Idea #78: Rambling about Girls Und Panzer, worldbuilding, and fanworks

Rambling about GuP worldbuilding, plots

Spoilers ahead

The main premise of Girls Und Panzer is both its greatest assest, and also its heaviest chain. For those who don't know, the anime tells the story of a high school sport for girls consisting of tank on tank combat. Somehow, nobody dies.

This is extremely unique, especially since the whole "different schools have different specialites" thing and "being completely animated" allows the writers to actually pull out a vast variety of tanks to place onscreen, outside the almost never-ending wave of Shermans, T-34s, Panthers and Tigers in other "tank films". (The one exception is a small film featuring an M18 Hellcat fighting a Pz 3).

However, the nature of the tank sport is also limiting. The entire show and most subsequent material is just one long tournament arc. The anime, a tournament to prove the ship is valuable, and to prevent it from being shut down. The Film, the school board tries fucking them over anyways, and the school has to fight a university team to prove their worth. The finale films, one of their council members needs something nice to put on her college application, so they need to win the tournament to help her out.

Now, this is mostly fine for a visual show, since the visual spectacle is really nice. Instead, this is more of a problem in written fanwork. There's only so many times one can write about a tank battle before it all starts to blur together. Yet, if you're drawn into this show, you're more likely to want to write about tanks. And therein lies the problem.

Tournament arcs often are just a small part of the story, not the ENTIRE story.

Fortunately, tankery is not the only piece of worldbuilding. The writers expand upon the world of GuP in unique, almost unnecessary ways unrelated to tanks. The high schools? They take place on a city sized aircraft carrier, which houses the school, the entire town, large fields and mountains. This is completely extra but they just go wild with it anyways.

Then they mention lines like "people only rarely get hit" by tank guns. Sure, maybe magical armor can keep people inside from getting shredded by shrapnel, but nothing's saving you from large explosives going off near open hatches, especially from naval-caliber guns. But they somehow survive those anyways, despite being tossed like 10 meters through the air.

The characters' continued blase disregard and survival of ridiculous danger makes them surprisingly closer to shonen protagonists in terms of durability and strength. Hell, in one scene in the film, one character thought it was a good idea to palm a stick grenade for a bar fight. In a later OVA, the main characters runs into a student larping as a sheriff with actual revolvers chasing a thief.

Nobody seems all that worried about asking whether she's using lethal rounds, especially considering it seems to have enough power to crack small stones. (They only learn about the paintball rounds when they have an actual duel at high noon in a dusty ghost town and hit each other, meaning that the only thing hard enough to crack the paintball pellets are the humans, not the stone buildings around them).

The giant-ass ship school already carried a town on its back, but now we just have random biomes all over the place for "authentic learning experiences". The Finnish school has an articial tree several kilometers tall on their boat. At this point I wouldn't be surprised that somebody's lower decks has Blade Runner bullshit going down.

This, I feel, is the best place to leverage unique story ideas that are more divorced from tank battle #309. Stories are generally about characters, being inside a tank limits how much a person can interact with the world. A tournament by necessity requires a massive cast, which can easily bloat the stage and slow the pacing to a crawl. Characters need to have some other type of motivation, different experiences that make them stand out, yet are still relatable. The varied environments implied by the school ship allows you to tell pretty much any kind of weird genre that just has absurdly dedicated high school larpers running around. Turns out, the history club full of people dressing up as historical figures is just A Thing people do here.

There can still be tanks involved, but they can be inserted into more situations than just a tournament.