Episode Four - The Footnotes

Hello Friendlies! This week, we look back on Episode 4 - The Victoria Nightmare. Listen to the podcast here.

Below is a copy of the transcript of this episode, created by the One-of-a-Kind Noirangetrois, and punctuated throughout with additional commentary by me in bold and in brackets (Edit: Like this!), plus a few corrections and additions where applicable. As always, if you have something to add, just get in touch! Hit 'Pineapple' on this website in the top bar, or contact me at lemontrash.tumblr.com :)

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Episode 4

Hey there and welcome back to Radio Meteor, the podcast where I watch an episode of 90s anime Gundam Wing and ramble about it, because the smaller the fandom, the nicer the people. This one’s for you.

Where are we? Episode 4, woo! What a gift. Let’s get into it.

[musical interlude]

So, episode 4, "Akumu no Bikutoria" (悪夢のビクトリア). “The Victoria Nightmare.” My god, what a gift of an episode. There’s just so much in this that’s so iconic and that I love so much. You have Noin flirting with Zechs. You have that terrible nightclub scene. You have Relena standing on a cliff shouting, “Come back and kill me!” You have Wufei shouting at hyenas. You have the duet with the violin and the flute. You have Heero stealing Gundam parts from Duo’s Deathscythe. It’s just so perfect.

I feel like episode 4, episode 5 is where you start to really establish whether or not you’re going to have people carry on watching whatever it is you’re producing. People will watch the first episode to see if they’ll like it. They’ll watch the second episode to see what happens next. Episode 3, 4, 5, that’s where you get that turn off. You need to keep it spicy, and I feel like they delivered. They definitely put some shit in, and narratively it’s very interesting.

Typically I have been talking a lot about translation and Japanese and what it means. Not much of that in this episode, for two reasons. (EDIT: This is a LIE and you should learn to ignore me when I say there isn’t much. There’s always plenty) One, there’s not much that I could pick up on that hasn’t already been picked to death already. There’s that whole conversation that Wufei has with Noin about, “oh, you’re just a woman,” and how poorly that was presented in the English. There’s some hairsplitting to be done there. It’s not that Wufei is perfect, he is kind of an ass. Ok he’s not kind of an ass, he is an ass. He has, shall we say, set a baseline from which he will grow. I think that’s the nicest way we can talk about Wufei here. But other than that there’s not much that was glaringly interesting in this episode.

The other reason I don’t have much to talk about on language is that Noin is freaking impossible to understand anything she says. My god, 50% of her speech, I was craning my ear toward the speaker, just hoping for clarity, but she’s a little bit lispy? Or slurry? I don’t know. I’m not really one to criticize your level of coherence while speaking. I don’t necessarily do that well myself, but oh. Noin is just so difficult to listen to. Genuinely a notch harder than Duo, which I didn’t expect to say because I think Duo is pretty damn difficult to listen to.

I think, though, if we have one word for an episode, or one language thing for an episode, for this one the word would be “amai.” （甘い・あまい） “Amai” is another of those really big awkward things to translate into English. We don’t really have a single word in English that really captures the sentiment, the feeling, the nuance of “amai” in Japanese. Taking it at its most basic level, “amai” means “sweet,” as in the flavor. So “amai mono”　（甘い物・あまいもの） would be “sweet things,” it would be candy, cake, all the good stuff. But on another level, “amai” comes up with this other set of meanings that get really convoluted, and hand on heart, I have to say that I don’t fully get it yet. This is something I’ve been learning for ten years and I still can’t really say I fully understand the concept of “amai” as a native Japanese speaker would get it. I’m not sure if it’s cultural exactly, or, well, it is cultural. I don’t know; it’s complicated as fuck. I will do my best to explain.

It has a somewhat negative connotation, I want to say. It also has this association with childhood. We’ve talked before about how the Gundam pilots are specifically perceived as children, and certainly that’s a big part of Noin’s confrontation with Wufei. She’s like, “oh my god! It’s a kid!” Despite the fact that she’s supposed to be 19, she’s barely out of nappies herself. But when you describe a person as “amai,” you can do it very critically, as in they’re completely naive, or that they’ve still got a lot to learn- that they don’t have the experience to really handle or understand a situation. That they’re a little bit childlike. It can mean that they are a little unrealistic in their understanding or their optimism, or something like that. It can also mean that they’re kind of indulgent or lenient, so when you call parents “amai,” they spoil their kids, they don’t really punish them as hard as they perhaps need it. There’s a lack of discipline there.

If you make it a verb, “amakusuru,”(甘くする・あまくする） where “suru”（する） is that ending that often makes things a verb, it means “to go easy on” or “to be soft” about something. You can do that from the other perspective as well. You can combine that to have meanings such as “to take something lightly” or as a lack of seriousness or weight to something, or that you are underestimating something, or making little of something. So that is the kind of context where we hear Wufei criticizing Noin. He says, “onna no ka,”　（女のか・おんなのか） as in, “oh, it’s a woman,” then “dakara amai,”　（だから甘い・だからあまい） so “that’s why you’re…” Well, the English puts it as “weak,” but I think it’s more like, “oh, so that’s why you’ve been going easy on me.” Because he’s very much already declared himself as an enemy. They’ve identified him as an enemy, but Noin doesn’t treat him as an enemy until after she literally sees him in the Gundam, swiping apart two of her soldiers, and kills them.

With that in mind, is he particularly to say, essentially, “you’re going way too easy on me. You’ve made my job way too easy.” Then he also says at the end, “I don’t kill bleeding hearts or women.” I feel like that is a reasonable translation there, but I don’t know if you would necessarily translate “amai” as “weak” in the way that the English criticism of “weak” comes about. What he’s essentially saying is, “you’ve already screwed up enough, to be honest, love.” I feel like Wufei comes with this very hard-to-read philosophy of battle. He has an expectation of what a fight should be like and what an opponent should be like, and if it doesn’t meet that criteria, then it’s not really a battle, and he’s not really facing an enemy. That does tie into his duel with Treize a lot more, where he goes into that and then Treize also lets him off, which then leads into further character development. But we’ll talk about that when that episode comes up.

And Noin forgets she’s got the comms turned on. She yik-yaks, she’s like, “oh my god, you’re a child, you’re barely…” This is the bit I couldn’t really make out. She says something along the lines of “kodomo shounen ne.” If somebody has the Japanese that she actually uses I’d be really interested to see it, because I listened and I listened and I listened and I couldn’t pick it apart. The English translates it as, “he’s practically a baby!” Which I think is perhaps slightly overkill, but I think the sentiment was there. She’s like, “my god, he’s young!”

At any rate, I find it really interesting (hehe, take a shot) that Noin says, or she’s criticized as being “amai,” but she also says about Zechs that, what’s translated in the English as, “oh, hurry up and come here and lean on me” or “rely on me.” She uses the word “amai” there in the Japanese as well. Again, I couldn’t really pick out precisely what she was saying, but she definitely uses the word “amai.” In that respect, that’s almost a boyfriend/girlfriend thing. It comes up in those sort of contexts, as in a “I want a guy who will spoil me a bit, or will look after me” sort of context. Typically, emotionally, but it can be in terms of what you do for them. So if you do his laundry, that would be “amai” to him, because that’s sort of the shit your mum does.

So there’s this funny triangle between various sets of characters with this concept. I think very much the theme of this episode could be boiled down to rational vs emotional. Zechs establishes himself as a very rational guy. He’s very cautious, he gathers data, he doesn’t like rumor, he doesn’t want his enemies to target him and turn up and make him have battles. He doesn’t want his own allies to get the wrong idea about him either. He’s very much Mr. “let me do my job, and leave me alone. Don’t want fame, don’t want fortune, just let me get on with the shit that I need to do.”

Noin is very much more representing something a bit more emotional. She genuinely cares about this that and the other. She’s got her philosophy. She’s got her beliefs. She’s got things that she really loves and that she cares about, which are in conflict with the kind of situation that she lives in. It raises this question of, who would these people be if they weren’t living in the situation they’re living in? Would Noin be a soldier if she wasn’t living in a world at war? If the people she cared about and really loved weren’t so embroiled in it? To be honest I think the answer would be no. Given the chance, she probably would have been somebody quite different. Zechs says, “a year and 22 days ago,” (which is how long since they’ve met) “You used to hate war and now you seem really gung ho about it.” But I think we can attribute that to the fact that she’s into him.

Noin really bothers me with her characterization. This need to be second best, not because she’s incapable, but because she wants to put other people ahead of her. She kind of does that the whole series through. She’s like Little Miss Wingman. She’s got your back, but at times she’s the kind of person where I’m like, “I love how you support me, thank you so much, you do so much that’s so good”, but I equally want to kick her ass and say, “Fight for yourself a little bit more!” Maybe that’s just me.

So as I said we get this sort of contrast the whole way through this episode between rational and emotional. So, Zechs and Noin, but then equally Noin versus Wufei, he’s very much more this sort of rational, hard-nosed soldier, even though he’s younger. Then equally on the flipside, we have Duo versus Heero. This is like the diet version of the theme, I think. Heero’s very much more like, “don’t touch my stuff, I’m gonna do the mission.” Clearly enjoys it because he laughs his head off. And then we jump over, just so they don’t feel left out, to Quatre and Trowa doing their violin and flute duet. I love how pissed off Trowa is about this. Nobody has forced him to do this, but he looks so annoyed playing his flute. I think in that situation, again, Quatre is the emotional and Trowa represents the rational. That I think is highly arguable. I’m not sure Trowa is as rational as he says, but he is very analytical, as I said in Episode 3. And he’s very judgy.

So we’re getting this theme again. I suppose it comes back to that previous thing they brought up, which is man versus machine, in addition to emotion versus logic. They go hard on that. They’re carrying that forward. I also forgot to mention, Treize and his popcorn bath is in this episode.

Like I said, this episode is just a massive fucking gift.

[musical interlude]

I suppose the last thing I want to talk about in this episode is that – and I remember distinctly when I watched this as a kid (I say kid. Teenager.), being kind of confused as to who I was supposed to be rooting for. In part that was because I hadn’t watched much nuanced story telling in cartoons before. There was a rut at the time in storytelling in animation that very much told you, “This is the bad guy. We don’t like them. This is the good guy. Big thumbs up.” There was no questioning that. You never questioned whether or not you should like the bad guy, or whether the good guys were right in what they were doing.

I feel this episode, even though it’s the one where Wufei is introduced properly, it does it very, very unsympathetically. He’s very much set up as the character that they’re using to suggest or imply that maybe the Gundams aren’t heroes, or that maybe they’re gonna get shit wrong, and we know they do, in future. He’s got quite a creepy introduction, actually. He doesn’t say anything for most of the episode. Then he’s just kind of mean. There’s not a lot to like about him. Whereas we get more of a mystery character with Heero, we get the cute guy with Quatre, we get the funny guy with Duo. Trowa is, well, I guess he’s just Trowa, isn’t he? There’s something gonna go on there. Then he gets put in with Quatre quite quickly, so a “good guy” by association.

But Wufei is very much on his own, and he’s very much a butt. I think it’s reasonable that he ends up kind of unpopular. Plus, this episode plays heavily on sympathy for the enemy. It’s very much more an episode about Zechs and Noin, and we get a little bit more insight into them. That Zechs perhaps isn’t all that he appears and that he’s not particularly thrilled with the Alliance. The Alliance is essentially the mustachio-twisting villains of the show. They are not good guys; we are not supposed to like them. And we’re not supposed to agree with them, and we don’t, and it’s easy not to.

We know that Zechs is working to undermine that, him and Treize together. We’re pretty sure Treize is an enemy, but there’s this question mark over where Zechs and Noin fit into this complicated puzzle. If I’d been asked where i thought this was going, I could quite easily say, “I think these are the characters who are going to default over and be on the good side.” Particularly Noin. Zechs perhaps not so much, but again, good guy by association. If Noin comes over to the good side, maybe that’s where it’s going.

We also learn that the Alliance is pretty damn sloppy. They have this base with crap security; they make these pretty poor assumptions based out of arrogance about their own safety, and evidently, that’s a mistake.

I think I’m going to leave it there. Other people have discussed whether or not Wufei is as misogynistic as he implies, quite what he means when he calls Noin weak. I think that’s been discussed a lot on other places. I think I’m going to leave Relena’s “come back and kill me” comment as well; I think that’s something else that’s been discussed heavily. We may touch on this in future episodes.

So that’s my take on Episode 4. Love it! Freaking legendary. It’s got so much in it that, as I said, it’s just iconic, and memeable, and that I love. I hope you all have a lovely evening, or morning, wherever you are, and that one day in your life, you get to have a popcorn bath, if you’re into that.

At any rate, this has been Radio Meteor. It’s been great. Thanks for listening to me, and I hope to see you in orbit next time.

[music]