You're listening to season ten of mobile suit Breakdown, a weekly podcast covering the entirety of Sci-Fi mega franchise mobile suit Gundam from 1979 to today.
This is episode 10.30, moonlight rendezvous. And were your hosts? Im Tom, and if this series doesnt end with Uso throwing a knife at somebody, Im gonna feel real let down.
And Im Mina, new to victory Gundam and shocked to meet a Gundam mom. I actually like. How quickly do you think this show.
Will change my mind?
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Our newest patron, Crotar.
You keep us a genki.
It's spelled like Centaur, but crow instead of Sen. So now I'm wondering which parts of the crotar are human and which parts are crow. Is the crotar basically a tengu?
Okay, so I kind of love the idea of like full on crow body, but then from the neck of the crow up is a human torso with head and arms. But alternatively, what about fully a crow but walking around on human legs?
I feel like I've seen art that was kind of spoofing on heraldic art where they gave a chicken human legs and it looked very, very silly. Just big old beefy legs under the body of a chicken.
I love that. This week we're covering Victory episode 30, haha no Gandamu or mother's Gundam. The episode was written by Oka Akira, storyboarded by Kasei Mitsuko, and directed by Tamada Hiroshi. Tamada has spent most of his career as an episode director, but just last year he stepped up into the chief director role for the anime adaptation of Isekai light novel series, saving 80,000 gold in another world for my retirement. The animation director on this episode was Nishimura Nobayoshi. And now the recap.
The lean horse, Junior, White Ark and all their crew are on their way to the moon with the revelation that the lead designer of the Victory Gundam V two was none other than Uso's mother, Mira Miguel. There is some hope that Uso will be able to find her at the league militaire's mobile suit factory there, and the ship needs new mobile suits and other supplies. Chronicles fleet does their best to intercept that. They are no match for Uso's new mobile suit and constantly improving skills. Nonetheless, the linhorse junior is badly damaged from its repeated run ins with the Zanskar fleet and is forced to make an emergency landing outside the lunar city of St. Joseph. One of their local contacts has alerted them to the presence of Zanskar spies in the city and has instructed them not to approach the factory directly from space, but to come through the city and to arrive in a small civilian transport. Karl drives the earthnoid kids and Flanders from the white Ark to the nearest city entrance, where the guards wave them through without suspicion. All of them are in awe of the immense glass and steel towers of the city. But in a place so big, so full of people, what chance do they really have of finding Uso's mother?
As they drive down the highway, a.
Dark sedan in front of them swerves across multiple lanes and into a retaining wall. Carl jerks the wheel to one side, and they come to a stop in time to see a woman get out of the sedan and run down a tunnel. Three men in dark suits get out of the sedan, spot the woman, then get back in and drive after her. Follow them, Uso insists, grabbing hold of the wheel. You're always getting us into trouble, Odello complains, but Uso is adamant, and they take off after the fleeing woman and her pursuers. The tunnel is a dead end. With nowhere to run, the woman stands illuminated by the sedans headlights. One of the men from the car runs up and punches her in the face, calling her a spy. Before they can force her back into the car, the kids buggy pulls up, crushing the sedan under its tires like a monster truck, crushing junkers. Uso jumps in with a flying kick while Flanders bites down on the wrist of a man with a gun and Haro clamps itself over the face of the third Mandev. Shakti goes to help the woman to the buggy, eyes widening as she realizes its Mira Miguel. After getting away cleanly, Meera directs them to a safe place while the rest of the group continue on to the League militaire factory. Odello and Shakti tell Uso to stay behind, clearly intending to give him some time alone with his mother. Once they are alone, Mira holds out her arms to Uso, and he rushes into her embrace, his head resting in her lap. Uso listens as his mother apologizes for leaving him behind, and he tells her about how he came to be the victory gundams pilot. She admires how capable he is and admits that they raised him to be able to fight, and fight well, because the night before his birth, she believes she had a prophetic dream, a dream that told her that her child would be a new type, someone with the power to do incredible things. She created the victory to destroy the guillotine and all it represents. Uso became a pilot for the same reason. Mira apologizes again for the suffering Uso has endured for raising him to be a fighter. But for one evening, they can be just mother and son. And Uso sleeps cuddled up to Mira. The peaceful sleep of a child, safe in their parents armst.
Well, I was not expecting another recap episode quite so soon after that first one. And this is a distinctly odd recap episode.
It is. I guess they both sort of were like, theres enough content in each of them that they dont feel dispensable the way a clip show might be. It's not just a bunch of characters sitting around saying like, hey, do you remember that time when we had to, whatever, launch the boots from the cameon? How exciting. The first one had the Duker ek like presentation to Maria. Our first glimpse of the Zanskar capital, the Zanskar ruling elite. This one, Uso's reunion with his mother. It's a huge, momentous, something he's been looking for basically the whole show. But it's extremely weird because of what they've chosen to show us, because it's not. I mean, this is a 50 something odd episode show. It's four core. The first recap was episode 17. This is episode 30. You would think knowing that information, that it'd be like, oh, okay. I guess it's like a three act structure. The first act gets recapped in the first recap, the second act gets recapped in the second recap, and then the third one takes us on through, barreling into the conclusion. The first recap episode happens right after they leave Earth. The second recap happens right when they arrive at the moon. So, you know, there's a certain, like, organizational principle that seems to be operating here. And yet the things that they actually recap in this episode are not the events of the previous 15 episode Space Combat arc. They're again recapping the first ten episodes of the show. In fact, I think they might be just reusing many of the same clips that they used in the first recap episode. Cause they were so cool and great. I guess that's really what they want us to remember from victory.
I'm going to sound as though I am defending this episode. Don't like recap episodes. They're typically quite boring. This one is odd in that about half of it feels like it's new animation. Whereas in my experience, clip episodes tend to lean more heavily into the clips and have much less new animation, despite the fact that they are reusing clips from very early in the season. And that all the clips are too long to maintain any kind of good pacing in this back half of episode 30. I didn't think there was a kind of logic to them. USo and his mother are reunited after, I'm gonna guess, some number of months apart. He's filling her in on what's happened to him and on his experience becoming the victory Gundam's pilot. It makes sense that he would start sort of at the beginning, that he would start with some of those earliest experiences that he had piloting. Again, the clips are all way too long. You dont even need clips at all. He could just talk about these things.
And ill concede that at least some of those bits at the beginning do make sense for USO recounting to his mother all the things that have happened to him and how he got here. But like you said, they're too long. And if you were doing it for the art of it, if you were doing it to tell this story and you felt like the best way to do that was with these clips, yeah, I'd cut them way down. Half as long, a third as long, maybe. And it's weird when so much of their latter conversation is about how Uso is a special person, has special abilities, is developing to become a new type, perhaps that they don't cover at all the parts of his adventure where he's been in space and actually starting to have those new type feelings, starting to have that precognition.
Well, for one thing, I don't think that USo entirely understands that those feelings he's having are what people mean when they talk about new types. Everyone has described things to him in such a vague, wishy washy kind of way that how is he supposed to connect those moments in space when he seems to have this almost preternatural awareness of what's going on around him? How is he supposed to connect that with people talking about new types?
Maybe this would be a good opportunity for him to make that connection.
I also think like, yeah, it would be a better episode if the clips were shorter. But my suspicion, given the odd structure of this episode, is that they were looking at the plot, the narrative set up for the next couple of episodes and realized that they had either a spare half an episode that they couldn't cut or realized, oh, no, the transitions between these couple of events don't really make sense. We need another half episode worth of content, but that's all we have, a half episode's worth. And so they're kind of just splitting the difference here. It's half a new episode, half a clip show, something like that, and it.
Opens with a bang. That opening combat sequence is very frenetic, very exciting.
You mean young Uso versus that tree?
Oh, no, no. I mean the fighting. Once he goes all dread pirate Roberts, I am not right handed. I can kill with either hand. And because he's using the new mobile suit, there's a ton of new animation in that. Anytime the new mobile suit has to do anything they don't have banked sells for it. So it's gotta be new.
In case we missed it last time, they make sure to show us again the v two's wings of light and have multiple characters comment on it.
Well, I mean, it's pretty cool. You gotta admit. That's pretty cool.
Audience.
Audience. Did you see. Did you see the wings? Did you see the wing a ling gundam?
Everybody loves wing Gundam.
I found a lot of the facial expressions in this episode really fun. I actually did a couple of posts on Twitter with my favorites. Very expressive, goofy faces on a lot of the kids. Having the kids all crammed into the buggy together is a great excuse for some group shots. Otello's comment that a group of kids is less suspicious if they have a dog with them is hilarious, but also true and also made me think of countless animated series of the past that have been group of children with dog.
Mm hmm.
So many.
Well, the child, especially a group of children, is like a hostile, foreign alien entity. Like, what is a child? What is it capable of? We can't understand them and a gang of them. But a dog. A dog humanizes the child. And of course, Warren then displays his unique talent again, his ability to have a fever on command.
Well, he just needs to be adequately nervous, which is easy enough under the circumstances.
He's gonna grow up to have anxiety. He's gonna be nervous all the time.
It was almost certainly Uso's new type abilities that made him grab the wheel of the buggy as they are driving through traffic to be like, no, chase that car. Even as his friends are like, God, you are always getting us into trouble. Why do you do this? We have a mission. We have places to go, things to do. He's like, no, follow that car.
He did see a blonde woman jump out of the car and take off.
Running, but he had no idea it was his mother. Neither he nor Shakti had any idea that that was Mira Miguel, until they go to rescue her from the men in black.
But the spirit of Gundam possessed him.
And despite all of that, it does seem to be Odello who takes the lead on giving Uso time alone with.
His mother, which is a nice answer to that time when Odello got really mad at USO for looking for his mom, and they got into a fight over it, shows a lot of development, both personally and in their friendship and.
Odello's kind of gruffness. The fact that he snaps at UsO a little bit when Uso very conscientiously is like, oh, but aren't I supposed to help you all with this? Just take some time off. I'm trying to do something nice for you, you idiot. I'm sure Odello still feels a lot of grief over the loss of his own family and sort of grief on the part of Warren and Susie as well. He still feels that, but he doesn't begrudge Uso that. Uso's own parents are still around.
Mm hmm. A certain sort of person would try to suck all the joy out of that. A certain sort of person would see Uso's reunion with his mother and feel personally, really bad about it. Why do you get to have this?
Or would just be mean or unpleasant or cold?
Mm hmm.
Naturally, Shakti is the one who thinks to bring Meera a cold compress. They don't render it this way in the subtitles because it's not something done in English very frequently. But she addresses Meera as Mira Obasan.
Like Auntie.
Yeah. Oh, Auntie Mira. Which basically, I mean, we already knew that these two families were very close. They were direct neighbors in a pretty isolated community. But it tells you a little bit more about their relationship and that they were quite close.
And then when the door closes, Uso at first doesn't know what to do. He seems to be very stuck, very uncertain. But his mother immediately raises her arms to him and is like Uso, but.
Also lets him come to her. While there were some moments in this episode that made me go, oh, no, by and large, I think Mira Miguel might be in the running for best mother in Gundam. To date.
So far seems to be the case. Yeah. I mean, she's very accepting of what he's done. Even when he tells her, like, I've been piloting the mobile suit, there's no fear, there's no horror. You can tell she's, like, stroking his arm, and she doesn't stop even for a moment. When he tells her that, she's just, like, she's proud of him. She's visibly proud of him. At a couple of instances, she's clearly.
Sad that he is in this position. But she doesn't try to stop him. She doesn't make him feel that he is at fault for the situations he's found himself in. She apologizes for leaving him and even tells him that. She doesn't expect him to understand. She doesn't expect him to forgive her for having done that.
And at the end, she even has this line. It's after he's fallen asleep. But she's talking to herself and she says, you know, we, your father and I, we've also suffered. But I'm sorry for what we've done to you, the way we've raised you and tested you.
Testing keeps coming up in these last few episodes. I didn't check to make sure that it's the same word in every case. But Lupe talked about wanting to test Uso in some way to find out whether or not he was a new type. I described them as men in black because they are guys in black suits, black fedoras, one of whom is wearing sunglasses, who have captured Mira and call her a spy. And they accuse her of trying to see their test results, whatever that's with regards to. And then she talks about having tested USO when they were raising him.
Well, earlier, regarding the men in Black Chronicle is talking to Duker about the testing for the Motorad fleet, which seems like they've been doing some of it here near St. Joseph. So that might be the testing that she's been spying on.
And when you consider the very beginning of the episode, the setup of the beginning of the episode, we are clearly meant to understand that the way in which he was raised is a big part of what has allowed UsO to survive and make it this far.
That first scene where they're teaching him to throw knives ambidextrously, is like, you see that? And it immediately recontextualizes a whole lot about Uso's life. It's like, oh, they were raising him to be a commando. Like they were training this kid for the life that he's leading now.
Although I'm pretty sure pedagogically you would never do it this way. There is a kind of kung fu movie logic that they had him start with his non dominant hand. That's not having done martial arts. Usually you start with your dominant side, and then if you want to train up your non dominant side, you do that after or alongside. But you wouldn't start with your non dominant one and then switch.
Generally, the theory is that you train the dominant side first and foremost, because that's the fastest way to get somebody to be, like, competent in fighting and that you focus exclusively on that one stance. Either you're a southpaw boxer or you're an orthodox boxer and with a few exceptions, you don't like, switch and train both sides equally. A lot of the traditional martial arts, kung fu, karate, you do train both sides equally, and the main detriment to that is it takes so much longer to reach the same level of proficiency. But they've got all the time in the world. Because he's a little kid, they're raising him from infancy to be a knife throwing, gundam piloting phenom.
And I'm sure for the target audience of the show, this opening scene feels like a bit of a fake out. Uzo's mother walks up to catch him, several years younger than he is now, throwing knives at a target in the woods. And you think, maybe she's going to scold him, she's going to tell him that's dangerous, or, what are you doing? And instead she's giving him tips like, oh, you need to calm your feelings. Concentrate. Oh, try your other hand. She's not just critical, she's also encouraging. USo seems quite eager and happy, especially when he switches to his dominant hand and gets a bullseye right away.
Well, there's that bit later in the episode where he's like, did you do this on purpose? Did you train me to be a Gundam pilot and a revolutionary? And she's like, we never forced you. You were eager to do it.
Well, that line is one of the moments that gave me pause. It's very common and very natural that parents and children would have significantly different perceptions of events that both took part in. Even though USO's parents might never have perceived it as them making him do things, and they may not have even exerted what they saw as pressure. But if it was clear that pursuing certain kinds of activities made them happy and proud of him, he might have felt pressure to do them, even if they never, quote unquote, made him. Or he might legitimately just have gravitated towards the kinds of things that they wanted him doing anyway. And it all worked out very happily.
Yeah. If you had taken me as a child and taught me mobile suit piloting and knife throwing, I would have been very into that.
What feels revelatory about Mira, in a sense, is that she both acknowledges that USO has become very capable and is glad, but at the same time, she doesn't treat him like that means he's an adult. She says, thank goodness you've become such a capable child. Thank goodness you're such a capable child.
And the way they sleep together at the end of the episode is very mother and child.
Yes, extremely. Even the way, I mean, obviously, any of us in a deeply emotional situation might hug or cuddle a parent, but the way he lays his head in her lap and falls asleep that way and then the two of them cuddled up to sleep afterwards is much more that he's a child. I just appreciate that she doesnt see how competent he is, how able to survive he is, and then immediately say, okay, that means youre an adult now.
Well, Miras, one of the few characters weve encountered who knows absolutely for certain who and what Uso is. Everybody has been confused about how to treat him. Child, adult. What is this person? And that's been a running theme throughout the whole show, especially since they went into space. But Meera knows with absolute certainty that this is Uso, her child, who she loves very much, which, compared to other mothers in Gundam, that's refreshing.
I loved their brief exchange about sort of what adulthood means when USO tells her, I hate not knowing what to do, and she says, I know, but you bear with it, and eventually you understand what to do. And he asks what she means. And I'm going to paraphrase, because I think it's awkwardly phrased in the episode, but you just sort of bear with not knowing until understanding comes to you. And that to some extent, that's what being an adult is, slowly, painstakingly accumulating the knowledge and experience so that at least you know what to do more often. And when you don't know what to do, having the patience to wait and figure it out and to not act impulsively, which we've noted is one of USo's flaws, is that he can be quite impulsive.
And here Uso reveals that what has been driving him all this time, the purpose that he found I is the knowledge that the guillotine of Zanskar needs to be stopped. He must break the machine. And conveniently, the gundam was built for that purpose. Perhaps USo was also made for that purpose.
And this is where things get weird.
Because Mira has religion about this, right?
Is basically declaring Uso space Jesus, that the spirit of the Gundam appeared to her in a dream the night before he was born.
She had a visitation from the Gundam angel. Notably, the new Gundam has wings. I don't know if we mentioned that earlier, but, you know, wings on the Gundam, like an angel.
Her line about how Uso was never just their child, that he was their child, but also has this destiny.
And I don't think she ever says the word destiny in the course of the episode, but strongly alludes to it, talking about how he's managed to survive, how he's managed to do all of these impossible things, how the Gundam has, like, protected and guided him all this.
Time, and that she does not believe that it's a coincidence.
Yeah, and she says it's too big to call it talent. It's something beyond that. And what else could it be but destiny? The pivot here to religion, to making Uso into a messianic figure feels super important for victory, which has thus far been a lot about Maria as a religious figure and the cult of personality around her. The corruption of Maria ism into the Zanskar empire's tyrannical and murderous drive to conquer the whole earth sphere.
What feels potentially significant about Uso is that it wasn't enough for his mother to have this prophetic dream that implied that her son was going to be a new type, that he was going to have this potentially incredibly powerful ability. On top of that, they raised their son a certain way, educated him in certain things, trained him in certain things. They weren't just going to depend on that new type ability and let the chips fall where they may. The two aspects kind of complement each other, whereas with Maria, quite possibly because of the circumstances around her, I it really feels like her healing power is all she's got. She doesn't really have independent political power. She does not seem able to build her own independent power base.
But Uso's parents saw his raw, unformed potential, and they raised him to become what he is now. They raised him to be a weapon to break the guillotine. Maria is also surrounded by powerful older figures who have shaped and guided her and who have used her potential to their own ends. It gives a sense of religion, of spiritual power, as being a kind of unformed, raw thing, a resource that can be shaped, can be wielded, but the people who possess it are rarely the people who determine what it's used for.
Mira mentions that even a realist like Uso's father, Hengerg believed her or was brought to believe this odd dream that she had, that it had real meaning and real significance.
A bit like Mary and Joseph, right? That Mary has the dream, but Joseph believes.
But despite both of them believing this and having significant connections in the league militaire and being involved in all of this themselves, in spite of both of them believing this and believing it strongly enough to have it shape how they raised their child. And despite both of them having all of these connections through the league militaire and through whatever else they've been up to, they have not tried to weaponize this. They haven't tried to create a cult around USo. And that's quite a balancing act for someone to believe that their child is some sort of destined savior, but to still let him be a child for as long as possible, even when war.
Comes knocking, and to leave him behind. Perhaps they felt he wasn't ready for it yet. Perhaps they felt he should make the choice on his own. But she doesn't. Neither of them bring him with them when they go off to the war.
In a way, Uso gets to be shielded because he can instead fall back on the cult of the Gundam. Numerous characters have already talked about the significance of having a Gundam involved in their side, supporting their side, and that.
He is the pilot who is reviving the legend of the Gundam, but that.
Lets it be about the Gundam and not about him.
Well, Uso is merely the prophet of the Gundam.
I made a skeptical look. They are two halves of the same weapon for destroying the machine. The one could not function without the other.
Well, the Gundam itself is a Trinity. The Boots, the hanger, and the core fighter. And Uso is the herald of the Gundam. I don't think we're off base with these religious analogies, and I don't think it's a coincidence that her name is Mira and they're in St. Joseph, very similar to Mary and Joseph from Christianity, from the Bible. You know, that book that a lot.
Of people have read, it's kind of important.
It's just funny referring to them as Mary and Joseph from ChristIanity. A couple of quick little detail notes. The factory that they're headed towards that is connected to St. Joseph, they call it the Khorasm. They spell it with an x in the show, the Khorasm factory. Khorasm is a region in Uzbekistan and it's from whence the famed astronomer Muhammad al Khwarizmi gets his name. There's a al Khwarizmi crater on the far side of the moon. And so that probably gives us the location of St. Joseph. It's probably in or adjacent to the al Khwarizmi crater. It's very funny to me that lunar cities are always just a bunch of skyscrapers in an underground cavern with a plexiglass wall to keep the space out and the atmosphere in and that they've still got, like, highways, belt roads.
I appreciated the awe that the kids express on driving into the city for the first time, particularly because it's so different than the cities that the earthenoid kids come from. They come from buildings with much older architecture that are frankly smaller and at least look old fashioned versus this very modern glass and steel looking overpasses driving around the buildings type city.
Yeah, lunar cities might look a lot like modern cities, your Tokyos, your New Yorks, but they do look completely different from either space colonies or the remaining earth cities.
And in further evidence that they want us to see Uso's reunion with Mira as a sign of his newtype ability, they express out loud. It would be impossible to find a single person in a place like that. They wouldn't even know where to begin.
And 10 seconds later, there she is. Its not just a coincidence and its bigger than talent, its something else.
Cue newtype sound.
And now the first of Toms research pieces on Yugoslavias influence.
On victory Gundam in 1994, Victory Gundam chief director Tomino was asked why he chose to place Cassarelia, the homeland of the show's main characters in eastern Europe. He gave several that the region is generally unfamiliar to japanese people, that it straddles the border between Europe and Asia, and that he felt it was a good location to depict a world where old ethnic distinctions had ceased to exist. He mentioned almost in passing that it was because of the then ongoing conflict in Yugoslavia that the region had even come to the attention of the japanese public. Looking back ten years later for the release of Victory on dvd, Tomino was willing to get more explicit in a back and forth which has been translated into English by Mark Simmons. He argued that victory was inspired by the collapse of the bipolar cold War framework that had defined international relations for most of his life. When soviet central authority collapsed, it created a power vacuum in eastern Europe that Tomino likened to Japan's own warring states period. He theorized that each community would derive a unique identity from its local environment, combining the lifestyle derived from the terrain, climate and resources of their land with their own pre existing culture. These characteristics would give each group diverse and conflicting interests. Under these circumstances, Tomino said, won't people go to war over and over again? And to make matters worse, they would still possess that egotism which is natural to most humans. Tomino argued that there could be no peace without some central authority capable of reconciling their interests and satisfying their egos. The authority must not only be strong enough to squash any conflict like Doctor Manhattan in watchmen, it also needed the symbolic power to make people want to get along. Like the alien squid. Tomino pointed to the familiar japanese example, the Tokugawa shogunate, which was able to end the warring States period because they preserved the institution of the emperor as an irrelevant but potent symbol. Likewise, the Meiji government succeeded by keeping the emperor around during their breakneck modernization program. Material power can reconcile material interests, but only symbolic power can reconcile conflicting egos. According to this interview, it was only while he was considering the situation in Yugoslavia that Tomino came to this conclusion. He discovered in the person of by then deceased yugoslavian president, dictator Josip Bras Tito, a man who had wielded the heavy hand of state power to somehow pacify dozens of different ethnic groups and wed them briefly to the symbolic idea of Yugoslavianism. And it was when thinking about Gundam through the lens of Yugoslavia that Tomino hit on the idea of mariaism. Just as Tito had formed the center of gravity around which all yugoslavian politics orbited during his lifetime, Maria would become the symbolic center of Zanskar. And it was the wars that brought Yugoslavia to his attention. Before the conflict started, he didn't know anything about the country. He didn't even know who Tito was. Of course. Ten years later, in 2015, Tomino again answered a question about the influence of the yugoslav wars and the end of the cold war on Victory Gundam. This time he said that there hadn't been any influence, not really. Actually, what he had been thinking about mostly was the gap between those who plan wars and those who fight them. You gotta love the guy. I guess if you're watching the dvd version, then you're watching the version of Victory that was inspired by Yugoslavia and the end of the Cold War. And if you're watching the Blu ray version, then you're watching the version that was actually about the distance between those planning wars and yada, yada, yada. So this research piece is exclusively for you dvd watchers. We're going to talk about Yugoslavia. If you're watching along on the Blu rays, then you can go ahead and skip the next 20 minutes or so. If you're not watching along or if you're just streaming the show, then I'm going to have to ask you to choose a side and stick with it. Honor system. This is going to be the first of several pieces about the yugoslav wars. The topic is far too big to try to cover in a single research piece because these are big themes that run throughout victory, and because I don't want the show to get too monotonous or depressing. I'm not going to do these back to back as we have done in the past for multi part research pieces. Rather, I'm just going to be coming back to this topic periodically, covering different aspects of the country and the wars that ended it. This week we're building the foundation, covering the series of historical developments that ultimately produced Yugoslavia and answering basic questions like what was Yugoslavia, where was Yugoslavia, when was Yugoslavia, who was Yugoslavia and why was Yugoslavia Yugoslavia, a name I've said so many times now that it's beginning to lose all meaning, means land of the southern Slavs and it was a multi ethnic country on Europes Balkan peninsula that existed from 1918 until 1992. Except for a four year gap in the 1940s when the country was occupied and divided by the Axis powers. It covered the territory now claimed by the modern states of Croatia, Slovenia, North Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo, although whether that last one counts as a state remains contested. Yugoslavia was thus north of Greece, west of Bulgaria and Romania, south of Hungary and Austria, and east of Italy. The Balkan peninsula has long been between. Tomino talked about it as a space between Europe and Asia, but it also stood between Greece and Rome in antiquity, between the eastern and western halves of the Roman Empire, between the orthodox patriarch and Constantinople and the pope in Rome, between the Holy Roman Empire and the Ottomans, between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. This betweenness has contributed to the region's infamously fragmentary patchwork of overlapping religious, linguistic, ideological, political. To really understand the origins of Yugoslavia, you have to go all the way back to the 6th century, when the Balkans were divided into the roman prefectures of Dalmatia in the northeast and Illyricum in the south, and were ruled by the eastern roman emperors in Constantinople. During the reign of the emperor Justinian, the empire was hit by a catastrophic epidemic, appropriately called the plague of Justinian, and which we now recognize to be caused by the same bacterium responsible for the Black Death. Many centuries later, this epidemic may have killed as much of a quarter of the population in the areas where it took hold. Out in the countryside, agricultural production collapsed, leading to a catastrophic decline in tax revenue. Justinian, caught in the midst of a ruinously expensive series of wars against the Vandals, is supposed to have increased taxes on the survivors, which drove many of the surviving farmers into bankruptcy. Huge sections of the countryside became effectively depopulated, their military garrisons too weak to exert local control or resist external invasion, which was convenient for the Avars, a confederation of central asian steppe nomads who began raiding the european and especially balkan parts of the byzantine empire from around the Avars ultimately settled north of the empire in the carpathian basin, roughly modern Hungary, where they remained until the. Actually, in a neat coincidence, you remember Tassilo III, the last independent duke of Bavaria, who was twice accused of treachery by Charlemagne, and from whom I think Tasilo Vago got his name well. The second accusation of treachery, the one that resulted in Tasilo surrendering his lands and titles to the king, was that the duke had formed a secret alliance with the Avars against the Franks. But the Avars are not the important ones here. Rather, it was the other peoples they had subjugated on their long ride from the asian steppe to the carpathian basin. Among these were numerous slavic tribes who found themselves enlisted in the avar forces and raiding byzantine lands alongside their masters. Finding the countryside depopulated by plague and war, some of these slavic tribes decided to settle in large numbers on the roman side of the border. Constantinople found the new settlers impossible to expel. Immediately, the cultures of the slavic tribes began to diverge in response to their local circumstances. In Albania and Greece, farthest from the borders, the slavic settlers were relatively few in number and were effectively integrated into the albanian and hellenic worlds. Elsewhere, as in Serbia, the Slavs fully assimilated the local population. In Macedonia. Nearer Constantinople, they fell under the power of the emperor and adapted to byzantine culture. In Dalmatia. Along the Adriatic, the fortified coastal cities retained their mediterranean Romande italian culture while the countryside became heavily slavic. In the north, the Slavs merged with the bulgar nomads and native Thracians along with many other groups to become the ancestors of todays Bulgarians. This will continue to be a theme but lets fast forward a few centuries ignoring a ton of important stuff like the rise and fall of the serbian empire under the rule of a whole bunch of guys named Stefan because well be coming back to it in subsequent episodes. We must jump ahead now to the final collapse of byzantine power in the Balkans and the arrival of the Ottoman Empire, who put an end to the stephanocracy when they seized the Balkans for their own. Slovenia, which is at the northern end of what became Yugoslavia, was never conquered by the Ottomans and so it instead fell under the sway of their northern neighbors, the german Habsburgs. The local Slovenes accepted first bavarian and then frankish rule and adopted the western facing latin Christianity of their overlords. South of Slovenia, Croatia was divided. The southern part fell under ottoman dominion. The coastal cities were seized by the Venetians, and the northern regions were turned into a military frontier by the Habsburgs. Further south, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro and Kosovo were all conquered by the Ottomans between 1389 and I 1499, but they were subjected to different treatment and adopted or resisted ottomanization in radically different ways over the ensuing centuries. Those centuries were crucial for the development of the various slavic identities and polities that united to form Yugoslavia. We still distinguish between Bosnia and Herzegovina largely because the latter, a duchy within the medieval kingdom of Bosnia, managed to hold out for 20 years after the former fell into ottoman hands, which led the Ottomans to treat it as a separate province under the name Herzegovina. Were going to be coming back to all of this some other day. For now, we need to skip ahead again to the next crucial moment, 1878 and the Congress of Berlin. See the Russian Empire, with assistance from Balkan Slavs, had just got done kicking the Ottomans teeth in during the Russo Turkish War. This was the era of the concert of Europe, when the great powers believed that maintaining a balance of power amongst themselves would prevent the outbreak of another major european war. The powers were deeply concerned about Russia growing too mighty from the spoils of ottoman defeat, not only through direct annexation, but also through the creation of a powerful new client state, Bulgaria. So, in summer 1878, representatives of the great powers, including Russia and the Ottoman Empire, met in Berlin. Under the stern eye and the heavy guiding hand of german chancellor Otto von Bismarck, Russia was allowed to keep many of its territorial acquisitions. But Bulgaria was divided, and part of it, Macedonia, was returned to the Ottomans. Serbia, Montenegro, and Romania were all recognized as independent states, while Bosnia and Herzegovina remained formally under the suzerainty of the Ottomans, but occupied and administered by Austria Hungary. Thus, the balance of power was maintained, and no major war would ever trouble the balkan peninsula or Europe again. In 1908, Austria Hungary announced the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, touching off the bosnian crisis. This move particularly enraged the serbian nationalist movement, who were by now beginning to dream of a greater Serbia that included Bosnia, or even perhaps the union of all the South Slavs into a single state. Within days of the austro hungarian annexation of Bosnia, Yugoslavists and serbian nationalists started organizing themselves into secret societies dedicated to expelling the hated empire. And four years later, a bosnian serb student and member of one such group gunned down the habsburg heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, outside a sandwich shop in Sarajevo, which famously led to an extended kerfuffle. After the kerfuffle quieted down, the Balkans were once again subjected to extensive reconstruction under the influence of the great powers, but with a couple of significant differences. For one, Austria Hungary and Germany didnt get much of a say in matters. For some reason. And just as crucially this time the powers were operating under a new principle. Instead of the balance of powers that had animated the Congress of Berlin, the great powers would now be taking their cues from american president Woodrow Wilsons 14 points for lasting peace in point number ten, Wilson called for the numerous peoples of the multi ethnic austro hungarian empire to be given the right of national self determination. And in point eleven, he called for a conference of the Balkan states to determine in friendship the political future of the peninsula along historically established lines of allegiance and nationality. By this point, at the end of the war, power within the future Yugoslavia was divided between the independent kingdom of Serbia, which had taken advantage of the war to annex Montenegro, Kosovo and Macedonia, and the former habsburg possessions in Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia and Slovenia, represented by the National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, one of those self appointed legislatures that always pop up when revolution is in the air. On December 1, 1918, the two groups agreed to merge, forming a united pan yugoslav kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. In 1929, it formally adopted the name Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and there we will leave the subject for today with the principle of national self determination applied and the yugoslavian dream of a unified nation for the South Slavs of the Balkans achieved war would never again return to trouble the Balkans or Europe next time, whenever we get to it. Irony. Another kerfuffle engulfs Europe and Yugoslavia is torn apart from within and without. But itll be the reconstruction that really matters.
Next time on episode 10.31, Shaktis big Adventure. We research and discuss Victory Gundam, episode 31 and motor transform and roll out. Lift with your boots, not your hanger.
Now she wants to get involved.
Men in black too. Buso and the gang.
Be under construction.
Mom, look at what I can do.
Mom, watch this. Are you watching? And killed by friendly tire, please listen to it.
Mobile suit Breakdown is written, recorded and produced by us, Tom and Nina in scenic New York City, within the ancestral and unceded land of the Lenape people and made possible by listeners like you. The opening track is waspental by Misha Dioxin. The closing music is long way home by spinning ratio. The recap music is slow by Lloyd Rogers. You can find links to the sources for our research, the music used in the episode, additional information about the Lenape people, and more in the show notes on our website gundampodcast.com. if youd like to get in touch with us, you can email hostessundompodcast.com or look for links to our social media accounts on our website. And if you would like to support the show. Please share us with your friends. Leave a nice review wherever you listen to podcasts or support us financially@gundampodcast.com. patreon. You can find links and more ways to help out@gundampodcast.com. support thank you for listening. There are a lot of wrong Gundam opinions out there corrupting the fandom. But there are also writing opinions. Like when Cauldron Panic said, you know, whenever I watch victory and the Gwigsies not on screen, I always go, eyo, where's my boy Gwigsy at? These are the kind of opinions we want to see more of in the community.
Car revving noise in the background. The medically appropriate car noise.
Diegetic I didn't know we were doing sound effects now. You know, when we were first, like, blueprinting out the podcast, I actually at one point thought we would do sound effects and stuff for the recaps.
Oh, goodness.
I know it would have been way.
Too much work, but it would have been fun.
Yeah, it would have been fun and cool. And if this was a corporate production with a staff of ten people.
Yeah.
You, you, you.
It's all about me, baby.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The fans have made very clear to.
Us that it is, in fact, all.
About tigress, and she doesn't even appreciate it. Her celebrity, it all comes so easily to her.
That is part of her charm.
She's not so charming. Hard about it, Tom. Hi.
I'm gonna get her some food.
Oh, he's gonna get you some food, kitten.
I know, I know, I know.
Kitten. I have one more thought to express, and then you can, then I can get on the floor and cuddle.