The Wasteland, Beautiful Girls, and Robots

Also known as I'm Repairing Mechs in the Wasteland, Love, Death and Robots (Love and Death Machine for short), or I'm Just Competing in Robot Fighting. In short, in the distant future, piloting giant robots in competitive matches is a popular sport, and like any sport, it naturally has a college league. Everyone loves watching steel giants clang and bash away, but ever since the league began, not a single season has involved people simply piloting robots and bashing them together as they should. Even if that behavior is a grave insult to the spirit of sportsmanship, it should be up to the referees and organizers to punish it, not to send someone transmigrating into a wasteland where all that's left to do is pilot industrial robots and bash away. A lightless landscape, razor-sharp black sand, mountains of metal, the occult, churches, mobile castles racing across the land, and knights piloting towering iron war machines: the world feels like what you'd get if you poured Hidetaka Miyazaki and a bunch of Japanese medieval fantasy writers who specialize in cute, bleak stories into a blender, then poured the resulting sludge into Anno's delinquent brain.