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 BlackoCatto wrote:
Zeon eventually does get what it wants, Freedom from the increasingly weakening Federation.

I feel like Zeon is almost a counter-intuitive example.

Zeon Zum Deikun was right but Zeon Zum Deikun wasn't a villain but an eccentric intellectual who, as eccentric intellectuals are often felled, twisted into a call to genocide by insane followers who never really got the point.

Zeon was a fascistic ethnostate that perpetrated atrocities, lost a bloody war they started, and then came back thrice to start some more while shouting for everyone to forget about all the bad gak they did because the Federation isn't squeaky clean. A corrupt government doesn't really wash the nutjobs of attempted genocide anymore than the nutjobs attempting genocide washes the corrupt government of falling just short of that level of evil (a problem that would repeat twice in the Cosmic Era storylines where it got groan-inducing how not morally equivalent certain groups were despite the show insisting on their equivalency).

In a lot of ways it feels like the Spacenoids won their independence inspite of Zeon and its remnants, not because of them. The Federation probably would have collapsed sooner if it wasn't continually handed psychopaths attempting to wipe out the population of Earth to keep pointing at (or if the Universal Century weren't plagued by a horrible case of status quo is god).

 LordofHats wrote:

 BlackoCatto wrote:
Zeon eventually does get what it wants, Freedom from the increasingly weakening Federation.

I feel like Zeon is almost a counter-intuitive example.

Zeon Zum Deikun was right but Zeon Zum Deikun wasn't a villain but an eccentric intellectual who, as eccentric intellectuals are often felled, twisted into a call to genocide by insane followers who never really got the point.

Zeon was a fascistic ethnostate that perpetrated atrocities, lost a bloody war they started, and then came back thrice to start some more while shouting for everyone to forget about all the bad gak they did because the Federation isn't squeaky clean. A corrupt government doesn't really wash the nutjobs of attempted genocide anymore than the nutjobs attempting genocide washes the corrupt government of fall just short of that level of evil (a problem that would repeat twice in the Cosmic Era storylines where it got groan-inducing how not morally equivalent certain groups were despite the show insisting on their equivalency).

In a lot of ways it feels like the Spacenoids won their independence inspite of Zeon and its remnants, not because of them. The Federation probably would have collapsed sooner if it wasn't continually handed psychopaths attempting to wipe out the population of Earth to keep pointing at.

To an extent that was exactly my thought. The idea of Contolism does end up winning in the end.

Wait…are you guys just making up names and scenarios?

Kinda need some framing here!

That's fair. Maybe jumped the gun a bit on my end.

It gets disturbing really hard and really fast how many Gundam fans root for the genocidal madmen simply because the people opposing them aren't perfect (utterly missing the damn point almost every time). Zeon is a really bad example that often goes beyond 'the bad guys are cooler' to 'how the feth are you guys glossing over all the genocide in this show?'

The frequency with which more recent media retells UC material from the Zeon side, often while ignoring all of Zeon's sins and highlighting the Federation's, has only made this problem more pervasive in the fandom. Some of it has even become a vehicle for Imperial Japan did nothing Wrong apologism (looking at you Gundam Unicorn!). It's especially freaky when so much Zeon imagery is very obviously alluding to Nazism.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Wait…are you guys just making up names and scenarios?

Kinda need some framing here!

Our bad.

So this is about Mobile Suit Gundam and specifically the Universal Century setting.

It's a gray-gray setting where neither side is necessarily good (though one usually has the heroes on it) and almost every entry in the franchise has a 'walk in the other side's shoes' moment where the protagonist(s) see that the war has good people on both sides and evil on both sides. A common issue though is that one side usually has some kind of wannabe world dominator on it or a genocidal maniac (usually both...) and fans can often take being evil is cool to an absurd level where they generally ignore which side was literally plotting (or had already committed) the deaths of billions of people because the other side has some right donkey-caves on it who also did evil things. But not genocide.

In the Universal Century's case, there's a guy in the background named Zeon Zum Deikun. The country of Zeon is named for him but was founded by a family of power mongers who probably murdered him so they could take over his movement and name without his more peaceful ideals to get in the way. He proposed a theory about the evolution of humanity and the future that ultimately proved to be very true. Problem is that it took a couple centuries for his ideas to pan out and in the meantime people were using his name to commit mass murder in the name of independence and freedom. War always has its atrocities but dropping space colonies onto planets and wiping out half the population is kind of a step above taxation without representation. The man is basically a stand in for Frederich Nietzsche.

Yea Zeon are pretty bad guys overall, genocide... more genocide.. more genocide by colony drops. Though, that being said, boy are the Federations Titans essentially making the Gestapo to hunt down Nazis, which is kind of funny in a way.




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 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
Wait…are you guys just making up names and scenarios?

Kinda need some framing here!

Yes, fantasy term for a fantasy universe. We can talk about Minovsky particles if you'd like as well, or maybe you'd like to talk about Psychommu?

The Titans were definitely not really any better than what they were hunting. Worse really. The big notable thing there is that the Federation ditched the Titans when it became impossible to ignore that the group was going too far. Zeon and its remnants never managed that. The best they ever managed was being eco-terrorists in space who were oddly okay with mass killing.

As bad as the Federation was, it was a much more mundane sort of evil.

What always got to me about the Gundam shows was the bizarre strains of pacifism that were weirdly okay with killing.

The 'philosophies' behind aspects of the show made my eyes cross, to the point that at times I couldn't tell if pacifists were supposed to be the ideal characters or they were trying to portray them as the absolute worst monsters in the show (with variations depending on which Gundam show it was).

It's a bit of both depending on the series. Gundam is a nominally anti-war franchise, thematically (I mean, it makes it's money selling toys of war machines but we'll skip over that for now).

Gundam Wing spends a lot of time on the paradox of pacificism. People unwilling to fight for their ideals will find them trampled upon, but people who are too eager to fight are likely to see their ideals rejected by a wary populace, rightfully demonized, or twisted into something they never intended to be. A lot of people I think ultimately missed the point of Relena's character and her beliefs that peace was an ideal but one that can only stand because people have fought to achieve it and fight to maintain it. It was a series rightfully placed in the mindset of the Cold War despite being made after the fall of the USSR.

Fast forward 10 years and you get Gundam 00, a very similar series that almost turns the notions of Wing on its head. The protagonists of the series seek to end war through violently intervening into any armed conflict only to find out that's a fool's errand and you're wiping up as much conflict as you're trying to stop. Very much a series made in the wake of 9/11 and the growing uncertainty of interventionist militarism.

Most of the protagonists in Gundam shows have respect for the sanctity of life and nominally oppose war as wrong but are often caught up in the heat of events they can't control. They have friends and family just as caught up in events as they are so they are usually reluctant participants in the wars they fight. IBO is maybe the one series to take a huge departure here as Mikazuki never questions killing his enemies until very late in the series and even then isn't that hung up about it.

Speaking of which, McGillis Fareed from Gundam Iron-Blooded Orphans. A hopelessly naive idealist with far too much faith in imaginary power who got a lot of good people killed in a hopeless cause, but he was right. The order of his world was corrupt and cruel and while he was definitely a villain even his enemies generally agreed with him about how wrong things were. The main issue with McGillis were his methods and his general blindness to the possibility things might not work out the way he thinks they will cause a lot of collateral damage over the course of the plot.

...

Actually most of Gundam by design includes baddies who have a point. The issue is they're usually massive super huge DICKS about it.

Also Hellsing;




Linked because Team Four Star managed to get the point of the story across with far more eloquence than the original material XD

Good ol Amuro Rey.

 Tamereth wrote:

 blood reaper wrote:
The Network from Utopia, who plan to sterilise 1 in 20 to bring the human population down to manageable levels and avoid a grievous ecological collapse. The protagonists never really offer a meaningful counterargument or position, whereas the Network have well over 30 years of study and research to back up their actions.

The similarities between this and what’s happened over the last two years are Erie. I think the blackmailing Dr sums up the flaw in their plan the best, when everyone gets old and there’s not enough young people to support them everything will collapse, causing society to fail. Kinda makes it sound like flat out genocide is a better option to decrease the population. Their plan just swaps one problem for another.

Well, the Network is aware of the issues - but Donaldson just posits there will be chaos (which, there's going to be when the climate collapses). It wouldn't collapse society, imo, but it would probably see a mass die off of the elderly population (which is already an issue).

So there's either the choice of the mass die-off of the older population, or the mass die-off of the entire population. Neither is good, but the Networks plan at least ensures there is a human population in the next 100 years.

There's no real reason why the older generation constantly need a bigger young generation after them to be supported though, that's an inherently unsustainable model and it comes down to stuff like policy choice.

Utopia is one of the trickiest for me, because in the abstract it's a fairly humane solution compared to the proposed alternative when all is said and done, and I felt like even the show itself wasn't sure how to talk us back out of it.

Casualty wrote:
There's no real reason why the older generation constantly need a bigger young generation after them to be supported though, that's an inherently unsustainable model and it comes down to stuff like policy choice.

There's a quote from a philosopher called David Benatar who makes the joke that procreation is a bit like a ponzi scheme; the next generation is paying the bill for the previous one.

Casualty wrote:
There's no real reason why the older generation constantly need a bigger young generation after them to be supported though, that's an inherently unsustainable model and it comes down to stuff like policy choice.

Utopia is one of the trickiest for me, because in the abstract it's a fairly humane solution compared to the proposed alternative when all is said and done, and I felt like even the show itself wasn't sure how to talk us back out of it.

Infrastructure maintenance is one reason. You shrink the tax base, you can't support what you've got. Less infrastructure strangles the economy, which strangles tax revenue, which means even less money for maintaining infrastructure. It's a death spiral that ends in impoverishment.

If North America wanted to shrink the population base all they'd have to do is stop immigration. We already have basically a negative growth rate without immigration. Affluent societies have fewer children because they don't need to have kids to retire when they can no longer work. With a shrinking population, however, the elderly would have to shoulder more of the burden of infrastructure maintenance, meaning they would have less money in retirement. Which might encourage a higher birthrate, because now people fear being old without being able to retire.

Basically our entire economic system at the moment requires a growing tax base, especially given how we're happy to borrow against the future of that tax base to pay for stuff now.

It only requires a growing tax base because we build systems to require one, is my point. In theory, a lot of infrastructural stuff has a huge upfront investment, and then pretty manageable maintenance costs - we just don't do that first part.

A lot of the costs associated with caring for an ageing population can be pre empted if you plan long term (as simple examples, older people can generally live independently for far longer in walkable cities, and robust community care networks preclude a lot of the stuff that ends up getting dealt with in hospitals otherwise).

It's not a law of physics, there's no inherent reason that one older person requires x number of younger people to support them like the Astronomicon choir or something, we make it that way by, for example, not designing for disability.

It's a really half hearted response by Utopia that makes me think it didn't have a better one up its sleeve, I think it accidentally sold itself its badguys' premise and had to do the Marvel thing of making the problem their methods instead of their idea.

Casualty wrote:

It's a really half hearted response by Utopia that makes me think it didn't have a better one up its sleeve, I think it accidentally sold itself its badguys' premise and had to do the Marvel thing of making the problem their methods instead of their idea.

The creator effectively admitted this (I think it was a cast reunion, it's on soundcloud); the solution is entirely correct and that the only reason it was 'wrong' was because it was amoral.

Casualty wrote:
It only requires a growing tax base because we build systems to require one, is my point. In theory, a lot of infrastructural stuff has a huge upfront investment, and then pretty manageable maintenance costs - we just don't do that first part.

Because it basically means building entirely new cities, at least in North America. Europe is far better set up for this already.

Casualty wrote:


It's a really half hearted response by Utopia that makes me think it didn't have a better one up its sleeve, I think it accidentally sold itself its badguys' premise and had to do the Marvel thing of making the problem their methods instead of their idea.

quite likely. theirs plenty of things in the world where the current state is objectively "wrong", but thier is no clear route to a "better" solution, or even a "better" solution to be seeking a route to.

Even when their is a "better way", sometimes the cost of transition to that way is so prohibitively high that it makes the "better way" impossible, like totally rebuilding every American urban centre to be more pedestrian friendly. European cities are only better in this regard because most of them have pre-date mass transit systems and so HAD to be built that way, and the constraints that it imposed on cities lead to thier own set of problems (mostly massive overcrowding, as everyone had to be within walking distance of the city centre).


the sad fact is its easier to recognise the problem than it is to find a workable solution.

xerxeskingofking wrote:

Casualty wrote:


It's a really half hearted response by Utopia that makes me think it didn't have a better one up its sleeve, I think it accidentally sold itself its badguys' premise and had to do the Marvel thing of making the problem their methods instead of their idea.

quite likely. theirs plenty of things in the world where the current state is objectively "wrong", but thier is no clear route to a "better" solution, or even a "better" solution to be seeking a route to.

Even when their is a "better way", sometimes the cost of transition to that way is so prohibitively high that it makes the "better way" impossible, like totally rebuilding every American urban centre to be more pedestrian friendly. European cities are only better in this regard because most of them have pre-date mass transit systems and so HAD to be built that way, and the constraints that it imposed on cities lead to thier own set of problems (mostly massive overcrowding, as everyone had to be within walking distance of the city centre).


the sad fact is its easier to recognise the problem than it is to find a workable solution.

They were also destroyed to a degree in WW2

 BlackoCatto wrote:


They were also destroyed to a degree in WW2

yes, they were, but in the overwhelming majority of the cases, they didn't significantly alter the street plan during the rebuilding. the square mile of the City of London* has basically the same streetplan its always had from the medieval period, and most of europe did as well. and many of the mass transit systems that enable a move away form "mandatory cars" pre-date the war as well, so i think its fair to say the war didn't enable these cities to become "pedestrian friendly", they were already so, and the war didnt change that.





*for those not in the know, "London" and "the City of London" are not the same. The formal City of London is a very small area in the centre of the urban area (which i will call greater london for clarity, and includes all the old villages that were swallowed by the urban expansion of London), and is literally just over square mile in size, running along the river form the Tower of London to Blackfriars (google maps will show you if you care). Of note, the houses of Parliament are NOT inside the city limits, but part of the separate City of Westminster, the result of late medieval political shenanigans.

It has legal status, separate to greater London that surrounds it, which date back to the Norman conquest and beyond, and it maintains its own police force (the city of london police, again separate form the Metropolitan police of greater london), and has its own "lord mayor of london" seperate form mayor of london (though the latter position is the one with all the power these days).

 LordofHats wrote:
Gundam is a nominally anti-war franchise, thematically (I mean, it makes it's money selling toys of war machines but we'll skip over that for now).

Cool stuff always trumps theme.

This is true in Gundam, but far moreso in Gantz and Gasaraki, but most especially Jin-Roh. Jin-Roh's 'Protect Gear' armor is so incredibly cool that it overwhelms everything else in the entire series.