Forbes is bullish on the mecha genre’s future.
What with a giant walking Gundam to be unveiled in Yokohama at the end of this year, it’s worth realizing that this kind of thing doesn’t happen in cultural isolation. So much so, that the last five years has seen a real resurgence of the mecha genre, both in Asia and across the world.
If you have only been on the periphery of all this, you will have likely noticed a few things in recent years. Such as increased number of mecha anime Blu-rays released in the West, an uptake in people building Gundam model kits (or gunpla), more mecha games and a lot of new mecha anime.
Sales figures back up these claims. Check out the current and projected US anime market share:
This is where we get to a strange meme that has been popping up intermittently over the past year or so, that somehow “mecha is dead”.
In the face of the various evidence available, this is a bizarre claim at the very least, but in the context of the actual increased popularity of mecha, begins to make more sense.
Specifically, many of these claims originate from quite specific sources, sources that work for a new agency that is trying to position itself as some new kind of creative consultancy.
It sounds like everything is coming up roses in mecha land. Anime is certainly selling like hotcakes, thanks in no small part to blu-ray and streaming releases making an end run around Hollywood during the lock downs.
Scratch the surface, though, and you find that a besetting problem–the one that the YouTuber linked in the original piece was actually addressing–persists.
Read through that Forbes article again, and you’ll find it mentions Gundam 22 times. The vast majority of the column inches devoted to discussing the growth of mecha is given over to this one franchise.
The point that I and others have made isn’t that mecha is unpopular or selling poorly. It’s that the genre–like many others–is stuck in a self-referential rut. Pointing to the recent glut of Gundam and Gundam or Eva-derivative series doesn’t gainsay the observation that practically every mecha series is either Gundam, Eva, or derivative of one or both.
In short, Forbes is answering an aesthetic critique with an appeal to economics, which is like trying to derive ethics solely from empirical data. The mere fact that a work is lucrative doesn’t necessarily mean it’s good. Consider that The Last Jedi is the second-highest-grossing Star Wars movie, right behind the arguably worse TFA.
That’s not to say that every recent Gundam or other mecha series is of poor quality. Many of them are fine productions. What even the Forbes article attests to is that mecha anime has fallen victim to the corporate play-it-safe attitude that frowns on innovation. After all, Big Brand X would be history if people didn’t like being told the same story over and over.
There’s a paradox that exists in tension with–not contradiction to–the human fondness for repetition. Neither MS Gundam nor Star Wars would be with us today if visionary directors hadn’t broken from the pack and presented familiar tropes in new ways that solved longstanding storytelling problems. In Tomino’s case, it was mixing super robots with war epics to pioneer the Real Robot genre. There’s no need to elaborate on what Lucas did with his childhood pulp influences.
Sales success proves that people like the familiar, but it can also gauge audience response to innovation. I’m uniquely placed to give firsthand testimony on that count. My first mecha novel series, created to break the genre out of its feedback loop, has been my biggest commercial success yet–far outpacing my major award-winning space opera series.
What that success tells me is that there’s a large and growing subset of greater mecha fandom that’s hungry for a series that respects venerable genre tropes while trying something new with them.
We’ll get a clearer picture of that audience’s size when the second series in my epic mech saga launches later this month!
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