My Life In Fandom: Yes, Western Mecha Usually Suck

ProfessorOtakuD2 cut a video expressing his frustration with Western mecha design that is hardly a hot take in Western mecha fan circles.

I can put this very simply: it's the influence of the Hard SF cult.

This influence is why there's so much Western Real Robot fiction as a subset of Western Mil-SF fiction, while the wonder and awe of Super Robots remains so difficult for Western mecha properties to capture without openly aping or outright deriviing from Japanese properties.

This is despite the roots of mecha fiction being Western (powered armor first appear in Triplanetary, well before Starship Troopers); the Murder of the Pulps and the the Treason of John Campbell includes this very consequence as part of the larger array of consequences that came from this epistemocide and the loss of those aethetics.

If not for the Japanese, this memory-holing would be complete.

This is, once again, a problem solved by Regressing Harder. Watching and reading the Japanese works is necessary, but not sufficient, because they build off Western media antecedent to their creations- indeed, often antecedent to the rise of contemporary Japanese popular media as we know it. If you want to succeed where others failed, it is necessary to be familiar with those Pulp Era works that informed the classic Japanese Super Robot shows.

We can do better than Very Gray And Brown Real Robot Mil-SF. We can have our own original Super Robots, and the conditions that made those Japanese Super Robots break out in the 1970s are coming around again, so soon--very soon--the window of opporunity will be present to do the same here.

Get ready.