Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury S1E1: "The Witch and the Bride" (continued)
Returning to the school, we see Suletta still standing outside Diorine's greenhouse, with Diorine snapping at her when she tries to enter. Suletta still squeaking in terror at every sign of irritation or disapproval, while Diorine tries to figure out what Suletta even wants from her if she's too scared of her to even have a proper conversation. I'm guessing the answer is some combination of "really, really determined to save her from Gary Oak" and "dat ass." A pair of impulses that sort of naturally feed into each other. When Suletta manages to find her words again, she asks a question that catches Diorine very much offguard.
"What is that fruit you just picked."
Suletta has never seen a tomato before. She's had tomato flavoring from dehydrated packets, but she had no idea what the actual plant looked like. Deciding she might as well do the poor dumbass another favor, Diorine wipes the freshly picked tomato off and hands it to her on a little napkin, telling her to go ahead and try it.
She likes it a lot; moreso than I'd expect the average person to like a raw tomato eaten plain by itself, but then again Suletta seems to have had very limited exposure to fresh produce in general. And, it turns out that there's also more to it than that. Diorine clarifies that most tomatoes aren't so appealing straight off the vine on their own. This particular strain of tomato plant was gengineered by Diorine's late mother. Huh, wonder what the story behind that marriage was? Horticulture RnD lady, and fascist military industrial zillionaire tyrant guy. Maybe Diorine just meant that her mother had one of her agrocompany's science teams develop this tomato sometime before she killed and ate them for failing to meet quarterly growth quotas.
Suletta mentions that she also has something inherited from her mother. And that it was also her mother's wish that brought her here to the academy, in the hopes of learning something (or at least doing some networking) that might improve things for the Mercurian colony a bit. Diorine says "Oh. Your mother is still alive, then," which naturally sends Suletta tumbling down into another inarticulate social anxiety spiral.
Just as Diorine is preparing to end the awkward meeting by making sure Suletta's campus navigation app is working properly so she can find her way to someplace she's actually wanted, Gary Motherfucking Oak comes strutting in passed Suletta and starts nagging Diorine about how gardening is dumb and she shouldn't do it.
When he announces that from now on she's going to live in his dorm with him and all his friends, and she tells him that she doesn't recall being obligated to do that just because they're engaged, he tells her that this is what her father wants. Um. Is it? I didn't get the impression that her father really cares about the fine details all that much, so long as things follow the general plan he has in mind. Whatever the case may be Diorine just retorts that she doesn't have to do everything her daddy says down to the last detail...unlike Gary, who dresses like, acts like, and never shuts the fuck up about his.
Apparently this hit a nerve, because Gary roars in fury and starts stomping around knocking plants over and throwing tomatoes across the greenhouse like a literal three year old.
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I mean, this is the sort of inbred aristocrat behavior you sometimes read about in accounts from the 18th century or whatever. It's not unbelievable. But it also seems like Diorine should have been able to trick this cretin into walking out an airlock suitless long before she got desperate enough to try a zero-G egress of her own.
As he stomps around and roars, Diorine backs away from him in fear and ends up tripping over something, which prompts some of Gary's hangers-on watching from the door to mock her. Either they're just really, really desperate to stay in Gary's good graces, or they came from the same culturally atrophied and genetically bankrupt environment that he did and actually think this is amusing in any way that doesn't make HIM the butt of the joke.
Suletta tries to get someone to please take Diorine's side. The hangers-on won't stop laughing, though. Standing a few meters behind them, the guy who refereed the duel - who now identifies himself as Gary's brother - miserably explains that he's already wasted enough time and sanity trying to reign in his brother today, so if Suletta wants it done she's going to have to do it herself. Dang, this guy seems to have lucked out in the genetic lottery. Ironic, that I'd have to feel sorry for him because of it. There are a couple of adult staff members standing a little way across the lawn, but they're pointedly looking away from the greenhouse and ignore Suletta when she tries to get their attention.
Regardless of whether or not the Space Hapsburgs were already controlling a chunk of the solar system before the events of the prologue, Delling's ascendence seems to have greatly empowered and emboldened them.
Eventually, Gary stops his aimless rampaging and starts some much more directed rampaging. He breaks a stick off from one of the larger plants, and invokes the Rule of Thumb.
This finally goads Suletta into trying to take action on her own. I'd have tried going for a headshot or something, personally, since if I was going to physically assault this apparently untouchable noble scion and get my hands cut off anyway I'd want to at least make it count. But, that's just me. Suletta, meanwhile, seems to be inspired by all this talk of corporal punishment and just smacks him really hard across the ass.
...you know, if you're going to take this approach Suletta, you might as well just switch those words around a little and command him to call you mommy. That might actually make him forget all about Diorine, depending on what he's into.
Well, Suletta doesn't get the worst possible outcome, at least. Instead of just jumping on her with all his friends and stomping her to death on the spot, he does a shonen villain "HOW DARE U" speech that leads into, obviously, challenging her to a duel. If she thinks that he's doing something wrong, then there's only one way to determine right and wrong in this place.
So, does the school just make mobile suits freely available for these duelling purposes?
Aren't those expensive?
I guess they're not too expensive to let one or two of them potentially get blown to bits whenever a student happens to have a case of the teenaged hormones.
Also, they're apparently free to name the stakes of the duel before accepting the challenge. Gary (he doesn't have the slight humanizing touches that Saiyonji did, so while this guy clearly *wants* to be Saiyonji I'm just sticking with Gary Oak for now) says that if he wins, Suletta has to quit the school. We don't see Suletta naming her own terms, but we can assume that it's something like "call off the marriage" if she has any backbone, and "plz don't hit your fiance/wife" if she doesn't.
On one hand, if I were Gary I would absolutely not take that. But then, he'd lose a lot of face if he backed out after posing the challenge himself. More face than he lost by throwing a toddler tantrum in public in response to, almost literally, "lol ur dad" as a provocation? Not sure. But, we already know that this guy lost half the blueprint for a working neocortex when his grandfather married his mother.
Well. Preparations for the duel are made. Apparently, this involves some very involved and manpower-intensive operations to move the mechs into position and so forth, and everyone on campus hears about it and excitedly prepares to watch. Which makes me wonder why the previous duel took everyone by surprise. That explicitly WAS a sanctioned, official duel, so it should have followed the same protocols instead of blindsiding everyone and catching a bunch of hapless students exposed by the battlefield where they almost got stepped on. Eh, whatever. As the preparations are made for the duel that will determine ownership of the Tomato Bride, we jump back to the corporate bigwig space station where there's some kind of conspiracy being plotted against old man Delling.
The chief conspirator appears to be Gary's father, and he seems to think that killing Delling will ensure that his son's marriage will go off without interference. Okay, this makes it seem like Delling DOESN'T want his daughter to marry the screaming brainlet, no matter what the brainlet in question has been saying about that. My suspicion is that Delling has been hiding his misgivings from the youngsters, but among his colleagues it's harder to keep them unnoticed. We're also, in this same scene, reminded that the duelling bullshit was in fact Delling's own idea, so if he doesn't like the outcomes that it's created he really only has himself to blame.
Heh, okay, that actually explains it pretty well. He despises Gary, and possibly Gary's family, but he was the one who forced through that insane "students can do legally binding mech-fights over their own human rights" idea and he'd look pretty pathetic if he admitted how unhappy it's made him.
Also, this suggests that he might still have some of that bizarre ideological motivation from his youth, instead of just being purely greedy at this point. A romantic image of aristocratic honor-duels seems like it could have easily been part and parcel of his kinda-sorta-but-not-really-paleocon ideology.
...
To be fair, stuff not too far removed from that has been endorsed by IRL fascist visionaries. I know some of the nazis wanted to try and breed the Eurasian aurochs back into existence so that the great Aryan warriors of the future would be able to hunt them across the plains of Europe like their noble prehistoric ancestors did.
So, "we'll have duels and honor killings again, but with mechs this time" isn't TOO outlandish within that ideological milieu.
...
Delling is about to board a shuttle to somewhere or other, and Professor Oak has planted a bomb on that shuttle and is waiting for it to get clear before blowing it up. Before we can see whether or not he succeeds though, we return to the high school mobile suit duel. The mechs are deployed. Gary in his purple mech of what seems to be a common type here (his previous opponent had a similar one). Suletta in her gundam. Does *every* student have their own mech? I guess the ones who don't just have to use one of the school ones, hope no one was planning to use those for anything important lol.
People in the audience comment on the unusual customizations that appear to have been done on Suletta's otherwise old fashioned looking mobile suit.
Keikaku means plan.
Is this actually the same GUNDam that Suletta's mother and grandmother escaped with in the prologue? It seems like it would be recognizable, but maybe they gave it enough of a facelift to prevent identification.
Also, even assuming that the GUND system is one-of-a-kind at this point decades after the technology was suppressed, you'd think that conventional mobile suit design would have improved enough since then to make up for the difference in performance. It's been what, 30 years at the very minimum? Probably closer to 40? Unless humanity has hit some kind of tech plateau since then at least as far as aerospace and weapons are concerned, that's a lot of time to improve things.
Granted, with Delling apparently having free reign of at least much of the solar system, human technological advancement hitting a lull would actually make a lot of sense. The man is not exactly fond of innovation, and he and his fellow travellers could have done a lot to disincentivize scientific and technological advancement in general.
Then, just as the duel is about to start, we see Suletta on the sidelines wondering how "she" could have gotten into her mech.
...huh?
What?
And yeah, the pilot of Suletta's gundam - seemingly without having received Suletta's permission or even knowledge - is the Tomato Bride herself.
I like that she's defying the system on her own terms. But, like. How the fuck did she steal Suletta's mobile suit?
Apparently, the answer is that she stole Suletta's tablet. When she took it back in the greenhouse to make sure Suletta had the campus navigation app, she just never gave it back.
-_______-
Okay. Even assuming Suletta didn't notice her phone was missing in all this time...
How could no one have checked this, at any point before now?
I get that Suletta is nervous and socially anxious, but would she really not raise the alarm if they started deploying her mobile suit without her inside of it?
Fucking.......whatever.
Duel starts. Gary Oak is a dick, and makes sure to remind us of that at every possible second.
Diorine, meanwhile, is a moron. She's never driven one of these things before, and can barely even figure out how to turn its weapons on before Gary is pounding it into the dirt. Why did she think this was a good idea?
Well, lucky for her, Nika the sophomore (you know, that character who we were introduced to for all of ten seconds and who never really had a chance to show a connection to any of the others) has decided to intervene and...okay, I don't completely understand what I'm seeing here, but somehow Nika sends a pod-thingy containing Suletta into the arena. Which is allowed, I guess. Suletta either has her phone back somehow, or she and Nika modified Nika's own to crack the gundam's security and allow access to the cockpit from outside while its in the middle of fighting. Gary stands there and "n-nanis" while the pod-thingy flies over and attaches itself to the prone gundam's side airlock.
It's a reverse of the earlier scene, with Diorine in the pilot's seat and Suletta looming over her in the cockpit and punching her in the face. Gary does not take this opportunity to tear the mech apart while its unmoving and no one knows what's going on. Finally, after outrage, threats, and appeals to the fact that this is her private property and an irreplaceable family heirloom that Diorine is getting destroyed to no benefit whatsoever all fail, Suletta finally tells Diorine that she can win this duel if she'll let her take the pilot's seat.
She still thinks it's her responsibility to save Diorine. Even after Diorine stole her irreplaceable family heirloom and tried to use it in battle despite knowing she had no idea how to pilot it. If I were Suletta, I'd just turn on the voice amp and say "duel's over Gary, we yield, you and the bitch deserve each other."
Anyway, Suletta eventually gets the stupid tomato girl out of her fucking pilot seat and activates the GUND system. This um...might cause her some trouble, if she's obvious about what this tech she's using is. The referee momentarily asks Gary if he's okay with switching opponents yet again, and he says he's fine with it. Why was Suletta herself never asked ab...oh who fucking cares. Anyway, Suletta takes over the mech, stands up, and blatantly uses the GUNDam's distinctive coordination, reflexes, and mentally-controlled drone swarms to beat Gary.
We actually see other people reading up on the GUNDam in response to seeing this.
Congratulations, Suletta. You never even needed the Tomato Bride to ruin your mech and your career for you; you were going to do it yourself anyway!
Back at the other space station, Professor Oak gets an update on the engagement between his son and Delling's daughter being off due to still more duel-related nonsense. No point in murdering Delling and possibly getting caught now; the wedding isn't happening anyway.
He disarms the bomb. Oh thank god, I was really worried about Delling for a moment there.
Tomato Bitch gets out of the cockpit and poses triumphantly, even after Suletta nervously reminds her that hey, SHE is the one who won this duel, not Tomato's stupid ass. Tomato shrugs her complaints off, and then does a thing with one of their tablets. Suletta's uniform (which seems to have some smart technology built into it) responds by reforming itself into something guadier, with a weird symbol displayed on the chest. She beat the school's mech dueling champion, apparently, which means that now she's the champion. O...kay. I'd have thought that you'd need to do a few more fights to get that, if this is a recognized-
Oh.
Literally Utena then.
...
Okay. So.
Revolutionary Girl Utena is not only a surrealistic allegory that isn't trying to be a conventional escapist story, but ALSO - even despite not strictly needing to, in light of the above - had an in-story reason for the stupid rules. It's an occult ritual mandated by the supernatural being that rules the world (or at least, the part of the world that the story takes place in). The Rose Bride is bound by magical laws relating to this. Etc.
Contriving the same situation, but using the justification of "her dad is a rich evil guy who owns this school, and also is insane in this weirdly specific way that causes him to institute these asinine rules about his daughter's marital future, even though he doesn't even seem to like it himself" just...I don't buy it. Delling has been presented as a human antagonist with human motives. Warped ones, sure. Insane ones, sure. But still, he's ostensibly thinking like a human dictator/businessman/whatever running an empire. Not a mystical personification of patriarchy doing a metaphorical ritual thing.
This just isn't a premise I can bring myself to engage with.
...
Anyway, speaking of engagement, that's what Suletta and Diorine are now.
Suletta is like "um...but we're both women." Diorine laughs at her, and says that she didn't realize Mercury was so conservative. Same sex marriages are normal here.
The retro-romanticist patriarchal fascist man with the dueling fetish is down with same sex marriage, and the people outside of his sphere of influence aren't. Apparently.
...okay. Is there like, a legally recognized dom/sub thing going on, with regards to marriages? Like, regardless of what sex everyone is, there's a legally dominant "husband" partner and a legally submissive "wife" partner? I feel like there must be, because otherwise Gary being able to beat Diorine with impunity makes no sense. Otherwise, even if the law is afraid to get involved in an assault case between zillionaire corporate heirs, there'd be nothing stopping her from just cutting his dick off in his sleep or whatever.
So, I guess "husband" and "wife" are legal constructs detached from sex and gender? I think? Maybe?
Whatever, that's S1E0-1.
I'd be totally down for a series, Gundam-related or otherwise, set in a solar system where a cursed intermingling of corporate neofeudalism and fascist romanticism has given rise to a new era of affluenza-ridden teenaged knights duelling over nonconsenting princesses with their personal mechs while peasant-class college students run around trying to avoid being stepped on by said mechs. Keep the conflict between this paradigm and the potential transhumanist one that it forcibly supplanted, too. This is cool. This is a neat mixture of concepts.
Just...not like this.
