Hello! Ok, as always feel free to ignore the following question(s) if no time/interest. And in case you have smth you've already written on the subject, I am happy to follow that thread if you can point me to it (I do promise I am slowly doing my best to work through your catalog of essays, I just proceed at glacial pace). With that out of the way:
What is your impression, either taken directly from canon or personal headcanon, about the class structure before the Calamity War, the organization of the Houses that later become Gjallarhorn Houses (do they exist in "House" status before Gjallarhorn is established? where do they come from? all over the planet? were they just family businesses from all over the planet who made it big with colony land/property speculation? did they recognize each others' jurisdictions via some sort of international board?), and who do you think were the Gundam pilots originally? As in: were they wealthy people? or poor and eager for a shot at fame (or a shot at protecting their families from disaster)? what were the eligibility criteria for the surgery? Who commissioned/produced the Gundam frames? Is it private family resources (which would argue for pilots having come from wealthy families, or serving at least as the champions of such a family)? Also, was the AV surgery already well-established and functional with other mobile suits and mobile workers prior to the onset of the Calamity? Or was it a procedure that existed as a prototype but had never been used in its peak form? Who used to get the procedure before the War, if it was up and running? Poor colony mine workers?
And full disclosure: I ask because I am trying to work out a little draft version of a Calamity War story for Angelica Elion, and I am playing around with a bunch of ideas for who she was and who Agnika was (not quite who mcgillis imagined XD), and who Makie Fareed was etc. But before I go down garden paths that I'd regret later on, I was wondering if there were any canon trail-markers for me to make decisions based on :)
The short answer is: for pre-Calamity society, there's next to nothing to work with.
MUCH longer answer below the cut:
We know Agnika Kaieru existed, that he died shortly after the War ended, and that he is credited with forming Gjallarhorn. We know Gjallarhorn - or some precursor to it - was founded during the Calamity War and solidified into its present form in the aftermath, as an enforcer for and watchdog over the economic blocs (you may wish to refer to the timeline shown in Season 1, which I wrote out here; there is some weirdness with the dates towards the present day [apparently picking years either side of PD 323 is a cursed exercise!] but it's a good source for information otherwise). We know the names of most of the Seven Star Gundam pilots who became the basis for the ruling noble class (Kalf Falk, Embrilla Kujan, Angelica Elion, Makie Fareed, Arzona Issue, Gargin Bauduin; it is very likely [though not outright confirmed] that the last of the seven flew Gundam Marchosias, given the cape included with the Metal Robot version bears the Baklazan crest). And we know that there was some kind of duelling tradition that had opposing fighters wearing red capes or banners.
McGillis describes Gjallarhorn as being born out of an effort by several parties who wanted to see the war brought to an end. The accompanying visuals suggest something analogous to the UN or at least some kind of governmental body, but this is the only look we get at events from the time (beyond schematics, mobile frame imagery, and that one glimpse of Marchosias battling a mobile armour on what is presumably Venus).
We don't have any information on the Gundam pilots as people and consequently, we lack any insight into who they were and where they sat, socially speaking. Even the coats of arms aren't solidly indicative either way: the official art of the Seven Star Gundams and their appearances in canon do show them bearing that heraldry, but crucially, not in-situ during the war. The flashback to Marchosias just has the red cape, no Baklazan badge included. Which might be an animation thing or it might establish the coats of arms as a Post Disaster development.
With respect to the technological development, this has been sketched out by various ancillary material. The wiki page for the Calamity War does a good job of summarising everything I've come across, but in brief, prior to the War there was a big push for automated weaponry, with automation in general being seen as a signifier of prosperity. When that got out of hand and the mobile armours started expanding their targeting parameters to include all humans, mobile suits were developed to counteract them. Later, the Gundam frame was developed to use the Alaya-Vijnana system to its full potential and thus become a match the armours' power. That worked, the War ended, yay. The War is thus split into three stages (for which we have no actual timescale): an Early Stage consisting of mobile armour combat, a Middle Stage that saw the creation of mobile suits, and the Late Stage where the Gundams went around trouncing everything.
The main gaps concern the extent to which mecha technology existed prior to the mobile armours and the development of the A-V system. The Alaya-Vijnana is described as "an old man-machine interface", which potentially positions it as a sub-type of a wider category. So it could be the most successful or the latest version of a concept that had been explored for a long time. There's clearly utility for it outside mobile suit combat, given its use in mobile workers and on ships (indeed, it being equipped on the Isaribi at all is highly suggestive, since that's a War-era vessel).
With the mecha technology, it obviously existed in a sufficiently advanced form to have produced the armours, but whether or not there were previously manned mecha is an open question. Yukinojo says that before the War, "most disputes were settled by two men battling it out." That may mean the duelling customs co-existed with the push towards automated warfare and, potentially, that some form of mecha were part of it. Alternatively, it could be that human scale traditions were later mapped on to the mobile suits. At any rate, mobile workers may represent something closer to pre-Calamity mecha tech, since their non-humanoid design seems more in keeping with the armours (and the plumas, in particular).
One further clue is the logo found on Hashmal, Bael, and Barbatos.
This seems to indicate a link between at least this particular mobile armour and the Gundams, though to my knowledge, there's not been any kind of confirmation of what that link is. I think it's common to assume this means they share a point of manufacture and I'm definitely incline to think that too. It would make sense, after all, for a maker of heavy military machinery to lend its support to the cause of stopping everyone going extinct even if they had contributed to the problem in the first place. The resources to build the Gundams alone might have been sufficient to get them a place at the big Gjallarhorn table regardless of any past crimes.
Which I suppose is a good point to segue from the scraps of canon into how I personally choose to put them together. Now, my preference is that we continue to receive no official information on the Calamity War beyond titbits. I think the idea of actually releasing a story set during the Calamity War is epically dumb, because the rhetorical move IBO pulls is 'yes there was a huge space-spanning conflict that nearly destroyed the world; it happened 300 years ago and everyone is still dealing with the resulting unexploded landmines and social injustices - enjoy this story about child soldiers and the mob'. Doing that is precisely what elevates it above its peers and going back to the War would likely mean a return to Standard Gundam Business about the Horrors of War (TM), which we've seen a million times already.
However I have written a few pieces of fanfic that touch on the Calamity War in order to suggest historical context for Stuff. This includes the framing device in Eugene Sevenstark and the Hesperus Treasure, the early sections of chapter 1 of History of a Catastrophe, and the opening section of chapter 21 of Child of the Dawn. There is also some dialogue for a putative 'The Death of Agnika Kaieru' fic that I posted a while back (I have not written any more of this and don't know if I ever will). All this means I have created for myself a vision of how things looked prior to the Great Disaster and you're more than welcome to crib from it as you see fit.
FANFIC AND WILD SPECULATION START HERE
Basically, I imagine a world in which there were both large corporate interests and strong aristocratic traditions. It is from the latter that Gjallarhorn draws much of its inspiration in terms of mores and dynastic impulses, while also superseding it entirely. There were aristocrats among the Gundam pilots, but there were also plenty of other kinds of people, drawn together from all walks of life by the simple expedient of Gjallarhorn needing good pilots in a hurry. As a net result, when it came time to rebuild the world, the leadership leant on the old traditions while only privileging the lucky few who'd actually taken part in the fight-back.
I take the taboo against human augmentation to be an entirely post-War construction designed to foster Gjallarhorn's power; therefore, man-machine interfaces and augmentation of all stripes were much more common prior to things going horribly wrong. The Alaya-Vijnana was the latest development of that technology and was deployed among mobile suit troops in various forms and stages. We see in the present that a cruder version of it has become rather widespread. I explain that by proposing its ubiquity during the middle to late stages of the War. The Gundams are specially designed to exploit the technology - that and their raw power is what separates them from 'suits into which the system was retrofitted as the War went on. I don't imagine that every or even most mobile suits fighting by the end would have had it, but it must have been used at sufficient scale for the tech to escape Gjallarhorn's attempts to ban its use afterwards.
My idea of Agnika is that he sat in the corporate or scientific sphere rather than the aristocracy. I just think it's more interesting if he was a nerd, not a rah, and that he just happened to know a lot of the right people. He was probably from a rich and well-connected family, and had a genius for drawing talented people into his orbit. I've hinted at him having a whole cohort of non-pilot friends who contributed to Gundam development, which I also picture as producing multiple prototypes in between the Hexa and Gundam frames.
The pilots are then variously taken from existing militaries, the upper classes who engaging in ritualised duelling, and any kid who had the right mindset for driving an 18 metre tall war machine under desperate circumstances. In what I've sketched, Arzona, Gargin and Makie were aristocrats, Embrilla was a soldier, and Kalf was a gifted kid (with him and Angelica being considerably younger than the others). I haven't thought this out very fully, but they got assigned various traits as I went along: Gargin is a hearty sort with a fondness for dying his hair purple (which he later made genetic), Angelica is cool and collected, Kalf is a bit of an Angry Young Man, Embrilla is a grump, and Makie is a (possibly genderqueer) louche. Arzona's only definable trait in the little I've written of him is 'golden boy', to go with the Issues' status as the head of the Seven.
Key in my toying with them is that they all suffer a slow-motion version of the physical toll that causes Mikazuki to become paralysed. The perfect A-V system McGillis reconstructs is safer but not safe. By the end of the war, the pilots had all been impacted in some way by the effects of using it without the limiters. Gargin's lost the use of his right eye, Angelica is in a wheelchair, Kalf has to rely on mechanical leg braces, etc. And the big reason for approaching it like that is, that's how I explain the myth about Bael and Agnika's soul. After fighting so long and so hard, he'd become so interlinked with the system, his mobile suit was acting as a life-support mechanism, with even that breaking down rapidly once the War was over. In comparison, all the others got off lightly, either due to fighting less, or because some of the kinks got worked out as more and more Gundam pilots were recruited.
Overall, I picture Pre Disaster society as just as unfair and unequal as the present day but along slightly differing lines. Greater corporate power, certainly (in terms of producing the high technology that has now been swallowed up by Gjallarhorn) and multiple aristocratic institutions squabbling with each other across national boundaries. Oh, right - the economic blocs are the result of post-War reconstruction; there had to be nations to get dissolved as a result of the damage. That likely means that space colonisation and even the terraforming of Mars was a much more fractious affair that it appears by the time of the series, but I've literally only just thought of that now!
I think that's all I've got for the moment? I'm happy to talk more about this but it ultimately boils down to making a meal from crumbs. On the plus side, that provides a lot of room to play - one could, for example, draw conclusions from the three separate naming conventions at play (classical Greek for the space-based infrastructure; Christian demonolgy for the Gundams; Norse for Gjallarhorn) and see where that leads. On the downside, well.
We really do only have crumbs to anchor ourselves.
So I'm working a-pace on a new 'IBO reference notes' post and since it concerns the origins of the setting's current economic order, I decided to go back an take a look at the timeline that flashes on screen during Episode 4. Since I'm transcribing it anyway, I thought I'd pop it here with some quick commentary -- it's available on the Gundam Wiki's Post-Disaster timeline page anyway but there are a few things I thought worth annotating.
P.D.0001 – The nations of Earth and Mars accept the 'Vingolf Proclamation' issued by Gjallarhorn. The interplanetary war that has spread destruction through the Earth Sphere and the Outer Sphere comes to an end. This conflict, which has produced more casualties than any in history, is described by the proclamation as the 'Calamity War' and is thereafter known by that name.
With the cooperation of Gjallarhorn, Earth is organized into four economic blocs in order to reconstruct the devastated Earth Sphere.
These are the African Union, the Oceanian Federation, SAU [Strategic Alliance Union], and Arbrau. Earth begins its post-war recovery under this new world order.
So we have the date of the reorganisation of Earth's countries placed within a year of the war ending. I feel 'with the cooperation of Gjallarhorn' is probably doing a lot of work here, since the fact that they were going around issuing proclamations speaks to how much influence they wielded. They did have control of Ahab Reactor production, after all, which is a hell of a thing to hold over everyone's heads while they're getting back on their feet.
Also, I think the dates are almost always styled as three digits elsewhere in the show?
P.D.0002 – At the 'Malta Conference', the four economic blocs conclude a treaty to divide and rule Mars. At their request, Gjallarhorn dispatches a large force to recreate the Martian governmental structure from scratch.
P.D.0003 – Gjallarhorn redraws Mars's national borders, and each city is place under control of one of Earth's economic blocs. The four economic blocs begin wholeheartedly interfering in Martian affairs, and Mars enters a lengthy colonial period.
This makes me wonder what Mars looked like prior to the War. It reads very much like Gjallarhorn swooping in to crush any chance of the Martians reorganising on their own. There are hints at the start of Season 1 that the War was caused by Earth having a lack of oversight on the Outer Sphere due to the Ahab interference caused by the Ariadne Network. Did it start as a conflict between Earth and Mars?
Either way, whatever was left standing, Gjallarhorn bulldozers in and rebuilds Mars as a directly-controlled colonial territory. Interesting but not unexpected that it's framed in terms of the cities: Chryse is a fairly concentrated population centre in the middle of nothing.
P.D.0205 – Arbrau's government grants limited autonomy to its Martian territories.
P.D.0208 – The Oceanian Federation also recognizes the autonomy of its Martian territories.
P.D.0236 – Last of all, the African Union also recognizes Martian autonomy. However, as Mars remains subject to harsh economic agreements, it is in fact entering an era of puppet governments.
Two things. First, why? What spurred the Earth blocs to grant the illusion of autonomy at this point? There's a story in that, methinks.
Second, does this mean the SAU didn't have Martian holdings, or are we meant to assume they acted similarly to the others in the twenty-eight year gap between the Oceanian Federation and the African Union entries? It's unclear but I'd err on the side of assuming the SAU *did* have territory there, since it's otherwise always implied all four blocs have a stake in the planet.
P.D.0312 – On Mars, a movement begins to protest economic disparities with Earth.
P.D.0314 – In her speech at the Noachis July Assembly, Kudelia Aina Bernstein calls for economic independence from Earth, and cooperative movements emerge in every city.
So the second date here is total nonsense. P.D.0314 is a year before the very opening scene of the show, which is a flashback to Mikazuki and Orga as little kids in P.D.0315. For comparison, here is what Kudelia looks like when she appears before the Assembly:
And here's how she appears in the end-credits imagery contemporary to kid!Mika and Orga:
It's the same costume but I really struggle to believe the Noachis July Assembly took place nine years before the start of the show (P.D.0323). For one thing, she is explicitly *16* in Season 1, and I doubt a seven-year-old would could have given a speech that spurred a planet-wide independence movement into action.
My guess would be that the mistake was made precisely because the opening scene is set eight years earlier than the actual action. In theory, that means we can extrapolate that the date is intended to be P.D.0322. Alternatively, if we take the 'second year at college' timeframe shown in the above screenshot as referring to the Japanese Upper Secondary School bracket, that probably places the Assembly a year prior, since it happened in July and Kudelia's birthday is 4 August. For her to have been in her second year of upper secondary, she must have been between 13 and 14, which is only possible if we take a date of P.D.0321 (that is assuming an April start to the school year as in Japan; obviously this calculation would change if you take a different month, or a different division of the school system).
Either way, we should probably also round up the preceding date, to P.D.0319 or P.D.0320.
Here's the visible text from the file on Coral's desk:
Name: KUDELIA AINA BERNSTEIN
Age: 16
Birthday: 08/04
Gender: FEMALE
Blood type: O
Home town: CHRYSE
Academic credentials: CHRYSE COLLEGE
The daughter of Norman Bernstein, who represents the Chryse Autonomous Region. Her mother is Norman's second wife, Tomomi Bernstein. She has an excellent academic record, majoring in history and economics. In her second year, she visited Noachis as a representative of Chryse College, and made a speech calling for cooperation between the various regions seeking independence.
After this Noachis July Assembly, the independence movements were stirred up, and she gain many followers among them. Continuous surveillance is required.
Interesting to know that Norman had a previous wife.
Now, back to trying to explain McGillis' . . . everything through the lens of capitalism, aristocracy, and blatant propaganda!
