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tinyozlion · 5 months ago

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Gundam Wing: Minutia and Trivia

On my long and winding way down research rabbit holes, I often stumble on bits and pieces of trivia that I find quite interesting, but don't really fit anywhere in my usual commentary on Gundam canon and are far too niche and inconsequential to merit a post of their own. HOWEVER. Since I know in my heart that you, dear reader, are also the sort of person for whom background details of the absolute least consequential variety are a source of delight and inspiration, I am compiling some of my discoveries here, and perhaps if I find more, there will be follow up posts. This one happens to be, in a very loose sense, mostly about Romefeller, OZ, and its Special Eyebrow People, because that is where my brain worms are currently converging. Here is my collection of useless trivia. I lay them at your feet like weird pebbles. Look at them. They're neat.

1. The Daily Kingdom Newspaper

It's quite likely that this has already been done, but in the grand spirit of this blog, I have decided to take the path of highest effort for the stupidest reason, and transcribed this paper. This page of After Colony news, ostensibly from July 14th, A.C. 195, appears to be reporting on events that happened towards the end of World War II. It's apparently been a slow news day for the Sanc Kingdom press for several centuries. I found myself getting kind of wrapped up in the stories and was disappointed I couldn't turn the page and find out what happened next. (I mean, I know what happened next, broadly speaking.) Of particular interest were Henri and Camille Dreyfus, Swiss chemists who made a lot of innovations during both world wars. ...They were also apparently noted OZ supporters? Well, what can you expect from a big industrial supplier of*checks notes* acetyl intermediates.

2. The OZ doggy

Pictured below: Treize's well-heeled hunting pet

and a dog is there too *BA-DUM tsch!*

This spotty and behaved hound is a real breed of hunting dog, the German Short-haired Pointer, or GSP! Did you know this, dear reader? I did not know this. This is new Dog Lore to me.

from the wiki: "It is a pointer and retriever, an upland bird dog, and water dog. The GSP can be used for hunting larger and more dangerous game. It is an excellent swimmer but also works well in rough terrain. It is tenacious, tireless, hardy, and reliable. German Shorthaired Pointers are proficient with many different types of game and sport, including trailing, retrieving, and pointing pheasant, quail, grouse, waterfowl, raccoons, opossum, and even deer."

Seems like a perfect bird-hunting companion for Mr. Treize. She'll probably go retrieve the beautiful red phoenix he murdered. I've decided she's named Oscar (after the Rose of Versailles) and she is a very good girl. Braver Oscar! Braver Hund!

3. Luxembourg Castle

This is Treize's abandoned Disney castle in Luxembourg. I owe the background artists of this scene an apology, for in my heart I assumed this was a random assemblage of spare castle-parts they found at Ludwig II's rummage sale. Reader, I was wrong:

THIS is Schloss Viandin, a restored castle in Luxembourg. Look at this place, it's gorgeous! You can hardly tell there's a secret mobile suit bunker in the basement. Frankly, I'm jealous I'm not being confined there, Treize! Stop sulking in the catacombs and go relax in the pretty princess bed until you feel better. Gaze upon the signed picture of Patrick Swayze; let him inspire you.

4. Romefeller's Secret

This one comes to us from the Battlefield of Pacifists manga, which, I've learned, is pretty good actually. (I mean it's not GOOD good, but it contains some interesting stuff). Now, come: I am taking you with me on this journey:

I feel extremely vindicated knowing that there's semi-canonical support for my theory that the Romefeller aristobrats are Austrian. I knew it. I KNEW IT. According to this manga, Romefeller was officially founded in Vienna-- the wording is a little ambiguous in this translation, but if Romefeller had members joining it in 1862, then it had to have existed in some form since then-- which means that the "Glorious Year" of 1956 is something other than its founding date. So what exactly happened in 1956? As I am a hack and fraud, and have been one all my life, I have looked to wikipedia for guidance. Mostly what was happening was the Cold War, colonialism, uprisings, Elvis, research and debate over artificial intelligence, both the hard drive disk and the snooze-button alarm clock being invented, Japan joining the UN, and wait what's this--

COMPUTER, ENHANCE:

...My god...

It's all coming together.

Eurovision is a plot by Romefeller.

The evidence is all here. There is simply no other conclusion we can come to.

--For this, and many other reasons that are well beyond the scope of a fandom blog, you should probably boycott them.

I rest my case.

5. The Romefeller Coat of Arms

I'm no vexillologist, and my heraldic experience is limited to adoptable pixel dragons, but what I am is an insane person with too much time on their hands. And so, to the best of my ability, I have blazoned the Romefeller coat of arms:

Supporters: Two Unicorns Rampant

Crown: Purpur Crown of Peerage or Lord of Parliament

Escutcheon: Heater with Two Engrailed Wedge Top - party per pale (halved vertically)

Blazon: Sinister (Right): Argent, Bend Sinister Sanguine; Dexter (Left): Bleu Celeste, Charged with a Ringed (or Celtic) Cross Argent

Motto Scroll: UPRTUN or UPRTVN

--I don't know what UPRTVN is meant to stand for, but there are truly SO many ways you could play Latin Mad Libs and get a reasonable-sounding answer. At a stab, knowing Romefeller's priorities and values, I would guess it probably contains a, you know, "Unity/Peace/Rule/Tradition/Victory/Necessity", "Unity Through The Rule of Tradition Is Our Victory", or some such deeply worrying thing. Take your pick really.

6. "Herbst" / "Autumn"

The Rilke poem Treize quotes in "Frozen Teardrop" is not terribly difficult to find online, but if you're not sure what you're looking for it can be difficult because he has multiple poems about Autumn, and Autumn Day is perhaps better known; also the internet is absolutely filthy riddled with despicable bots and farmed content that has lost its attributions, so you do have to dig to find where different translations have come from (bless this very Web 1.0 page for carrying on the lord's work in basic html). Here is the original in German, and two complimenting translations:

Herbst -Rainer Maria Rilke Die Blätter fallen, fallen wie von weit als welkten in den Himmeln ferne Gärten; sie fallen mit verneinender Gebärde. Und in den Nächten fällt die schwere Erde aus allen Sternen in die Einsamkeit. Wir alle fallen. Diese Hand da fällt. Und sieh dir andre an: es ist in allen. Und doch ist Einer, welcher dieses Fallen unendlich sanft in seinen Händen hält.

This translation by Horst A. Scholz (linked here so I don't get into trouble) is the most spare and one-to-one translation into English I've found-- I always appreciate having a comparison between the very literal meanings and a more creative reconstruction when I'm reading translated poetry.

Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum, this translation by Robert Bly is very freeform and agnostic; for my own purposes, I think the use of "Space" instead of "Heaven" happens to fit nicely with the themes of Gundam:

Autumn -translation by Robert Bly The leaves are falling, falling as if from far up, as if orchards were dying high in space. Each leaf falls as if it were motioning "no." And tonight the heavy earth is falling away from all other stars in the loneliness. We're all falling. This hand here is falling. And look at the other one. It's in them all. And yet there is Someone, whose hands infinitely calm, holding up all this falling.

#gundam wing #parsing post #tinyozlion pgw #Trivia and Minutia #Romefeller Foundation #Treize Khushrenada

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tinyozlion · 11 months ago

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“And Its Name is επυον”: Where Did Epyon Come From, Literally and Figuratively?

On the pillars before the Oracle of Delphi, the navel of the ancient world, an inscription carved read: “know thyself”.

Inside the Oracle’s inner sanctum sat the Pythia, bent over smoking fissures in the temple floor, breathing the sacred poison that would let Apollo in. It is a dreadful ecstasy– dangerous, body-wracking; gaining knowledge of the future shortens hers.

Far in the future, a man exiled to a gilded oubliette speculates his own worth and relevance to history, surrounded by ghosts, becoming a ghost himself. Alone with his doubt, he looks for the god in the machine, seeking answers: “Why do we fight? For what should I fight?”

But the god he built is silent.

The world of automated warfare becomes increasingly bleak and devoid of reason. He is terrified that the pilots who so inspired him will lose their purpose just as he has, and join him in miserable freefall.

Out of this wild abyss Treize builds the Epyon. Not for himself– he will never pilot it. There is almost nothing of Treize in this suit, not that we can recognize from its exterior. It is not the heroic Tallgeese with its Attic crest– it is something clawed, stygian, one of the bat-winged Erinyes with a torch and whip.

Epyon is not a weapon; it is a punishment. It is retribution for a world that has forgotten its humanity, its rites, its propriety. For its pilot, it is a scourge– the cracking whips of the Furies in their brain, driving them into a frenzy. Madness. Holy poison, to let the future in.

Its name, επυον, is meant to mean "Next", or “After”.

To guide the future, you must shorten yours.

You must not be a victor, when you pilot this suit.

Where did Epyon come from, in the mind of its creator? Everything we see of Treize forms a cohesive aesthetic: Roses, swords, romanticized old-world decadence, heroic motifs, gold, blue, white, red. Where did this thorny, tyrian-purple chimera live in him? Shouldn’t we have seen it lurking somewhere? Or does it seem to come out of nowhere precisely because he designed it to be his antithesis?

Whether or not “Frozen Teardrop”, the novelized sequel to Gundam Wing, can be considered canon is a source of contention amongst many fans, but looking at it purely as a way to judge script-writer Katsuyuki Sumizawa’s intentions when he wrote the series, I find many parts of it to be informative.

To paraphrase the fan-translation, it states that Treize found blue and white to be emblematic of heroism, colors associated with victory, and so their complementary opposites, black and red, could be seen as the colors of the defeated, associated with loss. For Treize, defeat and loss are tied inexorably to his vision of the future: “it was the defeated who changed the era and began the next”, as it says in the novel.

Epyon is meant to negate the ideal of the conquering hero, the counter for a world beset by victorious cowards who command legions of dolls to do their killing and dying for them. As Treize designed it, Epyon has no projectile weapons; it is a suit purely for one-on-one combat, a suit that demands you risk everything when you fight.

No surprise then, that he gives it to the first Gundam pilot he meets– remarkably, the one whose self detonation caused everyone in his orbit to question their involvement in the war-- though one gets the feeling that any of the pilots would do. Treize hopes that Heero will use the Epyon to navigate the chaos to find the true purpose he is fighting for, and determine what course the future will take.

But Heero has never been concerned with this sort of navel-gazing, and has no interest in discovering whether or not battle itself has a grander purpose or ultimate meaning. He fights the enemy in front of him and will continue to do so until either his life, or the supply of enemies, runs out. Heero does not overthink the future; he does not dwell on consequences. Treize does nothing BUT overthink the future and consider the fractal spread of consequences. They are mutually incomprehensible to each other, but perhaps not at cross purposes.

Heero enters the cockpit convinced that he is expendable and redundant, that his only goal is to survive. When he returns from his test flight in Epyon, he can barely stand or speak. From that point on, he thinks about the future, about who and what will be important for what comes after the fighting has ended.

Eventually, the Epyon passes to the only person more disillusioned and estranged from his sense of purpose than Treize is– to Zechs, where it seems it was always meant to go.

• How And When Was Epyon Built?

Whew! Now that the metaphysical stuff is out of the way, let’s talk about the physical development of Epyon, and how that must have come about.

As we know, after his confinement by Romefeller, Treize, lurking around with the lights out and questioning his place in the universe, uses his now copious free time to build this gundanium dominatrix using only his laptop and the power of depression.

Now, even if we are to accept that Treize is a programming and engineering savant on top of all his other accomplishments, it would still be beyond even His Excellency’s considerable talents to pull an entire Gundam out of a hat in the basement of an abandoned Disney castle.

Where did he get the gundanium? The crew? The construction equipment? Isn’t he under house arrest? Why would Romefeller leave him unsupervised to build a demon robot that predicts the future?

These questions have been annoying the fandom since 1995. But, if you look carefully (VERY carefully, one might even say obsessively), it's possible to find the connective threads that make Epyon’s construction less of a magic trick.

--Let’s go through the list of these unclarified canonical whoopsie-daisies in order of most to least glaring!:

If Treize is being kept in confinement in the Romefeller headquarters, why is he allowed to design and build a mobile suit?

*:･ﾟ✧ Our princess is in another castle! *:･ﾟ✧

The mansion that Treize goes into during episode 27 is NOT the castle that we see him in during episode 34. This switcheroo would probably have happened sometime in the MIDDLE of episode 27– which I guess might as well be the case, since episode 27 is a dreamlike, nonlinear stroll through Treize’s spiraling existential crisis.

Between Treize being confined in the Romefeller headquarters and developing the Epyon, Treize is in fact liberated by the Treize Faction and moved to the blue-roofed castle in the middle of the forest near the Luxembourg Base, which is where the faction has made their headquarters.

Presumably the crew and equipment needed to actually manufacture a new mobile suit were available at the base.

Treize’s confinement at this point is largely self-imposed; he could rally the factions loyal to him and make a move on Romefeller (as he does later), but he doesn’t believe he has the ability or the right to do so. Instead, he builds Epyon, and just kind of winds it up and lets it loose on the world to see if anything interesting happens.

And it does! The interesting very much happens.

Where did Treize get the gundanium alloy to build a Gundam?

The shipment of gundanium that Heero destroys in episode 4 was being transported on an OZ carrier, and it had to have been going somewhere. This gundanium was ordered WAY before Zechs’s gundam rebuilding project, so its purpose is left unidentified– someone in OZ clearly wanted to experiment with this new material for developing mobile suits.

Adding to that, the gundanium that Zechs had access to when he was rebuilding the Wing Gundam had to come from somewhere, and that somewhere was probably the very deep pockets of a guy who likes to keep his best friends happy.

Regardless if any given shipment of gundanium made it home in one piece, what it means is that OZ has a way of obtaining gundanium, and if OZ has it, then Treize has it.

How would Treize know how to build a Gundam?

During the process of rebuilding the Wing Gundam from the ground up, Zechs and his engineers would probably have kept extensive records and made new Gundam blueprints that Treize would know about. Also by this point in the series, several Gundams and their pilots have been captured, and the Gundam’s engineers forced to build Vayeate and Mercurius for Lady Une. OZ would therefore have all the data they need to build a fresh Gundam, and once again: if OZ has it, then Treize has it.

Okay, but how would Treize know enough about the ZERO system to be able to reverse engineer it?

As mentioned in the entry about the ZERO system, the AI of the Taurus mobile suits eventually becomes the Mobile Doll AI. This is a predictive battle algorithm OZ already had in the works long before the Wing ZERO was discovered.

Additionally, Treize is likely to have had access to the data being recorded by Trant while his team was researching the ZERO system, even if he was getting it covertly via a Treize Faction infiltrator, or a member of OZ who was still loyal to him.

How does Treize know so much about designing mobile suits and their cockpit systems?

One has to remember that Treize was the instructor at Lake Victoria Base (the same position Noin holds when we first meet her in the series), responsible for training OZ’s elite pilots, and (according to “Frozen Teardrop”) involved with crucial tactical developments and improvements to OZ’s lineup.

Yes, he’s a fancy-pants aristocrat, but you can’t say he doesn’t know his way around a mobile suit. He’s best friends with Zechs, after all– nerds of a feather flock together.

But how would he know to program the security system to accept Heero Yuy?

Well, ever since he was captured and hospitalized Heero’s biometric data would have been on file with the Alliance military, and therefore available to OZ, and therefore (again) available to Treize– so by now His Excellency will have certainly been made aware that Heero’s bones run on a third-party Adobe Photoshop plug-in.

But who cares about that crusty old data? All of the Gundam pilots have been accounted for and fingerprinted and scanned and microchipped up in Fortress Barge! They could probably 3D print Heero Yuy out of PLA and sell action figures if they wanted.

As to why Treize picked Heero specifically, I have two theories:

The first is that he simply programmed the computer to accept any and all Gundam pilots that might want to drop in for tea and assassination (and probably Zechs too, just in case he was in town).

The second is that Dorothy’s presence in the Sanc Kingdom means that Treize has a little bird keeping him informed about everything happening there, including that both Heero and Quatre are attending the Peacecraft’s School for Wayward Radical Pacifists.

True, Dorothy is technically there to be her grandfather Duke Dremail’s little bird informant, but Dorothy’s loyalties are her own, and she very much likes and respects her cousin Treize. She’s probably beaming news of the Gundam pilots directly to him on their shared eyebrow-frequency the whole time she’s there.

Eyebrow-to-eyebrow communication.

As one final note– I’m aware that the more recent manga adaptation, “Glory of Losers”, contains its own version of events that attempts to reconcile the building of Epyon with other events in the series. However, while I appreciate that they made an attempt to resolve the big, lingering Epyon Questions, I find that like most of their retconned material involving Treize, I…

I don’t like it.

Or to put it less personally, I think it creates an even more dubious timeline of events that is somehow less credible than the original. In this version, Treize begins the planning and construction of both Epyon and Tallgeese at the beginning of the series, before the original Tallgeese has even been brought into play and LONG before the ZERO system is introduced– somehow with the foreknowledge that these suits will be vital for the development of the new era.

I think this is a contrived way of making Treize into an omniscient puppet master who was retroactively steering everything in the correct direction from the very beginning, and was therefore always right and always assured of his role in the future– and I think that does his character an incredible disservice. In a story about the deep significance of changing people’s hearts and minds, the fact that Treize is retroactively scrubbed of his flaws and morally questionable decisions runs counter to the central thesis of Gundam Wing, and what has made it such a memorable story.

“Glory of Losers” is a beautiful manga and I do think it does an incredible job of presenting the rather garbled narrative of the series in a new light, with some truly masterful tweaks that add depth to the characters and story. But it’s also guilty of some egregious changes to canon that serve no purpose other than to reconcile the main series with the events of “Frozen Teardrop”, and as an excuse to redesign all the mobile suits to be cooler and sell more model kits.

…On the other hand, in this version of the story, Treize was already familiar with Tallgeese from his earliest days in OZ.

This is obviously another very unnecessary and suspiciously convenient retcon that I feel is in dubious taste– HOWEVER: it does mean that Howard gets to meet young whippersnapper Treize Khushrenada, who just so happened to be the one to ask him to paint it white because he thinks one day he’d like to pilot a Big Damn Hero Machine himself, and he wants it to be a more "elegant color."

And that is the funniest shit I can possibly imagine. So I’ll give it that.

I'd like it to be at least 20% more elegant

#Epyon #Gundam #gundam wing #treize khushrenada #parsing post #wing watcher's toolkit #tinyozlion pgw #Heero Yuy #Zechs Merquise #HOWARD

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