U'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 10.8 fighting fate, and we are your hosts. I'm Tom, and if my voice sounds a bit weird this week, it's because I have once again been indulging in my passion for getting sick at inopportune moments. This is going to be a little bit of a weird episode. Nina is also sick and can't record right now. Fortunately, she didn't get sick until after we had recorded the talkback, so she.
Will be there for that.
But I will be recording the parts she usually does. Starting with the recap wakes up pan hunting and sweating from a nightmare about the guillotine. Shockedy wakes when he does, and surrounded by the still sleeping members of their ragtag band, the two decide to sneak away back to Cassarelia. But Marbat and Romero were still awake, and they spot the two kids creeping toward the back of the cameillon. The two adults try every argument they can think of to convince USO to stay, but to USO, these are just more rationalizations, a pretext to make him fight for them without any concern for what he wants. Insisting that he and Shakti have things they need to do, Uso takes a whoppa and heads for home, Shakti and Carlman riding on the back at the best base. Farah Griffin has been ordered back to space to face a military tribunal, and Dupre has been promoted in her place. Although Chronicle wants another shot at the Gundam, Pippiniden maintains that Chronicle's capture of a league military leader more than demonstrates his competence, and that Pippiniden's own troops have a score to settle with the white mobile suit. In the meantime, depray wants chronicle to escort Farah Griffin and some damaged mobile suits to the privately owned neutral mass driver at Gibraltar. He expects the public corporation there will refuse to allow chronicle through, giving Bespa the pretext they need to take control of the mass driver themselves, a feat that even Xeon could not achieve during the one year war. Settling back in at Shockti's house, Uso moves a book and several photos fall out onto the floor. One shows a woman sitting at the cabin's dining room table holding toddler Shakti, while a young man who looks remarkably like Chronicle leans against the fireplace behind her. Oh, that's my aunt Maria, Shakti tells him, although when Uso exclaims that she looks just like Maria Armonia, the leader of the Yellow Jackets Shakti is quick to point out that Maria is actually the most common name in the world. Just outside, haro chirps and Flanders barks as flashes of light and distant explosions come off the distant mountainside. That's where the kameon was headed, Uso realizes, telling Shakti to stay here, that he'll be back soon. USO races off to warn the league militaire of the incoming attack. In spite of his fear and his worries for Shakti, he knows that Zanskar needs to be stopped. Pippiniden and his squad find the league militair cameon in the ruins of an old city with her legs still healing and very little experience with the Gundam so far. Marbette struggles against the superior enemy force, but she fights on, determined to demonstrate her own skill. After a hit knocks the Gundam's right arm offline, she takes cover in the ruins only for a bespo mobile suit to burst through the concrete wall behind her, wrapping the Gundam in an inescapable bear hug. Inescapable until the Gundam disconnects the hangar part. The rest of the mobile suit jets away, leaving the Tomliat pilot deeply confused for a moment before they drop the hangar and pursue. This is the moment when Uso arrives. Parachuting in, he lands almost on top of the corps fighter, and Marbette flies them into the woods so that he can take her place in the cockpit. By the time he gets back to the hangar and reforms the complete victory Gundam, he is surrounded. Flashing back to his nightmare, he wonders if this is it, but he gets away from them somehow and comes up with a plan. When one of them comes up behind him, some sense or instinct makes him turn around. Time seems to slow, and he kicks the enemy into the river before they can hit him. The Bespa pilot struggles to write their mobile suit, but before they can get away, Uso's shots bring one of the nearby ruined buildings down on top of them. Uso flies out of the cloud of mist and dust, destroying another enemy mobile suit. Before they can react. Pippiniden's group recovers quickly, and just like Marbette, Uso finds his mobile suit trapped in a hug. They intend to capture him and take the Gundam back to their base. With perfect timing, another core fighter arrives, distracting the enemy just enough that they loosen their grip, allowing Uso to turn and destroy yet another Tomliat. Having lost their overwhelming advantage in numbers, Pippiniden orders his remaining mobile suits to retrieve the escape pods and retreat. After the battle, Uso has to be pulled free from his cockpit, he seems feverish and has fainted. In his delirium, he has another nightmare. This time, the guillotine looms over him. Then he sees Shakti fall away screaming. But he wakes in peaceful, idyllic woods, surrounded by smiling, familiar faces.
We have to start this week by correcting something that we kind of got a little bit wrong last week, which is that I think we called the bikes used by Duker Ick and his squadron guitarles, which is not actually the name of the bikes.
What?
It's an understandable mistake. I'm excusing myself here. It's a very understandable mistake that we made because normally in Gundam, when you encounter the name of a team, the team is either named for its commanding officer or it's named for the mobile weapon that they use. In this case, I don't actually know what guitar is supposed to refer to because it's not Duker Ick's name. Nope, it's not the ick squadron, although that would be pretty great. And the weapons that they are using are actually called battle bikes sentobaiku. And they are, in fact, divided into two different types with different armaments, the Kohl type and the Otsu type. So if you're a passionate bike fan, if you're interested in reviving the tradition of biking from the Middle Ages, you probably want to know those kinds of details. Now, although the bikes do not show up in this episode except in that brief flashback at the very beginning, they were part of victory's sort of grand tradition of combined arms combat, which does continue in this episode. And I really like this. I love that the cameon are participating in this battle. Odello is up there with a machine gun. Warren is maybe not so effectively firing off these, like, rocket propelled grenades. And we have the mobile suits on the Zanskar side, which are both mobile suit and attack helicopter. The victory is both a fighter and a mobile suit. And this variety of different ways of fighting, of ways of participating in the battle, makes the fights so much more interesting. It expands their possibilities. And we haven't really seen this since first Gundam. Back in first Gundam, there were tanks and fighters, know, big warplanes, all participating more or less on equal footing with the mobile suits, even if the mobile suits were, admittedly the kings of the battlefield. But that really fell away in Zeta and double Zeta and counterattack. That was just mobile suits and more mobile suits. So it's really fun for me to have this back, and it feels like a throwback.
And even within the mobile suit, combat. It feels as though they are very creative, having the victory shed a whole chunk of itself to get away from another mobile suit. Like a lizard shedding its tail, or.
Like a person sort of slithering out of their jacket after they've been grabbed from behind.
So cool. That double hammer fist that one of these enemy mobile suits tries to use against the victory. And then that being fended off with a sidekick, like a classic karate sidekick.
And I know you love big Axe.
I do love the big axe.
The fights are really creative and fun. I also love that the victory itself is kind of bad. That's not bad. It's actually a good mobile suit, but it's, like, not that much better than the Zanskar mobile suits. Yeah, it's a little bit stronger. The beam attacks are stronger, but it's just as vulnerable. If you shoot it in the leg, its leg explodes. And this is made possible, of course, by the gimmick of the replaceable hanger and boots parts and the fact that the victory, as we now realize, is a mass produced mobile suit. There are other Victory Corps fighters flying around out there with other boots and other hangers.
Just making me think of the AK 47 and how. Part of the reason that the AK is so broadly used and has remained useful for so long is because it's very easy to change and replace parts as they wear out. It can withstand all kinds of different environmental conditions. This mobile suit feels like an AK version of a mobile suit. It's not so finicky. It's easily repairable. There are a lot of spare parts available, comparably compared to other mobile suits. Unlike the Bespo, mobile suits that we've heard are going to need to be shipped back to space for repair.
Yeah, there's a neat kind of inversion to that, isn't there? These Tomliats are more finicky, perhaps even more advanced in some ways than the victory. Certainly their transformation is more elegant. The basic difference between the Tomliat and the Zolo is that the Tomliat doesn't need to separate and combine. It just transforms right there, which is so much more effective. You kind of wonder why they bothered with the separation gimmick in the first place. Except that toys. It's for toys. The separation gimmick is fun because toys. So, yeah, the victory is rugged, but it's also vulnerable. And that vulnerability heightens the excitement of any fight because, you know, it could get destroyed. We're basically pretty confident that USO is going to be fine because he is the main character of a long running mechaseries, and it's going to be weird if they have to go 51 episodes with some other kid in the victory, but the victory could get destroyed. USO could get injured. Like, the possibility that things will go wrong is much more present than it was in, really, any previous Gundam show.
And more than any other show, the concern over being captured that it is clearly and expressly stated over and over again by both sides that they are willing to capture and imprison the enemy. That sometimes that is, in fact their goal. That sometimes they would like to capture a mobile suit without totally destroying it for their own research and development or just to know more about the enemy they're fighting. And now we know what happens to people who are captured. One of the things that can happen to people who are captured, first torture.
And then public execution.
And USO knows that, right?
The connection between the two is drawn.
Really very explicitly right from the beginning of the episode.
And then again when he's surrounded by the Tomliat squadron, they make a clear allusion to the guillotine scene. I think they actually flash a guillotine across the screen for a second. But more than that, Uso is suddenly isolated, and he's surrounded in this psychedelic, blotchy color palette. And it's the same one that was in his nightmares about being guillotined. So to be surrounded, to be made helpless, it's like in the dream when he is surrounded by all these ghoulish, leering, laughing, bespo faces. And also Gary is there in his nightmare.
A couple of things really stood out to me. One is that, yes, some of those faces are people he's actually seen, and then some of them are just blank faces. The eyes are almost always obscured. One of the faces looks almost skeletal. And then in his dream, he combines Farah Griffin with Dupre. He combines them into one person. It's like Dupre's face, but with Farah hair and in the uniform.
See, I didn't think that was Dupre. I thought he was just like in his mind, Farah becomes like a witch, like a hag, all of her features distorted to make her scarier.
I thought it was that he had kind of combined the two of them into one person. They did both appear in the broadcast. And because the new type word does get trotted out this episode, that it's possible he is having some kind of premonition about Dupre's promotion, though that would feel a bit silly.
And exit old enemy Farah Griffin. Enter new enemy Dupre.
Right.
Yeah. The feeling that is really evoked in these scenes is that of helplessness, not just being in danger, not just being killed, but being trapped, being in the guillotine, locked in there, unable to move, and able to anticipate what's going to happen to you. I found this very striking, partly because one of my core memories is of being on a playground, being bullied and held down by four different people. So that feeling, not just of being in danger, but of being absolutely helpless, I really get why that's so horrifying.
These scenes where it's the sort of blotchy color background and the sound distorts. And from first Gundam, we've kind of considered these scenes to be conveying intense emotional experiences and sometimes new type moments. I think this is the first series where it's occurred to me that they're also a really incredible artistic depiction of dissociation or a dissociative episode, which, if you've never had one, it's basically a sense of disconnection from your body, from reality. You're conscious, and you're not even necessarily feeling aware of any fear or negative emotion. But you do have this sudden sense of not really being attached to your body or part of your body. And they're very common when people are experiencing intense fear or traumatic experiences because it's a way for your brain to separate itself from what's happening.
And in both of these sequences, Uso is very isolated. And while it is necessary for us, as the audience, to see him, it may also be that he is seeing himself as we do. He is perceiving himself from outside of his body, which is a very common way for people to experience dissociative episodes. To feel as though one is, like, sucked out of one's body and watching this horrifying thing, whatever it is, happen as though to someone else. It's not how they happen to me. I'm different.
But that is a common way in which they are described. A lot of people who have dissociative episodes or have had them can describe certain memories as though they are watching them from outside themselves.
Uso's fear, but also fear in general, is really the watchword for this episode. They say it over and over again. Uso's afraid, and that's why he leaves. They tell him, don't be afraid. There's nowhere to run. Which not exactly comforting. Right later, when he returns to his paragliding adventures and leaps off of a building in order to get into the core fighter. Marbette is like I thought you hated being scared. And he's like, yeah, I do. This is way too scary. And then at the end, in the fight, he takes this. Maybe it's too much to call it glee, but he gets a lot of satisfaction out of making this Zanskar soldier scared. This is the sequence where he shoots a building to make it collapse onto one of these tomliates that's kind of trapped. And Uso is like, now you feel the fear. It would have been trivial for him to destroy the Tomliat or even disable it with just one or two shots, but instead, he takes, like, a significant amount of time and basically empties his beam rifle in order to collapse this building on top of this guy.
Well, as you pointed out, so much of his fear is tied up in a feeling of helplessness or of powerlessness. And inspiring fear in other people can give a person a sense of power. It's very significant that Uso's fear is always contrasted with adults fear. Yes, we are often shown very vivid depictions of USO afraid, but we are also frequently shown very vivid depictions of these soldiers afraid. And I am developing this theory that the show wants us to see adults and children as not as different as we might like to believe that it's not as though adults are immune to fear throughout this episode. And we'll get into specific examples later, but see both adults and children wanting to prove themselves, to prove their value. That's common to anybody. Anybody wants to have value in the group to which they belong. Anybody wants to contribute. As ridiculous as it sounds when Marbett says it, like, don't be afraid, there's nowhere to run. Both her attempts at an argument and Romero's attempts at an argument, at least vis a vis, like, fear and killing, which are things USO has specifically talked about, are more about reframing, because they can't change the. You know, the fact is, a ground invasion is going to begin soon, and probably nowhere is really safe, not even Casarelia. And that could be a reason to be very afraid, or that could be a reason to say, okay, if nowhere is safe, then what can I do? And to sort of bury your fear in activity. And when Romero says, we're not really asking you to kill people, he's not saying, UsO will never have to kill anyone, because we know that's patently ludicrous.
We laughed when we first heard this line, especially because in the immediately prior episode, Romero was like, you need to kill those guys, right? Stop letting them get away. Kill more of them, but that the.
Purpose of Usos serving as part of the league military, the purpose of his job as a pilot is not killing. Killing is incidental. The purpose is protection, is protecting these people he's come to care about protecting his home, protecting the earth. And that's about a reframe, not about the facts.
We're not asking you to be a murderer. We are asking you to fight. Marbette's line strongly reminded me of the one from Watari Gila when he tells one of his soldiers, fear is useless for a soldier. Lots of things are happening that are scary, but being afraid of them doesn't do USo any good.
Just like that Tumley out pilot, who you said he's stuck. I thought it looked almost like he froze, like he could have gotten away, but just froze up once he realized what was happening and couldn't move. That's the danger of fear, right? That in a moment when you need to take action, when action would be better, you'll be too consumed by fear to take it. Uso's rebuttal to many of these arguments, that these are just a pretext and that this is all being decided by them very unilaterally. Nobody is really asking him what he thinks, wants, cares about. Clearly, Marabet feels some of the justice of this because Romero is desperate to try and convince Uso to come back, and Marbette instead says, we're pathetic.
The word Marbette uses for pathetic there, nasakanai, right? Yeah. If the weblio online dictionary is to be believed, while it does mean pathetic in the modern sense, in medieval Japanese, that same word meant to be pitiless, to lack human feeling or sympathy. And I think probably the script writer is doing a clever little double meaning here, that they are pathetic in that they need to rely on this special child, but also that they are pitiless, that they are without sympathy for asking him to do all these things, that.
They are inhuman for having forced this on him. And Marbett goes on to spend the early part of the episode trying to live up to the fact that she is also a mobile suit pilot that she was supposed to be piloting from the get go. And to some extent, I think she's a bit too hard on herself because at this point, USo has more flight hours, combat hours, than she does. Of course he was going to perform better at that point.
This is Marbette's first time in the actual completed Gundam.
Yeah. And she does all right, considering how badly outnumbered they are.
Yeah. Also, early on, they refer to USO as special. They use the english loan word special. Marbette then calls herself a specialist when she's piloting. I think the similarity is intentional, that she might not be a special child, she might not have the gift that USO has, but she's still like a skilled, talented, trained mobile suit pilot. I think that's one of the factors that has always distinguished the old man. Polycule and Marbette and company, the rest of the league, militaire from Aug or the Earth Federation. While they rely on Uso, and while they feel bad about it, they're also all full participants in what's going on. None of them are safe. None of them are, like, shirking their duties.
There's an inherent conflict, though, between Count's line a couple episodes ago that no single soldier is that important, and this constant drumbeat insistence that Uso is special and they need him.
I think the line that encapsulates and synthesizes those two opposing positions is the bit at the end when the. I forget which one it is. Leonid, maybe one of the polycule says he is a chosen pilot, and I think you were the one who was telling me the word he uses really suggests, like, fated, destined, that it's not really anybody's choice. UsO is just going to keep winding up in that Gundam. And this is around when Marbette speculates that he might be a new type. I think it is. But this really implicates the whole long and sordid legacy of the special child pilots of Gundam of the universal century that, at least within the narrative logic of the shows, special children, chosen pilots like Amuro or Camille or Judo or Seabook really have altered the course of history by being in the right Gundam.
At the right time.
Also part of that conversation at the end, one of them says, we keep dragging him into this. And while they have attempted to convince him not to leave, never once has he been restrained and prevented from leaving. He keeps coming back and Bespa keeps attacking. The only thing they could do would be to refuse to let him into the mobile suit cockpit when he is.
Literally jumping off of a building in order to get into it.
Right. And so I can understand the sentiment to keep him out of it, but I also think that this is closing the barn door after the horse has bolted.
Every chosen boy has to steal the Gundam, but Uso has stolen it like six times at this point. And, yeah, he can't stay away. He has the opportunity. He goes back to Casarelia, but he sees the fight. He knows what will happen if he doesn't join it and he goes back, though. This is a silly quibble, but, like, are they just driving in circles around Casarelia? How are they possibly still so close to it that USo can see the battle from his house and get there on his Wapa before it's finished? Like, I thought, they left Casarelia four episodes ago.
Fair.
And maybe this is less of a quibble and more of a realistic complaint, but what is their goal? What is the league military actually trying to accomplish? I don't necessarily expect them to tell us what the league militaire is trying to accomplish. Like, in general, I think it's sufficiently clear that they're trying to oppose the bespa invasion wherever they can and however they can to protect earth from the Zanskar empire. But what is this specific cadre doing?
Are they meeting at some kind of rendezvous point? Are they trying to get to the next nearest factory to kind of husband their resources and then plan a counteroffensive?
I realized as we watched this episode that I had thought they were going to try to rescue the count and Katajina and that they were, like, driving to largaine to do that, but obviously not anymore. And also, no one ever said that. I just made that up because it seemed like the logical next step for the story after their leader was captured. I don't think they were trying to do that. They're just driving somewhere. Always be driving.
I did enjoy the little detail that there's sort of almost trailer hitch style connection they can put between the trucks.
So much thought went into designing the Cameoon and the way the different pieces of this convoy interact, especially when they're in battle. The crane arm they have to use to transfer people from one vehicle to the other while driving at speed. It's great. Why isn't there a model kit of the cameo that I can build? That's what I'm looking for.
Are you sure there isn't?
There might be an old one or like, a third party only available at Comicat, kind of one or one fest.
Counterpart to your comments about what exactly is this group of the league military trying to accomplish. I have some questions about what Zanskar is trying to accomplish. First of all, because Dupre brings up Xeon, he mentions the original Xeon when he talks about this plan to capture Gibraltar. Not even they were able to capture Gibraltar. So clearly people still learn about the one year war. It has some amount of influence on the way people plan these kinds of battles, invasions, et cetera. And Marbett brings up multiple times that the Zanskar invasion or that Zanskar's plans for earth will basically undo the environmental repair that's been able to happen over the past couple of generations on earth. That it will do massive amounts of environmental ecological damage, which to me smacked a little of earth for me, but not for thee. Unless maybe Zanskar has already said, oh, we're going to go in and it's going to be very extractive. We're going to set up a bunch of mines and we're going to cut down all the forests, and we just want the resources for our empire. Maybe they have, but that's very unclear. War obviously is very damaging to the Earth, as we've seen depicted throughout this series so far, in which they make a point of showing in basically every episode. But we also know from other Gundam series that there is a sense of the people who live on Earth being elites. We know it's a little more complicated than that, given Uso and Shakti's situation, but there is this narrative of those on Earth being elites, space noids, being denied access to this ancestral homeland, this beautiful place that they are no longer allowed to live in. But some people are. It's not that nobody lives there. Just, you can't.
You have to get into the Gundam side materials for this. But the people who are allowed to live on Earth under the reign of the Earth Federation are broadly divided into three groups. And over time, the Earth Federation continues to push more and more people out into space, which is how we end up with this situation in victory, where actually very few people live on earth. And because the population has gotten so low and because Gundam operates on this kind of malthusian carrying capacity logic, this has allowed the earth to restore itself naturally over time. But the three groups of people who are allowed to live on the earth are Earth Federation elites who treat the planet as a kind of playground. Illegal residents, squatters like the people of Casarelia, Uso, Shakti, etc. And then this third category of people who are basically allowed to live on Earth as a kind of reservation. People who, for specific traditional cultural or religious reasons, are allowed to continue living their traditional lifestyles as a kind of living history preservation project on earth. And this is probably the category that those muslim villages in Africa from double zeta fit into, and it's probably the category that the people of the special district of Uwig fit into.
At the same time, most of the damage being done to the environment throughout the series has been from the invaders and the show makes explicit during the big fight here that the forest is a source of protection for the people of earth. It's like the earth is protecting its protectors. And then that scene at the very end, Uso waking up on this sort of makeshift bed in the middle of the woods with the beautiful light coming.
Through the leaves, the beautiful arcadian scene. A butterfly floats past in the foreground.
We are clearly meant to associate the league militaire, uso shakti earthnoids with this beautiful, pristine environment. And the ruins which on the one hand feel a bit sad, on the other hand feel like the earth reclaiming itself, that they are slowly being swallowed up by nature. So I'm very curious to see how that continues to develop in the series. Oh, one other thing. Pippiniden also states explicitly, we can't use our usual tactics against you here. There's not enough room on this planet.
We can't come at you from below.
Which feels a bit ridiculous because we know combat happens inside colonies. It's not as though nobody ever fights inside a colony or in a debris field, know, various other circumstances that aren't wide open outer space.
I just like to imagine Pippiniden saying this line like he's a gunslinger in the west, like this planet ain't big enough for the two of us. Gundam.
That would be humorous, but probably more to the point in terms of why he says it here or why the writers had him say that here is again, to accentuate this difference between space noids and Earth noids.
It's funny, you highlighted the way Earth noids have generally been treated as the elite within this whole system. And that's true in that for most of Gundam, the most elite members of the Federation socio cultural sphere have resided on Earth. But also there has always been, from the very beginning, from the baseline DNA of Gundam, a lot of violence directed against the people of Earth, the ordinary, poor people of Earth who from the beginning were forced out into space. And those who remained have been subject to this oppressive police state under the rule of the Manhunters, as we saw in Shar's counterattack and subject to things.
Like the colony drop like attacks aimed at the planet. They may have taken multiple series to really make this point, but as we've kind of touched on previously, especially with Shar's counterattack, it's not really about Earth noids versus spacenoids, but the elites would love it if Earthnoids and space noids thought that it was Earth noids versus space noids.
I mean, think about Girin Zabi Girin Zabi in his gold braid military uniform, like a prussian dictator getting up on stage and railing against the elites. Ideas like the elites are so mutable, they're so applicable to any situation. It's always possible to twist your rhetoric, to designate whoever you don't like as the elite and yourself as the common, ordinary person.
It's also incredibly useful to people in power to be able to blame problems on a scapegoat, to be able to say to the populace, oh, this problem is not my fault. Even though I'm in power, I can't fix it. Even though I am in power and have all the power. It is in fact the fault of this other group that is such a common political distraction. Regardless of the kind of government, regardless of the circumstances, different groups are often scapegoated or pitted against each other to deflect attention away from the true source of a problem or away from people in power.
And I think victory as a show is deeply interested in the mutability of symbols and symbolic language like this. The guillotine, for instance, is one of the most iconic symbols of the French Revolution, and here it has become a symbol of the Zanskar empire. The Gundam. Is the Gundam a symbol of resistance? Is the Gundam a symbol of oppression? Is the Gundam a symbol of the might of the earth Federation? Or a symbol of teenagers taking power into their own hands?
Or is it a kind of boogeyman for soldiers? Which is how it's seeming in this show here.
It's described as sickening, the sickening name of the Gundam. And then when the Gundam actually appears, they keep referring it to it not as a Gundam, but as Gundam Modoki.
Gundam imitation or that white mobile suit.
Symbols can mean basically anything, and yet they have this power over our minds. They can be leveraged in such powerful.
Ways, possibly connected to that. I'm still thinking it through. But sepia tone makes multiple appearances in this episode. First, in Uso's dream, the enemy base, which used to be an Earth Federation base. I think.
I think it used to be a commercial airport.
Okay, well, it's been taken over now. And in his dream appears sepia toned. And then in the photographs that USO finds in Shockti's house, tucked into a book, which they're from when Shakti was a toddler. It's the early 90s. There is absolutely no reason why these photographs would be sepia toned.
Maybe they're just faded.
Perhaps. Although I keep wondering about this question of nostalgia, whether nostalgia is being depicted sort of uncritically as just, oh, yeah. The early 90s were a time when people were feeling very nostalgic about even a decade ago or two decades ago. And so here we are depicting that nostalgia. Or if this is meant to be a bit critical, like, it feels a bit ridiculous to craft this nostalgia about a time that wasn't even that long ago. But either way, it's come up enough that I expect to see more about it later in the series about the idea of nostalgia, the construct of feeling this longing for a previous time that may or may not really exist, that may only really exist in your imagination.
I'm reminded of that scene a few episodes ago where one of the old men is signaling the corps fighter to launch and nearly gets tumbled off of the cameo doing it. And they're like, hey, stop trying to look cool.
That isn't even necessary.
And it feels like a moment of trying to recapture youth, the energy and excitement of youth. I think having these really old men on one end and these really young kids on the other, and having the old men looking at the young kids and thinking like, gosh, if only we could do what they can do. Maybe if it were 70 years ago, Romero could be the chosen child.
Those photographs also feel as though maybe my early suspicions are paying off, that USO and Shakti's families were not normal refugees, that they had some kind of political connection that led to them occupying this supercomputer that is hidden in a cliff.
Yeah, the photo just, like, transparently having chronicle there in the background. I mean, they've been hinting at it for a while. The show isn't being particularly subtle about it, although they do this bit of, oh, Maria is the most common name in the world. Just because I have an Aunt Maria doesn't mean that. That's Maria Armonia, leader of the Yellow.
Jackets, and we've heard mention of her before, some of the old men on the Cameoon contending that she is maybe not a willing participant in what's happening, that her name is being used, or that something about her reputation, her background, is being used to lend substance to the Zanskar Empire, but that she's not really leading it, that it's not her. Very difficult to say until we know more about the politics of the Zanskar empire.
But regardless, Shakti is important and their parents are important.
Did their parents go missing to be part of the invasion, or did their.
Parents go missing to try to oppose the invasion?
Yeah, so many questions.
Or what if they're on opposite sides?
I love a good mystery. I'm also curious as to whether Dupre's mission for chronicle is meant to be a setup. Is it meant to be an impossible mission so chronicle will fail and he can get rid of him?
Certainly Dupre has been encouraging chronicle to do increasingly dangerous things, and Dupre admits.
No one has ever managed to capture the mass driver Gibraltar.
And he does give him a bunch of damaged mobile suits to try to.
Do it, and gives him custody of a prisoner at the same know she could try to know. If I were going to a military tribunal from a bunch of people who did not approve of my methods, I would probably try to escape.
Yeah, it does also serve the narrative mechanic effect of getting Chronicle out of the way during the period of the show where, based on prior Gundam, we can assume that Uso is going to get real committed to this fight and probably going to get over his aversion to killing people. So removing Chronicle from what we might call the period of maximum danger probably will preserve him for a bigger role later in the series.
And although Chronicle desperately wants to prove himself in a fight against the Gundam, he wants to take out the pilot and the mobile suit that beat him so humiliatingly. Pippi Needen, who has rank over him, insists that his own troops have a score to settle, and also that although this doesn't seem as important to chronicle, politically speaking, Chronicle has successfully separated himself from Farah Griffin's debacle. He brought in a very important prisoner. That she then executed that prisoner without getting any useful information was not his fault. Clearly he has demonstrated his competence to the higher ups. That's not really what Chronicle cares about, but his budy, who is looking out for him does.
This bit about PPNiden's squadron having a score to settle really does underscore everything Romero said to Uso at the end of the prior episode, because by letting them get away, not only has USO endangered the Cameon group in a general kind of way, there are still these soldiers out there, but in a really specific way, they have a score to settle. They are coming back, especially to destroy the Gundam and the cameon. They might have been scared then, but now they're angry. And that is the same thing that happens to USo in this episode. He was scared, and then that fear metastasizes into anger.
This is kind of what I meant when I talked about how everyone is trying to prove themselves. Chronicle wants to prove himself against the Gundam. Marbit wants to prove herself with the Gundam. Warren wants to prove that he can help too, and so takes on a task that's kind of too difficult for him, too big for him.
I keep expecting Odello to try to prove himself by getting into the like. I keep expecting him to feel jealous of USO and to be like, I can pilot too.
Underneath it all, I think Odello is extremely practical and on some level, and I don't mean this as critically as I usually mean it, he's very mercenary, and the reason I'm not critical in this case is because he's very young and is looking out for two kids, and that's part of why he's mercenary. He is on the lookout for the best possible situation for the three of them, and that's part of why he's mad. Uso left without telling them, because he also thought that hanging around Casarelia might be better for them, and he would have gone with them, who was not given that option. He's going to do whatever he feels like he needs to do to protect himself and Warren and Susie and to get them through this. So I don't think there's much pride in that. There's no, like, I need to make myself really cool or I need to make myself really important. And while he's not unwilling to put himself in danger, they've certainly done very dangerous things, like helping provide cover fire.
From a whoppa, or in this one, where he's just, like, crouched on the roof of the cabin of the Cameoon in order to fire this machine gun. We talked earlier about how fun the design of the Cameoon is, but the defensive weapons on these machines are not well planned out, and maybe that's intentional. Maybe it's to show that they've been adapted in a rushed fashion in order to be combat capable. But no one should be forced to sit on the roof of the cabin in order to fire the gun. There isn't a dedicated gunner position.
It almost feels like they were never intended for combat use. They were supposed to be mere transports, and that if they required an armed escort, that would be provided by other vehicles, not by the commune themselves. But this is clearly not an ideal situation.
Are they ever not for the league militaire? Double Zeta had some good bits where the AU forces, the argima's lack of access to people and supplies and repair facilities really defined the terms of combat. But never so much as victory has shown us with the League militaire here, it really, really drives home just how desperate their situation is.
Despite Uso's horrifying vision of the guillotine and of Shakti screaming and falling away, I do believe that this episode is his all in moment, that he is keenly aware of the ways in which he's being pulled in separate directions. But he acknowledges that to himself, and he thinks of what happened to count Oinyung and says, if they would do that to him, they have to be stopped. So I think this is the all in moment. I think this was the final. Okay, I'm back. Of all of the. I'm in, I'm out. I'm in, I'm out.
This may be represented by Uso's hat.
Oh.
When he leaves Casarelia to rejoin the Cameoon crew, he's riding on his wapa, and he has his cap on sideways with the bill, like, sticking out to the left side. He's trying to look cool anyway. When he actually gets back into the victory, actually, when he's paragliding to it, his cap is on backwards combat mode, full commitment, whereas when it was on the side, it was only half committal.
But you have to admit, it's pretty silly to wear a cap backwards while you're driving a thing. Wouldn't the brim of it just, like, bump into your neck and into the back of the chair?
Nah, turning your cap around backwards is for when you get seriously serious, just like in Pokemon. Doesn't Ash always turn his cap on backwards when it's time to really fight?
I don't know. I did enjoy Marbett pushing up her sleeves, though, which are already shorts. She's already wearing a t shirt, but she still pushes the sleeves up to her shoulders.
Everybody has the thing they do to show that they're getting serious.
I love her so much. I also like the new guy.
Oliver.
Yep.
You know who we haven't talked about?
Who?
Katajina.
Oh, she's caught the bug, y'all.
She's seen the cool. This. You may have seen this article. I think it's from hard drive, the satirical website hard drive. But the title of it is, I will abandon my anti war position in exchange for a Gundam. And that's Katajina. She will abandon her opposition to violence in exchange for a tomliat. She sees it shining in the morning sunlight, and she's like, ooh, I get it now.
That's a moment that a lot of us experience, though, that speaking as a.
Newly converted, or I guess, not that new, but speaking as a converted mecha fan.
As a converted mecha fan, but also as a human who always visits the arms and armor section of the Met whenever we go there. I don't know anything about sword fighting or armor in terms of actually being able to judge its usefulness or quality. I don't want to cut anybody up. I don't want anybody to get cut up with swords. But as a creation of a craftsperson, as a feat of human ingenuity, as something designed and built, I can look at these things and think about how stunning they are, that they are beautiful.
The robot is cool.
And now the third and final maybe of my research pieces about the history of the advertising agency in Japan. In prior episodes, I talked about how by the early 1990s, when victory was made, the ad agencies there had positioned themselves as an indispensable component of TV program development. They were the marketing experts, identifying the kinds of shows that would appeal to particular audiences and devising overall business plans that balanced the sometimes conflicting interests of advertisers, studios and TV stations. And ultimately, it was their job to secure the money that made everything else possible. We began this deep dive into the world of japanese advertising agencies by asking why Victory Gundam was relegated to the relatively weak 05:00 p.m. Friday time slot on TV Asahi, despite an obvious mismatch between the show's content and the expected audience for the time slot, a mismatch that was apparent even at the time, especially to those working at TV Asahi. We return to that question today. Let me introduce the players in this corporate drama. Besides Sunrise and main sponsor soon to be parent company Bondi, there were also the advertising agencies, Densu and Sotsu, and the TV stations TV Asahi and Nagoya television, to take the advertisers first. Densu and Sotsu represent opposite ends of the spectrum for ad agencies, the massive generalist versus the tiny specialist. One was built around conventional, above the line advertising, the other tightly focused from its inception on below the line merchandise and intellectual property licensing. Founded in 1901, by 1953, Densu had become the largest advertising agency in Japan, a crown which it retains to this day. In 1990, it was the largest agency in the world by billings and employed around 6000 people in 28 japanese and 16 international offices. Densu has been in the news lately due to a number of scandals. In 2015, the agency's abusive work environment, sexist harassment and excessive overtime demands were blamed for the death by suicide of a young office worker, 24 year old Takahashi Matsui. Although no individuals were charged in connection with Takahashi's death, Densu admitted fault, paid a fine and pledged to reform its culture. But in a tragic, ironic twist, the conditions that led to Takahashi's death already violated Densu's own selfimposed rules against overwork rules the agency had established after a hauntingly similar incident in 1991, the year of Takahashi's birth, when another 24 year old employee, Oshima Ichiro, ended his own life after reportedly working for 17 months without a single day off. More recently, a number of Densu employees were arrested in connection with allegations of bribery and bid rigging for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which is to say that they have been accused of accepting bribes from wouldbe olympic game sponsors like clothier Aoki holdings and using their influence to circumvent the supposedly competitive bidding process for coveted sponsorship contracts. Now, you might be, huh? That doesn't sound like the Densu Olympics bribery scandal that I remember, which is entirely fair because this is not the first time that Densu has been investigated for alleged participation in Olympics related corruption. Back in 2013, french prosecutors raised the possibility that Densu had been involved in a scheme to bribe International Olympic Committee members to select Tokyo for the 2020 games. Densu counts the ruling Liberal Democratic Party among their clients and is said to operate as a kind of de facto publicity arm for the party. This marriage of political and business convenience is symbolized by one of those rare, naturally occurring metaphors in the form of the actual marriage of former prime minister and head of the LDP, Abe Shinzo, to former Densu employee Matsuzaki Akie, now Abe Akie. Besides buying up all the best airtime, bullying its employees, and pumping its clients for under the table payments, Densu is also said to wield considerable influence over Japan's media companies, influenced enough to suppress unfavorable stories about their clients and about themselves. One commentator, a former employee of rival agency Hakuhodo, described Densu as untouchable in the japanese media, and in his book a japanese advertising agency, anthropologist Brian Moran, described an incident in which two brands of television sets from two different manufacturers were both reported to have an unfortunate tendency to catch fire. These incendiary television sets were blamed for a blaze that levelled an apartment building in Tokyo. One of these two manufacturers, represented by the unnamed agency in which Moran was conducting his research, asked that agency to do everything possible to suppress bad publicity related to the fires. The agency was able to convince the news media to soften their coverage in various ways, suppressing some stories outright and convincing other outlets to balance their coverage by including the manufacturer's defenses in their articles. Yet the other manufacturer, represented by Densu, managed to disappear from the story entirely. It's a neat little conjuring trick to make a flaming television set disappear live on stage with an audience full of reporters. Sotsu on the other hand was a small and highly specialized advertising agency, mainly known for its expertise in merchandising and television production. The agency started in 1965, handling the merchandise for a popular baseball team, the Yomiuri giants. Then they broke into TV and the branded character licensing business in 1972 with Tokusatsu series Thunder Mask on Nipon Television. In 1977, they collaborated with a newly independent anime studio and an inexperienced freelance director to produce their first anime, Invincible Superman, Zambot Three. Though none of them could have known it at the time, this partnership would change the fate of all three, first raising them to unimagined heights, and then, like something out of a Greek tragedy, dooming each of them in turn. In the moment, Zambot was successful enough to convince Toymaker and sponsor Clover to fund a follow up in the form of invincible steel man ditarn three, which was followed by mobile suit Gundam. The Gundam phenomenon of the early 80s made Tomino and Studio Sunrise famous, but it made Sotsu rich. It's not entirely clear to me how the copyright and merchandising interests for Gundam were distributed among the participating companies. We know from Uda Masro's tweets on the subject that sunrise was collecting some part of the royalties from Gundam merchandise. We also know from statements he's made that Tomino sold whatever rights he had as series creator to sunrise for what he said was the industry standard amount of ¥300,000, most likely in 1979, before the show started airing. But some portion of those rights definitely fell into the hands of Sotsu. If you're the kind of sicko who scrutinizes the credits of shows looking for things like copyright notices, you will have noticed that Sotsu is always listed as one of the copyright holders. The agency survived for decades, largely on the profits from its control of Gundam merchandising and other related intellectual property rights. If Gundam was the goose that laid Sotsu's golden eggs, it did not take long before it grew into a mutated, radioactive mega goose too large and powerful for the humble goosekeeper to manage. From victory onward, Sotsu's participation seems to have declined, and since then, most Gundam shows have been handled by larger ad agencies, usually either densu or asatsu, working in collaboration with Sotsu. But even with other agencies sharing the burden, Sotsu still found itself overwhelmed by the scale of work needed to manage their increasingly global IP. A 2019 notice sent to shareholders described the situation with fewer goose metaphors recently. The investment scale of each project, especially the ones related to the business of the mobile suit Gundam, have tended to be large scale. Although these challenges have required a response from Sotsu, the agency believes that it is limited in what it can do to deal with these challenges with its own resources, with its current human and physical resources, business scale, et cetera. The solution to this problem, it turned out, was for Bondi to buy out the agency and transform it into a subsidiary, much as they had done with Sunrise in 1994. So on November 25, 2019, Bondi forked over more than ¥26 billion in cash, buying out the agency and consolidating their control over the Gundam brand. Now, let's talk about television briefly. The japanese television industry is organized into a handful of nationwide networks. One, Nipon Hoso Kyokai, or NHK, is a public broadcaster funded through a license fee charged against anyone in Japan with a television set. Although practically everyone I know who has lived in Japan for any length of time has a story about hiding from the NHK man when he came around to check whether they had a TV set in their home. In the 1990s, NHK operated two channels available throughout Japan, but they didn't and still don't run commercials, so we're just going to ignore them. Besides NHK, there were a bit more than 100 terrestrial broadcasting stations throughout the country, and almost all of them were affiliated with one or more of five commercial networks. The principal way for a TV station to make money was by selling advertising time, which was broken into two categories. Time advertising was advertising that played during a particular program. The ad agency or agencies that successfully pitched a new program were granted the right to broker the sale of the time advertising associated with that program to the program's sponsors. Spot advertising was advertising time between programs and it was sold on a piecemeal basis, whereas time advertising was settled well in advance when the program was first accepted by the network. Spot advertising could be purchased as little as a month out from when the ad was scheduled to air, or even shorter in extraordinary cases, as might occur if another advertiser backed out at the last minute. For both time and spot advertising, the agency was entitled to a healthy commission based on the sale price and, if they produced the ad themselves, a separate commission on the cost of production. The standard industry rate for both types of commission was around 15%, but special deals and kickbacks meant that the actual commission rate for any particular transaction might be much less or much more. After the agency took their cut, they would pass along the rest of the money to the TV station. This was lucrative business in 1990, sponsoring a 30 minutes program on a major network for one month cost between 60 and ¥120,000,000, depending on the station chosen to run the ad. The station on which victory gun emaired TV Asahi was consistently in the middle of the pack on all the relevant metrics, and in this case the sponsoring cost was around ¥90 million per month. Sponsoring a full 51 episode series like victory could thus cost over a billion yen, and at the height of the bubble economy, wouldbe advertisers that had not yet established a rapport with the relevant TV stations might try to compensate by offering to pay more than the official rates, sometimes as much as 50%. More spot commercials involved less of a commitment, but they were no cheaper. In 1990, a single 15 2nd spot advertisement running just once in a premium time slot on Fuji television costs ¥900,000. The crucial difference between time and spot advertising is that spot advertising runs on a specific station, while time advertising attaches to the program and runs wherever and whenever the program airs across the whole network. For regulatory reasons, and also because of the nature of physical reality, any one station can only broadcast to a certain geographic area. Broadcasting to the whole country requires a network of affiliated regional stations broadcasting the same thing. Each of these networks was based around a socalled key station located in Tokyo, which generated the lion's share of programming. One source from 1992 figured that about 80% of all programming originated from these key stations. They received the sponsorship fees for the time advertising associated with those programs. Some of those programs were network programs distributed to the affiliates for broadcast in their regions. Affiliates were paid a network fee to reserve blocks of time in their schedule for these network shows. When a network show runs in a network time slot, it airs with the original sponsor. Commercials included allowing the sponsors to reach the whole network in one go. Thus, when victory started airing on TV Asahi, the key station for the all Nippon news network, it also aired simultaneously on eleven other ANn affiliates. It aired half an hour early on the affiliated station in the Kansai and up to a week late in eight other regions, mostly in the north of Honshu. Affiliates were also allowed to sell their own commercials during time slots, and they could keep time slots open for their own programs, either programs they made themselves like local news, or programs that they purchased to air specifically in those slots. Similar to the way syndication works in the US, the affiliate stations sold the advertisements for these local advertising time slots, and they kept the money. You can think of this system like one of those champagne waterfalls with the big stack of tiered glasses. The advertiser is the bottle of champagne which gets poured into the top glass the advertising agency's commission. Once it's full, the rest of the champagne money pours into the key station, which then spills some of that champagne into the regional affiliate glasses at the bottom of the tower. They are probably not quite full at that point, so you can bring in some other, smaller bottles, the local advertisers, and fill those up. Now, there's no particular reason why the regional stations can't make their own shows for national distribution. It's just that most of the people and almost all of the money lives in Tokyo. So those are the stations best able to recruit the kind of big money advertisers necessary to produce expensive television. That's where most of the ad agencies, the advertisers and the production studios keep their offices, too. In fact, in 1990, the offices of the key stations, TV networks, and ad agencies were all concentrated shoulder to shoulder in a single neighborhood, the glamorous Ginza district. And as a matter of fact, sometimes the pipeline does go in reverse. Sometimes a regional station produces a show that gets picked up by the network and aired in a network time slot on the key station and throughout the country. The stations that manage to do this with some regularity are called semi key stations, and they're usually regional affiliates situated in major commercial hubs outside of Tokyo. Most of them are in Osaka, the largest and wealthiest city outside the broadcasting range of the Tokyo stations, and in Nagoya, the next largest after that. Given their limited resources, it makes sense for semi key stations to specialize somewhat in the kinds of programs they develop. Kansai television, for example, has earned itself a reputation in recent years for producing TV dramas that buck the conventional wisdom of the Tokyo based industry in order to offer fresh stories told in their own style. But their output is limited in part because the Fuji television network, to which Kansai television belongs, allocates only a single time slot per season for dramas originating from Kansai television. TV Asahi and Nagoya television are both part of the all Nippon news network, which in 1990 consisted of 20 stations and ranked in the middle of Japan's five commercial networks on most of the relevant metrics, number of viewers, number of stations cost to advertise that kind of thing. Tokyo based TV Asahi, a subsidiary of the powerful Asahi Shimbun media conglomerate, is the key station for the network. Nagoya Television is a semi key station and famous among anime fans who care about such things for its long and productive relationship with sunrise. Having served as the originating station for much of that studio's output during the don't know this for certain, but I think it's fair to assume that ANN reserved at least one network time slot per season for Nagoya television anime in the same way that the Fuji network reserves a slot for Kansai television dramas. This means that from the outside, from the audience perspective, Victory Gundam aired on all the same ANN stations as every prior Gundam TV show. Prior Gundams had aired on TV Asahi in the Tokyo region, and Victory did air on Nagoya television, but from the inside, the specific people involved and the structure of the business relationships were completely different. On a previous episode, I mentioned a tweet by Ueda Masuo talking about the attitude at sunrise in 1988 when Bondi canceled their sponsorship of the Nagoya television Saturday evening anime time slot. Sunrise was frantic because that specific time slot allowed their shows to reach a national audience at a time when they did not have a foothold on any of the Tokyo based key stations. If I'm right and an did reserve a certain amount of network time for anime from Nagoya television, it seems entirely plausible that the Saturday evening time slot was the only one to enjoy that privilege. Naturally, network programs with National Reach Command significantly higher advertising rates and receive significantly higher production budgets than do local ones. That doesn't matter much for a relatively cheap production like nightly news, but TV anime is far too expensive to produce on a local scale. Losing their only network slot to another studio would have been devastating, and you can just imagine the rival anime production companies salivating over the prospect. But Nagoya television was willing to extend a little grace to their longtime partners, and they were rewarded before long by a succession of hits, starting with legendary armor Samurai troopers and culminating in the long running Brave series. This, however, meant that when Bondi decided to bring Gundam back to television in 1993, there was no spot waiting for it by default the way there had been for Zeta and double Zeta. They would need to convince some station to accept the program and schedule it in one of those precious network time slots. I suspect, although I don't know this for certain, that Bondi had hoped to reclaim Gundam's traditional Saturday evening time slot. Now, assuming Bondi did campaign for that slot, Nagoya television must have rejected their bid, and that would not be surprising. The brave series was going great at that point, and production on the next entry in the franchise was well underway. Why mess with success? Besides, Bondi's intransigence as a sponsor had put the station in a very awkward position just five years prior. That meant Bondi had to pitch victory Gundam to the various key stations as a new program, and I suspect this is why they picked Densu, the single most powerful ad agency in the country, famous for its deep rooted connections throughout the TV industry. You see, in theory, the key stations operated an open system where any agency could bid for any time slot. But with so much money at stake and so much industry practice based on informal handshake agreements, human chemistry, and favor trading, it shouldn't be a surprise that in practice they relied heavily on a small handful of long established favored agencies. In his book, Moran described these favored agencies as an elite cartel. Other agencies might even be obliged to go through one of the favored agencies in order to place ads on certain networks or during certain coveted times. The logic behind this system was simple
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