History Repeating, But Improved

Late in Gundam Wing, Heero infiltrates the White Fang's space battleship, Libra. I say infiltrate, he crashes a captured White Fang shuttle in a shuttle bay and slips away in the confusion of fire suppression. 

He's partly there to rescue Relena, who went to Libra on her own to try reasoning with her brother. Zechs plans, going by his public statements, to bring about peace by killing everyone on Earth, since it's clearly the source of the problems. As though the people living in space are some different species entirely and it'll all be Lionel Hutz's vision of a world without lawyers if only Earth weren't around. More likely, he plans such an ugly, horrific battle people will be too frightened/disgusted to fight wars again.

Which is actually stupider than the idea it's all the Earth's fault. Clearly the helmet he wore all those years did about as much good preventing cranial trauma as your average NFL player's.

So Heero is also there to assess if Zechs is really committed to this (idiotic) path. They both have suits with the Zero System, and Heero's has shown him Zechs has no future. Is Zechs seeing something different?

He and Relena confront Zechs in some command center*. Zechs gives them a history lesson on how, a couple decades ago, two people worked towards total pacifism. Zechs and Relena's father, King Peacecraft on Earth, and in space, the politician Heero Yuy. They were assassinated, and things continued on the same old path of those with military power dominating those without, making them afraid and desperate enough to do crazy shit like give five 15-year-olds incredibly powerful mobile suits and tells them to kill a bunch of people.

Back when I first watched the series, I didn't think much of that scene. I figured Zechs was making a point about why preaching of pacifism was pointless. You have to fight for peace, crush your enemies, because that's what they'll do to you. That sort of thing. But, he also asks Relena if she agrees, and when she doesn't, praises her for thinking as a member of the Peacecrafts should.

So the parallel finally dawned on me. Zechs talks about a Peacecraft and a Heero Yuy, one from Earth and one from space, working towards peace. He tells this story to a Peacecraft and a Heero Yuy, one from Earth and one from space, both working towards peace. Relena had to grow to understand the gap between ideals and reality, and Heero had to understand what he was actually fighting for, what he was hoping to achieve with all the battles. But they've each retained their resolve, maybe even honed it through their what their experiences taught them.

The critical difference between them and the predecessors Zechs spoke of is, unlike Original Recipe Heero Yuy, Kickin' Buffalo Ranch Heero Yuy is a soldier. He's not easy to kill. Hell, as good a soldier as he is, even he can't manage to successfully kill himself, and not for lack of trying. And he has, at some point along the line, decided he will protect Relena (instead of threatening to kill her.) Which means now Relena is not easy to kill, either. Good luck, would-be assassins.

I thought that was a nifty little piece of the series, certain things repeat, but people can actually learn from the past failures and get it right. Of course, Gundam Wing: Frozen Teardrop might very well have blown that whole notion to hell. I've only read plot summaries off the Gundam wiki, and am not sure I understand them - I can't even follow the way of marking years that tries to manage the difference in the length of Martian years versus Earth years - but it read like a lot of the characters ended up repeating the mistakes of the prior generations, as badly or worse. Sending kids off to war, when they weren't fucking up raising them or outright abandoning them, things of that nature.

Maybe, if you go back far enough before the events of Gundam Wing, there was a point where humanity was actually getting along pretty well, those on Earth and those in the space colonies, and then things went downhill, only to rise again, briefly. Hopefully not, I'd like to think things could trend up against the inexorable pull of entropy, but maybe.

* Actually a hologram of Zechs. Kind of odd, since there hadn't been any sign of similar technology up to that point.