When I was younger, a recurring criticism of mecha tropes I’d see was the way prototypes would be stronger than later versions of a robot. To the people discussing the genre back then, it just didn’t make any sense. After all, why wouldn’t later iterations be improvements over the original? Some story explanations, like for the Tallgeese from Gundam Wing, make it so that the early versions are harder or more dangerous to handle (and thus require a real pilot), but that mainly feels like a way to highlight how cool a character is.

However, thanks to the trajectory taken by the real world, we have seen multiple ways that technology can get worse, and that this decline can even be willful and purposeful. There’s enshittification, a term popularized by Cory Doctorow to describe how platforms get worse for end users over time profit-driven priorities shift from them to sellers to shareholders. There’s shrinkflation, whereby companies will maintain the price of a product but surreptitiously make what’s inside lesser or smaller, so that you get less value from your purchase. And there’s planned obsolescence, through which products are purposely designed to not last and contrast with older versions that were meant to endure.

While I can’t think of any works in the mecha genre that are specifically about these problems, some start to approach them conceptually. Dai-Guard is about corporate office workers who also have to deal with red tape, budget, and bureaucracy when using their super robot. Bokurano eats through its pilots one at a time. Darling in the Franxx exploits its pilots by restricting their sex education and diverting their libidinous energy towards fighting. The smaller mobile suits found in titles like Gundam F-91 and Victory Gundam are explained in-universe as being motivated by focus on mobility, but it was actually caused by the desire to save money on plastic for toys and kits.

I think a story built around the enshittification of giant robots and other issues has real narrative potential. Imagine pilots trying to fight battles, be they in a war or as defenders against monsters of the week, and their stuff just keeps getting worse and worse. It sounds awfully depressing in the best way possible.