One thing that can be said about Gainax is they weren’t particularly known for sticking the landing.  The “Gainax Ending” became a trope unto itself, like nice boat or jump the shark – synonymous with nonsensical and/or unsatisfying.  There’s irony in this – I mean, Anno Hideaki keeps remaking the Evangelion ending and getting it worse each time, when it was pretty good in the first place.  But the point is, (as I’ve always said) endings are hard.  And with the sort of surreal, trippy narratives Gainax tended to spin, they’re even harder.

I was wondering how I was going to feel about Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann’s ending now, watching it for the first time in a decade.  It didn’t leave me feeling especially satisfied in the heat of the moment in 2007 (note: in reading my comments from back then, I apparently loved the ending – which is fascinating given that’s not how I remember feeling), and while it too was remade in theatrical form the substance was essentially the same – it’s just that the presentation was cranked up to eleven.  I was too emotionally invested at the time, too partisan and driven by my rooting interests, to judge the ending with anything approaching impartiality.  The years have softened the sharp edges, and I think I’m able to see it for what Nakashima Kazuki intended it to say.

One of the things that strikes me about TTGL all these years later is that for all its bombast and scientific mumbo-jumbo, there’s a certain elegance and poetry to the narrative.  The pieces are intricately woven together, with no sense of improvisation or course changes along the way.  Nakashima always nailed the big moments, filling them with pathos, and Imaishi and the animation team hit it out of the park on the visual side (as they did here, in the final battle).  Even a line of dialogue as simple as “We don’t need to understand, we know.” is filled with meaning.  There’s something philosophical and romantic at the same time about this show, in a way that very few other anime call to mind.

A drill spinning, advancing a little with every turn.  A double-helix, the two sides of human ingenuity and relentless imperative.  Everything just sort of fits in the end, right down to Simon striking the final blow for spiral life alone (apart from Boota of course) in little Lagann – deconstructed of all the gattai that had gotten ever-more ludicrous.  Spiral life wins in the end for its willingness to sacrifice itself to move forward – which is as fundamental an evolutionary imperative as exists.  The message here – life is unstoppable, burrowing forever forward whether it’s wise or not – is a little scary.  And I think it’s meant to be.

More than anything Gurren Lagann, like so many successful epic series, is personal.  What stands out in the end is Simon.  Simply put, he’s one of the great protagonists in anime.  And even more, he has one of the great character arcs – long and winding and full of subtlety.  Simon’s story is beautiful and sad, and it ends in a beautiful and sad way.  That was what left me feeling unfulfilled (or at least, remembering feeling unfulfilled) when I watched Episode 27 for the first time – Simon has given up so much and gotten so little reward, and it was heartbreaking to see his story end the same way.  Poetically and thematically it makes sense – but it’s not what I would call satisfying.

I think it was pretty obvious that Nia was going to disappear in the end – she’s an anti-spiral being herself, after all.  One of the messages of Gurren Lagann is that love can’t conquer all – fate charts its own course, and humans can’t change that.  Only sacrifice can bring advancement, but boy – Simon sure sacrificed a lot.  To see him grow into middle age (almost) alone is hard, even if it fits with the story Nakashima is telling here.  He and Yoko were certainly never in love, but they share more than any two surviving humans on Earth – I think I was somehow hoping that would be enough to bring them together to share the burden of their regrets.

And there it ends.  Simon is a digger to the last – “others are better suited to follow the paths I clear”.  And now even that work is done, so he passes his drill on to Gimmy and fades into the background, to live out his days watching his children follow his paths from afar.  This was retold in movie form, as noted – and those movies are well worth seeing, especially the second, for their astonishingly epic take on these events.  But the end is the end, and I’m glad Gainax chose to leave things that way – as much as it hurt at the time, anything else would have felt like a betrayal of Nakashima-sensei’s vision.

Without a shadow of a doubt watching TTGL now is a bittersweet experience.  It’s a reminder of how great Gainax was (this was in essence their last hurrah).  It also forces us to confront how far short of the mark Imaishi, Nakashima and Trigger have fallen from the standard Gurren Lagann set.  But that’s the curse of time – we can’t un-know the things we know now, and we can only watch these wonderful old anime for the first time once.  That doesn’t change the fact that it’s great to experience this series again, and to be reminded of a better time in anime, when the scope of its creative glory was in full flower.