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clearlitebergaming · 10 months

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ah yes im glad gundam was enforcing traditional value of 1 breadwinner and 1 homemaker in sacred marriage /jk

#gundam #gundam witch from mercury #gundam iron blooded orphans #kudelia #atra #miorine #suletta #next gundamn we'll have another girls marrying each other amen

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asteriskofficial · 1 year

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I started watching Gundam Iron Blooded Orphans and I am enjoying it a lot so far

#gundam #ibo #iron blooded orphans #gundam iron blooded orphans #kudelia aina bernstein #kudelia #atra mixta #gundam ibo

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seeyounexttime · 9 months

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Terrible news! I've found the raws for the IBO manga volumes and I downloaded the last volume! the pics are a little pixelated but beggars can't be choosers you know? what's important is the fact that manga artist Kazuma Isobe chose violence and modified Orga's death scene so that he dies in Kudelia's arms

but wait! that's not all! there's also pages after they've brought Orga's body inside, and you get to see that Ride has the gun now

(everyone else's death in this last volume plays out the same, from Shino's to Mika's)

#gundam ibo #g tekketsu #gundam iron blooded orphans #iron blooded orphans #toonami #yes im tagging toonami in this #johnny and cherami woulda owned this scene #imagine the emotional devastation *-*#i might download the other volumes later #but for now join me in reliving the IBO Trauma (tm)#orga itsuka #kudelia aina bernstein

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kurozu501 · 1 year

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i can sort of understand why people started calling the grassley group “shaddiq’s harem” bc gundam certainly isnt above that trope, the last gundam anime literally had a guy whose crew was entirely his harem of cool ladies, but after ep9 it really doesnt feel like that at all. I think people assumed it bc shaddiq had a rep as a playboy and then we see his group and they are all beautiful girls so of course right? But seeing more of them their relationship feels more like close friends or even sibling-ish.

They clearly respect him and are loyal to him but none of them seem interested in him romantically. They all have their own fanclubs and admirers. Renee even has 12 backup boyfriends lol so clearly she’s actively out there dating ppl. Shaddiq himself never flirts with any of them or has eyes for anyone other then Miorine. The gals themselves are aware of his feelings towards her and support him in it with zero jealousy or resentment. It just doesn’t really come off as any kind of harem thing.

#tbh i doubt shaddiq's playboy rep now too #wouldnt be surprised if he played that up just so no one would suspect his true feelings for miorine #gundam the witch from mercury #gwitch #shaddiq zenelli #i still have mixed feelings about the harem thing in ibo #one the one hand it was pretty dumb anime fanservice-y #on the other hand it felt like the writers were genuinely trying for something resembling an actual ploy relationship #like how we find out the ladies on the ship all raise each others kids as one big communal family #and how seeing them is what causes atra to realize the love triangle with her and mika and kudelia didnt need to be a love triangle #and after that she's gunning for an ot3 ending and gets it

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dae-stuff · 1 year

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Gundam Girls

(Doing chibi is my guilty pleasure)

Did you know I'm an HUGE Gundam fan? Now you know!

Stickers and pins available on my redbubble

#gundam #gundam tekketsu no orphans #gundam seed #gundam witch from mercury #gundam 00 #lacus clyne #kudelia aina bernstein #feldt grace #suletta mercury

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marspalms · 9 months

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Kudelia: Please, I'm begging you go to a doctor.

Mikazuki: I'm sorry is this OUR stab wound? Stay out of it.

#mikazuki augus #kudelia aina bernstein #gundam ibo #tekketsu no orphans #gundam iron blooded orphans #ibo incorrect quotes

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bubblingbeebles · 1 year

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gundam IBO aka my problems with mari okada

i finished gundam IBO, tried to figure out why it felt so wrong, and only afterwards found out it was written by mari okada and honestly that explains so much.

if she somehow reads this post i’m sorry but here is my thesis about mari okada: all of her works have the same two problems:

1 - they set up a situation that will pull on your heartstrings, but then pull so much harder than was narratively justified that it breaks immersion and ruins the impact

2 - they have weirdly-romanticized ideas about romance, basically where a character falls for some idea that a person represents rather than the person themself, while also usually either (a) being heteronormative and/or steeped in tropey gender roles (b) ignoring perfectly good (less idolizing) chemistry between a different pairing

spoiler zone under the cut.

first of all, disclaimer: the other okada works i’ve seen that i’m comparing to are anohana, nakitai neko, maquia, and toradora. i found the first two to be insufferable, textbook examples of both problems. i liked maquia because i think it got the heartstring pull right, perhaps as a fluke, and avoided problem 2 by being about motherhood instead of romance. i tolerate toradora because, despite the annoying harem, it at least subverted problem 2 in the end by ending with the pairing that has actual chemistry.

IBO, i also find to be textbook examples of both problems, and both problems boil down to the fact that the show never really graduates from the toxic orga-mika-flashback ideology (”keep fighting until we reach the promised land“)

problem 1 basically comes down to how dark the ending is, how much they all lose in the end. the show presents an oppressive system - not just evil individuals - and so many ways our protags could have beat that system, but ultimately makes each one fail either through chance or through character flaw, and like, that’s not just crushing as a story beat, that’s crushing on the meta level of what makes a good story. the show could have been about cashing out with a peaceful life (i.e. not pursue the “king of mars” dream), but no. the show could have been about refusing to let the ends justify the means (i.e. refuse to partner with char chocolate mcgillis), but no. the show could have been about political reform and postwar quality of life (i.e. give any screentime to kudelia’s s2 business exploits), but no. in each case the orga-mika ideology blinded them to everything but to fight. the show set up from the very beginning to have them outgrow that ideology, and then spectacularly failed to deliver.

back on the object level, a more obvious example of problem 1 is just the string of named character killings. in season 1, biscuit’s death had meaningful narrative consequences. in season 2, i predicted naze would die after being politically maneuvered into some corner, which would have been narratively satisfying... if they payoff had been anything other than “now more characters will die with increasingly little justification”. we get the same exact story beat with takaki/aston, with akihiro/lafter, with yamagi/shino, and ultimately with orga. i’m not saying “war produces senseless deaths en masse” is a bad moral, i’m saying that repeating the same exact setup four times robs that moral of its emotional impact.

anyways, on to problem 2: atra and kudelia.

i should be happy about our girls getting a happy end where they’re literally married! i really should! the thing is..! the whole framing around it is stained with authorial intent so deeply that even this literal gay marriage is somehow heteronormative.

in short: the on-screen pretense of their relationship dramatically fails the bechdel test. (whatever happens off screen, the camera lens matters.)

in long: atra and kudelia explicitly talk about their respective relationships to mikazuki in that exact mari-okada-weirdly-romanticized way (”when a girl is crying, a boy should console her”), whereas their relationship to each other is, while obvious, unstated so explicitly as that, and i think that - because of okada’s track record - you need to do some heavy death-of-the-author-ing if you want to claim that they, in character, realize they have romantic chemistry on their own. moreover, as i wrote before i saw s2:

when she was jealous of kudelia about mikazuki, and then all it took was 1 poly adult role model to instantly break her out of that, was such a moment. i hope she meets a gay person and has the same moment again and then (becomes an adult and then) they date

...this of course never happens(*), and so, literally married as they are, occam’s razor says that in character, the only role model they have remains naze’s harem, where women can only be connected romantically indirectly via a guy -- in their case, the memory of a deceased emotional blank slate of a guy, as newly embodied in akatsuki -- and thus they are together because that indirection makes them platonic family (which is a powerful theme of the show in its own right, so it naturally completes the logic here).

(*worse yet: the only on-screen-text-canon gay character, yamagi, is heavily tokenized and brutally bury-your-gays-ed, and i find this actively harms the case, because it sets the precedent that if it was gay, they could have been explicit about it.)

if okada sensei had just spent 5 seconds of screen time for one of them to say “you know, what we have with each other is also romantic, isn’t it”, it would have been an amazing subversion of her own trope, but no. i can’t ignore the author here even if, underneath the metatext, their chemistry and their happy end are undeniable.

and that, i suppose, is why i am so eager about witch from mercury, even if its politics are even more incoherent than ever. it at least gives us - not just the queerness - but the queer-normativity we deserve in storytelling.

#gundam #iron blooded orphans #gundam ibo #mari okada #kudelia aina bernstein #atra mixta #mikazuki augus #queer shit #gundam the witch from mercury

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wordsandrobots · 1 year

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IBO reference notes on . . . Kudelia's decisions

Right then. This essay was prompted by various criticisms of Iron-Blooded Orphans that bug me purely by being centred on what I find one of the most interesting things the show does. Obviously, other interpretations are available, but this is where I settled after watching. As usual, spoilers (mainly Season 1, some Season 2 and final ending stuff).

Kudelia Aina Bernstein is the daughter of the governor of the Chryse region of Mars, a colony operated by the Arbrau political bloc (a merger of Canada and Russia, yes really). Like all Martian colonies, Chryse is suffering from neglect and abuse by its parent state, leading to poverty, violence and general misery for its inhabitants. Being a decent sort (thanks in large part to straying beyond the confines of her parents' estate and seeing the real Mars for herself), Kudelia sets out to right this wrong by persuading Arbrau to deregulate the sale of 'half-metal', Chryse's main export, thus bringing more income to the region that will – hopefully – raise everyone's quality of life.

There are a few things to note from the get-go. First, 'deregulate exports' is not exactly the stuff of revolutions. Kudelia is shown addressing an assembly of people who want Mars to be free (or at least freer) of Earth's rule, but she doesn't advocate for openly fighting the central authority. She just wants to negotiate for better conditions. Luckily for her, Prime Minister Makanai of Arbrau is inclined to listen, so it's an aim that appears within reach, if she can hold a meeting with him.

Second, we quickly learn the Martian independence movement in general and Kudelia in particular have some wealthy backers. Enter Nobliss Gordon, a businessman who has been generous to the cause. Now Nobliss is perhaps the most obviously evil-coded character you could imagine, which tracks perfectly with the later revelation he's an arms-dealer. And this immediately raises important questions about what kind of people are calling for independence. Think again about Kudelia's goal here: deregulation of half-metal exports will first and foremost help the people who own the mining business, with any benefit to the average Chryse citizen depending on trickle-down economics (pause for laughter). Those who stand to gain most immediately are those who already own the means of production: those in Nobliss' class – and, importantly, in Kudelia's.

I don't mean to imply any insincerity on Kudelia's part. She genuinely wants to see the lives of Chryse's citizens improved. It's an honest motive that only grows stronger the more she learns what it's actually like for those people on a day-to-day basis. But by dint of who she is in her society, she seems predisposed to look for solutions among those who already hold influence, and there's a degree to which she isn't wrong to do so. Men like Nobliss are the movers and shakers of Mars and do have the connections necessary to organise a meeting with their counterparts on Earth. If she can use those connections to influence the levers of power, she might be able to make things better.

The problem is, Nobliss just wants to stir up enough chaos that his customer base will expand with people desperate to buy new weapons. To this end, he intends to make Kudelia a martyr, setting her up to be killed by Gjallarhorn, the Martian branch of which he has in his pocket.

See that's the thing about Nobliss at the start of the show: he already has influence over the levers of power. He simply doesn't use them to make things better for anyone except himself.

It takes Kudelia a while to twig this is the case. Blame for the initial murder attempt can be squarely placed at the feet of her father, a craven toady who sells her out to save his own neck. Nobliss' involvement is hidden and she approaches him in good faith as a to get the money necessary to employ Tekkadan to escort her to Earth. He obliges, having been disappointed in Gjallarhorn's ability to do their job and now seeing further opportunities in using Kudelia to stir the pot.

This leads to the Dort Colonies and that bit where Kudelia gets a fleet to back down with only her words.

Except – no. Not really.

Let's take it from the top. The workers on the Dort Company-run space colonies are desperate for better conditions and on the verge of open revolt. Nobliss is funnelling guns and mobile workers to them via Teiwaz and Tekkadan. The leaders of the workers unions, fearing what more radical elements among their number might do, organise a march on Company headquarters to make their demands heard. Gjallarhorn, however, are aware of the colonists' intentions and set up a pretext for wiping them out. The whole situation is a colossal trap.

Into this walks Kudelia, who Nobliss has been bigging up as 'the Maiden of Revolution', fighting for the rights of people in Mars-sphere. It is vital to keep in mind he is the one who comes up with this moniker, not Kudelia herself. Sure, Kudelia takes inspiration from that one history book, but she did not set out to lead some grand-scale uprising. Again, her plan is to go to Earth and hold polite discussions with Arbrau to get better export deals. That's it.

By this point, however, she's starting to understand what she's up against. Quite apart from nearly being murdered by Gjallarhorn, her interactions with Teiwaz have demonstrated that other people want to take advantage of what she's doing. Indeed, in order to get the necessary support to reach Earth, she has to bargain away half-metal mining rights to Teiwaz.

Dwell on that for a minute. Her whole aim is to use money from the mining to improve things in Chryse, and now she's given a cut of it to the Jupiter mafia, just for the chance of making that work. Gjallarhorn has too much invested in their role as the colonial police force to ever willingly let Chryse gain independence. They will do anything to stop Kudelia and they're way too powerful for a lone idealist and a bunch of child soldiers to tackle alone.

So Kudelia choses not to be idealistic. She choses to be pragmatic, in the name of the end result.

But of course, nobody hearing rumours about the Maiden of Revolution has any idea this is the case. To them, she's a symbol of hope, heralding hope of change, and they greet her and Tekkadan (the 'heroic band of knights' escorting her) accordingly. Buoyed by their presence – and, more importantly, the guns they've unwittingly delivered – the workers head to Company HQ, where Gjallarhorn is poised to crush them in one fell swoop.

Kudelia is basically a bystander up to that point. She has no idea it's even happening until she stumbles on to the march while chasing after her maid, Fumitan Admoss, who she's just found out is in the employ of Nobliss. This is revealed by series arch-demi-villain/anti-protagonist McGillis in an effort to prevent Kudelia's death and so use her later. But Kudelia, being far more good of heart than him, wants to know the full story from Fumitan and pursues her through the colony, getting mixed up with the union people right as Gjallarhorn opens fire.

What is supposed to happen here, per Nobliss' scheme, is that Kudelia dies publicly in the course of the violence. See above re: inciting sales. But Kudelia survives, first due to the union workers protecting her, then to Fumitan taking a sniper's bullet for her – because all else aside, Kudelia is a kind, charismatic person who manages to get the people on side more often than not. With their supposed ally having prevented Kudelia's assassination, Nobliss' men pull out, marking the failure of his plan.

While this is happening, Nobliss himself receives a personal call from McMurdo Barriston, head of Teiwaz, who not-so subtly warns him off trying to kill Kudelia. Teiwaz stands to wins substantial profits if Kudelia's mission succeeds and they are the big dogs in the outer-spheres, so get with the programme. This warning comes too late to stop events already in motion, but it does neutralise Nobliss for the foreseeable future.

Shortly thereafter, he receives another call, this time from Kudelia, very much alive and in need of his assistance. You see, the massacre in the colony has led to a full-blown rebellion, with Gjallarhorn's sabotage meaning the colonists are being slaughtered by the forces deployed against them. It's a blood-bath, and Kudelia and Tekkadan are caught right in the middle of it.

Luckily. Kudelia has a plan.

We never hear what she says to Nobliss to convince him to help. However, I think it's reasonable to assume that her final illusions about him have shattered and she has put enough of the pieces together to know he set her up, big time. On the other hand, she also knows she currently has Teiwaz's support and her death would inconvenience them. My personal read is that she leverages this fact mercilessly – if politely – and requests Nobliss kindly give her a hand out of the mess he's dropped her into.

Impressed by her sheer guts, Nobliss obliges, pulling strings to get her a broadcast channel provided by the African Union – the very power bloc for whom the Dort Company operates the colonies.

Here is where Kudelia gives her speech, standing up in front of the world to decry the injustices being perpetrated before her. She castigates Gjallarhorn for their butchery and dares them to shoot her down on live TV (much to Tekkadan's collective WTF).

It is important to note (and I swear I'll stop saying that now) that even here, Gjallarhorn aren't the ones who back off. The commander of the operation is fully in 'jam the transmission, kill the lot of them' mode to the very end. But ultimately, the African Union themselves say – no. Stand down. Presumably because somebody who owed Nobliss a favour just let Kudelia put an enormous hole possible in the media narrative they were constructing around what was happening and those in charge, quite reasonably, panicked.

(If IBO offers one main lesson about big institutions, it's that they're full of factions working against one another.)

So yes. Kudelia gives a speech and the killing stops. Eventually, this leads to a negotiated settlement to give the workers more rights. Again, the show doesn't dwell on the details but I think 'the police quit halfway through six city's worth of riots' fairly neatly explains how the Company got brought to the table afterwards.

If Kudelia hadn't stood in front of the guns, things likely would have ended much more miserably. But like I said, there's far more to it than what she actually says. Kudelia leverages her connections to Nobliss, who leverages his connections to the African Union while himself being pressured by Teiwaz, who have bought Kudelia for their own interests, who is now fully conscious of this rats-nest of venal motives she's caught in. Mikazuki might come away deeply enamoured by Kudelia's ability to influence the world with just her voice, but we know it's not that simple. The things that allow the speech to take place and the reasons it has the required effect are laid out, bit by bit, to demonstrate this is a world where it's not what you say but who you have on your side at the time.

This informs everything that comes next. When Kudelia and Tekkadan finally reach Earth to discover Makanai has been ousted as Prime Minister, they are left with no choice except to get him his job back. He is the lynchpin of Kudelia's plan, so she sets about making more deals and getting him to Arbrau's capital in Edmonton for a key election. Which means cosying up to McGillis and his dumb mask, because he holds power on Earth she lacks. More compromises, more trading the future for an advantage in the present.

The election is the other Big Speech moment for the season and this receives somewhat less step-by-step justification. Partly, I think, because the point has already been demonstrated, so we can make do with brief glimpses of Makanai's allies laying the groundwork for his comeback while the show concentrates on the martial drama of Tekkadan battling through Gjallarhorn's defence perimeter. We're shown enough to reasonably conclude Makanai retained strong support in Arbrau. His allies are powerful people and his opponent had to sell herself to Iznario Fareed in order to oust him. Plus, by dint of arriving in Edmonton at all, Makanai can make a stink about Gjallarhorn's (illegal) interference in an internal affair, dealing them a harmful blow.

Within this context, giving Kudelia the stage might plausibly be read as a power-move by someone who's already won. That she shames more votes his way . . . well, this is ultimately still a story. IBO shows its working well enough for me, personally, to be satisfied with how the plot beats hit.

And with Makanai reinstated, Season 1 ends on an upbeat note for the Martian independence movement. Kudelia negotiates her deal, making all the sacrifices worthwhile – hooray!

Sacrifices. Interesting word. Everyone is at it, sacrificing each other for the greater good, for some far-off goal. Whatever Mikazuki's opinions on the matter, Kudelia dwells on the members of Tekkadan who die doing a job she is paying them for. She has their blood on her hands.

But what of Kudelia's personal sacrifices?

In Season 2, we see these come home to roost. Right away, we find Kudelia working as president of the Admoss Company, administering the half-metal mining on behalf of the people of Chryse . . . and Teiwaz, Nobliss and McGillis, her not-so silent partners. She has given up politics to focus on this task, building schools and orphanages with her fraction of the profit from the deals she made.

Perhaps it is therefore no wonder she is so much more reserved and downcast at this point. After all, how would you feel if you'd had to get into bed with the mafia, an arms-dealer and the world's least-reliable Machiavelli-impersonator?

This is Kudelia's version of Mikazuki losing his body so he can keep fighting. Kudelia takes what she can practically achieve at the expense of never becoming a true 'Maiden of Revolution'. It limits her potential as the inspiring figure Nobliss set her up to be, it neuters the hope she can provide, and restricts her achievements to fiddling around the edges of a still-unjust system. Not because she doesn't want to do more, not because she isn't a fundamentally good person, but because she values doing something concrete over aiming for a dream she may never reach.

Within the story, Kudelia forms one pole of morality, demonstrating how to grow and learn, and the importance of not letting your reach exceed your grasp. It's by following her advise that Takaki escapes the fate the rest of Tekkadan suffers, for example. However she also ends up shaking hands with the man responsible for killing large chunks of her adoptive family. I am not certain if the message coming out of that is the one intended, but it sure as hell is a coherent one.

Sometimes, if you want to make a difference, you have to trade with terrible people. And sometimes, making that trade stops your ultimate aim dead in their tracks.

“But Words, “ you might say, “isn't that a terribly cynical view of politics and how the distribution of power works to disempower even the most influential advocates of change?”

To which I'd say, “how did you get in my house?” before adding, “well yes, but this is a show rooted in the reality of child soldiers. If you're not being deeply cynical about the mechanisms by which the world operates, you're doing it wrong.”

These are the kinds of compromises made every day by those working in charities and political establishments, or any kind of official avenue, trying to do some good. I've been there myself, on much, much smaller scales. It's not right. Yet it happens. Until there are is an almost-inconceivably thorough change to the way the world is organised, it's going to keep happening.

Kudelia fails the same way most of the characters in Iron-Blooded Orphans do: incompletely. Like many of the others, she offers inspiration, hope, kindness, love, and opportunity to those around her. That she is ultimately powerless to save them is a direct, unintended consequence of who she is and what she values, and how those factors inform the choices she makes. That she achieves some measure of what she set out to is an ambiguous success at best.

The epilogue for the show portrays a Mars freed from Earth, with Kudelia as chairperson for the new Martian Union assembly. She has taken a position of power and this is presented as a good thing. A reward for her dedication to the slow, practical path. She gets to extol the virtues of the world she now lives in, building on Tekkadan's sacrifices to create something better.

But I can't stop thinking about all those deals from Season 1, how her speeches are underpinned equally by her righteous indignation at injustice and the pragmatic means by which she takes the stage. I can't help wonder how far her portion of the tragedy stretches. What fresh compromises did she make in order to reach the point of cosigning the Human Debris Abolishment Treaty?

What I know for sure is, for the chance to take another step forward, she wouldn't have hesitated.