Strauss is both Leo and Lévi; Karl is both Popper and Schmitt.1
For viewers just getting into Gundam, one question may keep coming up: besides the TV anime, why does Gundam have such a profusion of side stories, original video animations (OVAs), and manga and novels whose plots differ from the TV series? Perhaps we should also count games of every description, along with fan works and other reworkings with varying degrees of official standing.
The answer: to sell model kits. (Runs away.)
Memes along the lines of “Gundam is essentially a twenty-five-minute model-kit commercial” may help settle pointless arguments quickly, but they are tantamount to ending thought itself. The reductio is obvious: if the aim is to cash in on model kits as much as possible, why not have moved straight from the first few installments to works like Gundam Build Fighters, rapidly exploiting Gundam as creative material? Might the relative failure of the two works that followed Build Fighters suggest, in some sense, how quickly audiences tire of model-kit commercials in the truest sense?
To answer this question, we need to consider the characteristics of Gundam itself. Unlike some later anime, Gundam belongs to a category of works that make the construction of a “grand narrative” a selling point. This is not to say that individual characters or mecha are not consumed, but rather that this consumption depends on understanding the characters and mecha within a particular worldview.2 In other words, much of the effort behind Gundam goes into creating a fictional world and trying to make it nearly as credible as the real one. Similar phenomena are, in fact, also widespread in works such as Space Battleship Yamato and Legend of the Galactic Heroes.
A world we regard as almost as complex as the real one must, of course, be depicted from multiple perspectives. Here I borrow in part from the “tree model” in Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals to examine the question: “For example, since the Gundam anime series first aired on television in 1979, successive works such as Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, Char’s Counterattack, and Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ have all been set within the same imagined history. Gundam fans’ desires necessarily turn toward meticulous investigation of this fictional history and toward its richness and completeness.”
“Gundam-related books also frequently update their mechanical data and chronologies. Here, indeed, just as Azusa Nakajima says, reality is composed of other fictional stories.”3
—Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals, §2–3
The point of Gundam works is to create fictional history.
As a way of depicting history, TV anime has very clear limitations. First, a TV series is only one of many small narratives. Any single series has a limited perspective; side stories tell stories from different perspectives within the same worldview. Second, animation’s strength lies in giving imagined things an immediately visible form. Yet compared with the explicit verbal descriptions available to a novel, TV anime has no greater power than other forms to expound the underlying narrative (there is always a limit to how much voice-over narration animation can use). We can thus see why TV anime alone is not enough, and why a whole range of other works is necessary.
This also helps us understand some other cultural phenomena surrounding Gundam.
Gundam has more official and semi-official setting books—collections of information about its fictional worlds—than any other anime, with varying degrees of official standing. In fact, setting books are precisely a creative form that quickly bypasses fragmented small narratives to depict the underlying grand narrative directly. In the real world, it is difficult to view history with subjective perspectives stripped away; this is precisely the advantage of setting books grounded in “fictional history.” Perhaps this is what sparks the desire to consume them. It is worth noting that the text in Gundam model-kit instruction manuals also serves, to some extent, the same purpose as official setting books. This partly bears out my earlier claim that “mecha must be consumed within a particular worldview.”
The perfectly straight-faced historian’s voice also makes sense in this light: we hear it, for instance, in History of the One Year War, about Gundam’s Universal Century, or from Robert Spacey (ロベール・スペイシー) in Mobile Suit Gundam 00V Battlefield Record. (History of the One Year War even arranges a discussion between two real-life experts, conducted with the same solemn seriousness.) If the task is to create fictional history, then a historian’s manner of telling it will naturally make the experience more immersive.
Gundam’s True Underlying Narrative
Yet we can also see that the “tree model” does not quite capture Gundam, because more than one grand narrative lies beneath its works. The choice of different historical paths in Gihren’s Greed might be explained by the freedom characteristic of games. But the differences in worldviews that emerge when we set Mobile Suit Gundam: THE ORIGIN (GTO) against the original Mobile Suit Gundam (0079), an official novel against the TV anime version of the same work, or even different setting books against one another clearly constitute an experiment in parallel worlds along the lines of Marvel’s multiverse. The greatest effect of these parallel worlds is that they successfully dissolve the single underlying grand narrative, shifting instead toward the sum of multiple narratives whose worldviews overlap to some extent but differ in detail.
In other words, through the construction of a multiverse, we are not wholly “determined” through stories; ample space remains for us to create and imagine “fictional history” for ourselves. The battle between Innovators and the old humanity in 00V Battlefield Record, passed over in a few words with its outcome unknown; the ending of the TV version of Stargazer, which leaves its characters’ survival uncertain;5 and the rumors and fan fiction about a third Gundam SEED installment that have persisted for years—all give visible form to the spaces left open in Gundam fans’ minds. Whether this decentered structure, nondeterministic in character, has a deeper signified is something I would not presume to say. I’ll leave that interpretation to you heavyweights.
Editor’s Note
