Gundam 00 - Once More, with Feeling
Despite the server problems I experienced yesterday, I ended up writing a ton of crap this week that has nowhere to go. I feel sorry for you to have to read it here. Twice so if you tried to make a comment.
Anyways, yes, civilians. Noncombatants. Well, not the same exactly. But them darn things that you can’t shoot while in a war. I think. Perhaps better put, the everyday person in society. Gundam 00’s audience is squarely, as you can tell, college kids and younger. Just old enough to join the army amirite? (Yes, that means Saji and Louise–I believe they are the focal couple in this show as society’s measuring stick. Perhaps a perfect world is one where you could have a good-natured spoiled brat drag her Japanese BF to go to the mall IN SPACE and carry her crap.)
In fact, it might even be that unless you look at it from the eyes of an innocent civilian, you might not understand what the point of the exercise was.
I’m pretty close to 100% sure that, actually, Gundam 00 is about peace. It’s not really about war, or rather, war is merely an aspect of peace. It might be a human force, it might suck, it might be hell; war is a lot of things, but that is not the key message. It might not even be the key message in more Gundam show than one. Turn-A is the one other that comes to mind.
I think it’s also important to keep in mind the creators and the audience of these shows. For example, if you want to talk about pacifism, that’s fine, but I don’t think anyone cares about pacifism besides that it exists, and people should be sympathetic to people who are pacifists. On the other hand, people who make giant robots that blow stuff up (hi Billy!) are cool because giant robots that blow stuff up are cool! To people who like Gundam, hurr hurr.
The changing face of war, however, proves to be something anime has to change to match. That’s just how life is today. Something like Full Metal Panic might work as a good example. However I think Gundam 00 does a better job because it goes a step further and actually subverts the nature of authoritative nation-states and present us with the bigger picture. [I could explain more about the rightness or wrongness of consensus, the detached decision making process based on imperfect information, and all that. I hope you should be able to understand this on your own. But this assumption is important.]
A common trope in military anime is the “secret government project.” This trope helps writers to come up with expensive, above-the-law yet plausible operations that could only be given blessing by the government (should it be in-house or contracted). This is to be contrasted with the “autonomous militaristic force” trope that might color fear of abuse a shade closer to the hearts of today’s world (eg., ALAW). I think Gundam 00 goes yet another step further with “the terrorists are actually right” concept except, obviously, the protagonists are the terrorists, so we don’t realize the absurdity of it.
But are they really terrorists? The Celestial Beings remained an armed and militant organization to the very end, that applied violence as they wish. If there was order to the world they should be brought to justice. The ending of the show gave them an ambiguous status, like, I don’t know, Batman. But I think that might make them terrorists.
Which is actually a relatively rare concept in Gundam. Most of the time we’d expect more Switzerland (or the Vietcong) than Batman out of something that operates out of Just Yet Another White Base–that it should carry the sovereignty of a nation-state. At least that’s how Gundam SEED handled it, for another post 9-11 Gundam. I guess it’s a Mithril-style compromise, just like how in FMP they were sanctioned by nations but were also officially (in secret) recognized, and Swiss-like, even if they were just a bunch of mercenaries.
These organizations of military intervention (I don’t think calling this war-anything is productive) have to find a face and a role in a mostly-at-peace world. In FMP, they fought normal terrorists, armed with suicide bombs and typical motives–greed and vengeance. But in Gundam 00, our protagonists existed for the sake of military intervention (but not in the fight itself, as we saw in Mr. Bushido or Ali Al-Saachez). In practice, Mithril in FMP provides just a setting, an interface that puts a crazy guy like Sousuke in an environment like an anime high school. It provides Sousuke with war funds, toys, and a reason to do something irrational (as a guy who is totally rational otherwise. Recall that FMP is foremost a high school hijinks, comedy concept…). In Gundam 00, the notion of Celestial Being puts our Meisters more along the line of cult-ish, brain-washed soldiers. That was Setsuna, after all. Why are they going along willy nilly by the plans of some dead guy? Just how much genetic engineering and tinkering of the brain did they do? Quite a bit, for Tieria and many others.
The face of violence is no longer about men with messed-up upbringing or strange motives. It’s not about normal people who turn into criminals. Our enemies are ingrained, inconsolable from some perspectives, and born to kill (or to give you tender, loving, HILLING CARE LULZ). They are like Setsuna before his encounter with RibbonJesus. And after RibbonJesus, too. What’s more, our enemies could be anywhere. They could be your next-door neighbor, or your lover. They could be your brother, parent, or old friend. They could be your god. (This is a key thing about terrorism, actually.)
This is why Setsuna has to change. So he can kill his god. Or whatever that is your god in your life (to put it in Protestant terms).
And why do that? Not because those things lead to war and war sucks–well, maybe that’s a motivation for Setsuna. I believe when we start to ask why war sucks, we’ve already failed. Perhaps we can better ask: why did Lockon felt like he has to change? Because he knows that’s the price. Price of what? I think peace is a good, stock answer. But Sumeragi actually nails it better–it’s the price of a future that you desire. And I think that’s why we get this flashback like three times in the second season. I believe Setsuna realized why during that exchange and it started him on this weird, deus-ex-machina-y path. Of course, it helped that he actually changed thanks to magical GN particles or whatever. LULs.
To summarize, three things:
- War is contextualized in many ways; the portrayal in Gundam 00 paints a new war. The enemy of this century.
- It’s still GAR and cool to protect those you love, but that’s just one out of several possibilities as presented in Gundam 00. Setsuna (and Lockon, similarly) fought for a future that wouldn’t victimize people like him; Tieria fought for humanity’s future in general; Sumeragi did it for herself and her ideals (it’s her alcohol in a way). Everyone in the show had a reason. Gundam 00 paints an intensively personal concept of armed conflict. [This is also the FMP: The Second Raid in a nutshell.] Perhaps this is the face of war today versus of our parents’ generation, where we are no longer just grunts–no one is truly innocent if he is empowered by a system of government or a way to do something to change and strive for the future he desires.
- The nature of conflict, because it’s so personal, is also pervasive. The conflicts themselves are smaller in scope but they are just as significant in consequences. The battle is for the heart of people in a world increasing interconnected.
Interesting, interesting. Forgive the copypasta (I took large sections from a comment I wrote in a recent post of my own):
Gundam 00 with it’s conflict about war and fighting; people fight about fighting - is less interesting to me than its attempt to take the Newtype concept in UC forward (at least that’s how it occurs to me).
Innovation and GN particles allow for some hive-mind dynamics: allowing people to ‘truly understand each other.’ There’s a lot of similarity between this and SEELE of Neon Genesis Evangelion’s attempt to force evolution (the Human Instrumentality Project) to dissolve the barriers between human beings (the A/T fields, which I read as an approximation of ego or identity).
This places the source of the conflicts (ergo the source of war) in the nature of human beings - not as a dispositional (i.e. people are evil), but as a situational one - people have a hard time understanding each other and violence is the easiest way to resolve a conflict gratifyingly (i.e. war sucks).
I wish I could articulate this satisfyingly! On the one hand I’m tempted to place the blame squarely on the humans as depicted by Zeta Gundam, and to a lesser extent Gundam 00: They suck (a dispositional statement). But it’s more like, ‘they’re screwed,’ because this is the world they operate in, the cards they’re dealt, etc (’war sucks’).
I’m not absolving them of responsibility. Rather, the GN Particles in combination with Setsuna’s innovation allows for new circumstances. The possibility of deeper empathy and understanding exists because violence is no longer the most convenient option to resolve disagreements.
In the ending however, the connection of thoughts are only apparently possible through a large scattering of GN Particles, which may also require the direct participation of a true innovator. Instead of Celestial Being pursuing a vigilante career, it can be argued that they should (if they could) pursue scientific innovation that’ll allow them to continually broadcast GN Particles which should result in a warm and fuzzy version of SEELE’s sought after ‘Third Impact,’ = far less need for military interventions yes?
Shit I failed to close the bold face tag. I only wanted to emphasize “dispositional.” Feel free to edit accordingly and remove this succeeding comment. I apologize.
I actually have a post along these lines being written. But to me the GN particle stuff is mostly nonsense and a convenience in terms of plot device. Not really what the show is about. Of course, understanding each other is the thematic concept played up as to how to achieve peace, but I think any school child knows this.
See and here’s where I wished I had actually watched Gundam 00, so I’d have something to add to this.
But otherwise, I agree with you as far as the changing face of war and the changing face of war in anime. And I think your point about the military force not being a nation is an interesting point. It seems like when anime (lately) make a war about a nation it seems more interested in picking out the causes of war on a social level (Fullmetal Alchemist comes to mind here.)
You should chalk up Gundam 00 on your list. Besides that you can watch some of it streaming for free on Youtube already… the first season is a tight package all about this stuff. Second season has less of a focus but it wraps up thematically.
[…] it seems that IKnight’s post seems to have sparked a spate of discussion on Gundam 00 I might as well add more fuel to it. Omo wrote a post about how Gundam […]