Alternatively, writers for children’s cartoons have no sense of scale.
(look GaoGaiGar is amazing but I have no illusions what it’s target demographic was supposed to be, and I am not it)
Instead of putting art in-between commercial segments, GaoGaiGar puts tech specs. For everything. Everything. Up to and including Leo Shishioh’s gag inventions that show up for five minutes in a single episode and never appear again.
This is a wonderful gift to fic writers, because we can go look up exactly how tall the dreamboat BFF Guy Shishioh is. You can even look up if his name’s spelled Guy or Gai (the answer is yes).
Let’s take a look at one of those tech specs, hum?
Soldato-J 002. The man who’s face gracefully adorns this blog as a profile picture.
Now, there’s a lot of stuff here, so let’s take it piece by piece.
I know nothing about electricity, so let’s hop over that for the moment. Instead, let’s look at this man’s max speed: 2 X 10 to the 7th power meters per second.
That’s 20,000,000 meters per second. Or for those of us not on the metric system, that’s about 12,427 miles per second. For comparison’s sake, the speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. To pile on the comparisons, the speed of sound is 750 mps. Soldato-J is going sixteen times the speed of sound. Sonic booms should be going off all over the freaking place.
Switching gears, now. Let’s dive into this bit of tech spec:
The first thing to catch my eye is the - er… “Reft” hand? I’m just going to hand wave that as an Engrish mistranslation - Japanese has no hard “r” sound, and so substitute in the letter “l”, leading to all the shenanigans.
Let’s focus instead on Soldato-J’s dimensions.
2.1 meters works out to 6 feet 11 inches. Da man would be snapped up by every basketball league in the US by that metric alone. Which is to say, extremely tall, but not too far outside the norm.
His weight, though, is 0.2t. The “t” stands for “tons”. The man is 400 pounds. He weights as much as a freaking sports motorcycle! (And looks better than one, too.)
But now… Now we’re at the part that breaks my brain.
Span: 3.0 meters. That’s 9 feet. As tall as an ostrich and arguably just as dumb sometimes. It’s also three times the width of the average door.
If the span is measured from the tip of one of his shoulder armor bits to the other shoulder armor bit’s tip, that means -
