U'listening, to season ten of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci-Fi mega franchise Mobile Suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is episode 10.2 the Prince and the Popper, and we are your hosts. I'm Tom, and I've never actually read the prince and the Popper, but I did watch the wishbone adaptation.
And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam, and my ideas for research are already outpacing my ability to do research. Mobile Suit Breakdown is made possible by 743 paying subscribers. A quick shout out to our newest patrons CNE Finnebelli, NC Chris 1701 D and Scott L. Thank you for keeping MSB Genki.
This week. Ma shin to Atahi the day he met the machine. Originally intended to be the first episode of the series, but reworked and broadcast as a flashback set three days before last week's Shiroi Mobiru Sutsu. The creative team for this episode features many of Victory's heavy hitters. The script was written by mecha anime veteran Sonoda Hideki, previously series composer for Machine Robo and Zetai Muteki Raijin O. Though he is not formerly credited as Victory's chief writer, Tomino does characterize him that way in some interviews in his post victory career. Sonoda is probably best known for his script writing on the Pokemon franchise, especially its movies. Tomino himself drew the storyboards under his Yokitani Minoru pseudonym, and Egami Kiyoshi directed the episode. Egami previously directed episodes for Blue Comet Spt. Laisner City Hunter, three episodes of Gundam Double Zeta and adventure girl Artesia dawn of Papal, episode 103, bride of Suganam. He had also served as chief director on the 1991 armored police metal Jack. The animation director was Nishimura Nobayoshi, who had previously served in that role on St. Gundam's counterattack f 91 and 83, as well as shows like Pat labor, the Mobile Police. Nishimura was part of the outside company studio Dove, and the animation for this episode was handled by his team at Studio Dove. And now Nina's recap.
Walking in the woods, Shakti thinks back to the day that seemed to change everything. The valley where she and Uso lived was flanked by steep cliffs crisscrossed with streams, the patchwork of woods and meadows dotted with lakes. From outside her family's cabin, she watches Uso parachute down from the cliffs, when out of nowhere, a core fighter flies by, followed by a Zolo. The dog fighting planes come so close to Uso that his parachute partially collapses, and it's all he can do to keep himself in the air. The Zolo is joined by a Bespa mobile suit, a bright yellow, insect eyed shackle commanded by Lieutenant Chronicle Asher, younger brother of the queen of the Zanskar Empire. They attempt to corner and capture the corps fighter and its pilot, Marbeth, but she manages to shake them, flying through the narrow gaps between abandoned buildings of a long, empty town before bringing the corps fighter down under the tree cover. She was wounded in the dogfight and can't keep flying. Her allies in the league, militaire, saw the trouble, but with no other pilots, they have to take hoverbikes to go look for her. Meanwhile, Uso's parachute catches on the Chaco's head, blocking its cameras. Uso has no choice but to cling to the outside of the mobile suit, releasing his harness as Chronicle tears the parachute away and it falls to the ground, fingers and toes gripping any gap he can find. Uso accidentally opens the mobile suit's cockpit, and he and Chronicle proceed to brawl even as the Chaco is still flying through the air. It isn't long before the mobile suit crashes headfirst into a lake. Chronicle swims to shore while Uso struggles to pilot the Chaco out of the lake and to some kind of hiding place in the woods. A rustling noise puts Marbet on alert, but it isn't Zanskar or the league militaire, it's Shakti, accompanied by her dog, Flanders and Aharo. While Shakti helps Marbut with first aid, Haro bounces off to get Uso. Once Uso takes in the scene, he hurries to get Shakti away, asking Marbit to please leave as soon as she is able. Not long after the kids go back to their homes, Marbat's allies arrive. Before going to Shakti's house for dinner, Uso closes the shutters of his family's cabin, walks through the odly empty house, and goes to his loft room to write a letter and fax it to Miss Katejina Luce, informing her of his encounter with troops of the Zanskar empire. After it's sent, he hears people in the main part of the house and emerges to find two young adults or teens, one of them Odello, and one small girl, Susie, looting the fridge. They tell him they were chased out of largaine and that they thought the cabin had been abandoned. Before they can say anymore, the sound of beam rotors fills the air. All of them run outside and stare up at the sky where Shakti joins them as masses of Zolo fly in the direction of a nearby city. The orange glow of the bombing radiates over the nearby mountains. Overcome with concern for Miss Katajina, Uso retrieves the shako from its hiding place, intending to go help somehow, but he is intercepted by the Zolo from earlier, which never left the area. Clumsy and inexperienced, Uso still manages to destroy the enemy mobile suit and seems stunned at his own survival and at the possibility that he has killed the Zolo's pilot. In the present, Shakti keeps walking. Uso changed after that, she thinks, trying to pinpoint the moment when they couldn't hide from the war any longer.
Well, Nina, you have just watched the original first episode of Victory Gundam. What did you think?
I thought it was pretty good. I in particular noticed how many things they dropped about the world in a very natural kind of way. There's no big info dump on what's happening, where we are, who the various groups are, just little mentions, right? Yellow jackets, Bespa, Zanskare, Largain, the special zone, the guillotine. All things that clearly the characters in this show already know about, already understand. But the audience is going to have to piece that together over time, over the next few episodes.
And Uso, even at one point, references like the rumors that are floating around about Zanskar coming to invade. Now that I've met this bespa yellow jacket, I believe them more.
The fact that the photos of Kantejina that Uso looks at have kind of an air of celebrity or idol picks. They look like they were taken by paparazzi.
I think this is like his screen saver on his laptop, but it looks like, do you remember on geocities and angel fire and even before that, when people would make like a shrine to their favorite character and it'd be a web page you'd go to and it would just be all these screenshots and poetry that they had written about them.
So I don't remember that as much. That was not as much my thing. But when I studied abroad in Japan, I went to Takurazuka and they make photo books for popular Takarazuka performers that are often like photo collages or, I mean, they're all posed photos. They're not generally candids, but they'll put together these photo spreads of popular performers who have a lot of fans. And then fans will buy these photo books and stuff. And I had one for an extremely cool Tokoyaku who I'd seen perform.
I remember that.
Yep.
They do a similar thing for Gundam. Like, new type magazine will put out these moocs, these magazine books. In fact, we have one of them for Victory Gundam, where they'll include creator interviews and design sketches and stuff like that, but also a lot of glossy screenshots arranged in much the same way as, like, I don't know why I call them screenshots, when really they're like cells, film stills. Anyway, the point is, it has that same kind of, like, look at the idol. Here are a bunch of photos from different angles, right? So beautiful.
It's a bit like a photo spread in Us Weekly of some currently popular actress. And yet the fact that he's writing to her about the war, or about a possible war, a possible invasion, indicates that she is involved in politics in some way. She is not necessarily a performer. I guess she could be both. It's been known to happen, and there have certainly been, though they tend not to last very long moments when young, attractive politicians get this kind of star treatment.
I did not get that vibe from this at all. I got the vibe of, like, she's the cool older girl that he has a huge crush on. Like, not quite a neighbor, but like, when you're in middle school and you have a crush on a high schooler.
And this is just fan mail or.
Like a pen pal.
I don't know. The vibe I got was that they absolutely do not know each other. They do not have any kind of a relationship. But she is someone who is in some way contactable, which again, points to, like, a politician or a star who can, of course, receive fan mail or.
In this case, fan faxes.
Gosh, the fax machine. The fax machine, yeah.
Katajina's house has the same kind of old world opulence that, like, bara Rona's place did.
Yes, they do a lot with the background designs and the scenery in this episode that I thought was really cool, actually. And I had wondered about it initially because we cut from Uso's cabin to Katajina's house or apartment. And Uso's cabin is so bare.
Everything but his bedroom.
His bedroom feels lived in. It's this little loft. There's a pile of clothes and a pair of shoes. There are pictures on the walls. There's a pen cup and a lamp and a desk. The rest of the house is basically empty. There's furniture, but there's nothing on the table. There's a couple of laptops and a book on a desk. It has the feeling of a place that no one lives in. And I thought maybe that was laziness. They didn't want to draw in a more complex background for that scene. But then they cut to Catagina's, and there's this beautiful vase of flowers foregrounded. There are cabinets behind her that have the vague impression of stuff in them. There's the cityscape out the window. She's reading a book at a table with a pretty lamp on it. And so it was purposeful.
It immediately conveys what you might call class difference, that Uso and Katajina live in different worlds, even though they're, like, actually probably 2 miles apart.
And Uso's isolation.
We've already heard Shakti invite him to.
Dinner, but any neighbor might do that.
Any neighbor might say, oh, are you.
Coming to dinner tonight? But then he goes into this house, and there's no one there and there's no stuff there. And it's hard to imagine that it would look like that if he had a mother or father living in that house with him or other siblings or anybody, any other family or friend. It conveys how alone and isolated he is in this place, even before we get to his fridge being raided. And I was saving that. That was the last of the ham my mother made. She's away, and he is living in hope that she will be back anytime now. But it's been a while, and we.
Get all of this from Uso's house without needing to remember the line from the prior episode about how Uso was waiting in Casarelia for his parents to come home. This is very tight and efficient direction in order to convey the narrative of.
Uso's life that both Uso and Shakti's houses are clearly farmhouses, log cabins. They've all got shutters, not for storm reasons, but for blocking the light and not being a target at night reasons. I will say, when he's first parachuting in, I was like, what plants are those supposed to be? That doesn't look like any farm I've ever seen. It's like jungle plants or house plants down there. But I digress. Shakti's family has a pen of sheep. Uso's house has a small attached barn, and having him parachute in gives them the excuse to show this whole deep valley or canyon space. The woods, the meadows, the streams, the lakes. It's extremely picturesque. I did wonder if it's based on a real place because they show this bizarre rocky outcropping that's, like, oddly rounded sticking out of one side of the cliff with the staircases on either side. And that just feels like a very weird thing to draw unless you're referencing a specific place.
The environment design for this section of the show for this region is heavily based on Tomino's own tourist photography from his journeys in eastern Europe. And a lot of the locations here are actually quite well established, unlike many previous gundams that we have watched. We'll talk more about exactly where they are, I think once it becomes a little bit more apparent in the show. Did you notice that his cabin is built directly into the rock face behind it? So when you get a shot of the ceiling, one half of the ceiling is like wood, timber, and the other half of the ceiling is just rock.
I did notice that half of the ceiling looked odd. I wasn't sure if it was stone. I hadn't realized it was quite up against the rock face. I thought it might be some sort of weird uncovered installation or something like that. I did notice they have a fireplace with a pot in it. It's not properly two stories. He's up in a loft, but it's really a one story cabin, or like a one and a half. And most of it is open to the roof.
It's all pretty rustic, and one imagines.
That Shakti's is the same details.
Like Uso using a stick to knock down the other sticks that are used to prop open the shutters during the day. Feels like I have never seen someone do that. I have never done that myself. But it feels immediately like this is a real practice that real people do or did in the past and is like, being referenced here. It feels so authentic and natural.
It feels like something a kid would do. Like, on the one hand, he's being responsible enough that he does open the shutters every day, right? Even though there's no grown up there to tell him to do it. You have to open the shutters and air out the house, unless it's particularly bad weather or something. But then instead of holding the shutter, removing the prop and then letting the shutter go, just knocking the props out of the way, that feels like the way a kid would do this.
Speaking of that kind of really efficient storytelling just via the visuals and these narrative elements, having our first view of him be as USo is like, casually parasailing around. Like, what kind of 13 year old child just goes out for, like, an early morning parasail?
Well, not early morning, because, remember, the events take place over the course of an afternoon or so. Pretty early in the episode, we start to get a really great sense of the passage of time. This is one of the things I loved about the visual design of the episode, things start to turn warmer toned as we get later into the afternoon. And then all the pinks and purples come out at sunset, and then it's dark.
All right, you're right. It's great that they do that. And you have opened up the possibility that Uso is the kind of child who sleeps in before going for his casual parasailing session.
Okay, I didn't mean to nitpick that point. You just reminded me that I liked how they had the colors change to convey the passage of time gradually over the course of the episode.
I don't mind you nitpicking. It's just that when you pick the knits, you get the sass.
Maybe Gundam has done this to me, but the fact that he's into parachuting didn't feel weird to me at all. If Camille can be into homo avis, why can't Uso be into parasailing or paragliding? Para.
Absolutely. But it does tell us something about him, about his level of, I don't know, vigor. Amuro would not have been parasailing. No, Judo would not have been parasailing, but probably for other reasons.
Judo would have been parasailing if it offered him the opportunity to steal some valuables.
That is true. Judo would parasail, like, onto the roof of a museum and then break in through the skylight. But Judo's parasail would have patches all over it. It would be an Ursat's parachute.
Lena would have fixed it up for him.
There would be a scene later on in the show of Lena, like, sewing his parachute. Yeah.
This episode includes a lot of moments that contrast Uso's adeptness and his general physical abilities. Know a certain amount of lack of experience, clumsiness thrown into an unusual situation. He manages, by luck or by skill, to keep his parachute open even after several of these flybys. Then he gets caught on chronicles yellow jacket, and he realizes as the parachute's being torn away that he has to disconnect or he has to unload that backpack so he doesn't go flying to earth. And then he manages to cling to the outside of this mobile suit. So he probably does some climbing. He's a good climber. Then he holds his own in kind of wins that brawl. And they spend so much attention, they animate this brawl so well. And the moment when you see chronicles little bruise under one eye. And then later, when he sets up his beam rifle to auto fire, he sort of, like, props it up on the ground to provide him cover fire. While he tries to find the beam saber. And then in a move that feels kind of similar to knocking the supports out of the window shutters when he kind of, like, flips the beam saber into his hand at the very end of the episode.
Rifle.
Are you sure it's the rifle?
I could have sworn it was the.
Saber that he flips.
Maybe he does both. But if it's the scene I'm thinking of, he takes the rifle from the downed Zolo and flips it into his hand.
Okay, maybe it was that.
But anyway, such an unnecessary, showy little thing to do, contrasted with once he's inside the yellow jacket. We'll talk about the other name later. I'm sure he knows what he needs to try to do.
Like, in theory, he knows a little.
Bit about these machines that he kind of can say, oh, I think I need to get control of the prop, or, oh, I need to get the autopilot to turn off, or, oh, I need this, or, oh, I need that. There ought to be a way to access the manual, which I don't care how classified the manual is. Why wouldn't you let it be accessible from inside the machine? It's for.
So this happens really quickly, and it doesn't actually help him at all. But a manual does pop up on screen briefly.
Oh, does it just. It warns him that it's.
There's actually some content to it. It's hard to read, though, because it's in a mixture of English and Romaji. But it does say things like, if you land too quickly, you will die.
Helpful. So he kind of knows what he needs to try to do, but at the same time, is overwhelmed, is struggling when he finds that he is in the air after having tried to write the mobile suit, when it crash lands in the lake, he's, like, surprised to realize he's in the air. He had not realized this.
This is an extremely double zeta kind of sequence. Cockpit hatch stuck, open, brawl inside the cockpit.
Judo and Mashimo all over.
Absolutely. Mobile suit flying all over the place, up and down, left and right, upside down, underwater. Yeah.
Head dragging on the lake floor.
And really well executed for all of that. With one minor caveat that I'll get into later.
Oh, okay. Yeah. In general, I quite liked the animation of this episode. Even points where it felt like they were doing things to decrease the amount of animation they needed to do. I liked the result. I liked the effect.
Before we move on to the animation as a whole, I absolutely love the whole bit of Uso clinging to the mobile suit, clambering up at obvious difficulty, gritting his teeth, like, the way he moves to convey the chaos and the difficulty of what he's doing, even though, as you pointed out, he is succeeding at an incredibly difficult task, showing his skill and strength and gumption. It drives me crazy when you see movies or tv, and a person will be in this situation and just, like, effortlessly, skillfully, gracefully clamber their way up the outside of a building or something, it's like, no, this is a very difficult thing to do, and I love to see that difficulty.
And it's one of the beautiful things about this episode. I think that basically everything Uso manages to do is an accident. Even opening that cockpit, he's just trying to get a foothold, and he manages to kick open the hatch that has the external cockpit open lever. But Chronicle thinks it's all on purpose. Chronicle thinks he's been targeted. Oh, I never thought they would attack me with a parachute.
And when Uso gets the hatch open, it actually takes Chronicle a little while to realize that the hatch is open.
Which would happen if your cockpit is set to look as though it's clear.
Exactly.
Which I love the effect of. I think it looks so cool when.
They'Re fighting and Uso gets knocked onto the panoramic monitor, and it just looks like he falls into the sky and then hits it. It's a beautiful shot. There's also that great moment. He's climbing up the outside of the chest. The eyes look at him and open up and do the little compound eye thing.
They look like insect eyes, and it.
Gets reflected back in Uso's visor. It's a beautiful little shot, really nicely storyboarded.
Some of the other little bits of information that drop Gary's comments about Chronicle seem to hint at not much respect for this guy. They all know he's a Nepo baby. He's the queen's little brother. Even to the point where in the second and final fight between him and USO, at first he actually thinks it's chronicle, and that Chronicle has changed sides on them. That is his first thought, that Chronicle has turned coat. Not that somehow somebody got his mobile suit away from him. We've established that the league militaire is severely understaffed. The only pilot this particular group has is Marbett. The only other person who could pilot is their lead mobile suit engineer, and so they really can't afford to let him put himself at risk in that way.
And also that Odello and company are not yet actually part of the league. Military. They're, like, tagging along as civilian refugees, as is Gundam tradition.
Yeah, I imagine they were found by the side of the road or something, having fled their hometown of Largaine. The old guys picked them up because what else are they going to do?
There's that scene in the forest. After Marbette has been shot down and Shakti has administered some first aid to her, Uso arrives, summoned by Haro. I'll have more to say about Haro in a little bit, but USo arrives and his response is to look at this situation and say, I don't want to get involved. Shakti, come with me. Let's go. Lady. You get out of here as soon as you can.
Which is funny, because then he turns around and wants to save Miss Katajina. And Shakti is almost the reverse of this. Shakti saw an injured marbet and wanted to help her and clearly knows at least a little bit about first aid. Right. She's like, well, I have to cut.
Away your suit so I can actually see the wound.
Is ready and willing to help her, but is clearly very upset at the idea that there's no staying out of the war for them. Now that the war has come to their hiding place and that this thing that she thought they were maybe going to be able to stay out of, that's not going to be possible.
Yeah. Her level of horror when USo destroys that Zolo is, like, off the charts because she knows they're stuck. There's no going back from this.
On the second watch through, I did wonder whether maybe she can't see the fight and could just see the explosion and worried that he had been shot down. Could be, but it's unclear. It could easily be that she's horrified that he's killed an enemy soldier and the attention that would theoretically bring down on them, the fact that makes it truly impossible for them to stay put.
Of course, he hasn't actually killed an enemy soldier, but she doesn't know that.
Well, we don't either.
Gary bails out and lands in the canopy and lands safely on the ground.
We have chronicles comment from the previous episode that nobody would survive a fall like that.
I guess I operate on the logic that if we see the pilot bail out, then they're probably fine, but.
And they don't show us. Gary, move. Groan, respond in any way. Falling from that height through a bunch of trees like it's a toss up.
Yeah, we are two for two on. Somebody falls out of a mobile suit into a tree canopy. Now, I wonder if they'll be able to keep it up for the whole rest of the show. One tree canopy fall per episode.
Yeah, we've established that. Chronicle at least thinks that kind of fall would be deadly.
Yeah, we'll find out, I guess. Watch and find out. Also, there's a bit earlier on in the episode that kind of makes it seem like maybe Shakti has a little bit of precognitive ability going, oh, this is at the very beginning when Uso is paragliding around before the core fighter appears, before anybody else has noticed, Shakti looks over towards it, or what seems to be towards it and seems worried, and then looks away like, oh, there's nothing actually over there. And then looks back, and the core fighter appears, and like, maybe she heard it. Yeah, but we, as the audience, don't hear it. There's no audio cue for its approach, and so, look, it's Gundam. Maybe I'm projecting a little bit of new typeness onto her. It seems like maybe she had a premonition of something bad. And now at the end, after Uso destroys this mobile suit and maybe kills its pilot, she has another premonition of something bad coming. But Uso's reaction to seeing Marbette contrasted with his rushing to save Katajina, I think demonstrates that for him, this is all still very personal. He doesn't really care about the bigger political issues, the league militaire versus. You know, he wants to protect his little community and this girl that he has a huge crush on. And then contrast that with how we can imagine. Other Gundam boys would have reacted if they found Marbette in the forest like that Amuro, a stern, powerful, older sister type military officer. He would have been instantly struck dumb. He would have been in love with her, probably.
Yeah. There's a reason I called her the Matilda type.
Camille would say something rude and then try to steal the core fighter.
Camille would have pre existing opinions about the political situation, and the way he would treat her would depend on whether he agrees with the league militaire and what it's doing.
He might criticize her for having this fight in, like, a civilian area, but.
Does she know it's a civilian area? Nobody's supposed to know they're there.
Would that occur to Camille?
I don't know. I think Camille, in many ways, was, like, the most thoughtful and savvy about the world around him of the various.
Protagonists, but also a bit of a hothead, especially at the beginning.
That's fair.
I'm thinking. Yeah, I'm thinking about Camille in, like, episode one.
Episode two steals a mobile suit.
Camille punches one cop and then kicks another one. Camille.
Rampage. Camille.
Exactly. Judo, I think would probably say something nice and then try to steal the core fighter. We already know exactly what Al would do because this is basically the same scenario where Al first encountered Bernie. And I think if it were ko, I don't know that he would notice Marbette at all. He would just be like, wow, cool core fighter. Let me check it out.
I will note we both very much enjoyed the punny moment of, no, wait, don't shoot it. There's someone on that mobile suit. It's like, well, it's a mobile suit. Of course there's someone on it. No.
Yeah. Full belly laughs and then there was.
One moment that feels like maybe snuck in that they decided to make a change later and forgot to alter this or couldn't alter it. But there is an adult man in the background of one of these scenes.
Early in the episode when Shakti is.
Watching the dogfight, which Uso keeps getting caught in, in his parachute. There's an adult man in the background also watching this, which I thought was maybe going to be her father or an uncle or somebody who works on their farm, a neighbor who never makes an appearance again throughout the entire episode. And that feels strange. I think better to not show that person at all because otherwise, why aren't they checking on the kids? Why aren't they sitting with the kids watching the attack on Uig? So maybe there was a version of this episode where he was going to be involved in what happens more and then they changed it, but they couldn't or didn't remove him. I don't know.
Yeah. I assume he's like another person living in Casarelia with them, not one of their adults, but just like a neighbor.
But I would think a neighbor would be just as interested as the kids.
Are in the fact that a corps.
Fighter crash landed nearby or in the fact that a nearby city is being attacked. Maybe I'm naive, but in such an isolated community that seems so small, I would think that if a bunch of the other adults are gone and left their 13 or 14 year old children alone, you would maybe be checking on them. If you're one of the last adults left for miles or the last safe adult or adult they even know nearby that even if the kids continued living in their own homes and so were essentially living alone, that you might check on them, especially when there's obvious military activity nearby.
Yeah. Why is Usil going to have dinner at Shockti's house, who I think is twelve and not like, at this guy's house. Why are they not both going over to his house for dinner?
Right?
Yeah. It also raises the possibility that there's some kind of subplot that we're not seeing. Maybe it's in the novels where USo is not merely parasailing for fun and recreation, but, like, surveying the land on behalf of the community or something like that. Whatever it is, it is not in evidence before us in the show. I know that they had an unusual amount of pre planning for this. More time than usual to prepare these episodes, to plan out the storyline. And in retrospect, Tomio has said that he felt like that maybe gave them the rope with which to hang themselves, that they spent all of that time coming up with this overly convoluted story.
It's not an unusual problem. Fans of the podcast might remember me insisting that once we decided to do this, that we needed to set ourselves a premiere date for the first episode, because I was convinced we would just sort of edit it to death otherwise and work on it indefinitely without ever releasing anything.
Which, yeah, I definitely would have. So, with that in mind, it's easy to imagine how storylines would get generated, incorporated, and then discarded, but leave behind some traces of themselves in the storyboards, in the plot, in the outline. And then once it's been animated, might as well include it.
They couldn't reanimate that scene to remove him, and so there he is.
We've meandered a little bit around the topic of animation. There's one more thing I want to say about this, though, which is that the animation is really good throughout this episode, except the mobile suits themselves barely ever move, and you can tell that a lot of directorial tricks have been employed in order to avoid having to animate the mobile suits moving too much. Very frequently we see only a small part of the machine moving, only a hand, only an arm, only a leg bits where in prior gundam we would expect to see the mobile suit moving, and then cut to the pilot inside doing kind of a similar movement in like a match cut kind of situation. Instead, we just see the pilots and the mobile suits movement is wholly implied. When the mobile suits are on screen frequently, they are in a locked pose, flying through the air woodenly. And those directorial tricks are employed very well. They make the battle look good and exciting, even without needing to move the mobile suits around very much. But like, once you start looking for it, it's really obvious. The good animation here, and it's great, is for the characters.
Well, so before we talk about the characters really quick, there were a couple of things they did during that fight that I thought were very interesting.
One was a moment where, while on.
A still or while panning over a still, they flash lights, and it creates the impression of movement, the impression that something is happening, but they haven't had to animate anything. I assume that's done with actual flashing lights in the studio as they're cycling the animation.
Yeah. As they're photographing the cells.
Yeah, exactly. And I love the painted explosions. I've paused a couple of times on the explosions. It's this very painterly. You can see the brushstrokes. You can see the brushwork. I really like that effect a lot. And the moment that I assume was meant to be the ending of the episode before they made it, the second episode instead of the first, which is a still, again, very painterly frame of Uso's mobile suit sort of charging up into the air. It's quite beautiful.
That technique of ending on, like, a painted still instead of just a regular animation cell is called a Dazaki, after Dazaki Osamu, who sort of pioneered the technique in his work. And, yeah, it's good. We haven't seen those in a while. They cropped up occasionally in Zeta, more frequently back in first Gundam just looks real good.
You mentioned the faces.
Now, I don't have the time to do, like, research, research on this, but there were a couple of moments in particular with Uso's face when I realized that what he reminded me of, what.
The movement of his face and the.
Line work of his face reminded me of. And it's this particular era of Disney, which, it turns out, is sort of like the Disney classics era when Walt was still alive. And there was this group of animators, producers, directors called Disney's nine old men, who were kind of the core team. And not every movie that they made.
In this period had that look.
But if you think of, say, the.
Rescuers, the sword and the Stone Jungle.
Book, some of the way that the faces are drawn and animated, this felt.
Very similar to that.
And I checked the dates on some of the Disney movies that felt like the right kind of animation when I pictured in my head. Keep in mind, I haven't seen most of these movies in a long time. This is pure vibes and childhood memory. But some of the Disney movies that came out from, like, 51 to 77, but here in the 90s, those are the movies that this team might have seen when they were kids.
And Tomino has talked about his desire to go back to an older style of robot animation to get away from the overly serious, overly detailed, very stayed real robot stuff of say, the late eighty s and the early ninety s to get away from the 83 style and get back to the classic robot animation of the doing. So maybe there is some other elements of that older approach, that older aesthetic that he is also trying to channel here. Certainly the two key visual touchstones for this series, Future Boy Conan and the world Masterpiece theater anime like Heidi, Girl of the Alps and a dog of Flanders, which the dog here is named Flanders. It is not a subtle reference. Those are older shows. Those are largely shows from. The main beneficiaries of this more kinetic, fluid animation is Haro, who bounces and squishes, and that is a very plastic orb as it's moving around and has so much character.
Like Haro goes to get Uso and bring him to Shakti and Marbet. Haro clamps on to Uso's foot so that he has to be brought up into the mobile suit with him.
This is a highly advanced. I don't know what generation of Haro this is, but this is a way more sophisticated Haro than the Haro's of Amaro and Camille's day.
This haro appears to have opinions about the correct course of action in any given circumstance. Also has a different voice, that is a different haro sound.
Also capable of pretty incredible speed. Like, there's the bit where Haro is leading Uso around on the Wapa. Or in fact, I think later there's one where Haro is chasing Uso on the wapa and like keeping up. So Uso at one point complains that his wapa is very slow. So let's say it's not like a full motorcycle. But if that wapa is roughly as fast as, I don't know, a 50 cc Vespa, that's still doing like 30 metric listeners or 115 decimal hour for our french revolutionary listeners. So imagine a roomba coming at you at 30 miles an hour.
I'd rather not.
That's why Haro had to be strapped down when they got into the cockpit to restrain his power.
I was somewhat amused that they put in a seatbelt, but not a harness, an air belt. Right? But like, we've already seen one of these machines turn upside down.
Oh yeah.
You would think you would just put in a harness.
When did they start requiring the shoulder strap for seatbelts?
Oh, I have no idea. But like, mobile suits aren't cars, they're fighter jets. I take your point. But still, there were only a couple of other sound cues that really stood out to me. The crying eagles and twittering birds, which just kind of fits in with the animals in Tomino scenes. And the establishment of this relatively untouched valley canyon place that the most predominant sounds are those of animals. Although there's some indication that there used to be more people because Gary's Zolo, the helicopter thing, gets stuck trying to follow marbit through the overgrown ruins of some buildings. So this maybe used to be a larger community that was mostly abandoned.
Well, we know by now that the earth is largely depopulated. Most of humanity lives out in space. This is the earth. It's been 60 years since Shah's counterattack, 60 years of humanity moving out into space and, like, letting earth grow with a much reduced population. And I think we see this is Earth not in exactly a natural state, but much restored from where it was. Like you said, the sounds of nature. There's wildlife everywhere. The trees are grown up. At least in Casarelia, the humans are, like, living within nature.
And then the other sound cue that really stood out to me was that of the huge mass of zolocopters going to bomb the nearby city. And then we see the glow of the bombing and the subsequent fire over the top of this low mountain range or hills.
The bit when the zolocopters go over and all the kids are looking up at them, it feels really ominous and really eerie. I kind of wish it had been the end of the episode. It felt like it could have been.
The prominence of helicopter type machines in this show so far made me wonder about helicopters in footage of the yugoslav wars, which we haven't gotten to yet. But these wars in the 90s would not have been the first time that helicopters were used in warfare, or even the first time that they had been all that prominent. But maybe there was something about the way the war was covered. Maybe there were a whole lot more helicopters in these wars than there had been in previous ones. I wonder what exactly influenced them to be such a big part of the mobile suit design here when they haven't been before.
I do know. In the design history of victory, the Zolo was one of the very first mobile suits to be developed. It was designed by Oko Arakunio. It actually grew out of his entry in the competition to design the victory Gundam. When it didn't win, he sort of took the design and reworked it to be an enemy mobile suit. So it does the same separate and recombine thing that the victory does. And because it was the first Bespa Zanskar mobile suit to be designed, it did sort of set the design language for that army. Okwara has also said that he wanted them, the helicopters, to be sort of eerie, unsettling. And I do think they have that feeling. Helicopters always. Maybe this is just a me thing. Helicopters always feel kind of unsettling when you see them flying, because they shouldn't be. When the rotors are going really fast, they kind of disappear. And so you just see this metal body floating through the air.
I find the sound of a helicopter rotor really ominous. And maybe this is childhood associations and, like, apocalypse now, but the sound of a helicopter kind of puts me on edge. Yeah. Living in New York and finding the sound of helicopters unnerving is actually pretty bad because there are a lot of helicopter flyovers for perfectly innocuous reasons. We hear them pretty frequently, and I'm always like, what's happening? What's going on? Why is there a helicopter? Not unlike Susie, who clearly traumatized by what has happened, more so than the older boys. Or, I guess we do not know, the third kid.
Yeah, we don't know much about the blonde one, except that he likes driving the big truck or pretending to drive the big truck.
Or she could be a girl with a short haircut who wears suits.
Absolutely.
Probably he. Who knows? But, yeah. Susie's reaction to that sound is also very powerful and immediately sets up the conflict of Odello, having been pushed out of his home, wants to join the league militaire and fight against them. Susie has already lost so much and is already so scared that she desperately does not want him to go.
Odello also kind of has that hungry wolf attitude, like, when they break in and he's shameless. He's, like, still cutting and eating the ham even after USo has burst out to confront them. Odello's attitude is very much, I don't know you, man. And I am protecting my crew and feeding my, I'm gonna assume, sister or adopted. She's his sister now. However they started out.
Yep. I've already lost so much that I do not care anymore.
And then in that scene, Odello calls USo in the english subtitles. He calls him an illegal immigrant. And this is a really powerful line, because in English and at least in the United States, the issue of illegal immigration has been a major political issue for our entire lives and is almost a litmus test for political affiliation. A person's position on immigration will tell you so much about their politics and.
Casts a whole nother sort of layer of meaning on them hiding out in this valley, on them having farms and being farm owners, workers. I assume they're squatting. I assume they don't technically own the land if they're not there with permission. Right. They're squatting, and they've carved out some.
Farms and casts into starker relief that class distinction we see between USo and.
Katajina and explains why they're living in such an isolated place, why there's so few other people around. It might even explain why all the parents are gone.
And so I think it's really important that I note at this point that that is not what Odello says. In the Japanese, he calls Uso chikyuno. That's related to Earth Fuho Kyojusha, illegal resident, which is also the term that's used for squatters. It doesn't necessarily mean the Duso is a space noid who illegally returned to.
The earth, which is what the translation implies.
Right. There is a different term for an illegal immigrant. So illegal resident, I think, has very different implications and does not in the same way implicate the larger preexisting political debate and sort of calcified political positions that are associated with what people call illegal immigration.
It's much more like when the government orders an evacuation of an area and people refuse to go.
It is, in fact, exactly like that. The most likely explanation is probably that USo's family just refused to leave Earth when the Earth Federation government required all the poor people to leave the planet. Or it could be that Uso's parents illegally snuck back to Earth or his grandparents. But it suggests a very different situation.
There's one other line like that, which is when they are fighting in the cockpit. Well, and one part of this sort of backs up what you were saying. Uso says to chronicle, space noids should stay in space. Like, space noids shouldn't interfere with our life here on Earth. So he clearly doesn't think about himself or his family as space noids in any way. But in the subtitles, Chronicle says, you people have no right to pollute the earth. Which I was like, oh, no. Is he going to make some good points? Because the intro narration has established that the reason that they pushed people out into space ostensibly was because the Earth was so polluted that it wasn't a fit place to live anymore. Chronicle might be one of those who thinks that the best, fastest way for the Earth to recover from the environmental impacts of humanity is for everyone to leave, and that any human presence on the planet is pollution and is harming the environment. The reason this is a bad translation of this line is that what he actually says in Japanese is much more like, you people have no right to be here. Nothing about pollution, nothing about the environment or hurting the environment. And someone translating might try to use the word pollution to create the implication that, like, oh, you scum, you pests, you vermin, your very presence pollutes the earth. But by the 90s, people were talking a lot about pollution's effects in the environment, hole in the ozone layer, et cetera. You create a bunch of confusion about what exactly chronicle means here by using that word in the subtitles, like illegal immigrant.
It's just extremely loaded language.
Right. And does not convey the meaning that I think it's meant to. Yeah. What he says is, I think, kisamarani, chikyo, yoroshken, niwanai. And it's kind of flowery, formal language in a way. But also, Kisamara is insulting.
Well, he is a prince and a snob, so it's not surprising at all that his language be flowery even when he's being a jerk. Early on in the podcast a couple of times, you referred to the mobile suit that Uso steals as a yellow jacket. I think that yellow jacket is the unit that chronicle is part of and elite unit, somewhat separate from the regular armed forces of bespa.
Okay, are we eventually going to hear what exactly the difference relationship is between Zanskar and Bespa? Probably so, yeah, they do say the name in this episode. I noticed this is one of those names like Farah, like Mashima, that the chosen english spelling is not great for conveying how you say the word because they spell it shokyu or shokyu, which kind of.
You would say, like, oh, shock you, Jacques.
Yeah, shokew. But what they say is shaco, which I thought of a shaco, which is a british colonial hat or a helmet of some kind.
No, it's a hat. It's a hat. It's like it's stiffened wool or something. No, what you should think of is Shakoki dogu. Why Shakoki dogu are. I talked about them in one of our SD Gundam episodes, actually, but they're little clay figurines from the early prehistory of Japan. And they have these goggle eyes that look like the snow goggles used by native peoples, like in Alaska, which have a very thin slit in two big bug eyes, like the eyes of the bespa mobile suits to help with the.
Glare off of the snow.
So Shakoki Dogu becomes.
See. I see.
And that brings us to another fun name issue, which is, what is Uso's last name? Because in his letter to Katsujina, he signs it Uso ebbing. And it appears on screen in the show, which you would think would be the definitive word on how that name should be written.
It's not.
It is absolutely not. I have seen more different anglicizations of this kid's name than I think any other gundam character or mobile suit.
Quick note that while they do pronounce it with slightly different emphasis, in Japanese, Uso means lie. Yeah, as in to tell a falsehood.
In the Japanese, it's instead of Uso, a lie. It's USo.
Yeah, it's slightly different, but it's close.
And Tomino has actually gone on record about this. That is where the name comes from, at least according to him. Known liar. The katakana for Uso's last name is so it seems like it should be Evan. In Anima magazines that were coming out at the time that victory came out, it was written Ebin. Ebin. Now, the official way it's rendered on our Blu ray box, in the credits, in official websites and stuff like that is Ewing Ewin. And I did my best, but I could not find any official examples or even quasi official ones of Ewing. But I'm positive I have seen people write it that way online. So there is a verdant forest of possibilities for how we might pronounce this kid's name.
We will probably just call him Uso.
You mean we're just gonna avoid the problem, just run away from it?
Yes, we are.
Jupiter headband would be so disappointed in us for just avoiding a tricky name pronunciation. What would Admiral Zobel think?
Is that a good ending?
I think that is a good ending.
Great.
Even if we haven't actually resolved the issue of Uso's name, I mean, are we going to?
Do you have a proposed resolution? Because I don't.
I guess my only comment would be that I think anything that actually appears on screen in the anime is like, that's correct. It might not be the only correct option, but you can't say that's wrong. It's in the anime. It's there on screen. It's like, diegetically, like, top notch.
And that's the one that's ebbing.
Yes.
Yeah.
I mean, Ebing, it's definitely not what the katakana says.
Right.
If you wanted to write ebbing, you could do that and it would look very different from what they actually wrote.
Ebing.
Yeah, probably. But, I mean, I think ebbing kind of splits the difference. It's close to Evan and it's what's on screen. But there are times when, at least in the subtitles, we entirely ignore what's on screen, though the subtitles are not, like, digestic in the same way, obviously, but we never called him Mashimre, except.
Maybe once or twice for a lark.
But I'm perfectly content to call him Uso ebbing. I do think we will probably default to calling him Uso most of the time. I am curious whether they're doing names in japanese order or english order. At one point, Gary calls him Lieutenant Chronicle. I thought Asher was his last name. Shouldn't he call him Lieutenant Asher?
Well, but they also called him Commander Shar. The way Gundam titles interact with names is not like Captain Bright. But his last name is Noah, right?
They often do that.
Basically every character has a mononym which may or may not be their entire name. Like Makube. He doesn't have a last name. His name is Ma Kube. Names are weird and tricky and so weird, I'm pretty certain they're doing it in english name order. Now, having established that, I think Ebbing is correct. The current amalgamation of Bondi and Sunrise is also like the masters of the Gundam canon going forward into the future. And if they say the official name translation is Ewan, then I think that's also correct.
We want to be consistent and clear about who we're talking about. We want people to know who we're talking about at any given time.
But as long as we are consistent.
And clear and not just, like, making up nonsense, as long as we're not lying to you, our listeners.
One of the things that makes Gundam so interesting and important and is part of why we can talk about it the way we do in the podcast is that these shows didn't freeze when they aired. They've continued to live on after that and to appear in other media to continue to be a part of this almost living universe that is both a shared fandom artifact, but also a corporate product. Like, one of the sources I looked at when I was confirming his name is, I looked at Uso's profile in UC Gundam engage, the mobile game that is currently running. So we talk about covering Gundam from 1979 until today. And part of that means covering the continued life of these characters and these shows on and on into the future. And the. The current regime wants his name to be Ewan. Whatever it was on screen at this particular moment in 1993, 30 years ago.
Y'All, I have to say that just to remind myself of it, that that is in fact 30 years ago.
And now. Nina's research piece on youth and otaku culture at the beginning of Japan's lost.
Decades in a previous season's history overview, I discussed Japan's asset price bubble, the heady economic boom years of the mid to late 1980s. Certain assets, most famously land but also stock, appreciated in value at an unprecedented rate. Loan growth quotas set by the central bank and a low discount rate, which is the interest rate the country's central bank charges commercial banks when it gives them loans, meant that loans were very easy to get, which encouraged speculation. If you as an individual or a business won't have to pay much interest and you're confident that the value of what you buy with the loan will increase significantly, why then, a loan is basically free money. The causes of the subsequent crash were complex and are still hotly debated by economists. But some likely contributing factors include the export heavy economy and uneven balance of trade with the United States, an issue about which the United States applied considerable diplomatic and economic pressure. The plaza accords attempts to curb appreciation of the yen deregulation of certain financial transactions, in particular currency trading uncertainty about the international economy after the Black Monday crash of 1987, tax law that favors investment in land decreased savings rates, a sharp increase in the discount rate in 1989 and what one source described as an almost adversarial relationship between the two main institutions of japanese monetary and fiscal policy, the bank of Japan and the Ministry of Finance. While the causes may be debated, the effects are easier to quantify. The Nike stock index fell from a high of 38 915 at the end of 1989 to just 14,309 in August of 1992, though it wouldn't hit its lowest post bubble point until 2003. By 1992, average urban land prices nationwide had fallen 1.7% from their peak. It may not sound like much, but that's a huge deal when we're talking about asset value in major cities. The drop was worse and hit residential land, the kind average people are most likely to invest in. The hardest. To quote the wiki commercial, residential and industrial land prices dropped 15.2%, 17.9% and 13.1%, respectively. Average nationwide land prices in Japan wouldn't increase until 2017. Consumption decreased, household real income decreased, investing decreased, and what investment was happening was more likely to be in foreign markets. This made it harder for japanese companies to fund improvements. So many lost their technological edge and japanese goods became less competitive. Companies that had looked as though they were thriving during the bubble because they had these high value assets on their balance sheets were suddenly zombie companies without the operating profits to even pay the interest on their debts.
And that combination of a weakening economy with the crashing land prices means that if you were well off enough during the bubble to buy land, probably on credit, you now had a mortgage for land that was only worth a fraction of what you bought it for. And if you were too poor to invest in land during the bubble, the weakening state of the economy means you probably can't afford to buy the cheaper land either.
This also left banks burdened with a lot of bad loans, and many banks and companies were only saved by government bailouts. Whether those government bailouts helped or hurt in the long run is one of the debated issues. The bursting of the bubble also revealed many cases of fraud and corruption throughout japanese society. Coupled with the crash itself, consumer confidence was badly shaken. This lack of confidence, and the caution it inspired, likely made government efforts to increase domestic demand or stimulate consumption less effective. Even if people felt as though they had more money at their disposal, they were more likely to save it than to spend it or invest it. Japanese life during the bubble economy is often characterized by, on an individual level, conspicuous consumption of luxury goods and modern conveniences, and on a national level, international prominence of japanese companies, accompanied by admiration tinged with fear. Remember the scaremongering around Japan as number one and japanese investment in us companies and us real estate? In his book on japanese consumer Behavior, John McCreary discusses how the bubble established certain expectations among japanese people. Expectations about their future consumption and wealth, about the kind of lifestyle they would lead, and that the bubble bursting overthrew those expectations for most people, replacing them with nothing so much as uncertainty. And that's what I really want to dig into over the next couple of research pieces, some of the societal and cultural trends of the time and how they were caused by or influenced by the bubble bursting. Specifically, trends in the roles of women in society, perceptions of youth culture, otaku, and the moral panic around them, and the toy and anime industries. Because I am terminally over ambitious, I initially planned on covering all of that.
This week, but once I started writing.
It became clear they needed to be split up. So this week we will kick things off by talking about youth, culture and otaku. There are jokes to be made about perpetual pearl clutching that as each subsequent generation rises into positions of power in media, they look at the next generation with some combination of fear, disdain, confusion, and disgust. In fact, Sharon Kinsella suggests that Japan's attitude toward youth culture generally, as expressed in the media and by the sort of intelligentsia, is comparable to the attitude in the United States and the UK toward leftists during the Cold War. That combination of disdain or that kind of patronizing attitude towards the naivety of all these young people combined with a disgust for everything they were fighting for, as all leftist movements were basically lumped in with communism and the enemy.
Those kids today, they oppose everything that we stand for as a nation. They're simultaneously so weak and foolish, but also so dangerous.
They're a threat to everything our nation stands for. Only in Japan, this wasn't confined to particular political movements.
It was sort of directed at the idea of youth culture as a whole.
And both the speed and extent of the changes in japanese society during the postwar period likely made the rift between generations feel even wider. But in spite of the cyclical nature of complaining about the youths, there is a lot about this specific moment in time that feels as though it might be relevant, especially in a tomino series. In Kinsella's paper on youth subcultures and otaku, she suggests that, quote, political youth radicalism became completely obscure by the early seventy s. But younger generations, youth culture and young women became the focus of nervous discourse about the apparent decay of a traditional japanese society. She goes on to say that in japanese discourse, youth as a category is largely symbolic. What we might call youth or young adults are, in japanese discourse considered more like overgrown children or adolescents, basically that there's no intermediary life stage between adolescence and full adulthood. So if you aren't an adult, well.
Then you're a child.
This perception also goes back decades to the entwined with the view that youth culture is individualistic, childish, willfully immature, and escapist, that it's a rejection of designated adult roles in society. Implicit in this criticism is that those adult roles are necessary and that as participants in society, it is one's responsibility to fill them, to adequately contribute by fulfilling your familial, corporate, and national duties. The failure or refusal to do so shows that young people have no sense of social obligation. Again, these concerns raised about the young people of the been raised about young people of the youth, of the activism they had engaged in felt like a failure. The older generation solidified its hold on power and ignored their concerns. The reforms they protested for never materialized. This is one possible reason presented for the apparent apathy or lethargy of their generation. Later on, one contemporary commentator described them as enthusiastic about nothing and indolent about everything. These same concerns about the passivity, individualism, and empty consumerism of young people would persist into the 90s. Complaints about kids nowadays may be as old as time, but the feel like the root of this particular critique of youth culture and worth bringing up, because this generation of disappointed and disheartened activists is the one to which tomino belongs. In the mid eighty s, the term shinjin drui, or new breed or new.
Type of human, emerged as a term.
For young people who had been born into relative affluence, with no memory of the hardships of the early postwar period.
Who exactly the term referred to shifted over time.
In 1987 it was people in their people under 30. In 1993 it was people in their late teens and early twenty s. So.
It wasn't so much a generational marker.
As a term that just meant young people. They were comfortable with new technology and seemed to reject the old hierarchical relationships. For some members of older generations, there was hope that the xinjianrui would be more open minded, more flexible, less constricted in their thinking. At the same time, public discourse described them as irresponsible, complacent, mere passive consumers with narrow interests and no willingness to venture outside of their comfortable private life, what was frequently termed their cocoon cabin or capsule. Kinsela refers to Nakano Osamu, who, quote, appears to directly credit the shinjin Rui with causing the major characteristics and problems of a late industrial economy. Because of the new breed's preoccupation with pleasure and comfort, it chooses pleasure over pain, recreation over work, consumption over production, appreciation over creation. One particularly vivid metaphor from the consella paper is that of a cruise ship. An early 90s culture commentator describes the youth of the day as focused on being comfortable in their cabin but never sparing a thought for the ship as a whole or the sea that it sails, whether the seas are rough or calm, or where the ship is going. In the 1970s, and almost a foregone conclusion that middle class men would become salary men, which is to say, work, a white collar corporate office job with.
The companies one could apply to, more.
Or less strictly determined by one's academic ranking in secondary school and in university exams. This created a feeling of resignation. As a young man in this system, it would feel as though your whole future were already decided and laid out in front of you. And incidentally, the more a young person felt they were benefiting from this system, the more politically conservative they were likely to be. Even at universities that had been hotbeds of leftist activity like todai when the economy was good, freeders, adults who engaged in irregular or non salaried work, were seen as making a choice, rejecting the all consuming corporate life in favor of work that, even if it provided fewer benefits, gave them more freedom. However, as time passed and the economy went into recession, freers were seen more negatively, their lack of regular salaried employment characterized as a refusal to be part of or contribute to society. This feels particularly cruel given that after the bubble burst, japanese businesses replaced many of their regular positions with part time and contract jobs. There were simply fewer good jobs to go around, and those jobs weren't as good as they used to be. No expectation of lifetime employment, no guaranteed raises based on seniority and even heavier workloads. Andrew Gordon outlined an extreme example. Enterprises hire far more new employees than they plan to keep, impose impossible work norms, demand long hours of unpaid overtime, and squeeze out their labor until they quit, often in exhaustion or with damaged health. Young people sign on for such jobs, drawn by promises of regular employment status in a difficult job market. These conditions delegitimized the old construct of adulthood. Why work quote so hard to become like adults, like their sad parents in a society that might never reward them for that work? One change was that in the 90s, youth rebellion or rejection of the old norms wasn't through social movements as much as it was expressed in their personal lives. A prime example of what was called the twofold consciousness of the generation is a person who outwardly conforms at their office job but resists the expectation that they dedicate themselves to the job 100% and pursues their passions and interests, like, say, anime, in their free time. Which brings us to otaku. The word otaku originally means you, your home or yours with respectful connotations, the kind of word you might use to talk to someone of similar social standing, but with whom you are not particularly close. As a slang term, Kinsella describes it as referring both to someone who is not accustomed to close friendships and therefore tries to communicate with peers using this distant and overly formal language, and to.
Someone who spends most of his or.
Her time alone at home. And as with any niche slang term, the meanings changed and multiplied once it broke into mainstream media for otaku. That happened in 1989 with the case of Miyazaki Titomo, a man who abducted, murdered and mutilated four young girls. Before he was caught, police found his bedroom full of manga and anime tapes, including lolikan and pornographic content. He was dubbed the otaku murderer. The case kicked off a moral panic about the otaku subculture, especially amateur manga, and became a symbol of dangerous trends in japanese culture, with the media pointing to the murderer's lack of close relationships and a careless, neglectful upbringing as causes for his alienation from society, leaving a gap that was filled by immersion in a fantasy world of anime and manga. A world full of virtual company and grossly inappropriate role models. Some suggested that the freer contemporary relationships were no substitute for fixed traditional social relationships, and voiced concern that the lack of close parental relationships prevented necessary psychosocial development, creating children and then adults unable to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Coverage of the case fostered the public perception that otaku were dangerous psychologically disturbed perverts. Due to this coverage in the early ninety s, the term otaku came to refer to the murderer himself. All amateur manga artists and fans, and to some extent, all japanese youth otaku were seen as embodying the logical extremes of everything that was wrong with youth culture. Introverted to the point of dysfunction, childish prioritizing, escapism and comfort. An otaku generation that threatened the whole of society. Interestingly, several anime creators expressed disdain for their otaku mega fans, describing them as overgrown adolescents with too much of their identity tied up in something meant to be entertainment for children. But we'll talk about that when we talk about the anime industry. Even in this environment, otaku culture thrived. The amateur manga movement had peaked from 1990 to 1992, with over a quarter of a million people attending each comics market, commonly referred to as comiquette. Each year, these conventions were the largest mass public gatherings in contemporary Japan, and amateur manga was one of the few social or cultural forums not dominated by the privileged for a humorous take on otaku culture at this time. Made by otaku with full awareness of how they were perceived by non otaku.
You should check out otaku no video if you can.
It's a mashup. Half spoofy interviews with otaku, their faces.
Blurred as they talk about making figurines.
Or collecting tapes or whatever their particular interest is. And half anime telling the fictional story of a young college guy who gets.
Sucked into the world of otaku.
The interviews themselves are not like, real. It's not a documentary, but it really does capture the vibe of what it meant to be otaku in this moment and how they were viewed by the outside world, and also some of their own sort of self perception.
Yeah, they managed to convey both just.
How harmless most otaku were and most otaku interests were, but also that feeling they all had, that they needed to hide that part of their lives from.
Anybody who wasn't an otaku.
And that scrutiny coming from the outside world. That feeling of being under the magnifying glass.
Many otaku had that twofold consciousness I mentioned earlier. For example, in a 1992 article about a man who wrote amateur Shojo manga. Girls manga. He described girls manga as a more progressive cultural scene that allowed him to engage with society in a way that his day job could not. Making girls manga was an escape from and a criticism of his corporate life and mainstream masculine culture, a feeling that seems to have been shared by many men in the amateur manga scene. There was some censorship. In 1991, police confiscated unpublished and amateur manga from a few shops and arrested the shop managers. With the subculture receiving so much more attention from outside, 1993 was the first year in which Comakette issued guidance about appropriate content for works to be sold there. Perhaps some of the best examples of how otaku were described and perceived are these two quotes Kinsella included in her paper, both of which follow that pattern where the person saying it is clearly horrified. But to me reading it, I'm thinking, heck yeah. The first is by Yonezawa Yoshihiro. The city, the lost zone of japanese society exists here at comic market. Without any interference or hindrance from outside, this abandoned and forgotten section of society has started to produce its own culture. The sense of being, one body of excitement, of freedom, and of disorder exists inside this single, unified space. If anything frightful has come into being, it is no doubt the existence of this space itself. The second by Uno Chizuko. Without social roles, Otaku had no fixed identities, no fixed gender roles, and no fixed sexuality. Apparently, young people were supposed to save.
Society with their less constricted way of thinking, but not like that.
The hardest thing to remember thinking and writing about this time is that they didn't know what was coming. Most writing about this period is from well after the term lost decade comes into use after ten and more years of economic stagnation, new technological developments, and world events. From our current position in the narrative of Gundam, all anyone knew was that the exuberance and excess of the boom years was over, and it remained to be seen whether the youth of the day would save society, ruin it, or join it, just like their parents had. Next time on episode 10.3, unfriendly fire we research and discuss episode three of Victory Gundam and a truly terrible expository monologue, attack of the flying trousers. That is a thematically important baby fight, flight, or fawn. Hey, that's from f 91. You'd think they'd know better than to rely on the earth Federation. Shoot and scoot. Hang on, didn't we just see him die?
There is no continuity error so large that you can't solve it with the existence of body doubles, a new generation.
Of mobile suit martial arts. Surely this 30 year old children's cartoon will provide an escape from the unrelenting horror of current events. And I continue to fall for Marbete.
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 Dioxen. The closing music is long way home by spinning ratio. The recap music is slow by Lloyd Rogers. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the lenape people, and more in the show notes on our website, gundampodcast.com. If you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email hosts@gundampodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you would like to support the show, please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us financially@gundampodcast.com. Patreon. You can find links and more ways to help out@gundampodcast.com. Support thank you for listening. The Gundam fandom has been corrupted by wrong opinions, and the only way to purify ourselves is by exposing them to the light of day. For instance, did you know that hit the targets thinks Flanders the dog should be allowed to pilot the victory Gundam? Just because there's nothing in the manual explicitly saying that a dog can't be a war criminal. What an utterly depraved wrong opinion. Well, I can't do anything about that.
Right now, but that I'm not sure you can do anything about it, period. I don't think I've ever had that kind of fight with anyone.
I mean, I definitely have, but it was a long time ago.
I think I know what you're talking about.
You may or may not.
Oh, you little scamp, getting into so many difficult situations. You now I have a perverse desire to ruin the vibe.
My vibe. Don't kill my vibe.
You've thrown off the emperor's groove.
Off his groove.
I'm pretty sure I'm the one who showed you that movie. You are it's a great movie. It's a great movie. I'm really glad you showed it to me.
I think they blew it up.
Oh. So new side two?
Yeah, new and restored in 4k side two.
They tell him they were chased out of autocorrect.
Really up stuff for me here.
Largain. Largain.
I can't be expected to remember these things.
No, that's why I'm here.
Not the sirens.
They're going to love you up and turn you into a horny toad.
That would be preferable to messing with our recording.
Don't think it's an either or kind of situation.
I see the wookie warm up rocky.
The moncha warm up rocky. Rocky.
I can't quite do it.
Well, I can't do the proper spanish like tongue trilling one.
The rolling the arm in the back.
Of the throat one. There is no continuity error so large that it cannot be solved with the existence of identical twins. Wait, I've got a better one.
Gee, I wonder if this is a pattern.
Older generations continually pinning their hopes and disappointments on the generation or two after them.