Contrasting Gundam/Zeta Gundam to Seed/Seed Destiny

Zeon was a democratic movement of colonists seeking seperation from Federation rule. It was hijacked by a fascist regime under an oligarchical family that turned Zeon from a simple separatist movement into a imperialist state seeking the domination of the earth sphere through whatever means necessary, including mass murder.

The "Newtype" theme of Zeon was Deikun's (the original creator of the peaceful separatist movement) personal philosophy that emigrating into space would unlock human potential and mutual understanding. It's a deliberately flawed philosophy created as such to highlight that despite being Newtypes, Char and Amuro never understand each other's points of view.

That sounds plenty detailed and layered. This isn't including Zeon at later stages which involved them being naval remnants still holding Zabi (fascist) ideals, Axis Zeon that saw itself as the true continuation of the Principality, and Neo Zeon that tries to upholds Deikun's ideals of separation and space emigration, but tragically resorts to Principality methods of wars of in dependance and colony drops.

That's plenty of layers to the faction. And that's just Zeon, not counting the Federation that starts as a inept government that means well but has levels of corruption, and is then transformed in response to Zabi loyalist acts of mass murder to create a ruthless agency to quell uprisings by whatever means, and then finally back to a more well-intentioned government that is still rooted in deep-seated tradition and unchanging ways.

No it doesn't, at least to me. It basically amounts to what I already said; the original idea of Zeon was to form a democracy, (which I said,) but then Gihren used that to manipulate the people of Zeon, and turn it into a fascist state. (Which I basically said.) Now, if Zeon wasn't a facist state — if it was run by someone who was clearly morally grey, and if Zeon had legitimate reasons for going to war — then it would be detailed and layered. But as it stands, it's just once crazy bastard with a beam-laser, deluding the masses into fighting in a pointless war, either in the original show or in ZZ. (Haman.) Now, don't get me wrong; it's interesting, to be sure. But it's not all that detailed or layered.

(Also, just curious; ever heard of Legend Of Galactic Heroes? Because that's my personal standard for 'detailed&layered' Space Opera factions, right there. Neither side is objectively better than the other, and each of the two main sides, at least eventually, is run by an actual decent human being, and both sides reasons for fighting are well delved into over the course of the show. Though the bit about being run by a decent human being one-ups Zeon right there.)

edited 27th Jan '14 10:14:56 PM by kkhohoho

I feel that any answer I give you will be given an unfair rebuttal anyway but I have to point out that Gihren isn't the one who "rules" Zeon. It's his father, the head of the Zabi family who is the leader of Zeon and the first time we see him is when he learns the death of his son. Then, in a quite human way we see this once powerful man brought low by the death of his son, clearly deeply saddened that the war he started took the life of his child. Then, in what I believe, is very layered storytelling we see him attempt to end the war but is killed before he can do so by his eldest Son who probably got such power-hungry motives from his father. A father who was repentant for his actions after loosing a son in the pursuit of power.

Exactly; Gihren got his motives from his father. Which means his father was also a Hitler expy. Zeon is really just one giant Nazi Germany expy, on the whole.

Except Nazi Germany was never created from a corrupted secessionist movement, never justified itself as 'warring for Independence,' never had a ruling family that took roles in various parts of the military/administration of the government, never survived in actual organized remnants that started various other wars after its fall, and never took the philosophy of the initial separatist movement leader it never had to twist into its own dogma and instead relied on the flawed ideas of 20th century eugenics and 20th century imperialism.

You can throw around the word 'expy' but that doesn't make it true. Your statement doesn't hold any water at even the most cursory of glances. Just because a fictional faction is fascist in organization doesn't always mean it is a 1/1 based copy of Nazi Germany and therefore is bereft of any creative merit. Quite frankly that's a terribly Euro-centric view that doesn't do any justice to the original fiction and its intricacies.

Also your previous statement that any faction is automatically devoid of complexity due to it being fascist is also a terribly blanket statement that just doesn't hold any water. If that were the case, then you would have to lump a lot of works as being dull automatically. How something is constructed accounts for a lot more than what that construction can be categorized into.

I feel Zeon is pretty well constructed entity. It's realistic, as in it has happened in real history, that movements for independence can be overtaken by power hungry individuals. It's realistic that those individuals would twist political and philosophical ideals into extremist elements that suit their own agendas instead of the will of the people. It's also realistic that after this faction meets its fall, remnants might take their banner and attempt to resurrect it as they have long bought into the corrupted dogma those leaders fed to the people to make them serve the state. And, it's realistic to assume, as time goes on that this faction might begin to see how they were lied to and used to service others and might try to rekindle something of the original movement, albeit through the military means of the regime that falsely entrenched itself as the true will of the people and not the usurpers they really were.

edited 28th Jan '14 10:28:41 AM by mr.gaben

Zeon has a moderately interesting backstory (it's sort of a Fallen Hero as a faction instead of a character), but the way "modern" Zeon is portrayed in the animation is about as subtle as throwing a brick at someone's face. Zeon, with essentially no justification, launches a war of conquest that opens with a surprise attack resulting in the genocide of literally half the human race. That's beyond Hitler-level lulzevil. It'd be like Hitler starting WWII by launching indiscriminate chemical weapon attacks and murdering everyone in Europe outside of Germany. There's absolutely no question who the good guy and who the bad guy is in the One Year War — anyone who thinks that Zeon is anything other than The Empire launching an unprovoked attack on The Federation is deluding themselves.

Now, where there is some gray is in the fact that not all Zeon soldiers were evil, and not all Federation solders were good. But the fact that some Zeon soldiers were decent guys doesn't make Zeon as a whole any less evil, or their war any more justified.

Compare this to CE, where both sides have legitimate grievances with each other, there's a plausible history of conflict leading up to the start of hostilities, and the "correct" position is somewhere in between OMNI's and ZAFT's. That's much more nuanced than UC having Zeon being almost comically evil and unilaterally launching an attack for no obvious reason and using the element of surprise gained thereby to murder billions of civilians.

Of course, there was ZZ, which basically tried to level the playing field by making the Federation just as corrupt and EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIIIIIIIIIIILLL as Zeon in their own way. (Dublin, anyone?)

edited 28th Jan '14 3:18:30 PM by kkhohoho

That part where Bright Noa meets the fancy house of rich and apathetic Federation men was kinda hard to take seriously.

edited 28th Jan '14 3:22:08 PM by ninjaclown

Dublin wasn't destroyed by the Federation.

Sure, the Federation isn't filled with angels either, though it's worth noting that those particular examples were effectively living under Neo Zeon occupation. The fact that they exist at all doesn't speak particularly well for the Federation, but judging the entire organization based on them is sort of like judging all French politicians based on members of the Vichy government.

edited 28th Jan '14 3:30:50 PM by NativeJovian

That is true. What is also true is that the Federation basically left everyone in Dublin to die so as to have 'less mouths to feed'. (Seriously, they say those four words almost verbatim.)

And I wasn't talking about the rich fancy house. Again, Dublin, as in the Dublin Colony Drop evacuation. (Or lack thereof.)

edited 28th Jan '14 3:48:57 PM by kkhohoho

Yes, I have. Legend Of Galactic Heroes is the awesomeness.

I watched SEED recently, and I have to agree with what someone else on another site said: in its latter half, SEED's writing gets shakier, but the tension is good and it feels more comfortable with itself, and the last set of episodes is where it seems to fully come together. There is some good, but even SEED needed Astray to fill in some details.

Just putting it out there, but the reason I actually liked SEED over most other Gundam series I've seen has little to do with the plot or characters and more to do with actually having an Aesop/message/philosophy that was actually relevant to the show.

I still hated SEED Destiny to the core, though.

I'll probably get to watching both shows in a month or two. I was really iffy about both shows for a while, especially Destiny, but I decided that if I wanted to be a true Gundam fan, I needed to just sit down and, watch 'em both.

...Well, after Victory, anyway.

edited 29th Jan '14 6:14:59 AM by kkhohoho

I'll let you guys on a little secret: I think Gundam SEED is okay.

It's not perfect because: The story is uninspired (It takes notes from X, Turn A and a small bit from Wing.), Flay and Kuzzey and there's the fact that there are way too many Gundams flying around.

If I did believe in Rau's BS then I'd be spamming: NUKE THE COSMIC ERA WITH THE IDEON! IT CAN DESTROY THE UNIVERSE!

Yeah...

And if you actually watched it all the way (Here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD5OJd6i1uM) then you'd realize that I hate it for being terribly designed.

Oh and CE science is terrible.

edited 30th Jan '14 5:11:43 PM by HeirophantsFool

Gundam science period is terrible. Living in space will give us telepathic powers anybody?

RE: Nuance

I'm with Jovian on this one. UC might have a neat backstory, but in the present we're shown Gihren's dictatorship as a fait accompli There's no corruption of the revolution on display, just a sociopath running an empire the way he wants it to with no real opposition from anybody. It's like seeing the USSR after Stalin's seizure of power and without flashbacks to the Russian Revolution. Just another in a long chain of evil empires.

In CE on the other hand, we get to see both sides radicalise. We watch as moderates are pushed aside or killed off and power falls into the hands of Azrael and Patrick. That's a far stronger acknowledgement of political complexity than UC gives us.

edited 2nd Feb '14 6:39:37 PM by AmbarSonofDeshar

A poster once said of UC vs. CE that the latter had no balls compared to the former, citing how the Ramba Ral of SEED survived while the original...well, didn't. Starting on Destiny now and knowing that La Flaga has also survived, I do long for Mr. Kill Em All.

As the Zeta of CE, I expect a lot more out of Destiny than I did SEED. Regardless of what others have said about it, I'll give it a fair shake. It'll just be a long, uphill battle it it's going to rival my favorite Gundam series thus far.

For right now though, I'm taking the position that Cagali was NEVER a strong, respectable female lead so Destiny can't ruin anything. Her first use of a mobile suit lasts all of a minute before she's shot down, she accomplishes nothing in the final battle, her actions with Ahtrun on the island are comical at how inept she is.... She is given a commanding position in the desperate defense of ORB in spite of the fact she has demonstrated no leadership abilities to this point. (she was nothing more than a symbolic tool for the Desert Dawn as far as i could see) She is referred to as "spoiled" by her own father and she herself proves this when she insistently bitches about how he "betrayed them" when he did nothing of the sort. In short she's just lashing out - like a spoiled brat.

She accomplished nothing in the course of SEED except to bounce back and forth between Kira and Athrun.

edited 25th Feb '14 2:58:57 AM by Nikkolas

Gundam, any Gundam, isn't very politicaly sophisticated.

However, it often does a fairly good job of portraying people as well.. People. To make a comparison, think SWTOR: The Empire is a bunch of genocidial puppy-killing madmen... But not ever imperial soldier is. And th Republic and the Jedi might be the good guys, but not everyone is a Knight in Shining Armor. The UC conflict does that very well. Zeon is ludicrously evil (everything about them screams "Evil Empire") but they do go to some lengths to show the humanityof everyone involved: That even the ruling Zabis are a family and care about each other. (Gihren excepted of course)

The Zabi's were the best characters in MSG. I missed Garma so much after Char killed him. And Big-zam's Last Stand is one of the best Gundam episodes I've seen. I also really liked Sovereign Zabi as his grief and despair was very understandable.

That is one area SEED stomps all over MSG and even Zeta to a slight extent - it kept its villain presence strong. How I longed to see more of Scirocco and the Zabi's but i never missed Rau for very long.

edited 25th Feb '14 3:06:03 AM by Nikkolas

Exactly. Gundam has always been good at showing that individual morality is far more complex than just what side you're on, but that doesn't change the fact that for the most part, the various factions are closer to Black-and-White Morality than Grey-and-Gray Morality.

That said, CE is a lot more grey than UC, in that both sides at least have legitimate excuses for their genocidal psychosis, as opposed to UC where the antagonist faction du jour always boils down to "I want to Take Over the World, so let's go commit some crimes against humanity". (Gundam 00's even greyer than CE, at least in the first season, where it's essentially "individual nations trying to preserve the good-enough status quo vs forward-thinking radicals trying to improve things in the long term at the cost of short-term stability", but the second season pitches that out the window and brings back a black-vs-white conflict worthy of UC.)

The hilarious thing about Uzumi's rant is that he's essentially telling Cagalli that she needs to suck it up and do her duty, for the good of Orb... while he's in the process of committing glorified suicide for no readily apparent reason. Seriously, that scene was dramatic as all hell, but made no damn sense. There's absolutely no logical reason Uzumi had to die, and every reason for him to survive as leader of Orb's Government in Exile, not least of which because his death leaves Cagalli as Orb's official leader, thanks to Orb's WTF-as-hell combined democracy/aristocracy government system.

edited 25th Feb '14 9:55:35 AM by NativeJovian

ZAFT vs. the EA was just as simplistic as Zeon vs the Feds but instead of Angels vs. Demons it was Evil Versus Evil.

Patric and the other ZAFT leaders devolving into genocidal lunatics is perhaps more believable than Gihren starting off that way but as a whole I don't think either show made a legitimate case of "both sides have an equal right to fight." The Feds in UC were the only right choice ORB was the only sane option in CE.

That's true enough after both sides got hijacked by their respective extremist wings and turned it from a secession attempt on ZAFT's part to a war of extermination on both sides. (I'd argue that ZAFT had less fall to far there, given that the like second thing they did in the war was deliberately murder tens of millions of civilians, but I digress.) But the run-up to the war — the increasing tensions between Naturals and Coordinators, the terrorist attacks and failed attempts at reconciling things peacefully — make for a more balanced conflict than the Federation vs Zeon.

That said, CE is a lot more grey than UC

I don't think so. I think the fact that in the UC, while the Federation might be corrupt or incompetent in the latter stages, our protagonists generally keep working on their side. Gundam SEED's two main factions might both have better reasons for behaving like dicks, but that is completely irrelevant since in both Seed and Destiny there's a third faction that's pretty much all-white. (and far more so than the factions of the UC, which while closer to Black-and-White Morality than Gray-and-Gray Morality is at least at times more like Gray-and-Black Morality)