Hi! Been reading through your writings on the Gundam franchise on and off for a while now (really enjoyed them), and I've noticed in a couple of places you accuse it of not really understanding pacifism as a concept or an ideology. Tomino's work and 00 got special mention, I recall? I was wondering if you'd be interested into going a bit more into that, if you have the time and haven't already done so, especially considering how so much of Gundam ostensibly revolves around anti-war themes.
I'm going to start by zeroing in on the very last part of your question because I think this gets to the crux of the matter: being anti-war is not identical to believing in non-violence.
Non-violence as a belief holds that violence is always unacceptable under any circumstances. We can additionally define non-violent action as any action that does not involve committing violence. Neither of these is required to believe wars are immoral or oppose those who prosecute them.
It would be a perfectly coherent position to object to the large-scale destruction caused by the conflict between nations and the subsequent cost to civilian populations while still holding that other forms of violence are necessary and justified. On a very simplistic level, we might look at how the right to self-defence does not contradict a moral stance against starting fights, but this easily extends to, say, agreeing a police force is a necessary part of a civilised society yet objecting to the existence of an army. Equally one might consider wars bad for one's own financial situation and believe the violent enforcement of property rights was good. Finally, of course, one can take violent action with the aim of stopping a war.
I want to foreground this because it's very easy to short-hand 'Gundam takes a stand against war' as 'Gundam is against violence', yet I do not believe this has ever been true. One thing I find interesting about Tomino's Gundam is that he's very consistent in expressing a belief in forms of righteous violence, that is, violence justified as a moral stand against some greater evil. Amuro, Kamille and Judau are all encouraged to fight for the right reasons instead of blindly following the orders of the corrupt adults who lead the Federation or the AEUG. This is a common trope not just across the Gundam franchise but across genre fiction in general. Correcting one's motivation and cause while still enacting (often brutal) violence comes as standard for many a protagonist. A contemporary example, would be Fang of the Sun Dougram, where the main character switches sides from a colonising force to join the rebelling colonial subjects. That he is going to fight is never questioned; it's a matter of who he is going to fight for.
This in itself isn't something I criticise Gundam as a whole or Tomino in particular for doing. It is consistent and it can still be deployed in a way that is nominally opposed to war. What frustrates me about Tomino's early Gundam work is that it leaves no room for alternative solutions. It isn't until Turn A Gundam that his disdain for unchecked militarism is coupled to other avenues of resolving the conflicts he depicts. I doubt it's a coincidence this goes hand in hand with getting a bit better at writing women.
See, while you occasionally see people talking about how weird Tomino is about women, I've always found him pretty typical. Men are martial creatures, women are not, and if they are, it's an aberration that cannot end well. Even in Turn A, Sochie's embrace of fighting is treated as a character flaw at odds with her better nature while, despite being the Gundam protagonist who most serious rejects violent solutions, Loran still meets some problems with violence when necessary. Prior to this, we can contrast Amuro's mother's objections to her son becoming a soldier with Amuro's own moral arc towards fighting for a good cause. Mrs Ray views the violence as tainting her child. But in the final analysis, Amuro's maturing as a man goes hand in hand with turning his capacity for violence in the right direction for the right reasons. There's something similar going on with Fraw, and later between Fa and Kamille. Sayla, despite being a combatant in her own right, is positioned as the peace-maker between Amuro and Char. Violent activity or opposition to it is gendered along the lines we might expect from someone following the default assumptions of a patriarchal society.
Importantly for our purposes, however, none of this is a debate over whether violence is effective or practical. Where there is a question of it being morally justified, as I've already discussed, the answer is invariably that it is, for specific reasons. And within the confines of these shows, only violent solutions are considered as options. War is bad, but you must fight to stop it. Circumstances always funnel the characters towards combat and the debates over the appropriateness of that resolve ultimately to questions of what they can personally stomach. That's why it's important to consider the gendered concerns: this all happens at the level of personal choice and with regards to characters' inherent natures. At best, Tomino shows the military as a corrupting, suffocating masculine force that crushes the finer qualities in those who cannot wrestle free to follow their own beliefs. Those beliefs find violent expression even so, because that's still morally correct.
What we are missing, from the point of view of seriously engaging with non-violence, are other efforts to improve the world. I don't necessarily mean showing those efforts to succeed. I mean, at all, at least in the Universal Century series. There's a striking absence of – well, strikes, for one thing. We get a single instance of Zeon workers resisting their rulers in Gundam ZZ and that's really about it. Everything else is entirely framed as open warfare of one sort or another. That's not just the only thing that works, it's all anyone seems to try!
To some extent, I'm not even sure I'd consider this a short-coming, given the specific genre Tomino is creating these shows within. Mecha anime makes a spectacle out of violence, and although we can classify this as metaphor by saying 'fight for what you believe' doesn't have to literally mean fighting in a war, violence is almost inevitably the only approach taken.
On the other hand, contrast this with Iron-Blooded Orphans, where there are several examples of non-violent responses to social injustices, which are met in turn with aggressive responses from the authorities who perpetrate said injustices. At an initial glance, this might be taken as a statement that non-violence doesn't work. On closer examination, however, we find that neither do many of the violent responses and success only comes from being able to pull a variety of levers to affect societal change. Violence and non-violence coexist, their effectiveness circumstantial, neither a complete solution to the problems facing the characters. Moreover, IBO shows people meeting violence with violence to be a result of how their society has trained them to react. If you make it seem as though physical might and accumulated power are the only things that count, those as the qualities people will seek to gain, irrespective of how effective they actually are when the rubber hits the road.
This demonstrates more consideration of violence as something to be interrogated than I think Tomino's Gundam typically displays. Another point of comparison is Eureka Seven, which riffs on Universal Century Gundam and portrays a situation where violence is only ever an impediment to resolving the plot. In both cases, the concept of righteous violence does not feature except as a delusion. You don't get points for fighting in a good cause. You either have to reserve fighting for when it will be effective, or you have to set aside fighting in order to tackle the actual problem.
Ultimately, I think what shoots Tomino in the foot on this subject is a commitment to endless cycling and a lack of interest in the wider social context in which wars occur. For his version of Gundam, war is an inevitability brought on by the inherent nature of mankind. Whether this reflects his actual beliefs or merely the medium in which he chooses to express them is largely irrelevant. The result has simply no space to consider non-violence as an approach, viable or otherwise.
As you might have noticed, up to now I have been using that term, non-violence, rather than the one that you actually used in your question, pacifism. This is because I believe the former allows a far clearer discussion of what my criticism of Tomino's approach is, and because of the derogatory connotations frequently applied to the latter.
In the real world, non-violence covers a wide gamut of approaches, many far from peaceful or indeed passive. For some cases, there can be a fuzziness depending on how exactly one defines 'violence'. I, like many, do not consider property damage as violence except where it is done deliberately to harm people. Burning down the home of an immigrant family is violence; smashing the windows of a corporately-owned store is not. Equally, there are forms of violence that operate indirectly: stochastic terrorism is intended to incite harmful acts even if the person doing it does not carry them out. This still counts, to me, in the way the systematic exclusion from society of those considered 'lesser' does. Where one draws the line on these matters affects how one understands a non-violent action.
Nevertheless, clearer-cut examples are easy to point to. Quakers participating in war by running ambulance services. Unarmed demonstrators facing down the guns of the British military in Peshawar. Civil disobedience in order to protest the treatment of AIDS victims. The Selma to Montgomery marches. These are big, organised responses to big, organised injustices. To dismiss them as 'pacific' is, frankly, an insult.
And it is the insult Gundam 00 commits with the character of Princess Marina Ismail.
In some regards, though to a lesser extent, 00 does to Gundam Wing what Gundam SEED did to Mobile Suit Gundam, remaking elements of the original in new configurations for a new millennium. Certainly it is hard not to read Marina as a retread of Relena, the almost-maybe-sorta-kinda central character of Wing and the archetypal 'peaceful princess' love interest within the wider franchise.
What is important to remember about Relena, though, is that she's not remotely a passive character. Not only does she act on her own volition throughout Wing's run, pursuing an agenda regardless of what the boys are up to, she is not inherently a peaceful person. She tries to shoot her father's murderer and later expresses a desire to burn down the Romefeller Foundation headquarters that appears entirely sincere. Her turn to espousing 'total peace' is a conscious choice to embody her birth family's legacy, and the Peacecraft ideal itself seems better summarised as total disarmament, referring to the removal of mobile suits from the arsenal of the world's nations. Here again a distinction between being non-violent and anti-war becomes relevant.
Furthermore, her approach to achieving disarmament is reasonably proactive, consisting first of educating those in her social set on the issue, then of trying to usurp the machinations of the Romefeller leadership to enact her aims from on high. Neither of these are successful, but crucially, that initial attempt is viewed as immensely threatening by Romefeller, in a surprisingly acute reflection of how the upper classes tend to view peaceful attempts to spread viewpoints that do not serve their interests. I wouldn't call Wing's handling of what it calls pacifism good, exactly. It's not wholly without merit either and Relena is an interesting encapsulation of that mixed success.
Meanwhile, Marina bimbles around 00's plot preaching peace and achieving nothing. The crux of the matter is that the Princess of (urgh) 'Azadistan' really is a naturally peaceful person. Positively saintly, in fact, to the extent that the crowning image of her within the show's run is a sing-song with a group of little children. It's a tooth-rotting vision of what seeking peace through non-violent means should look like and, hey, do you know what one of the most provably effective ways of delegitimising non-violence has been, historically?
Elevating those responsible as exemplars of personal morality.
On this website, the best example I can give for how this works is Martin Luther King Jr. If the mainstream idea of somebody like that is of a too-good-for-this-world, peace-spreading icon who would have decried any form of quote-unquote violence, then it's terribly easy to 1) enshrine polite beneficence as the default attitude for Getting Things Done and 2) lift 'pacifist' status out of the reach of most actual human beings. Because it's not about non-violent action, it's about a non-violent attitude. Peaceful requests rather than disruptive demonstrations. Sainthood, not tactics.
King's work was not a morally-pure cry for a better world, it was about making the cause of civil rights in America impossible to ignore. He was hated by the establishment in his time and viewed with incredible suspicion. His words – his actual words – are full of both emotion and intelligent construction. He thought and he acted and he was one man within a wider movement. To boil him down to a jolly good sort who believed in peaceful protest really hard (forgive the English version of this sentiment; I can't confidently express it in American) is erasure through elevation.
Under this view, any action taken by those who come afterwards is automatically tarnished. Nobody can be as pure as the real pacifists, so don't even try, but if you're not prepared to be as noble and restrained, well you're clearly not really non-violent and can be freely bludgeoned by the full force of the state.
Many fictional pacifists are cast in the mould of the propaganda version of King, or Gandhi, or the others to whom this obscuring veneer has been applied. They can be something the other characters admire but their attitude and approach will seldom be achievable or practical. Marina exists as a distant angelic counterpoint to Setsuna's warriorhood. There are token gestures towards her working on diplomatic solutions in a professional sense but these don't come to anything until the boys beat up the bad guys. For the most part, her contributions to the plot can be summed up as 'thoughts and prayers'.
Of these two approaches – ignoring non-violence as an option or reducing it to a pathetic caricature – it will doubtless not be a surprise to hear I find the first far more respectable. Where I think it limits Tomino's work is precisely in terms of the anti-war message I took such pains to separate from non-violence at the start. In my personal opinion, it's silly to bang on about the horrors of war and how everything is trapped in a cycle of endless struggle without offering space for alternatives to the things you've shown to repeatedly fail. It speaks to the near-infantile cynicism threaded through that initial run of Gundam shows (MSG to Char's Counter Attack) and casts a perpetually stirring hope for the future in a feeble light. Newtypes are forever only mobile suit pilots, politics is mired in useless misanthropy, nobody ever seems to be doing anything except fighting the war of the week. But as I said, this is as much a result of the genre constraints of mecha anime aimed at teenage boys as anything else. You don't come to a sweet shop for wine and spirits, do you?
By contrast, 00 is participating in the misrepresentation of non-violence endemic to much of popular culture. Real life non-violent activists do not harp from the side-lines. They place themselves in the way of real, frequently deadly harm out of principle or tactical decision-making and there are no heroic warriors waiting in the wings to rescue them when things get nasty. They are not saints and, without wishing to be maximalist in either direction, they aren't useless. A genuine engagement with non-violence as an approach needs to reckon with the ugly reality of human beings choosing to stand in front of guns and see who blinks first.
Because, look. I'm not super concerned with people using art to make statements about where and when it is appropriate to fight or which approach is better. The fact is we live in societies steeped in violence and fixed ideas about who is and is not allowed to commit it and against whom. 'War' is a condition under which we carve out exceptions to the laws that say murder is wrong, for people designated our official killers, in order to destroy those designated our official enemies. It brings these matters to the fore precisely because it is a contradiction to what is usually held up as a fundamental part of being a citizen of a nation. But it's not the only place and time where murder is OK. I'm not even talking about the excesses of the police. Our systems, the things that define our civilisation, cause people's deaths all the time. There is violence everywhere we care to look and there are difficult discussions to be had about how we respond to that.
What I object to, quite strongly, is the lazy flattening of the debate. I don't care if an artist wants to argue violence has advantages or is something people are forced into. But they should absolutely be given grief if their only representation of the alternative is some stock 'pacifist' doorstop who exists to perpetuate this idea of the high-minded idealist too pure for this world. Those don't exist, not even in the stories we tell about the people who made gains via non-violent means.
Non-violence can be a threat, showing how many people are willing to stand up and how few, really, are arrayed against them. It can proceed from principle, from seeing harm done to others as abhorrent. It can be the only option available, because what can stones and slogans do against armour and tank-treads? Reckoning with that, the long history of strikes, 'riots', conscientious objection, protest, campaigning, starvation, self-immolation, petition, compromise, public condemnation, activist art, marches, speeches, lunch programmes, education, solidarity, pride, grief, defeat and victory…
Maybe it's too much to ask of brightly coloured tales of robot action.
But if they're going to wade in and make statements about war and what it does to people, I think it's fair to hold them to account for where they stop short and where they fall down. To be anti-war is not necessarily to be against violence. These things can be separated. Realistically, though, they should be a lot more intertwined than most of the Gundam franchise is prepared to admit.
Thank you very much for the ask! I've considered directly tackling this topic a few times previously but always held off doing so, so it was nice to have something to focus my thoughts.
As a little postscript, I want to note that I don't object to the word pacifist so much as what people are often trained to think it means. My point about thinking one term more useful to discuss Tomino's work means exactly what I said, particularly given the examples of non-violent support for the war efforts that he includes (from the women and children, naturally, and existing separately from solutions to the plot).
Additionally, one of the things I'm conscious of in writing this is that I don't want to descend into a debate about the utility of non-violent action, whether non-violence as a belief is reasonable, or any of the many endless circles that often result from bringing the topic up. So uh, to anyone who's made it this far, please don't drag us into that. I'm literally just talking about how a particular anime franchise handles the topic.
Shout-out to @thedancingwalrus-blog for giving this one a quick proof-read.
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