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 10.43 Big Ship, Big Gun, and we're your hosts. I'm Tom, the Comet of Podcasting.
And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam.
And really enjoying the irony of a mind control device called Angel Halo.
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This week we're covering Victory Episode 43 Senjou no Suise Farah aka Pharah the Comet of the Battlefield. The episode was written by Okiya Akira, storyboarded by Nishimori Akira, and directed by longtime Gundam veteran Sekita Osamu, with relative newcomer Morishita Hiromitsu and veteran Taniguchi Moriyasa sharing the animation director role. Now the recap.
Angel Halo has been completed and the combined Liege Militaire Federation Force plans an immediate assault. They must capture or destroy this monstrous weapon before it is fully operational. Uso, hurt by his father's coldness at the briefing, is distracted and grumpy as he returns to the White Ark and none of the other kids explanations, scolding or teasing snaps him out of it. But bad mood or no, the enemy draws near. Soon, USO and his friends are shooting and slashing their way through the Bespa fleet. Meanwhile, Tassilo and Pharah plot to use the battle not only to defeat the League Militaire, but to wrest the Angel Halo from Cagati's control. Farah launches the Zenek with co pilot Kil, who will fly and fire the cannon while she uses her new abilities for navigation and targeting far outside of visual range. Pharah can sense USO on the battlefield, but the first shot is a near miss, and the second, the beam, wide enough that it cannot be fully blocked by a standard shield, shreds the legs from Melira's mobile suit. Knowing that he is the true target, USO chases the Zanik and the two suits trade beam cannon fire without doing much damage to each other. To USO's shock, the Zennek draws near and then stops. Its cockpit hatch opens and Pharah emerges, floating towards him, arms outstretched. Somehow, Uso can tell that this is not a surrender, and he trembles with dread. Pharah, thinking of the two days she spent drifting in space before Tassilo's men retrieved her, tells uso I'll give you a taste of the fear I felt. Though he has not been informed of Pharah's plans, Kil realizes that now, while the dreaded white mobile suit's pilot is distracted, is the perfect time to strike. He fires the Xanax beam cannon, narrowing the beam in an effort to hit the V2 without hitting Pharah. Little expecting that there would be a second pilot, USO dodges just fast enough to save himself, but the V2's shield and right arm are blasted to pieces.
Pieces.
While USO darts away, Pharah returns to the Zanek, orders kill out of the cockpit, and for his failure to kill, USO shoots him in the face. Before Pharah can renew her pursuit, reinforcements arrive from the Jeanne D'Arc, giving USO time to return to the Lean Horse Junior for a new hangar. On the way, he concocts a plan for dealing with the Zanik and requests that the ship also launch as many Boots parts as they can spare. The boots follow him in loose formation as USO heads straight for the Zanik. When Pharah fires at them, USO uses the V2's wings to disperse the beam, then attacks her from above while the Boots maintain constant fire on their way to crashing into the Zanik itself. Enduring strike after strike, Pharah loses track of uso, allowing him to land a few decisive blows. Destroying the Xanak. Pharah ejects just in time. But these skirmishes were just the beginning. The fleet battle is intensifying, and the White Ark finds itself in the thick of the action. With no allies nearby to call on for support and no clear path for retreat, Marbek grits her teeth and decides to set a course for Angel Halo across the battlefield. USO senses Shakti's anxiety and seeing the danger the White Arc is in, us rejoins Odello and Tomas. All three return to the little ship to find everyone staring out the window of the bridge. Angel Halo clearly visible in the distance.
I think it's going to be a short episode this week.
Ha. I think that has actually happened maybe twice in all the times that one or the other of us has said that.
See, I don't think it's ever happened when I actually called it 0% hit rate on that one. But actually, I. I don't know. I didn't have that much to say about this episode. I mean, there's the. A plotline of USO feeling weird about his dad that to me plays out like an After School Special. Was not particularly impressed by that element of the episode. And then there's the bit with Farah Tasilo and the short lived Kiel. That one I thought was pretty interesting. I have some things to say about that.
I think we'll wind up talking about a few of these things for longer than you anticipate. But to start off, one of the funniest things about this episode for me was that it looks really good. But there are many moments where certain characters are distinctly off model. I think in general it is a well animated, pretty episode. But especially in that opening scene, the big meeting with the Federation and League Militaire pilots and officers, USO doesn't quite look right. And then in a few of the scenes that follow, I think Shakti looks a little off. Mubarak looks a bit strange in places.
If, as seems to be the case, this is a show about an anarchist organization like the League Militaire and their heroic struggle against the domineering tyranny of the Zanskar Empire. An empire that wants to control you, control your life, even control your mind. What is a better show of resistance than rejecting the conventional power structure of the animated series? Who is to say that the model sheet and the character designer should determine the designs of the characters? I salute the animators of Victory for rejecting the tyrannical reign of the model sheet.
Now that Tom has got that off his chest. One scene in particular stood out to me as quite beautiful. And that's during the big fight. A mobile suit gets hit with a large beam weapon. The mobile suit explodes. Somehow the pilot is still in one piece. And so we see this pilot in a normal suit, silhouetted against the glare of the beam and sort of like spinning through space.
I interpreted those events slightly differently. I didn't think that was the pilot of the mobile suit who got hit. I thought that was Kill's dead body floating through space.
Oh, maybe.
I suppose it doesn't matter. Either way, it's still a beautiful shot.
I found Uso's whole thing with his dad sort of sweet. It just treads ground that we've really mostly tread before. Because it's a whole nother storyline about how USO is caught between childhood and adulthood and is struggling with that transition. What he interprets as coldness from his father, most of the other kids I think correctly identify as like, well, of course he's not going to be the way he is with you in front of all of his work colleagues and bosses and allies. Like he has to act different in this circumstance. That doesn't actually mean he's an unfeeling, mean dad. That's just how dads are.
Sure.
I remember the first time I had that realization that my dad was not going to be as, like, fun and affectionate and relaxed when we were in or around his work as he was at home.
Yeah, you could easily substitute this storyline into any number of different contexts. It doesn't need to be a space battle. It could be the big basketball game. The arc of it is all, I think, pretty trite. Like I said at the beginning, it feels like an After School special. USO has an interaction with his dad that makes him feel upset. He lashes out at Haro. His friends tell him he's wrong, but he doesn't believe them.
Oh, I think he believes them. He just. He doesn't want an explanation. He wants to be mad.
But if he believed them, then we wouldn't do this, like, second act where he goes out, he fights, he's struggling because of his confused emotions. Then his dad does a big gesture that shows USO that he does care. Really? And he skips work to go to the big basketball game. Uso, realizing that his dad really cares, conks himself on the head and says, ugh, I've just been acting like a spoiled brat. Then he pulls it together, he shoots the three pointer, and he wins the game.
Counterpoint. USO does believe them, but feelings don't really yield to logic. Like, in the context of this scenario, Hangeul is USO's boss, not USO's dad. And he can understand that logically, but that doesn't mean it feels good.
And USO's sensation of relief, his emotional catharsis here at the end, when he's like, oh, my dad really does care about me. Ugh, I feel so much better. To me. That doesn't land when the gesture his father has done is to, like, send a mobile suit unit to support him. And as USO is being like, ah, I feel so much better, those guys are getting, like, killed. Like four or five of them get killed on screen, as USO is like, ugh, dad does care about me.
USO is in fact wrong about several things in this episode. You know, he maintains the Gundam tradition of rejecting Haro as he progresses out of childhood, but he still is childish in a lot of ways. You know, when he thinks to himself, are family relationships severed by war? It's like, kid, the complication of your relationship with your father that you are currently experiencing, it's not severing, it's just more complicated. And that's not war. That's growing up. Obviously, it's a little more complicated because of his specific circumstances, but most people's relationships with their parents become more complicated as they become adults. That's normal. Winusos. Oh, he really is looking out for me. It's like, well, he's looking out for the battle in which you are a very important asset. I don't entirely feel like you are interpreting this gesture correctly, but if it makes you feel better, whatever. And there is the sort of sidebar of Mubarak telling Hangarg, you could be more fatherly. And Hangrick says, you know, I don't think the other generals would feel the same way. And he may be right, but I don't believe for a second that had he really wanted to, Hanger couldn't have found, like, a private moment with USO to be fatherly and affectionate in. Like, I get that you can't do that in front of everyone, and that's fine, but two minutes alone before your son goes off to battle, you couldn't swing that.
Sure. This bit with Hagerg and Mubarak is the most interesting part of this storyline to me for the story as a whole. I guess my complaint kind of boils down to, I think they want me to sympathize with USO and I don't.
Oh, see, I think they're trying to point out that USO is still a kid because we frequently get glimpses of how mature USO is, you know, how sort of wise beyond his years, serious and conscientious beyond his years he is. And occasionally they need to remind us, oh, no, he's 13, y'all. Like, for the various other emotional beats of the story to maintain their poignancy, we have to be reminded that he's a child and not just a small grown up.
I mean, I agree with you.
You know, I'm defending it. I don't think it's the greatest story ever or, like, particularly good. I didn't find it quite as dull as you seemed to. Oh, also ripped your theory about the boots, I guess.
No, no, he destroys many boots, but not the boots that are on his V2. The boots from Oliver are still intact.
Okay.
That's why he needs to collect all the additional boots off of the lean horse, because he can't use his own boots.
Well, and he needs more than one boots, but. Okay, help me out here. I'm sure this is just another example of my memory being terr, but who the heck is Mr. Mathis?
That is the guy who he killed Outside of Castarelia, the father of the two little girls, the ones who throw rocks at uso.
They definitely only mentioned that name, like, once before. Yeah, and now they're saying it like they expect us to remember this guy.
Well, maybe you should have been reading the magazines that have information on all of these characters. Actually, this is another funny note. This is one of the small differences between the two different official subtitles that we've been looking at. In one of them, I'm pretty sure his name is written as Mathis Walker, and in the other one, it's Mathis Warker. Like how a chocobo makes a wark sound.
Please note that this is not MSP's official position on what sound chocobos make.
I'm a wark truther.
We're not gonna let Tom talk anymore until he stops saying such inflammatory things.
Support the Patreon to provide funds for my crusade for wark.
One last question about the sort of League Militaire Federation side before we move on to talking about Zanskar, Pharah and Tassilo. Why does Marbet fly the White Ark toward Angel Halo? Do we know?
I mean, I assume they're doing a strategy. They're trying to get deep into enemy territory so that they can cut out the soft underbelly while the main fleet is distracted. I think this is related to the bit at the beginning where they're saying, like, oh, there are all of these layers of defenses around Angel Halo. Our fleet isn't strong enough to break through fast enough to get there before the thing is completed. So if the main fleet, the Leanhorse, the Jeanne d'arc, and all these other ships can't get through the Tsilo fleet, the remains of the Motorrad, and the Sugun fleet, then the only way they're going to be able to do anything to disable the Angel Halo before it's ready is with a small commando mission aboard this smaller, difficult to detect White Ark.
But there's no indication that this was planned ahead of time. No, this seems very much like Marbet's, sort of figuratively on the ground assessment of their position and the situation and her determination that she really wants to do something. She wants to feel like a more active and contributing participant in what's happening.
And this is not the first time Marbet has pulled this kind of mission impromptu in the middle of a battle. This is how they wound up infiltrating Zanskar that second time. The time they almost kidnapped Queen Maria and then almost got guillotined over.
It Speaking of which, according to Farah, Tassilo's execution was legit. It wasn't a ruse. It was that he was found out. Cagati learned that Tassilo had been plotting against him and that was why he was going to be executed.
Although if I was Tassilo and I was telling Pharah how we wound up where we are now, I would probably tell her that the execution was legit as well, even if it wasn't. Because if it was a sham just the same as the sham that was pulled on Farah, then that means I'm under Kageti's thumb, doesn't it? And I might not want people to know that. Certainly Pippi Needen thought that was the case.
We are informed at the beginning of the episode that while the Angel Halo is now fully assembled, it is not fully operational and is surrounded by three different fleets, the Tassila fleet, the remnants of the Motorrad fleet, and the Sugin fleet. And that the bell sounds that people seem to be hearing sort of all the time now might not actually come from the Zanek, but from the Angel Halo airspace.
Hmm.
There are a couple of shots in this week's episode where you can get a clear view of the bells at Pharah's waist, and there's two clusters, but each cluster has five bells, and then she has the three bells on her head, and if she has seven bells on her feet, then she is like the bell covered scepter that shrine maidens use in the ceremonial dances that I talked about last week. Which kind of begs the question whether she herself is the medium, whether she herself is possessed by something, or whether she is the tool being used to try to induce that state in other people.
Hmm. Friend of the podcast Storm pointed out that there's a character in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Gan Ning, who also wears bells into battle, though I don't know anything more about that.
Could be protective. Could be to scare his enemies. They know he's coming. Lots of possible explanations there. Quick side note and question. We learn that Fonz Cagaty is from Jupiter, that the Helium three miners have formed a united Jupiter Republic. Are we gonna have a Gundam show set in and around Jupiter anytime soon? Or that goes to Jupiter? It really feels like a wasted opportunity. They use it as, oh, this faraway place where cool stuff is happening and then we never go there or learn anything more about it.
I think you need to read the manga Crossbow and Gun Gundam. I think that's the only thing.
Is this why Everybody is obsessed with Crossbone Gundam.
No.
Okay.
It's funny you talk about the instrumentality of Pharah as a person, what her utility is. Because there's that bit when Hangerg and Mubarak are talking and Hangerg is thinking to himself afterwards, as I had Mira, uso, you have Shakti, hold your horses, dad. And that should be enough. This is after Hangerg has been criticized for not being sufficiently warm and paternal to his child. Is Hangerg saying, as a man, you should get all of your soft, warm, fluffy emotional needs taken care of, satisfied by the nearest available woman. Like, I had my wife. Mira, you have your platonic common law wife, Shakti. I mean, they're raising a baby together, right? That's. Well, that's pretty close.
I put a slightly less cynical spin on it, which is that Hanger is basically prepared at this point to treat USO as an adult man. USO's not ready entirely to be treated as an adult, but Hanger's ready to treat him like one after seeing his fighting prowess and how USO has been able to handle himself and sort of navigate these difficult situations and that, yeah, in the very heteronormative nuclear family sort of sense. As an adult man, USO is supposed to find and cleave to a wife. He leaves his own family behind and creates a new one. And that he assumes that USO and Shakti, after everything he's heard about them trying to protect each other, rescue each other, that they've known each other since childhood, he kind of assumes that they.
Will wind up together and that should be enough. That's what gives me that cynical read on it. The bit at the end where he's like, and that should be enough, Shakti, should satisfy all of your emotional needs.
I, I think you're reading too much into it because I think if somebody put it to Hanger, oh, you had all of your emotional needs satisfied by your wife, no friendships, your relationship with your kid wasn't important, your comrades at your work, etc, like, I don't think he would agree with that. I really didn't think about that line that much when I first heard it, so shrug. I was too caught up in the fact that this dad is like, ah, my 13 year old son and his 11 year old friend will surely wind up getting married.
Well, I mean, they are raising a baby together. What did you think of the other line here where Mubarak says, like, your decision to let the other Jin Jahannam give the order to attack marks you out as a wise man.
This might be me swinging too far in the other direction, but I interpreted that as point one. Not being so proud or concerned about appearances that he can't let other people take the lead sometimes, or let other people be the front person. It's not about being seen to be in charge. It's about the best way to manage the battle and also to manage the people who work for you.
Right.
And that he has assessed the other Jin, Janaham's personality and said, oh, this is a guy who needs to feel important sometimes. He needs to feel like he's in charge sometimes. And he generally performs better when we give him that. And there are guardrails. Right? He knows there are people around the other Jin. I keep saying Janaham Jahanam.
I'm just calling him Tanuki Jin from now on.
Tanuki Jin. But anyway, he knows there are other people around this commander who will provide a steadying influence if needed, or who will ignore Jin if needed. And the morale boost Jin gets from being put in charge is valuable.
It makes me think back to Maria and the whole thing about needing to, like, tend to people's spirits, needing to give people an idea to cling to beyond merely their immediate physical necessities. Yes, the order to go into battle needs to be given. But for Tanuki Jin's soul, he needs to be the one who gives it. And Hangurk can recognize that. And if Hangurk can recognize that in somebody like Tanuki Jin, why can't he recognize it in his own son?
Oh, that's just parent child stuff right there.
Exactly. Exactly. Totally. He's got a. He's got a big old blind spot for uso, and he's like, he knew how to deal with USO when the kid was a child. He knows how to deal with USO as a fellow adult. But this teenager in front of him, this creature of earth and space, of adulthood and childhood, this in between thing, that's a mystery. No one really knows how to deal with teenagers.
Not even teenagers.
Especially not teenagers. They're the worst at it.
I did wonder when USO is remembering paragliding with his dad as a young child. When we return to USO in the cockpit, he has quite an angry look on his face.
He does. I was gonna ask you about that.
Is he angry because he's remembering this warmth and closeness between them that it feels as though he's lost? Or is he angry because the vibe was, oh, just trust me. Like, oh, you just need to trust me. But I'm not going to explain things to you. And he feels as though he's still being treated that way and that that's the way you treat young children, not the way you treat burgeoning adults.
Yeah, I mean, there is an interpretation of this where USO is in that emotional place where he just, like, nothing his dad does will satisfy him. If his dad treats him like a child, he gets mad. If his dad treats him like an adult, he gets mad.
Haru is obviously still very helpful to him, but he rejects Haro's chomping. He is specifically angry at the way the Xanak has lured him because he says they are treating him like a child.
And that probably follows off of the Lupe Chinot stuff last episode. Like, he does not want to be treated like a child by these people.
By anybody except his dad sometimes, but not all the time. Only when he wants it.
Why can Father not simply intuit whether I want to be treated as a child or an adult right now? Isn't dad supposed to know everything?
Oh, title of this episode, Senjou no Suisei Farah or Farah the Comet of the Battlefield would seem to connect Shara. Shara Farah pretty directly with Shar.
You would think so.
And yet I don't really get Shar vibes from her. We've had many discussions about who is the Shar of this series, and it's never been her. Well, or is this just a very common nickname for any sufficiently scary pilot? The comet, the red comet, the blue comet, one comet, two comets.
Well, what are the characteristics of a comet? They move fast. They burn hot and bright. And short.
Indeed.
But speaking of Farah, this is really her episode. Most of the most interesting things happening in the episode are her gratuitous butt grabs included. Yes, yes, this is what I was working up towards, because obviously it doesn't exist in isolation. This is another relationship in the Zanskar hierarchy. Commanding man, obeying woman. Like with Pippiniden. Like with Chronicle, there is a physical, intimate relationship between the two. As with Pippinidan and Lupe, Farah is not into it. Farah rejects Tasila's extremely casual pawing at her.
I got more of an indifferent vibe. Like, she's willing to put up with it, but she's not interested in him, really.
She lets it go on for a little bit, but then she, like, turns over and, like, slaps his hand away and snarls at him, doesn't she?
But that is in response to something he says, I think. Not in response to the fact that he's touching her.
But more broadly construed, these are all relationships in which a powerful man is like exploiting the body of a woman, whether that's using her as a soldier or pawing at her.
As with Lupe and Pipi Niden, Farah expresses some disinterest or even contempt for all the political machinations these men are wrapped up in. Farah doesn't care about any of that. Farah cares about fighting and about vengeance for what's happened to her. And in a I don't know what wave of feminism this would be, a kind of way, she's using her sex appeal with Tassilo so that she can get revenge against various people she feels have wronged her. Lupe was using sex to get Pippinidan to do what she wanted.
Mm. And seeing that replicated here, having identified four examples of this and seeing it in two of them, we are naturally inclined to wonder if that is happening in the others as well.
To be clear, there is still an obvious, like, power imbalance here. It's still sexual harassment, even if women are trying to get something out of it.
Farah and Lupe are both using their bodies, using their sex appeal, to manipulate the men above them. But those men are themselves exploiting their power in order to take advantage of these women's bodies. So the question is, should we read that same interpretation onto Katagina and Chronicle?
I think not, because unlike the other women, Katagina cares about the political machinations and the political situation. Katagina is a true believer, and so her goals, and Chronicle's goals, are more united than any of these other pairings, making them almost a more idealized couple.
Or did Katagina, as you recall, Katagina saw those Thamlyats sitting at the hangar at Largayan Base and immediately fell in love with the cool robot. Did she, in that moment, say, the only way I'm ever going to get one of these for myself is if I manipulate this idiot prince Chronicle with my feminine charms? Maybe that's too cynical, but looking at these other relationships, we're invited to either compare or contrast.
We don't have enough information yet to make that call. It's been a while since we have seen Katagina and Chronicle together.
Yeah, even when they're both, like, working together, even when they were on the Motorrad fleet, we almost never saw them together. They were talking about each other. Sometimes occasionally talking to each other, but usually not. Should we conclude based on these other examples that something similar is going on between Maria and Cagaty in A sense Kagati is exploiting Maria's body because all of those big revival healing ceremonies she performs are really taxing for her.
Moreover, he may not be exploiting her body for sex, but if some of her power derives from her being unmarried, this sort of untouched virgin queen, any pressure or control he exerts to make sure that she retains that state is still controlling her body and sexuality. She can't have a boyfriend, she can't get married. That would ruin the whole thing.
And there is a kind of latent feminist reading here that these women, especially Maria, focusing on Maria, since though she rarely appears in the show, she is sort of the focal point of a lot of the energies of the cast and the story. Maria is the mother figure who is being, in a very real sense, drained of her energies by her many children and at the same time exploited, dominated for political and other reasons by Cagaty. So you have this idea of the woman, the mother, as the figure from whom society demands the most and gives the least.
And a not dissimilar pattern already beginning to play out with Shakti.
Mm.
I have another thought about sexuality in Victory Gundam. But before we move on to that.
We sure are talking a lot about sex these last couple of episodes.
It is decidedly cruel of Tassilo to let Pharah drift for two whole days before he has her rescued. No wonder she was almost gonna kill herself.
Yeah, two days is a lot.
She had one more day of food or water left. I cannot even begin to imagine how the terror of just drifting through empty space would affect your mind, your body. What a horrible way to go.
I mean, we've seen what it did to her. There's a theory that in the intervening time between when she was rescued and when she reappears in the plot that Farah underwent, like cyber new type conditioning. But I think it's equally plausible that just like the experience of drifting through space like that kind of shattered her mind and opened her up to, as she says in this episode, the sound of the echoes of light.
Yeah, listen to the echoes of light in space. I thought that was such a beautiful line that was so good. But yeah, that she, in a way, had this very intimate experience of space. She looked into the void and the void looked back. Right. The sex politics of this episode continue when Farah has kill join her in the Zanik, which has the two seats, one in the front and one in the back. And while obviously this would not have been part of the thought process in 93, I couldn't help but Think of Darling in the Franxx and various other works inspired by Darling in the Franxx, which is all about mobile suits piloted by men, women, pairs, and the woman's pilot seat and the man's pilot seat put them in positions that look a lot like two people having sex. It's less explicit here, but she does tell Kiel to treat the Zanek, to treat the big gun like he would treat a woman. She's whispering in his ear. She's sitting behind him, coaching him on how to open up that third eye, if you will, and feel the universe feel his enemy instead of look for them.
Is that what they're calling it nowadays?
And so, in a way, just like Lupe was experiencing sexual harassment at work and then turning around and trying to harass or abuse uso, Farah is experiencing this harassment at work and turning around and harassing her subordinates. And then Kiel fails to kill uso. She judges this to be because he had the beam too narrow a thing he did to avoid killing her, but she is so angry about this, she just shoots him in the face. She's not even angry. She just doesn't care about this guy and has deemed him useless and so he can go.
Quick note, I believe this is one of the scenes where the commonly available fan sub departs quite drastically from what she's actually saying. So in the official translation, yeah, he says, I had to narrow the beam because even like one stray mega particle could have killed you. And she says, well, you narrowed it too much. Blam shoots him in the face. So to me, this is strongly reminiscent, and I'm only putting this together right now, but this is really reminiscent of a scene from Zeta where Yazan, as he's leaving the ship, like, grabs. I think the pilot's name is Adol. Another new pilot, who we've never met before, grabs Adol, sexually harasses him right there in the hangar, and then they go out and pilot together, and Adol ends up getting killed and Yazan is very frustrated with him. This feels like a kind of retread of that maybe Pharah is not a Shar, but a Yazan.
Pharah leaving the Zanik arms outstretched also echoes when Lupe's like spirit Ghost did this in the previous episode. It's all these women advancing on uso and something about her aura or her intent is so frightening that even though she is just a human person in a normal suit, she has no real power to hurt him in the v2 anymore. USO is really frightened of this woman coming at him.
Well, it's like, I mean, she's a ghost, she's a demon, she's an oni, she's a yokai. And after killing as many people as USO has, it's only natural that he'd be haunted by a few specters. She says, I'm going to make you feel a taste of the fear I felt. And that's when we get the flashback of her drifting through space. And I thought, maybe she's using her psychic abilities to, like, project that terror she felt, that dread onto him.
I would buy that. It came up very briefly earlier when we were talking about the scene where Tassilo has his hands on Pharah, but he's asking her about why she drew these young men into space, why she did that. And the word she uses, kawai garu, gets translated as to show them my love, which is one definition of that word. It can mean to show affection, to be kind and loving to. But it can also be used ironically to mean to be tough on someone. And that meaning made more sense to me in the context of the scene that he's sort of accusing her of having some other motive with these kids, or like, she's not really trying to kill them. And she gets angry and counters, no, I only drew them out into space, the better to destroy them. One more question. One last question about this episode vis a vis. Fear.
Fear.
Right at the end, Tassilo and Pharah are talking about the situation on Angel Halo, which they intend to try to take for themselves, right? And Tasilo says that Kagati and Sugen, who are both on Angel Halo, must be terrified right now. Why, especially, why would it be so much more terrifying to be there than on any other part of the battlefield? It's the target, but any flagship would be in this scenario. And Kagati and Sugen, while they might not go into battle very often anymore, have certainly both done so before.
I don't know. The machine's never been tested before. Maybe it's not reliable. Maybe there were budget cuts and they know that it was made with shoddy Zaanskar workmanship. I don't know. That one's a mystery to me. All we can really say for sure is that Victory sure is a show about women and soil at this point, mostly about women.
Yeah, Tom, there was no soil in this episode.
If Kageti and Tsugun are that scared, maybe one of them soiled himself.
That would be very tomino.
How many episodes are we going to end with a joke?
About poop as many as it takes for it to stop being funny.
And now, part three of Tom's research on the history of the Yugoslav War wars.
Welcome back to our intermittent series on the history of the Yugoslav wars. This is part three, World War II, part one. Last time in our series we talked about the first Yugoslavia, the kingdom that sprang into being in 1918 after the end of the First World War and the dissolution of the Austro Hungarian Empire, and which endured a little over two decades of political and economic chaos before it was invaded and dismembered by the axis powers in 1941. This Week and next we'll be covering the events of World War II itself. Events that set the stage for and eerily presage the dissolution of Yugoslavia in the 1990s. I wanted to do all of this in one episode, but it turns out that war, in addition to being bad, is also complicated. World wars and civil wars are especially complicated, and Yugoslavia endured both at the same time. So this is going to take a minute. In this episode I'll set the stage and introduce the protagonists. And next episode I'll talk about the events of the war itself. Before we dive in though, a quick note about terminology. I'm going to be talking a lot about the people who live in Yugoslavia, sometimes as residents of a certain region, sometimes as members of particular ethnic groups. Many of the regions are named for ethnic groups, but the distribution of people across the region was extremely heterogeneous. There are Serbs in Croatia and Croats in Serbia, and so on. So for clarity, Serb, Croat and Bosniak are ethnicities. They mostly all speak some variety of the Serbo Croatian language, and they descend from the same South Slavic settlers, but are primarily distinguished by their faith. Serbs are predominantly Orthodox, Croats, Catholic and Bosniak's. Muslim, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian are regional markers. Anyone resident in Serbia counts as Serbian for our purposes, Croatian in Croatia, etc. While the Kingdom of Yugoslavia faced countless political challenges during its short life, the defining struggle was between the Serbian dominated central government, which included the royal family, and the Croatians, the second largest ethnic group within the kingdom, who saw the politicians, bureaucrats and generals in Belgrade as just another flavor of foreign occupier. The foremost champion for the Croatian position was Croatian Peasant Party leader Stepan Radic. In 1928 he was murdered on the floor of parliament by a Montenegrin Serb deputy. The King Alexander I responded to this shocking act by abolishing the constitution and establishing a royal dictatorship. It was an attempt to hold the country together through his own personal gravitas Radij's death and the abolition of any democratic avenue for change radicalized huge segments of the Croatian population. The power gap he left in Croatian politics was filled primarily by two the moderate Peasant Party leader Vladko Maciek, and the radical nationalist Ante Pavelic, founder and leader of the Ustasha. Pavelic did not have a wide base of support, but he did command a small army of terrorists and enjoyed the material and ideological support of the fascists, especially Mussolini. In 1934, assassins from the Bulgarian nationalist IMRO organization, working hand in hand with Pavelic's Ustasha, assassinated King Alexander in front of a huge crowd in the streets of Marseille. The king's successors tried to appease the hungry fascists on their borders without surrendering their sovereignty complet completely. But that middle path grew narrower and narrower until it disappeared altogether, leaving full capitulation and open defiance as the only two options. Impressively, Yugoslavia managed to choose both capitulation and defiance. But they were in no position to fend off a simultaneous invasion conducted by six of their seven neighbors. The invasion, which began with a decapitation strike in the form of an overwhelming bombing campaign against the capital of Belgrade, took less than two weeks and ended in Yugoslavia's unconditional surrender. The small kingdom's army had been caught flat footed, was badly outmatched against the Germans, and the attack on Belgrade had destroyed their central command center. But that was not all that worked against them. As soon as the invasion began, several Croatian regiments had rebelled against their Serbian officers and went over to the Nazis. After the surrender, Yugoslavia was partitioned in the following First, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Bulgaria and the Italian protectorate of Albania all fulfilled their cherished national ambitions by directly annexing long contested territories on their respective borders, including the regions of Slovenia, Dalmatia, Kosovo and Macedonia. Montenegro became an Italian protectorate, while Serbia and a horn shaped strip of land to the north called the Banat were occupied by the German military. Only Croatia was allowed to remain nominally independent, and they even called it the Independent State of Croatia to make sure you know just how independent it totally was. It fell under the dictatorial rule of the Ustasha and our old friend Ante Pavelic, now back from exile and calling himself the Poglavnik, roughly equivalent to Fuhrer. In truth, Pavelic and the Ustasha had not been the fascists first choice for a puppet. They had offered independent Croatia to the peasant party leader I mentioned before, Vladko Maciek. He had the broadest base of support within Croatian politics across all levels of society. But he was not interested in collaborating with the Nazis in actual practice. And unsurprisingly, independent Croatia was subordinate to the war strategy and overall political agenda of both Hitler and Mussolini. Pavelic was a puppet, but an enthusiastic one. He wholeheartedly embraced fascist ideals and methods. Within days of the fall of Yugoslavia, the USTAA government gave itself the power to persecute any enemy of the regime, including, of course, any Jewish person unlucky enough to fall within their grasp. This was especially painful since thousands of Jews had fled Germany to Yugoslavia in order to escape exactly this kind of abuse. And before the invasion, Yugoslavia had offered Jewish citizens relatively good treatment. Pavelic's new independent Croatia also realized a long cherished national ambition, gaining control over Bosnia and Herzegovina. Bosnia Herzegovina lay in the heart of Yugoslavia, directly between Croatia and Serbia. It had significant Serb and Croat populations and was claimed by both. Never mind about the Bosniaks actually living there. If you look at a map of the region today, the modern nation of Croatia is shaped a bit like the jaws of a tyrannosaur wrapped around Bosnia Herzegovina. So you can imagine why they wanted to swallow it. The USTAE government would never enjoy the support of the majority of Croatians, so instead it sustained itself with the jackboot and the knife. In her history of Yugoslavia, Marie Janine Kallik wrote that the pillars of support for this regime of violence were the militias, army, secret police, special courts, and more than 20 concentration camps. From its inception, the Ustasha's goal had been they wanted an independent Greater Croatia inspired by and Based on the 10th and 11th century medieval kingdom of Croatia with an ethnically homogenous Croatian population. The Nazis had given them a state that more or less coincided with the bounds of the old kingdom. But it contained 6.3 million people and only 3.3 million of those were Croats. So they decided to do a genocide about it. Specifically, they planned to purge the Croatian Serbs, a population of around 2 million people. When the Ustae came to power by killing one third, expelling another third, and forcibly converting the remainder to Catholicism. Within a month of the Yugoslavian surrender, the USTAA had already earned itself a reputation for brutish, sadistic violence against their supposed enemies. Hundreds of thousands were disenfranchised and dispossessed, forced into internment camps, beaten, subjected to grotesque sexual violence, tortured and murdered, sometimes systematically, sometimes randomly. The Serbs bore the brunt of this violence, but Jews, Roma and leftists were also targeted, with many being shipped off to die in German concentration camps. I will spare you the details but it was as bad as you can imagine, probably worse. Even the Nazi officials monitoring events in Croatia wrote with evident horror about Ustasha atrocities. Reliable numbers for the genocide carried out by them are hard to come by, but the US Holocaust Memorial Museum gives a range of 320,000 to 340,000 Serbs, along with more than 30,000 Croatian Jews. Other estimates are much, much higher, since Orthodox Christianity was inseparable from Serb identity In Croatia, the USASA specifically targeted the Orthodox Church, killing, torturing or expelling hundreds of priests and desecrating or destroying Orthodox churches. At least a quarter of a million Orthodox Serbs were forced to convert to Catholicism, although Ustasha units would also use foe conversions to lure Serbs out of hiding in order to kill them more easily. In the region that had been Bosnia Herzegovina, the USTAE preferred cultural annihilation, removing all mentions of the region's old name and declaring that there was no such thing as a Bosniak, only Croats of Islamic faith, which angered the local fascists who had thought that Nazi rule meant that they would get their own quasi autonomous fascist state. Hitler ignored their complaints. The German occupied parts of Yugoslavia, including Serbia, were spared the particular horror of Ustasha rule. But the people there were still subjected to all the ordinary horrors of Nazi occupation and holocaust. The Nazis saw all Slavs, especially Serbs, as members of a filthy sub human race only fit to live as slaves. They carved out a special little exception for the Croats, but considered even their allies in the various collaboration governments to be disloyal by nature characterless and idle. All state functions remained firmly in German hands, and the lives of the local people became disposable. Early in the occupation, Nazi high command ordered the use of collective punishment and disproportionate retaliation to crack down on the growing resistance movement. For every German soldier harmed, occupation forces were to shoot 50 civilians. Should a German soldier be killed, then a hundred locals had to die. They were meant to focus on community leaders, intellectuals and their families. But in practice, the occupation soldiers would simply grab anyone they happened to come across off the street. They killed at least 25,000 people in just the three months immediately following this order. The Nazis took special pleasure in revenging themselves on the Serbs. Hitler made a point of assigning experienced Austrian officers, men who had fought in the Balkans during the First World War, to oversee the occupation. They came with axes to grind. The Serbs had humiliated them personally and brought their mighty empire to its knees during that war. It was no coincidence that the most brutal retaliations and so called cleansing actions took place in regions that had been hotbeds of resistance back in 1914. But the German and collaboration authorities still made sure to shoot Jewish, Romani and leftist Yugoslavs first. By 1942, the head of the German military administration in Serbia was able to report that the 72,000 Yugoslav Jews and 80,000 Yugoslav Roma had been effectively wiped out. The Bulgarian, Albanian and Hungarian occupied regions of the country were much smaller, but there too, the occupiers pursued policies of brutal retaliation and ethnic cleansing, the better to absorb their newly annexed territories. Conditions were slightly better in the Italian administered regions, but only slightly. They lacked the enthusiasm for the Nazi racial extermination program and resisted German pressures to, for example, turn over any Jews caught within their sphere of influence. But Mussolini's army had studied the brutal art of colonial violence in their African conquests, and they too saw the local Slavs as subhuman, inferior. They bombed villages to splinters, executed countless hostages, and interned tens of thousands more. The scale and severity of the reprisals hint at the level of resistance the occupiers and their collaborator allies faced. The lightning quick collapse of the Royal army had left the Yugoslavs shocked, demoralized and scattered. But active, disorganized resistance began immediately. Neither the Ustasha nor the Serbian fascists ever enjoyed majority support among the people they ruled. And the brutality of their rule only served to drive more people to take up arms. In 1941, German informants observed lots of fascist flags and big crowds at rallies. But under the surface, the people were wary and already on the verge of active resistance. In 1942, a German general warned that representatives of the Ustae movement make themselves unpopular time and again through their arrogance, despotism, greediness and corruption. Misdeeds, theft and murder continue unabated. By early 1943, the Supreme Commander for the region complained that the government had no support left, even among the Croats, for whom they claimed to act. The first organized resistance came from the Chetniks, nationalist Serbs, survivors from the old Royal army, gendarmes, police officers. Their leader was a certain Colonel Mihailovich, known as Drazha, a veteran of the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913 and the First World War. When the order to surrender came down from high command, Drazha instead took his small unit up into the mountains, eventually setting up a base of operations in a place called Ravna Gora. His first order of business was making contact with the Allies and gathering as many survivors from the Royal army as possible to serve under his black and white flag, emblazoned with a skull and crossbones and the slogan for the King and fatherland, freedom or death. Ironically, two years before the invasion, Drazha had gotten himself into trouble for writing a report criticizing the army's defense plan. He had argued that rather than trying to hold the Nazis at the border, they should concentrate their forces in the mountainous interior and use guerilla tactics to harass the invaders. That report had infuriated the Minister of the Army, Milan Nedic, who, double irony, was now the head of the collaboration government in occupied Serbia. Drazha's Chetniks fought to return to the old order, the reunion of the country, the return of the king and restoration of the monarchy, as well as the continuation of Serbian preeminence within Yugoslavia. The British, who saw Drazha as the most prominent representative of that old order, still keeping up the fight inside Yugoslavia, sent whatever military support they could manage his way. And Drazha sent back reports of his various military victories, even if he had to invent them. Because the question soon emerged was Drazha actually keeping up the fight? Assessments of his leadership during the war, and especially of his motivations remain hotly contested. But there is a general agreement that his strategy was to cultivate his strength, avoid direct confrontation with the Axis forces and wait for the Allies to land troops in the Balkans. At which point he intended to lead a general Chetnik uprising, sweeping the occupiers out of the country and perhaps sweeping Drazha himself into high office in the restored kingdom. And how much control did he really have over the Chetnik movement that he claimed to lead? The Chetniks were highly regional, mostly focused on protecting their own little piece of the country, and their discipline was infamously bad. Drazha's reluctance to fight the occupiers stands out all the more starkly when contrasted with the Chetnik eagerness to attack other Yugoslavs. Because if the Chetniks had one unifying principle, it was pro Serbianism, not anti Nazism. In December 1941, Drazha ordered his Chetniks to expel or annihilate all the non Serbs from Serbia, Bosnia and parts of Croatia. But they had already started doing it even before he gave the order. Part of the reason Drazha was so reluctant to fight the occupiers may have been that he feared Chetnik activity would lead to German reprisals, that those reprisals would fall heaviest on the Serbs, and that this might tilt the demographic balance of the hypothetical post war Yugoslavia that he dreamed of ruling. Andraje's Real enemy was not the Germans or the Italians or his old boss Nedic in the collaboration government. Nor was it the Bosniaks, the Croats or any of the other Yugoslav minorities. It was the Communists, of course. When the occupation started, the members of the Yugoslav Communist Party tried to keep their heads down. It was not a large organization, only around 12,000 members when the war began and almost entirely limited to the cities. Yugoslavia as a whole was still overwhelmingly rural and agrarian, and the Communists had failed to reach the generally conservative peasants. The Molotov Ribbentrop Treaty of non aggression between Germany and the USSR was still in effect, and Stalin did not want the Yugoslavian Communists starting trouble. When Hitler broke the pact by invading the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Yugoslav Communists went into open revolt. Hitler's strategic justification for invading Yugoslavia in the first place had been to secure the southeastern border as preparation for the planned invasion of Russia. Now the Yugoslav Communists rose up against the occupiers, partly to distract the Germans, taking pressure off of the Soviet Union in the process. The General Secretary of the party in Yugoslavia who announced the uprising was Josip Broz, better known as Tito. Half Slovene and half Croatian, he had fought for Austria, Hungary during World War I, but was wounded and captured when a cavalryman in the Russian army jumped off a horse and into his trench, stabbing him with a lance, which, now that I say it out loud, might be the most most First World War way to get yourself wounded. He was interned in Russia, but escaped. And after knocking around the country for a few months as a fugitive, he linked up with the Bolsheviks in time to participate a bit in the Russian Civil War. In 1920, Tito returned home to what had become the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, soon to be called Yugoslavia. He gradually became involved in labor organizing and communist politics, going by various fake names. This was when he first started using Tito. He bounced from job to job, leading strikes, getting thrown in jail, meeting like minded prisoners, becoming increasingly radicalized, going into hiding, getting into doctrinal and personal feuds with other members of the party, all the usual stuff. When right wing terrorists from the Ustasha and IMRA organizations killed the king, the authorities responded by cracking down on Communism. Tito found it necessary to get out of the country and like Stepan Radic before him, he opted for voluntary exile in Czechoslovakia. He was then elected to the Politburo for the Yugoslav Communist Party and dispatched to Moscow to link up with the Comintern. There. In 1936, as Stalin embarked on his Great Purge of the Communist Party, Tito slipped back into Yugoslavia. There he worked to organize volunteers to join the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. The contingent they sent was relatively small, and most of them were killed in the fighting, but the surviving veterans would form the core of the Communist uprising against the Nazis. Five years later, in 1937, the leader of the Yugoslav Communists was purged by Stalin, arrested, interrogated and shot, along with most of the other senior leaders. Tito was recalled to Moscow and promoted to fill the gap, though he did have to survive multiple denunciations in the process. He was then stuck in Moscow, tryin
Next time on episode 10.44 Hope Springs Eternal we research and discuss victory. Gundam episode 44 and a new type.
Of esper just dropped.
Dude, read the room.
Katamari, Victori.
Brainwashing, psychickers and human power.
Hallelujah. Bobby formed.
Farah seems like the type to pull wings off of flies and.
Light ants on fire. Hootin, hollerin, carryin on a bubblegum crisis and friendship ended with free will. Now forcing people to be good is my best friend. Friend 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 Dayakson. The closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio. The recap music is slow by Lloyd Rogers. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people and more in the show notes on our website gundampodcast.com if you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email hostsundompodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you would like to support the show, please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us financially@gundumpodcast.com Patreon you can find links and more ways to help out@gundumpodcast.com support. Thank you for listening. There are a lot of wrong Gundam opinions out there corrupting the fandom. Wrong opinions like did Chronicle Asher abandon his earlier morality in favor of imperial nationalism? No, he was merely replaced by a morbidable body double. Not Chronicle Asher Chronicle. Be sure this week we're covering victory. Oh right, you have to do your thing.
Yes, sorry.
I had to physically hoist Tigress off of my lap in order to do this recording session, so I hope you'll all be my character witnesses when she has me tried at the Hague.
I don't know. I didn't see the incident. I really can't speak to how you're behaved.
So Flemmy.
Oh look, here she is.
Conveniently time. Hello.
Hi.
Hi. You heard us talking and you thought maybe we were going to be interesting? More fool you.
Are you going to come up into my lap?
Is that what's going to happen happen next?
She can't climb up on her own, but when I pick her up, she makes grumbly noises at me. She gets mad.
No lift, only lap, kitten.
No lap or no lap, desk is not an option.