Graham Aker Fights the World

[ninthfeather]

 Saturday’s CAH game included a round that had cards that were some combination of “Graham Aker” and “fights the world.”

 

DISCLAIMER: A good person would make crack out of that instead of long, rambly meta.  I’m not a good person.

 

So, yeah.  Graham is, really, the one who fights the world in Season 

 

I mean, obviously, it’s Celestial Being in Season 1.  Aeolia Schenberg’s message was tantamount to the entire organization shouting “FIGHT ME” at every single political entity in existence.

 

But in Season 2, the world’s united, however false and forced the peace is.  Even the resistance forces are international.  Everyone’s using Gundams–Celestial Being’s own weapons once, now turned against them–and the fighting is all about greater causes, with a few exceptions (Saji’s having a character arc, okay, leave him alone, he’ll get there; the other exceptions are more clear-cut antagonists than Graham).  The first season’s personal has largely been absorbed into something larger and more ideological, and even the lone wolf-type characters like Saji and Setsuna are still starting to think about what impact their actions have on the world around them and on the future.

 

And then there’s Graham.  Excuse me, Mr. Bushido.  Flying his old model mobile suit, trapped by the memories of his dead comrades, and still fighting for his own revenge.  And, more importantly, to figure out his own reason for living.  It’s never really made text, but the way he argues with Setsuna and interacts with other A-Laws indicates that the defeat and his facial scarring together really did a lot of damage to his self-concept. And he’s trying to sort that out on the battlefield, while everyone else is struggling over liberty vs. security and questions about whether humankind ultimately has the potential to change and improve. In Season 1, this would have been par for the course.  Allelujah spent half his S1 screentime having minor existential crises in a Gundam; Setsuna did it a lot too.  But now, almost everyone else is getting down to the big issues, or at least sorting out their identity issues outside of the robots.  It would be easy to say Graham’s fallen behind, but I don’t think that’s quite it.  Graham doesn’t fall behind, Graham is the type to want the world to adjust to his pace, whatever it happens to be.

 

And Graham’s pace, as the parallelism at the end of the show all but tells us, is the same as Setsuna’s pace in Season 1.  He’s angry, and he wants revenge, and he thinks revenge will fix things.  Which is the tragedy of the whole matter, really.  You can believe what you want about the morality of revenge, but the fact of the matter is that in physical reality, doing harm to the person responsible for an event doesn’t undo the original event or make it better in any way.  It can affect you, now, but it can’t change the past.  And it was clear that Graham thought otherwise for a lot of Season 2, because for all of his fighting prowess, he has a bit of a tendency to magical thinking.

 

In the end, Setsuna is able to talk him around, partly because of how the two of them parallel one another.  But it’s a bitter, interesting little bit of irony, to look at screenshots of the fresh-faced blond man with binoculars at Patrick Colasour’s disaster of a MS demonstration, and then the later ones of him frowning at Aeolia’s speech, and then to think about his ultimate trajectory in the series.

 

Celestial Being’s fight with the world is very literal.  In Graham’s case, it’s more that he’s fighting the world’s direction–choosing revenge over peace and the past over the future.  

 

The parallels intrigue me.