IBO reference notes on . . . the meaning of the Gundams
I initially started writing this after finishing my Gundam media marathon a couple of years ago, only to stall on it repeatedly for no very good reason. Let's see if I can finally bring it together. Spoilers, as ever, for the entire show, and a few more besides.
What even is a Gundam?
According to Wikipedia (quoting the Gundam Archives series, apparently), 'Gundam' is a portmanteau of 'gun' and 'freedom', altered slightly to evoke a weapon with the stopping force of a dam. In the franchise as a whole, the word chiefly denotes the lead mecha (or 'mobile suit') of each series. This will usually be a predominantly white war robot, accented with primary colours and driven into battle by a precocious teenager. Sometimes it is a unique, singular creation; others, one among several of the same type. Whichever the case, the Gundam will always be a special variety of mobile suit characterised by greater strength, speed and destructive power, and frequently comes equipped with a vaguely supernatural control mechanism.
From this, you might imagine it to be a singularly good signifier. It's on the box, after all. However, while they are usually operated by what we'd consider the heroes of each show, the Gundams themselves tend to carry more ambiguous connotations. Take the original 'Mobile Suit Gundam' from 1979. This is a weapon created by the Earth Federation to combat the advances of the technologically superior Principality of Zeon in a war for control of Earth and its orbital space colonies. Now, there can be no argument over whether Zeon are 'bad guys'. Even before the show begins, they've devastated Australia by dropping an O'Neil cylinder on it (they were aiming for South America), they are frequently shown to be pursuing genocidal agendas, and their military leader takes comparison to Hitler as a compliment. Despite the many Zeon characters shown to have morally grey or flat-out noble characteristics, the term 'space Nazi' is an entirely fair (albeit incomplete) descriptor.
This said, it would be a stretch to call the Federation 'good guys'. The war emerges from their oppression of the colonies and environmentally-destructive indifference towards the Earth. They are shown to be inflexible, corrupt and more than willing to match Zeon in terms of weapons of mass destruction. That's what the Gundam is. Escalation of a war in which neither side offers a whole-heartedly better option for how the world should look. This is one of the things protagonist Amuro Ray has to struggle with over the course of the show. Even the direct inventor of the Gundam, Amuro's father, is depicted as neglecting his family for the project, ultimately becoming lost to his obsession with a device designed for killing.
Thus, what the Gundam symbolises isn't straightforwardly the same thing Amuro does. Indeed, Amuro – as he and his sense of morality mature – not infrequently exists in tension with his role as the Gundam's pilot. This kind of disconnect becomes even more obvious in successor show Zeta Gundam, which begins with Gundams being mass produced by the series villains, the Titans. The monstrous 'Psycho Gundam' that serves as hero Kamille's bete noir is less a dark mirror to his own mobile suit and more a natural extension of the forces that birthed it: a juggernaut of destruction, twisting the youth and empathy of its pilot in the name of total victory.
Similar treatments can be seen in almost all Gundam series, even those where the operators better align with their machines. In both Gundam Wing and Gundam 00, the Gundams are the products of terrorist organisations and protagonists Heero Yuy and Setsuna F Seiei are undeniably onboard with their assigned missions at first. But that isn't a good thing: they are deeply disturbed characters whose humanity has been stunted by the forces placing them at the controls. It is only by transcending this, either transforming the meaning of their Gundams or flat-out destroying them, that they are able to grow as people. In After War: Gundam X and Turn A Gundam, the titular mecha are actual doomsday devices, responsible for an unparalleled amount of harm. There, our heroes spend much of their time navigating around the destructive power they can unleash, especially in Turn A where the Gundam carries the possibility of quite literally ending the world.
If you've spent any time looking at the Gundam fandom, you've probably seen a meme showing a Gundam shooting the point of the show ('war is bad!') over the head of a cartoon person whose response is purely surface-level ('cool robot!'). Or this can be reversed ('buy our toys!' sailing over the head of someone concerned with 'the way war/capitalism consumes children for its own perpetuation!'). This dichotomy lurks within all Gundam fiction – most acutely when it decries human conflict, since mecha anime glamourises warfare as a baseline conceit. But it's also often consciously evoked by the writing, as metaphor or dramatic crux. That the Gundam is normally driven by the character we are rooting for doesn't mean we are meant to root for the machine itself or what it represents.
In fact, Gundams are seldom, if ever, forces for good in their own right. They may act as such due to the moral compass of the person directing them, but a perpetual friction remains with their original purpose as war machines. Not for nothing do a majority of these shows conclude with the protagonist stepping away from their mobile suits.
Mechanised demonology
The naming conventions used for Iron-Blooded Orphans feature a mythology gag, one I assume to be intentional. In Mobile Suit Gundam, the Gundam becomes known as 'The White Devil' to the Zeon soldiers, owing to its seeming indestructibility and martial prowess. In IBO, meanwhile, each Gundam bears the name of an actual devil, specifically one of the seventy-two demons listed in the Ars Goetia. Seventy-two demons, seventy-two Gundams, created three hundred years prior to the series' time-frame to fight the 'Calamity War', during which, it is initially hinted, they nearly destroyed the world.
Midway through Season 2, we learn this is a misrepresentation. These devils were created to prevent the destruction of humanity, by defeating angelically-named, AI-controlled mobile armours (within the wider Gundam canon, 'mobile armour' generally refers to a larger, non-humanoid machine, more powerful than a mere 'suit'). It is never explained why the mobile armours rampaged across the solar system, exterminating a quarter of humanity. This, like much of the Calamity War, is left to our imaginations. What we are told for sure is that a man named Agnika Kaieru led a successful fightback against the armours in the first of the Gundams, Bael. With at least double the power of the average mobile suit, exotic weaponry, and the human/machine interface provided by the 'Alaya-Vijnana system', the Gundams stopped the armours and the organisation their pilots belonged to became the dominant force in the post-war world. Gjallarhorn (named after the instrument that sounds the start of Ragnarök) evolved into an interplanetary police force, violently suppressing attempts to change the new status quo.
They also suppressed knowledge concerning the Gundams – hence the initial confusion over their role. Those still remaining in Gjallarhorn's possession were relegated to family heirlooms, relics of a by-gone age, to the point no one really seems to know what they are without making a conscious effort to learn. At the same time, the very idea of merging people with technology was branded a taboo, socially ostracising those with prosthetics or computer implants. For all that they benefited from their ancestors' victory and still cite Agnika as their founder, the present version of Gjallarhorn has largely abandoned the Gundams and what they symbolise.
But what are they symbols of, exactly? It's worth asking because in many regards, Iron-Blooded Orphans is the one setting where you'd expect 'Gundam' to mean something unambiguously positive. There's surely little moral greyness in a struggle to prevent the extinction of the human species, especially when the enemy is so coldly robotic.
To start with, we should be clear this is not a story about the Calamity War. It's about what happened afterwards. Any meaning we ascribe can thus be said to fall into two parts: what these machines meant at the time they were built, and what they mean 'now', post-disaster, in the narrative we actually follow. The first of these has been rejected, in text, by the antagonists of the series, while the second finds expression on both sides over the course of the series. And there is one word we inevitably keep coming around to when talking about IBO's Gundams: power.
Power to the powerless
Now, 'power' and 'Gundam' go hand-in-hand as a general rule. Be it naked military strength or the ability to obliterate life ala an atomic bomb, they always represent destructive force. But there's a very specific meaning to 'power' in Iron-Blooded Orphans – although I hesitate to call it 'specific' since it's really what we mean whenever we talk about power in our real lives. That is, power as the ability to alter the world around us.
Since it is not set in a war but after one, IBO demonstrates the generalisable utility of things like superior logistics, concrete political support and accurately grasping the reality of a situation. Everything that happens is the consequence of the way power was distributed in the aftermath of the Calamity War, with Gjallarhorn at the top and augmented child soldiers from Mars – ostensibly the inheritors of the technology that saw the mobile armours defeated – squarely at the bottom.
Under such a system, everyone is striving to improve their lot. There's a maxim I've seen applied to stories (I think I first encountered it watching early Atop The Fourth Wall at university, to show just how old I am), which is that 'villains act, heroes react'. Setting aside how, well, reactionary this is as a guiding principle, I find it amusing how diametrically opposed to it IBO's narrative structure is. It's not preserving their way of life that drives the protagonists because, frankly, their lives suck. Standing in place means catastrophe. The only way to survive is to battle out of an unjust situation, which takes luck, money, connections, munitions, fuel, power.
During the first battle we see the boys who will become Tekkadan fight, they are out-matched by the raw firepower Gjallarhorn brings to bear. An organisation that doesn't have to worry about how much its ammo costs can field towering engines of destruction. Next to that, a bunch of kids driving tinker-toy tanks shouldn't stand a chance. Indeed they don't, until they reactivate Gundam Barbatos.
All at once, everything is turned on its head. The overwhelming force of Gjallarhorn's mobile suits meets its match in this ancient 'white devil', piloted by Mikazuki Augus, a young man we may fairly summarise as an active war-crime with aspirations of becoming a farmer. His brutally effective defence sends the greatest military of the setting into retreat.
Here, the Gundam acts as an equaliser and a direct parallel to the gun Mikazuki habitually carries and uses on behalf of Orga Itsuka (who we might summarise as a young man who is friends with an active war-crime who'll do literally anything he says). While I can and have expanded on how the surface impression of Orga and Mika is misleading, Mika is still the stick Orga wields to enact change around him – first via the gun (Orga points at a problem, Mika shoots it), then to an exponentially greater degree with Barbatos (Orga points, Mika renders the problem a thin layer of jam atop whichever surface it was previously standing).
In our initial encounter with them as young children, we see Mika shooting men implied to have attacked the pair. The fight with Gjallarhorn reiterates this structure: a superior foe is seen off by a vastly weaker group using a weapon they weren't expected to possess. What's important to note is the scale at which this interaction occurs. These are very direct and limited conflicts, the anecdotal 'guy comes at you with a weapon in a darkened alleyway' scenario. Gjallarhorn's attack on the Chryse Guard Security base is closer to a mugging than world-shaking armageddon. One-on-one, of course a super-weapon will outshine more mundane materiel.
Unfortunately, tragedy that it is, the story does allow the characters to remain at this easily-navigated scale.
Signs and wonders
McGillis Fareed is a man fascinated by the mythology of the Calamity War. When introduced, he is presented as atypically knowledgeable on the subject but we quickly discover this is not simple nerdishness. For McGillis, the Gundams are omens, their reappearance fighting on behalf of Mars portending change to a stagnant, centuries-old colonial order. Another meta nod to the rest of the franchise has him claiming machines with that name have been present at pivotal events throughout human history. He'll later ask if it was destiny that brought him into contact with Tekkadan.
Born in poverty and exploited first sexually, then as a pawn in political games among Gjallarhorn's elite, McGillis found inspiration in Agnika Kaieru's biography and the tale of one man turning the tide of the Calamity War. It solidified a belief that if he could accrue enough power, even someone as wretched as himself might be able to up-end the world. His stated wish is to remake things so that no matter where someone is from, they will be free to chase their goals with all their might (see my previous essay taking a deeper dive into these claims). He attributes this principle directly to Agnika, about whom we otherwise have little concrete information.
Gjallarhorn's original leader was most certainly an extremely skilled combatant, taking on mobile armours with only a pair of golden swords. Like all the first-generation pilots, he possessed a 'true' Alaya-Vijnana (so-called in contrast to the cruder version child soldiers like Tekkadan are implanted with) and perhaps as a garbled consequence, it is said his soul resides inside Gundam Bael, waiting for a successor to awaken it from its long slumber at the heart of Gjallarhorn headquarters.
Gundams are, to McGillis, a symbol of the deeply personal power he idealises via Agnika. He does terrible things for the sake of seizing Bael and with it – he assumes – control of Gjallarhorn, manipulating struggles for colonial independence, authorising illicit experimentation to resurrect 'true' Alaya-Vijnana technology, and arranging the deaths of his two closest childhood friends: Carta Issue, head of one of the 'Seven Star' families that make up Gjallarhorn's ruling council, and Gaelio Bauduin, heir to another such family and obstacle to McGillis advancing his status via an arranged marriage to Gaelio's sister. He also topples his putative 'father' to take over the Fareed Family, but since Lord Iznario is a scheming paedophilic bastard who exists primarily to look increasingly irredeemable each time he appears on screen, this part may be considered a public service.
Indeed, there is a muddiness to how McGillis' ambitions are presented. He sees no problem with the Gundams being used by Martian children, who are viewed as sub-human by his peers. That they have been able to take these machines for themselves confirms their right to hold such power and their capacity to accrue more. This, however, tips hard into survival of the fittest: McGillis eschews the aristocratic society around him in favour of something egalitarian only in the sense of believing people shouldn't be hobbled by those whose only strength is wealth and hereditary position. It is deeply unlikely the world he planned to create would really have been a more socially just one. Yet it's hard not to be sympathetic when discussing the ideology of an abused, traumatised, intensely lonely man who fixated on the idea obtaining a single mobile suit would make everything better.
It is also easy to overstate how bonkers McGillis' plan actually is. Yes, he stakes a lot on being seen to activate Gundam Bael and thus position himself as Agnika's heir. However, he only does this after taking over Gjallarhorn's headquarters (with Tekkadan's help) and holding three of the other Seven Star lords hostage – a coup only instigated once he has cemented his place at the top level of Gjallarhorn's hierarchy. Had things gone without a hitch, the propaganda victory on top of his physical victory might well have strong-armed the Earth-based Gjallarhorn forces over to his side. We see it is at least widely discussed that his being able to fly Bael could mean he's the rightful leader. For all his faults, McGillis is a canny operator and constructs a potentially effective plan.
The problem is that a large hitch presents itself immediately in the form of the very-much-alive Gaelio Bauduin, broadcasting on behalf of Rustal Elion, McGillis' main political opponent to publicly accusing McGillis of attempting his murder.
Symbolic weightlessness, cruel limitations
Gaelio and Rustal (another family-head and commander of the massive Arianrhod Fleet) do not waste time disputing the legends surrounding Bael. Instead they attack McGillis' legitimacy, calling him a traitor and – crucially – a phony. By exposing the fact he isn't a Fareed by birth (not even the bastard son Iznario presented him as), they cast doubt on his right to any position of authority within Gjallarhorn. It is a true aristocracy: if you cannot prove your heritage, you cannot be part of its leadership.
This knee-caps the coup, providing the other three Seven Stars with an excuse to affect a neutral position. They are being reasonable, allowing space for both sides to present their cases, while knowing full well Elion's fleet will crush McGillis if he receives no reinforcement. And of course McGillis now lacks leverage against them, since harming them would visibly render him the traitor his enemies have labelled him.
What I want to highlight are the specifics of how he is outmanoeuvred. Elion – for we should call this his plan – weaponises the system McGillis is reacting against. Where McGillis wants to prove it does not matter where you are born and at what level of society, if you can seize enough power, Elion leans on the excuses made for why those who already hold power deserve it. Bloodline. Legitimacy. Manners. By doing so he displays total indifference to the symbolism of the Gundams, both as derived from their Calamity War heroics and as sources of power in their own right.
McGillis is not quite the only person to take inspiration from the stories surrounding Bael. But outside his chosen band of revolutionaries, they ring hollow. Myths don't matter to those he's trying to overturn, who don't believe in them the way he does. The omens have no hold over those who do not see them.
This mirrors the collapse of the Gundams' status as the ultimate equaliser. Under McGillis' philosophy, they represent the apex of individualism – the one-man army, pushing through overwhelming odds. That's the entire concept of mecha shows put in a nutshell, reducing wars down to the action of a single asset. Even as it places a greater emphasis on 'realism' when depicting war, Gundam derives from this root and the pattern repeats with Mikazuki and Barbatos' initial outings on the battlefield. However, taken as a whole, Iron-Blooded Orphans commits to the view that individuals do not win wars. Numbers and organisation are always the greater part of success.
Tekkadan make it through a great many skirmishes by virtue of being 'crazier' than their more numerous or better-equipped opponents. Holding the view they have nothing to lose and everything to gain, they are prepared to take outsized risks, throwing themselves forward until whatever stands in their way breaks. This gamble works well at relatively small scales only to fail completely when they go up against a serious military force like the Arianrhod Fleet.
Gundams do indeed maximise an individual's power, but ultimately they are merely machines, requiring fuel and maintenance, and rendered loose ends by the destruction of the groups that field them. During both McGillis' and Tekkadan's final stands, their respective Gundams rack up huge body-counts, cutting down possibly hundreds of soldiers apiece. Yet by this point, it doesn't matter. They've already been defeated and the orbital bombardment that rains down on Mikazuki and fellow pilot Akihiro Altland punctuates a campaign lost to sounder strategy and overwhelming manpower. All our protagonists' single-minded determination isn't enough to overcome an enemy leveraging systematic advantages.
This is not to say individual instances of bravery or self-sacrifice are pointless. To make that claim would, in my view, be to fundamentally misinterpret what the show says. Despite failing on their own terms, Tekkadan's short-term achievements have long-term consequences, not least because Mikazuki and Akihiro's deaths allow the bulk of the survivors to escape. Their defeat is a victory by other metrics.
It is more that IBO presents violence, encapsulated by the mobile suit battle, as one form of power among many. As a means of achieving one's goals, its effectiveness is highly dependent on other factors. Multiple times, we see conflicts ended due to outside concerns, disconnected from how well our heroes are doing on the ground. The African Union's leadership calls off the operation at the Dort Colonies for fear of losing control of the media narrative. Rustal Elion puts a stop to Iok Kujan's vendetta against the Turbines after striking a deal with their parent organisation. Even the Battle of Edmonton and the Arbrau/SAU war conclude for reasons beyond just Tekkadan's ability to push through. A finale centred on a holding action while other kinds of power save what remains is entirely of a piece with preceding events.
The Gundams are a key part of setting this up, demonstrating their own limits even as they provide the necessary thrill of watching one man fight off hoards of enemies. They are an expression of violence as a tool for change – and here, on its own, that is a fundamentally doomed approach.
This is going to hurt
Let's pause a moment to consider Iron-Blooded Orphan's approach to violence in general, as contrasted with other shows in a similar genre space.
The anime Eureka Seven (1997) is deeply concerned with the personhood of those on opposing sides of a war. It explores how people navigate the contradiction of doing violence while being capable of love and empathy, how others respond to that contradiction, and how a capacity for violence is insufficient to resolve conflicts. It is a very good, frequently heartbreaking story rendered with exceptional visuals and a great flair for intricate characterisation.
It also begins from the perspective of a teenage boy who, though falling hard for the propaganda put out by one side of the framing conflict, exists isolated from it until it literally crashes into his home. Renton's slow comprehension of the realities of war forms the major thread of the show's narrative, as he comes to realises the truth about the world and the people around him. This works well, especially as Renton is treated more like a typical teenager than a juvenile wish-fulfilment fantasy, lacking a lot of the 'knows better than the adults' traits found in comparable characters. The point is very much that he doesn't know better and how he reacts to his slowly-dispelling ignorance.
This is also the model for a lot of entries in the Gundam franchise. The first three series see different groups of teenagers dragged from humdrum lives into an ongoing war. Thereafter, the formula has repeated as the franchise bifurcated across multiple timelines. There are exceptions. Gundam Wing's protagonists are specifically-trained terrorist operatives. Gundam SEED's dutagonist is a serving soldier. The majority of Gundam 00's cast are intimately familiar with violence before the show begins. Typically, though, conflict is an intrusion into the lives of the main characters, forming a traumatic break from the peaceful complacency they previously enjoyed. Even in the preceding counter-examples, there are additional characters whose lives are upended, retaining the beat of a harsh break from normalcy.
Iron-Blooded Orphans is a different kettle of fish. More than any of the other Gundam shows, it presents violence – and specifically violence against children – as an everyday occurrence. To reiterate, the very first shot of the show depicts a prepubescent Mikazuki getting bowled off his feet by the recoil of the gun he is using to shoot dead adult men who have attacked him and Orga. At the CGS, they and the other boys are subject to beatings as a routine occurrence. A pre-teen Atra Mixta is abused both by being put to work and by being bullied on the job. McGillis is a victim of sex-trafficking. Child labour is rife; the very premise of the show relies on treating child soldiers in particular as an established institution – not something caused by the extreme pressure of an ongoing war, but part of the 'peacetime' economy.
Even Kudelia Aina Bernstein, the sole character to undergo a typical 'violence intrudes' arc, is a victim of lethal exploitation, first being sold out to Gjallarhorn by her father to maintain his government position, then being set up as a martyr by her sponsor, Nobliss Gordon. She is not in fact isolated from the violence intrinsic to the world around her, it merely seems that way at first (this is true in a lot of stories that take the intrusion approach, it's just worth noting as an extension of the central conceit – and I should also mention that Kudelia explicitly seeks out things beyond her sheltered upbringing; they don't just drop into her lap like a football kicked over a garden wall).
This has the effect of recasting the violence displayed by the characters as a natural response to how they are treated. Nobody here needs to work themselves up to face battle, or experiences crises of conscience about what they must do to survive. Nobody has time for that. Violence is so expressly normalised, conversations around it become about the struggle against structural, systemic issues, not individual morality.
And the reason this is important for the topic at hand is that it means Iron-Blooded Orphans lacks a strong element of righteous violence.
Amuro, Kamille and Judau Ashta – the three foundational Gundam protagonists – all go through arcs that see them finding a cause to fight for. To whatever extent the franchise focuses on the horrors of war, it seldom outright rejects the notion there can be good reasons to fight, be that resistance to oppression, the need to counter genocidal ambitions, or defence of one's community. This is hardly surprising, since the idea particular forms of violence are valid and justified is a pervasive underpinning of our societies. Thus, while much is made of the suffering war inflicts, each of the original leads matures into finding “their own righteous cause” for which they will do battle with others who commit violence for more misguided or diabolical motives. So it goes too with many of their stable-mates.
I will not argue that IBO entirely lacks characters who are placed in the right for the violence they do. Resistance against oppressive, exploitative forces is a big part of what Tekkadan attempt. At the same time, there is a decided lack of people taking ideological stands. Generally speaking, the protagonists are not fighting out of principle, or at least, not out of justifiable principle. This is stated directly in the text, with McGillis' proselytising of Agnika's principles lying somewhere between trauma response and delusion, Mikazuki claiming he solely acts to fulfil Orga's instructions, and Tekkadan as a whole standing accused of having no true purpose to fight for.
Indeed, the people who do make statements proclaiming the righteousness of their violent acts are firmly antagonistic. Ein Dalton, a half-Martian Gjallarhorn officer, dives off the deep-end over his superior's death at Tekkadan's hands, constructing a distorted image of the children he's trying to kill as unrepentant monsters deserving execution. Julieta Juris, his Season 2 equivalent, is at best in a decidedly grey area regarding her reasons for fighting. Her development is concerned with committing on more than inertia to advancing Rustal Elion's cause – but he is textually a pragmatic, merciless, underhanded figure and the very sort of 'untrustworthy adult' she otherwise disdains.
On top of this, the show remains ambiguous in how it frames 'heroic' violence, that is, violence we might claim has legitimate cause, such as refuting Gjallarhorn's initial attack. I don't just mean this in terms of including those like Merribit who stress the wrongness of allowing children to engage in brutal armed conflict. I mean the very depiction of that conflict. We are treated to constant juxtapositions of massive machinery and crushable human bodies, unequal battles that favour 'the good guys' becoming bloodbaths for their opponents, and a nominal lead character who uses routed enemies as a shield in only the second episode. The defining imagery of Barbatos is as a demon unleashed. Yes, this plays into mecha spectacle, as we'd expect. Yet it also has a different quality when compared to, say, Amuro or Judau, because there are no moments where the fight is elevated. There is no Char or Glemy to be refuted. Nobody save McGillis ever gets into a genuine debate with Tekkadan about why they are fighting. It is all brutal, all carnage, all profoundly wrong.
That wrongness lies in the world, in the colonial, profit-driven structures ensnaring the entire cast. Systems of violent extraction engender violent responses they in turn overpower through a greater capacity for violence. Tekkadan act for one another, for their mutual survival, and this is presented positively, as laying the foundation for am improved future. But they also never hold a philosophy more detailed than 'if you stop, you die', and lack a true conception of the 'better place' where they are free of this struggle. There is no war to end, no transcendence beyond the material choice between a quick death in fire or a slow one at the hands of everyday abuse.
The only real option, it seems, is to fight as long and hard as they can – which entails allowing the violence to consume them.
How to be eaten alive
Barbatos allows Mikazuki to escalate the harm he can do to those opposing Orga's plans, at the cost of losing function in the right side of his body. This happens via two sudden turning points, when he faces enemies requiring an exceptional burst of power to defeat. As a result of deactivating the safeguards preventing him from exceeding the limits of his body's endurance, Mika is partially paralysed, a condition only alleviated when he is connected to Barbatos' Alaya-Vijnana system.
This represents not only physical dependence on a weapon of war but also the curtailing of other possibilities for how he could live his life. His desire to settle down and become a farmer is a driving force behind his and Orga's intention of making Tekkadan a wealthy, stable environment for its members. Once he can no longer move under his own power, he ceases to claim any place for himself outside the battlefield.
Yet as I discussed in another post, it is not simply that Barbatos curses Mikazuki; through being rebuilt to his personal specifications, Barbatos is transformed, werewolf-like, into a more savage version of itself. And this is not an isolated incident. The second Gundam we are introduced to is Gusion, piloted by sadistic pirate Kudal Cadel. After he kills Akihiro's younger brother and is in turn killed by Mikazuki, Gusion is claimed by Akihiro and reconfigured into 'Gusion Rebake', losing its distinctive frog-like armour for a form built out of spare Barbatos parts. In some ways this represents a de-monstering, rendering it more conventional. At the same time, it shows Akihiro taking charge of a source of suffering in his life, asking something of those around him (specifically Orga), and making further progress on seeing Tekkadan as more than the place he works.
Right as he comes face-to-face with the remains of his birth family and has it torn away from him anew, he accepts that the people around him fill the resulting void. His care for them in return is expressed, as Mikazuki's is, by undertaking violence on their behalf. This is what Gusion facilitates, what its superficially more restrained incarnation parallels with a concealed capacity for devastating strength. As Akihiro's quiet, considerate demeanour is thrown aside in favour of grim destruction when it comes time to fight, so too does Gusion's ostensible role as ranged support unfold into a four-armed berserker when the chips are down. Barbatos and Mika are built to press on, ripping through whatever stands in Tekkadan's path. Gusion and Akihiro are there to provide covering fire and, when the enemy encroaches too close, to hold the line with brute strength.
Tekkadan's third Gundam, Flauros, is subject to a seemingly more frivolous transformation, being the latest mobile suit to receive a hot-pink respray and the appellation 'Ryusei-Go' at the hands of pilot Norba Shino. Envying his comrades, Shino expresses a desire early in Season 2 to get hold of a Gundam of his own. This furthers his aim of jumping into the firing line in place of his friends, having previously watched several of them die due to a mistake he made while in command. He eschews the responsibilities of leadership for the simplicity of the frontlines, more comfortable risking his own life than deciding the fates of others.
Alongside playing into his undoubted machismo, Flauros enables this self-sacrificing behaviour and in doing so, pushes Shino to ever-greater acts of recklessness. Originally an artillery piece, sporting twin Dáinsleif cannons and a quadrupedal 'shelling mode', it is switched to a more light-weight, manoeuvrable configuration and equipped with hooked knives to better suit Shino's approach. When it is later reverted to a long-range mode, this is as part of a desperate gambit to kill Rustal Elion and escape the hopeless battle into which Tekkadan have been drawn by siding with McGillis. These changes are enabled by Yamagi Gilmerton, a boy very much in love with Shino, and Shino's belated acknowledgement/reciprocation of that affection takes place immediately prior to him taking Flauros out to attempt a perfect, conflict-ending shot.
This fails, Shino is killed, and it is hard not to read this sequence as him confidently choosing violence over the possibility of romance, all while believing the former will clear the way for the latter. Although he misses Elion due to external circumstances, trying in the first place is hubristic and unnecessary. Tekkadan didn't need to kill the enemy commander as part of making a daring escape. It is simply that having the tools to do so presented the tantalising prospect of snatching a pyrrhic victory, rather than merely running away in defeat.
McGillis proves similarly prone to misjudged maximisation and if Bael remains physically unaltered by events, the same cannot be said for its new pilot. By sacrificing Ein, McGillis perfects a means of implanting an Alaya-Vijnana into an adult subject, something previously thought possible only in young children, at least in modern times. I should say rather that this research is carried out at McGillis' behest, another abuse of his position in pursuit of taking Agnika's place. Much of his life is dedicated to reshaping himself physically, mentally and emotionally into the kind of person – the kind of figure – he believes he must become in order to achieve the power he craves.
It falls upon Gaelio to act as McGillis' foil in this respect. Grievously injured at the hands of his former best friend, he undergoes surgery that not only restores his mobility but also allows him to use a 'pseudo Alaya-Vijnana' constructed from the system Ein was integrated into. What is left of Ein's brain is incorporated into Gundam Kimaris/Vidar as a means to match the response speed and spacial awareness of a normal A-V user. This macabre set-up sees Gaelio puppeted by his dead comrade, enabling them to more effectively seek vengeance on those who have wronged them. By agreeing to this procedure, he throws aside his original moral stance against human augmentation, going on to express a more comprehending attitude towards Tekkadan and finally accepts that their humanity is not revoked simply because their bodies have been altered.
His is perhaps the most clear-cut example aside from Mikazuki of how Gundams take over the lives of their pilots, albeit a far more fortunate one. Once his revenge has reached its tragic conclusion (the discovery, much too late, that McGillis did not simply pretend to be his friend but in truth cherished their relationship even as he could not reconcile it with his ambitions), Gaelio surrenders his augmentation and accepts his disability, determined never to fly a mobile suit again. That he has the opportunity to step away speaks to his relative privilege. That it comes with a physical price underscores the hold these 300-year-old demons have on those who embrace them.
What else did you expect from a deal with the devil(s)?
In the final analysis, the refrain that Tekkadan only belong on the battlefield is shown to be untrue. The survivors move on, for the most part, to happier, healthy lives. Gaelio's overdue acknowledgement of their humanity is extended by an epilogue that sees various characters growing up and finding homes within a more peaceful society. As the audience, we already knew there was no case to answer. We see practically from the start that these are children as much as they are soldiers, driven to extremes by circumstance but fundamentally as capable of love, warmth, kindness and care as anyone else.
The fact remains, however, that they are soldiers. This is not an either/or situation, where the human being cancels out the warrior. They are inextricably both, the same way that McGillis is both manipulative fanatic and abuse victim, Gaelio, both arrogant fool and compassionate friend, Julieta, tool and believer, and so on.
These characters exist in a landscape defined by violence and are taught to use violence to navigate their lives. Much of what goes wrong as a result rests on the well-worn idiom 'when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail'. The systems of the world mean there are people who never learn anything except how to fight, because being able to fight is how they survive. Fixing that takes care and attention and long-term investment, and it is easy to fall into harmful patterns out of sheer, bloody momentum. To pick, not the easy option, but the comprehensible one. The one that makes most sense according to the rules as they are understood.
That, above everything else, is what the Gundams represent. It's there, at the start, in Mikazuki's rout of Gjallarhorn: just hit the problem with a big enough hammer and it goes away! Except, ultimately, Barbatos is only a hammer and not even the biggest one around. Yes, it is a willing weapon, readily giving Mika what power it can provide. As I noted when looking specifically at the transactional elements of this exchange, IBO's Gundams are neither deceivers nor malevolent tempters. It is always Mikazuki asking for more from whatever personality he senses or imagines inside Barbatos' operating system. Just as it is Akihiro who requests Gusion for his own, Gaelio who digs Kimaris out of mothballs, Shino who lusts after Flauros, McGillis who desires Bael above all else.
Each and every one of them, picking up the shiny hammer before them only to discover the world is held together with screws and smokescreens, by people operating steamrollers.
The Gundams are power in a narrow, confining sense. Symbolic importance based on actions three centuries past has little sway over the cold facts of today. Without the veneer of legend, they can only amplify individual might. Unlike the Gundams of other universes, they aren't racing to keep up with burgeoning psychics, or offering a mechanism for extra-sensory human connection, or exposing the passionate fighter's heart beating within. They are weapons pure and simple, offering no special insight or moral imperative. And if they come to resemble their owners, that only funnels said owners further down a path to destruction.
Each and every Gundam pilot in Iron-Blooded Orphans could have chosen differently. They picked this of their own will, following their personal beliefs, on the understanding that they had to fight.
After a certain point, there is no stepping away from a life lived by violence. That point is the one that kills you. If Mikazuki made it through the last battle, if Akhiro had escaped after getting revenge for his friends, if Shino miraculously came through the inferno into which he leapt – perhaps they could have been farmers or mechanics or firefighters or any of a hundred, gentler things. There is no supernatural contract binding them to their machines. Just the natural bonds of faith and friendship, of ignorance and misunderstanding, of a social structure out to get them, in particular. Tragedies don't work if everyone is forced towards a miserable death; that's just horror. For it to be tragedy, there has to be some part of the characters that said: yes, I want this.
Have you ever wanted the power to protect your loved ones? To save yourself? Do you think using a weapon is the same thing? Would the world make it easy for you to stop, if you started?
The Hammer Problem cannot be answered by creating more effective mallets. This is why a lack of straightforwardly righteous violence is important. Violence alone is not rewarded, no matter how justified. The only real solution is finding a way to remove violence from the equation. That's true even of facing big, oppressive forces, where it may bring temporary alleviation from struggle or be a necessary step to opening better paths. There must be other factors, other sources of power, or else you keep running into the same meat-grinder over and over until nothing's left. We're back to logistics, to grasping reality before acting. Luxuries, to some. But at the same time, essential.
I talked in the opening section of this essay about a tension between what a protagonist signifies and what their mecha does. Unfortunately for everyone involved, that tension does not meaningfully exist in Iron-Blooded Orphans. Mikazuki and Barbatos are perfectly commensurate with one another. This is exactly what condemns them to a shared death.
A logical conclusion
Amuro Ray struggles with his role as the Gundam pilot; Kamille Bidan is left a wreck by it. Domon Kashu must become worthy of the God Gundam; Heero Yuy must almost do the opposite, proving he is more than merely than the squishy component of a war machine. Loren Cehack makes the decision to work towards peace, restraining the Turn A Gundam's apocalyptic potential; Kira Yamato maunders over putting his phenomenal mental powers to work fighting and killing others. So on and so forth, as each protagonist's values are challenged by the ambulatory weapon the narrative has connected them to.
And I do mean 'challenged'. I'm not claiming every instance of this pattern is a dramatic conflict between pilot and machine, simply that a point is frequently made to set them at odds in some fashion, even if they resolve the tension by the final act. In fact… well… that's the thing, isn't it? The tension is always resolved. The climax of these shows, like clockwork, sees the hero unite with their mecha for one last assault on some form of existentially-threatening enemy.
I don't say this to be dismissive; it's a perfectly fine beat. We're back in the region of mecha anime metaphors for maturity and standing up for your beliefs. But it does raise the question of what the point of all the prior havering was. Amuro still winds up in a death-match with the Zeong; Heero gets to leave his Gundam behind only after completing his mission; Kira works out how to miraculously fight without killing anybody (except when it would be plot expedient). Why, then, is so much focus placed on problematising their relationship with the war if the end result is 'actually they still have to go out and fight Char/the Devil Gundam/this big rock/some other form of World-Ending Doohickey that's come out of nowhere in the last two episodes'?
Each show has a different answer to that. Oh, yes, it's a serious question. The Gundam franchise's anti-war credentials are rendered very ropey by a lot 'fighting to stop the fighting' style conclusions but the truth is, structurally speaking, you can do a lot with an ethical debate that ends in a giant mecha brawl. The journey, the evolution, the development, those are the meat of the story, irrespective of the destination and regardless of whether you or I personally gel with it. Again, this is how mecha anime works. Characterisation and morality, philosophy and metaphysics, conveyed via large metal blokes duking it out.
What makes IBO unique is not that it proposes unity between the Gundams and the people inside, but that it takes this as a given throughout. Does a character have the right to be a mecha pilot and is that a good thing? That is perhaps the easiest way to boil down the kind of drama I'm talking about. From practically the word go, the answers here are, respectively, ‘yes 100%, couldn't be more suited to the job,’ and ‘hell no, are you out of your freaking mind?’
McGillis trades body and soul for a fairytale. Gaelio finds new, exciting ways to be a fool. Shino gets his wish to be a human target. Akihiro resigns himself to death, the long way round. And Mika?
Gundams Barbatos is on the box, in all the promotional material, resplendent in white, blue, red and yellow. We know from the start it is most likely going to be there at the end, for that one last battle standing between today and a better tomorrow.
Why waste time pretending Mikazuki Augus will choose to belong anywhere else?
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This will be the last IBO Reference Notes essay for a while. It's the last one I had pending and has incorporated ideas I originally thought would go into separate pieces, that I no longer feel there's a pressing need to expand upon. I have another image-based project in mind that I will likely put out under the Notes heading and I will of course continue to answer any asks that come my way, but all things considered, this certainly would not be a bad last word to leave things on.
Thank you for reading.
[Index of other writing]
