What was Zeon, canonically? Was he an ahead-of-his-time philosopher

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He's basically the reincarnation of Doba Ajiba.
https://youtu.be/pOp_YUwE9VY

You're allowed to decide for yourself. I personally think he was mentally unbalanced and his philosophy reflects that. I'd even go so far as to say his fetishizing of Newtypes is directly responsible for their extermination by ensuring they would too often be used as tools of war, causing them to die young and childless. Newtypes would have become much more commonplace if not for Zeon's assumption that they were inevitable.

>>13764202
There's no proofs of Astraya being a slut.

Zeon Deikun was a philosopher, who could save humanity from the disasters of the later UC. But, thanks to Zabi, the reputation of Zeon's teachings is gone and only Char tried to make the good image of the movement

>>13764202
"Canon" doesn't pass judgement on things you fucking retard.

If you mean what was he meant to be, Tomino never really made it clear and every other person who did anything treated him differently.

this is why i dont / never dig all these non-canon / expanded universe crap in scifi. Just watch the TV series and be done with it.

>>13764202
He is what you want him to be, buddy.

>>13764385
To be honest, while I like Origin's take on things, a part of me can't help but feel Tomino preferred we never actually know what he was like.

Knowing the kind of person Deikun was would paint how we read his philosophy, as all the responses to The Origin have shown.

As MSG itself has it, we just have his ethos and how it's been spun/interpreted/perverted by the various factions around him. Makes for a more interesting development that way.

>>13764202
>ahead-of-his-time
> power-hungry
> crazy guy
yes

>>13764202
It depends.
MSG is vague about it.
Tomino's novels paint him much more as an "ahead-of-his-time philosopher".
Origin seems to imply a little bit of all three of what you suggested, leaning towards "crazy-guy".
I like Tomino's interpretation of Deikun the most. It legitimizes Zeon as a faction, sort of giving them equal philosophical footing with the Federation (Which is described as being humanist).

>>13764416
I don't know, I think this thread shows a lot of Deikun is still left to interpretation. Even with the origin, they never really get into his character.

>>13764513
>>13764514

Actually, there's a speech by Deikun in the Tomino-written Zeta novels (source: http://www.mechatalk.net/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=16460) where he basically declares how individual rights are terrible and responsible for polluting the Earth, things are better when individual rights are subsumed for the good of the state and how Spacenoids are superior because they don't care about that nonsense and are focused on surviving in the harsh environment that is space. It all sounds very totalitarian and it's not hard to see how you can go from there to the kind of ideology espoused by the likes of Gihren.

BTW, I think English translated excerpts of that speech are in the book that Jinba Ral is quoting Deikun's teaching at to Char in Origin episode 2.

>>13764406
I feel you.

>>13764202
he is the Karl Marx of the universal century, allot of good idealistic propositions that humanity maybe could have achieved to solve the issues of the Universal Century. Got co opted and killed by dictators. The social issues never went away(because they are a fundamental problem of UC) so Zeonism never really went away, but so to did the tyrants who controlled it's ideals.

>>13764380
>Zeon Deikun was a philosopher, who could save humanity from the disasters of the later UC.

I disagree, in fact a lot of disasters of late UC could be laid on Deikun's footsteps. Blame the Zabis all you want, but the fact remains that shorn of it's new age, feelgood sounding bullshit, at it's core, Deikun's philosophy basically promotes Spacenoid supremacism. He outright says that only Spacenoids are the superior people who can evolve into Newtypes. In fact Origin highlights several time that a lot of the 'Spacenoids are superior' rhetoric comes directly from Deikun's teachings (see Jinbal Ral teaching Char or some of Gihren's speeches in the later volumes). The Zabis no doubt built upon this 'Spacenoids are superior' foundation when they built up their regime and it quite likely also influenced the late Zanscare and Cosmo Babylonia regimes to some extent as well. It's possibly the reason why a lot of Spacenoid governments end up being whacked out fascist dictatorships.

>>13764643
Pretty much this. Zeon (the nation) and Zabi are such obvious parallels to Nazi Germany and Stalin's USSR.

He was one of those philosophy professors who were hippies back in the day and he filled his students heads with a bunch of new age crap. He got popular and rose to power and the stress of it all becomes too much for him and he starts to crack and make crazier and wild speeches before being killed off by a rival politician.

>>13764733
Speaking of this, anyone else find the Origin sidestory where he's making Jesus parallels to Casval unintentionally hilarious?

>>13764380

And by good image of the movement, you mean dropping a colony on Earth.

>>13764406

>Expanded Universe
>Not Canon

The whole point of something being Expanded Universe is that it IS canon

>>13764202

So you wouldn't understand because you're not Asian, but there's a trope in East Asian (China, Japan, Korea, etc.) storytelling called "Don't wake the children!"

Whenever you see a father character wake his children in the middle of the night it's supposed to be short-hand for "THIS GUY IS A TERRIBLE FATHER!"

Origins was painting Zeon as a guy who had tried jumping into the deep end of the pool to impress people and discovered that he was drowning.

>>13764564
BTW, I think English translated excerpts of that speech are in the book that Jinba Ral is quoting Deikun's teaching at to Char in Origin episode 2.

Yup. Posting it anyway because the translation is different and has a part not seen in there:

Powered vehicles expanded man's awareness to a global level. And now, civilization is advancing into outer space. By living and working in space, man's consciousness will transcend the boundaries of Earth and become truly universal. The vastness of space will be "home". And as man's consciousness expands, he will begin to tap the unutilized portions of his cerebrum - the over half of his brain cells unused since time immemorial, the enormous untapped mental reserves given by God precisely for the new environment of space. And when this happens, man will change. Man will become a more enlightened, refined, and compassionate being. It is space - the act of living in an extraterrestrial environment - that will act as the trigger.

The harmful effect of specialization was that it provided a basis for promoting the doctrine of a single individual, rather than living in consistence with nature.

Until the 19th century, the history of civilization was one of constant struggle against nature, disease, and the tyrannical doctrines epitomized by anarchism. This forced humanity to undergo self-cleansing, and it prevented people from treating the Earth in a self-indulgent fashion. If they were able to escape disease, people felt humility and appreciation for life. Even with the man-made disasters of war, people responded as they did to the violence of nature, and sought only to continue living out their lives.

>>13765694 (continued)

Since the modern age, however, the masses demand compensation even for the sacrifices of national wars. At a glance, we can see that individual lives have been elevated to the same level as nations. But this too, is a result of individual specialization. A nation cannot obviously place it's member individuals on the same level as itself, and embracing the principle of individual sovereignty would mean the destruction of the nation. When a group of such individuals is managing a nation, the national administration becomes a doomed symbol of universal selfishness.

For example, when one's child dies because there is no fence around a pond in a public park, one might lay part of that responsibility for that death on the municipality that manages the park. There is no such option in space.

For humans, this is harsh. But because of that harshness, there is no option of appealing to the logic of human convenience. At the very least, it can make people reflect on the fact that blaming the municipality was an example of narrow thinking.

>>13765694

> he will begin to tap the unutilized portions of his cerebrum - the over half of his brain cells unused since time immemorial

It's sad that even in the future people will still believe that kind of unfounded pseudo-scientific bullshit.

>>13765694
Correction, once again: "tyrannical doctrines epitomized by anarchism" = "monarchism".

>>13764892
You're saying that like anybody outside of Organization knew of the plan.

>>13765710
It's tragic how billions have been killed in UC due to wars started based on the pseudo-scientific ramblings of some hack who probably wasn't even a scientist.

Really, Spacenoids like to brag about how they're more 'evolved' than Earthnoids because they're 'unbound by gravity' but really, all they do is repeat the mistakes of Earthnoids at a much larger scale.

>>13765993
I'm pretty sure everyone working with Char knew he was going to drop Axis on Earth. There's no other conceivable reason to move it there. If anyone on his side somehow didn't realize that, it's a sign that they're brainless imbeciles.

>>13764643
this

>>13764202
The last one.

>>13765710
Remember that MSG is from 1979.

>>13766863

That excerpt is from the Zeta novelization, which would have been released about 1985, by which time that kind of thinking should have been well disproven. Honestly, it should have been well disproven by the late 70s as well, since it was known even by then that removing any part of the brain, no matter how incidental seeming caused massive changes in functionality. Brain surgery as a proper medical science in that regard had been going on for decades at that point in the late 70s and early 80s.

>>13766988
To be fair, the whole 'using only X percent of your brain' nonsense is a myth that has persisted in popular culture to this day. Its cropped up a few Star trek episodes and there was even that Scarlett Johannsen movie where her character use a 100 percent of her brain and becomes God.. or something.

Now in-universe why no actual scientists in UC stepped forward to declare that Deikun was full of shit I don't know. Or maybe some did and were denounced as tools of the Evil Feddies or brutally killed by Angry Spacenoid Mobs, in fact, considering how Spacenoids act, I'd put good money on the latter happening.

>>13764643
I always say he's Karl Marx and Lenin rolled together.

>>13767205

It's not surprising that it is a thing in the present and will be in the future, it's just disheartening to know that it's true regardless.

>>13767205
>Now in-universe why no actual scientists in UC stepped forward to declare that Deikun was full of shit I don't know
They probably laughed him off as a pseudoscientist with a cult in a far-off space colony and/or the science checked out in-setting.

We have to remember that this is a universe where big giant humanoid robots are more effective war machines than tanks or planes due to a magical particle which should have brought out a post-scarcity society but instead becomes a McGuffin to explain why everything is actually sort of backwards and crappy compared to even our contemporary standards.

>>13767634

> a magical particle which should have bought out a post-scarcity society

Wait, what? How would the minovsky particle do that?

>>13764202
>syphilis

STDs don't exist in the future, we've cured them all by then.

>>13769346

Do you know how fucking crazy the world would go if we suddenly lost the ability to:

1. Accurately launch ICBM or any sort of guided missile

2. Communicate instantly with all corners of the globe

3. Send clear messages through satellites in space.

>>13773258

Yes, but what I don't know is how that would be supposed to lead to a post-scarcity society? Unless you're going off a very different definition of post-scarcity than I am, that being a society that has no resource problems and where everyone can get whatever they want at whim.

>>13773624

I think he just meant "Everyone declaring war on everyone" situation that most post-scarcity scenarios entail.

But I'm just guessing.

>>13775325

I must not be familiar enough with post-scarcity material then, because I cannot honestly name a single post-scarcity story of any kind that features lots of people declaring war on each other with that society. The closest I can think of is Star Trek and Banks' Culture novels, but there's internal peace in the post-scarcity societies within those - it's mostly conflict between non post-scarcity societies towards the post-scarcity ones.

>>13764643
And like Marx it is nothing but bullshit that is appealing at first glance but doesn't work in practice, as shown by all those pointless zeon and neo-zeon and neo-neo-whatever that follow. Because human nature cannot be denied.

Not even by magical space autism.

>>13776220

There's also the fact that, like Marx, Deikun appeals to concepts of 'destiny' and 'historical inevitability'. And of course, when you state that it's the inevitable endpoint of humanity for things to turn out like you envision, then you justify any behavior that will serve to try and make it a reality.

>>13776292
This is the big one here. Deikun's ideals are written and presented in a way that has them justifying extremism. If you believe that any action taken towards moving humanity and its ruling power into space is fundamentally good, you will do anything you've been led to believe will do that no matter how horrible. You'll drop colonies, you'll use nerve gas on your fellow spacenoids, you'll experiment on children to make superweapons. You can pick your poison when it comes to historic parallels, tons of nations have done horrible shit in the name of ideals.

>>13764202
>Was he an ahead-of-his-time philosopher who got put down because of his ideas?
Based on 0079, he was an ahead-of-his-time philosopher who got put down to secure the Zabi family's power