Why People Hate in Gundam Seed

before we start i want to go on record a saying gundam seed is the best gundam anime there that should make everyone happy the world is weird it makes me mad at least i get to talk about it with jose gundam seed like many gundam shows before it is about the earth being at war with the space colonies that orbit it wrinkle here is that the people living on the space colonies are genetically engineered humans while those on earth are not in the anime this is simplified to humans on earth being called naturals and humans on the space colonies being called coordinators so this is about space racism right no not exactly that's definitely a reading i've seen of this series but i would argue this show isn't about race specifically it's about hatred and to narrow it down to space racism simplifies a much broader point that the series is making my favorite scene in the whole series is this one involving a group of b-tier characters confronting hatred it needs some context to make sense so here's a quick rundown this takes place in an episode titled in the promised land a group of natural soldiers that is humans who are naturals not naturally born soldiers are dealing with the recent deaths of their friends kira and tol [Music] toll's death hits his girlfriend murielia especially hard flay seen here had been dating kira and the short version of the relationship is bear with me here he was a coordinator manipulated into helping the earth military to protect his natural friends and flay who not so secretly hates coordinators [Music] foreign dumped her old boyfriend psyched [Music] so she could manipulate kira into dying in battle [Music] technically kira is still alive at this point but no one here knows that and the final player in this scene is diarca a coordinator soldier from the other side recently captured he's a bit of a dick and he recently said this to a grieving marialia now all these characters are about to confront each other in a heavy moment foreign [Music] foreign and it picks up in the next episode gathering darkness giving us some more context [Music] flay being forced to confront the real feelings she developed for kira is essential to this scene up to this point she was pretty anti-coordinator which led to her manipulating kira but seeing the humanity in him is forcing her to confront her prejudice and the assumptions that underpin it and murielia confronting diarca is the rage that turns grief into hatred if she had killed him in that moment or not had flay's comparison of clear bigotry placed in front of her it's hard to say what might have happened to her her stopping flay and saying she doesn't want to be like her is her refusing to let her own hatred consume her and it's one of the most powerful scenes in the anime flay and marialia represent two types of hatred one birthed by the sheltered ignorance of a rich girl whose military family had taught her to hate the supposed enemy and one hatred birthed by the personal tragedy of the death of a loved one as a result of the supposed enemy during a time of war in both cases it's hatred that's learned but taking very different routes but both types of these hatreds are in many ways the same in that they otherize coordinators making them seem more like monsters than people by stripping away their individual personalities and seeing them as a collective evil they're just the people we're at war with in flay's eyes and they're just the people who killed my boyfriend in mariella's eyes it isn't until marialia sees the hatred represented in flay that she realizes what's been growing inside her since the death of tol forcing her into action leading her to reject that hatred even diarcha in the scene plays a similar role up to this point he's been a complete deck talking about naturals as if they were bugs to be ground under his heel seeing the real grief in marialia's face forces him to acknowledge their humanity we get a moment like this later on showing us his growth [Music] aside from psy who never really displays any overt bigotry everyone in the scene grows into a better person seeing humanity and the opposition when their lives in the military would sooner demand they dehumanize the other side learning how to empathize while dealing with their own trauma by far my favorite character in gundam seed is kira yamato one of the more controversial protagonists in a gundam series he does so many cool things he beats up his friends he cries he hooks up with someone he cries he nearly murders his best friend and he survives death and then he cries and i genuinely like that he cries so much he's a character in touch with his emotions in a way that's very relatable he's absolutely devastated when he's unable to save innocent people who were relying on him and over time we see how war hardens him before he's forced to confront the reality of how war is shaping his psyche [Music] much like flay and marialia and so many other characters in this series war is what breeds hatred in the hearts of the characters specifically the people at the very bottom the soldiers who do the messy business of fighting kira has a weird arc in this story he completes his personal growth roughly 35 episodes into the series [Music] leaving 15 more for him to run around saving the day but he doesn't just do that he also learns why he was created the way he was as some kind of super soldier coordinator in the last few episodes of the series usually this would trigger or help complete a character arc but keira's already finished his and just kinda takes it in stride it's because at this point in the story it really doesn't matter where kiri comes from what matters is the person he is in that moment his past shaped him sure but it isn't what defines him the same way our genes shape us but don't necessarily define our destiny kira finishing his character arc so early makes him seem too saintly in the eyes of some viewers and i get that a main character can seem a bit boring when his sense of self is never shaken after he becomes more or less sure of himself and we see 15 episodes of him kicking ass it makes it very easy to forget the very difficult 35 episode journey that it took kira just to get to that point one of the real difficulties in unraveling the metaphorical bigotry in gundam seed is that genetically engineered people like kira are presented and can be easily understood as inherently superior to naturals to call gundam seed space racism or fantastic racism if you must is to me a gross simplification that assumes a hierarchy of races or at least the idea that one race is superior to another although the fact that coordinators are better at piloting giant robots make them seem like they're better than natural humans it doesn't prevent them from being shitty people treating their friends like garbage like kira doesn't for all their physical and mental superiority they are an evolutionary dead end one of the challenges coordinators are facing in their space colonies is the lack of children being born leading to arranged marriages and a declining population and the divide between who can or can't be a coordinator is fairly thin since it can technically be done to anybody a coordinator simply someone whose genes have been altered before they were born it doesn't necessarily matter that their parents are naturals or coordinators and conversely if coordinators choose to have a child and that child's genes aren't genetically altered is that child still a coordinator or are they now a natural the series never really tries to answer that question because it's beside the point coordinators aren't supposed to be a scientifically distinct class of human beings and what this show is critiquing is the idea that we can use science to divide ourselves to understand where all this hatred between naturals and coordinators comes from we have to look at the ruling structures of both the earth and the space colonies the alliance of earth governments that are at war with the coordinators are dominated by a hate group called the blue cosmos notably in the form of their leader mudata azrael azrael as you might tell from the look of him is a rich [ __ ] who uses his considerable influence to turn fear and ignorance of coordinators into hatred lest the hierarchy he sits on top of gets disturbed blue cosmos are the tool to do that their creed is it raises the question what exactly is a pure world and why are human beings who aren't genetically modified not considered naturals the rhetoric here reeks of scientific racism carrying the assumption that human beings whose genes have been altered cannot possibly be humans themselves or at least not humans in the right and proper natural way if genetic engineering could be used to solve a chronic illness or prevent cancer is getting in the way of these developments somehow removing someone's humanity or is it only okay to intervene after someone has been born blue cosmos and gundam seeds seem perfectly fine when it comes to altering human beings after they've been formed as seen by the human cpus they deploy to fight for them these poor kids have had their minds shattered by drugs and experimentation turning them into weapons for the military but they are technically naturals since they haven't been genetically engineered but are these guys more human than kira or atherin i would say no but they're also not less human either even when you have a clear example of two different types of human beings and even if one has abilities the other doesn't it doesn't make one more human than the other and going back to kira the idea of jesus yamato a name given to him by some critics is short-sighted if he truly were that infallible hero throughout the series he wouldn't be nearly as compelling but we see him in pain we see him act like a jerk and we see him be manipulated even though kira has these abilities that appear to be superhuman when it comes to piloting a giant robot he's just as fallible as any other person the complexities of genetic engineering represented make it difficult to map onto any current prejudice which is why it's so much more helpful to read gundam seed as a series about the dangers of bigotry and prejudice more broadly although there are references to other forms of discrimination existing in this world they're never actually depicted and often discussed in the past tense as if this is a post-discrimination future aside from discrimination towards coordinators though it's hard to really tell for sure since there are very few people of color in the series and there don't seem to be any members of the lgbt community at all that may simply be a byproduct of anime more broadly much like previous gundam shows before it but it's still noticeable within the series even if it didn't want to use older bigotries it would still have been interesting to see how other forms of bigotry intersect with anti-coordinator sentiment even something like the difference between first second or third generation coordinators which is a concept that exists in the show but isn't really expanded upon aside from the increasing difficulties conceiving children it doesn't detract from the overall message of the series of course but does limit its effect making it appear as though discrimination only operates on a single dimension originally airing in late 2002 it's tempting to map the attacks of september 11th onto this story with the bloody valentine massacre standing in for the attack on the world trade center in many ways the bloody valentine attack had an effect on the people of the space colonies the same way the september 11th attacks had an effect on the people living in the united states this was an event that was considered so violent it was a trauma for an entire group of people and in many ways it felt like the beginning of history when you hear people speak about the bloody valentine attack on gundam seed it feels as though this is where it all went wrong this is where relations between naturals and coordinators completely broke down the truth is though if you look at the history of gundam seed it's one part of a much longer story in the same way the september 11th attacks were one part of a much longer story i've spoken already about the blue cosmos led by azrael and how they've infected the earth's government the space colonies are similarly infected specifically in how the bloody valentine attack changed its eventual leader patrick zala patrick lost his wife in that attack and from that moment forward views the naturals as a threat to be exterminated aside from doing the anime villain thing of building a giant space laser to wipe out all life on earth we also see him do more interesting things such as maneuvering political moderates out of power winning elections with his hard-line stance on ending the war as soon as possible he even orders the assassination of his chief rival siegel klein who seeks to reconcile with the earth government it's clear that the people living on the space colonies are being trained to hate the people of the earth which emboldens authoritarians like patrick zalah and i really appreciate how the anime demonstrates that happening referring to public opinion and how it's swayed by the media whether it be propaganda or pop music the people can have an influence of the political realities they live in but they also struggle around top down control that tries to guide them towards hating their supposed enemies patrick is driven by his hatred of naturals made slightly more relatable because of the personal element of his dead wife being the cause and it's here we can see echoes of that earlier scene i highlighted if azrael of the blue cosmos represents the cold bigotry of someone detached from the coordinators dehumanizing them so he can hold his place in society this maps on very clearly to the rich girl flay patrick is more closely assigned with marielia though driven into hatred because of the personal loss of his wife but while marialia was able to avoid descending into bigotry and hatred patrick is less fortunate what we see in these characters is how these angry hateful people weren't born that way they're products of their environments being detached from groups of people lets them more easily be reframed as the others or experience a trauma that gets extrapolated onto an entire group these people's genes didn't lead them to these positions it was the lies they lived reconciliation between people on different sides of the war and gundam seed is often done when one side humanizes the other when natural kagali and coordinator atherin are trapped on an island together they learned how to trust one another to survive in a way where they don't necessarily need to kill one another it's moments like this that really crystallize a lesson that should be simple enough to learn just because one person from a particular group does something horrible doesn't necessarily impugn every member of that group it's a very easy motto to live in your everyday life much more difficult when you're tasked with killing everyone who happens to be on that group because it's part of some sort of military operation and it must sound so much more convincing if that other group can be described through some sort of scientific formula to prove that they are in fact different and not worthy of the same moral consideration of the people who are scientifically a part of your group the scientific distinction between naturals and coordinators is a broader basis for discrimination junk science has been used for all sorts of different types of bigotries but legitimate science can also be used as a justification as well for instance it's perfectly valid to say that there is a scientific basis to explain why some people are born with genes that express one range of skin colors compared to people who are born with genes that express a different range of skin colors but what does that really matter genes can be used to divide people in an infinite number of ways so i'm more curious as to why someone would focus on this one difference so when someone uses this scientific fact as a means for separating one group from another it often says more about the person interpreting the science than the actual science itself and it's how science is manipulated into a justification for bigotry but wait you might be asking that example sounds like racism is this show about space racism after all like i said earlier it's more complicated than that it's a portrait of how ignorance and trauma can grow into hatred whether it's manipulated by someone like azrael or envelop someone like patrick gundam seed is about how that hatred is then rationalized backwards as being a product of scientific inquiry in a way it's about space racism but bigotry could also be read as space homophobia space sexism and space transphobia or really any form of space bigotry it's about all the different forms of bigotry that use science as a justification it's that little bit of weighted credibility that's used to disguise hatred hatred that's formed through ignorance or a misplaced sense of blame on a whole group of people one of the keys for a species survival is genetic diversity the more variation within a species the more likely some of those variations will be useful for the survival of the species as a whole we get caught up in the idea of having the best genes as if we can create divisions on who in society is most valuable as if there was a simple scientific formula to measure the worth of a person this not only ignores how genes interact with our environment to shape who we are but it also ignores the scientific reality that a multitude of different people is the key to building a better world and ensuring the survival of the whole species it's not about one person or one group being thought of as superior it's understanding how there is no genetic hierarchy and there were all people working towards making a better world together the closing line of gundam seed is one of my favorite kira having saved the day is floating in space and it's the wreckage of his gundam as he lays there wondering if all this fighting was worth it he sees atherin and kigali the two people who found a way to see past their sides on the war and create a connection flying out to meet kira and he says [Music] so this was my first ever video about anime i could have done an entire retrospective of the series but i wanted to focus on a narrow topic this time just to give it a feel see how this works see if people like it if you're into this kind of video let me know and i will do more of them be honest though i had been meaning to make something about gundam seed for a while it's one of my all-time favorite shows i have at least one more anime video in me i just need to get much better at making videos before i make it because i want to do it when i'm at the height of my power speaking of my power if you'd like it to increase you can become a patron like the lovely people you see going up the screen patrons get early access to videos just like this one and all future videos they also get to download my awesome theme song you're hearing in the background right now and of course the sweetest gift of all seen your name in the credits because obviously that's just too cool so do consider becoming a patron if you'd like to support this work in a non-financial capacity you can always like comment and if you haven't already subscribe and hit that little bell for notifications and if you don't know what to comment how about telling me what your favorite anime is thank you everyone for watching

Channel: José

Views: 125,759

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Id: XaJ7qLNsn4s

Length: 21min 26sec (1286 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020