It's a Gundam thread!

Well yeah he took over and made a horrible oppressive police state. But you said betrayl and murder and I figured you meant he killed Deikun.

But the Federation was never supposed to be the blanket good guys. There were sympathetic Zenon figures in 0079. We weep for Hamburger Benie who was a Zeon pilot. Zeta was made before 08th MS Team.

It's very much a Black and Gray setting.

Edited by Nikkolas on Feb 11th 2020 at 1:27:39 AM

Nope, trying to inject grayness into a narrative when one side started things off with stuff like gassing colonies and dropping them on Earth doesn't slide.

Heck, even in 0079 you've once again got a Zeon asshole about to destroy a colony.

Of course, neither 0079 nor 08th MS Team were nearly as bad as 0083 on this front.

Edited by M84 on Feb 11th 2020 at 5:29:42 PM

Tomino doesn't have to buy into your worldview. I'm telling you what the narrative says. The narrative never once presents the Federation as pure heroes and Zeon as pure evil.

Edited by Nikkolas on Feb 11th 2020 at 1:33:30 AM

Nope, even Tomino wasn't shy about depicting Zeon as based on the Axis. At least in the original OYW stuff, Zeon was always depicted as the much worse faction.

Yes they are worse. The Nazis being worse than Stalin does not make the Soviet Union suddenly good.

We are shown sympathetic and noble Zeon figures ranging from the Zabis like Garma all the way down to rando soldiers. There are good people who fight for the wrong side in all wars. It's important to remember this and not just think of your opponents as a monolithic soulless bloc of evil.

The Federation in the OYW wasn't as bad as the Soviet Union. It wouldn't be until the Titans were a thing that they sink to that level.

Also, you weren't even talking about the rank and file Zeon at first. You were jumping in to defend Degwin Zabi. The guy you even admitted had people murdered and created a police state.

Edited by M84 on Feb 11th 2020 at 5:41:39 PM

Not to mention, it took about... six years before the Federation government as a whole realised that the Titans were a really bad idea.

The Gryps Conflict between the AEUG/Karaba alliance (the latter of which consisted of a large chunk of disillusioned Federation soldiers) and the Titans in O087 was pretty much a wake-up call, especially with Haman's Axis Zeon on the rise.

And then the Federation surrendered to Neo Zeon, leaving the AEUG and Karaba to pick up the slack until they swanned in after the Axis civil war and took all the credit. And then a bunch of their armed forces had to mutiny en masse to stop Char's Axis drop after he bribed their leadership to look the other way. The Federation were the good guys in the OYW, but you can see why other writers might want to integrate that with Tomino's later depiction of them as corrupt, useless collaborators.

Yeah, well... there is one such thing as going overboard with it.

Personally I think the whitewashing is a combination of later writers who aren't as willing to call out Imperial Japan's bullshit as Tomino was Running the Asylum and people being more drawn to Zeon because they think their mobile suits are cooler.

Federation Mobile Suits barring the Gundams by contrast tend to look more boring and uniform.

Edited by M84 on Feb 11th 2020 at 7:18:38 PM

The 0083 manga by Mitsuru Kadoya kinda goes the opposite way. While it does depict the Federation as flawed, the narrative clearly sides with them over the Delaz Fleet, who are quite clearly portrayed as the villains.

Heck, in that manga, Kou even gets to give Gato a Shut Up, Hannibal! speech when Gato does the whole "hatred vs honor" speech.

It's good to know that those later writers have their priorities straight.

Honestly, I'd still prefer to be on the Federation because at least someone like Bright Noa is willing to call out the bullshit and act against it. Like that dogfight in the skies surrounding that Garuda with the Banshee and Unicorn.

Why do you think the leadership took their chance to discredit and defame Bright in Hathaway's Flash? Because he was a threat to the status quo.

Well, then, the Federation are fucking idiots, then.

Not idiots. They simply don't give a shit.

Yeah, Japan has a right-wing problem on par with the US's currently with how much they want their side to look good (they quite literally have textbooks edited to avoid talking about stuff like the Korean comfort women and how horrific the Japanese treatment of Chinese people were), and since Zeon was based on Imperial Japan it's no surprise they're being whitewashed.

Admittedly later works like Unicorn that came after stuff like the Zanscares and Cosmo Babylonia have been playing up the "Both Sides Have a Point but that doesn't excuse what Zeon has done" angle, but the damage has already been done and the Federation is constantly seen as incompetent and corrupt.

Edited by theLibrarian on Feb 11th 2020 at 2:09:15 PM

Yeah, Tomino was pretty in your face about how Zeon wasn't just Space Imperial Japan (as in the kind that lets other, hack writers whitewash away like all they did was give puppy dog kisses and cotton candy dreams) but fucking Space Nazis. Yanno, like how Gihren got compared to Hitler to his face by his own dad.

You know what, can I have a Wolfenstein/Gundam crossover fic that's basically "BJ Blazkowicz dismantles the entire Principality by himself and destroys dual chaingun Mecha Gihren?"

Zeon would be the sort of empire that Lelouch vi Britannia would dedicate his life to destroying.

Just imagine the nickname that would ensue from that crossover.

"The White Terror."

EDIT: ...I really hope that doesn't sound bad by itself.

Edited by G2BattleConvoy on Feb 11th 2020 at 11:42:33 AM

The White Terror seems like a more appropriate name for Suzaku, both given who he is and who he'd be fighting for (a 'White Terror' is, historically, a period of brutal anti-leftist repression, and Zeon are fash).

Oh, this again.

Gundam originally had an interesting mixture of Black-and-White Morality along with Gray-and-Grey Morality, which I do think that 08th carried that on but... To mixed results.

Because Zeon was always evil. Yes. There were people in Zeon who were respectable, but at no point was a Zeon victory posited as any kind of good thing.

08th MS Team does something similar, but more extreme. It does both-sides things pretty hardcore (making Gineas explicitly a rogue actor and lionizing Yuri using a nuke is bad) but it doesn't try to claim that Zeon is good, just that there are good and bad actors on each side. The Federation winning is absolutely a good thing. It's just framed as a shame that good people like Norris, Aina, etc. Are caught up with them.

Basically it still says Federation is a better institution than Zeon, even though it says that Federation personnel aren't better than Zeon soldiers which is... Yeah.

Still leagues ahead of Unicorn or Origin.

Well in Unicorn it wasn't so much the Federation as it was Anaheim Electronics.

And even in Unicorn Mineva Zabi said "The kind of thing you're aiming for at this point is just a reversal of the status quo and it won't solve anything at all, just perpetuate the cycle."

Edited by theLibrarian on Feb 11th 2020 at 6:35:25 AM

Yeah,and Anaheim Electronics was basically a puppet of a mostly-power-mad conspiring family clan.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean AE were being controlled like that for all the UC, that'd be dumb.

The problem with the "black and gray" interpretation of UC Gundam is that the Federation is such a light shade of gray compared to Zeon's such a dark shade of black that it's basically indistinguishable from "black and white". No, the Federation isn't perfect, but "imperfect" vs "basically space Nazis" is still very much black-and-white by any reasonable standard.

Basically all of the "gray" in the Federation in the original series is on the level of individuals. "This character who works for the Federation is a dick", in other words. Meanwhile, the reverse is true of Zeon: on an individual level, we meet some Zeon-aligned characters that are decent people instead of puppy-kicking monsters. But on the macro scale, Zeon is an fascist dictatorship launching a war of conquest and started that war by deliberately attacking civilian populations on the scale of killing billions, while the Federation is a legitimate (if flawed) democracy defending itself and its (remaining) citizens from said attack.

There's simply no comparison there. Zeon are the bad guys and the Federation are the good guys, even if some individual characters working for Zeon are nice people and some on the Federation side are mean.

Zeta is even more black and white than Mobile Suit Gundam is. Zeta doesn't even have any sympathetic characters on the "bad guy" sides. Every single person working for the Titans makes an active, deliberate choice to work for the bad guys, knowing and accepting that they're the bad guys. No one in Zeta is presented as a tragedy for finding themselves on the wrong side of the war through an accident of history, bad people end up fighting for the Titans and good people end up fighting for the AEUG, no exceptions. While people generally count the actions of the Titans against the Federation, the Titans are actively trying to overthrown and replace the Federation, so I don't really consider that a reasonable position. It's a civil war, and the Titans are fighting against the Federation.

ZZ is the first time it gets even a little fuzzy, and that's mostly because the Federation is basically a nonentity for the majority of the series. The only time the Federation appears at all is a pair of Les Collaborateurs schmoozing with Neo Zeon members at a party in Zeon-occupied territory, and when they roll in as The Cavalry at the very end of the series but Judau is at an emotional low point and just so fucking Done With This Shit in general that he's more pissed at them for not getting there sooner than anything else. It's certainly the least flattering picture we see of the Federation, but they were just wiped out by a civil war in Zeta and we get no viewpoint into what they're doing in the meantime, while they're rebuilding their forces from scratch offscreen.

In CCA, the Federation's only sin is not realizing that Char is basically planning a murder-suicide rather than trying to establish his own little fiefdom. They sell Axis to Char because they think he's going to set up a hippie Newtype commune in it and that will end the war without any further fighting — and he's going to pay them to do it, as a bonus. They don't realize that he's going to asteroid-bomb Earth with it (going completely against the teachings of Zeon Deikun, who he professes to follow) and immediately get the entirety of the EFSF to put his head on a pike. The only reason it seems stupid to the audience is because we're watching over Amuro's shoulder and Amuro has spooky newtype hax to know that Char is up to no good. My only real beef with the Federation in CCA is that apparently just a part of Char's fleet is enough to overwhelm and annihilate the entire Luna 2 garrison that was there to accept their surrender, which strikes me as being both stupid and unlikely (but narratively necessary).

All told, in Tomino-directed stuff, the Federation's besetting sin is incompetence rather than malice — and that mostly because if they were able to deal with the threat du jour on their own, there wouldn't be anything for the protagonists to do. But "the Federation keeps getting their ass kicked" is a very different thing than "the Federation is morally gray, if not as bad as Zeon".

I still think it boils down in part to Federation Mobile Suits overall not being as cool as Zeon Mobile Suits.

The funny thing is that Zeon's constant push for a new Mobile Suit that would win the OYW for them was a factor in their defeat. They spent too much time and resources trying out new prototype Mobile Suits and Mobile Armors so that by the time they came up with the Gelgoog, it was too late.

Probably didn't help that their brand new Mobile Armors kept getting demolished by Gundams before they could really do anything.

Reminds me of the Arthur C. Clarke short story "Superiority".

Edited by M84 on Feb 11th 2020 at 10:14:11 PM