The History of the Horrific War That Gundam Built Itself On

Almost every episode of the original Mobile Suit Gundam opens with a reminder, and a warning. A stoic narrator informs us that it is the year 0079 of the Universal Century, and that humanity has spent the last nine months locked in an interstellar war between the forces of the Earth Federation and the Principality of Zeon, a group of space colonies that has declared independence to rebel against governance from their home planet. Or really, they’ve spent much of that period in a stalemate that is only broken by the events of the show itself. Up to that point, only the first month of the conflict—the “One Year War,” as it would be enshrined in Gundam‘s history to come—had actually seen any fighting. That’s where the warning comes in, a lesson repeated episode after episode: in that single month, half of all humanity had perished. The conflict’s stalemate hadn’t been caused by strategic acumen or military advancement. Humankind had simply obliterated itself in a manner of weeks, enactin ... Read full article.