The Friends at the Table Divine Cycle is the funniest possible response to the 40 year old gundam fandom argument over what counts as a gundam because said response is thousands of hours of podcast in order to say gundams are a social construct
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in reply to @vforvalensa's post:
Something something hands of grace something something shining fingered
Oh this is very funny BUT I don't think this is actually true about Gundam! The Gundam is NOT a social construct (except in the sense that it is Fictional). The Gundam is the mechanical embodiment of state power, and almost always the (inevitable) defender of a liberal status quo (sometimes achieved through the utter destruction of (a) society). The rare times the Gundam /isn't/ that, it's because its pilot has overcome its designed predispositions towards that outcome.
I still kinda disagree. If what determine whether a robot gets to be called a gundam is a representative relationship to the state I think that still counts as a distinction constructed by a society. A lot of the "what counts as a gundam" discourse has focused a lot on design elements, like v fins, and fictional design lineages, like in the cases of whether mobile suits like the tallgeese or sinanju should count as gundams, but I find in most of gundam, besides the au shows that specify certain technological distinctions for gundams like 00, IBO, and witch from mercury, that tends not to matter. Especially in the UC where pretty much all the mobile suits on either side come from the same place, a gundam is kinda whatever the federation decides it is. I also made this post on tumblr where a lot of people were taking it to mean "a gundam is a social construct the way gender is" but what I mean is that a gundam is a social construct llthe way a cop is.
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