Or, at least, one who is god-like.  Pontifus had more sense than me, and spread his Aria posts throughout his twelve days.  I am now giving up entirely on a vertical scale here and just posting things; hopefully there will be enough gaps between my Gurren Lagann posts to keep them interesting.

Anyway, as you probably know already, this post is about the death of Kamina, or possibly 神な, the god-like one.

Yes, I did just get around to watching Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann this year, what of it?  The thing, I think, that appeals to me so much about GL is how brutally honest it is about everything that’s happening.  Horace Walpole, the creator of the Gothic novel, said of his creation that he wanted to put nice, normal characters into strange situations, straight out of a medieval romance, and see how they reacted, with something approaching psychological realism.

GL isn’t exactly fucking around with this idea, it’s what the show’s about.  I think just about every emotion one could write about gets into GL by the end — even the modern gun lust, through what’s-his-name, the bespectacled guy who’s always, uh, shooting his guns early.  Even he figures out what he’s doing by the end.

I’ve written about Gurren Lagann before, and I will again (I just finished the series on Wednesday).  You’ll find me generally quite honest about things, so I’m perfectly willing to admit I cried as I watched this show, several times, and this was probably the first.  The show doesn’t flinch from making Kamina a completely awesome character.  Watching him, at any moment in the series, is a delight.  We as audience members can understand why a group can build so readily around him — we want to be there too, being pushed by the force of his personality.  And then the show kills him, and guts everyone, cast and audience.  We’re forced to look at our own entrails hanging out, as though we’d tied them to Kamina to better anchor ourselves to his rising rocket and the rocket was thrown into a pit instead of leaping into the sky.

What’s different about this show, as compared to any other show where a character we love dies, is that GL models what we need to do.  Kamina’s death isn’t too far after he (and we) learn what happened to his own father, and Kamina uses this knowledge to go higher, as a place to plant his foot.  Much of the rest of the show charts Simon’s learning to do that, that one thing — it’s the only thing, at the show’s beginning, that Simon is actually unable to do that Kamina does.  It is the one skill that allows Simon to avert the death of the universe — he uses past loss to rise higher, rather than using his power to do so (but more on that later in the countdown, which is now more of a count, uh, sideways).