Going Nuts and Bolts for Mecha-Musume: The Seihou to My Touhou

Strike Witches x Touhou by 藤島製１号

To be frank, I don’t know where I started to like the genre of mecha-musume. The very first instance, if I remember correctly, was when Bubblegum Crisis started airing alongside Gundam shows, curious on the idea of busty girls wearing thick, sexy, tight-fit armor. Before I knew it, was browsing for mecha-musume pictures, and was enslaved by this certain unknown artist that I can’t remember anymore (and no, he’s not Shimada Fumikane of Strike Witches fame). He drew mecha-musume for old models of tanks and planes, which only deepened my liking for the genre. That was the very first time that I loved the idea of combining the charm of a girl and the spunk of a machine. Like how Seihou is West and Touhou is East, this fanaticism for technology became parallel with my love for fantasy and the supernatural.

The concept was already around before I found it, sporting a commendable compendium of illustrations. For the oldschool, renditions of past war machines of the First and Second World War. For the present day warfreak, illustrations of mechanized femmes based on modern weaponry, ranging from tanks, to submarines and planes. For the advanced yet feasible, models like the suits from Bubblegum Crisis are available. And lastly, for persons of pure fiction, futuristic renditions based on Mobile Suits, Space Fortresses and Starfighters. Every piece of machine, be it scrap metal or not, is made cute and badass by fusing the alloy with the female flesh.

Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk by Yone88

Before we move on, I’ll be frank with you about one thing: I’m very, VERY meticulous on my mecha-musume.  Why? Conceptualization is sometimes taken lightly, screwing the already volatile formula with designs that compromise either the mecha or the female. You can say that finding good mecha-musume can be likened to the process of finding rare gemstones, where one could only find a few of its kind. You’ll find a lot of mecha-musume illustrations, but only a few will be recognized as unique, avant-garde, and of eye-candy quality. That’s just me, but some people follow the same standard, to the point where said standard would be taken far too seriously and ultimately fucking everything up for the sake of self-satisfaction.

Moving on with the program, another thing to note about mecha-musume is that the fans try to distinguish themselves apart from lovers of pure metal and machine, mainly because other people try to lump both groups together. Mecha fans love their machines with or without the girls, while fans of mecha-musume can never live without adding a cute loli or a sexy MILF with the machine, or they’d just transform and redesign pure mecha to accomodate an appropriate female figure for its pilot. Of course, that includes fanservice-y designs, revealing transformations, with a story or plot that either strips them naked, or makes them sport more GAR and badassery than Transformers and Iron Man combined. Sure, mecha-musume aren’t THAT realistic or feasible (though lack of funding and fear of straying away from “being human” would impede so much, this wouldn’t happen in real life, EVER), they don’t explode to pieces (but they do die), and you get to sometimes see the “pilots” do something kinky, but they’re loved in a way no different to those who love cute girls and those who love robots and mecha. It’s just that mecha-musume walk the tightrope between the two, so the perception is most likely to be rounded off to either of them with regards to their ratio (mecha > musume, mecha < musume), which shouldn’t be the case.

German Panzerkampfwagen VI Tiger I by Shimada Fumikane

Of course, genre-wise, there are times where mecha-musume get a chance to get their own show, or manga, or figure, or whatever material they get featured in aside from their designs and illustrations. They never fail to give an ample supply of fanservice, and they’re unrestricted when it comes to showcasing the delicious perks of liking it. Maybe this is one aspect of moe that I’ve been hearing somewhere. Marketing strategy? Something to degrade the genre into something that would benefit the conspirators one way or another? And what about us fans? What about the brilliant minds behind the concept? For some reason, the more we love it, the more we dirty it, which leads us to hate how we loved it too much for it to be hated. But hey, ain’t that the same with any other genre?

Now, I’m not inviting you to like mecha-musume, nor am I doing shameless plugging for it. I just love the concept for me to share it regardless of how you’re going to perceive the information. Man and machine have always been together since time immemorial, and this mutual relationship will have to go somewhere. Mechas, advanced technology, human machinations born from the sinister minds of Science, or all of the above. Swing it this way or not, it’s fine. The concept is there, the concept was realized, and time will come that the concept will be made real. Hopefully, I’ll still be around when it happens.