Gurren Lagann is one of the most pro-natalist media pieces I've ever seen, and it's also one of my favorite anime series of all time. In this episode, I talk about why this is so rare, and why it's so good.
00:00:00.000I want to talk about why this show is so rare, because when you look at how this show frames good, bad are the things that limit humanity's potentiality, and good is the expansion of human potentiality.
00:00:11.440When I look at the way good is framed in things like Hollywood, where good is just sort of general utilitarianism or the maintenance of the status quo, you know, I'd often say that my favorite villain song of a Disney movie is Hakuna Matata.
00:00:26.820In Evangelion, they struggle to live, whereas in Gurren Lagann, they live to struggle, and that so resonates.
00:00:36.280This idea of struggle is bad, we need to live to end struggle. Instead of seeing struggle as the reason for living, in Gurren Lagann, when they're looking at the challenges ahead of them, they get excited about them.
00:00:51.360The challenges are what give life its purpose. And this boundless optimism isn't because we don't know that struggle exists. It isn't because we don't know how hard life is for people.
00:01:05.140It's because we're excited at the challenge to overcome that, both at the level of individuals and at the level of a species.
00:01:13.040I am so excited for our topic today, because it is on what I think is the greatest of all pro-natalist media pieces I've ever seen.
00:01:23.820And it's a piece that I also ascribe some religious significance to, because I think it captures concepts that we try to convey in some of our, like, religious episodes that are actually pretty difficult to capture unless you're doing it in this sort of goofy, irreverent way.
00:01:41.120But I want to, first, what I love is people, like, just to go over the pro-natalist Gurren Lagann connection here, right?
00:01:49.040Because I mentioned this to some of my progressive friends, and they're like, what? Gurren Lagann's a pro-natalist piece?
00:01:56.160Or the people who were surprised when Franks, we did an episode on, like, the naughty anime topics, where we talked about this anime Franks, which was just an entirely pro-natalist anime, very explicitly.
00:02:08.980And people were really surprised by how pro-natalist it was, and how much it shamed ideas like life extensionism.
00:02:14.800And I'm like, these are the people who did Gurren Lagann.
00:02:18.100Somehow, the world, like, collectively, when they were watching Gurren Lagann, they did not catch the enemy.
00:02:26.740And it's not even like an adult comparison or an adult slander on ideas like the carrying capacity of the Earth.
00:02:36.200It is as if I was creating a cartoon that was supposed to, like, go to a middle school and, like, cartoonishly sort of brainwash kids into a specific perspective on topics.
00:02:48.440We're like, in Captain Planet, you know how the capitalists, like, look like pigs and, like, oink and everything like that and everything?
00:02:55.500If there's anything I like more than being mean, it's being sneaky.
00:03:00.580The people who work in extractive industries are real people, not pigmen.
00:03:07.940This is, uh, that's basically the way Gurren Lagann treats the concept of antinatalism.
00:03:12.580So, for those who don't know, I guess I should go over the broad plot structure of Gurren Lagann, because that would help people sort of get to where we're going with this.
00:03:35.880So, it starts where they are in a small underground shelter, and they sort of believe that's their world.
00:03:49.000It gets bigger at a logarithmic scale with each sort of turn of this show's plot.
00:03:56.520Where at the end of the show, they are a, like, a fighting robot that's made out of galaxies and universes, fighting another fighting robot that's made out of galaxies and universes.
00:04:10.700But at each stage, there's also this idea of it is dangerous to go further.
00:04:17.500So, the key big bad of at least the first part of the show believes that something terrible will happen to the Earth, you're not told vaguely what, if the Earth ever gets more than a million human beings living on the surface.
00:04:30.420So, this is this idea of carrying capacity.
00:04:33.800And then, in the second part of the show, after they've defeated him and they are then moving to the surface and building this civilization, you see a character who is in a micro, because this is, again, you keep seeing this logarithmic thing.
00:04:46.140So, this one character grew up in an underground bunker where they didn't have enough food, and whenever they got over 50 people, they had to kill whoever the new person was.
00:04:54.480Or, you know, so they had to draw lots, and then those people would go out and die.
00:04:59.500Because, you know, this idea of carrying capacity is just constantly reinforced.
00:05:03.620And then they learned that this idea of carrying capacity was forced upon them by this cosmic scale force called the anti-spirals, who fear humanities and all spiral races capacity for intergenerational improvement, and that capacity for intergenerational improvement spiraling out of control.
00:05:25.760To just get to some exact quotes here, because I know that people who may only vaguely remember the show might be like, oh, is that exactly what it was about?
00:05:37.260So, and this will sound very much similar to something we'll say.
00:05:40.560So, when the nerdy gay engineering guy is explaining to everyone else what spiral energy is, he says,
00:05:46.060The genetic diversity stemming from gametogenesis is the key to evolution.
00:05:50.900It's that that keeps spiral power moving forwards.
00:06:07.860Well, reproduction through assortative combining, which is very important to us.
00:06:12.260He says in that line, and it's very important in all of our philosophy and sort of teaching, is that diversity is key to this sort of power.
00:06:22.200You cannot have this power if you are just cloning or if you are attempting to live forever.
00:06:29.620So, the beastmen in the show are the sort of like foot soldiers of the enemy.
00:06:33.360And they're said to not have the capacity for spiral power because they are cloned.
00:06:37.440Because they don't have this capacity for intergenerational improvement.
00:06:42.260And they also say this explicitly in the show as the main character saying, those who are dead are dead.
00:06:48.120If we bring them back to life, they will just get in the way of the next generation.
00:06:52.200And you really, like, all of this is just so irreverently our philosophy on sort of life and the power of humanity.
00:07:00.360But I want to highlight that I will say something like, the goal of humanity is iterative intergenerational improvement.
00:07:09.560And people hear this concept, and it can seem so, I don't know, sort of hollow or tinny.
00:07:16.240Or like, how could that be this big explosive aspect?
00:07:20.620How could that be something of true good in the universe, right?
00:07:24.340And Gurren Lagann through art and through low art, which I love.
00:07:29.800And this is something you constantly see throughout, you know, if you're ever reading Bible or anything like that, is that in the world of the divine, the low is made high and the high is made low.
00:07:38.480God chose things the world considers foolish in order to shame those who think they are wise.
00:07:43.240And he chose things that are powerless to shame those who are powerful.
00:07:46.860God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things and the things that are not to nullify the things that are so that no one may boast before him.
00:07:55.460If you are looking for truth, you are going to find it in the things that cannot also be used to signal social status.
00:08:00.620You should not dismiss forms of art just because they're reverberant.
00:08:04.820Just because our society denigrates, you know, goofy anime.
00:08:08.640They sometimes can convey concepts which are difficult for me to convey, you know, in the spoken word.
00:08:17.180But before we go further on this concept of spiral energy as it's captured in the show, Gurren Lagann, one thing I really wanted to talk to you about is I also think another thing the show does supremely excellently well is capture healthy relationships and capture, I think, the meaning of a life well lived.
00:08:37.200And just more succinctly than I could and in a way that I think helps people understand how you can live more meaningfully forever through the impact you have on the people around you than through just living forever, which is a constant reoccurring theme in the shows made by this team, which is also a reoccurring story in Frank's.
00:09:01.780But I wanted to talk to you about the various relationships you saw on the show, like the relationship between this one character who is just boundless optimism, but kind of a lug head and just ambition incarnate.
00:09:14.820And this other character, Simone, who's like his little brother sort of character, I had sort of seen them as almost the perfect example of what masculinity should be, Kamina.
00:09:25.740The way that a man should treat his wife or the relationship you should have with like a perfect wife is the relationship he has with a young male friend of his, Simone.
00:09:34.220But I want you to talk a bit about it when you saw and listened to analysis.
00:09:38.260Yeah, what I really, really love about it is, and you pointed this out too when we talk about the show, is it's so unusual to find a character who instead of being like the hero.
00:09:49.520Oh, by the way, there's going to be spoilers and what I'm about to say. So stop if you want to get the spoilers. So a hero that doesn't just lead by being awesome, but who is primarily impactful by inspiring other people, which is so what leadership is about.
00:10:04.500And yet you don't, I really can't think of other leaders like that. So it's amazing to me that Kamina, who really seems like the driving force of the entire show, like the number one main person does not survive through the entire show and then lives on through his impact in a very visual way.
00:10:21.900So in the past, like there are shows like Game of Thrones where like obvious heroes, you know, die all the time, but they don't, they don't really have that much of an impact and their characters don't really live beyond them, which is interesting.
00:10:34.860Whereas the impact of Kamina is so strong on the other characters that like literally as the other characters become more powerful or grow, they will adopt like physical aspects of Kamina, which I think is really interesting.
00:10:50.160Like Shimon, Kamina's younger friend and sort of who, the person who was most inspired by him, like after he gets to a certain level, like starts to adopt a version of kind of like, I guess the visor or sunglasses that Kamina wore.
00:11:05.120Hey, when the hell did you get taller than me? Wow, you're right.
00:11:09.660Yeah, it really, I mean, it shows through narrative through lines that Kamina didn't, like he's dead, but he's still impacting everything that's happening.
00:11:39.640Throughout the rest of the show to an extent where it never really feels like he's not the main character.
00:11:46.860Yeah, he like remains the main character despite not being there. It's so true. It's so true.
00:11:51.360There's been a lot of analysis done on the show and contrasting it with Evangelion.
00:11:55.440And the Evangelion starts with a character very similar to Simone, but who sort of descends into, you know, sort of self-indulgent depression because he didn't have a character like Kamina, who, you know, the line that he always says at first is if you can't, basically, if you can't believe in yourself, believe in the you that I believe in.
00:12:36.200So often in shows, what the masculine character does is they demonstrate their masculinity through their own heroic acts, through, you know, sort of leading the people around them, but mostly just their own acts of heroism and strength and everything like that.
00:12:54.340Whereas with Kamina, every one of his major heroic acts was about pushing somebody who didn't believe in themselves to have more faith in themselves and to do something that they didn't know they could do.
00:13:08.480And when people, like when they're making fun of me, like the manos here and stuff like that, and they're like, these are the ways you live short of someone like Andrew Tate.
00:13:17.140I don't, I have no aspiration to be that type of a man or that type of masculinity.
00:13:21.940But like, if somebody was like, you live short of the example that Kamina shows as to what it is to be a masculine male, that would actually hurt me.
00:13:31.200And something that's really important in the Kamina character is he always believes that he's going to do these great things in the world to the point where he doesn't actually have, like he's basically just a lone person saying he has this team that's going to change the world.
00:13:47.400But really all the team is until the episode right before he dies is just him and Simone.
00:13:54.680It's just this one person who believes in him and occasionally like people around him who are aligned with him in their in the moment goals.
00:14:03.460But other than that, it's just this boundless optimism where it sort of creates a distortion field where you as a listener can forget that, no, this is really just two people with one who believes in the other one and the other one who's constantly talking about how he's going to change the world.
00:14:20.420But who is never demeaning of Simone to Kamina, Simone was always the senior partner in capability.
00:14:30.040And this is another thing that's shown throughout the show.
00:14:32.360And it's really important to me in this show that's about inter iterative sort of human improvement and the growth that comes from that.
00:14:57.220The drill is the motif used for spiral energy throughout the show.
00:15:00.380And spiral energy is the energy contained within the double helix of the DNA evolution, but also the spiral of the galaxy, you know, galactic evolution, evolutionary on a galactic timescale.
00:15:09.560And the simple drill getting bigger was every turn, like a radial, like exponentially bigger was every turn of the drill represents that.
00:15:17.860But it also represents simple, diligent labor.
00:15:20.960Simone from the very beginning was in his village.
00:15:23.680Yes, he was smaller than everyone else.
00:15:25.020Yes, he was this sort of the pick squeak of a character, but he was always the best driller.
00:15:29.560He was always the best at simple diligence.
00:15:31.600As they move to different iterations of the cycle, you know, as they get a mecca, he now has a spiral key to turn on the mecca.
00:15:38.680As he, like a little drill, when he is signing bills and everything like that, the front of his pin is a small drill, a small little spiral showing that the work of governance, like that actually allows all of this to happen, is the partnering of people with astounding ambition, with people who have astounding diligence and work ethic.
00:16:01.040And the people who have this astounding ambition, realizing that the senior partner, in terms of who's bringing what to the partnership, is the individual with the diligence, is the individual with the meticulousness, is the individual with the work ethic.
00:16:16.300It's not the ambition or the masculinity or anything like that.
00:16:19.840It is simple diligence that allows for this unimaginable expansion of human potential.
00:16:25.920But I also want to talk about why this show is so rare, because when you look at how this show frames good, like it frames good as this concept that we call sort of spiral energy, right?
00:16:42.520And it frames bad as anti-spiral energy.
00:16:44.880Bad are the things that limit humanity's potentiality, and good is the expansion of human potentiality.
00:16:49.920When I look at the way good is framed in things like Hollywood, they are espousing these ideas of the urban monoculture, because it is so drenched in Hollywood, where good is just sort of general utilitarianism, or the maintenance of the status quo.
00:17:07.080You know, I'd often say that my favorite villain song of a Disney movie is Hakuna Matata, which is the most anti-spiral song.
00:17:47.600If you look at what the consequence that happened because of the lifestyle that they lured him into, a lifestyle of selfish indulgence, his kingdom fell apart.
00:17:59.220All of the animals suffered and died horrible deaths.
00:18:02.620Oh, and really funny, too, like a, well, almost vegetarian, you know, insect eating, which is kind of what a lot of people are fighting for these days.
00:18:14.380No worries for the rest of their days.
00:18:16.320The shirking of his responsibility to his people.
00:18:18.800And one of the lines that you picked up that you loved from one of the video essays on Gurren Lagann, do you want to go over this?
00:18:26.720Well, yeah, yeah, the best analysis I heard was that in Evangelion, they struggle to live, whereas in Gurren Lagann, they live to struggle.
00:18:38.600Like, you miss the point if you were just obsessed with your struggling and just trying to get by.
00:18:45.500And you totally nail it if you are fighting for the right to be challenged, the right to be pushed to your limits, because that's how you know you're really living a life.
00:18:54.120Yeah, and we're going to talk about this in sort of future tracks, but this is such an important concept in terms of framing reality.
00:19:02.240And it's why I think in so many aspects of our society today, one of the things that we'll talk about is I see some religious systems is really sort of religious systems that are anti-spiral energy personified.
00:19:14.520You know, fighting for these ideas of like harmony and balance and oneness and and then other religions, which are focused on the uplifting of man, this this constant state of improvement and the anti-natalist movement.
00:19:28.440You know, you couldn't have more of a, you know, anti-spiral mindset personified on the world.
00:19:37.560We need to live to end struggle instead of seeing struggle as the reason for living.
00:19:43.560And Gurren Lagann, when they're looking at the challenges ahead of them, they get excited about them.
00:19:50.020The challenges are what give life its purpose.
00:19:54.300And in every scene, whatever they've just achieved, they are now going for something that's as insane and big and astounding next, you know, that you would you would never expect, you know, even at the end of the movie, they've defeated the other like at a universal scale.
00:20:12.820They're now sending ships out to space to meet other planets and help other species, you know, achieve their potential.
00:20:20.220And this this boundless optimism isn't because we don't know that struggle exists.
00:20:26.400It isn't because we don't know how hard life is for people.
00:20:29.080It's because we're excited at the challenge to overcome that, both at the level of individuals and at the level of a species.
00:20:37.420And that gets me really excited when I begin to take on this framing.
00:20:43.200And it's also I mean, one of the reasons why I really want to bring in this idea of Gurren Lagann, even within a religious context for us, is because it's an idea that came out of Eastern thought.
00:20:53.920And yet the anti-spiral sort of mimetic forces that it personifies are such a major part of so many Eastern religious systems.
00:21:04.480So being that we think that these systems are not good for humanity, I want to use an Eastern thought to to show it's not like an anti-Eastern thing.
00:21:15.320Another thing I wanted to talk about here that I think is really interesting is the way that Gurren Lagann relates to religion.
00:21:22.300So there is a religious community in Gurren Lagann that's that's used when they've in one the village where only 50 people are allowed to live and 50 people.
00:21:32.560And you learn at the end the line is the dad gives to his son, the dad who created the religion, it's a preacher and has the book, their religious text.
00:21:41.480And the son says, you know, I've always hid from you that I didn't know how to read and I'm sorry about that.
00:21:46.280And the dad goes, it's OK, I don't either.
00:21:48.320With the idea being that he just made it all up to control people.
00:21:52.520And you later learn, you know, that it was a joke.
00:23:16.760And you see, this is why I like this show so much, is Kamina reminds me so much of you.
00:23:21.700Where, like, you, for some reason, don't choose to just build on the way that everyone else thinks and just, like, ask ridiculous questions and try things.
00:23:40.080Here's a theme that I've noticed in the analysis of Gurren Lagann that I think means that a lot of people are missing the point of the show, a point that you did not miss, which is they're watching it and they're like, yeah, man, like, believe in the you that I believe in, you know, that Kamina line, you know, just like, and, you know, think about that, you know, think about the fact that, you know, someone might believe in a better version of you that you can be.
00:24:04.820Like, everyone takes the point of view of Shimon instead of the point of view that they could be like Kamina, that they could inspire people, that they could think incredibly differently and outlandishly.
00:24:17.940And while I, I mean, I seeing myself very much as a Shimon, which is also totally how they pronounce my name in Japan.
00:24:29.320And we're way shorter on Kaminas than we are on Shimon's.
00:24:33.000So there's two things I want to elaborate on, on this point.
00:24:36.420One is if we ever do create some like meaningful thing, you know, if my little team girl had ever become something meaningful, I want the statues of me done in the style of Kamina.
00:24:46.180Hundreds of years ago, I want the statues of me, the statues pointing to the heaven.
00:24:49.660I've always loved that statue and what it embodies, this idea of, and I'll put it on screen, of just always looking upwards in sort of the manifest destiny of humanity being the stars.
00:25:01.100But I'd also say that there's another character that's really important in this, is that after Kamina dies, there is a girl character who then becomes Simone's wife.
00:25:10.820And she plays the same role Kamina does for him in this boundless belief in his goodness and abilities and not willing to let herself be constrained by the world that's around them.
00:25:23.140But she does it in a completely feminine way.
00:25:26.160And so I love that the show models how you can support your partner with insane ideas as both a masculine and feminine role.
00:25:37.220Because normally that's just framed as super masculine.
00:25:39.720Not to say that women can't take on masculine roles, but I think a lot of women are more comfortable taking a feminine spin on things, even if they really want to be outlandish and crazy and the most powerful and influential person in a relationship.
00:26:22.760Which is just a fantastic clip that really shows, I think, both the way we think about spiral energy and the way that we think about death.