People compare Scalzi to Heinlein, and for good reason. The basic gist of his SF universe is thus: the galaxy is full of habitable planets, but it’s also full of intelligent races, most of whom prefer mutilating one another over any sort of diplomacy (this includes our own humble race). In some cases, this is unavoidable; when two species simply cannot comprehend one another, and they’ve both decided they want a particular plot of land, what’s to be done? Even a fairly recognizable race of bipedal mammalians might prove culturally impenetrable. This lends Scalzi’s setting moral complexity, and that’s good; shades of gray are interesting.

For me, however, moral grayness becomes problematic when it’s little more than a lesson in moral grayness. Old Man’s War seems to suggest that anyone who starts wondering whether it might be a good idea to come up with a moral code that doesn’t involve razing all the diverse cultures of the universe is either suffering a temporary lapse, deluded, or an asshole. I can think of one exception, and it isn’t the protagonist.

Look: this isn’t the era of Milton. This isn’t Victorian England. This is postmodernism — and, in fact, it has been for quite some time. I really don’t need to be told outright that morality can’t be reduced to a binary, or that “killing is bad” is an oversimplification. You may as well write a novel about how people can’t escape their circumstances, or about how the American Dream is dead, or about one day in the life of an “ordinary” but remarkably self-aware protagonist.

It’s not that I actively disliked Old Man’s War, and I’ll grant that, in just over 300 pages, Scalzi didn’t have time to do much besides set up his universe. The included excerpt from the followup book suggests that we might get a broader overview of subjective morality if we continue on. I’m just a little dissatisfied that Old Man’s War dwelt for so long upon the notion that we may want to stop and think before we hold soldiers responsible for returning fire when fired upon.

My point here is that moral complexity has been done to death, and while I’m highly skeptical of the notion that originality is automatically good, I do think that stories benefit from not repeating the same old lessons to the point of banality.

My preferred solutions to the “stark gray” morality problem are just that — my preferred solutions. But, with that glaringly obvious disclaimer out of the way, my position is thus: while the character who simply becomes accustomed to a morally gray universe feels like old hat, the character who rejects the notion of moral grayness through force of will or personal failure, who operates beyond morality, or who undertakes a nuanced journey through an established moral system has the potential to fascinate me endlessly.

I’ve only just begun Otsuichi’s Zoo, but the protagonist of the first and eponymous story in the collection is something like a moral adventurer — or, if he isn’t quite lucid enough to explore morality himself, he serves as a vehicle for our own moral self-exploration. He’s like a good Poe protagonist in that regard; crazy as he seems, we have to wonder whether we can really hold his objectionable actions against him, and, if so, to what degree. For much of the story he engages in a kind of act, filling a social role that allows him to maintain a certain degree of self-righteousness while avoiding whatever moral judgments he has made about himself, and this bizarre interplay puts the reader in a strange position. But I won’t go on for fear of revealing too much, as the story is well worth reading.

What I will do is talk a little about an especially fabulous Gundam villain who has recently earned a place in my heart: Paptimus Scirocco.

I wonder what it is about these complete bastards that so appeals to me. You may have noticed that I’m not one of those people who takes pride in being a dick. I usually try to avoid conflict altogether; when I take a stand on an issue, I often attempt to do so in a way that appeases all involved. Hell, I don’t even like to see conflict. Being so peaceable (yeah, let’s go with that), I shouldn’t be predisposed to enjoy characters of Scirocco’s ilk, but I am. With a vengeance.

Now, Scirocco isn’t quite the sort of villain I lovingly deem a “real fucker.” But he isn’t exactly an upstanding dude, either. Most notably, he has a talent for seducing every woman in a ten-mile radius, and he abuses this superpower to build himself a loyal harem of skilled mobile suit pilots. And he isn’t much concerned about who he has to kill to accomplish his goals — goals which, in the end, make him an interesting character, as he seems to want the same thing everyone else in Zeta Gundam wants, namely a more peaceful and generally better universe. Granted, his approach to the problem renders him almost Nazi-esque, but it goes to show that Scirocco isn’t operating in spite of a moral code; he’s doing things in accordance with a moral code of his own.

We don’t have to agree with Scirocco, to be sure, but it’s easy to see that, from one standpoint, he’s one of the good guys. The same could be said of everyone in Zeta Gundam, really. It’s not as if any of them simply wants to go around in an ugly transforming robot and cause some shit (well, maybe Yazan, but…). Morality only becomes “gray” when we let numerous individual moral judgments blur into an abstract bigger picture, and while a bigger picture is fine, I guess, I really prefer a more nuanced treatment of morality, one where each “pixel” in the gray slate is enlarged to allow for scrutiny. Someone like Scirocco — a character whose moral code differs vastly from that of the protagonists, but who is allowed to live for more than five minutes anyway — aids in the zooming process, demonstrating that the personal moral frameworks that contribute to the gray mass are not simply and uniformly gray.

To put it in D&D terms (because, you know, I do that), maybe I’m saying that I don’t really believe much in “true” neutrality, and that everyone probably acts according to whatever they consider “good,” whether that be societal improvement, personal gain, or something else entirely. Old Man’s War’s doing-what-needs-to-be-done justifications make sense, I guess; I just wasn’t satisfied that the novel didn’t give much of a voice to those characters who didn’t quite agree on what needed to be done. Only now do I realize that I may be complaining about the novel’s kind-of-anthropocentrism and resultant lack of moral complexity; a single shade of gray can only be so interesting by itself.

What strikes me (lolpun) about Zeta is the willingness of its characters to slap the hell out of each other. As in 0079, much of the non-mecha physical violence we see in Zeta occurs between people on the same side — and, as in 0079, it serves as a reminder that people on the same side don’t always or even typically get along, that “sides” are deceptively arbitrary. But Zeta takes it to the limit. Here, physical violence between allies is an institution.

And, jarringly, it’s an institution as much cultural as military. At times physical attack is employed simply as a conversational technique; characters express displeasure and even puzzlement by hitting one another. The attackers aren’t trying to prove a point or knock sense into their victims; they’re just communicating, really, and nobody seems particularly fazed by this, as long as the physical harm inflicted is minimal. It’s really quite absurd — but, don’t get me wrong, I enjoy the absurd. Absurdity is almost a given in mecha anime at any rate. Zeta is perhaps notable, though, for its divergent modes of absurdity.

The inherent absurdity of giant robots allows mecha anime to be filled with more absurd things. If a show takes transforming plane-mecha for granted, it’s not a bit of a stretch to include space vampires or guitar-controlled cockpits. Or the whole my-robot-is-really-my-mother thing. Or Tang. [Schneider, "Absurdity in Mecha Anime"]

Schneider has it right, I think — the very existence of giant robots in a setting makes accepting related conceits easier. But the institutionalization of physical violence is (probably) not a related conceit. It’s not a hard-science absurdity; it’s a social, cultural absurdity, and it feels absurd even after we’ve granted humanoid war machines that surf on hover-rockets in South America. It might be difficult to justify; it might be symptomatic of that (in)famous Tomino depression — but if we can justify it, it might just be a clever narrative move.

Consider that, while Gundam is quick to humanize its petty officers and ensigns, it’s often just as quick to justify the less savory actions of the rank-and-file by putting rather stark villains in positions of power. 0079 has Giren Zabi; 0080 has the amusingly-named Killing; 08th MS Team has Gineas Sahalin, whose surprise mom issues aren’t given much time to confound his morality, and he’s matched on the Fed side by a few unpleasant commanders. If soldiers serving such leaders are responsible for the atrocities their commanders endorse, it’s at least a shared responsibility, responsibility that percolates down from the highest ranks. And maybe this is inevitable, maybe these villainous-types are necessary for conflict to continue beyond a certain point — after all, if both sides were allowed to understand each other as we understand them, there wouldn’t be much of a war.

In Zeta, however, gratuitous violence isn’t exclusive to, say, Bask Om. It’s everywhere. It’s such a part of human society in 0087 that Kamille’s kneejerk reaction to a minor insult involves attacking the eight or so Titans who insulted him, escaping arrest by kicking his interrogator in the head, and stealing a Gundam Mk. II so he can terrorize the people who pissed him off. This is utterly ridiculous. Even if we grant that the Federal military is complacent and lax in its security at this point, it’s hard to believe a teenager, even one dissatisfied with the people who have requisitioned his home and converted it into a secret base, would hijack dangerous weaponry to wreak vengeance upon those who pointed out in passing that he has a feminine name.

But the absurdity — the absurdism — at work here is precisely the point. The line between Federation and Zeon was always thin; the line between Titans and A.E.U.G. is practically nonexistent. In a society so inundated with violence, war would’ve happened eventually, regardless of what the warring sides chose to call themselves. Enlisted soldiers and officers alike serve violence itself more than they serve any military hierarchy, and fight because that’s just the thing to do at their particular point in history — in other words, we’re given a level playing field that seems to favor, morally speaking, neither privates nor admirals. Those characters accused of simply enjoying war, such as Lila Rira, are those who seem to realize this. I have to wonder if Zeon Deikun thought up his rebellion because he foresaw such conflict, and guessed that it couldn’t be avoided by a Federation-run human race.

In the interest of making the title of this post mean something, then, where does the year 0087 stand in the UC history of violence? I’ll have a more concrete answer once I’ve finished Zeta, but so far it’s looking quite a bit like a violent apotheosis, a period of violence for its own sake. I think I’m beginning to understand what Turn A Gundam’s Dark History was all about.