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Comment by joules77 | Hacker News Reader

Writing and writers changing every few decade. Reacting to the output of the previous gen.

Popular shows of 80-90s avoided trauma and ambiguity. Everything was simple and morally clear.

Then there was a huge counter reaction overload where we got Anti-Heroes, Moral Ambiguity, Trauma, "Realism" etc in every other show.

As viewers got tired and yearn for hope, faith, meaning, sincerity we got another wave (Ted Lasso, Reservation Dogs etc). Similar to the writing in Bluey they takes us back to Sincerity, but much smarter since they don't avoid Trauma. And show the viewer how healing and connection happens without power struggles.

Its basically a response to cynicism and fatigue. With comfort and care.

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> Popular shows of 80-90s avoided trauma and ambiguity. Everything was simple and morally clear.

Popular western shows did; I've started watching the Gundam series, the first set started in '79 and while superficially it looks like your generic saturday morning cartoon, it starts off with trauma (many people killed) and while the villains are obviously evil - genocide, nazi ideologies ("sieg zeon"), etc - they also get more character development than what the protagonists get. The villains are the underdogs, only 1/30th the size of the "federation", and the good guys have a new set of superweapons that seems to win and kill their people on every occasion. There's two episodes where a "villain" character is introduced as a lover, ambitious military man, etc, then gets killed, his would-be wife killing herself in the next episode.

Anyway, that's just recent experience, I'm sure if you revisit some of the 80's / 90's shows you'd see more trauma / ambiguity too. I'm thinking of the X-Men series for example.

That first run is pretty interesting because they clearly had the foresight to make things morally grey and the villians human. It's very clear they added some mustache twirling villiany to a few episodes as an afterthought. It's not even clear until like the last dozen episodes that Zeon is evil.

I know Gundam quality is a huge spectrum, but the 'sloppiness' of moral ambiguity in the first one is pretty great. Way too often (Z Gundam) they just do a timeskip and say "what if the good guys became bad after they won?"

> It's not even clear until like the last dozen episodes that Zeon is evil.

Zeon is literally portrayed as eugenicist Nazis early in the show. They literally chant "Sieg Zeon!" while saluting. Literally the very first episode shows Zeon dropping a space colony on Earth, essentially nuking a major population center (and says half the civilian population dies in the war.)

It's pretty clear Zeon is evil. What's unclear initially is that it was the Zabi family that made it evil.

Originally, Zeon was an idealistic movement by an essentially leftist philosopher (Zeon Deikun) whose work was co-opted by a militant autocratic family (the Zabi family). The leftist guy gets assassinated, and a big part of the series is watching his son, Char (the primary antagonist of the show) trying to take down the Zabi's while fighting for independence from the Federation.

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