You're listening to season ten of mobile suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci-Fi mega franchise mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is episode 10.18, Spider webs, and we are your hosts. I'm Tom, and I think if you're gonna start cooking up conspiracy theories about which victory characters are secretly related to which other previous Gundam characters, don't waste your time trying to prove that USo is related to shar. Focus on how Martina and Alicia Clanski have the exact same hair as seabook and his mom. It's hiding in plain sight.
And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam and wishing not for the first time that I remembered more from my high.
School chemistry and geometry classes.
Mobile suit Breakdown is made possible by our paying subscribers on Patreon. Thank you all and special thanks to our newest patron, Heckin heck with the e's replaced by threes as is tradition, you keep MSB Genki this week.
Victory Episode 18 Uchu Kantesen, or Space Fleet Battle the episode was written by Tomita Tsukihiro and storyboarded by Nishimori Akira. It was directed by Ashizawa Takeshi with Nishimura Nobiyoshi as animation director. This is Ashizawas first credit on victory and his first time working on Gundam. I struggled to find information about him. He got his start directing episodes of Samurai Pizza cats in 1990 and was prolific as both an episode director and storyboard artist from 1990 to 1993. But after that, his output dropped off precipitously. One episode here, one episode there, sometimes going years without any credits at all. As far as I can tell, he left the industry entirely in 2008. The new crew of the old model space battleship lean horse scramble to ready her for battle. They are bound for the highland solar battery and a rendezvous with another battleship, the Goan land. But the Kylas Gili fleet is nearby and enemies could appear at any moment. USO and the others on the highland are hard at work too, repainting the captured Sinope and Zoluat in league militaire colors, or at least most of them are busy with work. Odello and Warren have fallen head over heels for the sisters Elisha and Martina, and they are too busy flirting to do much else. While the boys try and mostly fail to make the most of their fortuitous meeting with the Highland girls, Uso is looking forward to his own meeting with league military leader Jin Jahanam, who just so happens to be aboard the approaching goanland bespas. Long range sensors have detected the lean horse and Tassila wago dispatches chronicle with a small squadron, one amalthea cruiser and two sinopes to investigate the enemy movement. As Klaxons on the lean horse warn of imminent battle, Shakti races to prepare her little band of stowaways for action. Shes found working normal suits in one of the rooms closets and with Susie's help and no small amount of difficulty, manages to get both flights, Flanders and Karlman, into them. It's awkward and uncomfortable, but it might just save their lives if there's a hull breach. USO and Marbet sortie from the highland to support their comrades, followed by the others in the captured Sinipe. When Uso tries to convince them to go back, that the battlefield is no place for kids, Tomash points out that Uso is a kid too, and younger besides. The Sinope is armed, and they've brought spare weapons too. They'll stay well back from the fighting, but theyre not going home. Warren takes the opportunity to pump Uso for advice on wooing girls. I dont know, man. In books, guys just give girls gifts, flowers, or whatever. The fighting is intense. The leagues pilots seem evenly matched against their Bespa counterparts, but theyre struggling to adapt to the zoloats electrified wire attacks. Uso grows more and more frustrated. Hes still not accustomed to space combat or to these kinds of group fights. Again and again he engages in enemy suit, only for Marbet or another ally to appear from nowhere and strike the finishing blow. Am I just no good at space combat? He wonders. Cannon fire from the Bespa cruiser grazes the lean horse. A minor hit, but it leaves a gash in the wall of the vip suite where Shakhti and company are hiding. All of them, kids, dog and baby alike, are thrust out into the void. A moment later, more beams flash past the lean horse, this time from the other direction. The Guan land has arrived. On the field now badly outnumbered and with fresh mobile suits on the way, the captain of the amalthea orders a fighting retreat. An eager Uso lands on the deck of the Guan land, excited to meet Jin Jahannam and perhaps to ask him what has become of his parents. His excitement curdles immediately. The man in question is a vain, histrionic bully, nothing like the man he expected. He cant even bring himself to ask his questions. He flies back to the highland. Marbet can tell hes upset, and its not hard to guess why. He snaps and snarls, but she pulls him in for a hug. Your parents are still out there somewhere, and wherever they are, theyre doing great things. Uso isn't the only one to have his hopes dashed. Warren tries to win Martina's heart with a bouquet of flowers freshly picked from the highland greenhouse, but he only demonstrates how ignorant he is about life in space. A furious Martina brandishes the flowers in his face and snaps at him. Don't you know what these are for? We need them to keep the air clean. And you just picked them. She leaves Warren devastated. But things could be worse for Shakti, Suzie, Flanders and Carlman drifting through space with no hope of rescue, with no one even aware that they are lost, things seem about as bad as they can possibly get. I make a point of trying not to harp too much on continuity mistakes in this show because, like, it's kind of a cheap shot. A continuity mistake, even an obvious one, does not make it a worse show. Not really, though it does reveal a certain sloppiness, I guess, on the creative team's part. There are a few really obvious ones, mistakes sort of between episodes here. Not in the prior episode, the recap, but in the one before that, the last real episode. USO very clearly punched the thruster nozzles off of this captured sinepe. And then in the one before that, a bit of space debris totally destroyed the cargo hatch of the PCST shuttle that they've been riding in, and now both of those ships are shown to be completely intact. And while we can hypothesize that maybe they were repaired at the Highland solar battery, that does seem to be a little bit outside the capacities of this group of kids that they've been hanging out with. Also, how did they get the sinipe there if it had been completely disabled in that prior engagement?
And what happened to the Bespa pilots who were on it?
Well, I think they were given one of the two zoloats to use to get back to civilization.
I had thought the idea was to basically strand them in the centipede, that they'd be able to send a distress signal or something, but they wouldn't be able to pursue.
Yeah, I mean, that seemed to be what they were going for in that episode, but clearly not. And I guess the issue with this is that when there are so many continuity errors like this, when so many details change without explanation within an episode or from episode to episode, it discourages a close viewing of the show, because when the details are consistent, we kind of assume that the people making the show intended them to be however they are, and that we are encouraged to read meaning from those details. But when the details change randomly, the expectation is that only the really truly macro stuff matters. And that we should just ignore all of the details. Cause they haven't been done with intention, and so they don't matter. And that sucks. I don't like that about a show. I like to be able to read it on a deep level. I like to be able to pay attention to the details and try to suss some meaning out of them. But the reason I bring it up is because I never noticed this level of discontinuity in previous shows. Something is different on this one. Something behind the scenes is different in particular.
In combination with the uncharacteristic recap episode last time. To have that and then to have these sort of continuity issues, confusion over what exactly is happening between episodes speaks to some kind of trouble behind the scenes, whether that's communication issues between teams working on different episodes, disagreements over the story, or just production timeline issues and not being able to finish things as quickly as they need to be done. And the faster you're trying to work, the more pressure you're under, the more mistakes you're going to make, and you don't have time to fix them. They just have to go ahead because you're under this very strained production schedule.
See, I think more than anything, it speaks to disinterest or distraction on the part of the chief director. And it's always like, it's dicey to speculate about the mental health of any artist based on the things they're producing. But Tomino has gone on record in interviews to talk about his own mental health struggles during the production of victory and afterwards, like, he was going through a pretty difficult time. He is the person who is supposed to be keeping track of these things between episodes, right? Different writers, different directors, different storyboarders work on each episode. The chief director is the guy who sees the big picture and who, in.
Theory, is coordinating between different episode teams to make sure everything meshes together properly.
I was reading some comments by one of the episode directors who worked on Victory about his time on it. And interestingly, this is a guy who only directed one episode, and it's pretty far in our future, so it doesn't directly apply to this period. But he said that when he met with Tomino to go over the episode before he started working on it properly, Tomino didn't talk to him about the content of the episode at all. Or, you know, maybe he's exaggerating for effect. But, like, mostly they just talked about the theory of directing so it kind of sounds like Tomino is maybe disinterested in this series, not paying as much attention to what's going on as he.
Ought to be from Zeta Gundam onwards, he's had a certain level of ambivalence about Gundam that he didn't want to get stuck doing the same stories over and over and over again. But that's what people wanted him for, and he has a family to support, and he wants to keep working. And so here we are.
There was all that marketing material when Shars counterattack was coming out that was like, is this the last Gundam? The final Gundam, ultimate Gundam battle, the end of the saga? Obviously it wasn't, but that was. I mean, that was the pitch. Shars counterattack was the end of an era of Gundam and potentially the end of Gundam period.
And although I think there's some very interesting stuff going on in victory Gundam and some the thought and feeling went into this story, I'm not exactly surprised to hear that. Maybe Tomino was kind of checked out. Maybe he was kind of bored of this. He wanted to think about the art of directing. He wanted to think about the big ideas, the concepts, the theory. And he's stuck making this show that we know from the perspective of the studio was about the health of a franchise in their portfolio. Like, ultimately, this is about money, and.
It'S always about money.
It's always about money. But as Gundam becomes Gundam, the franchise, it becomes even more about money when new iterations come out because there's a certain amount of sunk cost. There is this sort of long term asset that you are attempting to cultivate, and you want to maintain it. You don't want to lose it. You don't want it to lose value. The old saw holds true that it's much cheaper to hang on to an existing customer than to gain a new one.
And I don't know if this was true back then, but nowadays Bandai sells so many zaku twos, like as gunpla kits, so many variations on the original Zaku and the original Gundam. Right? But how do you get people to buy those? Because first Gundam aired in 1979. Those movies came out in the early eighties. Why is it that those machines are still some of their best sellers? And it's because the franchise refreshes its pool of fans with a new entry, but then it funnels them back into existing entries, and eventually you find yourself watching first Gundam and going insane for char and buying all the original kits.
Just feral.
That little goblin man. His power over people is immense.
And I think you'd be hard pressed to find a commercially successful artist who doesn't have deeply conflicted feelings about that success. I'm sure they're out there. I'm sure some of them are happy to get that bag and, like, really have no mixed feelings about it whatsoever.
John Carpenter.
But most artists who reach this sort of level of success that Tomino has have deeply conflicted feelings about that. And that's bound to affect their work in ways not necessarily predictable ways, not necessarily how we might think it would, but it's going to have an effect on them and the work.
And at least since f 91, Tomino has been saying at the beginning of every project, this is going to be new. We're going to take it in a new direction. We're going to leave the legacy of Gundam behind. We're going to tell new stories, new characters, new setting. But as we watch these things, we can't help but notice how similar they are to everything he's made before. The comparisons to other works are abundant. You know, we're over here arguing about whether Chronicle is more of a char or a Garma, and he's a Garma, but I don't think Tomino wants that. I don't think he set out to make this show and said, oh, I'm gonna stuff this so full of Gundam references that you won't be able to appreciate it unless you've watched all of Zeta and double Zeta and all the movies and all the ovas. I think he did want to make something new. And then probably because of a combination of his own preferences and limitations and artistic hang ups and of course, the pressures from the studio and from the fans and from the anime magazines and from the sponsors, all of it conspired to force him back into the box he was desperately trying to get out of. And that's depressing.
One of the elements of that that I find the most fascinating, which is not really within anybody's control, it's just a thing that happens organically. Anytime I think you get an established series or franchise long enough, you will find references to whatever your frame of reference is in the thing.
Getting some real boss baby vibes from this movie.
Exactly. But, you know, in quote unquote, classical european or, you know, american anglo education, if you read the classics, if you read the Bible, if you read the sort of foundational texts, you're going to find references to all those things in other media that you're exposed to. And sometimes those references are intentional, sometimes they're subconscious, and sometimes you're reaching. I was raised Catholic. I went and studied abroad in Japan. They took us to some Shinto ceremonies. I immediately see and feel parallels between some of these Shinto ceremonies and catholic mass. None of that is intended. Nobody did that on purpose, right? Or even subconscious. These are entirely different religions that had very little exposure to each other for most of their histories. Jung would probably say this is just deeply foundational human symbolism that supersedes culture. But at the same time, we're going to see what we're looking for and what's familiar to us. And so if you've watched all of the Gundam that preceded victory, you are going to look for and see, see the Gundam tropes in victory. No matter how hard Tomino tries to make it different. I don't know much about series to come. I know that reconquista. Reconquista?
Yes, with a G recognista.
I know that recong.
It's got a G cz Gundam.
I know that Reconquista is the current Tomino project, the one he's the most involved in right now.
As of this recording, he has finished making the movies and is basically done with it.
Okay.
But yeah, for most of the time that we've been making this podcast, that has been what he has been actively doing.
And my assumption would be, you know, late career, kind of a vanity project thing, really going all out, trying to squeeze as much freedom from his position of seniority and fame as he can. And yet I would put money that we will still watch it and go, hey, that's the char.
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to say too much about those future entries.
You can't really say anything.
I can say it's good. I can say I'm Jireko's number one defender.
I'm excited to watch it. My point is more that no matter how hard Tomino tries to do something totally different, even I think if at this point in his career he did something that wasn't a Gundam project, people would still watch it and see parallels to Gundam because that is our frame of reference for him. That's the lens through which our brains view his work.
And there have been some things we've talked about, I think, in this season where we've said, hey, that's a Gundam thing. And people have quite kindly come out and been like, actually, that's an idiom thing. So, you know, the, the greater Tomino robot multiverse incorporates much more than Gundam, but Gundam is the flag bearer. It's the, the one out in front. You know, he's very competitive. Or at least he seems to be. The way he talks about other anime creators. He's always announcing that he's going to crush whoever is the current, like, hotness. He's gonna crush Miyazaki. He's gonna crush Shinkai. And I kind of wonder if he kept going with Gundam after Shar's counterattack because he was trying to compete with the young guns who were working on stuff like 0080 or 0083. That, like, that's not Gundam. This is Gundam. I'll show them real Gundam.
It was the double edged sword of I don't really want to do Gundam anymore. But I also don't want to let someone else mess with my legacy, mess with the thing that people most associate with me.
How interesting, then, that in victory, there is all this discussion of the gundams legacy. Fake gundams. Gundam Modochi. Real Gundams. What makes a Gundam is a gundam a symbol of resistance or a symbol of tyranny? A gundam is a device like a guillotine. It performs a function, and its symbolic meaning is derived not from what its capable of doing or even really what it has done at some point in the past, but, like, what is it being used to do? The guillotine of the revolution might have represented revolutionary fervor. The guillotine of like. Because here's the thing. The guillotine didn't go out of fashion when the revolution ended. They didn't stop using the guillotine when Napoleon took over, or when Napoleon fell, or when Napoleon III took over. Like, the french empire used the guillotine in the colonies as a tool of colonial oppression. A lot of colonial freedom fighters were executed by guillotine. The gundam starts out as a federation weapon. It becomes a symbol of omaro and these kids fighting for their safety. The gundam mark two is a titan's weapon. It is a guillotine for smashing the colonial resistance fighters. And then it gets stolen by Camille and it becomes a symbol of resistance. Resistance against the titans, resistance against axis. All of these things are extremely mutable. And yet, no matter how much they change, we always look back on them and we see the gundam and we see its history and whatever it represents to us. There is no right or wrong way to make a Gundam, I guess, except.
Without a vfin, it looks naked.
I like it with the rabbit ears or elf ears that it's got going on.
I mean, I like the ears, but with no wifin. Something feels off about it.
I kept wondering if there was some sort of connection between Oliver as like Playboy and horns as a symbol of cuckoldry. And if removing that, I don't think it's there. But I was like speaking about mutable symbols and trying to interpret them based on our own limited, inherently limited frames of reference. If you can tell, we've talked a lot about things that aren't in this episode because not a lot like happens in this episode.
But returning to your idea of the importance of symbols of victory Gundam's preoccupation, I would say, with the use of symbolism and history and imagery to further a cause, is Uso finally getting to not meet but see Jin Jahanam?
He gets about as close to him as he wants to.
We see him as a whiny, entitled, demanding, selfish, and frankly ugly man. They made the character design choice to make him of sort of a middling age, so not old enough for gravitas and wisdom, not young enough to be rugged and handsome or a bichonn. A thin little mustache, jowls, short, heavy set.
But the thing is, he's not like impressively unattractive.
No scars, no nothing that would speak to us of a kind of soldierly unattractiveness.
It's just that everything about him, because I would not even go so far as to say that they made him ugly. I think he's just extremely unimpressive in every respect. He is a extremely normal looking and sounding and behaving person, as Marbet puts it, not what Uso was expecting.
As I was thinking about this scene again, my brain latched onto the way the nurse behaves when she comes into the room. She bows. She calls him Excellency. There is a parallel being drawn between Jin Jahanam and Maria Puramonia. Is he a figurehead? Does he perhaps have other important and valuable qualities that are not being well demonstrated under these circumstances? As Uso thinks to himself, this man did convince the federation to give us a ship. Or did he? Did one of his lieutenants do that? Did someone else do that? And Jin Jahanam gets the credit, but especially given that most of the league militaire has never met Jinja Hannam and never will. He just gets to be this mysterious figure in the background, leading them all in their important cause. And Marbit teases Uso a little bit and he gets upset. But she makes another comment that I thought was very insightful and in a way she is responding to something Uso hasn't voiced, but that he is probably feeling, which is a lot of people he cares about and respects are following this man, this kind of detestable seeming man. His parents abandoned him to follow this man. And Marbet, after she assures him that she's confident his parents are still alive, she makes a comment about that. She's sure they are doing important things, that regardless of his disillusionment with the leader of the league militaire, that does not invalidate what his parents are doing. And it doesn't mean that they abandoned him for nothing. It doesn't mean that they left him behind to follow a kind of, like, contemptible person.
You drew a parallel between Jin Jahanam and Maria Pura because potentially they're both figureheads. But the contrast between them is even more interesting. Maria is a deeply charismatic figure. She is an object of idolatry for the people of Zanskar. They love her. Her presentations inspire the masses in their millions.
As a very famous queen once said, monarchy has to be seen to be believed.
Did she actually say that, or does she say that in the crown?
I believe that's really attributed to her. Now I have to check. Well, I don't know how reliable the Internet is.
It's true. Google might tell you anything, but often.
The function of monarchies is, is the pomp, is the public appearance is to witness and to be seen and to be seen witnessing.
But here, Zanskars frankly loathsome mission of conquest and extermination of the other colonies of the people on earth is all laundered through this very charismatic leader. Whereas the league military's extremely laudable mission of resistance against all of that is represented, I guess, by this extremely uninspiring leader.
It's possible that with the sort of various cells, various disparate groups of league militaire all spread over a pretty vast area, pursuing whatever their local specific goals are. What's important is the idea of Jin Jahanam, idea that, ah, there is someone central organizing everything and who has a plan and who's coordinating it all. That may, in fact, actually be, you know, a group of a dozen that may be someone else. There might be half a dozen different Jin jahanams.
And when your mission is righteous on the ground, you don't need a charismatic leader because you know youre doing the right thing, and the people around you know it, too.
Marbit is not fighting for Jin Jahanam. Marbit is fighting for the league militarys goals. And thats true of most of the people involved.
But those Danskar soldiers would do anything. Maria asked them to do anything.
Quick Sidebar that this makes the second time that a beautiful adult woman has held Uso to her bosom while talking about family. Uso looking deeply uncomfortable.
Uso, who earlier in the episode was confronted by one of the. I think by Odello saying, hey, you have a crush on Marbet and she's already got a somebody. Don't lecture me, okay?
I really want to talk about all of the boys crushes and their conversations about that and their interactions around it.
I mean, we've gotta. Because that's the core. That's the only complete story that happens in this episode, and it's a pretty thin one.
I read a lot of nice emotional stuff into this, but love some caring male friendships.
I just mean that it takes up a really small portion of the episode.
Oh, yes.
Despite being the single completed narrative within the episode, the episode is like, there are now so many different storylines going on that most of the runtime of the episode that isn't active battle is just like giving breadcrumbs to each storyline. But before we move on, I do have one more thing I have to say about Jinjahana, which is we received a very kind correction from a listener on Instagram who, I should note, does some very cool gunpla. And you can find that gunpla at Hasaki art if you want to check it out. But they pointed out USo is wrong when he says that jinn are demons who live in hell. In fact, that's not true in Islam. Jinn are beings who live on earth. They're human, like, they have families. They're neither inherently evil nor inherently good. The only difference is that they are made of fire and have various, like, magical powers that humans don't have access to.
Got it.
Cool.
But yes. So, romance, keen love, who will go to the space prom?
One of the things I keep harping on throughout victory is the idea of self delusion of people lying to themselves. And with many of these crushes, what's different about that is that the young men involved, they know they are lying to themselves. It's a self conscious kind of thing. Uso doesn't actually think he has a shot with Marbus.
No.
Odello knows that this teenage girl on Highland already has a boyfriend, or it's implied that she already has a boyfriend. But it can feel kind of nice to have a crush, and it can be annoying to be confronted about it. And then Warren, even though he has this huge crush on Martina, is sort of annoyed by Odello's crush on Martina's older sister. There is perhaps a little bit of competing for Odello's attention that. Wait, he's my friend. Brother. Ugh. And he's obsessed with this girl.
Right?
But when Odello and Uso get in each other's faces and are about to, like, brawl again, they have become, for each other a safe place to vent frustrations. When they don't have anyone else that they can act out to or with. They can fight each other, and they know it's okay. They know they'll pick each other up afterwards and brush each other off, and it'll be fine. They can vent these intense new feelings, and they can be rude, and they can be physically violent with each other, but they know that they're not gonna take it too far. And they know it's okay. It's safe. It's a safe space.
In a show about battle and war and fighting to the death, it's so good for them to have an opportunity, a space in which they can just scuffle to fight with, like, no consequences whatsoever. At the end of it, they will be just as much friends as they were at the beginning, maybe more so.
And then Warren is sort of the outlier. Warren has a crush on someone who is actually theoretically available. And the found family element really comes to the fore here because they don't have older brothers, they don't have fathers. They have only each other to go to for advice, to go to for help. And it's hilarious, but also, I think, so touching that they are about to go into battle and Warren is like, whatever. How do I talk to a girl?
Uso, somehow you are the best person to ask about this, even though you are the worst person to ask about this.
Because to quote a favorite song from that time in my life, there's more to living than to only surviving. It's one thing to fight your way through the war, but what is it all for if not living a life and falling in love and being heartbroken?
There's been a recurring theme throughout victory so far. All of these love affairs that's giving them way too much credit. All of these crushes, I guess, have been pretty one sided. And it's always been the boys coming on a little too strong with the girls. Like, up until now, it's mostly just been uso'd towards Katajina, right? The adult relationships Katagina Chronicle. Marbet and Oliver have their own dynamics, but for the kids, it's always been the boys looking at the girls. And then sort of, I said it earlier, but coming on too strong, it consistently places the boys in the position of subject and the girls in the position of object. While we have a strong sense of Shakti, like, having a lot of thoughts about USO and a lot of feelings about USO and worrying about him, there's not a crush. We're told that there's something between Elisha and Tomash, but we don't see her yearning for him.
We don't see them hold hands or even exchange a glance that would indicate something between them.
And I think it's telling that both Warren and Odello approach Martina and Alicia in largely the same way that USO approached Katagina. I guess what I'm sort of circling around is there are a lot of women in this show, there are a lot of girls in this show, but it's still being told from the perspective of the boys.
Agreed.
I do think Tomino has a fondness for this kind of like, cold, dispassionate woman type, and that setting the romances and crushes up this way basically makes all of the women into that. All these boys are overwhelmed by their feelings and behaving in this very warm, excited manner. And all of these girls and women are reacting in this very business like, no nonsense, practical, kind of unfeeling way. Obviously, that is not the way every woman and girl behaves towards a man or boy who has a crush on her, but I don't know. Tomo likes injecting the pathos of young men being rejected.
He does seem to yearn for the stern one type, or likes that sort.
Of melancholy feeling of early unrequited loves and wants to invoke that over and over and over again.
Not exclusively, though, like in Zeta, the sense of relationship politics between, say, Camille and four and fa, those have a distinctly more adult. No, not adult, but like older teenager kind of feeling the relationships in double zeta to the extent their relationships at all progress in a kind of very, like, natural background, low drama kind of way. The romance between Bcha and El basically just simmers in the background until the last two episodes.
That's an age thing, though. USO is so much younger and.
And so is the audience.
Right.
And I think that's what it's about.
If you're eleven and it's your first crush, like, what do you even do if she accepts your gift? Like, turn bright red and run away? Like.
Right. I mean, that's the thing. This is made for an audience of kids who are, like, only just discovering that maybe girls are interesting.
They might be beginning to have those feelings, but what to do with those feelings? How to handle them? How to handle those kinds of relationships is totally socially beyond them. The teens just hang out together. They go on dates. They flirt, they tease each other. They have regular conversations. You know, the advice Warren should have gotten was find out what she likes.
Talk to her, and like. But they cool it a little bit, kid. Just chill out.
Ugh.
But he can't. And the thing about women reacting with coldness. I wanted to bring up Shakti again. I don't think it's that Shakti doesn't have a crush on USO, because I think she demonstrates some jealousy about the katagina thing, but that she is made out to be so almost unfeelingly practical about everything but the fact that she had to leave home.
You were talking in one of your research pieces about how women who get married are expected to graduate from womanhood. Shakti was born pre graduated. Like, Shakti behaves like a married housewife already. She takes care of the kid. She makes the food. Like, if this were set in modern day Japan and they were kids in school, Shakti would be making Uso's bento every morning.
And that cold practicality, which is largely focused on survival, may not, in her case, leave a lot of room for girlish crushes.
You know who Warren should have asked for advice about this?
Oliver.
That womanizer. Well, kid, the first thing to do is form your own military unit, then recruit her into it. No.
Um, here is a list of compliments that are very useful.
I mean, actually, Warren should have asked basically anybody else, but the shrikes could give him some really interesting advice about how to talk to girls.
I feel like the shrikes are just as likely to tease him mercilessly and be entirely unhelpful, though.
Yes, yes. And their advice would be things like give her diamond necklaces. And each one. Each shrike would have a different thing she would say he should give them, and it would reveal a lot about their personality. He could have asked the old man, polycule. They know how to find love.
Do we know?
Oh, well, they might not know how to talk to girls, though.
I realized we got very sidetracked talking about romance. I had one more point that I wanted to make about the relationship between the boys after the emotional intensity of all of this. USO and Odello laughing together. And I know there is an in universe explanation for why people have to touch their normal suit helmets together to be able to talk, but it feels very intimate. It feels like a warm, caring gesture to touch foreheads, basically, and say goodbye. And that these young men have become a source of mutual support that their friendship is helping them get through this really difficult time, both developmentally for their age and because they're living through a war.
It is really sweet. And yes, there is a in universe technological reason, skin to skin contact circuits, Minofsky particles, etcetera. But like, it doesn't have to be helmet to helmet. They do that because it creates that intimate feeling that you're looking for.
And a quick sidebar question about all the kids at the Highland solar battery. They said they were taken hostage to make their parents comply with something Janskar wanted Vespa wanted. But then throughout this episode, I don't think we see one of the highland parents until the very end in the garden.
I think they were in the prior episode, though. I think they were watching the tv broadcasts.
I was deeply confused at first. I thought the older siblings were supposed to be parents. Part of it is also, in my opinion, the character designs on the older siblings are not different enough from the younger siblings to adequately differentiate them. And it's very visually confusing who is being talked to and who is being depicted in any given scene, especially because.
There'S been no proper introduction for the new characters. They're just there and people are talking about them and to them. I would not have said that this series was suffering from a lack of characters and needed to introduce a whole bunch of new ones. There are quite a few characters who have just been kind of forgotten by the wayside, and it's like, what are they doing? Are they even alive? I don't know. Gary Tun, Quan Lee. Are they still alive? Who cares? Forget about them. We're moving on. We've got Godwald Hein now. And actually, if he hadn't shown up in this episode, I would have suspected that he had also just been discarded. But no, he's there along with all the other breadcrumbs. Look, there's Godwald. He's still around. We're still pursuing that storyline. He'll come up later. Pay attention to him, kids.
During the fight, there's a point where, because of the way they cut the shots together, it looks as though Junko has been killed. But then we see her in her cockpit immediately afterwards, because we see her in her cockpit. Then we see a gun, easy, get blown up. And it's like, oh, was that junko? What? What?
It's even more than that. We see her in her cockpit, struggling to fight against these wires that the zolofts are firing out, talking about how difficult it is. Then they do a cut to a gun. Easy getting destroyed by the wires and it's like, ah, that was junko. She was overcome by the wires.
Or it's that. I think it's that it has, it's cutting its way out of the wires, but while it's doing that, it gets shot.
Yeah, it gets tangled in the wires.
It gets destroyed in that process. That kind of cutting is obviously going to make us think it's junco. But was that meant to be a fake out or is that just badly cut?
If it was meant to be a fake out, it was a waste because they don't do anything with it, right?
Immediately afterwards, they show us junko. We don't even spend that long thinking that she's died, right? And it's clear from her reaction that it's not one of the other shrikes either. It's some other random person in a ganeasy.
So I was thinking about this. I'm pretty sure during the course of this episode we see two ganeasis get destroyed. And I'm wondering, were those the remaining survivors of the Bagley team, not counting.
Yooka, her umbrella guys?
Yeah, I think the umbrella guys might have gotten taken out.
Woof.
Rip. Umbrella guys.
Another moment that felt like it was supposed to maybe have some emotional poignancy but fell flat was the Bespa pilot who is shouting at Marbet because she's in a repainted Zoluot. I'm a friendly. I'm a friendly. Which ought to feel horrifying, I think. But it happens so quickly and without the same emphasis that Gundam has in the past shown for the fear that a pilot experiences as their suit is blowing up or lit on fire or whatever, it's without the same kind of close ups, the same lingering shots. It's very brief and then we move on.
It had, I thought, roughly the emotional impact of when you're playing a multiplayer shooter and friendly fire is turned on and somebody on your team starts shooting you in the back and you're like, hey, I'm on your team. And then they kill you. Didn't really feel like the real terror of a real person being killed for real, did you like the Zolobat's little like, shoulder Pauldron launching thing with a little robot arm? Naturally you were asking a while back what constitutes a gimmick in Gundam. When we talk about gimmicks in toys, Gunpla or mobile suit design, this is the kind of thing like the Pauldron launcher. That's definitely a gimmick. And when Ishikaki Junya talks about incorporating SD Gundam like gimmicks into the mobile suit designs for victory. I think this is the kind of thing he's talking about.
Some other tidbits from the episode. We get a hint that Suzy maybe also a new type because she can just tell which of the several V gundams is USO's. There was some really lovely, soft, kind of uplifting sounding music between the battle. And when USO actually sees Jin Jahanam while he's sort of boarding the ship and asking people for directions, and, oh, he's finally gonna find his parents, and it really makes the disappointment hit home that much harder to have this pretty music in the background. And then, as so often happens, it's only the barest couple of lines, but some really intriguing information dropped about the politics and the state of the war. The kids aboard the Highland solar battery mentioned to USO that the federation has told them not to send electricity to Earth and has not sent them a support vehicle. Unclear whether that's supposed to bring supplies or a relief team or what. But there's been no in person contact. There's been no ship in a year. And his speculation is that the reason they have told them to stop sending electricity down to earth and they send electricity for Asia, is implied for all of Asia. So all of Asia has not had this electricity for a year. Good God. Can you imagine? But anyway, we're gonna just like the show glossing that. What's implied is that the quote unquote Earth Federation has given the earth up as a lost cause, at least in the short term, that they expect Zanskar to. To take the earth. Whether they think then that Zanskar won't be able to hold it and that it will be easy to take back or whether they've just washed their hands of earth entirely is unclear. There are certainly plenty of historical precedents of armies that give up territory thinking like, ha ha, good luck trying to hang onto that. But by the same token, we talked about the moon as a power base for the federation before. If it really is the base of power for the federation, maybe they don't care about Earth anymore. Maybe the earth in their name is like our appendix.
Yeah, it's a scorched earth retreat strategy. Just like the Russians retreating as Napoleon advanced or the Russians retreating as Hitler advanced, or the Russians retreating as the Kaiser advanced. Give up land to buy time, but.
Try to leave them nothing.
Exactly. Burn Moscow on your way out. Leave them no resources so that they starve themselves. There's an old saying like the war feeds itself for this idea that an army on campaign in enemy territory can take what it needs to survive. And that's how you keep an army in the field operating. But if there's nothing to take, it becomes much harder to keep that army operating. And we have seen indications that Bespa may in fact be suffering on earth. Dukerique certainly implied that there's been a lot of ambiguity in this series so far about what the earth Federation is and to what degree are they engaged with BesPA? We know the earth Federation still exists, that it's some sort of overarching international organization, but Bespa seems to mostly be fighting other colonies. Those other colonies are probably also part of the Earth Federation. But then again, maybe so is Zanskar. Maybe they haven't actually revolted and declared independence. They're just under the umbrella of the Earth Federation, gobbling up other colonies, other small states. Like if the Earth Federation is the UN, as we well know, in our current day and age, you can be part of the UN and invade another part of the UN without leaving the UN or actually going into revolt against it.
And at the same time, the federation is providing some support to the league militaire.
But I suspect that the kind of.
Support they are providing is for them, low cost and low risk. These are soldiers who they were going to pay anyway. And what else were they doing? Is there another war going on for them to fight in? These are old ships that they had laying around.
I'm pretty sure the Gwanland gaonland, I'm pretty sure the Gawain land is an Alexandria class, which means it's zeta era, so even older than the lean horse.
This is a very low effort way for them to support the league militaire handling this issue, hopefully.
Hey, that's what they did with the Ayug and the Londo bell. What if we give a little bit of support to this small group of deeply invested people and let them solve the problem for us?
The federation never met an issue they couldn't pass the buck on.
There is a translation in this episode that is driving me crazy.
Oh, dear. Oh, no, not again.
I don't strictly know that it's wrong is part of the problem and that's really what's driving me crazy. During a conversation early on in the episode on Highland, I think Tomash tells USO about this other ship that they took out for a test drive. He calls it the Aeneas. They do a pan across it and it's like a little shuttle that they've cobbled together. He describes it as like a desperate attempt to save their lives.
A way to be able to leave Highland when no transport is being sent for them.
Right. It doesn't like there's. They're somewhat self sufficient here, but it does seem like they will eventually run out of supplies and so they do need to, like escape and go somewhere else. They don't have a ship and so they've like, built one, which is pretty cool. That's a really cool thing to mention. In the course of two lines in.
One pan, they're also pretty clearly vulnerable there without any way to defend themselves. If the Federation doesn't want them sending electricity to Earth and they don't want to be ZaNSkar pawns, they're probably better off leaving.
Yeah. Hopefully we'll see more of this ship in the future. But in the translation, they've spelled the name of the ship Aeneus. The normal way to spell Aeneas, the name of the famous mythological figure in EnglIsh is a e n e a s, not us. The JaPaneSE is the standard japanese way of saying Aeneas, the mythological figure. The thing is, there is a different mythological figure whose name is spelled the way it's spelled in this episode.
Huh.
And that other Aeneas with the u is the mythic founder of a city in Turkey.
Really?
So are they doing that on purpose? Are they doing a bunch of different references to cities in Turkey? Or is it called aeneas because it's their desperate journey to find a new home? Which was Aeneas whole thing in the Aeneid? It could be either one. There is external evidence to support either one. Is it a mistake? Is it a mistranslation? Is it intentional? Is it just a more obscure reference than we're expecting? I don't know. And it's driving me crazy.
Oh, now you're just making me want to talk about that theory that we're noodling with. Shall I say? Shall I reveal? We're still working on it. It's not fully developed.
I don't think they're ready for it.
All right. It's not fully cooked yet. Its underbaked.
Look forward to it.
Listeners needs more time.
And now ninas research piece on the theoretical capacity of the Highland solar battery.
Early in this episode, USo is talking to Tomasz about the highland solar battery, specifically its massive scale. He guesses that the solar battery itself, I assume he means the solar panel array, is about 300 km². But hes way off. Thomas says it is approximately 120 km long and 15 km wide, making it 1800 square kilometers, or six times the area that Uso guessed. So I started wondering, how much energy would a solar array that size collection? How exactly would they send it to Earth, and how much energy would be lost in the transfer? Could an array that large deliver enough energy to satisfy the energy demand for all of Asia? It turns out that the idea of a space based solar power station is quite an old one. Some articles on the topic credit russian rocket scientist and pioneer of modern astronautics Konstantin Tsiolkovsky as the originator. In 1923, he theorized that an array of mirrors in space could be used to send a concentrated beam of sunlight to earths surface with the collected heat of the beam used for energy. Specifically, that the heat gathered using a ten square meter absorbing area might boil ten big cups of coffee inside two minutes, provided the skies were clear. Other sources point to Isaac Asimov, whose 1941 short story reason features a space station that collects energy from the sun and then transmits it to human settlements across the solar system using microwaves. But it seems that Peter Glaser was the one who took this idea out of the realm of science fiction or thought exercise when his article Power from the sun its future was published in Science in 1968. In the article, he outlined the engineering concepts for a satellite solar power system, to wit, massive satellites equipped with solar panel arrays capable of harvesting sunlight in space, converting the sunlight into energy, and then beaming that energy wirelessly to Earth. In 1973, he received a patent for his proposed method of transmitting power using a very large antenna on the satellite, as big as 1 beam microwaves to an even larger rectenna or receiver on earths surface. The rectenna would be about 8 km wide. The benefits of a space based solar power system over a terrestrial one are significant. For one thing, it could be positioned so that it would receive solar energy more or less constantly. No nighttime, no hours of darkness, and no interference from the weather. For another, Earth's atmosphere absorbs a lot of solar energy before that energy can get to the surface, space based solar panels would get the pure quill, a phrase I wrote, then realized I almost never hear anyone say, then realized a.
Lot of people wouldn't have any idea.
What I'm talking about.
I don't know where I picked this.
Up exactly, but I just mean the pure thing, the whole of the sun's energy without interference from the atmosphere. The biggest downside is size. Per the European Space Agency, the biggest challenge is that in order to generate optimal, economically viable levels of solar power, the required structures need to be very large, both on Earth and in space. A single solar power satellite at geostationary orbit might extend more than a kilometer across, with the receiver station on the ground needing a footprint more than ten times larger. Now Thomas tells us the size of Highlands solar array, but not of the antenna. Lucky for all of you, we are just the sort of obsessives to pore over screenshots and try to convert pixels to kilometers. And lucky for me, Tom did that while I was writing a different section.
Of this research piece.
Only two antennae are visible in the shots of highlands exterior, though it seems likely there are quite a few more positioned throughout the structure. Based on their relationship to the size of the array, the antenna have a diameter between 0.26 and 0.33 km. That gives them an area of approximately one 20th to one 12th of a square kilometer. The quote from the European Space Agency seems to be comparing the size of the space based solar power station as a whole to the size of the receiver station as a whole. So instead, I looked at Glaser's patent, which involved an antenna with an area of one quarter of a square kilometer and a receiver area of approximately 93.32 km². If that ratio holds, that means that each and every one of Hyland's antennae would need a receiver of at least 18.66 km² for scale thats larger than many international airports, including Lax, Auckland, London, Heathrow, and its around three times the area of Gibraltar for each antenna. Moreover, the larger the satellite, the more expensive and complicated it is to fabricate all the parts, launch them into orbit and assemble them into a complete working solar power station. And once completed, repairs would be impossible. This is why satellites nowadays are decommissioned when they stop working, either flown towards the atmosphere to burn up or propelled to a region more than 23,600 miles, or 68,000 km away. Known as the graveyard orbit, where the satellites remains wont pose a threat to other spacecraft. However, many of these issues disappear in a society like that of the universal century. Fabrication and construction would all happen in space. Eliminating most of the transportation costs. And the frequency and ease of space travel would mean that solar arrays like highland could be easily serviced and repaired. As much as the whole idea still sounds like science fiction, there have been a number of new technological developments, equipment tests, and papers written on the concept. Recent proposals include using lasers or magnetic fields for transmission in lieu of microwaves, and using swarms of small panels or arrays instead of large installations. There are projects in various states of progress around the world by governments, research institutions, and private companies. For example, just last year the microwave array for power transfer, low orbit experiment or maple, a project at Caltech ran a test that marked the first time that power was transmitted and received in space, directed towards Earth, and then detected. And most usefully for me, earlier this year, NASA produced a report evaluating the potential benefits, challenges, and options for NASA to engage with growing global interest in space based solar power, including analysis of what conditions would make space space based solar power a competitive option to achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions compared to alternative terrestrial power sources like wind, hydropower, geothermal, nuclear fusion, etcetera. I thought that to calculate the energy delivered to Asia by the Highland solar battery, I was going to have to do all sorts of complicated calculations based on solar panel output per square meter, adjusted for conditions in space and for energy loss and transmission. But this NASA paper gave me a shortcut. For ease of comparison, they configured examples of the two main space based solar power proposals so that each example would deliver two gigawatts of power comparable to a large terrestrial solar power facility. To deliver those two gigawatts, proposal one, which is a swarm type, would need a solar panel area of 11.5. Proposal two, a planar array type, would need a solar panel area of 19 km². Highland seems most like the planar array type, so I used proposal two's solar panel area and peak output to determine that highland solar battery would have a peak output of 189.47 gigawatts at perfect efficiency, which would mean ideal conditions, perfect functioning of all the equipment, and constant operation with no shutdowns for maintenance or repair. An impossibility, of course, but it makes the math simpler that peak output translates to 1660 terawatt hours delivered per year. The NASA report describes 1 gw as the average output of a power station for an industrial city with a population of a million people. By this measure, Highland is comparable to more than 189 such power stations. It sounds immense, and it is. But nowadays there are more than 300 asian cities with populations of a million or more, and most of those have populations much greater than 1 million people. Tom had the idea to reverse engineer this if we assume that Highland provides for the whole regions energy demands, what does that tell us about the population of Asia in the universal century? I found data on electricity consumption in the region over time and decided to use the data from 1990, since that's closest to the release of the show. With total consumption of 25,606 TWh and a population of about 3,174,000,000 people, the per person per year consumption was around 8067 kilowatt hours at that rate of consumption. Highlands solar battery could provide electricity for around 206 million people, just 6.5% of Asia's 1990 population. Obviously, there are a lot of factors we can't account for. Improved energy efficiency of electrical equipment and appliances, changes in energy consumption per person, greater efficiency in both the panels themselves and in the energy transmission. The possibility that more than one solar battery delivers power to the region. But it was fun to extrapolate what that single line, about the size of the Highland solar battery, might tell us about life and technology in the universal century. Next time on episode 10.19 Blood Destiny, we research and discuss episode 19 of Victory Gundam and CSI Lean Horse.
If at first you don't succeed, die, die again.
Follow the trail of Willow Herb my favorite dummies.
Scandal.
Classic misdirection. This whole thing smacks of gender. Soap bubble reverie, crossed wires, fishbone Tassilo Wago's char impression don't you worry your little new type. Head over it. And adults who understand it's not as.
Far fetched as you think. Please listen to it.
Mobile suit Breakdown is written, recorded, and produced by us, Tom and Nina in Scenic New York City, within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is wasp by Misha Dioxin. The closing music is long way home by spinning ratio. The recap music is slow by Lloyd Rogers. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the lenape people, and more in the show notes on our website, gundampodcast.com. if youd like to get in touch with us, you can email hostessundompodcast.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@gundampodcast.com. support thank you for listening. The Gundam fandom has been corrupted by wrong opinions. The only way to purify ourselves is by exposing them to the light of day. Wrong opinions like Warren messed up with the flowers because he got distracted by how beautiful they were and he forgot that they were also important and useful. Next time he should give her something symbolic but useless, something that no one will miss if it disappears. Like jinjahanam.
Mm, no, no, kitten. Ouch.
Ow. Ow. I'm kind of acting it up cause.
I want her to.
I know. I figured.
I didn't like that.
The harder she tries to climb up, the more she discovers that she cannot.
Dig her claws into my leg for purchase. Like she can with, say, the couch.
She just wanted one pet, and then she walked away. All right, then.
I appreciated your clean version of the description of char, little man.
Can't say that on the podcast.
I know, but it's fun to say.
I know. You know, the romance between summertime and motorcycles. The romance between summertime and motorcycles. Yep, that was Dukerrik going by. We're not tidy enough to deal with that kind of cat behavior. A kitten in this apartment would be a nightmare.
God. Trying to eat the plants. Trying to eat bits of thread on the fl, like. Yeah.
Yep. Eat everything, climb everywhere, knock each and everything off of every other thing. The cat that somehow got off onto, like, you know, the lip around the cabinet.
Yeah.
No, I was thinking in the living room, where the recessed lighting is.
Yeah.
I can totally imagine a cat somehow managing to get up there. I see her at your feet. I see that tail flag.
Yep. I'm just picturing a kitten somehow getting stuck. Like, on top of one of the. Not the very top of bookshelf, but one of the middle bookshelves, and then on top of the books, like, between the books and the shelf above it, and just getting stuck and wailing until we come rescue it.