You don't need giant robots? [RANT]

Then what about Mazinger Z Re-Telling, who's entire story is based around the Mazinger? Or Getter Robo, who's existence alone causes harms to the Dinosaur empire?

Sure, the plot is important but in a lot of good mecha series (Kannazuki no Miko is more yuri-abuse with a mecha added at the last minute), either halves don't work well without the either. Without humanoid mobile suits, the sword fight between Char and Amuro wouldn't be as meaningful about Newtypes still being physically human.
 
I still liked 0083, and there is some character development, not heavly influenced but its there.

Yea, that girl had to go. But she did serve a good purpose in the movie, to be annoying and hated, and how her spoiled personality led to her death

Its stupid to have a series named after a mech, and NOT HAVE THE MECH IN IT!!! Why would Amuro pilot a tank, thats just stupid.

It wouldnt be called Mobile Suit Gundam, more like Mobile Tank Sherman. Thats why theres Dominion Tank Police, a great OVA about police officers with tanks, pretty good.

Yea ill admit, mechs in a since dont serve a purpose depending on the battle, but at the same time do serve a purpose. There big, so you can use them as a "tank" in the battle to draw the enemy to that, and of course, with bigger weapons mean bigger destruction, so its going to be easier to take down a battleship than with a regular machine gun.

There still cool and always be cool, i dont care what anyone says, including GunHeart...
 
A good mecha show makes the mecha a seamless and integral part of the show. Getter Robo wouldn't have done anything without the titular triple changer, and let's face facts, GaoGaiGar and Gurren Lagann as mere shounens instead of the madcap mecha frenzies they were would have been fail as opposed to epic win.

Mecha being tacked on is bad writing. Plain and simple. And no amount of mecha action can make a bad story good.
 
this seems like a pointless argument. saying Gundams & mechs are immpractiacal & unrealistic...well Yea...ITS A BLOODY SCI-FI CARTOON! CARTOON!!! The laws of Physics' reality & so much more as we all know do not apply to animation!

A mech can be useful in a anime because its animated, Good lord people willl Complain about mechs, but not Lil Pirate kiRAB who can Stretch there arms fatrher then Mr. Fantastic, or People Shooting Energy blasts straight out of there hanRAB...C'mon people, your Just being Silly.

If you don't like Mechs fine, but don't try to compare them to real life battle situations!
 
You could take any genre, strip away various conventions, and still have something as good or bad as the original - Greek Tragedy without Greece, Shakespeare without the old language or trappings of the traditional settings, a Western that doesn't take place in the Old West, a Film Noir shot in broad daylight with full color in the miRABt of the 70's, and yes, even a giant robot show without giant robots. So no, I don't need giant robots. However, conventions exist for a reason, even if for nothing more than sheer OMG awesomeness. That's all the justification required.

--Romey
 
The problem is that a lot of shows want to be comparable to real life battle situations. In which case the impracticability of giant robots is difficult to ignore, dramatic value aside.

Most of the time I don't care so long as the story is told well. But you can hardly blame someone who is put off by the mecha subgenre when this happens.
 
I wouldn't say robots are inherently unnecessary, but they don't need to be the main attraction or, even if they are, their presence and treatement doesn't necessarily say anything "good" or "bad" about the rest of the show.

There are more than enough mecha series out there with plenty of great robot action and...little else. The opposite is also true.

It is quite possible to make mecha action and plot complement each other very well, which is great, but they can also interact in very different ways without being in complete harmony. I may watch certain shows mainly because of the mecha, but sometimes it can be the other way around or just somewhere in between. There's room for a lot of variation.
 
The problem is that these same people often don't have a problem with starfighters that behave like fighter jets, space corabat done at visual range, slow moving energy weapons, complete disregard for any real military tactics...

So in the end, it's a pretty big case of hypocrisy.
 
I don't think Minovsky particles block out passive detection (ie. telescopes and infrared scanners).

So why don't they put it on a larger tank, like a land battleship? Gundam has no problems with Land Battleships.

So put a reactor in a larger fighter or tank. There are also numerous problems about the humanoid shape, but I can't remeraber the exact problems.

So if production is so easy, why not make smaller, easier, more numerous tanks or fighters which use less material than a mech?

But enough with the details and back on topic. Admittedly, Tomino actually thought out the major issues of making a battlefield were gaint mecha would dominate. He gave a decent explanation, enough to create a suspension of disbelief.

Most of these technical issues have been brought up by general sf fans. Often, such a debate occurs when someone begins to consider if real-life mecha are feasible. They begin to point out the flaws of actually fielding them.

Of course, I think both sides are missing the point. The point is that Mecha = Fun and Cool.

(The smae thing actually goes for space fighters. There's been debates against those as well).
 
Wouldn't it make more sense to have an even stable plot then put the mechs in? Putting the mechs front and center just makes it scream "toy commercial!"
 
The issue is actually with the Suspension of Disbelief.

A old saying goes like this: "You can believe in time-travel, you can believe in dragons, but time-traveling dragons is stretching it."

Basically, one can suspend their disbelief of space fighters and FTL warships. But for some people, a gaint robot set in a realistic setting just spoils it. This has to do with two things. One, the techical issues, which I already adressed. Two, the cultural differences.

When Gundam came out, Japan had decades of exposure to robots in their media. The Japanese had no problem in beliving in Real Gaint Robots. In America, this isn't the case. Hard core SF fans have difficultly believing in mecha.
 
There is the problem to consider that execution is in some ways more important than the story itself. Often times, the genre conventions are part of said execution. You could possibly set Star Wars during World War I, but would you really want to? Much of the story and set pieces would have to be completely rewritten to match the setting, and the Jedi aspect would have to be dropped completely without bringing in another fantastical aspect to the plot.
 
....they are toy commercials, only with a plot to them, sure, its always better to have a good plot, but the whole point of these shows is usually the giant robots, so it does have to be in the front and center.
 
It's kinda funny whenever I see people claim that the titular Big-O was some kind of last minute addition, when in fact it was the whole point of the series and the film noir angle was built around it (hell, I think it's a shame the toys it was meant to sell never got released). Hell, in most cases, regardless of the quality of the story, it's the concept that comes first, than the actual plotline.
 
Which is far from radar that would make the mobile suits obsolete. If you have to visualize things in space, you're screwed to begin with. Heck, Gundam 00 went the same direction a-la Solar Particles.



Remeraber the battle of Loum? Char took out 5 battleships with one Zaku. And shown in the CG series, this included Heat Axe and various explosives to the bridge. There's really no point in slapping it when it doesn't fix the reliance of a vulnerable bridge. The closest thing to it are the Pegasus Class (Like White Base). Even despite SEED's blahness, their comment on the "age of battleships over" reflects this.



Except there's no room without severely handicapping the speed of a jet, As for a tank, considering how they're such easy targets, it'd make it much easier to take out a whole platoon unless they solo, and tanks are not solo machines. The humanoid body has multiple advantages, including a near circular rotation on each arm for aiming, and legs that can move in any direction instead of adding more thrusters.

Space fighters are actually useless compared to a mobile suit that has a full 360 degree firing range on a dime.
 
Actually, space detection is preety easy. Check out the details here:
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3w.html


I'm not talking about Space Battleships, I'm talking Galoop-esque machines with tons of weaponry attached to it. Something like this.


Then you make it into a boraber or close air support craft.


Neither are Mobile Suits. They need support from Assault ships, or they lose their advantages.


Which could be done just as easy with turrets or swivels.


If the fighters act like an X-wing, then yes.

But otherwise, in space, a fighter could just just spin on its axis and shoot the person from behind. In space, a spacecraft doesn't have to have it's nose pointed in the direction its traveling. Once it gets going, it can keep on going in one direction forever, with the avility to manuver about its axis.
 
I'd have to agree that a lot of the "anti-mecha" argument boils down to pure hypocrisy. It's not a matter of "time-traveling dragons", it's a matter of something fundamentally alien in a setting. We simply don't have giant robots in the real world, and to an annoying nuraber of people, this seems enough to damn the entire idea. It's why starfighters are so readily accepted, or "space truckers"; hell, you could even find some way to rationalize a tank in outer space and it wouldn't provoke the same knee-jerk reaction, because these are all things we have in real life...IN SPACE!

What I'm seeing is a kind of pop cultural Luddism. Giant robots are no more "impractical" than fighter jets IN SPACE!, or battleships IN SPACE!, or infantry IN SPACE!. What drives people nuts is the simple fact that they have no direct real-world analogue (yet), and unable to express this thought clearly, they encapsulate their irrational reaction in a faux-intellectual statement.

I mean, really. Jules Verne put a man on the moon with a cannon. If you suggested to him that you could put a man in a giant metal phallus packed with fuel and ignite the contraption in such a way that it would launch into orbit, he might have laughed. H. G. Wells would have looked at you strangely if you suggested his Time Traveler might find himself unable to return to the same future he left: quantum mechanics hadn't been discovered yet. Arthur C. Clarke described an office in 2001 as being fully equipped with typewriters, for crying out loud. What seems pure fantasy today may become reality tomorrow: after all, Star Trek had pocket-sized flip-top voice communication devices (cell phones) and music via computer (MP3) long before such innovations became commonplace.

With the matter of "impracticality" and "suspension of disbelief" hopefully laid to rest, let's return to the issue of "robot shows as toy commercial". Of course robot series are made to sell merchandise. It's why television shows are made in the first place. No network exec or sponsor ever looked at a series and said "hey, this is a great story, people should see this": what they say is instead "hey, this show looks like it'll sell lots of merch or advertising space, let's put it on the airwaves". It's a brutal truth that permeates all media: people don't typically make shows or write books or compose music or develop games to fulfill some grandiose artistic ideal, they do it because it pays the bills. And if that's the only reason, then yes, you end up with soulless, mass-produced crap.

But not every series, mecha or otherwise, starts with "hey, let's make a show to sell toys/advertising space". Some do indeed start with "hey, let's tell a story and try to sell it to the network", or "hey, I have this really cool idea for something no one's ever done before..." Money may provide motivation, but it's not always the initial impetus behind a story. And before you say "why can't the story be told without giant robots?", I think I've already well-explained that there are things you can do with a giant robot story that you can't in other settings. Could you write a story concerning a war spanning a fantasy continent approximately the size of Europe, set in a world at an approximately medieval-era level of technology, where the plot hinges on quick and efficient communication between factions through plausible real-world means? Of course not; you'd have to either rewrite your story or change your setting. What about a story set in a far-flung Information Age future where everything is connected through the Internet and all information is readily accessible from any terminal, yet the protagonists must race against time to find the text of a mysterious piece of folklore? Again, either change the plot or the setting. (It's worth noting that .hack actually has almost precisely that exact storyline, but its means of handwaving why "The Epitaph of Twilight" is nowhere to be found is somewhat unsatisfying.) Giant robots allow characters to remain both anonymous and yet unmistakable, they're human enough in appearance for audiences to connect with them, and they can evoke a certain kind of primal awe: you couldn't have Setsuna F. Seiei in a world without Gundams. (Imagine the sheer ridiculousness of having a character convinced that a tank or a fighter jet was the closest thing in the world to God. Talk about suspension of disbelief problems.)

A giant robot story is intrinsically a giant robot story: yes, this hearkens back to "Gundam is Gundam because it has Gundams" or however the rebuttal went, but hear me out. Giant robots offer the aforementioned storytelling opportunities, but they are also a stylistic choice that affects the entirety of the work in question: you can't change a giant robot series into a non-giant robot series any more than you can set a space opera in the Middle Ages or recast a tale set in Babylon to take place in New York City. It's possible, but things will inevitably get lost in the transition - often good things - and the end result is almost inevitably not worth the effort. Imagine someone who hates the idea of incredibly human robots in fiction: you could theoretically change Blade Runner to appeal better to this individual's worldview, but would it necessarily be better as a result?

Conversely, you can't just randomly decide to drop giant robots into a setting and expect to make a giant robot story any more than you can randomly decide to put apples in a blueberry pie and get away with calling it an apple pie. Some people might appreciate the resulting concoction nonetheless, but others would be well within their rights to say "this would've been better if you hadn't changed your mind at the last second."
 
You're right that it seems hyprocritical that people would complain about mechs while still liking space fighters.

But consider that Space fighters, space warships, and even space borne infantry are easier to believe than space mecha is more or less due to cost-benefit, science, and military analysis.

To some, Mecha's advantages wouldn't be worth its costs, and it boggles the scientific mind in how complicated a machine would be.

Ironically, space fighters are now runing into the same problem.

Edit: Also of some historical note, I posted a thread about Justifying Mecha in stories.
 
I'm well aware that giant robots are impractical; my point was that such impracticalities are moot from a storytelling standpoint and their potential (potential!) benefits typically outweigh the strain they put on suspension of disbelief. I'd even go so far as to argue that at larger scales, a purely land-bound mecha would indeed have all the failings that are usually attributed to the concept.

Though if through some miracle of unobtainium you could get one to fly and fly well...
 
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