> the act of throwing a single punch would take a few million years. It would take a few million years more for the pilot of this robot to find whether the punch hit the target or not. It would be a long fight. These practical questions will henceforth be disregarded here
It's possible that that scale image of robot size comparisons might actually depict Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, in the same sense that a photo taken by an electron microscope depicts our solar system.
Kept looking for GL’s outlier dot in the super robot section, then figured the just left it out so as to not bastardize the results.
For anyone OOTL, the show features robots at an intergalactic scale, such that the crew needs to invent FTL communications and travel just to communicate and move within the ship proper.
The Gurren Lagann is only 12 metres in height though. Lagann is around the same height as Simon and Gurren is about nine metres on top (technically below) of that.
Shingeki no Kyojin is 100% a mecha anime. If you play Fur Elise on an electric guitar it doesn’t automatically become Rock’n’Roll, and making the giant robots out of meat does not change the fact trust SnK is full of mecha tropes, is structured like a mecha anime, and the characters treat the titans like vehicles.
>Otherwise, a fight between two pregnant women could be seen as a mech fight.
I mean, when you consider what pregnancy does to an expectant mother, hormonally, and the lengths to which some will go to protect their unborn child... It's not an entirely implausible characterization.
But speaking to AOT, specifically, it's real robot with some super robot/fantasy/Abrahamic text characteristics to allow for the setting. Despite the "summoning" aspect, practical considerations of when and how to employ titans, the political, social, and philosophical ramifications of their existence and use, and the fact that the story is ultimately a study of characters caught up in war and history and intrigue, all point to a solid mecha, real robot classification.
Considering [SPOILERS] the derivation of the evas from Shinji's dead mother and the heavy use of womb imagery as the pilot sits in amniotic-like fluid, arguably this is a valid interpretation of Evangelion lore.
Gundam: Hathaway is quite excellent. Adult characters dealing like (idealistically pragmatic) adults with not just the events of the film, but where, exactly, they are in the history and sociopolitical standing of their world.
Others in the thread have mentioned 86, that is a good one. Without spoiling: very interesting setting, themes that get touched on include racism, AI, drone warfare, relationship of soldiers to civilian life.
Then, what is the heaviest movable machine of human civilization? The answer is aircraft carriers. The U. S. Navy Nimitz class aircraft carrier is one of the largest ships, and each ship is about 325 m long and 99,000 t heavy.
Surprisingly the difference isn't quite as it seems.
There's an important distinction between mass of the vessel's own structure, the bare necessities like fuel, stores & crew, and its payload. Naval engineering and insurance talks several interrelated measures, for our purposes "light load displacement" is the closest to the weight of the bare structure, while "full load displacement" includes all typical stores, fuel, crew, and payload. Conversely the linked measures "gross weight tonnage" is measure of volume rather than mass, and less relevant for this discussion.
For combat vessels like USS Gerald Ford, most of the weight is in the structure itself, and while we don't have exact measures for the carrier, it's about 100,000 tonnes. For reference, an older generation but comparable carrier USS Nimitz has structure of 78280 tons ("light load displacement"), and all up weight 101196 tons ("full load displacement").
However for transport vessels like the linked Seawise Giant, the structure is small part of all up weight. While the ship plus cargo can go up to 646,642 long tons ("full load displacement"), the structure itself is much lighter: 81,879 long tons ("light load displacement").
Also the linked cruise ship, Icon of the Seas, has impressively high "gross weight tonnage" but again that's measure of volume. The displacement is a bit hard to find, people quote variously 100,000t or 120,000t without being specific light load or full load. So while the cruise ship is much larger by volume than the military vessel, the weight of the structure is closely comparable. The later is much more densely packed - keeping size down is a necessity for any combat craft, even the largest ones.
Long tons are rarely used outside shipping. Short tons are what people mean when they say ton in America. Tonne is the metric ton and is what most of the rest of the world means when you hear something that sounds like ton.
Mecha was a 1960s-1980s war-inspired fascination that maybe, if anything, we should be surprised at the longevity of. We haven't really been getting that many giant robots or pilotable mechs in popular media outside of Japanese animation.
I always felt like the big explosion was the 80s, not to say the 70s was unremarkable and the 90s just had a lot of really good stuff like turn A, Eva (I dislike it) and King of braves GGG
Patlabor wasn’t war-inspired; you might enjoy it’s contrast to gundam-type mecha stories. The Labors represent the rise of technological power that can be employed by a single person and all the effects that can have.
The toys are appealing even to children that never saw the anime.
Actually I wouldn't let my kids watch it until they were at least 13 or so, maybe more depending on the child. A lot of war and mass-scale death there, and frankly, a lot of adoration for fascism - the space nazis turn out to be right.
Wing (and, by extension, 00) was a fine watch at 10, and G probably would have been, too. They're considerably less fraught in both iconography and philosophy than some of the other series, and quite a bit more hammy. The Build Fighters/Divers series are great, too. Stay far away from AGE, though; cutesy stylings because it was intended to exist alongside series like Yokai Watch, but it ended up being quite problematic.
Anime and Fascism really do seem to walk hand-in-hand a lot.
Even my beloved Frieren has an unnatural dehumanistic streak against Demons who exhibit intelligence and personalities, which she explains away as mere mimicry, despite the fact that she has learned magic from them.
I guess I know which side of the AI debate she rests on.
Mecha fandom doesn't necessarily cross over with anime fandom (even though the former is arguably the origin of the latter). I find that there's more crossover with hobbyists (plastic models), military fandom, and gamers. Gundam is almost it's own thing (to Sunrise's simultaneous satisfaction and chagrin), and the Site Which Shall Not Be Named split a Mecha board off of the Anime board almost 2 decades ago. I don't know that the fandom will be represented on MAL, which is itself a niche service for the wider anime-watching community.
Suffice it to say, the multiple life-scale Gundam statues that have been put up/dismantled over the past few years speak to its enduring popularity. I will say that there haven't been as many non-Gundam mecha anime as there were in the 2010s. We did get G-Witch and Bravern last year, and Hathaway on Netflix in 2021. And, as someone said, AOT is essentially Meat Gundam.
EDIT: Also, I don't know that I'd even call 86 mainstream. It felt like it actually got way less recognition than it should have.
Last season had Yûki Bakuhatsu Bang Bravern, SYNDUALITY and Gundam SEED FREEDOM, this season has Shinkalion and next season has Grendizer U. "Disappeared" seems like a strong word.
I watched Shinkalion purely out of desperation and was pleasantly surprised despite being a show for kids and having "terrible graphics".
And yeah there's not much mainstream, but you always get some Mazinger spinoff, some Gundam and other "minor" stuff. The genre is definitely not popular but it's alive.
Super Robot Taisen is also still ongoing, and while it's not a show (although it's been adapted a few times) it's a good way to find stuff that might have escaped your radar. And the originals can help quench the thirst for new cool robots with flashy moves. Lately they have been adding "never animated" stuff like Mazinger ZERO, GaoGaiGar Vs. Betterman and Getter Devolution which is nice too.
While I'd like to blame the metastasization of the narou-kei LN adaptation, I think the real reason is the same as why Sci Fi has largely disappeared from visual media in general outside of hangers on from legacy franchises. People have stopped believing in the future.
“メカ” refers to any mechanical design. The artists who do “mecha” design in anime will do everything from guns to boats. The English term’s meaning changed when it was re-borrowed.
Depends on which borrowing you’re referring to. Japanese uses it like the original French to refer to anything animated, then it was changed when English borrowed it from Japanese to refer specifically to Japanese animation.
The point is "mech/mecha" as in "biped humanoid machines" is en-US specific. In ja-JP and probably few others it's "robots". "Anime" is more widely understood.
But then OP is correct: mecha/mech refers to humanoid bipeds. The Japanese word is not mecha but メカ (meka in romaji).
EDIT: I'm being pedantic. When used in English, "mecha" or "mech" is an English word and the semantics associated with similar words in other languages don't really matter. Where it gets confusing is that it's used in the context of discussing Japanese media (and its foreign derivatives) in English. The reason I'm being pedantic is that my native language is German and not only have German loanwords in English often mutated in ways that trip up German native speakers (e.g. wanderlust is better translated as Fernweh, whereas Wanderlust is more about hiking and being in nature) but the same is true in the inverse, i.e. a lot of English loan words in German have different or narrower meanings than in English (e.g. a Burger is not a type of Sandwich as that specifically refers to a sandwich using white bread and a Hot Dog always includes the bread and topping/sauces whereas the hot dog is just a Wurst and ground beef is never referred to as sausage or burger).
Fun fact is that in Russian the word "мех" (reads like "mech" or "meh") means "fur". I was thoroughly confused by mighty furry warriors when I found the "Star Guard" book on the shelf around the age of nine.
Related to this is something that's always bugged me. Playing games like Battletech, at some point the fandom (largely those who came in from the video games) started talking in terms of enjoying playing with "big, stompy robots".
But they're .... not robots? It's more like "big, stompy powered armor"
Arguably, while of alien making, the Macross flying fortress fits the "real robot" definition and seems to be miscategorised. By and large it's no different than your regular Imperial Star Destroyer except that it can transform to a humanoid form.
> In contrast, Macross is very unrealistic because Macross is equal to a pile of 182 Nimitz class aircraft carriers in terms of mass.
Is it? It's also 5 times longer (and presumably wider) than the Nimitz aircraft carrier. That would mean that Macross is only about 5-6x denser than the Nimitz aircraft carrier, which isn't entirely out of the realm of reason for a futuristic space battleship. If nothing else, having several tens of meters of dense matter between the innards and the outside where high energy photons are flying around sounds like a great idea.
It was also originally meant to house creatures much larger than humans, which correspondent mass, so the structure of the ship would reflect that.
They do mention the origin story of Macross a few paragraphs up so it seems like an odd criticism. On the other hand, it's kind of neat to see that alien technology is an outlier according to their analysis.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 139 ms ] threadhttps://jgeekstudies.org/2016/05/19/great-attractor-ttgl/
Brilliant
For anyone OOTL, the show features robots at an intergalactic scale, such that the crew needs to invent FTL communications and travel just to communicate and move within the ship proper.
Could you provide the full name of the show?
Titans are closer to summoned creatures. And they're not the product of technology.
Otherwise, a fight between two pregnant women could be seen as a mech fight.
> Otherwise, a fight between two pregnant women could be seen as a mech fight.
No. You are missing the fact that in AoT the pilots pilot the mechas, and not just be there doing whatever embryos do.
I mean, when you consider what pregnancy does to an expectant mother, hormonally, and the lengths to which some will go to protect their unborn child... It's not an entirely implausible characterization.
But speaking to AOT, specifically, it's real robot with some super robot/fantasy/Abrahamic text characteristics to allow for the setting. Despite the "summoning" aspect, practical considerations of when and how to employ titans, the political, social, and philosophical ramifications of their existence and use, and the fact that the story is ultimately a study of characters caught up in war and history and intrigue, all point to a solid mecha, real robot classification.
t. Gendo and Seele
Any other new dubbed mecha anime recommendations would be highly appreciated. Ideally, less child-focused.
Gundam: Hathaway is quite excellent. Adult characters dealing like (idealistically pragmatic) adults with not just the events of the film, but where, exactly, they are in the history and sociopolitical standing of their world.
Others in the thread have mentioned 86, that is a good one. Without spoiling: very interesting setting, themes that get touched on include racism, AI, drone warfare, relationship of soldiers to civilian life.
Looks like some ships are a few times heavier than that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_machines#Sea_v...
There's an important distinction between mass of the vessel's own structure, the bare necessities like fuel, stores & crew, and its payload. Naval engineering and insurance talks several interrelated measures, for our purposes "light load displacement" is the closest to the weight of the bare structure, while "full load displacement" includes all typical stores, fuel, crew, and payload. Conversely the linked measures "gross weight tonnage" is measure of volume rather than mass, and less relevant for this discussion.
For combat vessels like USS Gerald Ford, most of the weight is in the structure itself, and while we don't have exact measures for the carrier, it's about 100,000 tonnes. For reference, an older generation but comparable carrier USS Nimitz has structure of 78280 tons ("light load displacement"), and all up weight 101196 tons ("full load displacement").
However for transport vessels like the linked Seawise Giant, the structure is small part of all up weight. While the ship plus cargo can go up to 646,642 long tons ("full load displacement"), the structure itself is much lighter: 81,879 long tons ("light load displacement").
Also the linked cruise ship, Icon of the Seas, has impressively high "gross weight tonnage" but again that's measure of volume. The displacement is a bit hard to find, people quote variously 100,000t or 120,000t without being specific light load or full load. So while the cruise ship is much larger by volume than the military vessel, the weight of the structure is closely comparable. The later is much more densely packed - keeping size down is a necessity for any combat craft, even the largest ones.
Long ton = 2240 lb (1016 kg)
Short ton = 2000 lb (907 kg)
Tonne = 2205 lb (1000 kg)
Long tons are rarely used outside shipping. Short tons are what people mean when they say ton in America. Tonne is the metric ton and is what most of the rest of the world means when you hear something that sounds like ton.
[1] https://anichart.net/Spring-2024
Actually I wouldn't let my kids watch it until they were at least 13 or so, maybe more depending on the child. A lot of war and mass-scale death there, and frankly, a lot of adoration for fascism - the space nazis turn out to be right.
Even my beloved Frieren has an unnatural dehumanistic streak against Demons who exhibit intelligence and personalities, which she explains away as mere mimicry, despite the fact that she has learned magic from them.
I guess I know which side of the AI debate she rests on.
Other than their kits, everything else they operate is very standard WW1-esque tech.
Suffice it to say, the multiple life-scale Gundam statues that have been put up/dismantled over the past few years speak to its enduring popularity. I will say that there haven't been as many non-Gundam mecha anime as there were in the 2010s. We did get G-Witch and Bravern last year, and Hathaway on Netflix in 2021. And, as someone said, AOT is essentially Meat Gundam.
EDIT: Also, I don't know that I'd even call 86 mainstream. It felt like it actually got way less recognition than it should have.
And yeah there's not much mainstream, but you always get some Mazinger spinoff, some Gundam and other "minor" stuff. The genre is definitely not popular but it's alive.
Super Robot Taisen is also still ongoing, and while it's not a show (although it's been adapted a few times) it's a good way to find stuff that might have escaped your radar. And the originals can help quench the thirst for new cool robots with flashy moves. Lately they have been adding "never animated" stuff like Mazinger ZERO, GaoGaiGar Vs. Betterman and Getter Devolution which is nice too.
"Robot" is used to describe autonomous system, like Marvin or Laputian Robot Troopers
Like the meaning of the term "anime" changed?
EDIT: I'm being pedantic. When used in English, "mecha" or "mech" is an English word and the semantics associated with similar words in other languages don't really matter. Where it gets confusing is that it's used in the context of discussing Japanese media (and its foreign derivatives) in English. The reason I'm being pedantic is that my native language is German and not only have German loanwords in English often mutated in ways that trip up German native speakers (e.g. wanderlust is better translated as Fernweh, whereas Wanderlust is more about hiking and being in nature) but the same is true in the inverse, i.e. a lot of English loan words in German have different or narrower meanings than in English (e.g. a Burger is not a type of Sandwich as that specifically refers to a sandwich using white bread and a Hot Dog always includes the bread and topping/sauces whereas the hot dog is just a Wurst and ground beef is never referred to as sausage or burger).
But they're .... not robots? It's more like "big, stompy powered armor"
Is it? It's also 5 times longer (and presumably wider) than the Nimitz aircraft carrier. That would mean that Macross is only about 5-6x denser than the Nimitz aircraft carrier, which isn't entirely out of the realm of reason for a futuristic space battleship. If nothing else, having several tens of meters of dense matter between the innards and the outside where high energy photons are flying around sounds like a great idea.
It was also originally meant to house creatures much larger than humans, which correspondent mass, so the structure of the ship would reflect that.