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Happy birthday :D

P&S2 HAPPENING!!!!!

Hi, thanks for accepting! nice to meet you :)

Bro.. you could be right. I really can't say because I haven't seen either of them xD I do really want to watch Kaiji though, I've never heard anything but good shit about it. Were you a fan of it? Apparently the guy who wrote [POPULAR NEFLIX SHOW] was actually inspired by manga he was reading, including Kaiji. It sounds like you've already read a couple articles about the subject, but if you havent read this one it may be interesting to you esp in connecting that other show to Kaiji. The dude talks about why he doesn't feel squid game is really doing what critics often say it's doing from a few different angles. Since Kaiji is ostensibly about gambling and that is the apparent appeal of the series rather than posturing itself as a critical dystopian drama, maybe some of the stuff this guy says about gambling, fairness etc. w regards to squid game will hold true for Kaiji?

Yeah I'm at Episode 16 at the moment. It's not without it's problems, I just always liked the character designs and the vibe of it's being in 1889 at the turn of the 19th Century into the 20th. I'm enjoying it. 31 years is a long time to wait to see the whole thing properly English subbed.

ive always been hesitant about the manga, i guess because a lot of them seem kinda fan-ficy... among other reasons lol but i'll definitely check this out. i heard about bertolchika's children but i didn't know there was a manga adaptation of it. i can read it on my laptop at work LOL. i'm kinda curious to read the original story too, msg: high-streamer, if it's possible to find in english. thanks for the suggestion.

That is very true.

Nice to meet you!

based

LOL I really didn't even think it was gonna be that long when I was writing it. I wish I had had a reason to write about this bs in school. Really I often think it's kind of ridiculous for me to spend my time thinking/writing about this stuff but, whatever xd I just end up doing it anyway. Yeah the ending of ZZ is lame overall. I'm really looking forward to Tomino's redemption arc via Turn A Gundam tho.

https://wavemotioncannon.com/2016/11/08/interview-hideaki-anno-vs-yoshiyuki-tomino-animage-071994/
https://www.gwern.net/docs/anime/1993-anno-charscounterattackfanclubbook-khodazattranslation.pdf
Mostly what I know explicitly of his views on women come from these interviews, both with Anno. They're pretty interesting imo despite some questionable stuff and show how Tomino and Anno are quite a bit alike. ALSO I should mention, I think his views changed quite a bit after this because he had two daughters, and he put a lot of thought into the idea of gender performance, which apparently you can see in action in Turn A Gundam.

I think what you're saying about Newtypes is true, too, but part of what is exciting about Gundam to me is that it's the "others," the people who fall in a critical position outside of the cultural mainstream, that have the potential to change things. Like to start with, it's Char's father who comes up with the idea of Newtypes, and you could say it's a reframing of the identity of Spacenoids into a positive thing. It's when he dies and the Zabis co-opt his ideas for their own gain that it becomes converted into this excuse for war. Newtypes were intended to symbolize the possibility of a future without war though. So the Zabis become this kind of mold for everything that is holding back humankind. They say they are living out Zeon Deikun's (who I always think is supposed to be like Gundam Karl Marx XD) legacy, but they don't care about the original spirit of the idea at all, they turned it into something for their own gain.

This is the thing the young characters point out and rebel against all the time: adults ostensibly doing things "for a cause," when it's really for themselves. If they just didn't do all that stupid selfish shit, nobody would be getting killed and the kids wouldn't have to hop into a Gundam to stop them. Everyone leans on these social hierarchies and ideological platforms to merely justify their own selfish pursuits, even as they abuse people and commit genocide.

To me CCA is where Tomino really puts this point on full blast, because Char is the guy who is totally full of shit, and knows he is full of shit, but he just can't stop being full of shit and feeling bad about it. His dad is Zeon Deikun and he is one of the most powerful Newtypes himself, so he should have all the potential to do something actually good for humanity, but instead, after he makes it his goal to get revenge on the Zabis, he becomes just like them in the process. He becomes manipulative and selfish to achieve his goals. Even when he falls in love with Lalah, he cannot reconcile his feelings for her with the fact that she is a useful tool for achieving whatever his goals are after sacking the Zabis. But it's because he thinks of her as a tool that she dies, and then it is too late for Char to redeem himself. Everything is lost for him, he becomes a slave to his feelings of guilt and impotence. Casval is stuck being Char.

So in Zeta, he's not ever comfortable revealing who he is even though everyone literally is like "we know you're Char...," and he keeps saying stuff about how he hates playing the politician and making speeches, but that's exactly the kind of role he's trapped himself in. He cannot fully commit himself to joining the A.E.U.G., so he allows himself to use them as a resource against the Titans and Axis. He would like to be someone more like Kamille or Amuro, but he stands in his own way and acts like he has no choice. The truth comes out when he is fighting Amuro in CCA and he admits "I don't care about changing the world at all." He sees himself as this weak, hopeless person, and in turn he acts as though he thinks all of humanity is just like him, and that's why he should slam an Asteroid into Earth. He really thinks of it as killing himself. In the end, I think it's quite plausible to conclude that he actually wants expects to lose to Amuro, considering he gives Amuro the Psy-commu system to beat him with. So he indirectly saves humanity from himself by letting Amuro kill him in place of him destroying Earth. On the surface he has is a Zeon fundamentalist, underneath that he's become this nihilistic wretch, but underneath THAT, he still wants to believe in humanity. Yet since he thinks he's too shitty of a person to save humanity, he gives Amuro the tools to do it for him BY allowing Amuro to defeat him. But anyway, for me the big takeaway is that I don't think Char is the only person like this, who knows he's full of shit. I think lots of characters know.

I also think in CCA (and F91) you can see that Tomino is kind of Freudian, which is contributing to some of his "dated" ideas about gender imo. Like for example, you pointed out Quess. I think Tomino is thinking of Quess as just a needy child, and isn't really specifically thinking about her gender too much. The reason she goes from Amuro to Char, and is so easy to manipulate, is that she thinks her father is a despicable person (which he is, but so is Char, but she just doesn't recognize it). Tomino really buys into the idea that a person's relationship with their parents changes them in sorta predictable ways. I think he also believes a kinda Freudian notion like "kids cannot tell the differences between filial/fraternal love, and sexual/romantic urges." Tbh I think there is some merit to both of these views, but where it is a bit too dated/normative is in thinking that, because Quess has no acceptable father figure, she becomes needy for a replacement, i.e. everyone NEEDS this specifically patriarchal heteronormative family unit to function socially. But if you just look at it like "Quess' problem is that she has no suitable father figure" it's not actually that SHE'S hysterical, she's fucked up because the dudes available for her to look up to are shitty dudes. It's not even necessarily because she's a girl, per se. I think he also mentions in that interview with Anno about CCA that he thinks Char has a mommy complex. Kamille seems like he wants to get with like literally every older woman after he kills his own mom. I think he views the characters as always having these underlying motivations that amount to childish impulses, and they just use ideology as a screen.

I think because Gundam is framed this way (with people abusing ideology/hierarchies to veil and serve their own pursuits) women are in an interesting position overall, but one that Tomino is not fully aware of. They're narratively neglected to an extent (characters like Four and Matilda are not terrible in and of themselves, but they're largely there to serve as motivation for the male protagonist. When they are killed/abused, the protagonist recognizes what it is exactly he has to protect), but their social roles are pretty diverse, and you can see women directly chafing against the patriarchal social structure of the world (which Tomino himself is aware of, to his credit, even if he himself has a pretty naive, misogynistic view of women). From a normative POV, there are women who succeed by being "like men," and there are (comparably few, I think) women who act mostly "like women," but to me what many of the female characters have in common is that they are not willing to accept a prescribed social role at all. This even makes an abhorrent person like Reccoa sort of interesting to me, because even if she is vile... at least she has the nuts to be honest, and doesn't hide her motivations behind a veil of ideology (which is ostensibly what "men" do, even though I suspect in Tomino's view, they are equally weak and shallow).

Victory is such a misstep for me because Tomino comes to think that women have like their own biologically motivated philosophy of life. In that series, it seems every woman has a twisted desire to be a mom (namely the MC's adoptive mommy) underpinning everything she does, or has a vision of a government that enforces like some bizarre totalitarian "feminine" peaceful rule, which Tomino himself seems to think is stupid because it would be like "coddling" humanity and turning us all back into kids. So to me, when he had no idea what women were "really like" he was much better at writing women, because didn't have this specific narrow vision of what kind of people women could be. He just wrote them as if they were any person, maybe a little too much focus on them being domestic or innocent victims or whatever, but in this implicitly acknowledged (and actually, sometimes explicitly acknowledged, I think) position of relative social exclusion, because Gundam is in its own structure a patriarchal world dominated by male-centered ideology.

ZZ, I think Tomino was just not being his cynical self, to his own detriment. The more shitty he makes life seem (within reason, of course) the more triumphal it feels to come up with a reason to keep living. Though fwiw, I dunno if you got that far but in the end Kamille does recover. Lots of miracles happen in ZZ lol. Also I can't come up with a clever way to acknowledge it but I appreciate the Cruel Angel's Thesis joke XD. I kinda would be down to see Shukou Murase handle some remakes of the UC. He strikes me as a major fanboy, and I liked his take on Hathaway so far.

Yeah, I think CCA has a lot of issues from a continuity/narrative standpoint XD and I actually thought the same thing re: it just became a super robot series (Unicorn is even worse in this regard). From my understanding the actual original way 0079 was supposed to go (and how the novel trilogy is) was basically stretched out into Zeta and CCA, i.e. the white base was supposed to team up with Char for a while and then he would turn on them again; except Amuro was actually supposed to be killed halfway through.

I like CCA a bit though, because for me it clarified the way I see Char and Gundam as a whole. If you're curious I can say a bit more but I don't wanna just dump my Gundam Thesis on you at random haha

In general for Tomino I think the newtypes are just a way to encapsulate his idea that when you are confronted with the nihilistic possibility that life is absurd or meaningless or whatever because humans are shitty to each other, even if you can't imagine the world changing for the better in your own lifetime, humans have to keep living with the hope that in the future we will be better than we are today. For him all hope lies with children, the future, etc. He turns his idea of "growth" into a literal "evolution." This kind of view in general.. I dunno, it's something that resonates with me, even if it's a bit silly in the way it's presented. I think that Gundam has lots of problems in terms of execution, but I am a big enough fan of Tomino's point of view and many of his characters, I suppose, that I mostly don't mind them. Probably a good idea to drop ZZ though haha and I would say definitely don't bother with Victory. Victory is the most misogynistic one imo, and it's ironically the one where Tomino had said he thinks he finally became capable of understanding women.

I think ignoring context or authorial intent is like the basis of how most people watch anime, and basically what people are implying when they say "art is subjective" and stuff like that, so I definitely can't deny it holds weight XD For me the social/economic context just adds another layer of meaning. It's something to consider aside from whether or not you actually like the anime or how you interpret it, though I think most peoples' political views do affect their reading of the content either way, too.

And yeh I think you can't stop people from "objectifying" or "sexualizing" or what have you. It's a natural part of social life. People project onto one another, especially when they don't really know things about the person in front of them. The problem I think is more specifically like, some people do not realize when they are projecting, and don't realize there's a person with feelings beneath their projected idea of that person. So they're like "Ah yes, there is a person with large boobs before me. I can ogle this person and remark on their appearance without consequence." I think the gender bias is notable in both fiction and the real social world of course, which is a massive issue, but I do wonder if the projecting-awareness thing is something that can even be rectified by simply commodifying all bodies in fairly equal measure. And I wonder if fictional characters being shallow even plays as much of a role in the real world as we assume it does. Maybe it's actually the opposite, and the fact that some people choose the world of waifus/husbandos over real partners is that they KNOW in a strange, repressed way that the latter is not a pure object. Either way, people seem perfectly satisfied to actually not have that person with feelings underneath. When shit like VR/AR is commonplace, I feel like even more people are just going to avoid dating and shit like that. Which I still think is fucked I should add lol

I do think they're similar shows, and I like Madoka quite a bit. Although I think it's worth also considering whether you can't as much look at them in the light of like, a moe show with an actual dramatic plot, as you can a special kind of magical girl show. Many more dudes seem to find WEP and Madoka palatable than OG magical girl shit, which I don't think is a coincidence. Madoka is made by a bunch of people who typically make seinen, including Ume Aoki who's the character designer and the mangaka who made Hidamari Sketch. Not to say it's a bad thing or there's some much better way to cross those boundaries either, of course, but the very concept of moe is something that I think is contentious for anime fans who think along feminist lines. Some don't think it's problematic, and some think it is, and the divide is along this Marxist line, it seems to me. People are either saying one's own reading of the text is the main thing that matters, or the potential for different readings justifies its problematic status, or whatever (kind of a postmodern view I guess); or they're saying the facts of the show's existence and function as a commodity are more significant (more Marxist), because those factors truncate the subversive potential of the work and often discourage critical engagement.

I lean toward the Marxist POV, but it only bleeds into how I actually watch and rate anime a bit, or I'd be rating everything like 1s and 2s lol or just not watching anime. Even when anime try to incorporate some kind of commentary or message it just washes over people, because they don't care to watch or talk about anime on that level, and their experience with the content ends when the experience of watching it is over basically, and then they just pick out the girl that they liked to make her their forum signature or commission fanart or what have you, as the rest of the content recedes from their memory. So even while I'm scanning anime for artistically interesting or politically progressive or subversive content, I'm much more suspicious of the ways in which a show is maintaining or reinventing the structures that already exist, simply because an anime isn't really going to turn anyone into some kind of an activist to even .0001% of the extent as it's going to maintain the dominant ideology and social forms.

Not that Eva is very overtly political imo but even there, a lot of people just take it as an ecchi action/romance series with a shitty ending. I think that is a silly view and that it's one of the best shows ever, but in a very real sense you could say that the show is a total failure. It became the exact thing it didn't want to be, and has dominated the culture and industry for 25 years. So while I'm happy that Madoka is the kind of show that all kinds of people seem to be able to enjoy and discuss, and I love the show myself, I am a little reluctant to dub it super transgressive since in my mind the things it does good are inherently held back by its status as a product, its moe aesthetics, etc. You CAN read it in a way that's empowering, pretty convincingly I think, but I wouldn't fault someone for being turned off by moe girls getting chomped on either or preferring a more traditional Mahou Shoujo show, and I think that's a less stupid reading of the show than the aforementioned stupid reading of Eva. My initial reaction was in the vein of "Madoka is the Eva of Mahou Shoujo" but I've rolled back on that view. But yeah I think WEP does a lot of things worse and is imo overall a more sloppy show XD

most iconic moment of the whole show? T_T

I went ham and overexplained everything, I'm sorry lol

I thought WEP was ok. Overall I thought they tried to do way too much in 12 (or I guess 13) episodes. Honestly I thought the arc w Frill was the best part, but then the show just ends...

I think it's good as you're saying to include these dimensions of like, the male teachers being a bit fearsome (even the guy who seemingly doesn't have any ill intentions) because they are in a position of power over the girls and it's within their means to take advantage of them or harass them or what have you. Or like this whole kind of universal sorority thing, rika regretting bullying her fan, the girls coming to experience solace thru and solidarity with each other, feeling more obliged to be supportive toward the other girls around them, and all that. It felt a bit superficial to me at times though, which if I'm being optimistic I would just blame on the fact that they're sticking it into this show with so much other stuff going on plot wise and while still kind of trying to be a bit seinen-ish. But there are some things like the fact that a trans boy instead of a trans girl comes out of that one egg, that just give it the feeling that gender is not actually of primary concern. The cynic in me says that it's just turning being pitiful into a new form of performed femininity, and it's part of this larger cultural acceptance of the idea that "women are oppressed/traumatized" which we turn into the primary identifying factor of a "new" femininity. Trauma is like the new thing for consumers, whether it's gendered, racial, over sexuality, etc. Not to say that lots of shoujo/josei are not problematic in their own ways, but they are typically not just fixated on trauma or defining the cast via their trauma. There is a recognition that the female reader is not as simple as that. On the other hand, like... as a guy, I like Shinji as a character, not that it's exactly the same thing. It's hard for me to guess how a woman would really feel about this show, but you saying your friends felt to be depressed to be women after, that doesn't really surprise me too much lol.

Lol.. It was a dark time in my life.