I was visiting Jane Austen's House Museum last year and it always gives me pleasure to see how wildly popular her work remains. There always seem to be tourists there visiting from all over the world. That is really heartening.
She was very innovative. Maybe even underrated as a craftsperson at the sentence level. My favourite trick that I believe she invented is slipping from prose into a soft Iambic pentameter, essentially unnoticed. Lots of people have copied that from her.
And class-pressure narratives will never not be relevant to people's lives. She's a very very humane storyteller in that respect.
I am slightly biased - she's my great aunt (x 6). Used to find that embarrassing but now I feel quite proud.
Prose is mostly focused on describing meaning using any words that serve to do so.
Verse is more concerned with structural factors like rhythm, tonality, and structure within syllables, or within types of sound, or parts of speech. Other linguistic devices which look at details beyond the strict meaning of the words, like rhyme or many other factors (you could even use visual spacing for example) can be considered in verse.
Within verse there's the concept of iambs. I think of it as a tuple of two syllables which are said, weak-strong. Pentameter means ten syllables, and iambic means in groups of weak and strong. Most of Shakespeare is written like this. Also English naturally sounds iambic a lot of the time.
Iambic pentameter sounds like this:
I watched a bird attempt its beak upon
The end of fake too-moist baguette in vain
For it was sick of stale McDicks tossed on
It endlessly maintained its rationed pain
While others in its bobbing flock for scraps
Of birds fought for the thrill squawked on and on
Till cannibals among their kind rejoiced
To find cousins in mayonnaise so long
Or like a particular Shakespearean sonnet [0]. Or like any of them, [1]
[0] https://shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnet.I.html
[1] https://shakespeare.mit.edu/Poetry/sonnets.html
[2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/shakespe...
There once was a demi-god, Maui / Amazing and awesome: I’m Maui // Who stole you your fire / and made your days lighter // Yes, thank you, you’re welcome! Love: Maui
It’s a bit odd of an analogy, but limericks and “Iambic pentameter” are specific instances of an underlying language architectural thing, so it should be just enough to convey the basics of that “prose to Iambic” sentence. And: if you’ve ever watched “Much Ado About Nothing” from the mid-90s, that’s 100% Iambic.
(If you’re an English major, yes, I know, this is all wrong; it’s just a one-off popsicle-sticks context-unique mindset-conveyance analogy-bridge, not step-by-step directions to lit/ling coordinates in your field.)
But (because I have to go there - and I promise getting to this paragraph wasn't the point of the compliments above), Much Ado isn't entirely in verse: the clowns - lower class, all of them (Dogberry, et al) - speak in prose. So, the next layer of the onion, for anyone who wants to pick at it, is noticing in what circumstances writers use different registers, and why. Austin does the same thing: Mr Collins speaks in flat, prosy sentences, except (if I recall correctly) when he talks about his patron, Lady Catherine de Bourgh. I think that has a subconscious effect, even on people who couldn't name an iamb, but once you pick up on it, it's one of those "ooh!" sorts of moments where you get a glimpse behind the authorial curtain.
and, yes, what you said! I vaguely recognize that from studying the written form but certainly I didn't remember it here beyond “I bet this needs a conditional or something”.
ps. I am especially proud of the unplanned field pun!
prosaic.
Language architecture is really interesting, I think, for programmers who have bought into the LLM hype in any meaningful way. It's an important field to have a sense of.
Tokenizers, for example, generally have multi-syllabic tokens as their base-level, indivisible unit.
You rarely see this mentioned when LLM capability against non-coding tasks is discussed, despite it being deeply important for prose construction.
Not to mention, putting language models aside, that the vast majority of code is written in language with a logical grammar. The disciplines are highly linked.
My daughter loves the classics, me, science fiction and fantasy.
What I find strange is that people enjoy her books as romantic comedies because the world she represents is incredibly claustrophobic.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_indirect_speech
Edited for clarification
I have believed for a long time that Austen is broadly popular because her works deal with issues of human relations and economic prosperity at the heart of modern, bourgeois existence. The draw is summed up in this excellent quote from the article:
> They also both, mostly, focus on characters who have enough privilege to have choices, but not enough power to escape circumstances.
That's a perceptive description of middle class life. The movie "Clueless" is an illustration of how easily Austen's insights translate to a society that is superficially very different from hers. [0]
"Elinor agreed with it all, for she did not think he deserved the compliment of rational opposition". - from S&S
Who wasn't in a situtation where they felt arguing would do nothing? John Green asked: "Who doesn't want a friend as witty as Jane Austin to comment on life?
There's an annual Jane Austen festival there too - it really brings people from all over the world. Very fun event even if you're just +1 to someone who's into it.
I googled for examples from her books but — search results are terrible.
"Elinor could sit it no longer. She almost ran out of the room, and as soon as the door was closed, burst into tears of joy, which at first she thought would never cease."
She 'tends towards Iambic' in literary criticism terminology. So it's not a strict Iambic, more like a 'soft Iambic' which is a term I can't remember if it's actually used in lit crit, or if I made it up.
You need to drop the "at" syllable, in that example (which you would do in vocal rhythms of English, then and now), for it to be a true Iambic.
There's lots of good writing on the King James Bible "tending towards" Iambic, which should be more Google-able, and her father was a preacher, so that's a likely influence there, I would speculate.
Some others I like that I remember:
"You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope." - Persuasion (I think?).
"Till this moment I never knew myself." - Sense and Sensibility again? I can't remember off the dome. That's a gorgeous strict Iambic.
There are much longer examples - whole paragraphs that close chapters of Sense and Sensibility specifically. I'll try and find the version I have notations on when I'm next around my books. She regularly slips into it to close moments of emotional crescendo - "Cursus" being the Latin term for an analogous technique, when it was more frequently used in a more stylised manner.
"Till this moment I" and "I never knew myself" would be trochaic and iambic, respectively, but they don't strictly scan when you overlay the 'I's. You can of course get them to by e.g. eliding 'moment', or adding a line break and taking '-ment' as a feminine ending, or just scanning according to the writer's idiosyncrasies.
And individual writers can be very idiosyncratic here. Shakespeare, for example, if I remember right, lets monosyllabic words occur in almost any position. Disyllabic words on the other hand can have any combination of stresses (iamb, trochee, spondee, or pyrrhic), but only if they're foot-aligned. And so on.
The field has probably evolved since I was last part of it, but I'll still recommend Kristin Hanson's work in this area: https://linguistica.sns.it/RdL/9.1/Hanson.pdf. (Actually the second time I've recommended Hanson on HN. The last time was, let's see, 6 years ago!)
Personally, I do take 'ment' as a feminine ending there, or - more specifically - the T sound runs into the I sound when I read it, the way it would in the predominantly Italian stuff she's likely referencing.
I'm very much with Gordon Lish on Shakespeare's monosyllabic drift words - that he was educated in Latin, and integrating Germanic vocabulary into that structure relatively freely, and further analysis is almost impossibly complex. That said, there's a lot of moments in those where I'd kill to hear where the stress landed when first performed.
This specific area is really one of those "What if?" moments in literary criticism, I think - I believe it would be incredibly beneficial for the form if this was the dominant focus of critique, rather than thematic stuff. On the rare occasions I teach at universities, this is all completely new to students, which sucks - it's entirely possible to approach prose theory with the same rigour as music theory, and it seems (in the UK, at least) to be very quickly becoming a lost art!
Thanks for taking the time. I will spend tomorrow evening reading.
"He stopped on a dime and collected 5 cents change."
That's not to say that the parts that aren't soap opera aren't meaningfully different. I disagree with the reductionistic claim that "everything is just a soap opera in the end", and leave it to the reader to determine whether or not the original link is making that mistake.
I would say it's more like salt in cooking for the vast majority of people; they expect a certain proper amount and trying to engage a normal human's taste without it is an uphill battle at best. As a result, across a wide variety of genres and styles, you'll find soap operas.
(I use soap opera as a bit of shorthand for things focusing on human relationships a lot. Soap operas tend to focus on the romantic end more than average, so the embedding is not quite perfect. But I use "soap opera" as the shorthand here because they are one of the more pure embodiments of the idea, because they are basically nothing but human relationships churning and spinning, with generally not much more going on. Yeah, a couple of them have a more exotic framing device, but all that does is move them slightly off the center of the genre, not really change them much.)
Hypermodern openings emerged after world war 1.
One can only imagine what the old masters would call current chess theory.
But "novella" (different genre) is a thing in russian.
Either way, the word "novel" wasn't necessarily equivalent to how it is used today: any book length work of narrative fiction.
Though watch out, this is a rabbit hole. Just look up novel on wikipedia. You'll see a big orange message at the top which is the first sign there is a problem. And then the article is excessively long. A lot of ink has been spilled trying to define what a "novel" is.
> There's really only a minority of people who are interested in stories that have no personal relationship stories in them at all.
All that to say I wish there were more stories that are more focused on the plot / implications of the setting. What-ifs that aren't derailed by character drama. "What if telekinesis was real? How can we exploit it for energy / propulsion / everyday gadgets?" Like basically thought-experiments in narrative form, or a textbook with characters.
Or at least I wish I knew how to search for these types of stories. Searching for "hard sci-fi" comes close but it requires the science is plausible (no FTL, minimal new physics, etc). I don't think it's reasonable to expect authors to simulate an entire universe / provide plausibility proofs for every bit of engineering / physics. As long as the mechanics of whatever fantasy physics are consistent and developments are plausible, that's good enough for me. I don't even need a satisfying conclusion, if the protagonist rebels fail because the ultra-wealthy corpos are just better equipped, so be it, at least the ride was fun.
There’s probably not even 50,000 of those on Earth per annual cohort coming of age. And of the remainder practically no one will turn down the 7 figure cushy hedge fund job or equivalent career path.
I don't know if that's really fair. I don't think that's really what most people think the term soap opera denotes, and if you broaden it to mean any work that has any sort of relational elements, its almost a tautology that all fiction will meet the standard.
More to the point, i think its an unfair response to the article, as the author is not claiming that the similarity between these two works is merely that they have relationships in them.
I watched the one 'except' that OP has listed there "Iron Blooded Orphans". It's the only Gundam I've ever watched and I really liked it, to be honest. It was full of subversions of anime tropes. There's a prophecy, a stoic soldier like none other, a charismatic leader playing a dual role, another heroic leader trusted by his people. And there's the instrument of the establishment, playing the establishment role. And spoiler spoiler spoiler,
spoiler spoiler spoiler the establishment wins, the charismatic double-role leader dies trying to fulfill the prophecy which isn't real, the stoic soldier is cut apart in the final battle, and the remainder of the loyal band either gets their people rights in parliament or gets picked off in violent engagements over time in the denouement.
Fantastic story. You don't see that kind of thing very often. Western shows are all about the "you don't have to sacrifice anything to win" and Eastern shows are all about the "you're the chosen one" but this one was "the establishment is the establishment and most of the time it wins".
This probably has more to do with the type of content you are consuming. If you watch things for young adults, it will probably follow "the Heroes Journey" - wether it is LOTR, Harry Potter, Star Wars etc. (the West) or Naruto, Pokemon, Dragon Ball/Journey to the West (the East)
It's part of the reason the names are so wild. He was actively pushing the envelope with outrageous names during pitches to see how far he could go before producers would stop nodding along without paying attention.
Also don't forget Jamitov Hymen.
Gundam definitely fit into that "engineering fantasies for young professionals" niche, at least until ZZ came around in 1985. Gundam has the root word of "gun" because they were originally these more grounded fantasy weapons instead of man made demi-gods that appeared in shows like UFO Robot Grendizer. They weren't supposed to be superheroes, they were what engineering minded young men thought would be cool to have if they were given an unlimited budget to create bipedal tanks that could do the job of bomber aircraft, navy destroyers, and orbital bombardment satellites all in one. That's why Gundams, especially Zaku units, move slowly, pivot in unnatural ways, and use jets and wheels for locomotion, because they're giant tanks with manipulators that hold guns and not suits of armour. BattleTech also comes from that same origin, although it and Mechwarrior's development went all in on the "tank but with legs" idea instead of slowly losing their identity to the super robot genre.
The melodrama they mixed in as framing to discuss Japan's post-war military pacifism was incidental to creating and populating the backstory for an engineer's dream unlimited budget mobile weapons platform. So they weren't the Marvel equivalent back in 1979, they were more like Japan's answer to some of Robert Heinlein's militaristic concepts in Starship Troopers and The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, where the concept came first and the story was just an excuse to see that concept in action.
G Gundam and SD Gundam are more like the Marvel movies, in that they strip away most of the issues being discussed and coast on the aesthetic similarities and caricaturized versions of themes from the source material.
https://x.com/xlr8harder/status/1962768298153521202
Sun Wukong is the original "normal guy who grinds to greatness", which was the original plot of Dragonball before it turned more into Harry Potter (you are the chosen one).
What's sorely missing is the very rare theme of "the establishment wins, and for a good reason, and it's actually a good thing".
Here’s the Google summary:
> Early Chinese detective stories, known as gong'an ("court case") fiction, emerged from oral tales and plays during the Song Dynasty (960-1127), featuring incorruptible magistrate-detectives like Bao Zheng (Judge Bao) and Di Renjie (Judge Dee) who used clever deduction, forensic logic, and sometimes supernatural elements to solve crimes.
There is actually a little bit of that in this. While the charismatic leader has some points about how the establishment has gotten weak and corrupt, overall it seems pretty par for the course. To be honest, it's better he didn't win. He was a bit demagoguey.
I think this is why The Wire captivated me. I'd been raised on a steady diet of hero's journey stories and then suddenly I ran into David Simon's buzzsaw of contravening those expectations.
In those years I'd just I started my working life and unfortunately the parallels were uncannily accurate.
Even when a story starts as mostly lighthearted adolescent fare (see, The Witch of Mercury), it tends to end in trauma, injustice and many war crimes.
>driven by the circumstances the establishment has forced them to contend with for the entirety of their short lives (they're all child soldiers, btw)
>are only able to find their successful path by rejecting establishment and forging what seem, at the time, to be canny ties with other groups on-the-margins
>...right until they follow that path off a cliff.
The "heroes" and "villains" remain who they are at the end not just because of affinity bias (having spent more time with the rebels than the establishment), but because there's a tangible disconnect between the former feeling forced into the poor decisions that they make, and the latter's rather cold, and unforced, determinations.
Spoiler
So when Shino almost takes Rustal's bridge out, I am, of course, cheering, even while I know I'm watching him commit a war crime and sign his own death warrant. When Rustal orders atmosphere-braised pilot skewers, it still feels incredibly unfair, even when I know why he made that decision. They threaded the needle.
Overall, a very sophisticated show - on its own and definitely for its genre.
I'm trying to think of the earliest "Western Literature" that you get introduced to that has the darker side of humanity and not coming up with anything until you hit 11th or 12th grade while I bumped into anime at something like 7th grade.
Hmmm, perhaps something by O'Henry or Roald Dahl would qualify. I hit them in 7th grade and liked them very much, too.
One punch man, season 1. So chill, both pays homage to and is an amusing pisstake on the dragonballz kinda idea of heroes, training and "leveling up your power".
And then there is a double episode, around 7 or 8, that is a beautiful essay on "what defines a hero". For me, this was chefs kiss good and defined the series for me.
Later they say "They also both, mostly, focus on characters who have enough privilege to have choices, but not enough power to escape circumstances. Characters in both aren’t peasants without agency, but they’re also caught in larger systems they can’t opt out of" But that just describes basically everyone, none of us have no agency, but all of us are also caught up in larger systems we can't opt out of. But even within Austen you have Emma, who is entirely economically and socially secure and doesn't need to worry about anything and Fanny who lives entirely at the whims of others.
Similarly, all people have choices, but these choices are often pretty agonising ones, and Jane almost never has her protagonists or us confront such life-and-death, very-bad-vs-infinitely-worse choices. And this was a conscious choice since the novels of the 18th century had been more or less filled with them.
Edit: And even on risk, the big risk is that if Elizabeth's dad dies the family would have to live on Mrs. Bennet's income of just 200 pounds a year, which to put in perspective was about what Jane Austen's father made as a clergyman when she was born, though he would go on to make more money later in life. It wouldn't be poverty and still put them in the upper few percent of English people at the time.
She herself never married, she absolutely rips on the state of affairs in her time but she wasn't going to advocate in her pop fiction that the women of the time make a move that would almost certainly ruin their prospects.
Austen was insanely clever and pragmatic at making her point and having it shared, as much credit as she gets it isn't nearly enough. In some of her other works you can see certain of her points presented with less nuance and memetic potential, she worked at it.
Let me make an outlandish assertion because I'm feeling froggy as I do truly love Austen. If we assumed that Jesus was God and was like a boring Mr. Roger's type and intentionally embedded his message in the most controversial wrapper possible to ensure that the real message was propagated into eternity, then Jesus narrowly edges out Austen in cleverness and only because he didn't have to put pen to paper, I don't think Austen can be overrated.
The opinion you replied to frustrates me when I encounter it.
She was only doing "magical thinking" in her narratives so much as her novels are marriage comedies, and this is required.
The reality of her life was that she was incredibly uncompromising. She had to publish her early work under an androgynous pseudonym to profit from it.
She didn't marry cynically despite having opportunities to. She was a realist, and a strain of that runs through her work. There are many moments where she anticipates the great Russian realists. She managed to turn a good profit on her art in spite of her period's circumstances. She genuinely advanced the idea of who is allowed to make art, and who is allowed to profit from it.
Generally the novels have nuanced but happy endings. She was writing for an audience. She was a shrewd businessman at a time when there weren't businesswomen. In her personal life, she was genuinely uncompromising. She's a GOATed artist. You can't ask much more of a human!
But isn't the drama between the billionaire heiress and her starving-artist lover more interesting than the lawyer girlfriend deciding whether she wants to marry her below-average-salary boyfriend?
Or maybe I don't understand your complaint.
But there is a good answer. It's Gundam 79. That's not hard.
There are few forces in the world as strong as somebody seeing a long-running Japanese series and twisting and turning themselves into how to avoid release order.
The hard part is that the older series relatively slow paced. I enjoyed most of them when I first saw them, but I am not sure I would have the patience to catch up from the beginning now if I had not watched them before.
Newer series are much faster paced, but they build on the foundations of the older series. Like GQuuuuuuX is great but you might have to watch Zeta Gundam first to fully appreciate it (50 episodes, maybe a few movies). It can be a lot of time commitment depending on where you enter the Gundam universe.
I started with Zero, and I feel it was a good way to start, but a lot of people disagree.
MSG remains a masterpiece and a watershed and all of that, but it is possible to choose a Gundam series that incorporates many of its objective strengths without the aspects that can be hard for newcomers to approach. (But whichever one that happens to be depends on who you ask.)
This article made me realize that despite writing stories that can be broad and melodramatic, Yoshiyuki Tomino has a keen sense of character. It's an interesting counterpart with his closest American counterpart, George Lucas. Both funneled 60s anti-war politics into their science fiction worlds, but Lucas was obsessed with Joseph Campbell and wrote plot driven stories while Tomino always puts the soap opera elements at the forefront.
Also, I suspect the author hasn't seen Turn A Gundam yet, and if not, they really should. That one is Tomino saying, "what if I took out 90% of the space combat and really just made a comedy of manners." It's wonderful.
It's really deep in the series (about ten books deep) but Lois McMaster Bujold writes a sci fi space version of Jane Austen in a couple of the books of the Vorkosigan Saga one might appreciate more after reading a bit of Austen.
Watched almost all of them except igloo/build fighter type
Hathaway had a great fight sequence where you felt the scale of Gundam and the violence/heat
the soundfx tooo ahhhh
https://youtu.be/oiiIkSuiios?si=ylHdAqVnE2pPeSKv&t=202
Thunderbolt has great graphics too and the jazz
And unicorn the bell pepper gundam
Also lol @ kshatriya being called bell pepper. It's probably my favorite non-gundam mobile suit. I wish they'd make an MG kit for it despite how massive it is.
The Build Divers series is not very good, but I still recommend it to people who have some time to spare, because Re:Rise retroactively makes it so satisfying. Re:Rise itself is deceptively sophisticated, and touches on some mature themes that even most serious Gundam series don't get to.
I forgot to mention the hype of that Zgok lol in Seed Freedom
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvyAa4CgaOs
ugh I don't like these 60FPS things on YT makes it look worse my bad, updated
So what is good order to watch Gundam in 2025? What should be skipped?
Are mangas/novels worth it or is it better just to watch anime?
- Gundam 00: Gundam as a terrorist - Iron Blooded Orphans: Gundam as a (child) mercenary
After this I you want to watch the original universe (Universal Century) you can start with the 3 movies that summarize the OG series. They are legally on YouTube (search for gundaminfo)
The shows outside of the UC timeline are their own thing, a lot of folks outside of Japan saw Wing first, those you can watch in whatever order you like. I'd say start with the universal timeline in order, it's the backbone of the Gundam universe. The shows between Mobile Suit Gundam and Zeta are side stories during the events of the original show but don't skip them (except for IGLOO) because they're straight up some of the best shows in the Gundam universe.
The "core" of Gundam is the original show, Zeta, ZZ and Char's Counterattack. Those in particular are one story and Zeta is widely considered (one of the) strongest Gundam shows.
Plus Jane Austen at the time was a sharp critique of English nobility and high class, but presenting it in a stylized and popular way.
Nothing comparable to treating a mobile suit like an extension of the body, or killing people, or both at the same time (e.g. the "duel" between Char Aznable and Kycilia Zabi).
Every anime has a production committee who figures out how they pay for it (anime make miney from a wide range of sources) and they told the writers they needed to write mechs in to get the gunpla bucks.
No idea who that is, but I assume she writes Gundam stories without mechs.
Where my Gundam Wing fans at? (there are literally dozens of us...dozens!)
Some people find it harder to follow along in light of a rather anti-expository method of storytelling, personally I find it all the more compelling for story occurring during wartime. Combat is complex, people take action in the moment, not everyone's thoughts or plans need to be spelled out, leaving plenty to inference rather than narration builds for a better story.
Funny after a lot of this I think I broke it because it now loads a personalization context where it tries to apply this framework to everything and can't quit talking about a character that we seem to share a crush on.
1) I got that list of stories
2) It has kept mentioning the same character for a few days even when I am talking about something else, even in other conversations (I would do that if I "had a crush")
3) It has been trying the same 'mini-framework' for analyzing problems using the same vocabulary over and over again
In the last few months, for me at least, Copilot does make some attempt to build a personalization context (RAG?) and it quite often talks about something I talked about the day before or offers a suggestions about how the current discussion relates to a prior one and if I ask "remember how we talked about X?" it sometimes seems to respond accordingly.
It is really fun and probably does increase the risk of rabbit holing, but my experience with agentic coding is that if you talk with an agent long enough the context does have a way of going bad and pretty soon you are arguing about things and going and circles and the only way out is to start a new session.
Optimistically, this is the way our "thinking" will make HN highlights without the crutch of "experience". (I'm envious of their style, not their substance)
I have been having such a good time this week I think other people should be jealous. I was worried I might be a little manic, especially because I had a psychogenic fever the way I did before my "evil twin" came out, but my therapist doesn't seem concerned. My "evil twin" was empty and angry and now I feel overflowing [1] and know how to maintain that feeling so it's a very different thing.
It is 1's and 0's responding determinstically to input. There is no sentience.
I know it has never felt anything and never cared about anyone or anything. It has also read much more romance fiction and books about romance fiction that I could ever read so it equipped to talk a very good game about what the structure of that literature is and how it produces the emotional effect that it does.
What I think happened is that I was trying to figure out what it is that made me feel smitten with that character and my whole intention is to transmit that feeling to other people so I guess it just learned how to talk like somebody who is smitten with that character. It may also be that it is following it’s training to butter me up, though it was really going too far like I am trying to write some Python and I have to tell it that “we’re not talking about Ellie now”
(I’m not sure you learn as much as you think; I mean some context leaks through but Austin’s characters aren’t necessarily _that_ archetypical. If you want that you might be better with a social history.)
From what I gather - having never actually watched any - there are anti-war themes (IE armies are commanded by people who don't have to sacrifice, how that corrupts), sacrifice vs outcomes and more. It's a thematic experience rather than an education in robotics or history.
I like stompy robots. I have to yet to start on Gundam because I am hesitant as to where to start and which path to follow in watching it all and I know it would consume me once I start.
Maybe after Xmas, in my break, I'll "waste" some time with it.
How much of Hollywood is bad copies of Shakespeare?
For some reason I stopped reading the first book 50-odd pages in, but I will be returning!
https://www.reddit.com/r/Gundam/comments/y3766d/i_just_watch...
There's a tension in Mobile Suit Gundam and its direct descendants. The Space Nazis (Zeon) are also sort of, kind of a stand-in for Imperial Japan during WWII, and between the implicit relatability therein, and the charisma and popularity of series antihero Char Aznable (a Zeon officer), there is an enthusiasm in fan circles (leaking into later productions) for humanizing grunts on the "villain" side while emphasizing the corruption of the side the heroes happen to be on. But this as subtext to the headline narrative of Zeon being mass-murderers and the Earth Federation trying to stop them.
There's also running, unspoken theme of the various corporate conglomerates playing governments and ideologues against each other for profit, and occasionally stepping in (usually with a particularly powerful prototype robot) when one side threatens to blow up the Earth Sphere for realsies.
The end result is a lot of people dying for no reason, and constant backsliding into a state of war, and main characters who realize how ridiculous such circumstances are, but (as per TFW) don't have much power to do anything other than try to survive and protect their loved ones. Viewers are able to see where the shape of that society is warped.
That's without speaking much to the alternate universes. In Gundam Wing, the greatest threat to a global aristocracy-cum-junta is a small, loosely-associated paramilitary group made up of 5 teenage boys and their supporters. The machinations of colonial-era Europe are so philosophically feeble as to be legitimately challenged by NSYNC and Greta Thunberg.
Many characters of that series of Karl May novels have a direct mapping, e.g.:
Old Shatterhand => Jake Sully
Winnetou => Neytiri (gender swapped)
tamed mustang => tamed flying dragon
and many others.
The second one developed its own story much better.
... I'll see myself out.
Gundam actual influences are well known, Tomino himself talked about it, more than one time. Gundam was inspired by WWII stories, but the direct source of inspiration is Gerard O’Neill’s “The High Frontier”, in which there is depicted the O'Neil Cylinder, whose design has been literally copied verbatim for Gundam's space stations/colonies.