Super Robot Wars Anime Marathon #2: Gurren Lagann

Unlike most anime featured in Super Robot Wars, I’d actually watched a little of Gurren Lagann before playing a game in which it features. This was quite a few years ago, though, and I’d only made it about halfway through the series. I remember having problems with the pacing and oversexualization of some of the show’s characters, particularly Yoko. Well, those complaints are still here, but at least I didn’t have as many issues with the pacing this time around.

To its credit, Gurren Lagann has a really interesting premise from the outset. Protagonists Simon and Kamina live in an underground society of diggers. Simon in particular spends his days digging tunnels, looking for resources. He is the meek foil to Kamina’s brash fearlessness—and stupidity. Still, Kamina’s dogged refusal to back down from even the most dangerous of threats is part of what attracts people to him. He’s a natural leader, even as he vehemently denies the authority of their little community’s nasty village chief.

Kamina’s ambitions to reach and explore the surface very quickly come to the forefront when the sky opens up Jiha Village’s cavernous depths, bathing their home in sunlight. My first thought when this happened was that the residents of Jiha Village would almost certainly be blinded by that light, but I can forgive that the anime never addresses this. More pressing is the absurd giant robot that is responsible for breaking through into their village. It’s a weird, monstrous but otherwise humanoid mechanical thing. Soon after, we’re introduced to Yoko, a scantily clad sniper ostensibly from the surface. She’s been around the block a time or two when it comes to these giant Gunmen, but Kamina, his lack of experience notwithstanding, feels secure in challenging the thing face to face. This is in spite of the fact that he’s about 1/100th of its size.

Honestly, Yoko is a great character throughout the series. She’s thoughtful, smart, and caring to her newfound friends, but because this is an anime targeted at teen boys, she is relentlessly sexualized almost every time she’s on screen. Her initial outfit—basically just a bra and shorts—would almost be understandable given the oppressive heat of the desert surface, but the way she is framed and the situations the anime forces her into always lean into the lewd. Like, I know this is absolutely not out of the ordinary for anime, but it just always strikes me as so annoying and unnecessary. How many scenes do we need of Simon’s little hamster pet burrowing into Yoko’s boobs or Simon face planting into Yoko’s boobs or Yoko squeezing through narrow hallways, struggling to contain her boobs? All of this happens in the first episode just so we’re clear. Another thing to make clear is that Yoko is canonically 14 in this part of the story. This doesn’t make sense given the implied older sister/younger brother dynamic between Simon and Yoko (Simon’s also 14), but this is supposed to be her canon age. This makes Yoko’s extreme sexualization even creepier in this context.

Yoko

It’s probably clear that I don’t watch a lot of anime given how much I have to say about what is likely extremely routine pandering in this genre. Even so, it’s worth mentioning, because it does sour the experience of an anime that is otherwise about friendship, living up to your potential, and ludicrous giant robot fights, sometimes in space. 

Anyway, it turns out that the Gunmen are piloted by Beastmen that occupy the surface. Even Yoko originally hails from another underground village by the name of Littner. These Beastmen aren't big fans of Kamina's little group trespassing on the surface, but apparently, Yoko and her comrades regularly do combat with them over resources, using weapons they looted from Littner's buried cache. As it turns out, Kamina is the first person stupid enough to try commandeering one of the enemy Gunmen and is shockingly successful in doing so. Combined with the Big Robot Head Simon found while digging tunnels, Simon and Kamina now have a full-fledged super robot, the titular Gurren Lagann. These early episodes with Simon and Kamina figuring out how the robot works and performing manly combo attacks are pretty special and what I remember the most when thinking about this story.

I think I fell off on this anime the first time because I really enjoyed the first half a lot more than the second. This is probably still true today because I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to say that there’s a time skip about halfway through where the tone noticeably shifts. Simon and company age up about seven years in the interim and as one might expect, a lot happens offscreen. This does kill the story's momentum a bit and it becomes disorienting to make sense of how previously familiar characters have developed over time. Several principal characters’ personalities have noticeably shifted, but because we're not a part of that transformation happening in real time, it can be more difficult to parse. Even so, you can see how the seeds were sown for some of these developments. For example, an early episode has Simon and Kamina’s absurdly heavy, pilfered Gunmen falling into yet another underground society This village’s resources are much more limited than that of Simon and Kamina’s Jiha Village. As a result, the Village Chief has decreed that only 50 people may live in the village at any given time, with extras to be exiled to the surface. A long-abandoned Gunmen’s head adorns the central chamber of the village, worshiped by the inhabitants as a god. The village chief encourages this behavior and uses it as a tool to foster obedience from his subjects.

Rossiu

After Simon, Kamina, and Yoko drop in and disrupt their cultural norms, one thing leads to another and one of the village inhabitants by the name of Rossiu ends up agreeing to leave with two exiled orphan siblings called Gimmy and Darry. Naturally, they all come along with the Gurren Lagann team. After his introduction, Rossiu has very little to do in the show’s first half, despite taking a few turns at being Simon’s Gurren Lagann co-pilot. In the second half, his fanatical pseudo-religious upbringing comes to the fore, transforming a previously kind, generous boy into a taciturn bureaucrat in service of Simon, who now essentially governs the free world of the surface. It’s clear that Simon’s adventurous spirit doesn’t necessarily gel with his new leadership role, nor does it feel appropriate for many of his appointed advisors, all former Gurren Lagann team members. The new role seems to fit Rossiu like a glove, though, and of course, this conflict becomes an important part of this new arc. This is fine and all, but it’s not an arc I personally found to be as engaging as the starry-eyed adventure of the first half.

This is not to say that the first half doesn't have its problems, of course. A significant chunk of its runtime involves being attacked by a rogues gallery of extremely forgettable villains. This is nothing out of the ordinary for stories like these, but the old trope of sending off a string of incompetent henchmen until they're all defeated has been going since probably the 70s. Of course, one of these henchmen deals a crippling blow to the crew that also struck me as a bit of a momentum killer the first time I watched the series. It happens early enough that I'm hesitant to even call it a spoiler, but I'll refrain from divulging further even so.

Another point that I feel is necessary to address is the character, Viral. Viral is another one of the Big Bad's henchmen during the first half, and despite failing repeatedly to vanquish the Gurren Lagann crew, continues to lick his wounds and return after begging forgiveness for his transgressions. It feels like the anime wants you to care about this character's arc, but I never did. He's a Beastman, but like many other important Beastman characters, he's really just a human with some sharp teeth and other vaguely beastly features. The grunts, on the other hand, are birds and apes and fluffballs that barely resemble humans. The only real character arc Viral has is that he repeatedly loses against Kamina and later Simon in combat. He starts to consider it a point of honor to defeat his rival but never ends up being as strong a force as he hopes. You can probably predict where this arc eventually goes.

Viral

Although the first bits of the time skip drag, things start to get extremely ridiculous again in the final string of episodes, where the scale of Giant Action Robot stuff increases exponentially. As a nice bonus, the young orphans from the very beginning of the anime are now young adults piloting their own mechs! There are long-awaited character returns, redemptions aplenty, and some epic sacrifices as well, both before and after the action is done. Overall, it’s an exciting and enjoyable conclusion to a pretty solid anime, even though it's far from perfect.

Gurren Lagann in Super Robot Wars X

I used the following units from Gurren Lagann in SRW X.

Gurren Lagann - Simon/Viral

Super Galaxy Dai-Gurren - Daiyaka

Space Gunmarl - Gimmy

Space Gunmarl - Darry

Space Yoko W-Tank - Yoko

Due to the ridiculous and over-the-top nature of the mechs from Gurren Lagann, it makes sense that a lot of them aren’t available until the very latter stages of the game. As a result,  my only Gurren Lagann unit for more than 3/4ths of the game was Simon himself in the base version of the titular Gunman. That isn’t to say he wasn’t powerful, because he definitely was, but I wish I could have spent more time with some of the other characters. The amount of time they give you isn’t really enough to feel like they’re truly a part of the squad, even though the fantastic animations you get with the colossal Giant Space Mechs near the end were more than worth the wait.