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ImpAtom posted:The Federation is also perfectly willing to let Char gently caress people over as long as it sin't the elite getting hosed over. That's part of what disgusts Quess. I gained a lot of empathy for Quess when, upon a rewatch, I noticed the people with her at the start are most likely dead, left to die by the Federation. She only got saved because her father intervened. That's a pretty traumatizing event.
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Dec 17, 2016 01:55
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I don't hate CCA, but the parts of it I dislike I absolutely loathe. The Char/Amuro stuff was good, which is really all that mattered.
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Dec 17, 2016 02:04
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What don't people like about CCA? I haven't seen the entire thing myself (I really should), but what I've gathered is that it's a movie where a lot of people are, in the end, idiots and poo poo heels. That's completely normal for Tomino Gundam, where no protagonist is flawless in the least, and everyone is trying to get ahead in their own way. Char has always been an rear end in a top hat with charisma, and his life has been one long parade of him doing dumb poo poo for revenge, ruining the lives of countless people. Quess exists as an idiot teenager of the type who thinks Char is cool and right and gently caress those Feddies for being mean to her bishounen Char. Hathaway is basically someone who would be a hero in countless other animes, but instead a massive dose of reality leads to him committing treason and murder in the same moment because this isn't a shounen anime, this is Tomino's Gundam. I mean, I guess I can see hating it if you really want another hot blooded mecha anime, but UC Gundam isn't that in the least. UC Gundam was pretty much "War is poo poo, adults are poo poo, everything is poo poo", and then Kamille rams his rear end into the big bad and goes into a coma, Judau fucks off to Jupiter to get away from it all, and Amuro and Char die after the Axis Flash saves the Earth. In terms of UC Gundam, CCA seems like a great capstone to that whole message, where the only thing unequivocally good at the end of the movie is both sides throwing away their ideology and poo poo to save the Earth, and even that requires massive sacrifice. I can understand not liking it if you come into it without knowing what UC Gundam is, but otherwise, it seems fine to me. (Now someone tell me how wrong I got everything) Kurui Reiten fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Dec 17, 2016 |
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Dec 17, 2016 02:14
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I know a lot of people think Quess being annoying outweighs the sympathy you're supposed to have for her. A lot of others don't buy Char's charecterization changes from Zeta Gundam. I go back and forth on how I feel about both of these points, personally. I will say that I think Amuro is a fairly bland character in CCA and vastly less interesting than he was in 0079 and Zeta.
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Dec 17, 2016 02:59
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I don't hate CCA, but I'm fairly lukewarm on it compared to Zeta. It feels like the conflict between Amuro and Char is just retreading old ground to me. While including Hathaway and Quess allows the story to reinforce how badly adults treat children, the compressed runtime makes it harder to care about them or their fates. I thought the evolution between Amuro and Char in Zeta was far more interesting. I also wish there was some bridge between Zeta Char and CCA Char so his strong convictions made more sense.
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Dec 17, 2016 03:00
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ImpAtom posted:The viewer is not supposed to agree with Quess but that doesn't mean Quess has literally no point at all. Her response is bad but she is also a dumb teenager who gets taken advantage of. The question isn't whether the Federation is perfect but when Gundam started "trying to find some sort of moral equivalence" between the Federation and Zeon as seen in shows like Unicorn and Thunderbolt. ImpAtom posted:I don't think American Fans Hate CCA is true so much as there's a particularly loud segment of mecha fandom who hates it. It's pretty easy for mecha fandom in the US to get pretty insular because there are only a handful of places to discuss it and so conversation can get easily dominated by a few loud opinions. The need for something to discuss encourages contrarianism. No one reads the Paradiso and it's hard to talk about things you like.
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Dec 17, 2016 03:02
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Microcline posted:The question isn't whether the Federation is perfect but when Gundam started "trying to find some sort of moral equivalence" between the Federation and Zeon as seen in shows like Unicorn and Thunderbolt. I know it changes later on in the manga, but the show takes place in a colony Zeon destroyed. Zeon's atrocities are literally the backdrop of the show. Literally the backdrop. Literally.
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Dec 17, 2016 03:10
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Guy Goodbody posted:I know it changes later on in the manga, but the show takes place in a colony Zeon destroyed. Zeon's atrocities are literally the backdrop of the show. Literally the backdrop. Literally. Also, only one side is performing nightmarish, inhumane experiments on their own disabled veterans. The Federation goes to some dark places in Thunderbolt (hi, faking a chance to surrender and sending out literal child soldiers), but pretty much all the evil in the show stems from Zeon in one way or another.
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Dec 17, 2016 03:51
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Darth Walrus posted:Also, only one side is performing nightmarish, inhumane experiments on their own disabled veterans. The Federation goes to some dark places in Thunderbolt (hi, faking a chance to surrender and sending out literal child soldiers), but pretty much all the evil in the show stems from Zeon in one way or another. They're also the side whose goal is to make the opponent surrender, then not murder them. Murdering them is considered a consolation prize. Meanwhile, Zeon considers murdering Feddies more important than survival. But it's a matter of framing, I think. We're shown Daryl as a relatable guy, who likes a girl, has friends, and watches life poo poo on him from a great height. He's a killer, but he mostly snipes. No engagement with the violence, no acknowledgement that he's leaving grieving families. Meanwhile, Io's a jazz addicted murder junkie who taunts people as they die, and the Feds send out child soldiers (Which makes no loving sense, and I will complain about this at every opportunity, but, side note.) The Zeon captain is a steely father to his men. The Feddie captain is a drug addled wreck. Even though the Federation is, despite a lot of black marks on their record, much better than Zeon, the show tries to present things as morally even. Odd choice.
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Dec 17, 2016 05:42
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chiasaur11 posted:the Feds send out child soldiers (Which makes no loving sense, and I will complain about this at every opportunity, but, side note.) Well, to be fair, the basic premise of Gundam is that the Federation conscripted child soldiers to pilot their mobile suits!
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Dec 17, 2016 05:45
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Darth Walrus posted:The opposite. They're trying to protect the solution to a famine so that the military dictatorship can't turn said famine into an excuse for targeted ethnic cleansing to keep the proles in line, Holodomor-style. Oh, wonderful
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Dec 17, 2016 05:53
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chiasaur11 posted:They're also the side whose goal is to make the opponent surrender, then not murder them. Murdering them is considered a consolation prize. "This suit is so much better than those arms and legs I lost!" is not the sign of someone in a healthy state of mind. Io plays his jazz because it's the only way for him to deal with the poo poo he's presented with each and every time he steps out on the battlefield. When he becomes a PoW the Zeon guards holding him pay him back in spades for it, and what they do is not depicted as excusable or justified. They have about 75 minutes to drive home how loving awful war is, I'm glad they didn't spend their time going "The Feds have child soldiers, now let's go see Zeon's child soldiers!" and trying to show each side had the exact same poo poo going on, letting the viewer infer just how awful things are for both sides from what we're shown. I'm not sure how you came out of seeing Thunderbolt concluding Zeon was shown to be great while the Feddies are bastards, the way the Zeon lab techies use Daryl as a guinea pig and saw off the rest of his limbs just so they can get some results for their new suit is pretty brutal. It's also worth mentioning Thunderbolt doesn't take place in the same universe the shows did, it is somewhat different. TheKingofSprings fucked around with this message at 06:35 on Dec 17, 2016 |
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Dec 17, 2016 06:29
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ImpAtom posted:Well, to be fair, the basic premise of Gundam is that the Federation conscripted child soldiers to pilot their mobile suits! And if it was early in the war, I'd think it was totally reasonable! There's a scene in the beginning of The Origin where Tem Ray talks with... Bright, if I remember right, (I might not) about how Amuro's about the same age as a lot of draftees on Earth. Back against the wall, throwing meat into the grinder to clog the gears looks pretty standard. And when you get a team performing like the White Base, then yeah. Amuro is staying right there in the Gundam, and might as well keep Hayato in the Guntank since, you know, he's there already. (Kai, on the other hand, is 18 and therefore not a child soldier at all. Kai: Still the best.) But this is right before ABQ (and the solar ray wiping out half of everyone), with an ascendant Federation fleet, a dedicated veteran corps, and pretty good mobile suits. The Federation is winning partially because they're running aces in GMs, where Zeon has to grab fresh faced rookies off the street to have someone, anyone, piloting their latest half-assed superweapon or elite custom unit with a five hundred page manual dedicated to how to push the on button. If the Federation sent kids in Balls, fine. It's showing how few fucks they give about the Thunderbolt sector and Moore. But they're sending Guncannons and GMs. Not Sniper IIs or Commands, maybe, but the workhorses of the fleet, which cost a good deal of money. You'd think that, even if they sent kids, they'd send the ones who'd survived a few drops, to ensure that they'd see some return on their investment. A few dead Zekes before you lose your own. (After all, a one-for-one trade is a net win for the Federation) Then again, they sent a loving Gundam with better gear than Amuro's elite little number to this rear end-end-of-nowhere posting, so who knows what anyone involved was thinking (beyond "Please, God, let General Revil die before he sees how much I just hosed up.")
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Dec 17, 2016 06:29
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ImpAtom posted:Well, to be fair, the basic premise of Gundam is that the Federation conscripted child soldiers to pilot their mobile suits! Another basic premise of Gundam is that Zeon started a war that killed 3 billion people on Day One, and later that same week committed to a battle that killed a half billion combatants, not even mentioning the civilian casualties that died before, during, and after the battle of Loum. The "children in mobile suits" isn't a thing that is particularly limited to the Federation. After a single day the war was the most destructive event in human history, draining both sides of experienced adult combatants (a thing that would bite Zeon's mobile suit corps in the rear end later). And it kept getting worse, and Zeon just kept ramping it up from there. Like, I dunno what anyone would expect from ANY side in a war that was started with something like 3 seconds actual warning before 3 billion people got erased from the Earth Sphere. Most of whom were fellow spacenoids, innocent of any actual wrong doing that the Zabis were playing up to their own people. Basically, the Zeeks were beyond cartoonishly evil to such a degree that anything else in UC continuity that goes out of its way to say "B-but the Feddies are bad toooooooo~" feels really, really awkward and kinda-sorta-actually-really cheerleader-y for those guys in the snappy uniforms and tendency to corrupt a particular German phrase of note, circa 1939. It doesn't help that Thunderbolt is basically warporn, at best, that tries it's damnedest to make this tragic-but-elite Zeon special corps feel like dudes you can sympathize with, while pretty much every single thing the Federation forces in the story do is shown to be almost unconditionally evil bad wrong crazy no bueno awful. It might actually have real poignancy if we actually had more time to really show how the war had pushed these particular dudes so far, but Thunderbolt isn't interested in a particularly fair portrayal of the two sides. It's just another UC story where the Dark Side Of The Federation runs up against the Noble, Tired, and Abused Zeonic Ideal Soldiers, and YET AGAIN both sides get to field absolutely ludicrous superweapons that you should really really please for real buy the model kits of. Oh and nothing even remotely close to these monstrous weapons of mass destruction EVER comes close to being anywhere near the main parts of Mobile Suit Gundam, because the when the first show was being animated the mere concept of DoubleUltraZaku and SuperShieldGundamu weren't even a twinkle in a mecha designer's eye. Daryl's own personal damage and the bad poo poo that happens to him never really gets viewed through the same lens that Io and EFSF S.S. Crazytown Clown Car Of Crappy Criminal Colonists and Children he's a part of. Daryl's story is explicitly a tragedy, and he is explicitly a victim. The poor Zeeks have just been pushed that far how awful that they are so desperate to descend to the level of human experimentation on a willing and totally crazed subject, oh look how noble they are, willing to die as SOLDIERS, unlike those Federation dogs who are using children my god  Even Unicorn at its level worst doesn't have the sheer audacity to commit to this degree of horseshit. It's legitimately terrible writing. But drat is it pretty as hell.
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Dec 17, 2016 07:35
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ImpAtom posted:I don't think American Fans Hate CCA is true so much as there's a particularly loud segment of mecha fandom who hates it. It's pretty easy for mecha fandom in the US to get pretty insular because there are only a handful of places to discuss it and so conversation can get easily dominated by a few loud opinions. I've only been a Gundam fan for a few years now (the Twitter account linked to is mine) but outside of Twitter, where opinion is more split, and this thread, the CCA hate has always struck me as pretty consistently intense. To the point where I almost always get some kind of push back on social media for saying I think it's a flawed but overall pretty good film. You're probably right that it's a couple of very loud people skewing my perspective, though. A few old timer fans have told me that CCA used to be generally well-regarded so maybe it's just a shift in fan opinion, similar to the reception of Zeta going from 'pretty good but messy' to 'best Tomino Gundam EVER' as of late. The GIG posted:My favorite was all the tweets going "Whoa hold up, we hate Kira too." Some people went as far as telling me "Never trust Newtype polls!", heh. It seems like Kira and Lacus went from being generally well-liked in SEED to hated in Destiny, so maybe not too different from Western fan reaction? As long as I'm here, I recently translated the answer to that most troubling of questions, Why Doesn't Lt. Quattro Have Sleeves? dazat fucked around with this message at 07:43 on Dec 17, 2016 |
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Dec 17, 2016 07:39
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I thought it was pretty obvious that Daryl and friends were regular people who got sucked into a war and then human experimentation by leaders that don't care about them in the slightlest while Io and friends were regular people whose home had been destroyed, who didn't get the support they needed and deserved.
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Dec 17, 2016 07:45
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I want to kiss Amuro, Char, Kamille, Jerid, Io and Daryl around and on the lips.
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Dec 17, 2016 07:47
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fivegears4reverse posted:Basically, the Zeeks were beyond cartoonishly evil to such a degree that anything else in UC continuity that goes out of its way to say "B-but the Feddies are bad toooooooo~" feels really, really awkward and kinda-sorta-actually-really cheerleader-y for those guys in the snappy uniforms and tendency to corrupt a particular German phrase of note, circa 1939. I don't understand this mindset at all, no. The Federation is in fact bad too. Going "Well, this one side was so evil that it means everyone else is by default good" is the kind of awful poo poo that gets you treating World War 2 like The Good Guys vs Cartoon Supervillains and whitewashing the legitimate awful acts committed by the Allies. You can say one group is bad without inherently saying the other group is good. I certainly don't think that Thunderbolt does a good job of it but at the same time I do think that Gundam's willingness to at least wave its hand at the idea that maybe enemy combatants have actual belief in their goals is an important factor in the story. it's way too easy for war stories, especially war stories about giant robots, to glorify the mass killing of dudes, and I think Gundam is at its strongest when you're pitying almost everyone who dies on the battlefield because all of those are powerless victims of a cruel and uncaring society. That shouldn't ever lead to "The Zabis had a good idea!" mindsets but it inevitably will for the same reason people unironically decide that Lord Voldemort is a good guy or whatever. But I don't think attempting to take these monstrous villains and explain why seemingly normal people are fighting for them is a bad thing. (Nor do I think it's a bad thing that the Federation has monsters too. It should.) ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 08:03 on Dec 17, 2016 |
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Dec 17, 2016 07:53
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Improbable Lobster posted:I want to kiss Amuro, Char, Kamille, Jerid, Io and Daryl around and on the lips. Godspeed
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Dec 17, 2016 07:54
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ImpAtom posted:I don't understand this mindset at all, no. The Federation is in fact bad too. Going "Well, this one side was so evil that it means everyone else is by default good" is the kind of awful poo poo that gets you treating World War 2 like The Good Guys vs Cartoon Supervillains and whitewashing the legitimate awful acts committed by the Allies. You can say one group is bad without inherently saying the other group is good. I haven't seen the original Gundam in a while, but wasn't the Federation's lack of concern for the well being of the White Base and the refugees on board a plot point?
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Dec 17, 2016 07:55
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Guy Goodbody posted:I haven't seen the original Gundam in a while, but wasn't the Federation's lack of concern for the well being of the White Base and the refugees on board a plot point? The Federation in the original Gundam (pre-errata) is largely defined as being absurdly callous. They genuinely are largely old men who are interested in winning the war and returning things to how they used to be. A potential shift in humanity is appearing before them and they basically wonder how they can weaponize it. (The same as the Zabis.) That said the difference between the Federation and Zeon is incredibly stark in the original show and only largely muddied by later works. (Including the various retellings of the show.) It's arguably a flaw of the limitations it was created under but still, if you had to pick a 'good side' just based off 0079 the show then the Federation would win 11 times out of 10.. dazat posted:I've only been a Gundam fan for a few years now (the Twitter account linked to is mine) but outside of Twitter, where opinion is more split, and this thread, the CCA hate has always struck me as pretty consistently intense. To the point where I almost always get some kind of push back on social media for saying I think it's a flawed but overall pretty good film. You're probably right that it's a couple of very loud people skewing my perspective, though. Speaking as an old timer mecha fan myself, yes, CCA use to be extremely well regarded. The shift to people hating it is very recent and honestly feels very born of the 4chan /m/ community. The few places I discuss mecha stuff that have little to no crossover there still feel pretty fondly about CCA despite its flaws. The extreme loathing for it at minimum is absolutely something pretty new. Even the worst was calling it cheesy. (Another fun old time note is that Turn-A used to be despised and the opinion on that has turned waaaaay around.) ImpAtom fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Dec 17, 2016 |
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Dec 17, 2016 08:08
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I also remember back when Turn A was 'the weird show no one has seen and everyone hates anyway,' then slowly shifted to becoming absolutely beloved after the fansub got traction ~10 years ago. It makes me wonder how much of the perception parts of the fandom develop are based on hearsay and assumption vs. actually watching the show.
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Dec 17, 2016 08:27
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Dulkor posted:I also remember back when Turn A was 'the weird show no one has seen and everyone hates anyway,' then slowly shifted to becoming absolutely beloved after the fansub got traction ~10 years ago. It makes me wonder how much of the perception parts of the fandom develop are based on hearsay and assumption vs. actually watching the show. There's a fair bit, especially for badly or unsubbed older shows. I recall hearing about Zambot 3 before I saw it and people's discussions of Zambot 3 often discussed an almost entirely different show. Ideon too for that matter.
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Dec 17, 2016 08:29
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ImpAtom posted:The Federation in the original Gundam (pre-errata) is largely defined as being absurdly callous. They genuinely are largely old men who are interested in winning the war and returning things to how they used to be. A potential shift in humanity is appearing before them and they basically wonder how they can weaponize it. (The same as the Zabis.) That said the difference between the Federation and Zeon is incredibly stark in the original show and only largely muddied by later works. (Including the various retellings of the show.) It's arguably a flaw of the limitations it was created under but still, if you had to pick a 'good side' just based off 0079 the show then the Federation would win 11 times out of 10.. The "potential shift in humanity" being shown to them, pre-errata, is limited to off-screen speeches implied to be from a guy the Zabis had killed anyway because they are bad people. They then co-opted this philosophy and used it to create Space Nazi Germany. The next potential shift in humanity the Federation was shown is, again, 3 billion people getting erased from space, followed by a colony drop. The next shift after that is when Girhen Zabi more or less shouts on space TV about how Zeon is Pure, Zeon is The Best, gently caress Earthnoids 4eva. It's still a really hard sell that the Federation is being run by more than scared shitless politicians and generals who are looking for something, anything to turn around what might be the most one-sided curbstomp in the history of warfare. And honestly, the Fed status quo is a hell of a lot better than whatever the hell Zeon wanted, since there might be ten billion more human beings still alive, and a lot less colony craters on the Earth. If the Federation was at the very least the sort of incompetently evil sort of group, like, say, the Earth Sphere Alliance from Gundam Wing, blowing up civilian shuttles for kicks and actively stomping peace rallies and generally being evil enough to warrant, well, everything that Zeon does, maybe the effort to display moral equivalence on both sides wouldn't seem so very cheap. Universal Century has done a consistently lovely job of portraying the Federation because after a certain point, everything the Federation does is literally written to legitimize/humanize Zeon in some way. My problem with anything that gets added to Zeek Apologism: The Continuity isn't that the Federation has monsters, far from it. The problem is that they are almost always portrayed, in their respective appearances, to somehow be on the same level or worse than Zeon actually was, is, and continues to be in all of its appearances despite being injected on the regular with characters who embody "Oh What A Fellow/Lady, Shame They Fight For Literal Nazis." There's no balance. It doesn't feel like two lovely sides fighting a lovely war, and good people are caught in the mix. Despite the actual history of the war itself, UC stories are getting to the point where they might as well say "The Feddies were asking for it!" That'd be somewhat honest, at least.
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Dec 17, 2016 08:52
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ImpAtom posted:The Federation in the original Gundam (pre-errata) is largely defined as being absurdly callous. They genuinely are largely old men who are interested in winning the war and returning things to how they used to be. A potential shift in humanity is appearing before them and they basically wonder how they can weaponize it. (The same as the Zabis.) That said the difference between the Federation and Zeon is incredibly stark in the original show and only largely muddied by later works. (Including the various retellings of the show.) It's arguably a flaw of the limitations it was created under but still, if you had to pick a 'good side' just based off 0079 the show then the Federation would win 11 times out of 10.. It's also how they're shown in 0080. The Feddies are fighting to stop Zeon's murderous ambitions, but they've got the colony caught in the middle, and they mostly don't give a gently caress. It's also the center of Chris's arc. From start to finish, she's a loyal Federation officer, but she goes from "We're saving lives!" to "But that doesn't justify ignoring the damage we do." Of course, for all the Origin adds to the Federation's issues, it also has General Revil go "Alright, you know what the deal should be with Newtypes? It should be not murder. I say we kick Zeon's rear end, then let you newtypes and young people try to figure out a way to gently caress up less than us old people have." Seriously. General Revil? Alright guy.
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Dec 17, 2016 09:10
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I always imagined Revil as being similar to General Grant, including getting enormously drunk. Edit: If Revil had lived, the entire Universal Century would have turned out differently.
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Dec 17, 2016 09:33
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I will defend thunderbolt's themes and I think your reading of it being Zeon apologia is off base. Daryl is sympathetic, yes, but he ultimately damns himself by letting war consume him. Fleming was a lost cause ever since Zeon wiped out his home, and he absolutely grills Daryl for falling into the same trap he did. Thunderbolt isn't war porn, it's just slaughter and it doesn't expect the viewer to actually enjoy it. Apart from the gundam/psyco duel, the fights are one sided massacres over in a flash. Not exactly a "cool!" moment do much as a visceral reaction. Thunderbolt is two sides fighting over scraps in the wake of the apocalypse, and everyone is damned. It's hard to see the Zeon as noble in the show when they pull IJA suicide tactics rather than face surrender. It's not even really a federation Zeon fight, it's a private war fought by Moore and Zeon that the federation supports because it ties up enemy reinforcements. It's the homeless and the abandoned both being used by higher powers to keep the other occupied.
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Dec 17, 2016 09:48
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I tip my hat to Tomino for making both the Federation and Zeon mirror more or less politics political history of real life where everyone is just a series lovely shades of grey and the best you can hope for is a break between conflicts because investing it in of course makes things worse or extends the madness. Just like in real life.
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Dec 17, 2016 16:53
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I mean, you cannot take away what zeon does, as it is totally inexcusable. But at the same time that doesn't discount the federations lovely practices. It's the same problem you see on Facebook where someone says you shouldn't help certain people because other people need help more than they do. Just because zeon committed mass genocide does not mean the federation gets a free pass on their retaliatory measures. Tomino makes a big point that the federation is no better than the zeon. That is not comparing genocide to the federations crimes, but merely commenting on the fact that, in the wake of the apocalypse, the federation became even more callous scumbags than they already were, forfeiting any moral high ground they might have had by trading nukes with zeon, enlisting child soldiers out of desperation, and engaging in full scale combat in civilian areas. For a real life comparison, during the Normandy invasion, an ss commander executed several Canadian POWs, violating wartime conventions. The Canadians, understandably pissed off at this atrocity, returned the favour to several Germans. This bit them in the rear end when the ss officer responsible was captured, as the Canadians actions had forfeited their right to an impartial trial, and the ss officer walked free.
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Dec 17, 2016 17:15
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I think Thunderbolt is less Zeon sympathetic and moreso that it has a sympathetic Zeon protagonist, especially in contrast to Io.
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Dec 17, 2016 19:12
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TheManSeries posted:I think Thunderbolt is less Zeon sympathetic and moreso that it has a sympathetic Zeon protagonist, especially in contrast to Io. And I've got no problem with that. Even at their worst, zeon are still people. The zabis wouldn't be nearly as interesting is they were just cackling madmen reveling in mass slaughter.
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Dec 17, 2016 19:15
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Dulkor posted:It makes me wonder how much of the perception parts of the fandom develop are based on hearsay and assumption vs. actually watching the show. Ding ding ding ding
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Dec 17, 2016 19:23
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I really liked how in thunderbolt, zeon is undisputably the villain in the larger conflict, but on the level of individual soldiers in an extentend individual battle, it doesn't really matter a whole lot. Both sides are just killing each other senselessly and throwing away their humanity in this fight over an already wrecked colony. Plus, if anything, zeon is definitely the larger nation that's portayed worse. Zeon starts out using cripples to fight their battles, and won't even allow the recovered bodies to be given any kind of proper respect. Eventually, the federation employs children to fight the cripples, kind of bringing the two sides to an even moral standpoint, but then it's revealed that karla's working for zeon because her father was imprisoned for opposing the war and she was press-ganged into duty under threat of her father's death. The federation is presented as desperate and somewhat callous, while zeon is actively malicious towards its own soldiers. I thought it did a pretty good job of showing how even though zeon are the "bad guys", the soldiers themselves are human too, and even though the federation is the "good guys", not all feddies are good people. Also the action in thunderbolt deliberately accentuated the horror and despair of violence in war, and was generally more "hard to watch" than "exciting and entertaining." I wouldn't call it warporn at all
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Dec 17, 2016 19:54
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Midjack posted:Ding ding ding ding Woah man those mobile suits look super sweet and that dude in the mask is awesome. HAIL FACTION! What do you mean they are space nazis?!
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Dec 17, 2016 21:14
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fivegears4reverse posted:The "potential shift in humanity" being shown to them, pre-errata, is limited to off-screen speeches implied to be from a guy the Zabis had killed anyway because they are bad people. They then co-opted this philosophy and used it to create Space Nazi Germany. The next potential shift in humanity the Federation was shown is, again, 3 billion people getting erased from space, followed by a colony drop. A better way to look at it would be this: the Federation's stagnation and mediocrity at best allowed Zeon's rise to power through hubris or disregard for the conditions of space colonists and at worst is directly responsible for the conditions that created Zeon. As longs as power structure like that existed, radicalization and political violence is an inevitability, and it was the Federation's responsibility as the ruling power to avoid it. Zeon are the space Nazis, but the Federation is the punitive charters that created a victim complex. The Federation's sins are not measured in bodies, but are rather structural.
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Dec 17, 2016 23:15
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muike posted:A better way to look at it would be this: the Federation's stagnation and mediocrity at best allowed Zeon's rise to power through hubris or disregard for the conditions of space colonists and at worst is directly responsible for the conditions that created Zeon. Yes, it's the Federation's fault that Zeon decided to commit genocide. It's written into the founding documents, you know. "We recommend all pro-Spacenoid protests be undertaken in the form of mass murder of your fellow spacenoids." The Federation is lovely, and gets shittier, but even that can be blamed on the loving Zekes, seeing as they kept murdering every single officer with conscience and a spine who wasn't Ultimate Survivor Bright. Frankly, when the overwhelming majority of your military is wiped out twice in half a decade, in between assorted attempts at mass genocide, a government would have to be run by saints not to go off the loving deep end in a dozen different ways. General Revil (continuing to be the best) had a speech on the topic. I'll hit a few highlights. "Degwin Zabi must not be allowed to justy his vision of Zeon because of corruption in one part of our Federation. His words are the dogma of a man plotting a dynasty of Zabi dictators on Zeon. Even if we recognize the existence of the Zeon dictatorship, that in no sense means we must also sink to our knees before it! The Earth Federation is a government, founded on the premise of sovereign individual rights. Mankind was able to advance into outer space as a result of the Federation government, which is itself a crystallization of all mankind’s accumulated knowledge and experience." "And now Gihren threatens to crash Luna II onto Earth unless we surrender to him. What basis does he have for his demand?! Is he in possession of some sort of absolute truth? No! He possesses nothing more than his own demented dogma. Is the entire Federation completely enfeebled, corrupt, and degenerate? Again, the answer is no. Many good, capable citizens have fought bravely against the threat from Zeon, and we are still strong and alive!" The "Well, the STRUCTURAL PROBLEMS of the Federation made Zeon, so..." is just "Both sides!" by a back door.
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Dec 18, 2016 00:20
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Saying that the Federation is responsible for the conditions that led to the colony drops isn't the same as saying that Zeon doesn't bear responsibility for it.
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Dec 18, 2016 00:23
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I watched the first Zeta Gundam movie today, if only to have something to contrast the new Star Wars against. I went already willing to accept the newer animation was going to badly clash with the 1985 animation. I actually was able to get past that as a quirk of the movie, so whatever (Lot of the new animation looks really good btw. The reunion of Char and Amuro in particular might be the most interesting thing Tomino has directed). What I found truly baffling though was how certain parts of the story were just elided over, like the "Sounds like a girl's name" scene with Jerid and Kamille. Or like, Kai just suddenly appearing in the movie. Very strange, if only because it's not a long movie and I can't help but imagine that just a little extra footage could have helped establish some of the more important points more clearly. As it is, it seems like the movie basically assumes you've seen the show before.
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Dec 18, 2016 00:28
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No one is saying that both sides are moral equals, and I don't think very many of the shows do as well (thunderbolt certainly doesnt, and you seem to think it does, so I'm not particularly inclined to take your word on any others) Saying "hey the federation is pretty lovely too" is not the same as saying "the federation and zeon are equivalent" and you'd have to be someone totally lacking any understanding of nuance to not see that
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Dec 18, 2016 00:28
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chiasaur11 posted:
This in particular is pretty dumb
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Dec 18, 2016 00:30
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