Wow. Look mom, I’m blogging.
So I just need to type up my thoughts on my Eureka Seven rewatch before they’re totally diluted by my next here and gone hyper fixation.
The first time I watched E7 was in high school a redacted amount of time ago, but to give you an idea I watched a lot of it in parts with severe buffering. I loved it. I loved love then, I love love now. I also love big robots and had my mind squeezed through an Evangelion shaped playdoh press at the age of 15 and I feel I have that to thank for me becoming a real person. But that’s a bit of a tangent.
In my teens if I liked something, I mean if I really liked it, I’d rewatch it incessantly. SO I watched Eureka Seven over and over until my junior year of high school, around when I started getting a lot more self conscious about the art and entertainment I enjoyed.
Jump to today-ish and I’m right back where I started. I love Eureka Seven. I’ve gone through a bit of a light Gundam phase over the last year or so. Robots are in. Of course I was going to return to the surfing mech show.
The mech designs are great! They’re bulky, they’re colorful, they’re animated with an occasional expressiveness and when they explode they’re a bright powdery pink. What’s not to love. The palette of this show in general is lovely, it’s firmly set in an aesthetic that I find difficult to describe beyond the toy section of a mid aughts Discovery Channel store at your local mall.
More than the robots I was most captured by the character designs, the look of the landscapes and world, and the ship designs. I’m a sucker for flying wings and the ones here are Neat. The Gekko is also just such a wonderful ship design, inside and out, and I love that we get such a good feel for it as the show goes on.
It’s also impossible not to be grabbed by the politics of Eureka Seven and I’m kind of surprised I haven't read more about them elsewhere. Eureka Seven has one of the better portrayals of fascism and more importantly one of my favorite portrayals of antifascism I’ve seen in anything aimed at an all ages audience like this.
The show is deeply concerned with climate change and the ecosystem of the world at large, and in a way that goes much farther than just the comfort and survival of people. As a result our leader principle obsessed little freak, Dewey Novak, is a human supremacist driven by what he sees as the dignity of his species in the face of an environment that can’t support it unconditionally.
This feels incredibly prescient with the rise of eco-fascism and the increasingly inevitable rise of climate leviathan states (Joel Wainwright and Geoff Mann).
And thankfully none of this is to the exclusion of fascism’s violent cultural divisions. Being a show from 2005 produced by studio Bones, Eureka Seven is very much thinking about the United States’ wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and bombing campaigns across the globe. As a result the show demonstrates the process of alienating religious minorities and forcing them into violent acts of preservation that can be cleanly categorized by the state as terrorism.
It even shows how the decaying and ineffectual bureaucracy of the state can be consumed by the fascistic elements it had itself propagated and groomed in its own ranks for its benefit.
All of this resulting in a very holistic and digestible presentation of fascism in a show made for a younger audience.
We’ve talked about our fascism, let’s talk about our anti-fascism because it’s something I deeply appreciate in this show. For starters this it is unavoidably pro eco-terrorist. The Gekko and its flying circus of mechs is soaring across the globe being directly and lethally confrontational with the state and its destruction of the environment. And while the show does grapple with the human toll of these actions it’s never in a way that condemns those who fight the state in this fashion.
We have characters who share a conviction to safe guard the world that allows them to surf the waves they love without always sharing in the same tactics. Our romantic duo by the end of the show embrace a non lethal antifascism, destroying the tools of the state without destroying the bodies that composite it due to their discomfort with personally partaking in any greater violence than that. Meanwhile the crew of the Gekko continue to face the state head on with lethal means. By the end this is all done with a mutual respect and understanding.
It shows a multifaceted approach of antifascism as some characters only assist as medics, others in the capacity of artistry and journalism, and others still in a much more mundane logistical capacity. It shows a respect toward each individual’s unique toolset and the need for a great variety of hands working toward a kinder world.
All of this is steeped in the countercultural aesthetic of surfing and a deep love for music (and as a result we’re blessed with a unique and killer soundtrack). I really appreciate how Eureka Seven demonstrates what it’s for, what it loves, and what it wants far more than what it hates. It is a jubilant resistance.
To make a sharp turn back to our characters I couldn’t love the show without loving the relationship between Renton and Eureka. A relationship all about the powerful emotions of first love. It’s a romance that feels lived and earned. We start with one sided infatuation, with something that feels much bigger to our protagonist Retnon than it really is. And through the the course of their encounters we see the consequences of that culminating in a realization that what Renton has considered his love for Eureka was something that was initially selfish that resulted in convictions to protect her that she never asked for.
For a show made in 2005 it also nearly feels like it’s in conversation with the geek culture misogyny to fascist pipeline that blossomed in full in the 2010s.
After this realization, and as Eureka starts to understand her own feelings, we’re left with the development of a relationship that feels a lot more precious and tangible.
Okay, so it’s an abrupt close but I’ve talked enough. This was way more than what I originally intended to type. If you read all this, thank you. If you read some of this thank you but just not as much.
I think I plan on using this blog as a way to journal my thoughts about art I love as I find it or find it again. So maybe I’ll keep doing this blogging thing, who knows.
Anyway, thanks for being kind and get it by your hands 😌