![i read all of getter robo in 2 days and i don't know how they were allowed to make gurren lagann [spoilers for both]](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/22aa4bdf-d922-4420-ae6a-dc76754113c5.png){kind=link}
a: if the rights holders had wanted to they 100% had grounds to sue, and they would have probably won
b: the getter emperor is so cool! and someone should have told the people at gainax “if you’re going to do getter emperor, the manifestation of colonialism and genocide as the natural extremes of directionless shonen hotblooded spirit and humanities endless potential for evolution, you need a stronger argument than “nuh uh” when saying ‘actually this is a good thing. it’s good to forever grow and become more powerful and kill everything in your way’”
if i ever rewatch it i’m not going to be able to see team gurren as anything other than evil. seeing kittan’s sacrifice and shaking my head like “he succumbed to the corruption of the getter. sad!”
or maybe i’m wrong and it has a satisfying response that goes beyond “actually i’d just be chill about this whole thing,” but i really don’t remember that
yeah i got that, i just meant as an additional watsonian layer, you know?
if you want to have fun with that read that’s fine, but the story can just as easily be read as about capitalism being good, some facile anti-communist screed where the anti-spiral want to make everyone conform but team gurren is all about rugged individuality. in fact team gurren IS at least a little about rugged individuality. it doesn’t have to be perfect as a political test for you to like it, you know?
i mean, that’s what the anti-spiral are saying! they’re saying “you’re constantly growing bigger and stronger and we are going to try and stop you before you destroy the universe” and team gurren says “no! we will grow bigger and stronger than you!” and then they just do that and win, and it just feels unearned to me
yes! because the position isn’t just “a better world isn’t possible,” it’s “a better world isn’t possible because you won’t stop doing the giga drill break!!!” it’s like people saying “we can just use fossil fuels forever and constantly grow and expand and nothing bad will happen” in the face of criticism of capitalism or climate change.
idk, i never thought about this before reading getter robo, maybe it just poisoned me against this. but i would definitely recommend reading it, it’s cool as hell. i make it sound kinda downbeat and depressing here but it’s got so many sick things going on
some good images from getter robo
Damn those panels do go hard.
I dunno, that reading is the kind that we make fun of chuds for having. “Don’t believe in yourself! Believe in the me who believes in you!” is the total opposite mantra of a rugged individualist, and everything only happens due to the collective effort of everyone on the cast because they combine (more of Imaishi’s stupidly sincere puns) their efforts together.
I know, because TTGL is really special to me. I was a really depressed young liberal when I watched it, and it helped me a lot with getting through that rough patch, and I liked it enough back then. But it was this show’s really dumb “Drill revolves = Revolution” pun in the movie that started getting enough stones rolling in my head to get me to question my thinking at the time.
What I’m saying is that this reading isn’t a post-hoc justification to retrofit my politics into a piece of media I like. This is me saying that Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann was that piece of media that hit me at the exact right time of my life to completely change my worldview, and that coming up with this reading was formative in shaping my current politics by giving voice to a lot of ideas I couldn’t articulate for myself back then.
(And honestly it’s kinda embarrassing to admit that. Just how fucking privileged do I have to be to say that a Japanese cartoon had a huge impact in making me a leftist?
)
Ok, say for the sake of argument we reject any Marxist reading of the text (which I’m gonna put my foot down and say it’s just not possible, but anyway)- TTGL is still an extremely Humanist story. It would be one thing if the show presented the Anti-Spiral as having a point, like if Spiral Power visibly corrupted or the universe got worse every time a Giga Drill Break was used or if Simon started abusing his power- but those things never happen inside the story and aren’t implied at all in the epilogue. (And also, Simon in the show never pursues power for it’s own sake, it’s in order to protect his loved ones and liberate them.)
So what the Anti-Spiral’s arguments end up being in the show is a fear of a possible future. Like, maybe Imaishi is just straight up ripping off Getter to create a visual/narrative shorthand, but within the text of TTGL that still only represents a possible future, not a certainty. Just because things played out that way in Getter Robo doesn’t mean it’ll play out that way in TTGL.
The result of the Anti-Spiral’s fear of a possible future is an endless now, a status quo oppressively enforced from above, where people are reduced to digging through dirt looking for scraps just to get by- the state of the cast at the start of the show. It’s police states and sanctions and, when the Spiral races finally break though that first struggle, it’s genocide. Even if Spiral power was the analogue for capitalism (or the productive forces) and unlimited growth, the Anti-Spirals answer isn’t sustainability, it’s Malthusianism. They don’t plan to ever actually tackle the problem, just to kill enough people to kick the can down the road. It’s pessimism and nihilism and the shuttering of the human spirit.
The Anti-Spiral are letting the fear of a possible future paralyze everything into an endless now, but you can’t overcome those fears and create lasting solutions by freezing in place and not allowing yourself/life to grow. The only path forward is in believing in people’s ability to work together to chip away at the problem, one turn of the drill bit at a time.
To me, in the face of nihilism and utter annihilation, the only rational response kinda is to punch it in the face screaming “Nuh-Uh!”. After all, we’ve overcome so much hardship just to get here in the first place, it’s more irrational not to have faith in humanity. That’s why I can’t separate a Marxist reading from this show, because the inherent humanist optimism of “A better world is possible” is foundational to leftist politics- why can’t Simon the Digger and Team Gurren overcome the Getter Emperor?
You should have just lead with the Dinosaurs, I’ll read anything with Dinosaurs in it.
(But also if it has a downer ending like Devilman Crybaby or Mawaru Penguindrum I’ll probably bounce of it, for reasons articulated here hahahaha)
i mean, sure, but kamina’s final words go against that in favor of direct individualism. “believe in the you that believes in yourself.” “who the hell do you think i am” etc.
i mean revolutionary girl utena had a huge impact on me and my politics, so i get how an anime can have that kind of importance to you! but that’s a show that directly engages with ideas about oppressive systems and how they function, how they perpetuate themselves, and how to escape them, while gurren lagann is. like, i guess it can be read that way on an allegorical level but it fundamentally does not have any interest in how anything works, you know?
also the city they build sure just seems like modern capitalist japan from what we see
i think the thing that breaks the whole story apart is the bit where simon fights that anti-spiral mech and blows up the entire city? like that seems like the moment where the show shows us very clearly “hot bloodedness and willpower isn’t going to just work every time, that will break shit” and then the show forgets it ever happens once simon gets out of prison and they immediately go back to shonen spirit will always win! what happens if the other guy has more spirit than you? don’t worry about it. when your shonen spirit kills thousands of innocents just keep going and have even more spirit! i’m not saying “the anti-spiral were the good guys! they should have won” obviously that would be a complete misread of the show, i just think the show should do something with that
the more i think about it the less satisfied i am with gurren lagann. and it isn’t just “well in getter robo this is evil so i can’t like gurren lagann anymore,” it’s that gurren lagann just doesn’t have answers to the questions that it keeps bringing up. like, yeah in the text of the show they can just keep going with hot blooded willpower through any obstacle without problems. i don’t like that! not that i’m opposed to that on its own merits, but if you bring in people saying “hot blooded willpower will not solve this problem, in fact hot blooded willpower is CAUSING the problem” and the heroes just go “no! we will use hot blooded willpower to fix everything forever and forever grow and get stronger! and it simply will not be a problem for us, don’t worry about it!” that is supremely unsatisfying to me. engage with the problems you set up!
like, getter robo is about this. in getter robo some of the characters go “we can just hot blooded willpower our way out of this!” when faced with the getter emperor, but some characters try and find other ways of living and fighting. getter robo ends ambiguously because the mangaka passed away, but it ends in a place where there is firmly hope, there are people trying to stop the getter emperor from coming into existence without all of humanity dying, there are people taking the gurren lagann approach of “don’t worry about it constantly using hot blooded shonen willpower to solve our problems will never go wrong,” and they come into conflict over it. getter robo is always thinking about and meditating on the problems it has set up, while always being sure to show some of the coolest mech action i’ve ever seen. cannot recommend it enough
some more cool bits i liked from getter
you’ll notice some of these are in a very different art style, that’s because there was a 20 year break in between getter robo g and getter robo go and ken ishikawa’s art style completely changed
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actually i just figured out another piece of fundamental disconnect between me and gurren lagann
it’s all about masculinity, all about drill = penis, all about what it means to be a real man, rossiu is punished for not performing masculinity well enough, simon needs to grow into a true man like kamina, there is only one way to be a man and it’s to try and be as close to kamina as possible etc. and i’m fucking running from all that shit
I strongly disagree with this: it is deeply concerned with how human beings view the world and think about the future. TTGL is making the case for Revolutionary Optimism.
So like, I went back and rewatched these episodes: 1) First of all, they’re attacked. It’s not Simon’s hot bloodedness that’s the problem here because how the heck would he have known that the Anti-Spiral mecha are walking warcrimes made out of cluster bombs and 2) They develop countermeasures in the next fight! When Simon kills the next one he orders the Grapearl squadron to shoot down the cluster bombs. And the fight after that, they come up with a shield weapon to neutralize and contain the explosions. It isn’t a mindless hotblooded spirit that drives them, they learn from past mistakes!
The show does! They have to struggle and adapt! They don’t overcome all the obstacles without problem. Characters die just to get them that far!
Like, Anti-Spiral Nia says this in episode 18:
The issue isn’t that stubborn hot-blooded willpower will break shit, it’s that there’s a genocidal hegemony hell bent on maintaining power that will break shit and we’re going to need all the hot-blooded determination we can get to overcome it. The people saying that hot blooded willpower is causing problems (in the show) are full of shit and just using that as justification to keep everyone else down, because they don’t know for sure that it will cause problems. They’re just afraid of the future, so afraid that they literally froze themselves in time.
Like, again, the crux of the matter comes down to “Do you believe that the human spirit is a force for good?” and imo TTGL gives that question all the weight it deserves, with an unequivocal and enthusiastic “YES!”.
In the epilogue, Rossiu organizes the Galactic Spiral Peace Conference, presumably to preemptively organize and plan for a peaceful solution to the Spiral Nemesis.
Yeah, that’s the other metaphor for the drill. While the show did help me navigate towards a less toxic masculinity, obviously that’s not going to apply to everyone and y’know what? That’s ok. Trans rights are human rights.
maybe i worded it badly but i meant it’s not interested in the ways actual structures work. like, utena spends time digging into the ways misogyny is perpetuated and enforced, or how the patriarchy manages to keep people trapped and thinking it’s the best way of doing things. ttgl does not care about anything on those conceptual levels with any specificity.
yeah they come up with countermeasures for this one specific problem, but going forward every single fight is still won through the exact thing that got those people killed there! they change in that one specific thing but simon still treats every new thing the anti-spiral do the exact same way. like he goes right back to punching them through dimensional walls or screaming so hard thousands of them explode, it’s all the same shit
yeah but like. they overcome those obstacles purely through hot-blooded willpower. when everyone in team gurren has a big heroic sacrifice that’s still just them solving the problems the exact same way without any changes. they fight the anti-spiral exactly the same way they fight lordgenome, they do not actually change strategy and the one time they do it’s done by rossiu, who the show kinda hates for daring to try anything other than hot blooded willpower as a solution
the anti-spiral say the universe will be destroyed. if the show wants to say “actually they were lying” then ok, but it doesn’t. if it wants me to be satisfied with how they solve it i really feel like i need more than “uhhh rossiu went and did a conference and he handled it” after they beat the anti-spiral in the exact way the anti-spiral were explicitly saying was the problem!
also “Like, again, the crux of the matter comes down to “Do you believe that the human spirit is a force for good?” and imo TTGL gives that question all the weight it deserves, with an unequivocal and enthusiastic “YES!”.” is just not true. human spirit is not inherently good, if it was people wouldn’t do bad things. human spirit clearly isn’t a force for good and only good! saying “human spirit is a force for good” is a meaningless thing to say, are the structures you say the anti-spiral represents not set up by humans who had human spirit? everyone is always fighting for their own future, saying that they’re fighting for a better tomorrow without any more details on what that tomorrow looks like is worthless
and again, i want to repeat that i am not saying gurren lagann is a bad show or that you are wrong to take away the things you take away from it, just that i was thinking about it after seeing a story deal with the same ideas and the exact same plot and i feel like gurren lagann deals with those themes in a way that is profoundly unsatisfying
Ahhhhhhhhhh I had a whole reply typed out but Hexbear ate it.
Ok 5 min summary:
TTGL does go into the way actual structures work, it’s talking about the psychology of rebellion and existentialism. The way the show discusses despair and terror as tools of oppression is a lot like how Fanon describes them in Wretched of the Earth.
Resistance to oppression is resistance to oppression, all that changed was scale. Rossiu’s entire arc is to point out that survival isn’t the same as fighting back.
Lordgenome points out in the same scene that the Anti-Spiral is only saying that to paralyze Simon with despair, and Simon’s response that he can’t let a possible future prevent him from acting to correct an injustice in the present is imo the correct one. We only have the Anti-Spirals word that the problem is intractable, so I’m going to bet on the guy who went from a miner to saving the Earth by making the impossible possible. That’s also why I’m satisfied with the ending, because anything after would be kinda redundant.
This is on me, when I said human spirit I should have specified revolutionary spirit or the will of the oppressed to overthrow their oppressor. Sorry for moving the goalpost, I swear it wasn’t intentional
Don’t worry about it I’m only discussing this with you because I find it fun
idk it all seems like very stock villain stuff to me. if we start saying this stuff about gurren lagann then we start saying it about everything that has any evil empire as the villain and i just don’t think that’s true, you know? maybe i’m just not perceiving/remembering the subtle nuance gurren lagann brings to the table
i’ve said this before but when they say “this is a bad thing you are doing! the way you solve your problems is going to destroy everything!” and the heroes just have nothing but “nu-uh!” it just doesn’t hit right for me now that i’ve read something that takes the time to really dig into it. “well it’s possible they’re lying so i’ll just keep believing in myself and not actually consider whether it’s possible i could have made a mistake here!” doesn’t do it for me. like i think it’s cool to watch but philosophically it feels like a complete rejection of any and all material reality
that’s good! i also really like being able to turn it around in my head and put into words the thoughts i’ve been having and hear an alternate take that i disagree with
I’m not gonna claim that TTGL addresses it’s criticisms of structures on the level of Utena, but the way it focuses on the psychology of rebellion/oppression always stuck with me- with how it tied finding a reason to live with resisting oppression and wanting to live with dignity, in a way beyond most other shows.
Right, but I’ve been trying to point out that the underlying read of the metaphor for “ hot blooded shonen spirit” seems to be different between the two shows: for Getter by your description it seems to be “life’s insatiable ability to propagate and consume”, and for TTGL I’ve been trying to make the case that it’s “life’s struggle to live in a harsh universe with dignity”, and that those two things aren’t the same, because one is much simpler than the other.
Like, to me the main concern that TTGL has is “Do you have the willpower to live and to resist oppression? Yes or no? Everything else is a matter of scale” which, I think is more a philosophical question than a material one. It’s a “in order to build a better world, one must first be able to imagine it” kinda deal.
Obviously reckoning with humanity’s desire for consumption would require more nuance and depth to the work, but I suspect that if TTGL is a response to Getter the same way it is to Evangelion it would be something like: “You’re overcomplicating things. This is a matter of psychology. Do you have the willpower to rise to the challenge? That’s the first step to overcoming it.”
Yeah, I was kinda worried you’d just check out haha, so I’m glad you were having fun too. I do think we’ve kinda exhausted where the conversation can go until I read Getter tho, so I’ll get right on that after Yokohama Kidou Kaishi
oh yeah, i totally get that they’re trying to do different things, i just (without having rewatched gurren lagann in a few years) feel like gurren lagann doesn’t distance itself from getter robo enough for that to fully work. like, thinking about it with the context of getter robo i feel like it doesn’t quite work on its own merits and definitely doesn’t work when compared to getter
i agree we’ve probably reached the endpoint of the discussion, but this has been fun. and i’ll probably watch gurren lagann at some point with your read in mind and regardless of whether i agree or not i’ll definitely have a good time! i hope you do read getter and let me know what you think about it, i think it’s really something special and even if you don’t like it as much as me it’ll DEFINITELY be helpful in broadening your understanding the show you clearly love. like how i don’t love rose of versailles as much as i hoped but understanding its influence on utena was still a very worthwhile experience
a few more cool pages from getter robo, for the road
these are all from getter robo arc, the last manga in the series! even at it’s most serious and kinda cynical it’s still delivering on ridiculous action, look at that gun! that’s a machine-fed revolver! that rules!