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Later on in the series, in the midst of a winter match, Yukari and another Ooarai player of the military otaku persuasion sing Yuki no Shingun/ 雪の進軍, a blackly humorous march about soldiers freezing to death in the era of the Russo-Japanese War.
![girl und panzer tanks girl und panzer tanks](https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/ak-scans/images/1/1a/542605-panzers-1-.jpg)
The levity with which the titular girls view their tanks is shown when early in the series, before they’ve learned the practical benefits of camouflage, they all give their tanks outlandish custom paint jobs, including one in solid gold. All of the sensha-do teams depicted in the series, with the exception of the protagonists, theme themselves around a participant nation from WW2, fielding that nation’s tanks and even adopting its stereotypical mannerisms and dress.Īll of this is treated lightly. At one point we get to see the militaria festooning her room (including a poster of Motofumi Kobayashi’s Black Knight, a manga about German tankers on the Eastern Front). Yukari, the military nerd of the show’s protagonists, makes frequent and enthusiastic mention of each tank’s historical importance. Sensha-do is portrayed as an established sport with a storied history, and one whose character-building virtues are, much like with any other youth sport, extolled by schools and student governments.ĭespite the overt kookiness–entire towns float around the ocean on top of aircraft carriers for no discernible reason–this is also a world where the Second World War is confirmed to have existed. The winner is determined via elimination or knocking out the opponent’s flag tank. In the world of GuP, tanks, specifically, those deployed during the Second World War, are the primary instrument for sensha-do, a high school sport where teams of girls–because this is an all-girls’ sport–engage each other in tank groups of up to roughly company strength (15-20 tanks). The biggest storytelling gambit Girls und Panzer plays is to try and decontextualize tanks from their onerous history. While infantrymen and air power can and have been deployed as humanitarians (with mixed results), the very design and physical silhouette of a tank leave little room for false pretenses in most people’s minds–this is a machine for killing the enemy.
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On a broader scale, they symbolize that century’s industrialization of war, one of the new and innovative ways in which they’ve figured out how to kill you. Originally hulking curiosities, they later became a symbol for a “modernized” model of warfare built around speed, coordination (facilitated through modern communication hardware) and dramatic violence directed towards limited regions of a battlefront (to effect a breakthrough, eliminating the need to blunder against the rest of the enemy’s defensive line). Tanks occupy a special place in the iconography of the 20th century. Girls und Panzer’s ability to sense that intersection and recontextualize the two into a unique whole is what gives the show its eccentric charm and lets it bypass the thematic tank traps it seemed destined, on first glance, to fall into. The interplay between material superiority and tactical ingenuity is a crux for both areas of interest. To boot, winning now against Red Team, your historical rivals, who putter along using the same moribund strategy floated on top a mountain of infinite resources, will be vindication for the time you spent being underestimated by every commentator.” When, in fact, the underlying statement could be, “ Go Blue Team, this is the payoff for the past two years you spent hemorrhaging talent and resources while installing new leadership with their new, untested ideas.
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Military hobbyism turns many of the same knobs: following a team(s), the immediate excitement of following individual engagements, the later, deeper satisfaction of being drawn into the metagame–discussing the evolution of tactics, the nature and progression of leadership over time, the sundry extraneous political factors that come full circle and affect the team’s performance on the field, etc.įor an outsider to either fandom, the fan’s enthusiasm may just come off as, “ Go Blue Team!” Let’s take the sports analogy and run with it. While there are indeed people whose sole interest may be the weight distribution ratio on a late-war SBD Dauntless with extended fuel reserve, or the number and type of bolts used to rivet the post-factory armor skirts on the Jagdpanther, it’s the equivalent of a Red Sox fan who limits his enthusiasm to painstaking cataloging of every engineering detail of and renovation made to the plumbing system of Fenway Park since 1912.
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It’s a common misconception that military enthusiasts are nothing but a subcategory of gearheads, focused squarely on military hardware.