Escape Mechanism

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.

Funeral Games

Axe-wielding men in dressy uniforms fighting amid neoclassical columns. Delicious.

A month or so ago I finished Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It was very good. I’m going to stop myself from talking about how good it was. Perhaps Lelangir put it best when he wrote that ‘LoGH killed anime – I seriously doubt anything will be able to compare in the slightest.’ I’d provide a link, but that’s the whole of his post.

Yet I’m tempted to say that it’s not an anime.

Destination or Journey?

That Starship Operators post produced some interesting discussion. The consensus seems to be that said anime sacrificed character depth and development at the Altar of Conclusiveness. (I’ll have to be patient and rely on the goodwill of Amazon.co.uk and MVM Films to find out for myself.) This sacrifice seems to be an acceptable trade-off to me, if the staff are confronted with a wealth of source material and a lack of actual wealth, but OGT disagrees.

Figure 17: Attention! Deficit!

Author pointed out that I didn’t explain why I found Figure 17 ‘hard to digest’. It’s probably good that he brought it up, because I’m not sure I’d really considered that myself. Justify, justify . . .

A brief preamble is probably in order: Figure 17 takes a premise from the magical girl genre (the young heroine has to use her powers to collect some objects) and unites that premise with an unusually kinetic style of action (the objects are monstrous aliens) and a startlingly intense amount of emotion (‘THE SCENE‘, for instance). It’s not quite The 08th Mahou Shoujo Team, but it may be as close as we’ll get, and I rather like it.

‘Drink less, or taste not the Pierian spring’

No mecha musume Fairey Swordfish exists.
But if one did, she would be a tea-drinker.

Yes, more about mecha. In fact, the first, more boring, half of the entry that I posted the second half of last weekend. A blog entry like the Haruhi adaption and Huxley’s Eyeless in Gaza, I suppose.

Those Magnificent Men In Their Fighting Machines

‘Mecha’, as a genre, is odd: there’s nothing obvious inherent in our humanity which makes us hungry for titans of steel beating seven kinds of coolant out of each other in the same way that, say, people are prone to falling in love and so we hunger for stories about love. Mecha appear to be very much styling - however inextricably bound up with substance style is – in that most of the time you could replace them with some other weapon; you wouldn’t have the same show, but the character conflicts and action sequences could still remain in place. And indeed, it’s not unheard of for mecha to be inserted at the sponsors’ insistence.

LoGH Episodes 1-15: Spoiler-Free Commentary

Legend of the Galactic Heroes is too long to write neatly tied-together essays on while you’re still watching the early episodes. In fact, so much happens in just the first fifteen that for the first time in my (admittedly short) blogging life, I could actually use some episode summaries – and there aren’t any, of course. I should write some, but it would be boring and I wouldn’t be very good at it. In lieu of that, I offer you some sweeping commentary which is generally spoiler-free since I hope that I might persuade others to give this classic a try, and because anything I write further into the series will probably be spoiler-laden.

Nanoha A’s, Fateful Addenda: Accept No Substitutes

The White Devil eschews aimbots in favour of guts and friendship.

After finishing Nanoha A’s a few nights ago, I suppose I should put my thinking cap on again and examine my second dose of beamspam maho shojo goodness, attempting to produce something that bolts neatly onto the end of my previous remarks like an intellectual Dendrobium Orchis or the late application of glasses to a previously un-bespectacled girl. (Since this entry wanders a little, I felt ‘addenda’ was more appropriate than ‘addendum’.) Once again, I think I’ll write about Fate and once again I’ll use the excellent eleventh episode. (Spoilers follow the break.)

Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha: Fateful Philosophy

So Berkles has been making me flashback to my days of studying Philosophy at school. And, at the same time, I’ve been watching Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha, partly because it has a good reputation, partly because it has ‘lyrical’ in its title and partly because one can’t watch mecha all of the time. (Entry contains spoilers.)

It’s Allegory: The Decline and Fall of the British Gundam

Nothing adequately encapsulates the amount of awesome in this image
(full size)

‘Allegory’ is a word I hesitate to employ. Understandably, it is often used loosely on the internet, to mean something like ‘metaphorical’. I personally prefer to reserve it for a certain type of storytelling, and it’s a type which is relatively rare in anime. (Though perhaps more common in anime than in a lot of art after the ‘Rise of the Novel’.) It’s a kind of complex, extended and (over)developed metaphor or set of symbols which say something.

Frequently, allegory becomes so overtly symbolic that it ceases to feel like a normal story. The Bouge of Court, for example, has a set of characters named ‘Disdayne’, ‘Ryott’, ‘Suspycyon’ and so on, and it’s much more worthwhile to read their behaviour and speeches as examinations of the things they embody rather than as revelations of normal fictional character; Suspycyon’s eyes roll and his hands shake not because of some motive peculiar to him as a person (for he isn’t a person) but because (I think) the poem’s pointing out what suspicion does to anyone.

This sort of thing is, as I said, fairly rare in anime; Gluttony, Lust and Envy from Fullmetal Alchemist spring to mind, and Infinite Ryvius is (among other things) a sustained political allegory. (Is the Ryvius a Ship of Fools?) Another place where we can find something approaching allegory is Mobile Fighter G Gundam – yes, despite the fact that it’s a childish show about large robots, fighting. Or perhaps because it’s a childish show about large robots, fighting: allegory loves reductive simplicity.