Hathaway's Flash: What is a woman? A miserable little pile of hope.

[makz]

I just saw Hathaway’s Flash 2 at my local AMC and all I can think about is Mr. Tomino’s views on gender as both expressed by, and expressions of, ways by which people relate to the unknowable bounds of the future and more knowable systems of violence.

I’m very intensely focused on these topics lately (I’ve been writing fanfiction from Lalah’s perspective) and Hasakun 2 is right in front of me, and the stress soup of my mind is reacting to it as if I turned towards the familiar spectre of Quess and instead—

You know what, I don’t want to throw spoilers at you without your permission, so continue under the tag, if you dare.

Briefly, a normal review

Hasa2 gives the viewer the tiniest of “previously on Dragon Ball Z” synopses before diving back into the story it set out to tell, beginning with the Netflix Original Movie, around the time I was getting into Gundam originally. The animation direction plays with the concept of time and space, having continuous dialogue play over scenes told in fits and spurts of continuity. It does this while following three-and-a-half POV characters around the battlefield, breaking to show scenes which none of the main characters experience directly, introducing an extended background cast, and screaming philosophy at the viewer. It’s wonderfully orchestrated, and, even more than the first movie, it feels like a translation of Tomino through someone else’s lens, which is exactly what it is.

If you aren’t aware (although I expect everyone who clicked all the way through here is probably pretty knowledgeable), Hathaway’s Flash is originally a set of three novels penned by original Gundam director Yoshiyuki Tomino the year after Char’s Counterattack came out. It followed directly on the heels of 13 year old Hathaway Noa’s introduction to war, and saw a now-adult Hathaway grapple with the philosophical questions the previous movie posed, within its universe and in the context of his own actions as a child.

I'm actually *not* the most knowlegeable person to speak on these books, compared to a sizable amount of the fandom! Zeonic Scanslations has done a series of translations that I have not read and the Japanese language books themselves have made it into my collection but are gathering dust still in their plastic wrap. I will read them one day, but don't wait for me; if you're interested, go check out Zeonic's work, or, if you're exceptionally bilinugal, go get the ebooks — they're widely available wherever Japanese language ebooks are sold.

The previous Netflix movie, Hathaway’s Flash, or just Hathaway in the Anglosphere, covers the first of the three books, and it follows that the current Hathaway’s Flash 2: Circe’s Witch, or whatever the title was (I am just going to call it increasingly silly derivative names for the continuation of this blog), covers the content of the second book. Neither movie saw direct involvement from the original author, who, according to one interview I’m not going to source for this blog post (don’t just take my word for it; go google it if you’re curious), stopped in to visit the production and said something to the effect that while he didn’t remember the details of something he wrote 37 years ago, it seemed pretty timely (unfortunately)!

So it’s pulling from an older work within the UC timeline. As such, it runs into common UC Gundam problems. If it wants to sell overseas to countries where the Universal Century is one of the less popular Gundam universes, it has to be all things to all people. It has to free itself enough from the previous works’ gravity to stand on its own, a star free of the orbit of requiring its viewers to watch 140 episodes and a movie to engage with its text. The first movie does this fairly successfully. There are two obvious points at which having previous knowlege of at least Counterattack makes the viewing feel more complete and leaves the viewer with fewer questions. It’s bearable, if you don’t know anything. “This kid has some kind of bad memories,” you might think. “I’m sure they’ll be explained later.”

The second movie makes it pretty clear that it’s not going to explain itself legibly, but it might eventually explain itself emotionally, which could very well be enough for its audience. Hasakun’s voice actor does a good enough job of selling the character’s regrets that it almost doesn’t matter what he’s regretting; we can sit with him in his feelings.

“Who’s the ghost with the pigtails? Eh. Doesn’t matter that much.”

“Who’s the short-haired woman whose sillhouette shows up in his stress hallucination? Who knows; all we need to know is that he’s broken up about something.”

Meanwhile, if you’re a freak like me and have memorized the entire script of Char’s Counterattack (which is a normal thing that normal people do, surely), you’re rewarded mid-movie with line-for-line arguments you’ve heard before, while everyone dances around saying the name of the guy to whom they should be attributed.

(Look, every Gundam fan since 1979 has enjoyed quoting that guy, but you don’t really expect it to happen in-universe.)

The metaphysics of Gundam have been seeping into its material for a while, and the biggest sign of this is that, both textually and metatextually, the past can never be buried. If that’s true, we have to engage with those emotions, even if the shape of the problem itself becomes murky. That’s a little what watching Ha2way is like.

…And if I were a normal person, I’d end my review here, but woe is me; I want to talk about Tomino’s views on gender, god help me.

Tomino and gender

Hello, that’s a load-bearing section title. I will not be exploring the entire load it is bearing, but here — let’s talk a little bit about Gigi Andelucia, Newtype women, the idealization of new generations by the old, and the way beauty and enlightenment is subsumed into the mechanizations of war. Yeah? (We’ll do each briefly, because otherwise this is going to be a novel instead of a stream-of-consciousness movie-review-shaped-breakdown.)

Gigi

The central love interest of the Flashy Hasa series is Gigi Andelucia, a woman whose introduction bears out her beauty, intelligence, familiarly off-kilter personality; and which immediately ties her in a very opaque way to Hathaway’s first childhood crush who is apparently haunting him pretty viscerally — their voices overlapping, their speech styles converging, their existences blending for a moment, spurring our main character into action.

Newtype Women

Newtype women, in Gundam works, occupy this space where they are triggers that drive the men to fight (both with their words and their robots), but Tomino seems oddly unsatisfied with the shape of his own works, on this particular point.

It feels as if he is simultaneously apologizing at every moment that it needed to be this way and forcibly giving us glimpses at an interiority that is not understood by the men of the narrative, and therefore causes the viewers to feel complicit in the ways in which it is not explored. Lalah’s laugh, the way Four runs her fingers over a chainlink fence as she runs, Ple’s complete inability to draw boundaries between the morality of the battlefield and daily life, the remorse that Quess cannot allow herself to feel towards her own actions’ consequences — all of these exist in the text in a way that receives no comment, but is nonetheless there, and is there in a way that is loud.

Gigi’s existence is commented upon, compared to the women listed above. Her interiority is shown; she is given equal weight to Kenneth as a secondary character in this narrative. This, to me, is new, and I’m appreciating it greatly.

Generational Idealization and the Mechanization of Social Progress

What’s not new is the suggestion that these women represent a future that is won after the battle, not in the literal terms of “someone to fight for and settle down with later,” but in the more ambiguous terms of “how society will function once we win; the shape of the peace we hope to attain through war.”

Like Lalah, Gigi is a character who can guide the men through intuition, and who is looked to and exploited for this ability. Whereas Lalah’s abilities were primarily exploited in battle, Gigi’s are exploited for their tactical acuity — in telling the future, even if it’s not transparent and not convenient, she brings that future into being. In HasaFlash 2, she comments on the degree to which her comments only cement the luck or abilities of those who surround her; she’s not literally a witch as the title of this movie suggests. However, to the men, her intuition is something that will not simply drive the course of battle, but may reshape the world — that’s the core of Newtype theory, after all.

Like Four, Gigi is captured within a system. In Four’s case it is explicitly a military system, to which she is bound by induced medical dependency. In Gigi’s it’s much more mundane — she simply needs to remain connected to the social structure she’s found herself in to remain in a financial state of security. Still, also like Four, she makes attempts to reject this and takes steps towards a future that is shaped more by herself than by the systems that have both supported and bound her down.

Ple’s tragedy is of having been reared in such a way that killing people seems normal enough that she ought to be allowed, in her own mind, to do it over such perceived slights as wanting more attention from her new friend. Because she is split into two characters, with that darkness emerging in a very childlike way in her initial incarnation, the viewer is made to form parallels between this innocent violence and the more formulated expressions of violence of her second iteration. In the second case, especially, the structure that is being imposed on her via Glemy is made obvious. This is weakly echoed by Kenneth’s insistence that he have Gigi as a “good luck charm,” which is a position held on the opposing side by a housecat.

The Quess parallels exist directly in the text and will likely be more apparent as the story continues — as I said, I have not read the novels and don’t know where they’ll lead us — but the textual difference between the characters, surfaced by this second movie, is of the “thrill of (relatively platonic) first love” contrasted with adult relationships, which are at once less turbulent to a person’s self-image and generally carnal in nature.

In all cases, these characters represent the possibility of a future that is either allowed to grow into something (but is still used to a purpose, in the case of Lalah and Four) or is actively exploited (arguably true of everyone, but especially Four and Ple) or is set as an example of something that is contrasted with the complicated, nuanced, mature world of adults (which is what this movie is doing with the contrast between Quess and Gigi).

A VERY DANGEROUS ASIDE

That said, the contrast between Quess and Gigi is what holds the entirety of this dynamic together for this movie. I’m about to say something that absolutely requires you to have seen Counterattack and to extend me some amount of grace. If you haven’t done the first or can’t do the second, then consider the above a fun thought experiment, draw your own conclusions, and, I beg you, read no further.

Are we good? You’re not going to cancel me for besmirching the name of a decades old fictional fascist? Yeah? Ok.

So, look, when the text of Counterattack uses Gyunei to call Char a lolicon, what is it doing? It’s not having a fun time poking at the bad guy; it’s functionally doing something. What is it doing?

In my mind, it’s doing the same thing that Hathaway being terrified of his carnal feelings for Gigi is doing. It’s contrasting Char’s hangups surrounding a dead seventeen year old girl — his pinning of his hopes for something that can develop into actual Newtype intuition, which is arguably all he cares about by that point on the thirteen year old girl he picked up off the side of the road — with the fact that he has a beautiful, sexually available woman in his bed.

Why is Char like this? Why doesn’t he separate himself from Quess in a way that recognizes the barriers that need to exist between a 13 year old girl and a 33 year old man? It isn’t sexual attraction, but it is immaturity, and it’s specifically the immature idolization of first love. He’s looking at Quess and seeing a version of Lalah. Hathaway is looking at Gigi and seeing that this is not what he had in his youth with Quess.

Hathaway is an adult. Gigi is an adult. But up until now, Hathaway has had a stable but unremarkable love life, which he is at once sidelining in favor of chasing his ideals, and at the same time, was never caught up in to the extent that prompted him to fully commit. Until now, Hathaway was never in danger of having adult love interrupt his dedication to Mafty. Gigi is different — she is someone who could change the direction of his life, for the sake of love.

Char rejected the call to love someone when Lalah was alive, idolized her for the rest of his life, and died pathetically, longing for unconditional love while pinning his hopes on some pure ideal found in youth. Hathaway stands at that same precipice, and he is terrified of it, turning to his memories of Quess and being horrified to see Gigi in her place.

So what does this say about gender, Uncle Tomino?

I already said that I was not going to explore everything the pillar of “Tomino and Gender” is holding up; I’m not that much of a masochist. But I find it fascinating that Mr. “I have become an adult and therefore the enemy” still seems to be screaming “You do have to grow up sometime, though! Grow up and touch a boob!”

And even if Tomino is often just that crude about it when he speaks to the camera directly, instead of through his animation (although he didn’t actually say that; don’t quote me on that; go find the quote about the importance of the male lead metaphorically reaching for the female lead’s crotch instead — that one’s real), he’s not being crude here. It’s very sophisticated, if you take Counterattack and Hasakun together, as you probably would have been forced to do in 1989.

Having now exorcised my demons, given everyone things to think about, and perhaps made an enemy of the “Leftist Icon, Char Aznable” crowd (please tell me that’s just the one guy; my heart can’t take it if there are multiple of you out there), I will now abscond from the Internet for at least a few hours.

Thank you for coming to my terrible TED Talk; enjoy your weekend.