Mecha and the Male Fantasy

when watching a Mecca anime of the more realistic  variety there's a moment when a canny viewer will ask why Mecca have made tanks and planes and all  the other panoply of War obsolete outside of Pat labor where the answer is they haven't there's  usually a few lines of technobabble involving some kind of new power source and ultra light  Ultra strong materials gundanium and Palladium reactors with a second thought that rarely makes  much sense you could use those Technologies to build an even s

tronger tank after all and still  have a weapon which obeys the laws of physics tip speeds ground pressures many things get in  the way of giant legs the Gundam explanation of limbs being required for inertial dampening does  not necessitate something that looks humanoid carcinization comes for us all and minovsky  particles disrupting radar Rings Hollow if you know how effective and ubiquitous Optical sensors  really are never mind how in anime it always seems a gun or a missile which could be

mounted on any  other type of machine is made twice as effective when held by an anthropomorphic one it's almost  as if form trumps function it's almost as if the obsession with Mecca is fantasy and not thought  out speculative futurism I was once having this exact conversation about gasaraki and someone said  that the mecca is popular because it spiritually represents the light infantrymen reasserting  themselves over mechanized Warfare and I think that's an idea worth unpacking Warfare in this

  industrial era is a frightening thing indistinct blurs fire on each other over vast distances  men become meat in the blink of an eye the grit of soldiers is still a factor but vehicles  and artillery are King the result being decided by Technologies and techniques which are are  difficult to grasp in anime with Mecca making the infantrymen 10 or more meters tall closing  until they can swing at each other with axes it ironically regains a comforting Humanity even if  the figures are robotic t

he mecca is quite visibly an expressive extension of the pilot within  even more so when every important character gets a unique suit I used the word regains but  like most prelapsarian Fant FES it has only a limited basis in reality for all the hubub about  modern Network driven Warfare the foot soldier during the world wars was little less at the  mercy of disease or artillery or any number of other arbitrary threats that couldn't be overcome  by being a badass fighter even all the way back in

helenic Antiquity with hoplight armies fighting  in failinks it was less cool 300 Warrior Antics and more a coordinated shoving match where even  the most rugged and muscular ular individual was completely at the mercy of whether their  unit broke or got outflanked the conceit of nearly every meca series is that individuals or  a small number of main characters can be so good at killing that they basically fight Wars all on  their own in their custom robot suits who needs combined arms or organ

ization or industry when you  have Plucky teenagers death comes not because a battery Commander 50 m away decided to eliminate  your entire grid square but after face-to-face confrontations tense words exchanged before a  clash of blades tanks and ples and warships are too impersonal conflict has to be resolved mono  amono with ideology and steel at its campiest the effect is that picturesque recruitment poster of  War once used to push young men into the trenches you yes you can be such a good

fighter that you  can travel the world kill interesting people and entire armies or Herms or the forces of History  themselves will bow before you and no killing off a bunch of jobbers in the First episodes and  growling about the cruelties of War does nothing to disperse that since it usually serves the  ultimate purpose of making the main character's plot armor shine even brighter another push back  I have gotten on this thesis is that Mecca are less influenced by this General observation  of

militaria than specifically by fighter pilot movies like Top Gun to which I respond  that it's simply reaching the same point by extra steps what does fighter plane media do if  not insist that the whims of Modern Warfare can be bent around your balls of steel against all  reason and historical precedent an irony that both Top Gun and mcross share is that the iconic  F-14 Tomcat was not designed to have thrilling dog fights with Russian Fighters but to protect  the fleet by obediently lobbing gi

ant missiles at the radar returns of bombers 100 miles away even  before missiles and radar air combat consisted of far more Ambush coordination and Chaos than  the dramatic one-on-one duels out of the movies so one reading of Mecca anime be they Japanese  or American is that it represents individuals the manly men exhibiting their strength in Modern  Warfare against a technological Paradigm which at least in the popular imagination makes conflict  ever colder and more distant than it was yester

year sometimes that manifests as a supposed  return to infantry Daring Do other times as Gallant Red Baron fantasies if this were an  English class you would call it a Latter-Day Romanticism glorifying the past and the individual  but there is another interpretation what you might call a materialist reading in you and the Adam  Bomb George Orwell bear with with me wrote The Following while discussing the implications of the  then new nuclear weapon ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive

or difficult to make will tend  to be ages of despotism whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple the common people have  a chance thus for example tanks battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyranical weapons  while rifles muskets long bows and Hand Grenades are inherently democratic IC weapons a complex  weapon makes the strong stronger while a simple weapon so long as there is no answer to it gives  Clause to the weak I would argue that much of the following 80 odd years p

ut lie to his thesis that  nuclear weapons would terminally aify the world order since Nations and peoples have found other  ways to compete with and disrupt each other and Orwell seems to ignore the dramatic impacts that  National industrial Warfare Fair has had on the political economy in and of itself but I do find  this argument that weapons can shape the political landscape compelling there is something to be said  for the way Mecca shows tend to depict dudes with rifles and rocket launcher

s blowing up tanks and  planes and ships even if they are gigantic but in a less painfully literal sense there is often an  erir of disruption Revolution even to Mecca media whether the protagonists stand for for or against  anyone with any experience with military mechanics would tell you there's no way a complex Walker  could be repeatedly operated out of a cave with a box of scraps but Mecca shows love to depict  small fry and Irregulars somehow managing to maintain a fleet of them and engagi

ng in standup  fights with the federales when the protagonists are part of a military organization it's always  young people with their Nifty machines stepping into or opening up the the breach where the old  fogies cannot fighting righteously to place their stamp on the New Order Gundams are horse archers  dreadnots or high explosive artillery the new technology which upsets the balance of power and  forces everyone to adapt or die but in a fictional medium where single weapons and their pilots

can  be so preternaturally effective this is often in contest with that prior reading of Mecca as an  individualist fantasy especially when hereditary psychic gifts are made the key to success can you  truly have a democratic struggle in a conflict where success rests on a supernaturally gifted  few I think the most interesting series to view through these competing lenses is universal  Century Gundam I would be far from the first to observe that the appearance of new types on  the eve of the o

ne-year War constitutes a nent revolution of some kind the implication is that  more and more people will be born new types and these young savants will be the ones to ultimately  resolve the conflict between the dirt heaters and the space noids from the bottom up Gundams are  especially powerful in the hands of new types and are specialized to serve them as the conflicts  go on the psychics grow in credibility and notability through their distinguished service  surely the young will Forge a new

world order in the ashes of abuaku but what do we see a few  years postwar in Zeta Gundam increasingly worse versions of familiar social superstructures now  entirely embodied through a handful of post-human Warlords taking the field in their extra shiny  Gundams the revolution has failed or succeeded in producing something far uglier than hoped  for the individualist drive has won out and instead of new democracy civilian government has  largely vanished the world is effectively ruled by a han

dful of the most power power ful Mecha  protagonists and antagonists who only communicate in violence for all my complaints about the  kind of narrative post one-year War Universal Century anime has I think there is an extent to  which this was intentional and thoughtful though before I give tomino too much credit he would  have asserted that the reason this all happened is because the rootless Cosmopolitan shocks like  Melanie Hugh carvine are playing both sides in order to reclaim the holy lan

d or something  Wheeling back around to the original Mobile Suit Gundam and the one-year War I also think  the shape of the conflict reveals a lot about the specifically Japanese mentality which led to  the rise of Gundam Gundam creators often speak to how Zeon is roughly based on the Axis powers of  World War II when you compare the early events of the one-year war with the legend of World War II  you see the outlines of the various roles Gundams fill in the conflict the the Panzer the zero the

  weapon systems which so upset and horrified the Allied Powers but if we specifically look to the  east at large and Japan in particular we see a recent Legacy of Daring light infantry tactics  being used to surprise and overcome Superior Western armies one assumes that in the minds  of many Japanese people the Pinnacle of their nation's hard power lay with their Ace zero pilots  and fanatically brave assault infantry it all went down Hill after that so there is something  particularly evocativ

e about the way zakus seem to phrase a future space war in those same Concepts  either Elite infantry engagements or aerial duels perhaps there's a comfort in imagining that the  future will play to one's strengths yet again in short Mecca have taken and held their position in  the pop cultural imagination because they serve as a form of future Nostalgia it allows for the  depiction of futuristic conflicts but spun around the pillars of what we remember the Glorious  battles of yester year to be

in the popular imagination that often means a cool guy power  fantasy of manly Warriors turning the tides of battles by themselves but the other side of that  coin is that revolutionary Wild West fantasy the little guys having the chance to shape the future  it's these core tensions which I would argue have made Mecca the cultural Touchstone which they  are to today but yeah war is bad robots are rad