Gundam Is Stuck With The Colony Drop
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 11 พ.ย. 2022
- You could say the same about Star Wars
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Off the Brigador OST
IDK where I found those MSPaint Mario pictures but I didn't draw them
Char Amogus by dynamelicious on Reddit - ภาพยนตร์และแอนิเมชัน
I love how, a year later, I continue to get comments to the effect of "How could you miss this, it's so obvious, the only possible interpretation is [completely different interpretation from the last person who commented]"
this is the massive hole in uc for me and why i just couldnt get into it and something found very weird about uc fans.
even in a unironic way they seem to think zeon could still be good guys after the colony drop personal freedom at the cost of everyone else.
That why i prefer ad stella, though i still think it was cut too shot to be truly satifying beyond the persone staries of wfm
People still like the Galactic Empire even though they blew up Alderaan, and worse. Everything UC Gundam related runs downstream of Star Wars.
@@fatjellyfish9478 Which in a weird way if you look at it, it seems like a gundam plot point.
@@fatjellyfish9478 i mean its about "there are good and bad guys at both sides". also, the "i couldn't get into it", can i assume that u didn't even watch uc?
@@engokupengu1771 Given that the person is saying 'good guys' to describe someone in Gundam, they probably never watched it. The terms 'good guys' and 'bad guys' are extremely subjective and dependent on the faction using them. Also understand that someone can be a hero without being a 'good guy'.
From the Federation's standpoint, Operation British was a terrible atrocity. From an outsider's standpoint, its execution has no justification. But from Zeon's standpoint, it was a counterattack and massively provoked.
Honestly, it will be more interesting if after the colony drop there is a faction inside Zeon that thinks "are we the bad guys?" and start plotting some Operation Valkyrie.
there is a manga about that (also based on Valkyrie), and it's called Mobile Suit Gundam: The Plot to Assassinate Gihren
They’re known as valkyrie squad if I’m not mistaken
@@rhynchocephalian I don't know what I hate more, how fake that sounds or how real it actually is despite sounding so fake
@@ToxicAtom it really do be like that sometimes
That's essentially what happened with the Cima fleet, although they didn't seem to take action until many years later
While Ramba Ral is definitely the poster boy for a “good” Zeon soldier, even in his depiction in Gundam the Origin. I think that Cima Garahau from the OVA Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory presents a more interesting and nuanced look at a Zeonic soldier who was haunted by Zeon’s crimes.
While we don’t see much of it the OVA where Cima makes her debut, supplementary materials, such as the Audio Drama Mobile Suit Gundam 0083: Stardust Memory The Mayfly of Space and its subsequent sequel Mayfly of Space 2 as well as the video game Gihren’s Greed, sheds a lot of light on her career during the One Year War.
During the opening months of the war, Cima was one of the pilots involved with the toxic gas attacks on Federation aligned colonies. According to the Mayfly of Space, the experience of watching an entire colony full of not only soldiers but civilians die at her hands deeply traumatized her for years to come. In Gihren’s Greed, it is also implied that Cima and her unit were told that the canisters they launched into the colonies contained sleeping gas and they were only told that it was nerve gas afterwards.
Adding onto that, Cima and her unit’s home colony of Mahal was the one designated to be converted into the giant colony laser Gihren used towards the end of the One Year War. The construction of the laser necessitated the gutting of the Mahal and the forced displacement of all its residents, making her, her soldiers, and their families homeless.
To cap all of this off, Mayfly of Space 2 reveals that after the Battle of A Baoa Qu which marked the last major engagement of the One Year War, Cima’s superiors forbid her from joining the Zeon remnants at Axis, specifically, because of her past war crimes would bring disgrace to their cause. Crimes, I might add, that those same superiors who had gained amnesty as part of the Axis fleet had ordered her and her men to do and possibly even deceived them into doing.
Needless to say, the idea of surrendering to the Federation at the end of the war wasn’t appealing either. As part of the armistice agreement, Cima’s unit would have to surrender their ships which had essentially become the only home they had left not to mention the possibility of a post-war trial, which given the nature of the Federation would likely have been a kangaroo court at best.
For the next three years, Cima and her unit are forced to become pirates and mercenaries just to survive and overall pariahs even among the other Zeon remnants, such as the Delaz fleet whose plans involve nuking a significant portion of the Federation’s space fleet and dropping ANOTHER colony onto Earth.
This leads us back to Cima’s depiction in the OVA proper as a bitter, cynical woman who is completely disinterested and even contemptuous of idealogues, like Dalez or Gato, and cares only for herself and her crew because at this point she knows no one else will.
Your summary also explains why Cima and her subordinates stayed with Zeon through the end of the OYW and didn't attempt revenge until years later. As war criminals, they couldn't go to the Federation for help unless someone within the Federation offered them amnesty, which, as we know, took four years to happen. After the incident, they likely decided to remain in service until they could figure out what to do next, but shortly after, their home was taken from them when Gihren built the colony laser. At this point, they had little choice but to stay in service. Besides, by doing so, they were at least able to acquire arms, which they would need in order to even attempt a coup d'etat against a defeated Zeon, let alone a victorious Zeon.
The greatest theme of Universal Century is summed up completely in five words: And then, it got worse…
At least, 0083's manga let Cima and Gato alive after the event.
@@suthiraksb That better be a fake Gato, Kou dropped that capsule from like a mile up, and nobody is putting parachutes on an escape pod intended for a space use only mobile armor.
Then again Gato finally dying to Monsha of all people would be absolutely fucking hilarious.
Probably the best explanation of Cima I've ever seen. Shame the OVA left a lot of her story out the way they did.
The good old colony drop never gets old!
Just like the colonists that were on it!
@@notapuma Zeon used Colony Drop against Federation.
It was NOT EFFECTIVE. Federation is now preparing to use WHITE DEVIL in retaliation. Oh god... IT'S A GUNDAM!!!
"They can do a few war crimes, as a treat :)"
I fucking died.
I always found origin's depiction of the colony drop being the sole reason of half of all life on earth being wiped out strange, simply cause I always felt like the original series implied that it was the fighting as whole that did it not to mention the losses totalling both sides in space and on earth. Still though I think it seems like an obvious litmus test for someones alignment in the following series. Just imagine someone in Zeta going around the AEUG crew asking their opinions on it. You'd have the converted feddies like Bright and Emma staunchly opposing it, a few guys playing it down with a "both sides committed war crimes" here and there all the while Lt. Quattro conveniently needs to leave the room.
they show a lot of the devastation the colony drop left behind in stardust, im confused about origin tho, is it its own timeline ?
I think later on it's established that it's not so much that half the population was killed immediately, as half of the population was "unaccounted for" after the drop, so the actual death toll wasn't quite that high, and much of those who did die (which was still hundreds of millions, though remember Earth was already depopulated by this point so it would've had a couple billion inhabitants at most, probably less) died as a result of famine, disease and breakdown in social order rather than directly from the debris, though that alone did kill many millions.
Yeah the stated energy of the impacts aren't even close to the Chixculub Impactor, aka Dino Killer, which is closer to how big it'd need to be.
you should watch MS IGLOO if you havent. the first thing the show does, is present zeon soldiers being appaled by the decision of droping the colony. its not even the biggest focus of that episode, but it goes to show how the soldiers reacted to it. and how insane it sounded to most of them.
Didn’t they also use a ton of chemical weapons, maybe even nukes
The colony drop is a perfect example of when is fighting back too much, how far can we go before we lose our base humanity, our hearts and souls
I agree! In fact I’m pretty sure the entire population of Australia was completely wiped out. Like imagine if Zeon Zum Daikun saw everything….
I'd have to kinda disagree. I'm thinking of Gundam SEED and how that war ended with Earth trying to nuke every colony from the sky, and the Spacer leader building a Death Star in all but name with which to kill EVERYONE.
@@seanbigay1042 but even that came later the colony drop was as established at the start of Gundam's existence
@@seanbigay1042 Rau's plan. He's the product of humanity's pursuit of progress afterall. He's the one who gives the N-Jammer Canceller data to EA, all part of his grand scheme of I hate the world and what it done to me so I wanna burn it down with me. Vengeance and cycles of violence are some of the core themes in SEED. The Coordinators, they achieved in making so many things that can help humanity to move beyond the Solar System but what did they get in return? Discriminated, shot, stabbed, lynched and any other methods of murder. Even the oppressed can commit the very same level of atrocities as their oppressor should they're pushed beyond their limits. An eye for an eye, this is how we live since we start to exist on this rock. Bloody Valentine has no winner, even when armistice was achieved. Screw that, it was more like a ceasefire to me.
@@itszeronizer597I don't know what is the population size of Oz during the colony drop in UC. But I'd reckon a large proportion of population in New South Wales (One of 5 states in Australia, where Sydney is located near the coastal waters) are wiped out.
That includes the whole entire region of urban and suburban areas near Sydney and Canberra all the way down to the boarder between New South Wales and Victoria.
Given that it is stated the impact crater is 500km wide in operation star dust.
I really dislike the colony drop being so important in terms of a colossal loss of life. Without The Origin's context the Colony drop is depicted as basically an extremely flashy but ultimately anemic event. Equal parts an insanely herculean and monstrous effort to "end the war" that went bad and accomplished nothing more than an extra bad nuke strike given the context of the original series depiction of the war. The original prologue crawl mentions "both sides had lost half of their respective populations", with supplemental lore stuff like the battle of Loum and the Antarctic Treaty, I'd always assumed that the opening couple months of the war are a no holds barred nuke slinging contest that neither side could sustain, thus they agree to scale shit down a bit. If the colony drop was so destructive as to kill half the population of earth, there would be no quarter from the Feddies even in victory, and the Titans existence would be legitimized pretty concretely. There'd be no need for Stardust, because the Titans would likely exist before it and they'd have laid waste to Axis and any other Zeon holdouts.
This exactly! That was my assumption too. Focusing all of that loss of life in a single event was weird. Wars can have incredible loos of life, but seldom in a single blow. It comes in bits and ads up. In this context, going for a treaty once you realize you can't keep up with nuclear slinging makes a lot of sense.
I think the idea is they've exhausted so much resources by the end of Ao Ba Quo they can't just send a full power force out into the outer regions and destroy axis. And there were multiple zeon hunting units even before the Titans were formed.
the original series never claimed the half dead figure was entirely the colony drop wtf
It isn't the first time we've seen such cataclysmic events occur in our history that didn't end in the utter extinction of one side.
This is just scaled up to fit the universe. It's a flashy metaphor for nuclear weapons essentially. A giant boom and then decades of death afterwards because how it taints the earth.
Heads up: Don't talk to Yopium Trader. There's something wrong with this guy.
The Colony Drop amongst other reasons is why I always preach that you should view every Gundam work (especially those in the UC) within their original context, and ignore timeline chronology, retcons and explanations provided by supplementary material, which I think the fandom does a bit too much. When I first watched MSG, I had viewed the Colony Drop as simply a nondescript incident that the show used to set the tone for the scale and horror of the conflict, rather than the inciting incident that kicked it off.
The true culprits of the colony drop in Australia is most likely Australian descendents of the Survivors of the Emu war. Its scarry to think what Emus can do with mobile suits.
Newtype emus would wipe out humanity in a heartbeat.
@@maxspecs Thats some extinction level event right there.
There was an Aussie population in Zeon, Johnny Ridden's parents were Aussies.
Heads up: Don't talk to Yopium Trader. There's something wrong with this guy.
@@seanbigay1042 What's wrong is that people don't recognize the need for population equilibrium. Saint Thomas Malthus did not die for this.
I think it's never been *quite* articulated in-series, but for me free driving conflict of the Universal Century is precisely that Operation British taints everything. The Federation is routinely shown to be callous, greedy and cruel, but for the generation until Hathaway, the idea of Spacenoid independence is inextricably tied to the cruel, insane ideology of Zeon. That, more than brute force, is what keeps the Federation alive: the deep-seated belief of so many otherwise decent people that no matter how suffocating it is, it's still kinder than the alternative.
Honestly I'd love to see spacenoid independence groups turn on Zeon calling them out for turning the Federafion actively against this idea.
Make it clear that Zeon was approaching to getting everything it needed for independence and then went on its tantrum while the spacenoids, many of whom looked up to Zeon (the man) had their chances dashed and they knew it.
Thus all they can do is rage at the storm at Zeons greed and it would give further context as to why so many colonies supported the Federation, they didn't like their oppressors but they hated what Zeon had done to the conception of Spacenoid independence
Biggest critique is that a lot of your issues are addressed in supplemental materiel... that are rarely, if ever, avaiable outside Japan. A disturbingly large amount of Zeon spec op units existed that were tasked with straight up Extinction Level Event war crimes. Then there was the general warcimes... Eh, at least the UC isn't as stupid as SEED, where we straight up have an entire mobile suit dedicated to slaughtering civilians en masse... and I'm not even counting the nukes!
The only good thing to come from seed was the mech designs.
But yeah Japan has a tendency to put their own history of the warcrimes they committed in WWII in their media
SEED didn't just stop at the Slaughter Dagger, no. They created an entire division whose job was to go around and...kill civilians? And this somehow warrants 3 gundams in said division? And somehow all 3 gundams died in the stupidest way (destroyed by grunts due to poor strategy, destroyed by civilian transport suits and destroyed by a suit that doesnt even have any weapons)
Sounds like this kind of genocidal plots could make more sense in the CE, both main factions do horrible things to each other throughout both Seed and Destiny (where it gets worse ofc), while as this video argues the colony drop in 0079 seems to produce some unreasonable effects. Btw I never thought of it this way and it's very true
I can't think of anything on extinction level aside from the virus in Rise From The Ashes...
Heads up: Don't talk to Yopium Trader. There's something wrong with this guy.
the inanity of Gundam politics has always been summed up best by:
"WAR BAD...
WOAH COOL ROBOT!"
@@notapuma you dont have to go as far as full on pacifism (the idea that violence is NEVER acceptable, even in self defense); as a simple critique of militarism (war for glory and conquest) shows like gundam fail simply because war is shown as FUCKING COOL. unfortunately its hard to tell real antimilitaristic stories in fiction because 1: the audience really wants to see cool action, and 2: war actually is fucking cool in lots of ways when you're in it. the best example of real antimilitaristic anime i can think of would be something like barefoot gen or grave of the fireflies which have no action and simply show the suffering of the innocent victims
@@notapumai would argue that the changing attitude towards violent conquest in war is one way human society has objectively "progressed" for the better over the past 10000 years. it used to be (1000-2000 years ago) that killing other people and taking their stuff for no reason other than you want what they have, was seen as not just OK, but the height of human achievement. over the past couple thousand years we've slowly moved away from that and needed to find clever excuses for it (religion, ideology, etc), to the point where today, war for conquest without legitimate self defense casus belli is almost universally scorned. which imo is a good thing. but that still doesnt solve the problem that, the ability to exert violent dominance over other people is still a powerful driving force in the human psyche.
@@notapumaim not even sure what youre arguing to be honest and i think you're very confused. my point is that human culture and society has progressed to the point that naked aggression and pure conquest is no longer acceptable, but the lure of power and violence being used to dominate and subjugate other people still has a very strong hold on the human mind. Which is why we have this somewhat schizo take of the nature of violence in our media.
to the first point, we see this arc in history where as societies become more advanced the idea of using naked violence becomes less acceptable without a valid reason. evidence from pre agricultural warrior societies such as various african, celtic, and north american tribes, shows that they highly revered warriors who were skilled at raiding and pillaging, and this was simply accepted. "we want your cattle, slaves, etc" and that was the only justification needed. early mesopotamian cultures around 10,000 to 5,000 BC revered violence and built grand murals to commemorate the brutality of their conquest. things like bragging about building literal giant pyramids of skulls were common in this era. things ahd changed in the Roman era circa 500BC, but you are dead wrong to think there wasnt an economic motivation for Roman conquest (it was their primary motivation, not directly through looting and pillaging, but through tribute paid to empire by the conquered province). But even Rome had to cloak their conquest in some kind of "legitimacy" excuse and get the approval of the senate, and this often took the form of some claim of "self defense," whether that claim was legitimate or not doesnt matter. Julius Caesar was nearly stripped of power for his unauthorized conquest of Gaul, which is what kicked off his rebellion and civil war. follow this thread to the medieval era and the christian states of europe were de facto banned from warring with each other due to their shared religion. yet they still warred with each other constantly, through manufacturing various casus belli such as inherited claims to land titles. but they couldnt simply say "i want your land" and declare war lest they branded as apostates and excommunicated. now follow this thread to the modern era and lets take for example the modern russian war with ukraine. whatever you opinion on it, the fact is Russia is making a claim to the territory based on their traditional rights and sovereignty to the land. they are not simply invading without an excuse. all modern war is conducted with strict parameters about the "legitimacy" of the war, or it suffers near universal condemnation from the international community (as we see in the Russia/ukraine conflict, becuase the world as a whole does not accept the validity of russia excuse for the aggression).
of course there are always outliers such as viking raids of the 9th and 10th century, piracy, etc, but we are talking about broad strokes of history here, not treating the entirety of humanity as a uniform block.
you are conflating several things by saying "war" in general without referring to which perspective you are speaking about. of course there are many examples of war from the perspective of the attacked side which are legitimate cases of self defense to anyone but a staunch pacifist. and i am not saying that the urge to violence has been eradicated from humanity, in fact the opposite. but we are dealing with this tension where we want to see "our side" win and beat up and kill the "bad guys" because we are humans and violent by nature, but our civilized morals tell us this is wrong. this causes tension and problems. would anyone today argue that the invasion of iraq by the US in 2003 was justified? when we know that the entire justification for the war was not only false but completely fabricated? very few. but at the time, it was very common to support the invasion (even though there was a lot of dissent).
@@hiramesensei3112 By full pacifism, do you absolute pacifism? Because I tend to view UC Gundam advocating for a form of conditional pacifism by the time we get to ZZ Gundam. But then again, one of the reasons the anti-war messages is lost on the audience in my view, is because no one really talks about how Gundam implies that war is really just an institution of state power, and that ideologies such as fascism and capitalism as represented by the Zeon and the Federation respectively, seek such power. Ergo, both fascism and capitalism are the exact same ideology. The best way philosopher Paul Feyerabend summed up war was this:
"In war, totalitarianism has free reign"--Science in a Free Society.
As someone who is not an avid lore fiend for Gundam and has only really built the funny plastic models, everything I learn about Zeon is just a psychological haymaker. I just liked the Zaku designs and now I’m aware of the war crimes.
The war crimes are the spice that adds flavor
Also Norris Packard (08th MS Team) is still the best mech pilot ever, of all time.
@@lordfrostwind3151 absolutely. I’ve only watched the first season of IBO and the 08th MS Team, but Norris was cool as hell. I was gifted parts of his MG Gouf Custom and it’s sits pridefully on my shelf, sword in hand.
@@lordfrostwind3151 I think the only competition he might have is Lucrezia Noin, thanks to her performance in a repainted Taurus during Endless Waltz. Even if it wasn't alone as Norris's engagement with the 08th MS Team was, the unit performance gap was and numbers disadvantage was huge.
In an Interview, Yas talks about the Origin project and his ideal to correct the record in terms of how people see Gundam over the years. The re-affirmation of Zeon's villany is one of the main objectives. The same interview talks about the concept of Newtypes being a rally point in a real life terrorist plot in the late 90s in Japan.
IDK, that seems to take away implications that fascism and capitalism are the same ideology, insofar as they are both seeking power; the way they seek power is through war, an institution and extension of state power.
It's interesting to look at this through both the lens of Japan as an axis power, something they never really moved past, and the lens of America having nuked Japan and then going on to be a cultural powerhouse that depicted themselves overwhelmingly as the good guys in movies and television that got exported to Japan.
The Japanese empire is ontologically evil. No ifs ands or buts
Tomino has directly stated on a multiple of occasions that Zeon was primarily inspired by imperial Japan, but ok.
I also tend to view Zeon as the Confederate States of America, which makes sense if you view the remnants of Zeon as the KKK.
I think the issue is that people (particularly the suits) cling to the UC too tightly. Every addition to the One-Year War or the main timeline creates a small plot hole, one little mistake where things don't line up or an interpretation of a character doesn't match up. Bandai wants Gundams and Zakus, by any means necessary. Fans want a good story that makes sense. These goals don't intersect perfectly at times, and Bandai and the writers need to learn how to handle that.
I think we're hitting that "full shelf" point for early/mid UC, where we've added so many side stories and supplementary materials it's ridiculous to add any more, the bloat is obvious and adding anymore lacks believability or requires throwing out older material, which isn't good either. Stuff like Origin and Thunderbolt at the least can get away with it since they are supposed to take place in their own version of things, Thunderbolt outright is doing its own take on Zeta Gundam now.
I agree but it also feels like the OYW is the only part of the UC timeline that feels fully realized as a conflict as opposed to a few main characters swirling around.
This is kind of what my next video will be about
Heads up: Don't talk to Yopium Trader. There's something wrong with this guy.
@@seanbigay1042 Civilians are a spook. I'm a Red Guard, and you're starting to look like a sparrow.
i feel like the best side story for UC are MS IGLOO and War in the Pocket. as both add to show zeon's side. how desperate it had become as the war progressed. but more importantly, how the soldiers themselves acted, even though they may no agree with what needed to be done.
hell, one of the first things we see in MS Igloo is the cast commenting on how absurd the operation british is. and how it's something that shouldnt happen.
Always felt to me like it was some small radical faction that did the drop, and then the rest of Zeon was "in for a penny, in for a pound" whether they agreed with it or not. There was no reconciling with the Federation from the start, so an individual acting as a moderate or anti-war would have just been seen as suspicious spy/potential traitor.
Even if it wasn't "in for a penny, in for a pound" we're dealing with hardcore fascists. We see how Zeon troops are conditioned and programmed to feel that every action by the Earth Federation is a slap in the face to spacenoid autonomy. The lead up to 0079 wasn't quick, and there were plenty of people who probably became wholly and completely disillusioned with the Earth Federation.
AND if we look back to our own history of fascists we see how much control of the media can mean that the average everyday citizen of Zeon may not know just how evil their government is. Truthfully I don't even think it's much of a stretch to think that the Zeon soldiers would decide that *one* colony drop to end the war as quick as possible isn't a bad idea. If it had worked, if they had destroyed Jaburo and the colony hadn't been wrecked before it entered the atmosphere then the scale of the damage may actually have been *far* less. But the EF fought back (understandably) and nuked their own colony to dry and stop it. In doing so they made the scale of destruction significantly higher. The plan of Operation British wasn't to kill half the Earths population. It was to drop an armor piercing multi-megaton "bomb" on Jaburo and decapitate the EF. Sure, it would have caused widespread ecological damage, but nowhere near what ended up happening.
I really, honestly, believe that making average, Feddie disillusioned grunts okay with the sacrifice of one colony is not a hard thing to believe at all. The greater good and all that. One evil for endless good or something like that.
But Char, on the otherhand, is a myopically focused psychopath bent on killing the Zabis and literally anyone or anything in his way. Char is a bad guy with believable motivations but still unrepentantly bad. He also happened to be one of the greatest Feddie allies in Zeon whether he wanted to or not by killing Kycillia and helping to kill Garma (who really wasn't all *that* bad all things considered).
It's really unfortunate that the depiction of Zeon soldiers very rarely lingers on their thoughts about the colony drops. Usually they just go "ah that fucking thing again? What, so we did a little trolling. Everyone does an oopsie every now and again!" It almost feels like every Zeek that you encounter in Gundam has never left Side 3. The weight of what their nation did doesnt seem to register, even when theyre looking right at it. Which is unfortunate. It's even more unfortunate because it really holds back the idea that there IS a problem with the Federation. They actually ARE bad and someone SHOULD be trying to at the very least break the stranglehold that the Federation has on the Earth Sphere. But that gets cheapened when literally every faction that touts this ideal is also totally ok with mass genocide as their ticket to victory.
you should watch MS IGLOO, this is one of the things things that happen in the series, and we see the soldiers side, how they dont agree with it, but, the orders were given, and they should be followed.
i don't recall hearing my parents or grandparents or boomer reminesece or complain or bellyache at all about america's nuking of japan. we don't have that kind of societal empathy, we are apathetic to things distant from us, was there anti japanese sentiment during ww2 and the aftermath years? yes. were there protests? yes. but did it shape our society in such a way that we NEEDED to have the average person be dogmatically pro or against such action? no. life moves on and nearly every person i know alive during those years just chalked it up to something that was inevitable, and maybe a bit too extreme.
"oopsie we did a little warcrime, but we helped make japans economy bigger and better than it was before so its kind of okay yknow?"
you can plug and play this EXACT rhetoric into gundam with out even changing a word and it works
@@CoffeeKitty. the difference here is sheer scale and aftermath. Humanity’s population was cut in HALF by the colony drops. Nations worth of people, gone in a matter of months. We’re not talking about a couple big bombs hitting a couple of big cities. We’re talking about near-apocalyptic levels of devastation. What zeon did was on par with, if not worse than, the holocaust in terms of sheer annihilation.
@@spicylemons490 Probably for the most part because they completely missed their mark. The idea was to end the war right then and there, but the federation didn't give up like they had hoped.
@@spicylemons490 dont forget that zeon also nuked dozens of colonies in the first hour of the war, without even care if they would side with them or not
I started a rewatch of Stardust Memories. In the first episode, they say that the impact in Australia left a crater 500 km wide and released an estimated 60,000 megatons. For reference, the largest impact crater on earth is 300 km at widest. It's absolutely insane.
That was something I realized after watching The Origin series, Gundam has a villain problem. The franchise wants to tell gritty war stories but seem to think the bad guys cannot be sympathetic and must do evil mustache twirling behavior.
This happens in their other series as well, in Gundam Seed first we have ZAFT soldiers doing bad things because they're the bad guys but then we have the Earth Forces doing bad things because now they are the bad guys of the plot.
They seem to repeat this pattern in any of their series that are trying to tell gritty war stories.
The no one's the bad guy so everyone does bad things problem, you still have to realise doing bad things makes you the bad guy even if you get a redemption arc or the other side is equally bad. Being a part of that faction (even if that character has good traits) makes them complicit in those actions.
Practically no one in Zeon is a moustache-twirling villain except for Gihren Zabi. Not even Degwin Zabi, the man responsible for killing Zeon Zum Deikun and starting the war, was into Gihren's genocide. We can see that in Origin. Of course, all of the Zabis are complicit in Gihren's crimes, partly because they're high on power and partly because they're afraid of opposing Gihren. That's how bad guys become bad guys in many cases. Seems plenty realistic to me.
@@cyberspectre8675 None of that matters, If you support or are a part of a group that commits war crimes you are complicit. Anything you do directly continues that groups reign of destruction.
@@seawind930 It matters because it shows that "normal" people can be turned into bad people without them even fully realizing it. That's an effect of war.
@@cyberspectre8675 In the Grand scheme, no it doesn't those people support that cause whether knowingly or not. It stains their people's character and takes them away from being "normal" they are now from a faction that has committed war crimes. Even if they are a nice person or are considerate to their own people they are stained with the crimes committed by their leaders and it automatically damns them unless they take step against that faction. There are no "normal" people after such an action.
I wonder how much of this is a result of the serial escalation of atrocities that the series had portrayed over the years. Colony drop in 0079 is shocking, but such actions lose their power after it happens again in later series such as ZZ and CCA (and 0083). With this in mind, I wonder then if even the creators have been affected by this to the point where they forget that the original should elicit a wider range of reactions compared to later occurrences.
i mean, they altered the original colony drop in origins to not just be the colony falling onto one city, but the colony breaking apart and falling onto two cities and causing a massive tsunami, killing half of earth's population, and also the entire colony was gassed beforehand
@@TheRyderShotgunn the claim was that the gas was mercy. Better to die from gas than to burn up in reentry. Likely why so many soldiers felt little remorse, they saw it as a small sacrifice to end a brutal war. No different than when America nuked japan. Yes there were civilians and yes it was horrific, but the potential hundreds of millions more deaths would be even more horrific, you know?
I mean in the real world people aren't that torn up about things their nations do.
Look at Hiroshima. Most Americans would say it was the right choice even now, that they were at war, that the other side needed to be brought to heel, that they were worse.
I imagine Zeon blamed the Federation for the colony drop killing half of Earth, they would say "Well we intended to drop the colony precisely on Jaburo, but then the Feddie's shot at it and it fell off course." With regards to the Nerve Gas they'd likely say "It was a mercy rather than slowly cooking during reentry, and they couldn't let them leave due to operational security or some such."
People are detached from the crimes done in their name, they can rationalize quite a bit away if their is spite or hatred in their hearts.
And the conflict between Zeon and the Federation DOES become intractable, as evidenced by a new Zeonic or Gryps or some such war happening basically every 4-5 years with light skirmishing happening CONSTANTLY.
There's something to this, but I can't exactly take it for granted that this will be the characters reactions to the point that I will assume as much without explication.
Nevermind that the Colony Drop involves a substantial difference in scale from the aforementioned, and there isn't really the evidence of the kind of extended bitter conflict that primes people to accept something like that. There seems to be only like a generation of estrangement between Earth and Zeon and no apparent cultural or ethnic barrier, it isn't unprecedented but it's difficult to imagine such a dramatic othering. Earth is the center of the Zeon ideology and thought after all, as we see with guys like M'Quve.
@@TheBellman I mean you don't need a massive linguistic, cultural, or ethnic barrier for bitterness and hatred. Look at the wars in Germany that followed the Protestant Reformation (a massive event that also took only really a generation) the conflict between Loyalists and Patriots in the American Revolution, or the excesses that followed the October revolution in Russia.
Historically the most bitter wars have been Civil Wars, where usually both sides are of similar culture, language and so on.
So it is possible but they probably could have shown it better. I am really liking what they're doing now in Witch from Mercury at how they're portraying the conflict between the Earthians and Spacians, resentment simmering below the surface, waiting to be unleashed.
As an aside, I often hear people bring up the atomic bombing of Japan and if it was justified, but something that is often overlooked is if the U.S. had opted not to use atomic weapons and just continued to use conventional bombs to force Japan to surrender, we likely would have killed MORE people that way than the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
@@AVClarke It's very similar to Captain Mattias Torres's idea in Ace Combat 7 with the 10 million relief plan, which spoilers for a 3 year old DLC was to drop a nuke on the Osean Capital killing 1 million people in order to force an end to the Lighthouse War which he thought would claim 10 million lives if left to wage on and on.
This is likely the rationalization many rank and file in Zeon had when carrying out Operation British, they sacrifice the lives of those in one colony and one region on Earth to prevent a protracted conflict that would claim even more lives in total.
It really is the classic use of WMDs argument, that you use a terrifying weapon of immense destructive power in the hope that the show of force would end the conflict early. Now I'm not going to say whether that's right or not, many others much smarter than I have spilled oceans of ink on that debate, what I am saying though is that the Colony Drop made a kind of sense and even though it was horrifying does not make it impossible to empathize with individual Zeon characters as they are portrayed in various media and series. Note though that empathizing and understanding characters or figures does not mean that you agree with them or their actions.
@@michaelthayer5351 One of my favorite characters from another series Legends of the Galactic Heroes made a similar decision. Without too many spoilers. A character is described as very utilitarian and brutally so. Instead of preventing an enemy from using nuclear arms on a rebelling populous. His commanding officer and leader wants to immediately prevent this from occurring. However this character instead attempts to persuade his commander into letting it happen and use the situation for propaganda to end the civil war more quickly. When he fails to convince him fully, he lies about the timeframe of the nuclear strike and by the time his commander comes to a decision its already been done. The character I've been referring to also sent scout's to record the whole event and sent a feed to the empire. In essence he made the decision to sacrifice 2 million civilians in order to save the lives of 10 million soldiers in a drawn out conflict. All while helping his commander rise in favor. I'm trying to vague about the characters since I want to avoid spoilers.
4:00 well Jaburo wasn't just the HQ, it also housed massive manufacturing complexes that built most of the ships and mobile suits the Federation used during the OYW. Without it, they definitely wouldn't have won.
The feddies wouldnt have won. But neither would Zeon.
A federation fleet was poised to take out side 3 with nukes. Everything zeon had was at Loum. Literally nothing could stop them. They turned back to save their comrades. However if Zeon had decapitated high command they would have followed through with their mission
@@notapuma
1. Sci-fi. Nukes work in space in Gundam. See: 083 and CCA.
2. They would have been pincered by the federation counter attack.
3. Nothing. Hence MAD. However without a homeland zeon would run out of steam long before the federation.
@@notapuma the nukes in UC do work in space cause half of all the space coloies were nuked by Zeon in the first hours of the war. sides 4 and 5 were completely destroyed and sides 1 and 2 escaped to a less
The Zeon's actions in Origin should have brought about the vaporization of their colony and a highly prejudiced extermination of ANYTHING related to them. At the very least Zeon should have had internal conflict over the colony drop, perhaps even being destroyed from the inside-out by that action.
We are talking about a setting that is far enough in the future that, when prompted, Gihren Zabi, presumably a well-educated man, needed a moment to recall who Hitler was. The fascist imagery is, externally, obvious "Bad guy baiting" but in-universe could simply be a symptom of the passage of time, IE it's been so long that people have simply forgotten who the N@zis were.
And the contrasting between the affable and upright Zeon characters to the horror of the colony drop could, in turn, be emblematic of society's (at the time 0079 was being made) venerating of German officers and military leaders such as Field Marshal Rommel and the Myth of the "Clean Wehrmacht," the falsehood that it was the SS and Nazi party committing the war crimes while the regular German army fought a "clean" war, while the Origin series is a product of more modern research and evaluation, which has proven unequivocally that the "regular" German army was up to its eyeballs in war crimes and innocent blood, and most of their generals didn't really care.
The problem is like you said, explaining the Colony Drop but then not making the response be in kind, be from any of the sides.
Like theres stories where one side wants to annihilate the other for a simple disagreement over "is transhumanism Based or Cringe"
the Earth military did respond in kind eventually, and the repercussions of it play out in the sequel series to Gundam, Zeta Gundam-the Colony 30 incident, which while not a drop, also involved the gassing & murder of an entire colony
after the events of Gundam (in-universe, the One Year War) & the Delaz Conflict depicted in 0083, the Federation established a largely autonomous force to quell & stamp out any remaining Zeon sentiment & agents-however, they ended up just as fascist & authoritarian, and commited plenty of war/humanitarian crimes of their own
they would ultimately become the main antagonist faction of the Zeta series (aside from a revived Zeon), with their actions spurring some colonists & disgruntled earthnoids & ex-Federation military personnel to form the Anti-Earth Union Group (AEUG), with the intent to expose & defeat the Titans
The Federation literally deployed mass indiscriminate nuclear warfare in response.
@@rhynchocephalian I really can't imagine the general population of the Earth Federation having any problem with the slaughter of Zeon civilians, the same way Britain had no problem bombing Dresden in WW2
@@GonnaDieNever well, they did when it was revealed to the world during the Day of Dakar speech given in Zeta-the exposing of the Colony 30 incident made the Federation fully disown and disavow the Titans, and the Federation forces (EFSF & EFGF) joined the AEUG and Karaba, respectively, in the fight against the Titans (and later a resurgent Neo Zeon under the leadership of Haman Karn)
perhaps the Federation's decision can be viewed cynically, only joining the fight after immense pressure and public opinion was swung-then again, the Titans were actively air-raiding the city where the summit was being held
@@rhynchocephalian yeah it's incongruous. Half the Earth's population gets wiped out and they're feeling sorry for a few thousand Zeon people? I think this is bad writing. The fury from something like British would define Earth-Spacenoid relations for centuries.
Ironically despite many Gundam fans claiming these shows have the worst writing Gundam SEED and SEED Destiny did a great job at showing a much more realistic picture of how much hatred has to fester in society before they become completely okay going along with crimes against humanity. The racialization of coordinators and naturals is such a huge part of those series, every soldier is always casually throwing in some kind of slurs or speaking in ways that reinforce the racism in their society and dehumanization of the enemy it reminds me a lot of growing up in the US in the 00s after 9/11. Then in Destiny you see how that hatred lingers deeply and causes more of the same tragedies.
How the colony drops and other mass murder events in the UC Gundam timeline feel is very trivial and unrealistic in comparison. By the time of CCA there's been like 4 or 5 colony drops in a decade and yet it feels like none of that has affected the consciousness of their society in any way.
Remember 9/11? two buildings, a plane going down in a field and a scrape on the pentagon caused the entire western world(but mainly America) to shift into this extreme islamophobia and jingoism for a good decade and then even up until today the policies that had been put in place, the stereotypes that had been created still linger and have an effect on our world.
SEED's war in particular hit a particularly low point at the end after the Alliance launched nukes and were retaliated on with the Genesis by ZAFT where both sides of the conflict were fighting with feverish desperation, because there was an unspoken understanding for both forces that "The other side wants nothing more then to annihilate us and our people." It really felt like Kira, Arthrun, and the Three Ship Alliance were fighting the entire world's desire to destroy itself, a belief personified by Rau Lu Cruset and his desire to end the age of war and strife his short life existed through in Armageddon.
Realistically you'd have a hard time writing a sequel because Zeon would have been exterminated completely in a fit of sorrow and vengeance for the literal billions dead.
@@GonnaDieNever
I think you definitely could make a sequel or spin-off of the military and civilian elements conducting extra-solar colonization.
Because they know full well if the federation catches them, they're all dead or worse.
In fact, that could be a good plot for a new IP.
It also bear mentioning that Seed Destiny did a better version of the colony drop in the Break the World Incident as well. With more interesting character motivations as well which felt at the time somewhat realistic.
@@LastFatalis1 Very true! Also quite informative as it's a false flag attack, a strategy unfortunately very common in modern warfare
the real damage was all the secondaries it tricked into thinking, "woah gundam is totally morally gray guys, zeon are just innocent extremists!!!" thus ruining all discussion for eternity
I can't help but thinking about how the legacy of crimes against humanity tend to play-out in the real world. I remember hearing someone whose grandparents had been holocaust survivors and how they were extremely averse to physical affection and wasting food, how his parents' childhoods were negatively affected by those traits and caused them to share them, and how he was hoping to break that cycle with his kids, and this is not uncommon. It's stuff like that which comes from massive traumatic events which I think is missing. You could also look to stuff like the massive increase in respiratory illnesses around people who were in NYC on 9/11 from the particulate debris that was kicked-up into the air and now think about how effectively having the architecture of entire cities be turned into airborne particles by such massive levels of destruction would cause respiratory problems among many survivors, but also consider the lasting effects as fetuses that were within 2 miles of the WTC which had noticeably lower birthweights which correlated with increased fetal mortality, neonatal mortality, and infant mortality, subsequent poorer health, delayed physical and cognitive development, and increased susceptibility to stress in adulthood. By just pulling from two historical examples, we can see just how much shit people on earth would be dealing with.
This leads me to the question of how exactly this impacts the Zeon cause. Ultimately, this is a horrifying atrocity that needs a good answer: apologetics.
You could look to CSA apologists and see how they justify the actions and ideology of the Confederacy and perhaps go down a rabbit hole of watching "Checkmate Lincolnites" skewer those perspectives, but I think that is probably not the right direction to go in, at least right now. I think we don't have to look to history to find apologetics for crimes against humanity, for all you have to do is to go onto Russian telegram. That's what conversations on Zeon regarding the war and the Colony Drop will look like, which is to say horrifying. Because humans don't like feeling blameworthy, we exercise our reasoning skills to find a way out of feeling blameworthy, and supporting a cause which annihilated billions of people would be a pretty damn good reason to feel blameworthy, so the apologetics are going to be on the level of people who defend stuff like Nazi Germany. You would have people who outright deny the Colony Drop even happened. You would have people saying Zeon merely intended to take control of the colony but the damn people on board refused to let Zeon hold what they could take and decided to take their own lives by crashing into earth to deny Zeon control of the colony in an act of scorched earth. Some would even go as far as to say that this was a false flag or a trap by the Federation intending to trap Zeon forces aboard the Colony and create martyrs to further justify their war. "It didn't happen, they did it to themselves to make us look bad, and they deserved it."
In Germany, with the Nazis having fallen out of power, it eventually reached a point the 1960s where children of parents who had been adults in WWII started questioning what exactly their parents were doing during WWII, and coming-up short on good answers. Because of this, you have people whose grandparents are not looked upon fondly since they were probably Nazis. You had something similar happen in Cambodia where a lot of people who were teenagers or young adults during the Cambodian genocide are looked upon with suspicion since people around those ages were the primary demographic of people who carried-out the genocide which wiped-out nearly 25% of the country and thus anyone who was that age demographic and not an undeniable member of one of the demographics they targeted is viewed as having likely been complicit in the Cambodian genocide.
Ultimately, I think about all of these legacies of crimes against humanity and how hard it is for fiction to capture them, but I think Universal Century-adjacent stuff is not that willing to engage with the persistent legacies of crimes against humanity since seriously dealing with it as a lasting traumatic legacy would make Zeon characters look unsympathetic. For comparison, West Germany's foreign policy and modern Germany's foreign policy until quite recently was extremely averse to being confrontational with Russia because they felt guilty for German atrocities of the eastern front. Any grappling with the impacts of such a crime against humanity would make Zeon soldiers who didn't pull a Ruslan Zinin upon hearing of the colony drop look wildly-unsympathetic.
Yea, they really should have left sleeping dogs lie on this. Elaborating on it as a horrible atrocity opens up a huge number of questions in the story, ones that are very narratively interesting in a vacuum, but to have a bunch of characters react to it in order to answer those questions (positively or negatively) would have much heavier implications on those characters in all the story that has already been written.
This is just like, the last thing you want to put as the late prequel to a decades long franchise.
@@TheBellman I can't help but think it would be interesting if you wanted to go in an explicitly revisionist direction, highlighting the atrocity and how they all compartmentalized it or if they didn't even need to do so at all and their worldview was already cool with this. However, it does not seem like that is what they want to do.
I can't help but remember the Lindsay Ellis video on Nazi-coding the villains of all of the Star Wars trilogies which I recommend ("The Ideology of the First Order") and the term "cosplay fascism" she used the video which I think is useful here. In the original video, she was talking about how the Empire and the First Order received a lot of little things from costuming to cinematography that was explicitly meant to be evocative of the Nazis without going so far as to make them too close to the real thing that it would make cosplaying as the storm troopers be in poor taste, and I think perhaps this same thing is in play regarding Zeon.
Clearly, Bandai Namco Filmworks wants Char and friends to be marketable characters still while Zeon being something which can have sympathetic characters, but also wants to recognize that the colony drop was this massive atrocity and I don't think these two goals are reconcilable, at least in the way they've done so. I guess you could get bold and go the route of something in the style of "Before the Fall" and show how indoctrinated Zeon is to such an extent that the slightest act of defiance feels like a victory, but that would not be conducive to keeping characters the same marketable selves and still would make future Zeon characters not feel like callous bastards. Gundam, in spite of its anti-war reputation, seems reticent to address just how bad a militaristic society can get if it would mean making one side's characters less sympathetic. "Sure, we'll show Zeon engaging in unforgivable crimes, but forgive these cogs in the Zeon war machine because they're cool and were above it all (while still part of the machine that did it and whose continued participation will indirectly-aid future crimes by virtue of gaining Zeon further successes on the battlefield), and also don't let this color your opinions of latter Zeon characters who are fighting for a good cause this time since those genocide survivors can be mean to Zeon (don't ask who runs Anaheim Electronics)."
That's the problem I have with Gundam fans too. Like this is fiction and instead of discussing the story they become war crime deniers. It makes it hard to discuss the series, you can like something but you have to realise how certain actions effect the story.
UC fans want Gundam to be seen as a serious war drama but Gundam is never going to seriously tackle that because Japan itself never had to deal with their own atrocities.
For a better if not the best representation of how this would probably play out in real life in terms of dealing with crimes against humanity, I recommend looking at Roy Mustang and Riza Hawkeye's story from FMAB.
"In the end Hitler was defeated."
An actual quote from the show.
Degwin trying to warn Gihren about just how evil he was being, and it utterly failed. In terms of direct "Holy crap you are Evil!" writing it's hard to top that.
In the original show (and arguably Origin), the Colony Drop is more of a spectacle meant to show the horror of the OYW. Origin, being as bad as it is, does a terribly poor job handling it, trying to amp up the big numbers and emotional scenes to really tug at those heartstrings (I'd argue this has the opposite result, since it takes a tragedy and turns it into an overly-evil supervillain plot).
Before the Origin, it was a much less outright evil affair. Per Gundam Century, the aim of the Colony Drop was to destroy Jaburo, the Federation Headquarters, which very much had not been evacuated, and the attempted evacuation alone left the Federation in chaos. However, fighting around the colony during its trip to Earth caused it to break up during re-entry, missing its targeted landing point. The bulk of the colony hit Australia, while fragments landed across the northern hemisphere.
As far as plans go, the Colony Drop was a good one. It would decisively cripple Federation command in a single, swift blow, destroying the largest bunker ever built with the largest bunker-buster ever conceived. It minimized civilian casualties-Jaburo is in a relatively unpopulated stretch of jungle-and didn't use nuclear weapons or a costly invasion to achieve this. However, it went terribly wrong, with the Federation's response causing it to break up. This is probably why the average Zeon doesn't see it as evil-after all, the Feddies caused the Drop to miss. Furthermore, as the show's narration informs us, _both_ sides lost half their populations in the initial month of fighting. Since the Colony Drop was toward the end of that initial month, it's impossible to say the Federation did not have a lot of civilian blood on their hands.
I think the greatest problem with "Zeon Good! vs. Zeon Bad!" discourse is that it ignores the message of the franchise: war is the real villain, and the only way to avoid it is through understanding. The factions, at the end of the day, are nigh-interchangeable, with the Federation basically acting like Zeon by the time of Zeta. Also, had the Federation not forcibly deported millions into space and denied them representation after doing so, maybe Zeon wouldn't have come to exist. The Federation's unwillingness to compromise or understand Side 3's needs, desires, and problems created the conditions for the monster of Zeon to arise, a situation tragically mirrored throughout our actual history.
Stunning as always. Not a gundam fan but was hooked from the start. Keep it up!
For all that people rail on Cosmic Era, the one thing that Gundam SEED has shown consistently well is how the atrocities on both sides - the Earth Alliance and ZAFT - have made them quite PISSED OFF against one another, leading to extremism galore. It's thus always irritated me about recent Universal Century productions at how seemingly apologetic they are for Zeon, and they do this by making more and more sympathetic Zeon characters while making the Federation just more evil. There's this air of Zeon bias in modern UC that I really can't shake off, and I rather abhor that personally.
The Federation's oftentimes faceless and convoluted bureaucracy can hit too close to home and resemble Japan's own bureaucracy as well as its relations with the US. The opposite side, on the other hand, if often filled with charismatic ideologues who lead directly. This can become problematic when you give the reigns to people like Harutoshi Fukui, otherwise known as the "Japan's Tom Clancy," with clear right wing, nationalist leanings, and let them write stuff like Unicorn (which starts out as an allegory for US influence in Japan, with the UC charter a stand in for the 1947 Japanese Constitution and Article 9).
Lots of ways to manage it, esp since allegedly long range communication is super screwed in setting because of the reactors the mechs use. Misinformation, or even no information at all being given out. Rumors shuffling out that it happened. You would have zeon troops that don't even know it happened and they learn from the federation troops and are horrified. But to unpack these things really puts a damper on merchandise vibes.
i think my favourite "sympathetic" zeon character is Loni from gundam unicorn (the OVA version, i believe shes different in the novels and manga), shes a borderline abused child whos been fed military revenge propaganda and probably has survivors guilt despite being a baby during the war, it makes a really good narrative comparison to all the other zeeks and sleeves who are adults who actually fought in the war and have their own reasons for hating the federation, whilst shes just stuck in a feedback loop of other people's hatred
OVA Loni's parents were murdered sometime after the First Neo Zeon War and that seems to be her main motivation for using the Shamblo, which her father was working on.
At first I read the title as “Grandma is stuck in the orbital drop”
I'm not surprised it wasn't mentioned, but there is a bit of a novel Zeon perspective on Operation British within MS IGLOO: The Hidden One Year War-(th-cam.com/video/K4wKyBI7qtU/w-d-xo.html ...pardon the quality, it's the only source I could find on yt)
janky as the facial animation can be (given its age), I think the look of anguish on engineering 1st lieutenant Oliver's face was very well done
As a big Gundam fan I have nit picks about a few of the details you went over but there are so many versions of the story that I may as well be in the wrong for a few myself. I do over all agree with your video and it's well done.
Zeon were nothing short of what the Nazis would have been if they'd possessed an atomic bomb at the start of the battle of Britain. Every German was a Nazi (in the same way that there are no homosexuals in Iran). Not every Nazi was complicit in genocide or war crimes, but the people making the decisions and those "just following orders" definitely made sure they would be held to account.
There's a distinct difference between ending a war with a terrible weapon that should never have been invented and starting one with the same weapon.
Zeon are not Nazis. I think people use the word Nazi a little too freely, and forget exactly what makes them so evil.
@@smugcu3073 Socialists? Check. Leadership by racial purists? Double check. Starting unprovoked expansionist war to solidify their position after taking a huge L? Check. Uniforms inspired by Hugo Boss? Check. Lost the war because leadership went absolutely stupid and middle management figured out they were the baddies and surrendered under the threat of overwhelming firepower? Check.
Of course, this is an oversimplification, but to suggest that the equally disruptive energy hog forces of Earth don't duely represent the interests of the allied forces during and after WWII seems kind of naive.
Thanks for resurecting a 1yo dead comment.
This was a great breakdown. Thank you for sharing!
I love the yin yang of The Feds and Zeon. The Feds leech off the colonies and refuse step all over their freedoms. Zeon is in the right in the war, but committed a heinous war crime. With cooperation of both peace can be had.
the real world is like this you just stopped noticing. "zeon" are everywhere
Just realized the colony that was dropped was designed after the orginial concept of an o'neil cylinder. Now that is attention to detail
I've just accepted that Zeon are horrible and as a state are THE enemy. And that's okay.
I'm not sure I entirely agree with your assessment, but your dry humor is objectively hilarious and you've definitely earned a fan.
I know from the Origins story (manga, forgot if it was also in the OVA) there was this incident where a Federation observatory failed to spot an asteroid which was on a path through Zeon's colonies. Char notices it and just smirks though.
This rock hits the agriculture ring for Zeon's main colony, thousands die, huge loss in food production, and it was quickly blamed on the Federation. The Federation didn't seem to own up to their failure and instead deployed military forces. So the Zeon propaganda went wild with it.
Now, this might have been where the writing would try to tie this incident to Zeon's support for a colony drop but it was not fleshed out enough. There was a general pattern going on that Ghiren wanted to win the up coming war so he wanted such a devastating blow that the Federation would not just accept Zeon autonomy but also to be weak enough for Zeon to subjugate Earth instead. To do so would rely on MASSIVE escalation.
I'm not really surprised that after 1/2 of Earth's population was lost Zeon's leadership was okay with that. As for the people, well any pro-earth people within the Zeon colonies were basically driven out after the little rebellion that Char basically instigated because of the Federation's increased military presence. Char actually left with these earth sympathizers where he used it as a screen to get a job working on construction for the Jaburo base.
Kicking out the sympathizers does something called group polarization and it would make it far easier to radicalize a population. Something not really shown in the stories but still possible. Most of the anti-earth people felt a great deal of disconnection from Earth because they were kicked off world and put into colonies after all.
Yoooooooo has Gundam gotten to be big enough in the West that we get Gundam video essays now? Hell yeah
The slow roll-in of Brigador music is a brilliant touch. Great video.
I think what people don't understand about Zeon is that they're not the center of the war, not the *protagonist*. What Tomino wanted to tell is a story about the terror of the colony drop and the consequences that come after it. Zeon was given "redeemable" qualities to emphasize their hypocrisy and otherwise irrational perspective of the war, that's why they're the way they are during the OYW.
I think UC is being plagued by the same problems DCEU is having. Different writers who all wanted to tell a different story, with a lack of guidance within the company itself.
I will still highly regard Yasuhiko's The Origin manga as the story Tomino WANTED to write, a story he could not bring to its full potential because of the studio's interventions. Sure, the manga still has that Bandai advertisments bs, i mean that's pretty much the identity of the franchise since the start, but it's at least leaning closest to Tomino's philosophies.
I know for a fact that the colony was dropped on Sydney Australia, that's established lore for the one year war.
The sunglasses indeed stay while in bed with Garma Zabi.
I have to emphatically disagree. Gundam The Origin was written and directed by Yasuhiko Yoshikazu, a close friend and collaborator of Tomino's on the original Gundam, and I think the frank depiction of the awful terrors inflicted in the One Year War was a long overdue corrective for a franchise that had gotten too caught up with lionizing it's dashing antagonists. If anything, the version of the start of the One Year War presented in The Origin is much milder than the one that had been in the original story bible and scores of supplemental material since the very beginning, because it omitted all the indiscriminate uses of nuclear weapons.
Gundam was really the only notable exception to the nuclear weapons taboo, and official material was always very frank about the role they played in the deaths of billions of spacenoids as collateral damage in the Battle of Loum.
And while it might be fascinating to peer in the mind of the murderer and learn how he tries to live with himself, I think Yasuhiko was correct to not dwell on it (in the 1991 Entertainment Bible, which laid out the history which Yasuhiko fairly faithfully portrayed, most Zeon soldiers were told they were pacifying colonies with non-lethal gas, with only a select cadre of people in Operation British knowing the truth of the operation), because it does not make one whit of difference to victims. The vignette of Fang Li and Yuki Snow is to put a face on the tragedy, and I think it's right from a story telling perspective to humanize them more than their murderers.
Sunrise stuck in The 1 Year War is like Star Wars making a Ba-Zillion Shows set During Palpatine's Reign so that He or his Handicapped Sidekick(Vader) can have a Mandotory Cameo in every show.
Tbh, i am getting kinda tired of putting shows and movies between Episode's III and IV. Why not explore what happened between Episode's IV and V?
Andor: 🗿
@@galvy883 because milkin nostalgia
The real mistake Zeon made was only dropping one colony.
...nice weather today...lets drop a colony!
Because of Origin, Gundam Seed did War Crimes better than MSG. Sometimes less is more.
I like the use of the brigador ost. Fits the subject well.
This is mostly addressed in materials made for the main timeline but they're not distributed outside of Japan
that's too bad
This is why I'm an IBO fan.
God this is such a good point. I've always been cautious to herald The Origin as necessary or canon Gundam lore. I am at least glad I saw MSG before Origin since the scale of it all seems at odds with the characters reactions/morals we're told some soldiers have.
Using Brigador ost in video about mechas is a nice touch
Almost everything you brought up had real-life analogies in the conflicts that inspired the series to begin with, the Sino-Japanese wars and WWII. Tomino suspected his own father was at Unit 731, but he still knew him as a stern busybody and a middle class striver. Not only that, as horrific as the war in China, the American bombing campaign on the mainland, or any of the propaganda against each side was, once the war was over the powers that be defaulted to reality and simply shook hands and created the new normal. What else was there to do?
The morality of the OYW seems alien to us because it was written by post-war Japanese, well after the death of nationalism and the failure of their leftist youth movement, who would think the that these monstrous events echoing into expressions of popular will would have been silly.
Mobile Suit Gundam Aggressor is a pretty great manga starring Zeon turncoats fighting for the Feddies in the 1-year war. It also goes into detail about the colony drop operation in its own way. I always interpreted the event as something that an extremist faction of Zeeks did, and the rest of the nation had no choice but to double-down or else lose their nationhood.
More than the colony drop, the damn goofy mechanical designs from UC are what they’re stuck with. Like those Zeon planes with the cockpit on a stalk. Or their tanks with winged flying turrets. The trojan horse and core fighter aren’t much better.
The UC Gundam is still my favorite for many reasons. not because it's the darkest, the first of the Gundam universes, and because of the One Year War, but because it shows how both sides of a war can be the badguys. while Zeon was the big bad of the original Gundam, we learned just how blurry the lines truly were between who was in the right and who was in the wrong. The Federation were far from the goodguys we thought they were. it made you question if you were doing the right thing because you started to see the horrors of your actions and how complicated and ugly war can really be. Ramba Ral is an example that not all Zeons were bad, but then we had the Zabi family. The Federation had good men like Bright, but then we had The Titans, who gladly opened fire on civilians to suppress the possibility of another Zeon.
There are many reasons the UC universe is my number one favorite, and I always love returning to it.
I still love Gundam Seed Destiny's episode that sent the remains of Junius Seven crash into Earth especially that background music when it was blown up and crashed all over the place.
Excellent video
There are also mass posion disposal in colonies!
I have an a idea for a Gundam fanfic that examines a lot of the events in uc and the numerous colony destructions are a point brought in it, specifically a feddie soldier question a zeon grunt if such catastrophe was part of their revolution for spacenoid independence.
My first impression of the colony drop is that it was a Zeon colony that fell, a tragedy for both sides. The drop wasn’t an evil scheme, but the result of a battle that nobody won and everyone suffered for.
Should’ve talked about Full Frontal and his ideology that does not involve a colony/ asteroid drop to earth, but cooperation with other space regimes to form an alliance that opposes federation. Although the idea of “side co-prosperity” came from Republic of Zeon and based on the “Great Eastern Asia Prosperity sphere” imperial Japan used to justify their invasion, yet we can constantly seeing him cooperating with other factions willing to fight feddies/find laplace box(old principalities,Nahel Argama) , and he almost succeeded. Is kind sad to see him gets beaten by the space magic protagonist Banana links but I personally like him a lot and more I know about this guy the more I feel like he’s more than just an Char Clone, he’s much deeper than that.
I had this thought when I was watching legends of the galactic heroes. About the whole nobility of both sides. It's so much easier to swallow when you are settled with the massive war crime hanging on one side's neck.
I think Sunrise does acknowledge the full magnitude of the Colony Drop, in Gundam Wing. In the main series when they attempt the same strategy with the Libra and Peacemillion, granted I'm not sure the size of those ships relative to a Side, but they acknowledge just how catastrophic it would be and even the main character calls out the villain for the insanity of such a strategy even if his goal is basically to have a war so catastrophic humanity renounces war. And in Endless Waltz it shows that the original plan for a colony drop followed by an assault by the Gundams was enough to convince the pilots and Gundam builders to go rogue.
Well even if the colony drop was a mistake. It birth technological advancement never before and the human psyche as a weapon for the most part. While at the same time showing how fragile the human race is without plot armor. Also shows how humans like to do wicked things with new toys to play with and equally important it is to counter said wickedness by fighting fire with fire. The trick is knowing who needs to be killed and know when to stop the fighting before it consumes all.
Holy moly the Brigador background music is the cherry on top of this analysis
My understanding was that the 50% population loss was over the course of the war as opposed to that one particular colony drop.
That aside, this video does a good job of summing up my feelings on The Origin as a whole; something I've had a heard time conveying up till now.
Can someone help me out? I remember a clip where a Gundam cuts up an oneil cylinder with a plasma sword. What show is that scene from and what context?
The Origin is it's own universe, same as Thunderbolt.
NGL, this entire video sounds like something a Feddy would say.
I have to wonder ... Why do so many Gundam fans love the Zeon when it's the Zeon who committed acts like Operation British (the original Colony Drop), or the nerve gassing of every civilian on the colony dropped?
Well, Sunrise has been happy to depict Zeon positively over the years, but there's also just people who think fascists are cool
@@TheBellman Yeah ... unfortunately.
Zeon did nothing wrong wym
Well, for me it is their Machines, they look more like 'in Universe' military machines while especially the Gundam and other Federation machines are more going for your 'heroic' looks.
I hate fascists as much as the other guy, and you could read the rise of Zeon as how fascists/populists come to power by using people's wishes for freedom/independence/something made right for their own goals.
@@bizarrion Dude, this had better be a not-so-funny joke on your part.
My theory: All the water pipes in Zeon are made of lead.
SIEG ZEON
I really like this breakdown of the UC gundam time, could you do more introspectives into the UC?
I have a theory for why fans sometimes like to paint Zeon as a whole, or the Empire from Star Wars, as... if not the good guys, not purely evil. And this is beyond the writer's intent to show 'war is hell' and 'remember that your enemies are real people'.
My theory is that these forces feel more grounded and real. It is easier to imagine yourself as a Stormtrooper or Zeon grunt than it is to imagine yourself as a Jedi or Gundam pilot of pure heart, especially as you get older.
We grow constantly reminded of how powerless we are to effect change in the world. We discover the pinnacles of righteousness, be they our government, our religion, or indeviduals we look up to aren't exactly as clean as we imagined.
Maybe it's a subconscious cynical method of dealing with all that.
Or maybe we recognize internally that when one side is seen as only bad, it 'justifys' a few war crimes against them "for a treat" and we know thats wrong.
Or we are hipsters and like to be contrary.
Or fascists.
(Not sure why I kept saying 'we'. I'm not really pro Zeon or pro Empire... But not really pro Fed or pro Rebel either...)
I'd say it's pretty easy to ignore atrocities when you state does it.
We do it all the time. Look at how the decades of unrelenting war is just the norm in the USA or how china outright says nothing is happening, there is no genocide.
yeah America has committed some pretty heinous war crimes under "peacekeeping" and regime changes...
*"SWELL GUYS"*
the colony drop is good because it means the viewer keeps in mind that while the Zeons have a lot of legit criticisms of the status quo, their fascistic response to those problems is always going to lead to death and misery
I remember watching Stardust Memory for the first time, and losing all interest when they reveal that Operation Stardust was just another colony drop (among other things). Ironically, in a way, this probably confirms the implications of the colony drop being the only thing worth a damn that Zeon did on a large mass scale, done in kind from a bunch of guys still hopped up on that Zeon rhetoric. The point in ZZ where they do another colony drop in the supposed "better half" of it is also rather telling, as if that somehow makes the show better for it. The colony drop is important as context, but also seemingly loses all meaning for its continued usage in UC post-OYW.
Rambal Ral is by no means a good guy but he is a Knight in his morals where he has honors the chivalry code.
I know its a bit vein, but as I immerse myself in the shows and Gunpla, I came up with an idea for an original story within the OYW and beyond, with one of the characters being a NT who was once a test pilot, Newtype protege and son of a Zeonic (the Deikun type, not Zabi type) idealogue who defected after the colony drop, only to be used and abused by the Federation for his new type powers. Thought it would be interesting to share considering your desire for a more average joe (well as average as a space psychic can be) spacenoid view on the colony drop
I think that the perspective of someone who once was diehard on Zeon Zum Diekun's ideology before the Zabi usurpation of Side 3 would be a good way to do this, also feeding into the overall conclusion to NT ideology that I think CCA presents (I haven't gotten to that movie yet, I am about a quarter of the way through Z but I did see the clip of Amuro rebutting Char during the bazooka fight which stuck with me)
Zeek Zeon. And the Fed later after 0083 made the Titans and had to deal with the in Zeta Char's counter Attack was about dropping basically a moon on the earth.
Gundam Wing was to have a colony drop on the earth not once but twice because endless Waltz was going to drop a colony on the earth.
Granted, Japan only has the experience of getting nuked, I doubt they have much insight then in how the nukers must be written.
what happened to ending humanity's civil war and spreading the empire further out into space, turning gundam into a monster of the week space alien show...
It's crazy that almost every show after Gundam 0079 has had colonies dropped on Earth. Gundam Wing had a colony dropped to Earth, and after war, Gundam X had colonies dropped like since building mobile suits was too expensive.
We can alway drop a huge rock the next time! Did they say where the drop zone is, in double ZZ?
in ZZ the drop was on Dublin. Zeon really like to drop things onto former British imperial holdings.
Also, here's an interesting quotation from the novelization, book 1, chapter 1, page 10 by Tomino:
"At the end of the twentieth century-under the old system-Earth had plunged into crisis. Horrendous overpopulation had wreaked havoc on a civilization dependent on the burning of fossil fuels. It had brought out the worst evils of capitalism, aggravating a struggle for finite resources and exacerbating the greenhouse effect."
Although, the overpopulation bit was outdated even back in 1980, the evils of capitalism bit is still relevant. Not to mention it is what the Federation really fights for, rather than "democracy and individual rights" according to Revil.
The point of gundam: good people are very capable of accepting, if not outright engaging in, terrible things.
You’re entire analysis missed the point of the series, in its entirety.
The original series insistence that *both* sides have lost 1/2 their respective population hints at the depravity of both sides. For all its ails, Origin manages to portray -to a degree - how the Federation is not a just society and its own brand of "beige" totalitarianism was what radicalized people enough to hitch their cart to the Zabis. However, I wish the the Feddie warcrimes weren't swept under the rug while exploring the Zeon radicalization.
i just want mainline focus back on the one year war and conflicts in the next decade after. Designs are just cooler and more grounded, unicorn milked the limits of it
I really liked Ramba Ral's attitude towards the colony drop. Specifically the absurdity of how he was fine with wiping out an entire Side, but not with using part of it as ammunition. It gave me some insight into his character, and helped remind me that he's a bad guy, but still has morals.