The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

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sdwoodchuck
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

tHeWasTeDYouTh wrote: Sat May 20, 2017 9:36 pm I love IBO and a ton of people are hating on it so I am going to explain this once and for all.

A lot of people look towards anime as an easy form of escapism, a quick way to get away from the hassles of the real world. They don't care about what the show has to say or what it's trying to do, just that it appeases them and goes the way they want. Watching has become masturbatory in such a sense, and there are those within the industry that are willing to work the shaft so to speak in order to profit.

Every time I see someone complain about how the show went from something great to a complete trainwreck, they always say the writing went to ZOINKS just after the Hashmal battle. Always around there, the last major victory of Tekkadan. After that, the Turbines are taken out and Tekkadan join an ill-conceived coup only to end up destroyed themselves. When the show stopped being a power fantasy for them, that's when it went to ZOINKS according to them.

Mikazuki and Tekkadan were something a lot of Gundam fans wanted for a long time. Mercenary protagonists who can kill without hesitation. No discussing morals, no crying about the horrors of war, just kids who will fill graveyards in order to get things done. They ignore all the signs that such a group are emotionally broken, all the warning signs about it and fill it with their own fanfiction. It's what they've always wanted, hence why the power fantasy was so strong for some viewers.
For the people who are complaining about the fact that Tekkadan don't win in the end, sure, I agree with your counterpoint 100%. I can't say whether that's a majority of the people complaining about it or not (I tend to just ignore that kind of noise), but I've seen plenty who dislike the later portion of the series for much more substantial reasons than its failing to fulfill an escapist power fantasy.
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AceWhatever
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

This is a really sweeping generalization and I don't know why you're posting it in a thread where the majority of complaints about the show had nothing to do with it breaking a power fantasy.

Also, the idea that Tekkedan is more of a power fantasy than the Operation Meteor boys or Celestial Being on the surface is a bit ridiculous. The latter two factions had twice as many Gundams and would cut down mooks with a level of emotion between deadpan empathy and sadistic glee, so no, nobody was eagerly awaiting Pistol-toting Child Soldiers: The Anime.
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X_zoro
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

tHeWasTeDYouTh wrote: Sat May 20, 2017 9:36 pm I love IBO and a ton of people are hating on it so I am going to explain this once and for all.

A lot of people look towards anime as an easy form of escapism, a quick way to get away from the hassles of the real world. They don't care about what the show has to say or what it's trying to do, just that it appeases them and goes the way they want. Watching has become masturbatory in such a sense, and there are those within the industry that are willing to work the shaft so to speak in order to profit.

Every time I see someone complain about how the show went from something great to a complete trainwreck, they always say the writing went to ZOINKS just after the Hashmal battle. Always around there, the last major victory of Tekkadan. After that, the Turbines are taken out and Tekkadan join an ill-conceived coup only to end up destroyed themselves. When the show stopped being a power fantasy for them, that's when it went to ZOINKS according to them.

Mikazuki and Tekkadan were something a lot of Gundam fans wanted for a long time. Mercenary protagonists who can kill without hesitation. No discussing morals, no crying about the horrors of war, just kids who will fill graveyards in order to get things done. They ignore all the signs that such a group are emotionally broken, all the warning signs about it and fill it with their own fanfiction. It's what they've always wanted, hence why the power fantasy was so strong for some viewers.
Did you even bother to read any of the comments ? that not what people are complaining about at all nice job generalising everyone.

@AceWhatver Here Here dude you make a very good point.
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Areku
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

The power-fantasy argument doesn't make much sense. Few people able to overlook the child soldiering, sexual abuse, someone in/important to a member of Tekkadan dying every few episodes, space-slavery, warrior-nihilism, and incremental paralysis of the main character throughout the first 38 episodes would be unable to keep on overlooking those things when they became slightly more overwrought in the last 12.
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krullnar
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

So was rewatching IBO and I gotta say I love this show. Might i dare say my favorite in the gundam franchise but I'm an odd duck who adores stardust so meh. I will say that i had some issues with the show early season 2 like the focus on the b team on earth. As well as the going all yolo with Mcgillis but I get why. It's weird though after they drudge up the MA I thought that would be a focus shift to there being more resurrected MA but glad they didn't.
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Dustman
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

It's been a long while since I posted on this site.

I started going back to university so I had to wait before I could finish the second season. It would have been easy to complete IBO as the series was airing, if only it were not so plainly, agonizingly predictable.

I once gave this series the backhanded compliment that the first season was so mediocre that the second had a low measure for success. I came back her to say that I was wrong. It began on a shaky foundation and it squandered every possible opportunity for depth of concept.

An example, the one I think about the most in retrospect: In Season 1, there was an episode that revealed that Martians do not consume meat. This is presented to us by Tekkadan being collectively disgusted by the thought of eating a fish that had been gifted to them for a meal. An insightful writer would not have presented this as mere comedy, they would have also found a way to comment on how their disgust at taking an innocent life for sustenance is a direct contradiction of the brutality the crew showed toward even their fellow Debris.

Perhaps the only saving grace of this series was Gaelio. Aside from the subversive brilliance of flipping a Garma derivative into the masked man of the story mid-series, he was the only character with an ounce of genuine pathos. Where Tekkadan infuriated me with their freedom from individual quandry, I was sincerely interested in Gaelio's story and wanting for him to find a satisfying conclusion.

Unfortunately, in direct contrast, his nemesis fared quite worse and corroded the one sterling element. I knew immediately from McGillis' bruises as a child that he was sexually abused. It explained the anonymous boy seen in the limo with his father during Season 1 and it explained his creepy relationship with Almiria. What I did not expect was for the writer to completely drop the ball and not only refuse to conclude their relationship on dramatic terms but instead deciding to leave their feelings, in spite of overwhelmingly betrayal, as mutually sincere and therefore romantic. I also did not expect for the creators to explicitly portray McGillis' pre and post-coital rapings, with one scene lifted quite literally from Black Butler II - another notorious dud from Okada's extensive back catalog. "Bold" does not accurately describe her choices and personal hangups as a creator so much as "oblivious" and "troubling."

I did not follow the reception for this series too closely but I'm relieved that few people appeared to be wholly satisfied not only with the ending but with the sum of its parts. Nagai and Okada are evidently not that well suited, individually or collaboratively, to handle high concept science fiction, much less one with a significant legacy to live up to. They're better suited, though hardly perfect, to writing youth dramas and light comedies. This is hardly one of the worst Gundam series (I personally hated Try far more) but the franchise has dried up for me lately. Not even Origin can interest me since I have already read the manga.

My suggestion would be hiring Yasuko Kobayashi for the next series. There are few writers in the industry who has displayed her level of versatility across genres and mediums. The franchise is showing fatigue and while she's not an auteur, I would hope that she's got enough name recognition to spin things around and inject some humanity into the viewing experience. Maybe that's not what other people want but I'm a fan of almost all of her tokusatsu credits so I'd love to see it happen.
Last edited by Dustman on Wed Nov 08, 2017 4:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Deathzealot
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Errr... As far as I am aware Martians do eat meat, not sure what type of meat, but that was the first time they ever saw a Fish let alone eating one. Since they do end up eating Fish later on in that episode you mentioned they just never had it before.
Dustman
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

I deferred a reflexive response to assess the actual footage. You're right, I was wrong. Despite watching the first season twice, once in Japanese and again on Toonami, I assigned more nuance to the scene than what actually existed. It is not said that Tekkadan is disgusted by eating meat because Martians subsist on artificial crops. In fact, this is informed by most of Mars' agriculture being crops engineered for fuel. I was connecting dots that the writers didn't.

You see, the science of how this was written and set SHOULD have been that Tekkadan was incapable of comprehending that this creature could be used for food. Disregarding an unfamiliarity with the genus itself, this suggests that they have never had to think of food as being something you kill. Akihiro comments that it is "staring" at him from his plate, which an insightful writer could have used to infer guilt, showing a contrast with how they think of creatures that are not human. But you are correct, the comedy of the scene overrides any attempts at subtlety or nuance and suggests that they are merely disgusted with how the fish looks. I feel that in this case we are only arguing to set the record on diegetics rather than using this as a way to discuss how the show had perhaps unwittingly set up and missed its own opportunities.

I apologize if I come off as blunt and uncompromising in my disdain for the writing. It does occur to me that I am inadvertently presenting myself as rude or arrogant. I'm certainly lacking the gentle optimism I had one year ago but I'm at a point now where I don't want to rethink every emotion I had for an anime I disliked. I think this will be the only follow up response I can muster before logging off for another year or two but please understand that I'm stressed from school and work and, being that I just watched it, I'm probably using this as a designated target to let off steam. I feel I wasted a lot of effort stanning for this series, at a time in my life where I was bored and desperate for a challenge. I just felt silly not following up on that now that I finally finished it and have the energy and confidence to come on here and admit that I always thought it was sub-standard. :P
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Deathzealot
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Shrug. I personally think you overthinking that scene. For I had a similar reaction when I first went fishing with my father and then had to eat the fish we caught. I almost didn't eat the fish because of the fish was looking at me! LOL And that I helped clean the fish as well. I personally can see the kids of Tekkadan who never had seen a fish before let alone eat a fish where quite weirded out. Though I do wonder what the Martians actually eat for like you mentioned much of their Crops, like the stuff from Sakura's Farm were used for other matters like fuel. We don't see any animals on Mars as far as we have seen therefore where are they getting their food, sent in from Earth or something else. It is a good question. One that I wished was explored a bit more in the series. Heck! I want the Martian Culture itself to be a bit more explored in the series. There is one fanfic on Spacebattles that has Mika sent back in time to the start of the series after being killed at the end of the series. It explored a few things I would loved to seen in the series but that was the only thing I liked about that story. Anyways. I can't wait to get Season Two Dub on either GundamInfo or CrunchyRoll so I can rewatch the season in English. Maybe with Double Zeta Finished on GundamInfo we will start getting it? Who knows?
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Amion
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

I agree with Dustman's points. It was a series of brilliant potential that squandered almost every last piece of it. I would almost say it was systematic, except that it wasn't. It was exactly as Okada envisioned, down to orphans digging int he dirt as our finale.

What I wish would be done is a sweeping epic. A full-scale fifty episode series done by someone with a competent track record and without 25 episode season gaps (or gaps done like with Fafner' Exodus' two seasons, and therefore having few real time skips that affect the progress of the plot in a stalling fashion). Or better yet, 75 episodes, like what they planned with AGE. Something that gives the modern writers time to explore and build up the world without a looming time constraint marching after them.

And good action sequences. Bandai can afford good animation if they so chose. Give it. CGI if needs be.

At this stage, Gundam has indeed gone stale. AGE was ambitious, but was helmed by a shallow, sexist video game developer. With an epic war really not at all a good subject for a young audience. And Build Fighters was too short, and suffered an embarrassing sequel.

I wonder if Urobuchi would be willing to do a Gundam series. He did Gargantia, yes? Now there was a storyboard who knew how to present their material right. Same with Argevollen. Great story, and it could have gone for a second cour to expand its plot and worldbuild.

I don't know. I just feel like the Powers that Be in Bandai/Namco are really just not all that interested in giving us something grand or even daring, like G or Wing. To a dissatisfied viewer, though, their logic probably makes little sense. After all, I see them getting "burned" already by failed entries one after the other. Whereas, they're looking at model kit sales and other factors. In this era, I'd find it unlikely we will see a major hit again, or at least not for a very, very long time, for Gundam. Reboots are likely to be the safest course, and truth be, we have plenty of UC material to reanimate.

There also seems this desire to give us animated miniseries. That is the future for Gundam, for now, outside of The Origin, which has the spirit of the classic original nostalgia to channel. But one can always hope.

Ooh. Or we could find a way to slip Tomino a depression-inducing pill, and let him return in vicious glory to give us a final tragic war drama. Course, it would probably turn out like Victory... but I didn't mind V, so that would work for me. :P
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X_zoro
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Quick Question but is anyone going to the Gundam Panel on Saturday ? I feel if we have any question regarding IBO this is the best place to ask and I plan on going

https://www.facebook.com/gundamglobalpo ... 0129399791
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Deathzealot
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Lucky Sod! Grumble. That said let us know about anything interesting.
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X_zoro
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Deathzealot wrote: Tue Nov 14, 2017 1:05 pm Lucky Sod! Grumble. That said let us know about anything interesting.
will do :) I plan to ask about Mobile Armors and why Hush's name isn't on the memorial stone, these are questions that damned answers.
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BrentD15
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

So, the series' second season is getting broadcast on Toonami for the past few months, and we got to the point where Rustal dodged the bullet...er, Dainsleif.

Just a question: are there any comparisons of Rustal to other Gundam characters?
My thoughts go to Scirocco, except without the harem...or the death. :mrgreen:
"To you who will watch, I offer a heart filled with gratitude." -Yoshiyuki Tomino, Gundam Reconguista in G, Episode 25
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Amion
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Rustal only dodged it because of Idiok's Chosen One plot armor. That is the only excuse. And no, off the top of my head I can't think of anyone else in a similar scenario so late in the show. It's very rare for the villain to win, after all. Maybe Char in Zeta? But he was a protagonist at that point. Or perhaps Four? She seemed dead but inexplicably survived. Same with Char in MSG, now that I think about it, when he blasted Kycillia's head with a bazooka.

Speaking of bazooka that's what usually happens to the mustache twirlers in the end. Rarely do they have Idioks as their plotguards.
They don't know the power of a balanced vision.
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BrentD15
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Amion wrote: Fri Mar 23, 2018 3:41 pm Rustal only dodged it because of Idiok's Chosen One plot armor. That is the only excuse.
Wasn't that because Julietta threw off the aim? :?
"To you who will watch, I offer a heart filled with gratitude." -Yoshiyuki Tomino, Gundam Reconguista in G, Episode 25
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SonicSP
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

BrentD15 wrote: Sat Mar 24, 2018 11:15 am
Amion wrote: Fri Mar 23, 2018 3:41 pm Rustal only dodged it because of Idiok's Chosen One plot armor. That is the only excuse.
Wasn't that because Julietta threw off the aim? :?
Yeah it was.
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Amion
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

The Chosen One's armor works in mysterious ways.
They don't know the power of a balanced vision.
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BrentD15
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Sooo, I saw ep. 49 last night (thanks, Toonami).

It was interesting seeing Mikazuki take a rather commanding position in Orga's place after his death. Seeing him assert himself like that shows that he didn't need Orga to physically be there for him to understand how he would've wanted things to play out.

Hush's untimely death was a bit underwhelming. The poor pacing of his character growth really showed here.

Gaelio and Macgillis having their final brawl was, indeed, the highlight of the episode. Their final confrontation in the ship as Fareed bleeds out really showed how Macgillis seeing Gaelio and Carta as shallow with "fake happiness" is the result of his contempt for those born into high-status families while he, adopted, was abused by nobility.
"To you who will watch, I offer a heart filled with gratitude." -Yoshiyuki Tomino, Gundam Reconguista in G, Episode 25
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