We continue across the sea of stars, where Gee and Iro watch the seminal 1988-1997 Legend of the Galactic Heroes OVA a few episodes at a time. Keep an eye out for this podcast between main installments of The GLORIO Chat as we work our way through the history books.
Opening Song: Sea of Stars
Ending Song: Crossing the Bridge of Light (Orchestral Version)
Show Notes
This installment covers episodes:
- 19. The Yang Fleet Goes Out
- 20. Bloodshed in Space
- 21. The Battle of Doria Starzone, then…
01:04 – An Interesting Trio of Episodes
01:55 – Episode 19
02:25 – Admiral Kubersly and FUCK Andrew Fork
04:41 – FPA and the coup d’état
07:48 – Yang’s Plans
10:03 – The National Salvation Military Council
13:48 – Yang cannot take care of himself
14:45 – Schenkopp is just the FPA’s Oberstein
18:52 – Yang believes in the system, but it’s really hard to agree sometimes
21:03 – Speed of Pacing
22:05 – Episode 20
23:10 – Braunschweig’s Master Plan
26:49 – “Gale Wolf” Mittermeyer and “Succumbed to Theory” Staaden
29:11 – Rentenburg Fortress, Infantry Combat, and High Admiral Ovlessor
35:21 – Oberstein’s Plans for Ovlessor
39:02 – Episode 21
39:24 – Schenkopp’s Blitzkrieg and Scale/Numbers in LOGH
41:23 – Commander Bagdashu
44:07 – A Good-for-Nothing Battle
51:02 – Yang is smooth as butter and jam
53:46 – Protests on Heinessen
54:53 – Leading after violently overthrowing previous leaders
59:09 – The Rally for Love and Peace
1:00:07 – The Value of “Conviction”
1:05:15 – The So-Called “Paradox” of Peaceful Protest and Arguing in Bad Faith
1:09:33 – RIP
1:16:38 – Almost 20% through!
1:17:14 – Housekeeping and Closing
And don’t forget that Legend of the Galactic Heroes is available for streaming on HIDIVE!
The Glorio Blog 
While I readily admit that LoGH is not exactly the bleeding edge of progress when it comes to female characters (then again it was the ’80s in Japan) I don’t think Jessica’s death constitutes as fridging… at least going by the definition of “fridging” as having her die to provide motivation for Yang. Yang doesn’t decide to do what he does because of Jessica’s death, he would have done the same if she lived or if she hadn’t even been at the protest in the first place. Her death hits him hard, yes, but it’s not the catalyst of Yang’s actions, or even “a” catalyst. (Er, I hope this is not a spoiler, I don’t really remember where exactly the episode ended. But in any case, the episode makes it clear that Yang’s decision had been made before was informed of her death.)
On a different note, I know you’re doing 3-episode batches but considering that the first arc (“season” if you please) is made up of 26 episodes, you might want to watch the remaining five episodes, from 22 to 26, in one sitting. Not necessarily to talk about them all in the podcast, especially because there’s probably quite a lot to unpack. It’s just as a viewing experience – episodes 23-26 episodes form a very tight unit, and I think breaking it up, with a bunch of time between the episodes, is probably not a good idea.
Yeah, think Iro and I agreed that it doesn’t really constitute “fridging” in the traditional sense, just a shame since Jessica felt like a character with a ton of potential. And as we get into a bit, the FPA is already so short on sympathetic figures, it kind of places all of its narrative weight solely on Yang whereas the Empire can at least divide up its moral and character complexity between Reinhard, Kircheis, Oberstein, etc.
As for our format, it’s mostly what it is out of practical needs than anything else, but we’ll see how things go depending on scheduling.
I guess this is subjective but I don’t think the FPA is short on sympathetic characters, it’s just that there are relatively few sympathetic characters in the position of power. But with the FPA I always felt like the point was a sort of extended navel-gazing about the nature of democracy, how it’s deeply flawed and easily corrupted, but ultimately is worth fighting for, so having only Yang (who is flawed in his own ways and wouldn’t necessarily be regarded as a hero by history!) and a handful of smaller roles around him is kind of the point. With the FPA’s situation being what it is, I think it makes more sense to have characters who aren’t necessarily resisting loudly but try to fight where they can, or just simply low-key continue to believe in democratic values, because that’s kind of how things tend to end up in real life, too. Fighting losing battles usually ends up grinding people down – which is something that I think LoGH does a great job showing.
Aside from keeping track of dates, i think fleet count is another thing to be kept track off. Fpa lost so many fleets since the ova until present time do they even have any fleet remaining aside from Yang’s?
The novel gets into the military coup with some more detail. It boiled down to Greenhill being put in charge with watching for coups after the Amlitzer debacle. Whoops!