(no subject)

[darchildre]

Things:

- I have been on vacation for the last week, but went back to work today. My vacation was lovely - my parents went out of town, so I had five whole days of knitting and spinning and not talking to anyone. It was great.

- I have finished my first 2022 Christmas knitting project! (Yes, I am aware that it is March. I have a lot of knitting planned for this year.) It's a shawl for my Mom and it came out quite well - I'm very pleased with it. Alas, now I have to pack it away in my cedar storage box till December.

- Having now listened to nearly 200 episodes of The Great Gundam Project, my brain has started to do the thing where I start musing about watching particular works not so much because I'll enjoy it but instead because it feels like something I should be familiar with in order to have context for the larger genre. This tends to happen when the subject of my current interest is more a genre than a particular story. I'm like this with horror film, for example, which is why I've seen The Exorcist multiple times despite hating The Exorcist and why I keep thinking that I should watch Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Saw. I don't think I will enjoy those films (though who knows), but they still feel like something I should see in order to better understand horror as a whole. DC comics were like that for me too - I have read a lot of random-ass comics I wasn't particularly drawn to in order to better understand the shape and history of the DC universe. Sometimes this led to fun stuff - that's the reason I first started reading Fourth World comics, for example - but most of the time it meant me forcing myself to read all of Countdown.

- Anyway. My brain has started having those impulses about sci-fi anime and that is why I have now started watching the 1974 Space Battleship Yamato. The first episode of which is just absurdly bleak, you guys. Holy shit. However, the bleakness is mitigated by the funky 70's soundtrack and the fact that several characters are wearing space bellbottoms.

- Hilariously, despite GGP putting me on this scifi anime track, I have yet to commit in any way to actually watching, y'know, a Gundam show.

Comments

[shadaras]

As someone else listening to GGP with zero plans of watching any Gundam, I think it's freeing to outright know I'm never going to watch the main show(s) they cover. xD The shows that are most likely to make me go "huh, maybe?" are the ones they mention in their "what anime have we watched recently" segment at the beginning. (Still haven't picked anything up from that, but it's the right level of detail to make me go "oooh interesting!") But otherwise, like, GGP is the way I've chosen to deal with "what even is the history of the mecha genre" question.

[darchildre]

Yeah, most of the stuff I've wanted to watch because they've talked about has been stuff in the introductory segments, or stuff they've picked as backup shows - I'm nearly done with Armored Trooper Votoms, for example, and I'm planning to watch Space Runaway Ideon, neither of which I'd have heard of without GGP. (My knowledge of scifi/mech anime prior to listening to this show was basically nil.)

I do keep downloading the Gundam shows that sound good because I'm ridiculous, but I have yet to watch more than an episode or two.