GQuuuuuuX Record #7: Machu's Rebellion

“There was nothing left for us, and for me it was as if invisible monsters were hiding out in the world.”

Our Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX coverage continues with the seventh episode! There will be spoilers after this point.

When the original Mobile Suit Gundam aired in 1979, it marked a transition between anime of the past and anime of the present. Its toy robots fought in a fictional world with its own culture and politics. Their human pilots made mistakes and behaved in contradictory ways. Gundam was not the first mecha series, or even the first anime, to push the envelope in this way. The director Yoshiyuki Tomino himself had already made Zambot 3 after all. But Gundam’s late-blooming success made so much else possible. The toys were no longer just toys; they had context.

Neon Genesis Evangelion could not have been made in 1995 without that precedent. Its characters inhabit a larger world that the viewer must infer from context: one shaped by past apocalypse, alien invaders and trauma. Yet it is smudged, opaque. NERV and SEELE’s overlapping conspiracies are exhaustively detailed in the production materials but rather nonsensical within the series itself. The protagonist, Shinji, is far more important. Not politics, not the world. His pain and his selfishness.

nyaan reaches for shuji through the kira-kira

Feelings

Evangelion’s descendants at Studio Gainax go a step further by rendering their settings totally subordinate to the characters and their feelings. FLCL in particular plays its science fiction elements as a vehicle for adolescent angst rather than material setting. Diebuster reimagines the world of its predecessor, Gunbuster, as one ruled by metaphor and theme. You can sense an earlier generation at Gainax, who loved classic SF like Niven and Clarke, passing the baton to a new generation who read James Tiptree or perhaps even M. John Harrison.

Mobile Suit Gundam GQuuuuuuX is the newest work from the creative team behind these aforementioned projects. Its world has concrete politics, dictated by messy adults with conflicting ambitions. We know from interviews that the staff (Hideaki Anno, Kazuya Tsurumaki, Yoji Enokido, etc.) thought a lot about the material ramifications of the show’s alternate timeline. Even some fantastic elements like the “Kira-Kira” are explained as a “hallucination” rather than a physical phenomenon that affects the world.

machu shields her eyes from the spotlight

Zeknova

Yet while GQuuuuuuX differs in some respects from FLCL and Diebuster, its heart is the same. This is first and foremost “Machu’s Rebellion.” It doesn't matter that Side 6 existed before she was born. As far as she is concerned, it’s all fake. Machu’s angst is equal in power and influence to Zeon politics. By her word alone the buildings hanging from the sky are not real buildings but the metaphorical bars of a prison only she can see. So we, the audience, believe.

Teens and their feelings in GQuuuuuuX are so powerful that they can blow a hole in the world. Sometimes this happens directly, like when Nyaan’s confession to Shuji in this episode triggers a “Zeknova” that opens a hole in space-time. Rather than respond to Nyaan’s feelings, Shuji teleports away, leaving a crater so deep you can see layers of colony architecture beneath like tree rings.

Psycho Gundam

Sometimes this happens at the hands of others. Deux, the pilot of the Psycho Gundam, senses Nyaan and Shuji’s conversation through the Kira-Kira. She lashes out in response, raining fire through Side 6. Lasers light up the skyline and crumple skyscrapers like tissue paper. All in response to a fumbling confession between a refugee and a homeless kid. Two insignificant teenagers are the domino leading to the presumed death of hundreds, if not thousands, of people.

This is an old story. It’s a favorite of Yoji Enokido: the caged world breaching confinement and affecting our own. But it’s also a favorite of Kazuya Tsurumaki, and I think that’s the deciding factor. Tsurumaki’s influences include comics artists like Minetaro Mochizuki and Kyoko Okazaki. Authors whose works reflected the times through which they lived: the materialist 80s, the economic crash of the 1990s.

“Everything which was highly coveted became worthless overnight,” Mochizuki told du9 in an interview. “There was nothing left for us, and for me it was as if invisible monsters were hiding out in the world.” You can see the same cynicism in Okazaki’s River’s Edge, a comic haunted by environmental destruction and the collapse of the ozone layer.

the gquuuuuux is shot from afar, represented as a pierced silhouette against a red background

There was nothing left for us

GQuuuuuuX is rooted in that same cynicism. Its flashy battle royale, the Clan Battle, is built on salvaged war machines and fuelled by the lives of soldiers unable to adapt to postwar life. The government treats it like an illegal gambling ring but is secretly in on the take. In fact, they may have very well been involved with Gates Capa and Deux’s efforts this week to assassinate Kycilia. Meanwhile, Challia Bull plays both sides against each other for his own reasons. The closest thing the series has to a “responsible” adult, Machu’s mother, is totally clueless about what her daughter is doing after dark.

Side 6 is a place where your worst teenage fears are all true: adults are liars, the world they built could collapse at any time, and whether or not it does, nobody will ever understand you. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a frustrated child of privilege like Machu, an outcast like Nyaan, or a space case like Shuji. The future is a dead end. So why not pursue your selfish feelings over material goals? What else really matters?

the psycho gundam aims its finger cannons

Invisible monsters

There’s a way in which this risks falling back into the same cliches that the original Mobile Suit Gundam was trying to avoid. For as much as Tomino’s works trumpeted “don’t trust adults,” they also demanded that their young protagonists learn to live for others and not just for themselves. Successors like Evangelion and FLCL deepened character psychology but at the expense of that greater message. The idea that your feelings matter more than the world inevitably curdle into solipsism without pushback.

Then again, this episode pointedly does not reward Machu or Nyaan for the selfish pursuit of their goals. Certainly Machu escapes Side 6. Nyaan is given a chance at financial security as a part of Zeon. But now Machu’s trapped in an even smaller cage, and Nyaan is truly alone. These two girls got what they wanted but not what they needed: to stand together with Shuji on the fields of Earth.

Machu's rebellion

Machu’s turning point in this episode isn’t even piloting a robot, but instead breaking into Annqi’s safe and taking the money. When Annqi herself intervenes, Machu pulls a gun from the safe and fires. She didn’t mean to; her finger slipped on the trigger. It was an accident. It doesn’t matter if it was an accident. For every scene that reveres past Gundam there is one like this. A small, seedy story, about small people, told on the margins.

Next week, GQuuuuuuX switches once again from its present storyline back to Hideaki Anno’s alternate history. Do Tsurumaki and company still have time to thread the needle between these storylines without compromising either? I don’t really know, but it’s been an exciting (and selfish) performance regardless.

This week’s addendum

The Machu, Nyan and Shuji Power Hour: I think we’re off the map here. Where next?

The Robot Corner: Tough competition this week between the Psycho Gundam shedding its skin as a projectile halo, Xavier wielding a lance in the Gyan, and the Kikeroga unspooling from a flying vehicle into a big cool insectoid.

This Week’s Moment of Violence: Shuji leaving Nyaan behind to say, “my work here is done.” (He didn’t do anything!)

Chiaki J. Konaka’s Cthulhu Mythos Library: We catch a glimpse of the “Sunlight Amplification System” in this episode, codenamed Yomagn’tho. (A creature from the short story “The Thing in the Library.”) Tom Aznable suggests it’s a reference to Zeon’s Solar Ray superweapon.

Friends of Gundam: Here is some more Gundam fanart.

Bookmarks

For scrmbl, Alicia Haddick wrote about Japan’s modern musical and theater scene.

Feez of Tsuki no Mayu, an excellent resource for my personal favorite Gundam series Turn-A Gundam, published a translated interview with artist Syd Mead.

For IGN, Rebekah Valentine interviewed the guy who designed the English-language Pokemon logo.

For Anime Feminist, Megan D wrote about the annoying sexism of fan favorite Gundam Build Fighters.

For Mirage Library, jowy wrote about the indie RPG Nocturne: Rebirth.