Upcoming convention appearances: Flights of Foundry (April 14-16, 2023)

With the new year comes a new convention season. Since I'm in Europe now, I miss out on all the cons in North America, because I can't afford to fly over multiple times a year. I'm not quite connected enough here yet to find out about European cons (and also too broke to travel anyway), so I'm so glad that Dream Foundry continues to run the best online con so far, Flights of Foundry. I'm on approximately a million panels this year and running a workshop (please sign up in the lottery!)

Because FoF operates round the clock in all timezones, panel times are given as slot numbers, so here's my (probably final) schedule, given with time in UTC.

Regular sessions

0 (5-6 pm UTC 14 April) Language politics in the arts industries (new time)

1 (6-7 pm UTC 14 April) How to Find Translators

15 (8-9 am UTC 15 April) What makes a work a good candidate for translation?

17 (10-11 am UTC 15 April) Feminist translations

41 (10-11 am UTC 16 April) My first translation (mod)

44 (1-2 pm UTC 16 April) Language politics in the arts industries

45 (2-3 pm UTC 16 April) Reading - come hear the beginning of my "Waffle House in space, asexual lesbian SF romance" novel (aka "the DS9 coffeeshop AU novel")

46 (3-4 pm UTC 16 April) Linguistics primer for creatives

49 (6-7 pm UTC 16 April) What's the word? How to get unstuck as a translator

Lotteried sessions

3  (8-9 pm UTC 14 April) chill n chat (come hang out with me! I'll probably ramble about verbs or something)

20-24  (1-5 pm UTC 15 April) (4 hours; max 16 ppl) Linguistic world building Want your world's made-up words and names to sound realistic and internally consistent, but don't know your glottal stops from your lateral fricatives? Want to ensure your nonhuman species can actually make the sounds you're putting in their vocal tracts? In this workshop, you'll learn basic concepts of phonetics and sociolinguistics, as well as how to apply them when creating your setting and the characters who live in it. This is not a workshop for creating a conlang.

See you (virtually) there!

"That's too expensive": a mini rant

 I've been too burned by The Discourse on twitter not to include the following disclaimer for something so incredibly obvious it shouldn't need to be stated: the following discussion does not refer to people on limited budgets.

So. There's this habit among Germans to look for the best Preis-Leistungsverhältnis, which literally translated is roughly the relationship between cost and what you get out of it. Price-performance ratio, maybe. Cost-benefit analysis isn't quite right, but you get the drift.

This isn't limited to the Germans, of course! I think everyone who buys something wants to get the best value for their money. But I've encountered the specific attitude I'm irritated about far more here in Germany than back in the US, and I grew up with a single mom who was a secretary. (i.e. we were working poor. A lot of things were out of our budget.)

I adopted a cat from Ukraine, so I've been looking for all the cat things I don't have anymore. I wanted to get a name tag for her collar (and a collar), and I ended up searching at Amazon, where I also looked for a couple other things that were useful for me. (I personally prefer to avoid Amazon if at all possible, but sometimes it's the easiest option because of the extreme siloing of German stores. Which is another mini-rant in itself.) I forget what specific item I was looking at, it might have been eyeglass cases because mine broke and I wanted to replace it, but there were always reviews for the items that were "It was 5 Euro too expensive" or "I wouldn't pay that much again for this."

Granted, on Amazon, a lot of what you'll get is cheap plastic crap, and sometimes the cheap plastic crap is overpriced for something that'll break in five minutes. And the reviews mentioned above also included phrases like "cheap plastic crap." But not everyone was so displeased with the same thing, so I ordered the glasses case that one guy complained had "lumps in the outside material already when it arrived" so it was basically shit. (There is indeed a bit of lumpiness around the hinge, but who cares? It's not structural.)

So some of the Preis-Leistungsverhältnis can be chalked up to different definitions of value for the money. Does it hold my glasses? Great. Does it keep them from getting smashed in my bag? Excellent. I got what I paid for.

I'm going to add a caveat here that it's not exactly true anymore that more expensive equals better quality, especially for clothing. My old roommate in Georgia is a fashion studies PhD student, so I've heard so much about the fashion and textile industries, especially the $$$$ brands. But it's still true often enough that I expect a $150 pair of shoes to last longer than a $15 pair of shoes. (Obligatory "Sam Vimes Boots theory of economics" reference here.)

The following situations are not made up. I either witnessed them first-hand or was a participant in them.

Last year, I got a little into hiking, and my regular gym shoes weren't cutting it anymore. I'm not a hardcore hiker or anything; I'm not going to the mountains on a regular basis and definitely not in the snow. So I wanted to get low-end, quality hiking shoes. There's a sporting goods chain here called Decathlon, which is sort of like Dick's, so I poked around their website for their options. They have their own store brands, which are inexpensive, but I wasn't sure about the quality. So when I saw that they stocked a Merrell hiking shoe, and it was only 78 Euro, I snapped it up. I've always had good experiences with Merrell, and their low-end hiking shoe was well suited to my needs ("hiking" in Berlin is actually "going on long walks in the forest," because it's very flat here.)

Then I brought them home and mentioned it to my then-roommate, who said that was really expensive and promptly showed me the Lidl-brand hiking boots she'd acquired for 35 Euro (and which lived in their box in her shoe cabinet). Sure, they were warm and insulated and supported the ankle by being boots, but they're cheap plastic crap.

Earlier this year, I went to o-hanami with a friend (there's a cherry tree avenue that was planted by NHK) and we went into a shoe store afterward because there was a particular pair she wanted to try. I really like shoes, and I ended up leaving with a pair of not-exactly-olive-green leather peep-toe sandals with an ankle strap and a slight heel for 100 Euro. (The brand is Think! and they follow sustainable practices to make their leather.) That's a pretty normal price IMO for a pair of slightly dressy sandals, and I think it's half what I paid for my Danskos ten fifteen years ago. I have a pair of Keen sandals I bought when I started my MA program in Georgia, and I wore them to death. They were my "dress" sandals, the ones I wore when I was teaching and a pair of Tevas wasn't appropriate. I think they were $90 in 2016. I still have them! They were in storage until recently, so I haven't worn them in a while, but they still work.

Then I wore the new sandals and left them on the shoe mat by the front door, and my then-roommate once again said, "Think! sandals! Weren't they really expensive?" I was just like "sure, I guess?" because I didn't want to have to deal with it or her.

(I have six pairs of Fluevog shoes. I bought them on sale, but they were still a lot of money. And one pair was preorder only, so I paid full price, which was about half a new smartphone. One pair of boots I wear so much I had to get them resoled. And I just spent 300 Euros on a pair of knee high winter boots. So that's my footwear baseline. I grew up on Payless shoes, okay, and those are absolute shit, kill your feet in five minutes, have to replace them every nine months. Shoes are my fashion vice, and I would rather pay more for shoes that don't hurt my feet. And Fluevog makes 2-3" heels that I can stand in for hours, so fuck yes, I'll pay $200 for them, thanks.)

My ex-roommate also said things like "I bought a frozen pizza at the store and it was 4 Euro and that's too expensive. I also think paying 10 Euro for a pizza in a restaurant is too expensive." (I am so glad to be out of her apartment, for so many reasons.)

Just last week I was at a winter market where people were selling their handmade goods, from art prints to ceramics to fiber arts. A friend from roller derby is a ceramic artist, and I wanted to get two more little tart ramekins for my tart ramekin army. (I have 4 now; I want to have a set of 6 eventually. They're really cute, little pastels with polka dots like some 50s retro cuteness. They're 10 Euro each.) A guy comes up and looks at her plates. He picks one up and asks the price. It's an 8" or so plate, handmade, with a hand-painted design on it. It's 25 Euro. He asks about a different plate, a dinner plate, and it's 45 Euro. He makes some comment about the bigger plate not being twice as big as the smaller plate, as if they ought to be priced by the square centimeter or something. Then he says it's too expensive and wanders off.

So now we reach the point of this entire post: "it's too expensive" means "I don't think you, the artist or person who created this item, deserve to be paid fairly for your work. I don't believe you deserve to eat or pay rent or buy your materials." It also means "I don't believe factory workers deserve a fair wage, and I definitely don't believe the price should include external costs like environmental costs. I believe that the cost to me should be as low as possible, no matter who gets fucked along the way." [Please see obligatory disclaimer at the top of the post. Thank you.]

Modern society (and capitalism) has got us so far separated from the source of our things that we don't truly understand that there are people on the other end of the equation. Our comfort is the only thing that matters, not that some factory somewhere is employing people for a dollar a day and dumping waste into the local river so we can get our 35 € hiking boots.

The only way to change this attitude is to change society, and I unfortunately don't see that happening any time soon, what with Amazon inventing a holiday for the sole purpose of getting people to buy things they don't need (Prime Day).

The Batman (2022)

 I took a trip back to the US to visit friends and family, and one of the entertainment options on my flight was The Batman. Of the people I know who have similar taste as me, most of them said it was good, and I figured I could plug my headphones in and watch it before it was time for me to nap. (My number-one transatlantic flight tip is "sleep as much as you can," and I stand by that.)

The plot was basically any old Batman movie, with villains and Dick Gordon and Alfred and bat-gadgets and all that shit. Bats has to figure out who's targeting prominent politicians and police folks and why, and the villain (Riddler) leaves him clues at every murder scene. He's also trying to help Selina Kyle find her friend, without letting her know he's Bruce Wayne. (not-a-spoiler: The Gotham PD is corrupt.)

What makes it different is a couple things. First, Bruce Wayne is clinically depressed. He has stopped giving a shit about basically everything except being a vigilante. Alfred tries to help him out of it, with limited success. You might think this would make for a bad/boring/whatever Bats movie, but it adds to the noir ambience. Robert Pattinson is a better actor than a lot of people give him credit for, and he really made Bruce a haggard vigilante who had no more fucks to give.

Second, and I think most importantly, the film explicitly depicts what happens when you get a vigilante going around: more vigilantes. The film shows how easy it is for someone (Riddler) to radicalize a group of disaffected white men over the internet. It's the alt-right/Jan6/Q conspiracy milieu in clear text, on screen. When Bruce realizes the role he played in this, he has a moment of crisis.

Normally I complain about how movies these days are all grey and dark, but I think in this case it worked. The noir ambience and all. (I do miss bright color in film, though. Bring back the gaudy colors of Pacific Rim!)

Anyway, I liked it and would like to watch it again on a bigger screen.

Some books I've read and liked recently

Because word of mouth is the best advertising for books, I'm going to talk about some books I've read and enjoyed.

Clutter, Jennifer Howard (2021). Nonfiction. This is part memoir, part history of consumerism. Howard had to clean out her parents' home after their deaths (or moving into assisted living, I forget), and she weaves her story in with the modern history of consumerist capitalism. It's the type of book that if done wrong would end up being preachy and judgmental, but fortunately it didn't turn out that way. There are strong indictments of industry and consumerism, yes, but not of the people who live under it. She also casts a side-eye on the organizational products industry, because clearly the solution to having too much stuff is to buy more stuff to store the stuff, rather than ... stop accumulating so much stuff.

When I read this book last year, my mother had recently died, so my sister and I were dealing with all the stuff in her house and what to do with it. I was also frantically sorting and reorganizing my worldly belongings as I prepared to ship them to Germany (or shove them in my checked luggage). It was a very timely read for me, and I had a lot of moments of recognition as I read it. With the popularity of Marie Kondo and the growing number of Gen Xers whose Boomer parents are downsizing or dying and who are being stuck dealing with huge pieces of furniture that they don't have space for (for example), it's a very relevant and timely read for pretty much anyone.

(Note: I learned about this book from the blogger/podcaster Gin & Tacos, aka Ed Burmila, and it was an insta-buy, because I liked the last book he recommended, which was Combat-Ready Kitchen, which was a history of how the military-industrial complex led to pretty much all our modern convenience foods. Powdered cheese was invented to be sent to soldiers and reconstituted in their field rations. It didn't work very well, but it turned out to make a great sauce if you mixed it with liquid and fat. Cling wrap, granola bars, improved canning techniques... all of it stems from military research into feeding soldiers more efficiently. Great book.)

Das Doppelte Grab, Margarethe von Schwarzkopf (2021). This is an amateur detective novel set in Cologne, where the protagonist, an art historian, stumbles upon a grave in her deceased godmother's basement while she's renovating the house to be sold. Then, once that one is taken out of the basement by the police, they find ANOTHER, much older skeleton - from the Roman era. Family history, conspiracy theories, the Teutoburger Forest, monks, coin thieves, and double dealing -- this book has it all. I bought it because I wanted to read something not-serious that wasn't translated from English, which an unfortunate majority of YA & SFF books are. Germans LOVE detective novels, and there are tons of them written in German. Judging by the little postcard that was in the book, there are detective novels set in [insert your favorite city here], and you can get a list of titles by sending in to the publisher.

Son of the Storm, Suyi Davies Okungboye (2021). Twitter was all about this book last year, and I added it to my ebook collection at some point. I didn't get around to reading it until the end of the year (literally; it's in my book log as December 31.) I didn't write down anything useful about the plot in my book log (gj, past me), but I noted that there were themes of colorism (all the MCs are black, but people's social value is based on the shade of their skin) and how people react to oppression. The MC, Danso, is a scholar, and he's engaged to an heiress to a rich/prominent family. He is of mixed heritage and is therefore lower in social status. But he's really interested in what's outside the borders of their empire, and he ends up getting tangled in a mess of forbidden magic and secrets the priests don't want people to know. I'm looking forward to the sequel!

The Unbroken, C.L. Clark (2021). This was another of the twitter-buzz books of 2021, but it was on my wishlist until there was a sale. (I don't really have any steady income. I am really bad at the freelancer hustle.) So anyway. This is a military fantasy set in an empire. The MC, Touraine, was stolen from her family as a child, as the empire does when they need conscripts for their army. Touraine is from a desert region subjugated to the empire, and her unit is taken there to suppress a nascent rebellion. Her unit, which is made up entirely of people who were stolen from this desert as children, taken to the heart of the empire, and inculcated with imperial values. Touraine believes in the empire and wants to be a good soldier, get promoted, and take care of her unit - but she faces prejudice every step of the way.

Shortly after they arrive in the desert and escort the princess (who is dealing with her own garbage uncle's usurpation) into the garrison, Touraine thwarts an attempted assassination. As a reward, the princess has Touraine be the executioner (I know, some reward), but one of the rebels recognizes her. This haunts her and eventually leads to her confronting a childhood she barely remembers. Then Touraine is framed for murder, and she has to convince an imperial military that is prejudiced against her that she's innocent.

It's a profoundly angry book, in a good way. Touraine's naïveté repeatedly runs up against cold reality until she understands that no, the empire will never accept her. She has to balance her desire to protect her unit, her growing anger at the empire and ties to the rebels, and her love affair with the princess. I can't wait for the sequel.

Iron Widow, Xiran Jay Zhao (2021). I saw early promo of this on twitter that compared it to a lot of things I like, so it was on my radar. Then Zhao made a little TikTok where they said that the battle scenes read like DragonBall fights with mecha furries, and I was like "lol wtf, I definitely need to read this." So I put myself on the waiting list at the Berlin public library. 

The army uses giant robots to fight other giant robots from the enemy country. These robots are powered by two people, always a man and a woman (his concubine). The man is the main pilot, but he draws additional fighting power from the woman, who stands a good chance of being killed in the process. The MC wants to get revenge for her sister, who died in this way. So she signs up to become a concubine and intends to kill the pilot who killed her sister. She's about to stab him when there's an emergency scramble, and she has to go with him to his robot. She does dragonball magic stuff and kills the pilot. This gets her branded an Iron Widow - a concubine who is stronger than her 'husband' - and paired with the most deadly pilot in the system, because the hierarchy (patriarchy) can't have a powerful female pilot going around and disproving all the sexism they've built into the pilot system.

It's a cracking great read. It's got everything: wuxia tropes, giant robots, feminist rage, a love triangle, and one hell of a cliffhanger ending. I need the sequel, like, yesterday.

The Chosen and the Beautiful, Nghi Vo (2022). The Great Gatsby is out of copyright now, so it's legal to publish retellings, which this is. The narrator is Jordan Baker, Nick Carroway's socialite girlfriend from the original. In this version, she was adopted from Vietnam during the French-Indochine war, so she faces anti-Asian prejudice, which is to a small extent mitigated by the fortune she has at her back. A one-sentence summary could be "The Great Gatsby but queer and with magic." This is both an accurate summary and one that understates the book. Vo's writing is gorgeous. Go buy it, you won't regret it.

A Wizard's Guide to Defensive Baking, T. Kingfisher (Ursula Vernon) (2021). A girl whose magical power is baking stumbles across a dead body in the bakery one morning and gets embroiled in politics. Someone is killing people with magic, and she's on the list. She has to figure out who's killing people and why and then save the city. But, as she repeatedly says, she shouldn't have had to. The Duchess should have handled it before it got that far. It's a YA story and a bit dark. Not horror-dark, and the protagonist wins and almost everybody survives, but well. It starts with a dead body.

Starfall Ranch, California Dawes (2019). This was recommended by a friend as an example of "cozy SF" and described as "Stardew Valley in space." So I naturally had to get it. Shy Kerridan is a rancher on a remote moon. She's a loner and really doesn't like other people. Thisbe Vandergoss is the heiress to a vast corporate empire who runs away from her parents, changes her last name, and signs up to be a mail-order bride for Sean Kerridan on the remote moon. But she ends up on the wrong hemisphere and lands on Shy's doorstep just as an electrical storm blows in that knocks out communications. There's one tiny problem: Thisbe has to check in at Sean's ranch and be married to him within a week of arrival, or she will be fined, made to pay for the transportation to the moon, and deported back to Earth. It was a lot of fun, and the dark moments are resolved by ... people being adults and talking to each other. Imagine that.

I've got a bunch of books in my TBR, so I might write about those later. Or I might not. We'll see!

Updates from Germany

 Hello! It's been a minute, eh?

About 2 months ago, the EU added the US to its "safe" zone, then Germany opened their border to tourists from the US (previously, it was open only to people with an urgent need). So I got my plane tickets for August 1 and spent all of July sorting and packing basically everything I own.

Now I'm in Berlin, subletting a furnished room from a Croatian woman. I live really close to the Grunewald park, which is a great place to get some exercise when it's not raining. I went there yesterday by train (it's only 2 stops, but it's a good 40-minute walk to get there, and I wanted to maximize my park-time) and "hiked" (Berlin is a very flat city) 3.6 miles in a little under an hour and a half. I had a refreshing Apfelschorle (apple juice mixed with mineral water), a pizza, and an absolutely delicious melon salad at a beer garden by the train station. The salad had cucumbers marinated in some sort of peppery dressing, chunks of watermelon, and a heap of feta on top. The flavor and texture contrasts were amazing, and I complimented the chef on my way out.

I've finally had some time to write, since I'm just about settled in now. I've had to get a few things, like sheets, pantry stock, and plants, but I haven't had to spend half the day taking the bus or subway to a store and back in about a week. I went to one store to get a printer (they had back to school specials) and carried it in its box on the bus, then down the street and up a zillion stairs. Then it wouldn't connect to the WiFi for a reason I couldn't make heads or tails of (and it was in English), so I had to go buy a printer cable the next day, because of course they don't come in the box anymore. I decided to go to a different electronics store and left with a 3-Euro printer cable and a 15-Euro rice cooker. This is basically how I've ended up spending way too much money in the last 3 weeks.

At least groceries are cheap. I'm still managing to spend a bunch of money on groceries, even though a lot of things cost about half what they do in the US. A 250-g can of store-brand chickpeas cost 39 (Euro)cents! I have 7 in my cupboard. (I used one of them already.)

The way people are handling covid over here is so much different than in the US. You can't go into any businesses or get onto public transit without a medical-grade mask. (No cute cloth masks here!) You see people walking down the street with a mask around their forearm so they have it ready when they need it. It's the latest in pandemic fashion! When I went to see The Green Knight in the theater, I had to show my vaccination certificate to get in, and I was obligated to fill out my contact info when I bought my ticket online. One thing this theater did was block off the seats around you(r party) when you reserved your seat(s), so nobody from unrelated groups was next to each other. They didn't require you to wear your mask during the show, but I did (except when I drank my soda), and so did the other woman in my row.

The movie was trippy as fuck, and I kept getting distracted by the German subtitles and thinking how I would have used different words to give it the same "feel" as the sometimes-lyrical English, which didn't help at all.

I'm making the I-hope-final edits on my indulgent NaNoWriMo project, which is a retelling of the Germanic Siegfried legend from the women's perspectives, and I hope to start querying that by the end of this month. I'm also working on a nonfiction book on linguistics in SFF (for writers), whose sample chapter I need to finish and whose proposal outline I need to make shinier. The last project I queried got no bites, so I'm setting it aside for now and will rework it in the future. I think it's a good story; either the writing itself or the query wasn't landing.

So, that's it for now. You can also follow my YouTube channel and/or support my Patreon (payments currently on hold until I get my tax situation and work permit sorted).

Where do I start with the mecha franchises? Part 3: Gundam (non-UC)

There are fewer entries outside the UC canon, and I've seen most of them. Like many anime fans my age, my first Gundam was Wing, back when it ran on Toonami in the early 2000s. I got sucked into y fandom and mailing lists (back on ye olde YahooGroups) and even wrote fanfic. (No, I'm not telling; it may be on the internet somewhere, but I have no idea.) I haven't watched Wing since it aired on TV 20ish years ago, and I'm nervous about doing that, but I'll get around to it someday, now that I'm old and crotchety.

Some of the non-UC series are divisive among a particular type of US fan. Wing, for example, is the one with the pretty boys that caters to girls. When Orphans was airing, I had to block a dude on tumblr who kept commenting that it sucked on my posts.

Many of these series are available through streaming sites, some on multiple sites as of June 2021. The ones I know of, I'll include. Which one to start with depends on the type of story you like, so I'm listing them in order of how much I like them.

My favorite: Iron-blooded Orphans

This is a 50-episode series that ran in 2 seasons from 2015 to 2017. (There was a gap between them.) Of all the non-UC series, this is the most original-Gundam-like, and its tone is very similar to 08th MS Team. Most Gundam shows involve child soldiers (because the target audience is teenagers), and they're portrayed as normal. This one shows how fucked up that is.

Our protagonists are teenagers who are indentured to a military contractor, CGS, on Mars. As part of their indenture, they are implanted with cyborg hookups on their spines which connect to their robots and allow them to pilot better. The procedure is painful and frequently deadly. The oldest and leader is Orga Itsuka, who is all of 19 at the start. CGS is contracted to escort a rich Martian girl to Earth, but shortly after she arrives, they're attacked by Gjallarhorn. The adults of CGS send out the kids and use them as decoys while they run away. When Orga finds out and gets back to base, he and his cadre of older kids take over the company. They rename it "Tekkadan," the iron flower group.

Orga's mission is to give his family a peaceful future, which they have to fight for, because society literally considers them garbage. Some characters are referred to in the series as "human debris." Orga's quest leads him to make deals with the devil because he sees it as expeditious. He runs into a space yakuza group and joins them. There are strong anti-capitalist themes. There is mention of child abuse and child sexual abuse. It gets extremely dark (for a Gundam show, for sure) more than once, and there's a high protagonist body count.

I highly recommend this show. It's a real 21st-century one. The story and script are by Okada Mari, and it was directed by Nagai Tatsuyuki.

Where to watch: hulu, Netflix, crunchyroll, funimation.com; Amazon Prime (for an extra fee); Blu-Ray

Also good: 00

Gundam 00 is a 50-episode series that originally aired from 2007-09. It's set about 300 years from now, in the real-world timeline. The protagonists are four Gundam pilots in a group called Celestial Being, whose purpose is to stop conflict as it happens. They're kind of terrorists, you could say. But they're very powerful, so the other factions on Earth unite to oppose them. There's a magic supercomputer that calculates where conflicts will crop up, so CB can be on site to intervene. Then some super-powered people called Innovators (the Newtype analogue) show up.

Season 1 is better than Season 2, and the movie is ... absurd. (Sentient crystals from Jupiter.)

Where to watch: hulu, crunchyroll; Blu-Ray

Worth seeing

G Gundam (1994-95; 49 episodes)

Every four years, there is a Gundam fight tournament to determine who is president of the world for the next four years. One group wants to rig the tournament so they win, and they have an overpowered super gundam, which is Devil Gundam in Japanese, but Dark Gundam in the US dub. The mobile suits are piloted in a unique way: the pilots wear clothes that sense their motion and translate it into robot motion. So the robots do the martial arts that the pilots do, which makes for interesting fight scenes.

There are a lot of Problematic(tm) things, like the national stereotype Gundams. Tequila Gundam wears a sombrero. There's a windmill for the Netherlands. These are mostly not main characters, but they still exist.

Chibodee Crockett, from Neo-America, uses his shield as a surfboard and has boxing gloves. Nobel Gundam from Sweden is Sailor Moon. The French Gundam has roses. It's absurd, which is part of its charm.

Where to watch: crunchyroll; Blu-Ray

Gundam Wing (1995-96, 49 episodes)

Five pilots from the colonies at the Lagrange points are sent to Earth to destroy the Earth Alliance, which oppresses the space colonies. They don't know about each other, but the old scientists who sent them and gave them Gundams know each other. They form a little sentai squadron and go around being terrorists. The Earth Alliance has mecha, too, and they fight each other. But there's a side faction on Earth that wants to take over for its own reasons, and things get complicated.

Where to watch: hulu, crunchyroll; Blu-Ray/DVD

Gundam Seed (2002-03, 50 episodes)

There are genetically-modified superhumans called Coordinators, who escaped to space colonies to avoid hate crimes from the Naturals. There are a few factions on Earth, including one Naturals-supremacist group. War breaks out between Earth and space. One space colony is neutral, and they get pulled into the war when space forces attack.

To be honest, I haven't watched this since it came out, but I liked it at the time.

Where to watch: hulu, crunchyroll, funimation.com; Blu-Ray

They're ok, I guess

Gundam Seed Destiny (2004-05, 50 episodes)

This picks up where Seed left off, but it focuses on a new character. The new character is fine, but the heroes from Seed are brought back as overpowered gods, basically, after fans wanted them back. *yawn* It's not terrible. Parts of it are actually rather good. But it goes downhill about halfway through.

Where to watch: crunchyroll; Blu-Ray

Gundam AGE (2011-12, 49 episodes)

I watched this when it came out and don't remember much about it, beyond that it existed. The 3 seasons of this are each from the perspective of a member of a different generation of the same family, which is kind of neat. Unfortunately, the execution was kind of a mess. The best part is season 2, because the protagonist is the coolest. Or maybe it was parts of season 3 because of the pirates? Like I said, I don't remember this very much, and wikipedia has you covered.

Where to watch: not available streaming in the US; Blu-Ray

Do not watch: Reconguista in G (2014-15, 26 episodes)

This show is just bad. I watched all of it, and I can't tell you what happened, even with the wikipedia article open. The biggest problem is that there was way too much going on in way too little space. If it had had 50 or 52 episodes, it would probably have been fine, but it's difficult to keep up with all the factions and characters and backstabbing and side changing when there's an entirely different plot every other episode.

On the plus side, the mecha and character designs are pretty cool. The mecha and character designers from Overman King Gainer were involved.

Where to watch (if you must): crunchyroll; Blu-Ray

Haven't seen

I haven't seen Gundam X or Turn A, so I can't comment on those, and neither appears to be available for streaming in the US.

Other

There's a meta series which starts with Build Fighters that takes place in an alternate-here, where a magical space particle lets people imbue their gundam models with magic energy that lets them fight while the model builder pilots it. It's Angelic Layer but with gundam models, and its entire purpose is to sell model kits. Even more so than the usual gundam series.

That said, it's a lot of fun. The protags are middle schoolers who enter a tournament. There are powerful groups that have dedicated money to improving their build quality (Gundam Academy) and all the stuff you'd expect from a tournament show. The characters are archetypes, but they've got a bit more depth than just "the protag" or "the rival" or "the nerd." It's fun, and it lets Gundam nerds geek out (both on and off screen) about the various kits used. There's even a bit of kitbashing!

This isn't a good place to start if you want to understand all the in-jokes. If you don't mind not getting the references, or you just really like tournament shows, fire it up!

Where to watch: crunchyroll

Where do I start with the mecha franchises? Part 2: Gundam (UC)

 The first Gundam series aired in 1979-80 and had 43 episodes. The show inspired a lot of future anime and manga creators, and there are a lot of references to it in shows like Genshiken and Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. For something as superficially mundane as a show about giant robots in space whose purpose is to sell plastic models and model kits, the cultural impact it had is immense. There is a full-size model of a Gundam in Odaiba. It used to be an RX-78, as seen in the previous link, but it was changed to a Unicorn recently.

Gundam's influence reaches outside Japan, inspiring Guillermo del Toro to make Pacific Rim. This is the cutest damn video of all time, when during PacRim promos, a Japanese morning show took him touristing and to see the Odaiba Gundam, which he didn't know they were doing. The look on his face when he sees it! That is a man having a religious experience. (Obligatory PacRim side note: I love that movie, and the sequel doesn't exist.)

So, what's Gundam about, other than giant robots in space? Each individual series has its own plot, naturally, but there are a few essential elements to make something a Gundam show, other than the robots. There is a conflict between usually a large federated space navy and a smaller faction. Sometimes the space navy is the good guys; sometimes it's the bad guys. But neither side is ever all-good or all-bad. There are corrupt bigwigs in the space navy, and there are peaceniks in the rebel factions. The lead character is an ace pilot; sometimes there's a group of ace pilot leads. The lead antagonist is an ace pilot. They pick each other as their rival/nemesis/whatever. At some point, one of the leads gets stuck behind enemy lines and this changes his outlook on the war. Fighting continues; eventually someone wins.

There are a handful of conventions that originate from 0079. The (or A) main antagonist is a blond who wears a mask and pilots a red mobile suit. This is because of Char Aznable, the Red Comet in 0079. Some Char-clones don't strictly fit the mold, but that's fine; a Char is a Char. The hero Gundam is primary colors (red, yellow, blue, white). There is a post-human type of person who has super skills with piloting and sometimes psychic powers.

Gundam and Macross are about the same age as franchises, but there are way more Gundam shows than Macross, and I haven't seen all of them. (There's a LOT! And some are really bad, and some are extra bleak.) The easiest way to break it up is to divide them into UC timeline and non-UC timeline. I'll start with UC. The UC timeline is the largest, with over 30 TV series, movies, and OVAs spanning the years 0068-0260.

Universal Century

Humanity has built colonies in space, mostly at La Grange points. They call them "sides." Side 3 declared independence from the Earth Federation, called itself the Principality of Zeon, and launched a war, which killed half of humanity. Eight months into a bloody stalemate, the EF Space Force (EFSF) is at Side 5 picking up their new battleship, White Base, with Zeon ships hot on their tail. Amuro Ray is a high school student whose dad is a class-A jerk and an engineer on the Gundam project, and he gets sucked in to piloting the ship and drafted into the EFSF. The ace pilot on the Zeon side is Char Aznable, who has plans of his own. This is how Mobile Suit Gundam (aka 0079) starts.

The general through plot is that Zeon Zum Deikun wanted to make/keep peace with the Feddies, but he was assassinated. The Zabi family takes charge of Side 7 and uses Zeon's name to promote their cause. Because of the pressure of living in space, some humans have evolved into Newtypes (yes, what the long-running Japanese anime magazine is named for). The Zeons want to harness the power of Newtypes to make space free from the Earth-bound government. The Feddies think Newtypes are dangerous and want to eliminate them.

The One Year War is fought to a truce in the year 0080, but politics and all that means that wars happen again and again, in 0087, 0088, 0093, and 0096. The One Year War provides a setting for a lot of side stories, most of which I haven't seen. And I will confess that I primarily know Z, ZZ, Char's Counterattack, F91, and Victory from playing the Gundam Musou games. I hear that F91 is terrible, and Victory is depressing, but not as bad as War in the Pocket (which I have also never seen, because I hear everyone dies.)

0079 exists as the 49-episode TV series and 3 compilation movies. The compilation movies get you the gist of the story, and if you want to start with a UC series, you could do worse than the movies. These are all available on Blu-Ray in the US, and the TV series is streaming on Funimation.com as of June 2021.

My favorites of the UC series are the 08th MS Team and 0083: Stardust Memory. Of the two, 08th MS Team is better as far as plotting and pacing go, but Anavel Gato of 0083 is my favorite villain.

The 08th MS Team (1996-99) is a wonderful entry point. It's a 12-episode OVA series (there's a 13th episode that was a 10-year-anniversary special, but it's not good; it's from the POV of the most annoying character) about a half-dozen Federation soldiers and their fight to defend their part of Earth from Zeon. Shiro Amada and his team are sent to reinforce a base. The local Zeon commander has a mobile armor (a really big robot, which isn't particularly mobile, because it's that huge), which is piloted by someone Shiro knows. Once this is discovered, Shiro is arrested for treason (which is the plot of the mid-series recap movie Miller's Report.)

It's moderately gritty, but not, like, Full Metal Jacket levels. The OP animation gives you a good idea of it, though it's a little cheery. This show also serves as the basis for my favorite AMV of all time, which the creator to the best of my knowledge has never uploaded, so there are only low-res uploads on YT. SPOILERS FOR THE WHOLE THING AHOY. Tenth Man Down (It also introduced me to Nightwish, so double win.)

This is available in the US on Blu-Ray and DVD via your favorite retailer.

0083: Stardust Memory (1991-92) is a side-story which is never mentioned in the rest of UC canon (for reasons explained at the end of the OVAs.) Zeon ace pilot Anavel Gato steals the prototype Gundam GP-02A, and Feddie pilot Kou Uraki is assigned to get it back from him using the GP-01. The engineer from Anaheim Electronics, Nina Purpleton, had a relationship with Gato in the past, and that causes Trouble, of course. Gato's fleet has a plan for the GP-02A, which is equipped with a nuclear warhead.

As I recall it, the pacing is a bit off, but I like it anyway. The OP and ED songs are extremely 1991. Shoji Kawamori (of Macross) did the mecha designs.

This is also available on Blu-Ray in the US via your favorite retailer. (The DVDs are 4x as expensive, so I suspect it's out of print.)