I will be honest with you.  I am very tempted to just write about how awesomely funny episode nine, or episode ten, of Kannagi was and just leave it at that.  I’ve actually been trawling the depths of my sick-addled mind for days, trying to think of anything I could use here other than, well, what I’m going to be using here.  Because to tell you about the end of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, I have to tell you a story.  My stories are usually about plucky, unprepared people confronting enormous danger, usually involving ghosts or giant clockwork machines.  This danger is more pedestrian, but easier to relate to.  I have to tell you about my first real relationship.  

I say “first real relationship” because I’d had one other, when I was nineteen and the lady involved was eighteen.  I don’t really count it.  Most of it took place over a winter break, where we didn’t see each other, and was the sort of thing most people get out of the way in high school.  

Anyway.  Relationship:  six months went by pretty well.  She said there were problems for the last month, not counting the bit where I was back home before coming to visit.  She said the week I spent visiting was one of the worst in her life.  In later conversation with friends, we came to the conclusion that she may actually be ret-conning our relationship, because I don’t think I’m so dense as to miss that sort of thing.  So she called me in July and broke up with me.  The rest of the summer kind of sucked.  I recall a moment, driving to a distant town to visit a friend, over a month later, finally feeling as though I could enjoy a summer sky again, and then not for very long.  I didn’t rage or break down, but I kept going in whatever tasteless state I was in for far longer than some might expect.  

I already shocked Pontifus when I mentioned I couldn’t read for a week or so afterwards.  Anything that put me alone with my thoughts was rough for a while, watching anime included.  But I got back into it.  And then I took the hint that the otaku-rhombus was giving me, and started watching Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.  You already know a little about what that was like.  What I didn’t mention was the way I used it in my own life.  It gave me energy.  For the first time since July, I felt like there was a future.  

[I'll pause here to let you know that yes, I understand this isn't a unique situation.  In the grand scheme of things it's not even all that important.  I knew all that the whole time, even that moment on the phone, but it never helped recover from the emotional trauma.]

I’d been excited with friends, playing Dungeons and Dragons or Smash Bros. Brawl, but not really by myself, here in this room I’m in right now, late at night.  In fact, I stopped staying up late for a while; I was afraid of the introspection that I knew from experience really late summer nights bring me.  So that’s what TTGL started to do for me.

Then I started to take even more.  When regret would numb or blindside me, I’d grimace, I’d mutter “who the hell do you think I am?” to no one.  When I got back to Memphis it got worse again, after having gotten a little better.  Because she was at parties, in my classes.  We had three (of four) classes together this past semester.  In the apartment I first moved into (which is not the house I live in while in Memphis now), I felt terrible.  It was a dark, lonesome sort of place, even with a roommate, as she was rarely around.  I was homesick and heartsick.  So I watched TTGL.  I saw Simon beat the little armadillo man, and listened to the soundtrack as I drove to campus and unpacked my things (only to pack them again several days later).  

Now fast forward to last week.  Tuesday, I think.  I was sick (I’m still sick), and almost everyone had left the house but me.  My new girlfriend was coming over in the evenings to keep me company, and honestly, take care of me — I can be a huge, whiny brat while I’m sick.  I can also be a stubborn ass; I still haven’t been to a doctor.  So Tuesday I woke up, scrabbled around for some of the over-the-counter medicine I’d been taking, and made tea with my cereal, my usual morning.  And I decided to watch an episode of TTGL.  I had five episodes left.  

And a few hours later I’d finished the series.  It was tragic and hopeful, funny — well, you probably know all that.  I haven’t seen a story more palbably about loss and the way we deal with it since The Lord of the Rings.  And like in Tolkien’s work, TTGL offers us something to help move on — never to fill in the loss, but to deal with it, make it something solid in you.  

I’m going to be self-indulgent for a moment here.  Several years ago I wrote a short-short called, simply enough, “How to Save the World.”  It’s in second-person.  I’m going to quote a bit of it:

 When you’re bare, fragments of yourself littering the floor, friends, allies, and confused enemies cold in the earth, slumped under salt-water, eaten by fire, then you will be ready [. . .] Lift your fragments in a shaking hand, hold the dead close in your mind, and throw rocks. Scream, and cry, and fail to be strong enough, and wrap the flaw in your shaping around your perfections, and use the poison from that wound to stop the crawling darkness.

Aside from the obvious Lovecraftianism at the end there, I would like to think it taps into the same vein of experience and philosophy that drives TTGL, that we’re in a lot of trouble here, as humankind and as individuals; we all have problems and we have to deal with them in some way.  TTGL gives us a very simple way to deal with ourselves and the world:

“We’re evolving more with every passing minute.”  The turn of, in Simon’s words, a drill.  

Let me be simple.  The end of TTGL capitulated six months of my life that, for many different reasons (I didn’t get into the problems with my creative writing courses) were some of the hardest I’ve ever had.  It ran throughout, even though I wasn’t consistently watching episodes.  When we’re just talking about TTGL it’s easy to dwell on the GAR, on the love stories — or strange occlusion they go through — the action, or even the mythic nature of sacrifice and the unlucky few (like Gilgamesh and, now Simon) who don’t have the option of sacrificing themselves, and instead have to lose those they love.  But what’s happening, for me, as the end goes by — as Simon seems to have survived twenty years without any of his friends, so well he gives up his trademark phrase, one of the things that tied him to Kamina, because it’s better for the child — is that I’m piecing Simon’s strength into my own cracks.  Given that I still cry, sometimes, at the thought of some of the losses of fictional characters in a cartoon, Simon might say I have a long way to go.  On the other hand, while I don’t yet look at the pictures of my ex and remember the good times (mostly I have to work to hide them so I don’t stumble across them), I don’t spend as much time thinking about the past as I did.  In part that’s simply time.  But then, I know, now and until always, that we evolve more with every passing minute.

Tags: dungeons and dragons, kamina, simon, smash bros, tengen toppa gurren lagann

Thus spake Cuchlann on Thursday, 25 December 2008 at 2:12 am, and Anime 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.