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Reviewing Tropes: The 'Suit Up'

Or, Essentiality

A lot of my favorite stories include elaborate outfits for which every piece is essential to the survival, or at least daily utility, of its user, wearer, collector. In Nausicaä they require a mask with the leaves of a plant as filter for the poisonous air of the forrest of corruption. In dune the Fremen don complicated Still Suits which protect from the harsh elements and keep the body's precious moisture from being lost. In the Metal Gear series the protagonist infiltrators wear complicated Sneaking Suits that augment their strength, compress and keep their innards in place (in part to help them heal, with use of synthetic blood) and keep quiet. In Neon Genesis Evangelion the pilots of the titular Giant "Robots" wear Plug Suits which cling to their bodies with an activated vacuum-like mechanism which helps them synchronize and pilot their machines (presumably through some fetus-womb like metaphor). Every hero that ever held a sword has a complex outfit laden with belts and pouches carrying all means of essential gear, from refreshing mint tincture to gauze to salt. Soldiers, pilgrims, and vagrants, travelers of all sorts, especially before flight, had to have enough on them to ensure basic survival in many eventualities. Who knows how long it takes to properly don a space suit and ensure its proper functionality.

These characters and people dealt with exterior conflict and hostile worlds. We're lucky to live in a world where a lot of this has been alleviated for a lot of us, and I don't begrudge that. But I find myself invariably drawn to this sort of costuming. The more complicated and the longer it takes to make proper use of the gear the better. There's something attractive about that ritual of the Suit Up. Power Rangers (Sentai Rangers) and Magical Girls of all sorts are almost defined as genre by their elaborate magical transformation (read: suiting up) sequences.

I like the clear cut nature of a conflict which requires proper physical prep. While it may be vastly more dangerous to have to deal with a hostile world, at least you know where it and you stand. The majority of my attraction, then, to these outfits, is the lack of ambiguity. Most of the problems and dilemmas we face in the industrialized modernized world are ambiguous moral interpersonal and self defined. They have no clear shape or solution, and are always linked in the endless bureaucracy that defines our world yet is impossible for any one or ten people to understand in total. Thanks to mass media and then especially the internet, our sphere of concern or knowledge can easily span the whole globe, but our sphere of influence remains, save for but a few, our own actions and advice to be given to our closer friends and family.

Granted, I'd rather have penicillin and universal education and have to deal with aimless ennui and existential dread than to actually risk starving to death. Or, I think. I can't in good conscience begrudge the world given to me anyway. Or at least resenting the circumstances I find myself in is a definition of futility.

So and but there remains this "so" and "but," and the crux of this piece. I love the notion of being lean and chiseled by hardship, of having concrete goals and concrete problems and the sense of peace in having what I need with me and having every thing with me have a purpose. I'm jealous. I try to incorporate this philosophy in my own life as well as I can, anyway. I ride my bike everywhere and that gives me greater satisfaction than if she were purely an accessory. I have a small every day carry pocket knife and find myself using it constantly for incidental letter or box opening and that makes me happy.

Conversely, I feel as though I've swallowed a cloud of dread when I glance at something in my room that I haven't used since the day I got it. It feels like a waste of my space and of the world's resources. It reminds me that I live in a society that demands consumption and that these forces get the best of me despite my intentions and desire to be my own person. Every useless thing of mine, in short, reminds me in some small way of entropy and futility and the heat death of the universe and how much a product of my environment I am. These problems occupy a near equivalent level of concern in my mind, which is probably some form of absurd comedy.

Anyway, some of the 'value' we get out of story is in escapism, or living vicariously. I, as the modern suburban raised disaffected youth I am, fantasize about living a life where my most pertinent problems could be prepared for through an outfit of beautiful form directly from function, rather than through a complexly layered series of modulated attitudes. They say country music becomes popular in each country when the population at large becomes 51% urban. It's likely a form of cultural nostalgia to have this desire, but what can I say. I wish I lived a life that called for an outfit as complex and carefully considered as Nausicaä's sea of corruption flight suit.

#self indugent #tropes?#suit up #nausicaa #reviewing tropes #reviewing anything #letsgo