You're listening to season 10 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is episode 10.33, Stella Morris, and we are your hosts. I'm Tom, and like the good people of Underhook, I feel ready to return to the sea. Let the waves embrace me.
Sea cucumbers don't have anxiety.
How would you know?
Because I listen to them, Nina. Because I listen.
And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam.
And I got nothing this week, folks. I don't have much to say that other people aren't expressing more eloquently elsewhere, but if you feel sad, angry, frightened, worried, etc. This week, we're with ya. And we are trying to process those feelings so we can get on with the business of living.
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You keep us Genki this week Victory.
Episode 33 Umini Sumu Hito Bito or the People who Dwell in the Sea the episode was written by Tsunoda Hideki and storyboarded by Nishimori Akira. The episode director was Takei Yoshiyuki. Stepping up to Episode director for the first time after nine episodes as assistant Episode Director, Itakura Kazuhiro was in charge of the animation. Director Takei has a short but very impressive list of credits, starting with production assistant roles on City Hunter and Stardust Memory, then serving as episode unit or assistant director on g Gundam Escaflowne, Wolf's Reign, Eureka 7, Cowboy Bebop, and Mob Psycho 100. He was also director of photography on Fullmetal Alchemist, Brotherhood, Darker Than Black and Space Dandy, and directed either the opening or ending animations for Concrete Revoluccio, G Gundam, Escaflowne, and Witch Hunter Robin. And now the recap.
The Linhorst Junior and White Ark have chased the Motorrad fleet to the edge of Earth's atmosphere. As both forces prepare for reentry, Katagina suggests a last minute attack, risky but worth the chance that they can damage the League military ships enough to prevent pursuit or even cause the ships to break up completely. Despite the best efforts of both sides, neither ship takes lethal damage as each team of mobile suits looks for its opening. USO clashes with Katagina and continues to struggle with feelings of confusion and betrayal. How could she fight for Zanskar and defend the guillotine? Locked in hand to hand struggle, they are the last pilots to return to their ships. USO is forced to cling to the outside of the lean horse, sheltering behind its shields. Katagina seems to have left it too late. Falling to earth. Her mobile suit flares red, orange, and then winks out on the surface. They fly over an ocean blanketed by thick fog. A dense layer of ship debris floats on the surface, but they can't be sure where it came from. Did the Adrastiya break up on reentry? Or could this be camouflage? Some locals find Katagina's mobile suit floating.
Nearby, the pilot herself unconscious, Needing to.
Regroup and resupply before continuing their pursuit of the motorrad fleet, Captain Gomez directs their ship to the nearby city of Underhook, a modern settlement built almost entirely underwater. While the others meet with a local contact, Shakti takes Carman to look out one of the city's massive windows. It is like being at an aquarium, and he coos delightedly at the fish. Then a passing vehicle catches her eye. Is that Katagina on the flatbed? Worried about what might happen to Shakti if she's left alone, USO runs up to her, but as soon as she mentions seeing Katagina, he sprints off after the truck. Shakti follows him to a pair of heavy, locked wooden doors. They are unmarked and do not budge in the face of Uso's pounding and yelling. The same local official who greeted them when they first arrived shows up and tries to drag USO away when the doors swing open and they tumble inside. They've stumbled on some kind of church or temple devoted to Mariaism. Adherents in red coveralls and maroon hoods kneel around a dais where a massive projection of Maria pure Armonia gives some kind of speech or sermon. The Mauryans recognized Katagina as a Zanskar pilot and sheltered her to further the spread of Mariaism through the Earth sphere. The local official was in cahoots with them, and when Katagina reveals Shakti's identity, the princess is captured and taken away by the whole cult. USO reunites with Warren and Odello, but before they can do much searching, they are recalled to their mobile suits. A dogorla piloted by Lupe Chino has.
Attacked the lean horse, and the Adrastilla.
Has emerged from its hiding place on the ocean floor. The doughorla swim circles around the boys mobile suits, demonstrating its superior maneuverability underwater. Although the lean horse leaves port in an effort to minimize collateral damage, missiles from both sides strike Underhook, causing catastrophic flooding. The Marians take Shakti and Katagina to a private vessel escaping to the open ocean. USO spots them, but cannot rescue Shakti while fighting off the Dogorla. By the time he has destroyed the Serpentine mobile armor, Lupe Shino has ejected to fight another day, and the Marians, Shakti and Katagina have been retrieved by the Adrastiya. The chase continues.
I don't really have a. Well, I have a place I could potentially start, but it's kind of, I think, one of the deep conversations of the episode. And so I don't know if you want to kick off with it, Nina.
It's an undersea city. All the conversations are deep.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
But go ahead, what is it? Let's dive in.
Why is USO so desperate to find and talk to Katagina after everything that has happened? What is the point?
Hmm.
And I have a number of theories about this, but over and over this episode, I just found myself thinking, why uso? Why? Because obviously him chasing after her in the first place when they find her in Underhook was a bad idea. I blamed him for impulsively haring off. You kind of blamed Shakti for even telling him that she saw Katagina.
I mean, this is one of those situations where, like, yes, USO is at fault. USO shouldn't have done that. But anybody who knows USO should have known that he was going to do that. Shakti should have known that he would do that. So I do believe there is blame to go around. As much as USO might be the primary protagonist in this little tragic farce, farcical tragedy, it's one or the other.
And there were so many moments when they could, of course, correct it and didn't. When they first run up against an unmarked locked door. That would have been a great time to go back for help.
Sure. Although the upshot of all of this is that by anticipating this plot, by haring off on his own and causing all of this chaos, USO might have saved the lean horse Junior from being sabotaged from the inside. So all's well that ends catastrophically, I guess.
It's also gotten Shakti captured again. Although it seems pretty clear that for all they're putting all this importance on Shakti, she's not really an asset to them at this point.
Hmm. This is the third time she's been captured, right?
Yes.
Maybe the third time's the charm. Maybe they'll actually get some good out of her this time.
Returning to the why, I suspect USO hasn't really thought about it that much.
Mm. It's one of the few times he acts truly impulsively.
It's a week to be talking about this, but when someone who you really cared about winds up on the opposite side of something really important from you, I think there is often a desire to try to convince them and win them over. A desire to bring them back onto the same side with you, perhaps a desire simply to understand that overwhelming feeling of like, I can't understand why this person who I thought I liked and understood would say and do and agree with these things. And to some degree that that introduces a sense of personal discomfort. Like, if Katagina really is this person, why was I obsessed with her? Why did I love her so long? Why did I think she was so great? How could someone who I thought was so great do these things?
That discomfort also works in the other direction, which is to say, you look at this person who you know and who you like or liked or thought you knew, and you think, well, how certain am I that I'm on the right side? And convincing that person to come back to your side is a way of reinforcing your own commitment, your own certainty that you have chosen correctly. This is like a classic Gundam archetype. For the protagonist, Amuro had his relationship with Lala. Camille was immediately in love with and willing to sacrifice himself in order to save every young Titans and new type girl he met. In Uso's case, because he's so young, and because the Zanskar pilots he's encountered other than Katagina have all been grown adults, there has been no one on the other side for him to really relate to. And so his. His fixation on Katagina is about trying to connect with somebody on the other side, trying to understand where they're coming from.
The major difference for me comparing this relationship to relationships from previous Gundam shows is that in previous Gundam shows, the villain girl was often not a true believer. She's almost made out to be a victim of the baddies just as much as any civilian killed on the ground. Katagina is not that.
No, no she isn't. I think that makes it a really interesting dilemma for uso. She's like Kwess in that way. Kwes also was seduced by the ideology.
But in a sense, that still makes.
Them victims of this Seductive toxic ideology. Taking these people who don't really believe in anything, offering them something to believe in, and then using that to turn them into weapons. Their victimhood does not absolve them. No, of course not. Their victimhood does not absolve them of.
The many crimes they've committed.
And that's kind of one of the big tensions in how we talk about war, how we talk about soldiers. You take a bunch of 18 year olds and you give them lethal weapons and orders and send them out to go and do atrocities. And they are victims and perpetrators both. In the historiography of the Japanese imperial period, in the memory of the war, there is that same tension between the Japanese people as victims of imperial ideology, but also perpetrators of imperial atrocities. There's no easy or simple resolution to it.
There's a similar kind of moral injury that takes place with a lot of people who are involved in cults for any period of time. I saw this pointed out in a documentary I was watching recently where they're talking to a couple of former members of a high control cult like group. The way these organizations are structured basically demands that all of the members participate in whatever the abusive dynamic is. It makes them all part of it and complicit in it, which makes leaving that much harder. You not only have to admit to yourself that the group was unhealthy and bad, but that you did bad things to help them, that you caused harm as a member of the group. Dealing with that moral injury, dealing with how to come to terms with yourself for the bad things that you've done, is really hard.
Everyone shoots the chippy that way. We're all in it together.
Ooh, it's an Archer reference. FYI, he's not actually talking about group murder.
I am not surprised you brought up cults in this context, since there is one in this episode, the cult of Mariaism. Deep within Underhook, we learn for the first time that there is an undercurrent, if you will, of Mariaism lurking just beneath the surface, even on earth.
Katagina initially seems a bit suspicious of them.
Well, because Katagina is a true believer. But being presented with all of these zealots kind of throws her for a loop. Because she's a true believer in the political sense. She believes in the power of the Zanskar Empire. Maybe. Maybe she believes in the ideology of matriarchy, this maternal society that Maria wants to create. But I don't think she sees Maria as a goddess or as the avatar of a goddess the way these people.
Do the Design of the temple is great. It's got this skylight window. It's got a huge window in the ceiling showing the ocean. The ceiling of the room looks like a giant flower. There's a massive statue of what I immediately thought was Kubile in the. Not quite the middle of the room. The middle of the room is dominated by a circular raised platform. And I don't know if you caught this, but the pattern around the wall looks like coffins.
Hmm.
Which made me think of a number of cults that have been into, like, trying to freeze people or preserve people and their consciousnesses for the future or. And it's not a shape that you see in a lot of other decorative patterns. Feels like an odd choice to just have a bunch of coffin shapes all around the edges of the room.
Yeah, little. Little weird.
Little uncomfy there. I didn't catch that. So I don't have a particularly well.
Developed theory for it.
But this does seem a little bit like a doomsday cult. At the end when they're escaping on their submarine and the other people of Underhook are trying to get out with them and they're like, no. Salvation is only for the believers in Mariaism. That feels like a cult that is expecting the end of the world any moment now and preparing for it, but.
That they, the chosen few, will be preserved and be allowed to live.
Saved, taken away.
I wonder if Maria knows about them.
I wondered that too. They have this broadcast of her, this hologram that they display on the altar during their, like, praying hour.
Well, so quote, unquote. I wonder if the praying hour is even a legit thing that they do, because they're clearly trying to hide Katagina and be like, how dare you intrude into our church?
But they do have a sermon. They do have this sermon from Maria.
That appears on the altar.
And that seems like the most reasonable explanation for what that altar is for.
Right.
I mean, maybe they do human sacrifices on it. I don't know. But they do have this projection. And so the question is, did Maria send them, or did Maria's agents send them this hologram? Or is this something that they're just, like, picking up on the broadcast? Is she doing, like, a 700 club kind of thing? Is there a channel you can tune to in the universal century to just get 24.7Maria est sermons?
We've seen Maria give public speeches, but they always felt more political than religious.
Except for the one she does at the healing ceremony. That did feel very religious.
Well, I suppose it's a theocracy. Right. They're talking about, like a theocratic monarchy kind of situation. So trying to separate her political and religious appearances is probably pointless. But to use the word sermon makes it sound like she is making explicitly religious speeches on some kind of regular cadence and then distributing them to people. But it's similarly easy to imagine that this little cult on earth exists almost entirely independent of the intended actions of Maria, that they get their hands on some of her speeches or whatever that she's giving back in Zanskar, and they make those sermons, they pray around that, even though that was never its original purpose or intention.
Kind of a cargo cult kind of thing.
Yeah, yeah.
Interestingly and definitely intentionally looking at it. When they have the Maria sermon, her pose matches that of the statue in the back.
It is shot in such a way.
That the hologram is overlaid on the statue.
Yeah. It's almost superimposed over it.
You identified the statue as Kubile, which is not, strictly speaking, true.
Nuts.
It is a common mistake. If you look up this statue, you will often see it identified as Kubile. It's actually Artemis of Ephesus, which is importantly, not really the same Artemis you're thinking of. The Greeks conflated the two. But Artemis of Ephesus is an Anatolian mother goddess. Very like and possibly the same as, or at least in the tradition of Cupolae.
But for the Greeks to conflate a mother goddess and a virgin warrior goddess and then make them. One thing feels significant when we're talking about Maria. Pure Armonia.
And the Romans also associated her with Selene, who was the goddess of the moon. Tomino loves a moon goddess. The temple of Artemis at Ephesus was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. And the statue that is in it that this is an identical copy of is very famous. Many, many copies of it were made distributed around the Mediterranean throughout the Roman world. There's a bunch of them that still exist. There's some modern or more modern reproductions. There's one in a fountain in Rome, I think. And if you look at it, she has, like, on her lower body, she has all of these friezes of, like, animals and topless women. But then her upper body is covered in these, like, protrusions.
Are they not breasts?
For most of history, including going back into antiquity, they were usually identified as breasts. There are lots of good reasons to think that's not the case. They may have been originally the very. The original statue, which lore says descended from the heavens, it was like A piece of wood that fell out of the heavens.
Wow.
Okay. According to the original story, Right. Did not have those. Or so the theory goes. And what actually happened was that people would hang ornaments off of the statue.
Ah. So it's almost like she has this massive layered collar of like decorative offerings that people have draped over her, which.
Have been theorized to be the testicles of bulls. But recent archaeological discoveries suggest it may have been like amber beads left there. Yes, as votive offerings and then copies of the statue. Rather than making the base statue and covering it with the offerings, they form it with the offerings already attached. Though it's a fair point that like I said, throughout most of history, most people have thought they were breasts. And when this statue was drawn for Victory Gundam, that may have been the assumption.
Though interesting that you brought up the bit about bull's testicles, because as some of you may recall from when we first did research on Kubile, many adherents to her cult, if they were men, would castrate themselves.
Guess what is also true of Artemis of Ephesus? The priests were required to self castrate. There's a very plausible, radically anti feminist reading of this. And this sort of goes back to some things we touched on when we were talking with Colin. You can read this, I think, as suggesting that when women take on the attributes of masculine power, when they become political leaders, that inherently corrupts their womanhood, that corrupts what is good about being a woman. And that when men support maternal power, when men support a matriarchy, they are essentially castrating themselves to be able to do that.
It's also just this gender essentialist notion that women are inherently loving and non violent and motherly, which is hilarious coming from Katagina, who like, does not like babies and has no desire to mother anybody, but that somehow a society led by women won't have war. What? Excuse me?
Well, the idea then would be that as the priests of Kubile or Artemis of Ephesus emasculate themselves, Katagina has been forced to masculinize herself in order to become a soldier. Katagina has given up on womanhood.
I would argue she did that long before she became a soldier.
But you mean at least within the terms of womanhood as it's defined by the show.
Yeah. There is also this notion that a woman cannot exercise power in and of herself if she is involved with a man. That as soon as a woman is involved with a man, she takes on a position of subservience that makes like the exercise of her power impossible.
And this is why they keep emphasizing that Shakti is Maria's daughter without the influence of a man.
Exactly. Again, pure nonsense from Katagina. I really wondered if something got lost in the subtitling of that line, and it is a bit confusing, but having listened to it over and over in the Japanese, she really is just saying that, like, Maria, alone, by herself, through her feminine power, raised this child. And it's like, well, she didn't raise Shakti at all. A married couple on earth did for her.
I don't know if there's ever been any mention of Shakti's father or adopted father.
That's true. Maybe she was still raised by a single mom, I don't know.
But not Maria.
But not by Maria. Maria did not raise her.
Find the woman who actually raised Shakti. She is the woman qualified to be queen. And Maria, in her sermon, I'm going to keep calling it a sermon, notwithstanding your very reasonable objections there too. But in her sermon, Maria does basically say the old saw that. I'm. I'm sure you've heard, if the world were run by women, there would be no war. All of this links back to something Katagina says to USO during their first clash, before they've descended to the planet. And that's, you've become too strong to be cute. Because when USO was a child, he had a place in this matriarchy that they're talking about. He could be a kid, he could be a child. And this image of maternal power allows.
For children, even misbehaving children, right?
Even naughty, incorrigible children. But he's gotten so strong that he's practically a man now. There's no role for men in this world that Katagina is imagining.
This was another moment that I was surprised at Uso's shock, because she has signaled very strongly, almost from the moment he started fighting, that she, like, despised him for being a soldier. She despised his fighting on the side of the Ligue Militaire, or fighting, period.
But you can understand his confusion that she would still feel that way now that she is fighting. You could imagine USO being like, well, now we've got something in common. We can both talk about how we find it necessary to fight, even though we hate it. But the more like him she becomes, the less sympathy she has for him.
There's this recurring refrain from her actually, almost every time she fights him now, it's like, oh my gosh, he's even stronger than before. Oh my gosh, he's even stronger than before. Frankly, I think she liked Looking down on uso, oh, this poor boy who's obsessed with me. And the fact that she is continually unable to best him, even though she's older and thinks she's in the right, really grates on her.
And even though she has attire, she has the powerful Wheel of Zanskar, but it's not enough.
But this particular moment, he has just asked her how she can support a side that uses the guillotine, and she sidesteps that completely because she's not interested in trying to convince him, and she's certainly not interested in talking about their political beliefs. I think she just wants to hurt his feelings. And so she's like, you're not cute anymore.
Devastating.
But earlier, a couple of times actually, you've brought up that they are peers to each other in a way, and the visuals of the episode highlight that as well. There's a moment between the two of them in the fight before they re enter the atmosphere, when Katagina is saying, I want to see Zanskar complete their objective and USO is responding. Like, how can you support a political movement that uses the guillotine? Or whatever his exact wording is? But they both get the same sort of new Type Y effect over them while they're having this exchange. And it's different than the usual new Type Y effects.
Doesn't it feel kind of liquid?
I thought it felt quite psychedelic. Liquid is a good way of putting it. There's a bit of a lava lamp vibe to it. The colors and textures of the background are different. The effect moving over the whole image is different. But to use this same background and effect for both of them in the midst of this moment seems to highlight the similarity between them, that even though they are both fighting for different things, they both feel very passionately, very intensely about what they're doing.
I mean, it's been a while since I've had occasion to say this on the podcast, but I think what we might be looking at here is a parallel character development. You'll note in the beginning that USO is effectively the team leader for this little squadron of USO Odello and Tomasz Katagina, now promoted to team leader for Gus Barrel and Lupe Chino.
The episode kicks off with Katagina suggesting that, ah, but if we can attack the enemy just before reentry, maybe we can cause enough damage that their ship will break up. And that's USO's reason for not returning to the ship even though they have begun reentry. He's thinking, ah, but if I can just Damage their ship a little bit, maybe it will break up on reentry. They think about this situation at least in the same terms.
From that, we might extrapolate that while the show is overtly critical of the zanskarist Maria ist matriarchy, the status quo that USO is fighting to protect is not actually good either. That the answer is neither matriarchy nor patriarchy, neither paternal nor maternal strength, but something else. I talked about how that line about USO not being cute anymore gets to the necessary infantilization of men under a matriarchy. But any hierarchy of power based on a family unit is going to require the infantilization of its subjects. If a king is the father of his people, that means that everybody else is a child politically, if in no other sense. And then there's an echo of this during the battle around Underhook. We have both sides sort of firing at each other. Neither side actually wants to hit the city, and yet both sides end up destroying it.
You mentioned briefly earlier Shakti's naivete around USO's reaction to like, oh, I think I saw Katagina.
Yet another episode in which Shakti makes a big mistake and causes problems for everybody.
But I would say Shakti Snaifte is kind of her whole character thing this episode. And maybe after this episode, maybe the end of this episode indicates that, that she feels she's learned something and is coming to terms with that. But in addition to that moment with USO when the Marians are trying to leave Underhook and they have their own submarine ship, escape pod, whatever, and there are a lot of other people, refugees from the city who are scared, who are trying to get to safety, and she asks them to take in some more people and they refuse. On some level, maybe before she was taking them at their word, that they really did want to create like a world and a society based on love and non violence, if that were really what this was about, wouldn't they want to rescue people?
Sure.
And then at the end when she's facing Chronicle, she says, don't use these people and please and stop fighting, please, I beg you. And he sort of like pats her on the head and is like, oh.
I'll consider it like, sweetie, nobody wants to fight.
Nobody really enjoys waging war, but we can't stop fighting until Earth has been cleansed, which is there any more ominous word I want you to understand? And there's a whole bunch of stuff happening in the background of this scene that I think is very interesting.
But the reactions of people like Pippiniten and Katagina.
Yeah, But Shakti just kind of looks down and to the side and says, if that's how it is, the fighting will continue. And she says this in a very neutral way. She doesn't argue, she doesn't rage, she doesn't fight. It feels sort of like acceptance to me. But whether it's acceptance that she is not going to be able to exercise any power and control over these people despite them nominally calling her their princess, or if it's acceptance that war and fighting are somehow inevitable and that she can't stop them, I don't know. Pippi Kneaden looks, I would say angry during this scene, maybe skeptical, but I thought it looked more pointed than that.
I thought it was disdain. I thought it was pure disdain for this little farce that Chronicle is putting on.
Yeah, the platitudes that Chronicle would even take the time to try to explain himself to a child. Lupe seems a bit confused by the whole thing. So clearly she doesn't know about their relationship or know who Shakti is. Nobody's told her yet.
Shout out to Lupe for once again ejecting from a destroyed mobile weapon, lives.
To fight another day. I was curious at the beginning of the episode. Lupe comments to Gasparl. Today we follow team leader Katagina. Is this a setup? Is this a like. Alright, let's see how well the girl does. And if she completely fails, it's on her because she was in charge.
Maybe.
I kept thinking with this episode that this show is so rushed. They're cramming so many ideas into one episode.
This easily could have been two entirely separate episodes.
One about the descent to Earth, one about Underhook.
Underhook itself could have been multiple episodes.
I think the city is very interesting. There are occasional hints that there's more to it. There's that line about how Underhook was built to save Earth from destruction that is never examined.
They're cramming so much in and a.
Lot of stuff is getting shaved off. And it does feel like there is the implication of a storyline about Katagina as team leader and Lupe Shenod trying to undermine her in the same way that maybe there's an implication of Pippiniden suborning Chronicles Command from below. Like if they had just focused on the contested descent through the atmosphere and around that had done a bunch of little character pieces on both ships, maybe.
Some of that stuff would have come up. Maybe some of that stuff would have.
Been elaborated on a little bit. But no, Instead they crammed two battles.
Into one episode and a reentry and a whole new city.
Right. A whole new city that is introduced very briefly, toured and then destroyed in the course of like 15 minutes.
And the cult.
Yeah. And it's so disappointing. Like Underhook could have been really interesting. First Gundam spent like three episodes in Belfast. Well.
Or what about Moon? Moon or.
Yeah, yeah. Too many. Just too many ideas being crammed into these episodes. No space, no breathing, no development. Just rush on to the next thing.
I can't remember if we've ever talked about this before, but the obligatory reentry episode, the fact that this keeps coming up in Gundam, obviously it adds a nice element of drama, a sort of time limiting effect of this sort of danger that's right next to the battle and influences the battle. But isn't the battle itself or your enemy. But I started to wonder if it could also be this sense of nature of the universe and the forces of it superseding our like petty interpersonal conflicts of this power even greater than all of our technology, even greater than our machines of war that we are still vulnerable to, that doesn't care what side we're on or who we're fighting. And I can't speak to it clearly because in 93 I was quite young. But this episode spends a lot of time on the ocean as an environment. We see the dolphins, we see reefs and fish and sharks. The underwater pathways to and from Underhook are like the sort of plexiglass tunnels that they put in aquariums, so you can move through some of the bigger tanks in the aquarium when there's ship wreckage on the water. When the Lean Horse junior first lands, Marbit wonders if it's camouflage. I wondered about pollution. Is it just junk in the ocean, which there's a lot of.
Sure.
Though other portrayals of the ocean have.
Been, or at least other portrayals of the environment in this episode have been very positive. The land is all green and verdant. The ocean around Underhook is full of sea life.
I did remember that some year in the 90s and I looked it up. It was 1998, was declared by the United nations the Year of the Ocean. And I think this is less true now, though still true to some extent. Throughout my childhood, it felt like different environmental concerns had periods where they were getting the most attention, where they were getting talked about a lot. So there was a period about the ozone, There was a period about the oceans and the health of the oceans. So this combined with that earlier Artificial reef thing in the Barcelona episode seems to point to an increasing awareness of the ocean as its own environment and a desire to protect and preserve it. Though they don't elaborate on it. That line about I thought Underhook was built to save the Earth was. Maybe it feels like a very science fictiony idea, but I vaguely recall some people talking about in the same way that we might push people to live in space so that the Earth's environment can be preserved or recovered. If people were living underwater, that means you're not clearing some section of natural environment to build a city. You're building in this, you know, underwater area. You're still destroying part of a natural environment, though, which is where they lose me. But.
Well, you're gonna destroy part of a natural environment wherever you build. You go find a meadow somewhere and build there. You're destroying something.
Absolutely. I don't dispute that, but I don't.
Have a good source for this. This is something I found on Japanese Wikipedia and a couple of other blogs when I was looking for more information about Underhook, because again, I saw this episode and I was like, wow, that's a really interesting idea. Gosh, I sure wish they had given us literally any information about it. Supposedly Underhook was built for experiments on what it would be like to live in space.
That makes a lot of sense. I think for a long time there has been this comparison between sort of deep ocean environments and outer space as places that we don't totally understand, that we haven't explored very much, that are dark and cold and isolated and where.
The environment itself is hostile to human life, where you have to live in a hermetically sealed bubble.
Although I suppose it's not much different from the space colonies in this respect. But for an underwater city, there didn't seem to be a lot of, like, safety mechanisms in place.
Oh, did the Earth Federation not prepare adequately for possible calamity? Did they demonstrate a lack of concern.
For the lives of the space colonists? That's so weird. They never do that.
Further trivia while we're on the subject. Cult man and Cult lady do have names, though they're not said in the episode. They are Bistan and Elena.
There was also some irony in Gomez shouting about, how dare they pollute the ocean like this when it takes two to battle?
I mean, it's just like Chronicle says, we can't stop fighting until they give up. As long as they're fighting, we have to keep shooting the missiles, regardless of the consequences. There's some cool bits in the various battles. One I liked in particular is that during the Descent operation, USO gets trapped in one of these tires. It's like a Hula Hoop of Doom kind of situation. And he's like, being spun around in it, but then manages to reverse the spin or something with his Gundam and break the tire apart. Which is then repeated when he's facing the Dogorla. Because the Dougorla's tail segment can detach and become perhaps the mightiest tire yet.
The Ouroboros of Doom.
But again, USO is able to overpower it to defeat the spin and destroy it.
There is a big section of that fight where Katagina is using the other half of her rad as like an attack Yo Yo. Which reminded me, at least in the US there was a definite yo yo fad at one point in the 90s. Like, we definitely had an assembly where somebody came and did cool yo yo tricks.
My elementary school definitely had that too. Yeah. Maybe more than one. We might have done that more than one year.
Yeah.
And then for like a week afterwards, everybody in class has yo yos and they're like all trying to learn the tricks and stuff. Yeah. Though I thought maybe that was a Sukeban Deka reference in the Japanese context. I don't know if yo yos were a fad over there in the 90s as well.
To clarify, Sukeban Deka is a very old manga about a girl delinquent. That's what a Sukeban is. And one characteristic of the character is that she also plays around with the yo yo a lot.
Well, she wields it as a weapon, just like they do in this episode. People wouldn't need us to clarify that if they listened to our seasons about SD Gundam, though I am reliably informed that many people skip those.
Also, I don't even remember what I talked about season to season. I almost don't remember episode to episode, so I don't expect them to. I love the Dagorla as a sea serpent.
Yes.
And they introduce some really neat linework effects meant to illustrate how the ocean currents get disturbed by the fighting underwater.
Well, and all of these beam weapons keep causing, like, vortices to form. So that's part of it. It interferes with movement. It interferes with visibility. It's a really cool way to portray combat underwater that they haven't done so much.
There was also a still that they pan over. It's a gorgeous painting. When towards the end of their fight, the Dougorla comes shooting out of the ocean. And the Victory is already in the air overhead, and the sky is all red and black like explosions. The Victory has its energy wings out as the D'Gorlas shooting up towards it. And I got a really strong St. George slaying the dragon vibe. The Victory looking sort of angelic and posed with its saber, ready to take out this evil serpent dragon thing coming out of the sea. It's a cool shot.
We've talked a bit about the various backgrounds that we've seen in this episode, so this is probably a good moment to acknowledge that Ikeda Shigemi, the art director for Victory and a bunch of other Gundam shows, who is certainly one of the biggest contributors to the visual look of Gundam and the Gundam world, in my mind, probably up there with Tomino, Yasuhiko and Okawara as one of the four or five people most responsible for Gundam as we have it today, passed away this past week. The very sad loss of a legend far too, far too early. He was quite young when he passed away. That's a bit of a sad note to end on, but it wouldn't feel right to end this episode without acknowledging Ikeda and his incredible contributions to the franchise. Thank you for everything, Ikeda. Whatever criticisms we might have of Victory as a whole, the background art has always been impeccable.
And now Tom's research piece on the Dagorla's balls.
Behold the mighty Dagorla and its numerous balls. You don't need me to tell you that the new Bespa mobile armor is based on the image of a dragon, and particularly that variety of dragon which we might call an Asian or Eastern dragon, in order to distinguish it from the beefsome fire spewers now prevalent in.
Euro American fast fantasy.
A closer inspection of the mobile armor reveals that the main body of the machine is built to resemble the head of a dragon, with windows for eyes, exhaust or missile ports for flaring nostrils, decorative fins to represent the eyebrows, and four fingered arms that when viewed this way, look like curling regal mustachios. The real arms of the Dragon d'Gorla are the numerous pairs of three clawed appendages further down the segmented body, with a pair of arms appearing every 30 segments or so. Each claw grasps an orb bright red when the Dagorla's body is green, and green when it's orange, and each orb conceals a powerful beam cannon. You have probably seen artwork depicting dragons with orbs. Whether they're holding them, as is the case for the Dagorla, balancing the orb on their head, or body trying to eat it, fighting over it, pursuing it, whatever. The old flag of China under the Qing Dynasty showed a sinuous, mustachioed dragon pursuing a red orb. The flag of Bhutan today shows a dragon who, much like the Dougorla, clutches an orb in each of its four hands. You may have seen dragon with orb designs in sculpture, ancient or modern. Or like me, your first encounter with it might have been in the form of a pewter and glass miniature at a booth at the local Renaissance festival that also sold tarot cards, mystic incense, and powerful healing crystals capable of cleansing.
Even the most rancid of auras. Of course, I guess it's also possible.
That you watched a show called Dragon Ball, which I have been reliably informed has something to do with dragons and their orbs. Anyway, the Dagorla has got some other.
Dragon type stuff going on, like those.
Cloud shaped dummy balloons it scatters, or the fan shaped structure at the terminus of its tail. Now that's all apparent right on the face of the beast.
But I thought, hey, I've always taken.
These dragon orbs for granted. Maybe I should look into them, find out what they're really all about. So I did that and I very quickly realized that there isn't an answer.
Sorry, I put the emphasis on the wrong word there.
I meant to say that there isn't an answer. The motif of dragon with orb is so old, so widespread, and has been used in so many different contexts that it's impossible to attribute any one definitive meaning to it. Kind of like the name Gundam for a mobile suit. Plus, then there are those beasties that leave you wondering, does that even count as a dragon? Is that thing meant to be an orb?
So I'm not going to worry too.
Much about trying to be authoritative. Let's just talk about orbs and the.
Dragons who love them.
In Japan, the earliest depictions of dragons go back to the Yayoi period around the first century A.D. inspired, we assume, by imported Chinese myths. But it wasn't until centuries later that they started getting into cool orbs. In a 1991 article titled the Dragon and the Pearl, Helmut Nicholl, curator emeritus at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, traced the history of the dragon with orb design back to the beginning of the Tang period In China around 600 A.D. the Tang were able to extend their power farther westward than any prior dynasty. Their conquests brought them nearly to the borders of Persia. And Nichols article speculates that the Tang artists first encountered the dragon with orb motif among the tribes inhabiting the grasslands of the Central Asian steppe. The Romans had encountered these same steppe nomads, who they called Sarmatians centuries earlier and had adopted from them a kind of army standard, which the Romans called a draco. It's a metal dragon's head with a fabric windsock for a body. Air flowing through the dragon's mouth makes the windsock body undulate as though it's alive, snapping back and forth in the wind. And according to the soldier and historian Ammianus Marcellinus, the draco was made to emit an angry hissing sound, like a monster roused in anger. Nicholl then points to a motif that began appearing on Roman shields after their encounters with the Sarmatians, a motif that seems to depict a dragon pursuing a precious object, the boss of the shield, a crescent moon, a diamond, or an orbit of gold or silver. The idea that the image of dragon and orb united in harmony comes from the horse riders of Central Asia may find some additional support in the flying horse with orb traditions in Tibet and Mongolia, where the wind horse is often shown bearing a precious jewel on its back. Or in the case of the Chinese dragon horse, which is more horse than.
Dragon, but is said to have a.
Magnificent pearl in its throat. The Tang were also big into horses. There's a distinctive style of jade horse carving that developed during the Tang period, and it's said that they believed horses were related to dragons. The Tang dynasty specialist Edward Schaeffer called the horse a patrician animal invested with sanctity by ancient tradition, endowed with prodigious qualities, and visibly stamped with the marks of his divine origin. And even before the Tang, the Han dynasty scholar Wang Fu wrote that the depiction of dragons came about through a combination of the body of a snake with the head of a horse. It's neat that there's this possible bridge linking the two main styles of dragon depiction. It's a nice reminder that even ancient cultures were not nearly so siloed as we tend to assume. Like many middle schoolers today, the emperors of China adopted the dragon as their own symbol, sitting on a dragon throne, wearing robes emblazoned with dragons, even calling themselves sons of the dragon, a tradition that began when a peasant turned emperor claimed to be the son of a human woman and a deadbeat dragon dad. It even became a crime to use the image of the dragon without imperial sanction. The Yuan emperors elaborated on the hierarchy of draconic depiction. Dragons with five claws were the most revered and were reserved for the exclusive use of the emperor, for the dragon was a bringer of rain to desperate crops, an emblem of divine favor, power and wisdom, the avatar of good government. Across the sea in Japan, dragons were more closely associated with snakes and with all aspects of the water, oceans, lakes and rivers, rainfall and thunder associations they share with their South Asian cousins, the Naga. While there are countless local deities who.
Take on the forms of dragons, Miyazaki Hayao made a whole movie about this.
The most famous nationally recognized dragons are the eight dragon kings in their undersea palaces. Although they are often sort of conflated into a single dragon king Ryujin, also called the Dragon God. In the Handbook of Japanese Mythology, Michael.
Ashkenazi wrote that the dragon kings, rulers of snakes and dragons alike, are not.
All powerful, but derive their magic from a ball or pearl which is capable of controlling desires. In this sense, the dragon with pearl motif is a subset of the larger tradition of depicting deities carrying a so called wish granting gem that is so prominent in Hindu, Buddhist and Shinto art. The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara carries a wish granting gem, as does the God Vishnu. Likewise Kishoten, the Shinto counterpart of the goddess Lakshmi, and Uka no Mitami, a kami of rice. But in folk dragon stories, the magical pearl is less a symbolic representation of the divine power to fulfill the desires of faithful worshippers, and more a literal magical artifact from which dragons derive their power. One such story, frequently repeated with different variations, begins with a terrible drought ravaging a remote town. A poor peasant who supported himself and his old mother by cutting wild meadow grass and selling it at market, was forced to travel farther and farther from home, looking for fresh green grass, until at last, it seemed there was none at all to find. As despair weighed down his spirit, he was surprised to spot a fat rabbit hopping up the side of a rocky hill. The peasant pursued the rabbit and after wriggling through a narrow passage in the rocks, discovered a lush patch of grass growing out of the rocky soil. Marveling at his good fortune, he cut the miraculous grass and brought it back to town, where he sold it for enough coin that he could buy a little rice for his old mother. The following day, he returned to the miraculous patch of grass, hoping to find some more nearby. And he was shocked to discover that all the grass cut the prior day had regrown overnight. Not one to look a gift dragon in its horse mouth, he cut the grass again and again made the long journey back to town, carrying the fresh provender, and again on the third day and the fourth, and so on. But eventually he came to resent the long and difficult trek to this miracle grass. If I plant some in the yard behind our house, he. He thought, I can harvest it with ease in the morning and enjoy my leisure the rest of the day. So he set to work, digging up a small part of the patch to transplant. But as he dug, his trowel struck something. A large pearl buried under the grass. Delighted, he brought the pearl with him back to his house. After he had planted the miraculous grass in the backyard, he brought the pearl to his mother. Think what we could buy, he said, if we were to sell this. But his mother told him, it's such a beautiful thing. Let's keep it just a little while. We'll feel richer for having it than we would if we sold it. They placed the pearl in the empty bag they used to store rice and went to sleep dreaming of easier and happier days to come. But in the morning, the grass cutter found that the grass he had planted in the yard was brown and withered as all the rest. So he made the long trek up into the hills and back to the original patch. But here, too, he found the miraculous grass dead. Lamenting the greed and the laziness that drove him to destroy the source of his good fortune, he returned home. His mother, however, greeted him in agitated excitement, for another miracle had occurred. The handful of loose grains in the bag where they had placed the pearl had multiplied. The sack was overflowing with precious rice. By now, it seems the grasscutter had learned a lesson about greed. And so, instead of hoarding or selling the rice, Mother and son shared their new bounty with their hungry neighbors. Every day, the sack would fill up again, and every day they would share it out. Before long, word spread, and the powers that be grew suspicious. A local lord, or perhaps a merchant, a bandit leader, or even the emperor of China himself, dispatched agents to investigate. It did not take them long to trace the source of endless rice to the poor grasscutter's hut. These investigators were thugs, plain and simple, and they had no compunctions about using torture to extract the secret from the grass cutter and his old mother. But as soon as the story of the pearl came out, the grasscutter broke free from his captors, snatched up the pearl, and swallowed it so that they would not be able to take it immediately. He began to burn with fever and terrible thirst. He ran to the village well, but found it dry. He ran to the riverbed, threw himself on his belly, and drank desperately from the stagnant, muddy pools, all that remained after the long drought. He burned and burned, twisted in agony, his thirst unquenchable. Then there was a clap of thunder, a flash of light, and when it faded, the grass cutter was gone. Above where he had been, a dragon soared among the clouds and rain began to fall. At last. In this story, the pearl is the dragon's soul, fully containing its divine power. But in others, the pearl is more incidental. It may be a magical bauble, an artifact with its own powers, distinct from those of the dragon who wields it in Japan. One of the best examples of this is the story of Hori no Mikoto, great grandson of the sun goddess Amaterasu and grandfather of Jimu, first Emperor of Japan. Hori had an older brother, Hoderi, who happened to be a master fisherman. One day, the two brothers traded fishhooks and Hori set out to prove his own skills. But the hook that had served his brother so well offered him nothing but trouble. He couldn't catch even a single fish, and even managed to lose the hook. Enraged, Hoderi demanded that Hori return his fishhook. Since the original hook was now deep beneath the waves, Hoori melted down his own precious sword and offered the 500 fishhooks made from it to his brother. But Hoderi was unmoved. He wanted his hook back. Not 500 other hooks, nor a thousand, nor any other number. So Hohori descended into the deeps in search of the lost hook. There he found the palace of the local Dragon King and decided to stay awhile. Naturally, he fell for, wooed and married the Dragon King's beautiful and suspiciously human looking daughter. After three years, Hori began to feel homesick for dry land. So he went to the Dragon King and begged permission to return to this, his father in law answered, listen, kid, I like you. You make my little girl happy. But your brother seems like a real piece of work. So here's the deal.
I'll give you back the hook you.
Lost and you should return it to him. But once you do, I'm gonna put a curse on it. I'm gonna curse the heck out of it. Whatever your brother does, you do the opposite. Everything he touches will go wrong. And you will prosper in everything you attempt to which we can assume. Horii responded, cool. And then the Dragon King said, it is cool, but your brother may not.
See it that way.
So I'm going to give you these two magical jewels. They have the power to control the waters. When your brother comes for you, and he will come for you, you can use the water raising orb to drown that salty dweeb until he begs for mercy, like, ah, stop drowning me. No, don't drown us. I'll do whatever you say.
Then, bam. You hit him with the water lowering orb.
To which Horii probably responded, super cool. And then Hori went home and everything played out exactly as the Dragon King had predicted. Another account out of China says that dragons suck on pearls as a magical substitute for wine, and suggests that a human struggling with alcoholism should seek out a dragon pearl to ease their cravings. Sometimes the pearl is a perfectly literal and entirely mundane gem, valuable for its beauty and rarity like any other pearl, but with no special significance. These may form in the belly or the mouth of the dragon, the same way a mundane pearl forms inside a mollusk. Or they may be collected by the dragon as delightful trinkets. In one myth, a Tang emperor dispatched three priceless treasures to Japan to honor a recently deceased nobleman, the father of one of his favorite consorts. Among these treasures was magnificent pearl known as Menko Fuhai no Tama. But before it could arrive in Japan, the covetous Dragon King, Ryujin again attacked the vessel and carried off the pearl. Lord Fujiwara no Fuhito, the intended recipient of the treasures, disguised himself as a commoner and journeyed down to the seaside near the site of the attack to search for the stolen jewel. Instead, he found a different kind of treasure, a pearl diver named Tamamo. He fell in love with the girl. They married and had a son. Eventually, after some years together, Fuhito revealed his true identity and confided the nature of the quest that had brought him to this obscure fishing village to his wife. Hearing all of this, Tamamo the diver resolved to recover her husband's jewel from the greedy dragon. Down, she dived deeper than she had ever dived before, carrying her own sturdy knife. Her husband waited on the shore, holding the end of her lifeline. Down in the cold and the dark, down as deep as the Dragon King's undersea palace, there she found him dozing, clutching the pearl. Tamamo snatched the pearl away from him and began to swim for the surface with all the speed she could muster. But the Dragon King roused and dispatched his hordes. The armies of the deep chased after her. Sea creatures of every kind swarmed around the diver as her breath failed and the surface world seemed farther away than it ever had before. She took her knife and she cut a deep gouge into her own breast, pushing the jewel into the wound to keep it away from the swarming sea beasts. Her husband was left to reel in his love's body. After laying her to rest, he returned to the capital with their son and resumed his life among the nobles. That son eventually became a powerful minister of state and thanks to his religious devotion, his deceased pearl diving mother was able to attain Buddhahood in the afterlife. So I guess all's well that ends with escaping the cycle of death and rebirth.
All's well that ends.
That's good.
There are no shortages of other interpretations.
Of the orb pearl.
The orb may represent thunder or the moon or the sun. There are myths about dragons trying to eat the sun or trying to eat.
The moon that have been interpreted as.
Representing eclipses or the clouds covering the moon. The jewels clutched by the dragon on Bhutan's flag are supposed to represent the wealth and perfection of the nation. Even scholars who have written entire books on East Asian dragon lore find it impossible to give a definitive answer to hey, what's the deal with those pearls? But maybe they have all been blinded by their preconceptions. Maybe the answer is staring us in the face. Maybe all along the dragon's orb has been a powerful beam cannon capable of destroying enemy mobile suits with a single blast.
I do need to complain, because while I was doing this research and this happened to me over and over again.
Every time I tried to search for any specific information about dragons or their.
Orbs or mythology in general, I got hit by a deluge of AI generated slop. Just article after article with AI generated header images and a million rehashes of.
The same 10point bulleted list of unsourced factoids. Every third glorious word is a resplendent adjective, and sentences routinely lose track of their own subject between clauses, as though the whole thing was being recounted to.
You secondhand by a particularly distractible six year old. The situation out there is dire.
We're pretty good researchers. That's why we are able to do this podcast on a weekly basis. But if the Internet research situation gets much worse, we're going to be back to like books and only books. And it's gonna slow things down. Probably. Yeah, I hope it doesn't come to that, but if we're having to spend two days of the week at the library digging through material.
Next time on episode 10.34 no good choices.
No choices at all.
We research and discuss Victory Gundam episode 34 and paint roller hair roller roller skates, Halo Haro Zanskar's RD budget the.
Funniest Thing in the world according to Tomino.
Haven't we done this joke before?
That's okay, so has he.
Rock n.
Roller roller dance, rollerball pen Gazbarl's tireless efforts. The old man Polycule is gender neutral, worse than the guillotine.
The only thing.
That can stop a bad guy with a tire Roller waves roller derby foam roller.
It'S harder to protect than to destroy. The maneuvers of selfishness and duplicity must ever be revolting. Stay hydrated and I fall in love with a side character only to have.
My heart broken almost immediately. Please listen to it.
Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you.
The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dioxin. The closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio. The Rica music is Slow by Lloyd Rogers. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in.
The episode, additional information about the Lenape.
People and more in the show Notes on our website gundumpodcast.com if you'd like.
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Thank you for listening.
There are a lot of wrong Gundam opinions out there corrupting the fandom. Wrong opinions.
Like I'm getting really tired of this.
Show just going around in circles, rolling.
Out one episode after another, recirculating the same complaints about cycles of violence and.
Oppression with a rotating cast of characters, but never getting around to a vision for revolution.
I keep turning it over in my mind and I just don't get what they're driving at.
I see wheel puns, so initially I definitely thought like oh, I should have him re record this because he said wheelie at the beginning and he's gonna be embarrassed that he said it like that.
Each claw grasps a bright red orb.
And I didn't amend this for the appearance of the Orange de Gorla, but.
I will quickly check what it looks like. What color are its balls? They're probably green.
What the deuce?
I did put the line no, don't drown us in there just for you.
Do other people remember Married to the Sea? Don't stab.
There were just so many married to the Sea comics. And like so many, I don't know how many of them had any kind of staying power.
I also remember one of the ones that stuck with me. I read your blog. I read your whole blog.
You're fired.
You're fired. Anyway, moving on.