You're listening to season 11 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 11.7, Once Upon a Fight in Neo Mexico, and we're your hosts. I'm Tom, longtime Gundam fan, and though I'm dead right now, by the time you're old enough to listen to this episode, I'll be teaming with life again.
And I'm Nina, new to G Gundam and cursed to love mechs that will probably never be made into Gunpla. Mobile Suit Breakdown is made possible by our Yar and young at heart paying subscribers. Thank you all and special thanks to our newest Chell Kearney, Ella Arisu M and T Naam. You keep us, Genki.
This week we're covering g Gundam Episode 7, Kurunara Koi Hishi no Tobousha or Prepare to Fight Desperate Fugitive, which originally broadcast on June 3, 1994. Notably, this episode was written by Okea Akira, and roughly six months before this, it was Oka who wrote the Mexico episode of Victory Gundam. The storyboards and episode direction were both done by Komoto Shougo, and per an interview with Chief Director Imagawa Komoto was essentially left to his own devices in the making of this episode. Komoto started working as a storyboard artist and episode Director back in 89 on Mashin Hiro Wataru, but did not work on any prior Gundam shows and will not return to the franchise after G finishes. He seems to have reached the height of his career in the first half of the 2000s, working as director for a series of shoujo works under the famed Toei animation hitmaker and mentor Sato Junichi, including Strange dawn, twin princesses of the mysterious Planet, and Princess Tutu. He was also the chief director on the second season of youf're Under Arrest, the TV show, not the 1995 ova that produced the now famous Ah eto the meme. Since 2006, he appears to have given up directing in favor of storyboarding, doing a fair amount of that for the Yu Gi oh franchise. And now the play by Play. Date redacted Location redacted Joint Neo Mexican Neo American mission to retrieve missing Neo Mexican Gundam fighter Chico Rodriguez, codenamed Operation Tequila Sunrise. Mission status failed Target inadvertently terminated during Gundam fight Body lost at sea following Destruction of the 049 NM Tequila Gundam codename Spike Gundam Retrieval determined to be impossible. Reconstructed narrative follows Psychological profile provided by Nuevo Centro Nacional de Intelligencia for Gundam fighter Chico El Pescador Rodriguez indicated lifelong fascination with the sea and codependent relationship with sister Gina. Desertion from Gundam fight considered related to Gina's declining health following exposure to neocolonial respiratory virus. Additionally, NCNI analysis identified target region as probable location of Rodriguez's siblings, based on unexplained disappearance of multiple Neo Mexican intelligence and law enforcement assets likely killed by Rodriguez. Early developments in Operation Tequila Sunrise were not promising. The Neo American Special Gundam Forces unit assigned to this mission, codenamed Harem 1, arrived ill prepared for extended operations, and was almost immediately forced to improvise vodka daiquiris after exhausting their stock of rum. This loss hit Team Leader Crockett especially hard. He began showing signs of paranoid delusion, becoming enraged and demanding to fight a cryptid or bogeyman, which he called Mr. Japanese. Evidence of possible foreign interference was first reported by Neo American Recon asset Bunny, who observed a man resembling Neo Japanese Gundam fighter Domon Kashu in the Central Market district interviewing locals about Rodriguez. However, with the rest of Crockett's team engaged in a sensitive operation to keep his spirits up, Agent Bunny was unable to maintain surveillance on Kashuk. The following morning, Gundam fighter Crockett attempted to lure Rodriguez out of hiding with a provocative public display of American bravado. At this time, two men matching the descriptions of Cachu and Rodriguez were observed in the crowd, apparently fighting each other. Neo Mexican security forces posted nearby opened fire, but failed to prevent the target from escaping. Gundam fighter Crockett objected to the use of force as excessive and inconsistent with stated mission objectives, resulting in a breakdown of cooperation. Rodriguez was then spotted attempting to flee the area, but was cornered along with Kashu and two women believed to be Rodriguez's sister Gina and Neo Japanese team mechanic, manager, psychologist, bodyguard, doctor, girlfriend, Trip Sitter, and childhood friend Rein Mikamura. However, our forces failed to prevent the Neo Mexican and Neo Japanese fighters activating their mobile fighters. A squadron of P143s Pescatore units on loan from the Neo Mexican Navy moved to engage the two Gundam units, but was destroyed partly by friendly fire from the Gundam Maxter. Based on radio communications intercepted during the incident, it is this author's belief that Gundam fighter Crockett opened fire on the Pescatora units due to a relapse of space madness, which caused him to mistake them for the aforementioned Mr. Japanese. The Shining and Tequila Gundams then engaged in a brief Gundam fight, during which the Tequila Gundam suffered catastrophic damage, culminating in the loss of its head. After concluding that Rodriguez could not have survived, the Neo Japanese Team reported his death to the International Gundam Fight Committee. According to standing regulations, end of report recommendation, reclassify Chico Rodriguez as deceased and close file. In future, avoid relying on Neo America for assistance unless absolutely necessary.
Hello everyone. We have a treat today. We have a special guest friend of the podcast and Internet personality in the Gundam community, Pike.
Hi.
Welcome Pike. We are thrilled to have you.
Thrilled to be on.
Before we start, tell us a little bit about your experiences with Gundam and then specifically with G Gundam.
Ooh. So I am Pike. You may know me as the person on Bluesky who never shuts up about Char Aznabal. I I've been an anime fan for a very long time, but I started watching Gundam in specific a few years ago because I watched the Witch from Mercury and I thought, this is great. I love literally everything about this. I want more. And so I pulled up first Gundam, and at first I wasn't sure if I was going to stick with it because I kind of had this idea it was going to be kind of one of those older, like cheesy shows that was more of like, you know, a nostalgia thing. But then it was like the greatest anime I'd seen in my entire life. So I promptly went on to devour most of the rest of the series. I'm pretty well known online for my live tweet threads, or I guess live post threads now that I'm no longer on Twitter, but I've been mostly watching them in production order, as I'm sure you two are familiar with. So I watched G Gundam after watching Victory and and I'm not going to sit here and say it was my favorite Gundam, but it is. I'm very fond of it. It was a very fun time. I like it a lot. I'm also a longtime fan of the podcast, so I'm very happy to be here.
Thank you so much.
Shout out to playing it at max volume at work on accident when I forgot to put my earbuds in. Very educational.
But we do always ask our listeners to share the podcast with their friends.
Yes, share it with your workplace, Share it with your coworkers. Share it with everyone you know. That is my story and I'm happy to be here talking about this really fun show with you all.
So this episode, this is episode seven. This is the Neo Mexico episode. And to me, the first thing that stood out is while every previous episode has been about the sort of the national mythology of each country, Wuxia for China, the American dream, courtly romance in France, the Russian Gulag system, the Mafia of Neo Italy. There's nothing about this story that, to me feels particularly Mexican. Although I'll admit, personally, as an American from the northern part of the country, I'm about the least qualified person on Earth to say what the national mythology of Mexico is or ought to be.
Yeah, yeah, It's. The Mexico that I think we did get was very sort of Taco Bell, you know, the kind of goofy Gundam Fighter outfit that Chico was wearing. And, you know, the colony itself being a big sombrero with cactuses on it.
His outfit is the worst.
It's so bad.
Why is it orange?
Orange and green, a truly horrible color combination.
Unless you're Irish. Step off, Nina.
Okay, all right, all right.
Happy St. Patrick's Day.
But why is his logo an M with a sombrero on it?
So many sombreros.
It's so bad.
I thought of it as the tourist version of Mexico in a lot of ways, with all the cacti and sombreros and ponchos, the woven headband, bunny's disguise, which is a sort of stuff simplified version of a traditional dress and hat. Putting the stamp on that tourist experience is really chibidi being there. Showing up in his mega yacht, acting very much like a tourist from the United States in that he's loud, obnoxious, and insulting towards the place he's visiting.
Classic American military adventurism, to just wander around Mexico looking for somebody.
I did like that the episode chose to focus on family as a theme because while I'm not going to sit here and say that family is, like, specific to Mexico because obviously that is important worldwide, it is definitely important to Latin cultures. Just speaking myself as someone who is Mexican American, it felt right to me that that was something they chose to focus on. Whether that was a conscious choice, I don't know. Probably not. But it worked for me. So there was that.
The episode is replete with Mexico brand trademark items. This is the theme park version of Mexico. This is the frat bro Halloween costume version of Mexico.
Yes, absolutely. It was very much the Halloween costume version of Mexico. You could swap out the characters and put them in a different country and. And it would probably still mostly work with very minor changes, right?
Yeah. One of the things I noticed about this episode as very different from just the previous G Gundam episodes was previously, it's all been about how disgusting and polluted and terrible Earth is. We keep getting that in the intros with the narrator guy to why people left. And yet in this episode, the. They introduced the idea that There has been some level of environmental recovery. There are people who want to live on Earth, people who derive their livelihoods and sense of meaning from like an interaction with the earth, like fishing. And I did wonder if this was from a perception of Mexico as less industrial, which is absolutely not the case. Mexico has tons of big cities and lots of industry. It is an industrialized nation. However, a lot of the touristy parts of Mexico have this image of being less industrialized and sort of trapped in an earlier time for the benefit of
visitors in G. So far, there have been some countries that are advanced civilizations that have fallen into ruins. New York, Paris, Rome. And then there are the countries that are pre modern or primitive civilizations that are basically intact but time displaced. And that's China and now Mexico.
Yeah. Personally, when I was watching it, I felt it was a nod almost to the kind of Native American background of Mexico as being a melting pot of, you know, the Spanish who came over and the native Mesoamericans. So it almost felt like a stereotypical noble savage, the. The native who is closer to the earth and to nature, like in the design of like the little headband, which is kind of stereotypically, you know, Mesoamerican there going around that Chico wears. So I kind of got that impression from it. But the focus on the environment was. Was different, gave it kind of an interesting feel.
I hadn't really picked up on the possible, like, native influence of Chico as much until we started talking about it. But then I think of things like the blow darts and the canoe and the fact that apparently he fishes with a trident, of all things. He cliff dives to go get the tequila Gundam.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that's something I actually have noticed. Anime in general tends to kind of hype up the native part of Mexico a little more, I think, than you'll see, say, in Western cartoons. And obviously that's not the case, like with every cartoon. But it's interesting to see how Japan views Mexico, you know, being on the other side of the world, you know, as opposed to how America views Mexico being on top of it. Right. You get a different perspective. And so that is. That is interesting to me.
I don't know a ton about it, but there's a fairly really significant Japanese diaspora community in Mexico, I think.
So a lot of this is because for a while when Japan was exporting a lot of immigrants, a lot of them would come to the west coast, obviously, just because it's right there. And at one point the United States had closed its borders to Asian immigrants. But you could go to Mexico and then cross from Mexico into the US and so a lot of Japanese people were moving through Mexico for that and obviously some of them decided to stay. And then at one point the US made it much harder to do that. And so many who would have gone into the US ended up staying in Mexico. This was a thing that happened like in the early 20th century. And it makes me wonder if maybe the idea of what Mexico was like got locked into Japanese popular culture and the Japanese collective imagination back then and that's part of the reason why Mexico feels older in this episode.
That could very well be the case.
Yeah. That's actually really interesting. Hadn't thought of that. It would be interesting to look into that and kind of maybe see like how the Japanese immigrants from back then, you know, saw Mexico and how that has influenced their kind of popular culture version of Mexico.
Yeah. Someone out there. This sounds like a great PhD project for some student.
For all we know, it's already been done. But I have to search in Spanish and or in Japanese before we move on. I do want to bring up just a couple more things about Chibidi.
You popped off when Chibidi first appeared. You've had two episodes of this guy and you are already ride or die for him.
He's just such a lovable himbo.
He's such a bro. He's such a bro. He's great. I love Chibidi. I hadn't seen this in a few years and watching this episode again, I was like, oh, I miss Chibidi so much.
His sidekick Bunny provides some comic relief as she is tracking Domon around.
She's so inconspicuous.
Oh yeah. Question for you, Tom. It's happened twice now. Do we think there's going to be a third incident of Chibidi being used by a government because he fell for
it Again, Do Americans have a reputation for being like really credulous, blundering around on the world stage, no idea what we're doing, Being led around by the nose by a bunch of like local tin pot dictators, using our strength for their own purposes?
Couldn't be us.
I do love that Chibidi gives us a look into kind of how other people see America. Like, you know, it's. America loves to stereotype other countries. Let's be the ones getting stereotyped. I love it.
I wish we could go back to when everyone thought we were just good hearted idiots.
Yeah, that would be a good place to be right now, right?
Surrounded by women.
Right oh, yep. I also wondered to some degree if his role in the story as the lovable idiot is to explain parts of the plot that younger viewers might not totally understand. Because we have the end of the extremely brief fight between Domon and Chico, which we'll talk about more in a second. Initially, Chibidi is sort of outraged. Like, you had already won. You didn't have to kill him. And Domon is, ah, I only killed the Neo Mexico Gundam fighter. Chico Rodriguez is still alive. So Chibidi gets to be like, oh, so now his government will stop hunting him and other people will stop trying to fight him and he's free to just live with his son. Sister, you're a good guy, Mr. Japanese.
Because it's okay for Raine to walk away thinking Domon just killed that guy, but we can't have the audience thinking that about our boy. And it's important to Domon that Chibidi realize what he did. Like, Domon wants Chibidi's respect.
And we know Domon's not going to tell Raine. Like, she's going to find out, like completely, like unrelated years from now.
Chibidi will mention it offhand, and she'll be like, wait, what?
Domon will be like, oh, should we invite Chiko to the wedding?
She's like, oh, he's finally cracked up. That's it. I do love how Domon is continually insisting that all these situations have nothing to do with him and then winds up helping people anyway. He cannot help it and he cannot help himself.
Anytime he enters a new area, he has to click on every NPC with a question mark or exclamation point over their head.
He's got that full, clear achievement on Locke.
So the Tequila Gundam is one that had been spoiled for me before we saw this episode. It's so popular in the fandom. There's so many people who talk about it and do fan art of it. It was probably unavoidable the moment I got on social media and started engaging with Gundam fans. And then the fight is so disappointing. It's so, so brief.
I think the actual fight is probably shorter than the transformation sequence.
Yeah, it's definitely one of the big disappointments of G Gundam for me. I too was spoiled. I was spoiled on some of the more ridiculous Gundams in the show and that was one of them. And I was so excited for this. Looks so stupid. It's going to be great. I can't wait for it to have some ridiculous taco related superpower or something. Oh God. And Then nothing happened. It was there for like 10 seconds and did nothing. It's like, oh man. I didn't even get like. I didn't get any fight. I didn't get a stupid fight. I didn't get a cool fight. I didn't get anything. Like, it was just. It just did nothing.
And the design is sort of lackluster. There is a sombrero because apparently that is the go to thing to indicate that something is Mexican. One of the pauldrons kind of evokes a cactus because it's all spiky and green. But I much more enjoyed the. I've been calling them Kappa Gundams because they're green and have yellow beaks.
See, I am like legally obligated to stand Tequila Gundam as someone who is Mexican American.
So you love the Gundam. You call it stupid, but you love it anyway.
I love it. I love it so much. I would. I would get a gunpla of it and put it on my shelf proudly. Put a little Mexican flag on it.
I really like that. For some reason, the sombrero looks like the outlet of a jet turbine.
Maybe that's part of how they justify it. They're like, oh no, this is a. This serves a purpose. It's not just a sombrero on a Gundam.
But can you imagine it rocketing across the sky feet first, fire bursting forth from its sombrero.
They should have had it do that move. They should have had it launch itself feet first at the shining Gundam and like kick it into a mountain or something. That would have been cool.
Could have. Should have.
You mentioning that had me pull up the Gundam Wiki article for Tequila Gundam so I could look at it. And I gotta say, I did not know it had like all these like armaments like the Cactus Needle and the hat. The hat cutter and Tequila Vortex. So you know, it has all these great moves that we didn't get to see. I guess.
I guess Chico didn't know about any of those either.
I guess not.
How did this guy get to be the Gundam Fighter?
Oh, okay. I have a question for you both about the narrative of the story. It is established basically from the beginning of the episode that Chico only became Gundam Fighter to bring his sister to Earth. But up until now, everybody's been talking about how hard it is to go to the colonies and how everyone is desperate to go to the colonies. So shouldn't it have been easy for him to come to Earth? Couldn't he have done it without becoming the Gundam Fighter and then abandoning the Gundam fight? And being chased all over creation by his government. Like, why did he go about achieving his goal in this way?
We're told at the beginning of the episode that Neo Mexico has very strict immigration laws and enforcement. And we were told in the prior episode that Domon needed to be a participant in the Gundam fight to be able to move around Earth freely. So there's a dystopian level of control over personal movement in this world. But this is really interesting. Back in the 70s, back in original Gundam, it was the excess population who were being shunted off into the colonies steadily over time that has flipped by Victory. The Earth is a backwater. Everyone who's anyone lives out in the colonies. And that's the heart of political and economic power. So what has changed? Why the shift? Like, from our vantage point, looking back at the whole sweep of the series, it's very tempting to say, oh, this is like a sophisticated story of political development over time. Naturally that was going to happen, but we know that these shows were being made one after another. There wasn't a lot of foreplanning about where the franchise was going to go. So what changed?
I really don't know.
That is a great question. And I, you know, it's easy to say, you know. Well, with G Gundam, it's because it's got a new director, it's got new staff, but I'm not sure what Tomino was thinking. But it is always interesting to me to see how each individual Gundam series approaches the conflict between Earth and space, because that's just one of those little Gundam features that I always look forward to. You know, I want to see how they're pulling off the shar. I want to see how they're pulling off the Earth versus the colonies or versus Space conflict. It's. It's just a. Just a neat thing to kind of see how that is approached in each series.
To answer my own question a little bit as I was thinking more about it, I'm developing a sort of theory of G Gundam and of the Gundam fight as symbolic of pursuit of some goal or some dream, some ideal. Domon doesn't have to fight people in order to show them the photograph of his brother. He can just show people the picture. And yes, his government might try to replace him if he's not participating in the Gundam fight, if he's not defeating other Gundam fighters and, you know, pursuing their goal of winning and taking control of the government for the next four years. But it's also because of its relationship to his goal, because the goal is vengeance. Then most of the activity around him pursuing vengeance has to be using the shining Gundam, using this, like, instrument of power. And why he's so critical of Chico is because Chico has access to a Gundam Fighter. He has access to the Tequila Gundam, which is literally and representationally a huge source of power, and he refuses to use it. We know he doesn't have a problem with killing people. It's implied that he's murdered like a bunch of people who have been looking for him. But he doesn't want to get in the Gundam Fighter and fight people that way. That's why Domon is like, you're just running from what makes you sad. You're running from your fate. You're running from things you can't change. Like get in the Gundam Fighter and fight me.
It's interesting how the Gundam kind of as a symbol is approached in this as opposed to, say, you see Gundam, where it's the war machine. You get in it and everything is terrible. You're going to kill people, you're probably going to die, or you're going to going to be traumatized. You know, you're going to have horrible things happen. It's going to ruin your life, right? Whereas here, it's like, you know, it's. It's more like an extension of yourself, and it's more of a representation of what you want and your goals. And you know, even the way it's. The Gundam is controlled, as opposed to, you know, in UC Gundam, where it's kind of controlled with, you know, levers and. And, you know, controls like you would control a machine in the real world. Whereas here it's like, oh no, you literally. Your moves are literally being performed by the Gundam. You've literally become a giant superhero, right? And so it's definitely interesting seeing, you know, how Domon takes that personally. And it's like, well, no, you have the big superhero machine. Like you have to be doing something with it, right? I don't care what you're doing, but
you can't just sit around in the uc. You cannot use the power of the Gundam to destroy without being destroyed yourself in the future century. As long as you're a good person, you can use the Gundam all you want, because the Gundam is you, and you're a good person who's doing good things. It's a completely different logic.
And Domon almost seems to take the position that once you have it, once you have been given a Gundam to use, you have an obligation to use it for some kind of purpose. If you have access to that power. You have a responsibility to at least try to achieve something with it. Chico's refusal to do so is like horrifying, cowardly and weak.
Domon doesn't put it this way, but the Gundam Fighter carries the hopes and dreams of their nation. So many people have entrusted the Gundam Fighter with their power and their hopes for the future. To just run away from the Gundam fight is to be squandering so many millions of people's energy. Imagine Goku performing the Spirit Bomb and then not doing anything with it, just holding that energy forever.
Yeah, yeah. He takes his responsibility very seriously. And that's what he sees the Gundam as, is a responsibility. I think he understands that it represents what your desires are, what you want. And he takes that seriously. For being a show that is. On the surface, it looks like it's about countries. It's really not. That's how we're going to get all these guys together fighting like, you know, that's kind of our. Our device to get this together. And it does seem to be more personal with him. It's about his kind of his personal idea of his training and his background and being the best. He can be kind of tied up with the idea of what the Gundam represents, not necessarily as Neo Japan, but for humanity almost.
You are the one who is the chosen Gundam Fighter. Out of probably hundreds or even thousands of people who could have done it. You were the one chosen. And so what you personally want to achieve with it is important. In the same way that the Gundam Fighters that Domon seems to respect all have some kind of personal high ideal. And I think probably the one from Neo France is the only one whose high ideal has anything to do with his country really. For Chiboti is sort of the American dream of being able to work your way up from the gutter.
Chibidi is very community minded and motivated, but not nationally.
The Neo Russia fighter basically only lives for fighting now because he gave himself up to save his crew of former space pirates. That for Neo China, it's about reviving Shaolin and reviving these very old and traditional martial arts. Like most of them, it's a very personal goal that they're trying to achieve, but it's important to them and it's what drives them. And that is something Domon respects in the same way that he is single minded about his pursuit of vengeance.
Each of the people you've mentioned, each of the other Gundam fighters he's spared has a very like particular person or group of people that they're fighting for. Argo is fighting for his crew, who we know he has put himself into bondage in order to save their lives. George is fighting for the Princess and for the spirit of France, which he views as a person, even if we might not. Sai Saishi is fighting for his family, his father, his temple. Chibidi, of course, is fighting for the people of the great and glorious city of New York. Chico has someone to fight for, but he's not fighting. If Chico would just get into his Gundam and punch people until Gina's problems were solved, then Dolan would have no issues with him at all, correct?
This is how you solve your problems with your fists.
Dawn has yet to encounter a problem that couldn't be solved by getting into his Gundam and punching. He doesn't believe they exist.
Speaking of the Gundam fighters, who so far have all been men and of their very personal goals, we get that fabulous line from Rain. Men only think of themselves. And the Japanese is hewes pretty closely to that. It's basically that men do whatever they want. Men behave however they want, and they do this too much. We haven't had a lot of gender in CH Gundam yet, but we have had a few moments, mostly through Rain. And I really appreciated this one because as comes up over and over again throughout the episode, Chico has not really consulted Gina about what she wants. She's dying. She knows she's dying. He's here because he promised her that they would return to Earth and live together and fish together and so on when they were children. This is about his desire to fulfill a promise he made. At no point is he really consulting what Gina wants.
He's martyring himself because he feels bad about her impending death. That Rain line, though, is so good. Because on the one hand, she's right in general, especially about Chico. But she's also wrong in this very specific example because Domon very much was thinking about other people when he killed Chico Rodriguez. Gundam Fighter of Neo Mexico.
I noticed that line too, in my rewatch. It was an interesting way to kind of close out the episode because it was very, oh, there's trouble in paradise. What is that leading into? But yeah, it's. It's interesting. The contrast between Rain, who has so far in this show been a. A very strong character who, like, you know, she participates a lot. She's part of the team. She does stuff. Rain has been such a. Such a great character. I love Rain. I really. She's one of my favorite Gundam girls. And that's saying a lot, because I love a Lot of Gundam girls. When I first watched G Gundam, I was, I was very impressed with like, you know, how she in general, she has more to do than a lot of prior female Gundam characters. But then in contrast to Gina, who is just kind of there to be the sick dying girl to kind of, you know, be the plot point, it's
a little unfortunate you mentioned Gina's medical
condition, her incurable space tb.
Right. That's the thing. The roots of this episode are in the 19th century. This is an old fashioned story. This is a time displaced version of Mexico. She has consumption, like the constantly coughing, beautiful young waif who is too pure for this world. Like she has tuberculosis. That's the story. That's a classic of 19th century literature.
And to clarify for anybody in our audience who isn't familiar, for a lot of human history, we could not cure tb. We didn't have strong enough antibiotics, enough different antibiotics. And actually in the 90s there was a health crisis, like a global health crisis with tuberculosis. And occasionally antibiotic resistant strains pop up. But as a story trope, Tom is absolutely right.
There's a very good reason why it emerged as a story trope when it did. The Industrial Revolution created the ideal circumstances for TB to spread and so it actually became epidemic in Europe. Like a quarter of all deaths were due to TB at the height of it. The story, in fact that this one reminds me most of is Les Miserables, which includes both the beautiful consumptive young woman and also the wrongly accused, or sort of rightly accused, but morally righteous criminal guy faking his death by diving into the sea.
Oh yeah, absolutely. A more old fashioned type of story, even just with the aesthetics too obviously going from kind of the hard science fiction of UC Gundam to a more kind of a mythological allegorical story about heroes and anti heroes. And definitely more of a classical type of type of story.
Well, for Tomino, when he writes stories about war, he's writing stories about war. For Imagawa and other Gundam creators, when they write about war, they're writing about other things. It's always a metaphor for something else. Even the conflict between Earth and the colonies, it's a metaphor for the clash between tradition and modernity. It's a clash between the countryside and the cities.
Yeah, yeah, very good point. G Gundam definitely feels like a very, very metaphorical type of story.
And this is a really good episode to be talking about the comparison to UC Gundam because just a year ago, Victory Gundam went to Mexico.
Oh gosh, that's right. And demolished it.
I had actually completely Forgotten about that. But you're right.
Eznina's travel guides that she's been doing for every episode that we've watched so far will reveal. Most G Gundam episodes make liberal use of real world landmarks in order to set their action within a discernible place. But Mexico kind of doesn't. Are there any famous Mexican landmarks that show up in this episode?
I don't think so. It certainly looks like places.
When we watched Victory, we were identifying specific famous bridges and churches. Victory features lots of very real, very famous Mexican architecture.
There wasn't any moment in this episode where I felt like, oh, I'm meant to know what that building is, or I'm meant to know exactly where we are.
The view of the coastline looks like Puerto Vallarta to me, specifically. I think that might be the one really closely identifiable thing in the show.
There was also. Gosh. The house that Chico and Gina are staying in is up on, like, a promontory overlooking the town, and there's an old cannon there. It looks like it's part of a. Like an old defensive emplacement or something. So maybe there's a fort that it's meant to be.
Again, more of that, like, 18th and 19th century history stuff.
There's also, at the very end of the episode, Chico talking about being reborn through the ocean is basically a baptism, right?
I was almost kind of wondering if that was like a mythological thing.
Well, I'm sure the Christian practice of baptism comes out of even older practices, so.
Oh, yeah.
But that the old hymn is dead, and there is a new hymn born through this, like, full immersion in the water.
At the beginning of the episode, the ocean is established to be a symbol of regeneration. It may be dead now, but by the time you grow up, it will be alive again.
And in a way, Gina, following up on Chico's comments, is about hope for eternal life, that if she dies in the ocean, on the ocean, she might also be reborn through it. She doesn't mean dead figuratively, like Chico does. She doesn't mean the death of an identity. She means her actual death. But she likes the idea of her connection to the earth, to the ocean, to this place containing in it a potential for her to exist again in some form.
We often talk about the Earth when we talk about the cycle of life. We return to the Earth when we die. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, that kind of thing. And then we emerge from it in the form of new life. What does that look like to a spacenoid? The most prominent imagery of Death or of the body after death. That I can think of is back in Zeta, when there was a string of episodes that all opened with a frozen corpse drifting through the outer planets.
And we know that they do the space version of burial at sea in First Gundam. Don't they do that with Captain Paolo's body? They just eject it from the ship and let it drift in space forever.
If you die in space, you don't return to the planet well, and you don't change.
You're just like a frozen corpse. You just stay that way forever until something happens. If they did bury Gina at sea, she would be food for fish. Her body would feed the seaweeds, and those fish would get eaten by seals, and the seals would get eaten by whales and sharks, and she becomes part of this teeming, alive ecosystem.
And she's doing what Chico has refused to do this whole time. She's thinking about what happens after she dies.
Yeah, Chico does seem to be kind of in denial about a lot of things, which is almost kind of seems to be the point of the episode, in a way, is, you know, he's in denial about, you know, his sister's illness and what that means. According to Domon, he's in denial about what he's supposed to do as a Gundam fighter. It's an interesting theme of the episode. Yeah, yeah.
He seems so shocked when she first says it, like he had forgotten or was making himself forget. He's trying to deny it, and she won't let him. Did either of you catch the First Gundam reference in the fight? The way Domon cuts off the hands of the Tequila Gundam is the exact move that Amuro uses to disarm Rambiral's goof.
Oh, I had not noticed that.
And thematically connected, that's one of the episodes where Amuro is running away from the fight.
Well, I think that's the one where he has run away and he decides to come back. I think somebody who made this show
might have liked Gundam maybe a little bit.
Wow. Gundam fans making Gundam.
Tomina would be appalled.
Yeah, no, it's actually. It's actually is kind of IR ironic because, you know, as time has gone on, you know, now we have reached the point where Gundam fans are making Gundam, as probably most recently exemplified by gqx, was obviously Gundam fans making Gundam. But it is interesting because a lot of the stuff, like in the 90s where it was kind of in that weird spot like Host uc, a lot of the people making the shows were not really Gundam fans. They were Just people who worked in anime. And so that's been more of a recent shift, I think I would say, probably since around the year 2000. And so seeing that in the earlier stuff is kind of neat. Like, oh, I'm used to seeing that in the more modern Gundam, but, you know, oh, here it is in G Gundam. They had their little references, too. I did want to talk a little bit about representation. Just speaking as someone who is Mexican American, I always kind of come into shows that have like a. Have like a Mexican episode or a character or whatever. Kind of, I guess, kind of curious to see how it's approached. And I'm not going to sit here and say that I'm an expert on Mexico. I actually like to call myself a Mexicant because I can't speak Spanish. And. And I was not really raised in the culture, and I'm. Technically, I'm. But it's important to me as someone who grew up in the 90s, where you had a lot less representation. Right. We had what, like, Speedy Gonzalez and. Right.
You know, I got called that a lot in elementary school, as it happens. I wasn't Speedy and I wasn't Mexican, but my last name was Gonzalez, which was all that mattered.
Oh, of course. It's always interesting because just growing up, you know, knowing that you look different from the other kids, knowing that, you know, even if you're not really sure why yet, you know, I always kind of grew up knowing I'm. I'm darker than the other kids. You know, I. I have darker eyes than the other kids. I have darker hair than the other kids. Right. And so it was always interesting to me growing up, when I finally got to see, like, characters that actually looked like myself, it was like, oh, And. And it was mostly important to see if they were treated as like, actual, like, human beings or as like kind of a, you know, kind of a stereotype, like the token. Right. That was kind of how I approached this episode on this rewatch. Is, you know, is this the type of thing where when I was a kid, I would have thought this was, like, cool? And I don't think I would have specifically because as we talked before, it's not really necessarily, like, Mexican. It just kind of happens to be set in Neo Mexico, which is kind of like a stereotype. Sombrero space colony. Right. But at the same time, I also didn't dislike it. You know, I was stabbing Tequila Gundam earlier, and like, you know what? I think it's cool. You know, it's like, why not? You know, why not make a giant robot out of a sombrero, you know, and the. The other little thing that I liked was just anytime they showed a close up of Chiko's face, he had a little bit of, like, a little bit of hair, like just kind of random hair on his face, which it's such a small thing, but to me, it was just so touching because I always grew up also being very hairy, you know. Now. Now I'm. Now I'm transgender, so it's like, that's a surprise tool that will help us later. Right? But. But at the time, it was like, you know, oh, my God, I have to be the girl who shaves, you know, And. And just, you know, seeing, like, here's this guy in this cartoon who is darker like me, and he has little random hairs all over his face like me, and it just made me smile. Like, I don't even know if they were thinking about that when they made that. But I gotta say, at the end of the day, not. Not a perfect representation episode by any means, but I. I enjoyed watching it. I. I felt happy to kind of see that, and I just had fun with it. I liked it. It's a good time. I'm totally here for Tequila Gundam.
We know from before that Imagawa was a bit uncomfortable with the directive to do a lot of stuff with national stereotypes. And it does feel as though, at least with the main characters, with the Gundam fighters themselves and the people most connected to them, that while they've used a lot of stereotypical imagery, they have also tried to make all of these characters have a personality that isn't just stereotypes of where they're from.
Yeah, yeah. And I thought. I'm not gonna say, like, you know, he was the most interesting character ever, but he was an interesting character. He had an interesting story. It was a solid episode. It wasn't perfect or anything, but, you know, it felt like he was not being treated as the token. He felt a human right with motivations, and he was a guy I was kind of rooting for. Right. Which is important. And so, yeah, for sure. At the end of the day, I enjoyed the episode. And, yeah, I liked it.
I kind of wish they'd actually set it on Neo Mexico so that we could say, oh, all the sombreros and mustaches and Mexico kitsch is the Neo Mexican people trying to, you know, live up to the national stereotype they've all absorbed about what real Mexico is. And then maybe we could go to Mexico on Earth and discover that it's much more similar to what actual modern Mexico looks like.
That feels like it's asking a lot from this show, though.
Oh no. But you can't blame me for wanting it to be better.
Well, we can always want it to be better.
We could dream.
Next time on episode 11.8, Bon Gundam Bad Gundam, we research and discuss g Gundam episode 8. And this time, she really means it. Secret regulation 11 where possible, participants must conceal their Mobile fighter in a waterfall or, barring that, a body of water. Hey there, menacing green haired lady. Just one more week until retirement. Capitan Arlock. Situation Norma all up. He's a lumberjack and he's not okay. When the lumber Gundam goes underwater, does it become a Yukon class submarine? It's like poetry. It rhymes. One of those Rashomon type situations. And it was the space Police's fault all along. Ready? Go.
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 Dayaksin. The closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio, and the recap music is window by 1000 hands. 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 youm can get in touch with us by email at hostsundam. If you'd like to support the show, please tell your friends about us. Leave us a nice review. Wherever you listen to podcasts, or if you'd like to support us financially, you can do so@gundampodcast.com Patreon or look for other ways to support the show@gundampodcast.com support most of all, thank you for listening. Are you. Are you ready to come down to Neo New York and throw hands over your Gundam opinions? No. You lack conviction. Or maybe you just haven't heard an opinion worth fighting over yet. So how about this one? Inspired by djg? The show's fine and all, but it's weird that we're seven episodes in and they still haven't introduced the protagonist. I mean, this Domon guy seems pretty cool, but he doesn't have a Haro. How can you be a Gundam protagonist if you don't have the mandate of Haro? Domon is obviously just the overpowered prologue character who will die tragically while passing the torch on to the real hero. Sometimes it's such a moral blow. Like, what do you mean you weren't recording. I said the most clever things of my life. Literally every time we've ever, like, had to re record something, the re recording has been better than the original. So I'm sure this is gonna be great. We all, like, we've all forgotten what we said, but we remembered what we wanted to say. It's gonna be fine. We're gonna be okay.
Before I redo the intro, Tom, did you put on the red light?
The red light is on, Roxanne.
I can't believe we've never made that joke before.
Yeah, we did it. Give yourself a round of applause.
Great job, everyone. Even with the mishap. Woo.
We did it 150% because of someone, and I'm not gonna say who.
Yeah, literally, who remembers.