people talk a lot about what Mech fiction can emphasize but I want to shout it out into the tags that Mech fiction can also be about romanticizing and confronting the experience of being a tradesperson. I feel like it gets a little complicated by the implicit fact that so much of Mecha media is concerned with war, but the lives of people who labour on complicated machinery, who are instrumental in constructing any kind of titanic mechanism, are interesting. They give each other advice. They fuck around with one another and might even screw each other over. They’re melodramatic, they’re tough, they’re vulnerable, they’re icing each other out or they’re bringing someone in. It can be good or it can be bad, and every job is different.
I am not a tradesperson. I have only worked with them, mostly doing fire suppression (spark watch) for millwrights and welders. Even though I only did it for 3 years, their stories and attitudes have stayed with me because it still feels so unique.