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GimmickMan posted:My problem with mecha is that sometimes it fetishizes technology in a way that is almost spiritual, as if all we had to do is put our faith in technology progressing fast enough that it will somehow solve all of the world's problems. World hunger? Global warming? AIDS? Just throw enough nanobots at things and everything will solve itself! No, we don't need social reforms everything is fine just the way it is now let me tell you about the singularity. Contrast this to something like Captain Planet in which technology is unquestionably evil and it is only magic that can save humanity, although I guess this gets you into Sufficiently Advanced territory if you ride it far enough.
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Sep 28, 2015 23:37
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it's why i like the robots in eureka 7. they are on a fundamental level intended for communication but are perverted to suit the militaristic ends of a world-spanning fascist government that hides The Truth from people. and like most of the robots that exist in that world are for doing sports instead of shooting. oh and up until the last episode where there are some very necessary deaths, the main character robot's mid season upgrade is something that controls the force of love and understanding and turns it into an anti-death ray. contrast this with holland, who gets a robot upgrade that makes him better at fighting but at the cost of his body holding together
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Sep 28, 2015 23:42
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Gyra_Solune posted:pretty much this yeah The giant robot as a surrogate for a superhero is one that resonates with me, I think. Giant robots allow a narrative that has its cake and eats it too; a giant robot pilot gains a larger than life ability to influence events and make a difference that a superhero has while still remaining a squishy frail meatsack of a human being with all the potential flaws, drama, and pitfalls of being one. Superman and Kouji Kabuto are the same fundamental character concept: orphans endowed by their lineage with enormous nigh-unlimited power to use as they wish. The difference is that Clark Kent is an invincible alien with the powers of a god at all times, whereas Kouji stripped of Mazinger is a dumb angry human teenager who is trying his best to do what he thinks is right. Heroes like Batman and Iron Man are outrageously popular in large part due to the fact that lots of people find it easier to identify with a "normal" person than someone who has magic superpowers, but still want that "normal" person to have the power to change the world(in the case of both these characters that power is hypercompetence and infinite money).
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Sep 29, 2015 00:58
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I kinda like the incredibly grey morality presented in Cannon God Exaxxion. The protagonist is sort of just rolling with the punches and following orders, even thought he doesn't agree with them, but they are kind of the only option at that moment so he kinda has to most of the time. The inventor of the robot giving him the orders is literally telling him that yeah we're gonna save the world, and while doing so, loving take it over and become god king of Earth. Get in the robot, shoot the loving gun. Even the enemy aliens have a bunch of civilian innocents not related to the conspiracy they are fighting and they just do the poo poo they gotta do regardless of how many of them / innocent earthlings they end up taking out in the process. But they do acknowledge and sometimes struggle with the fact that it's happening.
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Sep 29, 2015 01:04
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Definitely relevant to this conversation is Space Runaway Ideon, which is loving brutal in its depiction of the deaths of innocent bystanders as a result of the conflicts that the space ships and one gigantic robot bring upon everything around them. It'd interesting to posit a world where Ideon was the huge success, rather than Gundam, and therefore shows like Evangelion were the norm, rather than the exception...
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Sep 29, 2015 04:23
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Toph Bei Fong posted:Definitely relevant to this conversation is Space Runaway Ideon, which is loving brutal in its depiction of the deaths of innocent bystanders as a result of the conflicts that the space ships and one gigantic robot bring upon everything around them. Ideon is particularly interesting in the context of spiritual mecha, like GimmickMan mentioned earlier: GimmickMan posted:My problem with mecha is that sometimes it fetishizes technology in a way that is almost spiritual, as if all we had to do is put our faith in technology progressing fast enough that it will somehow solve all of the world's problems. Ideon is basically the epitome of the concept, as it is literally a spiritual machine--and the show repeatedly emphasizes how that is a horrible thing. The Ideon (or, at least, the power animating the Ideon) actually does manage to solve all of humanities problems. It's not a solution you'd want.
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Sep 29, 2015 04:59
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The universal quantifier subs can't come out fast enough.
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Sep 29, 2015 05:00
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Schwarzwald posted:Ideon is particularly interesting in the context of spiritual mecha, like GimmickMan mentioned earlier: Buff Clan too! Everybody's wagon was fixed but good. Be Invoked is actually a pretty uplifting movie, especially compared to the series where there's always this pervasive aura of doom surrounding everything. The Solo Ship's always running, but there's no escape, no hope, nothing. Every end is met with calamity and disaster. The White Base civilians were at least allowed off, eventually. It's a one way ride if you happened to have the misfortune of being born human in the TV show. Sure Be Invoked had a small child get her head blown off by a bazooka, but the ending actually was a lovely and beautiful celebration.
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Sep 29, 2015 05:10
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Midjack posted:Contrast this to something like Captain Planet in which technology is unquestionably evil and it is only magic that can save humanity, although I guess this gets you into Sufficiently Advanced territory if you ride it far enough. Scientists can't catch a break. They're either trying to pollute the earth for the sake of blind evil, or trying to perpetuate some grand conspiracy in the media about climate change for the sake of some other blind evil. #BlightWasRight
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Sep 29, 2015 08:44
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Takahashi and anti-war messages are interesting to me, because personally I don't believe the man is a pacifist. Bear with me here. There's a type of character in Takahashi's work that I call the Doomed Idealist. He sees a world that is fundamentally broken and corrupt, whose continued existence only brings sorrow and misery to his people. The Doomed Idealist is not into it for glory or wealth, but for the salvation of his own, and he chooses war as the means to do so. He is not blind to the costs his chosen method will make his own people pay, but he believes there simply is no other alternative, and rejects the possibility of a peaceful way out. You see this in Dougram when Samalin rebukes Rick: "You are alone!" The path to Deloyeran independence does not end with Very Serious People around a negotiation table, it ends when the rebel forces remove Federation forces from the entire planet and take over the spaceport to block reinforcements. But in spite of Gasaraki's Nishida, I don't think this puts Takahashi with revisionist right-wing shitpiles: even the most righteous of causes for war still means that the innocent and the weak suffer needlessly. Sometimes UNDERSTANDING just isn't going to solve our troubles, sometimes war might be necessary, but it is never glorious or right. The other half of the equation is that the Idealist is Doomed. Ultimately, his world is even more twisted than he realizes, and he is betrayed or blindsided and his cause left in the dust. Sometimes he sees this coming (OVA Marder) and sometimes the way he is checked is simply unbelievable (TV Marder); Gasaraki is special in that Nishida is defeated because the world is actually better than he thinks it is, and America will take the immediate prestige hit rather than plunge the world into WW3. Ultimately, though, there are forces working beyond the Idealist's control that he cannot hope to counter even with his intelligence and strength of will; foreign interventionism, particularly that led by the United Nations, is something Takahashi seems to outright despise. This is more obvious in Dougram and FLAG, but even in Galient you have the spandex spacemen that would erase the cradle of galactic civilization rather than allow 'corruption' to upset the status quo. Traveller fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Sep 29, 2015 |
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Sep 29, 2015 18:22
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Traveller posted:Sometimes UNDERSTANDING just isn't going to solve our troubles, sometimes war might be necessary, but it is never glorious or right. The counterpoint to war being fun and bad is that it's also bad and occasionally necessary regardless. Society itself is already, on a base level, tremendously violent. The point is to transition out of it. I need to check out some Takahashi stuff!
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Sep 29, 2015 21:26
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Japanese nationalism is always an interesting beast. Your reading of Takahashi's politics got me thinking about Momoru Oshii, and the similarities between the two. Some stories in Patlabor and The Kerberos Saga derive their drama from chafing underneath foreign hegemony. But a lot of the plots of his work come from interdivisional rivalry between different sections of the Japanese security force, operating under the Government. That the lens isn't so much turned on the system that allows this kind of infighting to even happen, although the first GITS movie muses about the emerging cyborg consciousness and what that does to borders both national and digital, but instead towards the corruption in the bureaucracy. Someone smarter than the protagonist, although not always, is able to suss out the "corruption" and the current crop of protagonists can make things return to, relative, normality, with someone resigning, committing suicide, or getting shot. Thing is, I think Oshii is really interested in how all these robots work, move, and fight. It goes to an earlier point about why are the robots even necessary? In GITS, the machinery is something that's directly pointed at the themes of the work. The Cyborg Manifesto, the feminist document, is something I always think about when engaging with Oshii penned poo poo. Since Kusanagi is a cyborg, why should she necessarily fall within the constraints of conventional sexuality, femininity, and even modesty we as a society, American or Japanese, would seek to apply to her? If we're actually creating something new, which the Puppetmaster desired over all else, why shouldn't she be exactly who she is? Although it seems like Oshii likes the the current status quo a little too much to say anything about the last barriers: political, national, and economic, but oh well. I've always liked the first GITS movie because of this, and it's certainly more interesting to me than the spider tanks and active camouflage. Although in recent stories, the transcendental seems to have been replaced by that.
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Sep 29, 2015 23:38
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Oshii does seem to prefer the status quo, as inane and dreary and protective of iniquities as it can be, to the uncertainty and chaos of full-blown rebellion. ("I share your disgust for just wars.") In a way it's as if he has given up on the possibility of the Japanese public (and by extension, the world) to effect meaningful change on the system, and therefore looks to technology and transhumanism as the harbingers of change. But then he and other cyberpunk authors run into the great flaw of the genre: we already live in a cyberpunk world to an extent, and we are still dealing with issues we thought settles ten, twenty, fifty years back even though third-world farmers are using smartphones in their daily lives and Anonymous had its heyday. By contrast, Takahashi does not meander on the implications of giant robots all that much - Gasaraki is probably his most technofetishist work and even there the robots are powered, in the end, by funcional magic.
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Sep 30, 2015 00:19
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That's what I always thought was interesting about Gasaraki. The biggest action scene in the show is an American battalion getting ambushed by Symbol TAs, and it kind of recasts the Americans as Iraqis in the first Gulf War and Symbol as the technologically superior Americans. They get slaughtered. But what even enables TAs to move is demon magic and to get one combat effective you have to be pumped full of combat drugs that will kill you. There's this sort of pernicious will driving the robots in that show, literally in some cases, and I feel that it very nicely problematizes what exactly one should expect out of mecha action.
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Sep 30, 2015 00:35
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i'm totally ok with watching bad rear end cool war robots fighting each other even when the message is ultimately about the cost of fighting and why it's bad because robot anime is just one variety of escapism and i have a brain that is good at discerning fantasy from reality. i don't like it when i feel like the creators do not.
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Sep 30, 2015 00:38
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TNG posted:Buff Clan too! Everybody's wagon was fixed but good. I dunno, I thought that while it was nice that the cast got some peace and an (abstract) chance to start again, the upliftingness of Be Invoked was damaged by the serious question brought up in both that movie and the last episodes of the TV show about what right the Ide had to do all that in the first place. Let's be honest, here, it's not a wise, benevolent, and fair-minded arbiter, it's a genocidal, inscrutably alien shitlord running a blatantly rigged game. I'm sorry, but you don't get to judge two races for being unable to get over their differences when you force them to make first contact by framing both sides for each other's genocide, and that's only the start of how the Ide screws with its results. Couple that with its bizarre moral code (the ways in which it expresses its fondness for kids just get creepier and creepier), which raises questions about what, exactly, would meet its standards as an acceptable species, and you've got a creature that makes a Death Parade arbiter look like a trustworthy, sensible decision-maker.
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Sep 30, 2015 01:01
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Sep 30, 2015 01:11
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Probably those sand worm things that haven't exactly built a civilization based around expansion and shooting things. The thing about the Buff Clan and Humanity is that they were both ALL too willing to butcher each other at every turn. The Solo Ship was only running from Solo because the Buff Clan assumed the horrible aliens must have killed their princess and must be attacked and killed in turn. The Ide certainly doesn't help matters, but it isn't like Humanity and Buff Clan wouldn't be punching each other to death if the Ide hadn't thrown a knife into the middle anyway. The ending at least has everyone together, even some of the assholes, happy and celebrating Messiah's birthday.
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Sep 30, 2015 01:16
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TNG posted:Probably those sand worm things that haven't exactly built a civilization based around expansion and shooting things. The thing about the Buff Clan and Humanity is that they were both ALL too willing to butcher each other at every turn. The Solo Ship was only running from Solo because the Buff Clan assumed the horrible aliens must have killed their princess and must be attacked and killed in turn. The Ide certainly doesn't help matters, but it isn't like Humanity and Buff Clan wouldn't be punching each other to death if the Ide hadn't thrown a knife into the middle anyway. I'm not so sure. Impending extinction is a pretty huge deal, especially if there's reasonable evidence that the other side's responsible (and, well, as it turned out, there actually was an Earther ship engaged in the repeated and unprovoked nuking of the Buff Clan homeworld - just a shame its crew had no idea, or that it was also responsible for their own homeworld getting repeatedly nuked), and while there were assholes on both sides, the Ide went out of its way several times to torpedo peaceful solutions. By the end of Be Invoked, neither side actually wants to continue, but does so anyway because they're convinced, with a fair amount of reason, that the Ide would find a way to force them into it regardless, and they at least want to go out on their own terms.
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Sep 30, 2015 01:32
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there's a 90% chance banpresto is already working on the srw with cross ange in it
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Sep 30, 2015 01:58
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Fukuda is the Michael Bay of anime is what I would say if I were feeling SMG about it Going back to Takahashi talk: another blow against the attempts at painting him as Yukio Mishima With Robots is how he puts laying the sword down as a great act of maturity. You can give your very best, join forces with your friends and push forward with your cause but sometimes you will lose badly and you must not let defeat define you. The doomed idealists that I mentioned come to that realization, in the end, and Dougram in particular being a bildungsroman means that Crinn can only truly become an adult when he realizes his life is not to be thrown away for selfish pride. Considering that Takahashi is of the post-war Japanese generation, I think that's a powerful message.
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Sep 30, 2015 02:19
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I just don't think he's made anything really good since at least 2000, and his peak was in the 80s. And hey, being Mishima with robots isn't necessarily a bad thing, he was a fantastic writer despite being a complete loon. Interesting thing about his coup, they screwed up his seppuku so badly they couldn't even get his head off his shoulders. How's that for your bushido sense of ethics and desire to return to Showa fascism? I really don't think Takahashi's a fascist either. It's just that he has to deal with robots as part of the territory of working in the genre, and that I think his way of dealing with it is very interesting. About the Ide, the way that it interacts with our dimension is with the emotions invoked, blah I know, by life and death. Since it's reawakening in episode 1, it's mostly just been surrounded by death and negativity. Maybe you get an extra dimensional force who kinda breeds that itself with that's all you're throwing into it. Remember, this is the show that had the Buff Clan commit genocide during episode 2 and it gets WORSE from there. Sheryl certainly thinks the Ide is the one that's causing all of it, but the Ide doesn't brainwash Doba into pursing the Solo Ship with everything out of paranoia and sense of Buff Clan Supremacy, Cosmo into thinking EVERYTHING is a Buff Clan plot, Bes into thinking he's the only one saving the universe from Buff Clan domination, and all the other petty Buff Clan and Earth forces that act out of fear and anger and revenge. All the peaceful things the Ide ends up ruining are the result of neither side really wanting to have compassion for the other. And well, the Ide becomes an angry and destructive thing because of it. TNG fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Sep 30, 2015 |
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Sep 30, 2015 02:52
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Gyra_Solune posted:there's a 90% chance banpresto is already working on the srw with cross ange in it
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Sep 30, 2015 03:13
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From what I heard, the endgame of the show is everything being orchestrated by some weird dude that really wants to gently caress Ange.
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Sep 30, 2015 03:22
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TNG posted:I really don't think Takahashi's a fascist either. It's just that he has to deal with robots as part of the territory of working in the genre, and that I think his way of dealing with it is very interesting. You still hear it from some quarters because of his work on Gasaraki and Konpeki no Kantai. From what I understand, the latter is more "what if we had been the good guys we claimed to be instead of what we actually were?" but I haven't watched it myself.
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Sep 30, 2015 04:00
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Can some one give me a rundown on more recent mecha shows that are good or particularly noteworthy beyond the obvious stuff? Anything post Gurren Lagann would be nice, maybe some stuff prior to it. I feel like I have a decent grasp on stuff from the 70s and 80s, though my knowledge gets progressively weaker through the 90s, 00s, and now.
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Oct 2, 2015 02:53
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I'll just leave a list of a lot of the newer stuff I have watched and enjoyed lately: GunXSword Gaiking Kotetsushin Jeeg Shin Mazinger Mazinkaiser SKL If you liked Gurren Lagann all but the first one will be up your alley. I just generally recommend GunXSword because it is fun as hell.
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Oct 2, 2015 05:08
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Not Dave posted:Can some one give me a rundown on more recent mecha shows that are good or particularly noteworthy beyond the obvious stuff? Anything post Gurren Lagann would be nice, maybe some stuff prior to it. I feel like I have a decent grasp on stuff from the 70s and 80s, though my knowledge gets progressively weaker through the 90s, 00s, and now. It depends on what you mean by obvious. If you spend a lot of time in these threads, you've probably at least heard of most of the obvious recommendations. It also depends on what your tolerance for really long shows are. -For the 90s:
-For the 2000s:
There's a lot more than this, of course, but these are some off the cuff recommendations.
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Oct 2, 2015 05:13
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Edit : nope
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Oct 2, 2015 05:14
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You're better off just listening to RahXephon's excellent ost, because holy poo poo is the show itself boring as hell and bad.
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Oct 2, 2015 05:14
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Raxivace posted:You're better off just listening to RahXephon's excellent ost, because holy poo poo is the show itself boring as hell and bad. I would say it's about half kind of boring and half good. I feel like the good outweighs the boring, especially some specific moments of payout.
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Oct 2, 2015 05:18
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I'll add that Majestic Prince is also worth giving a shot, though it's not particularly exceptional in any area aside from CG.
Motto fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Oct 2, 2015 |
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Oct 2, 2015 05:22
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Motto posted:I'd also add that Majestic Prince is worth giving a shot, though it's not particularly exceptional in any area aside from CG. It's exceptional for not falling into the Valvrave trying to be Geass/edgy as gently caress trap. Rinne no Lagrange is fun enough if you want something with cute girls and robots and pretend the second season doesn't exist.
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Oct 2, 2015 05:24
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Motto posted:From what I heard, the endgame of the show is everything being orchestrated by some weird dude that really wants to gently caress Ange. yeah basically the main villain is an immortal physics experiment gone horribly wrong who has multiverse powers and the technology to apocalyptize reality and make a world where the entire population is his waifus and then this girl in a military-grade piloting bikini stabs him in the hand and he is like 'this is the ULTIMATE WAIFU' the upshot is, you get to see this almighty neckbeard stabbed in the face over and over because whenever he dies he just summons another him
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Oct 2, 2015 05:26
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The fight scenes are basically the reason to watch MJP.Kanos posted:I would say it's about half kind of boring and half good. I feel like the good outweighs the boring, especially some specific moments of payout. I think there are a few moments that work alright in isolation, such as episode 19, but in the larger context of the show I feel the writing doesn't really work. The actual presentation of the death of the girl that Ayato more or less kills himself was genuinely good, but I might have cared more if it hadn't been more than 10 episodes since we last saw that girl. Or if she or other characters had more realized personalities. RahXephon really frustrates me because it has all of the pieces of a pretty amazing show and they don't come together well at all, at least to me.
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Oct 2, 2015 05:31
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Sakurazuka posted:Rinne no Lagrange is fun enough if you want something with cute girls and robots and pretend the second season doesn't exist. I liked RnL S1, but I'm not sure if I'd recommend it as an mecha show since I felt the action was easily the weakest part. Madoka doing a suplex in the first episode is by far the peak of the show's action, the rest is kind of bleh. Good SOL though.
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Oct 2, 2015 05:36
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what the heck, nobody mentioned Big O
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Oct 2, 2015 05:37
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dogsicle posted:what the heck, nobody mentioned Big O I'm actually watching through this for the first time right now, and it's loving amazing. Watch The Big O if you haven't for some reason, people.
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Oct 2, 2015 05:38
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There's two seasons of Fafner 2 and no one mentions it. That's amazing. I have no idea what it was or that it had a 2nd season until I checked up a summary site.
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Oct 2, 2015 08:56
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The Gundam stuff released since 2008 has been hit and miss - probably the one I'd recommend with the least caveats is Gundam Build Fighters, a shameless toy commercial with an astonishing amount of heart and enthusiasm poured into it. The sequel series is a significant downgrade, though, so you might want to skip that.
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Oct 2, 2015 09:28
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