A friend recently asked how to get started watching Gundam, and as I tripped all over myself, equal parts excitement and not wanting to sound like a lunatic, I fumbled around for a good answer.
What I landed at was inelegant and I eventually panicked and found a watch list online. BUT! BUT! What is a blog for if not do overs!? Also, what follows has literally no information in it about where to get started watching Gundam, it is all about why I like Gundam…and Jane Austen.
“Okay, so, like, they’re both about tensions between duty, social position, and personal desires.”
I love Gundam for all the same reasons that I love Jane Austen.
Austen writes drawing room comedies about marriage and property in Regency England. Gundam is a space opera about war, its impacts on the people that make and are victims to it, and giant mech suits…also sometimes magical teens…
Folks in Austen’s books have to navigate rigid class structures where marriages are strategic alliances and personal feeling has to be balanced against social obligation. Gundam, especially the Universal Century timeline stuff, is filled with characters torn between personal relationships and their positions within military and political hierarchies.
They also both, mostly, focus on characters who have enough privilege to have choices, but not enough power to escape circumstances. Characters in both aren’t peasants without agency, but they’re also caught in larger systems they can’t opt out of…save for Iron Blooded Orphans…what I find compelling about both Austen and Gundam is watching the gap between personal desire and institutional logic do stuff.
Elizabeth Bennet wants to marry for love and respect, but in her world marriage is fundamentally about economic security and social alliance. Her refusal of Collins is personal desire asserting itself. Her family’s panic is institutional logic demanding she comply. The whole novel is the tension between those two forces, and arguably Austen’s project is figuring out if you can thread the needle; if Darcy can be both economically suitable and emotionally right. Having cake. Eating it.
Char Aznable wants…well, it’s hard to say exactly what Char wants, which is part of what makes him such a compelling mask-wearing disaster. He wants revenge for his father. He wants Amuro to acknowledge him. He wants Lalah back. He wants to be Casval Rem Deikun, or maybe he wants to stop being Casval. He’s committed himself to leading a colonial independence movement, and then to dropping asteroids on Earth. His personal desire, this unresolved stuff with Amuro and the ghost of Lalah, gets channeled through institutional logic in a way that threatens to kill many millions of people.
Both Elizabeth and Char are presented as the smartest people in most rooms they enter. Both are hyper-conscious of social dynamics and relish in having the ability to wield sometimes devastating wit. Both are shaped by wounds from their past that they can’t move away from: Elizabeth’s wound is social humiliation and economic precarity (this is maybe a stretch, tbh). Char’s is literal patricide and the loss of his birthright. Both are performing roles while pursuing deeper agendas. But, you know, Char’s agenda involves colonial war rather than securing a good marriage, but the emotional architecture is similar.
Emma Woodhouse and Suletta Mercury also pair well! Emma wants to play matchmaker, but the social institution of matchmaking is actually about managing property and bloodlines. Her meddling with Harriet kinda sorta almost destroys Harriet’s life because Emma is applying personal whim to institutional machinery. She thinks she’s helping. She’s actually just another gear in the system. Badly done.
Suletta wants to help Miorine to maybe understand what’s happening around her. But she’s a tool in her mother’s (who is also a Char stand in!?) plan, and the arranged marriage she’s been pushed into is institutional logic and corporate alliance dressed up as personal connection. Witch from Mercury kinda beats you over the head with this. Both Suletta and Miorine are heirs to massive corporate power but have almost no control over how that power operates or what’s expected of them.
The arranged marriage plot is straight out of Austen, and the show mostly kinda knows it, I think. But, whereas Emma eventually learns to see the system clearly and makes choices within it. Suletta has to learn that some systems can’t be reformed from within…and so kinda becomes a killing machine for a wee bit there to burn down the sources of corporate power entrapping her and Miorine and everyone else.
…and then I cut a lot more rambling examples that reveal me to be waaaaay to deep into this line of thought…
Smash cut!
There’s also something Austen-like in how Gundam does drawing room politics. Austen is very very good at showing how personality, wit, and emotional intelligence play out in constrained social settings where everyone is performing their role. The dinner party at Netherfield, the card games at the Musgroves. These are all arenas where characters perform their social identities while maneuvering for advantage or connection.
Gundam has all those diplomatic dinners, peace negotiations, military briefings where characters are similarly performing their institutional identities while personal tensions try to poke through from underneath. The constant political maneuvering in Unicorn. Every conversation in the Buch Concern boardrooms in Witch. What you say and what you mean are usually different things, and the camera lingers on faces the same way Austen lingers on small gestures and loaded phrases. But then, also, the giant mech battles are kinda Gundam’s drawing room politics, too, maybe?
My unhinged ending is that Iron Blooded Orphans is the exception (that I’ve seen…I’m not actually so obsessive as to have watched all of every single Gundam thing ever…yet). Mikazuki and the Tekkadan crew are trying to break into the social structure that other Gundam protagonists are trying to figure out how to navigate or escape. They’re not conflicted aristocrats trying to balance duty and feeling. They’re child soldiers attempting to use violence to gain legitimacy within the system that exploited them, kinda like an inverted Austen story.
I think that the stories in Gundam that work the best are the ones that understand that the tragedy isn’t just that war is bad, but that institutional logic and personal desire are fundamentally incompatible, and someone has to lose. Meanwhile, Austen’s stories posit that you can thread that needle, at least sometimes, if you are clever and lucky and good. Gundam is less optimistic. Maybe because within Gundam war as an institution is more totalizing than marriage is. There’s no Darcy compromise available when the institutional machinery is designed to kill…which is a very hilariously heavy thing to have written, but then I realized that Gundam GQuuuuuuX is out and that is where I suggested my friend start because…like…who doesn’t wanna see what Hideaki Anno does with Gundam?
Besides thinking too much about Gundam, I’ve been learning more about Gleam and Erlang and playing a lot of both Pokemon X and Pokemon ZA with my kids. We’re going for the full Lumiose City experience. I’ve also been thinking a bit about the next december adventure, because I’ve been making plodding progress on a game, I think I may continue to work on that throughout the close of the year.
In a sneaky moment, I assumed that the new The Last Dinner Party album would take over my listening, but what has actually taken over my listening and what I’m already ready to call my favorite album of the year is Florence + The Machine’s new album, “Everybody Scream.”
Oh! And I “released” a silly macOS app I made. FloatingClock.
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