You're listening to season 10 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is episode 10.39, Guardian angel, and we're your hosts. I'm Tom and I didn't write an and this week.
And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam, and it feels significant somehow that many of our favorite episodes so far are also episodes that we deemed inessential to following the plot. Mobile Suit Breakdown is made possible by our brainy and beneficent paying subscribers. Thank you all and special thanks to our newest Mark C, Miguel S. Someone, Bradley G, Justin B, Jonathan gpsychodave, Dan R, and Brandon E. You keep us Genki. That's a lot more new patrons than we've had in a while. Did someone talk us up? Is Gundam having a moment? And a special thank you to Henry for supporting us on Ko Fi this.
Week we are covering victory episode 39, Hikari no Tsubasa no Uta aka the song of the Wings of Light. The episode was written by Okea Akira, storyboarded by Kase Mitsuko, and directed by Watanabe Tetsuya. The animation director was Osaka Hiroshi. This is Episode Director Watanabe's first contribution to Victory and indeed seems to be his first time as director on any project. He started in the industry as a production assistant on Food Appreciation anime Oishinbo in 1988 and moved up to assistant episode director on Sunrise's 1991 Mechashow Armored Metaljack. Since Victory, he has mostly been an episode director and storyboard artist, including on later Tomino projects Brain Powered Ternay Gundam and King Gaynor. He directed episodes of Neon Genesis, Evangelion, the Big O and Cowboy Bebop, among others, and his signature accomplishment as Chief Director is probably 2001's zone of the Dolores Eye. We're joined for this episode by a guest costume expert, Sarah, who you can find everywhere on the Internet as Sarah McCostumes. Much of Sarah's costume work for film, TV and theater is under various NDAs and cannot be discussed, but you can see a bunch of their costuming and cosplay work on Instagram and at Sarah McCostumes. Sarah is also a podcaster, most regularly on Yu Gi oh podcast Pod of Greed, and is the director of the exciting upcoming audio drama the Disappearances of Lydia Fontaine. For more of Sarah's takes on Gundam specifically, you can check out the podcast wow Cool Robot Season two, in which Sarah covers Zeta Gundam with co hosts Colin and Max. Now the recap. The White Ark, with its complement of teenagers with attitude, is on high alert as it enters Europe and the airspace of bespa's Largain base. Odello is particularly pleased with himself. His heroics in the battle against the last remnants of the Motorad fleet seem to have earned him a little affection from Alicia. And he is quick to rub that little victory in Warren's jealous face. Not everyone is feeling quite so energetic. USO sits alone in the cockpit of the V2, clutching the helmet of his mother's normal suit and remembering how she was crushed beneath the tires of a Bespa battleship. When a trio of Bespa planes fly by, USO is quick to intercept them, expecting another fight. But the scouts pass by without incident. The White Ark sets down in a lake near Cossarelia, and the kids, with Harrow and Flanders, set off to check out the old homestead. Except Martina, who still can't stand the smell of nature. But danger lurks in the idyllic woods. A huge force of Zolos from the Largain base lies in wait. Rather than hand their mobile suits and weapons over to the Federation as per the terms of the ceasefire, these men have gone rogue and now plan to ambush the newly arrived League Militaire ship. After all, the ceasefire is between Zanskar and the Federation. It's got nothing to do with these guerillas. While the kids air out USO's cabin and check on the fields, and while Flanders barks at all his favorite rocks, they are surprised by a sudden sun shower. Or so it seems, until fish start falling from the sky. This is no natural earth weather phenomenon. The White Ark must be using its shield, throwing up gouts of water from the lake. The kids race back to join the battle, with USO, using his old paraglider to board the V2 in mid air. There's no contest between the antiquated Zolos and the mighty V2. But despite Marbett's prompting and the danger to his friends, USO cannot bring himself to fight earnestly against these small fry. He fires warning shots to drive the enemy suits away. Away. But they interpret his hesitance as weakness, perhaps of skill or of spirit. With USO all but refusing to fight, his friends are forced to bear the brunt of the battle. Tomash is caught out alone ahead of the unit, and barely escapes being killed when he falls into a Bespa trap. The enemy commander orders an all out attack. They'll use up everything they've got right here, right now. Before letting the Federation confiscate even one pair of boots. As the huge force charges the white ark, USO throws the V2 to the ground and sets its wings of light to their maximum power. They're big enough that the bulk of the enemy formation passes between them, and through the invisible field of mega particles they generate, one after another, the Zolos crash harmlessly to Earth. All except the Commander. He swings back around for a final attack on the V2, but the Gundam stops him mid strike just by grabbing his Zolo's arm. Seeing that the Zolo is on the verge of exploding, Uso pops his cockpit and jumps across to rescue the enemy pilot, who is now shocked to see that his opponent is just a child. Uso hauls him out of the cockpit, but it's too late. He lives just long enough to share a poignant moment and inflict a little more psychological damage on the young boy. That evening, orders come in over the radio to move on to Largain Base, but the team is not yet ready. They have graves to dig for, friends and enemies both, and when they move on, they will leave behind a row of simple wooden crosses on a ridge overlooking the tranquil empty valley. Welcome, Sarah McCostumes. Sarah is here to help us talk through this episode and maybe to discuss a little bit about the costuming in Victory, which is Sarah's area of special interest and expertise. However, I want to lead off by talking about how we got here. Because, Sarah, you have not watched all of Victory, have you?
No, no. Although not for want of trying. My life is very busy and it's hard to access, so, I mean, let me paint you a word picture, listeners. I arrive at Tom and Nina's house approximately five days ago. I am tied to the strapped to the sofa, my eyes are taped open, and I am forcibly Clockwork Oranged through not every episode of Victory.
No, indeed, Count Oy Nyung style.
Yeah, nice callback to the beginning of the show. We came up with a skip watch list for Victory. Up to this point, only the essential episodes. And then it turned out that that was still too long for the amount of time that we actually had with Sara. So then we cut it down even further, cut it straight to the bone, and ignored most of the really good bits in order to just cover the absolute essentials to get Sara caught up to where we are.
Yeah, these are the Victory Gundam. Any percent Speedrun strats that they don't tell you about?
So in the course of that, though, we did get to rewatch a Bunch of early episodes, and a couple of things stood out to us about those. One is just how much better the animation has gotten over the course of the last 39 episodes.
It was not something I noticed as it was happening. But to go from episodes 37, 38, 39, back to episodes 1, 2, 3, 5, etc. There has been a substantial improvement in the quality of animation that's gone into this show.
This is especially appropriate for this episode narratively, because this is really a throwback. They're back in Cosarellia. They are kind of going through the motions of some of those earlier storylines. USO regresses to an earlier state of.
Wanting not to kill people.
Yeah, exactly. This desperation that he has not to kill his opponents that had gone away only fairly recently, has now returned with a vengeance.
Well, this is twofold, right? On the one hand, he and most of the other kids are talking and behaving as though they believe the war is more or less over. Warren is talking about how much work it's going to take to whip the fields back into shape. Shakti is airing the house they have come home as if to stay, or as if they think they will be able to return and stay very soon. And if USO has been thinking, okay, the war is over, I don't have to kill people anymore, and liked that idea, then it's going to be a bit of a blow to have to go back to his soldierly ways.
The idea has already been challenged by the couple of Dukeric episodes that we just watched, and once again USO finds himself in a real pickle as he now struggles with his improved skills and improved mobile suit not to kill all of these BESPA soldiers flying around in Zolos. Another throwback.
Well, yeah, he's struggling with his own greatness when Shakti points out that the fact that he's gotten so much better means he actually has to be more careful. We don't entirely get what she means by that until the fighting begins. And we get some additional comments from Marbit as well, that things like when USO fires what he means to be a warning shot, which he assumes any decent pilot could dodge. Yeah, and he takes out that mobile suit instead. They do not manage to get out of the way in time. And that he just feels bad killing people who are so much worse equipped and so much less skilled than he.
Is, but he's not yet skilled enough or powerful enough to be able to fight this way. He can't actually just like snipe their guns out of Their hands. He doesn't have that superhuman ability yet.
But apparently he can knock them out of the sky with his Mega Particle wing. Wing a lings.
Yeah, his wingdings.
How is it that a Mega Particle Beam cannon destroys things, but the mega particles between the wings merely knock those mobile suits out of the sky?
Credit where it's due, Victory has actually established this before again, early on, and I might have forgotten it if we hadn't rewatched a bunch of those episodes. But there are some early episodes where you see, like, the spray of individual megaparticles. Not the concentrated beam, not the death blast, but just, like, the spray nearby. And you see them, like, bouncing off the hull of a mobile suit and frying its electronics. So I think it's just like, the density is low. It's so low you can't even see them, but they're still there, and they're still enough to disrupt these mobile suits.
And it seems that USO knew that he could do that.
No one else did.
Nobody else did. It feels very much in keeping with his mom's vision for him as some kind of savior figure to give him this very not lethal, but useful ability.
Yeah, I mean, the V2 has angel wings. Angel wings that flap like wings?
Yeah. Question. Do they do that all the time or is it just in this episode?
I think this is the first time we've seen them flapping like that.
Right. This whole episode is up and down, textbook biblical mythological, especially you guys citing it as a place of cycling back to here. And we're in this rebirth situation, not just narratively but visually. We have the angel wings flapping gracefully like a bird, or an angel, as the title would apply. We have the Victory Gundam because he gets in it from his paraglider once again, and then it falls in the lake and he sort of emerges like Excalibur to confront the rest of the Zolos, which he absolutely smashes up.
And when we watched the episode with USO getting the V2 for the first time, where he does the soap bubble transition, what did you immediately clock that as?
I think I sort of. I just said, returning to the womb much, are we? Or something like that. Like, it was so amniotic.
Yeah, I think you said something like, oh, that's so placenticore. Or.
Yeah, I think I'd forgotten the word amniotic. But, like, I think, you know, shout out to the word, which I think was one of the words of last year, which was raw dogging.
It's in the dictionary.
It is now in the dictionary. And like, I thought of that in the episode where he raw dog space and he goes into space. And we can talk about this more in costuming section. But like, the. The most extreme thing you can do in space, the environment which needs the most amount of protection of clothing, of layers between you and space, is to go in naked, which he does when he gets the V2. And then I thought a similar thing in this episode when he raw dogs the entry to the V2 in the middle of the air. Every time I say the word raw dog, we can choose a different word. It was the word of the year.
He's not wearing a normal suit.
I mean, but my point being that, like, because it's in the early episode where he enters mobile suit just from the paraglider, just like yeeting himself in there. No protection, no provisions, no system, no structure, just like leaping in there. So he does that once again with the V2, falls into the lake and is baptism style, born again in his hometown. Now back in a mobile suit that has literal biblical style angel wings.
And in the previous episode also, he did kind of like part the seas with the shield of the V2. Yeah. You can view this, I think, quite reasonably as USO performing a series of miracles.
Yeah.
At the same time, you brought up mythology, and I kind of half wonder if both Tomash needing to crash to Earth and USO delivering this final blow to the enemy force by allowing himself to fall to Earth are meant to be like Icarus parallels or fallen angel or where exactly that's going, but that both of them.
Are there any, like, Christian biblical figures who sacrificed themselves, like, in a big way, who might be associated with their mothers receiving a visitation before their birthday?
That's a good question. Might have to do some research on that one.
Let me look it up.
Herod Harrowed.
Stupid. What if he was King Harrow anyway?
Just put a crown on him. Harrow deserves a crown.
Harrow is a king whether we give him a crown or not.
Where were we? Actually, I do have a question about this episode. It's a bit of a going back to stuff. Is Magis the Mr. Purple only for this episode. Really?
He's part of a long tradition of BESPA pilots who appear for one episode in order to teach USO an important lesson about how you, I guess, should just kill them because they're gonna die anyway.
Yeah.
It's possible also that they're trying to make a more explicit case about the sort of like, settler colonial attitude of Zanskar, which came out a bit in the previous episode with Dooker and Renda, but is made very explicit by this guy at one point he says specifically, yeah.
Is it the one where he's like, this is the land for my wife and children?
Yeah. I mean, he says, emphasis mine. The land meant for my wife and children. He says things like, if you people had never come, my daughters could have lived in a peaceful land. Which sort of implies that Zanskar is not peaceful, which is interesting.
Mm. Or that, like, life in space is inherently contentious.
It makes me wonder if Zanskar promised its soldiers land and promised that they would be allowed to relocate if they won the war.
Very traditional thing to do.
Yeah.
We've mentioned before that there seems to be this disconnect that like, for whatever reason, these an SCAR soldiers don't realize that if they could just get passage to Earth, they could disappear into the woods just like USO and Shakti's families have, and live there, albeit illegally. They're not supposed to be there, but you can live. It's a thing.
But they don't want to just live. They want to rule, they want to conquer.
I also wonder if there's this kind of like, intergenerational thing going on because we've talked about how much time has elapsed since first Gundam within the world of the universal century. And so if the people of Zanskar are the descendants of the poorer people who were forced into space, then they might have this idea in their heads that anybody who lives on Earth, anybody who's on Earth must be the descendants of the elites who forced their families into the brutal conditions of space. They don't know the actual conditions of Earth. They just know that their grandfather, or great grandfather, whoever, was forced to leave.
And it's a convenient lie, because the people on Earth are, as we have seen, mostly pretty poor. The infrastructure is not great. The cities are mostly like old fashioned or crumbling or both. The actual central government of the Federation, we have learned recently, is on the Moon. The actual elites live on the Moon. Earth is a place for like, illegal residents, a handful of like religious or cultural institutions that are allowed to be here. The small populations of little, like free cities like UIG and then crumbling Barcelona, the spaceport of Gibraltar and decrepit Mexico.
City, and that the Federation government doesn't seem to care a whole lot about what happens to Earth at this point.
It's also been a major theme in these last couple of episodes that the spacenoids are not suited to life on Earth.
Yeah, they come in to the Town and all the spacenoids are like, ew, it's stinky. How do you like that?
It smells like grass.
I don't like it.
The irony of that scene where we've just seen these beautiful, rich green fields with grazing cattle, the deep greens of the woods, the clean water Flanders paddling around in. And Martina hates it. She's like, it smells like rotting grass. I don't like it here.
The moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength, the certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the blessed machine. Your kind cling to your flesh as though it will not betray and fail you. One day, the crude biomass you call a temple will wither and you will beg my kind to save you.
Is this from, I assume, some video game or Warhammer 40K? What is this?
Warhammer?
It is in fact from the trailer to a Warhammer 40K video game.
Yeah.
And Warren noting this is the loveliest season. If she doesn't even like this, then there is no hope. I assume it's spring or early summer.
It's like so over the top, idyllic of them approaching. Like Shakti is singing, which we'll come back later. But like, she is singing as they idyllically wheel through the woods or hover through the woods. It's just like so over the top, beautiful. And it's so much that, like, Magis is hearing her song and is like, wow, this is amazing. This is the land that is destined for my wife and children. I'm going to live here for the rest of my life. It is sort of her song that makes him fall in love with this place.
It's like, great. First I need to kill all the people here who sing songs and then my children can come and sing their songs on this land.
The irony, he's like, careful not to destroy it. You're already doing it. He says that right after some Tomino animals walk by and get caught in a blast, like, immediately.
Yeah.
Quick aside before we talk more about the environment though. That mad respect to Warren for just going off with his friends without Martina when she seems mad that he asks her to go and then mad that he goes without her.
Right.
She just really doesn't like being on Earth.
Yeah.
It's very notable to me that like, Majus and Usor basically yelling and screaming and fighting for the same thing, which is, this is my home.
And what right do either of them have to it? What right do either of them have to live there or to exclude people from it which.
And I feel like, given the resolution of the battle, where USO goes and tries to save Majus from inside his disintegrating mech, I get the feeling that USO was very frustrated of this. Of, like, we didn't have to have this fight. You could have just lived here. Because at the end, when they bury everyone in a line of crosses like USO's Maz there, the rest of the Shrikes are there, and Majes is gets a cross of his own. And I noticed that the grave that USO has the breakdown on is Magius's, not his mother's. Like, he politely and sadly lays like a lily on his mum's grave. But then the one he breaks down over is Magius.
Well, he blames himself, I'm sure, for the guy's death.
USO is also, at least in this episode, portrayed as kind of the most honorable soldier. He doesn't want to kill a weaker enemy. He has all this respect for his defeated enemy and wants that man to live if he can help him live.
Perhaps the most honorable soldier is no soldier at all.
USO also is very affected by the senselessness of war. In particular, he can understand when it's a fight for your life and one or the other of you is probably going to die in it. He's accepted that. But this feels so pointless, and he just cannot wrap his head around it.
And once again, as the enemy retreats and his own allies go after them, USO is like, no, stop. You don't have to pursue them. They're retreating. Just let them go.
Yeah.
Again, calling back to earlier episodes when USO chased off some of Pippiniden's mobile suits, some of his Tomlyats, way back in, like, episode seven. And afterwards, the old man Polycule are dressing him down for that, like, look, they're just going to come back and try to kill you again.
Yeah.
Like, these are not people of goodwill with whom you can converse, negotiate and live comfortably alongside. They are here to kill you. They want to kill you and your friends and take your land.
Speaking of the senselessness of it all, on the one hand, when they're fighting, he says of the victory, you alone are the League militaire symbol.
Yeah.
Like, oh, if I can just take you out, that would serve some purpose. And yet, later, same episode, if you kill one of us, a second will follow. If you kill the second, a third will follow. Like, you cannot kill us with one blow. This man has no sense of irony whatsoever.
Yeah. I also, again, sort of a side note, but notice that in Majizu's desperation to, you know, take down the V2 specifically, he's, like, so kind of appalled that these people, these, like, guerilla, like savages who live in this land, like you people of here, could have made such angelic wings of light, such powerful technology. Yeah, like, how dare you? I guess what he perceives as natives.
Yeah, you inferior enemy.
Yeah.
But I do want to revisit that question of who has the right to live here and why, because that is something that the show is very interested in. These different characters all want to live on Earth and seem, for one reason or another, to be unable to share it. And, like, why does Oso have the right to live there? Why doesn't this other guy? Or does he? But he's going about it wrong. Because USO and his family are squatters. They're illegal residents. They have no legal claim to Cassarelia. But we acknowledge that they have a moral claim to it. On what basis, on what foundation do we derive that claim?
To the extent that the show takes a position, and I'm not convinced that the show takes a strong position on this issue, but to the extent that it does, it seems to say that people who are stewards of the land, who live with the land in the most sort of unobtrusive and undamaging way possible, are the ones best entitled to live there. And that if there is a reason, if there is a thing that disqualifies the invading soldiers from living here, it is the thoughtless destruction that they wreak on the place that they keep claiming to care a lot about, and their.
Disregard for the people who already live there and for the expertise that those people have. Which, again, I think goes back to that idea of stewardship you suggested. Because think about the people on Earth who have been given the most positive presentations. People like old man Rob in Barcelona, who has turned all of this mobile suit junk into an artificial reef for the fish there. Or uso, just like, as a farmer, as a kid who wants to work the land. And Odello and Warren talking about, like, oh, with a little bit of work, we can bring these fields back into use.
Shakti and her cloth diapers. And.
Yeah, and that the direct contrast presented in this episode between the kids, like, taking advantage of the end of the war or the end of the ceasefire to do all of these very rote, simple domestic tasks. Opening the windows, blowing the dust off the table, cleaning out the houses, getting ready for peace.
Note the withered willow herb in the.
Vase, the withered willow herb.
We probably had you skip that episode. But they specifically left some willow herb or fireweed in a vase at Shakti's house before they left. And it gets shown in this episode when they come back and obviously the plants have withered up, but the vase is still there.
And then on the other hand, you get these Bespa soldiers who have deserted. They have run away from their base.
It also sounds like they are violating the ceasefire. As if one of the conditions of the ceasefire was that some Vespa soldiers surrender and they didn't, they ran away instead.
I think it was more like hand over their weapons.
He mentions snuck away without surrendering.
Yes, but I'm not sure that that means they were supposed to surrender themselves or they were supposed to surrender their weaponry, their zolos and everything.
Yeah, because there is a line that Maju says about like, oh, it's the last few days of the ceasefire, we have to use our weapons before we have to surrender them or before they run out, or something like that.
But instead they've snuck away and they plan to use them. And they do justify this to themselves. They do say, oh, the ceasefire doesn't apply to the guerrillas.
Maybe somebody should tell the League militaire that.
But so there is that direct contrast between like, the desperation to strike one last blow to kill the people who live here, versus the willingness to say goodbye to war, beat swords into plowshares and start plowing.
And the enemy even admits that at least part of the motivation here isn't about living in this beautiful place. It's about getting revenge for USO's successful attack against the Lorgain garrison.
Yeah, yeah.
He also, very notably, more than any other person I think, who's been surprised to know that the enemy they've been fighting is a young child, denies USO any agency once he sees that it's USO. And USO's like, we didn't need to have this fight. Come on, you don't have to die in this mobile suit now. He says something like, the adults you're with wrecked everything. As if USO didn't have any part in it. Or like any decision making power of his own, which I suppose his own children in Zanskar just do what their parents tell them. But it's not like Zanskar doesn't also have child soldiers. We've seen that. Yeah.
Because having done the victory Gundam 80% speedrun this week very recently I watched the episode in which is one of the early ones, where USO is fighting a pilot. And when he comes out of the cockpit and reveals himself to this pilot, the pilot just loses it. It's like, oh, my God, you are a child. I can't believe you've gotten to the stages of the war where they're making children fight. This is terrible. And, like, blows himself up with a grenade. Like, this was very, very similar a moment.
This guy had lost a lot of blood by that point, though, so maybe he wasn't thinking straight.
Well. Or perhaps a kinder view of his statement is, how much does any sort of rank and file soldier have agency when their commanders and governments order them to war?
Which just goes to show that he doesn't understand the guerrillas at all.
Mm. I felt very foolish for not thinking of this sooner. Or maybe I did very early in the season, and we've never revisited it. But Shakti's song, which mentions poppies among other things, but she also mentions, like, flying on wings to dreams beyond the stars, is about dead soldiers. The song is about dead soldiers, guys.
Yeah. My song is about poppies, and my dog is called Flanders. What could this be?
Yeah. For those of you who may not be aware, poppies in particular, red poppies are a symbol of remembrance for dead soldiers killed in wartime, especially in Commonwealth countries. You'll see a lot of people wear little badges that symbolize poppies on various historically significant days to do with war.
And it's specifically World War I. Right.
That's the strongest one. But I think they do get used more broadly sometimes.
Source. I'm British. Technically.
What, really?
Technically.
Also, I looked it up.
People put them on their cars. It's quite funny.
Very respectful.
Yeah. Not just as little badges. The cars get little.
Are they like, truck nuts? No, they're kind of like poppies dangling off the back.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly what they're like.
Tom very much appreciated Marbet telling off whoever she's on the radio with that, like, we have some dead people to bury and then we'll come to Largain. If that's not good enough for you, then count us out.
Lucky marmot. Are you free on Thursday? When I'm also free.
Love the new tat on the shoulder of her mobile suit.
I know that. The unicorn, that was a symbol for Amuro Ray, baby. Love that.
Also the white base in general.
Sarah, how can you take advantage of a grieving widow like that?
You know she's. You know she's pregnant, Right?
Do you want to be the dad that stepped up?
Yeah. Yeah. I'm the dub that stopped up.
Also, uso, when in your entire history as a mobile suit pilot has a warning shot ever done any good? You're not new to this, my man. You have been fighting these guys for a long time. They never take your warnings to heart.
He's new to everything. He's 13 years old.
Ooh, I have to backtrack real quick because my notes are a mess. And I just saw a point that relates to our conversation about spacenoids and the Earth environment and who's suited to it, because in the. In the Klansky Sisters, we have an object lesson that some spacenoids could adapt to life on Earth again and could enjoy life on Earth again.
Elisha. But not Martina.
Yeah, exactly, Elisha. While she may not be wearing it, she's still holding the whale charm that Odello made for her, the good luck charm. She goes out with them, she no longer seems bothered by the smells of Earth. She seems kind of curious about various Earth things they explain. Like, oh, a sun shower, which in Japanese is also sometimes called a fox's wedding. It turns out to not be that, of course, but presumably the climate controls on colonies do not include sun showers.
Yeah. If you've come from space to Earth and you're like, cool, cool, cool. This is new. And then all of a sudden, fish start falling from the sky, would you be like, oh, I guess the weather here is different. I guess it just does that your.
Friends have to explain. Rains of fish are not typical.
There's something going on here because. Yeah, it's not just the sunshar. Fish are also falling from the sky.
There's a bit when they first arrive at Cassarellia, when they come in by the wapas and Shakti is singing. They pass in front of a stand of trees that's, like, shadowed. And then after they've passed, the lighting changes and it reveals that behind that stand of trees is Mathis in his Zola with the cockpit over there.
Like the big bad wolf lurking in the forest.
Yeah, but it's so. This felt like something you'd see done in a theater show, in a live theater show, where they'd use the background, like, different lighting to give different scenes without actually changing the stage scenery at all. Yeah, I really, really liked it. I thought it was sort of just a little beautiful moment. Storyboards for this episode by Kasei Mitsuko Shout out. Kasei Mitsuko always turns in good work.
Beautiful backgrounds. They're becoming sort of a victory hallmark. I think low angle shots of the cockpits or the bridges of ships.
I Want to say there's one particular animator who loves doing shots like that.
So maybe it's just that person, but I like it. It gives a sense of being there. It makes the space feel tight in a way that it would be like if you were actually in one of these cockpits. It would be crowded, it would be close. That other types of shots don't really convey that sense of space.
In the same way, I want some grad student or professor, somebody with the resources of a university who knows how statistics work. Because I sure don't. To do like some kind of quantitative analysis on depictions of Christian style angels in Japanese media. Because I really think there was a surge in the early 90s and I want to know why. Yeah, I want to confirm. I want to confirm my prior position, my firmly held existing belief. I want it confirmed. And then I want to know why. What is going on? So I see the victory out there flapping its big wings. I'm thinking about future Gundam series. I'm thinking about Evangelion. I'm thinking about Sephiroth. The one winged angel from Final Fantasy vii.
Is Trigon in this era as well?
I think it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just a whole lot of angel wings. Where did they come from?
Who did this?
What do they mean?
Isn't there some angel wing stuff in Escaflowne too?
You'd better believe there is. Yeah. And that's just a couple of years off.
Yep, yep, yep.
And actually our first angel mentioned in this episode is by Odello talking about his gf, his angel of victory, Guardian angel. And then the real guardian angel turns out to be the VT all along.
I guess the real guardian angel was kissing.
I feel like I need more context.
Cause Odello got smooches from Alicia, right?
Yes, yes.
I think he's treating that as the real good luck charm.
I see. Okay, okay, okay.
He just wanted to brag about it too.
Warren.
Yeah, yeah.
Warren goes like completely beat red.
The brotherly vibe between the two of them, impeccable.
Also in that scene, Warren is explaining they've set up a new missile firing system so that he can be in this sort of main bridge cockpit part of the ship and still fire the missiles. The new controls reminded me of nothing so much as arcade games.
Yes, right.
Like all of the gun shooty arcade games where your controller is a gun.
Yeah, well, and Odello like looking over them from every angle. Because Odello loves to shoot the gun. He loves to shoot the missiles.
Sitting here sweating. Like, please don't practice these far. Odello Please.
And he's been, you know, he's had his own mobile suit for a little while now. So he hasn't been in the ship, seeing the upgraded systems. But now he's like, ooh, you could shoot so many missiles from right here. What if I just shot off a couple of. Like, Just a couple.
Just as a tree.
No one would notice.
Adela could have little of missiles as a train.
There's so much earth and so the missiles are so small.
Just a widow missile. We also got one of the most dad jokes of all Gundam of all time. Marbet, give me a hand.
No, I missed this.
She drops them in the aft cargo bay. And then Odello realizes he should probably get in his mobile suit even if it's not working completely properly. And he says to Marbet, give me a hand. And she takes the V1's hand and lifts him up with the cockpit of his ship.
Yeah. When she palms him in there. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I didn't. Yeah.
And the way he says it could just be like, help me out. But ho, ho, ho. It's give me a hand. Yeah. Like I said, dad joke of all time.
Yeah.
But it was still pretty good.
Yeah.
Worthy of a little. Oh, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho, ho.
Ho, ho, ho, ho. This show is kind of having trouble keeping track of its own history. Like in the opening narration when the narrator is talking about the events of prior episodes. Not for the first time, I have felt like he's watching a slightly different version of the show than I am. Did we have any idea that Dookaryk's cruiser was named M?
No.
Also, when USO is like, this is the light that killed my mother.
I was gonna ask about that.
My dude. Very much not.
I like, I thought that you guys would have more context to offer me about the light that killed your mother. Uso. Cause I could have sworn it was the back tire of a large motorcycle. Yes.
Oh, very.
Yeah, that shouldn't be funny, but it kind of is.
Gallows humor.
But you are absolutely correct. We have no idea what the light that killed his mother is. Unless it's entirely figurative. Like the light of Zanskar wanting to take over the Earth.
Nice.
Yeah, I mean, this sort of ties into like nuclear style explosion. Which then ties into later on when Usos like, no, no more nuclear blasts. No one's going to die here today. And then he sort of lies in the ground and does angel wing stuff. But not wanting to repeat the light that killed his mom. Is he just kind of losing it? Which he is.
The nuclear thing in Victory is driving me crazy because it has grown to become a load bearing part of the.
Show and makes no sense.
It makes no sense on a physical, scientific level. They also just like, they talk about it so much and they always say the same things and there's this attitude that like, oh, nothing is worse than a nuclear blast of a fusion generator. Yeah, there's no clean nuclear explosion. Except that a fusion generator, like failing would be a clean nuclear. It wouldn't even be an explosion.
Alright, so backtracking to our previous conversation about who deserves to live here, it does not make sense. But it provides a consistent, consistent point on which our heroes can demonstrate they actually care about the Earth and our villains can demonstrate they don't actually really care about the Earth.
Mm, that's true. That is true.
That's what it's for.
Except for that one time when I think Chronicle was like, don't those gorillas understand? We built the motor ads so that we could cleanse Earth without resorting to nuclear explosions or something like that. But Chronicle, of course, is the one good one. Quotation marks.
It also adds an additional element of tension to all of these fights and makes them harder for uso, which you would need to do anyway because he's getting so powerful. Is he just gonna like mow down every enemy in sight without having to try? Possibly, but not if he's trying not to blow up their mobile suits.
Yeah. Again, it feels like he's playing a video game and he's trying to do the achievement where you finish the game without triggering any nukes.
Yeah.
Finish the level without getting spotted, finish the level without setting off any explosions, that kind of thing.
He's on his pacifist undertale run.
But the image of Haro on the ridge as the nuclear explosion goes off and his little flappies are waving in the wind.
Haru in this show is so bouncy.
Bouncy mobile.
This is a rubber ball. He ate the gum gum fruit for Victory Gundam. Every episode that I watched was just like, boing, boing, boing, boing, boing. He's blowing bubbles. He's just so fun.
Seems to be much more active and much more of a participant in what's happening than Harrow's in previous Gundams have been.
Because he's like. And he's giving USO guidance and advice.
He's a little guy.
He's got a personality. He occasionally pretends to be a gangster when he's talking.
Aniki, did we have you watch that one?
I Don't think so, no.
There is an episode where Haru calls Uso Aniki and Usos like, who taught.
You to speak that way?
Where did you pick that up? We don't know. We don't know.
That's one of the original Amuro programming, the secret hack that he put in there.
That's about everything that I had on this episode.
I do want to swing back one more time to that idea of Zanskar taking over Earth to have a place to go and live, because that is now a running theme. Dooker wanted to turn it into a biker's paradise. Renda imagined her dream house in the woods. Mathis wants a place for his daughters to sing songs. And all the way back in like episode two or three, when USO goes to witness the massacre of uig, there is one line from one gorilla that's like, we won't let you turn Earth into a Zanskar theme park resort or whatever. And it is classic Tomino. I've spent most of this series thinking, like, what does Zanskar actually want to do with Earth? Like, back in the day, Zeon wanted to conquer and extract. Zeon was like an old school colonial enterprise. But Zanskar wants something different. Zanskar wants living space. Zanskar wants Lebensraum. They think this land is theirs by divine right, and they want to cleanse the people who live there and then settle in themselves.
Ed, on a sort of nitty gritty political level, I can't help but wonder if there were certain local political pressures and we've already seen the big healing ceremonies and public executions and that that is one way of managing the morale of the populace and of keeping the local population sort of willing to support the war effort because they are supporting this magical gift that Queen Maria has. But also that if there is a certain amount of local population pressure, even though some of their politicians may have other goals or other reasons for wanting to conquer all or part of Earth, they may also see the ability of being able to promise a bunch of, you know, members of this excess population. Oh, hey, guess what? You know, if you help us win this war, then here's this great reward. And I keep flashing back to, like, I know it's not historically accurate, don't me, but the show Rome and there are a bunch of discussions about what kinds of lands get offered to Roman soldiers as a reward for their service. And that a lot of those soldiers, like, weren't necessarily farmers or didn't necessarily know anything about the lands they were being promised, which were very far away. But it was all talked up to them in such a way that it sounded like a good deal.
It was, in fact, the Roman Empire's long standing practice of awarding seized lands to retiring soldiers as compensation for their many years of service. And indeed, finding enough land for them and finding the right land for them was a major problem that precipitated the crises that led to the end of the Republic. You're not entirely off base, historically speaking.
Question. How often do you think about the Roman Empire?
Do you mean the sort of classic, like Western Roman Empire? Or are you including the Eastern and later what we would call Byzantine Empires? Because if you include both of those.
He has been listening to a Byzantine Empire podcast.
It's a very good podcast. It's a good podcast, Nona. And there are, of course, a lot of historical parallels for this kind of a project. It's very, very fascist. It's very classic imperialist.
I notice you ignored Sarah's real question.
Oh, did I?
Listen, I was just bringing back a meme from, like, 2022 or whenever that was.
Yeah. It was a little cringe to dig that far back into the Internet's past. But, like, you know, in the American context, there's Manifest Destiny. I already mentioned Lebensraum.
Go west, young man.
Right.
You just throw a dart at a history book.
Right.
And this will be there.
Certainly it's true in the Yugoslav wars. That may or may not have been a major inspir inspiration for this series. They were 90s, literally happening at the same time. But in the Japanese context, the reference is probably Hakko Ichiu. Eight directions, one roof, which was an imperial era idea that the goddess Amaterasu, the first emperor Jimmu, had promised to Japan overlordship over the whole world. All the eight directions would be united under the Yamato race. And they published a document called Yamato Minzokuo chu taku to surusekai seisaku no kento, or an investigation of global policy with the Yamato race as nucleus, which included, among other things, a justification for seizing Australia and New Zealand because the Yamato race needed more living space. So, you know, deep roots on this stuff.
Never mind that there are good reasons why vast portions of Australia are very lightly populated.
Yeah.
But you look at the map and it's like, look, there's so much space.
Yeah. There's a big hole in the middle of it. Wonder how that happened. Yeah. The only other thing that I have in my notes to shout out is Just how much Rousseau is clutching to his. His mother's helmet. Which sort of comes back at the end of the episode where he seems to let go a little bit and.
He holds Carlman instead.
Right.
He picks up the baby.
The future instead of the past.
Yeah.
Life instead of death.
There is all this loss. But the needs of the living go on. Which would be a good place to stop if we weren't going to talk a little bit about Victory in general.
Maybe that's a good place to put our little transition jingle. So, Sarah.
Hi. That's me.
You know stuff about like costumes and things.
I've heard of them.
One really interesting fact about Victory is that when Tomino gave his instructions to the character designer specifically for Bespa for the villains for Zanskar, he said give me designs that people can cosplay.
So specifically for Zanskar.
Yes.
That is interesting actually because I was looking at those as the sort of. These are much less cosplayable than our main cast of characters because I found it very notable that everyone, you know, it is the war torn space future. But everything that everyone on the league militaire side is wearing anyway is something that one could buy in a shop in 1993, which makes them highly cosplay, makes them closet cosplayable. It means that you could go about your day being like, I'm wearing the thing that like my homie USO is wearing. I'm wearing my little brown baseball cap sideways to backwards.
It's good fan service, but it's bad marketing.
Yeah.
Because you don't see a person dressed like USO and go, hey, what anime show are you from?
Yeah, yeah.
It might not be costumey enough to have appealed to cosplayers of the time.
Yeah. But like with the Zanskar military uniforms, I mean, this is a side note, but I guess it does apply to the cosplay ability or the appeal to cosplayers because they are more than any of the other Gundam antagonist factions. They're very greebled in that the braid and stuff on them is drawn with these wiggly lines which in the first few episodes looks absolutely terrible. Like I'm looking at them, I'm like why? Why is. Are the lines on all their uniforms so wiggly? So, so like janky. And then they, the budget gets better and I suppose they start drawing them better and it sort of realizes itself as like, oh, these are depicting more like actual like trims that exist and that one would put on a military uniform that like they start to make More sense from a sewist perspective compared to very like clean Zeon uniforms which like I did spend the last week making a Char's Counterattack Char cosplay. And just like the pressure of being like, oh, this has to be like really clean. This has to be like this is a military costume from the space future. Like they probably have materials that I don't have access to and that don't exist. So from that perspective, like these are very sewable because they look a little. They're more wiggly, they're more janky, they're more like there is less pressure on them to have everything looking perfect.
It's a bit more forgiving.
Yeah. But like.
And they don't have those elaborate designs on the chest.
Yeah, yeah. To imagine that that comes specifically from a Tomini request is quite impressive of him from a sewing character design perspective.
In some retrospectives and articles about especially First Gundam and its popularity, he has been very vocal about the fact that women fans and cosplayers in particular did a lot to make First Gundam the juggernaut that it eventually became but wasn't when it first aired on tv.
Yeah.
And certainly no one was thinking about cosplay when they made the designs for First Gundam because the.
The most cosplay bait character that I saw in Victory Gundam was Farah who comes on screen and I point out and I go, yeah. Because she's got. She's got extravagant pink hair. She's got like a red contrast panel on her uniform. She's got a whip that she whips her on. She's got a guillotine. Essential part of the cosplay. But like apart from her, like most of them people have very like regular color hair which does make things easier for cosplay because like cosplay wigs. While wigs are synonymous with cosplay these days, that wasn't always the case. I know especially in Japan there's a massive variety of like in person shops that you can go to for all your wigs and contacts and cosplay needs. Historically I'm not sure what that was like in 1993. Specifically here. Well, I guess own America in like the UK and Europe. Like that was barely a thing until like, like really like the last last few years recently. And I'm sure it's fairly similar in America.
Based entirely on my memory of shopping for Halloween costumes. Wigs for sort of natural hair colors were common enough. And whatever the sort of popular costumes of a particular year were, there would usually be some cheap wigs for that costume, whatever it was, that year's Disney princess, you know, that. That kind of thing. But not nowhere near the same sort of range of colors and styles available now.
Yeah, I wonder. This is more of a cosplay culture question. And I'm sure cosplay culture has changed a lot since Victory Gundam came out. But to some degree would the difficulty of sewing a bespa jacket, all of the different fabrics and colors, the contrast panel on Pharah's for instance, the trims, would that in some way be appealing to a more like invested high level cosplayer as an opportunity to show off their skills?
Yeah, I mean, like, absolutely. Like, personally speaking, the entire reason that I'm here in the first place is because I saw a picture of Shahr Aznabal and it went secos png. That cosplay is in my suitcase right now. But you know, it's. It really depends because like, for an entry level cosplayer, like they are looking and I guess Victory does provide both of these things. For an entry level cosplayer, they're looking for things that are easy to do that they can just buy. And then if you are like a sewing sicko like myself, like many cosplayers out there, like stuff like the Pharah's whole design is a big challenge with, with all the sewing, with the wig especially. So we do have both of these things available as a palette to choose from. And actually that's one of the things that I noted about specifically Chronicles mask, because it's a mask that is like, it's a fairly standard, like underneath a, you know, racing helmet type mask. Like it is not something that is because I mean nowadays like I have a char helmet that I have 3D printed. That is not something that was available in 1990s three, you know, that kind of higher level fabrication was much harder and you don't really see it on anyone. In Victory Gundam, like Chronicles mask is cloth and spandex. It's very possible to make, if you want to make that or to buy.
In a shop, probably something very similar.
Do you nowadays see creative productions, movies, films, comics, audio dramas? Do you see them specifically like reaching out to cosplayers as part of a marketing strategy?
Oh yeah, all the time. All the time. Like I have cosplayer friends who have worked for the likes of Bethesda. I have spoken to like video game designer guests at conventions who have come and like talked extensively about like the new cyberpunk game, talking about how they're working with cosplayers how video games is what I'm most familiar with because they will often have on their website a cosplay guide. If you look at God of War, I think they have a website that has. Not particularly in depth or detailed in the way that the sickos would want, but they have guides of. Here is a layout of what the character is wearing, and franchises that tend to do that and bait cosplayers into marketing their characters for them, you know, do very well. So, yeah, absolutely. Like, extremely common, extremely considered. And the fact that this has sort of made it to common practice, I call it a win.
There are a couple of cosplayers who I follow online, who I had checked out their websites at various points because they do very complicated, like, armor builds and also fabrication for weapons and things. And recently there was an anime character I saw and thought I would love to cosplay her. And while I feel like I could handle most of the costume, her weapon would be something of a challenge. So I was looking up people who do fabrication, and their website mentions that they do a lot of cosplay stuff for corporate clients. I was like, oh, okay. Outside my price range.
But yeah, yeah.
And this is something that I have seen in, like, photos of old events run by Sunrise or Bandai for Gundam, going back to the early 90s, even going back before that to the 80s, where they would have these events and there would be cosplayers there and they would, you know, they would take pictures with the cosplayers, they would bring the cosplayers to the front. But it's unclear how much collaboration there was or if they were just taking advantage of these people who had already shown up in costume for their own, like, pleasure and hobby purposes. Say, a press conference to announce the release of a new home video version of 0083. And you see a whole bunch of people cosplaying as the Anaheim Electronics Engineer girls.
Yeah, that's such a great group cosplay, though, right?
And again, something you can, at least at the time, probably would have been able to buy most of that off the rack. Yeah, the colors are a little dated.
Now, but yeah, yeah, that's. I know. Like, I mean, this doesn't really apply to the 90s because this is for today. Like, the culture and position that cosplayers have at a space like a convention is quite different in Japan than what I would be used to, certainly in the European conventions. Like, I had a friend who lived in Japan for a year. Cosplayer friend, you know, was very Excited to like go out and go to events and participate in the scene and just find the Japanese conventions to be much more corporate rather than cosplay, community driven. Whereas the Comic Con would be there with the booths and then there would be an area for the cosplayers to go and sort of stand in. But then also find that Japan has its own much more prevalent home driven, community driven cosplay scene, where cosplayers will hold events in places for cosplayers by cosplayers, without any of the rest of the Comic Con stuff. Whereas here all that's kind of mixed and mumbled together in a much more chaotic way. So that would kind of lead me to believe that it's a bit more formalized. But again, that's only speculation based on where we've ended up culturally today in.
Terms of the sort of indie cosplayer corporate partnership perception in Japan. Japan has such enthusiasm for mascots of all kinds and mascots for things that in the United States we wouldn't normally think of having mascots. You know, towns and cities have their own mascots, companies have mascots. Corporate initiatives or governmental initiatives often have their own mascot. So it kind of dovetails the two that cosplayers then become sort of living mascots for the manga or the anime or whatever.
Yeah, because I personally, I'm fairly new to the cosplay scene. I came at it like came out of the movie industry costuming and then into cosplay. Yeah, I don't have the lived experience that most of my friends would have, but like, I hear a lot of people talking about how like becoming a booth babe was once like the pinnacle of your cosplay career. Like if you could get a corporate spot like from a company like cosplaying one of their characters at their booth at the Comic Con that was like you had made it. And I've heard that this is sort of still relatively prevalent in Japan, but again, that is just community hearsay from me.
Sarah McCostumes said it.
It came to me in a dream.
Beyond the question of cosplay though, let's talk about the outfits, the uniforms, the costumes and what they mean about these characters, this world and this setting.
Yeah, I have quite a lot of notes on just the picture that Victory paints of the war torn space future of this later stage, you see, because it is notable and whether this is for cosplay reasons or for world building reasons, like the effect that it has of the main cast. Wear very normal relatable clothes like they're Cool teens like you and me who wear our baseball caps backwards because it's 1993.
On the occasion that you see a uniform, like a Federation uniform. Some of these guys wear Federation uniforms.
Whoa.
But they're so rare that they don't feel, you know, uniform. And they're worn in extremely casual ways.
Yeah, yeah. And that really contrasts with the ceremony, like the pomp and circumstance and ceremony that, like, the Zanskar stuff has. Because that's wild.
The wigs, the robes.
Yeah. I'm like, hang on, I'm gonna finish up anything I had to say about the cool, the normality before I move on to this because I have quite a lot to say about this. But, like, everyone's clothes being really normal and, you know, it makes things relatable, makes things cosplayable, but it also shunts the, like, world building off the clothes and onto things like the mobile suits and, like, how sort of weird and insectoid or how some of them are bikes. And then there's, like. There's the change in tech. Like, they've got. They've got. Wires are a thing now. Beam shields are a thing now. And then we, of course, see, like, all the decay that has happened throughout the uc, like wars. There's weird space debris. Like, the Earth is like. But, like, the clothing has remained fairly. Even if it's not the same, it's fairly consistently normal clothes. It's not like inside something like Star Trek where it's the shiny space future and everyone is wearing jumpsuits. Well, the old manpolicule are wearing jumpsuits.
But they're perhaps the most earthy of all the characters.
They really are.
From that there is a sense that society. We live in one. We've gone into space, but we haven't changed our modes of living, haven't changed our modes of dress, which is so, so much a part of our way of living, of our culture, has not changed. There's been less change from today to UC153 than there has been from, like, 1900 to today.
Yeah. The. One of the things that, like, I know I said that, like, the world building is not apparent in the costume. The world building is apparent in the costumes. When it comes to, like, the ceremony and the cult of the pop and circumstance of the Zanskar stuff, because that's wild. It's giving a UK court system. It's giving UK ceremonial dress. It's giving, well, a lot of UK stuff. Honestly, the weird, like, cult stuff surrounding Queen Maria especially is striking.
If we think about the fact that they're trying to establish a new monarchy. Right. That Maria is the first Queen of Zanskar. She didn't inherit this. She was never Princess of Zanskar. And if you were looking around in the early 90s for like, what is the most powerful and influential monarchy in this day and age, like, what monarchy has managed to retain some of its power and relevance in modern society, you would probably have picked the British monarchy. Yeah.
Was this. Was this Lady Diana Times?
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying to.
Right, well, but like Japan's own monarchy had been in a constitutionally established symbolic role since the war. Most of the other European monarchies are largely symbolic and ceremonial at this juncture. I mean, the UK's is too. But for most of my life, it has felt like the one that commands the most international interest.
They are the ones who dress the silliest.
You think that's it. That's the key.
Therefore, if you dress that silly, you must have some kind of power or reason for doing it. I am joking, but it's kind of true.
Well, but also, Maria doesn't have power. That's kind of a big thing here. All the pomp and circumstance disguises what a puppet she is.
Yeah.
Everybody wears the special robes for her and draws their swords and wears their wigs to be in her presence. And all of that conceals that she's just a puppet.
And also she has her special, what I call the Rennala Elden ring robes. But they're fairly. They're not like insane. They are like ceremonial robes. But there's nothing too crazy in the way that I'm thinking of like Haman's Queen of Space outfit from.
Well, she's more like a priestess than a queen.
The closest parallel costume wise in Gundam at least is probably the priestesses from Moonmoon.
Yeah, yeah. But like, the notable thing about her is not so much her clothes, it's the fact that there are hundreds of people around her, all of whom are in wigs, waving swords around in uniform.
And I don't think it's a coincidence that when she gives one of her big addresses, she does it from like an exact copy of the podium Shar Aznabal used in Shar's Counterattack for his big speech.
Yeah. And she t poses.
Yeah. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, there's a lot of like. And maybe this is also a reference to the British, but there is a lot of like appropriated cultural signifiers from around the world gathered in Zanskar They've named their ships after figures from Greek mythology. The cult of Maria in Underhook uses this Asiatic Anatolian goddess statue for Maria. Zansgar itself is a place in the Himalayas. Like, they're sort of magpie, like stealing little cultural tokens from around the world and throughout history. And maybe all the old Zeon stuff is part of that. Yeah, maybe they have actually specifically taken a bunch of old Zeon iconography because Zeon was a great empire of space.
Oh, quick, come up with a name for our new empire. It has to start with Zedzo lines up.
It's not that Tasila Wago himself is a Char Aznabal cosplayer super fan. It's that every Zanskar command ship has a reproduction of Char's moping chair.
Or it's like trendy in Zanskar high society to model various things in your life off of antique Zeon furniture, antique Zeon practices and clothes.
I don't know if you noticed this. I didn't until my watch through. But Tassilo even styles his hair identically to the way Shar Aznabal did in Shar's Counterattack.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
I think even down to the little like two strands curling from the center, he's.
Yeah.
Xiannabu.
Sharaboo. Him among us.
I think the term now is Comet Girly.
I don't like that. I'll pass. Actually, I'm going to sit in my replica chair and drink my glass of whiskey and not consider it Alex Comet Boy.
Comet Lad Comet.
It has potential.
Keep workshopping it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We'll figure it out at Mike first when we do for Apocalypse.
I don't hear either of you throwing out suggestions.
Listen, I need my silly outfit on. Stupid. One of the other things I wanted to talk about Victory, like character design wise. And I was thinking about this because I'm connecting it to cosplay and like ease of closet cosplaying and lack of wigs. But like, because there are not a huge amount of like crazy haired characters in this series, there's a lot of differentiation using skin color in character design. And I don't know, this is just of the animes that I've watched, lacking in diversity, but this is definitely the most that I've ever seen that in an anime ever. The only other time that I've really noted that has been in something like keep your hands off of Eizouken, I think is the name of the show, which is about an animation club, but is specifically set in the Future. And in order to convey the futureness of the show, they have made it much more diverse and put in characters with darker skin tones.
It does seem as though that's something that Tomino has in his vision of the future of humanity as well.
Yeah.
This desire to convey a kind of like, multi ethnic, multi racial future society in terms of skin tones and origins of people's names, that was definitely something.
He talks about wanting to convey in Victory specifically. And part of the reason why he chose Eastern Europe and why he was focused on the Balkans is because he thought that was a good setting for a world in which, like, ethnic divisions have broken down.
Now we have new divisions.
Yay. But, yeah, I just wanted to approach that even just from a visual character design standpoint and just shout out that, like, your skin in a world in which everyone is drawn, their skin color is a costume design choice because your skin is kind of part of your clothing.
It's important to note Victory is not working with that big of a palette. You'll frequently see scenes that look a little bit weird because every green shirt is the same green color. And some of the mobile suits are also that color. And sometimes a door is that color. And so you get weird layering effects where Susie is standing in front of Alicia, and it turns out they both have the exact same shade of, you know, green on their shirt.
Or in. In this episode that we just watched where we have. I don't remember their names, but Tomash's dad and Tomash's little brother and Marbet, who all have the exact same skin tone of, like, mid brown.
So this means that the decision to invest colors in differentiating characters skin tones was a very meaningful and expensive decision to make.
Yeah. But I will say a discussion of skin does lead me to nudity as a costume, if you want to talk about that.
Sure.
Because as I mentioned in the talk through, like, in space, the place where one needs the most amount of protection and clothing, to go into that with no clothing on is sort of the most extreme and intense thing that can possibly be done. And, like, I'm gonna. I'm gonna assume that you have discussed the sort of nature of that bathtub scene.
Oh, absolutely.
Extensively. But just like, you know, in the post of that, when USO is running around, escaping, trying to get. And I think it's the fact that he manages to get a single pair of underwear on, which is yanked off him almost immediately. Like, no, no, no. You're going to go into space naked to be born again in the amniotic. Sack of a bubble that Harrow blows. Does that make Harrow as mother in some way?
But yeah, no, it's like more like his doula.
Yeah. Bubble doula.
He's born from out of the womb of the Core Fighter.
Yeah, yeah.
Also, Haruo uses the bubbles to project like photographs and videos, which are frequently memories from USO's childhood. So the bubbles have this connection to.
His like past really is like a nanny situation.
But what's the other thing he projects on those bubbles?
Mobile suits.
More like bubble suits.
Mobubbles.
Mo bubbles.
Bubbles.
But yeah. And like, I don't want anyone to forget that like nudity itself is a costume.
Well, it's a conscious choice on the part of the people making the thing.
Yeah. So yeah. To become a born again Gundam pilot, you have to go back to to.
Space to get in the V2 and have it really be your choice this time.
USO's Soap Bubble Rebirth Naked in Space could be the first of the V2's miracles.
Next time on episode 10.40, the wrath of Heaven, we research and discuss Victory Gundam episode 40 and Carlman likes it. Oh no. For Whom the Bell Tolls if I speak, I am in big trouble. No blame, no sympathy. Are the Pauldrons just for show? Tell us who's really in charge. HD texture pack Angels vs Aliens Captain Marbet and the Jetavana Temple Bells ring the passing of all things twinned Sal trees white in full flower declare the great man's certain fall the arrogant do not long endure they are like a dream. One night in spring, the bold and brave perish in the end they are as dust before the wind. 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 client 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@gundampodcast.com Patreon. You can find links and more ways to help out@gundumpodcast.com support. Thank you for listening.
And I'm like, I could calligraphy some fun.
Yeah.
Graphic tees and just wear like a long black wig and little jean shorts. Especially now that Anime NYC is in August instead of November. And so it's like boiling hot outside.
Yeah. That has definitely changed the calculus on cosplay.
Yeah.
See, this is why there's such a thriving cosplay scene in Ireland. You actually have weather that can sustain wearing layers.
Yeah.
It's freezing. And therefore I can wear my big capes all my layers.
I can only wear my cape, like two months out of the year.
It's a very cool cape.
Thank you. I need more cape. I need all weather capes is the thing. I need capes for summer, capes for spring.
Unfortunately for you, the summer version of the cape is really wasp y. The, like, tennis sweater worn tied over your shoulders.
Oh, my God.
Like, that's the summer cape, Tom.
Sorry.
The garments of my people.
It's tradition. Oh, yeah. As we were discussing.
Your ancestors are smiling on me. Imperial. Can you say the same?
Why were we talking about, like, you're not allowed to wear the traditional garb of your own culture. You have to steal from another's culture in order for it to be legit. Context for this is concerningly lost.
No return in imperialism. Only neocolonial imperialism. Only go somewhere else and take their culture. Imperialism.
Yay. This fits weirdly with the episode.
Nice transition. But we can't actually play.
No, we're not gonna be part of the episode.
Unless.
No, he's just. He's just leaving. Being that there.
But if someone says unless, you have to also say unless. So am I getting a pair of headphones or not?
Oh, right. I was going to give these to you. Here you go. Enjoy. But Sarah should. You should write up a little, like, how you want to be introduced.
I mean, I can very gently sing in the Arms of an Angel. That's how you want to start the. I don't really know how it goes. Not a good idea.
Then. It's probably not a very good idea. I was going to be like, that could work.
But wait, I haven't heard that song.
Like, don't make promises you can't.
You can't seg into.
I have kind of an intro.
Okay, then you should kick us off. Oh, the nature that's going in the outtakes. It.