13 Sentinels Companion Works
In the absence of an Artist Of The Year for this year, I haven’t had an overarching structure to my viewing habits, instead just watching whatever I feel like whenever I feel like. This is nice, but it also deprives me of one of the best functions of the AOTY project, which is to simplify my decision-making in the face of numerous options. If all else failed, I could pick up the next thing in my AOTY list. This is something the youtuber Daryl Talks Games covered in a video about his backlog project. While the motivations and structures are different, the effect is similar.
Something new I’ve been doing this year is playing video games, which I’d largely stepped away from for years. 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is the first game to capture my attention in a long time, and given that I figured I’d be spending 30 - 40 hours with it, it made sense to use that, and find companion works to watch that might enrich the experience of playing, or just generally feel thematically similar.
In particular, I’m not well versed in the history of mecha media that 13 Sentinels inherits and is in dialogue with, and it makes sense to spend some time familiarizing myself with that.
In between these two, I watched one The Outer Limits episode: “Demon with a Glass Hand”. This had been mentioned as an early inspiration for a story in the game that was ultimately dropped. I was excited to see The Outer Limits cited, as I’m quite fond of the episodes I’ve seen, but this episode felt almost Twilight Zone-esque in its relatively straightforward fable-like ending.
超時空要塞マクロス 愛・おぼえていますか Macross: Do You Remember Love? (1984)
Not what I was expecting to find in my mecha war movie: a paean to the power of the average love song. Perhaps the show makes the war feel more like war, but I think its reduction is beneficial. It allows the war to operate more on the level of parable. The male and female warring factions forgetting the pleasure of love as the basis for war? Sounds like a joke if played wholly straight.
This also has some lovely sequences, especially when Minmay and Hikaru are speaking at the end, silent lasers and destruction throwing them into silhouette.
マクロスプラス Macross Plus (1994)
Takes on new resonance in 2025. The mechanical turk aspect of AI entertainment and performance is eerie. And though we lacked the public language for it at the time, the idea of the system training off of a human's emotions, and claiming them in order to usurp the experiences is the AI-antagonistic balm I need to combat the AI-sympathetic impulse in Deus Ex or Blade Runner.
Where this succeeds on that front is in locating the conflict in labor, rather than in identity and freedom.
As a kid, I had friends who loved building Gundam models. I even bought a tiny one for myself to try to understand the appeal. It didn't stick. One of those friends still builds them, and the sets have only grown larger and more elaborate.
At no point during our friendship have I ever heard him talk about the anime. This was the era of Gundam Wing. Maybe that series was more appealing to kids, but this one is a pretty harrowing account of the hardening of child soldiers abandoned by superiors for reasons that are perhaps explained later, in the face of rising space fascism. I doubt this one would be able to move a bunch of fun cool mech toys.