On Saturday, February 03, 2007 05:49, Bob Allen wrote: > One thing I notice about the debate here is that everyone agrees that > Gundam, in general, is NOT about war. At it's best, it's supposed to be > about the effects of war on people.
I've held off weighing into this topic until now, but decided to comment now because Bob's observation is, in my view, entirely on the mark. Gundam (or, more precisely, Tomino's Gundam, stripped of the merchandizing angle against which he rebelled at every turn) isn't a war story. Gundam is a coming-of-age story, not only for its juvenile protagonists but also for all mankind. In Tomino's view, all governments are self-serving and untrustworthy, run by old men who've forgotten the dreams and aspirations of their youth, now seeking to perpetuate whatever empire they've helped establish or hope to extend. Their time has long since passed, yet they will never stand aside and let the world move on without them. Having long since lost their innocence, they believe in nothing beyond they themselves have some say or hand in shaping. They're the souls held down by gravity, even if they were born on or don't actually reside on the Earth. They're the Oldtypes. The future belongs to the young, the innocent, the dreamers and the seekers, those to whom the world is new. They're the Newtypes and it's in them that the hopes of the world reside. But innocence is easily lost, dreams can turn into nightmares and youth doesn't last. Choices must be made and some decisions cannot be undone. What sets the Newtypes in Gundam apart isn't so much their innocence and youthful optimism so much as their empathy for one another, their resonance, which allows them to resist the selfish temptations to which the Oldtypes must inevitably succumb. Amuro begins as a particularly selfish and self-centered brat, a child who never really had a childhood and desperately seeks to hold into whatever vestiges of it he can by be childishness, until circumstances beyond his control force him to see the larger community of which he is a part, however much he might wish to deny it. Eventually, he becomes a responsible member of that community and thus member of a family of the kind he'd long hoped but had come to think didn't actually exist, until he himself helped to create and shape by his deliberate action. All of the members of the White Base crew had become orphans, in effect if not in actual fact. The story of Gundam is the story of how they all eventually came together to become a family and, in so doing, achieved enlightenment that would make their bonds eternal. Interestingly, in Z Gundam, Tomino turned things around such that the Federation became as much if not a greater evil than the nominal villain of the first story, but the central theme remains the same. The family is now in crisis, previous actions and decisions come back to haunt, and realization is made that everything that they'd all fought to achieve has somehow gone awry. The only solution is for the family to reunite, purge itself of corruption and disillusion and try to regain their enlightenment. The catalyst for this a new generation of wayward innocent, another spoiled child who must find his way, often battling his own selfishness and childishness, toward his lost innocence and new sense of family, and, in so doing, lead the way for the others. If Gundam is a war story, it's about the war within all of us, not the ostensible war without... -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
