On Wednesday, March 08, 2006 23:52, Joseph Riggs wrote: > That's the thing, though. > > What is Reccoa's country? Or anyone else's country in Zeta > (at least who was born in space)? > > You could argue that the entire Earth Sphere is one giant > country at this point in time (since it's all officially > ruled by the Federation). Or since the Federation's > authority sometimes isn't all it's cracked up to be, you > could argue that a Side is a nation. Or maybe it's the > specific colony that you were born in. In which case, unless > the specific colony or Side that you originally hail from is > threatened, your example of a colony drop on my own country > doesn't really apply.
Although went to great pains to analogize Gundam to WW2, with the scenes on Earth being a parallel to the European Theater and the scenes in space to the Pacific Theater (with asteroids and colonies standing in for islands), the back-story of the One Year War is closer to the American Civil War (or, as Southerners prefer to call it, The War Between the States, because the Confederate States of America considered itself a separate, sovereign nation, despite the lack of formal recognition by anyone beyond Ernst II, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha). By this reckoning, the Earth Sphere represents the Union and Zeon represents the Confederacy. I'm not sure how to categorize the Jupiter Energy Fleet, beyond a somewhat analogy to Jamaica or the Lesser Antilles, the hubs of the Atlantic slave trade, which held a similar economic influence and significance to both the North and South. There's even an echo of "The South Shall Rise Again!" in the Zeon revenants in Gundam 0083, 08th MS Team and other post-OYW storyline other than Z Gundam. Z Gundam is harder to fit with any Western historical analogy because of the deliberate inversion of the original premise on which Tomino based the sequel. Here, the theme is "Everything You Know Is Wrong!" Or, perhaps, "We Have Met the Enemy and He is Us!" If you buy the original characterization of Gundam as an analogy of WW2, then ZG is an alternate world in which postwar America became fascist (a view that was admittedly popular among the 60s American counterculture, who spelled the name of the country "Amerika" and "Nixon" with a swastika in place of the X to underscore their sophomoric point). In any case, perhaps reflecting the disillusionment many felt over American involvement in the Vietnam conflict, the crew of the White Base now found themselves asking the always-relevant question, "Is THIS what I was fighting for all those years ago?" and taking a stand for or against the movement to "set things right" again. If you try to follow the view of Earth Sphere/Zeon = Union/Confederacy, then there's no real analogy, because no similar inversion is possible in that particular context. -Z- -------------------------------------------------- The Gundam Mailing List MK-II [email protected] Archives: http://www.gundam.com/gml Help: Email [EMAIL PROTECTED] with this in the BODY: help list
