Gundam 00 - A New State of War
Just to continue on this post, as there’s no time is better than the present to talk about Gundam 00 right when it is wrapping up.
I find Gundam 00, fundamentally, a very refreshing show because it is a good change in direction from the traditional look at Gundam. By that I don’t mean it had a break from tradition–quite the contrary I think it’s well within the bounds of your average UC-style Gundam with some AC bits mixed in–but there’s a good feeling about its modernization. Of course, it’s not really a UC Gundam series, but that’s why the changes that we saw fit so much better. It’s tempting to look at Gundam’s rich history and draw from that to talk about Gundam 00, but I think that would be missing the point. I’m sure it will not be a futile exercise, but maybe for another time.
The mentality in 00 struck me, as said, modern. Specifically, it is a post 9/11 mentality. When the Twin DriveTower came down on that fateful day, I was about an hour away. Since then, I was (and still am) surrounded by people who has witnessed its tragic visuals in the first person. It struck me as silly as to why it didn’t occur to me so much earlier to think about Gundam 00 in those terms–not so much how Americans see the post-9-11 world, but how the Japanese see it.
Gundam 00’s idea about conflict has drastically shifted, even when its core idea, the stripped down theme that is easy to digest for the audience, hasn’t changed much. However, during the Cold War, the notion of global war was a relatively simple, black-and-white construction (as much as you’d teach grade schoolers, anyways). After the Cold War, things were less so. But after 9/11, as Hiruken Emperor says it best, our enemies are no longer here or there, a thing to be grappled or zapped. Did it couple with Japan’s lost decade, ending in early 2000? Perhaps. I believe that is its real namesake; this decade is why Gundam 00 exists.
To Japan, as I’ll paraphrase from I heard from some Japanese academic, 9/11 and the American response was a global change in the way international politics and power moved and shook; a change in the dynamics of the world. Perhaps more than 8 years later people have more or less gotten back to normal, but I think the mark it has left on the mind of an entire generation of people–not just Americans, but all who are connected to America through today’s increasingly globalized economy and culture.
This generation of teenagers and 20-somethings are people who have no recollection of the tension of the Cold War, of the scars of Vietnam and the conflicts that broke out all over the world as a result. Perhaps 00 is just trying to teach us the price of peace we enjoy today, in its own way, as repackaged for a post-9-11 world.
I can’t say whether or not the Japanese view of what happened post 9/11 is accurate, but I don’t think it had as much to say about it in the end.
To be honest I don’t think foreign policy had changed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, retaliatory attacks are nothing new. What was new was the the discrediting of neo-conservative foreign policy, which wasn’t dealt with to a large extent I think.
In terms of the ending I didn’t think it was terribly new, all that fictional killing just for a change in leadership, and as much things change many things stayed the same. To me that’s not particularly new. Lastly I dispute the notion that America is in a period of peace right now, certainly for some of us it might be relatively peaceful but it certainly isn’t that way for all of us.
All I can remember from Destiny that touched on the post-9/11 world was the naming of two Gundams after operation titles for America’s involvement in Afghanistan. 00 certainly went a lot further than that. This may be one of the reasons why the very first scene of the first season is still one of my favourite parts.
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LOL Crusader. If you think you are right about today’s reality then you wouldn’t notice all the similarities that Gundam 00 has with today’s.
What is new is not anything neo-conservative (to me this word is a red flag when someone uses it out of the blue), but the crediting of an invisible enemy. The key here is the war on terror. It’s very different than, say, the war on communism.
No one is saying anything about period of peace either. In fact that’s the key message–to much of the world in Gundam 00 they do live peacefully, but obviously you have this struggle going on. The fights in G00 took place largely without any civilian consequences. The few that didn’t (lol falling tower) were very clearly a different kind of battle than ones in previous Gundams, and they tend to undermine the notion of peace people had at the time.