Stories About Building Giant Robots
(Note, this is a chapter from an Armored Core VI essay, that context is somewhat important but not necessary to understand this piece.)
I: Giant Robots: The Origin
It’s easy to see the giant robot as a metaphor for nuclear bombs; they both leave a big impression and return a lot of people to Nature. The giant robot genre, for the most part, started in Japan and became popular after the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, and while some later media will use giant robots in this manner, in reality: the first giant robot in animation was debuted on a Japanese street corner in 1931 in front of pale firelight glowed from a paper lantern. I use the term “animation” here super-loosely because artists on this street corner were simply flipping inked panels back and forth on a canvas and telling stories, which, in my mind, is animation in its purest form. This method of street corner storytelling was called kamishibai, or “paper theater,” and was very popular in Great-Depression-Era-Japan; I know this because I have a device connected to the internet and read Wikipedia (we live in a contradictory time in which access to information is so abundant yet people are still so lost, perhaps endless knowledge is more confusing than clarifying). The particular paper theater referenced here is “Ogon Bat,” or “Golden Bat,” a superhero conceived to be “more science than mythology” yet still ended up a skeletal thing from ancient Atlantis sent from ten-thousand-years in the future to protect the present-day which, depending on your perspective, would be the future Golden Bat came from in Golden Bat’s perspective and September 30, 2023, at 4:40 pm eastern time from my perspective, or something (time travel never actually makes sense in science fiction, you’re supposed to just accept it and move on for the purposes of the plot); the Golden Bat has an exposed golden skull and wears a Nature-themed pirate outfit with a flowing Coral cape; he also lives in a fortress in the Japanese Alps. The Golden Bat is not the giant robot in question here; Golden Bat is the hero; the giant robot was a one-shot villain named Dai Ningen Tanku, the first human-piloted giant robot. The point being, someone somewhere in Japan came up with giant-human-piloted-robots and came up with them before the bombs dropped and if that person had not come up with them I would not be able to tell you the following story.
II: Hobby Lobby and the Mark of the Beast
On September 4th, 2023, I drove my family: wife, daughter, and 4-month-old son to Hobby Lobby to shop for paintings and a wall-mounted-shelf for coffee cups. That was, of course, a pretense; I had been watching Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam for months until this point, so the true reason for this excursion was to purchase Gundam model kits; the most popular being Bandai’s “Gunpla” kits, which come in a number of different “grades,” namely: Entry Grade (for beginner modelers), High Grade (the next step up, with more parts, detail, and poseability), Real Grade (similar to High Grade but includes an internal frame; a skeleton of sorts), Master Grade (even bigger High Grades), and Perfect Grade (“the highest end of Gunpla, this series of ultimate avatars always packs in the latest technology” according to the official Gunpla packaging, “latest technology” roughly translates to “more plastic”; these are also really big) and a few other Offbeat Grades that aren’t worth mentioning in this essay. If you’re confused, I apologize, the term “gundam” and “mobile suit” refer to specific types of giant robot, popularized by the 1979 anime series Mobile Suit Gundam. Hobby Lobby had some of my favorite giant robots, and everything was 40% off: the original RX-78-2 Gundam, Amuro Ray’s mobile suit in the original anime; MS-06S ZAKU II, Char Aznable’s red Zaku (also from the original series); and, finally, the MS-07B-3 Gouf Custom, my childhood-favorite mobile suit, a blue Zaku-like with spiked shoulder pads, a heat saber (a sword that heats up to cut through metal, most importantly: not a beam saber), a gatling gun that doubled as a shield, and an extendable-magnetic-wire-hook-shot-thing for picking up weaponry that may have been dropped in the heat of battle or performing creative acrobatic violence all of which is captured beautifully in the 1996 OVA (Original Video Animation) Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team; arguably, in this writer’s opinion, the greatest Gundam media of all time and, along with the original series, the only series one needs to watch to “get it.” It being a subjective state of understanding, like watching the aforementioned Gundam series on a 14-inch CRT television set in your garage with the volume turned up so loudly as to drown out the sound of mom and dad screaming at each other in the other room or going over to a friend’s house after school to watch Gundam Wing on Toonami together before having to go home because it’s now 6:30 pm and you have a curfew and lots of homework to do.
I’ll do a line break here to allow you to catch your figurative breath before we move on with the story. I’ll also throw in an image for good measure.
*Hobby Lobby, model kit aisle, circa 2023.
Hoarding three Gunpla model kits into the shopping cart like a raccoon obsessed with shiny, alongside three or four paintings and a wall-scroll of an ocean view to hang in the barren-walled corner of the garage where I do all the midlife-crisis-bits (including this essay), I pushed the cart across the cheap linoleum flooring up to the short line at the cash register and waited my turn like a good consumer. Eventually, it got to my turn; I took the items out one by one and put them at the end of the conveyor belt, closest to the cashier, because I am a nice guy (sometimes), and she picked them up one by one, checked a sticker on the back of each item, and then keyed in the eight-digit code on the sticker. Then, I watched as the computer asked her, “What type of item are you ringing up?” and she selected “model kit,” which applied the 40% discount, and then she bagged the item. Confused, I asked her, “Why not just scan the barcode?” to which she responded, “Hobby Lobby doesn’t use barcodes.” She paused, then added, “For religious reasons.” The cashier had a hole where a nose ring should be and the sides above her ears shaved (an undercut?), so I trusted her bitterly-mumbled “for religious reasons” because she obviously had a chip on her shoulder if the Black Sabbath pin on her lanyard strap was any additional indication, and she clearly wanted to talk about it. She went on, “Hobby Lobby thinks barcodes are the Devil’s mark and won’t let us use them, even though they are on all the boxes, the computers won’t accept them.” I smiled wryly but did not laugh, as this wasn’t laughter-funny; it was stupid-funny, like a Year-2023-Conservative preaching for freedom but then saying anyone who burns the American flag should be locked up for life. Hobby Lobby thinks barcodes take them too close to Hell, and they have already decided that “Corporate Hell” is a compromise they’re willing to make for manifest destiny or whatever it is we’re calling “make as much money as possible” these days. I ended up spending $87.58 in total. The 40% discount was store-wide.
III: Plastic Passion
I opened the Entry Grade RX-78-2 Gunpla Kit as soon as I got home, closing out my family when I closed the office door behind me. It took three full listens of The Crib’s “In the Belly of the Brazen Bull,” a 47 minute long album, to finish building the kit. It would have taken longer if I had not had the foresight to purchase a “nipper,” a spring-loaded tool resembling blunt scissor blades attached to two rubber handles, used for cutting the plastic parts from runners; runners being the plastic assembly that all the parts are attached to in the packaging. Using these nippers, I was able to make clean cuts of most pieces, but some plastic excess was left on each piece, which annoyed me to no end. When it was over, I had a fully assembled RX-78-2 Gundam kit sitting on my desk, and I was proud of myself. I made the High Grade Zaku II three weeks later after watching several videos on how to efficiently build Gunpla kits; each video said to “panel line,” the practice of dripping colored (usually black) ink inside the small indentations of each part to give the model more definition. The videos also recommended using an x-acto knife to cut off excess plastic on the pieces left over from the runner, a phenomenon I learned was either called “nubs” or “stress marks” or both; regardless, I purchased all the necessary equipment. I took all the recommended steps, and during the process of building the Zaku II, I accidentally sliced open my fingers multiple times due to slips with the x-acto knife; in my haste to become a master builder, I had soaked the Zaku II in my own blood; serendipitously, the Zaku II matches the color of blood, and now stands posed with its huge bazooka pointed at its forever-rival: the RX-78-2. The final model kit, the MS-07B-3 Gouf Custom, still sits on my desk unopened, taunting me to open it, taunting me to spill blood in the name of giant robots and I think I will do just that before writing another word of this essay.
*Zaku II, Gouf Custom, and RX-78-2 gunpla
The Zaku, the Gouf, and the Gundam; the Holy Hobby Lobby Trinity of No-Barcodes-But-Some-Other-Eight-Digit-Code-That’s-Less-Demonic-Somehow. Balteus is the girdle of a Jewish priest and a papal garment, and the sword belt of a Roman legionary; perhaps the same Marcus Valerius Corvus who used the Raven to overcome incredibly low odds; incredibly low odds like the early-game-boss of Armored Core VI, Balteus. With enough practice, pattern recognition, and perseverance – the three Ps of passing AP literature (which this essay would surely produce a failing grade) – you will overcome. Three parts were broken on the RX-78-2 (requiring super glue); instant death from the initial missile barrage on the first Balteus run; blood was spilled on the Zaku II (staining the already red plastic); Balteus was half-health on the second run, and I learned the key to weakening his shield (energy weapons, of which I only had a weak energy missile equipped); nothing but fun was had building the Gouf Custom on a bright Sabbath morning: I let the panel ink dry before cleaning the excess and I clipped the runners so carefully that no unnecessary stress marks were left on the parts, and so delicate were my hands that no part was cracked in the snapping-of-the-pieces. I switched my AC’s build, equipped an energy weapon in the left hand to quickly deplete Balteus’s shield and a shotgun in my right hand for pure hull domination. Balteus was destroyed easily. I am certainly no modeling master and no master AC pilot, but I am much better than I once was. I am competent and more adaptable, “he roars as he smuggles in a bit about perseverance, poorly.”
(Originally published on 10/7/2023)