#lopsidedown

I love this game

I love Final Fantasy

I love games

Now playing. I’m a week or so behind all the discourse and everything else. But this feels like the kind of installment where taking my time and moving at my own pace is absolutely the entire joy of it.

First of all, let me say that I’m so glad you want to watch it, it’s a wonderful show!

I was watching as it came out on TFOU using Hola as well as watching it on telequebec where they’re airing rerun episodes all the time, unfortunately without subtitles. Nickelodeon is also airing them and there are ways to get around their online locked episodes. 

Other than that, try mlsubbing where they have links and subs abound. 

Also, @official-ladyblog posts about new episodes airing and you can find their old posts about premiering episodes here.

My dear friend, let me tell you. 

So with the first film (and only talking the original Japanese releases, not any American releases with their dubbing) Godzilla is a monster, both a victim of atom bomb but also the “personification” of it. And the Godzilla films of the 1950s after that (including other Toho monster films) follow that characterization; Godzilla is the villain and the result of humankind pushing science to devastating, destructive ends. But what’s so interesting about Toho is that like, yeah they wanted to keep the money gravy-train going with Godzilla and the monster movies (because they were doing really good in Japan but also in the US where they can’t get enough of shit attacking them because of the ‘Second Red Scare’) but to keep Godzilla “current” the message and characterization of Godzilla is constantly evolving over time. So in the 1960s, when environmentalism movements were taking off, Toho introduces Mothra, who is pretty much Earth (and is never bad in like any of the movies) and humans are the villains. Also in the 1960s, Godzilla starts to become sort of an ally to humans. Not good, per se, because he still will still attack people given the chance, but there are greater threats, namely Communists. Example: Invasion of the Astro-Monster; where these human looking aliens, basically Communists, want to take over Earth, steal our technology and resources and attempt to do so by taking control of Godzilla and Rodan. But through the teamwork of the Americans and Japanese, they work with a UN-like world organization in a constructive way to make decisions, they go on successful space missions, and turn the ‘nuclear-powered’ monsters against their controllers. 

So pretty much through the Cold War, Godzilla isn’t exactly good but isn’t really bad until the 1980s, with The Return of Godzilla/Godzilla 1985, which is the most legit sequel to the original Godzilla than any of the one’s previous. Like a huge part of the plot is that the Americans and Russians both want to nuke him, and Japan is torn but ultimately states their stance is firmly against the use of nuclear weapons. But the Russians still fuck it up and accidentally launch a bomb and pretty much it’s about to be 99 Luftballons, except they are able to avert disaster thanks to the US launching a missile of their own and they walk Godzilla into a volcano. Basically, this is the point of like entering the kind of current political stance Japan has; where it’s against nuclear weapons, but has America and it’s weapons as a back-up in case the Cold War became WWIII. 

The 90s Godzilla films are all over the fucking map with shit to say about Japan and the political/social status of the world. Like Godzilla vs. Biollante and Godzilla vs. Mothra get all environmental again. Godzilla vs. Destroyah is a commentary all about the hesitation towards the budding world of technology and the internet, and Godzilla Jr. taking over for his “father” is poised at the end as this interpretation of nuclear energy as having the potential for good or bad, and leaving it ambiguous. Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: Giant Monsters All-Out Attack is like, one of my favorites, and deals with Japan’s military in the millennium. It came out in 2001, just as Japan, who only ever had a “self-defense force” because of it’s treaty with the Allied Powers post-WWII, was starting to send troops to aid the US in the middle east. So it addresses a military that has never “experienced” war, because the oldest people in it were only kids during WWII, and that because of that, those generations don’t have the same memory towards Godzilla, i.e. Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as the much older generation. Godzilla, who in the film is pretty much a demon? is possessed by the souls of victims of the War. But what’s different is that, while Godzilla has always personified to an extent the victims of the Atomic Bomb, here Godzilla is ALL victims of the War in the Pacific- INCLUDING those who were killed by Japanese forces. Which was and is kind of crazy bold for a film, because at the time there was really no acknowledgement of war guilt, and even to this day, there is still a huge struggle in Japan. 

The later 2000s movies, kind of get a bit washed out with any sort of social commentary and end up being more interested in just the monsters fighting monsters. But it is interesting that, pretty much from the 1990s on, the human teams in charge of tracking or dealing with Godzilla and monster threats become less the military of a specific country (usually Japan’s Self Defense Force and then often the US military for support) to a specialized, ‘international’ team.

Like there is so much more that could be studied and said about the films that I have barely touched on; like the presentation of the Japanese government and military throughout the films and especially post-Cold War; how Godzilla’s destruction of Tokyo through the years becomes grander and grander, not just because the audience’s taste for destruction gets bigger; how in early films (and many early sci-fi films) the narrative is typically science vs. military vs. the public/media and how this changes/shifts over the years (specifically which category the main protagonist/s belong to- the early films it’s mostly science, the 1990s-present they’re mostly through the military/special defense team); spirituality and science; I could go on.