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IBO is super interesting. "The establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins," is the final outcome, but the road there is actually rather fraught for that establishment, and it's alternately almost damned and just barely saved by aspects of its rule and operations. The winning agent of the establishment wins, in part, because he skillfully threads through the requirements of his station while strategically breaking taboo (but only once he's certain to have the political backing to do so). On the other side, the rebels are

>driven by the circumstances the establishment has forced them to contend with for the entirety of their short lives (they're all child soldiers, btw)

>are only able to find their successful path by rejecting establishment and forging what seem, at the time, to be canny ties with other groups on-the-margins

>...right until they follow that path off a cliff.

The "heroes" and "villains" remain who they are at the end not just because of affinity bias (having spent more time with the rebels than the establishment), but because there's a tangible disconnect between the former feeling forced into the poor decisions that they make, and the latter's rather cold, and unforced, determinations.

Spoiler

So when Shino almost takes Rustal's bridge out, I am, of course, cheering, even while I know I'm watching him commit a war crime and sign his own death warrant. When Rustal orders atmosphere-braised pilot skewers, it still feels incredibly unfair, even when I know why he made that decision. They threaded the needle.

Couldn't agree more. I particularly enjoyed the ruthless exploitation of the symbolism that McGillis Fareed was attempting, only to be met by a similarly ruthless exploitation of political systems from Rustal Elion. This time this one won, and it was ultimately a close thing, but it could have gone the other way.

Overall, a very sophisticated show - on its own and definitely for its genre.

If you like IBO, you might enjoy this essay, which analyzes its sociopolitical content:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mNRjwktvPV8

Another unique thing about IBO is that they mostly use old fashioned projectile weapons (ok, there are railguns) and physical melee weapons. Beam weapons are rare and no longer really used, and it’s the only Gundam subfranchise that doesn’t have beam sabers.

> Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one"

This probably has more to do with the type of content you are consuming. If you watch things for young adults, it will probably follow "the Heroes Journey" - wether it is LOTR, Harry Potter, Star Wars etc. (the West) or Naruto, Pokemon, Dragon Ball/Journey to the West (the East)

That's the point. AFAIK Gundam is a mecha-anime for young adults - the same audience as Marvel movies or the average Oscar winner. It's not East of Eden or The Remains of The Day.

I think this erases some interesting nuance. The original Gundam is unabashedly a toy commercial--ostensibly marketing to children in the exact same vein as the OG Transformers--except apparently nobody told the director, so it's an extremely emotionally mature show (more so than nearly all YA fiction) where the main character, a teen soldier, is narrowly escaping death, is killing people, is watching everyone around him be killed, is suffering the effects of PTSD, is being openly used as an expendable tool by his superiors, is on the run for his life being hunted by half the world, is coming to terms with the costs of war and the throngs of innocent bystanders being reduced to burning ash for the sake of cruel and ambitous men, and did you know you can buy his cool robo-flail accessory at Toys 'R Us today?

It's not that nobody told the director. It's that the director knew nobody cared what was actually in the show as long as the end product moved units on the shelves.

It's part of the reason the names are so wild. He was actively pushing the envelope with outrageous names during pitches to see how far he could go before producers would stop nodding along without paying attention.

Those names include "A Baoa Qu", "Gelgoog", and a variety of insane character names that sometimes sound cultureless yet futuristic like Bannagher Links and sometimes are just "M'Quve" or "Full Frontal".

I have two words for you: Quattro Bajeena.

lmao i was waiting for someone to bring it up.

Also don't forget Jamitov Hymen.

Jamaican Daninghan. Not to be confused with Cuban Pete. And please do not forget that 'Kamille' is a man's name.

Lmao everyone hating on my boy Kamille.

The original intended audience for Gundam was supposed to be college students if I remember correctly and not highschoolers. 1976 was the real start of when you had this massive wave of engineering finesse in Japan that overtook everything else in the world. It was the time when Japan was forming an obsession with mechanics, with model kits of everything from fully articulated 1:36 scale 50cc scooters to giant 1:20 scale warships that would take up an entire table. Kids couldn't afford these models as they were priced strictly for adults.

Gundam definitely fit into that "engineering fantasies for young professionals" niche, at least until ZZ came around in 1985. Gundam has the root word of "gun" because they were originally these more grounded fantasy weapons instead of man made demi-gods that appeared in shows like UFO Robot Grendizer. They weren't supposed to be superheroes, they were what engineering minded young men thought would be cool to have if they were given an unlimited budget to create bipedal tanks that could do the job of bomber aircraft, navy destroyers, and orbital bombardment satellites all in one. That's why Gundams, especially Zaku units, move slowly, pivot in unnatural ways, and use jets and wheels for locomotion, because they're giant tanks with manipulators that hold guns and not suits of armour. BattleTech also comes from that same origin, although it and Mechwarrior's development went all in on the "tank but with legs" idea instead of slowly losing their identity to the super robot genre.

The melodrama they mixed in as framing to discuss Japan's post-war military pacifism was incidental to creating and populating the backstory for an engineer's dream unlimited budget mobile weapons platform. So they weren't the Marvel equivalent back in 1979, they were more like Japan's answer to some of Robert Heinlein's militaristic concepts in Starship Troopers and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, where the concept came first and the story was just an excuse to see that concept in action.

G Gundam and SD Gundam are more like the Marvel movies, in that they strip away most of the issues being discussed and coast on the aesthetic similarities and caricaturized versions of themes from the source material.

This is a good rundown of (the history of) the appeal, particularly to male viewers. I hesitate to call the melodrama "incidental", though, as the female viewers it drew in were the ones who saved the franchise (per Tomino) when it initially failed to take off. The creators recognized where their bread was being buttered, which is why so many series in the franchise (including the ones most grounded in some semblance of mechanical and military knowledge) end up centering around either love stories or a troupe of unusually handsome young men.

That was half the equation; the other half being the transition from toy-based to model-based merchandising, as you said, which drew back in the male fans.

The subversion of tropes goes back all the way to the original Mobile Suit Gundam, though a little more subtle due to the studio wanting to make a show to sell toys and the director wanting to make something with a actual message. It has: -a 'good army' that could easily be the 'bad army' in a more optimistic show -the protagonists dealing with callus military leadership -sympathetic enemy soldiers dealing with their own incompetent and callus leadership -the war taking a huge psychological toll on the protagonist and all of them end up worse off for having been a part of it

And to your first point, the "good army" did become the "bad army" by the time of the sequel, Zeta Gundam. Once they're no longer on the back footing, the "good army" becomes a ruthless occupying force, operating almost entirely without oversight and under the direction of officers who are all too willing to cover up war crimes. But it still makes sense because you can see over the course of the show how such shift could happen in the inter-war period between the One Year War and the Gryps Conflict.

> Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one" but this one was "the establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins".

What's sorely missing is the very rare theme of "the establishment wins, and for a good reason, and it's actually a good thing".

Isn't that basically every cop show for instance? Like an episode of Law and Order is this person does something bad, the establishment finds and punishes them hurray.

LaO doesn't always follow that forumula. In some LaO the trial is botched or the law doesn't protect the victims or the perps escape justice due to political influence, et al.

Still, cop shows generally are about the "the establishment wins, and for a good reason, and it's actually a good thing" which the other commentator said is a theme that is sorely missing.

As is most any other show where the protagonist works for the government, e.g. James Bond or Ghost In The Shell.

A favorite tidbit I learned years ago was that the Chinese invented Law and Order genre pretty much before anyone else. Very much an establishment wins genre.

Here’s the Google summary:

> Early Chinese detective stories, known as gong'an ("court case") fiction, emerged from oral tales and plays during the Song Dynasty (960-1127), featuring incorruptible magistrate-detectives like Bao Zheng (Judge Bao) and Di Renjie (Judge Dee) who used clever deduction, forensic logic, and sometimes supernatural elements to solve crimes.

Didn't watch Law and Order much (my wife is a fan though, so I'll ask).

Most of the cop shows/procedurals I saw have some kind of "corrupt mayor" arc as a substantial part of their plot, but I guess if you go one level up, it's still "the establishment wins". But then anything where civilization doesn't collapse would be that.

SPOILER

There is actually a little bit of that in this. While the charismatic leader has some points about how the establishment has gotten weak and corrupt, overall it seems pretty par for the course. To be honest, it's better he didn't win. He was a bit demagoguey.

We just call that "propaganda."

You have to be more specific because "Eastern" here does not include Chinese thematic tropes.

https://x.com/xlr8harder/status/1962768298153521202

Sun Wukong is the original "normal guy who grinds to greatness", which was the original plot of Dragonball before it turned more into Harry Potter (you are the chosen one).

> Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one" but this one was "the establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins".

I think this is why The Wire captivated me. I'd been raised on a steady diet of hero's journey stories and then suddenly I ran into David Simon's buzzsaw of contravening those expectations.

In those years I'd just I started my working life and unfortunately the parallels were uncannily accurate.

I do love The Wire and just recently ended up watching Generation Kill with my dad. That's another amazing one from David Simon. Very real. Cpl. Ray Person still talks about his experience in the actual unit portrayed there on Reddit as /u/plasmata.

War in the Pocket is also pretty good, if you haven't seen it. A bit dated now but I always thought of it as a "Business as usual" war story when I was young.

war in the pocket is the best of them imo

gundam is probably one of my favorite pieces of media ever created, and yeah id say you nailed it! BUT this is pretty much true for almost every gundam show. They will usually end with a "but at what cost" or with 75% of the main cast dead and the protag in a worse position then they started. but yeah what you said rings true, it really is a special piece of media that is more than the genre/anime its made in but can only exist with anime if that makes sense.

Yeah original Gundam is about a never ending war in which the protagonists are just cogs in the machine. And it turns out every side is led by immoral scumbags.

Yep, and splatter around some talk about the horrors of being a combatant in those wars, as if you don't fight, your loved ones die anyway. You can see how Evangelion is doing a lot of riffing on Gundam. In some ways it's not Jane Austen, it's Full Metal Jacket, or Rambo: First Blood. The different series might have giant robots all over the place, but there aer serious stories barely hidden underneath.

Even when a story starts as mostly lighthearted adolescent fare (see, The Witch of Mercury), it tends to end in trauma, injustice and many war crimes.

Anime was probably my first introduction to "Heroes can both sacrifice and still lose. "Winning" may not be worth it but may be the only option."

I'm trying to think of the earliest "Western Literature" that you get introduced to that has the darker side of humanity and not coming up with anything until you hit 11th or 12th grade while I bumped into anime at something like 7th grade.

Hmmm, perhaps something by O'Henry or Roald Dahl would qualify. I hit them in 7th grade and liked them very much, too.

> Anime was probably my first introduction to "Heroes can both sacrifice and still lose. "Winning" may not be worth it but may be the only option."

One punch man, season 1. So chill, both pays homage to and is an amusing pisstake on the dragonballz kinda idea of heroes, training and "leveling up your power".

And then there is a double episode, around 7 or 8, that is a beautiful essay on "what defines a hero". For me, this was chefs kiss good and defined the series for me.