I’m not finished with Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann yet, and as readers from my personal blog might expect, I’m horribly behind, both with the newest stuff and with my own, personal schedule.

As you might guess from the title, I want to deal with GL in terms of mythology.  And, really, when is talking about Kamina a bad thing?

I am what you might call a devotée of Joseph Campbell, who claims that all stories are, at their core, myth stories.  Specifically, Campbell describes the single story of the hero as an externalization of the internal forces, pressures, and desires common to all humankind — for example, all people deal with death, and so the myth-hero will be predictably forced to deal with death in the course of his or her story.  The bits and pieces that are specific to particular cultures are like the details of a play; the director might change the actors or the costumes, but the spine, the plot, will be the same.  Myth criticism (what we’re engaged in right now) lends value to readings of texts by revealing what elements appeal to the core of the reader, and how they do so.

GL has what I would call a well-wrought action cast, and the typical seinen action show is damn close to myth anyway.  Think Bleach.  Kamina is an Achilles figure, strong, valiant, and a role model for the rest of the cast.  Maybe it’s more accurate to compare Kamina to Cuchulainn, the hero of Irish myth who defended his homeland single-handedly against an invading army and lost his life in the process.  Kamina does what needs to be done until others can get their heads in the game — the men of Ulster arrive in time to rescue Cuchulainn’s body from looting and drive back the army.

Simon is our growing boy-hero, of course.  He begins much as any viewer, still forming and growing.  To keep up our Irish myth comparisions, he’s like Finn, who begins as a servant and ends up forming the greatest group of fighting men to ever live in Irish lore, the Red Branch (don’t think I’m not trying to allude to the Dai-Gurren-Dan here, because I am).

Yoko is a wise fighter-woman (try to recall the beginning of the show, when she’s the only one who knows the conditions on the surface).  Scathbad was a witch-woman who taught Cuchulainn everything he knew about fighting, playing music, and writing poetry.

These points, by themselves, just form a minor myth-circle of characters, and that’s not very useful for us.  But the knowledge of the archetypes involved will, hopefully, allow us to move further in.

I’ll have to digress a bit here — come on, you expected it.  One of the common questions for myth-critics, at least in my experience, is whether or not new archetypes, in character, story, or setting, can be created, or if we managed to nail down everything, ever, thousands of years ago.  Strangely, the answer tends to be that no, whatever example you’re thinking of is likely a cultural variation on an older archetype or trope.  The source of power is an important trope for obvious reasons.  It might be a plot coupon, or it might not be.  We’re concerned with power from within, but that isn’t just a kind of generic “spirit” or “chi.”  Yes, GL makes heavy use of fighting spirit, but as we progress through the plot we learn that’s not really what’s happening — it’s Spiral Energy.  The quasi-internal power, as we might call it, is an old trope.  Achilles was invincible to all forms of attack (excepting one spot), but only because his mother dipped him in a special fountain when he was young.  Baldr was immune to all things (except mistletoe), but only because his mother, concerned for him, most beautiful and wonderful of the gods, made everything in the world (again, except for the mistletoe, oops) promise never to harm him.  These attributes aren’t from outside when the story is happening, but the protagonist wasn’t born with them.

I’m trying to set up a scale, this might help:  think of American comics.  On one end of our scale would be the mutants, who come with their powers the way an action figure comes with Kung-Fu Action Grip.  On the other end would be Iron Man, whose powers come from a suit.  Without the external aid, Tony Stark is exactly the same as everyone else.

That leaves us with a middle ground: the people who were normal, but are no longer.  Think Spider-Man.  Peter Parker was average, and then was bitten by a radioactive spider.  So he received his powers, much like Achilles.  After receiving them, he just has them, forever (barring any low-sales plotlines Marvel might throw our way).

I use Spider-Man quite purposefully here, by the way.  I’m finally approaching what might be considered the point of this entry — though if you come for typical points, at least to my entries, you might be disappointed in a general sense.  We have arrived at an important point, though it might not be immediately obvious.

Examine how these gift-powers come to each of our figures.  In our ancient examples, the parents (specifically the mothers, always traditionally more concerned with protecting their children) bequeathe these gifts.  The Greek culture was focused on the whims and powers of the gods, and so Achilles was dipped into a magical pool.  Norse culture was more animist, and so each plant, animal, and stone in the world swore, as a kind of species grouping thing, never to harm Baldr.  The gift is the archetype — what interests us is the stage-clothes.  Again, consider Spider-Man.  He’s a product of the sixties, and where did he get his powers?  Radiation.  Science, in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is often the source of our “gifts” in stories.  Captain America was an experiment, Wolverine got his metal, but not his claws, from a lab, and the Fantastic Four indirectly received their powers from an experiment gone awry.

One step closer to GL: it’s not just science, but the branch of science.  If you saw the first Spider-Man movie, you may remember that the spiders weren’t irradiated — they were genetically altered.  In a post-Dolly world, genetics are the new nuclear physics.  And now, perhaps, you can see where I’m trying to go here.  GL plays with the idea of genetics and genetic-engineering like Lincoln Logs.  It uses a well-written action story, with serious sensibilities, to examine our modern culture’s obsession with genes (and that’s a global modern culture, as, you know, the show’s from Japan, and I’m not).  Simon’s power comes from his heritage, his genes that he received from his parents — who, we should note, are absent.  Orphans are common hero-figures because they effectively become the children of the town, state, world.  An orphan, by being the child of no one, becomes the child of everyone.  So Simon easily represents the progeny of the entire world.  The old king’s experiments with genetics led to the beast-men.  He figures as a kind of Frankenstein (remember, that’s Victor, the scientist, not the unnamed Creation — guess what I just read for Gothic novel class?).  Between them, they represent the poles of our feelings on genetics, on bloodlines (a much older idea that’s been recast in a modern mold).

Tags: achilles, baldr, comic books, cuchulainn, frankenstein, freud, joseph campbell, myth criticism, mythology, spider-man, tengen toppa gurren lagann

Thus spake Cuchlann on Monday, 29 September 2008 at 2:52 am, and Anime, Art and Culture expanded tenfold. Become privy to further discussion on the matter via RSS 2.0. You might grace us with a brilliant comment, or trackback from a distant podium.