reanimator fandom can we talk abt this

i like how everyone else is a real scary looking murder monster and herberts just. a twink with a bag

Tommy Rawhead

Tommy Rawhead has a lot of similarity to the Cutty Black Sow in terms of their appearance.  Tommy Raw Head is a reanimated corpse of a hog on which his flesh has been stripped of their bones.

During the times that they are still alive, Tommy Rawhead is said to be the favorite pet of a witch.  Sometimes the Bloody Bones also acted as the witch’s familiar.  One day a pack of hunters managed to kill the hog.  They decapitated his head, butchered him and carved off the meat from its bones. When the witch realized what happened to his favorite pet, the witch devised a plan to get revenge to the hunters.  The witch allegedly used her black magic and reanimated the corpse of the hog.  His bones and decapitated head has been reattached and the horrible monster was brought back to life.  One by one the creature hunted the hunters who killed him.

"Rawhead and Bloody Bones, Steals naughty children from their homes, Takes them to his dirty den, And they are never seen again."-Nursery Rhymes

After his revenge, the creature started preying on the kids.  This time he is now acting as a bogeyman who nabbed children who refused to go to sleep.

Rawhead is said to appear upright like a human and with its super human strength, it is said that winning against it in a hand to hand combat is impossible.  It also has the ability to take the parts of other animals and add it to his body.  In Irish and British lore, the Rawhead has the ability to shape shift.

Picture by Amanda Wood

Violator is the oldest and most powerful of five hell-born demons known as the Phlebiac Brothers, and his main purpose is to guide Hellspawns towards fulfilling Malebolgia's desire: to cultivate evil souls on Earth for Hell's army. He has been Hell's guide for multiple Hellspawn, his latest charge being the current Spawn, Al Simmons.[2] However, Violator views humanity as weak and so asserts that demons should lead the armies of Hell, not Spawn. Accordingly, much of his terrestrial activities, sanctioned by Hell or not, are aimed at proving his superiority to his master. The Violator's current disguise is that of Clown, a 3'10"[3] overweight, balding man with menacing face-paint and four fingers in each hand. The Violator is not a demon to be taken lightly: he has shown many times that he is more than a match for a young Hellspawn. His hands are tied by his role, though, as he cannot kill a Spawn without an order from his superiors. His role is not to kill the Hellspawn, but to weaken them and cause them to waste their powers in wreaking havoc. His chief purpose is to groom and prepare the young Hellspawn for their service in Satan's army. He has been killed multiple times, each time to be returned to Hell and reanimated by his master.

Fighting for his lifeEdit

His brothers turn on him at one point, sending him fleeing for his life through a New York city shopping district. He becomes briefly allied with a moral but naive vigilante.[4]

At one point he is kept prisoner in a scientific facility seeking to weaponize his energies. Violator has to deal with an unexpected trip to hell, an insanely murderous angel and the facility's director of security, the stone-bodied Badrock.[5]

After suffering a humiliating defeat in Hell during Spawn's return to claim the throne of the 8th sphere, Clown reappeared on Earth on the order of Mammon to wreak havoc in Spawn's life as part of the larger plan to give Nyx an opportunity to betray Al. He was a "mental adviser" to Jason Wynn, his former contact and partner in the deal that cost Al Simmons his life. He helped Wynn regain his sanity and return to the NSA, but had other plans, rather than being charitable. He has assumed the dominant role in Wynn's psyche and when Wynn was vulnerable, hanging from a steel girder many stories up, he caused him to fall to his apparent death. Clown then took over Wynn's body and used it as his new vessel. He turned Wynn's body into a fanged, bloated parody of his former self. Clown then began to attack and 'mark' citizens of Rat City, turning them all into blue face-painted Clowns. It was revealed that the Violator was possessing hundreds of civilians and forcing them to run amok, committing acts of violence and vandalism, all with a smile on their faces. After their attacks brought Spawn to the brink of death, leaving him bleeding and broken on the streets of Rat City in his Al Simmons persona, the Clowns vanished. The Violator has not been seen since, but has revealed that he has been turned loose on Earth with no strings attached, and it is only a matter of time before he returns to plague Spawn anew.

In Spawn #167, a new Clown emerges, who is thin and agile, and fond of using knives. Clown hijacked the body of Barney Saunders, who had been having an affair with a married woman named Wilma Barbera. Trying to escape discovery by Wilma Barbera's husband, Barney Saunders jumped down the garbage chute only to be trapped there a couple of days before the bright light event (Spawn's destruction and recreation of the world), and was trapped in a garbage chute and doomed to be eaten alive by rats and roaches. The new Clown easily escapes and frequently uses a knife to attack his enemies. He also can still change into his demon form when he wishes.

The Violator is revealed to be the cause of all the havoc of an apartment complex, freeing the residents of restraint and allowing them to fulfill their desires and violent urges. This allowed the Violator to create a portal to Hell from which the other Phlebiac Brothers could enter the world. Violator is confronted by Spawn, but easily gains the upper hand in the battle. Mere moments from Violator's victory, Barney Saunder's spirit gains control when his body sees his lover Wilma. Barney Saunders decides to go through the portal into Hell, knowing that the only way to close the portal was to trap himself and Clown on the other side while he could still maintain control over his body. Barney reveals that he was angry at his lover for not coming to save him when he was starving in the garbage chute and takes her with him, stranding The Violator, Saunders and Wilma in Hell.

Clown has recently reappeared in New York City (how he escaped from Hell is unknown). It is Clown who finds the decapitated body of Spawn in the alleys, and it is he who tries to mask the dead zone created after Spawn's suicide. Clown tries hard to keep the Spawn's death a secret and kills anyone aware of the Spawn's demise. Clown plans to put together his own army to bring down the kingdom of Heaven (against the wishes of the "Elders", supposedly very powerful rulers of Hell). He travels to Connecticut to enlist the help of a fellow demon who now assumes the life of a human and is married to a human as well. Clown tries to convince the fellow demon (who has not yet been named) to join his own private army, but to no avail. Unfortunately for the nameless demon, Clown is not going to take "no" for an answer. Clown gives the man two days to get his affairs in order before departing. The man, still defiant, looks in his cabinet to find the severed heads of his prize winning dogs and a note from Clown reading, "I'm not Clowning around!".

Clown is absent for a while, but then reappears in New York City to find an Angel crucified to a wall (done so by the newly ordained Hellspawn). He is unaware that there is already a new Hellspawn and asks the Angel who pinned her to the wall, as he beats her with a crowbar. She laughs at his lack of knowledge about "What your side is doing, Mr. Clown," which angers Clown. He gives her a reason to fear him as he contorts his Clown face into that of the Violator. She says she is unafraid, to which he replies, "There are worse things than death, especially for an Angel"; he then tears the wings from the helpless Angel's back.

After Jim and the Freak arrive on the scene, the Violator reveals himself. Though the Violator tells Jim he has the answers he seeks, it is made clear by the Freak that the Violator is not on his side. When confronted by the truth, the Violator threatens Jim and the Freak. Before Jim can get any information from Violator, he retreats deeper into the alleys. The Violator goes to "slaughter someone who could endanger my plans". In the next scene, the Violator is switching between his two forms in order to trick Jim, pretending the Violator is fighting Clown.

Clown emerges and claims that he has dispatched the Violator. The Freak curses Clown and then retreats in fear. Clown and Jim are left alone. Clown explains a little about Jim's newfound power; that his costume is alive and that there are ways of controlling it. He then laments over the Angel's current insanity. He makes Jim believe that someone else had been behind this vile act and not he. Clown explains that he is Jim's ally and that Jim should trust him in order to find the answers he seeks. Before the two can converse any longer, Clown dashes away, telling Jim that he has an appointment and he will see Jim around.

Clown is nearly run down by Sam and Twitch's car, after running in front of it. Clown is then pursued by the two detectives after he urinates on their car. After being stopped by Twitch, and tackled by Sam, Clown is taken to the pair's precinct (although this was obviously Clown's plan). Clown is put into a cell with three other men. Clown sits beside and talks to the one he identifies as Claudio.

He tells Claudio that he wishes to have a conference with Claudio's boss. Claudio becomes defensive and asks why Clown thinks the boss would want to see him. Clown explains to Claudio that he is going to make his boss an offer he cannot refuse. He proclaims that now that he has found a Spawn, he plans to combine his power, Spawn's power, and Claudio's boss' power in order to make the New Unholy Trinity. Spawn 294 and 295 reveals that he had made Spawn's powers and all of the other Hellspawns. Later, 300 confirms that Violator was the one who killed Wanda Blake and had evolved to a point as he is now more bulky in his demon form

On the anti-imperialist roots of the Super Robot genre

Tadao Nagahama is probably not a name you're familiar with. I won't reproach you for it, it's been a while, I had to look it up myself to help me remember. However, Nagahama is an extremely important person for my current subject of discussion: the anti-imperialist, anti-war roots of the Super Robot genre. Shinzo Abe, the current prime minister of Japan, probably most widely known in the west for wearing a Mario hat to promote the next olympic games, has been in his own quiet (and not so quiet) way contributing to the rise of hard right nationalism, historical revisionism, fascism, and a whole bunch of other nasty isms that have found traction in today's sociopolitical climate. Recently, I saw in passing a tweet about how the ever-popular, ever-mystifying Kancolle had an episode where Japan ended up winning the battle of Midway. Propaganda in media is nothing new, but that was quite egregious, even by my desensitized standards. It got me thinking a little bit about my own niche anime interests and how the common perception of the mecha genre is probably one either of random Gurren Lagann bullshit or simplistic, thinly veiled pro-Japan ideology packaged in a kid friendly, larger than life veneer. In a lot of ways, early Super Robots shared more in common with classical American Super Heroes than actual Japanese Super Heroes like Kamen Rider, which evolved into their own tokusatsu genre quite distinct from either paradigm.

I cannot rightly dispute these preconceptions as wrong, but I do want to at least bring up that some early, influential franchises rejected this narrative. One of the first of these, of course, is Mobile Suit Gundam. While now we have the distinction between Super Robot (robots that are like larger than life super heroes) and Real Robot (robots that are presented in a realistic context as weapons of war using standardized technology employed by military and paramilitary forces to project force) for tedious nerds to bicker over indefinitely, in the days of the original Gundam, that distinction did not exist. Indeed, to play for ratings, Yoshiyuki Tomino, famed creator of the Gundam franchise, had to make many concessions to his sponsors and make Amuro Ray's Gundam more like its more popular contemporaries, with goofy mid-season combination upgrades and some extremely anachronistic weaponry like a beam trident and a huge, MS sized ball and chain. On the back of his later success, Zeta Gundam and the seemingly never ending number of side-stories like War in the Pocket and Stardust Memory, Tomino would actually go on to revise the original series in a definitive movie compilation that cut out a great deal of filler and blatantly unrealistic (or at least immersion breaking) elements. This version is extremely good by the way. Give it a watch if you're interested in the genre's history or if you just like old sci-fi.

The reason I bring this up is sort of my roundabout way of arguing that while the Gundam of today is made of entirely different stock than Super Robots, the original article deserves a space in this discussion. The discussion being, of course, the distinctly anti-nationalist bent of a lot of early Super Robot shows. In all of its many incarnations, good, bad, and inbetween, Gundam is a story about war really sucking and how tragic it is that we fail to understand one another because it's easier to just kill one another instead. Now, of course, a lot of fans are either too thick to understand this subtext (and text-text) or simply willfully disregard it because they like cool robots that shoot lasers. Basically think of Dan Ryckert's relationship with Metal Gear. While certainly not all Gundam series have been good, they have always been faithful to these ideas, which is laudable. In broad strokes, anyway. SEED Destiny was pretty weird in spots.

Mobile Suit Gundam 079, which chronicled the One Year War, was not at all shy about this. The One Year War began as a movement for Spacenoid (a slightly ridiculous term for a person living in a space colony or on the moon) independence from the hopelessly corrupt Earth Federation. Naturally, the Federation did not take kindly to this and moved to suppress the movement, but found itself overmatched by the Principality of Zeon's advanced Mobile Suit weapons. To keep an even footing in the war, the Federation resorted to using nuclear weapons and other atrocities on largely civillian colonies to buy time as they developed their own brand of Mobile Suit. In retaliation, Zeon counterattacked with an even more devastating new weapon: dropping space colonies on earth. All told, the One Year War was not a good time to be alive, and nearly half of the Earth Sphere's total population died in one way or another. While all this was happening, the original founder of the independence movement died under suspect circumstances and power was seized by the Zabi family, who were Really Bad News. The Federation, meanwhile, turned to conscripting child soldiers in a desperate bid to keep pace.

This all culminated in the creation of the Gundam by Tem Ray, Amuro's emotionally absent father. Due to Circumstances, Amuro finds himself in the cockpit and becomes the most important soldier in the war overnight because the Gundam is several orders of magnitude more powerful than anything Zeon can field. The character of Amuro is explored most fully in Char's Counterattack, when he is a fucked up adult instead of a fucked up kid, but from the outset, Amuro is defined by forces completely out of his control and his fatalistic acceptance of his own lack of agency. Despite his nigh legendary piloting skills, Newtype powers of precognition and telepathy, and status as hero of the One Year War, Amuro might actually be the most passive motherfucker in the god damned galaxy. This puts him immediately at odds not only militarily but interpersonally with the dreadfully overambitious if mostly well-intentioned Char Aznable, his lifelong rival. Their entire history of conflict is based entirely upon the simple irony that they both want the same thing but, despite being Newtypes, lack the ability to understand this. The One Year War's violence and brutality defined them and their relationship to another, because of a petty twist of fate that put Amuro in the Gundam's pilot seat instead of some other sap.

Gundam uses many more overt methods of conveying that the One Year War is not glamorous or cool or just. Characters die regularly on both sides of the conflict, oftentimes for no real reason other than "this is war, sucker." Tomino developed quite a reputation for this style of storytelling, earning the moniker Kill-'em-all Tomino, especially in some of his non-Gundam works like Aura Battler Dunbine and Space Runaway Ideon. The entire continent of Australia got rendered uninhabitable by colony drops. The White Base, the federation battleship housing the Gundam, is crewed and staffed almost entirely by people who have yet to reach 20 years of age and they've got a pack of prepubescent toddlers running around on the ship because they've got nowhere else to go. I personally find the interpersonal conflicts acting as microcosm for ideology and war to be the most interesting, and most intrinsically Gundam thing about the franchise, but you don't have to go looking between the lines to find evidence of the show's ardent anti-war, anti-nationalist proclivities. The intensely nationalistic Zeon is surreptitiously usurped by a power-mad dictator without anyone even catching on after Ghiren Zabi uses a giant ass space laser to kill both his father and an influential Earth Federation general while they're trying to broker a peace deal. The death of that general, in turn, allows the worst elements of the Federation government to run amok and eventually create the deeply fascist Titans in Zeta Gundam, who make it a point of policy to oppress spacenoids as brutally as possible.

So Gundam, at least, has profound roots in the denunciation of military power as a metric of moral superiority. That's not really news to most people. Oddly enough, it's the most obsessive of fans that tend to miss the memo because they're presumably too busy making sure Mobile Suit measurements are exactly as documented and all character motivations are completely rational and logical, like them. Let's dig a little deeper for some more surprising examples of this kind of ideology in unlikely places. It should be noted, of course, that I am not heralding Gundam as some sort of bastion of progressive thought. Tomino's sexual politics are located roughly in the Stone Age until about 2000's Turn A Gundam, where they progress to about on par with inudstrial revolution social mores. Progress, I suppose. This is a problem with a distressing amount of media, especially in the 70s and 80s, but I'm trying to look at the bright side of things. At least it's not Cross Ange, right?

Moving on, when we look at the genesis of Super Robots as a genre of animation, we will invariably look to Go Nagai. Though a number of shows about large robot men fighting evil like Tetsujin 28 and the live action Giant Robo came first, the seminal Mazinger Z had the popularity and iconic staying power to define everything that came after. Though I could write a great deal about Go Nagai and his Dynamic Robots, they don't really pertain to my particular topic of discussion today because Go Nagai was about as progressive as a sack of bricks. His work was largely apolitical, at least in the sense that he did not intentionally make his stories about contemporary political issues, so at very least Kouji Kabuto never waxed nostalgic about the time Japan was allied with Nazi Germany. In fact, one of the show's major villains, Count Brocken, is a reanimated SS officer cyborg who carries his head around with him because of a decapitation in a previous life. Generally speaking, not a good or sympathetic guy, despite his protests to the contrary. Go Nagai focused on themes of brotherhood and being outcast by society for just being too damn hotblooded and having sideburns that were just too damn thick, though these mostly manifested in his manga. The TV adaptations of Mazinger, Getter Robo, and Grendizer were largely sanitized and inoffensive.

I mentioned Tadao Nagahama at the beginning of my piece, and it is now with him we come to a very important point in the genre's history. Nagahama was the director of three particular Super Robot shows: Combattler V, Voltes V (here the V is treated as the roman numeral, so it's really Voltes 5), and Toushou Daimos (roughly, Brave Leader Daimos). Colloquially, these three are known as the Nagahama Romantic Trilogy, and they are denoted not only by the iconic designs of the robots themselves, towering, blocky things made out of many constituent parts in a fairly sensical way (as opposed to the famously Unpossible Getter Robo), but also by the injection of genuine interpersonal and ideological drama into the proceedings. They were also super popular in other areas of the world, much like Go Nagai's Dynamic Robots. Voltes V in particular was popular in Southeast Asia. Combattler V was instrumental in cementing the notion of The Honorable Rival in the genre, a character aligned with evil that still conducted themselves with decorum. While you would find few such characters in the ranks of Dr. Hell's armies or King Vega's invasion force, in the Romantic Trilogy, they were critical to the show's success. Combattler V was not especially revolutionary, but it laid the groundwork for Voltes V, which in many ways was.

Voltes V is the tale of the Boazan Empire, an interstellar civilization with an expansionist streak and a highly stratified caste system. Unlike previous villainous organizations, the Boazans are noteworthy for being three dimensional and not painted in shades of black and white. The Boazans invade earth for the purposes of annexing it to their growing empire, with the crown prince Hainel leading the charge. Their battle beasts are too much for earth's military (and the militaries of many other planets), but the super electromagnetic robot Voltes V, piloted by a team of five headed by Kenichi, appears to beat them back. Things become interesting when we learn about Kenichi and his two brother's lineage. Their father, the brilliant scientist behind Voltes V's construction, is actually a Boazan expatriate. Not just any expatriate, but former royalty, no less. Boazan's strict caste system is based solely upon whether or not a citizen has horns. If they do, they're nobility. If they don't, well, uh, sucks to be them. Such a system, already untenable, is exacerbated by the fact that the vast majority of Boazans don't have horns. It's a rare genetic mutation. The whole Boazan war machine is powered by a gigantic underclass of slaves-in-everything-but-name. Kenichi's father believed that this was morally reprehensible and that reform was necessary. Unfortunately, this was not a popular opinion among the nobility, and he was disgraced, de-horned, and ousted for his ties to rebellion movements.

Complicating matters even further, he had a son while on Boazan, the aforementioned Prince Hainel. After relocating to Earth to escape persecution and devise some way of bringing change to the empire, Kenichi's father settled down and had a family. Now bereft of horn, he was largely indistinguishable from the average earthling. Parallel evolution is a concept emrbaced heartily by old sci-fi in both Western and Japanese media, probably because people thought alien babes were hot. Fair, honestly. At any rate, Kenichi engages in mortal combat with his half-brother's forces on a regular basis, which creates interpersonal tension mostly lacking in earlier shows. Sometimes Duke Freed got snippy at Kouji for being all love and peace at the Vegans but that was usually resolved at the end of the episode. Hainel himself gradually changes, too, starting out as arrogant, dismissive, and openly ashamed of his connection to a disgraced expatriate and his sons but gaining more depth as time goes on. The end of the show takes place on Boazan itself, with Voltes V spearheading a hornless revolution while Hainel turns on the emperor, vengeful and disgusted by his cowardice. Or maybe it was a movie. Look it's been a long time and I'm going from memory give me a break.

For a kid's TV show at the time, this was honestly pretty wild. Voltes V was not shy about displaying its moral core: people are not defined by the circumstances of their birth, and systems of government based upon the oppression of an underclass deserve only to be destroyed. Voltes V is not as morally complex as Gundam, but it is leaps and bounds ahead of many of its Super Robot contemporaries. Nagahama believed in a sort of fusion of genuine human drama and moral complexity with the more simplistic, bombastic style of storytelling common to his predecessors, and it resonated with viewers all over the globe. At the time of airing, a number of Southeast Asian countries were under the thumb of repressive dictatorships, and the final episodes had to be heavily censored and edited so as not to promote seditious ideas. That, more than anything to me, is the mark of something that is genuinely anti-nationalist in nature. Who would know better than fascist dictators themselves?

The final entry in the Romantic Trilogy, Toushou Daimos, continued the trend of creating morally and politically complex circumstances in which the karate robot made of transforming trucks must punch bad guys. The aliens of the day are the Barmians. The Barmians, however, buck convention and come to earth in genuine peace. Their story is a tragic one - their planet was destroyed in a catastrophe, and the survivors were evacuated on the aptly named mobile space city Small Barm. Due to severe space and resource constraints, a billion Barmians have to remain in cryogenic sleep while a skeleton crew of nobles and military officials keep Small Barm afloat as they search for a place to live. Naturally, they find earth to be a charming place as any to settle down (as it must have seemed in the early 80s before the environment started collapsing) and initiate negotiations with the governments of earth to try and accommodate their people. Expert martial artist and principle protagonist Ryuzaki Kazuya is the son of a brilliant scientist who created the robot Daimos and the special Daimolight energy that makes it so scary strong. Said scientist is part of the diplomatic delegation sent from earth to Small Barm (in some universes alongside the illustrious Rilina Peacecraft, but that is a story for another time entirely) and is a major proponent of the Barmian's request for peaceful integration into earthling society.

Regrettably, this all goes awry when the Barmian hardliner military faction assassinates the King of Barm during the meeting with poison and blames the earthling delegation on it, engineering their own perfect casus beli for a war of domination against Earth. Fascists are remarkably bad at sharing and getting along with others, as has been demonstrated. Prince Richter, the honorable if somewhat dim and hot tempered son of the King wasn't too hot on the assimilation idea because of his prideful belief that the superiority of Barm's culture and technology should allow them to dictate more favorable terms, but was ultimately loyal to his father above all else and acquiesced to the idea. When his father is assassinated, of course, he flies into a rage and declares earth to be the enemy of Barm and kills Kazuya's father. So there's a lot of bad blood between the two of them. Kazuya and Daimos stand up against Barm's battle beasts and prevents the invasion from progressing. He eventually meets and falls in love with princess Erika, Richter's sister. Where Richter is brash and hasty, Erika is intelligent and patient, and much more compassionate. These qualities allow her to see that the circumstances of the King's death, and any motivation the Earthling's might have had to assassinate him, were extremely suspect. They part ways, but Erika eventually joins a resistance faction on Small Barm against the military hardliners who had assumed power. Richter continues to dance to their tune, too consumed by misplaced anger and vengeance to see what is really going on. Erika's relationship with Kazuya only makes him more unreasonably mad.

Of course, Earth has its own hardliners, and in his battles, Kazuya not only has to contend with Barm's battle beasts, but General Miwa, an odious Earth-supremacist convinced that all Barmians, regardless of their disposition, must be eliminated immediately and without mercy. If we want to talk about more alternate universe scenarios, for reference, Miwa was a fucked up enough dude to cast his lot in with the Blue Cosmos organization after his Barmian extermination ambitions never panned out. He really fucking sucks. Ultimately, Kazuya and Erika manage to uncover the plot to assassinate the King, defeat the military holdouts, and bring the peace their fathers wanted about. Where Voltes V presented a scenario of a civilization run by ultra-nationalists needing to be restructured from the ground up, Daimos offers the inverse: a peaceful, tolerant civilization in a time of crisis gets hijacked by a few selfish, warmongering fascists and nearly destroys itself. Coming to understand and love one another, even when from different planets entirely, is an even bigger theme in Daimos than Voltes V, and is in many ways a more personal story. A romance, if you will, for a romantic trilogy.

Nagahama's Romantic Robots were well loved around the globe and left a lasting impact on their genre, encouraging those who came after to experiment with more complex themes and characters, even in the larger than life universe of Super Robots. While not all (or even very many) of these successors live up to this high minded ideal, it's an important part of the history of Japanese animation, proving that drama and politics were not just for Gundam or more "serious" shows. We can see the legacy of Nagahama in a number of more contemporary titles. Evangelion is so much more about interpersonal conflict than actual robots that the final episode of the TV series didn't even have any fighting in it (albeit mostly due to budget constraints). People hated it, of course, and Hideki Anno went on to make End of Evangelion to either appease or piss off further the angry fans, but it happened nonetheless. Gun X Sword represents an evolution of the genre into that of a pseudo-western, where heroes and villains are separated by the thinnest of ideological margins despite the fantastical robots and setting. Gurren Lagann briefly flirts with political complexity before promptly imploding on itself (maybe this one is a bad example). Even Shin Mazinger, an unabashed love letter to older Go Nagai properties, managed to create a surprisingly affecting and compelling character (dare I say, Protagonist?) in its reimagining of Baron Ashura.

The Mecha Genre used to be, and still kind of is, one of my big guilty passions in life. This essay is more personal in nature than a lot of my others, because from time to time I feel like I have to justify to myself why I like this garbage even when it's weird regressive shit. I guess the compromise I have found is that, in certain circumstances, it can be weird progressive shit, too.