• LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      4·
      4 days ago

      The part where Gato does a big officer-downqin-shi-huangdi-fireball is a lot more amerikkkaqin-shi-huangdi-fireball in the version of the show that lives in my memory.

      Edit: The first wave of post-Tomino OVAs really pushing the Zeon = space Prussian aesthetic is pretty miyazaki-pain tho.

    • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      7·
      4 days ago

      Gurren Lagann pulls a lot from Getter Robo, but instead of framing the exponential growth of power as a bad thing that brings suffering and destruction it frames it as good. I’m trying to stretch this argument into a political one, but I’m not smart or silly enough to do so lol.

      • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        12·
        4 days ago

        I have no idea what the point of bringing it up was, but it’s extremely political. The early episodes kind of suck and feel extremely generic and vapid and Kamina is the actual worst, but then all of a sudden none of those are problems anymore and it starts getting weird as hell and very good very fast.

        Like it goes from “generic episodic shonen battle adventure story” to “surreal popular revolution against a genocidal fascist comprador” at the drop of a hat and only gets weirder and more overt about how its ultimate villains choose a comfortable privileged stagnation for themselves and enact extermination and culling upon the vibrant underclasses out of the fear that if they are allowed to live and grow it could threaten existence itself.

        The villains are basically ecofash of the sort that imagines their way of life can be sustained forever as long as all the inferior peoples are kept in line and population controls are enacted upon them.

        • Kefla [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
          8·
          4 days ago

          I think the sort of slow start is beneficial to the overall pacing. It really feels like a revolution built on the unprecedented small victories of an in-over-his-head charismatic dumb guy. Kamina’s not a great character, but I think it’s believable the way he inspired a population of resistance fighters who had nearly been ground out of existence and turned them into the kind of organization which was willing and able to develop an actual government.

          It’s important for Kamina to be this ridiculous sacrificial lamb that the others follow into a situation that they don’t know how to handle, before the whole plot about a dysfunctional government without its figurehead trying to stay united against an existential threat can go anywhere. If they hadn’t been dragged out of the muck by Kamina, learning how they all (very poorly) manage the post-war government without him wouldn’t be as interesting. Kamina is a ‘perfect’ (as far as the history books are concerned) leader that everyone has to strive to live up to. Because he never had to take on the challenge of managing a developed society (which he, too, would no doubt have failed miserably at) he gets to live on as this deified eternal leader who both inspires and demoralizes those who come after him. There’s a simultaneous feeling that “I have to do this because Kamina would have” and “I can’t do this because I’m not Kamina” that I think is made all the more interesting by how much of a dysfunctional loser Kamina was. A guy with practically no positive traits who got himself killed through his own bad decisions when his people still needed him was, somehow, the inspiring leader they all needed to make something of themselves.

          • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
            3·
            4 days ago

            That’s a good reading of it. I never went back and rewatched it after finishing it, but I can see how it would be building its foundations in that early episodic stretch even before it got to the part where it was more explicit about its themes.

          • KobaCumTribute [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
            5·
            4 days ago

            Yeah, from what I remember it’s painfully straight, albeit the good kind where the protagonist doesn’t get the girl in the end as a special good boy treat for winning. The only queer character is a weirdly-innocuous stereotype who’s just kind of there in a supporting role and not really used as a punchline from what I remember.

            Now I’m imagining an alternate version where Kamina’s misogyny and fascination with masculinity are manifestations of him being extremely gay instead of just a chauvinist manchild.

      • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
        3·
        4 days ago

        It has high production value, but falls a bit short since it was made by nerds who wow-cool-robot at Getter Robo.

        Anime by wow-cool-robot nerds always has some problems, and I say this as a big Macross fan lol