one of my favorite tropes tbh, please feel free to add more examples

Mech Cadets S01E04

Ive been greeting really into robots lately.

Top to bottom, left to right: Jaeger (pacific Rim), Eva 01 (Evangelion), Buddy (Mech Cadets), Wall-e, Transformers

havent seen ANY mech cadets art or anyone talk abt it makes me SOOO MAD IRS SO GOODDDDD I wuv this show sooo much PLEASE WATCH IT IT NEEEEDSSS A S2 SO BAD

+bonus

THEYREEE SOOO SILYYYYYY

I FUCKING LOVE YOY

The first thing I thought of when I found out he speaks Cantonese

DT my bestie Lia I knew I had to get ur opinion first if I should watch or not 😻

She's even worse in the comics but that means she's also so much better.

She starts out as such a classist asshole nepo baby, I love it.

Also she loves her big Frankenstein's monster of a robot so much!

redraw of one of my favourite panels from 'mech cadet yu' but with the netflix series designs of buddy and stan!

original panel under the cut ⤵️

Imma be honest I only watch the show for her

I really like how Mech Cadets decided to go about handling the character Frank Olivetti.

These three would be an interesting trio.

When I watched TV or movies as a kid, I never got to see an amputee using crutches like I do. Much less using those crutches to fight aliens. I certainly played make-believe about stuff like that, but I only saw it in my imagination.

Well, it’s no longer just fantasy. It’s an actual thing you can watch on your TV. And I am lucky enough to voice the character.

Young Josh would LOVE this show. (Grownup Josh does, too.)

You can see Frank’s epic crutch battle in episode 4 of Mech Cadets, now streaming on Netflix.

So I put on this netflix show, in their tradition of being extremely obvious with names its called Mech Cadets, and its an alien-mecha human-pilot fight-the-giant-bug-aliens story. My first complaint is that the alien mechas are called Robo's. Wow exciting /sarcasm. Anyway thats totally forgiven because 1 the story actually makes choices and puts the characters through consequences instead of like hinting at oh it something bad gonna happen psych we dont have the guts for that. Its a kid/teen show so its not super dark but it follows through and goes the places it needs to.

2, and maybe most importantly, I gotta talk about the disability rep. There's four teens chosen by the alien mechs to be their drift-compatible pilots (I think im using that correctly? Im not super informed on the genre but I know some), and we see straight away that one of the guys has a prosthetic leg from the thigh down, and uses it as an example to tell the main protagonist, hey none of us are perfect we dont have to be perfect we just need to be human. The next episode the mechas are given human-designed weapons to fight with, and the disabled kid gets these flippy sticks I cant quite work out. One of them gets a staff, the other gets this glove for punching, story moves on. Then a bug-alien-antagonist gets into the teens dorm and while fighting it, the alien dismembers the guys prosthetic. He immediately grabs his crutches and goes to town on it with his crutches, and balancing on them to kick with his one good foot*. Then they disconnect the rest of the prosthetic and use its sharp edge to kill the alien. And then he just moves around on his crutches with no comment and Ill cut myself off there so I dont spoil the whole thing.

Except, a couple episodes later, Im watching him in the mech fighting and moving around, and I realise that his giant fuck-off monster attacking weapons ARE A PAIR OF CRUTCHES. Theyre his fucking WEAPONS. Thats cool as fuck!

Random Mech Cadets headcannons because I just watched the finale for the second time:

- Frank is bi

- Stanford and Olivia are both aro/ace

- Olivia is neurodivergent

- “Olivia is too stubborn to die” is a running joke between the gang, but they all low-key believe it

- Frank gives really good hugs. Like his hugs are just super comfy for no apparent reason

- Olivia is really, really good at everything she tries, EXCEPT for cooking. She just can. not. cook.

- Ava has called both Dolly and Chief Max “mom” on multiple separate occasions

- Buddy, Big Red, and Thunderwrecker sometimes argue with each other about whose pilot is the coolest

- Maya can do and often does pushups while Frank or Olivia is sitting on her back

she got the moment PLUS the plot armor