Fever Dream in Twenty-Seven Parts
There are two types of sick. The first is the comfortable kind—you drag yourself to the doctor, cough weakly in his direction, and earn two weeks at home with delivery food and the vague intention of cleaning the apartment. The second is the shadow dimension: fever, sweat, hallucinations, the genuine conviction that you will never see daylight again. Your only companion is the laptop, which at least provides distraction when sleep refuses you and the headache makes social media feel like sandpaper against your face.
That was the flu I had when I found Gurren Lagann.
I needed an anime—something that would make me cry and laugh and think without boring me with anything resembling realism. Someone online had published his personal top fifty anime, and I scrolled through it from the pillow. One Piece was there. Neon Genesis Evangelion. Wolf’s Rain. All known, all loved. At number one: Gurren Lagann, with a note attached: the first few episodes are terrible, but the rest is the best thing he’d ever seen anywhere. Funny, because I’d already tried the show once and dropped it after episode four. Desert, monsters, robots. The same loop every week. But what did I have to lose?
So I gave it another chance and watched all twenty-seven episodes in one sustained session, interrupted only by sleep, meals, and occasional masturbation. At the end I cried—into tissues already destroyed by a week of continuous nose-blowing—because I didn’t want it to be over.
The setup is quick. A nobody named Simon lives underground with his best friend Kamina, digging tunnels for a living. One day a giant monster crashes through the ceiling, followed by the extremely well-built Yoko. A robot materializes. Simon has powers he didn’t know about. Fighting, and breasts.
From there the mission is to reach the great villain at the far end of the world—the one who has kept humanity buried underground for generations. Simon and Kamina join a band of rebels, tear through enemies in their mechas, fight mutant toads and humanoid sharks and assorted escalating chaos. This still sounds like standard anime business.
The show actually begins when Kamina dies. Which happens early. And it is genuinely, properly sad—the kind of sad that repositions everything around it. After that, Gurren Lagann stuffs more story and feeling and invention into its remaining episodes than most series manage across ten seasons. Giant space battles. The question of what anything is for. Betrayal. Still more breasts.
Lying there wrecked in bed, I thought Gainax had probably made the definitive statement of what the medium is capable of. If years of children’s programming—the Yu-Gi-Oh!s, the Beyblades, all that noise and zero consequence—had made you write anime off entirely, Gurren Lagann is where you come back. There is no route around it.