If I Have To Summarize The Core Ideas Of Brain Powerd

18 8月 2024

it's about tomino's struggle against dualisms and binaries as established by modern societies.

anything organic, that is alive and youthful and spirited, is full of complicated emotions. the robots in brain powerd are brimming with organic energy. they are like children that need to be raised properly. they can follow orders or they can just do whatever based on their whims, most often taking cues from the pilots' own temperaments. such a dynamic being means you can’t simply pretend they are not connected to nature. organic reality cannot be split into binaries and dualisms, even if humans are sometimes bound to feel this way.

take the concept of family: it has caused a lot of suffering with the characters because they either don’t have it or are abandoned by it. but characters still seek some affirmation, usually from the opposite or something that can fulfill it. such a relationship cannot be a binary or of opposites. but they also cannot be left single, hence tomino’s bizarre criticism of single mothers. it has a misogynistic bent, but he also believes men are responsible for allowing this phenomena to happen. everything bad cannot be ultimately blamed on one person or symbol; it has many underlying factors. these binary-looking relationships need to be deconstructed in the derridean sense: there is too much excess on one figure (single mothers) and it needs to be exploded, so we can see causality is in fact multifaceted.

so brain powerd preaches interdependence between the organics with its bizarre usage of jargon. it tries to explode every opposite relationship, especially ones related to kinship, by showing the contradictions in their thinking. violence, especially a way to keep them apart, only aggravates the pain. binary thinking is toxic to the brain.

tomino once described brain powerd as a second debut and there are plenty of “revivals” aka the brain powerds and grand chers become more powerful mechs. i think he is also trying to allegorize his own graduation from doing uc gundam, as a way to find what is “organic life” or creative to him.

what he is interested in isn’t ossified formalized structures but vital life. but he has to do this in this bizarre roundabout way that remains true to post-eva real robots. he sees children, free from the usual opposition found in mecha shows (teens vs adults, organic vs metallic, etc) as the real exit. their interdependence between themselves and their parents give him an exit from the usual war violence he often portrays in uc gundam. he sees children as a blank future to project hope, as possibly a way to exit this binary styled thinking.

it’s a very strange show full of tomino-isms. but i ended up liking how bizarre it is and the ideas it proposed. it’s surprisingly emotional at the very end: tomino does care about his weird characters and wants them to have a satisfying ending that doesn’t heal all the wounds but still a happy one to work off from.

i think post-victory, tomino has been trying to conceive a story that doesn’t fall into the nihilism within the history of violence in uc gundam or become as commercialized as standard anime. even the way he portrays the americans who are the most malicious of the lot, there is still a point of recognition: this is a country without history and it wants to conquer other countries with history. it is like one of the neglected children, like jonathan.

if people are interested in the show, they should at least be prepared. it’s like he made a doujin game with no care for the audiences. while people who don’t know tomino can certainly find value in it being “so bad it’s good”, it is more worthwhile to think about what he is trying to communicate about the difficulty of communication, of articulation, of finding synthesis in fake binaries.

it is, to use hegelian/marxist terms, tomino at his most dialectic. and in the context of western philosophy, his most anti-dualistic work. he really went crazy with binary thinking to the point he invites watchers to deconstruct his show. he wants them to participate in the overcoming of such false binaries/dualisms, to sublate and find a clearer and more powerful definition of society. the audience cannot be passive; they must be active in deciphering and untangling what tomino wants to say.

this is a tall task to ask for someone, even tomino fans. but i think it's a worthwhile experience if you are interested in the show. i also recommend this review, though i think the negative take on the admittedly conservative gender politics can be too reductive:

https://spacekaleidoscope.com/2020/07/11/brain-powerd/

cool show to think about. i'm looking forward to watch g-reco movies because people often bring g-reco up in discussing brain powerd. i do have overman king gainer, dunbine, and l-gaim to watch first -- and i want to rewatch zz, victory, and turn a gundam at some point...