Hathaway's Flash Rebuttal: But Director, I'm just not built like that

[makz]

Yesterday, I dismantled a thread of thought I've been unwinding lately in regards to Tomino's views on gender and connectedness throughout Gundam and expressed clearly in the most recent Hathaway movie. I want to expand on those thoughts, why they're contributing to what I called "the stress soup of my brain," and what's been bothering me as I try to write from Lalah's POV, keeping all those things in mind. But also, if we want to continue from the last topic, I need the reader to already have read that post, and to read that post fully presumes you've watched at least Counterattack and both Hathaway movies (or read the books — and if you have, please don't tell me what happens, as I haven't yet!) and will extend me enough grace to be a bad person, bullying the Captain.

So that's a big barrier to entry. Feel free not to engage with this, if none of that describes you.

(Edit: In addition to the above, in this post, I hint at the spoilers I do know about the ending of the Hathaway's Flash novels. So be warned!)

"Last time, on Dragon Ball Z"

My last post concludes that Tomino's ultimate point, in having Char establish poor boundaries with Quess and in having Hathaway absolutely terrified of the prospect of loving Gigi in the context of being an adult, was to force the reader of the Hasakun novels to sit with the idea that it's necessary to engage with adulthood seriously, and with our need to connect with one another, even if those things are messier than the simplistic way we view them when we are children. It's a rare moment when mister adults-are-the-enemy breaks free from that narrative and tells us that, even so, we must all become adults, at least in terms of expanding our views as we mature.

The thing is, the metaphor here is sexual attraction and heterosexuality. Which is fine, but I'm an asexual, demi-romantic, genderless computer gremlin. I'm not avoiding anything that is within my innate nature as an adult or refusing to grow up, but even when I was meant to be a horny teenager, those instincts were simply lacking in me.

Compatibility Layers

Tomino seems to be a red-blooded male of the human species, and so when I throw myself into his perspective, it requires a lot of temporary rewiring of the frontal lobe. Thankfully, red-blooded males of the human species are overrepresented as viewpoint characters in all sorts of things, so I think my reading comprehension allows me to bridge the gap. But dang, it's sometimes pretty incongruent!

Me, talking to myself

"Okay, here are the symbols. Tomino fundamentally operates in the sphere of bildungsromans with big robots. The robots are human agency, and they represent the tension between the connectedness of humanity, individuals' right to autonomy, and the precision with which we deny others those things through warfare. All of those things are easy to track onto machines, especially if you're from the wartime reconstruction era.

"The most fundamental unit you can reach for when exploring traditional modes of connection is the Meiji ideal of the nation as a reflection of the individual family unit. It's pretty clear when he has characters react to the oddness of having women in the military, he's at least somewhat pulling from the 'good wife and mother' roles that had been available to women pre-war.

"He still doesn't reject women's autonomy, and expands the roles women play significantly starting in Zeta, but he also has most of even the most forward-thinking characters remain ambivalent with the idea of women fighting, and seems to fundamentally posit that women's existence as something that survives battle due to them not being on the battlefield directly is the point for many of the men who are choosing to fight. This is paternalist, and he seems to both recognize that and pull away from it at turns.

"His ideal seems to be Sayla, but he keeps coming back to Lalah as a character to iterate outwards from, whereas due to circumstances, Sayla's story never resolves.

"At the time he was writing First Gundam, female characters were allowed to either be good guys or sexy, at least within non-comedy works. Go Nagai was breaking those molds in comedy, but they hadn't really found any footing outside of that genre. Fujiko Mine is not a straightforwardly 'good guy,' but Maetel, who's covered head-to-toe is a 'good guy' as a matter of course.

"That has to be frustrating, if you're trying to respect women's autonomy within a framework that is exploring new paradigms of human thought, because you're in an era where the 'good wife and mother' roles are breaking down and women are being allowed to participate more actively in public life. Even if you haven't broken free from thinking that the old way is comfortable and familiar, you must want to explore new ideas to some extent. Sayla, specifically, feels like proof of that. I don't think it's necessarily just that he wanted to see her boobs on a big screen.

"There's also the wrinkle that he has Sayla outlive Amuro in the version of the story that was solely his to tell. I vaguely understand how Hathaway ends — this 'women carrying on the will of men; women as the underpinning of society that survives warfare' idea is clearly something he's coming back to again and again as he continues to write, from 1979 to 1989.

"So that leaves the question of what 'Hathaway' (both the novels and the character) is trying to accomplish.

"In the Hathaway movies, specifically, I'm not doing anything radical when I posit that the distinction between Quess and Gigi, for Hathaway, is that of youth/hatsukoi (first love) versus maturity/adult ren'ai (love that isn't bound up in arranged marriage). That's a conversation in the movies themselves — Kenneth states that clearly in the first 20 minutes of the first film.

"In addition to those symbols, in the second movie, you have Gigi acknowledging that she probably has a father-complex at the same time as Hathaway is experiencing real fear at the idea of letting go of his psychic connection to a girl who died when he was a young teenager. That last symbol, specifically, rhymes with the image of Char laid out in Counterattack who still mumbles Lalah's name in his sleep, to the point that it's idle gossip amongst his soldiers.

"If you keep in mind that the original planning documents went out of their way to call Amuro a character who basically has a mother-complex and then also remember that Counterattack ends with the most off-the-wall lines from Char, pointing both to the need for a mature love interest who can nurture completely and a need for someone younger with more potential to forge the future so that he can be absolved of that responsibility, we have a big soup of sexual complexes to stare at, and all of them seem to be symbols of something else.

"Put simply, isn't Tomino showing that even designated main characters like Amuro have to let go of the need to look to the past for indications of what future to follow? The end theme of First Gundam seems to say as much: 'That's the homeland that you've abandoned. Men must hide their tears and look only to the future.' (No pressure there, buddy.)

"The sexual complex is the symbol of the psychological state. (If you really want to get into what pop psychology was popular around the time Tomino was writing, go round up a bunch of books by Hayao Kawai — he's got a fair amount of material available in English.)

"So it makes sense that he then posits sexual attraction as the primal and inevitable base unit for human connection, as that underpins what would probably be seen as 'the opposite of war' and 'the most fundamental way in which the human species propagates.' If you're writing science fiction, you're staring directly at concepts like those."

Me, coming back to myself

But while all of that is literarily understandable, it's still at odds with the way I function on a base level. So when I'm writing Lalah as a heterosexual woman who is trying to connect with a guy whose lack of reciprocity is literarily a function of immaturity, I'm still more present in Char's way of thinking than Lalah's, and I come to the existential state of wondering, if I were a literary character instead of a flesh-and-blood human, what this lack would say about me, fundamentally.

It's much easier if you sidestep everything, throw yourself into fujoshiland, and simply let Char Aznable be the most repressed man alive. Even the text will never refute you on this — Nanai herself openly states that her lover is unable to become really entranced with women. Whether you want to take that (as I do) to mean that he forgoes connection in order to commit to warfare, or you want to take that (as I also do) to mean that he would probably be happier if he just dated men in a straightforward way that didn't involve murder, attempted or otherwise, there's a strong textual backing to your reading.

(Besides which, there's little chance in my mind that it was a mere coincidence, in the Char's Counterattack fanbook that Hideaki Anno put together, for Tomino to go out of his way to refer to Yukio Mishima as an example of the prewar spirit in the postwar world. Lalah's comment that "mankind may one day overcome even time itself" seems to me to be in direct conversation with Mishima's Beautiful Star. Also, if I'm doing my math right, in the planning phase for CCA, when told he couldn't have Amuro be a father since it would make him seem too old, Tomino changed his age from the age Tomino was when he had his first kid to the age Tomino was when Mishima met his very gaudy end.)

But even then! That is a straightforward expression of sexuality-as-connection, and so it's still(!) outside of my own lens on what humanity functionally is, at least if I count myself and others like me as human. (And if I were the only one in this position, I could discount myself as an anomaly, but it seems there are others! I will not belittle them just to make a more convenient map of the world, which happens to exclude the ground under my feet.)

There isn't really a conclusion here?

I'll be frank; I'm letting myself sit with all of this, but I haven't been able to resolve anything, and I probably won't be able to do so in the future. Sexuality is an amazingly succinct shorthand that will be viscerally understandable to the majority of the human race. If you read enough fiction, you can see the symbolic formulas even if you can't integrate them into self-understanding. But writing from an alien perspective, no matter how normal to everyone else it is, and how normalized it is socially, still causes friction. It still makes the brain veer off into a thousand hypotheticals with no answers. ("What if you were just normal? Have you ever tried that?")

The thing I want to impart onto the parasocial Newtype ghost of Mister Director, who haunts my own writing, is that I'm not just nantonaku crystalling my way around. I'm an adult, and I take my place in society, my connections with other people, seriously. Even if I'm told the era of pilots is over, I will not let myself sway in the wind at the whims of outside agents.

I'm just an uncommon type, Uncle Tomino.