Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans

Sheesh, McGillis and Tekkadan in general are apparently the Designated Villains of the show, if the director really thought they were in any way bad or evil. Meanwhile Rustal and Julietta are great big Designated Anti Hero Antagonists who we are supposed to believe will reform Gjallahorn despite them doing nothing but committing atrocities and selling out to the very same greedy bastards who corrupted Gjallahorn, like Nobliss.

Let me repeat that again: we are supposed to believe that the people who were given no choice but to fight back against a corrupt organization, and outright tried to make peace with them only to be refused, are the villains, and the duo of hypocritical assholes who committed atrocity after atrocity and sold out to greedy businessmen and politicians are the heroes? Or at least, we are supposed to believe that they are morally equal?

How does that make ANY sense?!

Edited by MasterN on Sep 30th 2019 at 12:30:37 PM

One of these days, all of you will accept me as your supreme overlord.

... I don't think anyone said that. Closest thing here is that The Director wanted them destroyed because he found their pursuit of moving up in the world, to the point they were going to conquer Gjallahorn to gain power with a literal blue eyed blonde haired Social Darwinist who is emotionally stunted as a child, to pretty clear be a line they shouldn't have crossed. The same poster in fact specifically said ...the Director had a very strong intent of having the villain win and no heroes survive from the beginning because the final conflict wasn't good or evil, it was them taking part in a poorly plotted coup and finally having their luck run out.

Tekkaden were still the heroes, but they made a Deal with the Devil which didn't exactly bear fruit.

... which again, makes me really uncomfortable with the mention of right-wing Japanese nationalist undertones going on with this allegory (that personally I hadn't heard about until this discussion).

Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.

Nope, Rustal isn't any kind of hero. He is Pragmatic Villain, he doesn't fight for freedom and free slippers for all. His aim is to keep order and knows he and Gjalahorn are best for job. Elion is Necessarily Evil and he knows it. And of course he would make reforms, because nothing is threatening stability more then corruption, even Tekkadan rebelion was consequence of it.

Tekkadan might be more honorable and symphatetical, but they decided go in direction that is ultimately harmful to system that protect people (even if system is corrupted, it's better then nothing) due unhinged personal ambitions. Which makes Rustal Lesser of Two Evils.

It was never Good vs. Evil, but Order Versus Chaos, which in the end happen to be repressented by two groups that can both be considered "evil" depending on your point of view.

Edited by Tenzen12 on Sep 30th 2019 at 10:54:07 AM

And its not like the Allies consisted of heroic nations. Soviet Russia was a part of it after all

Every accusation by the GOP is ALWAYS a confession.

Don't blame only the Russians. Soldiers are soldiers and giving them semi-free reign at harassing defenseless enemy civilians to let off steam has always been the historically preferred way of keeping the troops in line, regardless of nationality or ethnicity. As long as they're killing and raping civilians and looting everything not nailed down as trophies of conquest, they aren't fragging their own superiors and deserting due to the constant stress of danger and awful living conditions on the front line.

It's just that fiction doesn't portray this due to traditional expectations (and sometimes enforcement) of the protagonists doing nothing wrong.

Edited by amitakartok on Sep 30th 2019 at 1:29:49 PM

Pardon me if I'm more sympathetic to the group of child soldiers and slaves than I am to the authoritarians running the system that allowed them to be enslaved.

Fuck Gjallarhorn's system. It deserved to be destroyed.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Funnily enough, it happens anyway. It just feels galling to fans of Tekkadan it ended up being Rustal out of all people.

Yeah, the ending was 100% trying to have its cake and eat it too. The fact that they had to mangle Rustal's character out of all recognition to do it was just the cherry on top.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

I think it qualifies as adding insult to injury that the man responsible for destroying Tekkadan is also responsible for fixing the world & the problems they were striving against.

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

It wasn't really OOC, at least not to me.

Edited by Cross on Sep 30th 2019 at 9:38:51 AM

‘My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

My point of contention it actually did make sense for Rustal to make that decision and not out of character.

He has proven his bottom line is order and his stature and he's pragmatic and competent enough to have a good feel on what the future holds so even he knew they couldn't keep continuing Gjallarhorn's way of doing things.

Combine that with knowing how good it would make him look being hailed as a reformer, which is all kinds of dark hilarity, he would have no problem making that decision. Win-win for Team Rustal.

About sparing Tekkadan, it honestly could have gone both ways. Rustal could have easily cut a deal with no skin off his personal teeth and he would still be legitimate in wiping out Tekkadan as an example against insurrectionists.

It is the height of irony that Mc Gillis would have won if he had solicited the help of Galieo and Carta.

Edited by vicarious on Sep 30th 2019 at 9:42:39 AM

6xThere is nothing to pardon you off (Well, maybe except that unecessary sarcasm). Of course Tekkadan are supposed me more symphatetical. You just don't understand symphatetic and right are two different things. That and fact blindly chasing after end of rainbow will not get you cauldron of gold.

Edited by Tenzen12 on Sep 30th 2019 at 3:53:41 PM

Which unfortunately kinda falls in line with my general view on politics.

‘My ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’

Yup killing Carta is precisely what made the other two Nobles take a Neutral Stance, as the old ones shock at hearing that showed. And they alluded those two are much more by the book than Rustal is and would have joined Mcgillis if not for that.

Also killing his evil adoptive father would have helped. Because letting him live with the implication it was Cruel Mercy BIT HIM HARD.

Every accusation by the GOP is ALWAYS a confession.

Iok getting his dumbass self killed must have helped a lot in getting Rustal's reforms through. Tekkadan helped him to the very end.

Your preferences are not everyone else's preferences.

I don't think it's out of character for him to allow some reforms to go through if that was the only way for him to maintain power, but I don't think the show sells the idea that it was the only way for him to maintain power at all. At the end of the final battle, Rustal has accomplished everything he set out to in his quest to maintain the status quo. He publically destroyed Tekkadan, the upstarts who dared defy Gjallarhorn's rule. He defeated McGillis, the guy who insisted that Gjallarhorn's system was fatally flawed and needed to be rebuilt from the ground up. He'd seen half of the Seven Stars killed off, leaving the system unstable and vulnerable.

He was left in a unique position where he was able to disband the Gjallarhorn ruling council and declare himself sole ruler of the whole shebang. Which is basically what he did canonically!

Except he then immediately turned around and announced democratic elections and human rights reforms. Wait, what? Yeah, there were protests and stuff where people were rabblerousing for that kind of thing, but the show made it clear that they were largely emboldened by Tekkadan's unprecedented success against Gjallarhorn. Which Rustal had just utterly destroyed... as he said he needed to in order to maintain Gjallarhorn's rule. So he does the thing he says he needs to do in order to maintain the status quo, and then completely upends the status quo anyway? It doesn't track. Maybe they could have spent some more time on the epilogue and explained that Tekkadan became martyrs in the eyes of the public so the protests and rebellions never died down, but they didn't. So it just comes off as Rustal breaking character and allowing for a bittersweet ending because the writers didn't want a straight downer ending, which is what they were headed for.

Carta would never have agreed to it. Gaelio might have, but that's far from clear. Carta was obsessed with two things: McGillis, and the honor of her family. Given that she couldn't even admit how much she cared about McGillis, if he showed up and asked her to betray her family, she certainly would have told him to go to hell. Gaelio is less clear because he's motivated largely by personal concerns rather than abstract ideals, and he was on board with McGillis' ideas of reforming Gjallarhorn, but he probably wouldn't have been on board with the idea of burning down the Seven Stars completely and returning Gjallarhorn to an absolute dictatorship under the sole rule of one person.

Pretty much the only reason McGillis failed is because Gaelio (and his Gundam) somehow secretly ended up in Rustal's care after the battle of Edmonton, even though that makes no fucking sense given that you wouldn't expect the heir to one of the Seven Stars or their heirloom Gundam to disappear without it being noted, and the fact that Gaelio and Kimaris were left disabled on the battlefield surrounded by McGillis' men, so how the hell did he end up with Rustal anyway?

Tekkadan were fighting against an authoritarian regime that was hellbent on wiping them out for the crime of... defending themselves when Gjallarhorn attacked them without provocation. Gjallarhorn recognizes no civil or human rights of the people it's supposedly protecting. It allows slavery to exist within its borders, not just hidden in the criminal underworld, but openly used by legitimate publically-operating corporations. Even when they aren't enslaved, "common" people (meaning those that are neither members of the aristocracy nor rich and powerful in their own right) are branded terrorists and murdered for advocating labor reform.

Fuck Gjallarhorn. The system they have maintained for centuries is evil. They deserve to be destroyed.

If IBO had portrayed things that way — with Tekkadan as Doomed Moral Victors unable to actually defeat Gjallarhorn, but at least able to defy them (and inspire others to do the same), then that would have been one thing. But that's not what happened. Going into the final arc, it looked like Tekkadan and McGillis were going to win — they were outnumbered, but not overwhelmingly so, and Tekkadan was undoubtedly a higher quality force than Rustal even if McGillis' supporters were largely young and inexperienced.

Then the last five episodes undercuts this by finding increasingly blatant and unsatisfying ways to make Tekkadan lose. The impression I was left with was not "this is a reasonable outcome based on the situation" but rather "this is obviously bullshit with the writers obviously want Tekkadan to lose but wrote themselves into a corner by putting Tekkadan in a position where they had too much power for their loss to make sense".

Hell, doing it right would have been easy, too — just have all the Seven Stars agree to throw down against McGillis and then have him and Tekkadan overwhelmed by sheer numbers. That allows the good guys to go full ham and just tear apart everything that's thrown at them, and still lose because they can't do that forever but Gjallarhorn Has Reserves. Then end the series with all of Gjallarhorn's aces, a good chunk of their military, and most of their leaders dead, Tekkadan and McGillis also dead but Kudelia and a handful of survivors having escaped and running a full-on underground resistance movement, with the public at large reacting badly to the blatant display of Gjallarhorn's brutality and more discontent than ever. That sets the stage for a successful rebellion in the not-too-distant future, even if Tekkadan's attempts failed.

Instead we got: nope, Tekkadan lose and die, Rustal wins a slam dunk victory that leaves him the sole real power in Gjallarhorn, and he uses that newfound authority to... do all the things that Tekkadan was going to do and Rustal was fighting against in the first place. Bleh.

Edited by NativeJovian on Oct 1st 2019 at 9:29:26 AM

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

Mcgillis has openly revealed the crimes of Iok, and had his own crimes revealed by Gaelio. Then had any legitimacy he had nulled by his adoptive rapist, Gaelio and Carta's family power was already under the control of Mcgillis when he died, and Iok family power was in his hands when he died.

There were three seats left out of the original seven families, Rustal has no kids, and we don't even know if the other two have kids. That much of a change in the top brass requires some extensive reforms due to the number of roles each specific family has in overseeing the solar system, and since the other two sat on the sidelines while Rustal won it would be pretty logical that there would be a question of their right to oversee the earth.

For their part Gaelio or his father show no interest in returning to their seat as well.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Oct 1st 2019 at 8:11:47 AM

Every accusation by the GOP is ALWAYS a confession.

Again Tekkadan wasn't any better then Gjallahorn. They wanted be kings, were reckless and allied with manchild who promised them something he couldn't give.

Rustal Elion in other never cared for power on personal level nor about status quo. As long as Gjallahorn does its job, that is.

As long as you don't admit yourself Tekkadan doesn't have moral high ground you will not be able understand what kind story IBO is meant to be.

Edited by Tenzen12 on Oct 1st 2019 at 6:16:47 PM

Why be a flunkie when you can be a king?

I'm pretty sure we all know what kind of story IBO is...... But but it doesn't mean we have to like it.

Though saying Tekkadan isn't any better than Gjallahorn is literal horse-shit & I don't give a fuck if that's the intention from the creator.

Edited by slimcoder on Oct 1st 2019 at 9:30:03 AM

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

Because being flunkie doesn't get you killed. And yes Tekkadan isn't better then Gjallahorn.

Edited by Tenzen12 on Oct 1st 2019 at 6:39:42 PM

Better to strive for greatness than live as a fucking loser.

And I disagree with that, plain & simple.

Don't try to tell me how wrong I am, I really don't care what can be said especially from the creators.

Edited by slimcoder on Oct 1st 2019 at 9:42:02 AM

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

Yeah, a Pyrrhic Villainy ending would have been much better, and it would have made the assassination of Nobliss much more genuinely satisfying, since it would have further shown that their victory was short-lived and doomed to eventual reversal.

And considering the way Tekkadan was portrayed versus how they actually were, they do qualify as Designated Villains, since we are supposed to consider them as bad as, or worse than, Gjallahorn, when they have done nothing to deserve that reputation. Meanwhile, Rustal, considering his reforms in the finale, is clearly meant to be seen as heroic, or at least noble, on some level, even though it completely fails to make him sympathetic and feels Out of Character.

Honestly, @Native Jovian, I am starting to feel like WE are Tekkadan, opposed and outnumbered, but still fighting on nonetheless.

Edited by MasterN on Oct 1st 2019 at 10:14:07 AM

One of these days, all of you will accept me as your supreme overlord.

Thats a terrible idea and goes against the goal of Tekkadan. To make a place where they could live in peace. The flaws of Tekkadan in S2 had them fixate on being "Kings of Mars, to the point Orga and Mika don't realize their lives were already far better than they had ever been before, they were getting educations and everything, because they were obsessed with more and Mika and the rest followed.

Stuck in a cycle of fighting means nothing changes and they'll repeat the same terrible mistakes that got them destroyed, which neither Orga nor Mika wanted. That's why they specifically had the people they've befriended find places for them all to live.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Oct 1st 2019 at 11:57:49 AM

Every accusation by the GOP is ALWAYS a confession.

Nope, fuck that. Tekkadan were slaves fighting against the corrupt system that enslaved them. Gjallarhorn was the corrupt system that enslaved them. There's zero moral equivalency there.

The series makes it pretty explicitly more than once that 1) all Orga wants is for Tekkadan to be able to live in peace, and his pursuit of power is so that he can carve out a place for themselves, since no one's going to give them one, and 2) he's perfectly willing, even eager, to choose the less dangerous route that doesn't involve fighting, he just has no illusions that Gjallarhorn will allow that, and he's willing to make pragmatic decisions that involve risking the lives of some of the group in order to reduce the risk to the group as a whole.

The end of season one makes that point in pretty much exactly as many words, and even late into season two, Orga not only stays out of it when the Turbines are being targeted, he actually holds back the rest of Tekkada who want to go running to the rescue of their friends. It's not until Lafter is killed and it becomes clear that Teiwaz is either unwilling or unable to protect the Turbine survivors as promised that he finally agrees to step in — which shows pretty clearly that he's absolutely putting the needs of Tekkadan before his own personal desire for revenge — or even the rest of Tekkadan's desire for revenge.

The idea that Tekkadan deserved to lose because they lost their way and became just as bad as Gjallarhorn could have been a good story... but it's not really supported by anything in the show.

Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.

"Slaves fighting against corrupt system" lol. Tekkadan never fought for such lofty ideals. First they fought for survival and later for profit. It was never fight against system, it was always fight for owneselves

You forgetting Mcgillis was part of Gjalahorn and they worked with him even before knowing about his planned coup. Mars branch was getting fat paychecks from Gjalahorn and they got killed because they wanted even more.

And of course when Tekkadan got driven into corner Orga would happily sent Mackey to Rustal to appeas him. You can't eat ideals after all.

Edited by Tenzen12 on Oct 1st 2019 at 10:42:11 AM