Zinegata wrote:Yes. Bask Ohm is totally a sympathetic and outright good character
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Bask Om is too fat to be confined to your petty human views of 'morality'.
Incidentally, despite being a
colossal prick, I think Bask is actually kind of interesting. Consider when Emma questions his methods prior to her defection, his reaction is basically 'I like your attitude, and I want to see how you would handle this situation so you're in command'. This is actually kind of unusual when you compare him to Jamitov, Paptimus 'The Man From Jupiter' Scirocco and even Char. There's no ulterior motive suggested, unlike with Paptimus 'The Man From Jupiter' Scirocco letting people do as they please, no control freak tendancies or whatever. I mean obviously he's a fat, callous murderer who wears goggles pretty much constantly but his concession to Emma was so bizarrely level that even she is visibly confused.
Anyway, that's getting a little away from what I actually want to discuss: quite frankly, I still don't buy it. I don't think you're being dishonest or anything, but your interpretation here is really narrow when it can be read in more than one way, and when taking into account other sources the picture changes quite significantly. For example, you cite the early setting notes as saying that that Zeon Zum Deikun being 'opposed to the Federation's pacifism'. First of all, that sentence doesn't actually make much sense, which leads me to believe that it's been translated poorly. While it is fair to say that Deikun was opposed to overpopulation, as that was the driving factor behind Ereism, half of Deikun's Contolism philosophy, but I don't think you can properly conclude that this means that he intended to actively reduce the population through any sort of violent or systematic means. In fact I think that, based on other sources, we can actually conclude that the opposite was the case, and that passagei s simply poorly translated. While a later passage suggests that Degwin intended to perform some kind of forced reduction of the human population in line with Contolism, the actual show itself disaggrees: after all, Degwin actually insults Gihren and his plans to reduce the human population. More to the point, he actually specifically states that Gihren will never live to Zeon Zum Deikun's ideals of a 'Newtype', and is instead destined to become a new Hitler.
That alone should suffice, but there's more. From both
Roman Album Extra 42 and the
Entertainment Bible, we know that the Federation, in response to the declaration of independance in Side 3, put ona serious tough guy act. They put both economic and military pressure on Side 3 in order to bring them back into line. This honestly shouldn't be surprising given that the Earth Federation was well practiced at being real dicks to Spacenoids: the
Alien Landowners Act actually prevented Spacenoids from owning land on Earth, and from memory travel between the Sides was heavily restricted. I can't remember where I read those unfortuantely, so take them with a grain of salt, but Deikun is noted to have moved to Side 3 'secretly', suggesting that he was either a target as a major political dissident, or that it was indeed very difficult to travel between colony clusters. in any case, we know from the
Entertainment Bible that, despite engaging in a military build up in the form of the Zeonic national guard (obviously a response to Feddie aggression), Deikun was not interested in aggression himself, and up until his death was seeking political sollutions to the independance problem. In fact, the
Entertainment Bible describes the huge military build-up and intention to go to war on Degwin's part as a 'complete 180' compared to Deikun's policies. It seems fairly reasonable to assume that the specifics of the setting changed from the early setting notes, and that what they say about Deikun is not necessarily authoriative taking into consideration other sources written after the airing of the series.
This should honestly come as no surprise given the suspicious circumstances behind Zeon Zum Deikun's death. While it has never been stated that Degwin Sodo Zabi was behind Deikun's death, smart money says that he was. The novellisation, though not exactly compatible with the television series, indicates that Gihren Zabi was involved, and at that age it seems reasonable to assume that he was moving to Degwin's tune; outside of that, the necessity of both Artesia and Casval Deikun to go into hiding as children doesn't exactly suggest a legitimate exchange of power. Further more, while only Char claims that the Zabi's twisted Deikun's ideals, I think this is actually demonstrably the case. If the Zabis really did believe in Contolism, which holds the ideals of Ereism as part of its founding principles, how could they possibly authorise Operation British? Strictly speaking Ereism refers to pollution and I suppose technically speaking colony drops are 'clean', but such a huge strike on the Earth seems ideologically incompatible with Contolism.
Further, even if you accept that Deikun believed in population control specifically, saying that this automatically leads to eugenics and then to genocide is almost hysterical in the logic it follows. Population control is not an evil in itself. China's one child policy is a method of population control, and while there are a number of valid criticisms relating to that particular policy, there are other options such as delays in birth, planned spacing of births and so on. Honestly, your argument relies on a single early source which is not fully compatible with the series itself, and that is inconsistent with other sources. Further, I can't agree with this idea that Deikun supported a notion of spacenoid superiority, because as far as I can tell nothing of the sort has ever been suggested, and even gleaning it from the original setting notes (which I admit do paint Deikun in a much darker light) seems pretty weak. Yes, Deikun's early theories on Newtypes do state that humanity should move into space in order to facillitate our 'evolution' into what he called Newtypes, but that is
not a racist ideology. It is an ideology which suggests that the future of humanity is in space, and that's an entire different kettle of fish. Yes, it is implicit in Newtypism that living on Earth will result in no Newtypes, but taking into account the Ereism that Deikun lived by that element of the theory can be read as the Earth just not being the right environment for humanity to live in. It makes
no value judgements about the worth of earthnoids; Cardeas Vist's explanation of early Newtype theory makes literally no reference to the idea that Spacenoids are superior, and given the nature of Vist's conversation with Zinnerman I don't see why he'd gloss over it (I mean Vist pretty much says 'seriously guys the revival of Zeon is pretty dumb', he's playing it straight). I don't think there's nearly enough evidence to suggest that there was any sort of racist element to early Newtype theory. Yes, to an extent Deikun was wrong about the necessity of space as an environment, but there's nothing actually wrong with part of the theory not holding up with time - it happens all the time with other theories. That said, how many natural Newtypes shown in the series were earthnoids? There's Amuro, Jerid and
maaaybe Revil, but the majority of Newtypes are spacenoids so clearly Deikun was onto something.
Essentially, I think the majority of evidence does not lend itself to the idea that the Republic of Zeon was formed on the basis of a racist, genocidal ideology. That said, this is not to suggest that the Principality of Zeon was actually fighting for good reasons, and it's a part of the series that even if Zeon initially had a just goal, they were not just themselves. The Principality was rife with heedless ambition and corruption, and any noble fight for independance was lost the moment Degwin came to power.
PS. I put a lot of effort into this post apart and it would make me sad if you broke it down into chunks to reply to piecemeal.
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