My Life In Fandom: Finally, Acknowledgement Of BattleTech's Real Anime Roots

Renegade HPG, a BattleTech fan channel, finally puts on video what I'd been saying for years.

BattleTech has its roots in one of the realest of Real Robot mecha anime, which is almost always very Japanese Military SF, and those roots are most apparent with Dougram. It's amazing that first FASA and now Catalyst managed to maintain this sensibility despite all this disconnection from the source material (which also includes Crusher Joe), and even now there is no official release of Dougram into the West so you'll have to hunt around to find a playlist to watch.

As I said previously, you cannot grok BattleTech without familiarity with Dougram. You can skip Macross and Crusher Joe, but you'll always have a fundamental miscomprehesion about the game and its setting without Dougram. The reason is because, as an '80s Real Robot series (by the guy that would go on to create Armored Trooper VOTOMS) you're not only getting the Bosses Are Bastards All Around thing that most of Gundam nails, you're also getting a window into how the realities of how these things go down without either having to wade through historical revisionism or risking life and limb witnessing it first-hand.

In short, there's a damn good reason most rebellions do not succeed without external support (and even those that do often go wrong).

This, if you're familiar with "Tex Talks BattleTech", miraculously squares with how the game's setting has been since the 1980s. The heroes of both the Clans and the Inner Sphere are as much politician as warrior, to varying degrees of emphasis; this is not a Romantic setting at its root, far more cynical than it seems as befits those downbeat '80s Mil SF anime roots. I wouldn't call it subversive, as such; Razorfist describing it as "The War of the Roses in space" is not wrong, just incomplete, and you'll see that when you watch Dougram.

Now compare that to Macross. By the creator's own expressed intention, the franchise is a Romantic (and romantic) narrative experience. Yes, there's plenty of war stories to be had, and those fighting (and surviving) them are often changed irrevocably by the experience, but it is not a cruel and cynical experience informed by then-living memory of war and occupation (both ends) in the studios making the animation or writing the scripts. You get that in Dougram--it's promised in the very opening of the first episode--and the promise made to the audience is to not bullshit them about how that bad end went down, not that the heroes somehow win despite it all.

Your effective figures in BattleTech are often Hard Men Making Hard Decisions, which is the Mil SF version of Big Men With Screwdrivers, and that explains a great deal about (a) why BT and Dougram have their enduring appeal as well as why (b) more Romantic alternatives--those more in line with the Pulp tradition of heroism--were and remain far more popular with audiences.

Know what you're getting into. I'm not saying that it's bad; neither the show nor the game ever claimed to be what it is not. I am saying to adjust your expectations accordingly; you don't want to be the guy thinking he's in a Super Robot show when he's actually in a Real Robot one. If there's one thing I can knock the video for, it's failing to account for the fact that mecha anime doesn't have to be cynical Mil-SF to be good. (The best of it most certainly is not.) That's is the same error that insisting that only Hard SF is legit SF, when regulars here know that (a) that isn't true at all and (b) "Hard SF" is a degeneration and degradtation of the real Romantic roots of the genre.

So, if you like Men With Screwdrivers LARPing As RenFaire Nobels, Dougram's where that comes from. Watch Dougram and you'll grok BattleTech.