Finished watching Mobile Suit Gundam: The Origin again a bit ago. A few thoughts.

The animation quality is fantastic. It's well-shot, written, and paced. The music is spot-on. The plot is moving. It's amazing.

One aspect that stands out more on this viewing is the way each character is intensely his or herself. Every line of dialogue reveals something about the character's nature, and just about none is wasted. The series gives you reasons to sympathize (if only for a little while) with characters like Degwin or Kycillia even though their actions are power-hungry and cause terrible consequences.

Ghiren Zabi especially stands out - he shows an incredibly fluid ability to manipulate ideology, and actually seems to get more skilled at this over time, yet at the same time he's as slippery as an eel. You can easily see how he could get people to follow him, and also how he can figuratively broadcast on the national mental wavelength.

It's actually less political than I remember. For some reason, I thought that there was more content covering the oppression of Spacenoids, the internal factions within Munzo (which became Zeon), and the formation of ideology. There was actually much less oppression of Spacenoids than I remembered, though there is certainly plenty of rioting and sending tanks to suppress riots.

That said, the series is still highly political. This gets into the whole 'politics in media' thing.

The Origin is a sequence of events leading up to a gigantic space war, proceeding through the early phases of the war until right before the first episode of the original 1979 Mobile Suit Gundam (though with a few tweaks). It's a thrilling story of escapes and intrigue and murder and violence!

However, it all generally feels quite natural. A mobile suit may be an absurd form of military unit, but other than this, everything has its proper weight and momentum. It's a story told with great consideration, by someone observant and experienced.

I originally wrote that last line as a guess based on watching the series. The eye with which the author observes the characters suggests a great deal of life experience, and an understanding of individuals, their nature, and their course of development. In fact, there was an interview of the now 77-year-old author Yoshikazu Yasuhiko, who was on the staff for the 1979 original:

It was over 10 years of hard work, but I could depict the outbreak of the war in the prehistory of 'Gundam' and the absurdity of the elitism advocated by the Principality of Zeon to some extent.

He appears to believe that the idea of newtypes was over-emphasized in later series after 1979, resulting in confusion and support for elitism.

Just watching five minutes of one episode of The Origin was enough to help a concept click in a peace theory I have been working on. I don't mean a related episode. I had left it on pause a week or so before, and when I returned, after a few minutes of watching Char and his comrades, it came to me that I could reapply the tension and officer models that I use for ideology.

The Origin has an interesting contrast with Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn, another incredibly dense series set in the Universal Century, set sixteen years after the war that The Origin shows us the beginning of.

Where in The Origin, newtypes are of relatively little importance, in Unicorn, they take center stage. Where The Origin is a story told by an old man who cherishes people, Unicorn shouts at you as loudly as it can. So loudly that it fills your senses. So loudly that you can finally hear.

Between the two, it's my opinion that Unicorn is more dense. I found myself coming back to watch different scenes repeatedly, pause, and then pace and think deeply about the nature of the world.

I recommend both highly. However, I don't know what it would feel like to see either while having no familiarity with the Universal Century timeline.

Watsonian takes

I have deep-dive Watsonian takes, from a perspective that post-dates the portion of the Universal Century when Zeonism was relevant. This is the introduction:

the tl;dr: Zeonism started as an environmental movement paired with pacifist political independence for the half of humanity living in space. After its founder's death, Zeonism was turned into Space Nazism by the political family who ruled Side 3, and used to justify a war that killed half of humanity in the name of political independence. After that war was lost, Zeonism fractured and was used as justification for a variety of political and military movements.

Doylist takes

If you want Doylist takes, I don't have any short-form recommendations. The podcast Mobile Suit Breakdown would be a good place to get a thorough exploration, but each podcast episode runs 2-4x as long as the show episode that each podcast episode covers, and not all show episodes concern Zeonism. If you're prepared to binge a longform podcast, start with season 1:

I'm only partway into the second season, corresponding to the second Gundam show, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam. The tl;dr seems to be that, in the first show at least, Zeonism was just Space Nazism, or at the very least, Space Authoritarianism. After that, "Zeonism" was embellished to suit each show's plot conflicts, and to suit the political environment in which the shows aired. Sometimes it's just design flavor and a "freedom for Spacenoids" slogan; sometimes it's deeper.

If you watch most of the main series in release order, you'll have a fairly good working idea of what Zeonism is:

Mobile Suit Gundam (1979) (21.5h)

Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (1985) (25h)

Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ (1986) (23.5k)

Char's Counterattack (1988) (1.5h)

Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn RE:0096 (2010) (11h)

Not something that could ever happen to anyone ever.

Anyways.

Here's a chart drawing parallels between phases of the developmental history of Christianity, Marxism, and Zeonism.

I've dressed it up as a Federation Survey Service report because their logo is cool. It's posted as part of my general repository examining the history and development of Zeonist ideology in the Universal century timeline of Gundam, but stands alone. The main repository is about specific ideological differences. This is about a multistage developmental model of revolutionary ideologies:

The Prophet

The Original Interpretation

Prophetic Failure

Doctrinal Reinterpretation

Widespread Adoption

Rejection and Reform -> The Prophet

I'm very happy with how the chart turned out; I learned some new tricks in Cytoscape.js. Look at those big swoopy black arrows!

But I also learned about some new Zeonist movements! Check out ReZeon and the Jupiter Phantoms!

Here's the link to the whole chart, so you can zoom in:

[ @irradiate-space ]

My general view is that Zeonism is simultaneously prescriptive (a body of thought based on the writings of Zeon Deikun) and descriptive (a set of actions undertaken by a group of people, including Zeon Deikun, the Zabi family, and Char).  Because “Zeonism” embodies multiple interrelated things, ‘Sieg Zeon’ has multiple simultaneous meanings, but not no meaning.

Under multi-level recurrent ecology, the world is viewed as existing in layers of increasing abstraction.  Patterns emerge at the base level (replication, division, acquisition of resources, etc) of molecules, and then may reappear at greater levels of abstraction (often though not necessarily also more complex) such as the cell or multicellular organism.

“Zeon” is a nation, and thus like many things, a phenomenon which exists across multiple levels of abstraction simultaneously.  It is,

A people (and their associated biology, particularly noting the existence of newtypes)

A place (the various space colonies and their environment)

A memetic wave or ideology which synchronizes the actions of individuals and harmonizes their actions towards a specific direction (including rebellion against the ruling Earth Federation)

An information environment within which that wave spreads

A hierarchy and set of institutions guided by that ideology within that information environment which shape the actions of those people in that place

A set of specific technologies which enable all of the above, including the eventual invasion of Earth with giant robots from space

A sequence of events which enable all of this to happen

Cultivation of national ecology is not a form of transcendence nor in itself a moral action, but can be directed towards multiple ends, some of which are better or more moral than others.  Further, the different layers of abstraction have different qualities, not just different quantities - as reasoning beings humans are able to make agreements or make changes to the world which are effectively unreachable to, say, iguanas.  (Thus newtypes can be viewed from a certain perspective as being at a ‘higher level of evolution,’ due to their ability to reach a new level of communication, but of course that primarily makes sense as ‘figurative’ evolution, rather than literal.)

In another art project, a countryball describes splitting another countryball in two as “simple, if you understand the particle-wave duality of nationhood,” and this is essentially the joke.  A nation is both a physical thing or group of people (“particles”) and a phenomenon (“waves”).  In Polandball countries are generally represented as unified wholes; the act of splitting a country in two thus only seems sensible if you realize they are not (e.g. composed of “subnational particles better known as hominids”).  But of course even if you do know this it isn’t actually simple at all, and a countryball treating it as such is a distortion, similar to when Germanyball morphs into the Reichtangle.

Zeon Zum Deikun, credited as the foundational thinker of what became Zeonism, regarded Earth as the sacred cradle of humanity, which must be preserved against pollution and destruction. He called this concept "Ere-ism". He had other ideas, too, which were folded together with Ere-ism into Zeonism.

Political successors to Zeon Zum Deikun were many, and of those, several declared war on the government of Earth. In notable incidents: a space colony is dropped on Sydney, a space colony is dropped on North America, a space colony is dropped on Ireland, an asteroid is dropped on Tibet. To save the Earth from ecological ruin at the hands of one group of humans, these groups of Zeonists use weapons which cause ecological ruin.

Sarah Taber was tweeting today about ecofascism, which appears to be generally regarded as a totalitarian government which forcibly deprives people of rights and property for the good of nature.