Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits

Summary

Gundam is just the same as Jane Austen but happens to include giant mech suits A friend recently asked how to get started watching Gundam, and as I tripped all over myself, equal parts excitement and not wanting to sound like a lunatic, I fumbled around for a good answer. What I landed at was inelegant and I eventually panicked and found a watch list online. BUT! BUT! What is a blog for if not do overs!? Also, what follows has literally no information in it about where to get started watching Gundam, it is all about why I like Gundam…and Jane Austen. “Okay, so, like, they’re both about tensions between duty, social position, and personal desires.” I love Gundam for all the same reasons that I love Jane Austen. Austen writes drawing room comedies about marriage and property in Regency England. Gundam is a space opera about war, its impacts on the people that make and are victims to it, and giant mech suits…also sometimes magical teens… Folks in Austen’s books have to navigate rigid class structures where marriages are strategic alliances and personal feeling has to be balanced against social obligation. Gundam, especially the Universal Century timeline stuff, is filled with characters torn between personal relationships and their positions within military and political hierarchies. They also both, mostly, focus on characters who have enough privilege to have choices, but not enough power to escape circumstances. Characters in both aren’t peasants without agency, but they’re also caught in larger systems they can’t opt out of…save for Iron Blooded Orphans…what I find compelling about both Austen and Gundam is watching the gap between personal desire and institutional logic do stuff. Elizabeth Bennet wants to marry for love and respect, but in her world marriage is fundamentally about economic security and social alliance. Her refusal of Collins is personal desire asserting itself. Her family’s panic is institutional logic demanding she comply. The whole novel is the t...