You're listening to season 10 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today. This is episode 10.37, Live well and Die Naturally. And we are your hosts. I'm Tom and I'm sad to say that Tomino and co missed out on an opportunity for cross franchise promotion by not saying that we should all strive to live well and die hard.
And I'm Nina, new to Victory Gundam, and it feels oddly appropriate that we are ending the year thinking deep thoughts on philosophical topics inspired by Gundam. Of course, Mobile Suit Breakdown is made.
Possible by our magnetic, magnanimous, magnificent paying subscribers. Thank you all and special thanks to our newest Oberatix, Emrys Norias, passiveaudience, David N and rpo. You keep us, Genki. This is our last episode of 2024. We are going to take Christmas week kind of sort of off, maybe release a bonus episode and be back the following week. And since it's the end of the year, thank you to everyone who listened recommended Mobile Suit Breakdown to their friends, supported us on Patreon and Ko Fi, helped us with research, or reached out with a kind word. I remain astonished, delighted, humbled and proud that this project connected with you.
Goodbye. 2024. This week, Victory Episode 37 Gyak Shu Tsuinra do aka Twinrad Counterattack the episode was written by Okeya Akira and storyboarded by Ashizawa Takeshi, who also directed. The animation directors were Itakura Kazuhiro and Shinbo Tokuro. Guest character Sicily was voiced by Maruta Mari, previously the voice of Shrike team member Mahalia Merrill. Now the recap. Despite the ceasefire, the League Militaire can't bring themselves to believe that BESPA has really given up the fight. They have good reason to be suspicious. Bespa mobile suits are still on the move, operating from the White Ark. USO searches for any hints as to their intentions, but his mission is interrupted by good news. Captain Gomez has authorized the Youth Auxiliary Brigade to take leave and return to Casarelia for a little while. It will give USO the chance to bury his mother in the soil of his homeland. And Marbett volunteers to come along as chaperone. But they were right to suspect Zaanskar treachery. Sinister Wheel Fiend Duker Ik and his Lycithia class motorcycle battlecruiser have remained behind. Their goal is to take advantage of the ceasefire to ambush and annihilate the League Militaire's Victory Gundam unit. When Renda de Paloma returns with news that the White Ark is headed for the Atlantic, en route back to Europe via the North Sea. Dooker orders his ship to follow. Aboard the White Ark, the orthnoid kids kill time fishing. USO even gets into the action, using the V2 to cast a mobile suit, scale, hook and line. Susie wants to try catching whales. The spacenoids, Elisha and Martina Klansky especially, find the experience unbearable. The smells of life, death and decay. The sticky feeling of the salt spray. They would much rather stay inside and work amid the familiar smells of machine oil. Warren is devastated. He has been imagining his dream life with Martina as his dream wife, but he wants to live on Earth. What will he do if she can't bear to stay on the planet? This crisis is soon forgotten as BESPA missiles erupt from underwater. One even hits the belly of the White Ark, but fails to detonate. They radio for aid, but the Lean Horse Junior is half a day's travel away. The only friendly forces nearby are the Federation units stationed at Londonderry in Ireland, Captain Gomez's old unit. There's no telling if they'll even come to the League's aid. Dooker leads this attack personally in a new mobile suit supported by a new double wide battle tire system, the Twinrad. The White Ark is forced to retreat, taking refuge on the coast of a nearby island. The beach is carpeted in the bleached bones of dead sea creatures, and the smell of rot is oppressive. The Klansky sisters take it especially badly gripped by terror as the unfamiliar smell overwhelms them. As Dooku gathers his forces for their final assault, Warren and Shaak Ti confront the girls. Death is a natural part of life. We bleed, we die, we rot. What's important is that we live well. We do what we can while we're alive, and we die naturally. It's hard, but it's the only way to go on. The League pilots do all they can to blunt the BESPA attack and give their friends time to evacuate the White Ark and move further inland, away from the fighting. The twin Rads and the new mobile suits operating them are on the verge of overwhelming Ultra USO and company when a squadron of fast attack boats from the Londonderry garrison arrive to aid our beleaguered heroes. With their help, USO manages to destroy the cruiser's main gun, and Dooker gives the order to retreat. Now that the battle is over, the kids and their chaperones gather around a bonfire on the beach, wrapped in blankets and drinking coffee from tin cups. It seems the Spacenoids no longer mind the smell, so much to Warren's enormous relief. But USO stands apart from the group, his absence seemingly unnoticed. He does not know what to do with the rage still burning in his heart. Nina, do you want to tell the good people at home what I made you do this morning?
Well, good people, we assume you're good people. This is only for the good people in the audience. Bad people, turn it off. Everyone else, plug your ears. Tom vaguely remembered that a line in Evangelion was almost identical to a line in this episode of Victory Gundam. So we watched the first three or four episodes of four, maybe five.
So it was a line from one of the Rebuild movies, which I could not remember if it was in the actual Evangelion TV show, because I watched the Evangelion TV show like 20 years ago and not since. It might have been longer ago than that. Anyway, I remembered this line from the Rebuild movies. I did not know if it was in the show. I wanted to go back and check it, because Evangelion, the TV show, was made shortly after Victory, and Anno Hideaki is a noted fan of Victory Gundam. So I thought, hey, maybe he just straight up lifted this line from the other show that he likes. It's not in the TV show, as far as I can tell. If it is, it's buried so deep that we didn't get to it during our little binge session this morning. But it's the bit about the ocean and how the Klansky sisters are at first horrified by the smell of the ocean. They prefer the smell of machine oil. And I think it's the older one, Elisha, who posits maybe that's the smell of dead things that lived in the ocean and died and are now rotting. And in the second of the Evangelion Rebuild movies, they go to an aquarium and the kids have kind of the same experience. They're like, oh, this smells so weird. Because they live in a post apocalyptic world where the. I guess mid apocalyptic, actually. Anyway, it doesn't matter. They live in a world where there's no actual life in the oceans. So they go to the aquarium where sea life has been preserved, and they're like, ugh, it smells weird. It smells like decay. Anyway, you can see how I made.
The connection because I was watching it with all of this in mind when we got to the scene in Evangelion in the episode where Shinji runs away and he's spending the night in a movie theater because the trains have stopped running and it's a cheap place to spend the night. He sees a couple of teens making.
Out, or like young adults making out in the theater, maybe about to have sex in the theater, and he leaves. And I don't have a fully formed hypothesis around this, but that there is being depicted this kind of discomfort with the messier aspects of being alive.
Uh huh, uh huh. Life, death, sex, pain, decay, fluids of various kinds. That life in space is sterile. That's one of its primary characteristics. And it makes the people who live there uncomfortable with stuff like Shakti's blood, the smell of decay, the bones of dead creatures.
So I love that they are setting up again because this has come up over and over. And it's great the contrast between Earthnoids and spacenoids, this sort of culture shock between them. Chronicle the spacenoid to whom the very air on Earth feels polluted and unclean.
And speaking of that polluted and unclean thing, that's the first thing the Clansky sisters assume. I don't remember if they say this about the smell, but when they're on the island and they see all the bodies, they're like, oh, is it the pollution of the ocean that resulted in this? Shakti makes the distinction between the normal smells of decay in the ocean and the abnormal amount of decay on the beach. Because you have all of these, presumably.
Sea mammals, mostly whales, but maybe also seals and walruses and the like that have all washed up and died here because of pollution is the implication.
But the Klanskys don't know what the smell of pollution is. They don't know the difference between natural smells and unnatural smells. And so all they know about Earth is what they've heard about it. Presumably their whole lives growing up, they've heard how polluted Earth is. So they bring those preconceptions with them when they descend to the planet. And it's only through experience, it's only through actually getting out there and smelling things and touching things and crunching on the bones as they walk around this beach that they are able to get over their initial shock of revulsion.
While I think it's a fabulous story point and I kind of see what they're getting at there with the sterility of life in space. It's a little difficult for me to take it completely seriously because I'm sure in space there are industrial accidents. I'm sure people get injured and bleed or break bones or get crushed by machinery. Like what do people do with dead people in space? Nobody ever is living alone in a tiny apartment and gets forgotten until their neighbors can smell it. Like, what?
You're thinking of this literally. I know, and that's fine and valid. Certainly the show literalizes a lot of things, but it's also a metaphor. It's about, like, getting disconnected from the realities of life. It's about how an increasingly mediated society of young people who see the world through TV screens, through sterilized children's television, who don't go out and have actual experiences like making out in a movie theater, become uncomfortable with all of these unpleasant aspects of life that are hidden away from them. And if the space colonies are, you know, modern cities, if the space colonies are visions of a future of an increasingly isolated and an increasingly sterilized world, you know, that represents a vision of life that we are. Well, in the 90s, we were hurtling towards it, and I'd say we have landed solidly in it now.
It means that more than any previous Gundam we've watched, Victory sort of begs the question, are we still human when we leave Earth behind? Mm. And if it changes us fundamentally to leave Earth, maybe that's not a good thing. Maybe the disconnection from Earth isn't something we should be looking forward to or trying to further.
Mm. This leaves the space colonists, and USO asks this question. He asks, why are they coming here if they hate Earth so much? If they. If they don't get it, why do they insist on coming here? And I think the idea that's being presented is that in the people of the space colonies, there is a yearning, a longing that they may not understand, may not even recognize for what it is. But there's a hunger for the Earth, for that embodied good life, that natural life of living on the Earth and yearning for it. They try to possess it, but because they don't understand it, they end up doing so in this very covetous, very destructive way.
I would say it's almost darker that to space noise, who don't feel any connection to that environment, who don't feel like part of the Earth, who don't see themselves, as Shakti points out, as just like the whales and the seals, the Earth is a resource that's just sitting there, waiting for somebody to extract from it everything they possibly can, that without the experience of having lived in it, there's no sense of connectedness to it. And so no sense of a desire for preservation or respect for it, or awareness of how what they're doing affects the ecosystem as a whole. There is such a strong sense of separateness from that system.
And even if what they want to extract from it is not mineral resources, it's not oil, it's not like some physical thing that we think of as an extractive industry today. What they want to extract from it may still be something spiritual to fill a spiritual gap that they can feel in themselves, which is very similar to the way Orientalism as a concept plays into colonialism. There is this long standing idea that there's some spiritual void in the Western soul, that there is some absence that can be filled with mysticism, spirituality, religion found in the broadly constructed east and extracted out of it. I think a lot of the sort of Western vogue for Indian spirituality, for yoga that was so prominent in the latter half of the 20th century, that comes from this sense of hunger.
Even beyond looking at things with a literal lens rather than the more figurative one in which the episode takes place. It's still hard for me to take the Clancy sisters seriously when they're saying lines like, if we die here, we'll rot like the fish and the whales on this coast, leaving only our bones. And I'm like, so what? You'd be just as dead in space. Like, why is it so important to you what happens to. To your body after you die? What do they do with bodies in space?
Do they just, like, grind them up into powder and, like, make you space dust? I was just gonna suggest launching them. Space slowly filling with our dead bodies. Look, there's a lot of space and not that many of us. I did say slowly, slowly filling very slowly. One of them says, it's a horrible way to die. And I'm like, no, it isn't, because you're already dead either way. Have you never smelled a bad smell and be like, I need to get out of here. I cannot deal with this.
Oh, I totally have. I mean, smells like anything else. You get used to them. I remember the first time you were in a grocery store that had durian, and I, like, didn't even notice. And then I was like, oh, I should let Tom know that that smell is durian. I was like, oh, I just thought there was, like, rotting food around somewhere. In this pristine, shiny grocery store in a fancy apartment complex. It smelled like rotting food. I don't know. There are some delicacies that are partially rotted.
We live near the coast, and occasionally the wind blows in a way where we get the smell of the shore, which is different than the smell of the open ocean. It's got some of that rot in it. It's like briny still but it also smells like rotting seaweed and mud and various other things. Yeah, but sometimes we get the sewage treatment plant.
Well, yeah, but that's very clear what that smell is. But I think the first few times that I smelled that shore smell, I didn't really like it. And it's been as I've gotten used to it, that now I'm like fond of it now I smell that and I'm like, ah, home. Yeah, the seashore. Love it. In the same way that there's no way Warren could have known that it is totally unacceptable to like pick flowers in the greenhouse on a space facility. They don't get why fishing is fun. There's a lot that just comes down to personal preference and your own experiences and what you've been exposed to.
And I think it's really elegantly done and classic Tomino to hide this very high minded argument about like the nature of life in space versus the nature of life on Earth and, and how it changes our perceptions and what does it mean to be human. To hide all of that in this like kind of goofy romantic comedy with Warren having a huge crush on Martina and not being willing to admit it, but now being afraid they can't get married because he wants to live on Earth. It's nice, it grounds everything. But you notice they sprinkle this throughout the whole episode. One of the first scenes of the episode has this new and short lived Bespa mechanic, Sicily, talking about how the maintenance is going slowly because none of these spacenoids are accustomed to Earth gravity and they all feel weak, which is then mentioned again by the Klansky sisters as they're doing this like cleaning, repair task, seeding this idea even before they address it more directly. It's kind of a whole episode built around this one question, this one dilemma.
I was a bit surprised that they never quite do what I would think would close the circle on it, that the Clancy sisters express all this horror at the idea of rotting after you die. And the counterpoint to that is if you rot away when you die on Earth, you become part of the soil, you feed the plants, you feed the insects, you go back to the environment, you remain a part of this incredibly complex, beautiful, incredible system. And if you die in space, you're just nothing. You're just there, you're not part of anything. You don't feed anything, you don't go on to become other stuff.
You seem to be hinting at the inherent egoism of the Spacenoids that what is most important is the preservation of Their self, their body, even long after they've died. Whereas the Earthnoids are involved intimately in this cycle, and they may hit on that more directly in a future episode. They set up for us that there is going to be an episode about laying USA's mother to rest in Casarelia, and that would kind of be the perfect time to do that. Sort of like, and now she will become the cherry trees and the fireweed and the this, that, and the other thing.
Correct me if I'm misremembering, but this really feels like the strongest sort of generally anti Space Noi to take in Gundam so far.
I agree with that. I also think there's an interesting implication here for New Type Theory. And New Type Theory is always changing as the opinions of the people who are making the show change. But this strongly suggests that, contrary to what has generally been said about New types, it's not that going out into space will force humanity to reach the next stage of evolution, as though we were constantly moving towards an idealized form, but rather that it's merely a different adaptation. A different adaptation to a different environment. One that actually makes you unsuited for life on Earth, even if it makes you more suited for life in space. I mean, that's what evolution is, right? Like evolution is not in fact a progression through different stages towards an idealized type. There is no ideal human form that we're all evolving towards. It's merely adaptation to your environment.
And a lot of that adaptation happens in a lifetime or less. By the end of the episode, all of the Spacenoid kids are appreciating the joy of a good campfire. An experience they have probably never had before. And very soon they're about to learn about the corrosive effects of salt water. Yeah, I mean, if you live in a constantly climate controlled environment, if you're never too cold or never too warm, you would never be able to appreciate a campfire.
Most of my questions about smells in space can be hand waved away by just saying they have extremely high quality like scrubbers and air purification, or they're. Just constantly pumping cologne in through the vents. Migraine town, Population me. Nina, I don't think you would enjoy living in space very much.
That is the vibe I'm getting. Yeah. Some other quick notes about the environment. I think it's the opening scene, or almost the opening scene, where it's a beautiful painted background, sort of meadowland, hilly and trees, and then a couple of bunnies. I always think of couple of animals appear as a tomino Thing just like reminding us, here we are on Earth, there are other creatures other than humans.
And the rabbits are like poking their heads up and then hiding again. Which sets you up for this first scene in which USO is looking for holdouts from the Bespa forces who are hiding in the area. And then it turns out that in fact one of them, Renda de Paloma, is in fact hiding, though not in the agricultural warehouse where Ouso was looking for her. And she's in a new mobile suit, one with a scary mouth. I love that. I love that a lot. I kind of wondered what the point of the twin Rads is.
If one tire is really powerful, two tires, I mean, so they. The twin rad is big enough that it can carry two mobile suits. Well, it's basically two ainarads hooked together side to side. And maybe you need a twinrad to be able to drive on the ocean. Maybe. I don't know. It just seems very silly to me. Well, Dukarik does not strike me as the smartest guy. He just likeshe like wheel. He like big tire.
I wonder what's going to happen to him, if anything, for presumably causing an international incident by breaking the ceasefire. I. I mean, I feel like he's gonna get away with it. Like, obviously something bad is gonna happen to him eventually because he's a villain in a Gundam show. I just. This storebrand, Ramba Ral, does not spark joy. I want something bad to happen to him. He was fun and funny early on with his obsession with biking.
Right. They should have doubled down on that instead of making him like a Zanskar, like True Believer. And one of the architects of this operation, Ramba Raul as a character was very charming. And most of that charm was the fact that he loved his wife, his subordinates and fighting, in that order, and that those three very understandable, very relatable loves in his life led him to end up working for people that he personally hated or at least disdained, and who also ultimately like, betrayed him.
He has that honorable warrior vibe which is so compelling. And Duke Arek so clearly wants to have that vibe or something like it. He wants to be a likable character, but his love of motorcycles, while very charming initially, has not been enough to overcome his love of genocide. Well, and this is perhaps generational or grounded in.
Sorry, I just. As you were saying that I thought of Milkshake Dooker. Everybody loves Milkshake Dooker, the Dukereak who rides motorcycles. Five episodes later, we regret to inform you that Milkshake Dooker did a genocide.
Yeah. I was just thinking that perhaps this difference that we're noting is based in the kinds of war and specific events that the different Gundam shows are drawing from that when they hearken back to to World Wars I and 2, there's a sense that there's room for these honorable enemy types. But there's no sense of that in Zanskar. There's no sense of that here. To the extent that Chronicle maybe kind of had it at the beginning, it's gone now. And everybody else, no one is talking about how to give USO a fair fight. They don't want that. They don't want a fair fight with him. They want to get rid of him by hook or by crook, by any means necessary.
Right. Including the most despicable ones available. Right. They will do any dastardly deed they must in order to get rid of him. And that's a pretty significant vibe shift. Yes. Yes.
I also can't help but wonder what exactly Zanskar are playing at. Did somebody order Dookur Eke to do this, or is he doing this on his own recognizance? Why do they need a ceasefire? It looked as though they were being quite successful at their initial plan on Earth. Is there trouble on the home front? Is there something going on in space or in the Zanskar home colony that caused them to agree to a ceasefire?
I mean, there's a really hard shift between, oh, the motorrad fleet is invincible. They can't be stopped by anything. They're rolling right through the Federation until last episode, when suddenly they're exhausted, they're in desperate need of repairs, they're having all these troubles. They're being caught in a pincer action. I do think the idea is that the motorrad fleet was eventually stopped like that. They were on the verge of being destroyed when this ceasefire went into effect. But they're definitely buying time for something. Something dastardly. I think there was a mention in the prior episode when Pippi Nidan is talking about like, oh, we really need to destroy the white mobile suit. We really need to kill USO before this ceasefire goes into effect. I want to say that he mentioned in passing that Dookurique felt the same way.
He did? Yes. So this is like whether this was orders or Dookurique operating on his own, or like she Shadow orders from Pippiniden, the Shadow commander of the fleet. This does seem like a mission to kill uso. Like this is an assassination. Absolutely. That I don't question. I just wonder if Dooker is taking this upon himself, or if he was ordered, I believe he was under Pippi Nidan's command.
So part of the whole thing with Zanskar is that the people who are giving the orders are not actually running the show. Like Meria is the Queen and Chronicle is the commandant of this fleet. But Fonz, Cagaty and Pippiniden are the ones actually directing affairs. I find myself wondering, are there Zans'scar like Stans out there in the fandom? Are there because there are people who feel that way about Zeon. There are people who really think that Zeon was in the right. There were some bad apples, but on the most part, Zeon are the good guys. Is there anyone who feels that way about Zanskar?
What a terrifying question. And is there anyone out there shipping Renda and Cicely? Because I saw them together in one scene and I was like, oh, those two are dating. There were a couple of shots where it felt like Cicely's face looked exactly like some other side character's face from the first couple of episodes. Giving strong same face syndrome. Yeah, that wouldn't support surprise me. She did look very familiar.
Have to note one issue that came up in the episode. It took a re watch to sort out what had happened. In the English subs, there's a moment when Renda says, ah, you're headed for the Pacific, are you? White mobile suit or something like that? You're headed for the Pacific. But then later they mention avoiding the Mediterranean. And when they call for help, they call the Londonderry Squad or fleet or whoever, which would put them in the North Atlantic.
We know they end up in the North Sea later in the episode. And so I had a moment of where the heck are we? And this happens to me a lot in Gundam. They move around where we are without necessarily clearly conveying how or by what routes we are moving around the Earth. Although props to victory, it is one of the best for giving us solid landmarks, identifiable locations, and a consistent flight path.
So I rewatch the scene. I listen very closely to the Japanese. The line in Japanese does not say Pacific, it says Atlantic. They are admittedly almost the same word. Pacific is taihei, emphasis mine, and Atlantic is tai se yo. But this raises further questions about the translation process. Like, this is an easy mistake to make if you're listening to it, but I assume that the kanji for these two are very different. So this is a weird mistake to make if you're working with the text.
And a weird mistake to make if you're familiar with the story. Like, if you're really following what's happening in the episode. Right.
My fallback on any sort of weird translational issue is time crunch and budget constraints that somebody did not have the resources they needed to check over this properly, to proof it, to do a first draft, whatever. And so you wind up with more mistakes, because that's what happens when you're not willing to divorce, to devote resources to producing good subtitles. Divort. Divort. Sounds like a Homestar Runner line. Divorted. Divorted.
Resources. Divorted. Speaking of the location, Zeonic Scanlations sent me a passage from the GA Gear novels that Tomino wrote back in the late 80s. And there is an almost identical scene where the main character of the Gaya Gear novels sees a beach full of the bones of dead sea creatures and has a similar sort of meditation on the effects of pollution on the world's oceans. And it also takes place in the North Sea. It takes place in the same location, might even be the same beach which Gyagir puts on the North Sea coast of Norway. So that may be where we are specifically for this battle. But it's really interesting that Tomino liked that scene so much, he basically just had the writers for Victory put it into this episode.
For listeners who, like me, are unfamiliar, isn't Gaia Gear a video game? No, no. Gaia Gear was a serialized novel set in the far, far future of the universal century. And it features a literal Shar clone instead of all of the figurative char clones that we talk about, like Chronicle. Okay. My recollection of the 90s, especially the early 90s, is that it was a period when, when, in terms of environmental issues that were very front of mind. For people, Save the Whales.
Ocean pollution was huge. Save the Whales goes back to the 60s or something like that. Yeah, but it was big. It was big in the 90s. Well, in the 90s is when you started to have more Greenpeace action about this. There had also just been. I mean, the first one I think of. I'm sure there were many ocean pollution disasters, but the Exxon Valdez disaster, which involved an oil tanker breaking up and spilling crude oil into the Northern Pacific near Alaska.
I think the early 90s were also when they published the first studies indicating that underwater sonar use by the military was very harmful for large sea creatures. I think there was a Spanish study that correlated underwater sonar testing by the Spanish Navy with. With mass beachings of certain species of whales.
It is ironic to say the Least these bits of Japanese media talking about the whales and the creatures when Japan has been one of the most steadfast supporters of continued whaling. Like whaling is fine, but you shouldn't poison the ocean. Well, we don't know what the people making victory thought of the the Japanese national policy of pursuing continued whaling. They may very well have opposed it, perhaps.
But ocean pollution is a more widely acknowledged as a problem kind of issue. It's more neutral to bring up. Sure.
And there have been high profile cases in Japan of ocean pollution harming humans as well. I forget the name of the town, but I think industrial runoff gave a small fishing town like horrible lead poisoning. And a bunch of children were harmed and a bunch of people in general harmed by all this chemical runoff from a nearby plant of some kind. It was a period where ocean health was becoming a big prominent in sort of international discourse. Environmental issue.
I don't know. The episode leaves it kind of an open question whether this is the result of pollution, pollution or just naturally. Like how the currents in this part of the Skagarak Strait funnel the bodies of weak and dying sea creatures into this coastline. They mention pollution a bunch of times, but often with questions like is this because of pollution? And then there's no meaningful depiction of ocean pollution in the episode. The oceans look beautiful and they're full of jumping dolphins.
The visual contrast between the leaping dolphins and then the missile coming up from under the water was brilliant. So good. However, I have to disagree with you about the pollution thing because I think it is treated as conclusive by the end of the episode. But in Tomino's sort of subtle oblique way that he has, where he frequently doesn't want to state things directly. But that entire conversation where Warren and Shakti get fed up with the Clancy sisters are basically like if you can't deal, you need to just shut it. Because we have more important things to do than worry about your whining about death.
Disagreeing with me is illegal. I can't believe you would do that. Actually, I was going to say good on Warren for being willing to tell off his crush. That's hard to do when you're that age.
Very, but so important. But the conclusion of that confrontation is that this particular situation, this particularly horrible example of mass death on the Earth, is the result of creatures not having the freedom to live well and die naturally. Like I said, it's about as explicit as Tomino ever gets. The subtext is that they have died unnaturally. And what would have done that but pollution and human interference? You Know what? Maybe this will be my research this week. I haven't yet delved into some language and linguistic kind of research I wanted to do. Because in that scene, they use the word kirei to mean both well and clean and natural. They use it to mean, like, a pretty broad span of things. In sort of colloquial Japanese, kirei often means clean, like a clean room, a clean environment, tidy.
And in this episode, when they talk about Operation Earthclean, they use the English loanword clean. They say chikyu cleen. Yeah, but in prior episodes, at least once they used kirei. They used, like, chikyu kirei saxen for Operation Earthclean. And kirei is also often used to mean pretty visually or aesthetically attractive.
Now, I do kind of have to pick a bone with Tomino on this. A large sea creature's bone found on the shore of an island. Because this ties back to some things that he said, I think, around the time of the production of Char's Counterattack, when he talks about how, like, basically that modern people live too long, that our advances in medicine and our desire to continue living sort of beyond our, quote, naturally allotted lifespans is very bad.
That's just more Neo Malthusian carrying capacity stuff.
Well, yes. And also, I think there's this continuing strain of, like, neoprimativism that at some point in the distant past, people lived correctly. People lived naturally and died well. And that. That was beautiful. And so there's this idea that, like, people should not strive to live longer. People should simply, like. And, like, I'm not saying that people shouldn't try to live well with the time that they have. Absolutely. People should do that. But then it gets into these other ideas that, like, progress is bad because it leads to us trying to exceed our correct natural limitations. And I just don't agree with that.
Well, yeah, but I don't really get any of that from this episode. Nor would I if I had not read that interview in which Tomino says these things. You and I are embracing the two different sides of Schrodinger's author. That's fair. Yeah. And, you know, Tomino clearly had a hand in the writing of this episode, or we wouldn't be getting this scene lifted out of Gaia gear. But also, Tomino did not write this episode.
Alternative research idea. What species of whales have skulls big enough that a mobile suit could wear it as a hat? Remember, these are the smaller mobile suits. You'll have to take that into account when you do your calculations. Well, I would I would lean on you, I'd be like, all right, Tom, tell me how big that mobile suit head is and I will go research whale skull sizes.
There are other people in the fandom who are better suited to tell you how big that mobile suit's head is. They can probably get you the exact dimensions, the mass. All right, hit me up. No, by the time you hear this, I will already have done it or not, and we will have moved on. Fun mystery for everyone. That will be resolved in minutes. Let's call it seconds. And now Nina's research on the Japanese.
Word kirei Translation theory is a fascinating subject, especially for those of us who spend a lot of time watching and reading translated works, having frequently wondered, why did they translate that line, that word, that paragraph in that way? Even the cursory reading I did this week was enlightening. Is everything translatable? Is anything? In the Rutledge course in Japanese translation, author Hasegawa Yoko refers to an ancient Italian proverb, tradutore traditore, or translator. You are a traitor. There is something oddly comforting in knowing that vituperative arguments about translation are as.
Old as the practice itself.
I prefer this excerpt by John Ciardi from the translator's note to his translation of Dante's Inferno. When the violin repeats what the piano has just played, it cannot make the same sounds and it can only approximate the same chords. It can, however, make recognizably the same music, the same air, but it can do so only when it is as faithful to the self logic of the violin as it is to the self logic of the piano. All of which is a long winded way to introduce my actual the translation of a couple of phrases used when Shakti and Warren are confronting the Clancy sisters about their disgust at the earth environment. Not because I find the translation used for the subtitles lacking or confusing, but out of curiosity about the Japanese phrase and how translators handle words with varied meanings. The phrases in question are kireini ikiru and kireini shinu, which are translated as live well and die naturally, respectively. The verbs for to live and to die are straightforward. The adjective used to modify them, kirei, is less so. According to the Wisdom Japanese English Dictionary, kirei has four main meanings. First, it can mean beautiful, handsome, pretty, lovely, as in descriptions of a person, a flower, scenery, etc. Secondly, it can mean clean, pure, tidy, clear, or neat, as in a clean car, a tidy room, or pure or clean water. In this sense, it can also be used more figuratively to Describe, for example, someone with no criminal record as having a clean or unblemished record. Thirdly, it can be used to mean completely or entirely, as in kire ni wasureru, I clean, forgot, I completely forgot kireni kaisu, to completely pay off a debt or kireni wakareru, a clean break or to be through with someone and the end of a relationship. And fourth, it can be used to mean fair, as in a clean or fair election or fair play in sports, carrying connotations of justice, morality, and rule abiding behavior. Jisho.org lists very similar meanings and examples. I also consulted Sanseido's Kokugo Jiten, a Japanese only dictionary, and while the listed meanings are substantially the same, it provided a lot of additional notes about nuance. For instance, that when kirei is used to mean beautiful, it is more conversational than many other words with the same meaning, like utsukushi, and that it is often an interjection expressing surprise, excitement, or strength of emotion, used in combination with wa. Those of you who have studied Japanese and used the genki textbooks may remember.
Wa kirei na umi.
In the case of kirei meaning clean, this dictionary describes it as both not dirty and as an appearance or condition or state that feels good, feels nice, feels pleasant. The Japanese phrase used is kimochiga I yosu, the direct opposite of the phrase the Clancy sisters use repeatedly to express their disgust. Kimochi warui, when used to mean clean but in the more figurative sense. Sanseido's dictionary describes it as a lack of guilty feelings, a lack of qualms, an untroubled conscience, and clean or pure, as in honest, innocent, even chaste. The example sentence kare wa okane ni kireida, literally he's pure about money, means that the he in question is not overly attached to money, and the word used for attached is the same one used for the concept of attachment in Buddhism. Used in this way, it describes a person or action that is praiseworthy, creditable. Finally, it says that kirei can be synonymous with the word isagi yoi, which means graceful, noble, gallant, or brave, and can describe something that in its skillful or good execution results in a pleasant feeling, such as being gracious in defeat, a gracious apology, or an honorable death. One element that surprised me is how many overlaps there were with the English meaning of the word clean. Clean as in not dirty, tidy, sparse, a clean conscience, a clean record, a sense of morality, honesty, uprightness as in clean living, fairness as in let's have a clean fight doing something completely, as in I clean forgot, which reads is somewhat old fashioned now, but is absolutely a phrase I've heard before. What's remarkable is how many of these meanings come into play in this scene. Literal cleanliness versus pollution, the experience of beauty versus the experience of harm, pollution, war, the figurative cleanliness of conscience, of morality, the sense of purity versus the moral compromises engendered by war, and the sense of doing something completely, living completely and dying completely. And that perhaps in some sense spacenoids do not do either one sort of being implied.
Yeah, there's that additional line that was sort of outside of the scope of what you were looking at, but was within this scene where they say, well, maybe. Like maybe living well means do as much as you can. I think she says isho kenmei.
Yeah. The final line of the scene, Warren, defines a kirei death as one that follows a life lived well, a life fully lived, a life in which one did their utmost, tried their hardest. The Japanese dictionary that I consulted repeatedly mentions kimochi ga I yosu conditions or states that produce a good feeling, a life you can feel good about, and a death you can feel good about. And not merely a sense of happiness, but also of virtue.
I also would like to note the potential double meaning because issho kenmei, the term they used for like, do your hardest, live life to its fullest, do your best, try your hardest, is also like historically a yoji jukugo for a samurai who devotes his life to defending his territory.
It's like what your life's work is. And because it's a subjective phrase, what we are getting is Shakti's definition, Warren's definition that a kirei death is one that is not the result of war or pollution. Hence I think the translator's decision to use the word natural. Some of you may be familiar with the Latin phrase dulce et decorum est propatria mori, which comes from Horace's Odes and roughly translated means it is sweet and good, sweet and proper to die for the sake of your country.
There is a beautiful rebuttal poem from World War I that I believe is called by the same title takes its. Name from the first four words Dulce et quarumest by Wilfred Owen.
So go check that out if you want to feel horror. I also ran general web searches of these two phrases to triple check whether there was any established precise meaning to either of them. And and there doesn't seem to be. The search mostly turned up a blog posts and articles discussing what living and dying in a Kirei manner would mean to the author personally, Whether or not it's important, things like that.
I mean, I think the the question of how should we live and how should we die is one of the most fundamental philosophical and moral questions that people have been asking and trying to answer for all of human history. And there is no answer because everybody's answer is personal.
In a nice bit of serendipity, Zeonic Gundam Manga and Novel Translations recently posted A Translation from Message to the Gundam Generation, a collection of conversations between Tomino Yoshiyuki and people from various different professional fields and walks of life. These conversations were originally published in Gundam ace magazine from June 2003 until February 2006, and the first is with Dr. Moritsu Junko, a hospice physician, which is to say, a doctor specializing in care that supports people who are dying and makes them as comfortable as possible at the end of their lives. This conversation was first published at least 10 years after Victory Gundam aired, and by now we're all well familiar with the fact that Tomino changes his mind. His opinions and attitudes evolve. He makes contradictory statements. But the existence of this article and the things Tomino says in it suggest that grappling with the reality of death, with what death means to us, and with how our view of death can and should influence how we live our lives is a persistent interest of his. In his introductory remarks, Tomino says, among those often referred to as the Gundam Generation, it seems many have only ever contemplated death as it's depicted in anime or comics. By this I mean they understand death only as a notion inside their heads, not as a tangible reality. And if death is nothing more than an abstraction, then so too is life. The reason younger people find it increasingly difficult to grasp death's reality is that the adults around them, parents and elders, scramble to conceal it, sidestep it, and avoid confronting it head on. In this first conversation, I am speaking with Dr. Moritsu Junko, a physician who embraces the principle of a good death and lives every day in direct engagement with mortality. She has personally witnessed many end of life transitions. It is my hope that through this dialogue she can offer us meaningful insights into how we might better approach our own understanding of death. Tomino goes on to connect this superficial attitude towards death to a desire to avoid life's unpleasantness. In your book for everyone who will care for their mother's final Days, you write that when someone is caring for a parent over the long term, there are moments when a dark corner of the mind whispers, if they died right now, at least I could be free of this burden. You emphasize that you must be the one who befriends that very shadowy part of yourself. Now for me, the notion that people have a dark side is perfectly natural. The fact that you felt compelled to write it down suggests that many people don't dare acknowledge their own capacity for evil. It seems there are many who honestly believe their lives can be purely pleasant, cute, nice, and nothing else, and they sincerely chase after such a life when that's not possible at all. Discussing differences in how younger and older people approach their own deaths or react to other deaths in their lives, Dr. Moritsu notes that children who grow up never seeing death become abnormally sensitive to it when it does appear, but that if children react this way, it may be precisely because our society needs that reaction. Tomino responds that so it's not really a problem with the younger generation. It's my generation and those older who constructed the systems that hide home births, shroud death, and sanitize our food and funerals. We deprive them of first hand encounters with life and death. Now these children grow up in a sterile environment, and though they seem overly sensitive, they're actually striving to adapt in their own way. The two discuss the idea of a good death and how Dr. Moritsu defines it at length, and in an echo of Warren's comment at the conclusion of the scene with the Clancy sisters, one header in the article summarizes that exchange A good death is simply the natural culmination of a life well lived. What is a life well lived? Each of us has to define that for ourselves. Next time on episode 10.38, Ocean on Fire we research and discuss Victory Gundam episode 38 and even the narrator can't keep the mecha straight. Memento Mommy Octagonal Love Confession Even villains have dreams. Death flags galore. Someone is pregnant, but who could it be?
Harrow. Poor kids can't even go on one date. Parting the sea. Carmen's fussy bring him closer to the battle Riders in the sky, the promise of more Kino's journey and what could have been. Please listen to it.
Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dioxin. The closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio. The recap music is Slow by Lloyd Rogers. You can find links to the sources for our research. The music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people and more in the show. Notes on our website gundampodcast.com if you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email hostsundampodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you would like to support the show, please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us [email protected] Patreon you can find links and more ways to help [email protected] support thank you for listening. Happy holidays everybody. Go watch 0080 War in the Pocket.
Used in combination with onomatopoeic expressions like waa. I guess that's not an onomatopoeia. You're not. You're just like making a noise of surprise. I'm ready if Tigress decides she desperately needs to be in a lap prepared for that possibility. Last I saw her, she was waiting in the hallway. Well, now she's waiting on the floor of the office. But point is, I'm ready. Yep, I see her. I'm excited. I have a shiny new notebook. It is identical to my last notebook, but it's new.
Only two pages have been written in. So I know you crave novelty frequently. Yeah. Do you get that frisson of joy from a new notebook? Even if it's the same model of notebook you had before? I do rather my episode notes prep for Talkback Notebook for anyone who's curious. Is Life brand noble note ruled a 4 size. Are they paying us? All right, Tom will cut this part because he doesn't believe in mentioning anything. Cool, even if we love it. Unless they're going to give us money.
Well, now you've shamed me, so I guess I to leave it in. Kitten, you can come up. Do you want to come up? She doesn't want me to lift her, but she keeps like pawing at me like she wants to climb into my lap. Should we build her a ramp from the floor to your lap? She's climbed up that chair before. I don't know if she will this. Time, but she could if she wanted. All right, probably she's a little unsteady. Lately, but anyway, if if there are.
Any Life Brand notebook brand representatives listening to this, you owe us one, kitten. You can't play with cardboard while we're you can't be playing with like tissue and paper when we're in here. It's too noisy. We can't stop her. Well, we can kick her out, then she'll just scream. But she doesn't really scream. She'll make us feel bad. But you won't be able to hear her on the recording. I don't know. Her pipes have been getting stronger. All right, she's given up on us. All right?
I can't. I can't put that in that podcast. No, you can't. Sa.