tyrantisterror:

To recap my problem with SpaceGodzilla for those who don’t remember since I’m pretty sure I haven’t talked about the character in ages:

My biggest problem with SpaceGodzilla is that there really isn’t anything he brings to the table that another monster doesn’t do better.  Evil doppelganger of Godzilla?  MechaGodzilla does it better.  Strange Godzilla hybrid monster?  Biollante and Orga do it better.  Space Monster?  Gigan, Ghidorah, and Hedorah have him beat.  Godzilla’s worst enemy?  Oh man, he is outclassed six ways to sunday there – Ghidorah, MechaGodzilla, Hedorah, and Destoroyah all utterly kick his ass in the arch enemy department.

SpaceGodzilla just doesn’t have a niche to fill.  It even extends to his design – he’s just a blue Godzilla with crystals, a funky horn, and some sort of glandular disorder.  He feels less like a solid concept and more like a late season Ultraman monster that was hastily cobbled from parts of better monster suits at the last second – except he wasn’t!  There are actually dozens of concept sketches for weirder SpaceGodzillas that didn’t make it into the film.  They chose to make him this way, and I don’t know why.

I don’t know what the thought process was behind this character, and I seriously wonder if the movie creators did.

To fix SpaceGodzilla, we need to give him a niche that no other monster fills in the narrative.  And I think there is an obvious element he could bring to the table that no one else can fill.  Namely, he’s the only villain who’s also another Godzilla.

Godzilla’s isolation is a key aspect of his character – he’s both the last and first of his kind, mutated beyond recognition and trapped in a world that has long since left the prehistoric monsters of his era behind.  It’s one of the reasons Baby Godzilla is so important for Godzilla’s slow transition from villain to hero – by finding another of his kind (albeit one that often doesn’t share his level of mutation), Godzilla is finally allowed to heal from the wounds dealt to him at the beginning of his story.

SpaceGodzilla could represent the opposite side of that coin – a foil for what Baby Godzilla represents.  Maybe that was even the original intention, given that SpaceGodzilla abducts Little Godzilla in his debut film (although that could also have just been done to give Godzilla a reason to pursue the big blue bastard).

Have SpaceGodzilla arrive fairly late in the narrative – after Godzilla has adopted Baby Godzilla, perhaps even after the formation of Monster Island.  Play up the idea that these are two adults of a social species – that Godzilla is a creature that has been driven by desperate loneliness and actually wants a friendly connection with this new, differently mutated godzillasaurus that has appeared.  Have them strike up a friendship, or even a romance.

And then the kid gets in the way.

In this way SpaceGodzilla could actually play a foil to Godzilla even better than King Ghidorah, MechaGodzilla, and Destoroyah can.  Godzilla in this story has grown significantly from the vengeful ravager of civilization he began as, but SpaceGodzilla is still stuck in that vicious, aggressive mindset.  Baby Godzilla, meanwhile, keeps Godzilla rooted in his current heroic mindset.  There’d be a draw to side with both of them – they’re both his kind, after all.

SpaceGodzilla, meanwhile, would quickly catch on that the kid is making Godzilla soft.  And if they have a sort of romance, well… there’s a pretty disturbing trend in the animal kingdom of a suitor offing the children of the creature it wants to mate with.

Or, in short: if Godzilla were Batman, then one should make SpaceGodzilla his Catwoman – a character that he’s attracted to (platonically or romantically) but who also shows a dark reflection of who he is and could be.