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. Hello everyone. We are glad to be back. We are easing into our return from the brief hiatus by doing a q and a episode in honor of reaching the midway point of Victory Gundam. Thank you to everyone who sent us in questions. Lots of really interesting topics brought up, so it'll be a good discussion.
There are a few questions that I think we are going to skip because they really are more like research topics and questions for this kind of off the cup chat. Off the cup.
I was going to tell you to redo that.
Maybe they're not suited for this off the cuff Q and a episode, but we may revisit them in the future, so do not despair yet. You can despair later when we reach the end of the season and haven't had time for them. But let's dive into it. First off, a couple of people wrote in to ask very kindly after the health of Tigress the podcat, who is.
Obviously our real obsession at the moment, not Gundam.
It's become like a tradition at this point. Every time that we take some time off of the regular podcast production schedule in order to work on other projects or work on longer term podcast projects without fail, some kind of disaster happens in that first week that then eats up a huge portion of the time that we've allotted. And this time tigress got sick again. She had a, we think a little kitty cold or flu or something, and for about a week her health got real bad again and we were really worried about her, but she was able to pull through. The short answer is that she's a very old and really quite sick cat, but she's also getting a lot of care. She's on seven or eight different medications. We're giving her subcutaneous fluid injections twice a week. And between the ill health and all of the treatment, she's more or less stable and we hope will remain so for a long time to come.
Given all of her chronic health conditions, shes doing remarkably well.
Yeah, the vet comments on that every time she sees her. That for a cat whose numbers are as bad as tigresses, for a cat who is as sick as tigress, shes doing remarkably well.
Shes our little old lady and we love her.
But enough cat talk. Lets get back to Gundam.
Brayden, Kay, Daniel, JG, and Kirby all asked about Victory's reputation and our expectations for the show going in. Has victory lived up to the negative hype. Is it nigh unwatchable? As Tomino famously warned, why does it get so much hate now?
There's always the possibility that things are going to change radically in the second half of the show. So, you know, take this for what it is. This is the midway point of the series. Anina, going in, you were actually fairly well insulated against the general reputation of the show. You hadn't heard much about victory.
No, I had not heard that victory had such a negative reputation until right before we started it, which whenever I hear that, I always take it with a pretty big grain of salt, because often those reputations are being reported to me by people who haven't necessarily even seen the show, or if they have, they saw it a long time ago. And because of our approach to shows, often my opinions of them are very different. It's certainly not nigh unwatchable. I would never say that. I don't think it's going to come in as like a even top three favorite Gundam series at this point. There have been a lot of parts of it I've enjoyed very much, but it doesn't feel like a remarkable entry into the series or like it's adding something very new, different, insightful, interesting.
The last time we encountered this kind of a reputation was double Zeta, famously. And I think what made people bounce off of double Zeta the way they did is just that it was so different from expectations. And I think victory is different from what people would expect from Gundam going in. Most of the most. All of the beloved characters of previous Gundam are gone. The animation style is different. After more than a decade of increasing realism, increasing fidelity, increasing detail, they really turned those knobs back down to almost the minimum settings. The emphasis is different.
It's a much more aspirational main character than relatable one. The main character is also younger, and most of the english speaking fandom would have been exposed to victory when they were considerably older than UsO is, which also makes it less relatable.
I've talked to quite a few people who really like victory, who count victory among their favorite shows, but those people generally don't think much of the Zeta double Zeta chars counterattack era. I think it's just. It's very different. And if you loved that version of Gundam, if that's your idea of the ideal Tomino Gundam erade, then you're not going to think much of victory and vice versa.
I will say that in many ways, victory has actually been very similar to what I expected in that I did this background research about the anime industry, which eventually I'll finish that and write it up and it'll be in an episode. But changes to the anime industry around this time, changes to merchandising, the toy industry and so on. Japan's economic situation at the time, which I talked about early in the season. And so I was expecting something that felt a bit more commercially safe, perhaps that was targeted at a slightly different age range, that was trying to expand the fan base for the show, but to do so relatively cheaply if possible. So I wasn't expecting something sort of like iconoclastic, right? I'm expecting something fairly commercial still gundam. And so of course I hope they, because it's Gundam, do fun, interesting gundam things. But I wasn't expecting mind blowing animation. I wasn't expecting some really innovative story. This is more or less what I expected.
I have some more thoughts on why victory has the reputation it does, but I think those will come out as we answer some of these other questions. We got a few questions about animation art and character design. Solidsnack how do we feel about the limited animation and style for victory, and how has it affected our experiences and our opinions of the show? I think if the show didn't have the animation style that it does, I might expect it to be more adult, more serious, more grim, tonally, in the same way that previous iterations have been. The more cartoony style changes the stakes, changes the audience, changes the expectations. I think that very early scene of Uso brawling with Chronicle in the cockpit of the mobile suit while it like dips into the water and comes up again and they kick each other in the junk and people get thrown out of the cockpit and hang on by their fingertips. That wouldn't work in something that has the style of a 0083 because thats not really possible for a real human body. And the closer you get to real human bodies in the depictions, then the more limited the plausibility space.
Its hard for me to say because my memory is not great about such things. But a good point of comparison though might be double Zeta, which also had quite a lot of slapstick silly humorous. But was the animation in double Zeta as limited and the detail of the character design as limited as it is in victory?
No, although I think it was moving in that direction compared to Zeta, especially early on. But a lot of people complain about that more cartoony tone in the early episodes of Double Zeta than do about the same aspects of victory.
And I should clarify, a cartoony art style often is not more limited animation, those things are not the same thing. But once we start talking about the way that victory is animated, we also think about other aspects of that style, including the more slapstick, cartoony stuff. But the limited animation is a separate issue. I often find it rather clever. Sometimes it looks janky. Admittedly, sometimes the limited animation can look really janky. Sometimes they do quite clever things with it that I appreciate, or they use really beautiful painted stills that they pan over or zoom in and out of rather than animating a scene. I mean, the limited animation does mean that if I'm talking with someone about incredible animation that I've seen, I'm not going to think of victory and be like, oh, you have to watch victory. This one scene or this one sequence. Like, no, that doesn't happen. But I tend to be pretty able to take animated media as I find it and just sort of accept, like, okay, this was the kind of animation that they were working with, and then see what they do with the story from there. It also means when there are sequences that are animated with more detail or more fluidity, I really notice them. They stand out, and not in a way that makes me think worse of the rest of the show, just in a way where I go, wow, that looked really incredible. That looked really cool.
To solid Snack's point specifically about the limited animation, we know that victory did, in fact, use fewer frames than other Gundam shows were allowed to use, though I understand from comments by the animators that that rule was maybe more honored in the breach. But it's important to remember that the previous Gundam shows, at least the ones that were on tv, also used really limited animation. Sometimes they disguised it a bit better. Often what they did was have a very detailed drawing that they then panned across and didn't move very much. So I don't know that victory really gives the impression of having more limited animation than its predecessors, except in the effects. They really took a lot of shortcuts in the effects and in the coloring, and that does come through pretty clearly. And there are probably more moments where you sort of notice, like, oh, that doesn't. That doesn't look quite right. They didn't. Did they just slide the cell across the page or, ooh, they're reusing that one image of those three guys running past the window over and over again. So it looks like the league militaire is mostly made up of clones. There are more of those.
It's also very likely, and this may also contribute to the poor reputation of the show, but our expectations of animation from the early nineties are very different than our expectations of animation from the late seventies or mid eighties. We expect it to look significantly better than the old shows, and it doesn't really, although the why of that, I actually think, comes down to our next question, which is from Mark. The character design for Victory Gundam seems like a bit of a departure from the realistic feel pioneered by Yas and his followers. How do we like it? As with the more limited animation, I am usually not bothered by it. There are moments, and I often grab funny screenshots of these moments when the lack of detail on the characters makes them look really flat, makes them look like very cartoony caricature type characters. And again, often when they choose to add more detail and it's to a face or a figure, I'm suddenly like, wow, that looks incredible. And at those moments, I sort of wish they could do that.
The whole time you sort of touched on this. But there's so much variation in the way individual animators draw different characters for different scenes that it's hard to say, oh, I really like the depictions of characters in victory, and those depictions are less realistic. So I must like when it's less realistic, because often I think they look their best when the animator has really sort of taken extra efforts to make them look especially detailed in a particular cut. I notice the lack of detailing, the more simplified forms, much more so and much more consistently with the mobile suits than I do with the characters. And so this is outside of Yas's realm, although I know he did play actually a big role in the designs of the mobile suits for first gundam that did eventually make their way on the screen. But the mobile suits in victory have, I think, some good ideas underpinning them. But for the most part, I find the execution really lackluster.
There just haven't been that many that I've looked at and gone, wow, that is so cool.
And without the shadowing, without the level of detail, something like the Zoluat, which I think is a pretty interesting looking mobile suit, but ultimately it just kind of ends up being an orangish blob. Ditto the Zolo predecessor. The thomleyad is almost exactly the same thing, but kind of a pinkish blob. It's not that there aren't interesting designs. I think the shaco is great. You love the sandhoge, the abagor is nice.
I find the sandhos very interesting, and I love finally getting to see a mobile suit that's not a humanoid. But the more I saw of it, the less enthralled. I was. I don't think it's as cool as the shako.
And I think the. I think the gun easy looks great, although it could probably look better with a bit more, you know, just zhuzh it up a little bit. The James gun, on the other hand, is, again, just like a gray blob. We don't see a ton of it, and that's fine, because there's not much there to see, of course. The Gwigsy is amazing. Love a gwigsy. Love the smaller scale, petite mobile suits. Love seeing them stacked up against the full sized mobile suits. I realize now we've sort of moved off of character and into one of Marques's other questions, which is, please talk about the mobile suits some more and the mecca. What are your favorites? What do you particularly like? And as I've said, I love the Gwigsy.
We both quite like the shackle. I like a lot of the design elements of the Tamliat line. I love the idea of a mobile suit that's part helicopter or can transform into a helicopter and back. And then can you use the helicopter rotor like a weapon? That's some top notch mobile suit tech innovation right there. The new seat belts.
I think they call them air belts.
You all know how obsessed I am with mobile suit safety.
I think the air belts are terrible. I think they look bad. I don't think they would function very well. The body would still get thrown all over the place. You'd still get traumatic brain injuries.
I mean, it's nothing. A five point harness, right? But it's something new and interesting. It does that thing where it, like, expands up your chest if you get thrown forward, so it supports you and keeps you, at least from doing too much front back movement. Doesn't do much of anything about side to side.
And they must be effective, because we haven't actually seen anyone get their face smashed into the controls yet. A thing that happened all of the time in the Zeta double Zeta eradic, even though those pilots theoretically had, like, clips attaching their suits to their chairs. I love a lot of the non mobile suit tech that we've seen in this. The Camion, those big transport planes, the shuttles. But that's kind of going to another point that answers a different question that we'll just have to come back to later. So put a pin in that one. What do you think about the bikes? All the bike mobile suits, those bike battleships that got shown in that little presentation.
An idea in search of a show.
That'S a good way to put it.
If they were going to stay on earth the whole time. Super love it. If they were going to be planetside somewhere with solid ground, potentially very interesting. Imagine somebody trying to use those on the moon.
Yeah, or Mars.
But now we're in space, and they are an irrelevance.
Imagine Duke or eek ramping off the. What's that giant volcano on Mars? Mons Olympus?
I don't remember.
With the low gravity and the extremely tall mountain to ramp off of, you could probably make it to orbit.
That felt very much like an idea they kind of threw out there, hoping it would take, and then it didn't, and they decided to forget about it. While I don't remember super clearly, I was pretty young at this point in time, though I was alive, I did exist. I feel like motocross was big in the nineties, and so it may have been an attempt to kind of hitch Gundam's wagon to the motocross extreme sports biking enthusiasm, and it just didn't quite work. So as machines, super cool, fun, neat idea. A silly thing to put in this show.
I need to make you watch Venus wars. That's what I need to do.
I don't remember anything about it, but I recall a show called Biker Mice from Mars.
Let's move on. Pilgrim asks, victory uses character death as a storytelling element more than previous gundams have. Do you think that it may be too excessive in the sense that it may weaken the reaction to core character deaths in the future? Also, what character do you feel has the most red flags going forward from this point? I mean, connie doesn't stand a chance, right? The last surviving shrike regular soldier, she is living on borrowed time, and the interest rate for that loan is downright egregious, like 25% ApR.
Agreed. I think victories real problem here is a character sprawl problem. Like, the cast is too big, and so it's hard for them to give us enough about these characters to make us really, really care about them. There are a lot of shows where it feels like they use character death as a sort of cheap and manipulative tactic to drag some emotion out of the viewer. But I've certainly read books where it feels like one important character after another just dies. Just death, death, death, death. And it's still impactful in that context because of how it's been set up or how it's used in the story. So a story can have a lot of characters die in quick succession and not have that be quote unquote excessive. It just comes down to our reaction to it. And in victory's case, it is excessive, because only some of them make me feel anything. And if you're going to kill off main characters, villains or heroes, good guys, bad guys, bystanders, if you're going to spend episode time on it, you're advancing the plot or you're trying to make us something, I imagine. And if I'm not feeling that thing, that gambit has failed.
I think you can do a story where life is cheap, and I think you can do a story where life is precious. And it's really hard to do both of those at the same time. And that's what victory is trying to do.
That's a really good way of putting it.
Now, there may in fact be. I'm going to give them the utmost credit. There is a tension between our tendency as the audience to view these lives as disposable, immaterial, to see the deaths coming one after another, and to harden ourselves against them. And then to contrast that with Uso, who stubbornly refuses to get used to it. And in that contrast, in the tension between those two different feelings, maybe the show is saying something. Maybe the show is saying that life is both cheap and precious, that war makes these deaths inevitable, and that doesn't lessen the tragedy of it. Maybe.
Or that one of the evils of adults and adulthood is that people desensitize themselves to these things, that we don't feel them as deeply as children feel them, and that maybe that's part of the problem.
Going back to the subject of death flags, I feel like Duker eek less obviously so, but my man here designed a bunch of his own machines, and he is obsessed with the act of riding them. So he's like, definitely going to get vaporized while biking and then not even be mad about it. He's gonna do that whole Ramba Rawl I'll show you how a soldier dies thing, but it'll be about the last ride of the biker.
Were they calling motorcyclists organ donors at this point? Because it's a common joke in the US about motorcyclists, that it's a very dangerous form of transportation compared to others.
I don't know how common that joke is. I think you just know it because you ride motorcycles, or used to.
I remember hearing it from non motorcyclists, mostly in the medical profession. A lot of people asked us about the music. Chris H. Solid Snack and Kahneman 123 all asked about Victory's orchestral style soundtrack, its use in the show, and how we felt it compared to those in prior Gundam shows. Were there scenes that stood out to us specifically because of the music? No. Well, I'll expand on that.
You should just leave it at that. No, moving on.
In preparation for this, Tom put the soundtrack on in the apartment while we were doing other things. And what struck me is that it's quite lovely music. It's really nice, but it's used very subtly in the show. And there aren't any tracks among that orchestral soundtrack. That really stood out to me. That really popped, that really grabbed my attention away from what was on the screen, what I was seeing and to what I was hearing. Generally, when the music stood out to me, it was because of other things the show was doing. Like, there was a recent sequence with no dialogue that was just a series of establishing shots around the colony, I believe, the Zanskar capital. And because of the lack of action and lack of dialogue, suddenly I really noticed the music. Obviously, the lullaby type song that Shakti sings really stands out. The orchestral music is good and never distracting, which some people would say is optimal.
Yeah, and it's very consistent. There's no tracks that really stand out. Like, wow, this is something different. You know, there were bits in the Zeta and double Zeta soundtracks, especially when it got a little more electronic and synthesizer heavy. That really stood out from the general symphonic qualities of the rest of it. And victory doesn't have those. When the victory soundtrack has stood out for me, it has been in scenes where it's felt like the mood of the music and the mood of what is being shown on the screen differ. I think it was in the Barcelona episode. There's a battle, but instead of playing the battle music, they play this just like really sad, mournful music. And that stood out in a big way for me.
That's true. They introduced some good tonal shifts in the Barcelona one. I think a lot of that had to do with the old man and how he thought Uso was his son or grandson who had already died in this war or some previous one. It's a mystery. So it's really hammering home that sense of futility that we just keep doing this. And then the battle music has some portions that I find very anxiety inducing. Like, there's something about the way that music is composed that makes me feel anxious, that heightens the tension in a way that's very suitable for that kind of scene. Although that part of the music doesn't always coincide with the most tense moments.
Overall, the soundtrack feels kind of pastoral. It reminds me of Vivaldi's four seasons in a bunch of places. More than it feels like what I would expect from a mecha show. Certainly it lacks the sense of bombast and grand tragedy of the zeta and double Zeta era soundtracks. It doesn't have anything that quite stands out to me with the brilliance of some of the chars counterattack songs. But I do like it. I like it a lot. What kept coming back to me though is this sense that it doesn't really feel like a mecha show soundtrack. Like the main battle music act of war, I think is the name of the track. The rhythm of it feels like it's meant to score a cavalry charge, not a mobile suit battle.
When we were listening to some other classical music to sort of see what felt similar to the victory soundtrack, we kept coming back to very lyrical music. Peter and the wolf, Sleeping beauty, Swan Lake. Music that is meant to tell a story, the kind of thing that we associate with operas and ballets and orchestral music can feel more Sci-Fi remember? Gosh, which Gundam was it that Tomino said he wanted the soundtrack to be like Star wars and Lawrence of Arabia?
That was Formula 91, both of which.
Also have that grand orchestration, but dont necessarily, I think, have that same lyric sense, lyric in music or dance, meaning that it is telling a story more specifically.
Sonomon 123 asked something I've noticed on this watch through a victory is that it feels like they used the music more often than previous shows did, with moments that might have had the music fade out eventually are instead being fully scored. Is this something that y'all have noticed as well? Am I crazy? And I'm mmm. It's not something I've noticed. I believe it.
I hadn't noticed it either. Although if that is the case, I wonder if it's not related to the limited animation in that if you're trying to save money by animating less, you might also try to save money by using fewer sound effects. And if you can fill in the audio space with music instead, music that you only had to have the orchestra record the one time, and then you can just keep using those tracks, it might fill in places which might otherwise feel weirdly quiet without sufficient sound effects work or dialogue.
And, you know, we did notice that one episode where they had, like, really obviously written the dialogue so that Oliver's voice actor wouldn't have to come in that day. So it's possible that the music is being used here to give a sense of energy and motion to scenes that otherwise wouldn't have it scenes where the animation is extremely limited or non existent.
A couple of people asked specifically about the opening and ending songs. Wu Jin at the beginning of the season, I believe both Nina and Tom mentioned that the op and ed songs for Victory are pretty mid. Have you revised your opinion now that you've been listening to them multiple times a week? And how do you rank the songs you've listened to so far over the past few seasons? I do like the songs better than I did initially. They're catchy. They're well done enough that after listening to them repeatedly, I sing along to snatches of the music. They're still not favorites of mine, but they're not bad.
Yeah, they're. Well, I suppose this is actually exactly what we said at the beginning. They're middle, they're not favorites, they're not terrible. They're perfectly serviceable in their role. They have some catchy moments. They're fine. They're fine. They're all just fine. In terms of how I would rank the ops and eds that we've heard.
So far, that's getting to be a lot of songs.
It is, it is. And we. Because we were watching the official western release of Zeta, we didn't actually get those songs, which I have listened to otherwise and really like and might rank very highly in my listen.
To be fair to Wu Jin, they do say over the past few seasons. So we could probably confine ourselves to seasons six or seven to ten.
But that's a lot of St. Gundam, which generally doesn't have openings, and f 91, which didn't have an opening, and.
Cheating a little bit compared to recent seasons. Victory's music is great.
I think season.
You still think?
I think season six brings 0080 into the list. And I really like the opening for 0080.
Was it the ending of 0080? The ed for 0080 that I didn't like that much?
The one I was singing earlier?
It's fine.
That was the op. Okay, hang on. Let's do an apples for apples comparison. Victory's opening versus zero zero eight three's opening.
I would need to listen. Memory just real bad, y'all. Just real, real bad.
Two minutes later.
Okay. As youths like ten years ago would have said, the op for 0083 slaps.
It's an all time banger.
Definitely better than victories.
Sorry, victory, you're going up against some really serious competition here.
And that's just my personal taste in music. That's not really a comment on the quality of the song. It's just that zero zero eight three's opening is closer to the kind of music I like anyway than victory's is. Chris H. Facetiously asks, how many times do you recall standing up to the victory from your preferred seating apparatus during the watch along? And the answer to that is no. Never. Unless I realized I had left my.
Pen in the office, I always forget something. So basically, every time we watch an episode, I'm standing up to the victory at least once. Gotta go get my notebook, my glass of water, my pen snaps my glasses.
And Mark S. Asks, speaking of music, since the ending theme was originally written for a Kamen Rider sequel, I didn't know that. It seems japanese fans have created mock Kamen Rider za o openings using the song. I might ask whether y'all think winners forever would work better for the cricket themed superheroes tearing down the highway on motorbikes.
Unquestionably, yes, it would. I have seen people make quite a lot of hey out of the tonal distance between victory as a show and the feeling the vibe of the ending music.
Oh, this is actually bringing up for me. I like winners forever better than the ending music from 0083.
I think winners Forever could be an opening song. It doesn't have to be an ed like personal opinion. I, in general, don't think much of the ending songs that we've listened to in Gundam so far. Even going back to first Gundam, I don't think Amuro Forever is even a patch on Fly Gundam. So winners Forever probably ranks as a top tier ending song. Maybe the best one we've encountered so far. But that's because it isn't really an ending song. It would work just as well as an opening song. The situation reminds me a little bit of beyond the time. The ending theme of Char's counterattack, which, as I understand it, was not like written with the events of the movie in mind, was not written with an understanding of the characters and what was going to happen. And yet, it's so perfect for the movie, and I think is very important to understanding the characters and their motivations and their emotions in that final moment. So a thing doesn't need to be written for a show to be perfect for it. Sometimes that's a matter of selection. Sometimes that's a matter of the way all of the different pieces work together to combine to create a meaning that was not intended by the people making the show in the first place. Does winners forever do that for victory? I don't know. I don't think so. But it's fine. It works alright.
I actually think it's really funny that we happened to discuss 0083 right before this, because I think winners Forever bears a much stronger resemblance to that opening track from 0083 than it does to most of the other Victory Gundam music. In a way, the victory opening feels very sort of appropriate to the age of the main characters. Something about the peppiness and optimism of it feels like, yeah, that's right, for someone Uso's age, whereas winners forever diverges from that. And since I believe most Kamen rider characters are at least older teens, if not adults, then yeah, probably winners forever would work better for Kamen Rider.
That's an interesting take on it. Yeah. I had tended to think of winners forever as maybe not being from Uso's perspective, in the same way that when you watch double Zeta, for instance, silent voice doesn't feel like it's coming from judo's perspective. Silent voice is Haman's song then that maybe winners forever is meant to be chronicles or marbets. I haven't gone into it enough to be able to say who I think it belongs to, but I'm leaving open the possibility that it might really properly belong to one of the other characters. Moving on from music, Stephen Bee asked one honestly kinda heavy handed aspect of the show is the hypocrisy of Zanskar. All the time they're saying one thing and doing another. In a sense, it is a good fit for Katagina to join them. But is this thematic? Does the show want to say something about people who lie to themselves, or is it just a handy way to write good villains?
I actually don't find Danskar that exaggerated at all. I think most fascistic, tyrannical colonizing governments do that. It's very much in keeping with some of the historical events that they are trying to evoke on whether or not it's thematic, I would say yes. To me, one of the big themes feels like people's lack of self knowledge and the ways that people lie to themselves or justify themselves without truly understanding why they do what they do. And so for Katagina to have said these things, but then to change her mind because she's fallen in love with this soldier, and then to create some justifications and then quickly move on from them and act as if the justifications are not needed, feels very in keeping with her as a character, as a young woman in a Tobino show, and as a young adult trying to figure out where they fit in a world that has changed substantially from the one they probably thought they would be living in.
Yeah, every nation, every large organization is going to operate within a particular ideology, but then it's also going to be subject to the material logic of what it needs to do in order to perpetuate itself. And there's always going to be a big gap between what that ideology says they ought to do and what that logic says they must do. Rather than a specific criticism of Zanskar as a singular institution, I think this is a warning not to believe the ideology of any big organization, just like the PCST compromising its neutrality in various ways in the face of necessity, or the federation abandoning its duty and leaving the people of UIG to be massacred.
Im sure ive mentioned this before, but one really revelatory bit of one of my marketing classes in business school for me was the professor talking about how most people dont actually know why they make the decisions they make in society. We are generally supposed to be able to justify ourselves, but you know, generally speaking, those are ex post facto rationalizations, those are explanations we come up with after the fact. And he was talking very much in the context of consumer behavior, why people buy a thing or don't buy a thing, or why they bought that many of the thing. But in general, I think it's probably true for most human behavior. We often don't think about our decisions that much before we make them and then explain ourselves after the fact. If someone puts us in a position where we have to. And I don't think this just makes for good villains, it can also make for more complex protagonists and good guys, characters with more depth generally.
I mean, just for an example of this on the other side, look at what the league militaire is doing. Where did they start out? What were their actual intentions? While they've never been particularly overt about what they're trying to do, we start out with this small group of people tooling around Europe with a couple of trucks and a couple of mobile suits, just trying to survive and resist Zanskar. And now they're raiding the Zanskar homeland. That's not very consistent with the motives of their organization as we understood them from the beginning. But one thing led to another. They had to do this. They had to go into space in order to stop Tesla wago from using that giant cannon to blast the earth. And then they had to protect their friends in the side two alliance. And then there's Jinjahanam giving orders. But he's not the real jinjahanam. Like, there's a hypocrisy there too, but we're all hypocrites to one degree or another.
I'm not sure any human being is capable to fully living up to their own lofty standards.
And I think a big part of this is just that in talking about ideology, in talking about what behavior is right or wrong in a vacuum we really find it quite impossible to express in language all the nuances of the situations we encounter. Like we don't have a satisfactory explanation for the trolley problem. That's why we keep asking it. That's why we keep doing all these different variations on it. Ethics is nothing, something that is susceptible to easy, consistent answers.
And we can never fully anticipate the results of any action we take. And we can't try. Nobody could live life trying to anticipate every possible results of every little, seemingly innocuous action.
But let's move on. Tom B. Wrote in asking about our opinions on the context that this extended period of interaction with the world of Zanskar has added to the narrative. And I think it's great. I have always wanted to know more about what life was like for the average citizens. And so now to see Zanskar, to see the way people live within the colonies, to see this creeping militarism, these parades down the streets of middle schoolers in uniforms with guns, taxi drivers telling every little kid they meet that they.
Ought to enlist the heavy handed police.
Crackdowns, the deprivations and this magical healing ritual that the queen performs.
The depiction of Zanskar is so evocative. And one of the key differences to some of the older Gundam shows with Zeon, there was this argument that they did not have a level of sovereignty that was appropriate to their homeland, that they were sort of stuck under the thumb of the federation and not being listened to and in some ways, being actively cheated by this ruling government and that that's why they needed to fight back. But Zanskar never tries to argue that they're being mistreated. They're never trying to argue. And so you can't help but wonder, okay, how does the public of Zanskar feel about this? How do they feel about the loss of so many of their young people to war? The devotion of so many resources to the war when it's not even like we're being mistreated and we're fighting for freedom. It's like, oh, no, we're fighting to subjugate a whole bunch of other people to our way of life. But once you see that healing ceremony, it's like, oh, okay. That's how they've convinced everyone to get on board. That's how they've convinced everybody to have this, like, bloodlust for the enemy. Because anybody who threatens this miraculous thing, and if you can make Maria Armonia's power, her miraculous healing, synonymous with the state itself and the state's mission of expansion, then suddenly anyone who opposes them, anyone who opposes Zanskar's expansion, is in fact a threat to this miraculous power and has to be stopped.
Basically every Tomino show that we've watched has been about a road trip. A whole group of friends crowded into a ship, traveling around the earth sphere, having brief adventures in a bunch of different locales. Previous shows have really been about the ship, the dynamic on it, the white base, the argima, the Nier argument and the people aboard it and their relationships. Victory, not so much. There's very little going on on the lean horse. Junior USo is rarely there. Dzanskar is one of the first times when it's really felt like the show is settling in and showing us something, giving a sense of personality and life. For characters who have spent most of the last 20 some odd episodes bouncing from crisis to crisis, they finally get a chance to breathe. And the air that theyre breathing in is this noxious mix of fascism and religious zealotry. Its good. Its real good.
Mark S asks, since Youve followed Tobino through 15 real world years of developing the Gundam storyline, what kind of changes do you see in his creative approach? Weve had a lot of gender talk, but maybe not as much about new types, life in space and on earth, views of politics and ideology, attitudes about family, even technical stuff like pacing, editing or cinematography.
Now, this is a long list of things, but Marc has helpfully said that we could pick and choose. I think he seems bored. I think he seems bored with Gundam, bored with new types, bored with mecha, maybe even bored with space.
Yeah, I was thinking that victory is much less. I don't know if this is quite the word that I want, but metaphorical than a lot of previous Gundam shows. There is the shorthand in the fandom for Tomino dialogue, which often feels as if it's trying to convey something deep or abstracted. It's not meant to be naturalistic. There's also some very naturalistic dialogue, but Tomo no inserts these other sections where he's not concerned with having it sound like normal people talking. That is not what it's for. And there's been a lot less of that in victory, which could tie into that sense of boredom you described. He went into victory not really having something he wanted to say. They just made him make another Gundam, and so he's making another Gundam, but there isn't as much sort of oblique messaging. One thing that struck me in victory as being new, not completely new, but conveyed more strongly in victory is that at least while we were on Earth, there were multiple scenes that emphasized how destructive war is for the planet, regardless of who's doing it right. Just as much damage gets caused by people defending themselves as by the aggressor and this sense of the earth as maybe the only truly innocent bystander.
Hmm.
Who is harmed no matter what.
Yeah. Back in Zeta. To do a direct comparison, the most overtly environmental message in Zeta, I think, is when Camille and Quattro are infiltrating the Titans base at Mount Kilimanjaro, and there's a stream leaving the base. It's like a sewage stream or outflow or something, and there's a ton of trash in it. And they talk about the trash and the pollution and the effect on the environment. Victory here obviously takes a different attitude. And like you said, victory presents the earth as the ultimate victim of war. And I think Tomino at this point is much more interested in the earth than he is in space. That comes through in just the plotting out of the story. Like most gundams have started in space, made a brief detour to Earth, and then returned to space again. Here we've started on Earth. We spent a lot of time there in natural environments, in really beautifully drawn forests, in that grove of lilac trees that got so horribly destroyed when Uso went off on his own. It's just been. Yeah, it's been a show much more focused on the earth, on soil, on growing things and the colonies. The space element of it has all been kind of an afterthought. The mobile suits feel a little paint by the numbers, a little uninspired. The soundtrack, like I said, doesn't sound like a mecha show. It sounds like a more pastoral show. It sounds like a different kind of show that Tomino would much rather be making. Instead, the few times that there have been references to new types or to, you know, or where the new type flash has appeared have felt kind of.
Shoehorned in just references to how Uso could be a new type. I do think that his depictions of and ideas around motherhood are evolving and perhaps becoming more complex. Likely as he hits an age where he has tween and teen daughters and his own wife is contending with, like, as your children grow up and need you less like, what are you doing with your time? Because while a lot of it is going to depend on what happens in the back half of the show, Uso's mother having left in order to perhaps protect her and her husband's identities as members of the League militaire and also to assist the league military's efforts, is not presented as this, like, uniform abandonment, as in the way that it probably would be in an earlier Gundam show. It's presented as a more complex decision and contrasted with the fact that USo is obviously very competent and pretty capable of taking care of himself and that he has been able to find all of these other mentor figures and parental figures around him, that there are people who can offer him advice and counsel outside of that nuclear family sphere, and that that's not a bad thing. That's not a lesser version. It's just different. Plus the fact that Maria Armonia's position as Shakti's mother is so weird, so contentious.
Yeah, Maria insists personally, she says there is this special and unique bond that a mother has with her child created simply by the biological act of giving birth. Shakhti and the show kind of push back against that. And they say, no, mother is a verb. Mothering is a thing you do. Mother is a role you occupy, not merely a status that you have. That I think is an evolution out of Tomino's previous criticisms of the working mother, the person who has the status of mother and yet fails to fully embrace the role, the verb of mothering. And so this is maybe another Layer Onto that, an evolution of that idea that you can be a good mother without giving birth to the child. ShAktI's mother in Kasarelia, we've never met her, but we have every reason to believe she was a good mother to Shakti.
Look at Shakti's care of Carmen.
Exactly. And that it's not necessarily. Certainly, Shakti has feelings about this, but it's not necessarily a bad thing for a person who has given birth to cede the job of mothering to somebody else. They may not be suited to it, they may be called to other things, but then they should not continue to insist on the rights and privileges of motherhood if they have chosen to abrogate the responsibilities.
And an adoptive mother who wants to be a mother and is attentive is better than a biological mother who has no interest in that role. We don't get a ton of information about Katagina's mother, but the general vibe is that she was not interested in family life, that she was generally indifferent to Katagina, possibly neglectful. Tomino, of course, is tied up in infidelity in a way that, like, it's clearly a bit of a bugbear of his that I don't want to open that particular can of worms. But Shakti certainly has many more negative feelings about the sort of abandonment and then picking up again by her biomom than she does about the fact that she was adopted or fostered or whatever informal arrangements were made. She's not, like, upset at her adoptive parents over this. She's not ranting about, how could they not tell me? They denied me my true identity or my heritage. No, she's mad at Maria Harmonia or not even mad. She's too stunned still by everything that's happening to be really mad.
I think, for Shakti, a lot of it is. Why do you insist on coming back into my life?
Well, why do you insist on uprooting me? A word which I chose very specifically.
Because Shakti's all, like, plants and stuff.
She's very earth mother.
She got that willow herb in her.
One thing that I think is held fairly constant before we move on is Tomino's distrust of ideology of any kind and a sense that ultimately, what people fight for is not an ideology, but is their life, their livelihood, the people they care about, that, that is what drives us, that desire to protect what we love or to get back what we love if it's been lost or taken.
Well, I think to push back a little bit on that, there are people who fight not for ideology, but also not for personal reasons. There are people who fight for those grander things, people like Franz Cogiti, for instance, who engage in this kind of realpolitik, where he directs the armies of Zanskar for the aggrandizement of the state of Zanskar. Tomino creates these three classes of Yagiran zabis who are using ideology as a.
Shield for their own maneuvers, a tool to manipulate others.
Then you get your sort of charismatic.
Figureheads, the true believers.
They may or may not be true believers, though I think they tend to be, but they surround themselves with true believers. This is shar in shars counterattack. This is Maria in Zanskar. Both of those categories are bad.
Yeah, I guess I misspoke. It's not that people don't fight for those things, but that those are pretty universally in Gundam, conveyed to be wicked, evil, bad reasons that even the true believers are horribly dangerous and nobody should trust them.
And I've mostly focused on the people, on the villain side, because that's where Gundam has mostly focused its attention. But in double Zeta, when you get all of those federation high officials chilling at that villa outside of Dublin, and they're talking about how Haman killing a bunch of people on earth will just make it easier for them to distribute resources in an efficient way, that conversation that gets overheard at the airport about how the deaths of all these people will just make it easier to feed the remaining people, that is the same thing. That is the federation version of it.
Even somewhat less directly in Victory Gundam, with discussions about how the various fights and factions are playing out, and this sense from smaller factions like the league militaire or the side two alliance, that if the federation would just commit to helping them, this could be finished quickly. But the federation, despite its theoretical purpose of maintaining peace and stability throughout the earth sphere, is sitting on the fence and not getting involved in this particular fight until it decides, okay, this is starting to threaten the whole enterprise. Time for us to step in.
Yeah, I mean, you want to talk about hypocrisy in these big nations. The federation is a prime example, because those guys behind the scenes making the numbers dance and dispensing with tens of thousands or millions of lives as mere accounting errors, those guys are also hiding behind a shield of ideology. It's just their shield of ideology is democracy, internationalism, the ideology of the UN, the ideology of the Earth Federation. It is still the raw, brutish needs of the nation state dressed up in the fancy clothing of ideology, just like Zeon was.
Or it's a lot of high ideals and beautiful language that's been neutered and prevented from doing much of anything. One of the big research projects this season is to talk more about some of the wars that were going on at the time of victory that we think influenced victory's creation. But the federation's role in the conflict in victory feels like it's definitely connected to UN peacekeeping forces involvement and potentially NATO involvement in some of these big conflicts in the nineties. First, we were afraid we would have not enough questions to talk about. Now we have too many. And if there's one thing that Tom and I struggle with, it's a being succinct. So we are going to break here and put the rest of our answers in next week's Q and a part two.
I think I would add that in addition to having trouble being succinct, we also have a tendency to just kind of riff off what the other person is saying, which can take us down some very interesting other avenues to discuss all kinds of things. 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@gundampodcast.com. you can find links and more ways to help out@gundampodcast.com. support thank you for listening.
Not one of my favorites. One of your favorites?
Really? Oh, hmm. Interesting.
Well, at the time, I never remember.
No, no, no. I don't remember you saying anything about it, particularly at all. But I really like it. So when I like something and you don't, obviously that's an issue, right?
That is obviously an existential terror.
One of us is wrong. One of us is wrong. She likes the same bands I like. We're destined to be together.
Take all your natural opinions and make them three times as intense. At least.
That's just being a content creator. That's the secret to making money on YouTube.
Which of course we love to hear. We love to get a gold star. A exceeds expectations from the vet I'm.
Holding out hope for. Wow. I have never seen a cat recover like this before. She's getting increasingly demanding about the things that she wants, which are always either food or cuddles.
But not just Annie Cuddles. You have to sit in the precise spot on the couch that is her favorite, and you have to sit in the exact way that she likes you to sit, which makes your lap optimally comfortable.
She's big on manners. You have to sit exactly properly with your legs, feet on the floor, knees together, forming the perfect lap for her.
That's the part we can cut then, which is good. Since this is getting long.
I was actually thinking this might become two episodes.