#apologies for trying to form the UK centuries too soon

[bipunkharrington]

I got Crusader Kings III and am playing King Alfred the Great and it makes me so happy that he's still alive currently, 19 years after his real-life death and the King of England and Wales (with almost all the de jure land).

He is not long for this world so sadly it will probably be his heir (his grandson, because he's lives so long that his oldest son went and died aged 50 waiting to take over 😅) that attempts to bring Scotland and/or Ireland into the fold.

[sol1056]

I can’t seem to reblog the response directly, so I’m just linking to it. All of @aquaburst07′s comment is worth reading, but I’m replying to this part in particular:

I still think [GoLion] was an attempt to cash in on what Gundam [did] a million times better, along with another attempt to shock the audience into thinking it is mature and edgy, but it still does show how the people behind that series see war. In addition to that, it’s less about defeating the Galra, but more about Altea defending themselves from the Galra.

Thanks to its numerous reboots and long history, Gundam is a really interesting comparison-point. So with all apologies to @nelsonbrandela‘s attempt to watch all the series, here’s a severely truncated summary of how empire is presented across a sampling of Gundam series over the past 30+ years.

First generation gundam (UC), broadcast from 1979 with continuations and sequels through the late 80s. The UC continuum has a strong anti-war sentiment, thanks to Tomino’s childhood during the war. It establishes the basic components: earth, space colonies, and revolution. Its protagonist is both Earth-born and implied Japanese ethnicity, standing in as the Everyman character, fighting the rebels. As I recall, pacifism doesn’t loom quite as large over this story, and the focus is more on the cost of war. (Also, the death rate is brutal.)

In the 90s, we got the AC timeline (Wing). Again, earth, space colonies, revolution. But in reflection of changing political sentiment, Wing flips a few things. Now the ethnically-Japanese everyman protagonist is one of the rebels, from a space colony, and earth is the antagonist. The politics also gets muddier, with a debate about the role of pacifism. 

Just to compare the first two major timelines and the political and economic atmosphere at the time of their airings: the first timeline ran during a period of massive economic and cultural productivity for Japan. There was a sense of ‘we produce, others consume, and what do we get for that’, coupled with tensions among the five tigers in terms of economic power, bolstered by US nuclear support. Ergo, the theme of a once-great power now getting trampled by the political/military might of what had once been a subjugated colony. 

In contrast, Wing was broadcast after the bubble popped, and Japan hit hard times. Now the everyman protagonist could be an outright aggressor, fighting back against crushing (economic) defeat. Keep in mind, too, that as Japan’s economy plummeted, the American economy was experiencing growth like it hadn’t seen since the end of WWII. The tables had effectively turned, from ‘we can outdo our previous overlords’ to ‘we are losing the (economic) war and being ground under someone’s heel’.    

And then onto the CE timeline and SEED, broadcast in 2002-3, The (again, ethnically Japanese) protagonist doesn’t just live on a space colony. His colony is both explicitly identified as Japanese, and pacifist, and neutral. Remember, it had only been a year since 9/11, and the US was chest-thumping for war. Japan’s position was basically, hey, Article 9, people (look it up). Where the UC and AC timelines center their POV on one side or the other of rebellion/war, the CE timeline places the POV as a pacifist outsider.   

By 2008, we get Gundam 00, which iirc was also the first major Gundam series whose core protagonist (Setsuna) was not ethnically Japanese. (He’s not even much of an everyman; that POV is provided by another character.) 00 was directly influenced by the personal experiences of animators who’d provided JSDF support to the war in Afghanistan, and their fingerprints are all over the first season of 00. No space colonies here; the factions are both muddier and more pointed in reference to the political climate of the late aughts; the US is canonically one among several superpowers looking to colonize, meddle, extract resources, and then destroy in their wake. It’s possibly among the most immediately-relevant of any of the Gundam series. (It’s also the first time I could ever recall seeing a Gundam character showing explicit, consistent indications of PTSD.)

And most recent is the PD timeline, with Iron-Blooded Orphans. We’re back to space colonies, this time on Mars, but instead of the colonies producing resources that Earth consumes, the colonies are dependent on Earth to provide. (A flip of the colonial position in AC/Wing, where the colonies argued Earth was sucking them dry.) Our protagonist is implied Japanese, and a rebel, fighting to gain resources denied by superpowers. It’s a curious parallel to the rising debates about Article 9 and a growing undercurrent of dissatisfaction with pacifism as a viable political position. In a way, one of the arguments is that this imposed pacifist neutrality is blocking Japan from achieving equal standing among the world’s powers. Gundam just takes that current political atmosphere, maps colony and overlord to it, and crafts a story from the backdrop. 

It’s important to remember that colonialism has variations; the economic version most common today is neo-colonialism, which uses capitalism and globalization (cultural imperialism) to hold power over developing countries. Think World Bank or the IMF: if you want loans for development, you must enact the following policies in your own autonomous state. Classic imperialism is the use of direct military control (ie Japan’s occupation of its neighbors or the American occupation of Japan), while hegemonic colonialism uses indirect political control (ie US control of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam, etc). 

Coming back around to VLD, it’s effectively skipped a whole lot of development in (and representations of) empire. That’s a big part of why it feels so naive and shallow to me. VLD reboots a story whose core understanding of empire was rooted in pure defense against an aggressive upstart; the implication was that if Voltron were unleashed, there would be no contest. Hence, it had to be held in check by a morality that defined it as ‘for defense only’ (much like the perception of the JSDF, and Japan itself).  

But changing the Paladins’ efforts to offensive maneuvers hollows out that original paradigm. In the absence of that morality of pacifism and self-defense, there are no brakes on Voltron, so the Galran empire must be made supremely overwhelming, or else the story would be over as soon as Voltron formed. And that means the dynamic -- the discussion -- of ‘empire’ has changed, yet none of this is reflected in the VLD reboot. 

The most we’ve gotten is a classic imperialism: military occupation, designed to drain resources in a strictly-controlled one-way consumption from colonized to colonizer. Yet military occupations are massive efforts. There’s a reason they’ve been mostly tossed aside in favor of neo-colonialism, where control of resources keeps the colonized in check, rather than actual boots on the ground. Frankly, given the model VLD has presented, the Galran empire would have to have a gajillion bots to control every outpost and far-flung galaxy in such a micromanaging imperial style. (Which makes it even more stupid that you can overthrow a single base just by shutting down power. Why is it Voltron’s the first one to think of doing this? I strongly dislike stories that only know how to make the heroes seem smart by making everyone else be stupid.) 

Related to that, it’s possible Lotor’s idea of colonial agency isn’t meant as a federation of planets/systems, but as a hegemonic colonialism akin to the current American empire. Puerto Rico has self-rule, after all, excepting that (like Washington DC) it is still ultimately voiceless when it comes to its own fate, against decisions by the US Congress. I just don’t know if the EPs/writers have enough savvy to catch onto the fact that ‘self-rule’ doesn’t automatically mean true agency, or even having a voice. 

Furthermore, when you scale up empire to the level of planetary control (much like the US/EU/UK western juggernaut) -- let alone galactic control -- there’s a huge cultural impact. We should see regular civilians (including prisoners) dressed in Galran styles and colors; their food, architecture, fashion, historical records, whatever -- everything should be Galran or Galran-influenced. That cultural power should be everywhere, undeniable, unavoidable. That’s the core of neo-colonialism. You no longer expend your own resources controlling every last bit of the colonized. Instead, you hold out your (superior) culture and make the colonized jump to gain capital, whether material, economic, or cultural. 

And the most important aspect of that is that empire doesn’t end just because the occupation has -- this is possibly Japan’s greatest lesson (and biggest struggle) after what really just amounted to only about five years of occupation. It’s that having been colonized, the effects last for decades. Centuries, even. The oppressor is no longer omnipresent, but the oppressed continue in the same patterns, chasing after the oppressor.   

Americans don’t just lack an understanding of direct warfare, we’ve also conveniently blocked out, dismissed, or outright silenced any of our marginal communities who could show us the impact of our imperial control. And not just on external lands/people, but on our own peoples. Throughout our history, we have effectively treated our Black, LGBT, Hispanic, and Indigenous communities as subaltern colonized classes, if we didn’t just try to exterminate them utterly. Whether classic imperialism, hegemonic control, or capitalist neo-colonialism, we’ve done them all, and we’ve done them all to our own citizens. That’s an uncomfortable truth for a lot of people, especially those who continue to benefit from those systems.

So it doesn’t surprise me that American writers be clueless, at first. It just pisses me off that they don’t even seem to be interested in understanding the cultural and moral arguments in the source material or its source culture. 

Tangentially, I saw a response elsewhere on the various downstream threads about how the US can’t (or shouldn’t, it wasn’t clear) be compared to the Galra, who had eradicated an entire people, leaving only two overlooked survivors. I direct you to the histories of indigenous peoples in America. If you think the US Govt wouldn’t have cheered at the thought of complete and total genocide of every single indigenous person in US territory (and we did put a damn lot of effort and time into trying to achieve it), I suggest you are long overdue for learning about America’s blood-soaked history. 

What indigenous cultures remain in the US are absolutely in spite of the US Govt, and not because of it.