U'listening to season ten of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci-Fi mega franchise mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
Our one.
This is episode 10.7, strange tactics, and we are your hosts. I'm Tom, and just like Uso, I am a precious resource that you cannot do without.
And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam and starting to wonder if we will ever see another league military mobile suit.
Or if Uso is going to have to fight all of Zanskar by himself.
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Victory Episode seven Girochin no Oto or the Sound of the Guillotine the episode was written by Oka Akira, storyboarded and directed by Takase Setsuo, and with Mayida Meiju as animation director Nakata Kazuhiro guest stars as bike fiend Duker Ick. Besides prominent roles in Alaw star irresponsible Captain Tyler and a recurring role in the Dot Hack franchise, he also played the eponymous main character in notorious 1986 ova M D Geist. But now the recap.
From a mobile armor high in the sky, Commander Griffin receives confirmation that Lieutenant Chronicle Asher is alive and that the gataral team have a plan to trap the league military convoy that's been causing Zanskar forces so much trouble. At the convoy, Uso announces that he is going back to Casarelia. He's worried about Count and Katajina, but he's also worried about Shakti. Romero tries to convince Uso to stay, blurting out that the truth serum bespa uses on prisoners can cause brain damage, but Margot reassures Uso that it's okay to leave. He takes a whoppa and sets off right away, claiming that they are going to scout the area. Odello, Warren, and Susie take the larger Wapa and follow him. Casarelia seems like a nice place to.
Ride out the war.
Farther along, Shakti has stopped to wash Karman's diapers in a stream when a group of bright red motorcycle tanks come roaring up and driving circles around her and kicking up dust. Their commanding officer, Dukar Ik, comes out of his gataral, curious what a young girl is doing out in the wilderness alone with a baby and a high grade robot. He asks if she's with the resistance, but Shakti just stares at him until Karman begins to cry. And while she shushes and comforts the baby Dukkar decides to move on. As they chase after USo, Odello and company spot an unfamiliar enemy craft overhead. In a hurry to warn their friend, they take a shortcut over a cliff and land almost on top of Uso. He rushes to stabilize their wapa, which is tipping violently as it falls to the ground. The Gataro team will reach them at any moment. They need to hide the bazooka that Odello brought along, covered with everyone else's coats, Warren lays down next to the bazooka and feigns illness. When Duker reaches them, he's convinced by the story that they're going to find a doctor for Warren and lets them go. All of the kids realize they need to warn the league military convoy, but they can't outpace Duker and his team. Driving at the bottom of a deep, rocky canyon, the massive Camilleon struggle to evade the speedy and rugged Gatarl and Marbett, still wounded and with very little experience piloting the complete Victory Gundam, launches to provide cover fire, but crashes on a cliff top shortly after. Uso, who has been racing along the clifftop watching the fight unfold and trying to shout advice, is there in moments to take her place. While the Camellon launch the boots and USO focuses on docking, a group of purple and gray Bespa mobile suits, led by Lieutenant Arbio Pippiniden fly over. The lieutenant needs to report to Commander Griffin right away, but he suggests that the Kisarolia team under his command go support Duker. After all, they need to acclimate to fighting in Earth gravity. On the ground, Uso has defeated three of the six agataro, and with the final docking complete, forms the victory Gundam, the appearance of a white mobile suit striking terror into Duker's remaining troops. Despite the arrival of the Kisarolia mobile suits, Uso is able to use the terrain and the enemy's inexperienced fighting on Earth to evade their attacks and damage their mobile suits. He's desperate not to kill any more people and deliberately avoids targeting the mobile suit cockpits or engines. They retreat, and Uso, relieved, does not chase them. After reporting the intel he'd gathered about the league militaire, Chronicle returns to his quarters, where he receives a visit from Lieutenant Pippiniden. They were senpai and Kohai at the academy and remain on friendly terms. It seems that Captain Tacilo Wago, newly arrived in Earth orbit, disapproves of Commander Griffin's methods and has sent Pippiniden to make demands. Katajina, still a prisoner but now serving as a maid for chronicle, listens intently while serving tea. Meanwhile, Count Oinyung is being tortured. His eyelids are taped open. Bright light shines in his face, and his mouth is held open by some awful metal contraption. Still, he hasn't told Commander Griffin anything useful. You'll have to use the truth serum on me, he rasps, but Farah wants to break him. Looking right at her, he says, just send me to the guillotine. You will only strengthen the unity and resolve of the resistance. For her part, Commander Griffin is confident in the guillotine's efficacy. She credits it with Zanskar's ability to build a new nation so quickly. Uso returns to the Kamyon and is greeted with a dressing down for not pursuing and destroying the enemy. He argues that he's just a kid, not an expert, and that the soldiers he's fighting aren't the elites whose decisions led to the war, but the adults are implacable. If he doesn't kill the enemy, they'll just come back.
Real war isn't like one of your.
Video games, one of the engineers shouts.
And it's the last straw.
Uso's expression hardens, and he announces he's going back to Casarelia. Before he can leave, there's a shout from the cab of one of the Cameyon Bespa. Yellow jackets are broadcasting live on every channel. Margaret tells us to watch with the rest of the league militaire members, but sends Shakti, Warren, and Susie away. Crowded around the cab's small screen, the members of the convoy watch. A scaffold and guillotine have been erected in Largain's Margaret Square. A massive crowd held back by armed soldiers. Commander Griffin appears, addressing this broadcast to the entire resistance movement of Europe. And then two masked executioners place Count Oyung in the guillotine and dropped the blade.
You may not know this, but this episode gives victory one of its most famous meme lines, which is duker ich when he's talking about the bikes, when he's talking about driving. And I think in our version of the translation it says something like, this is nothing to me, the man who revived the tradition of biking from the old century, which is a pretty good line, as it is great meme potential on that one. But the version that gets passed around a ton online is an older, I think, fan translation in which he says, by reviving the bikes of the Middle Ages and reviving the tradition of driving, I've now become unstoppable, which is maybe even an s tier meme line, the bikes of the Middle Ages. And the tradition of driving makes a man unstoppable.
When he says the old century, he might not mean the previous century. He might mean the old calendar before the universal century was implemented.
I think he says, like, choose. I think he says, like, middle ages, but obviously middle ages. Middle changes relative to where you are.
He has extremely strong anime villain energy in a way that feels a little out of place in this show. The grandiose statements, the zipping around on.
A motorcycle tank, the complete disregard for the deaths of his men. Like the Gundam. Exactly. He's like, yeah, obviously, he killed all my guys. That's great. I'm so happy because now it means I have a worthy opponent. He's also uncharacteristically reasonable for a Bespa officer. Like, he runs into shockti with Karlman in the woods and is like, hey, twelve year old girl with child. I noticed that you have a high grade consumer toy robot. Are you a member of the militia? But as soon as he's asked the question, he kind of realizes how ridiculous it is. He doesn't actually wait for her to respond before he's like, no, obviously you're not. Go about your business, kid. And likewise with Warren, Susie, and Odello, the Odello experience.
Except he's also wrong. They're hiding a bazooka. They're gonna go warn his enemies.
Well, and Shakti also runs off to warn his enemies. He's wrong on both counts, but he's not unreasonably wrong.
No. I also want to touch on the bikes thing briefly. This might be a thing to research later once we get through our massive research topics that we're trying to cover on the front end of the season, because the behavior of the bikes feels inspired by both. Motocross, which is dirt biking on courses frequently involving a lot of jumps, and tricky biking, showy biking on pre planned courses. There are races, and then there's also motocross, where you're trying to earn points for doing tricks like you would do with bmx or I don't know a whole lot about the history of motocross as a competitive sport. I had an uncle who was pretty into it. I've gotten to see it live a couple of times, but I do wonder about when did it start to get popular? Because the 90s would sort of fit with my vague recollections. So maybe this is an attempt to appeal to another segment of kids like look cool motorcycle tricks.
I can forestall at least some of that research, because I know for a fact that these bikes are in this show. Because a Bondi executive believed that kids were really into bikes and ordered Tomino to put bikes in the show, summoned him to Bondi headquarters and in a meeting insisted, wow.
Okay.
It didn't necessarily need to be these specific bikes, but some kind of design. Some kind of bikes got to have bikes.
And in Japanese, when they say bike, they mean motorcycle.
His line about reviving the tradition of the old century is kind of absurd because if you have watched previous Gundam, you know, that, say, judo rode around on a motorcycle. So did kai in first Gundam. Even Monica Arno in f 91, very effectively, she had revived the tradition of falling off of your bike from the.
Old century not as prominently. There also seems to be some inspiration from biker gangs. I feel like that whole aesthetic of having them circle up around people and drive in circles around someone, kicking up dust and penning them in, that's a very biker gang thing to do to somebody.
I don't know if it actually is or if that just gets used in every film about them, but same difference from our perspective. Also, I'm pretty sure this only comes across in a couple of shots, but I'm pretty sure Duker's bike is significantly larger than the other bikes in his squadron. It's like a mama bike with its little babies.
I don't know. I think they may have just struggled with consistency of scale, scene to scene, and coloring.
Like, sometimes the wheels are painted the same color as the metal of the body, and it suggests that maybe they're metal wheels, but other times they look like rubber. They're used so creatively in the battle, though, the jumping, the flying around, the flopping.
Well, like I said, motocross.
Yeah. And they've chosen a great environment for it. This, like, rocky canyon.
Well, it's never explained. We assume they have a good reason why this convoy would go through this narrow canyon, which makes them so vulnerable and provides no cover whatsoever.
Well, okay, maybe it actually is explained a little bit because USO says when he first sees the bikes, oh, Bespa has landed ground forces. So it seems like up until now, and this is consistent with what we've seen, Bespa has been operating entirely from the air with their mobile suit, helicopter things. It would be really easy to hide from an aerial force in a canyon like that, because if you're driving in the know, the high ground flatlands around the canyon, you're very visible from the air. You go into the canyon, and you have to be directly above looking down to be able to spot them. So if the league military didn't realize these guitar rolls had been deployed, then the canyon would seem like the much safer option.
We also see the introduction of Pippiniden.
Which, it's such a fun name to say, I cannot take him seriously.
I tried to look into it to see if it seemed to bear any relationship to japanese adaptations of Pippi. Longstocking sort of unclear. There have been. There have been lots of popular adaptations of Pippi in Japan, and there's a musical that's just called Pippi and Niden. Sounds like two and some kind of counter, but I didn't really find anything useful. I don't know, but it is a fun, silly name. He takes the opportunity to have a sort of more casual, friendly chat with chronicle. He kind of invokes their relationship as a senpai and kohai from the academy, although I wasn't clear which was which.
I think the implication is that Pippiniden is the senpai.
Okay?
I think he's higher ranked. I think he's a first lieutenant to chronicles, second or junior grade lieutenant.
In which case it makes even more sense that he would say, like, hey, as your senpai, I wanted to let you know some things, give you a little heads up.
This situation is about to become much more tense.
Basically that because of the internal politics of the Zanskar Empire of Bespa chronicles, Commander Farah Griffin is not very popular with high command or has managed to make some enemies among high command. They do not approve of her methods. They disapprove of several of the decisions she has made since landing on earth. And there is a degree to which chronicle will get lumped in with her unless he manages to extricate himself or keep himself separate from it.
The appearance of the actual physical guillotine draws some immediate parallels to the French Revolution, and a whole lot of french revolutionaries ended up getting guillotined because they happened to be associated with a more prominent person who had fallen out of favor. So the warning to Chronicle is, I think, well delivered and well timed.
We get several additional reminders throughout this episode of the sense of difference between earth noids and space noids. Some of it, I'm sure, very real. Some of it may be constructed or imagined, but clearly important to the characters. He makes mention with some of his troops of like, oh, yeah, go get used to fighting in Earth gravity. Like, that is a thing you should do because you're not used to it.
And Uso later is like, ah, they're not used to fighting in Earth gravity yet. I can take advantage of their naivete.
And Earth terrain related to that inexperience with Earth terrain and Earth gravity. Multiple people within Bespa describe Uso's tactics as strange. The white mobile suit with the strange tactics. But I can't help but wonder, are they actually strange or merely strange to space? Like, are they different from Earth tactics generally? Or do the space noise just not understand or learn about planetary tactics?
I mean, we haven't really seen any other mobile suits fighting on Earth in this era, but I do think probably Uso's flying torso attack and in this episode, his all legs combat posture. I would call those strange tactics under any circumstances.
We know he doesn't have any training or really experience and so it's not entirely unexpected that the way he fights would seem very different.
Excuse you. No training, no experience. Uso is a gamer. Uso has been playing video games which have made him into a lethal combatant.
You're getting ahead of yourself. We're going to come back to that.
Feels like a speed running strat. You don't have to combine with the hangar. You can just fight from boots mode. Anyway, I'm sorry.
It's fine. And then, apparently completely ignoring Farah Griffin's advice, Chronicle decides that Katajina is going to be like his maid or something, his adjutant. She's listening to everything, dude. Do you think for a moment she is not going to try and gather as much information as she can? It's a very strange choice to make.
With a prisoner because he seems to be falling for her.
Do you think so?
In that scene where fire Griffin warns him about Katajina, there's a whole sequence where it's just close ups of chronicles eyes and Katajina's eyes and like he's looking off. Then he looks at her. Then she, without actually looking at him, notices out of the corner of her eye that he's looking. And then she shifts her gaze to look away from him. And then he looks away from her. This is eye flirtation. They're really paying attention to each other in a way that implies things.
And he did defend her from Trump and she did speak up for him. There's clearly something between them, a destined.
Connection, a red string of fate falling.
For sounds like overly dramatic.
He is accepting the narrative inevitability of their connection.
But anyway, the fact that PB needen asks her to make some earth, I love that line. It's just tea. Man cannot imagine that the tea is any different, really, from tea that they grow and drink in space.
Now, the earth tea has a whole different. Terroir. Terroir. How do you.
I think you were closest the first time. But I hate that word.
No, the earth tea has all the subtle flavors from the natural soil.
Right. But he didn't reference any of the specific places we associate with tea growing, which is how we would do this on earth. He just said Earth tea.
This whole sequence could be very ominous, very concerning for chronicles specifically because, you know, back in first gundam, also, I think in the 7th episode of the series a different academy senpai descended to Earth to visit a different young prince. And that did not end particularly well for the young prince.
The final things I wanted to note about Zanskar and Bespa and the degree to which those actually reflect the organization and government as a whole versus Farah's personal way of doing things. Now we're not so sure, but the torture sequence and the public execution. Torture sequence, very clockwork orange with the eyes taped open, the bright light shining into the face.
They've given him a bridle.
The fact that for Commander Griffin, it is more important to break the count than it is to get information from him. She could use truth of serum on him. He even says, just use it. I'm not going to tell you anything, but she wants to have broken him. And it's very brief, but they each say things that provide these kind of two counter positions. And we'll see how that plays out throughout the show. He says that killing him will just fire up. The resistance will unite people. Actually, it'll solidify their desire to oppose the invasion.
And Farah's response to this is, no, I've actually been guillotining people for a long time. And I know from experience that it just breaks people's will. The guillotine is how Zanskar has managed to build a powerful nation in space in a very short period of time.
That it facilitated the very quick regime change that they managed.
And presumably she's also referring to, like, taking over other colonies, executing their leadership and forcing them to submit to the Zanskar empire.
And, of course, in this episode, we learned that when they talked about the guillotine, they just meant a literal guillotine. A big wooden structure with a slanted blade that chops off people's heads.
Yep.
Into the traditional basket, no less.
Yeah.
And they do this in a public square. There are soldiers arrayed around the scaffold to keep the crowd away. But it is very crowded there are a lot of people there, and we.
Know they've been doing this for some time. They've killed quite a few people in this square in Largaine. Because way back in, like, episode two, when we first met Odello, we learned that Odello and his little band were fleeing from Largaine because of the terror there and that Susie. There's a great detail in this episode when the execution starts and the broadcast starts and everybody goes to watch it. Warren takes Susie away. They walk far away, and Marbett is like, yeah, you two should get going. Get as far away as you can, because Susie is still horribly traumatized by all of, like, everybody else feels like they need to see it, but they want to shelter her at least a little bit.
In a lot of ways, this scene is the culmination of kind of the main conflict of the episode, I think, which, and this seems to be a core theme of the show, is kind of the collision of people's principles versus practical realities. There's the league military, and it's mostly older guys, right? But there are a few younger know, still firmly adults involved.
Ness and Khufu and Marbet.
And we witness a transition in Marbett's attitude toward Uso throughout this episode that is really highlighted by this last scene. She begins the episode telling off Romero because Romero is basically, like, guilting Uso into staying or trying to guilt Uso into staying by dropping information about the kinds of horrible things that Vespa does to prisoners. She tells him, we have a complete mobile suit now. You must be worried about, like, it's okay for you to go. By the end of the episode, she is standing arrayed with the old guys. We'll get into the specifics of all of those arguments. But you mentioned she told Warren and Susie to get far away. She tells Shakti to get far away. She tells us, you should watch this. In effect, Uso is no longer one of the children to her because he's too useful as a pilot and soldier.
I don't know that it's entirely his utility, which is a factor, but I think it's that he came back. Uso is dealing with sort of three dilemmas. The dilemma of what is his duty, the dilemma of how to preserve his goodness. This is almost a binary. This is almost that sense of, like, practicality versus principle. But then there's a third point of it, which is that he's also wrestling with the fact that he can't actually do everything, even if he commits to joining the league military full time. And protecting everybody. He still couldn't save the count. He's running up against the limits of his abilities. But it's his decision to come back and to essentially give up on the return to Casarelia and to commit to helping. That makes Marbette think like, okay, he's one of us now.
I'm not entirely sure that I agree, mostly because it doesn't feel as though anybody articulates that to him. Nobody says, if you keep getting in this mobile suit, we are going to treat you like a soldier from now on. And if you don't want to be a soldier, stop getting in the mobile suit.
I think they kind of do. When he says, when they're challenging him about letting the best soldiers get away, and he says, I'm not some kind of expert, I think it's. Romero says, yeah, you are.
Actually, there's also basically an inversion of Marbette and Uso's relationship from the earlier episodes. For several episodes, we had Marbette flying around trying to give UsO combat advice. No, do this, do that. Try this. Try this technique. You need to move more. You need to do whatever. Now it's the opposite. Now he has so much more experience using the victory Gundam than she does that he's the one trying to tell her, deploy this thing. Try this technique. Do this different. I do feel like, in a big way, it comes back to his usefulness.
But they knew how useful he was even at the beginning, and they still let him go.
Well, they can't make him fight. They can pressure him. They can guilt him. They can try to give him reasons, but they can't actually make him do it. Uso feels a much stronger sense of duty. We kind of have three camps here. We have Uso, we have Shakti, and then we have Odello, Warren and Susie. Odello and co. For all that, Shakti does not want to be involved, just wants to go home and live quietly. The minute the gataral team leaves, she thinks, I have to warn them. She does feel a sense of responsibility towards these people and a desire to help others when she can and even is willing to put herself in danger to do so. Uso feels torn between his responsibility to Shakti and his responsibility toward the league militaire, and especially his desire to protect Katajina. Odello seems to want revenge, but feels responsible toward Warren and Susie. I don't think he feels a broader sense of responsibility in the same way the other kids do. They're kind of free agents, hence them talking about, oh, Casarelia seemed kind of like. Like, it would be a pretty cool place to be, and Susie could be safe, and they take a big wapa that maybe the leak military needed and lie about where they're going in order to join USo. And then they come back to warn, just as they always did. But they've also mentioned before, like, how long should we stick with this convoy? How long should we stay with the league military, and should we move on on our own?
Every time I see Odello, I get this vision of, like, a hungry wolf. He has his pack, he has his group, and he's responsible for taking care of them and finding for them the best situation in this very bad world. And, yeah, I think at this point, at least, they are still constantly negotiating that. They are still constantly thinking, where do we get our next meal? Where do we find a roof over our heads? How do we avoid getting killed? More so than any of the principles of resistance.
But Odello, as both the oldest and the one most interested in vengeance, I think he also watches the execution alongside USo. He is really old enough that he's not one of the kids anymore. He just has his group, and they're a fair piece younger. But other than the pressure that is brought to bear on USo, seemingly much stronger and more directly than before. They've definitely put some pressure on him previously, but it felt more subtle or more natural. This feels more calculated.
I wouldn't say calculated. I think this is like Romero losing his temper. Nobody restrains him because they all basically agree with what he's saying, even if they think he's being kind of a jerk about it. I think part of what this scene is doing is to emphasize the gap in the league militaire community caused by the loss of the count. I don't think the count would have allowed this to happen. He might have confronted USO in a different way. But his stabilizing influence on the group.
Is gone, and not for nothing, he also represents a missing generation. Romero is so much older, and Marbette is, what, in her 20s?
Probably.
And Romero is probably in his 70s or 80s. He looks very old.
I want to say the count is officially supposed to be 70.
The count is 70. Still bears the question, where are the 30, 40, 50 year olds? Like anyone of an age to be USo's parent is entirely absent. And that feels telling in a way, even though it hasn't been articulated or explained and feels like a possible source of the instability.
I'm imagining the old guy team, the old guy crew, as like, a polycule and all of them were dating the count, but not all of them were dating each other.
Oh, dear.
So removing him destabilizes the whole system, and they're working out their relationships to each other in real time.
Uso has been horrified by the death that he has seen so far caused by him and just happening in his presence. It's been awful. He is now sort of clinging to self defense when he feels as though he is directly defending himself or the people closest to him. He can bring himself to attack others and possibly kill them, because it's like direct, obvious, immediate self defense, which is.
Why he yells, don't make me kill you. Don't make me become a murderer.
Right? And all that stuff about if you would just leave, if you would just go away. And he is not wrong that most of the soldiers he's fighting and killing did not get to choose what their government decided to do.
But this is the same principle versus idealism argument that you've been pointing out the whole time.
Exactly. I was going to get around to it.
Oh, you were? Well, I beat you there. I get to be the one who says that you're just as dead if you get killed by a grunt who doesn't really want to be there, as if you get killed by a true believer.
And similarly, they're an army. They're not random civilians. If they come to attack you now, they're going to come back and attack.
You again, and they'll come back with better tactics. Having learned from this battle with you.
And every mobile suit you destroy, you're denying them resources that they need to continue this invasion.
And not only are they an army, they are an elite expeditionary force. In general Uso's position that random, low ranking soldiers in the army are probably not responsible for their nation's foreign policy. But there are plenty of examples of armies that basically operate independent of government oversight and direct themselves in invasion and pillage. And know a classic example from the japanese context is the Kwantung army, which was responsible unto itself for much of the aggression in Manchuria.
Do I think a lot of this should have been conveyed to Uso more gently? Yeah.
In maybe some form of edutainment computer game. It's the only way a child like him will learn.
Dot, dot, dot. But ultimately, whether they say it in a nice voice or they yell it at him, the meaning is the same, that they are fighting an army, and that that carries with it much different considerations, different tactics, different strategy than personal, one on one combat would. He thinks he's doing the right thing, but he's actually putting himself and the people he's trying to protect in more danger. That is the angle I would mean. Like I said, the meaning is the same one way or another. I just wish they were gentler with him.
To be able to fight the way Uso wants to, to defeat his enemies without killing them consistently over and over again, to win every time and protect those close to him, you have to be so much better than your opponents. You have to be practically superhuman, or in fact, actually superhuman, and you have to win every time, and that's really difficult. An actual human being in this context probably couldn't do that. When we taught karate. If you were sparring with somebody who was much less experienced than you, yeah, you could do that, but you have to be on the level of an adult fighting a child to be able to do that consistently.
One of my favorite bits of art that kind of, like, addresses this conceptually, which you reminded me I've probably talked about on the podcast before, but there were these comedy fantasy books by Robert Aspirin called the myth books, and in one of them, a couple of characters who used to be assassins or hitmen or bodyguards, something in organized crime. For some reason, I don't remember why they have to enlist in the army and they get in trouble with their commanding officer because they're not taking kill shots with crossbows, they're taking wounding shots. And they're like, well, but how do you get information out of somebody if you've killed them? Or how do you get money out of them or whatever? And their extremely exasperated commander is like, look, it's great that you guys can do that, but the raw recruits who have never fired a crossbow before, if they try to do that, they will get killed. They are not good enough at this to try to wound rather than kill. They need to be trying for kill shots all the time. And this idea that, yeah, you need exponentially more skill to do that, or the situation needs to be very different in order to do that without incurring a ton of additional risk to yourself and everybody around you.
There's this trope that shows up in anime often, which I call like, the fight and pacifist, and it's a character who, dealing with a similar dilemma to what Uso is facing here, resolves that they'll fight and they'll destroy enemy mecca, or they'll defeat their opponents, but they'll never kill. They avoid the cockpit, etc. Etc. And then they get away with it because they're not a person. They're an anime protagonist, and so they know unlimited power. Basically. They have whatever amount of power is necessary for the narrative to work, and they end up being able to sustain this otherwise completely unsustainable philosophy of fight and pacifism, which bugs the heck out of me because it relies on superhuman power. It relies on having the biggest stick, a stick so much bigger than anyone else, that you can enforce your sense of personal morality on the entire world, reshape the universe to fit your desire not to ever have to make a hard decision.
Uso could not go after Katajina and go after Shakti at the same time. He cannot fight off the enemy and not kill anybody. He is being thrust into all of these situations that create direct conflict between the things that he wants to do.
And be, and that's life. All of us have to do that. I mean, not those specific choices, I hope, but, yeah, you're always going to have to make those difficult choices. And I think that's a big part of what makes a good character relatable.
You brought up the line about video games earlier, which. So glad I talked about youth culture in Otaku already, because it just keeps coming up. The concern that the older generation seemed to have that video games and the kind of entertainment that young people engaged with meant that they didn't understand reality. I think they're wrong. Uso's desire to fight without killing someone, I think, is just the naivety of being young. And I think it's a rare person who at his age, would want to kill somebody, like actually really mean it, especially someone who hadn't personally harmed them directly just yet. But it comes back to that generational conflict and to this idea that, well, like any art, like any media, gives a skewed idea of what reality might be. If you've only ever played war games, you might mistakenly think that that's what war is like, and your first experience would be very jarring. But that's true of a ton of different categories of entertainment that's not confined to war. The same thing could be said of romance games.
Well, one thing that is, I think, universal of games. Obviously there are exceptions because the world is vast, but games are replayable. If you make a mistake, you can do it again from the beginning. If you're in a game where you have to make choices, you can look up advice on those choices. You can try it one way, and then you can try it another. You can save and reload. None of these things can actually be done in battle. It does kind of feel like the, er, old man yells at cloud, or I guess old man yells at child kind of situation, those video games. But I'm not entirely certain that we're meant to find it risable because I do know that in like 2009, Tomino gave a speech at a video game development conference in which he called video games evil. So he may not be their biggest fan of the medium. I also know that in this time, companies like Bondi, I. E. The major sponsors for mecca programs, who had been working with Sunrise and Tomino in specific for a really long time, were just losing their shirts to video game developers. Like kids were spending their money on video games and not robot toys. And so there may have been some hostility on that end too. Not that there weren't Gundam video games, not that those weren't bringing in the.
Cash, but to the extent that a toy version of something is a few steps removed from an actual real thing that may or may not even be possible or exist, a video game is yet a few more steps removed because of the lack of physicality, the lack of a real material thing that you can touch in your hands. I'm not going to get into the whole argument over whether or not that's good, bad, or both. That is beyond the scope of this talkback.
A video game is also constrained in certain ways that a physical object is not like if you were playing with a model of the victory, you could have it fight with just its legs on, you could turn its head all the way around. You could have it shoot backwards just by lifting an arm in the wrong way. If you're playing a video game, you can only do those things if they have in some way already been programmed into the game.
Yeah.
Or if you hack it. But functionally, you are limited by someone else's creativity.
That is one of the points in favor of physical objects.
Yes.
I'm not anti video game.
No.
I mean, I think many of us spend too much time on screens and it's like bad for our mental health. But I also think a lot of video games are very enjoyable as recreation and entertainment. And a lot of them are great art.
Absolutely.
So it's just like anything though, right? Moderation.
It is always good to think about the ways in which different media, different experiences, limit and condition our thinking.
One of the concerns about tv and film versus books. Right. With a book, your imagination has to picture these places, construct these people, construct the visuals, and it's active. You have to read the words. It requires this input from you and effort from you in a way that passively watching a screen does not also, God, we're having the conversation now. Oops.
Feel like I'm expressing so many criticisms of video games, but this is coming from the place of someone who really loves video games and has ever since the moment I first saw, like math blasters on an Apple two.
Right. We have both played video games almost our entire lives. We both really enjoy games of all different kinds.
Play video games basically every day.
Yeah, this is coming from, we're gamers.
Derogatory.
Exactly.
But there is a thing I have noticed in storytelling in mass media over the past decade or two decades, and it's the video gameization of plotlines that even in other media, even in books, movies, tv, there is a shift to narratives that are structured the way a video game is structured.
And do you think video game structure differs from pre video game story structure?
Yes, I mean, video game story structure inherits a lot of things from other existing narrative structures. But a lot of video game storytelling is based around the mechanics of a video game. Travel to place, obtain object, kill the.
Mans, and then the upgrades to the object and harder mans.
Right.
And build team.
And I'm going to bring it back to victory. Now, when they were designing victory, when they were writing the story and coming up with the mobile suits and all of that, they were looking to video games for inspiration. There is talk about, like getting upgrade parts for mobile suits the same way in rpgs you acquire new equipment. We haven't really seen that yet, but that's discussed by the designers when they're talking about these mobile suits.
And it's almost addressed internal to the story structure as well, because there's that moment where Uso is upset that they have sent out the boots because that's going to make him more deadly. It's going to make it more likely that he kills someone. So he needed the hanger, but he didn't really want them to send the boots. And once they do, it's like, oh no, now this is a real death machine.
I think in this one it's the other way around. He has the boots already and he doesn't want the hanger, but it's usually in the past, it's usually been, he has the hanger and then they give him the boots.
Right. Anyway, my point stands.
Stands like a mobile suit with just legs on the ground. I loved that legs sequence. The fights in victory continue to be absolutely top notch, really creative. The victory Gundam was designed by Katoki Hajime. There is a joke in Gundam circles that whenever Kotoki gets the opportunity to redesign an existing mobile suit. He always makes the legs a much larger percentage of its overall body. So the victory with just the legs is the ideal Katoki mobile suit. And in addition to being really creative, this fight also, I think, externalizes Uso's internal dilemma. His desire to return to Casarelia at the beginning of the episode represents a desire for innocence, to return to an innocent time, to give up these responsibilities, to give up the power over life or death that the victory represents for him. And then he gets into the fight and he has to confront that directly, overtly.
I disagree slightly. It's true that he doesn't want to kill anyone. It's true that he has been horrified by seeing death over the past however many days or weeks it's been. But I don't think he would want to go back to Casarelia if he didn't feel responsibility towards Shakti. If Shakti hadn't gone back, I don't think he would go back alone. It's not just about getting away. It's not just about trying to go home and go back to how things were. It's that with all their parents gone, he has kind of decided that Shakti is his responsibility, that he's supposed to look after her and he can't look after her if she's gone back and he's here.
I find myself in a bind because I don't disagree with anything that you just said. But I don't entirely think it negates what I was saying before.
Well, like I said, it's kind of a matter of we're arguing over degrees, which concerns rank higher on the list.
Than others and for which characters and.
How strong a pull do they have? My position is that if Shakti hadn't gone back, he wouldn't want to go back. He wouldn't go back. Is yours that he would?
Yes. And that's mostly because of that scene towards the end, after he's gotten out of the victory, after he's been upbraided by the old man polycule, where he's like, well, okay, then I'm going to leave. He tries again to leave and again he's forestalled by Bespa's actions. Shakti also wants to go back to Casarelia and also finds it to be impossible. And it's that impossibility that really makes me think that Cassrelia is becoming like the Garden of Eden. It represents the impossibility of a return to the innocence. Before all of this happened, I mean, I agree. It's basically the Shire.
The next time on for this episode says that they try to go back and they do go back and then the fight comes to them, which is more or less what I would have predicted, that there isn't really anywhere that they can truly completely get away from the war.
I guess we should mention that we've started watching the next time ons.
Yeah, we do that now.
We started with this season.
It was part of the episodes as they aired.
Yeah, I think my initial motivation in saying that we weren't going to watch them is because I wanted to preserve a couple of specific shocking moments from first Gundam to get Nina's in the moment reactions to them. But the appeal of that has kind of declined over the years. And like you said, they are part of the episodes. And as we do our best to put ourselves in the mind space of a person watching this when it aired, then, yeah, we ought to be watching them.
And now part two of Tom's research on the japanese ad industry in the early 90s.
Last week on MSB, we began our dive into the role played by the advertising agency Densu in shaping victory Gundam and deciding its fate as a work by talking generally about the role of the advertising industry in japanese commerce, how agencies first emerged as brokers for newspaper advertising space during the Meiji period, and how they evolved over the course of the 20th century to become full service shops offering expertise in everything from tv commercial production to market research, while retaining their traditional role as the brokers of both space and time in the mass media. As brokers, the ad agency's own short term business interests were often at ods with those of their clients, advertisers and media both. And yet their success, indeed their very survival, depended more on the strength of the interpersonal bonds they cultivated with those same clients than on their actual skill in the creation of advertisements. In his book, a japanese advertising agency, anthropologist Brian Moran emphasizes this interpersonal element. Quote, account executives soon learn that they are not required to be specialists in the field of their clients operations, nor are they expected to carry out the kind of strategic planning that typifies the work of account executives in european and american agencies. Rather, since what matters is process rather than results per se, these salesmen learn that they should be seen to be trying hard. Provided that account executives do exhibit this kind of what the Japanese like to call ishokenme attitude, a client will accept their account team's work even though it may not have been as effective as it might have wished. If, on the other hand. An account team's advertising ideas are successful, but the account executive in charge is not seen to be sufficiently diligent in his attention. The client may terminate the account. Moran notes that the term used for this kind of human chemistry work in the industry is Newaza, which literally means sleeping skills, but which I recognize from judo as the term for when the fight goes to the mats and you have to wrestle for a submission hold, and which the dictionary informs me is also a euphemism for underhanded dealing, at least according to the ad agency employees Moran spoke with. These so called Nawaza skills accounted for about two thirds of an agency's ability to attract and retain clients, their skills as advertisers accounting for the remaining third. This kind of human chemistry was especially important because, at least when Moran was doing his research, most business in the advertising industry was conducted without any kind of contract, a point of pride for many participants. Trust and mutual exchange of favors were the sinew by which the industry moved. And nowhere was this more true than in the extremely high stakes realm of tv advertising. At the time, at least, tv was the most important medium in japanese advertising. Tv ads represented around 30% of the nation's ad market, seven times more than radio, four and a half times more than magazines, and almost double that of their closest rival newspapers. And while different agencies might be stronger in one medium or another, all of the top agencies derived at least 30% of their total revenue from tv ads. In 1990, almost every household in Japan had at least one color tv set, and on average, each household watched around 7 hours of tv per week, with an average of three people watching at any given time. There were five commercial networks and each broadcast at least 22 hours per day, with two or more of those hours devoted to commercials. The standard 30 minutes program was actually 29 minutes plus 1 minute of socalled spot advertising between programs. Of the 29 minutes, three were reserved for what is called time advertising. We'll come back to those terms later. This left 26 minutes for the program itself, which is why tv anime is almost always 26 minutes long. The commercials that ran in those ad blocks ranged from 15 to 30 seconds, generally trending towards shorter rather than longer as costs ballooned. In the early days of tv, the ads were longer even as long as three minutes. But by the 1990s, producing commercials and buying ad time on tv had become prohibitively expensive. Making 130 2nd commercial in 1990 could cost as much as ¥120,000,000, something like $800,000 at the time, and nearly $2 million if adjusted for inflation. And that's not counting the cost of putting the thing on tv. Even so, in those latter years of the booming bubble economy, ad agencies created about 10,000 new tv commercials a year. Densu alone was responsible for as many as 2000 in 1990. But how did those ads actually get onto tv when commercial tv first started up? Actually, in a neat little coincidence, the very first ads to run on tv in the United States and Japan, more than a decade apart, were both for watchmakers Boulova in the US and Seiko in Japan. And the Seiko commercial was created for the company by none other than Densu. That first Seiko commercial has been lost. The original film was unfortunately destroyed in 1963. But a different Seiko commercial, which ran later the same day, did survive. And Seiko calls this one the first tv ad in japanese history, because it's good publicity for the company anyway. When commercial tv started up, advertising agencies would themselves come up with ideas for television programs. They would persuade networks to buy them, recruit sponsors to fund them, and then hire studios to produce them. This meant that it was the ad agencies on behalf of the sponsors, who really controlled the content of any tv show. Not completely. The tv stations had some influence as the buyer and the ultimate broadcaster. But the balance of power rested with the agencies and the sponsors. Tv sponsorship was relatively cheap at the time, so shows typically only had one sponsor, and that sponsor could exercise a significant amount of influence over the show's content. One consequence of this in the US was frequent and frequently ludicrous meddling by those sponsors. Moran notes a few specifics. Chevrolet sponsored the western gunsmoke, and so the characters were never supposed to say that they were going to Ford a river. Ford wanted the Chrysler building painted out of backdrops of the New York skyline, and Chrysler asked a game show contestant named Ford to change his name. I think my favorite of these, though, is the light bulb manufacturer Westinghouse, who insisted on changing the title of an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's the Light that failed, because we would not want our light bulbs to be associated with failing lights, would we? American tv stations were not thrilled with this system, and throughout the 1950s they gradually worked to weaken the grip of the ad agencies on program development. They were helped in this by a major scandal that broke in the late 50s when it came out that many of the most popular tv game shows were completely rigged. This scandal seriously damaged the credibility of the ad agencies responsible, and it was big enough to attract congressional notice, even legislation. The tv networks pled ignorance. They canceled most of their game shows and took advantage of the opportunity to assert greater control over their schedules, working directly with production companies to develop their own lineups. In 1962, the network ABC started the practice of holding what is called an upfront, a round of presentations to advertisers where the network announces its upcoming schedule and shows off the lineup of programs to convince advertisers to buy ad slots for particular shows in advance. Any leftover ad slots get sold piecemeal closer to airtime in what's called the scatter market. But things developed quite differently in Japan. The tv stations there never managed to squeeze out the ad agencies, and in 1990, those agencies remained directly involved in and indispensable to program development. I don't want to oversell the agency's power. They were not the secret puppet masters of all tv media. Program decisions were ultimately still made by the tv stations. Creative decisions were mainly made by the studios making the shows. But agencies did develop ideas for shows, analyze the market to determine whether the show might find an audience, recruit sponsors, find production studios, and pitch the whole package to the tv networks. In exchange, they received the right to broker the sales of the ad slots during the program. That was a very lucrative privilege. We've already noted how expensive tv ad spots were for agencies paid on commission. Securing a spot on a tv schedule was a bit like a prospector hitting a rich vein of gold. On top of that, they might also secure for themselves the merchandising rights to the new show. If the show turned out to be a hit, or better yet, a durable franchise, those merchandising rights could be extremely valuable and might even be enough to keep a small, specialized agency afloat for a long time. This is foreshadowing for next week. The pitching process could work a couple of different ways that involve more or less involvement from the agencies. A tv station might have an existing show that needed a new sponsor for one reason or another. In this case, they would notify all the ad agencies and ask them to propose new sponsors from among their clientele. At this point, the agencies would submit bids and the tv station would pick the best bid to become the new sponsor. Best could mean offering the most money, but often not. Prestige mattered a lot to the tv stations, and so did finding a good fit for the program. They also needed to make sure that the new sponsor meshed well with any other sponsors on the same program. It was bad practice to allow two competing companies to co sponsor the same program. In a scenario that's a little bit more relevant for us, the tv station might have an opening in their schedule and need a new program to fill it. The idea for that new program might come from anywhere. From the tv station, from an advertiser with something to sell, from a production studio with a story they wanted to tell, or from the ad agency's own staff. But in each case, the second step was to take that idea to an ad agency. Because it was the agencies and not the networks, not the sponsors, not the production houses that had developed the expertise and the infrastructure necessary to assemble all of the different pieces, creative and business, into an overall strategy that they could pitch to the tv station. To convince them to buy the show and put it on air, they sold themselves as the experts on the tastes of the tv watching public, and agencies lived or died on their ability to deliver on that promise. For example, Kusube Sankichiro, a Manchukwo born anime producer working at Shin a animation, is credited with the idea for the 1979 re adaptation of Doriman. It was Kusube who convinced the original mangaka to authorize a second attempt, despite the ill starred failure of the first adaptation. But it was not Kusube who convinced TV Asahi to take a chance on Doriman. That task was entrusted to the advertising agency Asahi Tsushinsha, also known as Asatsu and now called ADK. They were able to do this in part because TV Asahi was looking to shore up their weak primetime lineup and because Asatsu had the market research to back up their pitch. They believed Dorimon could be a big hit. And they were right. This second adaptation ran for more than 1800 episodes, only ending in 2005. It was immediately replaced by another adaptation of Doriman, also handled by Asatsu, which is still running today. It probably helped that Asatsu had already established themselves as animation specialists and as hitmakers, or at least the representatives of hitmakers, because they had also been the ad agency for, among other things, the mazinger franchise. For another example, the 1982 Captain Harlock movie Arcadia of my Youth was produced in order to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Tokyo agency. If the tv station decided to accept a show, they would buy it from the production studio, typically at a flat rate per episode. This fee might be less than the actual cost to make the episode. In fact, I understand that to be the rule rather than the exception. The additional funding necessary to make up the difference had to come from other sources, usually the sponsors, who got in exchange a license to sell branded merchandise. This practice goes all the way back to 1963 and Tezuka Osamu's momentous decision to undercut his competitors by selling episodes of Astro Boy for less than half of what they cost to produce, making up the difference in royalties. We often talk about the role of toy manufacturers like Clover or bandai, who have enjoyed a long, visible and well documented symbiotic relationship with the studios who make the mecca anime that we love. But there have always been other sponsors just as eager to capitalize on the popularity of a hit show to move merchandise. Back in season one, Nina talked about how music label King Records more or less created the market for anime soundtrack albums off the back of first Gundam's popularity. Then there's confectioner Morinaga, who used to sweeten their milk coffee caramel candies by packaging them together with mini gunplicates. But the main thing that sponsors got for their contributions was the right to buy advertising slots during the three minutes per half hour allotted to time advertising. This was a big deal in 1990. Getting your commercial on tv and in front of people's eyeballs was not a simple matter of showing up at the tv station with a reel of film and a fistful of cash. Moran describes a seller's market in which there were many more companies looking to sponsor shows than there were opportunities to do so. He likened the ad agency media buyers bidding on these rare spots to gamblers playing roulette at Monte Carlo. With only five commercial networks in the country, there simply weren't very many new shows being put on each year, and sponsors were loathed to abandon a successful program. One thing that Moran did not directly address in his book is the question of what constitutes a new program. That might seem like a simple question to answer. One show ends and another one replaces it. The second one is a new program, but when you start to look closely, the distinction gets a little fuzzy. From the outside, double Zeta looks like a new program, but from the business side, it was a continuation of its predecessor, the same sponsors, the same production studio, the same ad agency, and it aired in the same time slot on the same network. In fact, if you look at that particular time slot, Saturdays at 05:30 p.m. On Nagoya television, a time slot so storied that it has its own Wikipedia page, you will notice that it was monopolized by shows from the tripartite coalition of Sotsu, Clover, and Sunrise from 1977 until 1983. This arrangement, in which Sotsu bought time on Clover's behalf and filled it with whatever giant robot anime Sunrise was making that year, was not disturbed until Clover's bankruptcy during the middle of aura battler Dunbine, which created one of those rare opportunities for a new sponsor to jump into an already running and at least moderately successful program. Bondi inserted itself into the void left by their former rival and the new second triumvirate of Sotsu Bondi. Sunrise monopolized the spot for a further five years, until 1988, when Bondi decided to pull their sponsorship after the conclusion of metal armor Dragonar. According to Uda Masuo, Sunrise had pitched Bondi on a follow up to Dragonar, but the toy maker was not interested. This put sunrise in something of a desperate situation. The studio considered that Nagoya television spot to be crucial, the more so because they did not at the time have any time slots on any of the premier Tokyo based tv stations. I'll talk more about what that means, the importance of the so called key stations in Tokyo, and how Nagoya television fit into that scheme. Next week, when Bondi balked at whatever Sunrise had planned to follow Dragonar, the studio began desperately looking around for other sponsors. But they'd run out of time. The tv slot fell vacant. At this point, the tv station did something kind of extraordinary. They put on an emergency filler show for three months, giving Sunrise time to assemble a new sponsor and advertising agency, coalition. UDA credits this to the long relationship of trust that Sunrise and Nagoya television enjoyed. Those three months allowed Sunrise's top brass to reach out to some old, old business associates at toy company Takara, who they had known as far back as the 1960s, before the original Sunrise crew broke away from mushi productions to form their own studio, either because they liked the show or because they trusted sunrise, or just because they wanted to steal a march on Bandai. Takara agreed to take over as the main sponsor for the time slot. The new show would be a collaboration between Takara as main sponsor, Sunrise as production studio, and Tokyo as ad agency. That show turned out to be the wildly popular and enduringly influential legendary armor samurai troopers, which I used to watch on tv before school under its english name, Ronin Warriors. I don't know whether Sotsu was involved in this pitching process. Presumably they wanted to keep that valuable Nagoya television spot just as bad as Sunrise did. But perhaps Takara preferred to work with a different agency. Perhaps Sotsu was simply too closely associated with Bondi. I've yet to find any examples of Takara and Sotsu collaborating on anything, but either way, they lost the spot they had monopolized since 1977. Moran describes the struggle to replace a departing sponsor from the agency's perspective. Quote the main problem is when and how information about a program falling vacant is released. After all, the agency handling a sponsor who decided to drop out of a program is privy to information that neither rival agencies nor the network itself knows. It can therefore make a kind of preemptive strike by finding a substitute sponsor before informing the key station concerned of its present client's intention to stop supporting a program. Those in the business used to say that this was a ploy typically used by Densu, which had a long list of prestigious clients from which to choose and persuade a station to accept. Lesser agencies were not usually in a position to make such demands. It strikes me that Sotsu may well have been extremely lucky that Clover went bankrupt during rather than after the airing of aura battler Dunbine. With the show still in production, there was a strong interest in maintaining as much continuity as possible and little time to ask other agencies to put in bids. Bondi was ready and willing to work with Sotsu, and by the time the show ended, there was no particular reason to upset that new business arrangement. The new Tokyo Takara Sunrise partnership proved durable. They produced a second show, Jushin Liger, in 1989 before striking gold with Brave X Kaiser in 1990. Kicking off the Brave series, they pumped out a new brave show every year until the 1998 finale of King of Braves Gao Guy Gar. Low ratings and poor toy sales brought about the end of the Tokyo Takara partnership and that Saturday evening anime time slot. Nagoya Television replaced it with a Sunday morning spot that would be dominated by Tokyo until 2007 and then by Asatsu until 2016. Although the ad agencies remained consistent during those periods, there was a rotating cast of studios and main sponsors, which really tells you something about the influence of the ad agencies if you view it as a series of individual works. That Nagoya television Saturday evening time slot hosted something like 21 different programs over the course of two decades. Bu
Next time on episode 10.8, fighting Fate, we research and discuss episode eight of Victory Gundam and the most common name in the world, a vestigial cape Landers.
Is a good guard dog.
Turnabout is fair play.
The cryptic language of Uso's hat glomp.
See, when we protect the natural environment, it protects us. The sickening name of Gundam ooh, cool axe. Do I have a thing for Gundam's tall, dark women and blonde nerds with glasses? And Katagina is willing to abandon her firm antiwar stance in exchange for a s nine G. Tomliot please listen to it.
Mobile suit Breakdown is written, recorded, and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City, within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dioxin. The closing music is long way home by spinning ratio. The recap music is slow by Lloyd Rogers. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people, and more in the show notes on our website, gundampodcast.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email hosts@gundampodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you would like to support the show, please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us financially@gundampodcast.com. Patreon. You can find links and more ways to help out@gundampodcast.com. Support thank you for listening. The Gundam fandom has been corrupted by wrong opinions, and the only way to purify ourselves is by exposing them to the light of day. Like fancy Wookie, who says that Gundam has a proud tradition of celebrating dangerous women and their crimes and Madame la Guillotine is no exception. Like, three toes. Three toes in one stub. New record.
Pretty bad.
Yeah, well, one of them is a toe that I only kind of have partial feeling in, so that's okay.
The ones you cut off that time.
Which is too much fun to say. Gal guy. Gar.
The minute he said that line I wrote in my notes, shut it, old man. Someone is going to start watching victory because they're going to be like, there's an old man polycule. What? They're going to be so disappointed, and it's all your fault.
They won't be disappointed because there is an old man polycule and it's right there. I feel like Duke or ick. They could have a reveal that actually he, like Monica Arno, was a researcher who joined the military to get funding for his living history motorcycle revival project.
Oh, man.
One of his two wingmen, the woman with a dark skin and teal hair, has such great energy as a character. Just like, oh, man. I want you to stick around a while. But who knows? We might never see her again. But they made her look so cool.
Did you notice when Marbette gets out of the plane again, she has to try to protect her injured leg, which is why it's such a struggle to get out, why she needs Uso's help. She's got a bandage on the wound, and at the beginning of the episode, it's, like, clean and white and freshly applied. When she gets out of the plane, it's soaked with blood. It's, like, deep red.
I hadn't seen that. But this is basically the story of Marbette since the beginning of this show. So I just remembered one thing that you brought up before we started that we haven't talked about yet, which is the diegetic commitment to talking about the legacy of Gundam.
I feel like we're going to have another opportunity to talk about that later. And as you pointed out, we have been going for a long time.
Okay, then I think we should wrap it up.
All right. We didn't mention the foreshadowing, but maybe we can talk about that next week.
I actually didn't notice the foreshadowing very well.
You did, but you didn't phrase it as foreshadowing. When Pippiniden comes down and is like, the something has moved to a geosynchronous position and the so and so is.
Angry about this, and I've been instructed to make some demands.
And when Farah Griffin is like, tell me everything you know about Gin Jahanam and when Romero is like, don't you understand that they're just using Maria Harmonia's name to justify their actions?
Yeah, that was interesting.
Whole lot of name drops for characters who are presumably going to be important later. Anyway, I'm going to stop it. Cool.