Gundam Wing: Miscellany

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Ranks

A quick word about how rank is translated. And that word is: um? The only thing I'm sure of is that this show is not using the usual terms for Lieutenant (chuui, first, or shoui, second), Colonel (issa, JSDF, or taisa, navy) or General (isshou or gensui or shoukan, I think the second is most appropriate to Treize). Or even something like shousa for wing commander or shireikan for commanding officer or sousui for commander/leader. At least not for OZ. The Alliance officers seem to use standard rank, but the only one of the OZ rank titles I think I've unravelled is touki, which is used alone for Zechs (at first) and Noin (not to mention Alex and Meuller) and with san or sama for Zechs (later) and Une. I think I've picked out a prefix (ji) used with it for Noin. Touki seems to refer to a fighter craft, and is part of words having to do with the pilots thereof. I can't be sure, never having seen any of these written, but I believe the ji is the same as the one in ouji (prince), which generally reads as "child" or as a diminutive. So I'm not sure that the rank structure here is precisely military; it seems almost vocational. In my own mind, I translate these variations rather facetiously as Little Pilot, Pilot, Very Pilot and High Pilot. Using the more classic translations of those titles would make something like Pilot, Mr. Pilot and Lord Pilot, which you've gotta admit isn't any better. I'm thinking that translating Treize's title as Excellency might be closer. Kakka is an all-purpose title of honor that generally seems to show up attached to governmental positions. Which does get us back around to the idea of war-leader as political position, as noted on the Politics page. Oh, yeah, and the ubiquitous taichou (captain, leader, boss-dude) gets applied to both military captain-types and people like Rashid. Anyone figured out more?

An example of just how important correct pronunication can be: Koushaku means Marquise while koshaku means impudent. That one made me laugh. So did Otto's name. Apparently, otto is one of the terms for husband--the neutral word a wife would use when speaking about her husband to a third party. The context makes it quite clear that Otto's name is a proper noun, of course, but still.

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Imprecision of the Authors

This is one of those areas that alternately makes me laugh, delights me and makes me incredibly frustrated. As a starter example of what I'm talking about, you know how the offical word on Trowa's ethnicity is "Latin"? Peachy, yeah, that really clears things up. This means that he could be from Italy, France, Spain or Latin America (which is to say, about half the landmass of the western hemisphere). This is on a par with designating Treize as "Aryan" which only narrows it down to, oh, EVERYONE except the East Asians--Aryan is a synonym for Proto-Indo-European according to the American Heritage Dictionary. Unless, of course, the designation was intended in it's specifically nazi sense in which case it means any Caucasian Gentile. And the Caucasus mountains are the ethnic black hole of half the world--you go in and you don't come out, whence all the people fighting over whose land it is; for ethnic specificity, it's right up there with terms like Euromutt. (I have no idea why Caucasian should mean pale-skin; no one who lives there is what little Adolf would have called white.) See what I mean about imprecision?

One of the examples of this that keeps nagging at me is Maxwell Church. It has to be a Catholic church, I can't think of any other Christian denomination that has both nuns running around, certainly not black-and-white nuns, and that version of the black-and-white collar for priests. So why isn't it called Church of the fill-in-the-miracle or Church of fill-in-the-saint, like a Catholic church is supposed to be? The real answer for this is undoubtedly that the GW authors weren't aware of this convention, but they've stuck us with it and I find myself prey to that itchy fan desire to make sense of these things. So, here are my top possibilities.

1) The church is actually a Church of St. Mary or Catherine, of which there are simply oodles. And perhaps there's another St. Mary or Catherine on V08744, so that to keep from confusing the two people have started calling this one by its priest's name instead. This is rather unlikely for actual parishoners, but perhaps more likely for surrounding citizens who are not Catholic and don't actually attend.

2) Maybe Father Maxwell is some variety of heretic. Let's say that the arch-diocese of L2 sent Father Maxwell to a post at some other church in V08744--probably one in or beside the Alliance base. Let's say that, once there, he saw a need for another church down in the poorer sections and petitioned to start a new parish and church there. Let's further say that the arch-bishop refused. After all, there certainly wouldn't be any revenues from a church down there. Do you think Father Maxwell would stand for that? I don't. I think he would have gone and started that new church anyway. If he did that, of course, it's entirely likely that the bishop in question would have defrocked him (booted him out, that is) and refused to carry this new church on the books with a proper Catholic name. As far as Father Maxwell, and presumably those nuns who joined him, are concerned, they're still doing the work of the Church, thus the continuation of Catholic style vestments, but their church would not have a typical name. Instead it is named for its founder. Before anyone takes exception to the rather cynical view of church hierarchy implicit in this explanation, I should point out that my mother, who is a devout Catholic, helped me come up with it.

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Swords

In some areas, of course, they pay a good deal of attention to detail. One of those areas is who uses what kind of sword. Watch that first duel between Treize and Wu Fei some time. Really, based purely on their hardware, it's no wonder that Treize mopped the floor with Wu Fei.

At first I couldn't make up my mind whether Treize was using a sabre or a heavy rapier. It looks to have only one edge, which would indicate sabre, as would the fairly heavy, looped grip with the flattened bell guard. On the other hand, it's awfully light for a sabre, and it's straight while a sabre normally has a bit of curve; it could have just been a really early style rapier, before those got too far down the road to foil-dom. In the end I decided sabre was most likely; they did straighten out in later years, and the hilt is pretty distinctive. In any case, it's a light weapon for close quarters, small moves and finesse--quite Treize's style.

Wu Fei, on the other hand, has what I'm fairly sure is a dao (Chinese great sword). Single edged, curved, a touch point-heavy, very simple hilt with a straight cross guard (heavy, though). This sword developed along the same lines and for much the same reason as the sabre initially did in Europe: to fight on horseback. Thus the curve. It's a heavy weapon, though, and its use usually involves broad slashes.

I'm really delighted that the writers/artists got all this right. You can actually see the difference in style in that dueling scene. Wu Fei uses the broad (and, as Jeff notes, rather brutal) power-through-the-opposition slashes typical of his weapon; not to mention he takes the offensive. Treize slips out of his way, blocks a few times (greater mass has its advantages) and wins with a final side-step and a lovely bit of wrist action. Very smooth. The swords match the personalities to a T. I can't quite picture Treize using anything as blunt as a broadsword or Wu Fei settling for anything as...well...small as a jian, the double edge sword (for those unfamiliar with Chinese swords, think Green Destiny). He's so fond of overwhelming force (you note he still has the great sword in Endless Waltz). Silly boy. That's one of the reasons he loses.

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Music

Personally, I think that Pat Benatar is the perfect soundtrack for this show. But the character songs provided add some interesting snippets too. For one thing, I notice that it's Quatre and Duo, Relena and Une who got the love songs...though not ballads, by any means, at least in Duo's case, and Une's come to think of it. Trowa, Heero and Wu Fei, Zechs and Treize all wound up with rather more philosophical musings. Not that they aren't all fairly reflective if you listen to the lyrics. Curious combination, reflection with pretty unremittingly hard rock beat with singers that seem to be going for sultry (once again we see the payoff for the general policy of professional voice actors needing to be singers too).

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Follow Your Leader

How many do we actually have, here, anyway? Heero is probably the obvious one. He's the first one we meet, he gets the Gundam that flies, he's got the traditional blue-eyes-dark-hair going, he's the one who duels with the 'bad guy's' top fighter (Zechs), and he's the one who gets to do difficult to impossible things like defuse the bombs and go after the last bit of Libra's propulsion system. The all around hero, if you'll pardon the pun. All he's missing is the black color coding customary for the central figure of a sentai.

The trick is, he isn't a good leader. In fact, he isn't any sort of leader. He's an archetypal loner. He's the solitary, individual hero. I find it no end of odd that Heero is the one who's supposed to be of Japanese extraction. The character who displays the perfect template of leadership, in a more classically Japanese sense, is actually Quatre. Perhaps this is why none of them are color coded--I mean, what would Quatre get...pink and black stripes? Ah, pardon, he is male, that would make it...yellow and black, I think. Yellow, if I'm recalling my Voltron days correctly, goes to the youngest--and after all, Quatre is the only one of the five who refers to himself with boku (what you'd expect from a boy that age) instead of ore (which I'm sure makes Zechs snicker elegantly into his sleeve ruffles, since he doesn't ever seem to use that one himself; he sticks with the more neutral watashi or watakushi. For that matter, so does Treize. You can actually use the pronouns as a guage of pilot personality: I've yet to hear Quatre use anything but boku or Wu Fei use anything but ore; both Duo and Heero lean toward ore but use watashi when they're feeling less than usually heroic; Trowa uses whichever suits his mode and action at the moment).

Quatre is the unifier. He's the one who recognizes how pointless and destructive it is for the Gundam pilots to fight each other. He's the one who recognizes the need for them to cooperate in order to win in the Eve Wars (more on this in a moment). One of the first things we see him doing, in Episode 3, is convincing Trowa to stop fighting him and have some nice bonding moments instead. He does this by refusing to fight Trowa; he abandons Gundam. That refusal to fight allies or friends, however temporarily misguided, shows up in every focal hero/heroine of anime I have run across so far, in one form or another; it's the tag that says, this person knows what's important and can think beyond the heat of the moment in battle. Which is a pretty impressive skill, when you think of it. Heero isn't allowed to show this capacity off until Endless Waltz, when he jolts Wu Fei back to sanity by disengaging from their fight.

The most curious part, to me, is that when Trowa stops fighting and comes out to meet Quatre, he comes out with his hands raised. He isn't coming out to take Quatre captive, or even to negotiate. He comes out to surrender. Why? Quatre certainly hasn't asked him to; in fact, Quatre, ever the diplomat, reminds him that he was the first to come out and, by implication, surrender. And all Quatre said, upon emerging, was that they shouldn't be fighting. Trowa is not what I would call the kind of person to give in easily; though he might pretend to do so in order to survive and perpetrate further mayhem. This isn't pretending. To me, this says that Trowa recognizes something very powerful in Quatre. Though, Trowa being Trowa, we have no clue whether this recognition was a case of Hey, look, someone with his head screwed on right, or Wow, he's gorgeous.

And this brings us to...

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The Zero System (my impressions so far, based mostly on episode summaries)

Seems that every pilot gets a crack, some time in this story, at the Zero System; with two exceptions, it makes them all psycho. Now, recall what our five mad scientists keep saying about Zero? That the reason it messes people up is that they're not perfect soldiers; that Zero will enhance the perfect soldier and make him all he has the potential to be without bringing on the high-tech DTs. And who is the only one that Zero boosts that way? Quatre. Heero, Duo, Wu Fei it makes crazy (though, again, Heero seems to get a grip later on). For Trowa, since he's already totally messed up, it nudges him back to himself. Quatre is the one it works right for, decisively so for the Eve Wars. I personally discount his first go with it, after he restores that prototype; he was already around the twist due to having his family messily blown up.

I'm not at all sure this isn't purposefully lined up with the ethinicity. Who invented the numeral zero, with all it's simplifying and organizing mathematical functions? The Arabs. Who can employ the Zero System? The character of Arab extraction.

So, back to the bizarre parallels.

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Heart of Space (uuchu no kokoro)

Ever notice that there seem to be two of them? Dr. J tells us that Heero qualifies; that he feels the collective heart of the space colonies. And when you think about what it means for someone that sensitive to live as a soldier/assasin/terrorist, Heero's coldness and eerie laughter when he kills start to make a lot more sense. But Quatre also seems to qualify. When Rashid wants to know how Quatre can possibly tell that these other strange Gundam pilots are trustworthy, Quatre says that the heart of space tells him. He seems to savour the knowledge downright smugly, see right. And there seems to be some connection between the two of them, as well; in Episode 10, when Heero makes his...second? no, third I think, attempt to destroy Wing, and blows himself up along with it, Quatre feels what's happened to him. I believe the line is "My body...my heart (kokoro)." Which only makes sense, if Quatre is the leader-figure of our two heros.

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About Relena

I am not a Relena-hater. Nor am I really a Relena-fan. I think portraying her as nothing but a spoiled shrew is a disservice, but I have to admit, if I were Heero I would run away very fast. Not the least because they're much too alike. Note what Dr. J says, when Relena asks why he helped her escape Lady Une (Episode 5)? He says it's because she has the same look in her eyes that Heero has--a pure, kind expression. When Relena encounters Treize after threatening the Romefeller gathering, we get a scene of Heero, just about to blow up Wing, superimposed over her face. (The prospect of such a challenge seems to light Treize right up.) They certainly both have a high capacity for obsession, Heero with his mission and Relena with Heero--later with her own mission of stopping OZ. As with the object of her interest, the girl definitely has some quirks. I mean, I can see where a girl with an inquiring mind would be fascinated by someone mysterious and how someone who's probably been under guard her whole life might be attracted to someone who's clearly dangerous, but standing on a cliff shouting for said mysterious, dangerous person to come kill you is a bit much. Her initial character is just kind of freaked out. Later she seems to settle down a bit. By Episode 6, after she talks to J, her attitude changes; for one thing, she suddenly has her own motives for doing damage which probably does give her a better understanding of Heero (tones down the mystery). In fact, she seems to start providing some danger for herself by doing things like pulling out a gun and trying to shoot Une. That indicates, to me, a certain positive assimilation of the characteristics she finds good, strong and attractive in Heero. Of course, then she goes and decides to be so Absolutely Pacific that she nearly gets herself and all her people slaughtered. And here she was doing so well.

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If Gundam Pilot, Then...

This little equation has several endings. If you're a Gundam pilot, then you will go duel with the enemy commander who outmasses you at least once over and has had a good ten years more experience with the sword. If you're a Gundam pilot, then you're obviously suicidal (thank you for that tip, Zechs and Otto). If you're a Gundam Pilot, then you will ditch distance weapons and meet the enemy ace thermal blade to thermal blade in a duel, not necessarily complete your objectives (Heero, what are you thinking here?). So, the generic end of the equation seems to be, Then Testosterone Hopped and Obsessed with Proofs of Strength. Yeah, Treize fits right in. I think Quatre sums it up perfectly in Episode 9, when he tells Rashid, "They're violent and dangerous, but they're all nice guys."