The post before that was amazing too

Just think of it as enforced day

stock villain stuff

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.

”nuh-uh!”

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.”

disagreement

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

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.

that’s still just them solving the problems the exact same way without any changes.

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.

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

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.

human spirit is not inherently good, if it was people wouldn’t do bad things.

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

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

Don’t worry about it I’m only discussing this with you because I find it fun

but it fundamentally does not have any interest in how anything works, you know?

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.

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?

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!

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!

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:

Having passed one million, human numbers and civilization will advance explosively. They will become a power that will be a threat to our own. And so, we will destroy you before that can happen.

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.

on your other disconnect

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.

Yes

Damn those panels do go hard.

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.

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.

it doesn’t have to be perfect as a political test for you to like it, you know?

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? )

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.

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.

“Mark my words. This drill will open a hole in the universe. And that hole will become a path for those that follow after us. The dreams of those who have fallen. The hopes of those who will follow. Those two sets of dreams weave together into a double helix; drilling a path towards tomorrow. That’s Tengen Toppa! That’s Gurren Lagann! My drill is the drill that creates the heavens!”

“You struggle in vain!”

“That may be, but I still believe. In the me that I believe in. In humanity. In the future. I believe. My drill is my soul!”

-Anti-Spiral dies

“If it has to be this way, protect the universe at all costs…”

“Oh course we will. Believe in us, too. Have faith in us humans.”

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?

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

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)

(also since this post was really about getter robo i will say that, given all the other extremely obvious inspiration i think the drills are at least partially because the getter 2 uses a drill in the exact same way as the gurren lagann)

Ah, like, I meant why the drill was used as a story beat/macguffin and recurring visual theme in TTGL specifically, I know Super Robo loves it some giant drills.

i can kinda see it, but i think in order to really make that argument there would need to be some kind of evidence that they were building a communist state, which really doesn’t seem to be the case in my memory.

I mean, my guess is Imaishi was getting away with what he could at the time. From what I remember the state Simon ends up being the leader of wasn’t explicitly capitalist either. 2nd half of TTGL only started making sense to me when I started reading it as “Actually Existing Socialism vs Nihilism, Entropy and the Heat Death of the Universe”

but if you bring in the imagery and themes and direct plot beats from the horror story about the indomitable human spirit leading to evil and disagree but don’t go beyond “nuh uh! we’ll use it for good!” that isn’t compelling to me

Yeah, that’s fair. I dunno, to me when Simon yells “No, that’s YOUR limitation! You sit here in your closed-off universe locking away other lifeforms like you’re some kind of king! That’s nobody’s limitation but your own!” at the climax of the fight, after everything they’ve been through and especially after the dreamworld episode which spelt out exactly how much the entire cast sacrificed to get to that point by showing us their false consciousness possible lives that they had to give up… that was enough of a refutation of what the Anti-Spiral was saying (to me), because the crux of the matter really did seem to be a failure of imagination- after all, the entire preceding show was about how humanity keeps breaking through barriers by building on past successes (like, literally, there’s a matryoshka doll of Giant Drill Robots now) and row row fighting the powah, so why wouldn’t they be able to overcome what the Anti-Spiral feared? They overcame everything else to get there in the first place, at that point it kinda was just self-evident.

Like, when one sides position boils down to “A better world isn’t possible”, do you really need a more cogent response than “GIGA DRILLLUUUU BREEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKAAAAAAAAA!!!”?

(Also tbc this is just my reading of the Anti-Spiral in TTGL, I dunno Getter at all so I can’t comment on if the arguments made there are a lot more thoughtful/persuasive.)

but i’ll be honest this post was mostly an excuse to say ‘seeing kittan’s sacrifice and shaking my head like “he succumbed to the corruption of the getter. sad!”’ because the thought popped into my head and i found it funny.

No please continue shitposting about Gainax it’s funny

I actually am legit kinda serious about Team Gurren being Marxist revolutionaries (or rather, that TTGL has leftist themes). I’m a little hyperbolic in the previous post but I racked my brains for years trying to figure out “But why a Giant Drill though?” and the only answer that satisfied me was that it was a visual metaphor (well, more like a dumb visual pun) for revolution.

(Also, like, everything Imaishi does after TTGL at Trigger ends up kinda based, I do legitimately think he has leftist sympathies. )

For the record I haven’t read Getter, so I can only focus on Gurren Lagan here.

spiral power isn’t the manifestation of colonialism and genocide, but getter rays are. and if you are going to so blatantly one to one lift the manifestation of hot blooded shonen spirit turning into colonialism and genocide you need to change it up more or have a stronger reason why it isn’t going to be like that here. as is it’s clearly a response to getter but it doesn’t actually have anything to say beyond “getter robo was cool, but what if the getter emperor was the good guy?” and it doesn’t have enough distance for that to not be dissonant to me

If we’re getting into metatextual stuff- TTGL is at it’s heart a response to Evangelion: that internalised, individualised pain isn’t all that life offers and that it’s possible to build towards a better future with the people around us one turn of the drill at a time.

Within the text itself, Spiral power is always liberatory in nature, and Simon doesn’t use it to colonise or oppress but to emancipate. Even if Gurren Lagann is wholesale importing visual imagery from Getter, I don’t think it’s fair to either show to impart the same meaning between them when their respective texts are doing (what sounds like) diametrically opposite things.

Like, TTGL is ultimately about the triumph of the human spirit over an unthinking, uncaring universe (which is why it’s also about communism) so of course it’ll be dissonant if you attribute things to it from a previous text that it has repurposed to tell a different story.

I’m not sure if I’ll ever read the manga (I just generally prefer film to comics) and I’m pretty unfamiliar with Aria (although I guess I have a passing familiarity with gynoid fiction just from cultural osmosis) but I loved all the deep-fried Pre-Vapourwave 90’s anime aesthetics combined with all the unsettling details. The way the show’s directed reminds me a lot of Serial Experiments Lain and Kino’s Journey, which are some of my favourite shows so I’m honestly kicking myself for not getting round to watching this sooner.

a) I’m pretty sure Gainax were pretty upfront with how TTGL was basically Imaishi’s giant love letter to all of Mecha as a genre. There’s homages to other shows there, pretty sure Mazinger, Getter and Gundam are included.

b) Counterpoint: Team Gurren’s triumph over the Anti-Spiral is the ultimate triumph of the Proletariat over the forces of Reaction, and ending the process of Dialectical Materialism as laid out in Marxism-Lenninism-Giant Drillism.

We evolve beyond the person we were a minute before. We advance a little further with each revolution. That’s how a drill works!

The Anti-Spiral oppressed the Spiral races due to a failure of imagination- it simply couldn’t imagine a better world. Simon promises to steward the galaxy with giant drill FALGSC at the end of the show, using Spiral power for the benefit of the galactic proletariat.

Edit: Also, Spiral power’s not the manifestation of colonialism and genocide- it’s the rrrrrrrevolutionary (GIANT DRILL) spirit of the Proletariat as it evolves from national liberation (first half of the show) to global liberation (second half of the show). (Rossiu is a right revisionist who almost derails the revolution with a misguided coup attempt.) That revolutionary spirit is one and the same as the Hotblooded Shonen spirit and Humanities endless potential for evolution.

Ah, should have made it clear that the game I was talking about was Relink, not the Gacha (Ever since Fate Grand Order I’ve bounced off hard on all gacha). Relink won me over with how sincere of a “JRPG where we go kill God with the Power of Friendship” deal it was, even if the story itself was kinda tropey, so I wanted to learn more.

But apparently all the really kino stuff like Biblically Accurate Twinks screaming John Milton at each other while there’s more lasers, explosions and J-rock going off in the the background than an X Japan concert never got covered in the anime. Instead we get swimsuit OVA.

Based and Nausicaa pilled

GOATED:

Dungeon Meshi - monumental feat of imaginative worldbuilding, on par with LotR or Dune.

Ok:

Frieren- I think we’ve talked about this show on here enough already. It’s a mixed bag.

Apothecary Diaries- It’s neat. Having the plot twist be that the literal personification of patriarchy actually be a victim of patriarchy was a choice, although I’m not sure how successful of a story beat it was as presented.

Bad:

Granblue Fantasy- I started watching it because of the game, but it’s literally the middest of mid shows. S1 is at least kinda interesting for having all these baroque, incredibly hard to animate over-the-top over-designed JRPG character designs, that the animators somehow heroically tried to animate beautiful fight scenes for, but the story is mid as hell and then S2 simplifies all the designs and they just straight give up on trying to tell a story, so bleh.

I’m totally about those “industry” behind the scenes/meta type shows

Shirobako is the behind the scenes show

Right, what I was trying to get at is the “essentialism” part of DE, which I think is the more important aspect to emphasize.

OP links the post you’re citing, I find it unlikely they didn’t read it.

Sure, but I am doubting he fully understood it if reading

Or, not to put this user on blast, but the recent “Chorfs are capitalist?!??” post is another great example. It would be one thing if we could examine the story and see their mode of production and, wow, look, the author included enclosure of the commons and theft of surplus value, I wonder if that was intentional? But no. The argument is “Chorfs are greedy industrialists. Capitalism has greedy industrialists. Chorfs capitalist?!??”

Lost in this kind of nonsense are basic critical questions. E.g., what was the author(s)’ intent? What is the value of this criticism? Is this what the story is about, or is there only incidental interpretive evidence?

would result in a thread where OP did a wikipedia cliffnotes reading of AoT asking if it’s fascist.

My lit prof would have had my head on a pike if I tried to write a paper with this methodology.

(Also, to be clear, I’m not even saying his conclusions are wrong, Isayama really is Zach Snyder if Zach Snyder hated humanity.)

What you’re attributing to diegetic essentialism is the Thermian argument: using in-universe lore to deflect criticism. Slightly different thing.

Diegetic essentialism is when people (including leftists) flatten all meaning in a work in order to put media into boxes. The examples given in sigmarxism are Beasts of Chaos and Tau being written with superficial anarchists/communist aesthetics, so therefore BoC are anarchists and Tau are communists. (Neither of those things are true)

We do this because we need to let our in-group know that we’re watching the “correct” media, that we’re completely unproblematic because the media that we consume is completely unproblematic. (It doesn’t work that way)

Let’s use Attack on Titan as an example

I think it’s somewhere in season 3-

There’s a moment where the main character, who’s basically spent his whole life being taught to hate a dehumanised enemy, finds out that the “monsters” who destroyed his life are people exactly like him, scared children who were also taught to hate a dehumanised enemy: him.

And that shoe dropping makes such a potent anti-fascist message, because it lays bare in narrative form exactly how fascism fails, how it warps and distorts history in order to perpetuate a lie, because we’ve been with Eren from the start and seen his journey, and his shock at this revelation is echoed in the shock of the audience. It’s legit good storytelling.

And if AoT ended right there things would’ve been fine, but oh well.

My reading of AoT: AoT is the single most incompetent anti-fascist story ever told, that it warps right back around into endorsing fascism and anti-Semitism. This is because Isayama is a liberal: the moral of his story is “an eye for an eye makes the whole world genocided”, which is an idealist idea of fascism, a child’s understanding of fascism. Eren revealing himself to be a petulant manchild committing genocide because he’s afraid of losing his mother figure is supposed to be tacit condemnation, but Isayama still lets him get away with genocide, like the liberal he is. We’re just supposed to feel bad about it.

Anyway, going back to diegetic essentialism: anyone who asks “Is X piece of media ______” is deeply unserious and more often than not simply looking for validation of their own political beliefs. Art/media criticism is about deeply and seriously examining human subjectivity, to explore what that tells us about the world we inhabit and the people who inhabit it. Within us there are multitudes, and not even authors have the authority to dictate the meaning of their works- we have to determine that meaning for ourselves.

Yeah, one of the show’s strength’s is that it’s trying a variety of things at once, but it’s also it’s weakness. That and the author’s compulsion to cram worldbuilding into every moment leading to (what I am charitably assuming is) accidental race essentialism.

Whenever the story is in the slow paced melancholic slice-of-life “Let’s find a spell to make fresh bread” mode it’s amazing. Whenever the show is in Deathnote style “I’m thinking 4 parallel universes ahead of you” shonen battle mode, I’m not gonna lie I find that pretty entertaining, even if I prefer the other mode. But the world of the shonen battle mode show is hella Grimdark in the way something like Beserk is, and the SoL stuff is all whimsical Studio Ghibli stuff, and the author’s not doing a good enough job of bridging those two worlds and showing that the narrative can support both these things (even though it’s pretty obvious that the author is trying to make a larger point about the breadth of human experiences by having suffering and whimsy coexist in the same world). Sometimes it works (mostly with all of the Flamme flashback stuff), and I think trying to tell a story like that is a really interesting challenge for a writer, but most of the time in the show the total tonal whiplash just takes you right out of it, making the entire thing disjointed and confusing.

“You need to take things slow and live in the moment because life is fleeting and beautiful.” Ok yeah, I can get behind that sentiment. “Oh but also the peasant levies are made out of unarmed women and children, damn life sure sucks huh” and I was like, excuse me, what? Am I even watching the same show?

(And yeah I’m leaving out the whole demon thing cos that’s a whole other can of worms.)

Honestly tho I think the last part of the show really worked only because “Oh shit I need to defeat a clone of myself” is just such great narrative shorthand for the need for self-reflection… which is kinda undercut by the prior arc being Harry Potter Death Game, where the protagonists only survive by being such total badasses.

Really a mixed bag of a show, idk Dungeon Meshi is doing it more for me rn.

but the first book was written in the early 2000s, in the wake of the worst US-China relations that followed the 1999 Chinese embassy bombing in Yugoslavia and the 2001 Hainan Island incident, which nearly sparked a war between both countries (people old enough will remember how close we were at war back then, not to mention that China was far weaker than it is today) only to be averted by 9/11 attack later that year,

Yeah, I had vague recollections about this, along with Deng’s foreign policy which is what I based my reading of the book on.

It’s fiction at the end of the day and I don’t know why people are trying so hard to see a 1:1 reference to the real world, rather than extracting the meanings and exploring the questions the story itself provokes in relation to the real world.

Yeah, in this thread I was trying to simplify and make the analogies as obvious as possible but what you said is true, we should be focusing on the questions the books provoke.

Japan underwent modernization in the late 19th century, narrowly avoided the fate of being colonized by Western powers and instead found themselves among the ranks of imperialist powers, driven by the need of resource expansion to colonize China.

Huh, that is a really interesting reading. Maybe the Trisolarans can be used as a more generalised metaphor for imperialists then?

If the only way to survive in the world of harsh capitalism is to join the imperialist ranks (that includes the Soviet Union from the Chinese perspective, mind you, though I don’t agree with that labeling), then what is better: to survive at the cost of Humanity that defines us in the first place, or to preserve Humanity at all cost, even if it means this will lead to our own demise?

Is it accurate to say that the books can be read as an interrogation of recent Chinese history (from a modern, maybe somewhat liberal perspective), and it’s trajectory? I haven’t read books 2 & 3 to comment on them further.