Ever wonder if Char and Garma were more than just friends? There's more evidence to float that ship than you might think...

On the Gundam podcast this week, we watch Mobile Suit Gundam episode 6, "Garma Strikes," discuss our first impressions, and provide commentary and research on: soldier psychology, inspiration for the names of Zeon ships and tech, romance between men in Japanese history, and what exactly is an acting captain?

For our discussion of soldier psychology, we consulted the helpful and detailed website, Military Science Fiction.

Trying to decipher the inspiration for the names of Zeon ships came down to scouring German and Japanese dictionaries on the web (our favorite online Japanese dictionaries are Jim Breen and Jisho.

There are a few great resources on romantic and sexual relationships between men in Japanese history. We enjoyed Tofugu's great article "The Gay of the Samurai: All About Homosexuality, Buddhist Monks, Samurai, and the Tokugawa Middle Class". The following books were also helpful in our research:

Pflugfelder, Gregory M. Cartographies of Desire: Male-Male Sexuality in Japanese Discourse, 1600-1950. University of California Press, 2007.

To find our what exactly an "Acting Captain" is, we consulted the United States Navy Regulations, 1990, Department of the Navy, Washington, D.C.

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The intro music is WASP by Misha Dioxin, and the outro is Long Way Home by Spinning Ratio, both licensed under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 license. Both have been edited for length.

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