Untitled Tallgeese Podcast

The school year is over and it's time for yearbook superlatives. As of episodes 37 and 39, here are your winners:

Back from our unplanned hiatus, it’s Untitled Tallgeese Podcast! Today on Gundams of Our Lives: The Wind Beneath Our Wings, we visit Space China, home of Wufei, and our hosts get into what, exactly, is going on with Chineseness in Space China. Did you know there’s an alternative universe where Wufei is from Africa? But in this universe, Gundam Wing’s main African representation is… the circus lion, because that’s right, we’re back in the circus, which is now in space. That’s the real reason we went on hiatus: faced with the prospect of releasing another episode about a Gundam circus, now forced to discuss the mechanics of launching an elephant into space, we podcasters could no longer take the indignity. We are on strike until Sunrise takes away our bread and circuses. Nonetheless, we push through to talk about the fandom artifact: the Gundam Wing cassette dramas! For those of us who need Duo to give us a wake-up call in the morning.

2021 is about to leave us like Heero leaving the Sanc Kingdom the minute Relena takes her eyes off him, but before we go, your hosts are here to talk religion, make fun of Treize, and talk disastrous hookups—and we'll never be out of disastrous hookups! We're finally introduced to the dark and edgy outer senshi Gundam Epyon, which Treize has lovingly stashed away in a dark creepy mansion complete with his secret shrine dedicated to Heero Yuy figurines and photographs. Just kidding! He doesn't have a shrine! But he does have a lot of Feelings about Heero Yuy which he can't wait to share with us in a very long monologue, so long that we rise up like Nietzsche to declare that God--I mean Treize--is dead and Heero climbs into a deathtrap mobile suit just to get him to shut up. Come for token straight (literally) woman Cathy sharing her 1xR and 4x9 feelings and stay for Caitlin walking us through the October 1995 issue of Puff Magazine, which featured Gundam Wing trivia, fanart, doujinshi circles, and an advertisement for a Dial Fun Club. Happy New Year from your friends at Untitled Tallgeese Pod!

We're still at Relena's School for Girls (and Two Boys!) Who Want to Craft Peace, except one girl came out here to have a good time and her idea of a good time is attacking and getting attacked. Dorothy doesn't have time for your thoughts on gender essentialism and pacifism or the battle between Bad Oz and Treize Oz. She's just here to stab Heero in a fencing duel and drive Relena straight into the middle of a mobile suit battle! Honestly, big mood. And speaking of moods, we delve deep into every one of the many vibes Duo is putting out in episode 32, from "the only pilot in a healthy heterosexual relationship with someone who is not his sister" to "divorced dad in the streets, sexy goth Gundam in the sheets" to killing Trant Clark for being too online. One day Mike Flanagan will take all of the Zero System episodes from this series and turn them into a limited-run Netflix horror show, where the Zero System is a symbol for capitalism (probably) and Duo will finally be the Hot Priest Character we all knew he could be. But for the time being, you'll just have to stick with us as we pour over this week's artifact: the manga prequel Episode Zero, which explains why you keep hearing about the Maxwell Church, Meiran, and Midi Une.

Close your eyes. Imagine a beach. The sand between your toes. The sound of waves. Your eyes are shrouded in unexpectedly detailed eyelashes. Your friend sits beside you. The setting sun brings a new vibrancy to his platinum blonde hair. Two dogs run up to you. You throw a pineapple for them. You are at peace. Your name is Heero Yuy and your animation budget has just been replenished. Okay, enough of that: we have some questions. First of all, where is this beach jungle of Europe? Is total pacifism possible or is it merely schoolgirl naïveté? Why do people love war? Do freaky pointed eyebrows correlate with loving war? What other eyebrow shapes indicate political positions? Can dogs even eat pineapple? A little pineapple as a treat? We carefully research (read: totally make up) answers to these questions and more at the fancy shoujo manga rich girl school where Relena is a student, a teacher, the principal, the school board, the student council president, and the actual president of the whole country. How does she have time to do all that when she has an evil new girlfriend with a car? For our fandom artifact, Kat and Mallory played 1996 Super Nintendo game Mobile Suit Gundam Wing Endless Duel, a game about beating dudes.

Whump. Sandalwood. Dragon plushie. Perfect soldier. "Gods!" Do these ancient codewords awaken anything in you? If so, then this episode is for you. Gundam Wing has hit its midseason recap moment, so your hosts have decided, like Treize, to hide away in a shadowy and extremely elaborate mansion of their memories—only instead of Lady Une, we have the ghost of fanfiction past. Join us as we discuss the first installment in the Road Trip arc, a famous 1x2 fanfic series by Sunhawk, revisit fanfic archives loved and lost, ponder post-Earth polytheism, and finally pay tribute to an author who devoted two whole decades to the Gundam Wing fandom. You can find the Road Trip arc on multiple websites, including via the AO3 archive of A Little Piece of Gundam Wing.

In this episode, your hosts wax philosophic on anime and politics like they're college sophomores getting high off that good, good Zero System Juice. Cathy grandstands with her unified theory of anime, Caitlin breaks down just what the glory of the losers means, Mallory threads the needle of drone warfare and the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and Kat asks all the important questions, like "Is Quatre psychic?" and "What kind of health benefits does OZ offer?" and "Does competency get Duo hot?" (Hint: yes, yes it does.) This is the pseudo-season finale, so we're heavy on the heavy stuff, but in our defense these episodes featured two mental breakdowns, Trowa in a space coma, the Gundam scientists being huge assholes, and Treize risking it all just so he can tell a bunch of Romefeller guys he has a crush on the Gundam pilots. Thankfully, our fandom artifact -- fan postcards from the 1995 GW issues of MEGU Magazine -- helps us end things on a lighter note.

It's a bird, it's a plane, it's—Quatre in Wing Zero threatening to blow up a colony! Trowa might be horrified, but we're delighted, by the artistic flair and horror movie vibes on display anyway. Caitlin reveals that she's been moonlighting as the strategist for all the Gundam pilots; too bad no one has been getting her transmissions from the Lunar Base—except for Duo, who gives us all the fanservice we could possibly ask for in these last two episodes, from getting beat up to giving moving political speeches to finally getting his government assigned female love interest in Hilde. We recount in detail how Wufei definitely kissed Duo to shut him up and save oxygen, contemplate how Oz predates fake news, tear out our hair over Heero's deadpan sense of humor, and get into our very millennial concerns of burnout and being told to die for your job, because space terrorist is a profession and this is definitely not projection, okay? Lastly, our fandom artifact is something near and dear to the hearts of all Toonami fans: the trailer for Gundam Wing's debut on American airwaves and the promo video "Space is the Place."

The wings of the tall-goose continue to flap as we brave episodes 21 and 22 of Gundam Wing. Today, we learn that Quatre has sisters—uncountable, unknowable sisters! Doctor Sisters, Lawyer Sisters, Never-Met-The-Boy-Before Sisters! Sisters sprouting from the soil, sisters flowing from the sea, sisters bursting in the air— oh, wait, sorry, that was his dad. We discuss our plans to eat the rich, represented by Quatre’s dad—but do we want to eat the rich politically or eat the rich erotically? Quatre’s battle with his father goes full Freud when we notice a central feature of Papa Space Baron’s appearance. We discuss the philosophy of colony life as narrated by Septum’s (do you remember Septum?) dad and his son [threatening voice] Gwinter. Then we break last episode’s ban on discussing Lady Une because, surprise surprise, she has once again misunderstood Treize’s religion (which is himself, but not in the way she thought). Wufei is also around doing things because of things. I support him! You go, Wufei! Both episodes end with mad cackling. For our fandom artifact, Caitlin took a field trip to a Gundam Wing collaboration event at cat-themed arcade/amusement park Namjatown and learned her love fortune.

Today we follow the lives and loves of average young adults on a college campus through Gundam Wing episodes 19 and 20: Zechs Merquise has graduated from Earth High School and plans to shed his emo mask boy image with a total reinvention when he starts at Space University. He studies Mobile Suits in Classical Japanese Literature with eccentric Prof. Howard. Professor Lady Une (do NOT call her “Lady” or, worse, “Mrs. Une”) is offering her famous course on Military Propaganda this semester and everyone at S.U. is enrolled. For her advanced students, she is also teaching a seminar on The Psychology of Fascism, but her senior pet Nichol is beginning to notice that some days she’s her usual hard-ass self and sometimes she’s like “Oh, I’ll give you an A+ just because you tried.” Wufei, however, was earning every bit of his A+ on the “Attacking Barge” assignment, before crashing and burning on the final. Meanwhile, Duo is struggling at S.U. because he’s so good-looking no one takes him seriously; everyone treats him like a dumb baka! He can’t enroll in Public Executions 101 and they made him take The Aesthetics of Getting Your Ass Beat twice! His casual hook-up Heero is excelling in The Biology of Machines and spending a lot of time with Trowa, the T.A. for Prof. Mercurius’s Chinese Literature Through Idioms course. In Advanced Fandom Artifact Archaeology, we dust off Super Robot Wars and other Gundam games to problematize the question of “Who would smash who?” versus “Who would smooch who?” Surprise, we don’t actually answer anything—that's academics for you! Bam!