I was listening to the Veef Show podcast talking about Mobile Suit ZZ Gundam and it features one of the show's translators, Neil Nadelman. In it, he states that the parents of Judau Ashta, Iino Abbav, Elle Vianno, Mondo Agake and Beecha Oleg are all off the space colony looking for work, leaving the kids to fend for themselves and they do so by scavenging.
Compared to other show in the Universal Century (UC) timeline where the main characters are mostly upper/middle class, (examples off the top of my head being Banagher Links from Gundam Unicorn, Kamille Bidan from Zeta Gundam and Alfred Izuruha from Gundam War in the Pocket), ZZ may be the only UC show that features poor kids who happen to dress very fashionably for kids without parents and their plight to get off the colony towards a better life.
Nadelman also states that the motive of those five characters is not political at all, which was quite different from what was established as the main character's motives at the time. When they were recruited into the Argama, the flagship fleet for the Earth Federation, they did so with the understanding that they're not in it to fight a war. They just want money so they can at least improve their living situation. With regards to Judau, he never changed a beat when it came to his motives and they always involved Leina. He only became a pilot only if it can help his little sister have a good future.
Eventually Leina Ashta got kidnapped by the enemy commander Glemy Toto and was taken under his wing to become a proper woman and that became Leina's first glimpse of what it's like being rich. When you think about it, it's a very obvious visual of class discrepancy. Kids messing around in a junkyard stealing shit in contrast to glass houses with nicely dressed people having elegant dinners really paints a good picture of the differing qualities of social classes. Furthermore, you see it even more when Glemy tries to transform the poor girl from the junkyard into a proper woman, but Leina then has no issue leaving the elegant lifestyle when Judau comes to rescue her. Maybe she sees that this rich life isn't for her. Or is it more that she sees Glemy as a huge lunatic that she needs to get away from?
No matter, class issues was not an obvious theme of the show when I first watched ZZ but listening to that podcast did make me think about it in retrospect. It was essentially the story of poor kids trying to set up a better life through being pilots. It just never dawned on me until now that this was the overarching plot aside from stopping Neo Zeon.
