this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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dungeon meshi is a very good adaptation of a very good manga
im watching gundam 00 and rose of versailles, but i rewatched season 1 of ibo in between episodes of 00 and that's not a comparison that puts 00 season 2 in a good light. ibo is about things! like, real things! workers rebellions and colonialism and the ways hegemony perpetuates itself! and it's got lots of great characters! 00 season 1 was about real things, but season 2 on the other hand is about quantum brainwaves and the purpose of the innovades, and wants me to enjoy spending time with allelujah haptism
Even though it was very lib, I enjoyed the premise of Gundam 00 and Celestial Being. It's a very cathartic concept, if not totally ignorant of how the world works. On brand for Gundam tho. IBO was 🔥.
i liked season 1 a lot. celestial being going into not!venezuela and bombing the city because them trying to exit the united states' control counts as starting war is good stuff, it's juicy and fucked up and interesting to think about. in season 2 they say "we're antifa but not in an ideological sense" and only really seem interested in the innovades who are so boring. you wouldn't think that a group where all the members were named shit like bring stabbity or healing care could be boring, but this show finds a way
also i just hate allelujah so much, he sucks so bad. doesn't even have the decency to be a FUN bad stereotype of plurality, he's just miserable to be around and makes the show worse every time he's on screen. "ohhhh marie.... i can't accept that maybe you aren't exactly like you were when i knew you when we were 5 and i'm going to make it everyone else's problem"
I thought so at the time too, but seeing libs response to Palestine's uprising, I feel like there probably wasn't a lot of people that thought about it too much. Especially nowadays when it seems like every other MCU content is successfully framing revolutionaries as terrorists. The western
yearn for that negative peace and anyone who disrupts it must be the bad guy.
lmao, it's been many years since I saw it when it first came out, but yeah he totally got way too much screen time.
00 Raiser was cool though. Honestly, the plot of 00 and SEED are kinda blended in my head.
yeah it might just be that this was always what the show was, but it used to feel like it had space to be read in interesting ways. i was never expecting it to start advocating for revolution or anything, but season one felt like it at the very least was willing to explore stuff like that, and season two just isn't
also yeah a lot of this stuff is very seed coded
Unfortunately, Gundam kinda does that a lot where they'll toe the line and then not really go anywhere with it. As per someone around here talking about it, I recently watched Dallos and found it pretty interesting. It's full on about class struggle from the POV of space colonies. If you haven't seen it, I'd recommend it. It's older, but holds up.
i'm like 90% certain the one talking about dallos was me lmao. it's good!
and yeah, gundam has a problem with this in general. i mentioned that i had a bigger problem with it here because i watched iron blooded orphans (which does not have this problem*) but i also think in general 00 is worse about it than say, any of the tomino uc stuff for example. it helps that the newtype stuff is connected to the politics in a way that the innovators just aren't. it's also that season 1 seemed really clear eyed about the political landscape and just drops all of it, which is worse than if it was a more gradual shift from politics to arguing about scifi concepts
*ibo never advocates for revolution or anything, but it never loses sight of the actual things happening that matter. it doesn't introduce the illuminati at the end of season 1 and then stop caring about gjallerhorn beyond how the illuminati is controlling gjallerhorn
lmao, my apologies, it totally was you.
That all sounds like fair criticism, I'd say. Sadly, as I've given away, my memory is shit. And I watched all these series at much different places in my life, politically. I think I watched IBO as per someone recommending it on r/cth when it first came out. So at the time all these shows seemed radical, and now 7-20 years down the line I'm like, those fucking
s.
now you've probably seen me talk about this before, but you should read unjust depths
it's a mecha web novel that's just straight up by a marxist leninist about a postcolonial soviet state called the union in a post apocalyptic earth, where the main characters are on a mission to support revolutionaries in the empire the union revolted from, it's got the high concept scifi stuff but it never forgets that the core of the story is about colonialism and the evils of capitalism. i cannot recommend it enough
Ah, I have. But while I read plenty of webcomics, i have an aversion to web novels for some reason. Is there an end in sight? Because it does sound pretty cool.
there's an end in sight but it's going to be a while before it's reached. i personally really like getting a new thing to read every two weeks but i get it if that's not your speed. i can't make that work with manga, but i can with unjust depths
Hmm, I'll add it to my calendar to check on the progress this summer. Thanks for the heads up, it definitely sounds cool.
my gut says that it's probably 2/3rds of the way through things, but i can't say for certain and updates have been coming out slower lately
Word. I'll keep an eye on it.🤞
Em from Great Gundam Project has been describing a lot of the mid-season 2 00 stuff as "SEED-coded" lmao
Lmao, that makes me feel a bit less senile, I guess.
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
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)
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
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)
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
that's fair, i like lesbian spave magic. but i wish it was actually about fighting the mic and not evil milf space magic
Truuuuuue
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
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
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)