Patreon Letter: 26th August 2018

Hey everyone,

Jackson here! I’m back! I have finished University! Well, I hope so. I could have failed and end up needing to pay out of pocket to retake things but uh let’s not think about that. I would have needed to do really badly to slide under that bar. I do have a topic today but I’m gonna ramble about this for a moment: did you know I got an 85% in my TV Writing assignment? I’m really proud of that. It was about a Lawyer in hell who worked cases to try to get people into heaven. It wasn’t very good, but luckily that didn’t matter, I think it did really well because it sounds like a CW show that already exists.

Okay that’s enough humblebragging about school. My other assignments were, uh, not as good so let’s hope I’m okay. I’m here to follow up on Em’s letter last week, I’m here to talk about Gundam!

Jesus it’s been a year. A whole year! I feel like I’ve been watching Gundam my entire life. Who knows how I will feel in like six years when we’ve seen basically all the Gundam that there is to see and I am a hardened veteran of the Special Boys and their Special Robots. I felt the need to post a follow up when Em’s letter last week made me very emotional, because Gundam has become a constant in our lives in a way that almost nothing else ever has. 

Every single week, without fail, I watch two (2) Gundams. Regardless of how I feel about the episodes, it has become something I just do. And that’s new for me. When I get into things, I tend to get into them all at once and then burn out, I remember my original Star Trek summer where I tore through TNG and DS9, I had my Metal Gear phase and even though I try not to think about it anymore I did have a big West Wing phase in another life. I fall into fixations fairly deep and switch them up fairly frequently. So the constant of Gundam has been a strange thing to experience.

And what an experience it’s been. We joke a lot about how Zeta Gundam has been a crucible for the both of us, but it’s hard to overstate how true that has been for me. There have been weeks where just thinking about Gundam caused me to break into legitimate panic attacks. Honestly it still happens from time to time. Gundam is such a singular thing that I honestly don’t even know if I like, and so many of my friends care so strongly for it that I’m terrified of stepping on that, or saying the wrong thing and having to take it back later. And so often the things I latch onto fly directly in the face of the themes of the show, my favourite characters are Amuro, Kai and Fa, it's just been a non stop parade of the show owning me for the people I relate to.

In that sense, Gundam has been less of a capital T Thing that I have got into and more of an engine for self-reflection? It has caused me to look at myself, look at what I value in storytelling, in politics, in how I approach art all in forty minute chunks of a kids cartoon every week. And no matter how you look at it, that’s impressive. Its caused me to think about why it is I care about the characters I do, analyze the kind of catharsis I am looking for from stories, and have a more concrete sense of my own taste and worldview than I did before. It’s been a wild ride and I’m excited for more, even if the experience has been far more intense, personal and scary than I could have ever expected for a weekly mech podcast. 

What I’m saying is me: anime protagonist. Audacity: giant robot. A full decade of Gundam: the awakening of my true consciousness.

Anyway in a month or two Em and I are going to have The Evangelion Conversation so please look forward to that. Evangelion is basically “what if Gundam was made to appeal to Jackson” and I recognize that it invented nothing and the whole thing is in many ways a fraud and none of the teens who watched it knew any better but dammit I still love Shinji okay, and there’s nothing anyone can say to change that. 

Alright, the Month of Hell is over, I will see you all in two weeks as we move away from my dissertation nightmare and onto greener pastures!

-Jackson