort of precisely what I mean. They believe in dictatorial, leaders, in autocracy, concentrating power in one person, or a small group of people who then have absolute authority to do what they want. Unrestrained by laws, unrestrained by democracy. It's militaristic. They believe it is of primary importance to maintain a strong military. They glorify the military. They are willing and even eager to use military aggression against other groups. They see violence as a means of kind of rejuvenating weak or decadent society, separating the wheat from the chaff, as it were, honing the blade. They use a force to suppress all opposition. There is no room in their society for dissenting voices. There's an effort to create at least the impression of homogeneity, of unity in the society. Everything is very strongly regimented, not just in the military, but also in society itself. It's almost like trying to make all of society operate more like the military. And they believe in a natural social hierarchy that some people, by their very natures, by their birth, should be in charge of other people and should be followed and that some people are, by their natures, by their birth, inferior and should do the following. That sense of structure and order and obedience they think that should just be the way things work all the time. And with it there is this kind of romanticization of noblesso blige like we see with Gato taking care of his men right. He, by his nature, abilities, birth whatever deserves to be in charge of them. But in turn, he also protects them and looks after their best interests. I saw this idea recently discussed in a documentary I watched about Christian extremists, this idea that if you provide absolute loyalty and obedience to the people above you, they in turn will protect you from all of the threats and danger outside. There is, coupled with that natural hierarchy, some eugenicsy stuff going on, that certain populations are superior to other populations, that humanity as a whole is stagnating on Earth, and that only by moving everybody to space can humanity continue to improve rather than becoming weak. Interestingly, I think their attitudes towards Earth vary in the specifics, but in a broad sense, all of them think humanity needs to leave Earth behind. All the xeons agree humanity should no longer be based on Earth. That should no longer be the sort of cradle of civilization which everyone still feels tethered to. They need to break those tethers and move on. Some of them come at this from more of a conservationist perspective, like, we need to remove human influence from the Earth. We need to let the Earth return to what it was before humanity wrecked it. Some of them, it's more extractive. It's like, no. Earth is a great resource, and there's nothing wrong with us taking resources from Earth and using it in this way. But it should not be where all of human civilization and power rests. We have to move on. We have to keep pushing outward into the unknown. And finally, and I think this is probably true of a lot of fascist ideologies, but it's very Machiavellian. They think it's really great to be feared. They think the ends do justify basically any means. There is nothing they won't do if it helps them achieve their goals. And like a lot of fascists, they use all this romantic imagery and symbolism and pomp to create a sense of dignity, to make what they're pitching more visually appealing.
It is often said that Zionism is about independence or autonomy for space and space noids?
Well, independence and autonomy from the power structure on Earth, but not in general. They're not proposing that every single colony should be independent. They want to bring them all under their own wing.
Sure. The independence and autonomy of the Zabi.
Family to govern all of space without interference from Earth.
It's always so rich to hear them talk about space noid rights. When you remember that the first thing that happened in the One Year War was that they massacred a whole lot of space noids.
And I don't think we ever hear any of them even attempt to claim that after they take power, after they throw off the yoke of Earth Federation control, that they're going to revert to democracy.
No. I believe the one thing Girin says is that he is going to kill off all of the excess population in order to make the remnant easier to rule over. Yeah, there's no respect for the right to life per se. There's no sense that people, even people who aren't part of your nation, are entitled to be alive.
Well, it's kind of a classic counter imperialist narrative. If you think about World War II and before it and the Greater East Asia Co Prosperity Sphere. A lot of Japan's pitch as they were conquering their neighbors was, well, but isn't it better if someone is going to colonize Asia, that it's another Asian country instead of these Europeans, which I somehow don't think was very convincing for the many colonized people.
Yeah. Ask the survivors of Japanese imperialism what they thought of Japanese imperialism. Ask the survivors of Xeonic imperialism what they think of Xeon's idea of space. Noid autonomy.
After all those questions, I don't have a whole lot more to say about Stardust memory, but this is generally the point at which we make a verdict about whether or not we think a work was good or not and why, and our final feelings on it.
We usually try not to talk too much about whether things are good or bad, since that's very subjective and really is one of the least interesting questions you can ask about a piece of media. But what I've always found really striking about 83 is how wildly different people's perceptions of its popularity are on the numbers. 83 moves a lot of units. It sells really well. It sells consistently better than 80. The other OVA from around the same time, it was commissioned by Bondi's video department because they wanted to be able to sell video cassettes, and they have sold a lot of video cassettes and DVDs and Blu rays, and I'm sure whatever successor format comes after that. When NHK did a big poll for Gundam's 40th about what the Japanese fandom's favorites were, w 83 came in at number ten as the 10th most popular series yet. Just the other day I saw someone asking on Twitter, why is it that W 83 seems to be so universally hated? So clearly there are some very different opinions about this show. I've heard a lot of people say it's a personal favorite, one of the best.
Yeah, I get a much stronger impression of its popularity than of people hating it.
I think a lot of people, it just sort of washes over them. They have no feelings about it whatsoever. And I think this is because W 83 satisfies very different needs from most of the other Gundam that we've watched. It is a very different food group from a Zeta or a Double Zeta or a 80 or an SD Gundam for that matter. But if you're the target audience for this show, it's the best there is at what it does. So of course, it's going to be one of your favorites. It's kind of like after the monumental success of First Gundam, the light of Gundam shone through a prism and it got split into all of these different little bits of the original Gundam. And each different show is trying to capture a different wavelength of that. And if you watched first Gundam and you loved the little orphans with their hijinks and when they save the Federation by finding those bombs in the gym production plants or when they have the juice robot that also dispenses soft serve. If you liked that, if you liked the Wacky hijinks at the beginning of Double Zeta, you're going to love SD Gundam. And you're not going to be into 83. But if you liked the robots and the sense of the military and all of that, if you want to see the adults, if you're into the Slager type characters bright in Zeta and Emma, then W 83 is going to have some more appeal to you. That kind of storyline is not the most important thing in Zeta, but it is the most important thing for 83.
I find it really funny that you take issue with talking about whether the work is good or bad, because we are constantly making value judgments about, admittedly, more granular parts of the work, but we're constantly saying, like, oh, that animation is great, or OOH, that animation was terrible, or that delivery, or that writing. What made Stardust Memory a weird experience for me is that looking back at the OVA as a whole, I think it was very well made. I think it was well acted, well animated, interesting characters. The writing might get a bit wonky in places, but for the most part, I think it's a very well made piece of media. But it's not for me. I don't like this story. I don't really care about these people. I don't really see myself ever wanting to watch it again.
I think the one thing you absolutely cannot take away from it is that the animation is truly top notch.
There were some moments when I would look at a scene and think, wow, that is beautifully drawn. But with a few exceptions, those tended to be stills, very impressive artwork. The animation was good, but didn't stand out in the same way.
Well, I happen to know that you often prefer more surreal animation, animation that pushes the boundaries of what is real and what isn't. That stretches and squashes and warps perceptions. Satoshi Khan style.
Well, yeah, because if you just wanted realism, you would just make a movie with humans.
But what if you want realism without humans? Like, this is another thing where they're doing something that's so impressive and they've accomplished it at a really high level, and it's just not for you.
No, I mean, I'm being a little facetious. I don't think there's anything wrong with creating works with animation that you could, in theory, have created with live action I don't have a problem with that. I think things that are less realistic better showcase what animation can really do, generally speaking. But even that, there are exceptions. I don't tend to make definitive, hide bound statements about these things. Like I said, it's not bad, but it's not for me. When I imagine a version of it that I personally like better, it would involve changing some things really fundamental to the production. To my mind, its length hurts it.
But should it be longer or shorter?
Depends on which of two stories they want to tell. I think if the idea was simply how disconnected contemporary people are from the consequences of their actions and from the military industrial complex and how pointless the actions of individuals can feel in the great scope of history, I think they should have done that in a movie, even though I didn't like how their movie turned out. I think they could have trimmed a lot of it and done that in a movie. Or if it's more about the vast complexity and the ongoing effects of the old war and the new war looming in the distance and how it interconnects all these people and affects all these people, I think they could have made it more of an ensemble kind of show. Spend a little more time on the different side characters, a little more time with Shima, a little more time with all of those movers and shakers in the Federation who you were curious about different perspectives on what's happening and then make it longer. But as it is, it feels like again, this is just my take on it. They tell two stories fairly unsatisfactorily.
I agree with you that the length is not right for it. So much of why I'm finishing this series on kind of a sour note, despite moment to moment enjoying it throughout and really appreciating what they were doing is that the ending falls apart. And part of the reason the ending falls apart is because things terminate. So many different storylines terminate unsatisfactorily. There's not a sense of resolution of things. They just come to an end. And I like when you mentioned doing it as an ensemble, because as you were talking about that, I was thinking again about my pitch for the follow up to this that really goes in on the internal conflicts within the Federation that they were hinting and teasing in these last couple of episodes. And of course, to do that, you would need to remove Cole and Nina and Keith and most of the main characters that we've been following all along. And if you made it more of an ensemble, if you did it more like the sort of live action prestige TV we've seen in the last decade or so, I think you could have that original slate of characters shuffle out the side door and then continue the story without them. I think that would work.
I think you can even keep a bunch of the main characters and have some of their storylines threaded through what else is happening. But by the time we got to the end, the whole romance frankly, felt pointless to me. Like, it didn't feel as though it added much to the show. All that back and forth will they? Won't they? With Cole and Nina and her getting mad at him for not being forward enough and him working up his like that, to me, feels like a very different show and a very different story than what most of this was about. I would never say you can't have extraneous stuff happen in the show. There are plenty of shows and movies that know side plots or that are just they're not that kind of narrative. It's not that causal. One thing leads to another thing leads to the next thing. But other than making a lot of people really vehemently hate Nina Purpleton, I just don't get it. It didn't do anything for me.
Gato is not a particularly compelling romantic actor. Neither is Ko. Neither is Nina, for that matter.
All these people are having a lot of really intense feelings for some really somewhat bland people. There's no sense that Nina looks at Gato as some kind of romantic figure from the past. It's not that she's romanticizing him as a soldier, and that's why she's in love with him. So if that's not it, what is?
And maybe a show that gave more time to Nina's interiority, that showed us her memories of this relationship, might give us something to go on there, but that's not really what's important to the show's creators or to the show, even though it is like the central plot hook for this final episode.
Did Gato ever care about her? Did he leave because he knew he was going to be taking on this deadly mission and that the more attached he got to Nina, the less likely he would be able to go through with Operation Stardust? Entirely unclear. He does try to save her at the end, I guess, but anyway, we're getting a little into the weeds here when the point is, I can imagine them doing things with this setting, with these days, weeks, months in the universal century with these characters in a way that would be more compelling to me. But in the work as it is, it's probably not one that I would wholeheartedly recommend unless I thought it really fit with another person's tastes.
When I hear people talking about what they really like about this show and I mostly agree with them. Often they cite details, atmosphere, the sense of co as being a pretty realistic depiction of a young soldier who hasn't quite figured out who he is yet. The interplay of the mechanics with the pilots with the machines the emphasis on mechanical detailing and realistic movement realistic tactics.
Those parts were good, yes.
Yeah. There's a lot to like about the show. And there are scenes that hit like Sledgehammers, like that one where all of the mechanics are listening to the radio of the pilots while they're out in combat. That's not a big scene, but I'm going to remember that for a really long time.
I don't know if it's that the ending of any work is always going to have sort of outsized weight compared to the rest of it, or if, by the numbers, this is simply true. It's just that for me, all those good bits, all that good stuff is not enough for me to then say go watch this 13 episode thing. I would just assume give somebody a half hour super cut of some of the really cool mechanical animation and bits with the mechanics and Cole being silly and call it a day, I don't know.
And I would call that afterglow of Xeon, but it was also not.
I feel like at this point, I'm just saying the same things over and over again.
I would tell somebody to watch the first two episodes because really they are very good, totally independent of anything else. The first two episodes of this show are some of the best Gundam you can watch, in my personal opinion, which is objectively correct.
Next time on the first episode of season nine, we start our next translation project, SD Gundam Festival. But not to fret. While we are working on that translation, we will still be releasing episodes. It's an opportunity to finally make some progress on our backlogs. Our research backlogs, that is, our gunpla backlogs remain sorely neglected. The danger is still present in your time, as it was in ours.
Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people, and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dioxin. The closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio. The recap music for this season is 80s synth rock guitar improvisation by Zombie Fish. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people and more in the show notes and on our website, Gundampodcast.com. You can get in touch with us on Twitter or Instagram at gundampodcast or by email to hosts@gundampodcast.com. And thank you for listening. The wrong Gundam opinion this week is from Bippity Jones, who suggests that after everything we've learned making this podcast, we are now prepared to design the ultimate space weapon. It will need to be capable of firing in every direction with huge boosters for speed and big tentacles to leverage the principles of Ambac for high efficiency maneuvering while navigating battlefields to maximize its offensive and defensive capabilities. It should be equipped with remote melee weapons capable of cutting through even the most advanced mobile suit armor. And we've just reinvented the Raflesia. Oh. Well, I'm too old to be a Gundam hero anyway, but there's plenty of time left to be a villain. Nina, pass me that mask. I'm gonna go bully some teenagers.
Little do they know, we actually do have a creepy mask in here.
If I scare the teenagers badly enough, maybe they'll save the world.
I think I've decided what I'm wearing for the Barbie movie.
OOH, podcaster Barbie?
No, my, um I think they made a podcaster Barbie. I mean, she would just be wearing, like, monitors and holding a microphone.
Maybe that's not an aspirational enough career.
There's probably an influencer. Barbie, though. There's probably a Barbie with a ring light.
And, like, there's definitely a DJ Barbie. Began its ran, begun its run. This is probably going to go in the outtakes, but I do think it's telling that you cited as one of your favorite scenes. One? The one where Mora is chasing Keith around the hangar. A scene that is the most out of place in the whole show. The animation in that scene is almost nothing like the animation in the rest of the show, so, of course it's your favorite.
And there aren't that many straight up funny scenes. Most of the scenes that are funny are also embarrassing or awkward or have a bit of sadness to them. On top of being funny, that one feels just money.
Yeah.
Which is why I told my agent to get me a new co host before we launched this network. But he goes into this whole routine like, oh, no, what's wrong with Lieutenant Monsha? The test audiences love him. So I explained that if I ever see that creep in the studio again, I am going to throw him out of a window or off a mountain. Ideally, both. Anyway, long story short, now we've got an opening for a handsome idiot with no scruples, and I'm looking for an architect who can build me an in studio cliff.
Excuse me, ma'am. Do you know where I can find the lead anchor? Lieutenant Nine's daughter? I'm supposed to give her this late.
It's actually Nina's daughter.
Oh, wow. This set is amazing.
Thanks. I actually designed it myself.
Is that an infatulator? 3001 of those can generate nearly 100 fact adjacent sound bites per minute.
Yes, I know, because I picked it out because I'm Nina, nina's Daughter, news engineer and lead anchor.
Oh, nice to meet you. Is that an Anaheim Electronics audio crystallization matrix? I've never seen one in real life. Is it true that it can capture anchor's perfect mid lunarian accent with 86% fidelity?
You're spilling my coffee.
Oh, my gosh. I'm so, so sorry. I just see all this new stuff and I can't help myself. I'm kind of a news junkie, but I've never actually been on a real set before.
You've certainly got a lot of energy. Are you fresh out of the academy or something?
Oh, no, ma'am, I'm not a soldier. Not really. My friend jamie. Commander donninghan. He got me this. Uh, we were in a community theater troupe in ohio before know colony drop community theater. We mostly did stage adaptations of old radio plays.
I suspect I'm going to regret asking this, but why not just perform plays?
Well, that's what everybody does. We wanted to stand out from the crowd anyway. I always told jamie that I would do anything to break into the news business. Lie, cheat, steal. I mean, gosh, I might have even said that I'd kill for it. So then he got me this internship. But luckily, no one's asked me to do any of that stuff.
Not yet, anyway.
That's a good one, ma'am.
Hey, I've got an idea. This is TNN. I'm lead anchor, lieutenant nina nino's daughter.
And I'm ensign tom thompson, filling in for lieutenant bernard mancha, who is in the brig again. Tonight's top story the menace above us the twelve scariest threats from space.
Number six will enrage you.
Number twelve some kind of ray neutron.
Gamma, amaro? We don't know. And the ambiguity makes it scarier.
Number eleven the sleep paralysis demon of luna. Two.
And I thought the nightmare of solomon was bad.
Number ten entropy.
Every time we look, there's more of it.
Number nine falling in love with a pirate queen only to realize that she was just using you for her own advantage.
That's why I don't date anymore.