You're listening to season 10 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is episode 10.472 lives in one, and we are your hosts. I'm Tom, a longtime Gundam enjoyer, and due to a terrible transporter mishap during my time in Starfleet, One Life in Two.
And I'm Nina, almost done with Victory Gundam and starting to suspect I'll have a bone to pick with the gender of it all. Mosuit Breakdown is made possible by our kind and kooky paying subscribers. No new patrons this week, but thank.
You all the same, especially returning patrons and those of you who have increased your pledges. You keep us Genki this week we're.
Covering Victory Episode 47, Otachi no Senjou aka Women's Battlefield. The episode was written by Okea Akira, storyboarded by Nishimori Akira, and directed by Watanabe Tetsuya. It is Watanabe's last time in the episode Director's Seat for Victory, but he will return as Assistant Episode director for episode 50, and we'll also be seeing him again on Gundam X in a few years. Nishimura Nobuyoshi directed the animation. Now the recap.
On Earth, people lay on the ground or slumped in chairs and over tables. They float in swimming pools or hang out of overturned cars, wherever they were when the emanations from Angel Halo reached them. Concerned that she might use her abilities to collaborate with the League, Militaire Chronicle leaves Shaak Ti with Cagati, who almost immediately puts her in the Angel Halo's key chamber. Her prayers for peace, intended to end the fighting in space, are instead aimed at Earth. Meanwhile, USO is still fighting for his life against Vara when mid battle, he can hear Queen Maria Pure Armonia speaking to him telepathically. She tells him that Shakti is on Angel Halo before confessing that she believes her plans failed due to her own arrogance and unworthiness. All of this death and destruction, the sad penalty for a woman's misdeeds. On the White Ark, Marbet sorties In a fresh V1 dropped off by the lean horse, she can sense USO on the battlefield and go straight to him. Light seems to emanate from her in waves, more and more powerfully as she approaches USO and Pharah. Once she is close enough, she gives USO the V1's hanger and boots, then does what she can in the Core Fighter, harrying and dodging a laughing, gloating Pharah Then Marbet stops in front of the possessed pilot, staring straight at her from the corefighter's cockpit. The psychic force of Marbet's presence, wave after glowing wave, stops Pharah in her tracks. The power of two lives in one. While Pharah is distracted, USO uses the V1 hangar to extend the V2's reach. The two machines seeming to hold hands while the V1's beam saber cuts the legs and one arm from Pharah's mobile suit. USO tries to convince her to abandon the guillotine and know peace, but Pharah fights to the bitter end. Her last words are to Tassilo, letting him know he's on his own, and to her former subordinate Metchet, that she'd be with him soon. In her last moments, she realizes that birth and fighting, violence and death, it's all life, and the bells she's worn since her narrow escape from death fall away. Uzo, having sensed the same emanations as Farah did, now knows that Marvet is pregnant, although she insists that she can't be sure yet. He tells her to take the V1 to protect herself and the baby, while he goes not to retrieve Shakti, but to capture Maria. Confined to a room aboard Tassilo's flagship, Maria wonders if there's some way she can make amends for the harm she's caused and begins to send a prayer out into space, calling USO and the other kids of the League Militaire to her. When League militaire forces seem to concentrate their attacks on the retreating Shubaten fleet rather than on the Sugen Fleet and Angel Halo, Tassilo suspects Maria is responsible. But by then, it is already too late. While mobile suits dogfight all around them, the Jeanne d'arc rams the bridge of one of Tassilo's ships. It's a rout. The remnants of the Shibatan fleet fall back, and USO tears up at the thought that his father came to help him. But Maria is still in Tassilo's clutches, and Shaak Ti is still in the key room of Angel Halo. The battle is far from over.
Okay, so the recipe said to use a teaspoon of gender, but I tripped and I spilled the whole bottle of gender Sauce all over the Anime. Do you think that's gonna have any negative effects?
That depends. Was it Tomino brand, gender, or generic?
Oh, I always get the brand name.
Well, I hate to break this to.
You, but the bottle's got a picture of his bald head on the side of it. Gender by Tomino. There sure is a lot of it in this episode. They signal that to us right off the bat by calling it the women's battlefield. And they really do talk a lot about women in an abstract kind of a way, what it means to be a woman.
Which roles preclude being a woman and which roles can women hold right?
Farah was a soldier but became a woman. Those two are definitely incompatible. Maria talks about womanly misdeeds or woman's misdeeds as being the source of calamity for her. Whether that's her own particular calamity, calamity for the Earth sphere in general, kind of unclear. A lot of her language is very sort of airy and literary.
She and USO both, at various points in the episode, use what is called literary form, which is a different way of ending sentences specifically used for literary writing.
It gives the sense that they are quoting from something, that they are speaking from an authority beyond themselves or sort.
Of opining, in a way, making speeches.
And Maria indulges in a kind of magical thinking, this idea of, like, by doing good things, good things happen. By doing bad things, bad things happen. Even if there's not a direct, like, literal, physical, causal relationship between the two of them. It's a kind of synchronicity, but it's.
Deeper even than that. Like, she basically says that the reason Tasilo abducted her or was able to abduct her was because of her own immorality or her own unworthiness. What does that have to do with anything? He abducted you because you're a powerful symbol that he thinks he can use. We could argue that your actions up until this point helped create that situation. But this is very like, when someone is moral and good, good things happen to them, and only good results from their actions. And if someone is evil, then only bad results from their actions.
When.
Which is not like. That's not a new idea. We've seen that in countless forms, from the prosperity Gospel to, like, the belief in synchronicity or manifesting to the mandate of Heaven, which I think is maybe what Maria is getting at here. By her wicked deeds, because she was unworthy of the position of leadership, the power that was thrust upon her, she has lost the mandate of heaven.
But it just highlights for me how sort of childish and simplistic and romantic, not in the sense of romance between two people, but romantic in the sort of broader artistic sense. Maria is about everything in a way that strikes me as inexcusably naive in an adult person who runs A nation.
Yet she believes that she has become too adult, that it is her adulthood, her adultness, that has made her wicked.
Ah. So here we have to dig into translation a little bit.
Ooh. Or alternately. Oh, no.
Our own amateur attempts at translation have shown us just how difficult it is. I am leery of nitpicking someone else's translation work since I don't know what materials they had to work with, what timeline they were on. You know, the circumstances behind the work. However, shikashi. Shikashi. A word that comes up repeatedly in this episode is sugiru. Usually in most conversations that you have where it comes up, it gets attached to adjectives or to some verbs. To say too much, something is too fast, too tall, someone ate too much, someone drank too much. And when it's used that way, written, it's usually written with just the hiragana, just the phonetic Alphabet. However, sugiru can also mean to pass through, to pass by, to go beyond, or to expire, to run out. And those meanings, typically when they're written, use the kanji. When USO says, oh, it would be too sad to be crying as you are becoming an adult, he uses that only phonetic form, sugiru. We looked at the Japanese closed captioning for this. However, when he describes Farah as what the English subtitles say, too much of a woman, and when Maria describes herself as, again from the English subtitles, too much of an adult, they both use.
The kanji, suggesting that they mean not too much of a woman, but your womanhood has expired, or you have passed beyond womanhood.
You have gone through it and passed it and left it behind. And potentially the same for adulthood almost, that Maria may have kind of skipped over adulthood to something else or passed it by and occupies some other position that is not adulthood.
I think if you connect this to what I was saying in a previous episode about life as a series of stages and how for women, adulthood means child rearing.
And then she didn't raise Shakti.
Exactly.
If you take that and apply it to Maria in this one interpretation of what she's doing with the angel halo is that subconsciously she yearns for the baby daughter that she was forced to surrender, the child she never raised. She was denied the chance to be a mother, and so now she wants to make the whole world into her children. It's a kind of transposition of that desire. In the same way that, say, Lupe transposed her desire for a child into her desire to embrace a child.
And I very much want to come Back to the adult child dichotomy and how that plays out in the politics of Zanskar. But first, I think we have to talk about Farah and Marbet and the emanations coming off of a pregnant Marbet's belly.
Two lights, two lives in one. What could that possibly mean? It's blowing my mind.
Tomino loves a magical fetus.
He loves a magical space psychic fetus. This is Char's counterattack all over again. And I think. I think having the fetus growing in her womb has enhanced Marbette's psychic powers.
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
Just like it enhanced Chen's psychic powers back in Char's counterattack. One weird trick to improve your psychic power, I guess. The implications of this are so sinister, by the way, if you took it to its logical.
Like you would want every pilot to be a pregnant lady.
Exactly. You would, like, recruit potentially psychic women, impregnate them, and then send them out onto the battlefield for maximum battlefield effectiveness. It's the cyber new type program combined with, like, forced birtherism.
There is also a really sinister read on Farah's reaction to Marbett because she has that line about wanting to destroy Marbet, then I'll no longer have the light of that life to fear. Which if Farah, along with many of the other women in this show, is a stand in for sort of like career women who reject motherhood completely, only the evil women. Well, so it's. It presents this particular type of woman as not merely not wanting motherhood for herself, but as hostile to motherhood, period. Like, deeply hostile to it and in a way, hostile to the future itself.
Mm.
Well, Zans'scar is deeply hostile to the future itself.
Like the children of Zanskar are all.
Being fed into the war machine.
Zanskar has no future. It has killed its future on the altar of tyranny and conquest. But this, like, revulsion, this terror that Farah feels in the presence of a fetus does seem like the way, like, strident anti feminists choose to depict feminism.
Oh, yeah, the scaremongering around childless women and that their mere existence is hostile to women who do choose to have children.
Does this come from a place of mounting anxiety over Japan's, like, collapsing birth rates?
Quite possibly not so much related to the child side of things. But as I was watching this episode and seeing Marbet think about, I may be carrying Oliver's baby. And Farah keeps mentioning Medchet, who I guess she was in love with. Who knew?
Seems like it. Well, she. She dies, right? And once she is freed of these bells. Her voice changes, her attitude changes. Suddenly she's like, freed of this curse, the possession. And she's like, mechet, I'm coming for you. But anyway, now she can finally go and be a proper woman, I guess, because as Maria said, she was a soldier, but now she's a woman.
In this show, there are no intact, happy couples.
Warren and Martina and Odello and Alicia.
Alicia, okay. But of the adults, of the adults, there is not a single intact, happy couple. And remember that line from a couple episodes ago about the true form of adult love is those two Zanskar soldiers who killed each other? Mmm hmm.
Wait, what about Katagina and Chronicle?
Are they happy?
Oh, they don't seem it. We'll talk about Chronicle in a minute. But before we move on from Farah, her death sequence is so good, isn't it? Like, artistically, the visuals, the sound, this whole episode.
Yeah, the switching back and forth between using blue and red for those deep contrast emotional scenes. There's that moment where there's like a crack that spreads across the frame of Farah's face.
Mm.
And you brought up her death. Farah has just before she dies, what I think of in Gundam as being one of those third eye opens, deep realization about the universe moments. USO is coming in to attack her and she says, that's also light. You remember she's been talking about the light of Marbet's life and the light of Marbet's fetus. Life.
The beam saber is light and life is light.
The guillotine blade is shining.
Yes.
And there's no way you could have preserved this in English, I don't think. But the word that she uses for light, Hikari. She then uses the verb version to talk about the blade of the guillotine shining. Hikaru. So she's tying all these things together. And I think in that moment, she's saying one of the true things that the show believes, which is birth and violence and fighting and death. All of that is life.
Yes, it's all part of the same thing. Also, when she is freed from the bells, when she dies and the bells like break and come off of her. And then Tassilo senses this and he says, the bells have fallen. Later, he pulls that gun on Maria and he says, you know, I was sent to the guillotine once. I'm already living in the world of the dead. And this is when he's like. He's kind of cracking up. He's been holding it together pretty convincingly since his reappearance in the show. But now we see that he, like Farah, has been seriously messed up, traumatized, disturbed by his experiences, by his. His near death. And I think for both of them, what the show is saying is that these are two people who have clung to life beyond their appointed time. They should have died when they died, but instead they remained. And remaining on after the. The time when they ought to have died has turned them into the. These monsters.
Well, they're like ghosts haunting us rather than, like, people living in the world.
Yeah.
Because remember when I talked about spirit possession and stuff, that one of the stories of spirit possession was about all these nobles who'd been put to death and that their angry spirits continued to haunt people in the area for hundreds of years afterwards?
Mm. To return to something we were talking about earlier with Maria, part of what she's saying here, I think, is an admission that she was arrogant before with her attitude that a matriarchy, a world ruled by women, would be a more peaceful world. I think she is acknowledging, in an extremely gendered way, that a world ruled by women can also be bad.
I don't know how. Where are you getting that? Because I got the sense that she blames her own conceit. She does say I became conceited, but she also kind of blames Angel Halo. Like, oh, the machine only partly worked. It's the machine's fault, but it's not.
The machine's fault because the machine was built wrong. It's the machine's fault because what she put into it was tainted, flawed. That's. That's. I think, what she's saying. For this reading to work, you have to accept as. Given the ways in which, like, male dominance is bad. And I think the show has sort of established that in previous episodes, male dominance, like, in the extremely gendered worldview of the show, men are violent, men are warmongers, men are ambitious, and those ambitions lead them to hostile actions. The patriarchy itself is a form of domination and tyranny and violence. The cult of the Mother Goddess, then, is presented as an alternative to that, but it's not a real alternative. It's merely a different flavor of the same thing.
You don't think she's just saying, because I am a flawed person, it didn't work. But with a sufficiently virtuous woman, this would have worked.
Oh, maybe. I mean, they got Shakti in there now, Right.
Arguably, the distinction could be on woman versus girl.
Mm.
Because after the first time I watched Maria's little speech there, and she's talking about women's immoral deeds, you know, and what a sad punishment this is. I found myself thinking, what does this mean for Shakti, who is on the cusp of womanhood?
Mm. Well, whatever Maria thinks, I don't think the show is saying that the difference is womanhood versus girlhood, because the ending of the episode makes it pretty clear that Shakti is doing exactly what Maria did and potentially even worse, because she's more powerful, she's more pure, and they're.
Now closer to Earth.
And yet Maria, who I think is wrong again at the end of the episode, is thinking to herself, perhaps what we need is the compassion of children.
This when she then summons them and is like, hey, boys, you need to kill us. You need to kill the two of us in order to save many lives. Yeah, that's the compassion of children. She's asking for compassion at the end of a beam rifle.
But this really brings up an idea I've been kind of noodling with for a few weeks now, which is that in the League Militaire and in Zanskar, we see two different presentations of how the older generation of how adults treat children as they are growing up. One flawed, but ultimately better than the other. Because on the one side, we have Hangarg, who is struggling, admittedly, with how to deal with uso, as, you know, a soldier under his command, but also his son, but also not a young child anymore, someone who is growing into young adulthood, growing into manhood. And it's difficult, but he's trying to make it work. And Mubarak is giving him some good advice.
And if you go way back to the cameo on arc and you look at the old man, Polycule and Katagina, and the way they all argue about the treatment of uso, they're trying to feel out the balance between protecting children and empowering them, giving them agency, giving them autonomy. Maybe they give USO too much autonomy, too much responsibility.
Perhaps.
Perhaps. But it is a conversation. It is a debate. They are looking for the line, and.
They are thinking deeply about it.
Whereas on Zanskar's side, Zanskar wants to.
Keep you a child forever. Everybody, everybody, children forever.
But they also want you to be a battle child. Fons Kakati sees Shakti and is like, put that child in a situation.
But I mean, literally, the angel Halo is forcing infancy on all of these humans and creatures.
I. Sorry, I don't mean to cut you off, but I just had a revelation as you were talking. It's purity. It's black and white thinking you're either a child or you're an adult. There is no gray zone.
You're either pure or wicked.
Yes. And that's why they keep talking about purity, about Junsui. Like, you have to be one thing or the other. No questions, no fuzzy debates about where the line is. The line is hard and fast, and we're gonna force you onto one side of it.
But we see this over and over again in the way that even as Shakti starts to behave in a more commanding and forceful way, everyone in Zanskar insists on treating her like a child. Chronicle patronizes her and talks down to her and, like, laughs and pats her on the head practically. In the scene where Kagati is putting her into the angel halo and is describing yet again how this is going to work and what good it's going to be, she kind of cuts him off. And the vibe I got from her line, I think what she actually says is something like, you don't need to keep explaining it to me, but I got a very like, shut it, old man. Kind of like, I am taking this action as an adult. You don't have to convince me or lie to me like you did to my mother. I assume, like, maybe part of the.
Reason Tomino thinks that a pregnant woman is the ultimate life form is because a pregnant woman is like a complete mixture, a complete mingling of child and adult.
Well, and a child who literally hasn't been able to take any independent action yet and so cannot be considered to have done anything wrong.
The what? Only a fetus can properly command the angel halo.
So I actually have a prediction, because they go straight from Maria talking about how she was possessed by wicked thoughts, by passions, she was unworthy. And then they cut to Carmen crying. I think little baby Carman is gonna be key to whatever saves humanity, to whatever happens at the end of this. I think super new type baby Carl man is going to be a very important part of it. Humorously, we contrast all of this with a line from USO that I think sort of betrays part of him that's still a child, which is after he's killed Pharah, Marbet checks on him and she asks if he's crying. And he says something along the lines of like, wouldn't that be too sad to be crying as you become an adult? And I mean, one. This shows us he thinks of his actions on the battlefield, of being able and willing to kill another person under circumstances where it feels necessary as being a mark of adulthood. But in a way, it Also shows that he has this idea that the benchmarks of adulthood, the rites of passage, are supposed to be happy, sad things or joyful things. You're supposed to feel good about becoming an adult and how mixed up and depressing it would be if someone instead felt sad in those moments. Whereas from however many years old I am like, of course becoming adults is sad.
It's at least bittersweet.
There are happy moments too. There are plenty of happy moments, but there are, I think, as many sad ones. Mm. I was also struck by his change, because just an episode or two ago, he was very clearly going to rescue Shakti. That was the point of all this. That's what he was doing. And now in this episode, it's, oh, no, I have to go get Maria. And is this meant to convey to us that he is now making the more adult decision?
Hmm.
Perhaps as a military objective, Maria is probably more important to capture. I mean, arguable because of the angel halo, but if it weren't for the angel halo, he is perhaps making the less personal but more politically savvy decision.
Or he's making the more personal and less savvy decision because, like. Well, for one thing, I assume he's still pretty broken up about the fate of his own mother, a fate he does not want Shakti and Shakti's mother to replay. Also, Shakti has repeatedly put them all in trouble in order to run away and join Zanskar. So maybe USO is simply accepting this, but I think the actual intention of the episode is that Maria's psychic powers are calling to these boys. Maria is summoning them to her aid.
One other thing to do with children and babies and what it all means. That really threw me for a loop when USO hears Maria calling and Haro calls him out because Haruo can't hear anything.
Haro confirmed. Not a new type.
There is a sound effect that I thought sounded like a mewling kitten.
Hmm.
Like a. A kittenish kind of meowing sound before the enemies descend on them.
Are you sure that wasn't just tigress meowing during the year? Watch through.
I'm fairly positive, yes. I re listened a couple of times.
And the I've trained her to meow on command.
The closest that I could come was mewling kitten. Well, and what is the mewling of a kitten but a call for help.
From a baby directed towards its mother?
Sort of related to that adulthood thread in the episode is this weird, studiously calm and casual conversation between Mubarak and Hangar about whether or not they should follow the lean horse, which I assume is Hangarg trying to be dispassionate and logical and put the needs of the force he's commanding ahead of his own personal desire to go find out what is going on with his son and protect his son.
Uh huh. The presentation of the scene, the way the voice actors read the lines does make it sound like something else is going on. Something below the surface, below the specific words being used. It occurred to me that many, maybe they are also being affected by Maria's psychic summoning.
Mubarak does later in the episode say that his instinct is that they should continue to follow the lean horse.
Yeah.
Because once they get closer to Angel Halo, there's this question of do they follow the fleet that's following Tassilo, or do they stay near the Angel Halo? That what should they do?
Right? Uso, Odello and Tomash could not have gotten to to the Shubhoten if the Jeanne d'Arc had not been there to break through the rearguard.
And Uso tears up happy tears with the arrival of the Jeann d'Arc because his dad has come to help him.
And Mubarak is a pretty clear, like, copy of Revel from First Gundam. And one of the noteworthy things about Revel in First Gundam is that he's kind of a new type, despite being a million years old by the standards.
Of Gundam, which is to say like 50.
Yeah. I mean, yeah. However, while that seems like probably what they were going for, it's I think, more fun to imagine Hangerk and Mubarak sitting there in Hangerg being like, well, it sure would be tactically advantageous to go help my son out. And Mubarak being like, yes, strategically we should go and help your son. I agree. As a matter of military tactics, I.
Think it's almost more Hangurg with great pain in his voice. I should probably just stay and attack Angel Halo. Huh? And Mubarak interpreting this like, I don't know. I think it would maybe be more strategically advantageous to go protect your son. Why don't we go do that? Oh, you think that would be more advantageous? Okay, then like, Mubarak kind of gives him a rationale, gives him a reason.
To abstract this out of the battlefield context. It's like, oh, I guess I have to stay at work and go to this important meeting. And your boss being like, I have decided we're going to hold the meeting in the park where your son's baseball game is being played.
Yep, we Touched on the functioning of the Angel Halo a little bit earlier. But I want to return to that because there's some quite evocative scenes at the very opening of the episode dealing with just that. We see some reconnaissance planes and vehicles running around checking on what's happening.
Love their cool, heavily armored Google Maps truck that's driving around. Cameras facing every which way.
Various scenes of Earth. Hangarg points to a map, and either the map is wrong or Hangarg's intelligence is wrong. Because Hangar says this is the area we think was affected. And it looks like it's mostly Iberia and Northern Africa. Parts of Europe?
No, it's like the whole Mediterranean anyway.
Well, it's the whole Mediterranean, but the opening scene, the very first scene of Earth that we see affected is in Monument Valley in the United States.
Due to American economic problems, we sold Monument Valley to Europe. Aren't a bunch of Westerns filmed in Spain? Because the terrain is similar, But I.
Don'T think it's Monument Valley similar. It is like mountainous, rocky terrain, but I don't think it has the big spires of rock in the same way.
Mm.
I can't say for certain. Somebody on staff probably really liked Westerns and really wanted to draw the Salon again. Saloon.
Or they just happened to have the backgrounds already painted and decided to reuse them.
Yeah, that could be it. But then they talk about it having a regression effect. We've already talked about that. Hanger speculates that it would cause cellular degeneration. So in a way, that's almost counter to regression. That's like aging.
Right? They say premature aging and death, which I think is very interesting that this effect causes mental regression but physical aging. Also love that these scenes of the Earth with everyone falling asleep show a lot of fire, undermining any claims that this is a peaceful act.
Well, and people floating in swimming pools. Like, people would have drowned, people would have crashed their cars, People would have burned down their homes. But one of the bits that really gets me is Maria, towards the end of the episode, describing what she's done as having reduced people to primitives. And I did check the Japanese word that she uses. And it can mean to primitive people. It can also mean an original or natural state, a state of nature being unaltered by humankind. But here's the thing. The simplest form of life still acts for its own survival. And one aspect of Victory Gundam, in addition to, I think, Victory Gundam. Looking at certain social moral panics about kids these days. Don't want to grow up. Everyone is in a perpetual state of childhood and turning it around and saying, is it that they're in a perpetual state of childhood or that you put them in one and then get mad at them for it? Like that adult actions help create that problem, but also that Maria has actually caused something supremely unnatural. That Maria as a spacenoid, does not know what a state of nature is. She is totally divorced from any conception of what is natural because she grew up in space. And we can argue about, like, what does natural mean? And we have before, but this show demonstrates a clear vision that naturalness, that the state of nature, that that is about Earth ecology, that is about living creatures on Earth in our environment, and that living in space creates people who are completely disconnected from that understanding, from the wisdom of nature itself.
If there was any doubt at this point about how Tomino feels about space colonization as an initiative, really, this episode should dispel that Tomino thinks colonizing space is a terrible idea and that we should not do it. Because Maria has a little speech to Tasilo where she's like, the ambitions of small minded petty men have led to this age of space colonization. Can't you see that?
Right?
She talks about the space colonies as though it is the worst possible thing.
That this was a bad thing that happened to humanity and was caused by petty ambition and ego. Smallness of soul.
Smallness of soul. Just like my brother Chronicle. A person completely unrelated to the conversation, except that Maria really wants to drag him. Chronicle's stock falls so dramatically in this episode.
I think she's also making the point to Tasilo that he thinks he's different somehow, but to her, they are all the same.
Ugh, men. But on the specific topic of Chronicle, up until now, the most generous reading of Chronicle's character is that he has been working secretly behind the scenes, mostly undepicted, to undermine Fonz Cagaty's control of his sister and try to liberate the Zanskar Empire from the malignant influence of this old Jupiterian patriarch. And then in this episode, he just gives Shakti to Kagati. And when Katajina calls him out on that, he's like, oh, I didn't have the authority to oppose him. Chronicle, you just interfered in a coup. Tazilo just showed up, shot his way in, and kidnapped the queen. You are not living in the world of institutional deference. You are living in the world of Stop quoting laws to those of us who have mobile suits.
Would the demonym for being from Jupiter be Jovian?
Yes.
Sorry, I Just kept thinking about that. But on the subject of Chronicle, I wondered if he hadn't decided Shakti was more trouble than she was worth. In particular because he has that line about, I think she's collaborating with the League militaire. I think she and those kids can sense each other, which they can censor. And in fact foreshadows what Maria does.
Yes, but I mean, it's still.
It's still pretty weak sauce. I'm not gonna argue that you brought.
Shakti onto the angel halo. You didn't have to do that. You also didn't have to leave her with Kgatee. A thing that is going to be immediately disastrous. And Cagate sure is not grateful to you for doing it either. What a fail, Brother Nepo, baby. He's spent his whole career trying to overcome that allegation. And he's not beating it.
He's not beating the charges.
If you don't want Kage to have Shaak Ti, and things you have said in the past indicate that you don't want Kage to have Shakti, then just take her away from him. And if the old man tries to stop you, then tell Katajina to put a bullet through his good eye. She would love to do it.
This is the other thing that gets me. Why keep Kagate around at all?
Right?
The Queen just got kidnapped out from under him. If you ever needed a pretense under which to get rid of him, there you go.
Mhm.
And in all of the mess of battle, if he really wanted to, he could get rid of Kagate. And anyone who you think might spill the beans about him getting rid of Kagati and blame it on Tasilo.
Yeah, kill Cagaty. Kill those wig dudes in the control center and just be like, oh, Tasilo's mutiny. He killed everyone. So tragic. Here's your new queen, Shaakti, and I'm her prime Minister. He's not even good at scheming.
No, he's really not. What is he trying to achieve? Nobody knows. He doesn't know. Katagina really hopes he knows.
Katarzyna, I think you might have hitched your wagon to the wrong horse.
And now, Tom's continuing research on the history of Yugoslavia.
After many delays, both planned and unplanned, I'm back to wrap up the story of World War II in Yugoslavia. We left off with the partisan leader Tito and his staff narrowly escaping encirclement by the Nazis and their collaborator allies in what is called the Fifth Offensive. It was during this Fifth Offensive that Tito was finally able to make direct contact with the allies thanks to a British military mission that parachuted into partisan held territory and linked up with Tito during his desperate push to break through the fascist encirclement. For years now, the Brits had been collaborating with the Royal Yugoslav government in exile in London. And most of their information about events in country was filtered through Royal Yugoslav army officers working with Colonel Drazha and the royalist Chetniks. They were as anti communist as the communists were anti royalist and went to great lengths to obfuscate the real situation. But with conditions on the eastern front turning desperate, and the Russians pleading with their allies to please open up another front somewhere to take some of the pressure off, the Brits asked their Chetnik allies to step up the pace of sabotage. To which the Chetniks just kind of said nah, but please do keep sending us money. So the British started looking around for other allies in the region who, who might be willing to do some actual fighting. And so on June 25, two weeks after the official end of the fifth offensive, the partisans received their first delivery of British military supplies. The British liaison attached to Tito's headquarters had succeeded in getting word back to London that it was in fact the partisans who were doing the bulk of the fighting. In the coming months, more evidence trickled through. In July, Tito's group caught one of the Chetnik leaders who had led a coup within partisan ranks the previous year. And they found German orders among his papers. Ultra radio intercepts confirmed it beyond all doubt. British supplies meant that the partisans gained ready access to explosives. Men who had in better times been engineers or miners now became expert saboteurs. Rail lines were cut, bridges destroyed, and the communication and transport network that had enabled the occupation army to mass overwhelming force. Wherever the partisans gathered was if not completely destroyed, then at least seriously inconvenienced. And better news soon followed. Allied troops had landed in Sicily on September 3, 1943. They reached the Italian mainland. On the 8th of that month, Italy surrendered to the Allies. As far as the larger war was concerned, this didn't make as much of a difference as you might expect, because the German army swiftly invaded Italy and established a Mussolini led puppet state in the north that would continue fighting until May 1945. But for the partisans of Yugoslavia in specific, Italy's surrender was a major boon. The Italian army units occupying the southern parts of Yugoslavia melted away after the surrender. Some of them even defected. And the partisans were able to liberate huge sections of territory, including part parts of the coast where allied ships could drop off supplies and pick up sick and wounded partisans for evac. The departing Italians also abandoned masses of the kind of war material that is always in short supply for tanks, artillery, automatic weapons, ammunition, boots. But partisan control of such a large and strategically important area could not be tolerated by the remaining occupation forces. So in December 1940, the Germans launched the sixth major offensive to reoccupy the former Italian territories. And presumably because they were following the strategic policy of if at first you don't succeed, try, try again, they once again hoped to encircle and destroy the partisan army. As before, the Germans inflicted heavy losses on the partisans, but once again failed to trap Tito or destroy his army. And it was around this time that the British, who were still taking the lead on allied support to the Yugoslav resistance, decided to abandon their support for the chetniks and throw their full weight behind the partisans. Churchill announced in the House of Commons that we have proclaimed ourselves supporters of Marshal Tito because of his massive struggle against the German armies. We are sending and planning to send the largest possible supplies of weapons to him. The American air forces, now operating from bases in southern Italy, felt the sting of national and professional rivalry. If the partisans were going to be out there killing Nazis with British guns, then by God, they'd better get some American made ones too. So starting in February, American transport planes flying out of Brindisi began delivering tons of supplies and on at least one occasion, three dozen mules behind German lines returning, loaded to capacity with wounded partisans. Tito's forces kept growing. Every failed attempt by the Germans to pin down the partisan leader only added to his legend. Every brutal reprisal drove more civilians into open resistance. Take away the things a person lives for, and they will find something to die for. In 1942, there had been about 135,000 parts. Partisans mostly in small bands scattered throughout the country. By the end of 1943, there were nearly 330,000. Just a year later, that number doubled again. At the end of May 1944, the Germans launched one last major operation. They no longer had the resources for a patient smothering encirclement operation. This would have to be a fast moving surprise attack, a direct decapitation strike on partisan headquarters meant to kill or capture Tito himself. Without him, they believed, the movement he led would splinter. They called it Operation Rosselsprung, for the way the knight piece in a game of chess can leap over other pieces to strike behind enemy lines. At that moment, Tito was in Dervar, liberated territory in mountainous Bosnia, surrounded by a large military and Political headquarters, to which were attached British, Soviet and American military liaisons. In fact, Winston Churchill's son Randolph was himself among them. There were also a few Western reporters and photographers there to share the partisan struggle with the wider world. With local Chetnik and Ustasha support, The Germans detailed two elite units, the 15th Mountain Corps, about 15,000 soldiers, along with two tank companies and the 500th SS Parachute Battalion. The Mountaineers would provide the distraction and the heavy guns attacking partisan headquarters from eight different angles, while the airborne troops landed secretly behind the lines in small groups of between 20 and 110 men. German intelligence, relying on agents drawn from Yugoslavia's significant ethnic German population, along with local Chetnik and Ustasha informers, had identified Tito's headquarters on the grounds of an old walled cemetery overlooking Drvar. Their plan was as the Luftwaffe would open up with a massive aerial Bombardment starting at 6:30 in the morning. Half an hour later, airborne troops arriving by parachute and glider would begin landing. Divided into six groups, the first Panther group would was to land in the cemetery, capturing Tito and destroying partisan headquarters. Three smaller groups, codenamed Grabber, Stormer and Breaker, would land atop each of the allied military missions in villages around Drvar. Daredevil group would capture strategic crossroads outside town. And a final small team, Biter, was to knock the partisan radio station out of action. At the same time, the Mountaineers and tank companies would advance under various seizing power stations and airfields and keeping the partisan defenders too busy to engage the airborne troops behind their lines. The plan went relatively smoothly to begin with, the first wave of airborne troops facing only minimal resistance and swiftly occupying Dorvar and the cemetery. But they were all of them deceived, for Tito was not operating out of the cemetery. He was actually working out of a cave 2km away. A second intelligence unit from the SS knew this, but their commander, the infamous Nazi commando and later Mossad agent Otto Skorzeny, was organizing his own operation to capture Tito. And even though it was cancelled, he was not about to share his valuable intel with those idiots in the parachute battalion. The Germans also failed to locate the American, British and Soviet missions because they had noticed a Luftwaffe plane flying reconnaissance overhead two days prior and wisely decided to relocate. With the partisans main combat forces tied down fighting the advancing ground troops, the defensive Drvar fell to lightly armed improvised formations. Kids from the League of Socialist Youth of Yugoslavia who happened to be holding a conference in the town. Communist party functionaries barricaded inside their offices, officer cadets with pistols, local militia defending a hospital with a captured German machine gun women and children defending their own homes. The radio operators who fought until the building they were in was demolished with explosives. By 9:30, however, the Germans controlled the town center. One of them in all corners of the village. It crackles, crashes and bangs. Black smoke hangs above the valley. One ammunition store after another goes up in flood. The flames consume the enormous clothes and food stores. Everything, apart from things which can be carried away, have to be destroyed. They had also captured 400 or so prisoners, including all the allied journalists. Anyone who resisted or seemed like they might be capable of resisting was executed. Civilians who had hosted members of the allied missions in their homes were shot. Everyone was questioned, and those thought to have information about the partisan leadership were dragged off, tortured, then killed. The only remaining partisan resistance in the area came from Tito's personal escort battalion, fortified in good defensive positions around his headquarters cave. Realizing that this must be the location of the enemy command post, they had been sent there to annihilate the Germans concentrated their forces against it. But even with mortar and light artillery support, they failed to break the partisan line. Still, they had heavy machine guns covering the mouth of the cave, trapping Tito and his bodyguards inside. Around 10 o'clock, partisan units on the outskirts of Dvar began counterattacking, forcing the paratroopers to move to defensive positions. They fortified the walled cemetery it would serve as their headquarters and established a defensive perimeter around the town. They only needed to hold until the approaching mountain corps could relieve them. Throughout the afternoon, the fighting grew fiercer. Partisan snipers against German machine guns. Guerrillas with hand grenades sprinting across open ground under withering fire from Stuka dive bombers. By 6:00 that evening, the German perimeter had collapsed and the survivors were forced to shelter in the cemetery. Their commander had been wounded, leading one last desperate attack against Tito's cave, unaware that by that point the partisan leader and his men had already cut themselves a new exit out the back and slipped away to the relative safety of the mountain's peak. The German second in command was dead. The survivors knew nothing of their reinforcements because a partisan mortar shell had landed smack dab on their radio station. Eventually, a capsule dropped from a fighter overhead brought with it an unwelcome message. The motorized unit cannot get through. The road has been blown up. Hold out as long as possible. A survivor from the German force described. It is dark, dark night. Nothing can be seen of the desolate mountain ridges that surround the valleys any longer. Sometimes everything is calm and no shots interrupt the silence. Suddenly the machine guns rattle from all sides and every corner. At 10 o'clock in the evening, well past full dark, the partisans lit the cemetery up with phosphorus rounds and then their mortars started pounding. At dawn they launched a direct attack, even getting over the walls in places, but were thrown back with heavy losses. As the day brightened, the Luftwaffe returned to station over the cemetery and the partisans fell back. It was now May 26, 1944, and the battle was effectively over. The remaining partisans withdrew and the advanced units from the 15th Mountain Corps broke through to relieve the paratroopers. But of the 874 elite soldiers who entered Drvar on the previous morning, 576 of them were killed, 48 wounded. The unit would never participate in another parachute operation. This seventh and final anti partisan offensive had failed. But they did manage to capture Tito's dress uniform from the home of a local tailor. That's something, right? Eleven days later, allied troops landed on Normandy Beach. Ten days after that, Tito reached a compromise with the royal government in exile and the partisans became the official armed forces of Yugoslavia. Young King Peter II made a radio broadcast calling on all Yugoslavs to join the uprising under the command of Marshal Tito, leading to mass defections from the Chetnik and Collaboration Forces forces. But the Chetnik leader Drazhe still refused to cooperate with his communist rivals. That August, a coup in Romania evicted the fascist government and turned the nation's small army over to the advancing Soviets. In September, the Bulgarians followed suit, and a force of nearly half a million Bulgarian soldiers advanced into Yugoslavia to block German forces trying to retreat from Greece. Elements of the Red army soon joined them. In October, British commando and artillery units landed in Yugoslavia, there to provide the partisans with direct combat support. For the first time that month, Belgrade fell into Yugoslav hands. Then Mostar in February 1945 and Sarajevo in April. A few days after that, the former Partisans, now the army of Yugoslavia, broke through the heavily fortified Sirmian Front front. And on May 8, with Berlin in the hands of the Red Army, Germany surrendered unconditionally. It was all over. Tito and the partisans had won their war. But what would come next for the blood soaked country? Would the fragile detente between the King and the Communist endure? Would the internal contradictions and conflicts that had crippled Yugoslavia during the interwar years return to dominate the new Yugoslavia? Only time would tell. And that is where we'll pick up in our next installment.
Next time on episode 10.48 cleansing fire.
We research and discuss.
Victory Gundam episode 48 and you know.
Nothing Tomino Yoshiyuki new game plus a battlefield controlled by pregnancy. Incredible. She's wrong about everything.
Intercession of the Dead.
USO I'm right here so come and kill me.
Death on a Pale Mobile Suit Odello.
Is not forklift certified. You've done grand uso.
Now you know what you have to do. Burn the house down.
Burn em all. What do we want? A girl worth fighting for and imma keep it real with you. Chief Director of Victory Gundam Tomino Yoshiyuki this will not revert that declining birth rate. Please listen to it.
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 Dayakson. The closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio. The recap music is Slow by Lloyd Rogers. 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 on our website gundampodcast.com if you'd like.
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Thank you for listening.
There are a lot of wrong Gundam opinions out there corrupting the fandom with their wrongness.
Wrong opinions like this one Everyone should.
Support the USO is Char's great grandson theory not because of any so called evidence, but because it would be really funny if Char I Desperately need a Mommy Asnable turned out to be the ancestor of uso. I have way too many mommies. Ewan.
It's a good un.
Thank you Kevin S For this week's Wrong Gundam opinion.
Do we want to.
Briefly talk about the happenings? We had mentioned that before, but we don't have to if we're not feeling it this morning.
Yeah, let's not do it. I'm not feeling it right now.
All right, all right, I'm ready.
So am I.
Do you know the title of the the episode?
I believe we decided to call it Two Lives in One.
That is correct.
It's easier to remember when we decided it like yesterday.
I am going to keep teasing you about it though.
Oh, of course.
Wrong opinions Like I don't have the the intro for it, but.