Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040 Episode 26 Discussion

KrazyFang said:
So did Galatea turn good right at the end there or what was going on with the rain of lights?

ohohohohohoho said:
I think this show is a lot more subtle than it gets credit for. I wrote a massive post about the ending here that I'll just post here and revise a bit:



I'd like to add that I think Linna, Sylia and Priss are really good characters, and Nene is not too bad, definitely the most entertaining.

Linna faces alienating circumstances at home (arranged marriage, traditional expectations), so she goes to the city and finds that it's equally alienating in a new form (her male superiors at work try to take advantage of her by dangling social mobility in front of her and feel entitled to say and do what they want to her, basically. She doesn't feel she fits in at an office job). At first joining the knight sabers is kind of an idyllic fantasy for her, and even though they are not the pure superhero defenders of justice she imagines, it still becomes an outlet for her to struggle against the current social structure and hope to remake it into something new. She finds a place for herself in struggling to create a place for herself.

Sylia's ambivalence to her father and to boomers I think is really deftly handled, adds a lot of mystery and tension to the story but the more gets revealed, the more her character makes sense. She doesn't harbor a blanket hatred of boomers, and there's an element of jealousy/fear of abandonment. what her father did to her is really heinous and unforgivable, but she nevertheless craves a relationship with him and her animosity instead manifests in jealousy/hatred toward his other "children." She also develops a complicated relationship with femininity/beauty that manifests in her hobbies (owns a boutique, has a gigantic aquarium attached to it where she stares at pretty, elegant fish all day) and the way she treats the other girls (especially Linna). Also remember how mad she is when that female boomer goes berserk early in the series, and how her mother says "looks like Papa doesn't need you anymore" when she's raging about his experiments. To me Sylia seems to have a neurotic fear that her value has dissipated because of the existence of boomers, both as her father's child, and as a woman in society (because life can ostensibly be created without a womb, and as I showed with Linna, we are talking about a show that blatantly exposes that the characters live in an alienating patriarchal, capitalist social environment).

Priss keeps her issues private for most of the series and then when she finally confesses why she hates AD police it feels like her reticence/general distrust of people and willingness to sacrifice herself are not fully explained.. but it's a good thing. I appreciate how the protagonists in this series have murky, tangled, complicated psyches, and their anxieties are peculiarly relevant despite the freakish circumstances of the show.

ohohohohohoho said:
@recynon

i agree with what you've said about the women in texhnolyze fwiw but i think they're really rather different shows despite the thematic overlap, and i like different things about them. i don't really think that's true about the women lacking development in this show and i felt that their romantic interests were kinda randomly crammed in there and mostly insignificant (not really altering their decisions or personalities or what have you; priss kills galatea while leon is pitying himself in a bar somewhere, nene fights while mackey is an a vegetative state, linna leaves that guy she was on a date with and never returns, etc). I think the knight sabers' friendships with one another are much more significant, they depend on and change because of their friendships much more. i think the best way to look at it is as the knight sabers and genom representing two totally separate ideological structures. genom is linna's employer and she deals with misogyny there; genom tosses aside the AD police when they have no use for them anymore; genom establishes boomers as slaves. basically they take the view that people with more power can treat people (or boomers) with less power like tools. the more time the women spend as knight sabers the more they are cleansed of that, until they ultimately even convert galatea. and i think you could also argue like, linna becomes more confident and less naive, nene becomes more mature and responsible, priss becomes more open and trusting, and so on.

although in both this show and texhnolyze, i don't want to get into it at length here, but i think there's a similar situation where the problem doesnt lie in whether we use technology or not, it lies in an issue (or issues) with humanity that humans mistakenly try to plug up with enthusiasm for technology instead of addressing the actual problem. i don't think texhnolyze has an ostensible "resolution" like this show but it does reject any kind of resigned or fatalistic view. in this show it's this point that people refuse to acknowledge subjectivity in any entity they consider to be "other." boomers just happen to be the example that brings the problem to the surface because that's what the show is about. i think that's generally how it is in konaka's cyberpunk shows.

also i think it's important to note that the people who make these remarks about humanity's evolution stopping are not particularly trustworthy, or they're straight up antagonists (like the theonormals, mason, asuka in devilman lady). it's not a perspective that's privileged in the narrative. while most of them seem to be seeking a sort of dramatic biological or technological upgrade for humanity as a whole, konaka seems to think that the problem is they're focusing on the wrong things. humanity's problems lie in ideology/social structures, and can't simply be solved by increasing our strength or intelligence or whatever. honestly i feel like he would agree with all of the stuff you're saying about technology not being the issue, and the setting (future or ancient china) being basically irrelevant.