I've been watching a lot of episodes of Mobile Suit Gundam and I have thoughts to share about the experience.

I've been watching Mobile Suit: Gundam and consuming its huge and sprawling storyline with friends who are fans of the cartoons. We started with the most popular and dominant of the various Gundam storylines where it seems the bulk of the franchise seems to rest. For those who don't know much about Gundam it begins in a timeline called "The Universal Century." This is defined by the rise of a political force on Earth called "Earth Federation" that happens in a timeline where people who live on Earth have been in space for quite a long time. They've got colonies inside colossal cylinders that use spin gravity, and the inside of these enormous space colonies are so huge that they support cities, an atmosphere, and things like farming and fishing. It's basically indistinguishable from Earth except you can see the subtle curve of these colonies on the horizon (think of Larry Niven's Ring World and you're getting close to what I mean). But yeah, you've got roads, streets, skyscrapers and you can drive a car down a road just like you would on Earth.

The most notable thing about the Universal Century then is the conflict that Earth Federation has with the Principality of Zeon. These are people who live on space colonies that are pretty far out from Earth, and they are colonial secessionists who take a lot of their political cues from fascism and Nazi-ism (specifically) as seen on earth in the first half of the twentieth century. The head of the Principality of Zeon is a powerful (and fascist) Zabi family, and the story that follows is called "The One Year War" in which huge, mechanized infantry branded as "Mobile Suits" begin to dominate everything. And you see Zeon deal blow after blow to Earth and to their own people who are oftentimes treated with callous disregard.

In one part of the story, Zeon gases an entire space colony probably a little smaller than the state of Rhode Island and then drops that on Australia, which leaves a crater that looks like its 300 miles wide. I joke with my friends that I think all of the gay people were in Sydney at the time partying because Gundam as a story has very little diversity at least in its early iterations. Everyone is straight and white and pretty sold on the patriarchy as the way things need to be. There are some attempts to create strong female characters, but they usually either end up sacrificing their lives so that a male can live, or they end up as love interests for a male or as a vehicle for a male to "bear heirs" that we may see in other tellings of the story. Additionally, all of the characters who matter and get the most screen time are teenagers (the bulk of which are teenaged boys) which is probably the target audience for the story.

Interjected into all of this is the concept of a "Newtype," which is essentially this story's "superhuman." Just like in X-Men and other comic books, the "Newtype" represents the natural evolution of space-living humans that develop psychic abilities. These "abilities" make them excellent at the infantry warfare. Essentially, no one but the most talented crop of Gundam pilots even has a chance against a "Newtype." And the psychic abilities are probably a kind of proxy deus-ex-machina for whatever else they may need in order to forge more stories with these giant machines, and the various struggles of humans in a world devastated by war and fascist governments. In fact, I'd say Mobile Suit: Gundam's world-building mostly concerns itself with being a longstanding critique of capital combined with a military industrial complex that is out of control. Amidst this madness and death, you sprinkle a bunch of blond and blue-eyed characters everywhere and give us young male protagonists with muscly arms and slender builds. There's a joke online that says, "The Japanese know what we want" in reference to these prettily drawn and obvious "western" characters.

I'd also like to say that, for a cartoon, the franchise has plenty of moments of shocking violence. It ranges from the amputation of limbs to kids watching their parents die in front of them to nuclear explosions that wipe out entire facilities of people. There are scenes where a person will knock others (who are trying to get away and save themselves from said nuclear explosion) off ladders and staircases, acting in the most selfish of ways, screaming "Only the strong will survive!" And the consequences that characters oftentimes face for the choices they make are followed through (for the most part) with excruciating detail.

My journey through the Gundam backlog is progressing nicely. One of the friends I watch with is gifted with a good memory and has an almost uncanny ability to recognize drawn faces immediately and then memorize the name of that character even though the spelling of the names are oftentimes divorced completely from their pronunciation. This adds a second layer of difficult for me, so I'm oftentimes confused when a character bites it on screen, wondering which of the characters had just been killed. But the friend soon clarifies, and that makes it easier to watch these episodes. However, it is not lost on me that these "cartoons" were probably watched by a lot of kids in Japan. Their entertainment was quite different than mine (think Flintstones and Space Ghost), and I'm wondering why there was such a huge cultural divide.