You're listening to season 10 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
We have some sad news this week. If you already follow us on Patreon, you will have seen this but Tigress, our much beloved 19 year old podcat, fell ill and passed away in June. She lived a long and very exciting life. She was pampered to the utmost in her final days. She made our lives a lot better by her presence and I hope that her occasional interjections on the podcast brought some joy to you as well.
We miss her very much.
But the show goes on, as they say, and we have one last question to answer.
This question is from Cotav Coteaf C o T E o F Victory is the last Gundam project that Tomino himself had a direct hand in for several years, with multiple series to come that he had little or no personal involvement in. And at the time, it may have seemed like Victory was going to be the last Gundam series he was going to work on at all. In that light, how do you feel, both critically and as a viewer about this era of Gundam across the 15ish year period, from the original series to Victory? How do you feel the messaging and storytelling of Gundam under Tomino evolved in that time? What recurring elements do you think were most important to the story he was trying to tell?
Well, I think for a really fulsome answer to this question, I would recommend that you simply go back to episode one, Season one and listen to the entire podcast in order for our full thoughts on the evolution of Tomino's storytelling and his influence on the project. But to be a little bit less annoying about it, this is a great opportunity for us to talk about the Tomino era, which really is coming to an end here. He has no involvement throughout most of the 90s, and when he does return, the projects that he works on are going to be really quite different. It will be a new era, not a return to this one. We spend a lot of time thinking about the answers to this question. There's no way we could be even close to comprehensive with the time available to us and in this format, but we'll do our best. And as I was thinking about this, I kept coming back to one basic what did Tomino do that someone else would not have done? Because I think a lot of the elements of Gundam from this era that we think of immediately, whether that's the shift from super robot style shows to the more grounded real robot genre that Gundam inaugurated Or just the sort of archetype of the charismatic masked villain. Those, I think, were always going to happen. Maybe not exactly the way they did, maybe not all together in one package, but there was always going to be a real robot genre. That impulse to create a more grounded, a more gritty, a more realistic version of the mecha genre was always there. Something like the masked villain, rival character. This is such a classic archetype, such.
A classic trope that arguably existed for decades before Gundam ever existed.
And of course, Tomino didn't even want the mask. His version of Char was quite different. So there's a lot here that is just the natural progress of art, the natural progress of culture. But on the other hand, Tomino exercised practically dictatorial control over the creative output of a massively valuable and prolific media franchise for, like, 15 years. And that's extraordinary. Very few creators ever have that kind of power. He's also a very idiosyncratic person, so there can be no question that many of his artistic idiosyncrasies have become embedded in the work.
I thought about Tomino the person, basically, not at all when I was thinking about this question, I'm also realizing, looking over the question again, the first actual question in the question is, how do you feel critically and as a viewer about this era of Gundam? And I really didn't think about that either, mainly because on some level, my feelings seem irrelevant here. I am committed to this Gundam project. How do I feel about those 15 years of Gundam? There was a lot of it, and we said many of those things already.
You know, you've been watching this era of Gundam for the past six years.
You had not seen very much Gundam before that.
So from your perspective, this era of Gundam is like all the Gundam that there is.
I was focused much more on the storytelling. What I see is the evolution of those stories and of those recurring elements. For example, first, Gundam felt very much like a show about grappling with the past, made in 1979, kind of sort of about World War II from people who were young children when it happened and who are now adults. Every subsequent Tomino series instead feels like he's grappling with the present. And those consistent, important elements show up in the first series, but they're no less relevant in the subsequent series. And in a way, it's kind of like pulling Tomino the person back into it. The evolution of one person's big ideas about life and society, and attempting to grapple with the ideas you grew up with, colliding with the changing Culture, some of these consistent and important elements, things like that you can't truly shield children from war except by preventing war. And a sense that some amount of warfare is inevitable. Like it's this human sin that we can't escape.
Mm. He's torn between the idea that war is a. A spiritual failing of humanity and the idea that for a certain set of people, because of their position within the architecture of our society, war is the rational means by which they pursue their ends.
But there is enough consistent focus on the horror of war. The underlying philosophy of Gundam considers war an abomination.
Mm. From which we can extrapolate that if society creates people for whom starting wars is in their rational self interest, then that architecture of society is an abomination. A society that produces Girens and. And Fons Cagaty's and Haman Karns.
And this is maybe splitting hairs, but I don't think it's that the society produces these people. It's that the society produces people who will follow those people. The society enables those people. The society fails to stop those people from amassing power because. Aha. Mankaran can't hurt anybody unless she has access to people and resources that enable her to do so. Sure, Ahamon Karn without an army is just an angry lady.
If Haman Karn were just an office lady, then yeah, the scope of harm she could cause would be limited, sure.
But a society that produces a tyrant shaped hole at the top that could be filled by whichever charismatic villain happens.
To want it, or a society where people are so hungry for answers, where people want to be told what to do and how to live. Some of the other consistent important elements, I think are competing ideas about childhood. What it is, what it should be, what it means, how it is defined. Competing ideas about gender, we've talked about that ad nauseam. What is a man? What is a woman? Can a working mother still be a good mother, et cetera. Parent, child relationships, consistently difficult, consistently really complicated, frequently terrible. Which in the context of that overarching grappling with a changing society makes sense. Because if society is changing that quickly, then each subsequent generation is more likely to be raised with certain opinions and standards and assumptions that are very different from those their parents were raised with, which obviously is going to create conflict between the generations. And on top of those things, things like resource conflict, whether it's about living space or water or air or other resources or the earth itself. Similarly, the popular science of the time had a lot of people thinking about the idea of Human evolution and whether that is something that we can or should try to control, like the progress of human evolution, what happens next, our species. And is that something that we can control by going to space or not going to space or creating cybernetypes or whatever?
Tomino seems to be weighing his own cynicism about human nature, the idea that.
Humans are too egocentric.
So maybe what we need is to evolve to be better versus the idea that just waiting for for evolution to come along and fix all of our big problems is a form of abdication of responsibility that we, as we are now have these problems in front of us and have an obligation to try to fix them. And simply saying, oh, the next generation will save us, the next generation will be better is not a solution. That's just us being irresponsible.
And yes, we know that evolution doesn't work that way. We're aware, however, that idea in popular science and in science fiction has stayed strong to this day.
Then there's this third idea expressed through the Flanagan Institute, through the cybernewtypes of the Zeta Double Zeta era.
Instead of confronting our problems head on, or hoping that someone else, the next generation, or the one after that will fix them, what if we tried to engineer better people in a lab with science torture? What could go wrong? But I don't know how much we can attribute cybernewtypes and human reformation science to the Tomino era specifically. It's huge up through Double Zeta. But then he seems to lose interest after 1987. CCA, F91 and Victory barely touch on cybernewtypes. Instead, we should look at the cybernewtypes problem as merely one branch of Tomino's general techno skepticism that every innovation will be weaponized and become just another appendage of the many tentacled military industrial complex solar energy satellites repurposed to make a deadly heat ray, mining asteroids given a second life as space fortresses cum projectiles.
I was going to bring that up with regard to new types. Honestly, if he hadn't wound up in a mobile suit fighting for his life, what good would being a new type have done us as a farmer? Like, how is that gonna make him farm better? Like. Like it doesn't actually make sense evolutionarily because it's seemingly only good for fighting and occasionally for stopping fighting. I agree with regard to cyber new types specifically, but not about human reformation science. Because even outside of the cybernewtype framework, Tomino seems to believe that new typism is a thing that can be Cultivated can be encouraged to develop in people by putting them in specific circumstances. Whether that's going to space or having something really traumatic happen to them.
Throw that child in a situation, you.
Know, even if it's not being done with chemicals and computers, it's being done with a kind of social engineering. Early on, Char seems to believe that just making humanity live in space will lead to more new types. That by changing society in that fundamental way, they will create the next, better version of people.
I guess you could view USO's parents.
Trying to raise him to be like the perfect savior child of humanity. That's a kind of social engineering.
I really object to you describing it that way. All of the flashbacks that we see of USO's upbringing have to do with self sufficiency, responsibility, thinking things through before you do them, cultivating your own skills, shoring up your weaknesses and building up your strengths. There is never any mention in any of those flashbacks of him saving humanity or needing to be the savior child for humans or the Earth or any. And like, no, they don't put that on him.
They don't put that on him, but Tomino does. Those are the qualities that Tomino thinks the children of the future need to have in order to be able to save the world. When he was making Zeta, Tomino created this energetic, passionate young person saying, hey kids of today, why aren't you more like Chamile? The world would be better if all of you were more like Chamile. And uso, I think is the same thing. USO is an aspirational figure.
And finally, one element that is generally more subtly represented, although it's brought to the forefront and made a major part of Victory Gundam is that alienation from nature. And that this is tied up in our alienation from each other, that these things are connected. We feel alienated from like micro society, from our communities, even from our friends and family. And we are also alienated from the.
Natural world that's so strong in Victory. That sense of, you know, every person on Zanskar's side is like an island with very few if any human connections. And the ones they have are almost always contentious, rife with betrayals. And that is also reflected in their alienation from nature, from the land.
But I even thinking about the reaction of the the Zeon soldiers on Earth, on Rambaral's ship, right when they get caught in a lightning storm and everybody's freaking out, or Camille and Tha's relationship where they're best friends, they've known each other a Long time. But at various points, especially early in Zeta Gundam, they really struggle to express what they are going through to each other or to like communicate with each other at all without hurting each other.
Mm.
You brought up an interesting point when we were prepping for this, which is that even the fact that we talk about this span as Tomino Gundam, that we're in essence applying auteur theory, that he is this creative force who exercised widespread control over the production. He was one of the first anime directors to get that treatment, to even be in a position to be thought of that way.
Yeah. He and his success on Gundam are widely credited, especially by other people within the industry who are active around the same time, as being responsible for establishing the director as the author, as the single key creative force, the person through whom all decisions are filtered.
Not merely a technician for managing the production of an animated piece of work, but someone with artistic involvement in all aspects of a production.
And that seems so natural to us. But when Tomino was hired onto Gundam, it was fairly far into the pre production process. He was a freelancer. Directors were fairly disposable. Tomino himself was fired in the middle of working on Raideen in 76. Before Tomino and Gundam, often the most important person on a production would have been the character designer, the who might have doubled as the animation director and therefore was like the defining figure for the look of the show. And it's a visual medium. The look of the show in animation is most of it. Then there's the mecha designer. This is the person who most closely interfaces with the sponsors. This is the person whose work is sitting on the shelves in the toy store, who really is paying for the production. Then there's the producer. Generally the person who likes selects the staff. If anybody can claim responsibility for the overall production of the show, you'd think it would be the producer. But there was something about Tomino. Tomino had a gift for attracting attention to himself, for taking credit for things that are done, and for inserting himself into every stage of the production process. He writes scripts, he makes storyboards. He writes the the lyrics for the songs. He writes the tie in novels. He gives interviews to anime magazines. Tomino is everywhere. He becomes indispensable. Tomino departing is like the end of the celebrity creator era for Gundam.
And it wasn't really a handing over the reins situation. It was like, okay, I'm done brushing off my hands. Here you go.
It passes to Imagawa. I think if you're an anime fan of a particular era, you probably Know who Imagawa is, and you can name a couple of his other projects, but without looking it up. Who directed Gundam Wing? Who directed Gundam x? Name the two directors of 8th Ms. Team. I'm sure some people in the audience will be able to do that and be like, what is Tom talking about? These are obvious, but for most people in the audience, I suspect they will not be.
It was remarkable that he was able to to put himself in a position to have that kind of control, despite how things were typically made at that time, and maybe speaks to his relationships or ability to manage his relationships with the sponsors, with Sunrise, the production team. You know, we have ample evidence that people found him overbearing and difficult to work with, but they didn't necessarily have a choice.
And I think he was still generally respected.
Well, he works very hard himself, and for a lot of people, especially in creative fields, if you see your boss really working hard, then the fact that they're tough on you doesn't necessarily feel like you're being singled out or unfairly treated. It's like, oh, they have a very clear vision for what they want and we don't. We're not there yet, so we're going to keep working.
There are stories from the production of First Gundam where Tomino is receiving angry calls from the sponsors and dealing with them running interference between the sponsors and the production team in order to allow them to continue making a good show despite the increasingly irate demands of the money people. So I don't know how good he was at managing the sponsors necessarily, but if he's good at running interference, that's really important. And then after the magnitude of First Gundam's success, then he has the cachet that's what enables him to retain control of the franchise for as long as he does.
You mentioned that Tomino's involvement went beyond the show itself, and also involved interviews and working on the novels, which got me thinking about like, yes, clearly he's a control freak, and I think he enjoys being a provocateur. He enjoys saying things that are going to get tongues wagging, and even probably knowingly contradicts himself periodically just to confuse people and make people talk about him more. However, you had speculated that this era of Gundam also kicked off a certain type of fan culture that is very interested in what these lead creatives on a project have to say, really treats that information as important to. To enjoying a show correctly, to coming away thinking the right things about a show.
Sure.
And it makes me wonder how much of this could have been like A calculated effort on his part to promote that kind of material and to create that, like, broader media mix for the work that the more provocative he is in interviews, the more likely people are to buy the magazines to read those interviews. The more confusing things are, the more you feel like, oh, maybe I need to read the novel to really understand.
Well, he definitely has a symbiotic relationship with those anime magazines. He gives these incredible interviews. And so you want to read the interviews. People buy the anime magazines, they see the promotion for whatever his new project is going to be.
And like I said, you know, there's the control freak aspect of this, of I want people to interpret my art the way that I meant it. And so I'm going to keep providing these updates to kind of like push people towards the right interpretations. But it could also just be my power and relevance within this industry is based off of this franchise. And so the stronger I can make the franchise, which includes expanding the media mix, the better it is for me.
I mean, you can very easily look at this very cynically and say, this is a calculated campaign by Tomino to take control of the Gundam brand. That in first Gundam, the distribution of creative responsibilities is quite flat. Tomino is the director, but he's not really controlling the story. He only writes one episode script, and it's a bottle episode. It doesn't affect the general flow of the story. He shares control over the show with various writers, with Yasuhiko, with Okawara, with the producers. But then, because he's the visible face, because he's the charismatic one who's out giving the interviews, he's the one who shows up at the Anime New Century Declaration event when the Gundam movies are coming out to give the big speech to the thousands of otaku who have gathered for the rally. He's putting himself out there. He's becoming the public face of Gundam, and that pushes everybody else's contributions out of the window, and that makes him Mr. Gundam.
Whether it was intentional or not, him having that kind of control over this period of time basically allows him personally to establish this is what Gundam is. To the extent that non Tomino series include some of these same story elements, some of these same thematic elements, they may feel obliged to, otherwise their show won't feel like a Gundam.
Yeah, yeah. I don't know how much any of what he's doing is consciously directed towards convincing people to buy the side materials. I'm certain he wants you to buy his novels that he wrote. But as far as like, you know, data books, Stuff like that. I don't think that's his interest, but he does. By giving these interviews, he has cultivated a fan culture that sees like, there is the Gundam that got made and there is the Gundam that exists in Tomino's mind, and that those two are in tension because the Gundam that got made is a compromise between what Tomino and the other creators wanted to do and what the sponsors required them to do. And as fans, then we feel this obligation to try to figure out what is the true Gundam, which is not the Gundam we saw, and that we should view this as a competition, as a clash between the sponsors and the creators. Tomino famously said that the sponsors are the true enemy of Gundam, and as fans, we are encouraged to side with the creators. Now, there's some elements of this in practically every big media franchise, but it is a load bearing pillar of Gundam to talk about the sponsors as inherently hostile to the artistic output of the franchise. And I think that's. That's Tomino, baby. Going back to his big themes. And that question I started with of what did Tomino himself bring to this project that somebody else might not have? I think the obsession with Earth is a big part of that.
For a show with long distance space travel and many humans living their entire lives in space, we spend a lot of time looking at, thinking about, and actively on Earth.
Every Gundam show goes to Earth at some point, practically required.
Well, it's that sense of seeing yourself through someone else's eyes, seeing your own culture through the views of someone who didn't grow up in it, that maybe we can't really understand Earth, really see it until we're looking at it from outside.
And when Tomino looks at Earth, he sees all of these overlapping crises. There is a feeling in every Gundam, at least after the first one, that we are careening towards some kind of looming mega crisis. All of these different political, environmental, and social and spiritual problems will all come to a head as the positivist industrial post war order slams into the physical limits of the planet on which we live. Live.
And yet none of these crises is ever actually apocalyptic. Many of these crises do happen. Oh, someone did crash a colony cylinder into the planet, and it caused a horrific amount of damage. But here, everybody is still trucking along like it's never really the end. And I don't know if that's just because they couldn't get away with being like, and then the world ended. Have fun, kids.
Don't forget to buy all our playsets and toys.
Or maybe it's A reflection of a kind of cycle. Humanity finds itself faced with this sense of impending catastrophe. And we may never fix the underlying problems, but we do typically manage to dampen the catastrophe.
Tomino's Gundam is unapologetically a mirror for the real world. It's unapologetically political, and it reflects the current events both in Japan and abroad. Especially abroad. Really. It's an internationally focused show. I think that's another of Tomino's legacies. And because it reflects the real world, and because in the real world we are still heading towards the catastrophe, we have not yet wiped ourselves out. Therefore, within Gundam, the catastrophe is always looming, never quite arriving.
And even if we manage to delay it, it's still there.
At the beginning of this discussion, you pointed out the first Gundam show is very backward looking. It is about dealing with the specters of World War II and World War I and you know, the whole Imperial era. Whereas every Gundam since then, at least every Tomino Gundam, has been not exactly forward looking, but more contemporary about its.
Present, about when it was made more.
And it's kind of perfect that Tomino is leaving the franchise at this moment, because it's very easy to tell a story about Japan that runs from the end of the war up to the bursting of the bubble. This is a consistent narrative about Japan's economic and social recovery and reform after the horrors of the war years and the Imperial period. But then it hits the bubble and that story ends and a different story starts. And Tomino is leaving at the end of that story. But by starting first Gundam with a story about World War II, he's setting the universal century on the same trajectory as Japan and the whole post war international order.
You mentioned the kind of internationalism. What I think is very funny about that is that after World War II and with the United nations, and there was a lot of hope that the way the world was going to function moving forward was going to be less about like individual nation states, selfish pursuit of power, and more about like a desire for international prosperity and international peace. And Tomino's cynicism about how all that promise and how little it delivered comes out a little bit in first Gundam and then more in subsequent series. But what you have is an internationalization of populations. You have all of these multi ethnic characters who all live together, and we don't see much in the way of racial or ethnic conflict between or within these groups of people.
And in Tomino's notes and in the novels and in the side stuff, it's very clear that this is intentional, this blending of all ethnicities, all languages. This is something Tomino did really, really purposefully.
Because of global media, because of global trade, because of global transportation, there are all these opportunities for people to mix. And in general, that mixing happens pretty positively. And yet the big sort of internationalist organizations, the Earth Federation, et cetera, are weak and ineffectual and cowardly. These are shows that take a very kind of international view of people and of how people live as individuals, as small communities, but a very cynical view of that. Kumbaya, no more nations and that means everything is peaceful kind of outlook that a lot of people really believed in in the post war order and had very high hopes for.
Sure, adding a new tier, the Earth Federation at the top of the international order might seem like a good idea, especially right after World War II. I mean, somebody needs to restrain the worst impulses of the nation states, right? What else are we going to do? Break up the superpowers? Get rid of nations altogether? But then the problem with supranational organizations, or a problem with them, is that in any state, however, the government is constructed. Fascist, royalist, democratic, socialist, communist. There's always a gap between the common citizen and the leadership class. The leaders, like everybody, make decisions based on their own life experiences and their personal interests. And if the difference in experience and interest between the greatest and the least in a society is small, then we can expect the government to serve all members of the society reasonably well. Widen that gap and the government will become less and less responsive. So installing a new international leadership class on top of the existing structure without changing anything else, only increases the levels of alienation between the ultimate decision makers and their subjects.
If structures like Zeon inevitably produce tyrant shaped holes at the top, then structures like the Federation inevitably produce these kind of faceless, amorphous councils of bureaucrats who never do anything.
You keep bringing up the tyrant or dictator shaped hole in society. Villains are fun to hate and villains are fun to blame. And it's always great in a Gundam show when a villain gets got, but the blame falls almost as much or more on all the people following that person, all the people who fall for it, all the people who don't even have to be tricked who are like, ah, yes, I do want to subjugate all our neighbors for our own benefit. That sounds excellent.
Well, this is why I talk not about dictators, but dictator shaped holes that. God, this is so.
This is so weird. Yeah, maybe just stop calling.
Nope, this is my hole. It was made for me.
That's a meme that's a reference to a manga. If you're on the Internet a lot, you get it, and otherwise it's actually not dirty. Maybe we'll include a screenshot in the.
Show notes but the reason I keep talking about the dictator shaped hole is that it doesn't matter who fills it. It doesn't matter what the particular characteristics of one dictator or another are. It doesn't matter if it's Giren or Sirocco or Haman or Char Aznabal or.
Fonz Cagaty, but that there do seem to be a set of social circumstances or a type of society in which.
People want that a society in crisis yearns for a strong man, for a savior figure who can upend the status quo.
And surrounding each of these charismatic figures who draw in all of the attention are your horsed harnesses, bureaucrats, generals, industrialists.
Powerful men who are already part of the leadership class. Seeing the looming crisis and realizing that their society is on the cusp of major reformation, they want to manage the transition in order to ensure a place for themselves very near the top of whatever the new social pyramid is going to be. Melanie Hugh Carbine knows that the colonies are on the verge of open rebellion, so he backs the Ayug, a moderate anti titans but pro federation, pro corporate, pro democracy organization with strong ties to Anaheim Electronics. The Colony Corporation anticipates the Warring States period, so it secretly works with Cosmo Babylonia behind the scenes. The charismatic figurehead character is practically obligatory for this kind of show, but it's these backroom operations operators who I think have Tomino's own fingerprints all over them.
The thematic messaging, such as it is, felt much clearer in First Gundam than in subsequent stories, but I think that is because First Gundam is rearward looking. The messaging feels frequently pretty muddled in other series because it is. You can almost imagine the characters and the settings as like Tomino is playing with his action figures going like okay, but what would happen if this character is a career woman? And that means that she's like not really there for her kid, but okay, what would happen if this other character is a career woman but is doing the like free range parenting with her kid out in the woods? And what about how are the Fighty Women Shrikes different from Fighty Woman? Katajina he creates these types. He creates these characters and then he puts them in situations to see how they play out as a way to think about big social issues, not necessarily with a particular message she's trying to send. Just thinking about These things, contemplating them, let them fight.
And then I think if you want like really consistent messaging from Tomino, consistent themes, you can go a level deeper, dissolving the surface level aspects of a character. You get to these recurring ideas of punishment and compromise. I think Tomino is really interested in both of these ideas. Compromise is the easy one to discuss because every Gundam story is about a compromise between righteousness represented by childhood, and expedients represented by adulthood.
Mmm mm. Although that childhood righteousness is honored as something beautiful and good. Adults with, let's call it an overdeveloped sense of righteousness are presented as a danger. Like those people are dangerous fanatics. Basically, there's no way to be a good adult because your willingness to pursue expedience, to compromise, is grotesque. But if you're too hidebound, if you're too unwilling to compromise, you're a zealot.
Teenagers then exist at the inflection point between the righteousness of childhood and the expediency of adulthood. In any conflict between children and adults, the adults are going to win. Because what they lack in righteousness, what they lack in rhetorical force, they make up for in regular old fashioned force. But by giving mobile suits to children, righteousness is empowered to assert itself for better or for worse. Righteousness is not always good, it's not always the way forward. And often a very righteous child is forced to make compromises with expedients over the course of the show as they grow up.
Frankly, the category of teen arguably doesn't exist. In First Gundam, you're a child or you're an adult. This is largely situational or based on your behavior. The end, like there's no intermediary stage. You just, you are one or the other. And in a lot of cultures, you know, before World War II, you get a lot of that as well, that like there is some sort of point or ceremony or something that happens in your life and it's all right now. You take an adult position in society and before that you are a child, a child who is trying to learn the things that they need to know to be an adult. And so is like progressing towards it in that way. But teenage dom really becomes like an intermediate stage of life in the post war era.
A stage of life that is in.
Itself a compromise and which by the time we get into the early 90s and the bursting of the bubble, we are starting to see even the idea of teenage Dom be strained conceptually because you have more and more people who at almost any other time in Japan's history would have solidly been adults, you know, young 20 somethings who aren't married, who don't necessarily have a career type job, who aren't even interested in these things. And a lot of people of Tomino's generation seem to have struggled with how to deal with that. Like, are those people in an extended childhood or are they adults? But we have to rethink what it means to be an adult.
At the same time, though, there are countervailing social currents. There are all of these moral panics. And Jo Kosai, the compensated dating moral panic is happening right around this time.
Concerns about the content of popular media.
Children who are acting like adults and adults who are acting like children.
What does anything mean anymore? It's all topsy turvy. Well, and there was that great interview that Tomino did with the hospice doctor talking about death and about exposure to death and how we think about and deal with death in our lives. And a feeling that the younger generation was very uncomfortable with death or didn't really understand it, didn't really feel the reality of it, but at the same time that they had been sheltered from that reality by their parents generation. And so how were they supposed to think of it? How were they supposed to understand it if they'd never seen it? So it's not just everything's topsy turvy. It's not just the kids are ruining everything. It's oh, maybe some of our parenting decisions caused some of these problems.
Which is a great segue back to the other underlying theme I mentioned before, which is punishment. I was thinking back over all of the Gundam we've watched and it is very difficult to think of any, any important character whose death is not a result of their own actions in some sense, whether that's a conscious suicide mission or recklessly throwing themselves into danger. People are almost never simply randomly killed through no fault of their own. And I might discount that as just like that natural coincidence or standard storytelling. Except that if you watch Shar's counterattack, Shar keeps talking about punishment, the necessity of punishing the people of Earth for their actions. And I think this is something that lives very, very deep in Tomino's soul, this interest in transgression and punishment.
Which is not to say that he sees the two as perfectly causative or that he thinks that this makes sense.
And I don't know that he imposes a moral judgment on this. Camille, for instance, is punished at the end of Zeta for his many actions. But his actions were necessary. They were good at Times they were righteous, but he is still punished for them. I think that's one of the big lessons. Whatever you do, your actions will come back to you.
Well, and Camille's parents both worked in the military industrial system. They both worked on weapons of war in one way or another. But that's not why they're killed. They're killed because they're Camille's parents.
His mother is. His father is killed because he tries to double cross the Ayug by stealing one of their experimental mobile suits and taking it back to the Titans, for which he is punished.
When Shar talks about punishing the people of Earth, how many of the people of Earth actually had any decision making power for what he's talking about? Honestly, I think Shar's goal in Shar's counter attack is to punish himself or.
To find some way to convince Amuro to do the punishing.
Amuro, you need to come punish me. God, why does this all sound so dirty?
Amuro. I'm doing something extremely wicked.
Uwu.
I need someone to punish me. Amou.
I mean, I can't believe we didn't bring it up yet, but weird psychosexual stuff is absolutely a trademark of Tomino Gundam.
He also really likes it when people get electrocuted. Shows up way more often than it ought to.
And thinking about how do people poop in a spacesuit?
Yes, this is. No, this is another thing. This is another one of his really big ideas. This is like the mundane elements of life. Not just, you know, toilet stuff, scatological, but also like doing laundry, bathing. And the thing about Tomino is that the bathing is like. Generally speaking, the bathing is not prurient.
Well, no, because it's about like an important part of daily life, especially in the modern era. Like the daily bath or daily shower, which not everybody would have had access to before, but with modern construction, more and more people had that possibility and enjoyed that sort of habitual activity. But yeah, thinking about what it would actually be like to live day to day on a ship, on a colony.
Obviously we're not talking about the Shar shower scene with Garma. That one is totally prurient.
But as we addressed in the first season, Frabo and the Orphans isn't it's motherly, it's this is how a mom takes care of her kids or a big sister takes care of her little siblings.
When Hamon bathes right before launching her suicide attack against the white base, that's spiritual. She's performing like a cleansing ritual.
Purification.
There's a Bit in the early part of Zeta where. Where Lila Milleryra showers aboard a Titan's ship. And yeah, it's like beautiful blonde woman naked. Obviously there's some erotic appeal to that, but I think a lot of that scene is actually about showing off the weird, like, oxygen mask she wears while she's showering to show how a shower in zero gravity would actually work, because.
Otherwise you would inhale globules of water.
So, yeah, Tomino is very concerned with our bodies, their functions and how they would work in space. Another major characteristic of his work is density. There are so many characters always, and they're frequently presented in these big group tableaus, densely layered shots with multiple planes of action. Often where what's happening closest to the camera or what's most visually interesting is not the important part of the scene. You'll get a scene of the bridge where the captain is talking to somebody from the captain's chair, but in the foreground we see the pilots goofing off, or in the background, the orphans are running around.
Isn't that just an extension of the focus on the physical realities of lived life, though? Trying to convey the importance of groups. Like, even when you have these very important people, these highly placed individuals making decisions that affect thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives, these people are still part of groups. These people still have to function in groups. There's always a lot going on. There's always a lot of people around. Like that's. That's more real than three characters who are always just the three of them or alone doing important things and theirs are the only important things happening.
Oh, yes, definitely. But it's a lot easier to draw three characters than seven.
Sure.
And I do think it is part of Tomino's unique influence on the franchise. For better or worse.
I thought you were going to say. Another hallmark of Tomino Gundam was tall redheads. The man loves tall redheads, especially when they're stern, bit tomboyish. We got that older sister energy.
A tall redhead who's a little bit mean to you is totally adorable. I guess in the final estimation, the only way for us to really be sure what Tomino contributed to this franchise that someone else would not have is to watch some Gundam that he didn't know make and see how it changes. Which I guess is what we're going to do next. Huh? Did we just finish season 10?
I think we just finished season 10.
Wow.
Whoa.
Now, there will be a few supplemental episodes in the break as we work on little research projects, cleaning up things that we didn't get time to finish during season 10 proper. So we won't be going away completely.
But for the next couple of months we are recovering and doing the groundwork for season 11 and G Gundam.
We are gonna watch so many kung fu movies.
I can't wait.
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. 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 host@gundampodcast.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 and giving children mobile suits.
Or rather children stealing mobile suits.
The definition of what makes a person.
A new type is famously malleable.
I thought we solved this. I thought we figured it all out a few episodes ago, but you are correct. Please continue.