You're listening to season 10 of Mobile Suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of sci fi mega franchise Mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.

This is episode 1052B Cassarellia, the continuation of last week's Q and A episode, and we continue to be your hosts, Tom and Nina.

Mobile Suit Breakdown is made possible by our quippy and quirky paying subscribers.

They got so many quips.

They really do.

Endless, endless quips.

Thank you all and special thanks to our newest patrons, James D, CJ L, Melanie B, Jessie S, Carrie Low and Louis C.

You keep us Genki.

They're quirky too.

Now that I think about it, these are perhaps the most apt adjectives you have used for them yet.

I don't lie about the qualities of.

Our patrons, of course.

Of course not.

I would never, never accuse you of lying.

Merely that some adjectives are more apt than others.

Without further ado, the questions, Max writes.

My specific point of interest is Katagina, whose slow descent was one of the most interesting parts for me.

I spoiled myself with a meme a bit at the beginning of my watch, so the intrigue of how she goes from somewhat snobbish and selfish but still a seemingly reasonable person to this and he inserted the meme that is a picture of Katajina with text over it that says I can fix him says Woman who is wor but the execution was a little bit disappointing.

There's just not enough of her and Chronicle in the later half of the episodes and when they are on screen it's not enough.

And yet the show turns her into this grandiose enemy, almost like a true puppeteer behind all the conflict, which she clearly isn't.

If you look at her scenes in the later half, she's just fighting or at Chronicles side and their relationship is almost non existent on screen.

Though I did laugh when she almost literally commanded him to heal and he rushed off to her like a good doggie.

So the question is, how do you feel about Katagina?

Is her character fully developed in your opinion?

And what was the idea behind her character?

She's got charisma.

She's got more charisma than almost any other character in the show.

I would also say that while she's not as developed as some other characters, she's as or better developed than many of them given the size of the cast.

That's the problem.

There are so many wasted opportunities when they could have been developing Chronicle and Katajima more and instead we're frittering away time.

Maybe we needed Fewer battles.

Maybe we needed less time spent fighting.

Maybe.

I don't know, that we needed a second round of Shrikes.

I think that might have been excessive.

It is easy to blame Victory for having too many characters and not giving them enough time.

It's easy, but it's also true and fun and you should do it.

But there is more to it.

And a ton of Victory's dialogue gets expended on pro forma lines.

Stuff that any character in that situation would say and therefore doesn't actually tell you anything about the character.

Obviously this isn't every line, but to pick one example, in episode nine, Chronicle and Cartagena are heading for Gibraltar.

As they're passing over Casarelia, Katagina thanks him for taking her to see her old home.

And Chronicle responds, it's alright.

This tells us that Chronicle is treating Katajina kindly and that he is a polite young man.

That's not nothing.

But what if instead he had said something like, I envy you.

I don't have a home to go back to myself.

And Katagina could say, well, what about Zahanskar?

And then Chronicle says, there's no home for me there.

Or maybe if you want to emphasize that he's really committed to the Zanskar cause, he could say, maybe I'll live here too, once we've liberated the Earth.

Maybe you want him to be the stoic type who doesn't talk about his feelings.

They have just shown him having a flashback to his humiliation at Casarelia.

What about a flashback to his own childhood home to show how he remembers it?

Practically anything would give us more insight into his character than just saying, eh, no worries, it's cool.

Tominosho dialogue can get a bit overwrought at times because it's all so loaded and load bearing in terms of telling us things about the characters and the world.

And it's possible that this writing team swung a little too hard in the other direction of wanting it to feel more naturalistic, but then not including enough of those lines that tell you a bit more, even if they might seem less natural to the audience.

And I think back to First Gundam, which we watched years and years ago.

And some.

Some of these lines really stuck in my head because of how much they told us about the world and the characters in it with remarkable efficiency.

Real throwaway lines, like Captain Paolo referring to Mirai as from the famous Yashima family, or Mirai saying, I don't know him, but he's.

He's known throughout side seven for his love of machines.

Though in terms of Katajina as puppeteer, to my mind, that portrayal reflects her self image more than it reflects her actual position.

It reflects her self centeredness, her conceitedness rather than reality.

It's noteworthy that by the time Katajina is actually talking about USO and Chronicle as puppets, that she is forcing to dance to her tune, USO has freed himself of whatever control she once had over him.

He is fighting Chronicle because it is the right thing to do, because he is trying to rescue Shaak Ti, because he is trying to put an end to this battle.

And Chronicle is, in his way, stopping him.

There are of course, some lingering traces of that affection for him.

Talking about how Chronicle is the reason that she's been led astray.

But he's not fighting for her.

He doesn't want her anymore.

But you are getting at least one point that seems to be central to her character, which is the importance of our relationships on our own opinions and personal development, what we believe, what we espouse.

Because there is a bit of a sense here that if Katagina had found a sufficiently attractive young man on the league militaire side, that maybe she would have aligned herself with them instead.

That her alignment has very little to do with anything actually ideological.

She's aligning herself with a man, but.

She'S not just trying to find an appealing man.

She's trying to find a man who makes her feel a certain way about.

Herself and who is powerful.

She wants to be aligned with a.

Powerful man because of how that reflects on her.

Katajina is probably the character in Victory who to me feels the most real.

She goes to an extreme level.

Most people like her don't get access to tanks or jet fighters or whatever the modern equivalent of a mobile suit is.

But I have met a lot of people like Katagina.

I feel like by the end of the show I know her.

And interestingly, while the show presents her as a sort of dark side of feminism, right, that girl, boss, women, war criminals, energy.

The show ultimately makes the opposite point.

The sort of illuminates the danger of women being dependent on men for a sense of power and agency, of women seeking power and validation through men.

And finally, she is a contrast to special perfect angel boy USO and is potentially meant to be more of a normal youth of today.

In Tomino's most old man yelling at Cloud, in her selfishness, her self centeredness, how judgmental and rigid she is, that these were potentially things that he was seeing in the youth of today.

Funny, I feel like we See that in the youth of today, no matter what day it is, maybe those are just the characteristics that us old people project onto the youth.

We are, after all, the ultimate enemy.

In a similar vein, angel asks, what do you think of USO and Katajina's relationship over the course of the show?

And goes on to say, my interpretation of Katajina's actions at the beginning is that she seems to be affectionate to him and only helps the League Militaire because it helps uso.

At the end, she seems to admit that she used to like uso, but again, in my opinion, also seems to want Chronicle to prove himself better than uso.

And she definitely wants Chronicle to win.

Even in their final duel for her affections, she's actively helping Chronicle.

She's taking potshots at USO while cheering Chronicle on.

And when USO ultimately wins, she reveals that she never intended to fulfill her offer in the first place.

As for her feelings about USO at the beginning of the show, I think she is flattered by the attention.

I don't think she actually cares about USO at the beginning at all, beyond enjoying the adoration and that she likes to be contrary most of the time.

When she, quote unquote, stands up for USO against the League Militaire, I think she just likes picking a fight with the League militaire.

The only thing she does that tells me she cares about us uso.

And this isn't really caring about uso, it's caring about what USO thinks of her is when she leaves that note to be like, I'm gonna be spying from the inside.

Hilarious, though I think, again, that is for her.

That is not for uso.

Really.

Yeah.

That's because she cares about him admiring her.

And he might not admire her anymore if she doesn't come up with some excuse why she's gone off with Zanskar.

And she has, at that point, internalized that Zanskar is the enemy.

Zanskar is bad.

Zanskar is doing all of these massacres.

And as she is beginning to feel seduced by Chronicle and the comfortable life that he's offering her, she assuages her feelings of guilt by telling herself, oh, I'm just doing this so that I can spy on them for the good of the League Militaire.

I'm still a good person.

I am.

I am.

Yeah.

A lot of her attitude toward uso, I think, comes from a sense of contrast with him, that he is a child and she's an adult.

He's poor and rural and undocumented versus she's rich and urban and important.

And to the extent that she is fixated on uso, it's because he is not supposed to beat her at anything, given those circumstances.

And yet he does come constantly.

And this really messes with her sense of herself and what all these things about her circumstances and her past are supposed to mean.

Even when she wants Chronicle to beat uso, I think it's more that she wants Chronicle to be strong.

And if he's losing to this young boy, it means he's not sufficiently strong.

Rather than it really being about uso.

Though, I think going back to that initial sense of resentment and jealousy, she does want to see USO beaten in those early episodes.

She wants USO to stop piloting because of how good USO is at piloting.

And that's not supposed to happen.

Initially, she's very grateful to USO for saving her life, but I think also she resents that she needed to be saved, that USO was in a position.

To save her, and that someone who she sees as so inferior, someone saved her because Chronicle saves her and wins her undying devotion.

But Chronicle is like a prince, and.

As long as USO was in love with her, as long as she had control over him, then she could mollify her feelings of jealousy a little bit.

Yes, USO is better than me at these things, but also he's mine.

He's devoted to me.

I control those talents.

And in a way, when she's butting heads with the League Militaire in those early episodes, we what she's trying to do is assert her control over USO rather than theirs.

She's testing USO's devotion to her.

When she says, you know, don't pilot, and then he goes and does it anyway, so she realizes that she doesn't actually control him.

And when she realizes that she doesn't control him, that's when she sticks the knife in.

That's when she, you know, says things like, I hate the sort of person you're becoming, or I hate violence.

I can't help but wonder.

It's touched on so briefly.

Do you think the position of the show is that Katajina is like this because her own parents marriage is so messed up?

She was ruined by her frigid mother and as a result is incapable of feeling real love?

I don't know, maybe.

Well, I wasn't even gonna say frigid mother, but like that.

Her mother was basically absent and having affairs all the time that her father couldn't control her mother I don't know.

Not enough evidence to make a conclusion.

Now we get to a very silly question Snowwhistle asks, is Farah Griffin Peter Griffin pilled?

Please refer to the definition below.

Peter Griffin pilled to be of questionable sanity that compels you to engage in extreme hijinks and reckless shenanigans, often involving silly contraptions, and have little or no concern for the morality of your actions or the consequences of your actions upon others.

For example, I consider Farah Griffin to be Peter Griffin pilled when she shoots her subordinate in the face for failing to enact her plan to kill Ussel.

I also consider Farah to be Peter Griffin pilled when she coerces a Zahn Scar soldier to kill her lover.

I don't entirely know what he means by this in a mistaken murder suicide.

Oh, this is when the two Zahnskar pilots who are going to get married end up killing each other.

Oh, right, right.

Yeah, that was horrible.

Yeah, really tragic.

I actually don't think Pharah is, by this definition, Peter Griffin pilled at all.

I think Pharah is very aware of hurting other people and likes it.

Agreed.

Yeah, I watched a couple of seasons of family guy 20 years ago and haven't really thought about it since then.

Yeah, I was never all that into the show, so I'm not exactly equipped.

To answer this question.

But I will say based on what I remember of it, I think you might have been watching a different version of the show than I was.

I don't remember Peter Griffin, like, murdering.

Anyone in terms of wacky hijinks, reckless shenanigans, and little to no concern for the consequences of your actions.

That to me says more like Odello or maybe Haro.

No, Haro cares a lot about the consequences of their actions.

Haro is always trying to help or protect USO Odello, though.

Odello, who is like, where's the enemy?

Quick, let me get my grenade launcher.

Somewhat Beacha coded there.

But I am prepared to accept the validity of this framing device as a way to analyze the show.

And I did watch at least one of the Star wars parodies they did with Family Guy characters.

So I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say that while I'm not sure which Family Guy character would play Farah, I feel pretty confident that Duke or Eke would be played by Joe the cop next door and Renda de Paloma by his wife.

I'm just not sure Many characters in Victory, which is by and large one of the more serious and Like Self Serious Gundam shows fit with Family Guy's vibes.

Now if you had asked about SD.

Gundam, perhaps the heroes are a little harder to map.

Brian as Flanders feels like the obvious choice, but I think I'd make him wear a dog costume.

I was going to say that the Fonz cogaty should be played by Lois's father, Carter Peterschmidt, but then I looked into it a little bit and apparently Henry the Fonz Winkler actually did a guest voice on Family Guy a couple of years ago, so I guess have that character do it.

Quagmire can play Commander Dupre, and then after he dies, have Quagmire come back as Tasilo Wago, never acknowledging the change.

I think there's like a.

There was like a popular but mean blonde girl at school.

That's Katagina, obviously.

And gosh, they were always really cruel to Meg, right?

Yeah, she plays every shrike.

Oh God.

Ooo.

Nan Apocalypse writes.

What do you think kept Chronicle from doing the right thing and continuing to do wrong instead?

In the answer to my previous question on a previous Q and A episode, Nina mentioned his motives being extremely opaque, which is very true and doesn't really change in the second half of the show.

I'd actually argue that his actions make even less sense as time goes on.

The show makes it look like he's more passively evil than proactively so, being easily influenced and willing to please certain other characters.

Could Katagina be why he became more loyal to Zanskar, despite how little the Empire seems to value him?

We can't blame her for his wrongdoing, but we might acknowledge that once she's in his life, he becomes more and more corrupt, and we should wonder what the show is trying to say about both characters with the I think what.

Stops Chronicle from doing the right thing is what stops most of us in those kinds of circumstances, which is to say, self interest.

Both positive.

Not positive as in good, but positive as in a desire for something good to happen to you, a desire for power and negative fear of death, punishment, other unpleasant consequences.

The only explanation for Chronicle that has made sense to me in this show is that he is heavily influenced by what others want him to be and expect from him.

And in that context, Katagina becomes almost a Lady Macbeth type, and he is trying to live up to her desires, trying to live up to what she wants from him, even though he personally doesn't care that much.

And potentially the show is making a comment about the danger of weak men dominated by strong women.

Blech.

Bleh.

Well, let me throw out a different possibility and give me your thoughts on this.

Since Victory's characterization of Chronicle is so thin, I'm going to be leaning really heavily on one specific line that I think might be illuminating.

And this is when he's talking to Katajina about his plans, his ambition.

It's basically the only time in the show that he ever does this.

But he's talking about his plans for the angel Halo.

Shortly after entrusting his niece to the dubious care of the faun's Cagaty, he says something like, once we've won this battle, I will seize control of the angel Halo and use it to reduce Sugin and the fauns to mere infants.

We see a Chronicle who has things that he wants to accomplish.

Personal vengeance.

Listen, that's valid, okay?

All of us at some point in our lives are motivated by a desire for vengeance.

So he wants to do things, but he keeps putting them off.

He's waiting for the right moment.

He's waiting for the stars to align just so.

And he continues waiting forever.

He lets his best opportunities pass him by because he's waiting for the perfect moment, which, I don't know.

That feels very relatable to me.

You know, you play a video game and you're thinking, oh, I need to rearrange my inventory, but I'll just wait until I get to the next town.

Or you're sitting around the house thinking, I need to clean my room, but first I should buy some new storage bins, and I need to go to the gym, but I'll go after I finish writing this essay.

Or the other way around, I need to write this essay, but I'll do it after I go to the gym first.

And then you get into that paralysis mode where you're stuck between two things and end up doing zero things.

I think that's what's going on with Chronicle.

Maybe I just like, he could have killed Kagati.

If what he wanted was vengeance on Kagati, he could have gotten Cagati out of the picture easily, multiple times.

And he never does it.

It wasn't the right mom.

Well, and admittedly, simply killing Kagati does not reduce Kagate to a sad little baby.

And he might really want to see Kagati reduced to a sad little baby.

Larry writes, haro has been a mainstay of Gundam since the beginning, but in Victory, he takes a more active role, even helping USO pilot from time to time.

What do you think about the evolution of Haru's role from first Gundam up to Victory.

As I was reading these interviews with Tomino and the staff about Victory, one thing that came up is Tomino's storytelling can be very improvisational.

He starts off with these really complex outlines for how the story is going to go and all the elements he wants to include and all the characters and what their roles are going to be.

But he is so willing to throw those out the window the moment a better idea occurs to him.

And according to him, a lot of the character focus in Victory was determined by which voice actors were giving good performances, like Renda de Paloma.

The woman who is Duker IK's love interest there at the end was not even a named character until she was in the booth with Duker Ick's voice actor.

And they had a really good rapport, and so they wrote a romance plotline for them.

In Victory, Haro has such a big role because Tomino really liked the way the voice actor was portraying Haro.

That same voice actor also did Warren.

And because Haro's role expanded, Warren's role contracted.

If you notice that Warren is not a major part of the later parts of the show, a lot of that is because Haro is.

I miss a bit having Harrow as this definitive symbol of childhood, because here Haro is definitely not that basically at all.

But I did love how active Haro is.

Can't help but wonder, what are Haro's motivations?

Haruo acts independently so much.

Just how sentient is Haro?

Or does Haru just run on like a script that has him protect USO at all costs?

Protect and nurture uso, but also be.

A little bit sassy about it.

Women?

Why women?

You got it, boss man.

Who taught you to talk like that?

On second thought, perhaps Harrow is more complex or nuanced in Victory because Victory spends so much of its time preoccupied with the transitional period between childhood and adulthood.

Previous Harrow and previous Gundams, there was a line that the main character crossed between one and the other.

There tended to be some decisive point where, okay, now they are an adult.

In Victory, it's this vast shades of gray area that's being traversed and not in a straight line.

It's like weird squiggles.

Jeremy Baramy forward and backtracking and forward again through a much more nuanced shift between the two states of being.

That is a fantastic point in a lot of ways.

USO starts out already being an adult.

He's already living independent of his family.

He's already taking care of himself.

He's already doing an adult's share of work on the farm.

He's as independent and self reliant as an adult should be.

But also, within the language of Gundam, he never actually stops being a child.

He never loses that sense of righteousness that children are allowed to possess and.

Which adults do not, and that desire to have a parental figure comfort him, which maybe the other characters have.

But it's never made clear in the story.

It's not as obvious and in the fore as it is for uso.

And every other Gundam protagonist thus far has finished their story in a very different place from where they started.

Both like physically, but also emotionally.

USO literally winds up right back where he started.

To the extent that USO is changed, those changes are mostly internal.

And maybe it's not that surprising then, that his Harrow is a little more complex and that he never fully abandons Harrow.

He never fully leaves Harrow behind in the same way that some of the other Gundam protagonists do.

Because USO suppresses a lot of his more childish feelings from a very early point, and because he is so stoic with his emotions, Haro serves the really important role, I think, of expressing what USO doesn't.

Harrow is in some ways a less guarded version of USO's ID.

Perhaps our final question might be the most controversial.

Do you want to read it or shall I?

Sure.

Tohosaka writes Gundam boys tend to have some pretty bad parents.

But now that you've completed the original Tomino run of UC shows, who do you feel is the actual worst?

Can you individually or as a group, rank Gundam boy parents from best to worst?

They have helpfully included a list of parents.

USO's parents, Mira Miguel and Hanger Uwin Seabook's parents Leslie and Monica Arno, Judo's parents, unnamed Camille's parents Franklin and Hilda Bidan and of course Amura's parents, Tem and Kamaria Rae.

I'll be really curious to see if there are points where Tom and I disagree on this.

But first, easy one to get out of the way, I think.

While not perhaps the best parents in Gundam, the unnamed Ashtas actually get pushed close to the top, largely because we don't see anything about them.

But we know that they are both working elsewhere in an attempt to support their children.

It's not enough, but the children do not speak ill of their parents in any way, and this is treated as a necessity of their way of life.

Yeah, I think we can use the unnamed Ashtas as a control group.

That is our Baseline for parent, like.

Trying to do right by their kids.

No obvious mistreatment, mostly absent.

And the kids, while their material circumstances are pretty strained emotionally, seem pretty well adjusted.

I struggled a little bit with the next part, I think.

USO's parents and Leslie Arno come in next.

Ish.

They're all sort of grouped together.

You think Hunger belongs in the same category as Meera and Leslie?

So Hunger and Meera are both dealing with a more difficult situation than Leslie is, in my opinion.

Leslie's big problem is, oh, my wife works in another colony, so the kids don't see her very much.

Like, that's it Hanger is having to deal with.

My son is growing up and I'm his boss and I'm his dad, and he's growing up and this is really difficult to navigate.

And he struggles, but the fact that he struggles with it is, in my mind, a good sign.

It means he understands that it's difficult and he's trying to do the best he can.

And is he messing up?

Absolutely.

But he's trying to do right by his kid in a very difficult situation.

Leslie Arno, you know, Seabook is basically grown by the standards of Gundam.

He's a high school student, like, Right.

There's nothing more for Leslie to do with him.

Right.

Seabook is like the oldest, or at least oldest seeming of Tomino's Gundam protagonists.

USO is the youngest.

They're dealing with kids in very different times of life.

Not much parenting left to do there.

Though.

I will say, a lot of where I would rank Hangarg comes down to whether you think he abandoned the Jaundarc at the end or whether you think he was responsible for its final successful suicide ramming attack against the last of the squid command ships.

Because if you think Hangaerg turned tail and ran and abandoned the fight, then I think you have to rank him pretty low as a human being and as a father.

True.

On the other hand, if you think that he sacrificed himself at the end, then he gets a couple of points for that.

So in my view, Leslie Arno goes right to the top.

Okay, so you agree with me that he deserves to be ranked pretty high.

Oh, yes.

I also think Leslie Arno's dad energy is so powerful that he actually, like when his kids are sailing safely away in the space boat and and he sees another completely unaffiliated abandoned child back in the colony, he goes back to parent that child.

His dad energy is too strong for just two kids.

The other consideration with Lesley Arno is to be so dedicated to his kids requires him to defy the gender expectations of his society.

He is not supposed to be the primary caregiver.

He is not supposed to be the one who sacrifices his career for the sake of the the family.

And even if he personally disagrees with those conventions, even if he rejects them, he still has to live in that society and endure the consequences of that defiance.

The fact that he made that decision and seems not to resent it in the slightest speaks well of him as a parent.

I would say it speaks well of him as a man, not necessarily as a parent.

Because if we're not going to judge Monica extra harshly for breaking with those gender norms, why are we giving him bonus points?

I only mean to say that I think it indicates that he is devoted to his children.

He is, and very supportive of his wife.

And those are good things to be.

That should be standard for all parents.

And yet they're not.

Certainly not when we consider this list of parents.

I know certain listeners that we've talked to take issue with Mira Miguel and Hank Ewan's apparent parenting style.

It does look as though they, from a very early age, wanted to foster independence in uso.

They let him do various somewhat dangerous things and they were there to support him and provided a lot of educational materials and and parental guidance, but wanted him to be independent and to do things for himself.

I actually think that's a good thing.

I agree that it's weird that she has this messianic vision about him, but appreciate her restraint in not raising him, telling him that it's not as though from the time he could understand her speak, she was like, you are going to be space Jesus and save the world.

Yeah, it definitely raises some eyebrows, but it doesn't seem to have affected her mothering.

And a lot of parents dream that their kid will change the world after that.

I put Monica Arnault mainly because while I disagree with her career choices, I don't actually think she's a bad mother.

The position of the story she's in is that she's a bad mother, but I disagree with them.

She gives every indication of wanting to be loving and supportive to her kids because she works away from them.

She doesn't connect with them super easily because they just don't know each other that well.

But if roles were reversed and she had been at home and their dad had been away for years at a time, nobody would bat an eye.

So I think it's totally unfair to like, judge her in this sexist manner.

And I think then I would Rank her more or less even with the Ashtas.

Like, what we know about her is somewhat mixed but mostly positive.

And she has left her kids behind to go and work on another colony, just like the Ashtas have.

Then I put Hilda Bidan.

Mm.

We don't know much about her.

We mostly know that she was a career woman and so was maybe a bit like neglectful.

Absentee.

Yes.

Chamile describes her as being distracted from her family life by her work or using her work to distract herself from her bad family life.

Either way, not a great mother, but better than the ones who are coming next on the list.

Certainly not as actively bad as the remaining parents.

Then I think Tem.

Rae.

Yeah, I put Tem and Kamaria pretty close together.

See, I would put Tem on the same level as Hilda.

Okay.

Of basically, like, he did raise Amuro.

He was a single father and very much distracted by his work, which was his guiding passion.

But he still did raise the kid.

There's no sense that he prevented Kamaria from coming with them, prevented Kamaria from like being part of their lives.

It was just that he was going to space, Amuro was going with him and Kamaria refused to do so for one reason or another.

And I think heavily implied because she wanted to stay with her lover.

So while Tem was not a particularly emotionally accessible, or for that matter, just accessible in general father, he did a decent job with Amuro and he never hit him, not even once.

Tem would probably rank better if he had just died.

His indifference to Amuro when they meet again on side six really harms his position in these rankings.

It is occurring to me.

A cultural factor that is potentially at play here is that they basically don't do joint custody in Japan.

When parents split up, kids go with one or the other parent and that's it.

There's almost never visitation.

I think they are only just now starting to do split custody arrangements.

It's very rare.

So if you think of Tem and Kamaria as divorcing at this point, it would not have been unusual in Japanese culture for Amuro to basically never see Kamari again, except maybe as an adult.

I simply will never forgive how judgmental she is of him, of Amuro for simply defending himself.

She's an example of kind of a way that Hanger could have been portrayed.

I think she's also struggling with the fact that her little boy is not a little boy anymore and is a grown man.

But she's not aware of that struggle.

She's not really trying to navigate it.

She's just upset with him for not fitting this idea that she had of him in her head.

And what a thing to put on a kid who's already been through so much.

I am pleased to see that apparently we have ranked Franklin Bidan identically, which is to say absolutely the worst.

Just a real piece of work.

Just an absolutely abominable human being.

And father seems entirely indifferent to his child's survival in a way that nobody else is.

Like truly does not care what happens to Chamile.

Yeah, that's it for this week.

We do, however, have to answer one last question, but a question so big it keeps getting shunted to its very own special episode.

Please listen to it.

Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people, and made possible by listeners like you.

You.

The opening track is Wasp by Misha Dioxin.

The closing music is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio.

You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people and more in the show notes on our website gundampodcast.com if you'd like to get in touch with us, you can email hostsundampodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website.

And if you would like to support the show, please share us with your friends.

Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us financially@gundumpodcast.com Patreon you can find links and more ways to help out@gundumpodcast.com support thank you for listening.

Ooh.

Tiger, you want to come up?

Come on up, baby.

You won't let me lift you.

Yeah, I know you don't.

You don't want me to scoop you, but you can't be up here while I'm recording.

It's no good.

It's no good.

Here we go.

Kitten in the lap.

SHE GROANS AND GRUMBLES But I got her.

And recording that took two hours, so this is probably actually going to be two episodes.

Wait, three.

Remember, you wanted to devote an entire episode to that one question.

And we haven't even talked about victory as a whole.

Well, that's what that other question really is.

Yeah, so I guess you all wrote some really thought provoking questions and we had a lot left to say.

So I hope you enjoyed Season 10, Episode 52 Part 1, and look forward to the next part next week.

But next week we'll get back with one final story episode, one final Q and one final A.

That sounds terrible.

Don't do that.

Sam.