Screw you Gainax, screw you…

A movie adap­ta­tion lacks the time for details that a series enjoy. With that in mind, the sec­ond movie of Ten­gen Toppa Gur­ren Lagann: Lagann-hen was as good as it gets. Yes, it skived out a lot of the details from the early parts of the TTGL episodes range that it’s sup­pose to cover, but the bonuses it did add in totally destroyed any com­plaints I would have had. Seri­ously, the cli­matic bat­tle of Lagann-hen makes the final boss fight of Gur­ren Lagann TV series look like a cat­fight in com­par­i­son. Not to men­tion they did a bet­ter job clar­i­fy­ing the Spi­ral Neme­sis, and Lord Genome’s lit­tle Tron adven­ture were both brick-shitting and hilar­i­ous at the same time (screen­cap, 2).

WHO THE HELL DO YOU THINK WE ARE!?! –is some­thing I want to say to Gainax

My beef with the movie how­ever, lays in how badly Gainax’s mood pac­ing ruined my emo­tional con­trol for an entire night, and not in a good way. Deliv­er­ing absolute despair to your fan is not cool. I guess they’ve accom­plished their objec­tive: I can never for­get this movie now. But that still doesn’t mean I want to watch it a sec­ond time; at least, not all of it.

In Lagann-hen, the dis­as­trous space bat­tle that killed off half the Dai-Gurren-Dan never hap­pened. Instead they plunged straight into that ‘super dense space’ ocean, so Kit­tan still died. How­ever this meant that many other mem­bers did sur­vive, and instead of just tag­ging them in, Gainax gave us an eye-full by com­pletely redo­ing most of that bat­tle. I thought it might be just a few more character-specific attacks com­ing from the Ten­gen Toppa; no, we have a full course of new shinies!!!

Nia get­ting one alone was enough to make my jaw hit the floor

Viral then gave me car­diac arrest

The rest of the crew, espe­cially Yoko’s breast mis­siles, made me shit one galaxy after another

At this point, I was far too stunned to say any­thing, or even raise my arms to cheer for the show. I think my eyes per­ma­nently bulged from exces­sive wide-eyed star­ing, that my jaw might require med­ical restora­tion. Then of course, Gainax Gat­tais all of their new shiny toys together to form some kind of super-galactic avatar of GAR, a lit­eral god of awesomeness.

What now you anti-spiral bitches!

Giga Drill Breaker and Anti-Spiral Giga Drill Breaker cre­ates the most epic fight of all time, OF ALL TIME

And if 5 lay­ers of mecha isn’t enough, Simon per­son­ally steps out of Lagann to deliver a beatdown

After that scene my emo­tions were at an all-time high. My brains didn’t explode once, they’ve been spon­ta­neously com­bust­ing for the last ten freak­ing min­utes. I swear I’m like dying of excite­ment and joy over here…

Then Gainax crashed it all down on me: Nia still dies.

This change of mood is quite the killing blow. If I was watch­ing nor­mal drama the mood would grad­u­ally build up to the ulti­mate loss; I’d be cry­ing but it wouldn’t hurt so deeply. But in Gur­ren Lagann, rather than slow­ing down and then crash­ing into that tree, it feels like you rammed head­first into a car going the other way…

Hav­ing been ele­vated to the high­est mood achiev­able and then tossed straight into the pits isn’t enter­tain­ment; it’s freak­ing tor­ture. This is what they freak­ing call absolute despair in anime! It may not be harm­ing my real-life, but that por­tion of my brain that enjoys anime and manga and books and any form of enter­tain­ment was def­i­nitely just thrown in absolute despair, into com­plete emo­tional break­down, into a state of cry­ing itself to sleep.

I went to my room and cried for the next half hour. Then … Either way, it ended up being one f-ed up party night for me. Thank god for my friends being helpful.

Dammmnnnnn-it Gainax!!!

This is what the pro­duc­ers were thinking

Yes they could have salvaged/altered that end­ing and still made the same impact. Gainax sim­ply decided to play the ‘screw you’ card just like they did in Mahoro­matic (the manga’s good end­ing sce­nario would have worked for this as well, with Nia being res­ur­rected as a nor­mal girl and comes look­ing for Simon # years later…)

I wouldn’t have minded Nia dying if she returned in the epi­logue. Actu­ally I wished for that… until the very… last… second.

Pos­si­bly Related Posts

• Recipe for Suc­cess: Rem­i­nisc­ing Gurren-Lagann thru the Buster Series
• My Anime Fam­ily Project
• Mar­cana Tarot Project++

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 22:35 and is filed under Anime. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.