[Fish Sandwich]

One of the things that makes the anime Gridman stuff so fascinating is all the ways it finds to do new riffs on familiar concepts. The direct references to its source material are a given, and before he even started the thread, Die was already familiar with the homages to other things the creators happened to be inspired by, but it's also notable how often SSSS Gridman and its followups quote themselves. Specific lines of dialogue and and visuals sometimes as specific as entire shots are frequently repeated and recreated, given new meaning through new context, even in situations where not much else is altered. The purpose of it all, of course, being how drawing those explicit connections between moments can help get the viewer thinking about the story in a certain way, and hopefully making the experience that much richer.

I bring this up now because episode 9 as a whole is one big example of this going on that's just about impossible to miss. I'm kind of a sucker for when shows are able create warped and twisted versions of their own premieres for whatever purpose, and I think here, the way the entire show is unnaturally looping back on itself adds to that sense that the world Akane is choosing is inherently a world of stagnation, where she can't move forward, and thus nothing else really can either. The sense of atmosphere throughout this one is a standout of the whole show, but that particular element of it, I think is kind of at the core of why.

Oh, and speaking of poetic repetition!

Quote:

Originally Posted by DreamSword

So rather than go on and on about that, I'll instead note that, adding onto the various Robots being designed after DX Toys, Powered Zenon here doesn't have elbow joints.

If I'm remembering right, I think sharing this anecdote in DreamSword's own thread when he got to this episode was actually the thing that motivated me to finally speak up in there for the first time, after merely lurking for the previous 8 episodes? I forget exactly why I felt fired up enough to mention it, but the factoid itself is sort of particularly precious to me, because learning it for myself back when I still had mixed feelings on this series played a huge part in pushing my overall outlook more towards genuine appreciation and respect.

It's such an insanely specific choice for the series to make, that you can't possibly be doing the job half-heartedly and even conceive of it. To even notice it, you'd have to be a greater robot nerd than I. Which means I had to learn it from someone first too. So while we're on the subject of how people and the things they create are a reflection of their influences, I'm going to go ahead and give a ultra niche shout-out to Channel CUBE, who mentioned it when doing a 2+ hour long multi-part review of the Actibuilder Full Power Gridman. As you can maybe infer from the previous sentence, Cube-san's toy reviews are kind of a whole dimension apart from the typical standard of "describing plainly what the viewer can see themselves." His videos are actually heavily edited to avoid any dead air, but they tend to run long anyway because he likes to enrich the experience by bringing up relevant anecdotes about related media (like the elbow thing!), as well as just offering observations about the design and engineering of a transforming figure that are often staggeringly thoughtful and intelligent. Dude respects the art of transforming toys like nobody else I've ever seen, and while he sadly hasn't uploaded anything new in years at this point, during the period he was active, he was a constant inspiration to me. Part of that is just that he talks so fast it hugely motivated me to improve my Japanese listening skills (!), but I'm pretty sure all the weird long-winded galaxy-brain retrospective stuff I occasionally do on this site is carrying that whole spirit more than I even consciously realize. If nothing else, his enjoyment of this show absolutely started to rub off on me at a time when I wasn't yet convinced of its quality.

Oh, and I almost forgot one other thing, while we're talking about transforming robot toys and references! The references to Transformers in this series may be a particular obsession of the director and character designer, but the original Gridman actually *did* set something of a precedent for that with Powered Zenon's inspiration, God Zenon, who looked suspiciously like some kind of bootleg Optimus Prime. (Worth noting the original toyline for Gridman was made by Takara?)