Gate | Episode 6
cxt217: Episode 6 is a pretty good episode, but the way it was structured meant it works best if you watch both Episodes 5 and 6 back to back, instead of waiting a week. The Apocalypse Now-inspired sequence was pretty amusing, right down to repeating the lines of dialogue as the helicopters were heading in. They even had an air assault sequence towards the end, which surprised me.
It is pretty fortunate for the Empire that Itami is a very forgiving and lenient person. I found it amusing the sequence where he is fending off questions about his choice of prisoners for the JSDF to take back, while Hamilton is looking at the written agreement as if she did not have a clue what is going on.
And we get to see more of the knights! Though Itami might not enjoy the experience too much.
I am very much looking forward to the next episode. Gate is definitely a must-see title this season.
EmperorBrandon: Kuribayashi was pretty badass, though it looks like she was intentionally trying to be as badass as possible. I wonder if her desire to rush into battle will be a problem later on. Priestess of Emloy likes that, though.
Hah, and when they see more of the knights, the first thing they take note of is how well they fit the tropes. Blonde ringlets! Was looking forward to seeing the other girls from Pina’s flashback.
GingaDaiuchuu: I’m liking how this show is going more as it goes on. Everything pretty much went as expected, but it’s the right choice to make, and it plays it more real than most shows would.
cxt217: There were a few odd things. First, Itami as the commanding officer on the ground would have been the person calling in the gunship to fire on the bandits inside the city walls, not the gunship announcing that they were going to finish off the bandits that got inside the walls in ten seconds and would you be kind enough to clear the area? Second, the recon group would have had experience to tell the difference between smoke and dust cloud, especially since heavy dust clouds on a road is an excellent sign that there are troops on the march.
davesimmons: And also, my first words would have been “we’ve signed a treaty with your princess.” Even if they didn’t believe it, there is some chance they’d talk before attacking.
bctaris: I keep being so torn by this show. It’s paced well enough that it never gets boring, or repetitive. Rory’s obscene, but obscenely fun.
But the underlying themes still bother me. A line near the end by a random soldier replying to a citizen, “We’re the JDF,” seems to sum that up. It’s the author’s pride coming through. Once again the undercurrent desire of the story to show off a fully capable, offensive, Japanese military. One that is, by the way, and despite its terror, always shown as a positive force. (We’ve yet to see a negative result of the JDF’s technology or tactics on the “good people” of this world. Not only that, now they’re eager to demonstrate that they abide by modern conventions, including treating prisoners. “Yes, we’re the most terrifying military force you’ve seen, worse than dragons even, killing hundreds in seconds…oh, but, you know, we aren’t medieval savages who torture prisoners. We’re the good guys, after all!” That’s actually…not that amusing.)
This whole story is a fantasy for that (because, to be as obvious as the Apocalypse Now homage this episode, the JDF, of course, isn’t as able to do that in the real world), and this episode, especially with that increasingly silly homage, was–if Rory’s behavior wasn’t a clue–a total climax. Pure military porn. I maybe don’t mind that when I don’t have a pretty good feeling about the underlying motives of its author.
davesimmons: I look at that as wish fulfillment, like in US films Battle Los Angeles, Battleship, Independence Day, etc. and rejecting real-life behavior of US soldiers breaking under the strain in Afghanistan. Showing the JSDF at their My Love Story!! impossible best. To me it’s a nice change of pace from the grimdark stories like Attack on Titan, Blue Gender, Knights of Sidonia where the (friendly) body count is high, life is cheap, and the society is twisted.
cxt217: Even keeping that in mind, I can see bctaris’s point, even if each of us are coming from different sides here. This is very much a military otaku title, despite the setting and it shows by the problems that have been mentioned earlier, namely the lack of ‘Google is your friend’ on anything that is not military related, and the flat cardboard stereotypes of other nations (Whose few appearances have already reached the irritation level for me.). That the JSDF is a force for good filled with honorable people, and sometimes terrible actions have to be done for the greater good especially when confronted with a greater evil, both be included in the series is something that should have been expected going in. The means that both themes, as well as others, were written into the plot does leave something to be desired – and this is coming from someone who has largely enjoyed the series so far!
bctaris: Then it comes down to how one likes to see such military force portrayed in fiction. The “grimdark” portrayal is more true to life, thematically, in that it portrays consequences, rarely less than half of them bad. So, yes, I prefer that.
But there are wrinkles. If it was not a military force hewing so much to contemporary reality, I would have less objection. The wish-fulfillment of past military-themed anime/manga sci-fi and fantasy was of an unreal version–robots, spaceships, battle-suits, futuristic weaponry, whatever–and so even the triumphal stuff could be enjoyed without thinking about it. But using contemporary portrayals of this hardware and tactics and all of that for that same wish-fulfillment is something else, and not as fun. It breaks the wish-fulfilling illusion.
Sly05: It does deserve some of its criticism for its attempt to show the JSDF as the awesome good guys while at the same time showing them gleefully massacring enemy soldiers. Even if those soldiers can be generously described as a bunch of marauding brutes who are out to kill civilians, there are moral questions about whether a modern military should be going all out on what is essentially a medieval army. A show of force would have probably been enough to get them to retreat. Those soldiers, as evil as they were, still presumably had families and such who won’t exactly be thrilled that the JSDF killed their fathers, husbands, and sons.
That aside, I’m generally enjoying this show as well and I am fine with the existence of shows that are mostly wish fulfillment or glorify the military, even if there presentation of violence tends towards problematic and overly simplistic.
davesimmons: I’m not really disagreeing with either of you — the writing is unrealistic in many ways, and a real war like this would not be so black and white. I’m still enjoying it as feel-good cheerleading of the JSDF, even though I’ve read more realistic military fiction from Drake, Stirling, etc. and I did enjoy AoT and Blue Gender. To me it’s this season’s World Break with the JSDF as the overpowered MC 
General Hentai: Yeah, but World Break handled OPness much better.
But while I was blown away by the Apocalypse Now tribute, when the chain gun gets turned on, this is the thought that kept running through my head:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.
-Hilaire Belloc, The Modern Traveller. 1898
World Break kept its MC’s OPness either off center stage, or gave him powerful and worthy foes and situations. Indeed, I’ve chided those who bailed early solely due to the MC being OP’d, given how well the series handled that issue. Here, well, back to Belloc’s poem. I’m very much a respecter of our military. One of the men I’ve most respected in my life was the disciplinary principal of my high school, a retired Marine colonel, a veteran of Korea and Vietnam, who had oak leaf clusters for the Purple Heart, Bronze and Silver Stars, and was awarded the Navy Cross. But war comes at great personal cost. His last tour in Vietnam ended with him losing command of his battalion, when he hunted down and killed a sniper who’d been killing his men. He lost it and couldn’t stop hitting the corpse with the butt of his rifle. So, while I’m very much an amateur historian and a military otaku, I’m not blind to the price that our military pays, or that war is an ugly business.
Here, I’m just seeing an unnecessary killing spree, almost exactly as Belloc wrote of more than a century ago. Except that it’s even more weighted towards the JSDF, with artillery, mortars, gunships and more. at no point have I seen even the slightest effort to communicate and try to have the hopelessly ignorant enemy understand how unbalanced the military equation is. I don’t see any Western military unit of today needlessly slaughtering a primitive force. It’s worth noting that Belloc was Frenchman who would become a dual citizen of both France and Great Britain. When he wrote about Mr. Maxim’s gun, all of the European powers still had substantial formations, and used them, of horse cavalry, failing to recognize that they had become outdated. We’re not the imperial powers of the 19th century. If we were, the US and allied militaries probably wouldn’t have taken nearly as many casualties in the Irag and Afghanistan wars because there would have been fighting under the rules of engagement of 100 years ago, and prolific use of firepower would’ve been the order of the day, not a restrained useage designed to minimize civilian casualties.
Gate remains entertaining in many ways. And as the whole Apocalypse Now tribute shows, there is an amount of absurdist fantasy in this series. But the lack of restraint on the rules of engagement is troubling, and makes me wonder how members of the JSDF view this depiction of themselves as casual killers as an organization (we have the dissonance here of a military organization which has slaughtered with offhand casualness well over 100,000 people, and the heroic actions of our dozen member squad who are noble and pure).
What’s missing here is a significant challenge to the JSDF as an organization. It’s easy to have a situation where a dozen modern soldiers could face a challenge in this new world. The problem, however, is to provide a challenge for a modern military which is present in at least corps strength (at least 2 divisions), with more where that came from.
