Does the Principality of Zeon qualify as Fascist?

The original Mobile Suit Gundam definitely wants us to think of them as Fascist, every card played to make the Galactic Empire in Star Wars "Space Nazis" is played by Gundam here and then some.  The Zeon flag is clearly designed to be evocative of the Nazi Battle Flag, "Zig Zeon" is meant to echo "Hail Hitler", and Girhin Zabi is Godwined by HIS OWN FATHER and takes it as a compliment.

However I recently made a post all about how annoyed I get at superficial Nazi imagery being used to code villains as evil without any regard for actual ideology.  I avoided Gundam as an example in that.  The thesis of this post is that if the Zeon ideology fails to actually qualify as fascist it is a failure of the writers, as I certainly think they were trying more then George Lucas was.

I want to use the definition/characterization of Fascism provided by the Innuendo Studios YouTube video Endnote 2: White Fascism.  If this definition was constructed with an ideological agenda, it was to define it in a way where it was impossible to exclude the "Alt Right".  So it is certainly a definition that has wiggle room we could work with.

"Palingenetic Ultranationalism"

The "Us" in Zeon Zum Daikun's ideology is not "Racial" or "Ethnic" in any way we'd think of those terms today. They are the "Space Noids", individuals who were born in and/or live in the outer-space Colonies.  But this "Us" is not actually defined exclusively, he wants more people to migrate from Earth to the Colonies, he want the "Us" to eventually include everyone.  Therefor it does NOT work as the top rung of a Hierarchy.  You could argue the "Newtypes" were supposed to be the upper class, but they are actually more based on the New Age Indigo children concept, something similar was also in Childhood's End if I remember right.

It's also not "Palingenetic" since "Space Noids" are a new thing, there was no past greatness, it was all about looking forward.

"Okay, you've shown Daikun's ideology wasn't Fascist, but didn't the Zabi make it Fascist?"

The distinction between the Zabi and Daikun's original vision does matter, because in-spite of how much the Zabi and Char are vilified, Daikun's ideas are implied to be correct by the overarching meta-narrative.

The Zabi did indeed do many things I'm inclined to believe Daikun wouldn't' have approved of.  But the only thing that is even close to being an adjustment to the core ideology is changing the form of Zeon's Government from a Republic to a Principality.

The thing is, both Mussolini's original Fascist party and the Nazi Party were Republican parties.  Mussolini was forced to compromise with the King, but Hitler never had to because Germany's Monarchs were already in exile.  He was actually quite annoyed at the Kaiser's delusion that Hitler would put him back on the throne.  One of the Kaiser's sons joined the Party and they used him to get votes, but it's clear the Nazi leadership never actually trusted him.

Fascism is flexible however, and in France and Britan the would be Fascist movements were much more open to Royalism.  My point is, it's certainly not inherently Fascist.

I currently have no familiarity with any Gundam material that's post Char's Counterattack on the Universal Century timeline.  So maybe later on there is a villain who wants to "Make Zeon Great Again".  But the original Zeon Principality failed to qualify as Fascist.  Not being Fascist doesn't make them good, but the difference still matters.

Nebula in Avengers Endgame

Infinity War was the first Superhero movie to actually feel like an Event Comic as a movie.  It wasn't the first named after an Event Comic, but the Civil War movie is much smaller in scale then the Comic was, it felt like less then a normal Avengers movie not more.

Avengers Endgame however managed to feel even more like an Event Comic.  In truth both movies together are the Event, and the post credit scenes of Antman & The Wasp and Captain Marvel are the cinematic equivalent of the tie in Comics.

Endgame is something that does not work as a stand alone film, even Infinity War could kind of work on it's own.  But in Endgame things like most of the cast not being there till the final act yet being treated as of equal importance once they show up could never work as a stand alone film.  But in this case that isn't a bad thing, because the meaning it has is worth it.

Again, my experience with Comics are almost all DC ones, so I'm a weirdo loving these Marvel movies for recreating the experience I get from some of my favorite DC Comics.

No Event Comic actually succeeds in making every one of it's hundreds of characters equally important, you have to accept that sometimes your favorite character might get just a couple cool moments.  What can be interesting is how some Events are quite surprising in who gets to be important.

In the main DC Events the big three are always important, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, for the MCU those are Iron Man, Captain America and Thor, and the Endgame Video Essays on YouTube I've seen so far have mainly been about how their meta arcs came to satisfying conclusions.

But after that things can seem random, like the group of heroes and villains the Monitor originally assembled for Crisis On Infinite Earths, or Power Girl and Superboy's importance to Infinite Crisis.  And in Endgame one example of that is Ant-Man's key role in how the resolution became possible.  But what's most fascinating to me is Nebula.

In the first two Guardians of The Galaxy films Nebula is an important supporting character, but still there mostly as an accessory to Gamora's character development and what their relationship infers to the audience about Thanos, and it's the same in Infinity War but with even less Screen-time.

But in Endgame she is now part of the core avengers team, we open with her having amusing interactions with Tony.  And now 2014-Gamora is basically just here to compliment Nebula's story.

I think that's a pretty interesting pay off if you're a fan of the character or of Karen Gillian.

A Game of Endings

Avengers Endgame was great, I've already seen it twice now so I know it can hold up, historically second viewings have always been my most critical ones.  I wanted to celebrate that good news before getting into what this post is actually about.

I haven't watched Game of Thrones since season 4, but after watching a plurality of Video Essays and rants about the ending I get the sense that I'm generally inclined agree with mostly all of the criticisms.  People hating on letting the North be independent makes me uncomfortable but that's no where near the main event of all the complaining.

There are however two things that are a part of this discussion I feel inclined to disagree with.

The fact that I've seen more then one person say they can't enjoy the early seasons they used to love anymore.  This is something I've already talked about more directly in the context of Anime, my fundamental disagreement with Glass Reflection's The Ending is Paramount video.

Thing is I've never really been disappointed by a bad or imperfect ending because I know better then to expect it to be great.  I know that the longer it takes to get to the ending the more impossible it is it'll feel truly satisfying.  But even in the case of a single season 24 episode show like Romeo+Juliet my frustration with the last two episodes cannot take away how much I loved the first 22.

I do love great endings when they happen, and Avengers Endgame manages to top even the Anime Endings I find highly satisfying (Code Geass R2 is still the best ending I've ever seen in Anime) because it managed to pull it off even though it was over a Decade in building.

In order for my overall opinion of something I started out liking to become even mediocre much less bad the decline has to begin very early.  In the case of Neon Genesis Evangelion it was as soon as Asuka came in things started to decline, the literal End of Evangelion being utterly irredeemable was not enough on it's own.

The second Issue I have is everyone feeling so confident the eventual ending of the A Song of Ice and Fire books will be very well executed even if at first glance it looks like the same basic ending. I'm certain their ending will also be unsatisfying.  I'm not even confident the final book will ever get written at all.

It's possible of course that now people will praise the books' ending just for being different then how the show ended, or that even if it is genuinely better executed it'll be because it had the benefit of seeing how the show's ending was critiqued. Which means Martin should perhaps be eternally grateful the TV show ended how it did.

I do think Martin has a basic idea of where he wants the story to go, and maybe he gave the gist of it to the show's writers.  But his taking forever to write even the second to last book tells me he has no idea of how to actually get there.  And I feel the same way about Berserk, the insane confidence of some Otaku who think the Mangaka has some brilliant ending perfectly mapped out when it's taking him over 30 years to get there is laughable to me.

Meaning much of the core criticism of the show's ending could easily be equally applicable to the books, forcing the characters to a predetermined end even if it doesn't organically fit their journey, it's just the specifics that would be different.  This problem has never been unique to adaptations, Star Trek Voyager's finale had the same core issue, as SFDebris explained they stubbornly stuck to a finale they wrote at the same time they wrote the pilot.

Of course part of why I doubt I'd like the Books' ending any better is how for me Game of Thrones went wrong a lot sooner then it did for them.  I loved the first 2 seasons, even mostly liked season 3, which is more then enough to indefinitely give my mind an overall positive association for the brand.  But season 4 is where the show lost me.  Most people at the soonest see the very end of season 4 as the first warning sign, but overall it's when the show ran out of book material they started not liking it.

The show had some differences from the books even in season 1, and from what I've heard I think I'm inclined to like the show better in at least that season/book's case.  I mean superficially I'd have preferred the books much more over-sized Iron Throne, but the more meaningful changes I'm glad they changed.

So it seems like if anything I'm inclined to prefer the show to the books.

Many critics of the final season say they are not in concept against Dani's heel turn and they are confident Martin is going to "character develop" it better.  For me Dani being set up as a righteous leader is core to what I was liking, and the seeds of her ruthlessness being planted was part of why season 4 turned me off.

If Martin saw "The Return of the King" trope turning out to be a bad thing as the core of his deconstructive narrative, then he shouldn't have made that King a Queen, because to me choosing to "deconstruct" the Messianic Archetype when you give it to a woman is inherently sexist.  I crave seeing that narrative played straight but with a Queen and that's why I loved Krista/Historia's story-line in Seasons 2 and 3 of Attack on Titan.

So even if Dani turning evil genocidal maniac makes more sense in the books I would still inherently hate it.

Honestly I'd like it if it's Jon Snow who turns evil after finding out he was the rightful heir all along, that would be a far better deconstruction of that trope to me.  He's the one who's journey in the first 4 seasons seems like what modern audiences are inclined to consider the most acceptable version of that Trope, like Aragon as a Ranger but with even more humility and hardship.  So deconstructing the expectation that that inherently makes a good person much less a good leader would be far more subversive.   It'd also Subvert the show's internal expectation that the Starks are always good.

But like with the Dani debate you'd have to execute it properly and not make it seem like a switch was flipped out of nowhere.

What matters most in an Adaptation?

The ideal adaptation is faithful at least in spirit if not the details to what the original was, and also an entertaining and/or interesting piece of art on it's own.

There is of course a popular sentiment that if you can only be one of those then being the latter is far more important, regardless of the Fanboys who can't see the adaptation's innate value.  

I however can see the value in something that is the opposite.  

For example as someone who considers the main point of any dramatized medium to be the art of Acting, there are many scenes in certain books I'm a fan of I'd love to see performed by talented actors even if nothing else about the presentation of the product is at all entertaining or engaging to viewers not already into that source material.

There is one type of adaptation that is commonly viewed with the opposite priority, historical films.  You see I seem to be the only person who's willing to look at Historical films as simply adaptations where History is the source material.  The History Buffs YouTube channel will trash perfectly entertaining films for being "bad history" but praise the boring Gettysburg movie for being so ridiculously accurate that they brag about using actual Civil War re in-actors they didn't pay for their service, but to me the utterly uninspired performance by the actor playing Lee guarantees it can never qualify as entertaining.  Never mind how the Agora video shows he doesn't know History as well as he thinks he does.

The Patriot is not a history lesson and was never meant to be, it's basically a Comic Book Superhero movie set during the American Revolution.  If Mel Gibson's character at least had the same name as the person everyone says he's based on I'd understand all the nitpicking about his family and the slave or not status of the people working his plantation, but he doesn't, he's a fictional character inspired by more then one real person.  The movie is not pretending there was no slavery, it shows a slave being treated like disposable property by his owner and subjected to racism by one of the fellow protagonists.  (And all my points about The Patriot are somewhat also applicable to Braveheart).

Lots of our greatest purely fictional myths started as inaccurate depictions of History to the point where the real History is lost, from Troy to King Arthur.  Instead of acting like inaccurate films are the reason Americans don't understand history, just try educating people on the real history without being a pretentious prick about it who shames people for enjoying things.

Now to a slightly different topic.

There is something else I've noticed about the way some adaptations are critiqued by people that are way too invested in the source material to judge it fairly.  They often claim a certain Theme or Subtext or Moral is absent from the adaptation because of specific details they were looking for, that I absolutely got from that adaptation even though I watched it with no knowledge of the source material and no reason to expect it to be there.

One example is RikaDot's video on Higurashi, where he says the Anime's focusing too much on the Horror aspects caused it to totally lose the message about turning to your friends when you need help.  This is the most egregious example, I really don't get how anyone can watch the Higurashi Anime and not get that message from it.

There was also a YouTube video arguing that NONE of the Fate/ Anime successfully communicates that Shirou Emiya has a death wish because of his survivor guilt.  I kind of agree with the agenda of that video as it's kind of about justifying the use of inner monologue/first person narration which I do support.  But this aspect of Shirou's character I did absolutely get from the UFOTable Unlimited Blade Works Anime.

There is also how Dogasu's Backpack talks about the 4Kids Dub turning Mewtwo into a 1 Dimensional Villain, but how he describes the Japanese character is exactly how I always interpreted Mewtwo going off the 4Kids Dub alone.

This is why I prefer whenever possible to watch an adaptation with no prior investment in the source material.  If the original is better then I'm saving the better experience for last, but the originals are never the ones made less enjoyable because you saw the adaption first, even if I like the Adaptation more I can never truly dislike the thing responsible for the existence of the thing I love.

And most of the time returning to said Adaptation after I've learned more about what was changed doesn't hurt the experience.  There is often room to interpret into it whatever subtext actually was lost.  But there is one exception that happened to me fairly recently.

I watched the new Boogiepop and Others Anime with no real knowledge of what it was supposed to be going in and enjoyed it quite thoroughly.  But after watching Digibro's videos on it and the early 2000s Live Action movie I definitely saw what was missing as I tried to re-watch the first couple episodes.

Most disappointing to me now is the removal of most of what was going on with Naoko Kamikishiro.  I've repeatedly said when expressing my praise for the Polygamy of In Another World With My Smartphone that I now also want to see other kinds of plural relationships explicitly depicted positively in Anime not just a dude with multiple Waifus.  In the book and movie Naoko is engaging in Polyandry and she is NOT demonized or slut shammed for it, quite the contrary she is presented as the most morally virtuous character in the story, she is filled with Love.  Both Action Heroines of the story are described as having a "Messiah Complex", but Naoko is the one who is actually "Christ Like".

Nagi Kirima is also described as being Bifauxnen which definitely comes across in the LA Movie but not in this new Anime.  

I think the last 9 or so episodes of the Anime should hold up better since at that point I think it's more like 5 episodes per book rather then only 3.

These are some barely actually related to each other thoughts I wanted to share, hardly an in depth analysis of the subject.  Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

April 1989 was also perhaps the beginning of an Era in Anime.

I spent some of June making interesting observations about times when two or more vitally important Anime debuted very close to each other.  Those posts usually have the year or years in question in the title.  All of those posts were about examples where at least one of the Anime in question was in some way related to the Magical Girl genre, since I was celebrating MahouShouJune.  Today however I can talk about an example that isn't directly or mainly Magical Girl relevant.

Kor Reviews just released his video about the Spring 1989 Anime season, in collaboration with two other AniTubers.  I won't here be talking about every Anime mentioned in that video, they also talk about a number of interesting forgotten gems that I suggest you watch the video for.

What I didn't know before watching this was that both Dragonball Z and Ranma 1/2 started in the same season.  That's two Iconic genre defining shows.  DBZ wasn't even the start of it's franchise technically, but it definitely has become what people mainly care about when it comes to Dragonball, in the West at least.

I have some nostalgic memories of watching DBZ on Toonami back in the day, but Shonen in general I'm not very into.  Ranma is something I should check out eventually.

Meanwhile the premiere of Lupin II: Bye Bye Lady Liberty was the beginning of a new era for that important Anime franchise, the era of it being being kept alive by annual TV specials.  For awhile most of what I'd seen of the franchise were a handful of the 90s specials that got dubbed in the 2000s, it's cool that Lupin has returned to getting TV Anime and interesting theatrical films, but I feel this era of Lupin shouldn't be forgotten, they kept the spirit of Red Jacket alive but with continually more modern Animation and plots.

Bye Bye Lady Liberty also has an English Dub but different from most other Dubs, it was dubbed by the same cast as one of the Dubs of Mystery of Mamo, specifically the UK produced Dub, and like it was made in 96 so one of the earliest English Language exposures of the franchise.  I watched it recently and found it pretty fun, I recommend it.

So I don't have a lot to say about these examples, but they're interesting.  And knowing what super important Anime started this season makes the more obscure stuff most of that Video is devoted to even more interesting.

Update: As I just learned this was only a few months into the Heisei Period of official Japanese History, same era that ended in April of this year.  So like 90-99% of Anime that Millennials care about is Heisei Anime.

Ya know what I would like to see at Nerd Conventions more often?

People staging performances of Public Domain plays in Cosplay, making as many thematic and archetypal connections as they can.

For example I'd be quite amused by a performance of Richard III done by people cosplaying as Zelda characters.  Richard would be Ganon, (we already saw him take a Human-Pig like form in the Ian Mckellen film), both Elizabeths would be Zeldas and Richmond would be Link.

And more specifically for Anime conventions.  I love the episodes about a school doing an all female play (not exactly like Takarazuka because that's specifically Musical Theater) most often Romeo and Juliet.  But in a 20 minute episode of Anime we obviously don't get to see what the full production would look like.  So do it with the K-On cast for example.

This trope in Anime hasn't been limited to Shakespeare, in Strawberry Panic they debated between doing Alexandre Dumas Fils Camille or Carmen, they chose the latter.

I once attended a production of Hamlet where they had Hamlet be played by four different actors, it was a symbolic thing, he's still treated as a single character by everyone else.  Two were men and two were women.  Interestingly one of the women had all the scenes with Ophelia.  They also had a woman play Horatio.

Even doing Shaw plays could be interesting, there are a dozen different Anime versions of Joan of Arc to choose from.

Those are just my immediate ideas, try to also come up with ones even more creative.

Steven Spielberg may be my favorite Film Director even though none of his films make my Top 10

I don't really have a definitive top 10, but I have a relatively strong top 4 and a pretty solid pool of potential top 10s and even my top Spielberg film I currently have trouble seeing as likely to make it.  Before I started getting super into Anime letting it dominate my favorites of everything, and watching other stuff I hadn't seen before, there was one Spielberg film that was in the running, Jurassic Park.

You might think "how can that even be possible?" but you see only Spielberg is consistently above average while also having a large output.  I haven't even seen all his films, but I've seen only one I can call bad, Temple of Doom, everything else would if it was on MAL get at least a high 8.

Now I'm not saying my top ten films are directed by people who balanced that out with a ton of crap.  I'm someone relatively easy to please so my "average" includes a level of praise other people might only give to a 8 or 9 out of 10.

Most theatrical Pokemon films have the same director, only one is in my top 4 but none of them are bad movies.  They're just mostly stuff I'd never recommend to someone not inherently into Pokemon.

All three of Christopher Nolan's Batman movies are among my all time favorite movies, one is still in that top 4 group, another had been a potential top 10 but has slipped down thanks to all the Anime.  But I have zero interest in his non Batman movies.

I've seen 6 Miyazaki films, one is in that top 4 and another is strongly in my top 9 of at least specifically Anime films.  But without the extraneous circumstances that made ToD Spielberg is not capable of making a film I find as dull as The Wind Rises.

Even when watching a Spielberg film in a genre or with a premise I don't care about I can still go "this is a an expert film maker".

If you think Hook is proof Spielberg can make a bad film, I sentence you to watch this Video Essay.