Today’s the twenty-fifth anniversary of the premiere of Do You Remember Love? (Oi, Ghostlightning!)

In some ways this feels more significant to me than Mobile Suit Gundam’s thirtieth anniversary earlier this year, despite the fact that, as my tagcloud attests, Gundam is the franchise I’m more familiar with. But it may be precisely my lack of easy familiarity with Macross that makes DYRL? more prominent in my mind. It was very nearly my first Macross experience, only preceded by Frontier’s first episode, and it’s the one part of the franchise that I’ve since watched again. I can quickly call several scenes to mind: Minmei and Hikaru going on a date, for example, and of course the spectacular martial-musical fusion of the final scene.

Sadly I am restricted to memory myself tonight, as I didn’t bring a copy with my on my laptop and I won’t be able to squeeze one down this internet connection any time soon (apparently downloading slowly is preferred here). But even  remembering DYRL?, thinking of its delicious animation and its curious mixture of silly and serious, always uplifts me. I rather like the fact that this movie shares its anniversary with the 2005 Tube bombings: facing such gunpowder treason, love, in more than the narrowly romantic sense of the word, is not a bad thing to remember.

. . . is not to hope for safety.

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything here, for several reasons. One of these reasons is my preparation for a working holiday. In its (questionable) wisdom, my university has sent me to Cambridge for a month, to badger academics, raid libraries and generally gather enough material to write an impressive ‘Wot I Did In My Holidays’ piece when I return from the land of privilege. So far I can report that the land of privilege is efficient, friendly and just a little mad: there is, for example, a big white piano in my room. The room’s big enough that the piano isn’t inconvenient, or menacing, but it is there. Maybe I’ll attempt ‘Chopsticks’ once I finish writing this.

A more significant cause for my silence is the fact that for some time I didn’t watch any anime at all, because I was too busy playing Mount and Blade. This, the first computer game in a long time to keep me awake into the small hours, is a low-fantasy action title which involves riding around putting bandits, other nobles and anyone who looks at you funny to the sword. Weapon speed and direction have a lot of influence on the damage dealt by your attacks, creating a fighting system which is pleasantly intuitive though (thankfully) not too realistic, and great fun even when the relatively shallow Elite-but-not-in-spaaaace game that sits on top of it has worn a bit thin. Mount and Blade needs some morale mechanics, and perhaps more of a story to string together its addictive skirmishes for those of us with merely average imaginations, but then that’s what the (plethora of) mods are for.

But, for me, even the meatiest games wear thin after a while, and of course there were such gripping currently-airing anime as the new Mazinger Z and, erm, Sora Kake Girl and, double-erm, Hatsukoi Limited to retain my interest. I’m still pottering through Victory Gundam and Zambot 3, and I’ve just begun Saikano, which feels like an accidental, pre-emptive Serious Reply to Strike Witches.

Furthermore, subtitling work on Blue Comet SPT Layzner recently restarted, which is some compensation for the work on Dougram grinding to a halt (the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away). Layzner’s a decent real robot story and I’ve heard rumours that the second half is a rather pointed depiction of Earth’s occupation by a foreign power, which ought to be interesting. The colonisation of Mars by 1996 must surely have been obviously an over-optimistic idea in 1985, which has made me think a little about Layzner’s relationship with time: it could easily be labelled a nostalgia title, except that I’ve never seen it before and I wasn’t even alive when it first aired. And there’s a sense of recovery in the subtitling efforts for a show like this — you feel the presence of a shadowy body of as-yet-unseen (by most of us outside Japan) stuff waiting to be excavated.

Unusually, I’ve also been reading more manga: a chance visit to /m/, followed by some fact-checking here led me to Akumetsu. The story of one mildly deranged high school student’s revenge on those he deems responsible for the failing economy, Akumetsu probably isn’t very good (how would I know?) but reading it is, in the current climate, certainly cathartic. Most of the insignificant things like back-story or supporting characters found in other, more famous, yuppy-with-broken-dreams stories are cut away so that we just bounce from one drawn-out scene of violence and half-baked macroeconomics to another. As a result the best bits, like the sixty-eighth chapter’s money shot, have a spirit of gleeful, uncomplicated carnival. Comparing these moments to what I’ve glimpsed in Brack’s coverage of Violence Jack, I can see why David judged the Tabata/Yogo team behind Akumetsu suitable to adapt a Go Nagai property.

Returning to more traditional material, I’ve also gotten around to finishing Crossbone Gundam, which turned out to be remarkably cheerful, and kind to its cast to boot: in the course of the story an astonishingly large number of characters manage to not die. But then Crossbone’s greatest strength may be its piratical mechanical designs, and it’d be hard to write a stony-faced story around those. While I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone, if you’re looking for a compact, less depressing Gundam experience featuring the usual giant robots fighting while their pilots yell at each other about their ideals (and someone quietly says a few more things about Newtypes) then this would be a good choice.

* * *

As for this blog, it seems that at present long thought-out posts aren’t possible — though of course my predictions have been wrong in the past. This would be disheartening if I thought I was working on some kind of project or programme, but since I don’t, it isn’t: blogging or not, the point is that I have fun. After spending time aiming to write at a relatively high altitude, I feel like lying down where all the ladders start for a bit, so posts here might get a bit shorter.

I’ve been busy, writing essays and experiencing the loneliness of the long-distance reader. Here’s a list of some post ideas I’ve thrown together, but not worked up: a condensed review of The Skull Man; a post about honour in the eighth episode of Space Runaway Ideon; praise for the mechanical design of the ZZ Gundam; a piece on different attitudes to time and progress, and those attitudes’ effects on our viewing experience; a post asking just what I’ve been doing here, and why; and something approaching the Book of Darkness from Nanoha A’s as a metaphor for text in general (an idea which has no proper relationship with truth but which, like the Book of Darkness, practically writes itself). Some of these may see the light of day eventually.

And here’s a post that I have, more or less, written up. Newtype (the blogger, not the magazine) mentioned the presence of sound effects in some of the openings for Zeta Gundam. I squirrelled this point away in the back of my mind. Now I’m de-squirrelling it. This post is a slightly rambling survey of a fairly insignificant thing — the commentary category in all its glory — so don’t expect any thrilling conclusion. I’m currently a little tired of writing conclusions, thrilling or otherwise.

What do noises caused by what’s happening on the screen during the opening do? I imagine the simple and obvious answer is that they direct our attention. When it’s done, it’s usually only one or two sounds and so our attention’s focused on whatever onscreen events justify the intrusion of noise over the opening music. Probably because I began with Zeta, the first and in some ways the least interesting examples I thought of were mecha openings.

The music in Zeta’s first and it second openings isn’t really interrupted (though the second bookends its music with sound), but the OP that had to be used on the North American DVDs competes with sounds all the way through. I must admit that, while we’re obviously obliged by our unwritten Anime Fan Contracts to react with RAEG and HAET to any changes to the Japanese original, I’ve a sneaking liking for the instrumental theme used for the opening of the Region 1 release: it’s enjoyably bombastic. Indeed, I recall being rather struck by the Region 1 opening when I first watched Zeta: I had finished 0080 the day before, and I’m not sure I would’ve been ready for the original opening’s pep.

The first Tekkaman Blade opening has bookending noises like Zeta’s: at the beginning and (very conclusively) at the end; the second has more, throughout. Gundam 0083, meanwhile, has them in its first OP. As usual they draw our attention to the machines, but in 0083’s case the mecha have a kind of narrative significance: because the story begins with a Gundamjacking, but can only last twelve episodes, the stolen mecha are the focus of the characters’ desire for (it seems to me) at least two thirds of the story. (Unkind viewers might suggest that 0083’s Gundams are more interesting than its characters.) Besides that rather speculative explanation, looking at the mechanical design credits, if I had people like that coming up with mecha I’d want to give said mecha as much attention as possible.

Let’s move on to a couple of (slightly) more interesting cases. There are three noises in the Dougram OP: two when characters load their weapons, and the concluding gunshot. Personal firearms are are important in Dougram. These backpack-battery-powered ones have a scene devoted to their introduction and, like the titular mecha, they’re a symbol of the Deloyeran resistance movement’s ability to innovate. Moreover, the amount of fighting done by foot-soldiers is one of the things that distinguishes Dougram from other mecha shows (even VOTOMS: Dougram’s Combat Armours are much, much bigger than ATs, so they’re more clearly distinguished from grunts).

The sounds in Xenoglossia’s second OP arrive with the chorus and its accompanying mecha action. This is the second, more serious, opening, which accompanies the story’s shift into more serious territory, pitting the sentient mecha against each other; compare the more upbeat first OP. And finally there’s a surprising amount of noise in the opening for the first, ‘73-vintage, Cutie Honey (incidentally the same opening song has been used for all Cutie Honey adaptions — including the live action one). But there’s so much going on in that OP that I can’t properly process it.

The fact that different versions of the same iconic song are used in all the different Cutie Honey adaptions brings us to the issue of prestige. Who performs the opening song, and how interested are their fans in it? Putting sounds in alongside the music suggests a certain disrespect. Since the Idolmaster games are big on music, it’s odd that Xenoglossia’s opening features sound. On the other hand, this makes the sounds in Zeta’s North American openings more comprehensible: they tell us that, ideally, this isn’t the music we’d be listening to (I doubt that is why they were chosen, but I’m interested in the effect). The opening for the 2004 television adaption of Area 88 has lots and lots of other sound, after its initial eighteen seconds, because (I think) the opening music isn’t present to be listened to, but rather to stimulate excitement. ‘Look! Planes!’

There are cases of almost the opposite situation: in parts of the openings for K-ON, Detroit Metal City, Kannagi and the second season of Rosario + Vampire for example, the music is being produced by the characters performing on screen. The shot at the end of the DMC OP even appears to be from a camera on stage, as Krauser strides up to whoever’s holding it and seizes it. The non-existent camera itself is part of the opening’s world, at least for that shot.

Given that they’re about bands, I see why the K-ON and DMC openings are like this. I’ve recently heard one or two people muttering on the internet that you don’t actually see the band performing enough in K-ON, which seems a bit odd given that you have the opening . . . and the ending. Every episode. But I’m not watching it, and I’m not a music person, so what do I know? I suppose the other two depict and encourage idolisation. In Kannagi’s case, the idea of idolisation rather reminds me of this and also of the show’s Pygmalion premise. (I’m aware, vaguely, of the Japanese use of ‘idol’; would the punning shift from religious icon to pop-cultural icon be available in the Japanese use?)

I should also point out the first opening for Shugo Chara Doki, which does similar, and similarly interesting, things: first we see onomatopoeic words for sounds which we don’t hear — an emphatic ‘KONN . . .’ as Amu shares a brofist (sisfist? sororfist?) with Kairi over Rima’s head, for example — and then we see some of the lyrics writ large. (I wouldn’t have known about this if SDS hadn’t highlighted it.) I can’t really guess what this does, except, as SDS pointed out, remind us of Overman King Gainer, so I’d welcome suggestions. The only idea I came up with is that it encourages younger viewers to sing along, but I feel an urge to sing along myself, so obviously that can’t be right.

Scanlators have been working on a manga adaption of the Divine Comedy (I seem to recall that Lelouch was a fan). However! Rather than simply translating the dialogue they’ve decided to admix it with appropriate lines from existing translations — not translations of the manga, but of the Comedy itself:

[W]hat we are doing with this as of now is 1. translating the manga, 2. comparing to the original divine comedy/history (when the mangaka leaves the context of the Divine Comedy), 3. mixing it all together and 4. re-writing it in a decasyllabic meter to match with the Divine Comedy’s poetry style. We used mostly H.F. Cary’s translation of the original Divine Comedy as reference, but if the translation was to archaic to be applicable, we used Longfellow’s.

While there’s obviously a lot of potential for a mismatch of tastes here — one person’s archaism is another’s ornament, and not all of us enjoy Longfellow — I instinctively approve of this. A translation is a new text, and so it’s perfectly permissible (though not always advisable) for a translator to throw accuracy out of the window and try something creative.

Indeed, in certain circumstances, the addition of completely unrelated text can be an improvement. One example that comes to mine is (the ‘quite spectacularly not safe for work’) A Kentucky Barmaid in the Court of King Louis XIII, which is a bit like The Magic Roundabout, except with pornography instead of French children’s television. Of course, A Kentucky Barmaid and the other works of ‘newdog15′ are messing with originals that have no prestige: hentai manga, and hentai manga previously rewritten by others at that.

I wonder if the translators in this case felt more able to do this because the manga is already an adaption, and an adaption of a text (the Comedy) with much greater prestige? Of course, one thing that does separate them is that the alteration of this manga retains the purpose of the manga and of the Divine Comedy, while A Kentucky Barmaid alters its text’s expected response, from arousal to laughter. So is this creativity, or the assertion of the authority of one more prestigious original (the canonical late medieval epic) over another less prestigious one (the modern manga)?

Actually, how close to the prestigious original do we want to get? If my memory serves me rightly, the Comedy was predominantly hendecasyllabic — composed in lines of eleven syllables, usually with an unstressed eleventh syllable (what we used to call a feminine ending) — not decasyllabic. But for extended poetry in English I prefer decasyllabic lines. Or rather, I prefer a pentameter of disyllabic feet. (Presumably anapestic pentameter, for example, would be ‘pendecasyllabic’? There seem to be several competing and equally esoteric theories of rhythm in each language, and no unanimously-agreed terminology. Excuse me if this is wrong and/or incomprehensible.) So while I don’t know how closely this resembles the Comedy’s ‘poetry style’, and I don’t even know how one would judge, I’m not that bothered.

And does the manga continue to stick to Dante’s plot, thereby remaining open to the insertion of translations of Dante’s original? This is, according to the scanlators, by Go Nagai, after all. I don’t know much about Nagai, but my impression from what I’ve picked up here and there is that he’s a bit of a loose cannon.

Pressing questions, but not necessarily questions for us. Leave them aside; try reading this, and pay attention to the movements of your eyes:

Ignore the punctuation in that first sentence, which is either going over or under my head, and look at the kind of extreme enjambment this creates! Our eyes don’t just have to cope with ‘my life was passed / Beneath fair Augustus,’ they also have to handle ‘in the time /[shift up and leftwards]/ Of false and fabled deities.’ The shoe-horning of English verse into the manga’s speech bubbles adds a counterintuitive (for those of us brought up with English) right-to-left jump to the shift between lines that enjambment normally creates. Presumably the writers of comic books actually think about this sort of effect, but I must admit I’d never considered it before.

It gets better: in the second panel in the image above, the same movement is repeated, with the added challenge of shifting from reading left-to-right (within a right-to-left page layout) to reading top-to-bottom. (The dialogue in that second panel isn’t from the Comedy; the first panel on the next page returns to it with a translation of Dante’s ‘Or se’ tu quel Virgilio e quella fonte / &c’.)

Such complexity doesn’t put me off. Quite the contrary: I find this easier to read than most scanlated manga, which is normally, for reasons outlined in the second half of this post, a bit of a struggle. Being asked to process a crazy mix of verse and images seems to slow me down and help me to pay attention to the art too. Recognising Father Virgil (or indeed Father Vergil) can be pretty hard, but the task’s difficulty has turned out to be rather valuable.

Every now and then I get this unaccountable urge to mention anime that is actually still airing, so here’s a remark on the unremarkable Asura Cryin’.

If you want to watch anime — not to watch a particular kind or quality of anime, but simply to sit and think ‘Yes, I am most certainly consuming Japanese cartoons’ — then I must recommend Asura Cryin’, the meze of the current season. It presents a wide selection of the things I associate with anime: a sprinkling of mechanical war machines, the odd magical superpower, a dash of conspiracy, a mild case of amnesia, brief moments of fanservice, a threat to the very existence of the world, an incipient harem (seasoned, naturally, with a pinch of moe) and the inevitable school (I’m sure I’ve travelled, nonplussed, through far more fictional Japanese schools than real British ones). It’s quite entertaining.

So, if you’re busy but not picky, save yourself some time and just watch this. Mediocrity can epitomise an industry just as well as — perhaps better than — excellence, and Asura Cryin’ covers everything else that’s airing quite well. Except for the new Mazinger, of course, but that doesn’t so much ‘air’ as ‘rampage out from the television screen in a pyroclastic flow of sublimity’.

Armour Hunter Mellowlink arranges lots of fighting around a simple, sturdy story, leavened with drama and mystery in just the right (minimal) amounts. I owe it a certain debt for being my introduction to the VOTOMS franchise. It has, therefore, always pained me that the only available subtitled version is a set of rips from some kind of well-worn VHS fansub. Recently, however, I discovered that some inspired /m/en had got together to release Armour Hunter Mellowlink in higher quality. It’s still the old, amusingly unreliable translation but — well, I did say this was mostly fighting, didn’t I?

Anyway, to celebrate, I thought I’d write another post about it.

In the absence of plot and characterisation, this show relies more than most on its landscapes to provide tone and colour to the action. Each of Mellowlink’s episode titles announces that episode’s setting, which is what directed my attention in this direction in the first place. In fact, since the scenes of the show’s action are so conveniently listed, I might as well present my notes episode-by-episode — seriatim, if you will. This post is a sort of combined summary and commentary, or perhaps even in some sense a companion There are some moderate spoilers, but I don’t think there’s anything that would ruin the story.

The first episode takes place in a ‘Wilderness‘ because it’s a stripped-down version of the revenge formula that the rest of the episodes will extend and play with: Mellowlink has to establish that there’s a badass with an oversized gun out for revenge, and landscape details would be a distraction. Mellowlink’s opponent pilots a very normal Scopedog, and Mellow kills him. There’s no need for complications to entertain the audience as we’re still just enjoying the dogtag-delivering, blood-smearing business in and of itself, not in its familiar, ritual role.

The second episode is set in and around a ‘Colisseum‘: Mellow takes on a former superior who’s forged a new career as a Battler. Their confrontation has an audience, some of whom gamble heavily on the outcome. Whenever there’s an audience in an action show I look at myself, but I suppose there’s a kind of barrier of muted, but widespread, dramatic irony separating us, the viewers, from them, the gamblers. They think it’s just a match, but we know why Mellow’s fighting. This is also the episode in which I first spotted design elements taken from Western films — specifically, the door of the bar that Mellow visits.

I’ve noticed Mellowlink and Chirico being compared to Rambo, and the third episode’s ‘Jungle‘ probably — what’s a suitably pompous way to put this? — ‘partakes of the Rambesque’, perhaps. The Kummen arc of the original series alluded to past wars in Indochina, and this episode benefits from that, I think.  Snook, Mellow’s enemy in this episode, explicitly introduces a hunting metaphor to describe his favourite pastime: chasing the local jungle guerrillas down in a Scopedog, before celebrating with wine back at his mansion. I’ve mentioned Mellowlink’s tendency to repeat certain elements from episode to episode, but there’s a repetitive structure within this episode too: one of the guerillas is using an Anti-AT rifle like Mellowlink’s and wearing a cloak like Mellowlink’s, and they both become trapped, at different times, in the same mud-pit. (I’m not entirely sure why.)

Mellow’s visit may have permanently altered this particular landscape: at the end of the episode, we see the guerrillas return to their rocket attacks on Snook’s mansion as our hero rides his motorcycle into the night. With Snook and his retainers gone I imagine the guerrillas, and with them perhaps the jungle, will reclaim his land.

The ‘Leaning Tower‘ of the fifth episode is a crashed spaceship full of crazily-angled claustrophobic corridors, abandoned Scopedogs and other health hazards. The Astragius Galaxy generally has technology at about our level; the space ships and their faster-than-light travel are the main exception to this, and so they tend to get downplayed. In the original VOTOMS, the only spaceship that we spent several episodes in wasn’t under Chirico and Fyana’s control. Mellowlink’s spaceship is a passive hulk filled with the traps of Mellowlink’s opponent — who is, for the first time, an NCO rather than a member of the officer class proper. In the preview for this episode (which is, I suppose, a kind of paratext) Carradine picks up Snook’s hunting metaphor from ‘Jungle’ and asks who’s the hunter in ‘Leaning Tower’;

‘Prison‘ is the literary theorists’ episode. Its attraction for all those Foucaultaku wielding copies of Discipline and Punish should be obvious, but the male-on-male violence, the threatened rape and the question of just who is penetrating whom mean are basically a big open goal for a certain type of gender theorist. Returning to more prosaic matters, the violence that Mellow’s fellow prisoners inflict on him keeps up Mellowlink’s record for achieving unpleasantness without excessive gore (I’m thinking in particular of the fork-in-foot moment, and the accompanying sound effect). In fact, it feels like we’ve had a whistle-stop tour of the conventions of prison fiction by the end of the first half of the episode.

One of our subtitling benefactors said to me that the ‘Railway‘ bandits in the next episode remind him of Road Warrior. Looking at their motley collection of slightly punked-up, brightly-painted off-road vehicles, I can see why. Personally this episode always reminds me of the train battle in Around the World in 80 Days; this is, I am sure, entirely a product of my mind, and not an overt allusion, but both Road Warrior and the much earlier 80 Days feed off the idea of the Wild West. All this reminds me of my remark that the ATV franchise’s action elements feel very Hollywoodian. The train’s interior arrangement, meanwhile, begins to expand on the officer-class thing that Mellowlink has going on: Helmechion gets a lavishly-furnished armoured carriage; he, Lulucy and Carradine all use the dining car; ordinary citizens travel in nondescript seats; and Mellow hides in the cargo.

I don’t have much to say about the eighth episode’s ‘Ghost Town‘. This episode has an even simpler story than ‘Wilderness’, and very nearly as simple a setting: a giant hole in the ground, with lots of Polymer Ringer Liquid in the bottom. It is of course impossible to have an episode featuring PRL without blowing said PRL up, and this episode of Mellowlink feels like the prototype for one of the more memorably explosive episodes in the recent Pailsen Files. Ghost towns are also associated in my mind with the Wild West. I don’t think they’re common in cramped countries which lack the same kind of (ex-)frontier zones, like Japan or indeed the UK.

The ninth episode takes us to the ‘Forest‘ surrounding Lulucy/Fleurelle’s ancestral home, and briefly into the home itself. The fact that this is forest, not jungle as in the third episode, is important: we’ve entered a coniferous world of vaguely Teutonic aristocratic privilege. The castle’s full of gloomy, high-ceilinged rooms, and bare stone corridors with candelabra. Appropriately, the first third of the episode, in which we learn of Helmechion’s attempt to acquire Lulucy’s inheritance after murdering her father, is full of luxurious objects. There’s a pleasant sense of crescendo when Lulucy turns the ornamental items that she ought to own into tools, smashing Numerikov’s head into her mother’s dressing-table mirror with an ornate statuette. (No less significant a character than Annerose endorses the statuette as the high-born lady’s weapon of choice!)

When Lulucy escapes into the titular forest (a traditional refuge for the dispossessed noble), she and Mellow outwit their captors using her knowledge of the landscape from her childhood, demonstrating the usual aristocratic claim to a connection with the land. At least there’s no moral superiority attached to those aristocratic roots in this story: Helmechion has the same familiarity with the landscape from hunting in his own youth, and once he has realised what Lulucy is doing he begins to use it to predict her movements, manipulating chess pieces on a stylised map of the grounds.

In the tenth episode the action moves inside the ‘Castle‘ itself. This is the final confrontation with Major Boil, the most sympathetic of Mellow’s enemies, and the episode stands in that long anime tradition in which men can only settle their differences by fighting until at least one, if not both, of them has been near-mortally wounded. Before the battle Mellow devotes his time to thoroughly booby-trapping the building. His conversion of the (presumably priceless) contents of Helmechion’s wine cellar into PRL Molotov cocktails is a particularly nice touch.

The vast, entirely metallic ‘Base‘ of the second-to-last episode is a return to the metal military surroundings of the initial Uoodo City arc in the original Armored Trooper VOTOMS. It didn’t strike me particularly in this episode, only really coming to the fore as a physical environment in the next one. The episode’s significant events take place in Helmechion’s office, where Helmechion gradually changes position, moving from behind his desk to sit on his settee and then to stand agitatedly in the middle of the room, before eventually lying dead on the floor.

I’m not sure whether gaming or theatre provides the best context for the final episode’s title, ‘Last Stage‘. Throughout the story, each episode’s eponymous environment has functioned like a level in a videogame, and reflecting on the the story as a game seems to fit its plot-light, violence-heavy approach. On the other hand, ‘Last Stage’ has Mellow fighting with the drama’s most mysterious actor. These are equally attractive explanations, and both of them emphasise the idea of location, so I think I’ll retain both. Looking at that episode listing again, I realise that all of the episodes are referred to as ’stages’.

The Astragius Galaxy’s long-lasting war reignites just as Mellowlink’s story comes to an end, and so we see the base launching vast waves of missiles, and suffering equally vast waves from space. Although the resulting destruction seems pretty absurd and pointless, it does intervene in Mellow’s favour a couple of times during the final showdown, which is fought out on the base’s roof, with surface-to-space missile launchers dwarfing the human combatants. These interventions seem to me to neatly tie into the opposition, set up in the final episode, between Mellow’s simplicity (or brute stupidity, depending on your point of view) and the involved plotting of the officer class, which ultimately undoes itself. It’s pretty clear which kind of thought the show prefers and, given its refusal to get bogged down in plot and characterisation, it certainly practices what it preaches.

There’s no real reason behind my selection of this picture, beyond the fact that I’m talking about Turn-A Gundam in this post. It’s nice to see a Gundam lead piloting something low-tech now and then, though, isn’t it? (Given what I could have chosen, be thankful.) Anyway, this is a follow-up to ‘War Sucks!‘, and while it contains no spoilers for Turn-A, it does contain one moderate spoiler for the final episode of Gundam 00.

I pointed out that although, as far as the Gundam franchise is concerned, war sucks, this doesn’t necessarily make the franchise as a whole pacifistic. Cameron, swiftly dissecting Full Metal Panic, not only suggested that said franchise reverses Gundam’s ‘being thrust into war is being thrust into adulthood’ metaphor (so that Sousuke matures by being thrust into civilian life), but also that the story eventually escapes the attitudes to war of both its protagonist, and its villain, Gauron. I’m having to paraphrase, so do read his original post.

Now, it may well be that the challenges of war in Gundam are the challenges of adult life, writ large in beams and Minovsky Particles, and that the experience of the (almost invariably) adolescent, male hero being forced to fight stands for the experience of the (predominantly) adolescent, male viewers being trained to become mindless salarymen. Most stories with young male heroes seem to fit a coming-of-age stencil, and I’m sure there are people out there who will tell you that all stories are somehow coming-of-age stories. But that’s something that needn’t bother us right now. I like the idea that war is life — ‘a darkling plain / [. . .] / Where ignorant armies clash by night’ — as far as Gundam is concerned.

Pushing this, just for fun, a bit further, it strikes me that that statement is true in a slightly different sense, too: war is the life of the franchise. It’s inescapable. Every instalment has involved fighting, for without fighting, what would be the point of all the humanoid war machines? And without the humanoid war machines, how would the franchise be profitable? It would be hard to sell toy models of, say, the Combine Harvester Gundam, the Forklift Gundam and the Frankly, We Just Felt Like Building a Giant Humanoid Walking Machine Gundam.

Except, of course, for the Turn-A (or, for the perfectionists among us, ∀) Gundam, which is also the Washing Machine Gundam, the Agricultural Transport Gundam and the Weapons of Mass Destruction Safe-Disposal Gundam. Gundams into ploughshares indeed.

So Turn-A Gundam isn’t just (for reasons which I won’t spoil) the final conclusion to all the other series, including the alternate-universe ones, it’s also a conclusion to the franchise as a franchise, a franchise which needs war. Gundam can’t really spend time considering what a peaceful world would look like, because it’s Gundam, and merchandise needs to be sold. It can’t escape like Full Metal Panic can, either, because it doesn’t have normality (well, high-school comedy) as a counterpoint to its endless violence. But Turn-A, with its slice-of-life scenes and its unglamourous mechanical designs, gestures towards that world’s existence in a more sustained way than other Gundams. (Really, 00? Killing not-Amuro off in an RX-78? It’s amusing, but it’s no ‘Rebirth’.)

This might be quite obvious to some or indeed a lot of people. I feel like I’ve mostly been anticipated by (contains spoilers) OGT’s recent rewatch finale post: the point he does/n’t make (a kind of apophasis?) about the show’s ‘meta-joke’ is the kind of thought I was lacking. I think I’ve been too preoccupied by Turn-A’s role as an ending to all the stories in the franchise to properly consider its role as an ending to the franchise itself: an end to its voracious desire for more sequels, more wars and more toys.

Further Reading

• I haven’t noted down all the posts about Turn-A that I’ve come across, but besides OGT’s archive, IAmZim’s, Colin’s, Koji Oe’s and Crusader’s come to mind.
• Speaking of Crusader, it would be foolish to react to Cameron’s post without mentioning Crusader’s assertion that ‘mecha is magnificent, but it is not war’ . . .
• . . . and it would be foolish to mention that post without mentioning this one and that one.
• I haven’t devoted much thought to the mechanics of Turn-A’s effect on Gundam, but they probably resemble some of the chronological wizardry that Animekritik recently performed on the Leijiverse, in a series of posts starting here.

Heigar is one of the Ryvius’s consequentialists, and certainly the least emotional one. I’m not sure I’ve ever quite grasped his motivation, but perhaps he has a passion for efficiency. As someone who is sometimes too keen to keep things simple (blame Horace), I can sympathise.

Heigar serves a series of captains, but achieves his greatest influence under the story’s last captain, Ikumi. Ikumi, for reasons which I won’t spoil, sees protecting (certain) others as an absolute duty, a preoccupation which Heigar neatly manipulates to his own ends. Near the end of the story I think we see Heigar make a (very nasty) decision which appears have no proper justification, apart from his own antipathy towards certain other characters: I think he loses his integrity (which is a significant thing) here. Ultimately, his plans have to be defeated to bring about a (reasonably) happy ending.

Oberstein is one of Reinhard von Lohengramm’s admirals. He has a vendetta against the Empire’s ruling Goldenbaum dynasty, who not so long ago would have euthanised people with his congenital blindness. His hatred for the Goldenbaums might seem irrational, but with that as his end he sets about treating everything else as a means.

Oberstein’s thought-processes, as mechanical as his cybernetic eyes, seem completely alien to the attractive world of honour and emotion that Reinhard’s other admirals inhabit. True, Oberstein does have one emotional attachment, to a pet dog, but I don’t remember it ever affecting his decisions — indeed, judging from one of his lines in the last episode, he had to ignore his concern for it to do (snip! — spoilers) what he did. Ultimately, Oberstein’s plans had to succeed to bring about the resolution that Legend of the Galactic Heroes has, though whether or not that resolution counts as a happy ending is an open question.

* * *

Heigar serves his purpose within Infinite Ryvius’s story, and serves it well, but I’ve always been convinced that he was wrong, and that the show itself agreed with me. Oberstein, on the other hand . . . I’d be boasting if I said the emotional, honourable world of Reinhard’s other admirals resonates with my own. It would be more accurate to say that I wish it did. It attracts me, anyway, and Oberstein repels me — but I’ve never quite been able to persuade myself that he was wrong. Thus the contrast that is really the point of this post: both characters are presented partly as representatives of a certain kind of ethical thought, but while one is condemned, the other is rather unsettling. (I should note that I’ve no problem with the condemnation of Heigar: I do not think that moral ambiguity is always a good thing in a story.)

Incidentally, the contrast between my attempts to sum up these two characters’ motivations interests me. Heigar is not nearly as significant a character as Oberstein, and Infinite Ryvius has less than a quarter of the Legend’s length, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I’m not sure what drives him. If I didn’t feel like I needed evidence from the story itself, I’d suggest that he was (most of the time) doing what he honestly believed would create the best (by which he probably meant ‘efficient’) society possible on the Ryvius.

In Oberstein’s case, I’m struck by my own choice of the word ‘irrational’ to describe his ultimate motivation (I’m relying on some of the scenes in which he’s introduced, and I could be wrong). I think of him as a consequentialist, because he sees ethics as a matter of outcomes, but I wouldn’t call him a utilitarian, because he doesn’t aim for the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Actually, hatred and revenge are concepts straight from the world the other admirals inhabit. Am I using the word ‘consequentialism’ properly? If you believe that the ends justify the means, are you allowed to have some pretty irrational ends? I don’t know enough about meta-ethics to pursue this any further.

I was idle, and I thought idly about war and anime. ‘Anime says that war sucks,’ is what I thought first. This seems to be the standard opinion. If it’s deployed, it’s frequently followed by mention of pacifism and the atomic bomb.

Thing is, ‘war sucks’ isn’t directly a pacifist statement. Root canal operations suck, but most people dutifully submit to their dentist’s not-so-tender mercies regardless. Something else needs to be added to the mix to turn ‘war sucks’ into an argument against war’s very existence: the belief that things that suck should be avoided at all costs, perhaps (in which case, no root canal operation for you), or the belief that there is a line of suckiness which must not be crossed — and that war crosses it.

After all, it’s hard to find someone who won’t agree that war sucks. There isn’t (or at least I hope there isn’t!) a vast military-industrial conspiracy of people who sit in smoke-filled rooms planning next year’s conflict, and every soldier I’ve met has made it clear they think war is an unpleasant business. Indeed, in my experience the respectable breed of pacifist is against war because of more sophisticated philosophical or religious convictions than brute hedonism.

You might wonder why this exercises me so much, so perhaps it’s worth explaining that I encounter grubbier anti-war campaigners who object to certain wars in particular, rather than to war in general. (One of them represents me in Parliament, though I certainly didn’t vote for him — sometimes representative democracy really gets on my nerves.) If you listen to their arguments, there’s a worrying tendency to throw ‘war sucks’, ‘this particular war really sucks’ and a helping of buffet pacifism into the rhetorical kitchen blender. It’s this blending that I find especially irritating, though it doesn’t surprise me, since political speechmaking is to clear thought as Nena Trinity is to wedding parties.

Despite its reputation for unremittingly futile violence, different parts of the Gundam franchise (which is of course where all the above was heading) go to different places with ‘war sucks’. Zeta, for example, depicts a very unpleasant conflict (ending on a famously downbeat note), and some of the Titans (the Bad Guys) are reasonable, likeable human beings (others less so). At the same time, it’s clear that the Titans’ plans are Bad and that it will be A Good Thing if the AEUG defeats them. In Zeta ‘war sucks’ but it’s not pointless: we want the AEUG to keep fighting, and to win.

SEED, by contrast, depicts a very unpleasant conflict in which both factions are led by Bad Guys, though (again) some combatants on both sides are reasonable, likeable human beings. It’s suggested that it will be A Bad Thing if either side wins. In SEED ‘war sucks’ and we want the heroes we see fighting each other to sort out their differences and then do something to sort out the war (by teaming up and shooting things until both sides stop). The war portrayed is futile, but the heroes’ violence is not, at least once they figure out who to shoot. Note that I’m not including SEED Destiny in my thinking here, because Meer’s ass threw SEED’s Lacus-based value system out of whack.

(I’ve been unfair to the anime I’ve mentioned so far, though I’m hardly the only guilty one. I’ve assumed that each story has a relatively simple message to be extracted. None of these are explicitly didactic: it’s not clear that we’re expected to take these particular fictional wars as models with which to judge all wars, though SEED does feature some sweeping statements which nudge us in that direction. Still, we tend to approach stories hunting for a message, whether or not we’re promised one, so in my defence I shall say that I was simply imitating that mythical creature, the Average Viewer. I’m going to carry on being unfair for the rest of this post.)

I watched 0080: War in the Pocket again before Christmas, because Christmas is coming and 0080 is the best Christmas anime (take that, Itsudatte My Santa OVA!). It’s not perfect, but the only element that seems really deficient to me is the music, and even that has a certain ’so this is what the late eighties sounded like’ charm to it.

0080’s hero is (perhaps) Al, an eleven-year-old boy. He could be very annoying — within the story he certainly manages to get on his mother’s nerves — and there are probably viewers who dislike him. I am not one of them: I appreciate Al because he appreciates mecha. I remember having Al’s fascination for large war machines when I was his age. I remember the glee I felt visiting the Tank Museum or Duxford. Al’s interest may be different in its expression — since there’s a real war going on he can easily acquire actual memorabilia — but it’s similar in kind.

0080 takes Al’s love of war machines (the love that drives the toy sales that in turn fund the whole shebang) and makes it the catalyst for a catastrophe. Al’s concept of heroism, his rose-tinted appreciation of giant robots and perhaps his failure to understand the rules of 0080’s genre (the Gundam always wins!) all propel the story’s other hero, Bernie, towards that catastrophe. This is hardly the only clever thing that 0080 does — it has Bernie sensibly fleeing his responsibilities while wearing sunglasses that make him resemble Quattro (see below, and compare this blog’s banner), for example — but it’s the play on mecha fandom that I find most striking.

I’m a mecha fan like Al, so I’m jolted into an examination of my own attitude to machines and the wars they fight when I watch 0080. What of Britain’s wars, which in my lifetime have been geographically distant enough to feel like quarrels in far away countries between people of whom we know nothing? For some reason, I have a vote despite being chronically ill-informed about anything that really matters — when I’m holding a voting pencil I’m not unlike Bernie cosplaying as the veteran Quattro — so this isn’t as idle a question as it might have seemed when I began.

Because I grew up with war as something that happens somewhere else, and because I’m not a soldier myself, my attitude to war has been forged by experiencing war stories, historical or otherwise, and finding out whether or not I’m able to say ‘I see this, and I still believe some wars can be justified’. (For the record, I do.) Bombing determined the street layout of my home town, I was raised on history and having to repeatedly read the Aenied was one of the defining events of my late adolescence, so 0080 was hardly the first of these self-examinations. It’s just that the presence of robots gets me hard (in this way, not in that way).

Some Tyler, in case things have been too serious in this post.

In conclusion— actually, I should be honest and admit that there’s not much here to conclude. I’ve learned a little more about myself, and you may or may not have learned something about anti-war rhetoric in Britain, but I don’t feel like I’ve said anything especially incisive about 0080. There is the point that long-running franchises don’t boil down easily — Gundam rarely, if ever, simply says ‘war sucks’, just as there’s a difference between music that seduces because it epitomises culture to those who have none, and music that seduces because of, um, Fold Waves — but anyone could’ve pointed that out. They probably have already.

Further Reading

• Omo once considered the Gundam franchise in the light of the myth of redemptive violence (I don’t understand the myth of redemptive violence, but if you read Wink’s article maybe you will).
• I swiftly dismissed any connection between suffering per se and pacifism (or at least pacifism which I can respect) in this post, and it might be worth reconsidering that in the light of DarkMirage’s comments on pacifism in Japan.
• Oddly for a post involving phallic statuary, Cameron’s lengthy metaphor for the interplay between the media and a government which is fighting a war is probably relevant somewhere along the line.
• This post is in no way endorsed by the Royal British Legion.

Tear away the persona, then tear away the real person too.

I’ve been quite busy lately, and one of things I have turned to in my breaks is been Detroit Metal City. When the OVA adaption was originally being released there were a fair few positive and amusing posts about it, so I stored it away in my mind as a title for a rainy day. It seemed like a good idea to try it during last week’s downpour of deadlines.

It’s a good anime for the hard-working: it’s funny, its episodes are only fifteen minutes long and the jokes are delivered rapidly, so one’s mind is still active enough to go straight back to work once the fifteen minutes are up. But it wasn’t just amusing. I also found it satisfying for a reason quite unrelated to my poor time-management skills.

I don’t know how well I can articulate my satisfaction, but I’ll have a go. I think I’m satisfied by Krauser/Negishi’s double-minded predicament, which is simultaneously hilarious and quietly horrifying. Negishi/Krauser is, at best, a difficult person to be around. He also models, in an exaggerated way, the gap between inner and outer selves that we’re all to some degree familiar with, and the trouble that occurs when elements from one self seep into the other. This mix of unpleasantness and familiarity means that DMC’s stories might make good material for a tragedy, if you toned them down a bit.

DMC keeps on the funny side of the line separating laughter and sadness, but it retains its interest in unhappiness as a kind of muted contrapuntal melody. (If an unmusical person like me is reaching for musical comparisons then I can’t be explaining this well!) I’ve mentioned the central problem of Krauser/Negishi’s double life, but tragedy’s also present in quite peripheral touches: Negishi’s mother’s nonplussed concern for his brother in the fifth episode, the immigrant['s] song in the tenth and the actress’s contractual obligations in the ninth, for example.

Some of these things are things we might worry about laughing at. A certain type of comedy, evidently a type I enjoy, uses that worry productively, just as a contrapuntal melody isn’t just there, but actively contributes to the overall effect. Is this one of the features of black comedy? Dai Mahou Touge / Punie-chan is cynical, but it can’t be serious in the way that black comedy can be: it can’t let its audience feel anything, because a moment’s serious consideration of its plots would be insupportable.

That might, however, be because it’s more parodic than satirical: DMT’s premises relate to a genre of fiction (mahou shoujo stories), while DMC exaggerates a universal human experience and so has more potential to make us ask questions of ourselves. Satire is (hopefully) funny, but traditionally it’s meant to inspire reform too. Perhaps the more purely parodic something is (and DMT is pretty devoted to parody) the less it’s able to provoke us. I’ve just started to watch Dai-Guard, and while it does gently play with the mecha genre, its thought-provoking ingredient is its satirical angle on Japanese corporate culture and life spent piloting a desk.*

(This post sprang obliquely from some thoughts prompted by commenting here.)

* A metaphor stolen from the in-universe manual for the original Wing Commander. Does anyone else remember that manual? Puts me in mind of the short story anthology that came with Frontier: Elite II. Those were the days.