Utena as Gundam, or Gundam as Utena
Nov. 9th, 2022 01:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksThere is, as always, a whole bunch of stuff I keep meaning to write and have no time or brain available. Anyway, people who watch anime, this season the Gundam series turns out to be a full-power-of-the-Gundam-franchise-behind-it remix/rewrite of Revolutionary Girl Utena. It is one hundred percent intentional; the main series writer wrote the Utena light novels. So if you are an anime fan, I highly recommend watching Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury as it airs (and Utena fans are now mentally screaming at that title). The prologue episode has no Utena content. It kicks in at episode one. The whole thing is available free and subtitled on Youtube at the official Gundam channel.
For people who don't watch anime, I have very little way of communicating just how big a crossing of the streams this is, and just how impressive it is that they are actually doing it. Gundam is the biggest giant robot franchise in history. There is no competition. The main Gundam series are culturally influential in Japan on a level impossible to communicate to anyone who has not experienced it. There are one jillion different timelines, official AUs, spinoffs, and entire anime series of their own centered around things like 'what if all the toys we put out for the original Gundam series came to life and were the protagonists'. Various parts are varying levels of Serious Business, but the main shows are always a) downbeat meditations on the horrors of war, the philosophy of violence, and the amount of agency individual humans do and do not have in a world of constantly evolving tech; and b) GIANT ROBOT SHOOT THINGS REALLY, REALLY PRETTY. There are various tropes that occur over and over in the main Gundam shows-- the robot pilots as child soldiers, scarred from and integrally a part of a war beyond their emotional comprehension; the mysterious man in the mask who is an antagonist but, may, nevertheless, be right; the presence of Newtypes, or genetically enhanced humans, and their position in relation to other technical advances; and the adorable spherical flying robots called Haros which provide a significant cuteness factor.
This show starts a new timeline and is in (so far) its own continuity. As of episode six, it has done the following things that have never been seen in the Gundam franchise before:
1) There is a Gundam pilot who is a woman. She is unequivocally a Gundam pilot, it is her Gundam, she owns it, and she pilots it repeatedly. Until well after the year 2000 in this franchise any woman in any Gundam series who piloted or came close to piloting a Gundam died. Period. There should have been female pilots as far back as Gundam Wing in the late nineties or at the very least Gundam Seed in the late '00s and it has been inexcusable and insulting. It should never, ever have taken this long, but it has finally happened, unambiguously, center of show, cannot be disavowed or taken back.
2) The mysterious masked figure is also a woman. Honestly, that one's bigger than the first. I thought it was going to be another twenty years on that one. Literally. Possibly longer. I thought they might try to get rid of the trope eventually instead. The concept of a woman being, in any way, equivalent to Char Aznable... I don't know how to express what a game-changer that is. The closest I can come is saying that it's like portraying a woman as Darth Vader, and having the portrayal of Vader be, otherwise, identical to how it is now. Except Char is more central to Japan than Darth Vader is to anybody, and yes, I know there is a Jedi religion.
3) There is now a Gundam timeline in which same sex marriage is legal. I just about cried. Anime does not do that. The portrayal of queer, trans, and especially nonbinary people in anime has been improving by leaps and bounds over the last fifteen years or so-- I now have a list of really well-written nonbinary characters as long as my arm, and a list of trans women, and, more impressively, a list of trans men (generally a later stage in representation), and a list of GNC people where it isn't a punchline. But, despite the fact that I do not yet know whether anyone in The Witch of Mercury is actually queer, legal same-sex marriage, as a worldbuilding thing, remains extremely controversial to show and is seen as a lot more dangerous to market share than worlds which share the current Japanese legal status (complicated but boils down to nope).
I attribute all three of these to the influence of Utena, because Revolutionary Girl Utena defined the visual vocabulary in anime for lesbianism. The shadow of the director, Kunihiko Ikuhara, falls across everything in the medium since, and probably always will, because Utena went places in the nineties that the rest of anime is slowly catching up to now. Utena is one of my formative texts-- the first time I saw lesbians on screen, and then the first time I saw unambiguous lesbians on screen, and then the first time I saw non-tragic lesbians on screen. It is also a stunning piece of art that deeply influenced me in other ways and has more to say about the human spirit and the challenges of growing up than most other texts I can think of, but for a really long time in anime it felt kind of like a clenched fist of defiance in a void. The shows that followed and riffed on it have been wonderful and amazing (especially Princess Tutu, Simoun, and Ikuhara's own Sarazanmai), but none have gone farther than Utena did, and I found that frustrating.
... it turns out that repeating the tropes often enough to gain cultural saturation is also a valid way of pushing the boundaries of what's considered acceptable to portray, too. It's not that anyone has gone farther, but they've gone again and again and again. To the point where the visual vocabulary of Utena is a set of tropes on its own, which I've seen pop up as complex and symbolic referents in things as unrelated as the Pokemon anime and fricking One Piece*.
So things are in a place, now, where people in a position to do so could say let's take Gundam and Utena and put them in a blender and hit frappe and see what the hell we get, and it is delightful. I have been cackling about one of the remix elements for like a month now, and several of the others are very thought-provoking.
Do I think Witch from Mercury works as a show if one hasn't seen its ancestors? Oh, sure, absolutely, it's a fun corporate dystopia school story with giant robots and complicated factional politics and well-written characters, it'll make perfect sense on its own.
But for those who have seen its antecedents, it is deploying emotional spearpoints that have been incubating for twenty-odd years, and it is doing it very well.
And the war hasn't even started yet. And I haven't thought through some of what I think of Utena in the context of an actual war, and I will be fascinated to see what these writers will come up with in that direction. (Although, almost certainly, ouch.)
The show's gotten a full twenty-six-episode run, too, which is almost unheard of nowadays, split-cour between now and spring '23; as a main-line Gundam it will almost certainly run longer than that, so they'll definitely have enough time to do whatever their overall plan is. Because Gundam means never having to worry about your budget or getting cancelled.
There's a whole bunch of other interesting stuff going on this anime season, but that's the thing where I'm like, there are people I, specifically, know who may have missed this and really shouldn't, so I should write about this while it's airing.
As for writing about my actual life or anything? Ah ha ha ha no way in hell, nothing's better, just not going there. I can write about anime. We'll leave it at that.
*assuming my memory is not fucking with me (see comments)
For people who don't watch anime, I have very little way of communicating just how big a crossing of the streams this is, and just how impressive it is that they are actually doing it. Gundam is the biggest giant robot franchise in history. There is no competition. The main Gundam series are culturally influential in Japan on a level impossible to communicate to anyone who has not experienced it. There are one jillion different timelines, official AUs, spinoffs, and entire anime series of their own centered around things like 'what if all the toys we put out for the original Gundam series came to life and were the protagonists'. Various parts are varying levels of Serious Business, but the main shows are always a) downbeat meditations on the horrors of war, the philosophy of violence, and the amount of agency individual humans do and do not have in a world of constantly evolving tech; and b) GIANT ROBOT SHOOT THINGS REALLY, REALLY PRETTY. There are various tropes that occur over and over in the main Gundam shows-- the robot pilots as child soldiers, scarred from and integrally a part of a war beyond their emotional comprehension; the mysterious man in the mask who is an antagonist but, may, nevertheless, be right; the presence of Newtypes, or genetically enhanced humans, and their position in relation to other technical advances; and the adorable spherical flying robots called Haros which provide a significant cuteness factor.
This show starts a new timeline and is in (so far) its own continuity. As of episode six, it has done the following things that have never been seen in the Gundam franchise before:
1) There is a Gundam pilot who is a woman. She is unequivocally a Gundam pilot, it is her Gundam, she owns it, and she pilots it repeatedly. Until well after the year 2000 in this franchise any woman in any Gundam series who piloted or came close to piloting a Gundam died. Period. There should have been female pilots as far back as Gundam Wing in the late nineties or at the very least Gundam Seed in the late '00s and it has been inexcusable and insulting. It should never, ever have taken this long, but it has finally happened, unambiguously, center of show, cannot be disavowed or taken back.
2) The mysterious masked figure is also a woman. Honestly, that one's bigger than the first. I thought it was going to be another twenty years on that one. Literally. Possibly longer. I thought they might try to get rid of the trope eventually instead. The concept of a woman being, in any way, equivalent to Char Aznable... I don't know how to express what a game-changer that is. The closest I can come is saying that it's like portraying a woman as Darth Vader, and having the portrayal of Vader be, otherwise, identical to how it is now. Except Char is more central to Japan than Darth Vader is to anybody, and yes, I know there is a Jedi religion.
3) There is now a Gundam timeline in which same sex marriage is legal. I just about cried. Anime does not do that. The portrayal of queer, trans, and especially nonbinary people in anime has been improving by leaps and bounds over the last fifteen years or so-- I now have a list of really well-written nonbinary characters as long as my arm, and a list of trans women, and, more impressively, a list of trans men (generally a later stage in representation), and a list of GNC people where it isn't a punchline. But, despite the fact that I do not yet know whether anyone in The Witch of Mercury is actually queer, legal same-sex marriage, as a worldbuilding thing, remains extremely controversial to show and is seen as a lot more dangerous to market share than worlds which share the current Japanese legal status (complicated but boils down to nope).
I attribute all three of these to the influence of Utena, because Revolutionary Girl Utena defined the visual vocabulary in anime for lesbianism. The shadow of the director, Kunihiko Ikuhara, falls across everything in the medium since, and probably always will, because Utena went places in the nineties that the rest of anime is slowly catching up to now. Utena is one of my formative texts-- the first time I saw lesbians on screen, and then the first time I saw unambiguous lesbians on screen, and then the first time I saw non-tragic lesbians on screen. It is also a stunning piece of art that deeply influenced me in other ways and has more to say about the human spirit and the challenges of growing up than most other texts I can think of, but for a really long time in anime it felt kind of like a clenched fist of defiance in a void. The shows that followed and riffed on it have been wonderful and amazing (especially Princess Tutu, Simoun, and Ikuhara's own Sarazanmai), but none have gone farther than Utena did, and I found that frustrating.
... it turns out that repeating the tropes often enough to gain cultural saturation is also a valid way of pushing the boundaries of what's considered acceptable to portray, too. It's not that anyone has gone farther, but they've gone again and again and again. To the point where the visual vocabulary of Utena is a set of tropes on its own, which I've seen pop up as complex and symbolic referents in things as unrelated as the Pokemon anime and fricking One Piece*.
So things are in a place, now, where people in a position to do so could say let's take Gundam and Utena and put them in a blender and hit frappe and see what the hell we get, and it is delightful. I have been cackling about one of the remix elements for like a month now, and several of the others are very thought-provoking.
Do I think Witch from Mercury works as a show if one hasn't seen its ancestors? Oh, sure, absolutely, it's a fun corporate dystopia school story with giant robots and complicated factional politics and well-written characters, it'll make perfect sense on its own.
But for those who have seen its antecedents, it is deploying emotional spearpoints that have been incubating for twenty-odd years, and it is doing it very well.
And the war hasn't even started yet. And I haven't thought through some of what I think of Utena in the context of an actual war, and I will be fascinated to see what these writers will come up with in that direction. (Although, almost certainly, ouch.)
The show's gotten a full twenty-six-episode run, too, which is almost unheard of nowadays, split-cour between now and spring '23; as a main-line Gundam it will almost certainly run longer than that, so they'll definitely have enough time to do whatever their overall plan is. Because Gundam means never having to worry about your budget or getting cancelled.
There's a whole bunch of other interesting stuff going on this anime season, but that's the thing where I'm like, there are people I, specifically, know who may have missed this and really shouldn't, so I should write about this while it's airing.
As for writing about my actual life or anything? Ah ha ha ha no way in hell, nothing's better, just not going there. I can write about anime. We'll leave it at that.
*assuming my memory is not fucking with me (see comments)
no subject
Date: 2022-11-09 08:53 am (UTC)I would love to hear about them.
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Date: 2022-11-09 01:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-09 03:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-09 04:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2022-11-09 06:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2022-11-09 06:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-09 08:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2022-11-10 12:46 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-11-10 01:06 am (UTC)Nine
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Date: 2022-11-10 03:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2022-11-10 05:15 am (UTC)....well shit I am going to have to watch this, now. I mean my brain hurts a little at the concept but in a good way.
... it turns out that repeating the tropes often enough to gain cultural saturation is also a valid way of pushing the boundaries of what's considered acceptable to portray, too. It's not that anyone has gone farther, but they've gone again and again and again. To the point where the visual vocabulary of Utena is a set of tropes on its own, which I've seen pop up as complex and symbolic referents in things as unrelated as the Pokemon anime and fricking One Piece.
Okay, I absolutely missed the Utena referents in One Piece (probably because I watched all of Utena and my ADHD brain promptly discarded almost everything about except the emotional experience of watching it, sigh), and am very *chinhands* as to what they might be!
(no subject)
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Date: 2022-11-10 06:46 am (UTC)I cannot wait for more of the downbeat meditations on war and personhood and agency to kick in, though some already have, and the planet-wide plot ditto; I'm fascinated to see how that's going to mesh with the school story scope that episode 1 started with. But I have a lot of trust in the writers so far, based on what we've gotten.