Some Indie Giant Robot Thing

So I was watching this animated short, which feels odd to call that because if you added a modern volume of commercials and an intro segment it'd probably fill half an hour.



Obviously, bits of this are pretty slow, and most of that I don't mind (although I'd be lying if I didn't say I skipped over some bits). The fight was good but not great (way too much sitting there with the monster pushing its claws in further and the sound effects for the stomps and the hits were way too small-sounding), and I loved that the hangar had a progression of increasingly larger and more advanced robots in it. It was nice to see the newspaper clippings; it kind of reminded me of The Incredibles.

But I don't think we needed to see quite as much of the monster's origins as we got.

One of my favorite robot anime is Dai-Guard (which I actually only properly finished last month, as a result of having trouble finding the final volume). One of the many reasons I love it is because it gets past the question of "where do monsters come from?" really quickly: According to nonsensical science, earthquakes make monsters* emerge from another dimension**.

There we go. There's your origin for every monster. (Not necessarily literally, of course, but when you come up with something that simple and elegant, you certainly don't need to muck around with other ideas.)

It's like the Marvel mutant origin for superpowers-you're just born with powers, now let's get on with the story.

As far as I'm concerned, the earliest we needed to see the monster was when it woke up and started rampaging, possibly even later than that.

*Of course, according to the scientists in the series, you can barely consider the Heterodynes*** alive, and calling them monsters is arguably misleading.

**One of the really elegant things about the use of earthquakes as a trigger, of course, is that we can predict earthquakes, so the show has a good excuse for why the robot is always in the right place to fight the monsters, but we can't predict earthquakes perfectly, so sometimes one will happen unexpectedly; there was even one episode where multiple quakes failed to have monster results, and that was the actual source of conflict for the episode.

***No relation to the family from Girl Genius.

-Signing off.