Gundam Wing: Politics
Mar. 3rd, 2001 03:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootMusic for this page just had to be Pat Benatar's "Love is a Battlefield.". Click for reading accompaniment.
Just fascinating. I detect a distinct flavor of people-are-stupid-sheep in this story, which isn't altered until Endless Waltz. One of the bits of imagery that really grabbed me was Treize's little birds in Episode 7. What we hear is his conversation with Lady Une, following her assassination of Minister Darlian. What we see, though, is Treize walking the halls of his residence and stopping next to the cage with two bright little birds in it. He opens the cage and, after a pause, the birds fly away. This is while he's telling Une to take five MSs with her for her mopping up detail (killing Relena, that is). Once said detail has been blown away by Heero, he contacts Une again and calls her off. As the view shifts to his office, we see that he also has Noin on the line and she thanks him for saving Zech's sister. Treize perches himself in the window, reflecting that Zech's might have told him that he has a living blood relation. At this moment, those two birds come flying back and perch on his hand. His comment is, "So, you'd rather stay here?" I get two things out of this. One has to do with Treize's followers, like Une. They would rather follow his leadership than determine their own course of action, even when he starts to lead them into pretty pointless bloodshed. The other is a more generalized comment on humans in general, who may prefer the security of a cage to the uncertainties of freedom. And, after all, what else would lead people to put up with aristocrats?
Of course, this is another story in which no one comes out looking particularly good. The old title of the Main page came from the general categories of actors I see in the GW story. The colonies want Earth to back off (elbow room), and the scientists with their pilot proteges, Dekim Barton and White Fang are all expressions of this drive. Energetic expressions, to be sure, but it is true that one way to achieve elbow room is to vigorously propel the elbow in question into whatever is obstructing its way. The actual government of the colonies seems less extreme, but we also see very little of them. The Alliance, I kind of discount. Their visible function is mostly limited to being Treize's stooges and all-around cannon fodder. Treize, of course, is in it for the pride, because he enjoys strength and wants to exercise it in the ultimate arena of life and death (blood sports). He's the classic aristocrat, who thinks that the key to stable government is for the people to know that their rulers are too strong to be overthrown and, in addition, that strength is measured by facility in battle. That is how aristocrats got to be aristocrats, after all; they killed lots of people. For some peculiar reason, they all appear convinced that a nasty, bloody, usually treacherous past equates to inheritable leadership potential. Treize, to be sure, has a lot more than blood going for him--he truly does posess the manipulative instincts of a born politician. Curious that he's more interested in the Game than in the endpoint of power; I rather thought, in Episode 14, that he would be perfectly happy to let Zechs rebuild Wing and duel with Heero if only Romefeller wasn't interfering. And then there's Dekim's second try, Marimeia. She forms a strange sort of amalgam of Treize's position that strong rulers equal good rulers and Dekim's position that the colonies should have the upper hand in the Earth Sphere. She claims she will be so strong that no one will even think of trying to overthrow her and peace will be assured (y'know, a whole lot of people have thought like that and not a single one lasted in any country I can think of), and additionally that the populace really wants a ruler who is powerful enough to enforce stability, even if it is a despotic stability (...actually, she does have a depressing degree of historical precedent backing that one up). Curiously enough, this is also the camp I see Dermail as most closely associated with, what with his equality-is-rubbish and force-not-talk lines. I've dubbed this attitude the gold standard for the rather obscure reason that Marimeia (and Dermail) seems to believe that government can be reduced to something material like force of arms rather than something more productively ephemeral like the consent of the ruled; this is similar to the idea that money can be reduced to something material like gold, rather than the productive fiction of everyone more or less agreeing that X amount of money (otherwise valueless slips of paper) stands in for X amount of value in goods. What interests me is that Endless Waltz is the only place where the issue of the people's will comes in at all. It really strikes me as a belated sort of making-up for the basically elitist message encoded in the series proper (that is, it's only the elites, whether they be aristocrats or Gundam pilots, who make a difference). A nice gesture, and all that, but to me it's really too little too late to alter the valence of the show.
Which gets us to...
The reasons people fight are a major theme in this show. The poor Gboys certainly go through some major angst when the whole colony-hostage crisis hits and their mad doctors get nabbed. That, however, was reasonably straightforward: they fight on behalf of the colonies' freedom, so they can't keep fighting if that puts the colonies at risk of destruction. This crosses peculiarly with what seems to be an older directive: revenge at all costs. The 'don't worry about us, just destroy OZ' thing that Duo and Quatre recite to each other sounds to me like part of the origninal Operation Meteor parameters.
And then there's the repeating motif of the human will to fight. Heero, Treize and Lady St. Une all three mention this one. Treize and Lady St. Une both seem to regard that will as a beautiful and admirable thing--what got humans out of the ocean and down from the trees, though they don't quite phrase it that way. Heero, on the other hand, in his address to his class in Episode 14, presents it as a matter of tragic fate. People try to make their lives better and only wind up making stronger weapons. His conclusion at this point seems to be that humankind are too immature to be in space. This also marches with Zechs' comment as he takes Tallgeese into space: "Perhaps Earth is trying to tell us something by pulling us back down towards itself." This division has the fascinating effect of placing the warmongers (Treize, Une, Dermail and probably Barton and co.) in the position of immaturity--they're children who haven't learned to play nicely and defer gratification yet. On the other side, the mature side, we have the Gundam pilots (or possibly only Heero) and Zechs, notably some of the youngest characters in the show. The overall message in this arrangement seems to be that maturity equals the ability to stop fighting, no matter how much fun, how brilliant and exciting a life it may be.
Wu Fei makes an interesting case study all by himself. You note, in Episode 12, how wigged out he is about having lost to Treize? What he says to Sally, when she asks why he thinks he's weak, is that he lost to someone who was stronger. And that this means he was just acting as a bully all along, defeating only those who were weaker than he. This, then, would seem to be what he meant when he told Nataku that he was no longer worthy of her. The subtext I see to this statement is that Wu Fei believed that because he fought for Justice (which Nataku embodies) he would always win no matter how strong his opponents were; this makes his early insistence that only strong opponents are worthwhile a nearly aesthetic statement. It wasn't just that he didn't want to have to hurt the weak, it was also that defeating a strong opponent satisfied some kind of abstract desire for symmetry--since he didn't actually believe he could be defeated while fighting for the cause of Justice. No wonder he's so shattered at losing; it completely upends his worldview and ethical system. Also, I think this explains part of the bond he shares with Treize. In some ways, they were both in it for the aesthetics. It certainly explains why he went ahead and met Treize (ten years older, twice his size) sword to sword. Of course, this clashes strangely with Wu Fei's ideas about what drives people to fight. You note that, when he asks Sally why she fights when she knows she's on the weaker side and she tells him it's because she feels she must, he promptly asks if she's being ordered to. Clearly, what Sally's saying doesn't compute for him. As far as Wu Fei sees it, at this point in the show, the only possible motivation to fight when you know you're likely to lose is orders from superiors. I think this ties back into his statement that he has been acting like a bully; which is entirely true. I think this is the point at which he understands that his motivation to fight, before then, boils down to something pretty superficial. He claimed Justice as his motive and cause, and believed that this made him invincible. If we follow his logic about the weak not fighting except under coersion/orders all the way though, what we wind up with is the implication that he would have hesitated to fight if he had believed Justice did not make him invincible. If he finally realizes that, it would account for how shattered he is. It isn't just losing--it's all the understanding of himself that follows after.
GundamWing.net mentions in passing that OZ uniforms are pretty direct copies of uniforms from Napoleonic France. I certainly agree there's a strong resemblance, except for the really silly looking hats. In part, this historical reference may be a simple parellel of Napoleon Bonaparte and Treize Khushrenada: brilliant, charismatic leaders who seized control of chaotic situations, exiled and then returned, etc. For a quick overview, there's a good War Times Journal article online. Beyond that, however, I think the writers may have been paralleling OZ itself with Napoleon's army. The years following the French Revolution were not calm ones for the regular army there, and a lot of their officers (who were, in old European tradition, from aristocratic families) were killed off. One of Napoleon's more famous decisions was to promote pretty much anyone who was on hand and showed he knew what he was doing to whatever officerial post needed filling. Understandable, given that he started life as a peon himself. I believe this relates to the aristocratic ranks that OZ pilots seem to acquire. They don't appear to be hereditary, but rather something like the rank bestowed on a court noble (not hereditary for descendents either, not accompanied by lands in most cases). Zechs, for instance, gets promoted from Baron to Count.
Since the European rank system goes, in descending order: Duke, Marquis, Earl/Count, Viscount, Baron, Baronette, you can see that this was a promotion out of zone, as it were.
Makes me wonder just what Treize's birth rank may have been. He's the nephew of Duke Dermail, which says he probably has some title, but I suspect his own rank of Duke is solely due to his command of OZ.
At any rate, this ennobling of people who may or may not have any hereditary rank beforehand seems to resonate with Napoleon's promotional policy: ability counts first. One the one hand, this strikes me as very strange for the armed forces of Romefeller, who seem to be all about reviving aristocratic privilege. On the other, I have to admit, this procedure harks back to where noble rank came from in the first place (you kicked a lot of ass and killed a lot of people) in a manner that fits quite well with Romefeller's notion that the iron fist has the greatest right to rule.
And now that we're all moderately depressed try GenderSex, which is a good deal more entertaining...at least to a certain mindset. Go have your spirits lifted. Or something.
Politics
Just fascinating. I detect a distinct flavor of people-are-stupid-sheep in this story, which isn't altered until Endless Waltz. One of the bits of imagery that really grabbed me was Treize's little birds in Episode 7. What we hear is his conversation with Lady Une, following her assassination of Minister Darlian. What we see, though, is Treize walking the halls of his residence and stopping next to the cage with two bright little birds in it. He opens the cage and, after a pause, the birds fly away. This is while he's telling Une to take five MSs with her for her mopping up detail (killing Relena, that is). Once said detail has been blown away by Heero, he contacts Une again and calls her off. As the view shifts to his office, we see that he also has Noin on the line and she thanks him for saving Zech's sister. Treize perches himself in the window, reflecting that Zech's might have told him that he has a living blood relation. At this moment, those two birds come flying back and perch on his hand. His comment is, "So, you'd rather stay here?" I get two things out of this. One has to do with Treize's followers, like Une. They would rather follow his leadership than determine their own course of action, even when he starts to lead them into pretty pointless bloodshed. The other is a more generalized comment on humans in general, who may prefer the security of a cage to the uncertainties of freedom. And, after all, what else would lead people to put up with aristocrats?
Of course, this is another story in which no one comes out looking particularly good. The old title of the Main page came from the general categories of actors I see in the GW story. The colonies want Earth to back off (elbow room), and the scientists with their pilot proteges, Dekim Barton and White Fang are all expressions of this drive. Energetic expressions, to be sure, but it is true that one way to achieve elbow room is to vigorously propel the elbow in question into whatever is obstructing its way. The actual government of the colonies seems less extreme, but we also see very little of them. The Alliance, I kind of discount. Their visible function is mostly limited to being Treize's stooges and all-around cannon fodder. Treize, of course, is in it for the pride, because he enjoys strength and wants to exercise it in the ultimate arena of life and death (blood sports). He's the classic aristocrat, who thinks that the key to stable government is for the people to know that their rulers are too strong to be overthrown and, in addition, that strength is measured by facility in battle. That is how aristocrats got to be aristocrats, after all; they killed lots of people. For some peculiar reason, they all appear convinced that a nasty, bloody, usually treacherous past equates to inheritable leadership potential. Treize, to be sure, has a lot more than blood going for him--he truly does posess the manipulative instincts of a born politician. Curious that he's more interested in the Game than in the endpoint of power; I rather thought, in Episode 14, that he would be perfectly happy to let Zechs rebuild Wing and duel with Heero if only Romefeller wasn't interfering. And then there's Dekim's second try, Marimeia. She forms a strange sort of amalgam of Treize's position that strong rulers equal good rulers and Dekim's position that the colonies should have the upper hand in the Earth Sphere. She claims she will be so strong that no one will even think of trying to overthrow her and peace will be assured (y'know, a whole lot of people have thought like that and not a single one lasted in any country I can think of), and additionally that the populace really wants a ruler who is powerful enough to enforce stability, even if it is a despotic stability (...actually, she does have a depressing degree of historical precedent backing that one up). Curiously enough, this is also the camp I see Dermail as most closely associated with, what with his equality-is-rubbish and force-not-talk lines. I've dubbed this attitude the gold standard for the rather obscure reason that Marimeia (and Dermail) seems to believe that government can be reduced to something material like force of arms rather than something more productively ephemeral like the consent of the ruled; this is similar to the idea that money can be reduced to something material like gold, rather than the productive fiction of everyone more or less agreeing that X amount of money (otherwise valueless slips of paper) stands in for X amount of value in goods. What interests me is that Endless Waltz is the only place where the issue of the people's will comes in at all. It really strikes me as a belated sort of making-up for the basically elitist message encoded in the series proper (that is, it's only the elites, whether they be aristocrats or Gundam pilots, who make a difference). A nice gesture, and all that, but to me it's really too little too late to alter the valence of the show.
Which gets us to...
.
War
The reasons people fight are a major theme in this show. The poor Gboys certainly go through some major angst when the whole colony-hostage crisis hits and their mad doctors get nabbed. That, however, was reasonably straightforward: they fight on behalf of the colonies' freedom, so they can't keep fighting if that puts the colonies at risk of destruction. This crosses peculiarly with what seems to be an older directive: revenge at all costs. The 'don't worry about us, just destroy OZ' thing that Duo and Quatre recite to each other sounds to me like part of the origninal Operation Meteor parameters.
And then there's the repeating motif of the human will to fight. Heero, Treize and Lady St. Une all three mention this one. Treize and Lady St. Une both seem to regard that will as a beautiful and admirable thing--what got humans out of the ocean and down from the trees, though they don't quite phrase it that way. Heero, on the other hand, in his address to his class in Episode 14, presents it as a matter of tragic fate. People try to make their lives better and only wind up making stronger weapons. His conclusion at this point seems to be that humankind are too immature to be in space. This also marches with Zechs' comment as he takes Tallgeese into space: "Perhaps Earth is trying to tell us something by pulling us back down towards itself." This division has the fascinating effect of placing the warmongers (Treize, Une, Dermail and probably Barton and co.) in the position of immaturity--they're children who haven't learned to play nicely and defer gratification yet. On the other side, the mature side, we have the Gundam pilots (or possibly only Heero) and Zechs, notably some of the youngest characters in the show. The overall message in this arrangement seems to be that maturity equals the ability to stop fighting, no matter how much fun, how brilliant and exciting a life it may be.
Wu Fei makes an interesting case study all by himself. You note, in Episode 12, how wigged out he is about having lost to Treize? What he says to Sally, when she asks why he thinks he's weak, is that he lost to someone who was stronger. And that this means he was just acting as a bully all along, defeating only those who were weaker than he. This, then, would seem to be what he meant when he told Nataku that he was no longer worthy of her. The subtext I see to this statement is that Wu Fei believed that because he fought for Justice (which Nataku embodies) he would always win no matter how strong his opponents were; this makes his early insistence that only strong opponents are worthwhile a nearly aesthetic statement. It wasn't just that he didn't want to have to hurt the weak, it was also that defeating a strong opponent satisfied some kind of abstract desire for symmetry--since he didn't actually believe he could be defeated while fighting for the cause of Justice. No wonder he's so shattered at losing; it completely upends his worldview and ethical system. Also, I think this explains part of the bond he shares with Treize. In some ways, they were both in it for the aesthetics. It certainly explains why he went ahead and met Treize (ten years older, twice his size) sword to sword. Of course, this clashes strangely with Wu Fei's ideas about what drives people to fight. You note that, when he asks Sally why she fights when she knows she's on the weaker side and she tells him it's because she feels she must, he promptly asks if she's being ordered to. Clearly, what Sally's saying doesn't compute for him. As far as Wu Fei sees it, at this point in the show, the only possible motivation to fight when you know you're likely to lose is orders from superiors. I think this ties back into his statement that he has been acting like a bully; which is entirely true. I think this is the point at which he understands that his motivation to fight, before then, boils down to something pretty superficial. He claimed Justice as his motive and cause, and believed that this made him invincible. If we follow his logic about the weak not fighting except under coersion/orders all the way though, what we wind up with is the implication that he would have hesitated to fight if he had believed Justice did not make him invincible. If he finally realizes that, it would account for how shattered he is. It isn't just losing--it's all the understanding of himself that follows after.
.
Egalitarian Aristocrats
GundamWing.net mentions in passing that OZ uniforms are pretty direct copies of uniforms from Napoleonic France. I certainly agree there's a strong resemblance, except for the really silly looking hats. In part, this historical reference may be a simple parellel of Napoleon Bonaparte and Treize Khushrenada: brilliant, charismatic leaders who seized control of chaotic situations, exiled and then returned, etc. For a quick overview, there's a good War Times Journal article online. Beyond that, however, I think the writers may have been paralleling OZ itself with Napoleon's army. The years following the French Revolution were not calm ones for the regular army there, and a lot of their officers (who were, in old European tradition, from aristocratic families) were killed off. One of Napoleon's more famous decisions was to promote pretty much anyone who was on hand and showed he knew what he was doing to whatever officerial post needed filling. Understandable, given that he started life as a peon himself. I believe this relates to the aristocratic ranks that OZ pilots seem to acquire. They don't appear to be hereditary, but rather something like the rank bestowed on a court noble (not hereditary for descendents either, not accompanied by lands in most cases). Zechs, for instance, gets promoted from Baron to Count.
Since the European rank system goes, in descending order: Duke, Marquis, Earl/Count, Viscount, Baron, Baronette, you can see that this was a promotion out of zone, as it were.
Makes me wonder just what Treize's birth rank may have been. He's the nephew of Duke Dermail, which says he probably has some title, but I suspect his own rank of Duke is solely due to his command of OZ.
At any rate, this ennobling of people who may or may not have any hereditary rank beforehand seems to resonate with Napoleon's promotional policy: ability counts first. One the one hand, this strikes me as very strange for the armed forces of Romefeller, who seem to be all about reviving aristocratic privilege. On the other, I have to admit, this procedure harks back to where noble rank came from in the first place (you kicked a lot of ass and killed a lot of people) in a manner that fits quite well with Romefeller's notion that the iron fist has the greatest right to rule.
And now that we're all moderately depressed try GenderSex, which is a good deal more entertaining...at least to a certain mindset. Go have your spirits lifted. Or something.
