U'listening to season ten of Mobile suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci-Fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is episode 10.6 a world gone mad, and we are your hosts. I'm Tom, and I find it kind of funny. I find it kind of sad. The dreams in which I'm piloting the lm three one two v zero four Victory Gundam are the best I've ever had.
And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam and impressed with Shakti's cursive handwriting. Mobile Soup Breakdown is made possible by 745 paying subscribers. Thank you all, and special thanks to our newest patrons, Nanopocalypse Dylan G, Trevor Ae, Joshua K, and Gene Q. You keep MSB Genki.
This week on Mobile suit Breakdown Victory Gundam, episode six, senshino Kage, or a warrior's brilliance the episode was written by Sonoda Hideki, storyboarded and directed by Egami Kyoshi, with Nishimura Nobayoshi as animation director. The animation itself was entrusted to Studio Dove. A quick content warning before we start. This episode of Victory alludes to the threat of sexual violence, and we do discuss that briefly during the talkback. And now the recap.
Picking up where the last episode left off, Uso takes the corps fighter to confront the latest enemy. Best baleutenant Watari Gila and his squadron. While the league military engineers prepare to launch a hangar and boots for the Gundam, the two remaining Kamyon provide cover fire. Even Katajina is helping, remembering Uso's insistence that he fights because he doesn't want any of them to die. Clinging to the outside of the massive truck, she thinks, I don't want you to die either, Uso. The young pilot, successfully completes docking with the hangar, but he is outnumbered, and the enemy shoots down the boots before he can get close. Even so, the increase in firepower catches some of the best BA pilots unawares. Uso transforms the upper half of the Gundam, charging straight at one of the wingmen, Baku, and slashing an arm from the enemy mobile suit. Under relentless Vulcan and beam fire, Baku cries out for help. Hang on, Watari replies, rushing to Baku's side with another wingman, Trump. Boruuso flies right through the group, landing more shots on the already damaged suit. Baku's rising panic is clear. Bail out, Lieutenant Watari orders, but Baku cannot or will not hear him, instead shooting magnetic grappnels at Trump's mobile suit. In some way, this is the last straw, and Watari cuts the grapnel cables before stabbing a beamsaber through Baku's cockpit, this punishment a consequence of the wingman's unseemly display of terror still nearby, Uso is horrified that Bespa even kill their own. Still in disguise, chronicle observes the fight from the ground. On seeing the lead military prepare to launch another boots part, he rushes into the hangar on Awapa, initiating a firefight that keeps most of them pinned down and wounds several, including Count Oyung, who is shot in the shoulder. Katajina rushes over to help count up, but before they can get away, Chronicle is there with a gun to count's head. He decides to take both count and Katajina hostage, and the three leave on Awappa. Once chronicle leaves the league, militaire are able to load the boots onto a kamyon and launch them, while the other kamyon continues to provide cover fire. Final docking completed. Uso engages with Watari, but Trump flies up behind him and plants two beam daggers in the gundam's back, or at least he tries to. The Gundam's shields stop him before its head rotates 180 degrees, driving him back with vulcan fire before hitting his mobile suit's rotor arm with the beam rifle, Watari can see that his wingman's mobile suit is losing altitude. He supports the other mobile suit and decides to retreat, much to Uso's relief. Chronicle spots the retreating mobile suits overhead and orders Katajina driving to follow them while he bandages count's shoulder. At the league military facility, Suzy hands out water while Shakti helps with first aid. Uso returns seemingly cheerful, but notices Marbett, Romero, Odello, and others looking downcast. When they tell him about the kidnapping, he erupts. What was the point of me fighting? Why didn't you protect them? Odello snaps back. You aren't the only one risking your life. And the words turn to blows, the two falling to the floor in a tangle of punches and kicks. The adults seem surprised and try to calm the two of them down while Shakti looks on, troubled. This is so unlike the Uso she knows. Checking on the sleeping Karaman, Shakti wonders if Uso can come back from the war, murmuring to herself, if we stay here, we'll all go crazy. In the dark room, Shakti makes a decision with her fingertip. She leaves the parting message in the grime coating a mirror, then bundles up Karoman and leaves without a word to anyone. Trailing Haro in Flanders in clear, looping cursive, the message reads, I'll go back to Casarelia. Chronicle and his captives arrive at the clearing where Watari and Trump have landed. While chronicle admonishes Watari for not living up to his chivalrous reputation, Trump binds the prisoners and begins to harass Katajina, leering at her as he lifts her skirt with the muzzle of his rifle. Chronicle intervenes, but Trump points his rifle at the young soldier, fed up with the criticism and interference. I can do whatever I like after a battle. We risked our lives. You disrespected our commander. I could kill you now and say the resistance did it. The two jockey over the gun, Trump resting it away and pointing it at chronicle. But before Trump can fire, Watari shoots him. Seemingly unfazed, Watari apologizes for his subordinate's rudeness and asks chronicle to report to the nearest captain that the Watare squadron fought to the last unit. Meanwhile, the league military units are searching for count and Katigina. In the Gundam. USO leapfrogs through the forest, searching but distracted. Before the search began, he saw Shakti's message. Spotting a downed mobile suit in a clearing, USo lands and begins to run diagnostics while he looks around. There's no sign of the other mobile suit, nor of the pilots, until Watari's mobile suit bursts up from underground. Before Uso can react, Watari knocks the Gundam to the ground. When it rises, he beats the beamsaber from its hand, cuts off one of the Gundam's arms, and brute forces his own beamsaber through the Gundam's shield. The shield flickers out. Uso tries to get away, but Watari is relentless, knocking the Gundam to the ground again before diving straight at it. Beamsaber ready to run through the legendary symbol of resistance. Time seems to slow before the killing blow can land, Uso scrabbles for the Gundam's beamsaber, still clutched in its severed hand, and throws the saber piercing Watari's mobile suit. The Bespo lieutenant tries to eject and escape, but USO launches magnetic grapples at the pod. Brandishing a handgun, he climbs out of the Gundam cockpit and confronts Watari. Wounded and shocked to find that his opponent is a child, Watari falls to the ground with tears in his eyes. If this is what the world has come to, then everything's gone mad. Get out of that mobile suit before you're as mad as the rest. He tells Uso to get back, then blows himself up with a grenade. Uncomprehending, exhausted and traumatized, Uso crumples, crying to the ground.
This episode, from the very opening narration, asks a lot of questions about how to characterize war, and it presents four overlapping, partly compatible, partly contradictory characterizations. The first in the opening, they talk about Uso looking at this war and fearing that war makes men mad. Or perhaps he is coming to believe that it is men's madness which makes war. Contrast this with the original opening narration for the first four episodes or so, which characterizes war as an instinctual aspect of humanity, not a deviation from the norm, but the norm which has recurred in space when humanity goes out there. So this is the first two. The other pairing is whether war is the activity of adults from which children should be excluded, or whether war is itself a very childish kind of activity, one that makes children of the people who participate in it.
Not about war specifically, but one other contrast, and that, I think, is panning out to be like a generational difference, an older folks versus younger folks. One is, what does it mean to have standards? What does it mean to have a code? And is it better to follow those principles rigidly, or to be flexible? And does being flexible mean that you don't have a code, and does that invalidate the code? Like, basically, what does it mean to live a moral life in a lot of ways? What does it mean to have principles, and how do we judge ourselves, and how do we judge others when they try to live by those principles, or don't?
And both of these big questions are embodied in the singular figure of Watari Gila. This is really his episode, dense with meaning for a guy who has, if we're being generous, appeared in two episodes. And if we're being realistic, this is his only episode. Watari gives us so much to talk about. It's Watari's squadron, his two wingmen, who really give me that sense that the show is, on some level, calling war a childish activity. And the first instance of this is when one of his soldiers, his Zolo, is damaged, he's falling towards the earth. He has this moment of complete panic, and he reaches out for help, and he screams and begs and cries, and this so offends Watari that he actually kills the guy.
I have a completely different read on that scene personally, because when he first starts panicking, when this wingman first starts freaking out, he calls out for help. And Watari's response is not, quit being afraid, nerd. Or like, how dare you show fear? It's hang in there, we're coming. And they come to try to help him, but they're still in the middle of a fight. There's only so much he can do. They tell him to eject. He does not eject. Instead, he latches his mobile suit that is falling out of the sky to someone else's. This is like classic drowning person bringing the person trying to rescue them under with them. And it's not until then, it's not until he starts dragging down the other wingman that Watari cuts the cables loose and kills this subordinate.
Although Watari does say to know a soldier who shows fear is useless, he does focus on his expression of fear, at least when he's talking to the guy.
I feel like another read on that line could be like it's pointless for a soldier to show fear, which may seem a bit nit picky, but it's not that he thinks this subordinate is useless. It's that succumbing to this feeling serves no purpose.
But the reason I brought it up in the first place is because I characterize that breakdown of self control, that emotional expression in the soldier as an expression of childishness.
Yeah, that's a good point.
And the scrabbling for any help, even though he's a trained soldier, even though this is the sort of thing he should be trained for, the sort of circumstance he should have expected. The desperate reaching out for anybody to help, even if it means pulling somebody else down with you. That feels childish to me.
There are also a couple of other moments, I think, that cast Watari as the adult of their group and his wingmen as the children. Including this is another line where I feel like the subtitling loses some additional nuance. You know, he mentions that he killed his soldier's pride, which I have no idea what exactly that's a reference to or what that's about, but we'll revisit.
By which you mean he killed his pride as a soldier, not he killed the pride of his soldiers.
Correct. But then he also mentions that he killed his own subordinates. But in the Japanese, he describes them not merely as subordinates, but as tasetsina. Like people who were important to him. It implies like a personal closeness and a fondness.
Presumably he feels for them sense of obligation. It is very clear that Watari is governed by a set of self imposed rules, and they feel kind of alien to us from the outside. But to him, they seem entirely consistent. And it is the violations of those rules which compels him to kill his treasured subordinates. And because the rules are so alien, because he is this chivalrous, as Chronicle calls him, out of time warrior guy, we can't really understand all of his motivations, but it seems like maybe part of his set of self imposed chivalrous rules is that he has a powerful obligation to his men and an obligation to make sure that they follow the rules, his rules.
I found it very interesting that chronicle describes him at separate moments in the episode as chivalrous, but also as infamous. And those aren't usually compatible things for a person to be, and that may be a nuance in translation issue, or it might be the perfect encapsulation of what you're describing, where his code exists and people know that it exists, but it's also kind of alien to people. And he's such a powerful fighter, such a formidable opponent, that there's this infamous air about him. The other thing about him that set him up as the adult of the group and really sets him apart from a lot of the other Bespa soldiers we've encountered, whether it's experience or intelligence or whatever. Watari has much better awareness of what's going on. He never gets confused and thinks he's fighting three different enemies. He recognizes that the core fighter is just a support and is kind of weak. But the minute it does its first combination, he recognizes immediately it's going to be much stronger.
Now, these are the benefits of that recarl reconnaissance mission they went on.
But he also begins the fight saying, there's no way that this league, military developed mobile suit can compete with our industrial military production.
I think he calls it a civilian developed mobile suit. Which really raises some questions about why Sabat was so insistent that these enemies were not civilians, since Watari is perfectly willing to admit they are.
But by the end of the fight, he very willingly acknowledges we were fools to underestimate them, and he's willing to retreat. His soldiers begin the fight talking about, oh, this inexperienced opponent. They get overconfident and they get cocky, and he has a bit of that, but clearly is constantly reassessing and is willing to admit, in particular to himself, which is the most important when he's been wrong, and to adjust his thinking, which is not a thing we see a lot of.
You could even characterize his final act of suicide when he pulls the pin on that grenade, as adjusting his thinking after discovering the identity of the pilot he has been fighting.
I found that scene so sad, but also a bit ridiculous the more you think about it, because it would be horrifying, I imagine, as a soldier, if you're in a plane or a tank or something, that prevents you from seeing who exactly it is you're fighting, and then to realize that you have been fighting a twelve year old? A 13 year old would be horrifying. But how many twelve and 13 year olds and younger did he kill when they bombed Uig?
But see, it's not about him having a problem with killing children. I don't think that's it. I think the issue for him is he has a very clear and rigid idea of what war is and what it should be, and more important than that of who soldiers are, who they should be, how they ought to behave. When his soldiers let him down, he kills them, both of them. When he sees Uso, it is an existential challenge to his whole view. I say war view instead of worldview because Swatari and his worldview is a war view, and he can't reconcile the evidence of his eyes with this rigid internalized structure and idea of what war ought to be. And because of that conflict and that inability to reconcile the two, the only thing he can do is die.
But there is some aspect of a reverence for childhood about his reaction, because he mentions a kid who ought to be playing on some level. It's like he believes war shouldn't touch kids, even though that's obviously ludicrous under the circumstances.
Deeply naive, but he seems to be coming at it from an idealistic perspective that a couple of other characters, notably Katajina and maybe Shakti, also hold, which is that participating in war because of what it does to you spiritually is actually somehow worse than being killed in war. It is better to die innocent than take up the gun. I'm so glad you mentioned him saying Uso is just a child who should still be playing, because it is his use of to play the verb asobu. That is the other really big point that connects war to childhood, because it is the same word that his subordinate Trump uses when he talks about chronicle kidnapping Katajina for his own selfish, dark desires. He says, you just took this girl so you could play around with her, didn't you?
Yeah, I mean, the word for asobu, I think, is often used for dating and some dating adjacent activities, sure.
But to use it in those two separate contexts, to use that word specifically to describe what children should be doing, and then in this other context to use it to describe not just what soldiers do, but like loot and pillage and the worst excesses of war. And this idea of war as a childish behavior isn't just in the text of the show, it is the meta text of the show. They made a show about war specifically to appeal to little kids because little kids are into this. The whole appeal of UsO as a character is that little kids can project themselves onto him. Imagine that you had a gundam. Imagine that you had all of that power. Imagine that you were the one out there. Everyone was looking to you to save the world or destroy it. That is the appeal of this kind of show.
We revisit this idea basically every season that has children as protagonists rather than adults, which is most of them. But a lot of programs for kids are built on a fantasy of magic or technology or a special ability or a magical friend that allows a child to have power and agency like an adult allows them to stand up to adults and in a big way. The kind of technology that humans develop for warfare does that. The more technological warfare becomes, the less relevant the size, age, physical ability of the person using it is.
I mean, think about drone warfare. Now it's just a pair of VR goggles and some joysticks. Any video game playing teenager would be good at that.
See Ender's game or since got card, obviously horrible person. But before I knew that, that was a deeply formative book for me, for both of us.
We were of an age to read that at a.
When we were in middle school, when we were Ender's age.
I think I might have read it earlier than that, actually.
Yikes.
Right?
In that final scene, I also appreciated the ambiguity of watare saying to Uso, if this is what the world has come to, then the world's gone mad. And then get out of that mobile suit before you're as mad as the rest. And is he talking about the rest of the world, or is he talking about soldiers? Is he talking about mad as the rest of us?
This echoes the scene earlier, when Uso and Odello get into their brawl in the lunchroom and Shakti is looking at them like, uso, this isn't like you. That the process of fighting out there has brought the violence into Uso's soul and he can't leave it on the battlefield. At least that's how Shockti sees it.
Obviously, anyone might hold in themselves a desire for things not to change, for things to stay the same, or even to be able to wind back the clock to a simpler time. However, I do wonder if Shakti's insistent desire to go back to Casarelia and implied in that, go back to how things were before Marbette crash landed in their valley, before Uwig was bombed, if that stems from the trauma of her parents'disappearance. She's already been through a traumatic loss and is hungry for stability, is hungry for the familiar.
I saw it more as a reluctance, a refusal to grow up, a desire to freeze things in this innocent moment of childhood.
I appreciate that you mentioned that, because the first thing that popped into my head when she says, uso, that's not like you, or, this isn't like you. I'm like, well, maybe he's going through puberty. That can make people feel aggressive.
Yeah, well, it is inevitable that he will become an adult. And we have already associated adulthood with violence. Very clearly and over and over again, we've had people saying to Uso, like, don't grow up. Don't turn into a soldier, don't become an adult, which obviously is impossible. He's going to grow up assuming he lives long enough to do it. The scene where Shakti, where she writes the note on the mirror and leaves, it's a beautiful moment of her looking into the mirror before she writes the note. When a character looks into a mirror, it is usually as a way of expressing that they're dealing with some identity problems. They're seeing in the mirror something that they don't like about themselves. And in her case, what really strikes her seems to be the way she's carrying Carlmann. For her to be carrying a child is a signifier of her transition into adulthood. It's very gendered, but the message the show is giving us at this point is, for men, adulthood is violence. For women, adulthood is rearing children.
And on some level, maybe she is not ready to acknowledge this yet, but she's realizing the war has already changed her. The war has already changed Uso. They could go back to Casarelia and go back to exactly how they had been living before, but it wouldn't be the same. No, they can't undo what's already been done. They can't unexperience what's already happened.
And no matter how much she wants to unwind the clock and go back to the way things used to be, she's not willing to leave Carlman there. She wants to protect and care for Carlman in the same way that Uso wants to protect everyone that they've met.
This isn't directly tied to that, but the show manages to convey, mostly just through the animation, that Shakti is constantly watching Uso. If they are in the same place, even if she's in the middle of administering first aid or taking care of Karoman, she is always watching him. He doesn't seem to notice, but he.
Only has eyes for Katajina, though maybe not even that so much? Certainly not as much as he did at first.
Well, his reaction when he learns that Katajina has also been kidnapped is certainly much stronger than his reaction to just count being kidnapped.
Sure.
About the brawl. There are a few things about that that I found really striking. It really sums up that for USO, whatever the broader implications he is really just fighting to protect and preserve specific people he cares about. And so if that doesn't happen, it was like, well, what was I fighting for then? Even though we can look at everything that happened and see purpose in it, he doesn't because Katajina got captured.
There is, I think, a quote from Tomino around this period where he expresses some very negative feelings about people who fight for ideals or for principles. That when you devote yourself to ideals or principles it becomes very easy to basically lose perspective and to kill lots of people without really considering their humanity because of the strength of your ideals. And that people ought to bring their focus more into their own world, their surroundings, the people they know, the life they live. And I wonder if it's that feeling that's being expressed with Uso here. Very likely that there is something inherently noble about fighting to protect the lives of people you know and care about.
I'm gonna wanna come back to that in just a second.
Me too.
I thought it was very funny that all of these adults are standing around like, yelling at the boys to stop fighting but nobody actually intervenes. And I have no idea how old Odello is supposed to be, but they're fairly young. Like, four adults should be able to wade in there and pull them away from each other. I know breaking up a fight can be dangerous to do but under the circumstances, it feels like somebody ought to try.
Maybe the count would have, but he's gone now.
Nina also pretty impressed with Uso's fighting ability. He manages to hold his own against a taller, presumably heavier and older opponent. But this connects with something else I noticed, which is he seems to prefer hand to hand kind of combat in the gundam and that seems to be where he shines. Like where he really demonstrates some natural skill or ability is when he's in close, he does that whole, like, double kick move.
I mean, Uso's real strength in combat is his creativity, absolutely unmatched. And the show as a whole, the combat sequences have been extremely creative and this one is no exception. The bit with the cameo technicals driving around, firing Uso and his incredible flying torso maneuver. The bit where he turns the head.
And of the Gundam backwards 180 degrees. That was great.
This is such a beautiful expression of Uso's childishness, though, because when I played with action figures as a kid, I would do that kind of thing all the time because they're physically capable of doing it just like a gunpla model and just like the victory, apparently. But as you get older, I think it becomes harder to conceive of the object both as what it represents and as what it physically is. So it becomes harder to see that the head, in fact, can turn all the way around because a real head can't do that. And the more you reify the object as a representation of a real thing, the less flexible your brain can be with what it's capable of. But for USo, it's just an object.
He doesn't have the same preconceptions.
Right? It doesn't need legs. He's got all the important bits just in the torso. I loved that sequence. Although it kind of does undermine the whole conceit of the mobile suit in Gundam, because if you can just transform into the torso, slash somebody up, transform back into a core fighter and zip away, that's so much more effective than amback that, like, why do we even have legs? If they slow down and prevent that kind of transformation and rapid maneuver, there should just be an army of these flying torso fighters.
But then how would USo leapfrog through the forest?
He wouldn't need to. It's a fighter. He could merely skim the canopy.
You mentioned fighting to protect the people you care about as the kind of maybe only real like basis. Most true, most justifiable reason to engage in warfare or violence. And wouldn't you know it, this is the first time that Katajina involves herself in the fighting. And as she is doing so, we get this internal monologue of hers and her thinking that, uso, I don't want you to die either. That it is her desire to help protect him while he's protecting her that drives her to involve herself for the first time.
Early on, when Watari is fighting the completed victory Gundam, he calls the Gundam a legendary symbol of resistance. And later he says, we're the ones rebelling against the Earth Federation. The Gundam should be on our side, which I bring up here because while it may in principle be true that the Zanskar empire is revolting against the earth Federation, they may in fact be engaged in rebellion and resistance on the ground here in this sphere, in this small little window into the war. What we are seeing is the Zanskar Empire oppressing a whole bunch of basically not involved civilians. What he is doing in this battle is in no sense resistance. So, no, you don't get to have a Gundam. I'm leaving out here all of the gundams that have been built over the years that weren't for the sake of resistance, which all of them. Well, okay, yeah, but arguably, the Zeta and double Zeta may have been built for the purposes of resistance. Most of them get co opted for resistance.
Resistance doesn't tend to have a lot of infrastructure in place for this kind of thing.
It reminds me a little bit of the AK 47 in the real world, where, like, the AK 47 was developed by a colonial imperial superpower in the form of Stalin's Russia, and yet it has become a symbol of resistance around the world.
Symbols are so often and so easily co opted or changed.
And think about, like, any rage against the machine song being played at a political rally. Again, I think it goes back to Tomino's point about principles and ideals and symbols being unreliable, mutable. And if you put all of your faith in them, you are on the highway towards atrocities.
But I was thinking about what Watari said, and the vibe is very, like, why are you mad at us? Yeah, we blew up your house, but we're here to liberate you.
Yeah. The bespa soldiers will be greeted as liberators by the grateful people of earth, those who survive.
Another complicating element of this that ties back to the Wingman Trump threatening Katajina with sexual violence. One, sexual violence is very common in genocides and is, in fact, considered typical or like, that's included in the definitions of genocide in a lot of cases. And you might argue there's no evidence that they want to wipe out everybody on earth or that that's the point of them being here, is to wipe out everybody. But then he goes on to say, so you've seduced the earth girl already. So clearly, there is a sense of separation, that earth people are different, and that that is feeding into some of this hostility. It's feeding into how these soldiers think about what they're doing here, whether the intent is to kill a bunch of earth noids or not. There is a hostility based on this difference between the earth noids and the spacenoids. The whole kidnapping arc is really interesting in that it brings Katajina and chronicle together. And the more time they spend together, the more I feel like they actually have a lot in common.
There's almost a sense of a destined connection between the two of them, because in the prior episode, Katajina just, like, sees chronicle in the hallway. She sees him save Shockti and Suzy, and something passes between the two of them. She immediately suspects that there's something weird about him, even suspects that he might be a spy, because later, when he actually reveals that he is, she's like, oh, I knew it. That's the guy I saw. But there's no reason she should have thought that. No discernible one to the audience, at least, unless there is something that links the two of them. At first when I saw that, I was like, oh, did they meet previously? Did she go to an embassy ball that he was at or something? But it doesn't seem so. It just seems like there's some kind of vibe between them.
And they are, both of them, very rigid in their thinking, perhaps in different ways, but each of them has these very specific ideas of what's right, what's wrong, how people are supposed to behave, and their ideas don't really allow for exceptions or leeway. That's just how it is. We see this in chronicle when he continues to be quite polite to her and to count. She calls him out for constantly calling her girl, and she says, my name is Katojina Luce, and he apologizes and he starts calling her by her name. He apologizes when he steps on her skirt to prevent her grabbing the gun. It's weird, but there you go. That's chronicle.
I imagine Chronicle would say something like, it doesn't cost you anything to be polite.
She even speaks up for him when Trump is accusing him of having captured her for the purpose of raping her. She says, he's not like that. He wouldn't do that. She can tell, presumably because of all the politeness and the fact that he has not molested her already. She doesn't get that vibe.
Yeah, this episode goes to some dark places.
Yeah. One other potential point of connection. People are very quick to throw into Katajina's face how privileged she is, that she grew up wealthy and in sort of rarefied society, that she can't possibly understand how things are for people. And she mostly ignores this criticism as irrelevant. Chronicle tries to argue with Trump that it doesn't matter to him that his sister is queen, that somehow that shouldn't be relevant, and Trump rightly throws in his face. You're the only one who thinks that, that if he really wanted to not benefit from his position, he would have to invent a new identity and move away. He cannot exist in the society he exists in and not be affected by this connection. He has to power.
He should change his name. He should go by quattro begina, the legendary symbol of creating a new identity.
One final note about Chronicle, and it's possible that we will learn that he made the right call here. But in taking hostages, he kind of loses the thread a bit. The whole point of his attacking this particular league military like hangar or launch facility was to prevent them from launching the boots so that Uso couldn't form the whole Gundam. Then he leaves with hostages, and they are able to launch the boots, but.
He takes the commanding officer of the league militaire, at least of this little unit. Though I think when Count Nyong is like, taking me is not going to do you much good. It betrays the dramatically different organizational principles of these two armed forces. And that chronicle has misunderstood how the league military operates.
Well, if it operates like a lot of other guerrilla forces, then probably command is very dispersed and set up in a way so that the loss of any one sort of cell's commander is not going to be too damaging to the rest.
He shouldn't even know that much about any other cells outside of his own.
Unit, so that he has no useful information to give them, either. Not really, or at least it's very limited in the amount of damage that it can cause. It's possible that chronicle made the right call here, but it's also possible that he should have left them and just taken the Kamyon or something.
Going back to Watari Gila for a second, he's kind of a funhouse mirror version of Ramba Rawl, partly in that he is the experienced older warrior who plays the narrative role of showing the younger warriors both chronicle and Uso. This is war. This is serious. Taking it kind of to the next level, but also in a couple of weird, specific ways. Suicide by grenade is also how Ramba Ral died, and also the trick of hiding his mobile suit underground and then leaping up to attack the Gundam from beneath the earth was the thing that Ramba Rawl did in the desert.
I had a little quibble about that.
I had a big quibble about that.
That would be extremely difficult to do in that kind of terrain and not have it be noticeable. Unless someone hid you, unless you had.
Help, which he definitely didn't. I have no idea how he accomplished that.
Right.
The Ramba Raul one made sense. He was in the desert. He had a whole team to help him. It's very easy to hide in the sand. How did Uso not see all the freshly dug earth? Or did this guy start out digging like 2 miles away and dig a big, long tunnel so that he could get under here without disturbing the ground around this booby trapped Zolo, he's set up.
But coming back to Watari and Ramba, they're also both men who do not engage with the politics of what's happening. And they both feel like men from another age, men whose time has know, old soldiers who don't really fit in to the methods and madness of modern war.
And of course, they both have mustaches. But when Ramba sees all of the child soldiers on the white base and actually one of his subordinates brings it up to him, he's just like, yeah, that's how war is. Now shoot those kids before they shoot us. We've talked about deep themes. Do you want to get shallow and petty for a second?
Oh, absolutely. But I have nice things to say, too.
Oh, okay.
I don't only have petty things to say. I'll start with something petty, though, just for you.
Oh, thank you.
The romanization of Casale. Casare. Casarelia. In the subtitles, it's with an r and an l. When Shakti writes it on the mirror, it's two L's, and.
You know our rule. If it's written in the show, then that's correct.
And there is an ambiguity because, well, there isn't an l sound like we have in English, it's closer to an r. I'm not a linguist, so I can't really describe exactly how they are different or similar, but based on the katakana that they use to write it, if you were just going to do a straight rendering, you'd probably use R's. But then here in the show, it's L's and then in the subtitles, it's something different.
Personally, I think Casarelia has better mouth feel than Casalelia, but the name Casarelia actually comes from a real word, and the etymology of it is hinted at in Tomeo's novels. And Mark Simmons was able to track down where it actually comes from. It's from a pompeian word. Pompeian is a micronesian language, and the phrase casale means both hello and goodbye. And for some reason, this small refugee town in what is currently Czechia takes its name from this micronesian language, I.
Assume for symbolic reasons, naming your home hello and goodbye. Especially for some young kids being pulled from home, perhaps for the first time.
It's where we meet them. So we say hello to them, but then they need to leave it.
I was impressed with Shakti's handwriting. Her cursive is nice.
The kana rendering for Casalelie is ca re, and it's not rie. So Tomino has, like, changed all of the vowels, which I think is sort of standard when you're mutating a language to show that time has passed and also that it's being said by different people in a different part of the world. And also to cover your tracks a.
Little bit, there were a couple of other visual effects or scenes that I particularly liked in this episode. Though not particularly beautifully rendered, they bring back that idea of damage to the environment. The size of the craters left by the attack of Watari's group is truly shocking. They're shooting at the cameyon, which are big for trucks but are not that big, and leaving massive craters in the forest. And the forest is smoking, is on fire. In the backgrounds of a bunch of the other fights, you can see the smoke rising in plumes. They fly through the smoke. I thought chronicle zipping around on a whoppa shooting at people was actually pretty cleverly done. Later on, if I had been Katajina, I probably would have tried to crash the wapa to escape.
But, Nina, I hate to tell you this, but I think you're actually very different from Katajina.
Thank goodness. And then the other scene that I really liked was when a whole group of league military people come up on this elevator. They really make an entrance. It feels like a shot intended to show us how cool they are.
And then the following bit where they're sort of marching forward and odello is jogging backwards.
Well, he probably thought they would stop and then they didn't. They keep coming forward. So he's sort of trotting backwards while he fills them in on what's happening. When they first come up, the camera is behind them at first and then swivels around to be like a front on shot of them advancing before it switches to sideways so we can watch them and Odello walking. I also liked the lens flare effect during the fight. They only did it once, but the Gundam flies up high and then comes down really quickly directly at Watari's group. And they recreated some. I think of them as classic Gundam shots, like having the Gundam face suddenly be up in your grill. All of a sudden the Gundam is right there in your face is pretty classic. I think they do one of those. The explosions were different. The explosions were more like the old explosions and less like the new painted ones.
There was one of the new painted ones, by which I mean the old painted ones that are new for us. But where? When the booby trap to Zolo explodes in Uso's face for that, when they do the painted explosions, you have offered praises, you have patted the episode on the back. Now I shall be the one to stab it. Stab it in the back with my petty blades.
With your harsh criticisms.
I'll try not to be too harsh. This episode has some trouble keeping track of where its characters are and what they're doing. Probably the most obvious one for me is that the last episode really clearly ends with six zolos attacking the league.
Military base and three of them disappear.
Yeah, exactly. Presumably they have been sent to pursue all of the people fleeing the facility, but that's not actually conveyed. Another one is Shakti, who at the end of the prior episode is underground, has just seen Uso run off to join the battle, has herself just survived nearly being crushed by rubble, and she goes to get Karlman. But then in this episode, she's like. She starts out in the wilderness, just kind of wandering around with Karlman. And I know that kid loves to go for walks, and I know you love the wilderness, but did Shakti seriously wander out of the base in the middle of an air raid just to go for a walk?
Maybe.
And then some things about the scale get a little confusing. Like we see Katajina firing the beam rifle mounted on the back of Odello's truck, and then not much after that.
Hang on. It's Warren's truck. Let's be real here. It's Warren's truck.
Warren and Susie of the Odello team, the infamous Odello squadron. Chivalrous and cruel. No, but, yeah. So they're driving around, they're shooting the gun, and then not much time after that. They're back at the factory, they've got a set of boots on the truck. A fairly significant amount of time would need to pass for them to finish their shooting operation, turn around, come back, and load up. Something else on the Cameoon yet the fight between USO and the Zolos doesn't seem to take that long. It's kind of like if you've seen Dunkirk, the Christopher Nolan movie, where there are three very different stories playing out across dramatically different timescales, but all being shown to you at the same time in the film, it's a bit like that, only they're not actually consciously doing that.
My go to explanation for any moments like this going forward is going to be, oh, there must have been something that happened here in the books that they decided to skip over, but they didn't adjust the story to reflect that.
I can't tell if that's you being generous or critical.
Critical.
I assume it is reflective of a lack of communication between the teams handling the animation of the different episodes. Because both this one and episode five, the prior episode, were written by the same person. It was written as a two parter, but completely different directors, storyboarders, completely different animation teams. And I'm wondering if maybe if episodes were running behind, if animation was happening in parallel, if the team working on episode six didn't entirely know what the team on episode five was doing. That seems like the best explanation for these kinds of inconsistencies.
And now Tom's research on the role of advertising agencies in anime production in Japan in the 1990s in February of.
2022, Victory Gundam producer Ueda Masuo tweeted a photo from the now defunct Space World Amusement park in Kyushu, a park most famous internationally for the time. They unveiled a new ice skating rink with 5000 dead fish entombed in the ice for guests to skate over. They closed this controversial attraction after two weeks, apologized, and promised to hold an appropriate religious service to memorialize the fish. The park closed down entirely a month later, on New year's Day 2018. They blamed the declining birth rate and the depopulation of provincial cities in favor of Tokyo, as well as competition from a popular new Netherlands themed amusement park in Nagasaki. But the fish thing probably didn't help. The photo Ueda tweeted depicts spaceworld in happier pre fish rink times. The photo shows a bunch of victory staffers with Tomino in the center making v for Victory hand signs while standing in front of a five meter tall statue of the victory Gundam erected to promote the show. Uweda then shared a few recollections about what it was like working on victory. Most of it is stuff you've heard me talk about before, how they lowered the age of the protagonist to appeal to a younger target demographic, that the working environment for the animators was difficult, that the whole project was strongly influenced by St. Gundam's popularity. But then he started talking about two companies essential to the production of Victory whose roles are rarely discussed, the advertising agency Densu and the broadcaster TV Asahi Uweda, wrote Aratani star Tosuru TV Shirizu Gandamua wakudori no tame erabareta Dairy ten densua Animega Hajime Tedata Tivi Asahide Hajimata Sono Shirizua Kyoksan Niwa Kange Sarate Nakata this part is relatively easy to parse. Translated roughly, he wrote Densu. The advertising agency chosen for the time slot of the newly launched Gundam TV series had never worked with anime before. Though the series started airing on TV Asahi, the station did not welcome it. Then, he explained. Dairy ten mochikomi no egyo kikaku kakono fast ta tv Gundamwa Keretsuno Nagoya Terabi daihitono onkeo ukatanai kyokutoshtewa shikatanai toyukuki this part is somewhat harder to parse, but Uda seems to be saying that densu was able to convince. We might even editorialize a little and say strong arm TV Asahi into putting victory on their schedule. Despite the station's misgivings. By alluding to the success of past Gundam shows and playing on their fear of missing out on another big hit, I would translate it as the agency brought their business plan to the station in the past. First, and the other Gundam TV shows had aired on their affiliate, Nagoya Television, and the feeling was that TV Asahi, who had not enjoyed the benefits of the big hit, had no choice but to accept the show. When he was interviewed about his work on victory in 1994, Koizumi Yoshiaki, the producer who represented TV Asahi, was somewhat more polite. But he too made it clear that the station was not thrilled with the new Gundam show that they had just bought. As translated by Mark Simmons, Koizumi said they'd already completed three episodes worth of rush film when I came in as producer, and the development of the story was more or less decided. Saying, this may sound like I'm making excuses, but in that kind of situation, the meddling of a station producer would only create confusion in the studio. Since director Tomino himself was the original author, the story was also skillfully constructed. I didn't really participate in the story decisions. Actually, where our station is concerned, it's usually customary for us to be deeply involved from the start of production, so this was a pretty irregular situation. I thought it was very well made. But a good work doesn't necessarily equal a good program. It's only when the broadcast time slot and the content align with the target that it becomes a good program. We station producers are the ones who manage that. But with this work, the production had already progressed pretty far, so it was too late for me to say anything. I think we had a problem there from the outset. How did this irregular situation come to pass? Why did Victory air on TV Asahi instead of in the same Nagoya television time slot used for all prior Gundam shows? Why did TV Asahi join the production so late? How did Densu convince them to take the show at all if they were so unhappy with it? And why assign it to a time slot that did not suit its content? I think we can answer some of those questions, but we need to know more about the complex web of business relationships that connect production studios like Sunrise, sponsors like Bondi, and broadcasters like TV Asahi. But most of all, we need to understand the role played by the advertising agencies like Densu, which place themselves at the center of that web, the indispensable nexus of all strands. This week I want to talk generally about the history of advertising in Japan and the state of the industry in the early 1990s. Next week, we'll focus on television and television ads and the part played by the ad agency in tv programming. Finally, in part three, we'll look at the specific circumstances surrounding victory's production, the advertising agencies, sponsors, and tv stations involved, and how the relationships between these various companies dictated, at least in part, the form and the fate of Victory Gundam in 1990, the anthropologist Brian Moran spent a year embedded within the Tokyo offices of a major japanese advertising agency, and in 1996 he published his monograph, a japanese advertising agency, an anthropology of media and markets, in which he describes in detail the structure and operations of that agency and the japanese advertising industry as a whole. It is a fascinating work that addresses both the formal practices of the industry and the equally important networks of informal social relations amongst its participants. And because you can't talk about fish without talking about water, it also offers a rare perspective on the early, heady days of the bubble economy from within a major japanese corporation. Moran's book describes the state of the industry in very nearly the exact moment that is most relevant for this investigation. But it has been almost 35 years since he conducted his research. Every industry has changed massively in that time, and I don't know how much of what he describes about ad agencies is still true today. Many bits certainly are not. I'm fairly sure, for example, that the people who handle advertisement scheduling for newspapers no longer use pencil and paper to do so. When Moran was doing his research, no one had even begun to dream of Internet advertising. The hot new technology threatening to change everything was a system that would connect your landline telephone to your tv set so that you could place an order for whatever product was being advertised at that exact moment, simply by picking up the receiver. But some things endure. Account executives still whine and dine current and prospective clients. Writers still dream up catchy taglines that worm their way into the parts of your brain where precious memories are supposed to be stored, and popular celebrities still endorse everything from cars to contact lenses. Indeed, much of what Moran describes about the industry in Japan as of 1990 will be familiar to anyone who has watched an episode of Mad Men set 30 years earlier or read Dorothy Sare's murder must advertise set 30 years before that, the agency sent its account executives out to make presentations to wouldbe clients to win their business. Its writers and artists collaborated with market research experts to develop comprehensive advertising campaigns, and its media buying department secured the space and time in the popular media, newspapers, magazines, radio, and television in which to run those ads. And, of course, there was all the generic business of business. Copies had to be made, bills had to be sent and paid, data had to be entered into the mainframe, and young women, for this was still 1990, had to make and serve the office tea. Advertising, loosely defined as some kind of text or graphic display meant to attract attention and improve business, is attested in Japan as far back as the early 8th century in records of laws concerning signs erected by shopkeepers to advertise their products. But ad agencies, as discrete and specialist concerns, first started to appear in Japan during the 1880s and 1890s. A little more than ten years into the Meiji era, during a period of nation building, rapid industrial growth, and enthusiastic modernization, the economy and the population were booming. Railroads made it easier than ever to move goods and people around within the country, and newspapers were popping up everywhere you looked. Newspapers, too, go way back. The first proto newspapers printed on carved wooden blocks appeared as far back as 1615. Modern style newspapers started appearing from the 1860s with the country's first daily newspaper, the Yokohama May Nichi, in 1871. Many of these early newspapers were funded by political parties as propaganda mouthpieces for their positions. The independent papers, without that kind of outside funding, focused their coverage on the tabloid grotesque true crime, sensational accidents, gossip, anything that might catch a reader's attention. As their audiences expanded, they soon discovered that advertisements could bring in even more money than subscriptions. This coincided with the emergence of the first ad agencies, and they proved so successful that by the end of the 1890s, even the political papers had started relying on ads to fund their operations. But wouldbe advertisers didn't want to send their employees traipsync across Japan to negotiate ad deals with dozens or hundreds of different newspapers every time they wanted to place an ad. Nor did the newspapers want to send their employees around to knock on doors and ask companies whether they'd like to buy ad space in today's issue. So in Japan as elsewhere, the advertising agency emerged as a kind of brokerage, working for both sides, helping newspapers find advertisers, helping advertisers find newspapers, and pocketing a commission based on the price of any ads purchased. One of the main benefits they provided from the beginning, and still in 1990, was as insulation against credit risk. Agencies, as a rule, paid upfront with their own cash and then collected from their clients later. That meant the media companies didn't have to worry about advertisers, who could be quite precarious flybynight operations, going bankrupt and failing to pay for an ad after it ran. Advertisers loved the system too, because it meant they could enjoy the benefits of the ad today while deferring payment until tomorrow, so to speak. It was on the agency to vet potential clients and make its own arrangements to protect itself from the risk of default. This exposed the agency to substantial risk, and agencies could go bankrupt if they made a bad bet. But the system offered enough advantages to everyone involved that was still standard practice a century later. It was one of the ways that agencies made themselves indispensable, and as a rule, businesses that operate as middlemen are always looking for ways to become indispensable because on some level, all of their clients are always wondering why they're paying so much for something that they could theoretically do themselves. I think already you can maybe see how the actual practice of the industry is starting to diverge from the formal relationship between the three parties. In principle, the agency is placing an ad on behalf of their client, passing the client's cash to the publisher and retaining a commission. But when the agency is paying upfront in cash and then only collecting later, in practice, it is starting to look like the agency is buying space and reselling it to their client with a markup. Speaking of which, the bigger agencies like Densu soon got into the business of space wholesaling, in which the agency, acting on its own behalf, would reserve a large block of ad space from a publisher at a preferential wholesale rate, especially if they were paying cash upfront. And then the agency would parcel that space out to its clients, especially the smaller advertisers who couldn't afford to pay full price or buy a whole ad block on their own. Thanks to the discount from the newspaper, the agency could charge their clients a below market rate while still pocketing a tidy profit over and above their commission. Over time, some of the biggest agencies, densu especially, were able to negotiate exclusive relationships with particular publishers, meaning that the agency would buy out all the ad space in certain magazines and newspapers. You can see how this might lead to sharp dealing and other ethical challenges for such monopolistic agencies. Imagine for a moment a hypothetical lifestyle magazine, let's call it the thrifty vegan, a quarterly collection of inexpensive, animal free recipes and articles about how to save money by texturing your soy protein at home. Imagine you want to advertise your new line of extra filling, high calorie rice. You've dreamed up a great advertising campaign and a slogan, the rice that fills your belly and your pocket. The readers of Thrifty Vegan magazine are your ideal customers. But the magazine has an exclusive relationship with a particular ad agency, and now you have no choice but to go through them to place your ad, and they get to set the rate. But maybe you're not selling low cost, high yield rice. Maybe you own an ultralux gourmet steakhouse and you want help promoting your upcoming limited time, all you can eat, bountiest beef buffet special event only it seems that your ad agency has already paid for the whole year's worth of ad space in thrifty vegan, and they've been having real trouble filling those spots. I don't want to oversell the power of the agency in both of these examples. Both the advertiser and the publisher do still have to approve the ad. Publishers can refuse to run an inappropriate ad even if the space has already been reserved, and advertisers might refuse to pay if they think they're not getting the services they're owed. But there are pernicious incentives at play. The interests of the agency and of its individual employees rarely align 100% with those of its partners, especially in the short term. As Moran puts it, agencies are not really agents at all, but businesses acting in their own interests as intermediaries between advertisers on the one hand and media on the other. Besides acting as brokers of space and time, the ad agencies developed specialized skills in the creation of advertisements. They, or specialists working under contract for them, write the text from the catchy tagline to the list of product features. They draw the art, design the logo, select the celebrity spokesperson, hire the locations, take the photos, and in the case of radio and television, they record or film the commercial. Then they package it all together into a usable format and send it off to whichever mass media companies have agreed to run the ad. This is the conventional or above the line business, and it accounted for roughly 65% of advertising expenditure in Japan in 1990. The remainder, or the below the line business, included everything else, from those direct mail catalogs that clog up your mailbox and somehow follow you from address to address, no matter how many times you tell them to stop, to sales displays erected in retail shops, to billboards, subway ads, corporate sponsorships for things like sports tournaments or art exhibitions. That five meter tall victory statue in the QSHU space Park probably started its life as a line item in the below the line advertising budget for Victory Gundam. The below the line business also includes merchandising for certain special accounts, sporting events, music shows, and of course, tv programs. We'll come back to this point in future weeks when we talk about the ad agency most closely associated with Gundam Sotsu an account is the basic building block of the ad business. It is a budget set by the client and given, or more like promised to the agency on an annual basis to spend in the promotion of some objective. In the US and Europe, it was and may still be customary for advertisers to assign all of their accounts for all of their advertising needs to a single agency. So if back in 1990, the Ford Motor Company had decided to hire the New York based advertising agency of mobile suit and breakdown, then we would be designing the advertising accounts for the 1990 models of the Ford probe, Festiva and Taurus, plus maybe a little corporate pr to promote the company's then recent acquisitions of prestigious UK brands, Aston Martin and Jaguar plus anything else they wanted to advertise. And if somebody at Ford came to their senses and realized that mobile suit breakdown is in fact a niche anime podcast from 30 years in the future and not a chic Madison Avenue ad agency, then they would move all of those accounts as a block to an actual agency. But in Japan, those accounts would be assigned piecemeal. One agency would handle the ad campaign for the probe, another for the Taurus, and so on. In the euro american system, agencies are not supposed to handle the accounts of directly competing clients. An agency working for Chevrolet and bidding for the account of Chrysler would know that winning the latter would mean losing the former. But in the japanese system, with every big company spreading their advertising business across multiple agencies, this kind of exclusive relationship was neither possible nor desirable. Thus, an advertising agency like Sotsu. A lot of these agency names end in Tsu. It's because they're using the same kanji, which means an expert or an authority. Anyway, Sotsu could work with toy maker Clover on Trider G seven and combat mecha Zabungle while also working with Bondi on the mobile suit Gundam movies at the same time. One of the reasons that companies preferred splitting their counts ties back to what I was saying about agencies negotiating special sweetheart deals with particular media outlets. If an agency negotiated a 50% discount on ads purchased in a certain newspaper, it might then go to its clients and offer them a 20% discount or 10%. They might not offer any discount and just pocket the difference, plus their normal commission calculated on the basis of that higher rate. And if the client only worked with a single advertising agency, and if that agency offered them something close to the newspaper's standard rates, well, the client might never realize that the agency was leveraging its position to enrich itself at the client's expense. But if the client employed two agencies, or three agencies, or four agencies, and if those agencies all worked with the same newspaper but offered the client different rates, well, then the client has learned something and they can go back to that first agency and say, thank you so much for all of your hard work. We really appreciate it. We do think you can give us a better rate, though. The other major difference in the japanese advertising agency world, at least for our purposes, was the role that agencies played in television program development, which is where we'll pick up next weekend.
Next time on episode 10.7, strange tactics we research and discuss episode seven of Victory Gundam and Joyride. Go on, kid, get out of here. The tradition of biking from the old century sometimes a family is a kid, a dog, a haro, and a second, smaller kid. What if a motorcycle were also a tank? That is how the bibbies do.
We're jumping onto USo's face.
Zanskar stands for old fashioned values like torture and public executions. The kid gloves come off, and if you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine. Please listen to it.
Mobile suit breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina, in Scenic New York City, within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dioxin. The closing music is long way home by spinning ratio. The recap music is slow by Lloyd Rogers. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the lenape people, and more in the show notes on our website, gundampodcast.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email hosts@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@gundampodcast.com. Patreon. You can find links and more ways to help out@gundampodcast.com. Support thank you for listening. The mobile suit breakdown fandom has been corrupted by wrong opinions, and the only way to purify ourselves is by exposing them to the light of day. Can you believe that? Ryan thinks whenever I get sick, my role in the podcast should simply be replaced by a stock recording of the victory Gundam's combination sequence. The sponsors might be on board with a crassly commercial substitution like that, but not me. If I'm going to be replaced, it'll be by a text to speech robot voice that just says.
The tradition of biking from the old country.
Country century.
Oh, yeah, old country. Just.
Yeah, old country just flows off the tongue. I like that. The tradition of biking from the old country. In February of 2022, Victory Gundam producer Ueda Masua. He twoted a photo. Can I steal your water? Yes, you have a full glass. And I'm like, on the drakes with my tea. How is it so far?
It's great. I'm very interested. I love this kind of stuff where it's like, you didn't know that this was important, but it turns out it's extremely important.
Can the youths of today even read Shakti's message about Casarelia?
It is at least a very clear, legible cursive.
No, don't. Awu. $25. Fine.
Do you want to do. We're jumping onto USo's Facebook.
All right. Shall I stop it, or do you have anything else you want to say? Do.
No, I think I'm done.