GUNDAM WING: The Value of Life

For a story who's major theme is the value of human life, there sure are a lot of folks attempting suicide in Mobile Suit Gundam Wing.

Released in Japan on April 7th, 1995 as New Mobile Report Gundam W, the extremely popular mecha anime series Gundam Wing followed in the footsteps of its colossal, ground-breaking ancestor Mobile Suit Gundam--also debuting in Japan on April 7th, but in 1979--by telling a the tale of a futuristic series of battles known as the Eve Wars fought between factions who use manned giant robots, mobile suits, as the frontline to most battles on Earth and in space.

In the future, when the peace-keeping leader of the space colonies is assassinated by military organization OZ, five OZ scientists become disgruntled with their former employers and spend the next twenty years plotting revenge. Their plan is executed in After Colony 195, and the scientists see the completion of five Gundams, hyper-powerful mobile suits, and the training of their teenaged pilots. The plot to send these five Gundams and their pilots to Earth to rebel against, and defeat, OZ, is where the story begins, following the pilots and their adversaries, who with their powerful Gundam mobile suits execute mass mayhem across the world akin to Dynasty Warriors, extracting their revenge on OZ and striking fear into the hearts of otherwise stern and stubborn soldiers.

For a boy who grew up on Robotech--another violent space opera/sci-fi/war drama that centered on giant manned robots--the arrival of Gundam Wing in America on March 6th, 2000, on Cartoon Network's extremely popular Toonami block was a perfect fit for me. I knew nothing about Gundam back then, except that the Toonami promo for it reminded me of Robotech. I saw cool-looking anime characters piloting these beautiful, stylish, oddly recognizable giant robots, with excellent music, and once I finally watched the show for the first time, I was shocked and impressed. I was ten years old. I had no idea how deeply this show would impact me for the rest of my life. Granted, nobody thinks that a series about hot teenagers piloting giant mechas and killing hundreds of soldiers is anything beyond simply cool to a ten-year-old boy. And sure, yes--it was cool as hell.

Watching the series enchanted me to take to CompuServe 2000 dial-up internet, and deeply research the franchise in its entirety, which at the time was largely not available in America. I fell in love with what I couldn't touch, what I couldn't see. Apparently, Gundam was thriving in the 80s with a bunch of series that were exclusive to Japan with neat titles, more simplistically designed suits, and classically anime-looking protagonists. I was so intrigued and heartbroken all at once. But as the shows and films under the Gundam name have constantly been released stateside over the years, I noticed that each of these shows and films had themes attached to them--sometimes subtle, sometimes obnoxious. The underlying theme of Gundam Wing, again, was the value of human life.

In the show's backstory, the assassinated pacifist leader of the space colonies was a man named Heero Yuy. The 15-year-old protagonist of this series is a handsome, personality-less, and nameless soldier who was trained and conditioned to be the ultimate mobile suit pilot. The show never reveals his real name or acknowledges if he even has one, but the "codename" he goes by the entire show is Heero Yuy, in honor of the pacifist leader, whose death is the progenitor of the rebellion OZ is now facing. The way that the real Yuy's life is honored through the young main character carries a weight with it that captivates the gravity of one single life. The entire series is based off of that weight, the value of that one individual person.

Four of the five main characters, the Gundam pilots whose missions are so secretive that their existences are unknown even to one another until future episodes, have attempted to kill themselves at least once. Heero Yuy does successfully self-detonate his Gundam in the tenth episode of the series, and he is thought to be dead for a moment, surviving by nothing less than a miracle. Watching the first nine episodes again with a new clarifty, I caught various moments where Heero tried to kill himself that ten-year-old me didn't catch. As an adult, it hit me. This war, the killing of other men...these five kids were conditioned to become numb to it. Numb to their own lives, it would seem. In various circumstances, their proposed suicide attempts have been symbolic gestures of the bigger picture, offensive measures in battle, and steps to ensure that no enemy gets their hands on their secretive Gundams. The only thing that has kept these insane 15-year-olds alive are the others around them who can see their value, or the Gundams themselves in stranger circumstances.

The latter half of the 49-episode series reveals new players in the war: mobile dolls, powerful and intuitive A.I. based mobile suits that require no human pilot. Upon the arrival of these powerful machines, the relationships between friends and foes alike are changed when the morality of sending pure machines into battle instead of fighting, and dying at the hands of, another human being is largely put into question. The dolls soon become a threat to everyone, but most importantly, their ideals. Their arrival sets the foundation for one of the show's key antagonists, Treize Khushrenada, to defect from the very OZ that he leads. Because, he claims, human life is more valuable than to be snuffed out at the hands of a lifeless doll. And war, others say in agreement, is not some video game or chessboard with game pieces to be placed and moved instead of human soldiers. Ironically, during this period, the attempts of the main characters to die at their own hands is reduced drastically. When the value of their own lives is threatened from an outside perspective, they seem to be able to focus better on winning, and living, their value maintained and sought after.

Gundam series are traditionally multi-faceted, nuanced, and emotionally "adult". 1985's Zeta Gundam speaks volumes on women in the battlefield, and femininity in general. 2010's Gundam Unicorn, adapted from the manga, carries the underlying theme of setting destiny in motion by possibility, not by the decrees supposedly setting destiny rigidly in place. Even the more simplistically self-aware, fun series like 1994's G Gundam and the more recent Gundam Build subseries have their moments. But what makes Gundam Wing such a stand-out show on its theme are the conditions it sets for the audience to be captivated, and the questions it brings. Is a revolution really worth it when the cost of the freedom at the end of the tunnel is the mental instability and conditioned worthlessness of the soldiers at the frontline?

As a grown man now, it breaks my heart to see these teenagers constantly find next to no reason to live, except for the next mission, and to otherwise attempt to end their own lives if any compromise is presented, or if any alternative message needs to be delivered. When Heero attempts to end his life, it isn't long before Trowa Barton, another Gundam pilot, considers attempting to do the same thing. "It'll be my last," he thinks aloud to himself, "grand-stand show." While losing his first battle in space to the mobile dolls, Gundam pilot and deuteragonist Duo Maxwell laments that, for he and his Gundam, it may be the end. Upon defeat, he announces that he doesn't want to necessarily "copy Heero, but tag along, on my journey into hell," before pressing his self-detonation switch rather than have his Gundam taken by the enemy. (His Gundam is so battered, however, the switch malfunctions and he lives to see another day, which the otherwise optimistic Duo laughs about.)

Unknowingly, Heero has a profound impact on his future comrades' decisions, and he never even knew it. Violence begets violence, we know that already. But the show's portrayal of suicide contagion, or "copycat suicide", reflected a true and serious societal wound that has yet to be healed. It was only two days after the suicide of Kate Spade that Anthony Bourdain took his own life by the same method as Kate. Similarly, following the suicide of Robin Williams, it was reported that suicide attempts using the same method as him had increased by 32% in the following months, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. This type of coincidence is no coincidence at all. Yes, violence begets violence, but evidently, suicide also begets further suicide. Gundam Wing's aim to shine a light on the relationship between the value of human life and what encourages us to protect that value may possibly be inadvertent. I, however, highly doubt it.

Gundam Wing was ahead of its time for me. Toonami's most popular shows at the time were DragonBall Z and Sailor Moon, and Gundam Wing quickly became the action cartoon block's highest rated show and, to this day, it is highly revered for widely bringing Gundam to the States. Even though Sunrise Studios was celebrating the franchise's 20th anniversary and, to help further that campaign, dubbed 1981's Gundam Movie Trilogy, 1989's Gundam 0080, and 1991's Gundam 0083 directly to VHS for American video store shelves in 1998, none of these animated features would appear on television in front of millions of anime-hungry kids and teens before Gundam Wing did and set the standard for giant robot anime in the west that made a pathway from everything to Big O to Evangelion to Cowboy Bebop to succeed in America. But none of those shows had the impact on me Gundam Wing had. I only hope, as major issues like suicide need to continue to be responsibly discussed, that the shows, video games, films and animes that largely speak on them are continually talked about as well.

In those regards, I'll probably never stop talking about Gundam Wing.