A year or so ago I did a meme on my personal journal, where the point was to summarize a show, book, or something in one sentence, then let everyone guess at what they were meant to be. The subject line up there was, as best I can remember, my summary of Gundam.
As you might have guessed at this point, I just finished Gundam 00. And I haven’t seen many Gundam versions, I’ll admit. The only series I finished was Gundam Wing, and along with that I saw Endless Waltz, one of the OVAs (dunno which one), and a scattered few episodes of the original. I also tried G Gundam and Gundam SEED, but neither of those went too well for me. The point I’m making here, with this poorly-collated list of shows, is that Gundam 00 is my favorite out of all of them.
I’m sure, by now, most of the interesting topics have been exhausted. Yes, 00 seems to be a remake of W; it’s post-9/11, I get it; it was Gundam’s anniversary, super; people have even likely exhausted talking about the cute girls. My idea might be well-worn by now as well, but I don’t read many anime blogs, so bear with me for a while.
Examining Gundam 00 from the top down might offer some interesting insights. Or not. Yes, this is basically myth-criticism, or, at least, genre criticism, taking the premise and moving toward the fine points, rather than away.
the Gundams, as I implied in my summary above, start every series as massively-overpowered death machines. They destroy any competition. We could view them as the Greek heroes, if we’d like. Matched with everyday soldiers, they win every time. It’s when you get some heroes of your own, like the Trojans, that things get interesting. The technological aspect of this — that is, that the pilots aren’t really any more special than anyone else — always manages to highlight the futility of the arms race, just like in real life. But my point here is that several individuals begin the show having been imbued with godhead — indeed, “Celestial Being” is a name heavy-handed enough to make O. Henry weep. This seems like an odd way to begin a series, with the characters so powerful they have no competition. Of course, we all had confidence that they wouldn’t stay super-powerful for long. But as young gods the Meisters needed a bit of development — usually the story ends when the protagonists get that much power. There’s nowhere else to go. Of course, when that power is technological, it means we can screw around with the people involved as much as we’d like. The internal struggles within Celestial Being are worrisome, but in some ways not well-developed. I understood, right away, that Erde had some weird thing or other going on that made him question all the other Meisters. However, it wasn’t until he became comfortable with all of them, accepted them, that we were presented with what that would have meant: his ability to judge them. Also, by the way, it’s not good form to introduce an ability only to immediately negate it. Nadleeh’s Trial system activates and works for a good fifteen seconds, then gets cut off when everyone disconnects from the Veda system, which means there’s no hope of it being used again. Why doesn’t he ever try to judge Setsuna?
The structure is strange, that’s what I’m getting at here. And, consequently, even while the show delighted me it took a while to really draw me in. The latter half, when the stakes go up, the competition gets more powerful, and Celestial Being begins to function as a unit, that’s when things got interesting for me. This isn’t too surprising: the latter half of the show exhibits more mythic tendencies. Saji might be one of our heroes in the second season, as he’s bereft of family and has a loved one injured nearly unto dying. He’s got all the earmarks of a quester. I could be wrong. Erde confirms his status as “not quite human,” as does Allelujah, making them fairy babies, changelings. Setsuna gains a proper nemesis and quest of his own, which is largely in his head, as he finds what he needs by doing precisely what he’s been doing over the course of the whole show.
I would like to take a moment to say fuck you, Gundam director and writers, whoever you are. Why do the creators of awesome space operas have to always kill my favorite character? First Joss Whedon decides to use cheap tricks in Serenity and kill Wash, but then Lockon has to die as well? Yes, I spotted what might, might have been Lockon in the final montage, though the drinking would seem to suggest it’s Allelujah instead. I dunno. I just really liked Lockon. So bite me.
On the subject of Lockon, he seems to be the best-balanced Meister. He also has the most mundane story, that of “seeking revenge.” Allelujah rivals him with “irate super-soldier experiment,” but “angry revenger” predates science-fiction by kind of a lot, so Lockon edges him out.
If you look at the whole from far enough away, all the holes become apparent, though they also seem not to matter as much. The questions are obvious, for the most part. One has to wonder, for example, who “Ribbons” is hanging out with at the end, who’s been selecting people for Celestial Being, who the hell is Wang Liu Mei, and did any of the Meisters actually survive? Given that Erde isn’t, apparently, human, his easily-recognizable appearance in the ending montage might signal a move to Rei Ayanami mode.
My point about the gaps being relatively unimportant still stands, however. The arc completes itself in the only real way it can: with the (apparent, at least) Shakespearean death of everyone on stage. I’m glad I brought of Whedon earlier (I’ve just thought of this), as the guy in Serenity hunting our (Big Damn) heroes down professes a theory — that he’ll destroy all the monsters in the world, and then destroy himself, as he’ll be the only remnant of the pre-utopia world. This appears to be happening, in some way. Lockon, being possibly the most astute Meister, has grasped this on a personal level. Obviously things will go awry in some way, or else we wouldn’t need a second season, but the world has come together and the warriors are superfluous. The gaps exist to highlight their status as human beings, as almost all the questions — that I can think of, anyway — have to do with personal issues. The whole of the plot stands on its own. Intervention, divine or otherwise, creates a kind of utopia, it brings back the Garden. However, in a perfect, pre-lapsarian state, the rules and regulations are unnecessary. The Buddha had to nullify himself to reach Enlightenment; Jesus couldn’t stick around to poke his nose into everything, he had to go back to Heaven. Effectively, a hero who brings change for his or her world has to leave that world, as the hero is a product of the world before. I think the angelic, mythic overtones of Gundam 00 were well-chosen, and could only wish, as a nerd as well as a critic, that they gave us more to go on. Of course, that pretty much guarantees that I’ll be right here in front of the computer come October, doesn’t it, eagerly awaiting the fansubs.
Given the religious nomenclature and what you call the angelic overtones, I liked to think of 00’s Gundams as dei ex machinis. From the perspective of the three superpowers, the Gundams initially looked like godlike things that literally came out of a machine in the sky to sort things out by defeating the bad guys.
Of course, defeating the bad guys didn’t sort things out – at least, not as Celestial Being might have expected – and the bad guys became progressively stronger.
I think you’re right that it was a show which benefitted when (at least partly) viewed through a mythic lens (though I seem to recall lelangir suggesting that my lens metaphors were unhelpful).
Bah. Lens metaphors are *always* helpful. : ) I recall that my lit. crit. professor used the lens metaphor on the first day of class to describe the function of literary theory; each one, she said, is simply a lens.
And you’re right — the Gundams are definitely a kind of god from the machine; especially as the technology used to motivate them is so vague. The only thing is that I never viewed the other people as “bad guys,” though that is a convenient term. I always thought the point was that no one was really “bad.” Though I really never did like the super-soldier chick.
Ah. I was speaking in invisible inverted commas: to Celestial Being, anyone who was promoting war was a ‘bad guy’; in Wing and several other parts of the franchise (though not, I would argue, the original MSG) these people are at least people it’s ok to blow away without much thought; in 00, for the audience, Graham, Patrick, Soma &c were normal people we could sympathise with.