#IBO SPOILERS

[akihatohnoofficial]

made another mikazuki amv

[janeyshivers]

Masculinity, Third-Sexing, and McGillis Fareed

(art by liusang)

(cw: this post involves discussion of fictionalised rape and CSA)

this post also contains full-series spoilers for Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans.

there's such an interesting way to view McGillis' story through the lens of like, third-sexing and the way that he (in the popular gundam fandom perception) "becomes an idiot" later on being heavily tied into like, masculinity and patriarchy. as a kid he's sexually abused, raped and beaten repeatedly by his adoptive father, in a way that a lot of violently patriarchal cultures basically recognise as him being tossed into the like, "third sex" dumping ground between man and woman, in the way that young boys often were in e.g. Hellenic societies. and the result of this is that mcgillis ultimately gets a good idea (accrue enough power to fundamentally break and remake this deeply evil system) tangled up with a very bad idea (accrue this power in such a way as to reaffirm his masculinity). he remains obsessed with this even as he ages, becomes a young man, and, theoretically, is no longer third-sexed as a young male concubine for a violent pedophile. that's why he thinks getting his hands on Bael means he wins and everyone has to listen to him; in his head that means he's a man again, it's his ultimate trump card because it represents his triumphant return to the vigorous, powerful male sex.

the show presents this as deeply delusional and tragic, not just in the way that McGillis directly fucks up and fails at the end of season 2, but even in season 1. we see in the back half of that that mcgillis is actually an extremely slippery and effective political operator, if he sticks to the shadows. in his gay little mask and girly wig, McGillis is capable of toppling his father, grabbing control of the Bauduin family, and replacing Carta as the commander of the OEJR Fleet. his problems start when he discards the mask and gets directly stuck in, blabbing his entire plan to gaelio and then failing to kill him because his sword wasn't big enough. his desire to be seen as dominant, vital, and male causes him problem after problem, where if he had accepted that maybe masculinity is a poisoned chalice, he could have gotten away with a lot more.

but the shame of being third-sexed as a child drives him to extremes to try and escape, and this then extends to the show doing a really interesting thing with how masculinity is a core aspect of oppressive regimes. while it's never said outright, Gjallarhorn seems to be not only a bloodline system, but a heavily patriarchal one. the only female member of the Seven Stars we see is Carta, and that's because her parents are both dead, and even then she is fully under Iznario Fareed's thumb. it is also seen as, at worst, a bit dubious for Gallus Bauduin to marry off a nine-year old girl to an adult suitor in McGillis.

i don't think it's an accident at all that McGillis' guiding philosophy comes from a book specifically about the history of Gjallarhorn itself; he directly says in the flashback during episode 43 that his vision of power, "authority, vigour, might, vitality, influence, as well as... brute force" comes from this book. this is Gjallarhorn's vision of masculinity, built into its founding 300 years prior.

bluntly, i also don't think it's an accident that McGillis discovers the text about Agnika Kaieru in the direct aftermath of being raped by Iznario.

in a moment of utter, abject humiliation, when he is about as third-sexed as it's possible to get, McGillis is suddenly given this mirage of not just power, but masculinity. is it any wonder that he becomes obsessed with becoming a modern Agnika, even when, as an adult, he nominally rejoins the male sex? the show makes a lot out of McGillis' arrested development, his childish love for Agnika Kaeiru, and i believe a large part of that is that, even if he is not socially third-sexed as an adult, he himself has never quite been able to escape the mindset he had when he was as a child, which is paradoxically why he feels he must prove that he is a man.

McGillis had a real shot at fundamentally remaking the terrible system at the heart of the PD timeline, and his obsession with masculinity and power, directly cultivated by a system that victimised him and then dangled a false means of erasing that victimisation in front of him, means he ultimately fumbles, and allows Rustal Elion to limit the damage and maintain the system's basic functionality, if not its strict reliance on bloodlines. i think that's a genuinely brilliant depiction of how oppressive regimes weaponise sex and gender to neutralise threats against them on the part of IBO's writers.

building on this, it does not escape my notice that during McGillis' attempted coup, there are basically no women in the show, and certainly none among the forces under McGillis' direct command. i feel that's a deliberate contrast to the final act of season 1, where Kudelia is playing a pivotal political role, Lafter and Azee are a vital part of Tekkadan's mobile suit forces, and Atra and Merribit are working overtime to keep Tekkadan's frontline troops on their feet in the field hospital. McGillis' revolution fails because he wants it to be at once a repudiation of the system he wants to destroy, while simultaneously reaffirming his own masculinity in the way that same system has told him it must be reaffirmed. when he operated outside the logic of the system, he did a legitimately generational level of damage to Gjallarhorn, but as soon as he moves into the open to grab at his masculinity, he is subsumed, and his ambitions are stopped short. that's why he fails.

this also massively plays into McGillis' relationship with Gaelio. what becomes clear in their final conversation is McGillis has deliberately shut out his very real and existing feelings of love and affection for both Gaelio and Carta, in that very typically masculine way. i truly don't believe there's any way to read Gaelio's feelings for McGillis without understanding them as an extremely twisted mixture of ferocious hatred and intense love by the end, and the fact that McGillis rejects these homoerotic feelings for so long is what ultimately leads to them killing each other in s1 and s2. what Gaelio ultimately represents to McGillis is a vulnerability; given Gaelio repeatedly expresses anger and dissatisfaction with the status quo within Gjallarhorn in s1, i don't think it's a stretch to say that McGillis could have gotten him on-side with his plans. even in s2, Gaelio's main objections to McGillis are personal; the way he treated Carta and himself are what comes out in his confrontation with Isurugi, rather than any principled opposition to McGillis' revolution. but accepting Gaelio's love would mean McGillis accepting that he can't Become A Man again, and he can't do that. easier to kill Gaelio, or be killed by him, and be done with it.

i'd even argue that this theme is built into a lot of McGillis' visual design. even besides the gay little mask that we've already discussed, if i had to pick a word to describe McGillis, it wouldn't be "handsome", it would be "pretty". the designers and animators have quite deliberately given this dude floppy blonde hair, icey blue eyes, etc and so forth, all the accoutrements of a Char-style prettyboy. this also extends to his mobile suits, with his Grimgerde in season 1 being very slender, painted in a fetching ruby red and fighting with dexterity and precision rather than the direct, merciless brute force of Bael in season 2. he desires one of these far more than the other, and it is not the one that delivered him a string of incredible victories.

McGillis' insecurity about being third-sexed as a child lasting long after he is, to most people, accepted as a man, is an incredibly important part of his character. not the whole thing, of course; i wouldn't be so fascinated by this guy and IBO as a whole if there wasn't more to him than just this stuff. i've mostly talked about McGillis in terms of being an aspiring sigma male jackass here, but if anything that makes the genuine flashes of empathy and humanity we get from the guy in other contexts much more interesting. running in fascinating parallel with this desire to Become Male Again is also a discernable yearning for real human connection, for McGillis to be accepted as he is. the tension between this, and his entrampment in a coercive system of masculinity, is what makes him such a fascinatingly flawed and contradictory character.

i might do another post at some point examining the other side of this coin, the way the McGillis tries and fails repeatedly to drop his mask outside of just his relationship with Gaelio. you may have noticed a distinct lack of discussion of Almiria and Tekkadan as a whole in this post, and that's because they live much more in that aspect of his character (although i'll tack on a pre-emptive disclaimer that i'm not framing this as the 'good' side of McGillis' character; i think his behaviour towards Almiria is complex and interesting narratively, and utterly indefensible morally, a fact that both myself and, imo, the show itself make no bones over).

anyway, this has been your regularly scheduled post where i'm insane about Gundam. i hope you found it interesting!! and hey, if you want to listen to me and my friend jacqueline talk more about this show in detail, check out the podcast we do on our Patreon, Nectar of the Pods! we did a full back-to-front analysis of both seasons, and we've also covered stuff like Black Sails, Disco Elysium, Homestuck, and are currently working our way through Revolutionary Girl Utena!

[kaxtwenty]

A thought I had while watching IBO was that the Alaya-Vijnana system had some serious untapped potential as a medical device. With the ways that it allowed people with the implant to connect their nervous-system and brain to technology it’d be a no brainer for *someone* to try and apply it for things like prosthetics. Granted, there’s reasonable explanations within IBO’s worldbuilding for WHY that potential remained untapped (Gjallarhorn’s ableist propaganda making cybernetics taboo specifically to suppress it’s development to maintain their military dominance being the big one), but I couldn’t help but wonder when seeing Mikazuki slowly lose his motor functions if they could somehow still use his AV in a way to reverse the process. Or maybe hook him up to a device that would allow him to move his body without being connected to a 60 foot tall demon that’s disguised as a robot.

So imagine how pleasantly surprised I was when I realized that G-Witch was taking it’s Alaya-Vijnana equivalent, the GUND-Format, and doing exactly that! The main group’s entire goal with GUND-ARM is to research the medical usages of a device(?) that allows people to connect their minds to technology! Exploring how to take something associated with war and turn it into something that improves lives instead (Kudelia would be so proud)!

I’m really happy that I decided to first (re)watch IBO before jumping into G-Witch, it’s really awesome to see how G-Witch borrows many of the plot points and themes of IBO and takes them in a new—more optimistic—direction.

[diurnaldays]

Men come in all shapes and sizes <3

[beeffilledshark]

Listen. I completely understand the importance of Gundam, a 40-year-old mainstream Japanese cultural export, having their main female lead of a series be in a canon, unashamed marriage with another woman. It’s fucking fantastic and in no way am I complaining because I’ve gotten Soooo much dopamine from the epilogue because of it.

However, PLEASE watch IBO because even though every guy in there is definitely totally transmasc and I’m not just insane, but Kudelia and Atra are also canon wives and were in a poly relationship with Mikazuki for almost the whole show. Gundam has done this before and I DESPERATELY need Witch From Mercury fans to give this series a fair shot because it’s groundbreaking in its own ways. Even though a lot of the womens’ stories in season 1 are a bit unsatisfying to me, it’s a fantastic watch and has a surprisingly satisfying, yet sobering ending.

Also we get Yamagi’s gaydisaster ass. Please please ibo, it’s gay as shit, wfm isn’t the first gay gundam property PLEASE WATCH IRON BLOODED ORPHANS IM BEGGING Y-

[amplexadversary]

Okay so I get that part of the point of Agnika Kaieru's role in IBO's plot is that he's this legendary, posthumous character that's basically there for McGillis to put words in his mouth. If the audience knew anything about the guy, part of the intended impact would be lost. The whole point is that the guy's latching onto a fairytale and the audience having context would just distract from it.

That said, Gundam is a big ass franchise with a lot of finished stories, that has already entertained the concept of far-future continuations of their timelines (Turn A being the big one).

I kind of want to see the same idea used but with a previous gundam protagonist.

In that case, no one in-universe would have any more context than in IBO, but it would toy with the audience by having a character slander/misinterpret the likes of Amuro Ray for their own gain, or to falsely paint Heero Yui as an upstanding, gallant figure, or similar. It would be a show of dramatic irony where most of said audience has the context to call bullshit.

[gunplon]

I just finished watching Gundam IBO so of course I made a meme

[toskarin]

looping back to IBO (I do it at least weekly) I think it's cool how both season finales do the exact same thing with bleeding the opening into a fight scene where a character has given up on everything except blind revenge, right down to the animalistic berserker framing of the fights

[stgroversfire]

oh man. holy fuck. ep 40 of 0079, a cosmic glow

by far my favorite episode so far. i did not think this piece of media would affect me, but the writing to the animation to the general art direction is just. man. i finally understand char as a truly twisted individual, and i just want lalah to have peace. amuro didnt deserve this. fuck man. beautiful and tragic.

still not as sad as shino tho

[scarletlotus182]

So the wife and I finished IBO Season 2.

[akihatohnoofficial]

Short King Anthem - Mikazuki Augus

[sorairoknife]

It was literally so funny how the characters in IBO started dying so much that when Orga was at Kudelia's office at the very end I said "watch this. there's gonna be an armed squad outside and they're gonna shoot him down as soon as he puts a foot out of that building", and lo and behold

[kaxtwenty]

OT3 CONFIRMED

LET'S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

W FOR POLYAMORY

[local-redhead-bookworm]

In the end, McGillis and Tekkadan were fighting for the same thing, they just didn’t realize it

[amplexadversary]

Welp I have fallen for a plot twist because I'm used to no one in anime being willing to wear a fucking wig.

Not that I know voice actors in general well enough to have picked up who IBOs obligatory masked man was just by his voice after existing for two episodes.

Even though that blonde fucker was conspicuously absent.

[wordsandrobots]

Current minor-major quibble with GQuuuuuuX:

Why isn't killing people in the sport battles where you're only supposed to chop off the enemy mobile suits' heads a bigger deal?

I don't mean in the characters-confront-the-harsh-reality-of-war sense. I mean in the oh-shit-pack-it-up-boys-we-need-to-run-like-hell-or-we're-all-going-to-jail-forever sense. As @thedancingwalrus-blog noted last week, the Pomeranians seem remarkably sanguine about one of their team executing an opponent on live TV when we haven't really had much indication this is meant to be more than a particularly risky game. I get that the Side 6 authorities aren't being depicted in the best light here, but you'd think someone somewhere in the political establishment would be a little leery of getting a reputation as the place where murder is legal so long as you do it in giant, public-property-endangering robots.

It's just one of those details that is bugging me, especially now it's happened twice and indications are it's not likely to upset the status quo on its own.