kalechipskid | TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE FOR NEW PEOPLE, PT.1

TRUE LOVE IS POSSIBLE FOR NEW PEOPLE, PT.1

char and amuro, snowden, mr.lawrence, the asteroid, the boy, and the place we were born

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In the Snowden chapter of Catch-22, Yossarian wakes up in a cold sweat surrounded by probing doctors after getting stabbed multiple times in his side. The doctors ask:

‘Where were you born?’

The fat, gruff colonel reminded Yossarian of the fat, gruff colonel who had interrogated the chaplain and found him guilty. Yossarian sat up at him through a glassy film. The cloying scents of formaldehyde and alcohol sweetened the air.

‘On the battlefield,’ he answered.

‘No, no. In what state were you born?’

‘In a state of innocence.’

Before this it was all comedy. After this– after the knife comes down, after the woman cries for her lover, after Yossarian shrieks and falls to the ground in genuine terror as the past blooms in his side for an uncaring audience– it dies. From now on, there will be nightmares. It won’t stop until the end.

—-

I started watching Mobile Suit Gundam in middle school on the library computers and then I began saving the battery on my school-issued laptop so I could watch it on the bus as well. I loved the mechs and grand, sweeping arcs and most of all Amuro Ray, curled up with whited-out eyes in a near vegetative state as the world orbits around him. I drew him clumsily with a mouse in mspaint and made it my icon for various online activities. His hair was nice. I didn’t understand what I wanted for or from him, but I knew I wanted to watch.

At some point I began to question where exactly it is that Amuro gets doomed. We already know how it ends– in that brilliant burst of cosmic light, the sky painted with shooting stars– but when did it start? When did he lose it all? Amuro is so withdrawn, so singular, so depressing to watch in action, he’s nothing more than a doll for another doll, some flesh and bones that bring a killing machine alive when somebody else tells him to. There’s nothing left. Amuro believes in compassion but it’s too late for him. Maybe it wasn’t always like this.

Following the thread, I found it: It wasn’t in the burning cockpit at the end of CCA or in the elevator in Zeta or through the endless battles of ‘79, it was when he entered the mech. The RX-78-2, a tool for war and a plastic toy I have lovingly placed on my shelf. A machine his father built. His father is thrown into space. His mother rejects him for his atrocities. Amuro is effectively orphaned by the machine and pulled apart and reconstructed and told to continue onward. He despises it, and then he lives it.

Before this it was comedy. After this, it dies.

—

Char Aznable never really existed. Because of that, nothing he says or does really means anything, no matter how much others would tell you otherwise. Quess adores him for the promises he feeds her, Garma latches onto his support, the world revolves around him. He has an undeniable magnetism. And yet, when he is up on a podium speaking to an audience, he fails. Char is a terrible politician. He has so much charisma but no real ideals– He was a boy with a gun and he’s been coasting ever since then.

A man who has spent his life under a mask will know the script by heart. These are not words of his own but he speaks them like they are, not because he means them or even that he wishes to but because it will advance him to the next scene. The play will keep going. He started this as a means of revenge but his role became too large and now everyone is watching, waiting for his next move, and frankly, there isn’t any reason why he shouldn’t continue. Casval never got to be a person. It’s just the mask and uniform now.

Unable to exist, there isn’t any reason why he shouldn’t destroy everyone around him. Quess is so easy for him. Nanai, too. He’s been doing this his whole life. Incapable of treating his fellow man with any sort of respect, how can he be expected to craft a better future for humanity? Only in the very end in tears and a burning cockpit does he realize something so simple– “Humans, who possess warmth, are still cruel enough to destroy Earth” – and the mask is gone at last. What was he doing this entire time? What was the point? Casval’s eyes open and he cries.

Hatred is so easy. It’s just nightmares to the very end.

—

“How can you aim a gun at someone like that, and fire?”

Amuro’s mother asks this when they meet for the first time since being separated by the war. Amuro looks panicked because he doesn’t have a good answer– He’s been told to do this, to survive, but death is still death, except he never really wanted to hurt anyone, not really, they would’ve died if it wasn’t for him– and his mother cries and rejects him for what he’s become. She’s so ashamed of him. You’re no longer my son, she says He’d lost his place in the world as soon as he’d entered the mech but now he really knows it, that the one place of unconditional love he could ever hope for has officially run dry. He is taken away by the White Base and the two strangers never see each other again. Somewhere, his father is melting away in a colony tinkering with trash trying to make gadgets of war just like the old days.

Amuro speaks to his mother in a foreign language. It is a language of violence. It was how he was taught to live. But there is no response and there is no love here; there are no words or violence that could possibly express how alone he has really become. The world revolves around him but he sits at the center unmoving and unchanging, tinkering with the toys that ripped him out of time. It’s the last place he has left to go. It’s too late for people like him.

—

Amuro and Char are trying to craft a new world. They are the only people who could understand each other because they were both born on the battlefield and remember there must’ve been innocence once, if not in them then around them, and somehow it was lost along the way. If they saw something beautiful they wouldn’t know it because they only know how to speak in guns and swords and nights preparing for something terrible to happen, probably by their own hand. The story makes circles around them and they get closer and closer with time. In their final battle in the original series, Char tries to kill Amuro but then suddenly suggests they run off together instead. It’s such a selfish action. Humanity’s future lies with them.

It is too late for either of them and no matter how pure Amuro’s heart is or how powerful Char becomes, the future will never be born with them or anything they do. They cannot picture a world unlike the one they live in now. White Base’s beloved crew will grow up serving the government without question and have happy families and live in a hell they inherited but nonetheless perpetuate. Somewhere on the battlefield, a boy is born. He does something terrible. He’s given a medal. His father will kill him one day. He watches two pilots burst into light and the galaxy glow with the souls of a hundred mobile suits. With blood on his hands, he catches sight of a future where none of this has to happen.

It was always too late for Amuro and Char. But for the boy–

—

At the end of Merry Christmas Mr.Lawrence, POW Jack Celliers is dying in the sand. He has been a rebellious spirit for the entire story, pushing back against the senseless cruelty with harmless acts of humanity . He has kissed the Captain of the camp and he is going to die for it. His head lays in a miniature desert with the skin flaking off his sun-scarred cheeks.

The Captain appears. He saws a small lock of hair from the man he’s sentenced to death before bowing and leaving forever. Jack dies. The Captain dies. The Sergeant beneath him is executed years later for his war crimes. Earlier, a young man bit his tongue out and bled to death. Emaciated prisoners collapsed to the ground after being forced to walk from their beds. So much death all around, and for nothing. All of the kindness was crushed underfoot and left behind in the march.

The dread is overwhelming but there are flashes of crimson throughout the film; there are sprouts of kindness between the blows that appear beautiful and bright before they are stamped out. Sergeant Hara gets drunk and hand waves the execution– a move that would normally get him shot– but the usually so venomous Captain Yonoi lets him off with a slap on the wrist and a cigarette with a notable red flower mark on its side. The red flower is not unlike the one Jack offered to him scenes ago and the deliberate act of unprecedented kindness has a similar ring. Hara, years later in his cell before his death day, looks up to his old friend and brings up a joke from the night he was drunk. Yonoi kills Jack but takes a lock to remember him. Everybody dies. Somewhere, there is love.

The sprouts are plucked out time and time again but they keep pushing out from the cruel earth regardless. Jack knew he would die when he stole that kiss, but he planted the seed regardless. It is too late for us, but true love is possible. Just not here. Not for me.

—

The only thing left for the two men is to die.

The Axis is coming down and it’s going to end at last, finally the play will be over and we can stop reading the lines and pretending like we mean them, but soldiers fly up in their war machines and try to push it all back. They dissolve due to the overwhelming temperature and vanish into stardust. Amuro screams for them to stop. But this is a radical movement of selflessness that will save them all and in the end the two men die and become a part of the green aurora that swims around the earth like a halo. The children look up at the sky and point to the light and smile. It was the best thing they could ever become. And it only lasted a night.

–When people speak of happiness, they almost always refer to the near-impossible everlasting kind, the one that you spend your whole life chasing. But it is easy to forget there were small moments as well; everyday occurrences or inexplicable happenings that plant a seed in us before being swept away forever. They’re a peek into the future. Somebody left it there for us to find. It was impossible for them, but for us…

—

The moment Jack holds forth his flower is no more than 3 seconds long. But I can take that reel and I can find that frame and I can see it was there and alive and that it meant something. Things never really go. They just sit in a sequence of many other moments, and sometimes– hopefully– they’ll repeat.

—

Amuro and Char and 100 other pilots become a green moonlit mist that the children of earth wish on. A boy in his mobile suit watches in horror and inherits this moment in all of its love and hope and pain forever and ever. He has killed someone and he is about to get a medal. The earth is saved. The children watch and send their wishes to the sky. For a moment before their evisceration, the centers of the universe saw the world they could never build themselves. It is too late– It is too late– It is too late—

Seeds are planted. True love is possible. A boy named Hathaway watches the dream of thousands pour out from the precipice of the new world.

Somehow, it repeats:

Humanity lies with him.

thank you for reading.