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Posting in new thread to say that Gunbuster and Diebuster (and TTGL, their spiritual successor) collectively make up the best anime show ever, mecha or otherwise. There was a particular strain of folk working at Gainax for a long period that simultaneously hated anime, hated anime fans, and yet appreciated both on a deeply human level, and embraced their potential to be great. They fully embrace the entire point thematic point of giant robots in the first place - that they represent the power of humanity's ideals and inventiveness, abstracted into pure symbols. There are so many fuckin' rad things about these shows that I could accidentally write for ever about them and need to stop myself right now. Watch them. Honorable mentions: Shin Mazinger Z, original Mazinger Z with horrifying chinese subtitles in VHS quality, Mazinkaiser, the unrelated and hilarious Mazinkaizer SKL, Space Runaway Ideon, original and Zeta Gundam, and Bokurano. Shin Mazinger effectively failed to get a second season continuing from its semi-cliffhanger ending, but the story was told in such a way that this failure enhances the story to a mythic level and recasts Kouji's struggle against the chaotic, godlike mechanisms of control as a struggle against the real-life capitalist nightmare that is the Anime industry. It is an infinite nightmare, and you are broken, yet you leave behind a dream that saunters on and fights for ever more. Hbomberguy fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Sep 22, 2015 |
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Sep 22, 2015 03:39
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Droyer posted:I disagree. Despite their many obvious similarities, I think Gunbuster and Diebuster are different enough both stylistically and thematically to be difficult to compare, which I think is to Diebuster's credit. If Diebuster had simply been a retread of Gunbuster it would have been a clearly inferior product, but it is instead an intentionally different product, and is great by its own right. Diebuster, thematically, has two 'twists'. The first is that it's a sequel, and yet no-one from the original turns up, it's way in the future and a totally different setting and tone. The second is that it really is a sequel. It just took the ideas of the original and extrapolated them outwards so far you don't see the connection until it's too late: Instead of people being people and robots being an externalisation of humanity's development, humanity and machines are themselves a singular species - characters can become ideas, rather than simply invent and wield them. It takes the necessary step from 'ideas can make humans great' to 'humans are themselves comprised of ideas'. It's no surprise that the same studio made gurren lagann, a show where the robots are literally powered by believing in something, and renege on all forms of internal logic. Gunbuster is principally about a character who, simultaneously, never appears, is omnipresent, is dead, lives on in the form of the world built in their name, represents the greatest mankind has to offer, and was a relatively ordinary awkward teenager. And also isn't dead. It's a dense as gently caress show. Like, New Testament style. It is love.
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Sep 22, 2015 04:06
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Droyer posted:I'd say that Diebuster is far more about Nono than Noriko. Noriko's actions inspired Nono's, but they did not define them. wielder posted:This is a pretty cool post, in general, except I don't necessarily think Gainax as a collective has ever really hated anime. Especially not the "classic" Gainax before the production of Evangelion. Many of their original founders were essentially otaku who developed the skills to actually work in anime for a living, rather than otherwise unrelated normal people. Gunbuster in particular was an explicitly commercial celebration of what they knew a lot of otaku wanted to see back in 1988, without any critical lens applied to the situation. It's still awesome, but that was literally fanservice in every sense of the term. Something like Otaku no Video from 1991 did attempt to be more self-critical and cynical about how the entire business worked, to be sure, but including enough sympathy for the idealized otaku "dream" in spite of it. There is a certain nobility and civilised-ness to human cultures that can be naked around each other like it ain't no thing. There's a reason the most advanced cool future-people are called the topless. It almost implies that once we can get over ourselves and embrace whatever we really are, we spontaneously gain superpowers. You can dismiss the robots as just giant robots the creators liked, but that fails to deal with why people like giant robots, and why people decided to create art with giant constructions of humanoids in them. Viewing mecha as 'just cool' or 'just robots' is a failure to account for their actual existence in art imo. Hbomberguy fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Sep 22, 2015 |
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Sep 22, 2015 04:40
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Schwarzwald posted:That's explicitly not true, though. There's a seen when Noriko, Kazumi, and Jung are bathing, when some passing soldiers peek in on them through the window from their RX robots. Droyer posted:This isn't true though. That's a part of her personality yes, but she is also defined by her relationship to L'alc and her conflicting desires to be a hero and a normal girl. The answer, paradoxically, is to be as inhuman as possible.
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Sep 22, 2015 22:06
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Droyer posted:And how is Nono "as inhuman as possible"? You have a bad habit of making statements and then not backing them up in any way. Being human isn't all that great. People can be misled, make mistakes, have incomplete psyches, are inherently never totally rational, and so on. We are only capable of doing good things for a very brief part of our existence. In Diebuster, busters have an expiration date. There's only so much good a single person can do, and those that try to prolong this inevitably end up being implied cannibals, hanger-on losers, etc. The question the show, and in fact a lot of shows, is asking is how it is possible to have a functioning civilisation in the face of our own failures. The starting hypothesis of the show is that we just need to keep changing people out when they get used up, toss them in the trash, and hope things can generally continue as they are. (This is also known as Capitalism.) I've gone into detail about how robots in shows tend to function as externalisations of our own ideas or strengths. There's an inbuilt criticism to this - the machines are cold, unfeeling, and dangerous. This reflects how our ideals are in a way 'too big', and perhaps ill-fitting and get in the way. How many societies have destroyed themselves in supposed service to a seemingly-good ideal? Even in this century? The danger is in being too rigid that you fail to actually help humanity even if your idea was good, much like how actual machines can't simply get get better at what they're doing by themselves, merely performing commands. Lots of shows explore the gap between ideals and humanity, but the Buster series does it the best. It's a treatise on the struggle of human civilization. With that in mind: Nono becomes inhuman in the very specific sense that she commits herself completely to a function. In the story, this quirky, upbeat, silly girl just sort of hoping fate deals her a good hand literally disappears, and then mysteriously re-emerges as a machine, performing a literal deus ex machina in the process. She becomes a machine dedicated to justice - and not just in a literal sense. She doesn't actually lose her emotions or self, but learns that there are more important things than one's own existence. She's gained a new perspective that allows her to easily solve the problems she faces. That's what she means when she says 'a true buster machine pilot has a buster machine in their heart.' You have to become closer to an ideal and avoid being Too Human. This is repeated in Lal'c's arc but from the opposite direction. She's very good at following orders, but her relationships with others aren't great. To a certain extent she's afraid of opening herself up to people because of the pain that can cause. Dix-Neuf is an extension of her here - they're experienced and strong, but cannot achieve their full potential and incapable of recognising a way of doing better. They're literally blind in one eye. Dix-Neuf is also explicitly so old that people have seemingly forgotten his real name, like a game of chinese whispers it's become known entirely by its french pronunciation. He's like real ideals in the postmodern era - old, and too rigid, their actual goal lost in their present manifestation. They don't have the ability to rethink their goals or methods, and thus have a limit to what they can reasonably achieve. When Lal'c realises she wants to help her friend regardless of the danger, Dix-Neuf tears the horn out of his eye. Metaphorically speaking, they have opened themselves up to being hurt, but can see clearly now. Being a machine wasn't enough either. As soon as they do this, Dix-neuf is reborn and can finally be what they were always supposed to be. We are re-introduced, text and all, to the same robot, this time as buster machine #19. Importantly, it becomes a machine with a human face. The point is you have to be unflinchingly, almost suicidally dedicated to doing what is right in the best possible way, but also constantly in search for what the most right way of doing things even is, for the world to get better. A machine with a human face.
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Sep 23, 2015 01:02
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The biggest criticism of my approach I can think of is that I'm in some places ignoring plot content in favour of the themes. A character turns out to have been 'special all along', but thematically they always get stronger in response to development as a person and changes in perspective. So you could read that as there being a few special people who are intrinsically better made for heroism, or something similar - but this would ignore that the whole point is power comes the hearts of people, and in Gunbuster it's a fairly ordinary person. I'm enamoured with the idea that, seemingly from nowhere, a character manifests a new backstory to justify their power. When a careless barmaid decides to throw her entire life behind the protection of humankind, it spontaneously 'turns out' that she was always built for this task.
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Sep 23, 2015 05:49
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Droyer posted:To further add to this, it is possible to enjoy things on multiple levels. I enjoy robots as, among other things, representations of human potential, as metaphors for nuclear bombs, as representations of their pilots (depending on the work in question of course). However I also like it when giant robots punch each other and metal goes flying and buildings are destroyed because it's loving awesome and cool and YEAH!!! To say that one of these levels is "why robots exist in art" is the same as saying one of them is more valid than the others, which strikes me as snobbish. Generally things are cool because they communicate an idea. I'm just trying to talk about those ideas rather than merely celebrating that they made me think at all. Don't take that as a jab at anyone, I just like trying to contribute. I dunno I seem to have killed this thread for the last couple days so don't stop talking about stuff on my account!
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Sep 25, 2015 06:02
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ninjewtsu posted:i'd be pretty ok with a robot show that was just robots punching each other for 20 minutes without any intended deeper meanings or boring drama with the stupid human pilots The desire to watch giant mechanical humanoids destroy each other and see as little as possible of the 'stupid humans' underneath is not meaningless. You're describing a need to see things simplified. The complications of being human evaporate and in its place is a powerful super-human with hands that do not bleed. Less thinking, more punching - it's a lot easier to concentrate on, isn't it? This isn't meant as an insult. It's the entire appeal. Mecha shows take abstract, dramatic human concepts and render them simpler and more direct. It's pure storytelling. Hbomberguy fucked around with this message at 01:30 on Sep 26, 2015 |
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Sep 26, 2015 01:18
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Exactly. A good action scene is good precisely because it conveys information well. That's why I'm dubious toward any show that relies very heavily on dialogue to tell you how 'deep' it is. Like Madoka or Evangelion, although both have visual stuff that makes up for it.
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Sep 26, 2015 16:00
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I don't think its possible to be neutral about war for very obvious reasons. What is the neutral response to the Iraq war? And what is the neutral response to specific battles or actions within those wars - Hiroshima, for instance? The blanket declaration that war is bad and should be avoided all the time for ever is simplistic but way less easy to work around with your own specific ideological bias. Once you accept some actions in war are rationally justifiable, you very quickly can justify almost anything. There was a time when almost every American had an internalised vision of the WWII-era Japanese as vicious, never-surrendering, need-to-be-shut-down-by-nukes kamikaze nightmare-people when, in reality, there is evidence they were planning - or even OPENLY ATTEMPTING TO - to surrender before the bombs were dropped. Anyone trying to shift the goalposts in terms of war's 'badness' inevitably has some very hosed-up ideas of what constitutes an objectively-correct action. Peeps are right in that lots of mecha, especially lots of Tomino's works, don't actually use the robots as much other than advanced war-tech and could even be replaced by tanks or guns. Instead the shows function as an abstraction of war onto an alternative playing field where one doesn't have to think about it in terms of an actual war. All of a sudden, you might even have people condemning the sci-fi version of an atrocity their own country committed irl and would normally have defended. There's a saying that all sci-fi stories about the future are really about the present and finding an alternative way of dealing with it. So even 'real robot' shows have a function. Again, especially Tomino's, considering all the bizarre dream-sequences and psychic-magic stuff in there. Also in response to someone's 'if the machines are cool and the fighting is fun, how can they have their cake and eat it by saying war is bad?' - I'd suggest the same answer that I'd give about Apocalypse Now's attitude to war, where it's occasionally empowering and fun and rock music plays while you fire your machine gun, but in the end you're slitting a man up like a cow while he screams about the horror of human existence. The point is that violence is fun, and bad. Humans are ultimately in a war with their own self-destructive nature, and that's why Tomino bets his chips almost entirely on humans 'becoming' a superior species that does not need to wage war against itself. He's not talking about literal biological evolution there. poo poo I wrote too many words again. Do-over: There are some bad wars happening and it is bad. Can we do peace now instead? Cool.
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Sep 28, 2015 19:27
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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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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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I'm partway through Big O 2, and the second season really does have a very different tone and direction. Like the first season's little bubble-world is meant to be unquestioned, like it's just a stage for the story to play out on. In a play you don't question why the stage exists. Season 2 begins with Roger not only offstage, but on a different one where he's a homeless crazy person. It goes on from there and adds so much more to the texture of the first season that I might have to watch the whole thing again when I'm done. It's rad. So rad.
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Oct 7, 2015 04:47
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Droyer posted:Big O is very good. That's cute, but I do deserve it. I've been writing like an idiot for ages and need to stop! I think I write elaborate stuff about things as a defense mechanism from having to work on my own stuff. I'm getting better. I wrote out a huge post about Otaku No Video and what it's trying to say with its giant robots and compared it to Jaws and the shark (complete with screenshots) and then deleted it and watched pretty cure with my friends instead. BTW precure is ridiculously good if you're into sentai and having feelings. It's ostensibly for little girls but they seem to hire the best writers and animators in the business and it's crazy good. Also yeah episode 14 is great. Roger Smith VS three megadeuses and mind tomatoes
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Oct 7, 2015 05:07
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boom boom boom posted:"Giraffes don't have long necks because they evolved to eat leaves on tall trees, they have long necks because they got infected with a virus that made their necks long" It's kinda crazy that giraffes ended up the way they did. Like, it was obviously a gradual change but that means over millions of years the trees also probably had to get higher, or something? The nerves in their necks are crazy inefficient and loop around and stuff. It's messed. Evolution is messed. I need to go read about giraffes.
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Oct 25, 2015 02:04
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Space Runaway Ideon is real good, and Be Invoked is great. It's definitely the best example of 'oh god, Tomino kills so many characters' out there. I've not seen so many main, named characters get decapitated or shot in the face and head in a single film. The movie reminds me a lot thematically of Kill la Kill, but that's not surprising since the creators are admittedly huge fans and have loads of references to it in their other works (and KLK itself straight up used the Ideon logo at one point). They both end on roughly the same positive note, with conflict itself ended in a definitive way and things looking up, only Ideon has the stinger that it's because everyone's fuckin' dead and ghosts. tsob posted:There's apparently a wide-spread theory that the necks didn't develop to eat from the tops of trees but to fight with, which they do do. One of the major bits of evidence being that they often don't eat from the tops of trees and mostly bend down to eat from lower down on trees, not the very top. But yea, evolution is pretty crazy regardless. Hbomberguy fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Oct 25, 2015 |
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Oct 25, 2015 20:56
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It's garbage in the same way a Tarantino film is garbage. It's loving, rapid-fire 80's/90's referencing garbage in the best way, with a very strong thematic point about human violence, filed so sharp it's almost a joke how anti-war it manages to be.
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Dec 10, 2015 23:28
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FortMax posted:Also, GaoGaiGar BD box 1 is out, and it looks amazing. I've never seen GGG all the way through, I've been waiting for this. Awesome!
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Dec 20, 2015 16:42
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