Also written: giant robot
The giant robot of mecha's first era: a near-invincible machine with named weapons, piloted by a hot-blooded hero against a monster of the week. 50 in the letters, reducing to 5.
5Reduced, this term gives 5. It sits on The Turn with the rest of a turn.
A super robot is a giant fighting machine treated as a hero in its own right: often built by a lone genius, powered by a mysterious energy, armed with weapons whose names the pilot shouts as he uses them. Go Nagai's Mazinger Z (1972), in which a boy pilots a robot from a cockpit in its head, defined the type.
Each episode brings a new enemy machine or monster, the robot is damaged, and a signature attack wins the day. Combining robots, in which several vehicles join into one giant, followed with Getter Robo (1974), by Go Nagai and Ken Ishikawa, and toy companies made the designs central to the business.
In 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam introduced the "real robot": mass-produced military machines with logistics, limits and politics. Fans still divide mecha into the two traditions, though many series mix them.
Super robots were among the first Japanese exports to win huge audiences in Europe, the Middle East and Latin America, and their energy, from posed attacks to impossible odds, still runs through shonen action.
Counted letter by letter this term comes to 50 — 5 once reduced. The weight sits in “Super”, which carries 25 on its own and reduces to 7.
The reference files it as a turn. The number's contribution is freedom, disruption, and restless movement — and with it the 5's restlessness and hunger for change, which is the thread the reference follows here.
Split the term again and the vowels give a Heart's Desire of 2 (cooperation) against a Personality of 3 (expression) in the consonants — cooperation underneath, expression on the surface. The gap between them is where the subject is most interesting.
Read on the 5's terms, this entry asks you to ask what was abandoned, and whether it deserved to be. The 5 moves for the sake of moving. Not every break documented here led anywhere, and the reference says so where it did not. The other entries that reduce to 5 are collected on The Turn.