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 10.40 Wrath of Heaven and we're your hosts. I'm Tom and instead of podcasting I should be farming the land.
And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam. And yes, even after years of Gundam podcasting, I am susceptible to wow, cool robot.
Sometimes the robot is just cool.
I might actually be more susceptible now than when I started. Mobile Suit Breakdown is made possible by our canny and charismatic paint paying subscribers. Thank you all and special thanks to our newest patrons. No new patrons to thank this week, but it's a good opportunity to thank all of the returning patrons and those of you who were already subscribed but increased your pledges. You keep us Genki.
This week we are covering Victory Episode 40 Chou Koku Kou Geki no Shita aka Beneath the Ultra High Altitude Attack. The episode was written by Okea Akira, storyboarded by Nishimori Akira, and directed by Sato Ikuro. The animation director was Sato Keiichi in his only credited role on Victory. Now the recap the sound of ghost bells resounds in the dreams of the children who sleep in Casarelia, delighting Baby Carlman unsettling Shaak Ti. She slips out into the cool night air, finds USO in the half light of the moon. He heard the ringing too. The next day they separate USA with Marbett and the White Ark, bound for Largain base, where a booster rocket waits to propel them back to space. They know this ceasefire can't last. The next phase of the war will be fought up in the heavens, and not even Jin Jahannam is foolish enough to depend on the Federation. The others mean to stay in Casarelli a little while longer. The Highlanders have decided to stay here for good, and Odello and the others mean to see them settled properly in an abandoned cabin down by the lake in Largay. Nuso and Marbette link up with their old friends from the lean horse. Meduso's work adjusting the booster is interrupted by a couple of young girls throwing stones at him. He recognizes them and their mother as the family of the Bespa lieutenant who led the ambush outside Casarelia yesterday. As night falls, the soundless ringing of bells returns. Shoxy descends into the Data center below USO's home to see if anything in the encyclopedia entry on BELS could explain this strange phenomenon. Columns of fire descend on Largaine without warning, and explosions rock the city. Something glints in the moonlight high above the clouds. Panicked crowds flee the war scarred city, but. But USO runs against the tide despite the fiery rain. He finds the widow and her daughters on a burning street, surrounded by bodies, and brings them back to the White Ark in time to escape. In Cassarellia, they prepare their counterattack. Boduso has something else on his mind. He uses the V2 to carry the family to the line of graves where they laid Lieutenant Mathis to rest. He leaves them there to mourn in peace and returns himself to battle. The lean horse is hard pressed, but has somehow managed to avoid taking a direct hit. Now the White Ark climbs to meet the high altitude enemy. At first it looks like a halo, then a flying saucer, a wheel, and finally reveals itself to be a huge mobile suit with shoulders that burn with disks of energy and a rifle to rival a battleship's main gun. Those that get too close complain of headaches and nothing they try can penetrate its shields. And yet the enemy machine retreats unharmed, leaving them in possession of the field. Thankful to have escaped the battle with only minimal damage, the White Ark returns to Casarelia. Marbet convinces Captain Gomez to authorize one more day of shore leave so the kids can say goodbye to the home they love. The home for which they fight. Jin Jahannim protests, but who cares what he has to say anyway, when the time to depart comes? At first it seems that the gang of kids will be split up, with only Odello, Warren and USO continuing the fight. But before the White Ark can pull away, a pair of magnetic grappling lines clamp onto the wing. Tomash and Karl, Elisha and Martina, Shaak Ti and Susie, Flanders and Carlman all dangle from them. After all they've endured, they mean to see this war through to the end. USO is the last board. He's gone to say his goodbyes at his mother's grave. The widow Rena finds him there. She's heard what happened to USO and has come to lay a bouquet of flowers on Meera's grave. It seems she and her daughters have decided to stay in Casarelia, fulfilling, though she cannot know it. Her husband's dying wish. I don't know about you, but for me personally, this episode was an hour long.
Huh? There were definitely parts of it that felt a little slow to me, but I actually liked this one fairly well.
Oh no, I don't mean that it dragged or felt like it was an hour long. I mean this episode was literally an hour long. Because when you get to that scene where the lean horse is flying through the sky dodging laser blasts, and one comes through the clouds right behind it, and it reminds you so much of that one similar shot in episode 14 of Escaflowne, the best single episode of TV anime ever made, then you have to pause the Victory episode, go watch that episode in its entirety when you get to the credits. Then you switch back to Victory, and you can actually finish the episode.
Well, Tom, I'm going to tell you something that will no doubt delight you. I did not remember any similar Escaflowne episode at the time. So I guess we're just going to have to watch Escaflowne again.
I guess we are. Probably from the beginning, right? You want the full context.
Well, and probably several times over again, just so I actually remember Escaflowne, even when we're not actively watching Escaflowne.
Do you think we just need to make an Escaflowne podcast?
No. I draw the line. I draw the line there. This was an odd episode, but I found it really interesting and really enjoyable.
Yeah, I also liked it. I liked it a lot, even though I have many criticisms of it on a sort of composition level, I guess it felt like there were two independent stories that were stitched together somewhat inartfully.
Some definite continuity issues.
They could not, for the life of them, keep straight how many graves there.
On that ridge or what the crosses are made of. In some scenes, they look like pieces of plywood or like 2x4 stuck together. And then in some scenes, they look very polished and regular.
So this episode had a different animation director from all of the other episodes we've watched. A guy who I think only served in that role for this one episode. The guy who will go on to be the director of Tiger and Bunny, which I know a few of our listeners are big fans of. And there are quite a few moments in here where the animation feels very unlike Victory. There's a bit at the end where Gomez looks about 10 years younger. Special, beeshy, beautiful Gomez.
We both independently took screenshots of the scene where Odello is listening for the bell sound and gets this very exaggerated form. The head is bigger relative to the size of the body. The hands are bigger, the feet are bigger. The posing is very exaggerated.
It looks like something you'd see in a gag manga. It doesn't look like Gundam anime.
I know it feels silly to say this about animation, but it looks cartoony.
But I know what you mean. I know what you Mean. But for all of that, it looked good. It was a good looking episode. It was a beautifully storyboarded episode. The way they had the unnamed mysterious enemy mobile suit flying around through the sky, attacking from above the clouds. So it's basically invisible for most of the episode. And then you just get these lances of fire coming down, parting the clouds and striking the earth. Really, really arresting.
The design of the enemy mobile suit, for all that we don't get a great look at it, really is different, is creative. I'll be talking some more about that later.
And I mentioned that one shot that reminded me of Escaflowne so much and yeah, that's it. Part of the reason it caught my eye is it's just a beautiful shot. The bit of the lean horse, like fleeing in the foreground with the fire coming down in the back.
The sound design. I quite liked the bell sounds that they use. The sound of bugs at night when Carlman first wakes up Shakti, the music when the Widow is watching these kid pilots get aboard their mobile suits.
I liked the motif of the bells a lot.
It's funny, in the first watch through after the bells, at the beginning, I'm wondering, okay, is that meant to be figurative? Is it a nod to like ceremonial bells? From religion to bells used for dispelling or repelling demons? Historically, bells have been used in crude alarm systems. Because I listened very closely and when Shakti is going, oh, don't you hear it? And USO can hear it, I was like, but I can't hear it. And then after the episode I asked you what was the deal with the headaches? And you said, new typism.
Yeah, it seems pretty clear to me. This is like a new type Kono pre kind of situation.
And so are the bells.
I think so.
And with the bells we have Carmen, Shakti and USO being the ones who are most affected and can hear it most clearly.
I love this recurring background thing of Carlman. Like Carlman gets happy and coos when there are explosions going off nearby. Carlman likes the scary bells. Carlman is so messed up by having been raised around this war zone that conflict feels natural and peace is upsetting.
Though now I'm starting to wonder because in a couple of recent episodes when they've been in battle, Carmen has been very fussy and upset. And so I'm wondering, is it not the battle itself? Like the time that he seemed comforted by explosions? Was it that USO was coming to rescue him and Shaakti and he could feel USO with his baby new type powers. Or like now that we know Carlman is a new type, I almost want to go back over all of those scenes to reassess for what is it he's really responding to. And then the headaches affect Elisha, Warren and Marbet, so they are our other obvious newtype candidates. I suppose.
Though sometimes Gundam takes the attitude that like everybody is a little bit receptive. Like if the new type pressure is strong enough, everybody will feel it.
I did love Shakti's desire to go and search the database for information about bells in the middle of the night.
Extremely relatable. Shakti does not have a phone she can whip out and like google bells.
Whomst among us in a fit of insomnia hasn't just started like trolling Wikipedia for no good reason.
I did actually look at a few different encyclopedias trying to confirm this story about condemned people wearing bells as they were paraded through the streets and could not find any serious evidence of that. Which is not to say that it doesn't exist. For those of you listening to this episode in the far future, or time travelers listening to it from the past, we are in the dead Internet era here. There is no way I can reliably say that just because I couldn't find this evidence means it doesn't exist. So yeah, maybe. Could be. I don't have access to Japanese encyclopedias available in 1993.
Yeah, unfortunately, a lot of what immediately comes to mind for me regarding bells is from other pieces of like fiction. And while I assume they are based in like folk practices, I cannot point to the Korean fantasy live action drama Alchemy of Souls or the American live action movie Practical Magic as sources on like bells being used to summon or dispel demons, or the superstition that hearing a particular sound means your death is imminent.
Though I'm familiar with some folklore for both of those. And I did find some actual evidence of bells being used in like not in executions, but when somebody had committed a lesser crime and they were going to be shamed, they would be paraded through the street and various things would be done to draw attention to this parade of shame, including making them wear bells. So there is some evidence of that. Also found some evidence of church bells, civic bells being rung to announce that an execution was happening. So there's like there's some bell connection.
There and the ringing of church bells when someone has died as well.
But if the story wants me to accept that in the universal century bells were tied to people's waists on the way to execution. Fine, that's reasonably plausible. I'll accept it. What did you make of the reference to Farah Griffin, the. The Guillotine and Largain when Shaak Ti is catching up with USO and telling him about these cool facts she learned from reading Wikipedia, and he's like, oh, yeah, I already know that. I already read the entry about belles.
I didn't entirely understand why Pharah was relevant because I didn't remember bells being a thing in any of those scenes.
Though speaking of the executions, there is a developing pretty consistent aesthetic theme with Zanskar and Death From Above.
Oh, I thought you were going back to beheadings because Tomash's mobile suit gets its head.
It does. They do do a lot of beheadings. I thought that was just a great demonstration of the sheer power of this gigantic new mobile suit that they're facing. The first real threat they've faced in a long time. It's got menace, it's got mystery. It shows up sort of out of nowhere. It doesn't get resolved in the same episode that it appears. It doesn't get annihilated the moment USO decides to get for serious about it. It's so powerful that just by swinging the barrel of its gun around, it can crack the head off of Tomash's mobile suit. Like teenagers taking a mailbox off its posts with a baseball bat. But no, I was thinking about, like, the Kailash Gili satellite, which is designed to shoot death beams from orbit down to the Earth. The way all of the Zaanskar mobile suits on Earth fly around like helicopters shooting civilians on the ground, while at the same time their counterpoints in the League Militaire are riding around in, like, trucks. The recarl that flies around and shoots its powerful beams from above. The Guillotine Death descending from above. And now this new mobile suit that.
Dovetails really nicely with something I had wanted to bring up. This episode makes a point of reminding us of Bespa and Zanskar's sort of callous indifference to death. Even the death of their own people. Because it includes that line about even though some of bespa's people are still here, they're firing on the city. And they begin by firing on the city. They don't attack the airport first. They don't attack military locations first, they attack civilian locations first. And what are all of these super powerful weapons you've described? What is all of this death from above if not a way to keep the death at a remove?
And we saw that with the motor ads, too. They were so casual and detached from the destruction they were causing, from the horrors they were inflicting. Their superior technology, their height advantage, gives them the luxury of neither seeing nor feeling the effects of their actions.
And we hear civilians shouting, is it the League Militaire? Like they don't know who it is. Attacking them is the other aspect of being at such a far remove. It makes it safer for the person doing it, and it creates confusion around what is actually happening. Although I. I really wondered what the purpose of it was until they fired on the airport. Like, what is the point of firing on the city? What good does that do them?
Sadism. So you assume that they were firing on the city on purpose, but with the cloud cover, isn't it possible that they don't know what they're shooting at? That's the other thing about attacking from such a great remove. At that kind of distance, you don't really know what you're hitting. And that's something that BESPA has played with throughout the redefining their targets sometimes mid attack. The Ligue Militaire, they're not guerrillas, except when it's convenient for them to be guerrillas. They're real soldiers, these civilians. No, no, no, they're not civilians. This is.
The Resistance is very much like UIG all over again.
Mm. And we know from Odello and Susie and Warren's backstory that they seem to have carried out a kind of campaign of slaughter when they first occupied Largain as well. So that's just what they do.
Did you notice that in the opening narration, it refers to BESPA remnants? I did, in what I assume is a callback to Zeon remnants of previous UC series.
Well, I' I mean, it's all a callback to, like, former Imperial army remnants. I feel like it's been a consistent enough theme for Tomino going back to, well, at least a double Zeta. Were there remnants in Zeta?
I don't remember.
I mean, I guess you can say that all of Axis, all of Axis Zion were holdouts who refused to come in from the cold, so to speak, until they could do so with an army and try to get revenge.
The real meat of this episode is in the storyline of that pilot's widow and daughters and how USO interacts with them. But before we get to that, two much smaller things. I have to give a shout out. I loved Romero's line about BESPA's using the ceasefire to buy time and the Federation's using it as an excuse to do nothing.
Romero got some zingers in this episode. I also liked the one we know. He's talking about Gin Jahanm, though he doesn't say the name. And he's like, I may not be at liberty to say what I really think of the guy, but for once, at least, he's on the right track.
The other bit that is just kind of a throwaway and is not explained at all, but has such significance in the context of everything that's happened in the show so far. It seems that the Hyland families are planning to stay on Earth.
Yes. And in Causarelia, or at least for now. I mean, it's not safe anywhere. But Casarelia seems to have been mostly spared the horrors after USO left.
Right. But, like, the White Ark is going to be returning to space. They could return to space on it. They've been with the ship this whole time and instead are choosing to stay. And a bunch of the young folks, some of whom wanted to participate in the fighting and some of who didn't, are now all going back and participating in the fighting. Tomasz and Carl, Alicia and Martina Shaakti, Susie Carlman, Flanders. Yeah. Oh, Susie is carrying Flanders the same way Shakti carries Carlman.
FYI, because Flanders can ride a WAPA and climb a ladder, but cannot climb.
A grappling line, I don't remember which Clancy sister it was, but initially one of them was really against getting involved in the fighting, and one of them was interested. And now I guess they're both doing it. I don't know. We don't.
Martina was the one who was interested, and Alicia, I believe, is the one who was not.
Whereas before, it felt like the show might be saying something about, you know, certain people loving their own way of life or being adapted to their own way of life and so being fitted for, you know, living in space or living on Earth. It now seems to be saying, oh, actually, Earth is the ideal environment for everybody.
Yeah. Yeah. Martina has mostly gotten over her horror at the smell of grass. And the. The pilot's widow, whose name is Rena, or Rena, when she first meets uso, she's like, oh, are you a gorilla? You shouldn't be fighting. You should farm the land instead. Very strong. Like he should have been at the club. Boy should have been farming, which of course, he would love nothing more than to go and farm. It feels so weird coming from her woman.
How do you think he got involved in this?
Lady, your husband is a soldier. He should have been farming. Farming was Available to him. If he'd been farming, if he had been at the club, he would not have gotten killed.
If Uso's home hadn't been attacked, he wouldn't have gotten involved. I spent so much of this episode trying to read her emotions and finding them largely sort of opaque. It seems she cares a lot about propriety. That, like, even if that soldier did kill your dad, like, we don't throw rocks at people.
Right?
Your dad was a soldier who died in battle against another soldier.
Don't shame him. Now. She keeps it together for her kids. I think it's fairly clear to me that she knows USO is the one who killed her husband.
Okay, I wondered about that. That the. The lie she tells about. Would the soldier who killed your dad show us his grave?
That's for the benefit of the kids, for the girls. She doesn't want them to blame uso, because in her worldview, USO is not really to blame. Her husband was a soldier. He died in battle. To say that anyone is to blame for that, like, undermines her husband's whole, like, worldview and value system.
Which is also why she's really not interested in USO's apology.
Right. He doesn't have anything to apologize for. It was a battle.
It almost may read to her as, like, insulting.
Mm. Well, it's the same as the daughters throwing the rocks. Right? Like, it.
This is inappropriate.
Exactly. You can see the conflict between her real, true human emotional feelings, her love for her husband, her despair at being left alone, her fear about the future. All of those things are there, burbling under the surface, and they come out when she's at his grave, when she finally breaks down, starts sobbing, throws herself across the cross marking the grave. That is the moment where all that decorum and propriety, all that rationalizing, philosophizing attitude about honor and shame, all of that falls away. So both of those feelings are in there. But for the most part, throughout the show, she is able to master herself.
She does seem surprised that USO would try to help her and her family during the air raid, but ultimately, she goes with him. She seems constantly sort of confused by Uso's behavior, but she does trust him. She and her kids get into the hand of his mobile suit and let him carry them to the grave site. She certainly recognizes the irony that they are escaping, you know, friendly fire with the help of the League militaire. When they're in the ship. There's a moment when she's asking USO about the attack, and I can't tell if she's angry that USO would suggest that BESPA would attack while their own people are still there, or if she's angry that BESPA did it in a big way. Both the Dooker Eek Renda storyline and this storyline of the pilot and his wife and daughters are illustrative of the other half of bespa. Because on the one hand we have true believers like Katagina who believe in spreading Maria ism throughout the human populated part of the galaxy. And on the other hand, we have the self interested, the ones who are here because they expect personally to get something out of it that they want. And as a true believer, Katagina has to hate uso. She has to hate everybody who stands in the way of what she's trying to accomplish. But to the extent that any of the self interested hate USO or the League Militaire, it's only because those people put them in more danger and are standing between them and a thing that they want.
And often they know basically nothing about the people that they hate. This lieutenant, who was willing to lead his whole unit into a suicide mission to try to take out the White Ark, only knew that the League Militaire had like defeated the Motorrad fleet. He knew that these guerrillas, on account of their insistence on surviving in the fate of impossible odds, had shamed the BESPA military. Whereas Katagina knows USO personally, Chronicle knows USO and Shakti.
It is very poignant that in helping this mother and her two children settle near Cassarelia, USO is fulfilling the dying wish of the guy he killed.
And just shows again how pointless that whole thing was. That Ouso would have been very happy to settle these people somewhere in Cassarellia.
And coming back to the sort of impersonal nature of the conflict that you brought up, that this woman can can wish ou so good luck in battle. Because having gotten probably the best that she's going to get out of this situation, it no longer really matters for her whether BESPA wins.
In a sense, by settling in Cossarelia, she has become an Earthnoid. She has become the enemy of Bespa. When the next wave of Zolos fly over Cossarelia, shooting indiscriminately at anyone they see, they're not going to check her ID to see if she's from BESPA to see if she's a Zanskar citizen or not.
While this does not at all take away from the poignancy and emotion of the episode, there were a couple of continuity problem. Things that stood out to me, especially towards the end. And in these scenes, we already talked about the number of graves and what the grave markers look like.
Although the number of graves problem is more significant to me than just a simple continuity issue. Because who is in those graves other.
Than USO's mother and the one pilot guy? I don't know.
I mean, there's a grave that Marbette prays at, and at one point somebody says, oh, she. I think talking about USO's mother. She's with Oliver and the women from the Shrike team. So presumably they're like empty graves for Oliver and the Shrikes. But that is not enough to make up either the 11 graves that show up in the smaller groupings or the 16 graves that show up in the larger ones.
And the show says that the other pilots that USO fought most recently weren't killed?
Yes, it says that pretty explicitly in the opening for this one.
And yet.
And yet. A, where did those pilots go? B, who is in those graves?
Maybe they decided that was too much death, they needed to rein it in. I don't know.
Well, I mean, if those guys had died, it would sort of undermine USO's whole. Like, if I use the wings of light in this way, I can avoid killing anyone, which was such an important part of the prior episode. Yeah, they need to draw little like parachutes as the Zolos go down and the guys are escaping. Or they use those super powerful jetpacks from First Gundam to zip away.
When they all arrive at the grave site, the family photo is still stuck to the cross. Yet at the beginning of the episode, USO takes that photo out of his pocket. That's how he's like, wait, I recognize those girls. And he confirms that he knows who they are.
Also, earlier depictions of the gravesite don't have either a wreath or the helmet on the pilot's grave. So the strong implication here is that USO like staged this gravesite in order to have this very poignant moment with the mother and the children.
Or somebody on the animation team just forgot where the photo was supposed to be.
Yeah, it does feel somewhat uncharacteristic of USO to have like, gotten there in advance and prepared the grave specifically for this purpose. Maybe the. Maybe the Zolo pilot just had two very similar photographs.
And then the helmet appears to have written on it in cursive English, I love. And then an initial. It's mostly not legible. It's very hard to see in most shots. I think there's One or two shots where you can kind of make it out. I really thought that initial was M and I assumed that was his wife's initial. And then Tom is like, oh, no, her name is. What was it again?
Rena.
Or Rena. Anyway, so either someone made a mistake or maybe the M is for Maria ism or Maria.
It could be. It could be. When I saw it, I just assumed that the last bit there was kind of like messy and sloppy and it was meant to be I love you.
But oh, maybe.
Like I said, I didn't get a clear view of it and it wasn't particularly clearly written. I could only tell that it was I love when they were doing a close up on it. And at that point the final letter or word was obscured by somebody's body. The main continuity issue for me was actually like a time problem, a chronal issue, which is it felt like when you're playing a video game and there's a really dramatic cutscene that establishes urgent, immediate danger. A high stakes situation happening right now that you need to go in and deal with.
And then USO is like, but I have to take these people to this grave first.
Exactly. I need to run around and do some side quests and minigames first. And video games do this right. They'll like pause the big cutscene midway through and give you the option to continue immediately or to go off and do other stuff. And you can just wait indefinitely before triggering the next climactic phase of the mini mission. But then when you do it, it's like no time at all has passed. Somehow your allies have just been narrowly dodging the boss's super laser attack the whole time. Feels like maybe if I can just throw a suggestion out there, if that's allowed. If you'll permit it.
I'll permit it.
Maybe the big poignant moment with USO and the Widow and her children. Maybe that should have been during the one day of leave that they get in Casarelia at the end of the episode. The day of leave that is very important to the characters but completely skipped over by the episode. Maybe you should have done all the fighting first and then had these emotional scenes in Cosarellia at the end. Just saying. I think that would have been nice. I think that would have worked well.
Definitely has the feel of an episode being worked on by teams of people who are maybe not communicating with each other. Very. And yet.
And yet it turned out really good for all of our quibbles. I enjoyed this episode a lot. Not as much as I enjoyed rewatching Escaflowne episode 14, but you know you can't compete with the best single episode of TV anime ever produced.
My plan this week had been to research some of the visual inspirations for the new mobile suit, the Zanik. Yes, Tom revealed its name to me, even though I have yet to hear it in the show itself. However, while I was doing that research, I came upon something that is very relevant both to UC Gundam as a whole, especially the Tomino stuff, and to a research piece I did long, long ago. Probably in season one or two. We looked into Indian spirituality and its influence on modern popular culture to try to explain some reasons why perhaps Tomino is so interested in Indian spirituality and we were thinking in particular of Lala, of new typism, of this idea of interconnectedness between people. And most of what we turned up at the time had to do with an English speaking context. It was about the United States, it was about the Beatles going to an ashram in India. It was about things like that that certainly would have been talked about in Japan but were not specific to the Japanese context. Well, while doing this week's research, I found specific information about the Japanese context, which with Shakti in the current season, clearly remains relevant. In the Aesthetics of Buddhist Modernism chapter of the Bloomsbury Handbook of Japanese Religions, Pared Stortini writes that in the Meiji and Taisho periods there was a strong scholarly interest in Buddhism's origins and in original Sanskrit and Pali texts, which was a response to Euro American scholars who discredited East Asian Buddhist traditions that were based on the Chinese canon, which was considered to be flawed with mistranslations and apocrypha. This served to re establish Japan's cultural connection with the Indian sources of Buddhism and served as a purportedly scientific approach to their faith. In response to criticism from Euro American Orientalists and Christian apologists.
It also conveniently allowed them to assert a sort of political dominance over the, as you said, flawed and apocryphal Chinese Buddhists.
Startini goes on to write that the redefinition of Buddhism as a spiritual connection among Asian peoples became an ideological tool to justify Pan Asian views and so to support Japanese imperialism in the region. However, even in the post war period, Indian spirituality and the Indian origins of Buddhism retained a lot of importance. Visual arts used Buddhist iconography in the post war period to stress the international dimension of Buddhism as a world religion, perhaps in contrast to Shinto as uniquely Japanese, and the Indianness of Buddhism reimagined through Modernism made Buddhism seem cosmopolitan and like a cultural bridge between Japan and the outside world, a symbol of the kind of post national, diverse society of Tomino Gundam's universal century.
And as you were telling me all of this, it reminded me of something that came up during my research on the Yugoslav wars and why the Balkans and Yugoslavia was so important to Tomino. And at one point he talked about how to create a nation to bring a fractious people together and put an end to wars between different interest groups or ethnic groups within a particular population. You need to not only address their material physical needs for things like food, shelter, space, etc. But you also need some kind of ideal, something to bring them together and satisfy their spirits, their souls. And while a political entity, a government, can satisfy the material needs, you need something else to satisfy the spiritual one. And in the case of Yugoslavia, he identified the charismatic magnetism of a leader, an individual leader like Tito, who could hold a country together for decades simply on the power of their own personal authority.
Cough, cough, Maria.
Exactly. But that is also something that religion can do. Religion can give you a sense that, oh, all Buddhists belong within the same community, all Christians belong within the same singular nation.
A connection built on theoretically shared values that supersedes borders, that supersedes ethnicity. Well, and ethnicity and religion are often closely connected.
In the case of Yugoslavia, for instance, the ethnic difference between a Croat and a Serb in many cases is simply, are they Catholic or are they Orthodox? There are some other elements as well, but that's, that's like a big part of it, a really big part of it. And during the period of national, like national identity formation, those kind of distinctions, which dialect do you speak, which religion do you worship? Those become hard dividing lines between nations that then become dividing lines between countries. And when you're trying to create an empire, when you're trying to create a nation, you have to say, what are the ideals that unite all of the people under our banner? What is the language we all speak? What is the religion we all follow? And we've certainly noticed in Victory that religious iconography keeps showing up. We just had all of those cross shaped grave markers. The V2 is increasingly associated with an angel and a very like, specifically sort of Christian Western depiction of an angel. Zanskar has battleships shaped like Vajras. It has a lot of sort of Eastern Orientalizing religious iconography.
Previously, the use of Indian spirituality was almost irreligious. Post religious. In the United States context, and I imagine many other contexts as well, practices that used to be religious are now just Seen as sort of vaguely spiritual without specific connection to a religion like yoga, meditation. Those kinds of things are no longer thought of as like a religious practice associated with a specific religion. They're thought of as vaguely spiritual, or not even spiritual merely. Good for you.
Given a sort of mystic secular attribute.
Which in theory creates this sort of globe spanning spirituality without the divisiveness of religion. But then we come on the various examples that you mentioned here in Victory Gundam. So is Tomio kind of refuting that idea?
There was very little religion in First Gundam. Practically none, really. There were some crosses, there were some crosses on graves, but it's not until you get to Double Zeta, I think, that you get an explicit depiction of religion. And that's initially with the Muslim call to prayer in a village in Africa, for instance, I think is one of the first really truly explicitly religious scenes in any Gundam. You get into F91 and not only are there shrines with little crosses made out of pencils that have been tied together, but there's also this idea in the background materials about Cosmo Babylonia trying to create a new religion to unify that new nation that they were trying to create. And then in Victory, it becomes a major theme. And I wonder if this is Tomino in a way, reflecting critically on his own more utopian idea of the future. That First Gundam presents an image of a fully secularized, unified world government under the Federation. And say what you will about Federation bureaucracy and incompetence, but the presentation of the Federation in First Gundam is about as positive as it gets for Gundam. It only gets worse from there.
True.
And whatever optimism there was for the idea of world government for the UN, etc. In the late 70s, by the 90s, I'm betting that had soured pretty bad.
There is this conflict between people's desire for deeper meaning and their pursuit of that through spirituality and religion. And the ways in which religious institutions can be just as untrustworthy as governmental ones. And religion can also be used as a tool to control people and to cause harm. People need that sense of meaning, but that need also poses this social risk.
And a strong government, a strong state, can itself be a kind of secular cult, a kind of religion. Or at least it can take up the space in public life otherwise occupied by religion. It can suck up all the oxygen necessary for religion to thrive, and vice versa. When states decline, when chaos increases, people often turn to religion. When the Western Roman Empire went into decline, a lot of functions that had been administered by the state were taken over by the church. As the order that characterized the universal century under Federation dominance is breaking down, as the status quo is falling apart, people are turning to religion to fill the gap, to find a sense of stability in an increasingly chaotic world. One aspect of this that seems crucial and which we haven't addressed directly yet, though, is the relationship to new typism.
You know what this reminds me of, actually, there is a Roald Dahl short story that has also been made into a really lovely short film called the Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. Henry Sugar finds a book about a guy who trained himself to be able to see with his eyes closed. And Henry Sugar is a sort of dilettante. He has enough money that he doesn't have to work. He doesn't do much of anything except, you know, gamble. That's what he has the most fun doing. So he thinks, oh my gosh, I would be so good at gambling if I did this. But after he's undergone the really intensive training required to be able to acquire.
The skill, important side note here, the training is specifically yoga based. It's specifically Indian spirituality.
It's like meditating on a candle, doing visualizations.
And the book that he finds is written by a doctor about someone who has attained this ability, but uses it as a circus performer. Uses it just as a parlor trick. So it's fully abstracted out of its original religious context even before Henry Sugar finds it.
But the process of acquiring this ability changes something in him internally, so that just using it for gambling suddenly feels empty and pointless. Like the process of acquiring this ability makes him a different person and a better one. And it's kind of an open question whether Tomino buys this idea because most of his new types don't acquire that ability through training, it just happens to them.
But they do acquire it through conflict, through fighting, through life or death situations. That's at least how it seems to manifest.
And as we've seen, not everyone who's a new type is a good person.
But could we say that those villains like Hamon or Siroko, those who have the psychic abilities but fail to reach an elevated and enlightened state of mind and spirit, are they failed new types? Are they people who have taken the first steps on the road but not followed it to its conclusion, are they.
Like the circus performer? Some people gain this ability and just use it to survive, and some people gain this ability and try to use it to help others. And perhaps new typism is the same way. Like it's. It can be achieved through this sort of spirituality or has a Spiritual element. But some people are going to use it just to be good pilots and to survive. And for some people, it's going to change how they connect with humanity.
Is this why cyber new types, the psychic ones, are always so unhinged, so dangerous. Because it's not having the psychic abilities, having that intuition into other people that makes you a new type. It's the process of acquiring it that changes you internally.
We will probably never be able to really pin this down, because the show refuses to pin it down. Sometimes it seems like merely being in space makes people new types. That's kind of part of the implication with Hamon and Sirocco, right? That just by being spacenoids, by living outside of Earth's cradle, they have this ability.
The Shaliabol principle, right? Guy goes to Jupiter, comes back with powers. But on the other hand, look at Lala. Look at Shakti. It turns out that you can develop new type powers while living on Earth as long as you're an Indian woman.
Look at Carlman. Not an Indian woman. And also not fighting anybody.
He did go to space at a very young age though. So maybe he was exposed to space at a young enough age to count as a spacenoid.
There's like a special form of radiation out in space that makes you a new type.
It's the appendix. If the appendix is exposed to space energies, then it grants you psychic powers.
That's what it's for, right?
See, that's the problem. Martina was starting to develop new type powers.
But then now she never will.
She was misdiagnosed with appendix instead of nascent newtypism. That's why Elisha senses the bells, but not Martina.
Tom, I think you've just cracked the case. We've solved new typism. Totally understand it 100%. No one else need ever try to explain it.
Case closed. I await my congratulatory letter from Tomino. You are the first person to understand new typism. Congratulations to you. I bequeath the Gundam franchise.
Oh no. I don't want that responsibility. You take that back.
Never.
Next time on episode 10.41, the Bells of Xanak, we research and discuss Victory Gundam episode 41 and Joan of White Arc Managing up. Ring my bell. Bring your son to work day. RIP to Tassilo Wagyu. But I'm different. Blast from the past. You must gather your fleet before venturing forth. Unhand her. And who wouldn't want to be bullied by two pretty girls? 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 unseated land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dayoxin. 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. Podcasting Content Engagement with the public Metrics not me because I respect my gigantic head. It's supposed to be like wearable size, isn't it? I think this I think this seems.
To be like to scale like 1:1 scale. But maybe Char has a small head. We don't know Char.
Well, Char is a tiny boy.
No wrong Gundam opinion this week.
I'll try to think of one, but no, none yet.
Okay, that one. Well not open that can of worms. And I believe you said you had what you thought was a good opening.
I don't remember saying it was good.