There is a myth to the American West that I long for: not as a cowboy or someone born here, but as a queer with no heart stuck in isolation. A longing to be seen, out there on the horizon: maybe seen but not heard. On my own, with a few animals. I hear stories of queer farmers but I’ve never met one. I know they’re out there: I know people buried under sand, soot and carhart jackets that save their bodies for those closest to them only who’re trying to show an example to the snap-back wearing post-cowboys that catch horses on quads and no closer live to the wilderness than a yuppie dying of a cocaine overdose in LA knows of making a mark on the world.

I have met the people searching and urging for a world where they can be seen on the horizon and have a chance to return to that type of privacy. An agrarian idleness: there are so few frontiers left that aren’t being eyed for development or subdivisions or god knows fucking what. I wear a mark on my face when I visit my family that says “I never could have been a better version of you.” and so the past will tumble and fade, the range stories and gunslinging and drunk rides through deserts filled with cacti.

I’m Queer, I say at least once a day now in an empty way. An urge to be recognize by someone or something out there: maybe an urge to hear someone else say it back to me too. Maybe that’s all it would take for my heart to unlock and all of this viciousness and vileness to go falling away. Maybe, maybe I’m hoping that if it happened I could hold onto just enough fucking viciousness to keep on living.

Through my avatars I live vicariously feminine, sometimes. All of them strong and beautiful and just a little violent, just a little bloody. Those are the words and worlds of videogames. Always beautiful, always dangerous. I say I’m queer again, I let people know now. “as long as it doesn’t affect me.” I hear in response and sometimes, sometimes I know the people I say it to expect a fucking congratulations for telling me they’re happy I want to be seen and not heard.

I never pulled up the roots out here, you know. In a way I made sure I could set them down, that every day I cut one root from who I was I might have some small chance of replanting and finally having a chance to grow down and tangle and deep, no longer having to stretch and pull and ache to find something that’d water who I am.

you touch analog. it touches you.

But is this getting all spoken word now? There’s a myth to the American west that I see in the people around me, and I can picture big fucking white letters that say “HOLLYWOOD” still – pointed and laughed at, mocked, but that’s what it is. A desire to go where other people are and put up a big fucking sign that says we’re here. In the queers I know dreaming of gardens and farms, it’s a desire to go somewhere and tear it all down. Maybe not to build something better, but at least to build something smaller and quieter. An agrarian nihilism for generations that get told they’re lucky to want to believe they should exist, but they really need to get with the times already.

I want to die, smiling.

LUNA-TERRA’s dislikes are listed as treating herself well, and one of the first lines the player will read them say is something like a sardonic treatise on mechanized bodies: “It’s not fair to get more than one body.” and we greet the last frontier as it vanishes. You can’t kill space, but you can kill the idea of it just like you can do to any frontier. Wrap it up in Presentation, Values, History. Not real history, only the kind made for preening photographs of people in white dress shirts drinking coca-cola, where the only activists always already have a bullet in their head for a cause.

I know the look in her eyes. You get it passed a certain age, a certain amount of experience no matter what. It’s the dream of every teenage boy caught in the light of history and myth, a type of weary confidence that only comes from being too paranoid to trust and too dumb to love. It was strikingly easy to pick her.

///

MOBILE SUIT GUNDAM aired to not avowed success in the 1970’s. It took it awhile to stick the landing: now it feels like every little thing that has one person in one big robot has a little to owe to Gundam even here with Heaven Will Be Mine.

The original, the big top universal century stuff ends with a showdown where Amuro Ray that’s the protagonist, sacrifices his big robot toy to try and kill Char Aznable that’s the badguy (they are in love); to sublimate the relationship and end the conflict it requires Amuro give up his robot. That body of oh, what’s it called, pure gundanium? Am I getting my timelines fucked up? It makes perfect sense there’s a bunch of horny art of this stuff, you know.

Amuro gives up his Gundam as a resolution: a stiff and noted way the series tells us to turn over the toys of conflict. A weapon is a weapon, it can build towards only a new war. Crispin Freeman, the voice actor has a whole workshop he used to do at anime conventions about the point of anime about giant robots and the conflict between how giant robots are depicted in media in The West.

You have to get out of the “Gundam” Who told me that? An American voiceactor and Auteur Freak, Crispin Freeman who’s been in hundreds of anime and has a voice so recognizable and such a specific typecast it was exciting to hear him. It was easy to burn an entire weekend going to his workshop on media criticism, even if hearing him say The West and The East a bunch of times started to turn a pit in my stomach. It’s a measure, right? Who do we trust to tell us what to think, who’s perspectives to we open ourselves up to when we don’t know any better?

So I listened to Crispin Freeman tell me and a room of Anime Acolytes of every Age that that was the true resolution of “Japanese Anime” – we must give up our toys and dragons and settle into adulthood. I imagine some of the people in the audience went on to write Young Adult Fiction about how our Toys and Dragons can grow up, with us, actually, just so you know, adults.

You have to get out of the Gundam.

But Heaven Will be Mine is Robot Violence with aftercare: everyone’s too busy holding each other and feeling Naked and Known to really commit to killing each other, commit to the conflict. Gravity is a tidal lock that keeps us together, gravity is necessary to be known in space.

Naked and Alone and Seen, floating in an ether-orbit of past conflicts and memories. Will Heaven be Mine? Will my avatar – this despondent and unpredictable woman I see myself in make all of the right choices? Is there a pleasure in being known so well and being unable to do anything out of it?

Wearing a second skin, all analog – I think that’s what made that story the easiest one to pick. While everyone else is sleek and has a love with their body that seems like it can last forever, here’s the character who can tether to a solar wind in a body like a coffin. Piloted by the carried ones and zero’s.

Amuro Ray has a relationship to the Gundam that’s psychic, but only so intimate as being a barrier of pure thick metal that isolates him from the vaccuum of space can be. It’s barriers in barriers that the final battle is being fought in. A gundam inside of a ship inside of the vast and unknowing blanket of space. With one final sacrifice, he leaves his body behind.

Maybe everything I know about Mobile Suit Gundam is wrong. Maybe my body isn’t a temple: it’s a steel age coffin with cannons on the shoulder where panels run deep into the skin. My body can be one built for love and war, but most importantly it can be one I never have to leave behind. I am tired of believing we want to kill each other because we want to kiss each other.