#kudelia/atra

[fiannalover]

Mikazuki's corpse does so much heavy lifting everyday cheerleading Kudelia/Atra into being such a tasty and God tier ship

[clearlitebergaming]

ah yes im glad gundam was enforcing traditional value of 1 breadwinner and 1 homemaker in sacred marriage /jk

[lilenui]

Weekly Yuru-Tetsu~ Kudelia: Onboard hygiene is very important, so let's make sure everyone has a change of clothes! Atra: Yes, I agree! Eugene: These clothes though... Mika: Looks good on you Eugene. Eugene: Thank you...

[kurozu501]

i can sort of understand why people started calling the grassley group “shaddiq’s harem” bc gundam certainly isnt above that trope, the last gundam anime literally had a guy whose crew was entirely his harem of cool ladies, but after ep9 it really doesnt feel like that at all. I think people assumed it bc shaddiq had a rep as a playboy and then we see his group and they are all beautiful girls so of course right? But seeing more of them their relationship feels more like close friends or even sibling-ish. 

They clearly respect him and are loyal to him but none of them seem interested in him romantically. They all have their own fanclubs and admirers. Renee even has 12 backup boyfriends lol so clearly she’s actively out there dating ppl. Shaddiq himself never flirts with any of them or has eyes for anyone other then Miorine. The gals themselves are aware of his feelings towards her and support him in it with zero jealousy or resentment. It just doesn’t really come off as any kind of harem thing. 

[youreaclownnow]

voted for destiel I'm doing my part as a long time tumblr citizen 🫡 haven't seen supernatural ever in full but enough memes and osmosis knowledge has been gained for me to make this choice, over the years. But it was easy bc the

Truth is I'm just not a sulemio guy I really am not

[bubblingbeebles]

gundam IBO aka my problems with mari okada

i finished gundam IBO, tried to figure out why it felt so wrong, and only afterwards found out it was written by mari okada and honestly that explains so much.

if she somehow reads this post i’m sorry but here is my thesis about mari okada: all of her works have the same two problems:

1 - they set up a situation that will pull on your heartstrings, but then pull so much harder than was narratively justified that it breaks immersion and ruins the impact

2 - they have weirdly-romanticized ideas about romance, basically where a character falls for some idea that a person represents rather than the person themself, while also usually either (a) being heteronormative and/or steeped in tropey gender roles (b) ignoring perfectly good (less idolizing) chemistry between a different pairing

spoiler zone under the cut.

first of all, disclaimer: the other okada works i’ve seen that i’m comparing to are anohana, nakitai neko, maquia, and toradora. i found the first two to be insufferable, textbook examples of both problems. i liked maquia because i think it got the heartstring pull right, perhaps as a fluke, and avoided problem 2 by being about motherhood instead of romance. i tolerate toradora because, despite the annoying harem, it at least subverted problem 2 in the end by ending with the pairing that has actual chemistry.

IBO, i also find to be textbook examples of both problems, and both problems boil down to the fact that the show never really graduates from the toxic orga-mika-flashback ideology (”keep fighting until we reach the promised land“)

problem 1 basically comes down to how dark the ending is, how much they all lose in the end. the show presents an oppressive system - not just evil individuals - and so many ways our protags could have beat that system, but ultimately makes each one fail either through chance or through character flaw, and like, that’s not just crushing as a story beat, that’s crushing on the meta level of what makes a good story. the show could have been about cashing out with a peaceful life (i.e. not pursue the “king of mars” dream), but no. the show could have been about refusing to let the ends justify the means (i.e. refuse to partner with char chocolate mcgillis), but no. the show could have been about political reform and postwar quality of life (i.e. give any screentime to kudelia’s s2 business exploits), but no. in each case the orga-mika ideology blinded them to everything but to fight. the show set up from the very beginning to have them outgrow that ideology, and then spectacularly failed to deliver.

back on the object level, a more obvious example of problem 1 is just the string of named character killings. in season 1, biscuit’s death had meaningful narrative consequences. in season 2, i predicted naze would die after being politically maneuvered into some corner, which would have been narratively satisfying... if they payoff had been anything other than “now more characters will die with increasingly little justification”. we get the same exact story beat with takaki/aston, with akihiro/lafter, with yamagi/shino, and ultimately with orga. i’m not saying “war produces senseless deaths en masse” is a bad moral, i’m saying that repeating the same exact setup four times robs that moral of its emotional impact.

anyways, on to problem 2: atra and kudelia.

i should be happy about our girls getting a happy end where they’re literally married! i really should! the thing is..! the whole framing around it is stained with authorial intent so deeply that even this literal gay marriage is somehow heteronormative.

in short: the on-screen pretense of their relationship dramatically fails the bechdel test. (whatever happens off screen, the camera lens matters.)

in long: atra and kudelia explicitly talk about their respective relationships to mikazuki in that exact mari-okada-weirdly-romanticized way (”when a girl is crying, a boy should console her”), whereas their relationship to each other is, while obvious, unstated so explicitly as that, and i think that - because of okada’s track record - you need to do some heavy death-of-the-author-ing if you want to claim that they, in character, realize they have romantic chemistry on their own. moreover, as i wrote before i saw s2:

when she was jealous of kudelia about mikazuki, and then all it took was 1 poly adult role model to instantly break her out of that, was such a moment. i hope she meets a gay person and has the same moment again and then (becomes an adult and then) they date

...this of course never happens(*), and so, literally married as they are, occam’s razor says that in character, the only role model they have remains naze’s harem, where women can only be connected romantically indirectly via a guy -- in their case, the memory of a deceased emotional blank slate of a guy, as newly embodied in akatsuki -- and thus they are together because that indirection makes them platonic family (which is a powerful theme of the show in its own right, so it naturally completes the logic here).

(*worse yet: the only on-screen-text-canon gay character, yamagi, is heavily tokenized and brutally bury-your-gays-ed, and i find this actively harms the case, because it sets the precedent that if it was gay, they could have been explicit about it.)

if okada sensei had just spent 5 seconds of screen time for one of them to say “you know, what we have with each other is also romantic, isn’t it”, it would have been an amazing subversion of her own trope, but no. i can’t ignore the author here even if, underneath the metatext, their chemistry and their happy end are undeniable.

and that, i suppose, is why i am so eager about witch from mercury, even if its politics are even more incoherent than ever. it at least gives us - not just the queerness - but the queer-normativity we deserve in storytelling.

[asteriskofficial]

I started watching Gundam Iron Blooded Orphans and I am enjoying it a lot so far

[shuchelle]

I love them your honor

[yurimultiship]

Back when Witch from Mercury was airing, I saw a few messages about being hopeful for the f/f content because of two important female characters being implied to end together in Iron Blooded Orphans, then I saw them mentioned again once WfM concluded. I already had an interest in watching IBO so I started it soon after.

Sadly, my feelings on their relationship ended-up being rather mixed. They're cute together! They have some very sweet interactions and uplifts each other! And it's nice that there's no jealousy issues between them because of the start of a love triangle with our male protagonist, Mikazuki, in the beginning of the series.

However... like 95% of their interactions end-up turning around Mikazuki/refering to him/being in relation to him. Part of the reasons they connect to each other is through how they each like Mikazuki.

And the series pushes the possibility of a Atra-Mikazuki-Kudelia poly relationship but with mostly the het part as text and focus. When they interact with him, it's less often centered on the third leg of the triangle, unlike in their interactions together. That made Atra/Kudelia feel more like an afterthought or implied if-you-want-to-see- it-like-this-you-can in a few scenes: Kudelia likes Mikazuki... but she also likes Atra... buuut she also likes everyone else in their group too! Family!!

The polyshipping can be nice for those interested in f/m/f. For me though, I'm rarely into it and the way it was portrayed here in particular felt unappealing. I couldn't really buy the romance aspect from Mikazuki's side and all the talk about babies in the last stretch of the story was too much. Especially the whole "oh, we need to have him make us babies to tie him down so he won't get himself killed in battle" thing that Atra does at one point.

So yeah, I really wouldn't rec the show for its f/f. If you're interested in other aspects of the series and you think what I've mentioned won't bother you, yeah, go ahead and give it a watch! Maybe you'll be able to better enjoy the potential of Atra/Kudelia than me too! Just don't expect much content going for them (or any other yuri ships) in the canon.

A few more spoilers under the cut about the ending:

And so, indeed, Atra and Kudelia end up living together, because Mika dies at the end of the series (it's a main characters death heavy Gundam show) so he can't be with them like the characters wanted.

And Kudelia "going home" is worded by another character as "going back to the man she loves", putting the focus on Mikazuki and his child with Atra. Which is of course a boy because it's like, 99,99% always the case when an important male character leaves a pregnant female character behind: she's gotta have a mini-him.

They're still cute but... There's a lot there that didn't quite work for me.

[niaojirou]

One of the powerpuff girls isn't even a girl and is a war criminal

[quiixs]

Their Place

[beeffilledshark]

Since it’s their anniversary, happy Lumity Day! Still can’t believe they’re up to interpretation ^_^

[clearlitebergaming]

what a way to close pride month

this is like second gundam that ends with married lesbians, in which one of them is CEO

[wordsandrobots]

Iron-Blooded Oprhans G Side Story - Soup Party

So Trafalgar Log just put up fansubs for the latest IBO Side Story and . . . look, if you've seen all of Iron-Blooded Orphans or even just finished Season 1, go watch this (there's spoilers for S1 in the thumbnail which is why I'm not doing this as a link post).

It's cute, funny fluff and utterly delightful. I'm not going to write up reference notes because there's really nothing added in terms of continuity. Just the development of a relationship and some daft jokes.

(I will say that I think this release exhausts the footage for the side stories shown in the trailer for the app, except possibly the bits featuring Shino and Naze, which looked like they'd belonged to the Urdr Hunt campaign instead.)

[b-kut]

Managed to get back to IBO and Atra and Kudelia are now discussing who should get Mikazuk's child. This show is amazing.

[meikyuunolovers]

//GUNDAM IBO SPOILERS, PLEASE PROCEED WITH CAUTION

For real proceed with caution because it's major spoilers

Just found out these two scenes happened in the same episode 💀

I didn't reached episode 49 yet aaaaaaah