As the title indicates, this is an addendum of sorts to my last post, which you can find over here: ["A Terrible Darkness"]. At Ghostlightning‘s (sort-of) request, I’m revisiting Shin Mazinger and the Gothic in light of the thirteenth episode, “First Love? The Beautiful Lorelei!”
Here’s the “request” I was talking about, culled from Google Reader Shared Items comments (whew):
Yeah this is not a filler ep. This is a love story in the gothic tradition with faithfully (?) Go Nagai moron characters. Right Cuchlann?
[Later]
Cuchlann, yessss! My hunch is on course. Validate it when you’ve done watching the ep!
Well, I watched it, and as you might know, I’m pretty amenable to requests (let the record show the Haibane Renmei debacle was the result of public opinion: ["SF.c Call-In Podcast Poll"], I recently ran a poll determining my next long-term project ["Agenda"], and my very first SF.c post was spurred on by Pontifus’ strong reaction to a throwaway comment I’d made during my application ["An introduction, of sorts" -- with twice the tentacle rape!]). So away we go!
Really, I’m some sort of magical prognosticating machine. A machine, I tell you. Was there an episode with better imagery with which to prove my point?
We’re even seeing corpse-lights, an old standby of the Gothic genre, developed perhaps from the will-o-the-wisps that lead travelers astray? Anyway, between that, the references to Frankenstein, the resurrection concerns, and so on, this episode is rife with Gothic elements. Much of the Gothic was set in Germany, actually.
I also noticed a kind of transition, that one could plot through the shift of the Gothic itself. When Shiro finds out Heinrich is supposed to be dead, he wonders if they’re dealing with a ghost. Kouji replies that they know what they’re dealing with if something’s come back from the dead, flashing back to Baron Ashura. The shift from supernatural to scientific (or, dare I say it, SUPER-SCIENTIFIC!) explanations follows the line of the Gothic itself, which moved (generally in a line) from the ghosts of Castle of Otranto to the resurrected piecemeal man of Frankenstein. This could maybe indicate that Shin Mazinger Z is at the head of this progression in its own, GAR-robot way.
And in this very Gothic episode we find Shiro falling in love with the mysterious Lorelei. Do I even need to warn you, at this point, that we’re dealing with a myth here? The Loralei (depending on which version you’re reading/hearing, that’s either singular or plural) lured sailors on the Rhine to their death with their beauty and singing; they’re roughly analogous with the Sirens of Greek myth. Have a wiki link: [->]. Shiro’s in love with her (as much as he can be, I suppose); Lorelei seems to like having him around; her father is a big (evil?) scientist guy in Germany who wants revenge on the Kabuto family. Good times. It’s like Romeo & Juliet, but with fewer emo wordplay gags about Rosalind. If you’re a fan of the old Batman animated series, which went through several iterations, you might be reminded of the amazing episode where Robin, himself a boy about Shiro’s age in the show, falls in love with a cute little girl who turns out to be made from Clayface, though she doesn’t know it. It’s a really horrifying episode, and I’m left to wonder if the same sort of thing might happen here.
Now to the question at hand: does this sort of love story jive with the robo-Gothic awesome of SMZ, or is it just (that dreaded word) filler? I would say yes. Love stories are the norm in Gothic, be it in the slightly twisted marriage of Theodore and Isabella, the standard, if untrusting, marriage of Emily and Valancourt, or the crazy RAEP of Ambrosio and, uh, any woman he wanders across. Let’s not get started on the weird shit Victor Frankenstein sees in his dreams. Freudian readings of the Gothic are still popular for a reason, folks.
One has to wonder if things are going to work out for Shiro. I do notice that both Loralei and the Gamia robots (objects of Ankokuji’s desperate and dedicated lust) are blondes, while Sayaka is a more typical Asian hair color (which, uh, looking at some images, varies according to version — Brunette-ish). Does this indicate the “wrongness” of the first two relationships, and the rightness of the third? Hard to say. Lorelei shows up in the OP, so I’d hope she’s not just a two-episode-arc-throwaway. On the other hand, she is the daughter of a crazy scientist who doesn’t have the good grace to be the greatest motherfucking grandpa ever (hint, it’s Juuzo); that’s not bound to end well. Doomed love affairs are certainly Gothic, but can this relationship tell us anything more about what’s going on in the show?
With the exceptions of any female lieutenants Dr. Hell might be keeping around somewhere and Dr. Hell himself (Shiro could like some hot dude-on-littler-dude action, we don’t know), Shiro has chosen just exactly the worst person in the world to fall in love with. This is in a family that already has a history of poor emotional states. Kouji is almost in a perpetual state of vengeance rage, Juuzo labored for years to remedy what he sees as his destruction of his family, and there’s some sort of weird shit going on with the missing segment of the Kabuto family that we’re seeing next episode. It’s almost as though this is another heritage passed down to the brothers alongside Mazinger Z. It could also illustrate a kind of familial alienation: until everything is resolved and the boys make their choices for the future, post-Doctor Hell, this normal world, represented here by cute girls, is verboten. They can’t take part in all the regular stuff they’re protecting until they figure out what’s going on. Finally, it represents what they could be giving up. In becoming either god or devil, Kouji (and to a lesser extent, Shiro) would be leaving behind this world — again, represented here by cute girls. If you’re going to be a Byronian hero, you don’t exactly get the happy relationship (unless, I suppose, you have a willing sister handy, but even that didn’t go so well).
Further Reading:
The original post by Wally Xie, on which all the comments were made in GRSI: [->]
FUCK YEAR! Awesome read!
LOL I really enjoyed this one. Another example of a child’s doomed love: in Tetsuwan Atom Atom falls in love with a young robot (blond?) girl on and island. She turns out to be a bomb ;_;
The design of Gamia is one of Go Nagai’s standard designs, showing up in a lot of his manga. I think it first appears as one of the secondary female characters from Shameless School. Her name escapes me as she’s the boring one who isn’t a secret ninja! I do think Imagawa may appreciate that they and Lorelei are blonde, as that ties them aesthetically to the artificially created Rocky from RHPS. And like Rocky they are physical ideals, rather than the monstrous creation of Frankenstein.
Well, actually, the Creature was beautiful, the ideal man, before it was animated. A nebulous something in the way the Creature moves, holds itself, is what made it terrible. One could argue the Gamia move in a way that makes them just as terrible (as they’re, you know, killing people with their hair). Of course, Rocky was drawn directly from the movie tradition, so his terrible thing is his speech affect.