The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

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

I actually loved that Tekkadan got wiped out in the end. Their actions at the end of Season 1 led to an increase in war, weapons dealings and the use of human debris......... The main character was just an empty shell for the most part and besides the cook girl all he did was follow Orga's orders to the letter. I wish that when Orga got killed and Kudelia went out another car showed up and shot all of them and THEN Rustal had done research on the Tekkadan base and when the rocks blocking the underground tunnel got moved the Gjallarhorn would be waiting for them and just wiped them out( I can only dream) . I just have to say after Reconguista and Age this show has been amazing along with thunderbolt!!!!!
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

tHeWasTeDYouTh wrote: Mon Apr 10, 2017 1:58 am ...
...except that Gjallarhorn did nothing wrong and Tekkadan being the true antagonists completely renders the entire First Season of the show pointless. Again, then why weren't Gjallarhorn, Gaelio and Rustal just made the main protagonists of the damn show in the first place...? If Rustal was meant to be the show's Bright Noa analogue, why wait until the 2nd half to introduce him?

Either way I smell major Morosawa- or Yukana-style RL bullsh*t at work here, in this case even WORSE than suspecting a character's VA of having an affair with the director and deliberately torpedoing the character in retaliation.
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Rawhloe
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

So do I get it right that one of the creators got bored/angry and decided to fuck up the show? Alrighty then. I don't get how can people even get jobs with this mentality. It's not like they are doing the X-files for ten years and they need a closure because it dragged on too long. Weird.

The ending could've been better, at first I didn't like it but after I thought about it a little(man when was the last time I had to think about a gundam show?) it makes sense. Idealistic people die, the media lies, everyone has their own petty motives, war isn't pretty and whatever you do you end up nameless in the big picture. They managed to conclude this with what they had.

So what I'm trying to say I'm fine with the concept of the ending, I just wish they would thought this through better from the start and that they didn't build up stuff in an useless way. That whole Earth faction storyline and the Aston drama was a total waste of time in my opinion. Julietta and Iok got too much screen time. Bael ended up just being a relatively fast white mobile suit with two swords instead of the mysterious machine that is capable of great things because I felt like they wanted me to think that, I think Macky even mentioned something along those lines. Not to mention all the cutey food scenes. When Galieo got unmasked I knew he is going to be some kind of main hero, the love for him from the writer/director was so obvious and forced it's not even funny.

That being said they surprised me, I thought McGillis is going to win somehow and that he turns against Tekkadan as they are dangerous or something. I guess I have clichés in my head. I really liked the Sopranos-like mafia stuff, it was refreshing. Not to mention all the space pirates/mercenaries, logistic issues stuff. I also loved all the scenes where these gjallahorn grandiose speeches got cut short because somebody smashes the cockpit with an oversized pipe wrench. But I guess they wanted me to think that is not nice? It didn't really work on me then, haha.

tldr: Overall I liked it but I think there was a huge wasted potential here and there.
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X_zoro
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

tHeWasTeDYouTh wrote: Mon Apr 10, 2017 1:58 am I actually loved that Tekkadan got wiped out in the end. Their actions at the end of Season 1 led to an increase in war, weapons dealings and the use of human debris......... The main character was just an empty shell for the most part and besides the cook girl all he did was follow Orga's orders to the letter. I wish that when Orga got killed and Kudelia went out another car showed up and shot all of them and THEN Rustal had done research on the Tekkadan base and when the rocks blocking the underground tunnel got moved the Gjallarhorn would be waiting for them and just wiped them out( I can only dream) . I just have to say after Reconguista and Age this show has been amazing along with thunderbolt!!!!!
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Rawhloe
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

I kinda wanted some kind of tinfoil-hat guy to show up and investigate the illegal actions of Rustal and shake the peace that has been established. Watchmen ending style.
domino
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Who knows, we could always imagine that Ride and his gang may move on to re-establishing Tekkadan's rightful place in history by exposing Rustal. But what would be the benefit of that? To disturb the peace?

If it's truly Watchmen style then there will be the conflict of getting revenge against Rustal vs maintaining peace
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

domino wrote: Mon Apr 10, 2017 10:27 am Who knows, we could always imagine that Ride and his gang may move on to re-establishing Tekkadan's rightful place in history by exposing Rustal. But what would be the benefit of that? To disturb the peace?

If it's truly Watchmen style then there will be the conflict of getting revenge against Rustal vs maintaining peace
At that point I highly doubt Ride actually cares about maintaining the peace in the first place as long as he gains his pound of flesh.

Though given Ride's surname, his Shiden Custom having a red(ish) color scheme, his inability to let go of his past failures, and him essentially being a slightly less incompetent and less malicious version of Iok, I have to really wonder if Ride was initially meant to be a much whinier parody of Char Aznable (maybe next Ride's faction will start dropping mining asteroids on Earth in an attempt to utterly uproot Gjallarhorn and move Humanity's seat of power to Mars and Kudelia outright)... :P
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Kuruni
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

...if they really going to make sequel or spin-off with Ride as protagonist, there's very good chance that we will see ASW-G-63 Gundam Andras.

Why Andras? Well, in demonology, he's easily the worst among the Goetia demons. Mess up with summoning ritual, and he'll kill you and everyone associate with you. If the ritual work perfectly, then you can send him to kill someone...and he'll kill everyone associate with that person as bonus. He also like to trick his master to mess up the ritual.
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Areku
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

I just watched all of S2 for the first time over the past few days, and there are a few things about this show that I feel like I have to get off my chest (other than stuff that's already been discussed at length here, so I'll leave that be).

The stuff in spoilers is all part of one main issue, but there are many contributing factors that I'm going to elaborate on. The tldr is that the show's geopolitical maneuvering and themes and various depictions of morality and ideological mindsets were fairly interesting overall (even if difficult to buy into in some places, but hey, I finished the show), but the execution, presentation and structuring of the plot and characters were all handled very poorly.
Spoiler
First point: Let's get subtlety out of the way. Whenever it came to things like foreshadowing, death flags, or trying to describe some basic character motivations and mindsets, there was no subtlety whatsoever; the show would often drone on and on, repeating the same thing in rapid succession with slightly different wording, or it would otherwise spell out something that they really should've been willing to trust the audience would be smart enough to figure out on their own. Many shows do this, some of them succeed in spite of it, but in IBO the problems are amplified when the more complex and less self-apparent events, mindsets and themes do not receive anywhere near as much elaboration because all the screen-time was wasted on clobbering the viewer over the head with "Tekkadan is like a family" and "being a child soldier/slave/soldier-sex-slave is miserable and depressing".

Basically, IBO glosses over the complex stuff it presents while talking about the simple stuff like the audience is 5 years old. The disparity in how things were emphasized/elaborated was so great that I sometimes wondered if I was just over-examining monkeys-and-typewriters.

Next point: There were way too many characters. More specifically, there were way too many characters engaged in fierce competition for the "limited" screen-time available in a 50-episode show, which is really saying something. Some of my favorite fictional series have literally thousands of named characters, but they have the common sense to figure out which side characters need more screen-time/exposure and which only need to show up occasionally, or at the very least how to cluster a side-character's appearances to give you a stronger intuitive grasp on who they are. IBO seemed to go out of its way to give every last still-living named character multiple speaking lines each episode, even to the detriment of all characters.

Onto the next point: exposition part 1. Overall, many of IBO's lines were rather flat and uninspired, resorting to a bland and matter-of-fact depiction of the "need to know" information. Then again, I watched all of this through Crunchyroll, so maybe they just had a poor translation, but given my (limited) understanding of Japanese I don't think this was the case.

Exposition part 2: the dialogue that wasn't technically exposition but was employed like exposition anyway. IBO had an obsessive habit of employing exposition disguised as "organic" dialogue, with a huge portion of the spoken lines being characters hashing out geopolitical maneuvering for the "benefit" of the audience through "conversations" while barely making even a token gesture to imbue the dialogue with the character's perspective or personality. An instance of this that really stood out to me was when there were four consecutive scenes of McGillis/Isurugi and Rustal/Julieta/Iok plotting against each other from their flagships, with each scene seemingly serving more as a micro-timeskip-catchup than anything resembling an actual conversation. Another example would be the many times that characters mechanically pontificate about Mikazuki/Orga while gazing up at Barbatos. I'm going to go further in-depth with this later, but combined with my above point on "subtlety", I would estimate that upwards of 70% of IBO's word-count was spent on exposition/exposition-in-disguise/beating the dead horse.

Exposition part 3: Silence is golden. This might just be the worst part, the thing that brings all of these points together into a Gordian Knot of botched storytelling, worldbuilding and characterization. Caution: if you haven't already noticed this for yourself, the next few paragraphs may ruin your ability to rewatch any non-action scene.

The spoken lines in IBO proceed at a breakneck pace. If it's not a battle, a detailed slow-pan of a Gundam frame, or the ~half-second between scenes, there's always a character talking. It isn't inherently bad for a show to employ a lot of dialogue or to occasionally rush from one line to another (in short bursts), but IBO does not let up. This can still be done well, such as in the Monogatari series, but add in all the other issues I've described and this becomes a debilitating problem. The show rushes from one scene/location to another in its compulsion to get every character some screentime, offering just a split-second of establishing shot before a character pops on screen at the exact moment they start bombarding you with exposition/still-basically-exposition/dead horse, another character rushes to start talking the moment the first character needs to breathe lest the momentary silence kill their sanity, rinse and repeat until action scene or end credits.

Maybe this doesn't sound like a big deal, but once I noticed it, it became intensely distracting and disruptive to the viewing experience. This just is not how humans communicate, even fast-paced conversations have full-second pauses every few exchanges, but in IBO pauses that last longer than a half-second (without Mikazuki's awkwardness) are quite rare (and even then, the next line is usually an acknowledgement that something weird just happened, like when Hush was stunned by Dane saying so many words). It's as if the show doesn't understand the concept of non-verbal communication and is uncomfortable with the absence of talking. Even if you somehow missed the blatant foreshadowing, you instinctively knew something was about to go horribly wrong when the show turned its presentation completely on its head by giving you 32-out-of-40 seconds with no talking... then Lafter got gunned down.

An example of these things all rolled into one that really ticked me off was when Akihiro explained why Mikazuki said Tekkadan was no longer Takaki's family/problem; it was an interesting thing for Mikazuki to say, but its true meaning was crystal clear and the scene would've worked much better if it spent ~10 seconds in silence to show Takaki standing there stunned by the words before turning to look at Mika's back with an understanding and grateful pained-smile. Having Akihiro blandly explain exactly what happened just 2 seconds earlier completely ruined it.

I'm going to sum all of this up by going personal. I was 28 years old when I was first informed that I was a high-functioning autist; this retroactively made a lot of sense, given the extremely mechanical and logic-oriented way that I finally taught myself as a middle-schooler to empathize, socially interact, read facial expressions and body language, interpret tone, etc... conveying and receiving information from people beyond just the literal meaning of words.

Watching IBO, I get the impression that I'm watching the work of someone who's still in the early stages of similar logic-oriented social self-improvement; that they understand the literal meaning of words and have picked up on general personality-associated behavior like frequent laughing, yelling, acting stoic, etc, but have yet to fully appreciate, interpret and replicate the full range of subtler social behavior and communication. Basically, watching IBO is like watching a stage packed full of dull robots acting out a play written and directed by people who logically understand the outline of a good story but have no idea how to translate it into an emotional experience by making the robots act or interact in a compelling way, so they just give the robots "personality" by making some of them speak gruffly, laugh randomly, or cry often, then tell the story by having the robots unnaturally rush through dull exposition and repeat themselves a lot. There are a bunch of (mostly) pretty good stories there, but they got horribly butchered in their presentation.

Not once did I truly sympathize/empathize/relate with a character in IBO. Every last moment of the show, I was acutely aware of the fact that I was watching someone attempt to tell me a story through a series of pictures that create the illusion of motion... and it had nothing to do with the show's animation. Nothing gave me feels, nothing made me feel attached to the characters, and not once did I even momentarily forget that I was viewing a badly-disjointed conversion of idea->animation->perception.
A few other things that bothered me that I haven't seen discussed at length:

Most of the space battles were lame, feeling like a bunch of MS/ships randomly smashing into each other. In particular, most of the space battles lacked a sense of positional awareness and failed to naturally communicate where characters/ships/MS were in relation to each other (a problem when you aren't going for the Gunbuster "space is fucking terrifying" portrayal), notable exceptions being asteroid slingshots and the use of Dainsleifs. In stark contrast, the ground-based combat was excellent, though it would've been even better if they portrayed the 0.38g's of martian gravity (tell me with a straight face you wouldn't want to see Cookie and Cracker casually toss Biscuit across the room).

Holy crap did "smug dumbass of the month" start to wear thin. I understand people underestimating Tekkadan in S1, but how the hell does anyone think "surely I'll be the one to defeat Tekkadan even though they trounced Gjallahorn-but-playing-dirty at Edmonton and changed the paradigm of how we fight wars" unless they either have Rustal's fleet or a damn good plan for keeping the Gundam frames out of the fight?

Tonal inconsistency. Sometimes the characters would go into battle like they were marching to their deaths, sometimes they would be happily laughing and carrying banter while slaughtering their enemies (the Turbines pilots seemed especially guilty of this at times). The audience has the benefit of knowing which battles will go well based on blatant foreshadowing and whether or not their opponent is portrayed as smug dumbass of the month, but this doesn't make sense for the characters' behavior.

Iok. Just... Iok... I lied earlier, Iok made me feel something.

Okay, I think that's enough.
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Areku wrote: Wed Apr 12, 2017 12:41 am Onto the next point: exposition part 1. Overall, many of IBO's lines were rather flat and uninspired, resorting to a bland and matter-of-fact depiction of the "need to know" information. Then again, I watched all of this through Crunchyroll, so maybe they just had a poor translation, but given my (limited) understanding of Japanese I don't think this was the case.
I had a friend who's fluent in Japanese who commented on how dumb the dialogue sounded while I was watching an episode at his place, so it's not just you.
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Its interesting to think that Gaelio is the only Gundam pilot to survive in the end, and even then he's bound to a wheelchair, possibly not even recover. A enemy/antagonist Gundam pilot outliving the protagonist Gundam pilot(s). Another 1st for Gundam, regardless if its a good or a bad thing.
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X_zoro
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Areku wrote: Wed Apr 12, 2017 12:41 am I just watched all of S2 for the first time over the past few days, and there are a few things about this show that I feel like I have to get off my chest (other than stuff that's already been discussed at length here, so I'll leave that be).

The stuff in spoilers is all part of one main issue, but there are many contributing factors that I'm going to elaborate on. The tldr is that the show's geopolitical maneuvering and themes and various depictions of morality and ideological mindsets were fairly interesting overall (even if difficult to buy into in some places, but hey, I finished the show), but the execution, presentation and structuring of the plot and characters were all handled very poorly.
Spoiler
First point: Let's get subtlety out of the way. Whenever it came to things like foreshadowing, death flags, or trying to describe some basic character motivations and mindsets, there was no subtlety whatsoever; the show would often drone on and on, repeating the same thing in rapid succession with slightly different wording, or it would otherwise spell out something that they really should've been willing to trust the audience would be smart enough to figure out on their own. Many shows do this, some of them succeed in spite of it, but in IBO the problems are amplified when the more complex and less self-apparent events, mindsets and themes do not receive anywhere near as much elaboration because all the screen-time was wasted on clobbering the viewer over the head with "Tekkadan is like a family" and "being a child soldier/slave/soldier-sex-slave is miserable and depressing".

Basically, IBO glosses over the complex stuff it presents while talking about the simple stuff like the audience is 5 years old. The disparity in how things were emphasized/elaborated was so great that I sometimes wondered if I was just over-examining monkeys-and-typewriters.

Next point: There were way too many characters. More specifically, there were way too many characters engaged in fierce competition for the "limited" screen-time available in a 50-episode show, which is really saying something. Some of my favorite fictional series have literally thousands of named characters, but they have the common sense to figure out which side characters need more screen-time/exposure and which only need to show up occasionally, or at the very least how to cluster a side-character's appearances to give you a stronger intuitive grasp on who they are. IBO seemed to go out of its way to give every last still-living named character multiple speaking lines each episode, even to the detriment of all characters.

Onto the next point: exposition part 1. Overall, many of IBO's lines were rather flat and uninspired, resorting to a bland and matter-of-fact depiction of the "need to know" information. Then again, I watched all of this through Crunchyroll, so maybe they just had a poor translation, but given my (limited) understanding of Japanese I don't think this was the case.

Exposition part 2: the dialogue that wasn't technically exposition but was employed like exposition anyway. IBO had an obsessive habit of employing exposition disguised as "organic" dialogue, with a huge portion of the spoken lines being characters hashing out geopolitical maneuvering for the "benefit" of the audience through "conversations" while barely making even a token gesture to imbue the dialogue with the character's perspective or personality. An instance of this that really stood out to me was when there were four consecutive scenes of McGillis/Isurugi and Rustal/Julieta/Iok plotting against each other from their flagships, with each scene seemingly serving more as a micro-timeskip-catchup than anything resembling an actual conversation. Another example would be the many times that characters mechanically pontificate about Mikazuki/Orga while gazing up at Barbatos. I'm going to go further in-depth with this later, but combined with my above point on "subtlety", I would estimate that upwards of 70% of IBO's word-count was spent on exposition/exposition-in-disguise/beating the dead horse.

Exposition part 3: Silence is golden. This might just be the worst part, the thing that brings all of these points together into a Gordian Knot of botched storytelling, worldbuilding and characterization. Caution: if you haven't already noticed this for yourself, the next few paragraphs may ruin your ability to rewatch any non-action scene.

The spoken lines in IBO proceed at a breakneck pace. If it's not a battle, a detailed slow-pan of a Gundam frame, or the ~half-second between scenes, there's always a character talking. It isn't inherently bad for a show to employ a lot of dialogue or to occasionally rush from one line to another (in short bursts), but IBO does not let up. This can still be done well, such as in the Monogatari series, but add in all the other issues I've described and this becomes a debilitating problem. The show rushes from one scene/location to another in its compulsion to get every character some screentime, offering just a split-second of establishing shot before a character pops on screen at the exact moment they start bombarding you with exposition/still-basically-exposition/dead horse, another character rushes to start talking the moment the first character needs to breathe lest the momentary silence kill their sanity, rinse and repeat until action scene or end credits.

Maybe this doesn't sound like a big deal, but once I noticed it, it became intensely distracting and disruptive to the viewing experience. This just is not how humans communicate, even fast-paced conversations have full-second pauses every few exchanges, but in IBO pauses that last longer than a half-second (without Mikazuki's awkwardness) are quite rare (and even then, the next line is usually an acknowledgement that something weird just happened, like when Hush was stunned by Dane saying so many words). It's as if the show doesn't understand the concept of non-verbal communication and is uncomfortable with the absence of talking. Even if you somehow missed the blatant foreshadowing, you instinctively knew something was about to go horribly wrong when the show turned its presentation completely on its head by giving you 32-out-of-40 seconds with no talking... then Lafter got gunned down.

An example of these things all rolled into one that really ticked me off was when Akihiro explained why Mikazuki said Tekkadan was no longer Takaki's family/problem; it was an interesting thing for Mikazuki to say, but its true meaning was crystal clear and the scene would've worked much better if it spent ~10 seconds in silence to show Takaki standing there stunned by the words before turning to look at Mika's back with an understanding and grateful pained-smile. Having Akihiro blandly explain exactly what happened just 2 seconds earlier completely ruined it.

I'm going to sum all of this up by going personal. I was 28 years old when I was first informed that I was a high-functioning autist; this retroactively made a lot of sense, given the extremely mechanical and logic-oriented way that I finally taught myself as a middle-schooler to empathize, socially interact, read facial expressions and body language, interpret tone, etc... conveying and receiving information from people beyond just the literal meaning of words.

Watching IBO, I get the impression that I'm watching the work of someone who's still in the early stages of similar logic-oriented social self-improvement; that they understand the literal meaning of words and have picked up on general personality-associated behavior like frequent laughing, yelling, acting stoic, etc, but have yet to fully appreciate, interpret and replicate the full range of subtler social behavior and communication. Basically, watching IBO is like watching a stage packed full of dull robots acting out a play written and directed by people who logically understand the outline of a good story but have no idea how to translate it into an emotional experience by making the robots act or interact in a compelling way, so they just give the robots "personality" by making some of them speak gruffly, laugh randomly, or cry often, then tell the story by having the robots unnaturally rush through dull exposition and repeat themselves a lot. There are a bunch of (mostly) pretty good stories there, but they got horribly butchered in their presentation.

Not once did I truly sympathize/empathize/relate with a character in IBO. Every last moment of the show, I was acutely aware of the fact that I was watching someone attempt to tell me a story through a series of pictures that create the illusion of motion... and it had nothing to do with the show's animation. Nothing gave me feels, nothing made me feel attached to the characters, and not once did I even momentarily forget that I was viewing a badly-disjointed conversion of idea->animation->perception.
A few other things that bothered me that I haven't seen discussed at length:

Most of the space battles were lame, feeling like a bunch of MS/ships randomly smashing into each other. In particular, most of the space battles lacked a sense of positional awareness and failed to naturally communicate where characters/ships/MS were in relation to each other (a problem when you aren't going for the Gunbuster "space is ZOINKS terrifying" portrayal), notable exceptions being asteroid slingshots and the use of Dainsleifs. In stark contrast, the ground-based combat was excellent, though it would've been even better if they portrayed the 0.38g's of martian gravity (tell me with a straight face you wouldn't want to see Cookie and Cracker casually toss Biscuit across the room).

Holy crap did "smug dumbass of the month" start to wear thin. I understand people underestimating Tekkadan in S1, but how the hell does anyone think "surely I'll be the one to defeat Tekkadan even though they trounced Gjallahorn-but-playing-dirty at Edmonton and changed the paradigm of how we fight wars" unless they either have Rustal's fleet or a damn good plan for keeping the Gundam frames out of the fight?

Tonal inconsistency. Sometimes the characters would go into battle like they were marching to their deaths, sometimes they would be happily laughing and carrying banter while slaughtering their enemies (the Turbines pilots seemed especially guilty of this at times). The audience has the benefit of knowing which battles will go well based on blatant foreshadowing and whether or not their opponent is portrayed as smug dumbass of the month, but this doesn't make sense for the characters' behavior.

Iok. Just... Iok... I lied earlier, Iok made me feel something.

Okay, I think that's enough.
I agree with you so much dude, I feel one thing you forgot is Characters go no where to, like I still don't understand what Hush was in this show, he had such fire in his eyes and looked to be working hard to do some great things or was going to have important role at the end, but no they
Spoiler
just killed him off for no reason
like what was the point ? lol
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Areku:

I mostly agree with you, though my negative opinions aren't quite as strong. I feel like they had a great world-building team, and then the writing just had no idea what to do, and did a lot of treading water, and then at the last minute realized they needed to actually GET somewhere and rushed through everything that should have been built up over the course of the entire second season.
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Areku
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Reading through my 1800-word (!) post a few days later, it comes across as a bit more negative than I'd really intended. I've always been more comfortable in the realm of criticism than praise, but I'll try to balance the ledger with things that slipped my mind or just got buried by all the other things I wound up talking about.

Tekkadan Part 1: For as much as I lambast the execution of individual characters, I liked the way Tekkadan was consistently (if unsubtly) portrayed as a cohesive family unit that often felt like its own character. Helped along by battle-less episodes, the individual stories and moralities/mindsets of Tekkadan's members intertwined and bound together to create something that felt like a fleshed out organic group, even if they all individually acted like the creations of an autistic roboticist who didn't understand how to manage screentime. I'm intrigued by the fact that IBO successfully portrayed Tekkadan as an organic group/super-character while completely failing at the task with every individual character.

Tekkadan Part 2: The iron flower is grey. In contrast to most Gundam protagonist organizations/core-units, Tekkadan was at least as morally dubious as the organizations and manipulators they struggled against. Every action they took was in the pursuit of their own growth and self-preservation the only way they knew how: by taking it to the battlefield or by putting a bullet in it. They never went out of their way in the pursuit of altruism (any generosity they exhibited was incidental or apologetic), they proliferated the use of child soldiers in sectarian conflict, they dug up and used incredibly destructive weapons they knew they didn't understand, they engaged their enemies savagely, and in the end, their disruptive and selfish tendencies turned the world against them and they were put down. It was an interesting portrayal of pragmatic heroism (in the classical sense); Tekkadan weren't inherently bad people, but they were also a far cry from the modern and inherently-childish interpretation of heroes.

Music: Pretty good and fitting overall, but leaned way too heavily on the central leitmotif. As much as I would like to say good things about the soundtrack, "pretty good" has long been the bare-minimum expectation for a Gundam series' music, and there really wasn't enough here to properly support a 50-episode run.

McGillis: Initially, I was really disappointed with his deterioration from a magnificent bastard/master manipulator to a naive man-child obsessed with the vestiges of power and authority and might, but after a few days of reflection, I think I actually prefer it this way. For all his tunnel-idealism and tragically-simple worldviews, he always had his gaze locked firmly onto the future (but still informed by history), even while surrounded by Gjallahorn peers obsessed with lineage and revenge and the status quo. For example, while Gaelio seemed driven by getting revenge for himself, Carta and Ein and brought this up constantly, he only once mentioned the one person (supposedly) close to him that he could still save from Macky's influence and machinations: Almiria. I thought it was an interesting juxtaposition that while both men exhibited extreme tunnel-idealism/mentalities, the "good" man who believed in being a valiant knight of virtuous honor became a jaded bloodthirsty revenge-seeker whose actions were dictated by a retroactive outlook while the "bad" man who believed in manipulation, force and betrayal was in fact an incorrigible idealist whose actions were dictated by hope and the genuine desire to save humanity.

In this sense, McGillis was a strange fusion between Gundam villain and Gundam hero: violent, scheming and more than a little backstabbing, but still driven by blind hope and the dream of a peaceful world while maintaining the belief that he could guts! his way through any unforeseen complications with his Gundam. This contradictory blend of archetypes threw other characters into the abyss, exposing the paradoxical flaws of traditionally-celebrated virtues like honor, chivalry and righteous/rebellious fury. Rather than only challenging characters within a story like most manipulator villains in mecha, McGillis challenges ideas that extend into the real-world and does so in a way that feels at least a little original, and that's something that may leave a much longer impact than if he had simply stayed backstabby pseudo-Treize.

Ground combat: As I said before, overall excellent. Elegant and harsh, swift and ponderous, fluid and abrupt in all the right places. Easily the highlight of the show, but I'm glad they didn't feel compelled to give us a battle every episode. Would've been nice if the space battles were as consistently-solid as the ground battles; for all of Dainsleif-ex-machina's narrative/technical flaws, they really did enhance the space battles and I wish they'd shown up sooner.
latenlazy wrote: Wed Apr 12, 2017 4:03 am I had a friend who's fluent in Japanese who commented on how dumb the dialogue sounded while I was watching an episode at his place, so it's not just you.
Good to know my Japanese hasn't deteriorated as badly as I sometimes fear.
X_zoro wrote: Thu Apr 13, 2017 4:28 am I agree with you so much dude, I feel one thing you forgot is Characters go no where to, like I still don't understand what Hush was in this show, he had such fire in his eyes and looked to be working hard to do some great things or was going to have important role at the end, but no they
Spoiler
just killed him off for no reason
like what was the point ? lol
I'm fine with Hush. He was introduced as an entitled little shit who thought he was destined for greatness for no reason, then reality smacked him upside the head so hard that he saw the tears of time and realized he didn't want to be the next Katz, so he wizened up, relinquished his foolish dream of AVSx4, and re-purposed his original spirit and angst to set about doing what was actually within his ability while steadily growing stronger and developing in a more realistic way. He realized that he would never be Mikazuki, that he didn't actually want to be Mikazuki, but that he could still learn from him and live proudly as a normal MS pilot (and this was something he still had to work toward, it's not like he just said "oh well, guess I'll just settle with being a Mobile Worker pilot for life").

So it's ironic that after Mika loses the use of his leg, Hush becomes his new legs and ultimately shares Mika's fate in the final battle while fighting beside him as a respected comrade to give the rest of Tekkadan a chance at a new life, not even noticing that he'd effectively become what little-shit Hush could only dream to be. Heck, there was even a reference to his childhood hero when he took that mecha-axe to the abdomen and (presumably) lost the use of both legs.

It may have come to a tragic ending, but Hush was actually one of the better-developed characters. But, see my massive spoiler-rant about how IBO botches the portrayal of good stories.
sdwoodchuck wrote: Thu Apr 13, 2017 5:17 pm Areku:

I mostly agree with you, though my negative opinions aren't quite as strong. I feel like they had a great world-building team, and then the writing just had no idea what to do, and did a lot of treading water, and then at the last minute realized they needed to actually GET somewhere and rushed through everything that should have been built up over the course of the entire second season.
That sounds fair. Like I said, there are a lot of good stories being told in IBO (and some not so good), but they're portrayed poorly and are often organized badly within the show's use of screentime. Bad pacing and wasted screentime are some of the natural consequences of the stuff I've tried to describe.
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

Areku wrote: Fri Apr 14, 2017 12:00 amI'm fine with Hush. He was introduced as an entitled little ZOINKS who thought he was destined for greatness for no reason, then reality smacked him upside the head so hard that he saw the tears of time and realized he didn't want to be the next Katz, so he wizened up, relinquished his foolish dream of AVSx4, and re-purposed his original spirit and angst to set about doing what was actually within his ability while steadily growing stronger and developing in a more realistic way.
I dunno if I'd say Hush was entitled so much as HE thought MIKA was entitled (at least in the sense of "what's this little punk got that my old friend didn't?") and acted like a prick about it. But like you said, reality slapped him upside the head like an award-winning bass.

(Oh, and as a minor quibble: "wizened" means shriveled up; you meant "wised up". Please don't mind my English wonk-iness.)

And I would like to clear the air a bit: even if discussions got heated around here I hope people didn't take it personally. I've been on the Internet for a very long time, and I've been through a bunch of different fandoms, and invariably you end up dealing with the trolls, the idiots, and the "trainwreck-spotters" (the people who want a show to go bad so they can laugh at the viewers who got their hopes up) and it gets to you after a while. I'm not accusing anyone here of being one of those, it's just that sometimes negativity gets my dander up, and I wanted to make sure that this wasn't going to cause any long-standing problems for the future of the board and its users.

And as a side note, I've got a new discussion topic!
Spoiler
Apparently at the big finale event, one of the writers revealed that Kudelia and Atra are married in the epilogue. However, the way they revealed it was odd, including specifically pointing that there's no stigma against same-sex relationships in the Post-Disaster world. It almost felt like the implication was less "Kudelia and Atra moved on after Mika's death and found love with each other" and more "They got married so they could pretend Akatsuki was their kid to keep people from finding out who his father is."

On that note, Akatsuki's full name is officially Akatsuki Augus Mixta Bernstein.
Sakuya: "Whatever. Stop lying and give up your schemes, now."
Yukari: (Which lies and schemes are she talking about? It's hard to keep track of them all...)

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

I've feeling that for all "See? The director want to kill everyone for petty reason!" opinions here, if said killing method involve "They wake up another MA by accident" then many of you will be much more happy. Sugoi!! Tanoshii!!
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

sdwoodchuck wrote: Mon Apr 03, 2017 5:30 pm
Spoiler
The concept of Rustal leading Gjallarhorn into being an idealized democratic organization is farcical, whether it's an overnight change of heart, or whether he's "forced into it," it's equally nonsensical to his character, to his leadership style, and to the status of the world at the end of IBO.

Murderous dictators do not become benevolent leaders just because "the public eye is on them." They don't become benevolent leaders because the social order is destabilized. If anything, a destabilized social structure is where dictators thrive. IBO's world is one where military power is very centralized into a few organizations, with Gjallarhorn being top of the heap. When you put the megalomaniac in the position of being king of the hill in an organization that has the furthest reach and influence, who has shown no remorse in bending the facts in order to justify his actions, who has been a meticulous social manipulator, that person doesn't just roll over and accept that things are changing. A military dictator like Rustal would take over the newly destabilized world like Hitler took over post-WWI Germany. Like Lenin took over Russia after the February Revolution. Like Pinochet took over Chile in 1973. Only unlike any of these guys, Rustal has way, way more influence.

The notion that he's got to just "grin and bear it" that the world is changing under him is ridiculous, childishly idealized nonsense. Granted, Gundam in the past has been guilty of this, and IBO's brand of childishly idealized nonsense isn't any worse than Wing's childishly idealized nonsense ending, but I don't see anybody really praising that either.
And it's not like changing that would have fixed the ending. The ending had MUCH bigger problems than not making sense politically.
I somehow missed this comment. Yes. This. Exactly.
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

I have a minor quibble on what Areku said. I actually thought the space battles went over relatively well. They're not glorious strategic displays like in Legend of the Galactic Heroes, but they weren't disjointed or lacking in tactical reason.
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

AmuroNT1 wrote: Fri Apr 14, 2017 4:47 am (Oh, and as a minor quibble: "wizened" means shriveled up; you meant "wised up". Please don't mind my English wonk-iness.)
This is what happens when you ignore your arched eyebrow and trust Firefox' little red dots anyway.
AmuroNT1 wrote: Fri Apr 14, 2017 4:47 am And as a side note, I've got a new discussion topic!
I got that impression from the show directly, based on how cozy they were during the show and how the epilogue wielded the word "home".
Amion wrote: Fri Apr 14, 2017 2:53 pm I have a minor quibble on what Areku said. I actually thought the space battles went over relatively well. They're not glorious strategic displays like in Legend of the Galactic Heroes, but they weren't disjointed or lacking in tactical reason.
I meant the choreography and visual representation of position more so than the broader tactics employed.
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Re: The Official Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans Anime Thread Mk IV

While I do agree the ground battles were amazing and were better than the space battles, the AV equipped Gundams had some great acrobatics in space combat especially with the Barbatos Lupus during the fight against the Dawn Horizon Corps. With the AV system and without the restrictions of gravity, the Barbatos Lupus and the Rex, more so than the Gusion Full City and Flauros, had amazing mobility and high speed combat. The Bael had some cool moments in its final battle too in Space. I did like the multi targeting in the space battles with the ranged weapons of the Gusion Full City and the Barbatos Lupus that were not done in any of the ground battles.
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