The Patreon Letter - 28th July, 2018

Hi everyone! Em here with another letter for you all. If you listen to The Great Gundam Project (and you should, it's totally there for you if you subscribe to this!) you'll know we recently finished Zeta Gundam, the second in our long loooong line of shows. It was really good! In fact, some (me, not Jackson) might say it's the best Gundam we have watched. Even Jackson would admit that we've come out the other side transformed by our experience, forged from Gundam babies into Gundam children, the most dangerous age to be Gundam in. 

The energy coming off of such an experience is very real and very powerful. If we weren't locked into the measured pace of GGP, I probably would have watched most if not all of ZZ Gundam this past week in an excited rush. I'm really glad we have the podcast, because this is both a really unhealthy thing to do and really bad for actually remembering and having good reads on the shows. 

I'm a big believer in not marathoning shows the way we are trained to do by Netflix in 2018, and I think our podcast proves the power of that as we teased out details and weird bits of Zeta Gundam over 25 weeks. There's a lot of deep reads and dusty theoretical roads you can go down when you're only covering 40 minutes of anime a week. It's slow, for sure, but there's a value in slowness. I think the general tenor of all of our podcasts is that sort of careful thoroughness (though even we mess that up sometimes, for sure). 

Looking back on all of it, though, I am struck by a lot of the things that we miss doing this show week to week. And it's not necessarily the thematic material, or the story beats—we might fumble those from time to time as we watch things play out, but we always circle back. I'm talking instead of the texture things we miss, the sort of stuff that is in the 'whoa cool robot' part of the whoa cool robot meme. The kind of things that make someone get really into gunpla. That stuff? That stuff we're really bad about. So let me dedicate this letter to remembering those things, because they're also what make Zeta great.

I think about the Argama, with its endlessly cramped corridors and baffling cafeteria machines, far less of a magical question mark in space like the White Base was and more a submarine around the enormous mobile suit hangars and launch bays. The Argama regularly has at least four mobile suits on it! At minimum! That's a lot of space taken up by some big big boys.

We never really talked about it on our podcast, but the way in which the mobile suits climb out onto the large runways atop the ship, climb onto the catapults, and announce their departure is sick as hell. "Quattro Bajeena, Hyaku Shiki, ready to launch!" The reality of these giant robots standing atop their spaceships in the vastness of space and silently rocketing out to do battle is a very specific thing that we never dwelt upon even though it's in nearly every episode, and it's fantastic. 

We talk a lot about how we prefer the 0079 designs, generally, but to be honest most of Zeta's mobile suits are incredible. The additional detail never gets too busy for you to read (minus a few of the lesser Titan suits), they all have good silhouettes, and when the suits actually do battle? There's a real sense of mechanics and power to them that is really something special that 0079 didn't quite have with it's older sensibilities.

Colonies are really crazy to think about! They're these totally enclosed, sufficient habitat areas with trees and light and water and birds. They're just like a city or some suburbs on Earth. But they're also on the inside of a toilet paper tube in space, easily voided into hard vacuum if ANYTHING should pierce the thin hull at everyone's feet. Colonies are terrifying, I can't imagine why anyone would live on one (Haman: WE KNOW THAT'S MY WHOLE DEAL). 

We talked about it at some length because it's an incredible plan but crashing one asteroid base into another asteroid base because you have one to spare is a plan beyond measure. Axis just wiping out the Gate of Zedan is one of the ages, the sort of apocalyptic battle tactic that you need when dropping colonies feels tired. The collision itself was one thing, but watching everyone try to fight around the hail of debris that was shredding colony ships as Kamille and Jerid argued in the rain of rocks is one of those visions that is so evocative and the show is so good about not overselling and lingering on. 

Remember that time the Zeta and Hyaku Shiki HALO jumped from space to the summit of Mt Kilimanjaro, currently being seiged by Kareba forces? It's the best two episodes of Zeta, so it gets a lot of attention but also two mobile suits fell from outer space to Mount Kilimanjaro where a full scale battle was happening up the mountain and where a full ass spaceship would launch before the whole mountain explodes. This is the serious, politics Gundam. I love it so much.

Zeta Gundam is a show where it's easy, especially for us watching two episodes a week, to get mired in the particulars of motivations and political ideals forming factions and fronts. But please never forget, even if we sometimes do on our podcast, that Gundam is cool as hell. It always was cool as hell, it remains cool as hell, and it's worth stopping to appreciate the aesthetic wonder of this ridiculous setting we find ourselves thinking way too hard about week to week.

Until next time, 

Em