It’s hard to make any kind of series about war without having a little bit of real-life in it. There have been so many different experiences of war around the world, and there are so many ways to represent them when telling stories.
Mobile Suit Gundam is a franchise explicitly about war and the way it affects the people who both fight in it and the people just have to live with the consequences of the fighting, particularly where children are concerned. So it’s no surprise that a lot of things in Gundam seem pretty familiar. Here are 10 things in the Gundam franchise that were inspired by real events.
10 Fascist Regime
Zeon fighting for liberation doesn’t specifically make them a fascist regime, but the ways in which they do it and the philosophies they hold remind us a lot of some similar situations of the past hundred years.
First of all, everyone in power is one family, which is not the way most democratic nations function, since they couldn’t have all been elected that way, and their control over the ways that their colony behaves and what the people who live there are allowed to do and believe is a little too reminiscent of WWII fascist states like Germany and Italy.
9 Nuclear Arms Race
Stardust Memory takes place shortly after the end of the One Year War that is fought in the original Mobile Suit Gundam series. In it, the remnants of the Zeon army steal a Gundam that has nuclear capabilities, starting a literal race to retrieve it before it’s used. But beyond that, mobile suits themselves also fit the bill as a metaphor for nuclear weapons; while this isn’t a cold war, each of the armies is racing to improve their mobile suits to become stronger, faster, and more destructive than the other to give them a leg up in the war.
8 Child Soldiers
Pretty much every Gundam series deals with the concept of the child soldier on some level, since so many of them star children getting caught up in the wars that the adults around them are waging, but this is especially true of Iron-Blooded Orphans.
In this series, the children work for a security company that essentially uses them as cannon fodder so the adults can get away from dangerous situations. It’s a nasty look at the ways that people use children to fight their battles for them even today.
7 Recruiting Young People To Fight
This touches on the same point mentioned above. In the more violent and destructive wars, particularly WWI, there was a real lack of men who were actually of fighting age by the end of the war, because so many people died. So some countries were using teenagers, whether they were turning a blind eye to their ages or were actively recruiting underage teenagers, to fight in the war. This is a lot like how White Base turns out in Mobile Suit Gundam; it’s manned almost completely by teenagers because almost all of the adults are already dead, and there’s no one else to do it. Most of them aren’t even soldiers when they board the ship.
6 Revolutionary War
As mentioned above, the Zeon colony rebels against the Earth Federation. They no longer believe that they’re beholden to Earth, since Earth doesn’t actually know what life is like in the colony and doesn’t necessarily have their best interests in mind.
While Zeon’s methods for this war aren’t exactly great, this isn’t dissimilar from the American Revolutionary War, where the colonies fought for liberation from the hand of the British government, which they felt didn’t represent their interests.
5 The Assassination Of Franz Ferdinand
Franz Ferdinand’s assassination is credited as the main reason for the start of WWI, and in that way, it seems a lot like the assassination of Zeon Zum Deikum, the politician and philosopher of Zeon who began talks of Zeon breaking away from the Earth Federation. While it’s not known for sure if Zeon was assassinated, it seems pretty likely, especially with the way that the Zabi family immediately grabbed power in his absence and used his death as a way of rallying the colonists to their side.
4 WWII Atomic Bomb
One of the ways that Zeon cripples the Federation army is by literally dropping space colonies onto Earth. This causes extraordinary amounts of devastation to the planet as well as millions of deaths, and it generally leaves the army with fewer resources.
The only thing that could be even remotely this destructive is if someone dropped an atomic bomb, which is essentially how the U.S. one the War in the Pacific during WWII. By bombing two major cities in Japan, the U.S. killed tons of people, military and civilian alike, and left the already struggling country totally helpless.
3 Cold War
As mentioned above, during the One Year War, the nuclear arms race ends up taking the form of trying to make the most powerful mobile suits. This is because, prior to the beginning of the war, the Zeon and Federation armies signed the Antarctic Treaty, agreeing to not use nuclear weapons during the war. This is pretty similar to the treaties signed at the end of WWII and the subsequent agreements and discussions between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. regarding nuclear weapons.
2 The Reign Of Kaiser Wilhelm II
It’s very easy to compare evil leaders in fiction to Adolf Hitler, but in Gihren Zabi’s case, this doesn’t seem quite accurate. He seems more like Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last Kaiser of Germany, who led the country through WWI.
Wilhelm was impulsive and driven by his emotions, and he had a strong desire to be accepted by his other family members, particularly his grandmother, the Queen of England, and is often resentful of Britain because of their lack of respect for him. He is a lot like Gihren this way, who is constantly frustrated by the fact that his father doesn’t think as highly of him as some of his siblings, which leads to him ultimately betraying him in the quest for more power.
1 Volkswagen
Volkswagen isn’t the only company that made military vehicles for the German army during WWII, but they, along with BMW, are perhaps the most famous. This is a lot like the way that Anaheim Electronics, who are responsible for the creation of Gundams and other mobile suits in Mobile Suit Gundam, seem to aid both sides of the war with regard to weapons, not seeming to care what their role is or the fact that they could potentially come down on the wrong side of history.