It sounds funny to say about a show that killed off its false protagonist (debatably) in Episode 8, but this was the ep of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann where shit got real. I remember being quite shocked when I saw it the first time, just be the sheer volume of named characters deaths which took place. Admittedly this is a series with a huge cast and these were all tier 2 characters, but even so – there was a ruthlessness about the proceedings which was rather invigorating. When you feel like a writer has no guardrails, anything seems possible.
It’s something I’ve long-contended, but when it comes to the big sci-fi studios, their representative mecha series share a common personality. Bones, Sunrise, Gainax – you could pretty easily tell which studio they came from even if you ignored the animation style, because there are common links in the writing. From the moment the Chouginga Dai-Gurren pops out of its space-jump to find a giant naked Nia confronting it, this episode is pure Gainax. No studio embraced GAR quite to the extent they did, nor the romantic notion of irreverence in the face of imminent demise.
The anti-spirals have plenty of tricks up their sleeve, but you almost feel sorry for them. Or at the very least you understand where they’re coming from, in the face of spiral life’s relentless insistence on surviving and expanding its reach. Humanity is a pestilence in their eyes and it’s very easy to see how they’d feel that way. And despite their trickery – playing possum, bending the rules of physics, ultimately a power-sucking sea in space – the humans just keep on coming.
It’s not insignificant that we see so many humans sacrifice themselves for the greater good (or simple altruism, like the Twins saving Gimmy and Darry), because this is the great randomizer. This is what anti-spirals can’t prepare for because this is something spiral life-forms aren’t really supposed to do. Even Nia drawing the humans here comes down to this effect to an extent. Among the many other scourges of spiral life is unpredictability, and this is ultimately the humans’ secret weapon against the anti-spirals. Well, that and the Lordgenome head.
