alt Hacker NewsGundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits
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In the end, almost everything has a soap opera in it somewhere. People have a hard time processing stories that don't have a soap opera in them somewhere. For some people it's just impossible. There's really only a minority of people who are interested in stories that have no personal relationship stories in them at all.
That's not to say that the parts that aren't soap opera aren't meaningfully different. I disagree with the reductionistic claim that "everything is just a soap opera in the end", and leave it to the reader to determine whether or not the original link is making that mistake.
I would say it's more like salt in cooking for the vast majority of people; they expect a certain proper amount and trying to engage a normal human's taste without it is an uphill battle at best. As a result, across a wide variety of genres and styles, you'll find soap operas.
(I use soap opera as a bit of shorthand for things focusing on human relationships a lot. Soap operas tend to focus on the romantic end more than average, so the embedding is not quite perfect. But I use "soap opera" as the shorthand here because they are one of the more pure embodiments of the idea, because they are basically nothing but human relationships churning and spinning, with generally not much more going on. Yeah, a couple of them have a more exotic framing device, but all that does is move them slightly off the center of the genre, not really change them much.)
Spoilers for Iron Blooded Orphans below.
I watched the one 'except' that OP has listed there "Iron Blooded Orphans". It's the only Gundam I've ever watched and I really liked it, to be honest. It was full of subversions of anime tropes. There's a prophecy, a stoic soldier like none other, a charismatic leader playing a dual role, another heroic leader trusted by his people. And there's the instrument of the establishment, playing the establishment role. And spoiler spoiler spoiler,
spoiler spoiler spoiler the establishment wins, the charismatic double-role leader dies trying to fulfill the prophecy which isn't real, the stoic soldier is cut apart in the final battle, and the remainder of the loyal band either gets their people rights in parliament or gets picked off in violent engagements over time in the denouement.
Fantastic story. You don't see that kind of thing very often. Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one" but this one was "the establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins".
I don't really agree with this authors analysis of Austen. Like on Pride and Prejudice, "Elizabeth Bennet wants to marry for love and respect, but in her world marriage is fundamentally about economic security and social alliance." Elizabeth grew up with her parents fairly disastrous marriage (where her Dad doesn't respect her Mom) and inability to think in the future which put the girls in such a bad situation (her father should have saved money up instead of just assuming he'd have a son eventually). She is reacting against that, wanting a husband that will have mutual respect AND the economic security of someone who is responsible. She wouldn't just want to marry someone for love who wasn't able to provide her economic security, just like she doesn't want to marry Darcy she doesn't respect him. This article makes it sound like she is rejecting the social expectations of her society, but only her mom really wants her to marry Mr. Collins and as seen by her own marriage and support of Lydia's marriage she is a pretty bad judge of what's going to make a good life.
Later they say "They also both, mostly, focus on characters who have enough privilege to have choices, but not enough power to escape circumstances. Characters in both aren’t peasants without agency, but they’re also caught in larger systems they can’t opt out of" But that just describes basically everyone, none of us have no agency, but all of us are also caught up in larger systems we can't opt out of. But even within Austen you have Emma, who is entirely economically and socially secure and doesn't need to worry about anything and Fanny who lives entirely at the whims of others.
What an excellent piece! I have some Gundam experience and I recently picked up Pride and Prejudice to try and fix the total lack of Austen in my life.
This article made me realize that despite writing stories that can be broad and melodramatic, Yoshiyuki Tomino has a keen sense of character. It's an interesting counterpart with his closest American counterpart, George Lucas. Both funneled 60s anti-war politics into their science fiction worlds, but Lucas was obsessed with Joseph Campbell and wrote plot driven stories while Tomino always puts the soap opera elements at the forefront.
Also, I suspect the author hasn't seen Turn A Gundam yet, and if not, they really should. That one is Tomino saying, "what if I took out 90% of the space combat and really just made a comedy of manners." It's wonderful.
> A friend recently asked how to get started watching Gundam, and as I tripped all over myself, equal parts excitement and not wanting to sound like a lunatic, I fumbled around for a good answer.
But there is a good answer. It's Gundam 79. That's not hard.
There are few forces in the world as strong as somebody seeing a long-running Japanese series and twisting and turning themselves into how to avoid release order.
> A friend recently asked how to get started watching Gundam
So what is good order to watch Gundam in 2025? What should be skipped?
Are mangas/novels worth it or is it better just to watch anime?
Now someone tell me the equivalent of P.G. Wodehouse and I'll check it out. Wodehouse feels like the lighthearted successor of Austen, focused more on the comedy and farcical plots, than serious romance. Funny enough, I started reading his stuff on the recommendation of Paul Graham.
Love the lore in gundam, usually ends in sadness but yeah
Watched almost all of them except igloo/build fighter type
Hathaway had a great fight sequence where you felt the scale of Gundam and the violence/heat
the soundfx tooo ahhhh
https://youtu.be/oiiIkSuiios?si=ylHdAqVnE2pPeSKv&t=202
Thunderbolt has great graphics too and the jazz
And unicorn the bell pepper gundam
I thought it was pretty well known that Gundam is a commentary on class and the effects of imperialist wars on normal people. The OG series didn't glorify violence and instead showed a lot of gratuitous civilian deaths, and most of the main characters are the poor-orphan-becoming-a-knight archetype.
Plus Jane Austen at the time was a sharp critique of English nobility and high class, but presenting it in a stylized and popular way.
Weapons and violence in Jane Austen's novels include characters hunting with shotguns and (remotely implied) armed Navy ships.
Nothing comparable to treating a mobile suit like an extension of the body, or killing people, or both at the same time (e.g. the "duel" between Char Aznable and Kycilia Zabi).
I read somewhere that Code Geass originally didn't have mechs in the script.
Every anime has a production committee who figures out how they pay for it (anime make miney from a wide range of sources) and they told the writers they needed to write mechs in to get the gunpla bucks.
Moonrise Kingdom and Snow White too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARoKJ00cEZ8
If you are someone for whom this article resonates, you should watch Legend of the Galactic Heroes, the old one, not the new one.
> Jane Austen
No idea who that is, but I assume she writes Gundam stories without mechs.
Posting because someone has to say that "Witch From Mercury" was literally Shakespeare's Tempest (which I thought was amazing). I mean the Gundam's name is Ariel.
On a note of Gundam, an unpopular opinion but I actually do really enjoy how in the moment G Reco is, and while not quite Gundam another of Tomino's works similarly, Overman King Gainer. The latter being vaguely based off of La Compagnie des glaces.
Some people find it harder to follow along in light of a rather anti-expository method of storytelling, personally I find it all the more compelling for story occurring during wartime. Combat is complex, people take action in the moment, not everyone's thoughts or plans need to be spelled out, leaving plenty to inference rather than narration builds for a better story.
I feel attacked.
Where my Gundam Wing fans at? (there are literally dozens of us...dozens!)
But does Gundam have an awful vicar? If not, not interested.
A mech eng PhD said that he watches Gundam/Macross for drama and Romance (as in Romanticism).
Was funny, I was using Copilot to analyze a certain light novel to reverse engineer the storytelling techniques so I could write a fanfiction the other day and I asked it if it could apply a certain method to any other stories and it said, yeah, The Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, The Great Gatbsy and Neon Genesis Evangelion
Funny after a lot of this I think I broke it because it now loads a personalization context where it tries to apply this framework to everything and can't quit talking about a character that we seem to share a crush on.
When reading Jane Austen you learn a fair bit about the English upper classes of that time period. What do you learn from Gundam?
There are only so many stories and we are all telling variations on them.
How much of Hollywood is bad copies of Shakespeare?
Patrick O'Brian (author of the Aubrey/Maturin series) was a huge Austen fan and intentionally modeled his writing style after hers. Post Captain (book 2) is the most explicit homage, with a number of character names borrowed from Austen's work.
Ah, so thats why I find Gundam boring.
Glad they mentioned Iron Blooded Orphans... the best gundam (and very cynical and dark)
Obligatory meme about what really Gudam is about:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Gundam/comments/y3766d/i_just_watch...
The Witch from Mercury is excellent. It's almost like a space opera version of Open AI board drama.
Gundam Seed is 1000% emo.
Is it as funny and does it "make ridiculous" it's framing culture as much as Austen? I love Austen, still don't get why people consider P&P a romance primarily.
Which Jane Austen book has a character rip off their own arm and use it as a club?
just the same as Jane Austen is one hell of a statement.
Gundam actual influences are well known, Tomino himself talked about it, more than one time. Gundam was inspired by WWII stories, but the direct source of inspiration is Gerard O’Neill’s “The High Frontier”, in which there is depicted the O'Neil Cylinder, whose design has been literally copied verbatim for Gundam's space stations/colonies.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a robot suit to ride around and fight things with."
I was visiting Jane Austen's House Museum last year and it always gives me pleasure to see how wildly popular her work remains. There always seem to be tourists there visiting from all over the world. That is really heartening.
She was very innovative. Maybe even underrated as a craftsperson at the sentence level. My favourite trick that I believe she invented is slipping from prose into a soft Iambic pentameter, essentially unnoticed. Lots of people have copied that from her.
And class-pressure narratives will never not be relevant to people's lives. She's a very very humane storyteller in that respect.
I am slightly biased - she's my great aunt (x 6). Used to find that embarrassing but now I feel quite proud.