I’ve been really enjoying Sousou no Frieren and by enjoying I mean feeling like I want to cry.

I’ll need to find something more upbeat next.

  • CriticalOtaku [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    Yeah, that’s why 00 is one of my least favourite Gundams. Like, it was fine as a show when I was a kid but now as my politics have grown, I kinda realized that it came at the question “Was the American response to 9/11 justified in any way?” from the most contrarian and least dialectically materialistic direction possible, and then leaves no conclusions by just blaming everything on the Illuminati pulling the strings, and I dunno that just rubs me the wrong way rn

    Seed at least had boring “racism bad why can’t we all just get along” liberal politics, G and Wing were camp and entertaining if kinda politically incoherent, and IBO and WfM had more or less decent things to say about the state of the world.

    00 just has 9/11 brainworms the size of the sandworms from Dune

    Edit: the only thing that I still like from 00 is Op 1, “My wishes over their airspace” is one of the hardest lines in a Gundam op ever. (Only “Raise your Flag” and Turn A’s op is better imo)

    • Cromalin [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      yeah for sure. i think 00 touches on a lot of interesting stuff but i’m bummed by how it’s going here. though once i accepted that it’s just in anime nonsense land now i’m back to having a mostly good time (i just watched the episode where they introduce the 00 raiser and that’s good enough bullshit to keep me happy)

      but imo wfm goes down the same route of just not resolving anything, just in a less egregious way. i am not opposed to space magic, but you gotta also address the material concerns of the setting some. like, suletta just works together with kenanji in the last bit and the show totally forgets that he kills her dad. and guel goes through all that shit and just becomes the nice ceo, and i never got the feeling the show was really interrogating any of that stuff at all

      basically ibo is the only really good non-tomino gundam i’ve seen

      • CriticalOtaku [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        I think I’d have liked 00 more if it was more thoughtful about the stuff it does. Unicorn and Hathaway kiiiinda cover similar thematic ground in that they are both very heavily post-9/11 shows (albeit with UC canon baggage) and succeed a lot better (but that’s probably because they are Tomino influenced and leverage the UC’s history into their themes)

        WfM

        Yeah, I think that’s fair criticism: for me “we need to use lesbian space magic to literally destroy the military industrial complex” is just doing so much heavy lifting that I definitely am willing to be more forgiving and overlook the show’s flaws even if it fails to justify it’s ending, whereas 00’s Illuminati and… other stuff just left me cold

        Edit: wait I just realised that 00’s contemporary to Macross Frontier, which is lib as fuck and can be summarized as “Ariana Grande hires Blackwater to try and stop the Iraq War” but that show absolutely had better politics lmao

            • Cromalin [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
              2·
              9 months ago

              also i think giving me 25 episodes to adjust to the fact that this isn’t going to really address the politics might end up making me feel better about it than wfm just shoving it all in at the last minute. i can just get into the groove of scifi anime bullshit that doesn’t mean anything, as opposed to expecting a resolution to any of the politics and not getting one. i’d still infinitely prefer something like ibo that actually just deals with the setting as presented, or even better an unjust depths where it does that, AND the scifi bullshit, AND is explicitly about communist revolutionaries who are unambiguously good

              but i can deal with scifi anime bullshit that has no meaning

              • CriticalOtaku [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
                2·
                9 months ago

                See it’s the opposite for me, I really can’t deal with meaningless sci-fi anime bullshit nowadays. WfM for most of its runtime was about something, even if it didn’t stick the landing, which I’d prefer to 00’s kinda blah jumble of technobabble.

                Of course IBO’s the best tho

                • Cromalin [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
                  2·
                  9 months ago

                  i totally respect that

                  and yeah ibo is just far and away the best gundam has to offer outside turn a (unless like, gundam x or age or g-reco blow me away)