>Otherwise, a fight between two pregnant women could be seen as a mech fight.
I mean, when you consider what pregnancy does to an expectant mother, hormonally, and the lengths to which some will go to protect their unborn child... It's not an entirely implausible characterization.
But speaking to AOT, specifically, it's real robot with some super robot/fantasy/Abrahamic text characteristics to allow for the setting. Despite the "summoning" aspect, practical considerations of when and how to employ titans, the political, social, and philosophical ramifications of their existence and use, and the fact that the story is ultimately a study of characters caught up in war and history and intrigue, all point to a solid mecha, real robot classification.
Wing (and, by extension, 00) was a fine watch at 10, and G probably would have been, too. They're considerably less fraught in both iconography and philosophy than some of the other series, and quite a bit more hammy. The Build Fighters/Divers series are great, too. Stay far away from AGE, though; cutesy stylings because it was intended to exist alongside series like Yokai Watch, but it ended up being quite problematic.
Mecha fandom doesn't necessarily cross over with anime fandom (even though the former is arguably the origin of the latter). I find that there's more crossover with hobbyists (plastic models), military fandom, and gamers. Gundam is almost it's own thing (to Sunrise's simultaneous satisfaction and chagrin), and the Site Which Shall Not Be Named split a Mecha board off of the Anime board almost 2 decades ago. I don't know that the fandom will be represented on MAL, which is itself a niche service for the wider anime-watching community.
Suffice it to say, the multiple life-scale Gundam statues that have been put up/dismantled over the past few years speak to its enduring popularity. I will say that there haven't been as many non-Gundam mecha anime as there were in the 2010s. We did get G-Witch and Bravern last year, and Hathaway on Netflix in 2021. And, as someone said, AOT is essentially Meat Gundam.
EDIT: Also, I don't know that I'd even call 86 mainstream. It felt like it actually got way less recognition than it should have.
These complaints are always funny to me, because the "viewpoint diversity" referred to is usually right-wing rhetoric which not only already has a voice in NYT, but also has several dedicated outlets that are elevated to "paper of record" sources among conservatives. What doesn't get much play is, say, PoC and lower class youth perspectives on topics like foreign affairs and economics. There a plenty of eloquent voices among that cohort (that you should have to be eloquent to be heard), but that would disrupt the manufactured consensus around what government and private enterprise do here and abroad.
If that's what you're arguing we should be hearing more of from the NYT, though, I'm all for it. Not, say, another half-baked article about "crime waves" so that the NYPD can get another billion in overtime or whatever. Or, on the hysterically liberal side, not another article about "Biden wiping out student loan debt [which he was obligated to do under already existing statute]."
To say nothing of waste, even when everything goes right. Nuclear is the grandaddy of instant gratification traps. Moment on the lips, hundreds of millennia on the hips. I think we can do better.
Always good to mention the property management cartel that's in cahoots with rental management software companies to price-fix and jack up rates for everyone ("allegedly").
People keep trying to rationalize the status quo with complex explanations, when the dynamic is really "Army setting up a school" dead-simple (or, even more applicable, Soviets setting up apartment blocks): if you care about fulfilling the need, it gets done. The problem is that there are competing interests that profit from housing insecurity and homelessness, and the government routinely chooses them over us. Nothing will change until the choice is made to throw these entities - developers, management, investors, etc. - under the bus, instead of people who are simply looking for a safe place to live. Unfortunately, without a massive reorganization of the economy and even society, it's impossible to have both come out winners.
IIRC Miami was the worst on a list put together by CityNerd of large cities with a high (housing+transit)/income ratio. I can't access YT at the moment so feel free to correct.
It sounds like a problem that punishing students for not showing up doesn't solve. Incentives (like pay for attendance) that help to alleviate some of the issues causing attendance problems (by your own words, poverty among them) seem like a good start. At the bottom of it is a very rough and ill-enforced social contract, though. People in these positions don't believe that society cares much to reward their positive qualities (and it often doesn't).
Which is why government should break their own scheme by building houses and selling them at-cost, or even subsidized (i.e., no-interest mortgage).
I'll fully admit that I've been radicalized by an adulthood of housing insecurity, and I no longer care about housing as an investment or even a market. The current system is cruel, and while I understand that it can never be perfect, the ease with which people's stable shelter can be ripped from them is appalling. Yes, even with eviction and foreclosure proceedings. There are many who would object vociferously to this because their own stability is based on housing's scarcity and inflated value, and while that may be a reality whose collapse we'd have to contend with, I have to think that anyone of good moral thought would recognize the fundamentally perverse nature of the status quo.
Epic Games Store comes to mind, along with dozens of other smaller/defunct enterprises. There's a rumor that Gamestop is going to make one that's crypto-enabled somehow. The problems remain; ask anyone who's been banned by Valve how they feel about their Steam library being rendered completely inaccessible.
It's strange that Egyptian never took off in a similar way, considering that many Greek thinkers received at least some of their education there. Perhaps it was difficult to "port" for some reason (complexity, lack of proper writing materials/equipment, etc.)?
Between the sheer number of people getting axed in layoffs and the amount of, "Yeah I actually only do like 2 hours of work a day," boasts, it doesn't sound so farfetched. They're surely not doing something so technical and important that they deserve that versus, say, the person dealing with screaming, irate customers in a pharmacy for 8 hours (also, you can't sit, no sitting allowed, it looks lazy).
That's a bit of a leap. The argument is that the pain should be felt at the top as well as the bottom, as a function of the state of the company. The least execs could do is try to appear as if they're working to keep people's livelihoods intact. They could signal this in a number of ways, but it's a matter beyond an irrational sense of fairness; if the execs don't have to sacrifice anything at all, is the company really in such dire straits that employment has to be disrupted for the most vulnerable parts of the org?
For many of us slogging away in retail or made unemployable by "5 years of experience"-ism, those were a barrage of "let them eat cake" moments. The delta between that quality of life and the average Zoomlennial's (the real average, not what any given coastal publication might have you believe) is unconscionable and in no way justified by apparent differences in capability. I watch luxury mansion tours for fun, and not one has made me nearly as furious as one of those DITL videos. They make the tech industry look like an upscale daycare for the adult children of the right class of global citizens, and no one else.
I mean, when you consider what pregnancy does to an expectant mother, hormonally, and the lengths to which some will go to protect their unborn child... It's not an entirely implausible characterization.
But speaking to AOT, specifically, it's real robot with some super robot/fantasy/Abrahamic text characteristics to allow for the setting. Despite the "summoning" aspect, practical considerations of when and how to employ titans, the political, social, and philosophical ramifications of their existence and use, and the fact that the story is ultimately a study of characters caught up in war and history and intrigue, all point to a solid mecha, real robot classification.