Season 4, Episode 7: On the Other Side of Darkness (Patreon)

On the podcast this week: our final episode of Season 4, Iraj returns to talk about asteroids, nuclear explosions, and capes, Thom names names, and Nina looks at alternative narrative frameworks. Plus we clean up a few ambiguities, answer some questions, and come clean about our favorite mobile suits. Will Thom's controversial takes enrage the MSB fandom?!

Show Notes

Names, Names, Names:

The Geara Doga

• The Nagano designs for a 'Killah Doga' / キラ・ドガ and a サイコ・ドーラ can be seen in this Twitter post by Mark Simmons. 
• The DWDS (Digital Dictionary of the German language) records usages of Killer going back to 1972. 
• The assertion that the Geara Doga and its gear was designed to look like a German WWII soldier is from the Japanese Wikipedia page for the Geara Doga, which cites: Yutaka Izubuchi "Yutaka Izubuchi Mechanical Design Works (1)" Movic, August 2000, pp. 16-17. ISBN  978-4896014907.

The Alpha Azieru

• Izubuchi Yutaka explains that he drew the Alpha Azieru without having been asked, and says that the name comes from the Greek letter α and the word アジール, meaning an asylum or refuge.
• Background on what アジール means in Japanese can be found at the Japanese Wikipedia page.
• Jisho.org page on アジール which specifies the German derivation from Asyl.

The Sazabi

• Izubuchi Yutaka explains that the prior title for the MS was ザ・ナック and that he thought Sazabi would be hard to trademark.
• ZeonicScanlations Twitter thread translating excerpts from an old Animedia book and specifying the Sotheby's reference.
• ZeonicScanlations page translating a section of B-Club 30 from 1988 about the Sazabi, mentioning Zanac and the conflict with a similarly named Famicom game. 
• The video game Zanac, which prevented CCA from using ザ・ナック for the Sazabi.
• Japanese Wikipedia page on the Sazabi. 
• Japanese Wikipedia page for The Knack (the band). 
• And the Japanese Wikipedia page for "My Sharona," specifically.
• A rundown by Zimmerit.moe of musical references included in Nagano Mamoru's Five Star Stories. 
• English-language interview with Izubuchi Yutaka in which he mentions the name issues for the Sazabi.
• Nagano's design for the Naitiengeaile (Nightingale) can be seen on this twitter post by Mark Simmons.
• Nagano's revision of the Naitiengeaile as the Nahatgall (ナハトガル, Nachtigall) can be seen here, or here.

Story Structures, Cross-Cultural Analysis:

• Masterclass overview of 4 different story structures.
• Author Kim Yoon Mi's overview of story structures from around the world.
• Tofugu article about how arguments are structured in Japanese (with reference to how this relates to Japanese story structures.
• Blog post from art-collective Still Eating Oranges about "plot without conflict."
• dbpedia and Japanese Wikipedia pages for kishoutenketsu (起承転結). 
• Articles on kishoutenketsu from Art of Narrative, Book Riot, Mythic Scribes, and Tofugu (Tofugu specifically looking at how this structure is used in Japanese horror). 
• Papers and articles:

Francisco Vaz da Silva. “Narrative Cultures in the Mirror.” Narrative Culture, vol. 1, no. 1, Wayne State University Press, 2014, pp. 85–108, https://doi.org/10.13110/narrcult.1.1.0085.

Matsuyama, Utako K. “Can Story Grammar Speak Japanese?” The Reading Teacher, vol. 36, no. 7, [Wiley, International Reading Association], 1983, pp. 666–69, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20198301.

Koenitz, Hartmut & Pastena, Andrea & Jansen, Dennis & Lint, Brian & Moss, Amanda. (2018). The Myth of ‘Universal’ Narrative Models. 10.1007/978-3-030-04028-4_8. Accessed at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/329064597_The_Myth_of_%27Universal%27_Narrative_Models

Lien, Henry. “Diversity Plus: Diverse Story Forms and Themes, Not Just Diverse Faces.” SFWA, 18 Dec. 2020, https://www.sfwa.org/2021/01/05/diversity-plus-diverse-story-forms-and-themes-not-just-diverse-faces/.

• Wikipedia page for jo-ha-kyuu (序破急).

Mobile Suit Breakdown is written, recorded, and produced within Lenapehoking, the ancestral and unceded homeland of the Lenape, or Delaware, people. Before European settlers forced them to move west, the Lenape lived in New York City, New Jersey, and portions of New York State, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Connecticut. Lenapehoking is still the homeland of the Lenape diaspora, which includes communities living in Oklahoma, Wisconsin, and Ontario. You can learn more about Lenapehoking, the Lenape people, and ongoing efforts to honor the relationship between the land and indigenous peoples by visiting the websites of the Delaware Tribe and the Manhattan-based Lenape Center. Listeners in the Americas and Oceania can learn more about the indigenous people of your area at https://native-land.ca/. We would like to thank The Lenape Center for guiding us in creating this living land acknowledgment.

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