The Ballad of Miss Countryside: Mobile Suit Gundam F91 as a Feminist Text

or, why telling Shinji to get in the robot is transmisogynistic

I'm still a relatively new Gundam fan, all things considered. I watched 0079 sometime in 2022 or 2023, but watching Zeta Gundam starting in August of 2024 rewired my brain on a very deep level. For one thing, it gave me a much more severe case of Char Aznable brainworms than 0079 already did. For another, it inspired me to finally get off my ass and start writing fiction like I always said I was going to. For a third, it led to a much deeper exploration of the Gundam meta-series (as of now, I've seen 0079, 0080, Zeta, Char's Counterattack, half of ZZ, and Witch from Mercury).

I've thought about the movie Mobile Suit Gundam F91 a lot since I first watched it on the 19th of October, 2024. I've finally processed why that is: Gundam F91 is feminist in a way that its predecessors in the Universal Century timeline were not.

The development history of this movie is odd: it was originally planned as a new TV series, but due to production problems its first thirteen episode scripts were retooled as a feature film. Naturally, condensing about four and a half hours of television into a two-hour feature meant that some elision was necessary. Characters change allegiances off-screen or appear in the background and suddenly become prominent for one scene, and the whole thing moves at a breakneck pace. It can be a bit hard to follow, but if you're familiar with previous entries in the Universal Century, your imagination can fill in the gaps.

The Beauty Queen and the Vanguard

What I'm interested in is what is presented onscreen. The most enduring element in my memory is Cecily Fairchild's struggle for liberation against the patriarchs who attempt to control her and finding freedom in the arms of Seabook (We'll get back to Seabook, trust me).

The first setting where we meet our principal characters is a beauty pageant. Cecily has been nominated for the competition despite her protests. I shouldn't need to explain that beauty contests are gross outgrowths of patriarchy that reify the idea that women are a second class who exist for the enjoyment of men. It's not lost on me that the President of the United States, the avatar of the misogynistic backlash we're currently enduring, is a former owner of several beauty pageants. To hammer the point home, after Cecily wins the contest she comments that her outfit doesn't even suit the theme, and a male heckler in the crowd retorts, "who cares! You just have to look good!"

Right off the bat it's been established that Cecily has no interest in living the kind of life that patriarchy has dictated she should want. She has no interest in being eye candy or a piece of property in the lives of men, but as of right now, she goes along, even with reluctance, because she doesn’t see any way out, as many women unfortunately do.

Cecily Fairchild isn't just any woman, though. Her birth name is Berah Ronah, and she's the granddaughter of Meitzer Ronah, the ideological leader of a fascist gang of raiders called the Crossbone Vanguard. The Vanguard attacks our main characters' home space colony, Frontier IV, as the beginning of their effort to establish an aristocratic state, but also to recover Cecily, who's been living away from her birth family.

Cecily's adoptive father, Theo, has been a loyalist to her birth family all this time. He points a gun at Cecily to try and get her to comply. Seabook Arno, a friend of Cecily's and our other principal character, tries to intervene but is shot by Theo and told that what's happening is "family business." Cosmo Babylonia, the state that the Crossbone Vanguard intends to found, is explicitly chauvinist and anti-egalitarian. It's no wonder that its male supporters consider the women in their families subordinate enough to them that they believe pointing a handgun at them to ensure their compliance is acceptable. To a misogynist, women are property to be dealt with as they please, and anyone trying to intervene should stay out of the affairs of the paterfamilias.

Dorel, Cecily's half-brother, and the Vanguard came to collect her, telling her that the Ronah family "has need of her," like you might say you need a tool to complete a job you're working on. Thinking that Seabook died from the gunshot wound, Cecily relents because she feels she has no other choice, and the Crossbone Vanguard takes her back to her father and grandfather, patriarchs desperate to regain control of the wayward girl they believe is theirs by right.

The False and True Char Clones

Cecily is first brought before Carozzo Ronah, her birth father, who's more famous under the name "Iron Mask." Some people say that Iron Mask is this movie's Char Clone, but for a variety of reasons I consider Cecily herself to be F91's true Char Clone (wears red, goes by multliple names, betrays her faction, (strawberry) blonde, has a romance with F91's Amuro equivalent). What Iron Mask is is an embodiment of a pathetic and wounded masculinity.

Iron Mask was cuckolded by Theo Fairchild, and both Cecily and her mother, Nadia, have no interest in him or his beliefs. He feels a sense of wounded pride because of it. The reason he wears the mask, in his words, is that he's "struggling against his weak side." He feels entitled to control the women in his life, and his fascist politics are a drawn-out tantrum over his inability to.

We have a word for a man who ties his self-worth to his ability to control women and gets upset when they exercise any autonomy, and that word is "incel." The kind of wounded, desperate, entitled masculinity embodied by Carozzo is very recognizable to me as incel thought. Ideology like Iron Mask's is very popular right now- a lot of what's happening right now is attributable to misogynists' panic at the advances made by feminists in the past half-century. They're desperate to reassert the hierarchy. It calls to mind a certain robber baron who rapidly let the mask slip from his fascist face after being defied by his daughter. It's not an anime; it's real life.

Meitzer also has plans for Cecily. During their conversation, he asks Cecily to "act as queen." Not to be queen, but to act as queen. He also refers to her by terms like "idol." Cecily is a tool in his ideological project. While not as outwardly gross and misogynistic as Carozzo, Meitzer's plan is still to reassert and make explicit a lot of hierarchies. Cecily goes along for now, not seeing any other choice.

"This is Only the Beginning"

Don't worry, though, because Cecily does betray the Crossbone Vanguard. As soon as she realizes that she has a choice aside from serving patriarchy or suicide, she chooses the third option, and that option is Seabook Arno, who she'd believed was dead. In the end, Seabook and Cecily kill Cecily's incel father, pathetic to his last breath and still frustrated at his inability to control women. The film ends on the exceptionally romantic image of Cecily and Seabook embracing each other in their space suits, floating freely in lunar orbit. This, too, is yuri.

Now, I can sense your thoughts, and your thoughts say, "but Juliette, Seabook is a boy, how can this be yuri?"

That's where you're wrong. Seabook Arno is a trans woman, like many other Gundam characters. I'm about to prove this, so listen closely.

Seabook is very much cut from the same cloth as Amuro Ray, the protagonist of the original Mobile Suit Gundam. She's the child of the Gundam's designer, press-ganged into piloting it at too young of an age due to extreme circumstances. Amuro Ray is also a trans woman.

There's a scene partway through Gundam 0079 that's critical to understanding this. During a battle against Garma Zabi and Char Aznable, Amuro refuses to sortie in the Gundam due to the trauma it's already caused her. She's confronted by Bright Noa and Frau Bow for her "cowardice," and Bright hits Amuro twice, remarking that "you can't be a real man without taking a few blows." Frau Bow also admonishes Amuro to "man up" and pilot the Gundam again.

This kind of corrective violence is often deployed against boys who aren't demonstrating sufficiently manly qualities in the eyes of the abuser. I talked about this in my last article in relation to one of Talia Bhatt's essays. In this way, we can understand piloting a mobile suit under duress as compulsory cissexuality. Amuro is deviating too much from the norm, and needs to be "corrected." Amuro even says, OUT LOUD, that she doesn't like the idea of being a man.

That's a trans girl. So yes, it is, in fact, transmisogynistic to tell Shinji Ikari to get in the robot, as the subtitle suggests. For the record, Amuro does eventually get in the Gundam, but it's not because of the barbs about masculinity, it's because she hears that Char has taken the field. Those two are cooking up the biggest fourteen-year toxic yuri situationship in the history of the Universal Century.

If we move forward six years of real-world time and eight years of Universal Century time, we come to Kamille Bidan in Zeta Gundam. Kamille is also the child of a Gundam designer like Amuro, also piloting it at too young of an age, and subjected to the same kind of transmisogynistic "corrective" violence. She's also bullied for her feminine name, and adopted masculine hobbies during her school days to compensate. Later on, she becomes more confident in her femininity and says that she's no longer embarrassed of her feminine name. She transitioned. Also, I mean, just fucking look at her. That is not a boy.

Just for fun, let's do one more proof- Char Aznable. This one's a bit of a stickier wicket, since Char isn't the main protagonist of any series and doesn't follow the formula quite as closely as Amuro, Kamille, and Seabook. I am up to the task, though. Let's refer back to the toxic yuri situationship that I mentioned beforehand. Char develops an obsession with Amuro, constantly searching for her when they're apart and even addressing her in her thoughts by the time of Char's Counterattack. Char's behavior in that movie is best understood as that of a jilted and spiteful lover. She has a deep empathy and admiration for Amuro, despite being on opposing sides more often than not. Now, I don't know many cis men who genuinely have that much empathy and admiration for a trans woman. This, too, is yuri. Char's injecting estrogen off-screen; cry about it.

I'm very confident in calling Seabook a trans woman because she's cut extremely closely from the Amuro-Kamille cloth. In her comparatively-brief screentime, we see Seabook protesting at having to pilot the Gundam and being violently forced back into her place. She's literally kicked into the pilot seat by Cosmo, and admonished by another character that "only death awaits those who don't fight." It's too close to Amuro and Kamille's stories to ignore. I'm also going to pull the same ripcord I did with Kamille. Doesn't she look like a beautiful butch lesbian? I say so.

Like I said, as soon as Cecily realizes that Seabook is still alive, she runs away with her. She chooses life with her girlfriend, a life of real freedom, over the drudgery the patriarchs in her life had planned for her. It's a tale of lesbian love's power to shatter a hierarchy. It's personally resonant to me, as well, because of my own transition story.

My case was different from some other trans people. I knew that trans people existed from when I was fairly young, but only started to understand what they actually were when I was about sixteen. It wasn't till I was twenty-five that I realized it was something I could do. As soon as I did, I abandoned masculinity and patriarchy in pursuit of real freedom.

I think it's no mistake that there's a shot referencing F91's ending in G-Witch's ending. G-witch deserves even more credit for making explicit what F91 left implicit. The moral of the story is, if your dad's a shitty incel fascist, you should fucking kill him.

Oh my stars, I love this silly Popsicle-colored robot series so much.