You're listening to season ten of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci-Fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is episode 10.23 under the sign of the z or z for our listeners who are wrong and we are your hosts. I'm Tom, and this used to be a free podcast before Zanskar. Free in the sense of liberated, not free in the sense you don't have to pay money for the podcast. It's still free.
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On MsB this week. Victory Gundam Episode 23 Zansuskaru Senyu or infiltrating Zanskar the episode was written by Okea Akira, storyboarded and directed by Ashizawa Takeshi, with Nishimura Nobuyoshi as animation director. And now the recap.
The Earthenoid kids and Highland kids are hard at work encircling the Aeneas in a debris studded net that will make the ship look like an asteroid on radar, when Martina suddenly faints and has to be helped back inside. Feverish and dizzy, with sharp pains in her belly, she lays in bed while the adults discuss what to do. They need a doctor, but the nearest colony is the Zanskar capital itself, a place in which some of them may be wanted criminals. Urgent need wins out, and they begin their approach to the colony. Zanskars home Guard has been understaffed ever since the Mutterman fleet left to fight the side two alliance, and the patrols consist of inexperienced pilots and student soldiers. Young and half trained, they spot the Aeneas and, thanks to the camouflage, think it's an asteroid. But this asteroid is headed straight for the colony and should be intercepted before it can damage a mirror or other important equipment. Buso deploys dummies for additional cover, yet the dummies tip off the patrol. No civilian ship uses them after all. Once the patrol spots the Victory Gundam, the student soldiers are ordered to attack and launch their own mobile suits. Even two to one, theyre no match for Uso and the victory, and he quickly manages to trap one of the enemy mobile suits from behind, holding the pilot hostage in exchange for abandoning their ship mobile suits and weapons. Ousso lets the soldiers go safe for now. USO cuts open an exterior hatch on the colony covering the gap. Once the Aeneas is inside from the small hangar, Uso is able to cut into a passageway and hold an instant airlock in place as the others secure it with birdlime while the rest of the group rush martina to the doctor. Uso's job is to distract any other patrols that get close and prevent them finding the ship. Flying around just outside, marveling at his first close up view of a living colony, USO spots some kind of bright orange, eight legged, insect like mobile suit crawling on the colony exterior, one for which he has no data. It is the sandhoge, a repair mobile suit retrofitted by the local colony corporation for use in combat. Piloted by the patrol unit, USO fought earlier, accompanied by a colony corp representative, USO fights cautiously, unwilling to risk damage to the colony that could put its million inhabitants at risk, and the patrol fights recklessly, eager to prove the strength of the sandhog and full of excitement at the prospect of heroically capturing an enemy mobile suit, they do not call for backup. The Sandhog fires a barrage of clamps at the victory, one of which catches on the victory's arm, pulses with electricity and shorts the beam saber. Another, clamping over the victory's face, shorts the mobile suits monitors, leaving USO temporarily fighting blind. Seizing the advantage, the sandhoge fires multiple cables from the end of its segmented body, further entangling and immobilizing the victory. USO charges in close, preventing the enemy from firing their heavier guns. They disengage and duck out of sight, leaping out to grab the victory, kneeing it over and over while another limb breaks the barrel off the beam rifle. Little do they expect that the rifle still works, and Uso drives them back with beam fire before neatly severing the sandhozha's legs from its body. He leaves it, unarmed and drifting, and returns to the Aeneas. Just inside the colony sits a large red spherical robot with a single menacing arm, some kind of local repair or sentinel robot. It has been disabled, and Haro bounces next to it, waiting for Uso with a note from the others, the address for the doctor. Searching for an unobtrusive way into the residential part of the colony, Uso runs into another sentinel bot, but is able to immobilize and short it with his wire gun. Peeking up through hatches and manhole covers, he finally finds a quiet spot to emerge, eventually finding his way to the doctor's office outside, Warren and Odello tell him that Martina is out of surgery but will need to spend a few days recovering at the hospital. Excited, barking down the street catches their attention and who should come bounding up but Flanders? Moments later, Suzy rounds a corner carrying Carlman. She collapses in the middle of the street, sobbing with happiness and relief as Warren and Odello comfort her, ecstatic to be reunited. Uso's smile is tinged with sadness. He is happy that his friends have finally found their little sister, but he still has not found Shakti.
I kind of love this episode, but not for the reasons that I usually like an episode. In terms of the portrayals of the main characters, the characterizations of Uso and the various kids from Highland, from Largaine, etcetera. Honestly, there's nothing there that's particularly novel or that interesting. Uso is still caught between the war and Shakti. People are still speculating about his motivations. Odello is still jealous of him. Warren and Odello are still totally into the clansky sisters. On the Zanskar side, we get some new characters we've never met before who are extremely thinly characterized, but it's everything going on around and behind that that is so interesting. It's a phenomenal view into life in the universal century in space, the technology, the social structures. We see a lot of things here that we don't often get to see from Gundam.
In particular. I loved getting a glimpse inside the Zanskar homeland, the Zanskar castle, because all of our exposure to Zanskar so far has been aggressive military forces, invading armies, huge space fleets, and, uh, I gotta say, this new empire is pretty, uh, baby town frolics.
You're not, you're not impressed by what you see.
What I see is a, a country, an empire, a force that has spread entirely too thinly and that has spent a massive amount of resource on these various military activities and in the process has hollowed out their own capital.
That was striking to me, too.
I mean, the guard patrol outside the palace is all young kids. The red headed freckled one made me think of Matilda, but ten years younger, theyve got the public exhorting middle schoolers to enlist. Like the cab driver says to USO, the student soldiers clearly have no combat experience. They are raw recruits and frankly, even their senpai, who they do not address by title, they just call him senpai, may talk a big, tough game, but also has no combat experience. When USO takes one of the student soldiers captive and says, if you don't surrender, I'll kill him, he's not sure what to do. He's like, uh, do we call for reinforcements? Question mark?
Yeah. The kids from the league militaire and from Highland are so accustomed to combat at this point, and the formal soldiers they're facing are complete amateurs. Yeah. Also, the parts of Amelia or Emiria that we see here are, like, pretty impoverished looking, and yet Odello seems to suggest that it was once a very wealthy colony. He has that line about like, oh, that's what you'd expect from a myria, a lady like that. A classy, beautiful, rich looking lady like that. Even in a neighborhood like this, I.
Thought that spoke more to perhaps a sense of cultural cachet, that Ameria used to be the sort of place where, you know, people are very put together and fashionable, even if they live in poorer neighborhoods where there is a certain attentiveness to that kind of beauty in public life and as part of everybody's lives. And that might even speak to just generally, the people of Ameria being better off, even if they don't live in the more fashionable parts of town.
Right. Well, and generally space noids being better off than earth noids, since Odello and company are accustomed to conditions on the earth, which it seem like, are not that nice right now.
So she has to be important, right? We didnt spend all that time looking at her getting out of a car and walking into an alley for her to never show up again.
Im pretty sure thats the queen in disguise. Could she be meeting with somebody? And if susie is here, then where is Shakti? Could she be nearby? Could she be meeting with her mother in disguise? The cultural cache you mentioned is really anathema to the kind of militaristic society that Danskar is turning itself into. That focus on. I mean, the soldiers are wearing these pretty drab uniforms. The focus on dedicating all of your resources to industry, production materiel to warfare, is incompatible with spending money on culture, books, poetry, clothing, all the things that make life enjoyable.
Well, rationing becomes a sign of patriotism, and the only sort of acceptable luxuries, the only acceptable entertainment per se or art, has to also further that patriotic furor to support the military, to support the expansionist policy, to deprive yourself of certain things for the good of the empire.
If the process goes on long enough, everybody ends up wearing the most utilitarian clothing or reusing old clothing, using stuff that uses the bare minimum of materials. Even kids who are not actually enrolled in the military will wear increasingly militaristic looking uniforms in school. Like, this is, this is a process we have seen play out many times in societies throughout the world. And now in space.
The contrast between the image of the colony as introduced, where it looks almost like a gun pointed at the moon, and then the reality inside the colony. The student soldiers mention that ever since the Mutterman fleet left, local patrols have been shorthanded. Which begs the question, why did Zanskar attack Earth when they did? Because if they already are struggling to field a large enough force to fight the other colonies inside, too, their nearest neighbors, who, for their own security, they really need to conquer quickly. Why did they attack Earth when they did? Are there resources that they're desperate for? Was it a.
What was that rare mineral that McVeigh was trying to extract?
Oh, gosh, I don't know.
Solidum? Solidium. Something like that. Sol. Anyway, was it a made up one.
Or a real one?
No, it was made up, and it was. I'm pretty sure it's the only time it has ever been mentioned in all of gundam. Now, I have this in my notes, too, because it's a really compelling question. First of all, the title of empire for Zansgar seems deeply aspirational. Yeah, they are a tiny little nation out in space. They are only one of what seem to be many, many competing warring states in space, a phrase that the show has now used multiple times to describe the situation and I think is completely apt for another reason, which is in the two, like, distinct warring states periods, the one in China and the one in Japan. Although I've seen a lot of great jokes about how we should refer to the period during the decline and collapse of the Roman Empire as the european warring States period. But anyway, in both the Japan and the China examples, there was a lot of fighting over the capital and over the personage of the empire. And these tokens of symbolic authority, which no longer had any actual power in the world, and a lot of lives and resources were wasted trying to occupy Kyoto or chang'an. And because there is a spiritual and political legitimacy that you obtain by seizing the capital, even when it's no longer relevant.
Right? I mean, everybody's gunning to be the Tokugawa shogunate, right? Everyone is gunning to be the family, the domain, the structure that manages to survive the Warring States period and ultimately coalesce authority once again.
Well, at the beginning of the Warring States period, there was this ten year war called the Onin War. I've talked about it on the podcast before, but, like, ten years of really vicious fighting in Kyoto itself, at the end of which the capital is devastated. The capital is basically reduced to the level of a couple of villages. And one of the enduring questions about this is that we don't really understand what anyone involved in this was trying to accomplish. The goals seem to have shifted over time. The alliances shifted, but they were fighting over Kyoto even though there was no discernible value to it, really, and I think that's the case with earth. Like Kyoto, earth has been reduced to irrelevancy, except that it still has that spiritual power. And Zanskar, because of its entanglement with Maria ism, is deeply concerned with spiritual legitimacy.
And as we have mentioned several times over previous episodes, Zanskar does not always behave logically. They do not always take the actions that seem to make the most practical sense. Someone may have been overconfident and thought that, oh, surely most of side two will rally around us once they see how sensible our arguments are, and then we will only have to deal with a few small, scattered malcontents versus, oh, like a lot of side two is actually allying against us now. Oopsie daisy. Two other things really stood out to me in terms of the situation on Zanskar. The conditions on Zanskar. Every time our core group of people cut through something, I expect an alarm, maybe not in that first area, since it seems like it was not pressurized, but the moment they cut into the colony itself, before they attach that hatch, you'd think there would be some kind of depressurization alarm of some kind somewhere in this facility. You assume that there must be several rooms full of people who are constantly monitoring conditions aboard the colony just for safety, because it's dangerous not to know if there's a leak somewhere.
Well, that's why they have those giant, angry security haros rolling around in the corridors of the colony, zapping anybody they.
Meet, which, again, okay, so you have these automated patrols, robotic patrols, large, angry harrows. They appear to be shockingly easy to disable, and again, within seconds of it, encountering someone who does not simply state why they're there. Why is there no alarm to some human person to follow up on this?
They've outsourced everything to AI and fired all the human engineers, or so many.
Working adults have been co opted by the war effort that there simply aren't enough left to properly maintain the colony and the colony's own security.
Are you telling me that the human races obsession with warfare is not only actively destroying our environment, but also sapping the resources necessary to maintain it in safety?
No, no, no. It's not that at all. Its merely that we beggar basically everything else in society while we fund massive militaries to no obvious purpose to that point.
In this episode, one of the new characters we meet is Mister name. Somewhat unclear.
Zubrach.
You would think so on account of the subtitles, but in the Japanese as spoken by the senpai, it's Zuguroku. And then it's a different thing in the credits. It's Zuburofu in the credits, which is close enough to like Zubroch that I assume that's what it's supposed to be. There's a polish vodka that has a similar name, which is the closest thing to it I could find.
He was the next bit that I was going to bring up because his appearance in the show tells us one there is a colony corp here. They have not been entirely nationalized and theyre at least somewhat independent. He talks about the Sandhog as something that we gave you this, like, we didnt have to let you use this mobile suit. Im doing you a favor.
I think thats not what he means in that sentence.
Oh, okay.
I think he means capturing the victory and then giving them the victory to deliver as a prize of war is the mobile suit that he's giving as a favor. But I think what he's doing with the Santosh is he's trying to prove that this like colony maintenance and repair robot that he has weaponized is a good war platform and then he can sell it to the Zanskar army. He is a perfect encapsulation of what you were just talking about, because here we have a civilian maintenance machine and he's like, I want to prove that this is just as good a war machine as the actual purpose built war machines.
It also feels hilariously ahistorical for him to be talking about. This is my lifelong dream because the original mobile suits came out of machines built for maintenance, repair, construction, et cetera, in space. And while it seems that the retrofits he's made to the Sandhog have made it a really interesting, combat usable mobile suit, he had to make retrofits to do that. Something custom made for a purpose is generally going to be better at that thing than something you kind of jerry rigged together.
And if Uso had felt free to use his weaponry, I don't know that the Sandhog would have put up much of a fight. But the fact that UsO feels like he can't use his rifle in this environment because UsO sees the colony as land, Uso sees the colony as a place where people live that needs to be preserved and protected.
This is Uso's first glimpse of a living colony. He's fought inside dead ones, and he's very aware of how many people are there. And I think after his experiences so far fighting in space and his experience of war on earth is hyper aware of how vulnerable this environment is, of how vulnerable all those people are.
I think Mister Zuberlch's attitude about the sandhoge is actually very understandable if you perceive him as a fellow mecha fan who saw a cool robot and was like, it's unfair that all of those other less cool robots get more credit. I have seen the coolest robot. We've all done this. We've all seen a robot that, like, speaks to us in a particular way and we fixate on it. And it's like, that one might not be the best, it might not even be very good, but it's my favorite, and I'm gonna prove to the world that it's worthy of their esteem. This is a. This is a guy who has customized a stock car. This is a guy who has turned a bulldozer into a tank. This is Killdozer man.
This is also someone who, by dint of age and position, has more authority in this little group than he probably should. Like that one kid who ignores him is right to do it. They should not be worrying about trying to capture this mobile suit if doing so will endanger the colony. And they had USO. They had a moment when they probably could have taken out the victory if they had acted quickly and they didn't.
And instead of destroying it, they chose to repeatedly knee the victory in its robogroin.
Yeah, one of the sillier moments of.
The episode, that whole sequence when the victory gets tied up, disabled, gagged. Like, I'm not the only one who sees this, right? Like, this is like a bondage thing. This is. This is the director's thinly disguised fetish. This is not the first time Tomino has done this.
Although the being knead in the groin over and over and over again just feels like a nod to sort of more juvenile, humorous.
Yeah, that's true.
America's funniest home videos. Like, hahaha. That person got hit in the groin. Hilarious.
The leering glee of the sandhogia's operators as they're doing that and the fact that it shoots electric webs out of its spinneret. It truly is a robot spider.
It feels like a part spider, part wasp, because the segmentation on the body and the way it curls the body feels more like depictions of wasps and bees.
And it has a distinct, like, proboscis. It's kind of an ant thing going on as well in the way it.
Moves, but it has eight legs and a spinneret. But, yeah, the fact that this patrol went to this colony corp official for assistance when they needed another mobile suit and then that even the most senior of them doesn't seem to feel empowered to say no to this guy and to be like, you're here as a courtesy. I am in charge. This is a military operation. Speaks to a lack of experience on their part, even the part of senpai.
Well, the senpai, whose actual name is Nomaizu Zeta and who is played by Yanada Kiyoyuki, the same guy who played Zabine Sharu in Formula 91, is probably, like, a cadet, an ensign. Maybe he's a sergeant or something. I don't know. Gundam almost never actually depicts enlisted soldiers, so he's probably like a lieutenant junior grade, but you take my meaning, like, he is a young, inexperienced, low ranking kind of guy, closer to his student charges than he is to anybody else. The prevalence of young soldiers in Zanskar, though, kind of makes a lot of interactions from the beginning of the show feel weird now. Like, why did Watari Gila kill himself out of shame over fighting a 13 year old when it's abundantly clear that the Zanskar army enlists 13 year olds?
So I don't know exactly how much time has passed from episode one to now, but my impression is that Zanskar did not necessarily start enlisting children until shortly before the Muturman fleet left, or possibly right after, because remember, that's from the recap episode.
Yeah, you know, actually, speaking of that recap episode, I noticed this at the time, and I didn't think it was significant enough to mention it, but they do a pan over the audience, and the audience of soldiers listening to the speech are very, like, distinctly middle aged.
Yeah, well, remember I pointed out how many of the people who make appearances in that episode, some of the older advisors and generals or admirals, have old, probably war wounds, missing an eye, facial scars, things like that.
I think that was our first hint at how totally militarized this society has become. And like so many of their fighting age, people have gone and died on earth.
Like, they sent the primary force to earth. Then they needed another force, and they took mostly older folks. Now they don't have enough people left to defend the capital, so they're recruiting younger.
This tells you something about their political imperative to conquer these other colonies. They need the people. There was that line some episodes ago where they talk about the power of the guillotine to transform a conquered colony into a part of the empire. And I think that's, like, that's what they need to do. The logic of imperialism here necessitates that they continue conquering so that they can have the troops available to defend what they've already taken.
And every layer, every perimeter conquered around the capital increases the safety of the.
Capital, but it also increases the resources necessary to defend the perimeter. This was Napoleon's problem.
Unless you get substantial buy in from conquered peoples, you're basically in a pyramid scheme problem. You constantly need more money coming in, or the whole thing collapses. Well, money and resources. It was very funny to me that Odello seems almost surprised by how militarized Zanskar is, because given everything that we have heard various Zanskar officials say over the last 20 odd episodes, that's what I expected from their society. But Odello is younger than me, and.
Odello has mostly not gotten to hear what the Zansgar people are saying the way we have.
And even from what has been broadcast, what's been shared, he might not put together that all of this imperial activity, all of this aggression, is generally accompanied by militarization at home.
Mm hmm. That imperialism reflects outward and inward. Also, Odello continues to know rather a lot about space life. And despite having never been to space, he may have come in with a lot of preconceptions about what life would be like in the colonies, and this is not living up to them.
One bit that made me scoff out loud when we first watched the episode is that this colony used to be called America.
I am not convinced that that's America.
You're not?
So I. Let me explain myself, okay? Because I can understand why you would, uh. You would think that they just filed off the letter c. I know of four instances in Tomino directed gundam works where something is called Ameria. One of them was a woman whose name was probably meant to be Amelia. That was Capricorn, Kakuler's girlfriend, who he calls out to when he burns up on reentry after his balut system is destroyed by Camille. This is the second one. The other two appear in future shows, so I can't say too much about them except that they are nations, and they do very much seem to be more or less analogous to the United States. However, in Strabo's geographica, which is a old latin end of the roman republic, beginning of the empire. Text on geography.
Strabo was a historian, right?
Yeah. There is a small town in Asia Minor, which is to say in Anatolia called Ameria, that had a significant temple that was associated with the God and goddess of the moon. And Tomino has a lot of interest in deities who are associated with the moon. And given that it was part of the kingdom of Pontus and relatively close to Sinope, I think there are reasons to think it might be that a maria. Also, because Zanskar has a whole greek and roman mythology naming scheme for their warships. Other colonies inside, too, are named after places in Greece.
You make a good argument, and I can definitely see it being that instead, the other moment that comes right after that, though, Uso describes Ameria as a free colony. And I want to be like, define free. What exactly do you mean by that? Or a free society of free.
It's just sitting there in space. Anyone can take it.
I assume he means democratic in government with a lot of civil liberties, but it's such a vague term to use. And it's possible that some of what we are seeing here in Zanskar is meant to be reflective of some other conflicts we saw in the region, that saw societies that were more free, more democratic, with more civil rights and human rights protections shift either through violent takeover, through politics, through both, to being much more conservative, much more religious, much more theocratic or militaristic governments. This happened in Afghanistan, it happened in Iran. In both cases, quite a bit before this show happened. But this is a thing that can and does happen to societies. I mean, it happened in Japan. It happened.
Yeah. I mean, there have been a lot of references in victory already to Czechia, some to the old Czechoslovakia. And Czechoslovakia was one of the first victims of World War Two, one of the first victims of german aggression. And those references to places in Czechia, to czech political figures out of history, those have been on the earth league, militaire, highland side. So they are the victims of Zanskar's aggression. I think we joked Zanskar is every empire. And, you know.
Yeah. I mean, Weimar Germany, the Roman Republic.
Turning into the Roman Empire.
Yeah. Pick an empire from basically anywhere on the planet Earth. I had one note that the first of those red patrol balls that USO encounters, I love him going like, did it break down? Did they reprogram it while there's a big bullet hole in its faceplate that he apparently just does not notice.
And I love just Haro sitting on top of it. When I first saw that I assumed Haro had killed the robot.
Maybe it did. Maybe Haro shot it in the face.
I am not convinced that Haro didn't. I mean, we know Haro can contain messages within his little mouth thing. Maybe he has a gun in there, too.
He has that little grapple magnet thingy that he can shoot.
Loved the little emergency airlock that they have.
Probably a very important piece of safety equipment.
Absolutely. But it's part of the whole background of the episode that teaches you, shows you so much of what life in the universal century is actually like. I loved the bit where they have to match their speed to the rotation of the colony, which is rotating faster than you think it has to in.
Order to maintain the gravity.
Right. But if they had gone in via the spaceport at the ends in the like, non rotating center block, then you don't have to do that. I'm sure it's rotating relative to some frame of reference, but, like, slower.
I know you didn't think much of the characterization in this episode, but there are some interesting sort of contrasts built up. I think we've already talked a lot about the student soldiers of Zanskar versus these kids sort of loosely affiliated with the league militaire. The contrasting statements of this fighting style are they guerillas? Versus like is all they know how to do. Shooting at me directly. This is pretty funny.
Uso's just on another level. There's a recurring theme where USO and company keep doing things to try to avoid combat, and then those very things seem to contribute to them being forced into it. This happens at least three times.
Well, the disguise. It's a great disguise. It's good. But if anybody notices. Wait, that's a pretty large asteroid. And it is headed straight for the colony. That is, in fact, dangerous.
Exactly. Or when they deploy dummies and they're like, no civilian ship carries dummies. And then again, when they see the sandhoge crawling around the surface of the colony looking for them, theyre like, oh, USO, theyre coming for us. You need to go and lead them away. But they hadnt actually seen them yet. Its only the light from the victory going out to distract them that actually catches the attention of the sandosh. Theres got to be something there. They did it three times. Thats a pattern.
And theres also a contrast built up between the earth noid kids and the highland kids, who are all spacenoids. Part of which seems to be that the highland kids maintain a lot more calm in tense situations. They are less quick to the trigger. And I don't know how much of that is attributable to, like, trauma of what the earthenoid kids have been through. Admittedly, the Highland kids were taken hostage in an effort to control their parents. They've been menaced. They have not seen presumably dozens, if not hundreds of people executed by guillotine in a public square. They have not seen their home burned to the ground, decimated, rendered uninhabitable rubble. And so now that the earthenoid kids have the resources at their disposal to defend themselves, they are very quick to say, oh, is that a threat? I should get rid of it immediately. Whereas the Highland kids seem to be more ready to take the risk of trying to simply avoid the danger or talk their way out of it.
Well, the highland kids, it seems like with their families, are accustomed to life under the power of Zanskar, or at least within the sphere of influence of Zanskar.
They already know a sympathetic doctor in town who helps people without asking too many questions.
So their approach to these kinds of situations is hide, run, look innocent, talk your way out of it. Odello and Warren, they spent a lot of time on the camion, being attacked directly all the time on earth. The rule was, if Bespa sees you, they're going to start shooting. So you'd better shoot first. I wanted to bring up a translation issue with you here because it's about this first encounter and Warren's desire to fire the missile. A very Odello like emotion coming from him. In the english translation, Warren says the first missile took out a dummy doll. I'm firing, but I thought that was kind of weird because they weren't being attacked with missiles. They were being attacked by beams. And the beam didn't destroy a dummy. It destroyed a meteorite. So I looked at this line in Japanese, and the Japanese is, ipatsu misaerua dami ningy shikonde Arukara utsuyo. I'm pretty sure what he's saying here is because the first missile, like the first of their missiles that they've loaded, contains a dummy. I'm going to fire it, which is confirmed a little bit later when he actually does fire the missile, and it releases a bunch of dummies.
And I took a couple minutes to look over that line again with Tom, and I'm pretty sure he's correct that Warren is saying, well, there's no explosive loaded in the first missile slot. It's dummies loaded there. I'm gonna fire them now.
And to me, this feels like a very strange translation mistake. I'm not sure how one would make.
This mistake if they didn't have the video to go from.
Yeah, if you weren't working from the video. But I also like there's nothing in that sentence that conveys the sense of something being taken out, something being destroyed.
But if you didn't have video to go off of, you might puzzle what exactly the line is meant to be, because Shikone de Aru indicates that something has been prepared or readied, and if you don't know that they shoot the dummies, it'd be a very confusing line. Basically, if you are strapped for time and you don't have the video to watch, you would be hard pressed to understand what exactly this line is supposed to mean.
Yeah, yeah, I get that USO worries.
That the presence of the victory is what puts everyone in danger, but the victory has also saved everyone's lives a couple times over now and is the only reason the kids aren't still in captivity and have been reunited with their parents. So his tendency to fret over his position continues. I think it's probably a waste of mental energy at this point, but that, of course, doesn't stop us from worrying over the things that bother us.
There are repeated references to Odello's jealousy.
I love this little interaction, actually, with Alicia. Yeah.
Grabs his sleeve in a surprisingly intimate.
Little gesture so both of the sisters seem to have a sort of no nonsense practical air about them. Martina has had a fever, presumably all day, maybe longer, but has kept working because what else is she gonna do?
And it seems to be that she has appendicitis. Yeah, pretty bad. Yeah, pretty bad thing to happen to you in space.
Well, that was my guess. The moment the adults say she needs a doctor because fevers are not all that unusual in childhood when you're sick. But for her to have either a high enough fever or a fever accompanied by symptoms that tell you immediately, oh, this person needs a doctor. Yeah, appendicitis was my guess. I was vindicated. Love.
When that happens now she'll never be a new type. The newtype powers come from the appendix. That's what it's for.
And then, I don't think Odello entirely absorbed or understood this, but in her own practical, no nonsense kind of way, Elisha is complimenting him. He feels this frustration at USO's ease in space, that USo seems to be adapting so readily and so quickly to all of these new experiences, new tasks. But she doesn't just say being jealous is a waste of time. Work on yourself. She tells him to focus on his own talents, basically that he must have things that he is good at and that that should be where his focus is, not on Uso's skills, not on comparing himself to Uso, but on what he is good at and can get better at, and the way he panics when he realizes she's taken his wrist.
And I kind of doubt Odello is going to take it this way because he is a young man and young men generally do not take things this way. But the fact that Alicia thinks he's worth the effort of trying to help him better himself is actually a really.
Positive sign, because she could just ignore him, or she could just tell him off, or be like envy is really.
Unattractive and walk away. But no, it's a sweet scene between the two of them, almost as sweet as the reunion at the end of the episode when Flanders comes barreling down the street, presumably having smelled Uso, and then Susie right behind with Carlman on her back, everyone sobbing, Susie so happy.
And relieved she can't stop crying.
There is a whole story behind how she wound up there with Carlman on her back and Shakti nowhere to be found, and I hope they will show it to us in the next episode, or at least tell us how it came to be.
And now toms research on the names of Tomasz and his family from the Highland solar battery.
Although USO and company left the territorial borders of modern day Czechia many episodes ago, victory Gundam remains firmly within the regions spiritual penumbra. Its fascination with Czechia is now embodied in the family of new friend and ally Tomash, his younger brother Carl, and their father, named for the first time in this episode. The lattermosts name is written in the subs as V a C L a v, which I learned during the course of this research ought to be pronounced more like Vatslav. The Japanese roughly matches this batsurafu. All three names are typically czech, but what really drives the nail through the coffin and into a second separate coffin underneath the first one is their last name, Masariku. In the Japanese, Masaryk. In English, Thomas Masaryk thus shares his name with Tomasz Masaryk, founding father of the short lived Czechoslovak Republic. The original Masaryk served first as the head of the provisional government while in exile from his homeland during World War one, then as the country's first elected president from 1920 until retiring from public life in 1935. He died two years later at the age of 87. Two years after his death, Nazi Germany occupied the nation and dissolved its republic. Masaryk was born in 1850 in Moravia, then under the dominion of the Austrian Empire, near the border with modern day Slovakia. He came from relatively obscure origins. His parents were both servants, a coachman and a maid. At 15 he abandoned an apprenticeship to become a locksmith and started studying philosophy. He earned his doctorate at 26, and shortly afterward met, fell for, and married the Brooklyn born Charlotte Garrigue. Tomash's studies had taken him away from his homeland, but after their marriage the Masaryks set up house in Praha, where Thomas was appointed professor of philosophy and almost immediately got involved in progressive reformist politics. He served briefly in the imperial legislature as part of the young czech party and later under the banner of the Czech Progressive Party, which he himself founded. Much of his philosophical writing was about the corrosive effects of capitalism and modernity on the human soul. It was also deeply influenced by his faith. He had converted from Catholicism to Protestantism and considered the declining role of religion in society to be one of the major sources of the modern world's ills. But he was also a reliable champion of minority rights, even at the risk of public or government censure, as when he intervened in the blood libel prosecution of a young jewish man, Leopold Hilzner, accused of ritually murdering two young women, or when he joined the defense in the 1909 treason trials of the croat serb coalition. Masaryks outspoken opposition to imperial expansion put him into a tight spot when the austro hungarian annexations of Bosnia and Herzegovina and subsequent invasion of Serbia touched off the First World War in 1914. The following year he slipped out of the country and went into a self imposed exile, meeting with british and french leaders who recognized him as the chief representative of the czech liberation movement. Moving next to Russia, he played a key role in the creation of the Czechoslovak a small army of some 100,000 soldiers recruited both from the ethnic czech and slovak populations in Russia and from the czech and slovak prisoners of war captured by Russia in its back and forth campaigns against the Austrians. The story of the Czechoslovak Legion is one of the most dramatic war stories from an era of extremely dramatic war stories. But by the time they were distinguishing themselves on the battlefield in 1917 and 1918, Masaryk himself was in America meeting with President Woodrow Wilson. Masrek and the president shared a vision for the future of his homeland and its the dissolution of the Austro Hungarian Empire as an institution and the division of its constituent parts into smaller democratic nations along ethnic lines. The allied victory in World War one made his dream of an independent, pluralistic democracy for the Czechs and Slovaks, a reality. The new National assembly in Praha acclaimed him president. He would serve as the stable, almost universally respected center around which czechoslovakian politics whirled for 17 years, winning re elections in 1920, 1927 and 1934. I have focused thus far on Tomash Masrick because the reference in that name seems so straightforward that its hard to seriously doubt it. His younger brother Karl and his father Vaclav present trickier questions. Both of them are common czech names, but there are no particularly famous persons known as Karl Masrek or Vaclav Masrek. If we approach this question on the assumption that they are indeed references to specific people, and that those people are in some way satellite to the more famous and more obvious Tomasz Masaryk reference, then a few different options leap out to us. For Carl, the most immediate possibility is the real Tomash's own younger brother, Ludwig Masserek, whose middle name was Karl. But I find that an unsatisfying answer, and it's hard to know whether the person who named the character Karl probably but not necessarily Tomino himself would even have known about the real Tomash's brother of that name. Ludwig Karl chose the path of the businessman, and he died in 1914 in relative obscurity just before the outbreak of the war. He's not likely to feature prominently in any books about czech history or the life of his famous brother, and in those sources where he does appear, he is usually only identified by his first name. Ludwig I was only able to find that crucial middle name in online genealogical databases. Besides, does it make sense to obscure the name of the less famous sibling by using the middle name after you've already overtly lifted the full name of the more famous sibling. As for Vaclav, there doesn't appear to be anyone in Tomash Masaryk's immediate family going by that name. So my theory is that Karl and Vaclav take their names from other famous czech figures who are connected to Tomasz in some manner, friends, contemporaries, successors, something like that. Of course, it is entirely possible that these names were picked simply because they are common czech names. They may hold no special significance whatsoever, but still, lets consider the possibilities. Personally, I suspect that the fictional Vaclav Masaryk got his name from real world czech politician Vaclav Havel, who was the last president of Czechoslovakia. Like Masaryk, Vaclav Havel started his career among the intelligentsia well outside the world of politics. Rather than a philosopher, he was a celebrated playwright, but also, like Masaryk, his advocacy for reform decentralization and democratization in Czechoslovakia turned him into a political dissident. The Czechoslovak Republic of Tomash Masrik had been reestablished in 1945 after the end of World War two, but in 1948 their government was seized in a coup d'etat by the soviet aligned Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, who transformed it into the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic 20 years later as part of a broad package of reforms meant to reduce political centralization, democratize society, and liberalize the economy, the nation was formally divided into two co equal federated republics, the Czech Socialist Republic and the Slovak Socialist Republic. But the rest of that broader reform program was cancelled in August of 1968 when soviet troops invaded and occupied the country. The party leadership in Moscow viewed the reforms as a threat to soviet hegemony. That occupation triggered a months long period of mostly nonviolent civil disobedience within Czechoslovakia, followed by a long period of repression and censorship. Many of the reformers who had supported liberalization and the dissidents who had resisted the invasion were purged from positions of leadership or influence in politics, media and society. Vaclav Havel was one of those blacklisted during the period of so called normalization that followed the invasion. Effectively banned from working in the theater, Vaclav turned to politics. Imprisoned twice for his activism, he eventually became a leading figure in the opposition, and when the Velvet revolution brought an end to communist rule in 1989, he was elected as the first and final president of the Czechoslovak Federative Republic, and he oversaw its dissolution into the fully independent czech and slovak republics that exist today. Then, in 1993, he became the first elected president of the new Czech Republic, which office he occupied until 2003. Youll notice a lot of this concentrates around the period in which victory was being made for someone interested in Czechia, as Tomino appears to have been at the time. Vaclav Havel's name would have been inescapable in the news. As for Karl, the life of the real Thomas Masrick is abundant with potentially significant karls. But for a couple of reasons, I choose to believe that the name was taken from the author Karl Chappek. First, Chappech was Masaryk's contemporary and his friend. He wrote a kind of biography about the philosopher politician based on their conversations called talks with TG Masarik. A japanese translation by Ishikawa Tatsuo was published in April of 1993, and it proved popular enough to get a second printing later that year. Second, we know that Tomino was interested in czech literature. He's confirmed that the name Katagina came from a collection of czech literature in translation. The literature collection in question does not include any of Chopek's novels or plays, but there was a boom in interest in his work starting in 1990. Many previously untranslated works like the absolute at large were published in Japan in the early nineties, and others, like the war with the Newts, were republished with new translations. Now, if the whole time I've been talking about him, you've been thinking, I'm not really familiar with czech literature, but that name Karl Chapek still sounds kind of familiar for some reason. It's probably because of the third reason that I think he might have lent the first part of his name to Karl Masaryk, and that's because Karl Chapek is the author who introduced the word robot for an intelligent mechanical being in his 1920 play Rossum's universal robots, japanese translations of which were published in 1989 and 1992. So in a sense, chappek is kind of the godfather of the whole mecha genre, which seems like a pretty good reason to give him a nod in your Gundam tv show.
Next time on episode 10.24. Mother's helper we research and discuss episode 24 of Victory Gundam and family reunions. Surveillance State born on the wrong side side of the sheets chronicle the feminist Laphons cagatie papers, please. Cheez it, it's the fuzz NBA Easter eggs never tell me the odds hot wiring a gundam a surprising filial attitude Oliver loses his voice and sorry, uso, your princess is in another castle. 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 Mischa Dioxin. The closing music is long way home by spinning ratio. The recap music is slow by Lloyd Rogers. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the lenape people, and more in the show notes on our website, gundampodcast.com. if you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email hostsundompodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you would like to support the show, please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us financially@gundumpodcast.com. patreon. You can find links and more ways to help out@gundampodcast.com. support thank you for listening. There are a lot of wrong Gundam opinions out there corrupting the fandom. Wrong. Opinions like Zanskar had no choice but to invade Earth when they did because Queen Maria Armonia developed a crippling addiction to willow herb syrup while she was in Cossarella. And earth is the only place that can produce enough Willower to satisfy her cravings.
I have my mugi.
I have my water. I have my notes. I have my bowl of food in case the kitten comes to visit us.
Y'all. We've been having this heat wave in New York, and it's terrible because basically, every day we look at the cat and we're like, is she sluggish and sleeping a lot and not eating much because it's hot and that's how bodies behave in the heat? Or is she dying every day? Every day.
I haven't been sleeping well. Almost entirely. Cat anxiety.
Yesterday was terrible. Today is great. There's really no telling.
Okay. But this morning was terrible. It's just that the terribleness had resolved itself by the time you woke up. I had fixed the problem.
To each their own. You try increasingly elaborate measures to get the cat to eat. I make all the phone call appointments.
Are you prepared to give the cat her a little kitty IV?
No, not at all. I mean, in as much as I have acknowledged that I have to do it, that I know I'm gonna. You know, the vet sent a video. I'll watch it a few times. Thankfully, it's. It's not actually an iv. Right. I don't have to find a vein.
Right? No, it's just subcutaneous.
Right. And it's in the. What we think of as the scruff of the cat's neck, where there's a lot of, like, skin and fat, but not a lot of nerves. But it's still, like, I have to jab her with a sharp thing.
Yeah.
And keep her, like, distracted or still while I'm doing that, which she's not great about.
It's. It's wild to me that this even works, that you can just, like, inject a bunch of fluid under somebody's skin and then the body will just slurp it up.
Yep.
When they're like, oh, yeah, you're gonna see a bulge on her leg. Cause that's where all the water has gone. What?
That'll absorb in a couple hours.
What? Bodies are weird. I I keep. I mean, obviously, this is a complete fantasy and not going to happen, and I'm not seriously holding out for it or anything, but I keep hoping those are really bad numbers were just because she'd been, like, particularly sick that week. And the next time they do the numbers, it's gonna be, like, amazing. She's the first cat in history to cure kidney disease through strength of will.
Yeah.
Fidello is not beating the siderea.
Boo.
Allegations. Siderea from sidereal of or relating to the stars.
Mmm. Indeed. I paid a lot of attention to how Carlman is tied onto Suzie's back, and I'm pretty sure I could replicate.
It now with Tigris.
Tigress would claw me to ribbons. And she is not an aggressive cat at all. She's never scratched at us or bitten us or anything, even when we sort of, like, tried to pin her down and give her medicine. Even when we've had to put her in unpleasant situations for vet visits, she never gets aggressive at all. But I think if I try to tie her to my back, she might take issue. Yeah.