Mobile Suit Breakdown Season 1 Episode 1.2: No, She’s Too Strong! Mobile Suit Episode 2: Destroy Gundam! Podcast Transcript Original Publication: September 8th, 2018

Intro music plays

THOM: This is Mobile Suit Breakdown, a podcast about Japanese Sci-Fi mega-franchise ​ for new fans, old fans, and not-yet fans, where we watch, analyze, and review all forty years of the iconic in the order it was made. We research its influences, examine its themes, and discuss how each piece of the Gundam canon fits within the changing context in Japan and the world from 1979 to today.

THOM: This is Mobile Suit Breakdown Episode 1.2: No, She’s Too Strong!, and we are your hosts. I’m Thom, giant robot enthusiast and real, honest human being, I swear! ​ ​

NINA: And I’m Nina, Gundam n00b and podcast enthusiast. ​ ​

THOM: We now return you to the destruction of the Side 7 space colony, already in progress. This episode sees our heroes shift from defense to escape, from the terror of the battle to the dread of knowing that the colony is bleeding oxygen and Zeon is coming back. There is no way out for them--except aboard the very same Federation warship that inadvertently led Zeon here in the first place, and brought the war to this neglected little island in space.

THOM: This week we’re going to talk a bit about how the events on Side 7 reflect two related events during World War II. The first one was the bombing and firebombing of Japanese cities by American forces during the war, but the second was the Battle of Okinawa. This is, perhaps, the less obvious allegory and so I think it deserves a little bit more attention during this episode. We’ll talk more after we watch the episode and give you the recap and our first impressions about the Battle of Okinawa but it might be helpful to have a little bit of background upfront.

NINA: Okinawa is a large-ish island, about 460 square miles, making it the largest in the Ryukyu Archipelago. It is roughly equidistant from Taiwan, mainland China, and the southern tip of the Japanese home islands. All the Ryukyu islands have officially been part of Japan since they were annexed in 1879, but the Ryukyus have their own distinct culture that was, until the modern era, at least as much influenced by China as by Japan. Even today Okinawa Prefecture remains culturally distinct from the rest of Japan. They have their own language, unique Okinawan religion, and even a significant Okinawan Independence movement.

THOM: The Battle of Okinawa was the last major battle between US and Japanese forces in the Pacific, and it was viewed by both sides as deciding the ultimate fate of the war. The US intended to use Okinawa as a base from which they could launch air raids of the Japanese home islands, and as a staging ground for an eventual invasion. For the Japanese, hilly, densely-wooded Okinawa looked like the perfect place where they could make their final stand. A natural fortress, where they could lure in the American invasion force and destroy it. If they could succeed, they could break American morale, and perhaps even turn the tide of the war in the Pacific. But if they failed, and Okinawa fell, then so would Japan. As for the unlucky civilians living on Okinawa when the army decided to turn their home into a battlefield? Well, let’s watch the episode…

[03:14] Twinkling stars music to RECAP ​

NINA: Decimation. There are no pilots for the Gundam, no gunners for the defense turrets, no helmsman for the ship. The colony is bleeding precious air through a breach that cannot be sealed. The ship’s captain, Paolo, is badly wounded by shrapnel while personally manning a turret, and command falls to the only surviving officer--nineteen-year-old Ensign Bright Noa. It is only his first trip into space, and now he is in command of the Federation’s most advanced ship, far from any friendly forces, with nothing but a bunch of untrained civilians to operate the , and some kid piloting the Gundam. He almost orders Amuro out of the Gundam, but Captain Paolo hangs on to consciousness long enough to remind Bright that, historically, there have been 15-year-old soldiers before.

NINA: On the Zeon ship, Char reports to his commander, Vice Admiral Dozle Zabi, and receives his new orders: capture or destroy the Gundam at any cost. While he waits for a supply ship carrying more mobile suits, Char himself launches with a small commando team in normal space suits to infiltrate the colony. Once inside, he is spotted by Sayla Mass, another Side 7 civilian out searching for survivors. She holds Char at gunpoint, but is distracted when he removes his mask. The face revealed is much like that of her long-lost older brother. Char escapes by jetpack, remembering his gentle sister, Artesia. Surely the young woman he just met is too strong to be her.

NINA: While Char had his team escape, Amuro has them in his sights, [but] his hands shake, [and] his fingers won't respond. A scream tears itself from his throat. Shooting humans is very different from destroying mobile suits. As the White Base tries to leave port, Char sorties personally in his custom red Zaku, sending the Federation officers into a panic when they realize that their enemy is none other than the famous Zeon ace known as the Red Comet. It’s immediately clear that Amuro is no match for Char, but once again, the Gundam’s superior specs allow it to survive the furious assault. With a single shot from the Gundam’s powerful new beam rifle, Amuro destroys Char’s wingman. Realizing that the Gundam wields firepower to rival a battleship's main cannon, Char panics and flees. Amuro has won the day against one of Zeon’s finest aces, but Acting Captain Bright only chastises him for continuing to rely too much on the Gundam’s technological superiority.

[05:34] Twinkling stars music to TALK BACK ​

THOM: Okay, so these are our impressions from the second episode, but the first thing I wanted to talk about actually is from the intro sequence that every episode gets. The very first shot in the intro is the planet Earth, looking sort of grim and cloudy, and there’s a bright sort of bubble of light on one side, and then a halo of light that spreads, starting from that bubble then goes all the way around the planet. This is a very “space-y” kind of image, y’know the Earth and the sunlight falling on it, etc, etc, but I don’t think that’s sunlight, I think--

NINA: That’s an explosion.

THOM: --I think that’s the colony drop. The bubble of light is too big to really be anything else.

NINA: Oh, see I actually assumed that it was the colony drop--

THOM: Mmmm

NINA: -- I never thought it was just [cheerily] “, over the Earth!”

THOM: So, the first image we see is the most cataclysmic act of human genocide that you can imagine. Everything in this show, both artistically and narratively, follows in the wake of that.

NINA: Well, and there’s a line in the opening about humanity being horrified by its own actions…

THOM: You’ll notice that doesn’t stop the war.

NINA: Right, that, that means they want to end the war more quickly with more horrifying weapons rather than, “Oh, we should try to negotiate some sort of peaceful resolution to this. Too many people have already died.”

THOM: And what a joke when Amuro’s father, Tem Ray, says, “Oh, now with our more powerful Gundam we’ll finally be able to bring the war to a conclusion.”

NINA: When we think about the mid-to-late ‘70s and into the ‘80s, and the Cold War, and the nuclear escalation, and this idea of, “Oh, they’re just a deterrent, we’ll never use them. But we have to have hundreds or thousands of nuclear weapons so that we never have to use them…” ​ ​

THOM: Mm-hmm.

NINA: ...And I think in a lot of ways the Gundam is an analog to that. Like, “Oh, if we have a bunch of Gundams no one will ever go to war with us ever again.” The opening also talks about, and I didn’t think about this in the first episode much, but that Zeon is the furthest Side from Earth, and so, y’know, it’s the most removed. For that reason it’s the least visited, perhaps the least well understood in terms of its population and their needs, the least well represented in terms of, y’know, access to central government. Which means that they're some of the most likely to want to be independent. And also theoretically the most likely to be able to get independence. It’s that much harder for the Federation to get to them. ​

THOM: Zeon, Side 3, is located opposite the Moon from the Earth. Even with the most powerful telescope you could never see Zeon, and vice versa.

NINA: So very quickly in the opening we get introduced to Vice Admiral Dozle of Zeon. I think this is one of first unsympathetic looks at Zeon, like a very hierarchical, like everything in his comments about “Aargh, I was gonna throw a banquet for you and you've ruined it by dawdling, everything and all my banquet preparations were for nothing!” It feels ridiculous, it feels very, sort of aristocratic and excessive, especially in the midst of war…

THOM: It’s interesting that you picked up on that so quickly in those couple of lines, ‘cause you’re absolutely right, and that’s going to be a major theme going forward as we see the leadership of Zeon. It’s very impressive, I think, on the part of the show creators, that they were able to convey all of that in basically just a couple of lines with this one character.

NINA: Yeah, well that and his delivery. But we start to get a sense that while, while Char seems to be both an excellent soldier himself and also a particularly good commander of his men, who his men respect, and he y’know treats them with the right combination of, sort of seriousness and mercy, that that may not be true of the whole leadership.

THOM: Char is clearly ready and willing to sacrifice his soldiers for the mission, though he doesn't seem eager to do it, and he does certainly seem to be distressed when it happens, but the orders he gets from Vice Admiral Zabi are to destroy [the] Gundam and the White Base even if he has to sacrifice his entire ship to do it.

NINA: Oh, and for reference for anybody who hasn’t been able to watch the episodes along with us, it’s “Zabi Dozle”... or “Dozle Zabi”?

THOM: “Dozle Zabi”, Zabi is the last name.

NINA: Okay, “Dozle Zabi”. So we are talking about the same guy.

THOM: Yes

[Both NINA and THOM laughing]

NINA: Uhm…

THOM: Oh, that actually brings up an issue though, which is the internationalization of the characters and the world here--

NINA: Oh yeah--

THOM: --because it’s--

NINA: --they do the Americans, or Western-sounding naming--

THOM: Yeah

NINA: --convention--

THOM: It’s not--

NINA: --First Name/Last Name

THOM: --it’s not Yashima Mirai, it’s Mirai Yashima, and it’s Hayato Kobayashi. I mean, these are very Japanese names but they’re ordered in the, the Western way, with [given] names first and family names second. Amuro, when he’s driving around in his car, the driver’s side is the American style.

NINA: I mean, on the bridge Mirai says “Roger”, not “Ryōkai” (了解), which is Japanese for “Roger” and what most anime use, but she says it in English.

THOM: And of course many of these characters do not have Japanese names or have half-Japanese names. Amuro Ray and Ryu Jose are both half-Japanese. Bright Noa, certainly is not a Japanese name.

NINA: Well Sayla--

THOM: Mm-hmm

NINA: Fraw bow, yeah.

THOM: Yup.

NINA: Back to meaningless age distinctions…

[THOM laughing]

NINA: ...Bright’s reaction when he sees Amuro piloting? “Some kid is piloting the Gundam!” Most of us, I don’t know how many youthful listeners we have, but most of us have been 18, 19. Obviously, we, at the time, we were adults and 15-year-olds were children. But from a somewhat further remove, this feels pretty ridiculous.

THOM: It does. Interestingly, the second-in-command, the commander of the Musai, below Char, and Bright are the same rank.

NINA: Hmm…

THOM: As much as there’s a rivalry between Char and Amuro in center frame, perhaps we should be paying attention to these two ship captains as we go forward.

NINA: Well and the, the captain of the White Base makes some comments--

THOM: This is Captain Paolo, by the way.

NINA: Yeah. I think he makes explicit some of the stuff we’ve been discussing about how war affects children. That in the exigencies of war when the chips are down we can’t afford to be too, too nice, too particular in our ideas. If all, if he’s the most experienced pilot you have, suddenly all of our peacetime ideas about, “Oh, 15 is too young,” go out the window. All of their lives are , in a big way, dependent on Amuro’s ability to protect them.

THOM: When Bright says, “Oh I’ll have, I’ll have Amuro get out of the Gundam. This kid can’t pilot, I’ll have him get out”, Captain Paolo’s response is, “Well, only if we have pilots.” ​ ​

NINA: And Bright, with his six months experience...

[THOM chuckling]

NINA: Ah…

THOM: On his first trip into space.

NINA: On his first trip into space, does not know all that much more than Amuro. There’s a discussion of what Amuro should do to destroy the unused Gundam parts, and Amuro says, “Ugh, I guess the Super Napalm?” and Bright’ not actually sure either, and he checks with the captain--

THOM: Mm-hmm.

NINA: --and the captain is like, “Amuro’s right.” For all that Bright, right now, is putting on his rank and putting on, “Well I know better than all of you civilians”, he’s not certain at all-- ​ ​

THOM: Right.

NINA: --about what to do.

THOM: He doesn’t know where the button to turn on the camera is.

NINA: Yes.

THOM: So that you brought up the Super Napalm, I want to talk about that a little bit--

NINA: Mm-hmm

THOM: --because, I think, going into this before we started researching it, I thought napalm was developed for [the Vietnam War]. But, it turns out it’s actually older than that, and it was originally used, in warfare at least, in World War II, and it was used in the firebombings of Japan. I couldn’t find any certain evidence about this, but given the timing, and the fact that it was being used already, and that Odawara, the city where Tomino was living at the time, was firebombed, I think that there was a very good chance that napalm was used in the bombing of his home city when he was 4. I think the use of “Super Napalm” instead of anything else they could have used there, right, it’s a, almost a throwaway line, it’s a brief moment, when--

NINA: They could have made up a name.

THOM: Yeah, or he could have just shot them with the rifle, right? He could have destroyed them in a million different ways but they chose to use Super Napalm. And it never shows up again, and that’s, that feels very significant to me. First of all, it has to further solidify the impression we already had, which is that the destruction of Side 7, is meant to evoke the bombings of Japanese cities during World War II.

NINA: Agreed.

THOM: And it may also be further evidence that we are supposed to associate the Federation with the United States. In the, in the great pantomime of World War II that we’re playing out here, the Federation is the US. Which is really interesting because our heroes are on the side of the Federation.

NINA: I mean, are our heroes on the side of the Federation? ​ ​

[THOM chuckling]

NINA: We hear Hayato, sounds like he wishes he could just stay out of it. I don’t, and the Side was clearly not, they weren’t necessarily mustered for wartime, they didn’t have people, they didn’t have civilian involvement…

THOM: Mm-hmm

NINA: Initially, when they evacuate the Side, it’s not because they’re under attack, because they don’t realize yet that they are, it’s to keep the civilians from seeing the top secret tech as it’s moved onboard-- ​ ​

THOM: Right.

NINA: --the brand new Base. So, y’know, are the Sides really involved in a war, or is it just Earth?

THOM: As I said before, I think that the attack on Side 7 is meant to evoke attacks on Japanese cities. I think ​ ​ it’s also, separately, a reference to Okinawa during World War II.

NINA: Mm-hmm

THOM: Like Okinawa, Side 7 is under the control of the Federation, but a civilian colony, fairly underdeveloped (Side 7 hasn’t actually been finished yet), they don’t really want Federation military bases there, they’re not really part of the war but the Federation put a base there anyway and that made them part of the war, and ended up getting their colony wrecked and most of the population killed.

NINA: And the rest turned into refugees.

THOM: Or soldiers--

NINA: Conscripts--

THOM: --well against, yes, against their will.

NINA: Yeah. Yeah, which leads me into thinking a bit about some of the various characters who we’re getting to know a little better in this episode. I think it’s very interesting that there does not appear to be any sexism in terms of, say, Mirai piloting the ship or Sayla working on the ship’s bridge. There’s no sense that, like, “We can’t have a woman pilot the ship!” or “Ahh! Only because we have no other pilots.” It’s like, oh no, this is the most--nobody even mentions that they’re women. And then when Fraw Bow and Sayla go do the, frankly, I think, fool-hardy and exceptionally dangerous search for any remaining survivors on the Side, there’s no like, “We can’t send women into danger!” It’s like, oh, no, these are two young people who have been very helpful and very proactive--

THOM: Mm-hmm

NINA: --on the ship. Okay great, one last minute thing before we leave, go see if you can find any survivors.

THOM: Interesting character note, when Sayla is sent out to do that, search for survivors, she’ has a gun in her car. I don’t think she was issued that gun for this purpose. It’s, like, under some magazines in her glove compartment. I think Sayla carries a gun everywhere she goes--

NINA: Ahh--

THOM: [Knowingly] I wonder if that’s significant.

[NINA laughing]

NINA: Possibly unpopular opinion, I kinda gotta side with Kai in that whole confrontation with Sayla. Like, you’re a bunch of untrained, well, maybe Sayla’s not, but Fraw Bow and Kai are not military personnel. They have no combat experience whatsoever. I would think that at this point, with the enemy ship closing in, you’d want to get White Base away as quickly as possible. What good is Kai gonna do, kinda sorta running around Side 7--

[THOM laughing]

NINA: --with no idea where to look for anyone and no real way to to get them back if he did find some--like ​ ​ what’s he gonna do, carry however many people he finds? Like, it’s a little ridiculous. ​ ​

THOM: Yup.

NINA: It was definitely the right move on his part to, like, get to [safety] as quickly as he could, which he did.

THOM: And he gets a running slap from Sayla for it.

NINA: And to be called a coward, so--

THOM: I guess, I guess Sayla is just too strong.

[NINA laughing]

NINA: I mean, he’s definitely smarmy. I get the feeling we’re not supposed to like Kai? They draw him so snide!

THOM: Yeah.

NINA: I mean the expression on his face.

THOM: He’ best summed up with the sound “Mnyeah”.

NINA: [Laughing] Agreed! But when a soldier who’s got a survivor comes up, like, Kai’s not like, “No, I won’t help you carry that wounded guy inside.” He’s not a [BLEEP] about it.

THOM: Although, in Sayla’s defense, when Kai runs up, he does run right past them struggling with the wounded guy, [heading instead] for the elevator.

NINA: Okay, fine. He is definitely very self-interested. I just think, in a lot of ways, his response is more reasonable. Although, like, what on Earth is Kai doing on the bridge in the last scene?!

THOM: I assume he just wandered in and there was no one to stop him.

NINA: Well right, but why would he even want to be there?

THOM: So that we know he’s going to be important in the future?

NINA: Maybe? Probably. The other big impressions in this episode are of the combat. We get several moments of Amuro having difficulty shooting at a person who is not in a mobile suit. That, y’know, it was one ​ ​ thing to shoot at this big, hulking, inhuman piece of technology--

THOM: Even if it's shaped like a human...

NINA: --and another to shoot at a tiny person in a space suit [Editor’s note: NINA’s pitch goes much higher ​ ​ here for dramatic effect.] They do another really great moment, so, several times we see Amuro take aim at Char and Char dart out of the way at the last second. When Amuro takes aim at Slender, you know, [a] regular Zaku, there's this little, like vibrating back and forth, like Slender’s trying to serpentine--

THOM: Mm-hmm

NINA: --or like, trying to do evasive maneuvers like Char, but is just not as good…

THOM: Mm-hmm

NINA: ...Either ‘cause his Zaku isn’t as good, or he isn't’ as good a pilot, and Amuro takes him out in one hit.

[19:59] Twinkling stars music to RESEARCH 1 - Parallels with the Battle of Okinawa ​

THOM: Things don’t work out super well for the people of Side 7, do they? Here we have a foreign colonizer’s army, and whatever good you can say about the Earth Federation, they are fundamentally a government of and for Earth--not the space colonies. Not Side 7. So this army sets up a base in what is essentially an otherwise out-of-the-way demilitarized island in space. That army base then leads directly to an enemy attack on the Side, the deaths of hundreds, probably thousands, of civilians, the conscription of the Side’s young people, and the evacuation of the crippled colony. And back on Okinawa, things went pretty poorly for the civilians there, too. I’m not going to attempt to describe the battle in detail, or go into the full litany of atrocities and tragedies that occurred during the battle. There's no way that I could possibly do justice to it, to the scale of it, the tragedy, the horror… So, I’m mostly going to focus on areas where I think there are parallels between the Battle of Okinawa and the Battle on Side 7.

THOM: There are a few of these. First, the shelters. In episode 1, Amuro is hiding in one of the shelters when he hears the sounds of battle. He recognizes the sounds of explosions and he knows it’s a Zeon attack. Now, he immediately realizes the shelter will not actually protect him, or any of them, because the shelter is not built to withstand enemy fire. This seems ridiculous when you think about it, but the same thing really happened during the Battle of Okinawa. Shelters where civilians were taking refuge were not capable of withstanding the US bombardment, [and] many of them were destroyed. Just like on Side 7, that, as well as some other factors, forced many civilians out into the open, despite the danger.

THOM: Second, the land expropriation. How do you think the Imperial Army got all of the land to build all of those bases? How do you think the Federation got the land to build the development facility? Fraw Bow alludes to this during her conversation with Hayato in episode 1, right after she’s retrieved Amuro from his home, and she asks Hayato if he’s still mad about the Federation government forcing them all to move when they built the Gundam facility. In much the same way, when the Imperial Japanese government decided to fortify Okinawa during the early days of the Pacific war, they forcefully expropriated land, farms, even homes, in order to build airbases and fortifications. And that sort of behavior shouldn’t really surprise us because Side 7 is a colony and, while Okinawa may technically have been part of Japan at that point, it was very much treated as a colony, and that is pretty much how colonial powers treat their colonies.

THOM: Finally, and I think most tellingly, most significantly for Gundam, is the conscription of young ​ ​ Okinawans. Now, thousands of Okinawans civilians were forcibly conscripted, and many of them were adults, but what's particularly noteworthy about the Battle of Okinawa is the young age of many of the conscripts. The Imperial Japanese Army forced hundreds of middle-school girls to serve as Army Nurses, and remember that Fraw Bow and Sayla both serve as Combat Medics during the fighting on Side 7. Additionally, more than 1,700 middle-school boys, as young as 14, were forcibly conscripted and made to fight as guerrillas or given hand grenades and ordered to attack tanks. So, in episode 1 when Tem Ray bemoans the fact that there are children younger than his 15-year-old son already fighting as guerillas, well, perhaps we should remember those 14-year-old Okinawan boys.

THOM: Now this mass conscription during the Battle of Okinawa was all done without any real legal authority, so those conscripts were, quote, “volunteers”. But after the battle, in August 1945, the Imperial Cabinet passed a law that would allow the army to do the same thing on the home islands, but on an even bigger scale. In order to protect Japan, the Imperial Army was authorized to conscript all able-bodied male civilians between 15- and 60-years-old, as well as all unmarried female civilians between 17 and 40. For the most part, this never actually happened, but the plan was to organize them into defense units which would be led by civilians who had some prior experience with the weapons that they were going to be using. And doesn't that just sound ​ ​ like our main characters? When you think about it, Amuro is already a technology whiz and computer genius before he ever gets into the Gundam. Fraw and Sayla both know how to provide combat medicine already. Hayato trains in martial arts. Even Kai, “Mr. Mnyeah” is going to turn out to have a license to operate heavy vehicles, and that’s going to come in handy later. Of course, those kids all volunteered to defend the White Base. Didn’t they? It’s still “volunteering” when you don’t have a choice, right?

[24:52] Sweeping music to RESEARCH 2 - Yasukuni Shrine ​

NINA: Tomino wasn’t just interested in telling a World War II story. In interviews, he has said that part of his ​ ​ motivation for making First Gundam was the increasingly conservative and militaristic political discourse of the ​ ​ 1960s and ‘70s. Frustrated with society’s short memory, he wanted to remind us all of the horrors of war, and the evils of an Imperialist Japan. This was an era where the pacifism that followed the war started to fade. The US-Japan Security Treaty, which was amended to include a mutual defense obligation and to provide for the continued presence of US military bases in Japan, was signed in 1960 despite mass protests. 1970 saw the first visit by a sitting Prime Minister to Yasukuni Shrine (靖国神社). For those of you who aren’t familiar, the ​ ​ Imperial Shrine of Yasukuni was founded in 1869 to commemorate those who died in service to Japan. Mostly soldiers, but also women, children, even pets. This is done without the permission of the deceased’s family. In the 1960s and ‘70s the government secretly decided to enshrine war criminals there as well. Since then, visiting the shrine has been a way for conservative politicians to signal their support for a more militarized and nationalistic Japan, leading to frequent national and international protests.

[26:06] Sweeping music to FINAL THOUGHTS - Military Technology Parallels and Escalation ​

NINA: Before we wrap up episode 2, we have some final thoughts about the arms race, Zeon versus the Federation, childhood in wartime, and the strength of Sayla Mass.

THOM: We talked a little bit about this attitude that the key to ending war and ensuring peace is for the Federation to just amass vast numbers of superior mobile suits, and how that resembles the logic of “Mutually-Assured Destruction” during the Cold War. That is, if both sides just have enough nuclear weapons, then neither side will be willing to risk a war because it means total annihilation for everyone. Now, nuclear ​ ​ bomb allegories are so common in anime, that, as the length of an anime series increases, the likelihood of a nuclear bomb allegory showing up approaches 100%.

NINA: So I’m not sure that’s true of all anime. It’s kind of hard to imagine how that might come up in something ​ ​ like Princess Jellyfish, for instance. ​ ​

THOM: [Jokingly] Season 6: The Jellyfish Have A Bomb

[NINA chuckling]

NINA: But it is a long-standing tradition and subject in Japanese science-fiction. In Godzilla, for instance, in ​ ​ Akira… ​

THOM: So do you think we’re there already? Is Amuro’s Gundam, episode 1, episode 2, the nuclear bomb?

NINA: I think, probably, the more direct parallel is that the colony drop is an atomic bomb. It looks like a bomb ​ ​ in the opening animation. Even the way it’s described is horror at what humanity had done. But to continue their arms race, to continue their weapons proliferation, the thing that the White Base and the Gundam most remind me of, and other ships like the Zeon ships launching the Zaku, is of an aircraft carrier and fighter planes.

THOM: Especially when you think about the role that fighter planes played, especially in World War II, where the introduction of the fighter plane and the aircraft carrier totally changed the nature of warfare in the Pacific, and likewise, the introduction of the mobile suit, the Zaku, totally changed the nature of warfare in space. The early adoption by the Zeon of the Zaku is responsible for a lot of their early success in the war. It’s interesting that you say that about fighter planes because one of the key distinctions between US and Japanese fighter planes, especially early in the war, was that the US planes were more heavily armored and had more powerful guns. The combination of that meant that while a US plane could take multiple hits from a Japanese fighter and still keep flying, for Japanese planes, often one lucky shot (especially if it hit a fuel tank, which were unarmored), would cripple the plane or destroy it.

NINA: Which we see happen over and over in this episode…

THOM: Exactly. The Gundam has much more powerful armor and can just shrug off dozens of hits from the Zaku’s machine gun, but a single shot from the Gundam’s powerful beam rifle is enough to destroy the Zaku. In the first episode we see the Zaku’s reactor get hit, which is a bit like seeing the fuel tank get hit, and it explodes catastrophically.

NINA: Related to this parallel that we’ve found between military technology during World War II and the military technology in the show, I wonder if, as this series progresses and as we move on to future series, we’re going to see similar kinds of development in the kinds of changes that are made to each successive Gundam, or Zaku, or whatever they’re calling the mobile suit in whatever episode it is. Things like better cloaking, things like being drones and piloting remotely…

THOM: [Knowingly] Hmmmmmm…

[NINA chuckling]

THOM: I wonder, listeners, if that’s going to continue to come up. We’ll just have to watch the episodes and find out.

[29:59] Sweeping music to FINAL THOUGHTS - Aesthetics, and What They Imply About These Societies ​

THOM: Since we’re already talking about the differences in the military technology between the two sides, last episode I remember you pointing out that the Zeon aesthetic is kind of a throwback to the early years of the 20th Century, with their uniforms, the designs of the Zaku… It’s especially apparent now, when we compare it to the Federation, which has a kind of bright-and-shiny, almost Star Trek futurism look to it. The Zeon officers ​ ​ wear capes and epaulets, the soldiers are in muddy greens and khakis, and they have helmets that pretty closely resemble the helmets that German soldiers were wearing in both World Wars. Then the gold braid chest decorations for rank insignia looks a lot more like something you’d expect to find on a medieval knight than a soldier in any modern army. And as for the Zaku, I mean they look like tanks, and they’re armed with machine guns and hatchets. Up against bright-and-shiny Gundam with its beam rifle and its “I-swear-it’s-not-a-lightsaber” lightsaber--

[NINA chuckling]

THOM: --and we start to get the impression that Zeon is kind of a throwback in other ways, too. So, what do you think they’re trying to do with those, setting up the two sides like this?

NINA: One of my first reactions to how Zeon was being portrayed is that we’re meant to be sympathetic to their cause. They want independence. It’s hard not to sympathize with that sentiment. However--you mentioned Star ​ Trek futurism with regard to the Federation, and to kind of flesh out what we’re talking about there: we’re ​ talking about the way people in the 1970s thought the future would be, and it’s a future that is multi-ethnic and multi-racial, it’s a future with more opportunities and more equality for women, it’s a future that is less socially stratified…

THOM: And we’ve talked a couple times about the Gundam future as being international, but in a big way, ​ ​ what we’re really talking about is post-national. No one is from the US, or Japan, or France. People are from ​ ​ Earth.

NINA: Or a Side. We also get a sense that things are a little flatter structurally than they might be in Zeon, where we see a lot of attention to rank, where we know that they have aristocracy of a sort.

THOM: It is a Principality.

NINA: It just feels like they are trying to recreate a more feudal time. We don’t see a single woman.

THOM: No, we don’t see any meaningful ethnic difference between the people, except that Char is a lot fairer skinned.

NINA: So yeah, we’re seeing a society that is, that seems to be, from what we are shown in this episode, more stratified, more homogenous, more old-fashioned, and we don’t sympathize with wanting that instead of what the Federation has.

THOM: Mm-hmm.

NINA: Or at least I don’t. [Laughing] I don’t know how viewers at the time would have felt about it. Like we’ve said, we’re only two episodes in, most of what we’ve seen is combat. We really haven’t seen society, we really haven’t seen much outside of these brief glimpses of how people are behaving in a tense, dangerous situation. So we’ll have a better grasp of what Zeon is later on, but clearly Tomino wants us to feel that this is more ​ ​ complicated, that there are layers to this conflict.

THOM: Right, it’s not the clash of nations over territory or anything like that. There is a real philosophical difference. It’s a clash between a nation, perhaps even between nationalism, and this international, post-national Federation.

[33:32] Sweeping music to FINAL THOUGHTS - Horrible Viability of Child Soldiers ​

NINA: I’ll do a full citation in the show notes but in Mizuko Ito’s article, “Migrating Media: Anime Media and the ​ Childhood Imagination”, she talks about how only when childhood is idealized, and that abstract ideal is made concrete, can we experience a sense of childhood violated or at risk. Which is precisely what this show banks on. Our initial reaction to a bunch of young children and young teens in this situation is horror, because childhood is supposed to be a time of safety and innocence. For all that that’s, within the great span of human history, a pretty modern idea, it certainly was very prevalent in the post-war period and has been since then. Well, and for all of the horror of those early scenes, we get over it pretty quickly, I think because most of us understand on some level that children are capable of violence.

THOM: And of course the show works as a show for children because children understand that instinctively. Children are intimately familiar with their own capacity for violence.

NINA: Technology is a big part of what makes, it makes the distinction irrelevant. Y’know, a child with a sword probably doesn’t stand a great chance against an adult with a sword, but if you give them both guns--

THOM: Even the sword is a great equalizer for a smaller, weaker person. If you think about combat in its rawest form, hand-to-hand, the size and weight advantage that an adult has is pretty much unbeatable. But as soon as you add a weapon, as soon as you add a knife, then the smaller person has a better chance. A sword, even better. A spear, better still. And then of course a gun, and, I mean, anyone who has played Counter-Strike with a 15-year-old knows that their reflexes make them far more dangerous than an adult. ​

NINA: As technology makes physical size less relevant to your ability as a soldier, to your ability to kill another person, suddenly, in a horrifying way, child soldiers become more viable rather than less.

THOM: When you watch Gundam, Char and Amuro are quite small people, and of course there are huge ​ ​ people in the show. Admiral Zabi, Admiral Dozle Zabi is like 7 feet tall, Ryu Jose is enormous, but our warrior-heroes at the heart of the show are both small people, quite slender.

NINA: Which actually ties back into the connection to fighter planes. To be a very tall fighter pilot was a distinct disadvantage. It’s actually something I remember from reading Roald Dahl’s second autobiography, where he talks about being a fighter pilot during the war, because he’d always wanted to be a pilot, he’d desperately wanted to be pilot, but he was very tall, he was over 6 feet tall, and I think they almost wouldn’t let him do it. He was extremely uncomfortable every time he was in a plane. It was a disadvantage rather than an advantage ​ ​ with that new piece of technology.

[36:32] Sweeping music to FINAL THOUGHTS - Sayla & Kai ​

THOM: We talked earlier about our relationship with the different characters that are evacuees aboard the White Base, and this is the episode that brings the last of them into focus. It introduces us to Kai and to Sayla, two characters who really could not be more different from each other. And they share a, let’s call it, tender moment, in the episode, and Kai is an ordinary, if, like, slightly-more-cynical-than-the-rest-of-the-cast person, while Sayla is strong, too strong. Sayla is heroic, and she’s rigid, and harsh, almost to the point of cruelty. I mean, when Kai admits that he didn’t go looking for anybody before going running for safety, Sayla tells him that he’s a coward, and that cowards like him should be left behind.

NINA: I think Kai and Sayla represent two extreme ends of a spectrum. Kai is intense pragmatism and self-interest. Sayla is unyielding heroism, which I think feels a little unfair. We talked for a moment about how she has a gun, she may have had some kind of military training, and so expecting the same level of comfort in a combat situation for people who don’t have that training is entirely unreasonable of her, but doesn’t stop her from doing it. But between those two poles we have most of the rest of the characters, who we see afraid. We almost don’t see Sayla afraid--

THOM: No--

NINA: --not really.

THOM: She’s briefly startled when Char takes off his mask and kicks the gun out of her hand--

NINA: Right.

THOM: --but she’s not afraid.

NINA: Whereas Amuro, and Fraw Bow, and [NINA forgetting a character’s name] judo kid…

THOM: Hayato.

NINA: Hayato. We see in the first episode how much Fraw Bow has to struggle even just to keep going after her mother and her grandfather are killed. We see Amuro struggle with shooting at people. We see him shake as he fights Char, and realize that he hasn’t truly experienced combat yet, but they’re trying to do the best they can in spite of their fear, to do right by the group. I think it’s that, that social pressure, that feeling that everyone is depending on them, and that they can make things better for everyone, that keeps them engaged. I don’t think Sayla’s heroism comes from a point of social obligation. Just as Kai’s pragmatism is self-centered, I think Sayla’s heroism is self-centered.

THOM: [Thoughtfully] Hmm.

NINA: She does it because that’s who she is and she’s very proud of being this brave, hard person.

THOM: “Pride” is a good way to describe that.

[39:08] Sweeping music to FINAL THOUGHTS - The G3 Appears! ​

THOM: One final bonus tidbit. Remember last episode when we talked about the G3 Gundam, the one with the Tomino-approved color scheme? [Editor’s note: Officially known as the RX-78-3 Gundam “G-3”] Well, it actually appeared in this episode. Its one and only anime appearance. Did you catch it?

End credits music fades in

THOM: Those spare Gundam parts, the ones that got loaded onto the White Base, or destroyed by the Super Napalm, are the remains of the partially completed RX-78 “G-3” prototype, and later in the war they’re going to be reassembled, off-camera, to form the G3 Gundam.

[39:39] NEXT TIME & END CREDITS ​

NINA: Next week we’ll return with Episode 1.3: Mistakes Were Made, for Fraw Bow and the Orphans; space democracy; Char teaches us to always ask for more than we need; “First thing we do: we kill all the engineers!”; so long, space walrus; “Manuel, relay instructions!”; in space, no one can hear Bright scream; laser sword, light blade; and the rise of Admiral Zoble… Will you be able to survive?

Music plays

THOM: Make sure you do all the podcast-things! Like, subscribe, share, and pledge your undying devotion to Mobile Suit Breakdown on fine podcast services everywhere, and on YouTube. Follow us on Twitter at ​ ​ @GundamPodcast, check out our website GundamPodcast.com for episodes, show notes, and more, and you ​ ​ ​ can email your questions, comments, and complaints to [email protected]. Or, come shout your ​ ​ Wrong Gundam Opinions to us directly by coming to scenic New York City and yelling that: “Gundam the Origin is 100% canon!” ...on any busy street corner. We’ll totally hear you. ​ ​

Music plays

THOM: The intro song is “WASP” by Misha Dioxin. The closing music is “Long Way Home” by Spinning Ratio. You can find links and more in the show notes. And thank you for listening. ​ ​

[41:25] Music continues through OUTTAKES ​

NINA: I would like re-record for posterity, and in better quality, that you are not allowed to do alliterations again. Ever. No more alliteration for you.

THOM: You can’t stop me. You don’t have that power

NINA: SssssssSayla Massss, Ssside Ssseven Ssscivilan out Ssssearching for Sssurvivorsssss

THOM: Nina, I think you have a snake, snake infestation in the studio.

NINA: The Gundam’sss Sssuperior Ssspecss Sssurvive the furiousss assssault’s. Sssingle Shot.

THOM: [Defensively] I’m sorry that the English language has a lot of “S”s in it.

NINA: It’s like you’re trying to write tongue twisters!

Music plays

NINA: I think that should be good.

Music plays

[42:34] END ​