[Slice of Life]

Kaioshin_Sama's arguments look pretty defensive to me. He's not saying mecha is great because it has mecha. He's saying, no, no it's not about the mecha, it's just that it is so versatile that it can be anything. So is this actually still an argument in support of mecha anime?

Let's accept for a second and for the sake of discussion that mecha anime is really so versatile. What does that mean? It means that you can always find something that appeals to you. Great. At the same time it means that there is a lot of stuff that does not appeal to you. Not so great. You can't praise a whole genre (theme, category, whatever) based on the cherries you picked.

And you can of course apply this argumentation to any genre.

I also don't see the point in going for one genre if I want another. If you want romance the usual strategy is to look under "romance" and see what appeals to you, and not under "mecha" until you find something that is also "romance". And if you want to watch romance, you normally don't want to see a giant robot walking across the screen every episode except if you watch that anime also for that giant robot or if you consider the story to be good enough to ignore the mecha aspects.

Normally, people will watch mecha for the mecha. Admit it and go on. The mecha are put into the script for a reason, and at a prominent place, otherwise it wouldn't be a mecha anime. When Sunrise puts a big robot wielding a truck-sized laser gun into the trailer what do you think the message is? Is it "Hey, this is a cool anime because it has a big robot wielding a truck-sized laser gun. Buy it."? Or is it "Actually, just ignore that big robot, we actually don't know why it's there but we have ... uh ... political commentary." Mecha are put into the anime becuase the target group wants to see big machinery making *click*, *srrr*, *stomp*, transform and unite.

Now, how versatile is mecha anime really? Kaioshin_Sama's says it is, which is a position easily to defend, because there are 1000 mecha anime out there, and if somebody says "mecha anime is like this or that" he can easily come up with a counter example. Which doesn't mean much of course as long as the rule does still apply for the other 999.

I will still give it a try. Let's start which the obvious. Mecha anime has mecha (*badum-tish*). The mecha play an important role in the anime, otherwise they most likely weren't there at all, or at least the anime couldn't be classified as a mecha anime anymore. Mecha are war machines that means the anime typically deals with them fighting a kind of war.

More often than not, this war is not a war in the classical sense but consisting of single fights against other mecha or otherwise gigantic enemies. Nevertheless something very important is at stake which can be defendend that way. We typically have a limited number of pilots, or only one, often piloting their own individual mecha. More often than not, the pilots are too young for their role. It is hard to construct a convincing framework for all this and it's often not even attempted.

Then we have the more classical war situations, something that was more common in the past (although I think the scenario above was always the more frequent) where the mecha simply replace the infantry, sometimes to an extent which makes me wonder why they don't use normal infantry in the first place. Well, acutally it doesn't make me wonder of course, the reason is simply that the target audience wants robots. See above. Plausibilty (the little plausibilty a mecha as weapon has in the first place) often falls victim to attempted "epicness".

OK. I stop here. It has already become too long.