Gurren-Lagann: Closing remarks

Our duty, as men and women, is to proceed as if limits to our abilities did not exist. — Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

There are any number of motivational quotes that would crystallize Gurren-Lagann, but I happened upon the above candidate in the latest (September) issue of IEEE GOLDRush, but that's not very important (I mean, it's IEEE). So here's to the kid's show that wasn't, and the affirmation that cool needs no other reason.

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There's an innocent-looking tree sitting in the kitchen. You look at it one day and see a shoot. Two days later, it's completely unfurled and the thin base stem looks as if it's gotten that much taller. Pretty soon, it'll be screaming for increasingly larger plant pots. At long last, it will be planted outside, where it will continue to grow faster and taller than I ever did.

When I spot yet another shoot appear, I think about Gurren-Lagann. Plant you now, dig you later.

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As if millions of physicists suddenly cried out in terror

Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann, wherein humanity discovers the Unified Field Theory and in return, agrees to discard the laws of thermodynamics. For the sake of a pretty fight of course. A solution to the inevitable destruction of the universe continues to elude the species as a whole.

(Progress: 27/27)

In an era of peace, there is little room for heroes

Old soldiers never die, but they may undergo puberty a second time. Even Yoko's jaw is squared at the end. I quite like my voice as it is right now and I'm not sure how I would feel were it to drop another octave over the course of 20 years. Perhaps this voice deepening was done to emphasize the time skip to kids, Gurren-Lagann being a kids' show and all. Right?

After seeing The Incredibles, a friend remarked that it had a foundation for children, with layers that would only be picked up by older people. It was entertaining for kids and their handlers, a very rewarding quality for those who managed to achieve that balance.


Subtlety was never a strong point of this series. Viewers are whacked over the head with the theme on at least four occasions:

1. The encounter with the isolated village
2. Lord Genome's stated motivations following his defeat
3. Rossiu and his Red Star leftists (trying to pick up where Genome left off but things quickly spiraled out of control)
4. The Anti-Spirals

It was always about population control and the problem of finite resources, played out on an increasingly larger scale. And each time the answer was to kick reason to the curb and break out of the limits imposed by others. Alone, the sentiment is inspirational and is a large factor in the feel-goodness of this series. Underneath that, though, spelled out in no uncertain terms by the Anti-Spirals on numerous occasions throughout the multi-episode battle, is how ugly breaking out can get.

Infiltrate, assimilate, consume the wreckage of the fallen, repeat. Friend or foe, it matters not and indeed we see Simon taking control of and absorbing things from either side throughout the series. It can be clever and heroic like his commandeering of the Daigenzan, but it can also border upon the horrific. Seeing Genome's head mounted to the base of a giant drill that gets consumed has hallmarks of the latter.

There's this sense of fatalism, depending on how far you want to push the symbolism. Even if all life were wiped out, entropy happens. You can try to reduce entropy in localized systems, but at cost to the larger whole. In other words, the universe, as far as we know, will burn itself out on its own. With our entropy producing ways, we would merely accelerate the process.


The eyes. Or just the eye. He's clearly half human, half Contractor. Wait, wrong series.

Is this how Simon spent his time to defending the universe? As a sage? It might not be a bad idea, for what steps should be taken to keep the resource party going for as long as possible? Forcefully take responsibility away from individuals and dictate terms? Or, as Simon advises the child, less force and more suggestion?

Gurren-Lagann is at turns cartoony, over the top, yet quite serious if you dare to venture beyond the fun factor. There's a lot to like, unless you're a physicist. Then it may just leave you in despair.

Lastly, I don't even remember what the first ED song and sequence was, but I always stick around and watch the Minna no Peace sequence in full. Loud anthemic rock, and Gurren-Lagann is definitely a better package with its own anthem.

Simon losing Nia and leaving everyone else mirrors the ED imagery. Usually the hero re-integrates into society after completing the last stages of his quest alone. Simon has always had support, and with his job done, heads out on his own. One last twist to a well-executed series.

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Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann: This surreal moment brought to you by the letter J

(Progress: Episode 26)

Some people have a fear of clowns. Me? I get weirded out when seeing the PBS logo, especially when set against a black background like in the above. I don't have any bad childhood memories of PBS programming, although I can't say the same for the National Film Board of Canada (and Boards of Canada seem to agree); it's just the logo that I have always found disconcerting.

Maybe it's the notion that I was bearing witness to a severed human head, or rather, the suggestion of one. At the age of 4 or so, it was hard enough trying to deal with the latest virus or bacterial infection, and now I was multi-tasking trying to make sense of vaguely humanoid outlines. It had the components of a face, but it lacked emotion. Having only seen human faces with expression up till then, it was something that I struggled to reconcile. I may or may not have curled up into a ball and started muttering to myself.

The Anti-Spiral figure elicits a similar response. Instead of muttering to myself, I'm writing, which is basically the same thing. Its design is generic, yes, but just like the PBS logo, I find its genericness to be disturbing. There's something sinister, not elegant, in the simplistic design of both.

Animated as a sketchy outline, the Anti-Spiral goes one better, hinting at an unknowable, unseeable, pulsing chaos. It is an entropy that defies current understanding, the same random movement that gives rise to quantum mechanics.

Emotions that are unknown, a form that is unknown, and mastery of the unknown. Anti-Spirals keep me awake at night.

On a marginally related note

The entire last half of episode 27 was quite surreal. Seeing the first channel surfing scene, I thought I might have been watching an episode of Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei. Of the several references Gainax got in, I only picked up on one, much to my chagrin.

Yoko Bebop

Who knew that Yoko dreamed of being a bounty hunter with a jazz background?

Channel surfing part two, the drastic shift in dress and scenery, Yoko's discarding of her alternate reality was wonderfully wtf. I'm still trying to wrap my head around it, but I get the sense that what she wanted was avoiding coming to grips with Kamina's death, so it was necessarily Kamina that held the TV showing her all these happy scenes. The one scene that she finally returns to, though, is not bright and clear, but the muted and smoky site of Kamina's death. This is her reality, the one that she accepts before rejoining the fight.

Simon's scene was much more straightforward, with a weak Kamina targeting Simon's insecurities. A parallel is drawn between a fictional outcome of the earlier war and the battle going on now. It's okay to stop fighting, as long as a simple life can be made out of view of the ruling class. Beastmen and Anti-Spirals alike are merciful so long as their power is not challenged.

In the end, Simon reaffirms that he does things not for Kamina, but for himself. Problem solved, for the second time. He then proceeds to turn into Megaman, assimilating all of his surviving comrades. When the next episode preview features a familiar looking sniper rifle, what other explanation is there?

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Gurren-Lagann episode 22: Our cruisers can't repel awesomeness of that magnitude!

Now witness the full power of this fully armed and operational battle station!

This is the Death Star that the Empire only wished they had built.


I think the above screen capture seals the deal.


Thermal exhaust port access to core? Check.

And now it's time for my favourite Return of the Jedi line!

It's a trap!

It's a trap!

It's a CAGE!

It's a stick up!

It feels almost unfair that carbon-based life (necessarily) prevailed against a much more prepared enemy. They camped out space waiting for the appearance of Genome's dreadnought, they built the Death Star III on Genome's moon, and they installed a hostage in front of the moon's control port. They knew everything.

But once again, it's really hard to convince life to stop living. Except for Rossiu. He's been their tool ever since Genome's fall and at the end, and he looked ready to slash his wrists.

Call it evolution on steroids. Blizzard Games, take note. Terrans can evidently out-evolve the Zerg.

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A drill that will consume the heavens

At this point I'd hesitate to consider Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann's Anti-Spiral faction as being explicitly anti-life. Maybe they're silicon-based life. It would go some way towards explaining Nia's SHODAN makeover. Even if they were, we're almost obligated to support Spirals, DNA, and other symbols associated with carbon-based lifeforms. Not only are they ridiculously cool, we also happen to not be droids.

Although if you are, that's cool too.

One can't completely write off the Anti-Spirals as generic bad guys, as SHODAN Nia offers an interesting, if brief, commentary on carbon-based life. It was probably brief because it's depressing to contemplate the big picture. Spirals are viewed as this grave threat to the universe because life does what life does: consumes and multiplies without consideration. It thus fell to the Anti-Spirals to put carbon-based life in its place, which is to say, in convenient and easy to manage boxes, with the threat of complete extermination to keep them from expanding outside of their boundaries. Eventually, in theory, the molten crust of the respective planets would cool, and they'd all die anyway, causing minimal additional damage to the cold and austere beauty of the universe.

It's a situation that plays out all the time, with humans in the role of Anti-Spirals, and weeds, pests, and even other humans in the role of Spirals. Trying to stem the vicious rampancy of growth and consumption sounds like a just and responsible thing to do, especially when described with terms like vicious and rampant, until the realization hits that doing so may involve some messy details, like inducing resource starvation or just plain death.

Beyond that, Spirals are also agents of chaos. It's evident, even now. We like to burn our dinosaurs fossils, kill animals, kill trees, kill each other, dig stuff out of the ground, and generally engage in the very clean practice known as industry. What would happen should humanity ever escape its current confines and run amok throughout the universe? We'd be like this unstoppable force of entropy, vacuuming resources from planets and asteroids, gobbling energy by creating our own stars or just subjugating existing ones, and generally accelerating the level of decay all around us.

Spiral power is the desire to survive, whether that involves fighting, consuming resources, or multiplying. It exists even while doing so means that the necessities to that existence are slowly eroded. To an entity like the Anti-Spirals, Spirals are just out to consume the entire universe, and then die out when the job is done.

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Gurren-Lagann: Fine subversion

Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann is a lot of fun. Part of the amusement is derived from the fact that the series is just a vehicle to do cool stuff, and it's all good because expectations were set when plausibility was thrown out the window in a very clear, unambiguous manner in the opening episode. There are two examples that stick in my mind at the moment.

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Want to demonstrate 1337 $n1p3|2 $k1llz? Make sure that Yoko's depleted uranium rounds have only knock-back (or devastating high-explosive, take your pick) effect on enemy armor until she's confronted with a hostage situation. Only then does an armor piercing round actually, uh, pierce, as opposed to pack several pounds worth of plastic explosive.

Out-gunned or lacking superior firepower in advance of an epic battle? Reinforcements have arrived! I think this needs no further elaboration.

Other things are just shamelessly dumb, like turning a destroyer into a giant kayak. But it was pretty convenient that the Daiganzan looked sea-worthy to begin with. At the time I kept thinking, it's a ship on legs. Cue stunned silence at the development that it can't cross the sea without hax.

The other part of the fun comes from embedding subversion into several aspects of the series. Subversion of authority is a given. There is also the very obvious aspect that Simon's first occupation was that of a digger. And then, how does he discover his power? By digging. How does he get out trouble? By digging a hole and running away. How does he achieve victory over his enemies? On several occasions, dig a hole and attack.

The subversion goes beyond just subverting ground. Inevitably the major battles are won through a bit of dishonourable conduct. Dislodging Guame the Unmovable (the irony!) was a sneak attack. Disabling the Daiganzan was accomplished by luring it into a trap. The Helix/Spiral King was defeated by feigning defeat and then engaging in some unsportsmanlike conduct not unlike a certain infamous head-butt. Enemy armor is commandeered by breaking out the spl01ts and getting r00t. Once the good guys are in the b0x, they then proceed to kill d00ds.

While the series adheres to some conventions, it goes about poking fun at others. Lampooning the ability to use firearms correctly on the first try is now common enough to expect it, but the trick is still worth some comedic value. It's common knowledge that the man without a (coherent) plan will inevitably to win battles because he's got hot blood and burning passion. Usually there's no particular reason, but that was easily remedied in the first episode. Kamina is more honest than most when he freely admits to making up the name Lagann. No secret meanings (that we know of yet), no strange acronym behind some hidden project. It sounded cool, full stop. Or what about the transformation technique that was sufficiently imperfect the first time that Kamina has to align the Lagann? And it's not every day you come across a female character more interested in surviving/winning a fight than getting upset at some furry creature feeling her up.

Lucky Star is all about these Ah I see what you did there moments, but Gurren-Lagann is more productive with its time, although by combining (mind-numbingly straightforward) plot with humour, it's not hard to be more productive than a series with no inter-episode continuity.

Side note: If the population exceeds 50, the lot of you will die. Later, if the surface population exceeds 1 000 000, the lot of you will die. The parallels are self-explanatory. Use subversion to keep the population in check, or use it for the purposes of awesome. Clearly only one choice makes for an entertaining show.

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