#the birth of Kircheis into his role in the story | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

logh-icebergs · 7 years

Text

Episode 3: Birth of the 13th Fleet

Early 796/487. Alliance backstory! New characters! Creepy violent nationalists in masks! We’re back on Heinessen, and Yang pretends to be injured to avoid attending a political propaganda rally about the soldiers lost in the battle of Astate, a ploy which literally everyone sees through. Jessica interrupts Trunicht’s speech, Yang and Dusty swoop in and save her from the Patriotic Knights Corps, and Yang eventually swallows his humility and uses his “hero” status to pressure Trunicht into calling off his attack dogs. Presumably Reuental and Mittermeyer go on a date, but we don’t see it this time.

Julian

Who the fuck is this person? Yang has a “ward”? Why? IS YANG BATMAN?? These are all good questions to be asking yourself.

You may recognize Julian Mintz (sorry subs, it’s Mintz) from his starring role in the ED, so it’s not any sort of spoiler to say that he’s someone you should be paying attention to. Julian takes a background role for most of the actual action of the episode, but at the beginning we get a short glimpse into the domestic life of the Yang household.

Why is Yang sleeping on the couch anyway?? I’m gonna guess he fell asleep there reading and Julian fetched the blanket and pillow for him.

Character development in small visual details: Julian styling his collar and sleeves to exactly match Yang here shows his hero worship and desire to emulate him.

Waking Yang up, making him tea, scolding him about drinking brandy in the morning (but pouring some into the tea nonetheless), Julian functions here as something in between a servant and a caretaker of sorts. His body language (standing at attention while Yang lounges on the couch) and speech patterns (using extremely formal, honorific diction) emphasize that he’s a subordinate in some official way, not family or an equal; at the same time the way Yang appeals to him to let him sleep longer, rhapsodizes about his tea, and reacts with dismay to his ambitions to be a soldier all indicate a lot of affection between them.

A bit is lost in translation here: after Yang comments that he can pay back Julian’s debt to the military for putting him through school, Julian reacts with surprise and an extremely formal phrase expressing his desire not to be a burden (“Soko made go-meiwaku o kakeraremasen!”), to which Yang replies teasingly “don’t be impertinent, you’re just a kid.” (“Namaiki iu na yo, kodomo no kuse ni.”) His use of namaiki here seems ironic, accusing Julian of saying something too forward or presumptuous for his position, when in fact what Julian said was excessively respectful. In Yang’s philosophy, as a kid Julian shouldn’t be self-importantly taking on responsibilities and worrying about lofty principles of paying his own way. Yang’s pragmatism runs deep.

But so does Julian’s desire to follow in his father’s footsteps (and Yang’s) and become a soldier, and not shockingly this thread will return.

Yang’s relationship to the war introduces tension into his personal life from multiple angles: While his distaste for the military creates a dilemma for Julian, his status as a war hero drives a wedge between him and Jessica.

Gender Roles

White men: eating this nationalist crap up. White women: feeling slightly uncomfortable but not saying anything. POC: so over Trunicht’s bullshit that they literally all faked sick to avoid him.

By now I’m sure you’ve noticed that the power structures in LoGH are incredibly male-dominated. Reinhard and Kircheis fly off into space to earn accolades in battle while Annerose sits passively by a pool; Alliance men argue with each other about tactics while their female love interests sit at home playing the piano and waiting for news. And it is absolutely true that the societies whose history we are learning are mostly run by men, particularly in military contexts. Hell, LoGH doesn’t indisputably pass the Bechdel test until episode 103 out of 110.

And yet. The handful of female characters that we do get to know exist within this society as fully defined individuals, with their own ways of navigating the roles and expectations pushed on them because of their gender. In episode one we saw Jessica first as a holographic image carried around by her fiancé, adding pathos to his death by reminding us that he had someone waiting for him. But in this episode we see that Jessica wasn’t a prop for Lapp’s death scene—rather, his death was a plot device to push her into more active and public opposition to the war. He was fridged.

Better than the almost identical scene in Wonder Woman, don't @ me.

We see Jessica pushing against typical gender roles on two levels: in-universe, by speaking publicly to the men in power challenging their motives and integrity; and also at a narrative level, by flipping the typical trope in which a male protagonist is motivated to action by a woman’s death.

Meanwhile Julian, a 14-year-old boy, happily and enthusiastically keeps house for Yang, cooking and cleaning and making tea. While many of the female characters overtly break with the traditional roles assigned to women (by entering politics, the military, etc.), Julian is one of the only characters to push in the other direction; and it’s important that (spoiler) the show never plays this for laughs or really remarks on it at all.

I found this image on the talk page for the entry for Julian’s cat on the LoGH wikia. Listen you cannot say this blog has not been meticulously researched.

Jessica and Yang

Similar to the graveyard scene in the previous episode, this moment between Yang and Jessica at the airport is fraught with the distance that his part in the war has put between them. And again we see his passivity as he lets the silence stretch until she finally walks away.

I cautioned in the last post about projecting heteronormativity onto the narrative and assuming that Jessica must play the part of love interest for Yang just because she’s the only woman he’s interacted with so far. However, here we get to see more of their dynamic in detail. As always LoGH does a lot of work with facial expressions, cinematography, and atmosphere, and it’s clear that this airport scene has a romantic vibe—the drawn-out, wistful looks, camera lingering just a bit too long on each of them, music swelling in the background, the framing of the shot with them facing each other. As usual a lot is left unsaid, and this early in the story we don’t have the context to fill it all in, so just tuck it away as a piece of the puzzle that will gradually come together. What’s clear is a deep sadness in Yang, unable or unwilling to fulfill what her eyes seem to ask of him.

Remember when we said that LoGH is incredibly layered? Let’s go one level deeper than just stripping away our own society’s assumptions about what Jessica’s role must be. Yang and Jessica, too, live in quite a heteronormative world, one (like our own) in which close male/female friendships can be difficult to navigate without societal expectations intervening. Along with the rift created by the war and his guilt over Lapp’s death, could part of Yang’s sadness here come from struggling with the weight of those expectations? Yes, it could—in this show it definitely could, and at least wondering that as you observe Yang’s sadness combined with his passivity here is the sort of habit you should get into as you try to unravel these characters’ inner lives.

Stray Tidbits

This moment gives me chills.

Yang casually giving running political commentary throughout the episode is absolutely amazing. 100% would buy a book of Yang Wenli political quips.

Yang grabs Jessica, Dusty grabs the cat, and poor Julian has to fend for himself??

And speaking of the cat, fun fact, it is one of the many ways the anime team improved upon the source material, in which it does not appear. According to the wikia “Japanese fan sources” refer to the cat as Gensui, meaning fleet admiral, so as sketchy as that attribution is we hereby dub Julian’s cat Gensui and shall refer to it as such from now on.

#Legend of Galactic Heroes #Legend of the Galactic Heroes #author: Rebecca #Julian #Jessica #Alliance #Gensui

24 notes · View notes