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I started watching Gurren Lagann a few days back, and it was nothing like what I'd expected.
I knew very little about it. It had mechs, presumably some very big ones, and I think I'd read that by the end, they were slinging galaxies and universes as weapons (or is that a different franchise?).
Well..
Episode 5 had the main character being anally fisted by a toddler. A sentence I didn't expect to ever write, but here I am.
I thought the series would be relatively serious. Far from it. This is quintessential shonen slop. It does the opposite of taking itself seriously.
So many annoying tropes:
Powering up with the sheer human will
Nobody fights seriously, it's all half-assed
Simon, one of the main characters, is literally retarded. He is congenitally incapable of making good decisions.
Not quite as annoying is the sheer amount of fan-service. This is a profoundly horny show, and distactingly so. I'm a red-blooded young man, but I'm going through a dry spell of several months, the longest in over a decade, and it's hard to focus when there are voluptuous tits out on display. Nice tits though, very tasteful. Alas, I prefer sex to have some kind of resolution, the way typical anime does it is akin to paying for a strip show. Who wants to get a boner while being unable to do anything about it?
I'm not sure the series has any redeeming qualities, but I'm not quite ready to give up on it yet. But if continues frustrating me to this extent, I'll have to see if Macross or Gundam are any better.
I feel compelled to defend TTGL: it was one of the first anime series that I ever watched, so there’s no doubt that that colors my perception of it, particularly since it’s been years since I last rewatched it. But the show that I remember has quite a bit more going on than you’ve seen in the first few episodes.
I think that a big part of the problem is the attitude that one has when going in and watching the series; I’ve met big anime fans in real life who bounced off of it for this reason too, expecting well-choreographed tactical fights with a deeply-thought-out power system like many modern battle shounen series instead of GIGA DRILL BREAKER ad infinitum. But to me, that’s like watching a performance of Romeo and Juliet and asking “Why didn’t Shakespeare go into more detail about the political chaos of Renaissance Italy instead of this stupid love story?” TTGL operates on vibes rather than carefully engineered magic systems, and that’s the level that the show is best appreciated at.
More specifically, the way I think of TTGL is this. If you (I) watch it when you’re young, you love it because of the epic fights and the horniness and the increasing power levels and “humans fighting to evolve against those who want to keep them down”. If you watch it a few years later, further into your teenage years, and that awkward time isn’t treating you particularly well, then watching a show about “believing in the you who believes in yourself” and “doing the impossible” might be exactly what you need, even if your own travails involve precisely zero giant robots. But then if you watch it yet again as an adult, you realize: hey, maybe kid me was on to something, and the “humans fighting to evolve against those who want to keep them down” plotline has a lot more real-world relevance than teenager me, who figured that it was just a metaphor for depression or something, thought.
This fundamental thematic conflict in the series, which becomes particularly apparent in the second half (and particularly towards the end at that), could be boiled down to “growth vs. degrowth”: at what point does technological and economic progress need to be stopped entirely, lest humanity collectively shoot ourselves in the face? How much of our own humanity and dignity should we sacrifice in order to prevent this? [1] I’d say that these are questions that’ve gained particular relevance (in public discourse) in recent years, both with climate change and now (more recently) with AI. Without getting into spoiler territory here, one thing that I found TTGL to do extremely well was to “aestheticize” these questions and translate them from an abstract debate about policy into something that “feels” important on a direct, gut level. The show take a rather refreshingly techno-optimist stance on these questions (which made me reconsider some of my own personal aesthetic attitudes towards them—more on that later), but still provides an appropriately healthy level of nuance (which is most strongly made clear in the series’s controversial ending that large numbers of its Internet fanbase refuse to understand).
Now, as I write this, I realize that “being made to feel certain questions strongly” does not make an anime series high art. What I wrote here unfortunately reminds me of some image collage I’d seen created by a One Piece fan, which insisted something like “One Piece is not a childish anime! It deals with themes like poverty and racism!” It’s clear that whoever made that image had a horrifically stunted aesthetic sense, one that hadn’t developed past the 7th-grade English class stage of “good art = deals with ‘themes’ that can be summed up in one word”. And yet here I am, going and saying “TTGL is a good series because it deals with ‘themes’ like ‘growth vs. degrowth’”—alright, that’s great, but why should I care if a show “deals with themes”? And if I tried to rebut by saying “well, maybe it changed my opinion towards those themes”, then that would only reflect badly on me: I don’t particularly consider myself a Rationalist, but I know well enough Not to Generalize From Fictional Evidence.
But if there is a nugget of value to be salvaged from the assertion that “TTGL is a good series because it addresses the question of ‘growth vs. degrowth’”, it would be this: TTGL presents an aesthetic of (responsible) techno-optimism which is compelling, in the sense that it helps me to understand why it would feel good to live in a techno-optimist world. Even though techno-optimism can be considered, like many isms, as a set of policy prescriptions or economic attitudes, man cannot live by policy prescriptions alone; there has to be some sort of narrative that structures how he will relate to the society formed by that set of policy prescriptions.
For example, you could take two different people living in the same society in the same (or similar) material circumstances, who nevertheless have polar opposite instinctual emotional attitudes towards that society. One guy sees that OpenAI and DeepMind have created AIs that placed 1st on the International Math Olympiad and thinks “Holy shit! We’re living in the future and the future is so cool! I can’t wait to see what humans—and soon, robots—are gonna invent next!” The other guy thinks “Holy shit we’re all going to either be replaced or killed, it’s so over.” Now, if you’re in a position where you can affect policy (be it at the political level or at the market level), there is an asymmetry between these positions: executing the policies associated with the wrong one (whichever it may be) could spell mass disaster. But if you’re just some guy—then these are just different ways of relating to the world, on an emotional level that most directly shapes your own life.
So if a piece of art (or a TV anime series) gets you to relate to the world in a different way at the personal level, even if only provisionally, then I’d say that that’s a point in its favor: it was able to enrich your collection of mental attitudes towards the world [2]. And since TTGL did that for me, to some extent, I have to say that I found it to be a good series.
Now here’s the part where I apologize for this massive rambling text dump. Forgive me; I ended up getting way too carried away. Anyway, I’ve never watched Gundam or Macross, but from what I understand, there’s quite the convoluted viewing order for those franchises, so be aware of that before you jump in.
[1] Only writing this now do I realize that this too is an expression of the lingering trauma from the atomic bombs in the Japanese psyche. It’s not quite as obvious as in e.g. “Giant Robo”, but in retrospect, it makes a lot of sense.
[2] Of course, there are some “attitudes towards the world” that are just harmful and not suitable for most humans who want to live a good life. E.g. regularly watching cartel snuff videos probably doesn’t foster attitudes conducive to eudaemonia. But I don’t think that TTGL belongs in that category.
Well, that's a spirited defense of the series. I feel that I owe you enough to power through the rest of it. I'll also report it as an AAQC, because it deserves it.
I'm more than happy to admit that I might be the wrong target audience for the show, I did say that I went into it with very little on the way of pre-existing knowledge, just that it involved big ass robots and ludicrous power-scaling, which are aspects I was perfectly happy to indulge.
(A yet to be disclosed aspect is that I was seeking to perform a bit of field research. In my own novel, there's a weeb superhero who is really into mechs, and in-universe, loves TTGL. I felt I owed it to the character to watch it for myself, at the very least, it lets me write better satire and throw in more puns.)
Let's not rule that out! I don't know about my travails, but I do know I intend to travel in a big-ass robot this weekend. It's called a plane haha.
Funnily enough, I entertain both positions. I don't know if I'm a bog-standard techno-optimist, but I do think that progress in AI can lead to amazing things, I just have grave concern that it could directly or indirectly kill us or screw things over.
Glad to hear you appreciated my ramblings (although now I feel responsible if you end up not liking the series…)
Heh, nice one.
I think that this is a pretty natural feeling. Even on LessWrong where the biggest doomers congregate, I’ll often see those very same doomers idly musing about whether X architectural improvement or Y change to the training procedure of language models might remove Z limitation. (If you want specific examples of this, I’m afraid I can’t provide, but I do remember seeing this.) This can, of course, be justified as “world modeling”: it’s important to think about things so that we’re better able to estimate timelines and prepare for the future.
But if I may be permitted to engage in some bulverism: I think that deep down, it’s just fun to do this. It’s fun to see a problem and try to solve it. It’s fun to push past some limitation that you were previously chafing at. Humans are natural hill-climbers: we’ll follow the local gradient upwards, even if the hill we’re climbing is actually Mt. Doom. (Now I’m tempted to start going on about again about how “humans just want to evolve and go further than they were the day before” is another core theme of the series—but I’ll stop myself here.)
Of course, I do recognize that your techno-optimism is grounded in more practical, utilitarian, moral reasoning than merely Werner Von Braun-style “Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down” thinking. But at the very least, I personally feel its pull quite a bit (even though my primary disposition is more to fear an immanent eschaton, be it utopia or Doom).
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