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Mobile Suit Gundam is and enormous work. Much like having seen any movie since 1950 is to know Citizen Kane, it is impossible not to know of Gundam if you have even a passing interest in the mecha genre. However, that is not the same as "Experiencing" Gundam. While subsequent shows exhibit the same plot beats, the same stylings, the same characterizations as Gundam; there is no substituting the keen understanding of the violence and the status quo that Tomino and team brought to this seminal work.

Having been cruelly cast out into space, the newfound Spacenoid humans struggle for independence from the Earth government. A ... beautiful dream for the future is turned into supremacist ideology as this movement is co-opted by fascists. The ensuing conflict results in the deaths, the murders, of more than 5 billion human beings. This is the start of Gundam.

To combat the Spacenoids, the Earth Federation enlists Tem Ray of the supposedly neutral space colony 6, an O'Neil Cylinder suspended in space, to create a weapon to eclipse all others. This mechanical being in human's own image is known as the Gundam. Because of this, the colony and its inhabitants are attacked by Spacenoid forces. In addition to the thousands of civilian lives lost, most of the military personnel are killed in the attack. Thus, events conspire such that Tem's son Amuro must pilot his surrogate brother/father/parental sin/power fantasy mech on behalf of the Earth Federation hegemony.

Again, if you have an understanding of Mecha anime then you have a surface level understanding of Gundam. Characters grow and relapse, they struggle and overcome, they forge new bonds and break old ones. Amuro and the Gundam dispatch numerous foes as begins to both resent and tie his self validation to his ability to pilot the Gundam. However, this is only surface level.

It's quickly revealed that Amuro Ray is and esper of supernatural ability, referred to in series as a Newtype. With these newfound powers, Amuro exceeds the abilities of his rival Char Aznable, the abilities of his commanding officers, even the abilities of the Gundam itself. However, despite his mechanical surrogate struggling to keep up with him, Amuro is unable to escape the crushing weight of history.

Director Yoshiyuki Tomino is on record as saying that his ideas are entirely derived from history. I won't argue with the man on this, but his ability to cut through immediate politics to depict the underlying conflicts and ideologies is wholly his own in the mecha anime space. As influential as Gundam is, it rarely exhibits clichés of the genre, past or present. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, there is no indomitable human spirit, there is no breaking the yolk of the system to establish a third way; instead, its characters fall back on play-acting the roles assigned to them at birth: they are slowly broken into their pre-assigned constructs for the benefit of the empire. Individuals, even those endowed with supernatural abilities, are mere speedbumps compared to the overwhelming force of societal constructs.

And this is what separates Gundam from other media. Once Newtypes are known, they are Known. Governments bend and construct these superhumans to their own ends, ideologues implement them into their philosophies for validation, and individuals struggle in vain to become them in search of meaning. It's a lesson all opportunists know well: there's more power in exploitation than erasure. To know Gundam is to watch the fantastical unrealized potential of mankind be twisted into an experimental program to create supersoldiers.

I could speak further on the various tragedies that befall our protagonists, the supporting characters that enact their tragedies in miniature, the antagonists that reflect their struggles like a mirror; but ultimately they all amount to the same thing. Every moving piece is an attempt to birth a new world that fails.

This may be on me: I went in to Gundam knowing there were decades of content succeeding it. At the end of the series, once all opponents had been vanquished, once the treaty papers had been signed; I couldn't help but notice that Amuro went back to the military that had exploited him. He has no family, no friends, nothing except his colleagues in a war machine that used him for it's own gain. At the end of it all, I believe Gundam remains a deeply pessimistic show. It wants to believes in an inherent good in humanity, wants to believes in an individual's ability to surpass their past self, but knows that social constructs won't let them achieve these things.