you can call me your hero baby

[esmenet]

Late comment for episode ten: By the way, Trowa, I hope you know that is basically the worst way EVER to carry an injured person. I am just saying. (Seriously, the only way I can make sense of the 'put him in a hard sharp cold Gundam's hand and ride around with him like that' carry is if they assumed he was dead from the get-go.


Episode eleven:

Thanks to Zechs, I now have the image of people sitting in their castle-sized garages, tinkering with old beat-up mobile suits. "It's just a fixer-upper, it's not that bad."

I think I am starting to see why everyone likes Duo so much. He's pretty okay!

This show is still all about the ladies, though. I honestly don't understand how the early fandom could have missed all that awesome. You're going to focus on boys in giant robots when we have ladies running around having Secret Family Drama and shooting roses off people's chests?

Holy shit was that ever an Utena moment, btw. I heard somewhere that Ikuhara considered using guns rather than swords at an early planning stage, and, fairy-tale implications of swords aside, I can see why. Also this totally proves my theory of Relena as an Utena-style prince.

It's pretty problematic that none of the front-line footsoldiers are women, though. That was one thing I really liked about A:TLA, where you would just see random Fire Nation soldiers in the background and some of them would be female. I think I'm going to assume that, in GW, female footsoldiers just aren't recruited, but women can buy officer's commissions just like all the rich dudes.

NOIN IS AMAZING, THE END. Actually no not the end, because Noin + Relena is just one of the most amazing team-ups I can think of right now. LADIES. ♥


Episode Twelve:

Sally is a giant badass. As well as possibly the only person Wufei has actually talked to in months.

Wufei seems to have some interesting power/emotion/gender issues going on. Weak people shouldn't fight, cowards have no right to fight, women as a whole are weak (so because he's not a woman, he can't be that weak?). I think Sally might be able to help him, though. Because she's a grown-up.

I actually really liked Sally's "Helping you is more important than my own life" speech. Because it didn't read as "this dude is more important than me" but rather "this kid needs some help, I can do something". (And, combined with what she was saying earlier, makes me think she was trying to goad him into helping her, which is infinitely more acceptable to me than simple self-sacrifice.)

Also I feel like I am watching the moulding of Wufei's future personality here. This is definitely one of those cases where someone's etching a conversation into their heart.


Episode thirteen:

I realize this is not something you're supposed to say about mecha shows, but I wish there was less fighting and explosions and a lot more politics and family drama.

Zechs, I recommend you stick with Noin from now on. She will never kill people who have already surrendered, and she probably won't try to kill you. It is a winning proposition all around!

I actually kind of like that one of the major roles the female characters play in this show is to tell the dudes to get their shit together and grow up. I especially like it because it's one of their roles, and not all of them.

I've heard something about people writing Heero as an 'emotionless robot' in the early days of GW? People, have you heard how many times he says "emotions" or "feelings" in just this one episode? Heero is all about the feelings, let me tell you.

As a side note, I really want that buttoned dress Relena wears in the first part of the ending. It looks really comfy!


Episode fourteen:

Ngh. Ladies in elaborate uniform! And they are saying profound things about the nature and techniques of war. Sometimes I think mecha shows are not my thing, and then I will come across something that makes me feel like the writers did this part just for me.

So I guess there is an explanation for the European aristocracy trappings! B/c the Romfeller (or whatever it's called) Foundation was founded by the European aristocracy, and they figured the best way to stay in power/have a strong legacy was to keep the foundations of their society exactly the same. And by 'foundations of their society' I mean classism, titles, and fancy clothes.

I feel like Noin and Zechs are kind of occupying a Team Mustang position within OZ. They don't like the system, and they're trying to change it, but they need to be inside it to get anywhere. Except I am pretty sure neither of them will ever call each other up to say "I got drunk and bought a huge quantity of flowers."

RELENA RELENA RELENA. You go, girl! I may or may not be vicariously living my ambitions through you here, what with the stealing the microphone and speechifying about how all those people are wrong, wrong, WRONG. But I do think that Noin is right, you can't get through to this particular audience by telling them "You are wrong and the Gundams are going to kick your ass." They're the upper strata of the upper crust, marinating in their privilege. (Eugh, what a terrible food image.)

"She's the younger sister of a friend I invited." Nice misuse of the truth there, Treize! I'm not even kidding, that is a seriously perfect turn of phrase.

Okay, I take it back about last episode. This one has the perfect amount of politics/family drama/half-truth-telling/fancy clothes/ladies. I am entirely happy with it.

Comments

[annotated_em]

I am loving your liveblogging of GW. It's like the inverse of my experience of GW fandom back in the day (when it was all about the dudes, all the time, and the female characters were largely an afterthought, if they weren't outright bashed, except for a fairly small corner of fandom that tended to be very quiet most of the time...).

I wonder what I would have made of GW if I had come to it later than I did? *ponders* Nah, I'd still probably have been a Duo fangirl from the start.

[esmenet]

I think I've mentioned it before, but I am incredibly happy to have come to this fandom (and fandom in general) when I did, because now there are a lot of people actively working to make and promote things about female characters and characters of color and lesbians and interesting gender stuff and everything else I love. My experience of present-day GW fandom has been incredibly positive w/r/t ladies as well as characterization & plot in general, whereas from what I've seen of earlier GW fandom it would have been . . . rather less so. I wonder what the response to GW & its ladies would be if it was first aired today?

Now, what I meant by that long and slightly repetitive paragraph was 'I'm glad you like it.'

icon used because it's my sole GW icon

[annotated_em]

Believe me, you should definitely be glad of that. When I was hanging out in it, the GW fandom was a lot less friendly towards the female characters, though it was getting better towards the end of my time there. [Caveat: all of this is my own perspective of things, based on the corner of the fandom I hung out in. Maybe it was better elsewhere, but I kind of think not.] Relena-bashing was more or less de rigeur for some of the more ardent Heero/other-boy-pilot fans, and in general she was kind of a figure to be mocked regardless.

I'd like to think the reception today would be better? I think it probably would be, at least in some respects, because when I was first getting into the fandom, it was before GW had begun to air domestically, and fansubs were a lot harder to come by--you had to order them on VHS tapes, or hope that your local anime club was showing GW or something, so a lot of what people understood about the content of the show came second or third-hand, or from the fic they were reading, which of course is shaped by the preoccupations of the writer. *rueful* And the fandom had some, uh. Pretty preoocupied folks in it, folks who had a lot of undue influence because of their expertise.

I still expect that most people would dwell on the male characters, of course. I mean, general fandom loves its pretty boys much more than it loves its pretty girls. But now people can pretty easily get their hands on the actual fansubs, and don't have to rely on the handful of people who have access, and that matters. A lot.

Meh. Apologies for the ramble here. GW hits all my nostalgia buttons.

these paragraphs are not in any kind of order

[esmenet]

Your perspective tallies with everything else I've heard about early GW fandom!

I wonder if one of the reasons people found (I'm not going to say 'find', because I haven't actually seen anyone who does these days) Relena so easy to bash is because we get her whole story close up, from the beginning. The only one of the boys I've seen having really obvious conflict so far is Wufei, and if you don't pay attention you might miss that he's been sitting in the woods thinking I am a failure for a month. I know we get more backstory on all the pilots later, but you don't start off the show by seeing them run after people or deal with their family issues.

I think GW if aired now might be compared to Fullmetal Alchemist (manga + Brotherhood) fandom. Because FMA does have a fair number of fans who are in it for the dudes, but there's also a very large subset of fandom that's all about the female characters.

The thing about GW, though, is that, while it's definitely an ensemble show, if it has a main protagonist at all, that's Relena. And I think that's very interesting for a giant robot show, to have a 'main protagonist' who is not only female but also a politician rather than a pilot.

Of course, the other thing about GW is that it's a show about war rather than a show about fighting. And if you're going to talk about war you need to talk about politics a lot more than you need to talk about explosions.

You know, I always forget that ten or fifteen years ago there was a real question of access, because nowadays you can find a download of just about anything within half an hour. And that makes a really huge difference.

I think GW is a giant nostalgia thing for a lot of people! Alas, I was too young. My nostalgia-button series are DNAngel and Tokyo Mew Mew.

rambling Em rambles

[annotated_em]

Access absolutely mattered, yeah. I came to GW fic-first, and then canon, and when I actually started watching the show my mind was blown by the number of things that the fanon had taken for granted that pretty much never happened in the canon. The popular safehouse? The boys are almost never all five in the same place at once. Relena-the-evil-hellbeast? No such thing. Lady Une's craziness? Not actually as pronounced as fandom makes it.

And so forth. It was absolutely mind-boggling, to the extent that I could almost argue that there were actually two GW fandoms: one for the canon, and one for the fanon. The canon is interested in war and ethics and morality and politics; the fanon is interested in interpersonal relationships and character development to a far greater extent than the canon, and uses the war/politics angle as a staging ground/background to those preoccupations.

Of course, I fell out of GW several years ago, so I don't know if that distinction still holds.

The analogy to FMA fandom is interesting, because I think you're onto something there--it's the same sort of examination of war and its evils, in its way. Plus a strong cast of male and female characters who are all pretty distinct.

Relena is an interesting character. Aside from the whole "she gets between Heero and my preferred partner for Heero" spitefulness, her character is made to do a number of things, and undergoes a lot of shifts through the series. Some of it is the growing up that any adolescent has to go through, so there's a bit of second-hand embarrassment there, perhaps. And some of it is political: absolute pacifism is a philosophy that's pretty easy to dispute. So some of the bashing comes from grievances with that.

And I wonder, too, if her character was just asked to hold too many different roles. *ponders this* Been ages since I thought about this in a lot of detail, but the many different things she does are almost incoherent if you're not the kind of fan who's into reflecting carefully. Ahem. Without attempting to assassinate a fandom's character, I'd say that not all early GW fans were the reflective sorts. Ahem.

[seventhe]

I really like all of these thoughts here~!

They don't like the system, and they're trying to change it, but they need to be inside it to get anywhere. -- THIS. And Relena, too, to some extent, because she comes at it from the edges of the system (through her dad) and then starts to get more involved. But it's an interesting balance for Zechs and Noin early on here.

I actually kind of like that one of the major roles the female characters play in this show is to tell the dudes to get their shit together and grow up. UHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH YES. And no, it isn't all they do and that's cool. But I do really like the way so many characters are foils to each other. Catherine and Trowa is another awesome example of this, for me.

you mentioned Relena in one sentence and I wrote you a paragraph about her

[esmenet]

(That is a really great icon, btw.)

I love that Relena has blood & family connections in politics but grew up kind of outside all that, knowing how it works in theory but without any real practice. And then suddenly there's something she cares about very strongly and needs to go into politics for, and she uses her name and relations as a lever to do that. I should go back & rewatch the beginning of the party in episode fourteen, to check if she really did introduce herself as Relena Peacecraft or if I was just imagining that. But that kind of thing seems characteristic for her.

I am really enjoying the foils & parallels in this show! Treize is Relena's counterpart, Zechs is Heero's, but also Heero and Relena have this kind of war/politics (instead of Gundams/OZ) counterpart thing going on, especially in the context of the original Heero Yuy. After I finish the show I will probably write a giant thing about everyone and their parallels.

Re: you mentioned Relena in one sentence and I wrote you a paragraph about her

[seventhe]

Relena is a really complicated character to me! She's spoiled rich girl but not; she's political but not; she's anything but shallow and silly, and yet, she has a long way to go. Her arc is bigger than anyone else's, I feel anyway. I like it about her.