Forum - View topic

INTEREST: Anti-War Novelist, Tokyo University Professor Discuss Conflicting Morals In Gundam

Anti-war is an easy stance to take when you never have to lift a finger yourself or suffer the consequences for it.

That's kind of the point of Japan's Article 9...

zaphdash wrote:

The argument is not that watching Gundam will make individuals want to join the military, it's that works like Gundam have the aggregate effect of making their audiences more receptive to fighting a war... But not wanting to personally fight a war doesn't stop people from supporting politicians who saber rattle or deploy military force to resolve (or incite) conflicts.

Of course, Gundam does routinely go out of its way to show those politicians are evil racists/fascists (Gihren, Patrick Zala), all-around-jerks (the whole Earth Federation leadership), pathetic man-children (Char), or all of the above (Azrael).

zaphdash wrote:

These are meant to show us the "horrors" of war, but they are, by and large, abstractions that obscure the real horror. They are depicted from afar, or even just described in dialogue, or we are shown their aftermath, but in any case, we are generally shielded from the suffering that occurs as these events are actually taking place... Gundam shows instead denounce the specific perpetrators of the atrocities and justify waging war against them.

The original MSG opens with Fraw's Mother and Grandfather killed in an explosion, with her running over to sob over their lifeless bodies. Gundam SEED with some frequency depicts people screaming in terror as sci-fi weapons cause their bodies to burst and explode; a character is decapitated, and we are shown a character's pilot suit filling up with their blood. Victory features the protagonist spoiler[carrying his mother's severed head]. F91 and Hathaway depict the pandemonium and fear of civilians fleeing for their lives while caught in a robot fight. The entire Saji/Louise storyline from the first season of 00 is meant to give a concrete attachment to those horrors when they arrive. And a good number of those are perpetrated by no one in particular (opening of MSG, F91) or an ostensible protagonist (SEED, Hathaway).

It's also not as if a certain level of abstraction and detachment isn't also an effective means of conveying a message. The way a story can casually treat horrific consequences is capable of conveying just as much as laboring over the details. A story that personalizes and particularizes all of its atrocities turns us away from establishing empathy in realistic circumstances and confronting systematic and structural outcomes.

zaphdash wrote:

Gundam largely spares us from the more "mundane" horrors of real war -- arbitrary executions, prison camps, starvation of civilian populations, mass rape, and so on

I mean it is aimed towards children, so I dunno what exactly you expect, but even then, Gundam goes pretty hard on a lot of these. Victory Gundam has way more attempted rape than I'd expect for a show for elementary school children (which is to say it has any at all). It also has torture, execution by guillotine, and the sexual assault of a prisoner (which is admittedly often memed, but in the context of the show is much more unsettling). MSG has Amuro return to his home, only to find it occupied by soldiers (from his own side, no less) who assault him and are all around cruel bullies and petty tyrants. Unicorn has (off-screen but explicitly mentioned) the massacre of an occupied town and child prostitution.

zaphdash wrote:

[Macross 7] does depict war itself as a self-perpetuating cycle of violence that if not broken leads inevitably to oblivion, whereas most mecha shows (Gundam included) depict it instead as the perhaps unsavory but nonetheless necessary solution to otherwise intractable conflicts

Yeah, but no. SEED, Turn A, and Unicorn are all explicitly about war as a self-perpetuating cycle of violence, and that theme lurks under much of the rest of the franchise. The big picture of the UC timeline is about the whole planet literally dying because humanity can't break that cycle, and the conflict between the people who stare into that abyss and choose nihilism or hope.

zaphdash wrote:

The argument is not that watching Gundam will make individuals want to join the military, it's that works like Gundam have the aggregate effect of making their audiences more receptive to fighting a war.

Right, another way to interpret someone growing up to be pro-war (also in my original post). And like I said then, no it doesn’t. Gundam isn’t pro-war propaganda. At worst, it might desensitize the audience towards violence. That’s no different then alot of other modern media.

zaphdash wrote:

It isn't really clear from the ANN article exactly what Aisaka's broader point was...

Which has me wondering why you’re so defensive of him? I can only respond to the quote posted. As for how I responded, his hot take simply sound all too familiar to me. I’ve been hearing similar statements towards media blaming it for a rise in violence and/or crime since the 90’s. Of course this sort of thing has been going on for a lot longer.

I wasn’t insulting him or his work. I’m just tired of seeing the blame shifted onto fiction whether it’s anime, video games, or whatever.

zaphdash wrote:

You don't necessarily have to want to go fight the war yourself, and you probably don't, nor do most people. But not wanting to personally fight a war doesn't stop people from supporting politicians who saber rattle or deploy military force to resolve (or incite) conflicts.

Regardless of fiction consumed, there will always be some people who support a politician’s call to war. Especially in countries with questionable politics in which citizens live in police states and are fed daily propaganda through TV. While having their internet limited to only what their government wants them to see.

I do not see Gundam as that type of fiction to be any kind of major contributor to pro-war sentimentality. And I have no desire nor the time to go into great detail why. So we’ll have to agree to disagree.

zaphdash wrote:

Gundam, of course, takes it even a step further with its fetishization of enormous body counts...

So do some video games, movies, comics, etc. Etc.

I get what you’re saying, but to me it just sounds like another American politician shouting about violence in some kind of media. Be it video games, movies, tv, or comics.

Yes, and it shows that the appropriate response to these politicians is violence.

That's fair enough, but in each UC show (and in each of the alternate universe ones, for that matter), the discrete conflict at the heart of that specific show is still ultimately resolved with violence.

I don't necessarily "expect" anything. I think you are misunderstanding me, because I am not trying to say that Gundam should be anything other than what it is. It can be whatever its creators want it to be... All I'm saying is that Gundam, as it actually exists, is not particularly "anti-war."

light turner wrote:

Anti-war is an easy stance to take when you never have to lift a finger yourself or suffer the consequences for it.

In the real world, there is such thing as nuance. I can be anti-war, yet understand that there is such thing as necessary action for the greater good.

For instance, just cause I don't like to fight doesn't mean I've never put in the time to learn self defense. I have.

I also understand a Doctor amputating a limb that can't be saved. That is for the greater good. Doesn't mean I have to like it.

My country is helping Ukraine. I understand why. If I was a politician, I'd probably make similar choices in their shoes.

If Russia wins the war, that's bad for everyone except Putin and his allies. Doesn't mean I want there to be a war.

War should be limited to fiction and history books. I tried to cover this topic in my dissertation, but it turned out to be difficult, and I needed professional help. I was advised to use the services of https://edubirdie.com/dissertation-proposal-help and I can tell that the writer meets the highest standards and covered all my needs. The main idea that I wanted to convey is that we should all live in peace. But unfortunately, war is still around.

Spider3PO wrote:

light turner wrote: Anti-war is an easy stance to take when you never have to lift a finger yourself or suffer the consequences for it. [i]In the real world...

I like your arguments.
Every normal person understands that war is bad, and the romanticization of war is beneficial only to those who want to unleash this war. This is where propaganda begins. However, I don't think the authors of Gundams tried to do something like that. It seems to me that they simply expressed their vision and perhaps tried to convey their position to young people in such a way that it was easier to perceive.

zaphdash wrote:

Yes, and it shows that the appropriate response to these politicians is violence.

Though rarely violence perpetrated by the protagonists; the evil politicians are usually undone by (violent) internal coups and betrayals (warmongering, much like crime, never pays). And the point remains that I don't really think you can argue Gundam contributes to a desensitization to war that breeds support for pro-war politicians when those exact kinds of politicians are depicted so negatively by the show--unless the claim is it leads people to believe political support for warmongers is ok because you can always violently depose them later if things get too bad? Which I guess is... something?

zaphdash wrote:

That's fair enough, but in each UC show (and in each of the alternate universe ones, for that matter), the discrete conflict at the heart of that specific show is still ultimately resolved with violence.

I mean, sure, they don't have an *answer* to the cycle of violence, but that doesn't mean they can't condemn it.

Especially when the best example you can muster has the solution of "just sing a magic song," I don't really think you can hold Gundam's lack of concrete solutions to cyclical violence against its anti-war bonafides.

You also need to look at the UC timeline as a whole; yes the immediate conflict is (often) concluded with violence, but then the next series shows that resolution didn't really fix anything and just set everything up for more violence--sure, that's the result of production needs to keep cranking out sequels and reset the conflict, but I do think Gundam leans into that structure to further its themes.

(As an aside, I'd point out that the "conflict at the heart" of Turn A is not the fight with Ghingham. I also would have thought you'd appreciate his position as a warmongering caricature who literally became that way by watching Gundam shows, and who eventually spoiler[gets defeated by reflexively anti-war space magic goo].)

The problem is that you have an incredibly rigid, narrow, and literal definition of what it means to be an anti-war piece of media (and I'm guessing rather internally inconsistent). You won't seem to tolerate any deviation from a strict didactic approach, nothing that can grapple with contradiction or nuance, no space for metaphor or fiction. The horrors of war must be granular and realistic, but that realism ought not to extend to presenting intractable problems without tidy solutions; anti-war media must be a model of pacifist behavior, never a tragedy.

You also have far too little consideration of the context in which Gundam often sits as a media franchise; sure it may sanitize the depiction of war, but compared to what? Compared to a journalistic account of an actual violent conflict, sure. But compared to other exciting action-adventure violent media directed towards children, absolutely not. Maybe once you have already become desensitized to depictions of violence the x-ray weapons of SEED read as cheap attempts at shock value, but I can vouch for their lasting and visceral impact to an actual child.
Is Gundam the most anti-war thing out there? No. Could it go harder on its anti-war message? Yup. But does that somehow sap it of that message entirely? Does the fact that it doesn't act as a manual to non-violently end a conflict really preclude its ability to condemn violence?

Your primary complaint seems to be that Gundam shows have violent conflicts that eventually end with violence, and that this must definitionally glorify war. That of course requires putting aside that throughout the shows are full of characters sad, crying, broken, miserable, and lamenting the state of affairs they're in. That the shows don't end with fireworks and victory celebrations but everyone essentially just thankful they've survived the preceding mess. That in the end the wars don't accomplish anything but killing a bunch of people and laying the seeds of more violence to come. That the people advocating for and profiting from war are shown to be craven villains. But because the space magic afforded in the shows doesn't just solve all the problems, and the wars drag on to an inevitable violent conclusion, it must be glorifying all that violence. That you could watch almost any Gundam series and come away with the sense that it is trying to say "All that violence? More of that please, it was glorious and necessary" is absurd to the point of parody.

zaphdash wrote:

I don't necessarily "expect" anything. I think you are misunderstanding me, because I am not trying to say that Gundam should be anything other than what it is. It can be whatever its creators want it to be... All I'm saying is that Gundam, as it actually exists, is not particularly "anti-war."

I mean, you also said that you think Tomino and other Gundam creators had the intention to make something that was anti-war, so you need to have some sense that those creators failed miserably at what they were trying to do and that it in fact cannot be what they want it to be.

I think you are looking for -- and/or believe I am positing -- a more direct correspondence than actually exists.

I don't believe the persistence of conflict within the UC timeline is as much a condemnation of the cycle of violence as it is an attempt to keep making money off of more sequels and sidestories in a successful franchise (you acknowledge this yourself further down in your post).

You are again looking for a more direct correlation than I am suggesting or than need actually exist. I wouldn't consider Macross 7 anti-war because it proposes the solution of "sing a magical song,"...

I am not attempting to define "what it means to be an anti-war piece of media." I'm only explaining why I feel that Gundam, in particular, falls short.

It's not necessary to compare Gundam to anything. I am not making comparative judgments here. I am simply evaluating Gundam on its own merits as I see them.

Its sanitized depiction of war is one part of the whole, and the whole collectively amounts to yes, explicit condemnations of war, but condemnations that are implicitly undermined by the content of the show. It is not "sapped of that message entirely." The franchise is still full of characters musing about how war is hell and philosophizing over the merits of pacifism, enduring deaths of friends and loved ones, and getting generally just ground down, and that's not nothing. It's just also not everything.

I don't have a "complaint" about Gundam.

Anything can be absurd if you are so eager to engage in reductio ad absurdum

I don't think it is too crazy to ask what message a show has that uses warfare to sell toys.

zaphdash wrote:

I think you are looking for -- and/or believe I am positing -- a more direct correspondence than actually exists.

No, I'm trying to point out that indirect correspondence exists in the opposite direction too. The notion that media can have diffuse cultural effects is not nearly so unheard of or difficult to understand as you seem to fancy, it's just that it's not an effect that's limited to the single vector of pro-well-maybe-not-"pro"-but-functionally-indistinguishable-from-pro-war sentiment. Just as Gundam can subtly nudge people in the direction of thinking war can sometimes be necessary, it can not-as-subtly nudge them in the direction of thinking warmongering politicians are scumbags (among many other things that are not acquiescence to war). Maybe the former wins out over the latter? But that's an argument you'd need to make, it's not an axiomatic result. I also think it's hard argument to make, that the implicit in this case wins out over the explicit, especially when the implicit-not-anti-war aspects are those most detached from reality (e.g. the cool robots, the fact that you can solve a war by defeating Neo-Hitler when he gets in his giant robot, etc.) and the explicit-anti-war aspects are much more grounded (e.g. the callousness of warmongering politicians, the indiscriminate violence inflicted on civilians, the psychological horror of being forced to commit and bear witness to violence, etc.).

...

zaphdash wrote:

Its sanitized depiction of war is one part of the whole, and the whole collectively amounts to yes, explicit condemnations of war, but condemnations that are implicitly undermined by the content of the show. It is not "sapped of that message entirely." The franchise is still full of characters musing about how war is hell and philosophizing over the merits of pacifism, enduring deaths of friends and loved ones, and getting generally just ground down, and that's not nothing. It's just also not everything.

But how? Why? That there are implicit undercurrents in Gundam that are in tension with the more explicit pieces of its message is not in dispute, the question is why do you conclude that tension resolves so decisively in one direction? Why are whatever seeping background effects and subtext not counterbalanced or even overwritten by the plain text of the franchise? Why does "not nothing" seem to mean "practically nothing"?

zaphdash wrote:

I don't believe the persistence of conflict within the UC timeline is as much a condemnation of the cycle of violence as it is an attempt to keep making money off of more sequels and sidestories in a successful franchise (you acknowledge this yourself further down in your post).

As the great wise man Diamond Joe Quimby once said: "It can be two things." And indeed, if outside production considerations and intentions were determinative and all-encompassing, all those cool robots aren't as much desensitizing people to violence and romanticizing war as they are just an attempt to make money off selling cool model kits in a successful franchise. Or perhaps Macross 7's rejection of violence isn't as much a plea for pacifism as it is an attempt to shoehorn in more music and drive album sales in a successful franchise.

zaphdash wrote:

You are again looking for a more direct correlation than I am suggesting or than need actually exist. I wouldn't consider Macross 7 anti-war because it proposes the solution of "sing a magical song,"...

No, but I was hoping for a clearer recollection of the arguments you made before (and just saying "there's not a direct correlation" ad nauseum doesn't substitute for an argument), and a bit of comparative analysis. You held up Macross 7 for its depiction of "a self-perpetuating cycle of violence that if not broken leads inevitably to oblivion" claiming Gundam did not do the same, eventually resting the distinction on whether that cycle of violence leading to oblivion continues unabated (Gundam) or is broken via plot-contrivance (Macross 7). My contention is that's sort of a silly distinction. That "war grinds on until the planet is unlivable" is somehow judged more accommodating of war-is-a-good-solution-to-problems than "war grinds on until we decide it doesn't have to" seems a bit counterintuitive.

zaphdash wrote:

I am not attempting to define "what it means to be an anti-war piece of media." I'm only explaining why I feel that Gundam, in particular, falls short.

I'm not sure how you think the definition of X isn't directly implicated in discussing whether something is X or not. It's especially relevant when you've held out Macross 7 as the pinnacle of anti-war mecha anime, while dismissing the generally understood as anti-war Gundam as not even anti-war at all--there's clearly something going on with how you conceive of that concept. Most of the aspects of Gundam that you claim undermine its anti-war messages are likewise abundantly present in Macross 7 (crass commercialism, cool robots, sanitizing war). And as noted above, what you originally cited as the core of Macross 7's message, that "war itself [is] a self-perpetuating cycle of violence that if not broken leads inevitably to oblivion" is reinforced over and over again in the Gundam franchise. That one could not even be anti-war at all but the other is an exemplar of the genre means that the whole of the matter must be in the difference between the two. And that difference seems to boil down to what I was attempting to articulate--that you seem to require a literal non-violent solution to war, no matter how contrived, to maintain a coherent anti-war message.

zaphdash wrote:

It's not necessary to compare Gundam to anything. I am not making comparative judgments here. I am simply evaluating Gundam on its own merits as I see them.

I mean, you *do* need to make comparisons, pretending that you can't only stunts your analysis. Gundam's "own merits" don't exist in a vacuum, but rather those merits need to be evaluated within a context (and those merits extend to its ability to complicate received narratives about violence and war for a younger audience). There isn't some amorphous neutral perspective from which to evaluate a piece of media, see if it checks off some objective list of anti-war traits engraved on stone tablets, and call it an analysis. Things need to be seen within the context in which they exist; if you're coming from an environment suffused with media that portrays war as a fun, heroic adventure (Star Wars is the clearest example here that comes to mind) then Gundam isn't sanitizing war but rather doing the opposite, scratching at and peeling back those layers of sanitization.

zaphdash wrote:

I don't have a "complaint" about Gundam.

I think you are misconstruing what "complaint" means here; I mean it in the sense of claiming something has deleterious effects on society, that it fails to live up to and in fact completely undermines its creators' intentions, and that it has a grossly unearned reputation for its supposed virtues. That kind of complaint, not the other kind.

zaphdash wrote:

Anything can be absurd if you are so eager to engage in reductio ad absurdum

(Leaving aside that's not how reductio ad absurdum works) I don't really think it's "reductio ad absurdum" to restate your claims in a mildly more provocative manner and set them alongside descriptive statements that provide evidence against them. That Gundam glorifies war and promotes violence as necessary are things you have claimed explicitly and repeatedly here (and continue to do so). If you think those statements are an attempt to draw an unreasonably absurd conclusion from your arguments then perhaps you have found evidence for your "failure as a writer." (If you want to quibble with the "is trying to say" part because the creators did not intend to give it the message you claim it has, just substitute "is saying" and I think the point stands.)

zaphdash wrote:

I don't think it is too crazy to ask what message a show has that uses warfare to sell toys.

I see your edgy crass-commercialization-corrupts-everything take and raise you a double-reverse-edgy "actually it's a show that finances an anti-war message by selling toys" take. And I'm only half-kidding, I played with the cool robot toys which led to watching the shows and being exposed to the "war is hell" angle (and in particular SEED's "the union of racism, the military industrial complex, and the state is hell" version); I imagine I'm not alone.

I don't think the one reduces the other to "practically nothing"... I don't think either message necessarily has to "win" over the other.

For one thing, these apparently contradictory effects can coexist in the real world. Portraying violence as the easy or best or only solution to conflict can nudge people toward being more accepting of violence even if they don't actually like violence. And portraying warmongering politicians as scumbags can make people hate warmongering politicians, but when presented with a concrete menu of specific politicians to choose from, they may have overriding reasons to select the warmonger anyway

This is all just conjecture, obviously, suggesting effects that have not been and probably cannot be measured, certainly not down to the specific influence of specific shows, but it serves to illustrate that neither side of Gundam necessarily has to "win" for its "war is cool" elements to be worth discussing.

The difference is that, if you read an anti-war theme into the sheer volume of wars taking place in the UC timeline, that theme is only there out of coincidence, because they decided, for commercial reasons, to keep on making more shows...

I don't really understand what the point of this paragraph is.

My hot take is that the most anti-war mecha anime is Macross 7, and I think this plays a large part in why it's maligned by so many people. It's true that Macross 7 doesn't go any deeper into those realistic "horrors of war" than Gundam does, but it does depict war itself as a self-perpetuating cycle of violence that if not broken leads inevitably to oblivion, whereas most mecha shows (Gundam included) depict it instead as the perhaps unsavory but nonetheless necessary solution to otherwise intractable conflicts.

We also don't have to keep harping on this one specific phrase that I used to describe a different show.

... but I think I'd actually just reconsider my definition to better fit what "I know when I see," so the question of what "the problem" is with my definition or whether it is internally consistent just strikes me as not a particularly productive tangent to pursue

Whether Gundam presents a more or less sanitized portrayal of war than some other work is one question, and whether Gundam presents a sanitized portrayal in general is another.

I'm not sure how you can think, after I have repeatedly noted that I don't consider Gundam "pro-war," that "restating" my argument as being that Gundam's message is "All that violence? More of that please, it was glorious and necessary" is really keeping my core thesis intact, just "in a mildly more provocative manner."

... [Gundam's] fundamental message is actually "some problems can only be solved with war."

And it wouldn't be Gundam acting alone here, but Gundam as the big name franchise is a useful avatar for the more general situation of "anti-war" stories that actually romanticize and glorify war and make a population more receptive to the idea of war

Though, if you want to talk about examples of sanitizing war, [Basara Nekki] nonlethally rampaging through battlefields with the invincibility cheat activated is as good a place as any to start.

zaphdash wrote:

I don't think the one reduces the other to "practically nothing"... I don't think either message necessarily has to "win" over the other.

You have been consistently adamant that Gundam should not be classified as anti-war (though I'm a little unclear, do you think it's pro-war? you've been frustratingly vague on that point). Which ok, sure, but you have held out other pieces of media that have similar tensions and conflicting messages as being decidedly anti-war, so you do think these messages *can* win out over one another, they just don't do so here. You've clearly done some kind of balancing assessment weighing the messages against each other; trying to pretend like it's all unknowable and who's-to-say reads as a little disingenuous at this point.

zaphdash wrote:

For one thing, these apparently contradictory effects can coexist in the real world. Portraying violence as the easy or best or only solution to conflict can nudge people toward being more accepting of violence even if they don't actually like violence. And portraying warmongering politicians as scumbags can make people hate warmongering politicians, but when presented with a concrete menu of specific politicians to choose from, they may have overriding reasons to select the warmonger anyway

I mean, yeah, we can make up any causal chain and have it mean whatever we want. Condemnations of violence can nudge people towards rejection in practice even if they actually think violence sometimes looks cool in fiction. Media that champions non-violent solutions can nevertheless lead people to acquiesce to violence as an option when choosing among concrete options. Anti-war media is often pointless because every choice in a democratic society is just for a warmonger anyway. When presented with depictions of nonviolent solutions to war, people can become more open to escalating violent responses with the understanding de-escalation is always possible. Displaying more realistic aspects like trauma and civilian deaths alongside cool robots makes people reflexively second-guess attempts by political leaders who try to use appeals to cool-war-media to justify manifesting violence in reality. Images of fictional kids traumatized by being involved in a war make people more inclined to reject proposed solutions that involve war even if that one fictional traumatized kid did kill space-Hitler and that was pretty sweet. Sometimes depictions of warmongering politicians as evil makes people less inclined to vote for them. Etc.

zaphdash wrote:

This is all just conjecture, obviously, suggesting effects that have not been and probably cannot be measured, certainly not down to the specific influence of specific shows, but it serves to illustrate that neither side of Gundam necessarily has to "win" for its "war is cool" elements to be worth discussing.

Sure, none of it is falsifiable or even knowable, but man, talking about the vibes in the absence of any concrete reference point sure sounds productive to me.

zaphdash wrote:

The difference is that, if you read an anti-war theme into the sheer volume of wars taking place in the UC timeline, that theme is only there out of coincidence, because they decided, for commercial reasons, to keep on making more shows...

The difference is that, if you read an anti-war theme into the triumph of nonviolence taking place in Macross 7, that theme is only there out of coincidence, because they decided, for commercial reasons, to make music triumph to keep selling more albums. It doesn't delegitimize any themes the show conveys, including themes about "nonviolence" if you read such themes into it (and you are free to!), but I don't, and I bring up the commercial aspect to explain why there are so many non-violent solutions to problems in Macross 7 if not to make a statement about "nonviolence" itself--the answer is straightforward but is not to be found in the text of the shows. The commercial considerations behind Gundam, on the other hand, are irrelevant in this context.

zaphdash wrote:

I don't really understand what the point of this paragraph is.

Oh, I'm aware. I left parts out of the quote that I was not responding to, and which I don't think were responsive to what you had quoted from me originally. I was trying to interrogate your (original) argument for distinguishing Macross 7's anti-war message from Gundam's--in case you've forgotten:

zaphdash wrote:

My hot take is that the most anti-war mecha anime is Macross 7, and I think this plays a large part in why it's maligned by so many people. It's true that Macross 7 doesn't go any deeper into those realistic "horrors of war" than Gundam does, but it does depict war itself as a self-perpetuating cycle of violence that if not broken leads inevitably to oblivion, whereas most mecha shows (Gundam included) depict it instead as the perhaps unsavory but nonetheless necessary solution to otherwise intractable conflicts.

Whether Macross 7 is anti-war was not in dispute, and whether you could marshal some other set of arguments in its favor or write eloquently about its virtues also didn't seem particularly relevant.

So, it seems we do actually need to dig into this now. Because I really don't recall Macross 7 actually having much of a cycle of violence; war doesn't exactly beget more war, violence leading to violence. The Protodeviln arespoiler[ fighting to enslave others to secure a necessary lifeforce], the Macross 7/UN Spacy/Protagonists/Whatever are fighting to not have that happen; the UN Spacy violence isn't leading to the Protodeviln violence (unless you consider spoiler[enslaving a population] not inherently an act of violence, in which case, yikes). Sure, the violence escalates, but it doesn't perpetuate itself, and the very fact that the violence stops once the underlying material reason is shown to not be necessary rather decisively cuts against that idea.
It's hard to see how it's any more cyclical of a conflict than, say, the original MSG. Then the remainder of the prime-UC timeline is all substantially more cyclical, even each taken on their own, as the sides are always initiating new violence in response to past violence. Despite your poor memory (delusion?) that MSG-Zeta-ZZ-CCA are a series of unrelated conflicts that become cyclical only by being arranged sequentially, each conflict is directly born of the violence that came before. Just taking Zeta on its own, we have the victors of the preceding conflict wielding extreme violence against their defeated enemies in the name of preventing a future resurgence of violence, while in parallel a revanchist faction of the defeated seek to rekindle the last conflict--with that latter fight not even ended within the series (despite your insistence on tidy solutions, Zeta ends with the protagonist spoiler[having his mind destroyed] and the war unresolved). Exactly how violence born of a brutal occupation in the aftermath of a war wouldn't be cyclical in its own right is hard to figure out. ZZ features the aforementioned revanchist faction born of the violence from the One Year War, with a side conflict featuring a violent internal struggle for control of Neo-Zeon born of, you guessed it, the violent struggles among the Zabi family for control of Zeon. CCA has Char literally looking at the UC's history of violence and deciding he will solve it once and for all with violence.

zaphdash wrote:

We also don't have to keep harping on this one specific phrase that I used to describe a different show.

I mean, it's *the* specific phrase you used to identify a proper/legitimate/un-muddled/good/better/pick-your-positive-adjective anti-war message in direct contrast to the franchise primarily being discussed here. It also probably is a core part of any self-contained argument in favor of Gundam as an anti-war franchise, especially as it plays directly into the optimism embodied by newtypes and communication/understanding/awareness as the hope that might be able to unwind the knotted threads of violence.

zaphdash wrote:

... but I think I'd actually just reconsider my definition to better fit what "I know when I see," so the question of what "the problem" is with my definition or whether it is internally consistent just strikes me as not a particularly productive tangent to pursue

I mean, sure, you do you, but then there's really no point in communication of any kind if you don't care whether anything you say makes sense or is consistent so long as it comports with your whims at the moment.
Does explain a lot though.

zaphdash wrote:

Whether Gundam presents a more or less sanitized portrayal of war than some other work is one question, and whether Gundam presents a sanitized portrayal in general is another.

And whether Gundam engages in the process of sanitizing war is a third question, and one I think is worthy of much more consideration than you give it.

zaphdash wrote:

I'm not sure how you can think, after I have repeatedly noted that I don't consider Gundam "pro-war," that "restating" my argument as being that Gundam's message is "All that violence? More of that please, it was glorious and necessary" is really keeping my core thesis intact, just "in a mildly more provocative manner."

I mean, sure, you've repeatedly said you don't consider Gundam "pro-war" (and to be clear, I don't think I've actually accused you of claiming that, so your continual invocation of it as a defense is odd).

You've also repeatedly said it promotes violence as necessary, makes war look cool, and excitedly indulged in speculation of all the ways Gundam (yes yes, in tandem with other media) can contribute to the propagation of war and violence in the real world. To dig into some specifics, you have said:

zaphdash wrote:

... [Gundam's] fundamental message is actually "some problems can only be solved with war."

Given the assumption that those problems are in the abstract common enough (e.g. war or the looming threat of war, etc.--I'm assuming you didn't mean specifically "some problems" like "sad, crazy, charismatic blond man drops an asteroid on Earth" that are unlikely to occur in reality), and the fact you imagine people reflecting on this fundamental message with regularity--yes, I simplified the statement of that message to violence being necessary. You've also said:

zaphdash wrote:

And it wouldn't be Gundam acting alone here, but Gundam as the big name franchise is a useful avatar for the more general situation of "anti-war" stories that actually romanticize and glorify war and make a population more receptive to the idea of war

If that's not saying it glorifies war, er, well... I mean, maybe you meant that even as the avatar for the category, Gundam still doesn't glorify war, only romanticizes it? Or it does neither? Though then one might question whether it's a useful avatar if it doesn't share the properties of the class of things its representing. And that's leaving aside the continual claims that Gundam makes war look cool, which sure, you can distinguish that from glorifying war (which I imagine, unfortunately, you do), but that's close enough, right? If I had substituted "cool" for "glorious" would you not object so much? Or is the distinction you want to make that glorifying something isn't the same as making it look glorious?
So yes, if your level of nuance requires that categorizing "violence is a necessary solution to some problems" as "violence is necessary" is an absurd overreach, or that glorifying, romanticizing, and making something look cool or glorious are all incomparably distinct and ought never be mistaken for each other, then I am not really interested in engaging with that kind of "nuance."

zaphdash wrote:

Though, if you want to talk about examples of sanitizing war, [Basara Nekki] nonlethally rampaging through battlefields with the invincibility cheat activated is as good a place as any to start.

I mean if your whole issue now is just gonna be that the actual relationship between watching Gundam and being more receptive toward war hasn't been verifiably demonstrated then just say that.
...
If you agree with the principle (that people are influenced by media) but not my application of it here (that making war "cool" could make people more open to war), also great.

If you don't think this is a productive discussion then I don't know why you're even here or what you expected to find in this thread that is all about a dude claiming that Gundam's portrayal of war is problematic.

Sure, ok. I mean, whether you are willfully missing the point or you genuinely can't understand the distinction I was drawing and why the same distinction doesn't just work in reverse if you flip the titles is of no concern to me.

I mean, the actual text I had been responding to from you reduced Macross 7 to "just sing a magical song,"

I mean, sure, they don't have an *answer* to the cycle of violence, but that doesn't mean they can't condemn it. Especially when the best example you can muster has the solution of "just sing a magic song," I don't really think you can hold Gundam's lack of concrete solutions to cyclical violence against its anti-war bonafides.

I feel that the show portrays violence as something of a Chinese finger trap in that the more that you struggle, the worse it gets

MSG-CCA is only one part of one timeline, so it has not been my instinct to attribute characteristics of this one arc to the franchise as a whole. I can grant that could be unfair, given that MSG-CCA is the main part of the main timeline in the franchise, and I don't offer this by way of argument that "MSG-CCA is irrelevant because it's not the whole show" but only to explain where I have been coming from.

But "x is y because of z" doesn't imply that "all x's must be z to be y."

You react to stimulus, then maybe you interrogate that reaction to understand why you reacted the way you did, and then maybe you develop principles that could predict how you will react to similar things in the future. I'm at level 2 here with Gundam -- I know the impression that it leaves on me and I know why. I have not proceeded to level 3, a unified and coherent theory of "anti-war media" that I could deploy to characterize anything I've watched.

I've already explained why I feel Gundam's presentation of war is sanitized, and hell, you've even agreed, at least to a point -- you acknowledged several posts ago that it sanitizes its depiction of war, at least as it compare to journalism. We're obviously not going to see eye to eye on questions like whether it matters that Gundam is sanitized, to what extent it is sanitized, etc, but whether it is sanitized at all is a question we are already beyond.

If you think it's fair to "restate" my point as "All that violence? More of that please, it was glorious and necessary," I don't think it's a stretch to read that as essentially pro-war, so I keep repeating myself here because you don't really seem to be processing the point.

Sure, but I acknowledged even in the very beginning that Macross 7 is no more realistic in its depiction of war than any Gundam show -- in fact, it is obviously considerably less realistic. But it's also a completely different type of story, and I take different things away from it than I take away from Gundam.

you can either have the last word if you want it or save your breath if you don't feel like producing another post that I probably won't read and almost certainly won't respond to

Either way, have fun.

There's nothing wrong with thinking Gundams are cool. It's like saying you shouldn't find villains like Frieza or the Joker cool because they're mass murderers despite how charismatic they are in their own series. Seriously, the "wow, cool robot" meme is so stupid; you can like how badass the fights are in Gundam while still believing war is bad. Do people who kill random civilians in GTA for fun have anti-social beliefs? It's puritanism dressed in academic lingo.