You're listening to season ten 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 10.13, flesh and blood in a war of machines, and we are your hosts. I'm Tom, a priceless relic from a bygone age that is somehow still working.
And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam and wondering if kids still whistle through blades of grass. I did.
I just whistled the old fashioned way.
To my eternal frustration, I have never been able to whistle.
Oh, that's so embarrassing for you. I can't believe you would admit that.
On the podcast, mobile suit breakdown is made possible by our paying subscribers on Patreon. Thank you all, and special thanks to our newest patrons, Shell, Kamel, Alexei, and Zabi. You keep MSB Genki this week.
Victory Episode 13 Jiburarutaru Kuiki, or Gibraltar Airspace the episode was written by Tomida Sukehiro, storyboarded and directed by Nishimori Akira, with Nishimura Nobuyoshi as animation director. And now the recap.
An airport and a city perch next to the sea, the terrain swiftly giving way to steep, craggy bluffs crisscrossed by the red struts of the mass drivers. Ouco and his companions have arrived in arty Gibraltar. Marbet, Oliver, and Uso hide their core fighters at the bottom of a cliff, Marbit staying behind while Oliver and Uso walked the highway, following it until they are able to hitch a ride to the airport. Chronicle has been there some time, attempting to convince Mandela, the head of the PCST facility, to allow Bespa passage to space. Further pressure is brought to bear when the recarl and its mobile suit escort land at the airport, ignoring the fact they have been denied permission to do so. Mandela insists in the corporations neutrality clearly ruffled by this Bespa occupation, an attempt to bribe chronicle with two tickets to space, one for the lieutenant and one for the girlfriend waiting at his hotel. He must mean Katagina. Not long after chronicle leaves, Uso and Oliver are ushered into Mandelas office. Mandela pulls USO into a hug, exclaiming that he looks just like his father. It seems Mandela knew both of Usos parents and that Hangurg had for a time worked for the PCST as a soldier. Having received word that Uso was looking for them, Mandela conducted his own investigation. But after resurfacing when the invasion began, Osos parents vanished once more. His mother left two tickets to space with Mandela to pass on to USO. When the time came, Oliver makes his own plea for assistance, but the response is much the same as the one to the PCST is determined not to aid any party in the current conflict. It isnt long before that commitment is tested. Farah calls in additional tamliots to threaten the PCST, and the arrival of the transports creates still more tension. Their disguise makes it seem as though the PCSCs neutrality is a lie. At the airport, USO, Oliver, and the kids are brought face to face with Chronicle Mechette and Farah Farah and the kids recognize each other, all of them feeling a sense of betrayal over having liked an enemy. Mandela's efforts to calm the situation are in vain, and both sides take to their mobile suits, bristling at each other, waiting for any provocation or excuse to break me, the peace of this neutral place. A member of the Shrike team, Mahalia, takes UsO to his core fighter, while marbet flies by to pick up Oliver. Junko admonishes all of the shrikes to stow their weapons, and both sides warn their fighters to avoid damage to any PCST facilities, especially the mass drivers. After she has returned to the airport, Mahalia is preoccupied with thoughts of avenging helens death and draws her beam rifle. Although she doesnt fire or even aim it at the enemy, Vespa catch her on camera and consider the image pretext enough to attack. Using the terrain and the mass drivers shield, Vespa and the league militaire clash over Arty Gibraltar. The shrikes strike down one Tomliat after another. Uso fights well, but aggression gives him a kind of tunnel vision and leaves Vespa pilot Lupe Shino an opening, and she launches a savage attack with her beam axe. She is unprepared for how much stronger Uso has become, and before long is forced to eject and retreat. Next, Uso finds himself fighting the recall, but with its long range beam cannon, it has the advantage over open ocean. He draws them inland through the twisting ravines, and they lose him around a column of stone. Emerging from a tunnel, he catches the recall off guard, landing a shot and then launching the victory gundams boots at the mobile armor. Mechet shoots the boots part down before it strikes them, but the blast shatters the glass of the recarls cockpit, and Uso hesitates. Confronted with the human faces of his enemy. The recall gets away, and Uso, overcome with frustration and despair, is left wide open to an attack by one of the tomliats. Mahalia intercedes, landing a lethal blow against the enemy. Lulled by a feeling of triumph, she ventures too close, and the Thomliot lashes out at her ganeasi. Both mobile suits go down in flames and smoke. Afterwards, Junko reports to Oliver. Six Bespa mobile suits destroyed. One shrike lost. Mahalia's comrades retrieve her mobile suit, gently laying it on the tarmac. USO sprints over, climbing up to the gaping hole in the gun easy's cockpit. Mahalia is dead. Between sobs, Ussel calls her name.
Over the past few episodes, victory has been juggling a whole bunch of different plot balls, and we've been waiting for them to fall to earth. One of them lands heavily in this episode, and it's the status of the neutral PCST public corporation of space transport. And this bit of ruse that the league militaire or the federation forces, somebody has pulled off with these transport planes emblazoned with false PCST livery.
It's very unclear, by the way, who exactly made that decision. I feel like in previous episodes we were told they were federation ships. Here, someone identifies them, I believe, as league militaire ships. The pilot, Lieutenant Gomez, is a federation.
Lieutenant, unofficially succumbed to the league militaire going AWOL in order to help them out, or question mark, presumably he was.
There under orders to transport the mobile suits, and ever since has been forced to kind of wing it as the original plan has not worked out.
We didn't see the league military painting these logos on these planes, and they appear to be federation planes flown by federation officers. So you would think that this was a federation thing.
But then when they are discussing the status of their group arriving at this facility in planes that have clearly been falsely painted to look as though they belong to the corporation, Nez says, well, the federation hasn't put a stop to it, have they?
Yeah, though this is in direct response to Romero saying that it's a crime to impersonate to do that. So Ness is like, well, maybe it's a crime, but the authorities haven't done anything about it. After a previous discussion about this practice of disguising these transport planes as neutral corporate property, I did a little bit of research on this topic, but really only got as far as finding. I think I found one article that was like, disguising military equipment as civilian equipment is perfidy, and then another article that was titled, literally, no. Disguising military equipment as civilian equipment is not perfidy.
And whether it is or not is almost beside the point here, because what becomes very evident throughout the episode is that no faction involved in this conflict respects the neutrality of this corporation, but.
They respect it enough that they do feel like they need to let or force the other side to be the ones to break the neutrality first. Like it has a public relations impact.
They want a pretext, but if they actually respected it as neutral, they wouldn't be trying to get the corporation to make an exception for them, right?
Each is angling to get the corporations.
Resources on their side, and ultimately, without a defense force of its own, the corporation is entirely incapable of enforcing its own neutrality.
Yet it seems like the corporation does have a defense force. Where are they? I don't know. But in this episode, USO hears that line from Mandela where he's like, your father was a brilliant employee of the PCST. As a soldier, it's like, okay, so the PCSD has an army, or at least it has people you call soldiers. Did he mean like a corporate warrior? Like when we call someone a corporate raider?
I wonder if people had that phrase in Japanese, like a corporate warrior. I can imagine it, absolutely.
I have definitely read stuff about an attempt to create a modern, like a modern version of Bushido, corporate Bushido, suitable to the salaryman as a way to like, motivate them to put the well being of the corporation, their feudal lord, over their own, like health, safety, happiness.
But there is no evidence in this episode that the PCST has a militarized force of its own. Every attempt by Mandela or any of his employees or aides to defuse this situation is either completely ignored or explained around. He makes one attempt at bribery with chronicle, although why he thinks getting rid of just chronicle will help him, I'm not entirely sure.
His signature move does seem to be giving a person two tickets to space and saying, get out of my hair.
Well, when you control the route to.
Space, there's something to be said about that too. And USo calls out that this is a monument of the past. This is like ancient infrastructure, more than a century old and still functioning, and still absolutely essential to getting into space. It gives us this impression of the universal century as existing in a kind of decayed technological state, where either the technology or the industrial capacity or the political will is not there to do big infrastructure projects anymore. And they have to rely on these ancient relics of the time when the federation actually had the juice to operate as a functioning government.
It actually made me think of the handful of pieces of infrastructure around the world that are incredibly ancient. There are some bridges and aqueducts that are still in use that are remarkably old. There is plumbing in some cities that is incredibly old, certainly roads and the like, that there are important pieces of infrastructure that even if they seem outdated, even if they are historical, remain in use and valuable as more than mere artifacts.
And it is not lost on me that in Japan there was a massive infrastructure building boom from the end of the war until the mid late seventies, and then by the nineties because of the bubble bursting, because of collapsing tax base and government budget deficits, that boom in infrastructure building basically ended and they were relying on existing and decaying infrastructure.
I mean, there is a school of thought that Japan's economic growth and economic prosperity in the post war period was entirely driven by the fact that they were rebuilding from the ground up and invested in the best of everything and were partially able to do so because they weren't trying to fund military at the same time. And that once the benefits of all of that brand new infrastructure ran out because it hadn't necessarily been renewed to keep pace, that was a big part of why the economy started to stagnate.
Partly just the act of spending an enormous amount of money to build infrastructure is itself a huge boon to the economy because you're pouring enormous amounts of money into the construction sector now. A lot of that money ended up being wasted or getting funneled into sort of pork barrel projects that didn't do much good except to enrich particular localities. There was a lot of waste, there was a lot of graft. Even. So, it was a huge stimulus to the economy. But that kind of stimulus can't last forever because one, money runs out and two, eventually you've built everything that you could possibly build or everything that you could build with any degree of, like hope of recouping the cost on the value of the eventually created thing. Like if you build a bunch of dams and bridges out of the middle of nowhere and then no one uses them, they're just going to decay into nothing.
And even infrastructural projects or investment in like manufacturing technology, it's not the sort of thing that it makes sense to do. Very frequently you're kind of trying to juggle the decreasing efficiency of the thing over time with the cost of creating a new one or putting in upgrades.
There's this model for how you do this with equipment in a factory or something where you're constantly cycling some things out and some things in. So there's like a steady level of investment and a steady growth in capacity. But that's very difficult to do with big infrastructure projects, and government budgets don't really work that way, is it? I think the term is like green field investment or something like that for when you start from basically nothing, and you can build the very best thing possible.
That sounds right.
But then you have this problem where once you've built it, like with. This is one of the big reasons why we don't have better high speed rail in the US. Because the place where it would be most useful, the most heavily populated parts of the country, are so developed at this point that you would have to destroy huge amounts of existing buildings and infrastructures and communities in order to lay straight, effective high speed rail tracks down. It's so expensive to build a new thing where there is something already.
And in the US case, it's been a long time since we have eminent domained that much land, and it would likely be extremely unpopular.
Mm hmm.
It would affect probably a lot more people than any one project ever had before. Even big dam projects where, like, whole towns had to be moved, I bet, like, the northeastern corridor would still involve more people. But we digress.
That's what we do here. We digress.
I'm glad you brought up USO's comment, because something I noticed last episode as well, but it was even more apparent in this episode is they are kind of using USO as a narrator. They're having him do a lot of expository kind of explanations for the audience, that it doesn't necessarily make sense for him to be saying these things out loud to himself. So clearly, this is meant to be a way to impart information to the audience. To my mind, it feels a bit clumsy and frequently explains things that I don't feel need an explanation. And granted, I'm an adult, and the show is being marketed to kids, so maybe they think kids need some of these points spelled out to them.
The screenwriter for this episode, Tomita, didn't write very many episodes for victory, so this may purely be, like, a stylistic difference. This is how he likes to write episodes. We haven't seen many episodes written by him, so it just is a little unfamiliar. But there's a lot of dialogue in this episode that it's what I call I'm shooting the beams dialogue, which is where a character, like, narrates what they're doing more or less as they do it. I don't entirely understand why. I feel like it just adds a certain, like. Maybe just adds a certain auditory texture to the thing. Like, in this scene, it makes sense for the character to scream something, and the best thing they could think of for them to scream was I'm firing my beams.
I almost think of that kind of dialogue as separate from what I'm talking about because it's so characteristic of a particular type of show to have somebody be like beam attack shields, you know, to name their moves, as it were, and declare what they are doing in.
A. I wonder if that tradition comes out of the old radio serials. Hmm.
Or possibly out of comics and manga.
It's very easy to imagine a flash Gordon, or for that matter, a superman, being like, watch out, chum. Those zapper beams could tear you in half.
But then there are moments like when Uso sort of freezes after the glass on the cockpit and passenger area of the recall is shattered. He can see the people inside, and he can't bring himself to shoot and then says, I can't shoot at someone when I can see their face. That was very evident from the scene that we just watched.
I don't know. It's very easy to imagine someone seeing that and being like, why didn't he shoot like he's seen all of these people before? He won't be shocked to learn that it's actually Farah Griffin, Chronicle and Mechette in the recall.
But there is a difference between attacking a big robot and knowing logically that there is a pilot inside and being able to see that person.
Oh, 100%. And this has been a consistent thing going back to episode two of first Gundam, when Omaro really struggles to be able to open fire on Shar's commandos, when he sees that they're just little dudes, when he realizes that they're just little birthday boys. But I can also imagine the person who sees that and the little cinemasins ding goes off of like, it's a plot hole that USo didn't immediately kill these people when he had them at his mercy. Should they have trusted the audience to get that? Yeah, probably. But I honestly am not surprised that they didn't. Before we move on too far from the PCST, I found myself wondering in this episode, are they neutral like the Red Cross is neutral, or are they neutral like Coca Cola is neutral?
I assume like Coca Cola is neutral.
And there's that bit after Chronicle has had his meeting with Mandela where he's leaving and he calls him a sly fox. He actually calls him a tanuki in the Japanese. And tanuki are specifically like shapeshifters and tricksters. And then there's that scene later where Mandela is talking to USO and Oliver, and they're like, if you're so neutral, why are there Zanskar mobile suits and mobile armors here in the base? And Mandela is like, oh, are there? I wasn't aware of that, even though he saw them land. Well, I guess you're leaving now. He's maybe not as reliable as he seems to be. He's very nice and friendly to everybody, but a bit of a shapeshifter.
That felt like practicality to me, because what is he supposed to do about the recall or those tumliots? Like I said before, without some kind of militarized force of his own, he can't stop them from landing, just like he couldn't stop the league militaire transport ships from landing.
Sure, he can't do anything about it, but he could be honest about it. The decision to lie there, it's a small and pointless lie, but that almost makes it worse. He could have just said, yeah, they landed without our permission. I'm trying to get rid of them. Please don't make this any worse for me.
How much good does it do the PCST when they're honest about those transport ships, though it's not as though Bespa believes them.
I mean, I basically agree with you. I get why he's doing it, but it doesn't fit with the level of warmth and friendliness that he shows to USO when he first arrives. There is in his interactions with Oliver and USO, at first, the feeling of, like, we're friends. I was old comrades with your mom and your dad. Like, I'm your buddy. I'm trying to help you. We have to work within these specific rules in order to make that happen. There are certain things that I can't do for you, but, hey, here are these tickets. And then to just slip back into that corporate Persona, put on the mask and reflexively lie about something so small, I don't know, puts me on guard. He is a sly fox.
A sly fox who, by the end of this episode, has probably lost his job after word gets out about the battle in and around the airport.
Well, if Fire Griffin is any indicator, you can screw up pretty badly and still keep your job for a surprisingly long time.
This actually is dovetailing pretty nicely. Our discussion of Mandela and then of Uso's talking to himself, lines, and even Pharah. Because one thing that I'm starting to get a sense that this show that victory gundam cares about a lot is the complexity of people's identities. In the case of Pharah, there's that whole confrontation between her and USO and the other kids, and they all recognize her as the woman they met in Barcelona, where she was so kind to them and friendly and seemed like a nice young woman. And now they find out she is far Vara Griffin, Bespa commander away, who played a pivotal role in the deaths of a whole bunch of people they care about. And she's both of those people. Mandela is both an old friend of Uso's parents, who is delighted to get to meet him, and a manager or executive of a corporation that is trying its darndest to stay neutral in the midst of this quickly expanding war. And after hearing about his parents from Mandela, Uso asks himself in his cockpit whether it's right for a soldier to abandon his child, not a father, because I think we all know the answer to that question. But a soldier and his father was.
Both just like Uso is, both pilot and child, and many, many other things, too. People keep trying to slot him into some kind of role that they need in their life and that he approximately fits. In the last episode, he approximately fit the role of Nicol for old man Robb in this episode. He has that sequence with Mahalia where she is pretty clearly treating him like the little brother she lost all those.
Years ago, which is, of course, awkward for him because to him, she is this beautiful woman who's, like, cuddling him.
And he is a pubescent boy.
Yeah, like, he's blushing.
And, you know, her behavior with him is very sisterly from her perspective. But for him, like, with his head nestled in her bosom and her lipstick kiss on his forehead, he's clearly feeling some powerful feelings about this.
And in some ways, that's puberty in a nutshell, right? A lot of people around you are treating you as a child still, even as you are having feelings that you associate with adulthood, even as you are feeling more like an adult and feelings.
You'Ve never had before and do not understand and do not know what to do with. Shakti expects something different from Uso. Shakti wants to put Uso back into the shape of the boy she knew in Kasarelia. Oliver, at least in the beginning, wanted to push Uso into the soldier mold because he was enough like a soldier that he felt like he should be kept to the same standards.
But even those relationships are evolving because although Shakti doesn't play a huge role in this episode, look at her behavior when USo returns. Susie and Warren rush up to him, so glad he's okay. They're so excited to see him. She can tell he's not done yet with what's currently happening, that he requires this emotional. And she's not really interested in being rebuffed by him over and over and over again, right? So she's just going to give him that space.
And then the final scene of the episode is USo. He's so solitary. This is where the Ganesi, Mahalia's Ganesi, is lying on its side, mortally wounded. She's dead inside. There are fire trucks there, but there's no one else around. It's only Uso who has clambered up to it and is clutching the chest of the Ganesi, like, hugging it and crying. The background is gone, the ground is gone. There's just sort of an abstract blot of colors, blues and whites that give the general impression of a spotlight. It's so theatrical, it's so stagey.
The animation of this last sequence, from the time he grabs the fire extinguisher and runs up to when he trips, falls, continues running up.
The trip and fall is such a poignant addition to the scene. At first it feels unnecessary, but it also feels like it wouldnt work the same way without it.
Its the moment where he accepts what everyone else already has, which is that Mahalia is already dead. He cant rush in and save her now. But something about the animation of this final sequence reminded me a lot of the scene of Robb in the previous episode, jumping from the waapa, tumbling across the street and then being shot by those soldiers. In particular, something about the way the hands are drawn felt very similar to me. The linework, structure, movement of the hands, and speaking of complex identities. And Uso and Mahalia, her parting words to him are basically an exhortation to maintain his love of his parents, to keep looking for them, to keep valuing them. Because although he has some clearly conflicted feelings about them, both about them always lecturing him, and about the fact that they left him behind without explaining what was happening, he is still looking for them. And from her perspective, the fact that he even has parents to look for, that his parents are still out there and that they could be reunited, is a thing that he should value, because she doesn't have that and hasn't had it for a long time.
Even the way she says it, the specific words she uses, reinforces this idea that she is treating him like a little brother. Because she says oya koko shinayo. And that ending, Shinay, seems to be like a Kanto specific dialect, like Tokyo dialect that is a bit abrupt and rude and the kind of thing that you would say to a little brother, but not necessarily to somebody outside your family.
Interestingly, in his flashback of that moment, she says shina sahi.
How interesting.
But that wasn't really where I was going with this.
He remembers a much more conventional way of saying the line, huh?
What I was thinking of is that in previous episode, his focus has been so much more on Katagina than on his parents, and wanting to find Katagina and be reunited with Katagina and see her again and try to get a more convincing explanation for what's going on and why she has stayed with chronicle all this time.
In the great juggling game of Victory Gundam story concepts, we were kind of expecting the Katagina ball to fall. This week they've arrived at RD Gibraltar. She is, in theory just off screen at the hotel, waiting for chronicle to come get her to take her to space. And Uso does briefly confront Chronicle about her, but she is quickly forgotten when the issue of his parents becomes more pressing.
In this episode, the search for his parents very explicitly fuels his aggression in the fight he mentions don't get in the way of my search for my parents. I have no sympathy for someone who gets in the way of my search for my parents. Is this because of the conversation with Mahalia?
Hmm, maybe so. Uso is clearly very easily influenced by things that pretty girls say to him. Strikes right to the quick. It rewrites his psychology at a pretty fundamental level, especially if theyre older, taller and just a bit condescending.
Some boys like a girl whos kind of mean to them. Its irresistible. Oh, although speaking of familiar language, and we brought this up before, but in this episode we have both sides calling him Boya. The shrikes call him Boya and it's nice. And Chronicle and Pharah both refer to him as Boya and it's not.
His identity as a child is kind of like the PCST markings on those league military transports in that it has in the past protected him and no longer does so Pharah and Mercet have no patience for that kind of Watarigela style angst about how children shouldn't be involved in the war. Machete is just like I will kill those kids. I will shoot them. And Pharah very explicitly orders him to shoot Uso down.
Once she knows that Uso is a combatant, shes shocked by the knowledge.
She gets over it pretty quickly.
Yeah, once she has it, its not relevant to her fighting him. And that scene where she first gains this knowledge kind of stands out as potentially marking her as childish because this line really stuck with me from ages ago, from one of the early episodes. But when one of the league military old guys tells Uso what you think. Every bad thing that happens to every enemy soldier you fight is your fault. No one is that important. And he's absolutely right. Not even the protagonist of a Gundam show is that important.
But he's the chosen child, and he.
Struggles to let go of that idea. Right. Like, he blames himself for not being able to protect Mahalia. Never mind that she never expected that of him, that she was a soldier who knew how much danger she was in, that nobody on the rest of her team blames him or even seems to be blaming themselves. Like, this is a thing that happens, but he struggles with it. He winds up blaming himself much of the time.
It is becoming characteristic of the shrikes that they all value each other's lives way more than any of them value their own life.
Mm hmm. And then pharah has that line that he is the reason for all my failures since Uig. That forced me to use the guillotine because how comforting to be able to blame your mistakes and to blame the actions that maybe you're beginning to regret or feel ashamed of on someone else.
I should never be allowed to actually translate anything because I would have rendered this line as something like. And I would have gotten away with it, too, if not for this one meddling kid.
Yet we know she feels some regret about the use of the guillotine. She felt it was justified when she first did it. She felt it was necessary. She's starting to regret that, perhaps. And while Uso has certainly been a thorn in Vespas side since he got his hands on a mobile suit, there are other pilots, and there have been other mistakes on the Bespa side. It's not all on this one kid being some sort of super genius.
I do think one element that's missing is maybe a sense of Bespa units sabotaging each other. That was such a good aspect of first Gundam. I mean, it was mostly centered around shar sabotaging Garma. But, like in the titans, in Zeta, for instance, there was a lot of everybody angling for their own advancement and not really taking the enemy seriously, and this resulting in all kinds of blunders and failures and backstabs and double crosses. There's some of that with Pippiniden. As soon as he arrived, everybody started acting like he was doing that. But there hasn't been any indication at all that he actually is trying to undermine this operation.
There have been hints of internal politics and wrangling and jostling for position behind the scenes, but not in much detail. There have been plenty of incidences where Bespa clearly underestimates who they're fighting, which comes up again here with Lupe fighting USO. And as I think several other Bespa pilots have before her, she's like, haha. Don't get cocky in your civilian designed mobile suit.
Lupe very quickly developing into a lieutenant worf kind of character where she shows up mainly to get wrecked and escapes to fight again.
She keeps escaping alive in a very Tomino esque misunderstandings, fuel conflict kind of thing, and possibly tying into the stuff about complex identities. There have been a number of times where various characters have attributed to malice or planning things that are happening by chance or are coincidences.
I keep thinking of Uso in that one episode where he and Shakti went off on their own, where he had thought himself into the whole tizzy about where he thought the Bespa forces were gonna be, and this, like, double and triple cross that they were pulling off. And then he goes flying off and runs immediately into a huge patrol and is like, what? How did they trick me? No, kid, you played yourself.
And I believe there were times when Chronicle was thinking about his first encounter with USO and thinking that it had been planned somehow that obviously that was too much of a wacky coincidence to have just happened by bad luck.
Ambushed by the league military's elite glider force.
I believe there have also been moments when Pharah has commented on some league military activity that we know because we have more inside knowledge was not really planned. It was a reaction to a series of events, but that, from her perspective, feels planned as yet another jab. At Vespa. We hear both sides tell their own people, don't hurt any of the corporations facilities. Do your best not to harm the corporation's facilities, only to attack the enemy. And at one point, Mihaly is like, look at them. They're targeting the corporation's facility.
This is within seconds of Farah saying, attack, but don't target the corporation's facilities. Yeah, and partly this is because Mahalia is spoiling for a fight. She really wants to get revenge. She wants a fight to happen. She sees everything through that lens.
And Bespa's reputation, I don't think we can ignore the effect that their reputation as bloodthirsty and destructive means, that people expect them to take action that they acknowledge would not be politically valuable. But those bloodthirsty bespa monsters might not care. They might just do it anyway because they love wrecking things.
And Farah calls this out in the prior episode, she says this line like, am I ever going to be free of my history of using the guillotine? And no, not really. Everybody sees you as Madame La Guillotine. I think they call her, like, miss Guillotine. At one point in this episode, Uso calls her that.
Cause he's telling Oliver if she takes any shots, if she starts a fight, I'm not. I don't want to let her get away. Total side note, I love that he nicknamed the recarl the frying pan the Frypan.
Yeah, it's great.
Also that the combination of the Frypan and a character being called Ness made me wonder if they're meant to be earthbound references. Cause Ness is the name of the main character in Earthbound, if I recall correctly.
Yep. Ness, who in this episode gets more characterization than she has previously enjoyed. Like, three or four whole lines of.
Dialogue, and she gets called a smarty pants, a smart aleck.
I like her already.
Right.
You know, she has the same voice actor as pharah.
Really?
Yeah. And they're both voiced by Orikasa Eye, who, if you remember, was the singer for the SD Gundam space band.
Nice. That's fun, but yes. And then a frying pan is the weapon of choice for another one of the characters in your party in Earthbound. So I did wonder about that.
The recaro looks so much like an overgrown ashammar that I keep waiting for it to transform. And I don't remember this series well enough to know if it does or not. If it doesn't, I am going to be disappointed.
It could sprout legs and turn into a. What's the one that's like a disc on legs from first Gundam? One of the zombies pilots.
Oh, the adzam.
Is it the adzam?
Well. Oh, you're talking about the big zam.
Yeah.
It could sprout some legs and turn into a big zam.
Yeah, it could. Medium sized zam. I kind of wonder, do you think when Marbet is picking Oliver up in that weird, like, mission impossible sequence where he jumps out of a jeep as he goes flying into the water and then he gets dragged through the ocean a little bit? Do you think that was Marbet getting a little revenge on him for his womanizing ways?
I assumed that dragging him through the ocean was.
Yeah, good for her. Mahalia's lipstick. War paint freaking rules. Such a good little demonstration of her character, the duality.
There are a couple of moments when the way the shrike mobile suits are animated is very much more like human bodies than giant pieces of war machinery. During one fight in the air, one of them gets knocked back, and another catches her against their own body. And then at the end, when two of them go to retrieve Mahalia's mobile suit, and it's like a limp body, and they place it on the ground gently, as though they are laying down the body of a friend.
Well, and when Uso is clinging to it in that final shot, I was struck by how much like a body it looked.
What are we, if not spirits, piloting meat mechs around?
Yeah. Sometimes we say that mobile suits move like human bodies, and there are kind of two different things that we can mean by that. I have read a bunch of comments from animators who worked on Gundam talking about the way the machines were animated in first Gundam compared to the way they're animated in zeta double zeta and shars counterattack, and they distinguish between these two styles. And I believe in 0083, they talk about trying to get back to the first Gundam style rather than the Zeta era, mid eighties style. And at first, when I started reading these, I didn't really understand the distinction they were making. But they do talk about it in terms of, like, moving like human bodies.
Is it when they talk about moving more like a machine, that sense of heft and weight and somewhat more either slowness or fastness, that inhuman quickness, or that this machine weighs tons? And so there is going to be a different sense of weight behind the movement of its arm, behind the way it walks. When Mahalia has her gun, easy kneel so that she can drop off USO at the core fighter, the ground breaks up beneath her when she lands because this is a big, heavy mobile suit landing on dirt and stone. But we don't always get that sense of heft. And it's not always evident in movement. Sometimes it's evident when they contact other objects, but the way they move has a. A fluidity and a style that's more like the way humans move versus even if it's shaped like a human, the way a machine moves. And the feeling of that movement is different.
Yeah. At first, when I heard these comments, I didn't entirely understand them because it was very hard for me to tell what the difference was between first and the Zeta ones, and because it feels like the only time I've ever seen machines in Gundam actually feel like machines was in 0080, war in the pocket, and maybe one or two of the early episodes of 0083, especially once they go to space, they lose that sense of the mechanical and it becomes more like human bodies again. But for me, I think the distinction is that in Zeta, the Zeta era, if you will, they move like human bodies in a superhero comic book or a superhero tv show or something like that. Whereas in first, they have more the feeling of a person wearing a suit.
Of armor, maybe somewhat less stylized, an attempt to have that weightiness, but to feel like natural human movement rather than a sort of stylized, heroic kind of movement.
Yeah, but then when the Shrike team really take it up a notch, when they're moving so fast and so skillfully on the battlefield, then they start to feel a bit more like that Zeta era of superheroic movement. I was pretty down on him before, but I am feeling more positively about Oliver, especially now that he's sort of more the butt of jokes. It just goes to show that the standard of expectation for an adult in Gundam is so low. All you have to do is go a couple of episodes without doing anything egregious, and you come off looking pretty good. I mean, even Farah, she had one episode of not being a total villain, and it's like, oh, I can see the person there.
Yeah, but she kind of lost all of that for me the moment she was like, this kid forced me to massacre all those people.
But don't you understand, Nina? She's both of those things.
That would be a great place to end. But you still have to talk about that line.
I do. I have this translation thing I need to talk about. Cursed to come up with great ending lines and then not actually end the podcast. There I had this devastating realization as I was watching this. I don't even remember why I started comparing the two different versions, but at some point, I decided I needed to look at the UC library Blu rays, which have both the Japanese and the English in the subtitles, versus the Nozomi american Blu ray release, which just has the english subtitles. And I was looking at them side by side, and they are 99% of the time identical. And I had been operating for weeks now on the assumption that they were 100% identical. And then I discovered in this episode that they are not 100% identical.
You played yourself?
I played myself. I feel cursed by this knowledge. This is punishment for my hubris. What sins have I committed that this has inflicted upon me? And the line that I caught this on. Uso and the frying pan are dueling in the air over the water. He shoots. They shoot. Pew, pew, pew, pew. Beams going back and forth. And Uso says a line which is either you dodged it so the same trick won't work twice. Huh? Or you missed. I won't keep falling for the same trick. And the thing is, even in context, it is impossible to tell which of these was the intended meaning of the original line, because the japanese line yogita onajite niwa hika karanaika does not include a subject or direct object in the way that we would expect in English. He's basically just saying if you translate it literally evaded regarding the same hand or arm or paw or effort or handwriting or hand of cards or move or trick or direction or handle, there won't be getting caught or being delayed or stopping by to visit or getting mixed up in or being worried about or obstructing or splashing. Huh?
Ha. Indeed.
No, he says. Huh? That's the ka at the end.
I know I'm being silly.
You being silly. I'll accept it. But yeah, like also, even if you see the animation, they're both shooting and they're both missing, and it's not clear what trick he is saying won't work twice. So only the original writer knows which translation of this line is accurate. It's honestly a great example of the perils of translation and how difficult it is to translate Japanese into English accurately.
This is actually one of the biggest pitfalls of using freely available machine translation on Japanese. I will occasionally try to check my understanding of a sentence or paragraph by plugging it in to say Google Translate. But Google translate gets very confused about the subjects and objects of sentences when they are not clearly stated, and so tends to turn everything into he said he did. He. Whatever. Even if the article's about a woman, even if the article's about a plant, even if I don't know if more advanced machine translation is better at it. But it seems to really struggle with the fact that japanese grammar can leave out that information and assumes you will understand based on the further context that preceded it.
And now a miniature research piece from Nina based on one of the idioms used in the the ogre and the.
Serpent during the fight with the Marie Karl Uso says to himself, oniga deruka jaga deruka, which translates into something like will an ogre come out? Will a serpent? Which I figured had to be some kind of proverb or idiom, and it is according to the kotowaza kany ku hyakka jiten or proverb and idiom encyclopedia. The saying conveys a sense of waiting for something terrible to happen, but not knowing what it will be, or uncertainty about what sort of fate awaits one. The encyclopedia entry quotes an expert who puts special emphasis on the speakers total inability to predict what is about to happen, and that the saying implies there is some kind of weird, eerie, ominous, or uncanny reason for this state of events. Additionally, this saying conveys the speakers sense of fear, nervousness, or apprehension which yeah, waiting expectantly for some terrible but unpredictable thing to happen would do that to a person. There is a different but very similar saying, oniga deruka hotoke ga deruka, which swaps the buddha for the serpent. Supposedly, both versions began as something narrators would say at the beginnings of puppet shows to pique the audience's curiosity about the story to come. Both ogres and serpents convey that sense of the eerie, ominous, or uncanny, and for this reason, the encyclopedia entry cautions that it can seem rude if it's used to describe certain situations faced by other people rather than yourself. The page which I will link to in the show notes includes examples both of proper usage of the phrase and situations when one should not use it. One final note adds that no matter how terrible the fear and uncertainty, there is an element of resolve, a determination to face whats coming and live.
And.
Now part two of Toms research on possible origins for the name league militaire.
This week we return to the question of the league militaires name, its meaning, and its inspiration. Last week I focused on the league militaire version of the name and looked at organizations with similar names around the start of the 20th century. While those military leagues varied in method and means, the anti masonic traditionalists in France, the modernizing progressives in Greece, and the reactionary warmongers in Bulgaria, they were alike in that all three were explicitly nationalist and composed principally of current and former army officers. None of them looked very much like the league militaire of UC 153, but perhaps the Miryteya used in the Japanese is more like militia than militaire. Thats certainly what the game developers at Namco were thinking when they made their 1993 giant robots fighting to liberate the earth game militia. Either way, lets put the words riga and mirithea behind us and focus on what theyre supposed to mean. According to Uso, league militaire actually means shinsei dome shinsei meaning holiness or sanctity, and dome as a general term for an alliance. An allied army is dome gun. A treaty of alliance is Dome Joyaku. Dome also can be used for coordinated action. In fact, there is a yoji jukugo, a four character compound for labor strikes that is composed of dome plus the characters for quitting and business Dome higy an alliance to stop working. The english subtitles render Shinsei Dome as Holy alliance, capital h, capital a, as though Uso were referring not to the general idea of a religiously motivated entente, but rather to a specific, historically identifiable holy alliance. And if you look up Shinsei dome in any given japanese dictionary, you will see the same thing, that in most cases, Shinsei dome means the Holy alliance of 1815. That in most cases is going to be real important later, because if I may tip my hand for a second here, I dont think that Uso is talking about the holy alliance of 1815. That holy alliance was a coalition of three absolutist european the Kingdom of Prussia, the Austrian Empire and the Russian Empire, formed just after the final defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, emperor of the French. For more than 20 years, Europe had been wracked by near constant warfare, touched off initially by the French Revolution, then brought to bloody climax during Napoleon's reign. Each member of the holy alliance, the monarchs and the nations they ruled, had suffered grievously during that time. Prussia was crushed on the battlefield in 1806, lost half its territory in the ensuing treaty, with the remainder occupied by french troops at prussian expense. And for five years, her armies were forced to march and fight for Napoleon. Austria, too, had lost huge swathes of territory. In fact, the empire of Austria only existed as such because Napoleon had seized its predecessor, the Holy Roman Empire, and dashed it to pieces on the floor like an antique vase. By 1810, Francis, Emperor of Austria, even found himself obliged to marry his daughter, Marie Louise, to the hated Bonaparte. Russia, famously, was not conquered like its holy allies, but Napoleons ultimately disastrous 1812 invasion still inflicted terrible damage on the country, including the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and the immolation of Moscow. But from the vantage point of 1815, the three monarchs and Emperor Alexander I of Russia in particular, saw Napoleon as merely a symptom of a deeper sickness. There were dangerous new ideas infecting liberalism, republicanism, secularism. In France, these ideas had been allowed to spread uninterrupted, and they had metastasized into that most dangerous of all ideas, revolutionary as they saw it, revolution had ended the monarchy and killed the king, displaced the Catholic Church from its central position in society, and killed, suborned or exiled tens of thousands of priests. Revolution had brought about the reign of terror, the rise of Napoleon, and all the ensuing chaos and suffering that had swept from one end of Europe to the other. It had taken them more than 20 years to suppress those dangerous new ideas, and the cost of doing it had been enormous. What damage might ideas like those cause if they were ever let loose on the world again? So these three emperors formed their holy alliance, a bulwark of reaction. Whatever enmity the great powers might feel for each other, they pledged to form a united front against revolution wherever in Europe it might next rear its head. In an interesting historical coincidence, this holy alliance was also an interdenominational alliance between Protestant Prussians, Catholic Austrians and Orthodox Russians. The Holy alliance per se did not last very long, no more than ten years. But the spirit of the alliance endured, and each of the participant nations remained staunchly committed to suppressing revolutionary ideas wherever they cropped up, as when Russia sent her armies to put down an anti austrian revolution in Hungary in 1848. And it was to this holy alliance that Karl Marx alluded in the now iconic opening sentences of the communist manifesto published during the wave of revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848. A specter is haunting Europe, the specter of communism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exercise this pope and tsar, Metternich and Guizot, french radicals and german police spies. It is a fascinating moment in history, but as a source for the name of the league militaire, I would call it a bad fit. But like I said, shinsei dome doesnt always mean the holy alliance. All of these terms originated in other languages, in German, French, Russian, Latin. The english and japanese translations are just approximations of their meanings. There is a whole series of early modern european alliances that we usually call in english holy leagues, but which are known in Japanese as either Katoriku dome, catholic alliances or Shinsei dome. To explain these, first quick question how much do you know about the Ottoman Empire? Dont worry, its a rhetorical question. The crucial thing you need to know for the purposes of this conversation is that by the late 14 hundreds, the Ottoman Empire was seen by christian monarchs in Europe, especially those in eastern and southern Europe, as the big existential threat to Christendom. The ottoman state first emerged out of a kind of warring states period in Anatolia, modern day Turkey. The orthodox christian byzantine empire had been in terminal decline ever since the battle of Manzikert in 1071. And Anatolia, the old heartland of the empire, fell under the control of the turkish and muslim sultanate of Rum. Rum from the turkish name for Rome for roughly 200 years. In the 1240s, this sultanate of Rum met and was conquered by the Mongol Empire. The Mongols left the sultan in place as a puppet. But with the prestige and power of the central authority so badly reduced, power increasingly devolved to local principalities or beyliks. The Ottoman Empire began as just another beylik. But around 1300, a man named Osman, the bey of a tiny fragment of land in northwestern Anatolia, launched on a campaign of conquest that would occupy the rest of his life and those of most of his descendants. It was continued by those descendants for two and a half centuries. It is from his name, Osman, that we get the word Ottoman for the empire. In the 1350s, Osmans son Orhan crossed into Europe and seized territory in Gallipoli, the empires first foothold outside of Anatolia. By 1388, Orhans son Murad had reduced Macedonia, Albania and Bulgaria to vassalage. In 1389, he annihilated a joint serbian bosnian army at the battle of Kosovo, but did not survive the battle himself. An ottoman civil war and the appearance of the infamous warlord Timur, often called Tamerlane, on the Ottomans eastern flank, afforded the Europeans a small measure of peace. But by 1420, the Ottomans were unified again and back on the offensive in Europe. Then, in 1453, the sultan Mehmed II besieged Constantinople, penetrated the impenetrable theodosian land walls and conquered the unconquerable city. The Ottomans had just graduated from a purely local problem for the christian rulers in the Balkans to a serious threat to all christendom. In 1520, Suleiman, called the Magnificent, brought an army all the way to the walls of Vienna, but failed to take the city. He conquered most of Hungary, Transylvania, Wallachia, pushed north into the Caucasus and east into Mesopotamia. In response to the rapid and seemingly inevitable ottoman expansion, the european powers formed a series of holy leagues, Shinsei dome or Katoriku dome, that were ad hoc alliances sponsored by one pope or another in order to assist those christian rulers actively engaged against the Ottomans. Lets go down the list. Holy League of 1535. Papal sponsor Paul III Main Charles V, Holy roman emperor and king of Spain, plus anyone that Charles could bully or cajole or pay to join him, including Genoa, Portugal and Naples, notably absent France, who were busy conspiring with the Ottomans for a coordinated attack against Charles. The seize the ottoman base at Tunis, european occupation of the city. Good start team. Try to keep it up. Next up, the Holy League of 1538. Papal sponsor Paul III again. Main participants Charles V again. Plus Venice, the Knights of Malta, Naples and Sicily. The defeat the ottoman fleet and retake the venetian controlled islands in the aegean and ionian seas. Outcome, catastrophic defeat, venetian capitulation and 30 years of ottoman dominance over the Mediterranean. Not great, not great, but theres always next time. The Holy League of 1571 papal sponsor, Pius V. Main, Philip II of Spain, Naples and Sicily, the republics of Venice and Genoa. The Knights of Malta, the italian duchies of Tuscany, Savoy, Urbino and Parma. The goal to put an end to those 30 years of effective ottoman dominance over the Mediterranean. And the outcome? Decisive victory. Ottoman control over the western part of the Mediterranean effectively broken. Holy League of 1595. Papal sponsor, clement VIII. The main participants, the Holy Roman Empire, Transylvania, Moldavia and Wallachia. With the Spanish kicking in some troops from their dominions in the Netherlands and fleets from Naples and Sicily, the reconquer Hungary and push the Ottomans back to the Danube. Outcome inconclusive, despite more than a decade of back and forth fighting. But now the big one, the Holy League of 1684. Generally speaking, if someone says the Holy League with no additional information, they mean this one. Papal sponsor Innocent XI main the Holy Roman Empire, the polish lithuanian commonwealth, the Venetian Republic, the tsardom of Russia. Notable absence, France once again allied with the Ottomans against the Holy Roman Empire. The resist ottoman expansion and recapture as much territory as possible. Outcome after more than 15 years victory over the course of those 15 years of war, this holy League demonstrated an almost unprecedented level of cooperation, which admittedly is not actually saying very much because the european powers were not good at cooperation. They were at each other's throats at the best of times. But their victory brought the ottoman empires era of westward expansion to a close. A renewed ottoman offensive in 1716 was decisively beaten by the Austrians at the cost of yet more ottoman territory. Instead, the Ottomans would turn their attention north to confront Russia in a rivalry that would define both empires for more than a century, until each fell prey to that most dangerous of ideas, revolution. The Holy League of 1684 is significant to us for a couple of reasons. First, because it started with ottoman attacks on weak, politically fractious Poland, Lithuania and the collective might of the great european powers did not commit themselves to the fight until after the badly outnumbered polish army had managed to pull off an inspiring victory or two. Second, because unlike the naval campaigns of the 1530s and 1570s, this war was fought in and for the balkan territories that would later become Yugoslavia. And we know from his comments during the production of victory that Tomina was deeply influenced by current events in that region, the beginning of what we now call the yugoslav wars. During the writing of victorys story, it seems entirely plausible that he was also inspired by the regions history. Third, because the professional soldiers of the Holy League were aided in significant numbers by irregular serbian militias, many of whom had fled their homes during the outbreak of the war, and fourth, because the Holy League of 1684 has one of those fancy latin names, the Sacra Ligua. So all things considered, I think that if the league militaire is in fact meant to be a reference to a specific historical predecessor, one with a name from old Roman that means something like holy alliance and translates to Shinsei Dome, one with significant militia involvement, great powers that only got involved reluctantly when the war arrived, right on their own doorsteps, and a connection to the Balkans, then I think this is our most likely candidate. But I would be remiss if I didnt point out that in the early nineties a worldly japanese person may well have read or heard Shinsei Dome in the news as the political situation in Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, deteriorated by the late 1980s, President Mabutu Seisei Seko was starting to lose his grip on the country that he had ruled for more than 30 years. In 1990, Mobutu bowed to international pressure to make some token gestures toward democratization, and he allowed the formation of opposition political parties. By 1991, there were more than 200 such parties, including major ones like the Union for Democracy and Social Progress, the Democratic and Social Christian Party, and the Union of Federalists and Independent Republicans. To coordinate their efforts, they formed an opposition coalition, the sacred union of the opposition, usually shortened to the sacred Union in English, Union sacre in French and in Japanese, Shinsei Dome. We do love a contemporary reference, even if it doesnt seem like a very promising lead. After all, who knows? Perhaps news coverage of events in Zaire did play some small role in inspiring the league militaire. Stranger things have happened.
Next time on episode 10.14, holding up that hill, we research and discuss episode 14 of Victory Gundam and last Rites, a cool plume together forever, Memodorzo memes for Zanskar teens, file your complaint with St. Peter, the luckiest villain in all of Gundam. Give the kids a boost. Combat tested the nine lives of Lupesh yu know. And with this token gesture, our glorious neutrality will endure for a thousand years. 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 Dioxin. 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 to get in touch with us, you can email hostsundompodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you would like to support the show, please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us financially@gundumpodcast.com. Patreon. You can find links and more ways to help out@gundampodcast.com. Support thank you for listening. The r is rolled with the tongue, right? My tongue is completely inert when I do this.
I don't know how you make that noise.
I don't know how you make the rolled r noise. I mean, I know in theory how one is supposed to do it. I have been told how it is to be done, but I've never in my life been able to do it, even though the actual Wookiee noise is like three different sounds layered over each other. Like there's a lion and a golden retriever. So the voice of Chewbacca was in fact created using four bears, a badger, a lion, a seal, and a walrus.
Incredible.
Maybe I can find a way to sneak that in earlier in the episode and then we can actually end on the good ending.
Sounds good to me.
Either way, I think that's it. They're just little guys. You'd be so mad if we're picking up that dog been barking the whole time.
I can hear it pretty clearly, but often my mic, because of the direction, picks up stuff that yours doesn't, so I hope it's fine.
There is a historical coincidence here that I cannot pass by without noting, but I'll probably not actually include in the episode, which is the conquistador Francisco Pizarro famously demanded a vast ransom in gold and silver in exchange for the life of the inca ruler Atahualpa, then executed him anyway after getting gold. If you've ever wondered what happened to that gold it paid for this expedition. Stranger things. Yes, I do. Messy one. Just a gesticulator.