Hello Freindlies!
This week, we look back on Episode 1 - The Shooting Star She Saw. Listen to the podcast here.
Below is a copy of the transcript of this episode, created by the phenomenal Noirangetrois, and punctuated throughout with additional commentary by me in bold and in brackets (Edit: Like this!), plus a few facts that Noir helped me to find.
Noirangetrois has also posted a really good commentary of her own here, which you should definitely read - she makes some great points about Treize, Zechs and Heero, and how they react in different ways to civilians vs. soldiers vs. weapons.
So without further ado, here are The Footnotes.
Hey there, and welcome to Radio Meteor. This is a podcast where I watch an episode of 80's (Edit: 90’s!) anime Gundam Wing and I talk about it because I talk faster than I type and I’ve got a bunch of thoughts, just like, A BUNCH. So, I figured, why not share? This episode, if you’ll excuse the pun, is gonna be somewhat of a pilot. It’s a little experimental, and I’m still figuring out how this works.
So just to kick things off, let me explain what it is that I’m doing. This podcast will be a mix of banter, observation, general nerdery, and hopefully discussion as well. Consider it a kicking off point for fandom chat, nothing formal, and I’m certainly no expert - so if you’ve got something to say, or an idea, or there’s something you’ve noticed, or I’m just plain wrong, you know, jump in! I’d love to hear from you.
By way of introduction of myself, you may know me from tumblr as lemontrash or travellemon. Lemontrash is my Gundam specific blog, it’s where I hide all like the deeply nerdy stuff that I do. Travellemon is my main blog and I also go by Odamaki, which is my AO3 handle. (EDIT: the audio podcast is hosted on Soundcloud and my Gundam Wing website containing all my fanworks is Radio Meteor on Wix.)
Each episode of this podcast will discuss one - count ‘em - ONE episode of the show starting with Episode 1 and finishing, well, wherever we finish up I guess. If you want to watch along as well, and I certainly hope you do, then you know, jump in!
The plan was to use the original 1995 television release version of the show with the Japanese audio and English subtitles, but somehow in my genius I have managed to delete Episode 1 through to Episode 22, so I don’t have those anymore. Instead what I am using is the high definition, slightly prettied up version of the show, but again with Japanese audio and English subtitles, which is available for now on YouTube (keep it secret, keep it safe). (Edit: I recorded this in November 2018, and since then these have disappeared from Youtube, but may still be out there in the wilds of the internet.)
I don’t think there’s a huge material difference other than just some slightly nicer animation between the versions that I did have and somehow deleted and this YouTube version, but I think for consistency’s sake, from about Episode 22, I’ll switch over to the old version that I have. Again, I don’t think there’s a huge amount of difference to be honest, but, yeah. If I can get Japanese subtitles, I will, just to kinda look at where the language affects it. I have downloaded the ones that are out there but they don’t sync with the video I have so if anybody technical out there has a bright idea how to get that, please, please get in touch, let me know. (Edit: I’ve had some advice on this I need to put into practice, but I’ll let you know if I can’t get it to work!)
So that’s kind of it, that’s the podcast, that’s the premise, I’m Oda and this is Radio Meteor, welcome to orbit.
[musical interlude]
So here we go. Episode 1, “The Shooting Star She Saw,” or in Japanese, “Shōjo ga Mita Ryūsei.”(少女が見た流星・しょうじょがみたりゅうせい） A bit of a tongue twister in both languages, I have to say. There is honestly a lot to say about the first episode of any series, because it has so much to do in terms of establishing characters, establishing the story, and all that good stuff. I am gonna assume that you have seen the episode this time because most people are fairly familiar with Episode 1 of the show, and skip the recap of the content. It is pretty straightforward. We get an overview that there is an Alliance, the Alliance is bad, there are colonies, the colonies are subjugated, they have launched Gundams, we meet Relena, she’s annoyed at her dad and it ends on that famous party invitation.
So when you really start with dissecting what the hell this is, there’s a lot I could really talk about, but I don’t want to overburden this first episode so I’ll stick some kind of down the line. But first of all, let’s answer the question where Gundam Wing sits in the greater Gundam canon, so to speak.
First, we know that Gundam Wing is the odd one out in the whole of the Gundam universe. It’s very much the alternate universe amongst, well, a bunch of alternate universes. If you’ve ever watched it, it’s not quite as bad as Tenchi Muyo where they just kind of 180 on you and you have no idea that it’s even supposed to be an alternate universe - It has the same characters, it’s VERY confusing, but Gundam Wing is generally considered to be something of a standalone other than, of course, Frozen Teardrop. And I think there might be a few random references to Gundam Wing in some of the later series, but I have to admit it’s something I don’t really know for sure.
In terms of what I know about the wider canon, I have watched Episode 1 of Gundam Unicorn and I have read about half of “Mobile Suit Gundam: The Novel” in translation, which I should add is not the same as the Mobile Suit Gundam the anime, or not quite. They’re both written by the same writer but there’s some fairly substantial differences between the two, both in plot and in the general feel of it. So far, for a grand total of 2 out of 3, the Gundam franchise seems to run on a fairly formulaic approach. You have an teen(™), or a few of them, they find a giant robot in space, and they go to war against oppressors of some sort. There are varying degrees of philosophy about war and the human condition. The flavors vary and they vary in intensity, but the meat is pretty much the same.
So, right off the bat we’ve got a fairly key difference in that we don’t see the origin story of any of the pilots in Gundam Wing. We don’t see them get their Gundams. Most of these other series seem to jump in at the point where they get their Gundam. So, for example, in Mobile Suit Gundam, we have Amuro Ray. He is a civilian, his ship is attacked, he comes across the Gundam and uses it to defend his colony so that they can escape. Or the remnants of his colony, so that they can escape. He’s obviously so good at it, he has natural ability for piloting, so he keeps it, yadda yadda yadda.
In Mobile Suit Gundam the novel, Amuro Ray, is actually part of the sort of Federation military. He is training to be a pilot, and he goes on a mission to move some Gundams from the colony where they’re being tested and stored, the colony gets attacked by what we call Zeon (Note: Spelling for this varies across versions of MS Gundam; I am using the spellings as provided in the novel translation I own), the totalitarian regime that is rebelling against Earth, like a sort of second colony system. They have broken away from Earth and they kind of want to mess shit up. But yeah, Zeon attacks, Amuro stumbles across the Gundam and he basically just co-opts it in order to arm himself and gets into a fight. Then the Federation say, ‘well actually you were good at that, so we’ll keep you on it’. There’s also a lot of discussion about Newtypes, which I’ll come back to, maybe not in this episode but in a later one.
And then in Gundam Unicorn, they really do pay a lot of homage to that original Mobile Suit Gundam. You have the main character is Banagher, he’s… and I didn’t appreciate this when I watched Episode 1, he’s like a space janitor. It’s very cute. He’s a cadet type student; I don’t really know what he’s doing but he’s learning to pilot really mini, mini mobile suits and clean up space debris. Then his colony gets attacked and his school gets attacked and he finds the experimental Gundam and he… (Spoilers? Kinda?) ...meets the guy who’s been designing it or working on it, and they have a personal connection and the guy, locks the Gundam to him biometrically so it will only function for Banagher.
So there we’ve got this big difference in Gundam Wing. We see them kind of fait accompli. They come fully fledged and trained and they are designed to be Gundam pilots and not much else. This is more like the way that the antagonists are introduced in the other Gundam series. At least, in the one and a half other canons that I’ve seen. Baddies are presented as fully trained pilots, higher up the scale. They’ve got specific roles, they have already developed into those roles and they’re already very familiar with their machines.
You know, they’re already good at what they do, so I think that’s a kind of curious departure that the protagonists are presented as such in Gundam Wing. And I think it’s also worth bearing in mind that it isn’t as clean cut as it appears. We’re presented with these Gundam pilots in Gundam Wing as, they’ve been trained for this, they are ‘The Gundam Pilots’ and they are incredible, and they’ve got these incredible machines, but actually, none of them are really that great at what they do. Particularly if you bear in mind what happens in later episodes.
Then of course, the other obvious difference is that there are five of them. Which brings me onto the next question, which is, who the hell’s the protagonist here?
[musical interlude]
Ok, so if we’re asking, who’s the protagonist, you might answer, ‘it’s Heero, duh’. And, you may not be wrong, but at the same time, how much of a protagonist is he? He’s not the first primary character we see. He’s not the first face we see in the series. He doesn’t have much by way of development in the first episode. He’s actually something of a mystery, in fact. I’m not entirely clear if we even learn his name until quite late on in the episode. I didn’t actually check that, I didn’t check at which timestamp we hear his name for the first time. (Edit: We hear it at 20:34. Thanks, Noir! And wow, that really IS late in the episode!)
But I think that’s also quite telling because, the other main characters in the other series, we get that straight out of the gate. And even though Heero’s put forward as this kind of unusual and mysterious character, he’s not - his mystery is diluted a bit because we know there’s five of them. It’s not like they’re suddenly surprised, “Oh my god, there’s a second one!” like in Sailor Moon; “Oh my god, there are other Sailor Scouts!”. The characters don’t have that awareness, even though we all do. In Gundam Wing, though it’s not a shock. They know there are five of them, we know there are five of them. So, how unique is Heero, really?
(EDIT: To expand on this, I appreciate that obviously by later episodes we learn that the pilots don’t know about each other, but certainly in this first episode Zechs at a minimum and the Alliance in general have their suspicions that there are five Gundams. My point here, and which I nearly explained better in the following section, is that this is not a ‘collect ‘em all’ style of anime. It’s not about assembling the team. And when characters do meet, they frequently part again. Except maybe for Quatre, their goal isn’t to form a supergroup of Gundam Pilots, the way that the goal of many other animes targets this coming-together of the main protagonist and their support network of key secondary protagonists. Instead, each pilot operates within his own corner of the narrative, and it’s not even treated by the bigger story a mistake. Again, in other anime the separation of protagonists is often presented as one of the big hurdles they need to overcome in order to achieve the grand goal of the show. In Sailor Moon, there’s a whole season about the conflict of the outer scouts not wanting to work with the main team. In DBZ, there’s whole issues with the scooby gang of secondary characters trying to get back Goku (the hero).
Instead we have a much more sweeping narrative of paths crossing and parting, far more in the style of epic novels than hero anime, and it’s worth noting that MS Gundam: The Novel does this too. Different chapters focus on different characters, often at great distance to one another, and who do not necessarily gather in a traditional way (e.g. all arrive at the battlefield for one last big team-up) at the end.)
So I guess from the perspective of Episode 1, there is a narrative argument that, in fact, the main character (at least for this episode) is Relena. Even if we just look at how the credits and the interstitial snapshot, (that bit that comes up in the middle of the episode where they put the adverts), how she’s presented there, she’s smack bang center for a fair bit of it. Perhaps not so much for the theme tune. She does kind of fill in the traditional, ‘main character, main character, fight scene, and there’s a girl! And then back to main character kind of schtick. You know how anime titles get set up.
But she is the big giant head of that interstitial snapshot, which is often a spot reserved for the principal character, or otherwise the soul of the show. My instinct is to jump to Power Rangers. If you remember snapshots from that, you would have all five power rangers lined up with the red guy in the middle, and then that big giant head guy that gives them their powers is floating in the background behind them. Relena, she is the Big Giant Head. You kind of get that a lot, I think, with these kind of group protagonists kinda shows.
(Edit: *laughing* so in retrospect, Power Rangers was probably a bad example. At least, I can’t find the image that I remembered anywhere online. However, I stand by the fact that if you’re arranging a group shot of your characters (remembering that this show was intended to sell toys) you still have your row of protagonists with the Number One Protagonist emphasised, then the toys behind or below them, and then if you have background space to fill you throw in either the threat or the soul of the show. Now that might be the enemy they have to defeat looking suitably menacing, or it might be the motivation they have.
Edit 2: I’ve just gone to rewatch the Intro, and the first face we see properly in full is Duo’s, followed by Trowa, Quatre and Wufei. Heero stands with his hand over his face for the first 26 seconds and then never appears again. We get more shots of the Gundams before it jumps to Relena, and it actually dwells on her for a while. Nice zoom in of her face. More shots of the Gundams (sell those toys!) and then Zechs and Treize are introduced at around the midpoint, a spot typically reserved for introducing the antagonists. More Gundams, Gundams in action! And then it ends. So all we get is literally a half second of Heero’s face unobscured in the opening titles.
The interstice gives us a big Wing Zero (sell that toy!) and a flash square which flickers, subliminal message style, with Treize, Zechs, Lady Une, Noin, Sally, Catherine, Dr J, and then finally Relena in a larger square. Cue logo, music and then the boys flick up in the foreground, but Heero isn’t emphasised other than being placed in the middle of the line.
And of course, Heero isn’t in the Relena-hassles-African-wildlife Outro at all, but we’ll let him off that because anime outro animation often seems to be only tangentially related to the main story, or focussed on a different character.
I’ll make a separate post about posters and advertising I think, as there’s a lot to be said about it.)
But if you think about other narratives, you’re generally introduced to the main protagonist, and then he’s got a bunch of buddy sidekicks, and then there’s a girl. Usually what happens is that the protagonist is so-so relatable, and then something remarkable happens to them, and then they meet their cool destiny. So with Amuro Ray, he’s the main guy, he’s got a bunch of cadet buddy friends, he meets a mysterious girl and then, well, various women actually...floating around him. With Banagher, this is exactly his same story. They meet a mystery, and then something remarkable happens, they get this Gundam, and they realize they’re very good at piloting it, and then that’s like this cool handsome destiny that they’re going to go off with.
So in that light, in Episode 1, the character that that happens to is not Heero, is it? Heero is the remarkable something. He is the Obi Wan, he is Luna the cat, he is the Edward Cullen, he’s freaking well, he’s not a manic pixie dream girl but he’s a grumpy, murderous dreamboy? He’s a fixer upper- what girl could resist? Not Relena, anyway. But he’s the thing that happens to other people. So, in that respect, is he the protagonist?
I think it’s also quite interesting that it’s not an ensemble anime, which usually gives you that one, clear protagonist, and then they go kind of questing around to find their allies, because destiny, and it’s very much like, “Okay, these guys are good, they’re important, ‘power of friendship’, but this guy is the ONE.” And when push comes to shove, in every single crunch situation, this guy or gal is that character who is gonna step it up, save everybody else’s ass, and there is kind of no doubt that he or she is 100% necessary. You know, if they die, then we’re fucked. You know, like Sailor Moon cannot function without Sailor Moon, it’s that kind of story.
Whereas, Heero is very, very good, but you kind of get the impression that, if it all went south, if Heero copped it in that first episode, if he punched the button on his spacesuit and actually blew himself to smithereens, and that was it, and they were like, “Well, we’ve got a dead guy on a beach,” the show could go on. It wouldn’t be as good, and the others would certainly have a harder time of things, but it wouldn’t be impossible, so, I think what I’m trying to say is that even from the outset, the show is unusual and complex on a number of levels. And certainly it does seem to make this sort of departure way from these stereotypical first episode rubrics.
[musical interlude]
So, I’m just going to round up with a few things that I picked up on as I was rewatching the episode. It’d be great to hear what else you have picked up on, if there’s something that kind of struck you second time round.
I really love that the first thing you see of life in space is this curved landscape of the inside of a colony. I don’t know if anybody out there has also seen “Interstellar”? It came out, oh, back in 2014 I think. But that image is just so ingrained now into the general kind of visual schemata of colony life in space. I really love that. I’m not saying that Gundam Wing particularly innovated that, or spread it around, but I love that there’s this kind of: 1995, we had that image, 2014, we still kind of have that image of what life could look like in space. I think that’s actually quite a nice little nod.
We often talk about how Gundam Wing is very anachronistic. It looks fricking old fashioned with their floppy disks and big fat monitors. But actually in some ways the science is pretty good, and certainly reading Mobile Suit Gundam, you can see that, despite the fact it’s pilot came out in the 70s, would have been the original series, or early 80s? (EDIT: According to wikipedia, it piloted in 1979 and finished airing in 1980) There was also a lot of thought put into what life would be like in future.
Another thing I didn’t really appreciate before is that Heero was heading to Thailand. That completely escaped me. He was off to eastern Eurasia, and they kind of pinpoint Thailand as his target for where he’s going to initially land on Earth. He then ends up into JAP Point Asia Area, so they kind of send him off to Japan, which is where Relena’s at school. Which I found also quite curious, because I just assumed that her school then and the Sanq Kingdom were roughly in the same place, but evidently not.
The next thing I really liked was that when we see Vice Foreign Minister Darlian’s shuttle land, it lands at this space port. I especially love this because I know that Kansai Airport was completed roughly around the same time as they were making Gundam Wing, and it looks similar. If you’re not familiar with Kansai Airport, it is kind of unique. It’s a huge feat of engineering because it’s built on a man-made island and it is very, very eerie when you land. If you don’t like flying, you will not like it because you cannot see the runway as you’re coming down. You’re looking out the window and it looks like the pilot’s gone insane and he’s just gonna plow you into the ocean. So yeah, I really love that there’s this kind of little nod to a sentiment of ‘this is what we’re doing as engineers and as scientists on Earth and this is kind of what the future will look like’.
So just a few points on language that I picked up with the translations. When Zechs is fights Heero for the first time, he refers to it as “omoshiroi,”(おもしろい・面白い） which is translated in the English version, or at least the English subtitles, as “reckless.” “Omoshiroi” is a really complex word in Japanese because it means so many different things depending on the context. It can mean, “that’s interesting,” it can mean, “that’s funny.” (Edit: It can even mean ‘that’s weird’.) So, it’s not a direct translation to reckless. He’s not actually saying that. He’s kind of just like, his interest is peaked in some way, and I think it is because Heero’s being reckless, but that’s not actually what he’s saying. It’s not necessarily a criticism the way that the English presents it.
Relena is pretty formal and polite, as you might expect, so it’s worth running through the different ways you can say “I” in Japanese, because in English we really only have one way to say “I.” I suppose you could say “one” or you could use the royal “we,” but it’s very rare that you meet someone who goes around being like, “Oh yes, one likes this. One does that,” or that uses we on a sort of frequent basis, other than perhaps the Queen herself.
So you have “watashi,” (私・わたし） which is the standard “I.” “Boku,”（僕・ぼく） which is kind of a more boyish ‘I’; it’s less formal. You will get some younger women using this as well, but it does have that kind of boyish connotation. You have “ore” (俺・おれ), which is much more masculine. It’s definitely one that guys use. It’s not something that you hear a lot of women using. It has the kind of connotation of bigging yourself up, like you think you are THE BUSINESS if you use “ore.” It’s not something that you hear in quite formal situations. So you wouldn’t go into a business meeting introduce yourself using “ore” unless you were the absolute head honcho and you could get away with it because otherwise it would make you look bad.
And interestingly, Wufei uses “ore.” That’s his pronoun, that’s the one he uses to refer to himself. Wufei has an excellent opinion of his own self esteem, and this boy in Episode 1 is not lacking in confidence. And Duo doesn’t use any pronoun. He just says, “kochi wa Duo,” (こっちは） like “this thing/one here is Duo.” He’s just ‘kochi’, which is quite casual. He’s quite slangy, he’s quite fast.
I also thing it’s interesting that when [Relena] pulls Heero’s helmet off, she actually says “Mada kodomo nano ni,” (まだ子供なのに） which, “mada”（まだ） is “still,” “kodomo” （子供・こども）means “child,” so she’s not saying “oh, it’s a boy,” or “it’s just a boy.” She actually says, “oh, he’s a child!” Which I think is kind of an interesting distinction. I used to teach 15-16 year olds in Japan, and okay these were nice kids, they were from nice families, but they would refer to themselves as children. I certainly know that the attitude that I grew up with, あand my peers grew up with, was very much like Ariel in The Little Mermaid when she’s like, “I’m 16, I’m not a child, daddy!”. So I think that’s a sort of interesting cultural difference there when she says, “oh, he’s still a child.”
The last word that’s very similar to “omoshiroi” which is very difficult to translate is “hidoi.”(酷い・ひどい） So Relena says “hidoi” referring to what Heero does at the end. “Hidoi” is kind of like, it’s negative. It can mean “that’s horrible” or “that’s harsh” or “that’s mean.” It can sound really childish or whiny depending on your tone of voice. You can use “hidoi” to mean like a “why are you picking on me?” kind of thing, or you can use it to really express sympathy. It’s a really complex word. And I think it kind of shows something about her character.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that at that stage when Heero rips up that invitation, Relena really, really represents everything he stands against as a Gundam pilot. She is Earth born, she’s rich, she’s the richest girl in school, she comes at him with this presumption that she can know him, that he owes her something, he owes her at least an explanation or his name, and she doesn’t really have a clue at that point. Or at least he thinks that she has no fricking idea. Relena is perhaps a little more clued up than she lets on and I think she does learn quite quickly, as well. She definitely is a figurehead for what the colonies resent about the Alliance and about Earth, even though she’s not OZ with a capital O.
And I think the last thing that I really noticed and I really loved was that at the end, where you get that final little run where they actually introduce the other Gundam pilots. So up till now it’s been Relena’s story, Heero is her mystery who turns up, and then finally at the end we get a little “Hey and how do?” from the others. And I kind of like how they’re introduced because the way they’re attacking really gives you an insight into their personalities.
So the first thing, we see Gundam Deathscythe, he’s attacking someone from behind, and then he says, “Kochi wa Duo,” and it’s like, “Surprise, motherfucker, here’s Duo!” It’s nice, it’s like that little Jack from ‘The Shining’ moment. And then at Dover, Trowa just walks in and blows shit to hell, he has zero subtlety. He’s just, “I’m gonna walk right in and unload my guns.” And then Quatre’s attack, he’s got this strategy to surround, and then he attempts to negotiate, and when it doesn’t work, he kills them. But that very much shows his style, and I quite like that they’re establishing these very different personalities. And then, obviously Wufei turns up and he’s like, “Ore wa Wufei,” and he just flames everything.
That’s about it, I think, for Episode 1. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you found that interesting; I hope it gave you something to think about. If you have comments, questions, suggestions, let me know. I will put a link to where you can find these episodes and how you can contact me. You can obviously always contact me at lemontrash.tumblr.com, I’m always there, drop me a message. Tag me on tumblr, I will keep an eye on things. Thank you, and I’ll see you in orbit next time. Bye!
[music]
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