#dallos

Cover of the movie program for "Dallos - Commemorative Final Edition", Bandai Frontier Division, July 1984. Scanned from my personal collection.

But that isn't nearly as important as the plot stuff. The story is steeped in, essentially, collectivism - concepts of nationalism, "society", generational movements, and so on. It feels like something made by, well, Japanese people who are part of a society that still strongly remembers World War Two, who still feel the "axles of history" turning under their feet. A modern show like this would have characters who are far more internal - a teen girl who loves hanging with her friend circle, "thrust into the war" by unfolding events. Here though, while what societal force one belongs to is up for debate, that you are a piece of a wider puzzle is a given.

And, of course, all of this is set in space, in the peak aesthetic of the mid-century sci-fi boom. The technology of this era is actually very load-bearing here - the people on the moon are manual laborers doing mining. They don't use drones, they pilot these suits individually, no internet exists despite them having moon colonies. No internet is important, because they can barely talk to Earth! If they had internet, kids on the Moon would watch ASMR reels of Caribbean beaches and kids on Earth would follow MoonTubers. Today, anime has humans piloting the mechas because that is the genre, right? We know it is stupid, these would be largely AI-piloted in practice. But here the technology has a level of realism to it that you can only get by authentically believing in a different future.

So the character is saying "the die is cast" in Japanese, which is not the typical way a Japanese person would say that concept and therefore the audience would understand this to be a Julius Caesar reference; the character is being an intellectual about this. But he is still, ya know, speaking in Japanese?? And I understand that this fansubber might hang out with a select crowd that may bias their perception of the normies, but surely they know that the median person does not know this Latin phrase??

I find this amusing because - as someone who has written somewhat substantially about the nature of fansubs - this is like a fun house mirror version of the typical issue of "unprofessional flexes". Normally the problem is the overuse of Japanese phrases with translation notes, because the audience are weebs and they wanna know those terms, they wanna feel the Japanese nature of the product. But here, subbing an OVA often called "the Battle of Algiers in space", the people subbing are weebs, sure, but almost surely also history and military otaku/nerds - and they wanna express that part of their personality too. Peppering in period-appropriate quotes is their keikaku equivalent. Honestly it is a bit adorable, I know exactly who this guy is now and how many versions of the Axis & Allies board game they have played with the lads.

Dallos OVA (1983-84)

Dallos OVA (1983-84)