"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a robot suit to ride around and fight things with."
I was visiting Jane Austen's House Museum last year and it always gives me pleasure to see how wildly popular her work remains. There always seem to be tourists there visiting from all over the world. That is really heartening.
She was very innovative. Maybe even underrated as a craftsperson at the sentence level. My favourite trick that I believe she invented is slipping from prose, unnoticed, into a soft Iambic pentameter, essentially unnoticed. Lots of people have copied that from her.
And class-pressure narratives will never not be relevant to people's lives. She's a very very humane storyteller in that respect.
I am slightly biased - she's my great aunt (x 6). Used to find that embarrassing but now I feel quite proud.
I watched the one 'except' that OP has listed there "Iron Blooded Orphans". It's the only Gundam I've ever watched and I really liked it, to be honest. It was full of subversions of anime tropes. There's a prophecy, a stoic soldier like none other, a charismatic leader playing a dual role, another heroic leader trusted by his people. And there's the instrument of the establishment, playing the establishment role. And spoiler spoiler spoiler,
spoiler spoiler spoiler the establishment wins, the charismatic double-role leader dies trying to fulfill the prophecy which isn't real, the stoic soldier is cut apart in the final battle, and the remainder of the loyal band either gets their people rights in parliament or gets picked off in violent engagements over time in the denouement.
Fantastic story. You don't see that kind of thing very often. Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one" but this one was "the establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins".
The subversion of tropes goes back all the way to the original Mobile Suit Gundam, though a little more subtle due to the studio wanting to make a show to sell toys and the director wanting to make something with a actual message. It has:
-a 'good army' that could easily be the 'bad army' in a more optimistic show
-the protagonists dealing with callus military leadership
-sympathetic enemy soldiers dealing with their own incompetent and callus leadership
-the war taking a huge psychological toll on the protagonist and all of them end up worse off for having been a part of it
> Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one"
This probably has more to do with the type of content you are consuming. If you watch things for young adults, it will probably follow "the Heroes Journey" - wether it is LOTR, Harry Potter, Star Wars etc. (the West) or Naruto, Pokemon, Dragon Ball/Journey to the West (the East)
That's the point. AFAIK Gundam is a mecha-anime for young adults - the same audience as Marvel movies or the average Oscar winner. It's not East of Eden or The Remains of The Day.
War in the Pocket is also pretty good, if you haven't seen it. A bit dated now but I always thought of it as a "Business as usual" war story when I was young.
gundam is probably one of my favorite pieces of media ever created, and yeah id say you nailed it! BUT this is pretty much true for almost every gundam show. They will usually end with a "but at what cost" or with 75% of the main cast dead and the protag in a worse position then they started. but yeah what you said rings true, it really is a special piece of media that is more than the genre/anime its made in but can only exist with anime if that makes sense.
Yeah original Gundam is about a never ending war in which the protagonists are just cogs in the machine. And it turns out every side is led by immoral scumbags.
Yep, and splatter around some talk about the horrors of being a combatant in those wars, as if you don't fight, your loved ones die anyway. You can see how Evangelion is doing a lot of riffing on Gundam. In some ways it's not Jane Austen, it's Full Metal Jacket, or Rambo: First Blood. The different series might have giant robots all over the place, but there aer serious stories barely hidden underneath.
Even when a story starts as mostly lighthearted adolescent fare (see, The Witch of Mercury), it tends to end in trauma, injustice and many war crimes.
> Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one" but this one was "the establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins".
What's sorely missing is the very rare theme of "the establishment wins, and for a good reason, and it's actually a good thing".
Isn't that basically every cop show for instance? Like an episode of Law and Order is this person does something bad, the establishment finds and punishes them hurray.
LaO doesn't always follow that forumula. In some LaO the trial is botched or the law doesn't protect the victims or the perps escape justice due to political influence, et al.
Still, cop shows generally are about the "the establishment wins, and for a good reason, and it's actually a good thing" which the other commentator said is a theme that is sorely missing.
There is actually a little bit of that in this. While the charismatic leader has some points about how the establishment has gotten weak and corrupt, overall it seems pretty par for the course. To be honest, it's better he didn't win. He was a bit demagoguey.
IBO is super interesting. "The establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins," is the final outcome, but the road there is actually rather fraught for that establishment, and it's alternately almost damned and just barely saved by aspects of its rule and operations. The winning agent of the establishment wins, in part, because he skillfully threads through the requirements of his station while strategically breaking taboo (but only once he's certain to have the political backing to do so). On the other side, the rebels are
>driven by the circumstances the establishment has forced them to contend with for the entirety of their short lives (they're all child soldiers, btw)
>are only able to find their successful path by rejecting establishment and forging what seem, at the time, to be canny ties with other groups on-the-margins
>...right until they follow that path off a cliff.
The "heroes" and "villains" remain who they are at the end not just because of affinity bias (having spent more time with the rebels than the establishment), but because there's a tangible disconnect between the former feeling forced into the poor decisions that they make, and the latter's rather cold, and unforced, determinations.
Spoiler
So when Shino almost takes Rustal's bridge out, I am, of course, cheering, even while I know I'm watching him commit a war crime and sign his own death certificate. When Rustal orders atmosphere-braised pilot skewers, it still feels incredibly unfair, even when I know why he made that decision. They threaded the needle.
Couldn't agree more. I particularly enjoyed the ruthless exploitation of the symbolism that McGillis Fareed was attempting, only to be met by a similarly ruthless exploitation of political systems from Rustal Elion. Overall, a very sophisticated show - on its own and definitely for its genre.
In the end, almost everything has a soap opera in it somewhere. People have a hard time processing stories that don't have a soap opera in them somewhere. For some people it's just impossible. There's really only a minority of people who are interested in stories that have no personal relationship stories in them at all.
That's not to say that the parts that aren't soap opera aren't meaningfully different. I disagree with the reductionistic claim that "everything is just a soap opera in the end", and leave it to the reader to determine whether or not the original link is making that mistake.
I would say it's more like salt in cooking for the vast majority of people; they expect a certain proper amount and trying to engage a normal human's taste without it is an uphill battle at best. As a result, across a wide variety of genres and styles, you'll find soap operas.
(I use soap opera as a bit of shorthand for things focusing on human relationships a lot. Soap operas tend to focus on the romantic end more than average, so the embedding is not quite perfect. But I use "soap opera" as the shorthand here because they are one of the more pure embodiments of the idea, because they are basically nothing but human relationships churning and spinning, with generally not much more going on. Yeah, a couple of them have a more exotic framing device, but all that does is move them slightly off the center of the genre, not really change them much.)
> I use soap opera as a bit of shorthand for things focusing on human relationships a lot.
I don't know if that's really fair. I don't think that's really what most people think the term soap opera denotes, and if you broaden it to mean any work that has any sort of relational elements, its almost a tautology that all fiction will meet the standard.
More to the point, i think its an unfair response to the article, as the author is not claiming that the similarity between these two works is merely that they have relationships in them.
Here's what's funny. You know what they used to call a book that foregrounded the soap opera elements you're talking about? A novel. That's why Tolstoy called Anna Karenina his first novel. Now, if you go to Wikipedia, War and Peace is also categorized as a novel. What else could you call it? But it's funny to imagine a time when novel was a genre.
It is kind of like how modern art doesn't mean modern today. It means that time period where people called art "modern". Novel meant new as in "novel science results". It was used differentiate prose (the new style at the time) from epic poetry back in the 16 hundreds and stuck. How that translates to Russian IDK.
I don't speak Russian, but whatever the Russian word is for "book." Or maybe others called it a novel but Tolstoy rejected the label. I'm not sure.
Either way, the word "novel" wasn't necessarily equivalent to how it is used today: any book length work of narrative fiction.
Though watch out, this is a rabbit hole. Just look up novel on wikipedia. You'll see a big orange message at the top which is the first sign there is a problem. And then the article is excessively long. A lot of ink has been spilled trying to define what a "novel" is.
I don't really agree with this authors analysis of Austen. Like on Pride and Prejudice, "Elizabeth Bennet wants to marry for love and respect, but in her world marriage is fundamentally about economic security and social alliance." Elizabeth grew up with her parents fairly disastrous marriage (where her Dad doesn't respect her Mom) and inability to think in the future which put the girls in such a bad situation (her father should have saved money up instead of just assuming he'd have a son eventually). She is reacting against that, wanting a husband that will have mutual respect AND the economic security of someone who is responsible. She wouldn't just want to marry someone for love who wasn't able to provide her economic security, just like she doesn't want to marry Darcy she doesn't respect him. This article makes it sound like she is rejecting the social expectations of her society, but only her mom really wants her to marry Mr. Collins and as seen by her own marriage and support of Lydia's marriage she is a pretty bad judge of what's going to make a good life.
Later they say "They also both, mostly, focus on characters who have enough privilege to have choices, but not enough power to escape circumstances. Characters in both aren’t peasants without agency, but they’re also caught in larger systems they can’t opt out of" But that just describes basically everyone, none of us have no agency, but all of us are also caught up in larger systems we can't opt out of. But even within Austen you have Emma, who is entirely economically and socially secure and doesn't need to worry about anything and Fanny who lives entirely at the whims of others.
Neveress all Austen's happy endings are due to the magical alignment of respect and love with security and social alliance. Jane's heroines are playing a (relatively, see below) high risk/high reward game of not wanting to sacrifice _anything_, which leads to their triumphs in the novels but most often led to loneliness and economic insecurity in the real world.
Similarly, all people have choices, but these choices are often pretty agonising ones, and Jane almost never has her protagonists or us confront such life-and-death, very-bad-vs-infinitely-worse choices. And this was a conscious choice since the novels of the 18th century had been more or less filled with them.
Agreed but I think "The best marriage is one where the spouses respect each other and the man is able to provide a comfortable and secure economic life for the woman." wasn't like, a counter-cultural ideal, while the author of the post has Jane set up in opposition to her societies ideal of what a marriage should be. She was willing to reject the certainty of Bingley for a chance at something better, but I also think Elizabeth would have rejected a poor suitor who she did feel respect for. She wouldn't have married a farmer like Robert Martin for instance.
Edit: And even on risk, the big risk is that if Elizabeth's dad dies the family would have to live on Mrs. Bennet's income of just 200 pounds a year, which to put in perspective was about what Jane Austen's father made as a clergyman when she was born, though he would go on to make more money later in life. It wouldn't be poverty and still put them in the upper few percent of English people at the time.
Was funny, I was using Copilot to analyze a certain light novel to reverse engineer the storytelling techniques so I could write a fanfiction the other day and I asked it if it could apply a certain method to any other stories and it said, yeah, The Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, The Great Gatbsy and Neon Genesis Evangelion
Funny after a lot of this I think I broke it because it now loads a personalization context where it tries to apply this framework to everything and can't quit talking about a character that we seem to share a crush on.
I'll agree it is the product of a schizotypal mind and one might think the whole project is wrong-headed and there might be a wrong interpretation here but it is factual that:
1) I got that list of stories
2) It has kept mentioning the same character even when I am talking about something else
3) It has been trying the same 'mini-framework' for analyzing problems using the same language over and over again
What an excellent piece! I have some Gundam experience and I recently picked up Pride and Prejudice to try and fix the total lack of Austen in my life.
This article made me realize that despite writing stories that can be broad and melodramatic, Yoshiyuki Tomino has a keen sense of character. It's an interesting counterpart with his closest American counterpart, George Lucas. Both funneled 60s anti-war politics into their science fiction worlds, but Lucas was obsessed with Joseph Campbell and wrote plot driven stories while Tomino always puts the soap opera elements at the forefront.
Also, I suspect the author hasn't seen Turn A Gundam yet, and if not, they really should. That one is Tomino saying, "what if I took out 90% of the space combat and really just made a comedy of manners." It's wonderful.
I find I always have to lookup the value of the monetary stuff and Georgian British rules about inheritance whenever I go back and read Austen, it's the only part that's really dated, after one gets used to the sentence structure.
It's really deep in the series (about ten books deep) but Lois McMaster Bujold writes a sci fi space version of Jane Austen in a couple of the books of the Vorkosigan Saga one might appreciate more after reading a bit of Austen.
> A friend recently asked how to get started watching Gundam, and as I tripped all over myself, equal parts excitement and not wanting to sound like a lunatic, I fumbled around for a good answer.
But there is a good answer. It's Gundam 79. That's not hard.
There are few forces in the world as strong as somebody seeing a long-running Japanese series and twisting and turning themselves into how to avoid release order.
Because most Americans started with Wing, which (for whatever reason) turned out to be a brilliant synergy between timing and executive choice. I think we almost got X or Turn A first, and I don't know what that timeline looks like.
MSG remains a masterpiece and a watershed and all of that, but it is possible to choose a Gundam series that incorporates many of its objective strengths without the aspects that can be hard for newcomers to approach. (But whichever one that happens to be depends on who you ask.)
Patrick O'Brian (author of the Aubrey/Maturin series) was a huge Austen fan and intentionally modeled his writing style after hers. Post Captain (book 2) is the most explicit homage, with a number of character names borrowed from Austen's work.
Actually, when I saw the first Avatar, I thought that it was much closer to the "Treasure of Silver Lake" ("Der Schatz im Silbersee") by Karl May, combined with many scenes from the earlier novels of Karl May.
Many characters of that series of Karl May novels have a direct mapping, e.g.:
I mean, Avatar is a pretty on-the-nose allegory for the decimation of American Indian tribes and western colonization. I don't think this is at all a controversial take.
Is it as funny and does it "make ridiculous" it's framing culture as much as Austen? I love Austen, still don't get why people consider P&P a romance primarily.
I haven't read Austen, but there's an infamous exchange in the original series where the ceremonial head of the Space Nazis compares his son, the acting head of the Space Nazis, to Hitler. The son replies, essentially, "Thanks."
There's a tension in Mobile Suit Gundam and its direct descendants. The Space Nazis (Zeon) are also sort of, kind of a stand-in for Imperial Japan during WWII, and between the implicit relatability therein, and the charisma and popularity of series antihero Char Aznable (a Zeon officer), there is an enthusiasm in fan circles (leaking into later productions) for humanizing grunts on the "villain" side while emphasizing the corruption of the side the heroes happen to be on. But this as subtext to the headline narrative of Zeon being mass-murderers and the Earth Federation trying to stop them.
There's also running, unspoken theme of the various corporate conglomerates playing governments and ideologues against each other for profit, and occasionally stepping in (usually with a particularly powerful prototype robot) when one side threatens to blow up the Earth Sphere for realsies.
The end result is a lot of people dying for no reason, and constant backsliding into a state of war, and main characters who realize how ridiculous such circumstances are, but (as per TFW) don't have much power to do anything other than try to survive and protect their loved ones. Viewers are able to see where the shape of that society is warped.
That's without speaking much to the alternate universes. In Gundam Wing, the greatest threat to a global aristocracy-cum-junta is a small, loosely-associated paramilitary group made up of 5 teenage boys and their supporters. The machinations of colonial-era Europe are so philosophically feeble as to be legitimately challenged by NSYNC and Greta Thunberg.
"It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a robot suit to ride around and fight things with."
I was visiting Jane Austen's House Museum last year and it always gives me pleasure to see how wildly popular her work remains. There always seem to be tourists there visiting from all over the world. That is really heartening.
She was very innovative. Maybe even underrated as a craftsperson at the sentence level. My favourite trick that I believe she invented is slipping from prose, unnoticed, into a soft Iambic pentameter, essentially unnoticed. Lots of people have copied that from her.
And class-pressure narratives will never not be relevant to people's lives. She's a very very humane storyteller in that respect.
I am slightly biased - she's my great aunt (x 6). Used to find that embarrassing but now I feel quite proud.
Spoilers for Iron Blooded Orphans below.
I watched the one 'except' that OP has listed there "Iron Blooded Orphans". It's the only Gundam I've ever watched and I really liked it, to be honest. It was full of subversions of anime tropes. There's a prophecy, a stoic soldier like none other, a charismatic leader playing a dual role, another heroic leader trusted by his people. And there's the instrument of the establishment, playing the establishment role. And spoiler spoiler spoiler,
spoiler spoiler spoiler the establishment wins, the charismatic double-role leader dies trying to fulfill the prophecy which isn't real, the stoic soldier is cut apart in the final battle, and the remainder of the loyal band either gets their people rights in parliament or gets picked off in violent engagements over time in the denouement.
Fantastic story. You don't see that kind of thing very often. Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one" but this one was "the establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins".
The subversion of tropes goes back all the way to the original Mobile Suit Gundam, though a little more subtle due to the studio wanting to make a show to sell toys and the director wanting to make something with a actual message. It has: -a 'good army' that could easily be the 'bad army' in a more optimistic show -the protagonists dealing with callus military leadership -sympathetic enemy soldiers dealing with their own incompetent and callus leadership -the war taking a huge psychological toll on the protagonist and all of them end up worse off for having been a part of it
> Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one"
This probably has more to do with the type of content you are consuming. If you watch things for young adults, it will probably follow "the Heroes Journey" - wether it is LOTR, Harry Potter, Star Wars etc. (the West) or Naruto, Pokemon, Dragon Ball/Journey to the West (the East)
That's the point. AFAIK Gundam is a mecha-anime for young adults - the same audience as Marvel movies or the average Oscar winner. It's not East of Eden or The Remains of The Day.
War in the Pocket is also pretty good, if you haven't seen it. A bit dated now but I always thought of it as a "Business as usual" war story when I was young.
war in the pocket is the best of them imo
gundam is probably one of my favorite pieces of media ever created, and yeah id say you nailed it! BUT this is pretty much true for almost every gundam show. They will usually end with a "but at what cost" or with 75% of the main cast dead and the protag in a worse position then they started. but yeah what you said rings true, it really is a special piece of media that is more than the genre/anime its made in but can only exist with anime if that makes sense.
Yeah original Gundam is about a never ending war in which the protagonists are just cogs in the machine. And it turns out every side is led by immoral scumbags.
Yep, and splatter around some talk about the horrors of being a combatant in those wars, as if you don't fight, your loved ones die anyway. You can see how Evangelion is doing a lot of riffing on Gundam. In some ways it's not Jane Austen, it's Full Metal Jacket, or Rambo: First Blood. The different series might have giant robots all over the place, but there aer serious stories barely hidden underneath.
Even when a story starts as mostly lighthearted adolescent fare (see, The Witch of Mercury), it tends to end in trauma, injustice and many war crimes.
> Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one" but this one was "the establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins".
What's sorely missing is the very rare theme of "the establishment wins, and for a good reason, and it's actually a good thing".
Isn't that basically every cop show for instance? Like an episode of Law and Order is this person does something bad, the establishment finds and punishes them hurray.
LaO doesn't always follow that forumula. In some LaO the trial is botched or the law doesn't protect the victims or the perps escape justice due to political influence, et al.
Still, cop shows generally are about the "the establishment wins, and for a good reason, and it's actually a good thing" which the other commentator said is a theme that is sorely missing.
SPOILER
There is actually a little bit of that in this. While the charismatic leader has some points about how the establishment has gotten weak and corrupt, overall it seems pretty par for the course. To be honest, it's better he didn't win. He was a bit demagoguey.
IBO is super interesting. "The establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins," is the final outcome, but the road there is actually rather fraught for that establishment, and it's alternately almost damned and just barely saved by aspects of its rule and operations. The winning agent of the establishment wins, in part, because he skillfully threads through the requirements of his station while strategically breaking taboo (but only once he's certain to have the political backing to do so). On the other side, the rebels are
>driven by the circumstances the establishment has forced them to contend with for the entirety of their short lives (they're all child soldiers, btw)
>are only able to find their successful path by rejecting establishment and forging what seem, at the time, to be canny ties with other groups on-the-margins
>...right until they follow that path off a cliff.
The "heroes" and "villains" remain who they are at the end not just because of affinity bias (having spent more time with the rebels than the establishment), but because there's a tangible disconnect between the former feeling forced into the poor decisions that they make, and the latter's rather cold, and unforced, determinations.
Spoiler
So when Shino almost takes Rustal's bridge out, I am, of course, cheering, even while I know I'm watching him commit a war crime and sign his own death certificate. When Rustal orders atmosphere-braised pilot skewers, it still feels incredibly unfair, even when I know why he made that decision. They threaded the needle.
Couldn't agree more. I particularly enjoyed the ruthless exploitation of the symbolism that McGillis Fareed was attempting, only to be met by a similarly ruthless exploitation of political systems from Rustal Elion. Overall, a very sophisticated show - on its own and definitely for its genre.
In the end, almost everything has a soap opera in it somewhere. People have a hard time processing stories that don't have a soap opera in them somewhere. For some people it's just impossible. There's really only a minority of people who are interested in stories that have no personal relationship stories in them at all.
That's not to say that the parts that aren't soap opera aren't meaningfully different. I disagree with the reductionistic claim that "everything is just a soap opera in the end", and leave it to the reader to determine whether or not the original link is making that mistake.
I would say it's more like salt in cooking for the vast majority of people; they expect a certain proper amount and trying to engage a normal human's taste without it is an uphill battle at best. As a result, across a wide variety of genres and styles, you'll find soap operas.
(I use soap opera as a bit of shorthand for things focusing on human relationships a lot. Soap operas tend to focus on the romantic end more than average, so the embedding is not quite perfect. But I use "soap opera" as the shorthand here because they are one of the more pure embodiments of the idea, because they are basically nothing but human relationships churning and spinning, with generally not much more going on. Yeah, a couple of them have a more exotic framing device, but all that does is move them slightly off the center of the genre, not really change them much.)
> I use soap opera as a bit of shorthand for things focusing on human relationships a lot.
I don't know if that's really fair. I don't think that's really what most people think the term soap opera denotes, and if you broaden it to mean any work that has any sort of relational elements, its almost a tautology that all fiction will meet the standard.
More to the point, i think its an unfair response to the article, as the author is not claiming that the similarity between these two works is merely that they have relationships in them.
Here's what's funny. You know what they used to call a book that foregrounded the soap opera elements you're talking about? A novel. That's why Tolstoy called Anna Karenina his first novel. Now, if you go to Wikipedia, War and Peace is also categorized as a novel. What else could you call it? But it's funny to imagine a time when novel was a genre.
What else would one call War and Peace at its time?
It is kind of like how modern art doesn't mean modern today. It means that time period where people called art "modern". Novel meant new as in "novel science results". It was used differentiate prose (the new style at the time) from epic poetry back in the 16 hundreds and stuck. How that translates to Russian IDK.
I don't speak Russian, but whatever the Russian word is for "book." Or maybe others called it a novel but Tolstoy rejected the label. I'm not sure.
Either way, the word "novel" wasn't necessarily equivalent to how it is used today: any book length work of narrative fiction.
Though watch out, this is a rabbit hole. Just look up novel on wikipedia. You'll see a big orange message at the top which is the first sign there is a problem. And then the article is excessively long. A lot of ink has been spilled trying to define what a "novel" is.
I don't really agree with this authors analysis of Austen. Like on Pride and Prejudice, "Elizabeth Bennet wants to marry for love and respect, but in her world marriage is fundamentally about economic security and social alliance." Elizabeth grew up with her parents fairly disastrous marriage (where her Dad doesn't respect her Mom) and inability to think in the future which put the girls in such a bad situation (her father should have saved money up instead of just assuming he'd have a son eventually). She is reacting against that, wanting a husband that will have mutual respect AND the economic security of someone who is responsible. She wouldn't just want to marry someone for love who wasn't able to provide her economic security, just like she doesn't want to marry Darcy she doesn't respect him. This article makes it sound like she is rejecting the social expectations of her society, but only her mom really wants her to marry Mr. Collins and as seen by her own marriage and support of Lydia's marriage she is a pretty bad judge of what's going to make a good life.
Later they say "They also both, mostly, focus on characters who have enough privilege to have choices, but not enough power to escape circumstances. Characters in both aren’t peasants without agency, but they’re also caught in larger systems they can’t opt out of" But that just describes basically everyone, none of us have no agency, but all of us are also caught up in larger systems we can't opt out of. But even within Austen you have Emma, who is entirely economically and socially secure and doesn't need to worry about anything and Fanny who lives entirely at the whims of others.
Neveress all Austen's happy endings are due to the magical alignment of respect and love with security and social alliance. Jane's heroines are playing a (relatively, see below) high risk/high reward game of not wanting to sacrifice _anything_, which leads to their triumphs in the novels but most often led to loneliness and economic insecurity in the real world.
Similarly, all people have choices, but these choices are often pretty agonising ones, and Jane almost never has her protagonists or us confront such life-and-death, very-bad-vs-infinitely-worse choices. And this was a conscious choice since the novels of the 18th century had been more or less filled with them.
Agreed but I think "The best marriage is one where the spouses respect each other and the man is able to provide a comfortable and secure economic life for the woman." wasn't like, a counter-cultural ideal, while the author of the post has Jane set up in opposition to her societies ideal of what a marriage should be. She was willing to reject the certainty of Bingley for a chance at something better, but I also think Elizabeth would have rejected a poor suitor who she did feel respect for. She wouldn't have married a farmer like Robert Martin for instance.
Edit: And even on risk, the big risk is that if Elizabeth's dad dies the family would have to live on Mrs. Bennet's income of just 200 pounds a year, which to put in perspective was about what Jane Austen's father made as a clergyman when she was born, though he would go on to make more money later in life. It wouldn't be poverty and still put them in the upper few percent of English people at the time.
Was funny, I was using Copilot to analyze a certain light novel to reverse engineer the storytelling techniques so I could write a fanfiction the other day and I asked it if it could apply a certain method to any other stories and it said, yeah, The Catcher in the Rye, The Bell Jar, The Great Gatbsy and Neon Genesis Evangelion
Funny after a lot of this I think I broke it because it now loads a personalization context where it tries to apply this framework to everything and can't quit talking about a character that we seem to share a crush on.
This comment is literally delusional.
I'll agree it is the product of a schizotypal mind and one might think the whole project is wrong-headed and there might be a wrong interpretation here but it is factual that:
1) I got that list of stories
2) It has kept mentioning the same character even when I am talking about something else
3) It has been trying the same 'mini-framework' for analyzing problems using the same language over and over again
What an excellent piece! I have some Gundam experience and I recently picked up Pride and Prejudice to try and fix the total lack of Austen in my life.
This article made me realize that despite writing stories that can be broad and melodramatic, Yoshiyuki Tomino has a keen sense of character. It's an interesting counterpart with his closest American counterpart, George Lucas. Both funneled 60s anti-war politics into their science fiction worlds, but Lucas was obsessed with Joseph Campbell and wrote plot driven stories while Tomino always puts the soap opera elements at the forefront.
Also, I suspect the author hasn't seen Turn A Gundam yet, and if not, they really should. That one is Tomino saying, "what if I took out 90% of the space combat and really just made a comedy of manners." It's wonderful.
I find I always have to lookup the value of the monetary stuff and Georgian British rules about inheritance whenever I go back and read Austen, it's the only part that's really dated, after one gets used to the sentence structure.
It's really deep in the series (about ten books deep) but Lois McMaster Bujold writes a sci fi space version of Jane Austen in a couple of the books of the Vorkosigan Saga one might appreciate more after reading a bit of Austen.
> A friend recently asked how to get started watching Gundam, and as I tripped all over myself, equal parts excitement and not wanting to sound like a lunatic, I fumbled around for a good answer.
But there is a good answer. It's Gundam 79. That's not hard.
There are few forces in the world as strong as somebody seeing a long-running Japanese series and twisting and turning themselves into how to avoid release order.
The memes around Fate were especially annoying for this. Anything but a "dated" entry, I guess.
Because most Americans started with Wing, which (for whatever reason) turned out to be a brilliant synergy between timing and executive choice. I think we almost got X or Turn A first, and I don't know what that timeline looks like.
MSG remains a masterpiece and a watershed and all of that, but it is possible to choose a Gundam series that incorporates many of its objective strengths without the aspects that can be hard for newcomers to approach. (But whichever one that happens to be depends on who you ask.)
Where is my janpla model kits, then?
Fine china tea sets.
Jane Austen crossover series based around customizing your china sets.
Moonrise Kingdom and Snow White too https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARoKJ00cEZ8
The Witch from Mercury is excellent. It's almost like a space opera version of Open AI board drama.
Glad they mentioned Iron Blooded Orphans... the best gundam (and very cynical and dark)
Patrick O'Brian (author of the Aubrey/Maturin series) was a huge Austen fan and intentionally modeled his writing style after hers. Post Captain (book 2) is the most explicit homage, with a number of character names borrowed from Austen's work.
Avatar is Pocahontas repainted. Fight me.
This was an incredibly mainstream meme, back in the day! https://mattbateman.net/writing/avatar-pocahontas.php describes his contribution to the comparison.
Actually, when I saw the first Avatar, I thought that it was much closer to the "Treasure of Silver Lake" ("Der Schatz im Silbersee") by Karl May, combined with many scenes from the earlier novels of Karl May.
Many characters of that series of Karl May novels have a direct mapping, e.g.:
Old Shatterhand => Jake Sully
Winnetou => Neytiri (gender swapped)
tamed mustang => tamed flying dragon
and many others.
I believe the comment I saw, back when the first one came out, was "PocaHalo."
The second one developed its own story much better.
And has humans doing Factorio as well as ecranoplans - ideal. :-)
So that's where Master "Chief" comes from!
... I'll see myself out.
And Pocahontas is Fern Gully repainted
Nah, Avatar is Dances With Wolves
Dances With Smurfs was a common comparison at the time.
I mean, Avatar is a pretty on-the-nose allegory for the decimation of American Indian tribes and western colonization. I don't think this is at all a controversial take.
Smurfcat planetary immune response.
Is it as funny and does it "make ridiculous" it's framing culture as much as Austen? I love Austen, still don't get why people consider P&P a romance primarily.
I haven't read Austen, but there's an infamous exchange in the original series where the ceremonial head of the Space Nazis compares his son, the acting head of the Space Nazis, to Hitler. The son replies, essentially, "Thanks."
There's a tension in Mobile Suit Gundam and its direct descendants. The Space Nazis (Zeon) are also sort of, kind of a stand-in for Imperial Japan during WWII, and between the implicit relatability therein, and the charisma and popularity of series antihero Char Aznable (a Zeon officer), there is an enthusiasm in fan circles (leaking into later productions) for humanizing grunts on the "villain" side while emphasizing the corruption of the side the heroes happen to be on. But this as subtext to the headline narrative of Zeon being mass-murderers and the Earth Federation trying to stop them.
There's also running, unspoken theme of the various corporate conglomerates playing governments and ideologues against each other for profit, and occasionally stepping in (usually with a particularly powerful prototype robot) when one side threatens to blow up the Earth Sphere for realsies.
The end result is a lot of people dying for no reason, and constant backsliding into a state of war, and main characters who realize how ridiculous such circumstances are, but (as per TFW) don't have much power to do anything other than try to survive and protect their loved ones. Viewers are able to see where the shape of that society is warped.
That's without speaking much to the alternate universes. In Gundam Wing, the greatest threat to a global aristocracy-cum-junta is a small, loosely-associated paramilitary group made up of 5 teenage boys and their supporters. The machinations of colonial-era Europe are so philosophically feeble as to be legitimately challenged by NSYNC and Greta Thunberg.
Which Jane Austen book has a character rip off their own arm and use it as a club?
That would be Fanny Price
Didn't you read Pride and Prejudice and Zombies?