Gurren Lagann: Boobs, Monsters, Giant Robots
There are two kinds of sick. The light kind where you drag yourself to the doctor, cough in his face, and then get blessed with two weeks decomposing at home with delivery food and a laptop—maybe even clean the apartment if you’re ambitious. Then there’s the other dimension. The one where you’re stuck in bed sweating through fever, hallucinating through mucus, certain you’ll never see daylight again. The laptop becomes your only friend. It’s all that keeps you from losing your mind when your skull feels like it’s splitting open.
I needed something massive to break the fever grip. An anime that could make me cry and laugh without boring me with realistic garbage. Some guy named Veed posted a list: the 50 best anime ever, according to him. One Piece, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Wolf’s Rain—I knew them all, loved them all. He had Gurren Lagann at number one, and he said the opening episodes were shit but the rest was the best thing he’d ever seen anywhere. That was funny because I’d tried Gurren Lagann once, quit after episode four, and moved on. Desert, monsters, robots. Repeat. Nothing grabbed me. But I had nothing else going on.
So I tried again and watched all 27 episodes in one sitting, broken only by sleep and food and jerking off. And I cried at the end. Like a small kid into a tissue. Because it was that good. Because I didn’t want it to finish. Gurren Lagann.
The setup is simple. Simon is a kid living underground with his best friend Kamina, and they spend their days digging tunnels. One day a giant monster crashes through the ceiling with a big-breasted girl named Yoko, a robot appears, Simon gets superpowers, and everything goes sideways.
The story’s about hunting down an ancient monster at the end of the world who’s been crushing humanity for centuries. Simon and Kamina join a resistance group, pilot giant robots, and start destroying everything in their way—mutant frogs, bathhouses, shark-men, whatever. Standard anime logic, the kind of stuff you’ve seen before.
But then Kamina dies. Early, and it hits hard. That’s when the show stops being a kid’s cartoon and becomes an epic. The rest of the series crams in more story and heart and raw insanity than most shows manage in 16 seasons. Massive space wars. Questions about meaning and will. Betrayal. The weight of the universe.
I was lying there ruined by fever, and watching it all unfold was extraordinary. I think Gainax created the perfect expression of what anime can be. If you gave up on the medium after Yu-Gi-Oh! and Beyblade wore you down, you need to watch Gurren Lagann. There’s no getting around it.