Breaking into the super robot genre has proven difficult for me, so I asked the wise OGT to point me toward a few shows that might help. Among other things, he recommended Gunbuster (aka Top wo Nerae!) — you may already know this, given all the fanboying I did over the show and its sequel. Gunbuster was probably just the sort of thing I needed, tempered as it is by enough drama and pain to sustain my interest through the genuinely awesome moments, which I can in fact enjoy on the level of genuine awesome if I stay interested long enough.

Diebuster, though.

You want to put it into words. You really try. But the last episode explodes your mind, and you’re left with assorted pieces, slightly charred, floating through space. You could leave it at that, but these pieces practically beg to be reassembled, and I’m nothing if not tenacious when it comes to weaving my webs.

So this is a post about Diebuster, ostensibly. But where to begin? “At the beginning,” some would no doubt suggest, but that’s part of the problem: the story’s structure resists that sensible impulse. It’s vexing now that I’m trying to put my thoughts in order, but it’s not something a first-time viewer would notice early on — the beginning seems just fine, and it is, in more ways than are evident from the beginning.

If that makes little sense, you can blame Diebuster’s unusual structure. Things we see in the beginning are parts of larger things that aren’t evident until later; crucially relevant information is withheld. Open an image in your favorite image editor, zoom in as far as you can, and then zoom out slowly, and you’ll get the idea. We could call it “revelation,” but it’s more ubiquitous than a series of run-of-the-mill reveals — plot, characters, setting, et al. (or, specifically, our perception of them, which is what matters anyway) are affected across the board, enmeshed as they are in a structure that’s heavily reliant on strategic obscurity and the unexpected.

It’s atypical, perhaps, but not unique, or even especially new; eighty or so years earlier, the same technique saw use by (you guessed it) James Joyce, particularly in Ulysses¹. Joyce scholar Fritz Senn calls it “circumdation:”

In [Ulysses's] first chapter we will figure out, not in the conventional, expositional order, but by circumstantial links, the setting on top of a historical tower, somewhere near Dublin, at a certain time. The last two chapters, “Ithaca” and “Penelope,” above all put much of what we had taken for granted into a different light. Adjustment takes patience and circumspection, many retracings in an Odyssean progression of trial and error… As often as not we may still be waiting for the final, redeeming “circumdet” that makes everything fall into line.²

It must be said that Diebuster is more comprehensible the first time through than Ulysses. Still, if you compared the point-by-point, beginning-to-end analyses of a first-time viewer and a second-time viewer, you may not find much middle ground. I’ve watched bits and pieces of earlier episodes after finishing the show, and the experience was quite different the second time around, relatively speaking; given how much we learn about Nono, the Topless, the space monsters, and the universe itself along the way, and how much of that information is the sort that’s probably evident to the characters all along even if we aren’t aware of it, the second viewing produces constructs of meaning vastly different from the first. Many stories (maybe all stories) have this quality to some degree, but Diebuster has it in spades — again, it shapes the story’s very momentum.

Since I’ve ended up on the topic of second viewing anyway, consider the first episode on rewatch. We know of Nono’s identity; much of what she does makes a new sort of sense, or assumes altered significance. We know that Lal’c, with all of her baggage (of which we also know), is responsible for the brief voice-over during the opening moments, and we’ve heard the complementary voice-over in episode 6. We know the basis of Tycho’s attitude toward Lal’c. We know more about the antagonists, about the setting, about practically everything. It seems, to me at least, a more profound change in experience than that brought about by simply knowing what will happen in future episodes.

With that said, circumdation isn’t specifically a process that takes place between viewings; it happens all along, and forces us to question our assumptions even during the first viewing. We’re kept on our toes, made to disassemble initial conclusions, insert new information, and reconstruct them as best we can, all while processing plot developments which, in six episodes, don’t have time to pause and give us a breather. It results in a very active, almost hectic reading process — I enjoy it, usually, though I wonder if this would be a basis of complaint for some viewers.

The effect is most evident in later episodes, when revelatory events invoke broad re-imaginings — episode four in particular comes to mind, and the sixth episode affirms that Diebuster’s circumdative nature can reach even Gunbuster, if we let it. Being a matter of basic structure, however, it’s present all along. In the first episode, for example, we aren’t even certain of the setting (that is, Mars) until the latter third or so, when it’s announced outright. Consider the screencaps above, both from the beginning; the predominance of blue, the snow, and the rustic nature of the houses are all deceptive. As the episode progresses, yellow and red come to dominate the palette, technology becomes more evident, and we might, if we’re perceptive, “figure out” (as Senn says) “not in the conventional, expositional order, but by circumstantial links, the setting.” Appropriately enough, the reveal itself takes the form of a literal zoom-out.

Now, I do enjoy examining structure, probably more than I enjoy examining socio-culturo-historico-things in the usual way. But structural nuances, I must admit after a thousand-odd words about them, are not much of a starting point, which is to say that my thoughts on a story don’t begin with the specifics of its twists and turns. Customarily, I’ll try to attach broad identifiers to a thing, but Diebuster even makes that difficult — about which I am thrilled, as any excuse to combine Northrop Frye and mad speculation is a good one.

Diebuster is a mecha show, certainly. It might be postmodern, though I suspect it takes that half-step beyond that hints at postmodernism’s relevance having begun its slow death. Terms like “mecha” and “postmodern,” however, are narrower than the identifiers I have in mind — namely, Frye’s modes and mythoi. It’s possible that these terms are too restrictively Aristotelian; it’s also possible that, when these terms no longer serve our needs as-is (which isn’t necessarily the case, mind you), it’s time to play around with them, and you should know by now that nothing is sacred when I wield my Unlimited Interpretation Works.

We can say one thing with some certainty: Diebuster has irony. I don’t claim that it falls within the range of Frye’s ironic mode (I would’ve said it is ironic); it may, but I’m not yet certain of that. I simply mean that Diebuster is bursting with ironic elements, things that aren’t what they seem they normally would or should be and situations that play out in unexpected ways. Given circumdation, the very structure itself is ironic; one might say irony is its gimmick. And the characters — really, if you’ve seen Diebuster, I doubt I need to explain how the Topless are atypical super robot pilots. Consider Casio, who, despite his hanging around and offering words of wisdom where needed, essentially quit the mecha business out of fear, or Nicola, who, lacking any direction of his own, just rolls with whatever life throws at him. Tycho and Lal’c aren’t what you’d call paragons of awesome, either, until Nono teaches them how to be. And if you figured out what Nono is before the reveal in episode four, you’re probably superhuman, as it’s really just ridiculous (in a good way).

It’s possible, if we’re going with a descriptor that consists of mode and mythos (and we are, because I like to), that Diebuster is “ironic irony,” that it meets the conditions of the ironic mode (the work deals with characters presented as “below” the reader in situation or surroundings) and the ironic branch of the Mythos of Winter (the work applies myth conventions and storytelling methods new and old to realistic, recognizable situations). The latter is likely accurate; despite their capabilities and their surroundings, the Topless are all too human in their mannerisms and conflicts (perhaps it’s the effect of realism on familiar tropes that gives irony its unpredictable nature to begin with). But are they ironic characters in the modal sense? They do, after all, still have those capabilities, and they still inhabit those surroundings; the basic conditions under which their humanity takes place are unfamiliar to us. Consider the climax, during which, for a brief period, the laws of the physical universe don’t apply to Nono at all. Mode-wise, it’s almost mythological.

That in itself isn’t mind-blowing. I’ll borrow Cuchlann’s lovingly hand-crafted illustration:

It’s reasonable to imagine the modes as a cycle, and even Frye speculated in the Anatomy of Criticism that the literature of his time showed signs of moving away from irony and toward myth and romance, citing science fiction specifically. We could stick Diebuster somewhere between irony and myth, and label it transitional, and I’d be okay with that. But something deep in the untamed wilds of my mind insists that there must be more to it than that, that I shouldn’t be so quick to concede to Frye’s cycle as is. It almost feels as though we’re missing something.

Consider the relationship between contemporary “myth” and what we usually think of as myth, stories of gods and heroes and such. Both are basically myth, in Fryean terms, as both involve characters who surpass human beings in kind; whether we’re talking about Zeus or Buster Machine No. 7, we’re dealing with characters whose means fall beyond the comprehension of the humans below them. Those humans may possess the fantastical powers of the romantic mode, but they’re still human, literally speaking, and their abilities, however potent, cannot match those of the myth-figures present.

There is, however, one key difference between mythic paragons old and new. The former are made by older deities, generally, elsewise they simply are. In the beginning, there was Oceanus and Tethys, or Chronos, or Chaos, or Muspell and its guardian Surt, or God who created the heavens and the earth; these deities oversee the creation of other deities (when they allow other deities to exist), the processes of which don’t involve human beings much at all. But consider our alleged contemporary mythology. Nono is a war machine built by humans, one imbued with human-like intelligence and emotion. The Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is raw human potential made manifest. In Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Cantos, those we see gain power over time and space are either human or human-made. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith leverages Martian wisdom with his humanity to reach his state of godliness. The difference, then: we, humans, make the gods — sometimes we are the gods. I don’t believe that’s something we can ignore.

We might call this strategic use of the unexpected, irony in the vein of this ironic age. Or we might not; I’m not sure that it’s expected or unexpected, if that makes any sense. It’s simply a fictional truth that continues to appear in the fiction (especially the science fiction) I consume. It’s not even especially surprising; irony has primed me and others to accept that God is dead, disinterested, or irrelevant, that there is no concrete meaning of life, and that, subsequently, we’re free to fill the meaning-void with whatever meaning we choose, as soon as we stop moping about there being no meaning in the first place (did I mention I usually don’t like postmodernism?). We are creators, in that sense; Heinlein’s aforementioned Stranger in a Strange Land presents that idea with little distillation. It’s as if we’ve been getting it wrong all along — rather than products of gods, we are fledgling gods ourselves. Thou art God, as it were. Please continue being a Messiah.

I’m not claiming that’s a fact of the natural universe, or even that the idea’s increasing presence in narrative art is evidence of some deep awareness of the idea on our collective part (realistically I might suggest the latter, but that’d make this post much longer than it is already, and I don’t want that). I am claiming that what Frye had in mind when he outlined the mythic mode…

If superior in kind both to other men and to the environment of other men, the hero is a divine being, and the story about him will be a myth in the common sense of a story about a god. Such stories have an important place in literature, but are as a rule found outside the normal literary categories.³

…may not describe satisfyingly or with suitable accuracy our new mythology, which, given that, may not be mythology at all. It is at the very least a mythology informed by our having written our way through the entirety of Frye’s cycle and emerged from irony intact, one which acknowledges that, even when gods grow beyond our ability to control, they wouldn’t exist at all if not for us — even from works in which gods exist literally, such as Neil Gaiman’s American Gods, Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods, and (since this is basically an anime blog, after all) Kannagi, we often get the sense that a god’s power depends in whole or large part on the devotion of its followers. Either we are gods, or we inflict them upon the universe — the two may be basically the same thing. Perhaps, if we’re going to keep the cycle of modes, we should accommodate expansion, turn it into a spiral whose size reflects the experience we accumulate as we travel the modes.

Or perhaps we must acknowledge that the cycle is a result of our oversimplification of an amalgam of modes with no clear demarcations between them. “Fictions,” says Frye, “may be classified…by the hero’s power of action, which may be greater than ours, less, or roughly the same⁴” — but what if, in fiction, our power of action knows no bounds, or if an apparently mythic hero’s power of action is no more or less than what we “mere” humans decide it is? Perhaps we haven’t come full circle, so to speak, but have integrated all modes known thus far into our understanding, in a linear progression — and if that’s the case, what undiscovered modes lie ahead? What happens when self-aware gods write stories about themselves?

Endnotes

¹Not that Joyce invented it singlehandedly, but, to my knowledge, he refined it into something like what we experience in Diebuster. Even very old literature relies on the withholding of information from the audience, but, in this case (and in the case of Ulysses), it’s synonymous with the narrative structure itself, which offers understanding slowly as a series of junctures which broaden setting and characters in steps.

²Senn, Fritz. “Anagnostic Probes.” Joyce, Modernity, and Its Mediation. Ed. Christine van Boheemen. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1989: 40, 44.

³Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000: 33.

⁴Ibid.

I’ll start by getting something important out of the way that likely might not come up later.  That is, people used to accuse Northrop Frye of not distinguishing between good and bad writing.  He cheerfully responded that his critics were right, he didn’t.  I like this about him.

[I'll be getting all my stuff from The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism] unless I let you know differently.]

It’s also been said “that Frye strips away the historical and political meanings from texts” (1443).  Much to the horror of certain other bloggers on this site, I like this about him as well.  In fact, I’m not very well suited to be a critic in the current theoretical climate in the academy.  That is, I’m not a New Historicist, a gender critic, or a Post-Colonial / political theorist.  I’m simply interested in the text. 

And yes, I accept that in some ways those concerns can’t be removed from a text.  However, I am, basically, interested in the text for whatever reason the author was — or I’m not.  So if the text is obviously (to my mind) meant to deal with gender issues I’ll discuss them, but otherwise I usually don’t bother, as I’m not catching any overtones from the author (and by that I don’t mean the person who penned / typed the text, but more on Barthes later).  

I like to think that what I’m interested in is what interests the people.  Like Frye, I would be perfectly willing to discuss a soap opera, except I am not, personally, interested in them.  They do not entertain me, so I can’t sustain a reading long enough to have anything to say.  But would I read an interesting piece of criticism about soap operas?  Oh yes, because they’re valid topics of discussion in my mind.  Everything is valid, because by the time a critic bothers to write something about it, it must have entertained enough people to prove it’s good in some way.  The asshole writer/reader in me is horrified by how popular the Twlight books are in America right now.  However, I accept they do something significant for the people reading them.  Like Anne Rice’s earlier works they deal with sex in an erotic, fantastical way that still admits to problems — more or less depending on which author we’re talking about.  I don’t really like Anne Rice either, so the entire genre isn’t really appealing for me, it seems.

Logically, I hate the concept of a “canon” of literature, in any field.  Fuck that.  If I find value in something, it’s in my canon.  I don’t care about anyone else’s.  In the end, I feel that’s all we can really do, come up with personal canons of texts we love, we refer to, so on.  This happens in every realm of entertainment.  Let me whip up a top five list for several of my fields of interest.

Anime:

• Cowboy Bebop
• Genshiken
• Tenchi Muyo!
• The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya
• Slayers

Books:

• The Lord of the Rings
• Stardust
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
• At the Mountains of Madness
• Nine Princes in Amber

Movies:

• Star Wars: A New Hope
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• Mallrats
• Shaun of the Dead
• Fellowship of the Ring

Criticism:

• Hero with a Thousand Faces
• Tradition and Individual Talent
• The Archetypes of Literature
• Preface to “The Picture of Dorian Gray”
• Wizardry and Wild Romance

My theory has been shaped by my experiences as a creative writer.  I found recently that people in school from the lower, working classes tend to write genre fiction (that is, popular fiction), especially sci-fi / fantasy and mysteries.  This is my background and my chosen field of writing.  However, I have been forced, by schooling, to learn how to deal with realistic fiction, which, in its modern guise, holds no interest for me.  I am, then, by habit an egalitarian.  In my lists you probably noticed a strong strain of fantastical / speculative / imaginative fiction, or interest in same.  Mallrats speaks to me because it illustrates the way nerds look at the world.  

So, for various reasons, I feel everything can have value.  My actual process of criticism is very much a myth-critic’s — I usually begin by matching characters to mythic archetypes.  I then (try to) use those comparisons as a baseline to find something interesting in the text.  And that’s probably the next thing I should address, since it has a lot of cache on Superfani right now:  the purpose of criticism.  I’ve already come out as a defender of criticism as an art.  There are three things, I think, criticism could be — it exists, so it must be something.  It’s art, it’s artisanship, or it’s science.  I think most people, at least right now, would agree it’s not science.  Even the critics who claim the ground of objectivism usually don’t go that far.  They used to, so maybe they still are and I’m missing it.  But, for me, the debate seems to be between art and artisanship.  So, thus:  is criticism an art of its own, or a tool useful for viewing pieces of art?

Criticism certainly can serve as a tool — see my metaphor in my title line; it’s common to speak of criticism as a lens to view a work through.  However, I believe that’s inaccurate.  I think one person’s critical approach serves as the lens through which they view literature (of any kind).  But a work of criticism can’t be such a lens, because it’s not a transparent work.  ”There is no outside-text,” Derrida claimed (1825).  It is more commonly translated as “there is no outside of the text,” but that is misleading.  As the editor’s footnote in my text puts it, “a text is constituted by the attempt to represent what is outside it: every attempt to get outside of that ends up repeating, not transcending, the structure” (1825).  A text, any text, acts, in the beginning, to deal with or represent what it outside it — the world around the author(s), the ideas the author holds, so on.  However, the reader isn’t reading all of that — the reader reads the text.  So, a critical essay, in turn, reacts to something outside — the “original text.”  However, when a reader reads said article, they are reading only that.  Again, “there is no outside-text.”  There is, by extension, only the text one is reading at the moment.  So, in the moments a reader reads a critical essay, that is the only text that exists for that reader.  The reader responds to it, must respond to it, as a text in and of itself.  Sure, some essays are so poorly done, stylistically, that knowledge of the initial referent is essential.  I could make the same argument for books, and will do so right now:  certain classes of literary fiction require the reader to be familiar with outside texts, to greater or lesser extents.  The Inferno refers outside itself, but functions on its own.  These references are like treats, easter eggs on a dvd.  Good criticism refers outside in the same way — that is, good criticism can be read on its own.  Bad literary fiction refers outside itself and cannot function without the references.  Most allegory works that way (I should warn you now that, like Tolkien and Poe, I despise allegory).  The best example I can come up with is dangerous:  I haven’t read Finnegan’s Wake, but my impression, from others, admittedly, is that it requires knowledge of the texts Joyce referenced to understand it.  I’m sure Pontifus will correct me if I’m wrong.  The next-best example I can think of is Everyman, which requires an understanding of Christianity, and an understanding, really, from inside the religion, to work.  Now, at the time it was meant for exactly that.  Simply, Everyman was originally a work of artisanship, not art — it was meant to instruct.  

Some criticism acts in this way, sure.  Pick up any journal of criticism — you may be particularly interested in Mechademia, the journal of anime and manga.  Most of the articles therein will require knowledge of the text it examines, like the article in Mechademia‘s first issue about Revolutionary Girl Utena.  But sprinkled in there will be pieces about the world of the text.  

Actually, easier example:  look at Superfani.  Granted, in the past few weeks we’ve all been feeling pretty meta, but there are still a few posts about particular series or episodes.  Those are works of artisanship.  This sounds incredibly self-indulgent, but other posts here are art.  I would cite Pontifus’ piece on video game theory as art.  

I may or may not have succeeded in setting up my opinion that criticism is art, but I have nothing else to say about it at this point, so let’s move on.  What is criticism doing?  As I have said earlier, in various places, at its core criticism (in my opinion, as always) is an entertainment.  If you don’t like criticism, you won’t read it.  I feel the senses of catharsis, epiphany, enlightenment, and other fancy terms writers have come up with for the emotions invoked by “good” fiction are all merely forms of enjoyment.  People enjoy texts that don’t do those things.  People enjoy texts that do, but not for that reason.  In my opinion that means it’s not a “higher” form of meaning, simply another, an equal form, as compared, say, to the primal enjoyment of watching a character you like beat the shit out of a character you hate.  I would put these forms in a sack, not on a scale.  I think if one were “better” than another then the “higher” form would be what people noticed about the text.  But some people read, for example, The Lord of the Rings and don’t notice the eucatastrophes (Tolkien’s neologism for good catastrophes) or the themes of loss, racial alliances, or moral / ethical struggles.  Some people simply enjoy it for the evocation of something different, or for the swordfights (if swordfighting is all a person gets out of LotR they’re probably watching the movie, as there’s not enough of that in the book to carry it).  Again, if one set of entertainments are “better” and “higher” than the other, everyone, I think, would necessarily latch onto them.  The fact that some people don’t says, to me, that everything’s mixed in a sack and people grab the stuff that works for them.  Like a buffet.  

Yes, I’m comparing literature to a buffet restaurant, a Ponderosa perhaps.  

Again, this is a supremely egalitarian way to view things.  Earlier, IKnight referenced the “correction of taste.”  Some people view criticism in that light, as a way to “fix” people.  Unaltered, this concept horrifies me.  It feels like 1984, to claim that some form of enjoyment is good, while another is, essentially, thoughtcrime.  Fuck that noise.  I’ll say now that IKnight, to my understanding, wasn’t pushing the “correction of taste.”  I’m not trying to equate him with Big Brother, he simply brought up the term.  

This thought explains, to some extent, why I like myth-criticism.  It, more than other fields of criticism, is equipped to handle any form of entertainment.  It’s difficult for most forms of criticism to deal with a soap opera — excepting perhaps readings of it to further a reading of the society which produces it.  That is, one could write about Days of Our Lives and what it proves about American society’s views of marriage, gender, domestic violence, whatever.  But I feel that isn’t actually reading the text, it’s using the text.  Myth-criticism, on the other hand, could conceivably examine Days of Our Lives in light of the story of Jason, Medea, and their children, and show why DoOL appeals to people — because that sort of story always has.  That’s circular, of course, and not very useful by itself.  But that equation, as I said earlier about what I try to do, could then be used as a springboard to launch into the rest of the text, illustrating why characters act the way they do, why people respond in the way they do, and so on, so forth.  Like I said, I’m not actually into soap operas, so this is hypothetical.  Maybe I’ll do a myth-critical reading of Lucky Star sometime.  

Simplified — I think criticism acts to connect two worlds, that of the thought and that of art — and the two aren’t the same.  It shows the reader a way to think about things, beginning with a particular text and ending with the world itself.  The critic reveals something about the world, and oftentimes the reader, in revealing something he or she saw in a book or movie.  

If you made it this far, just remember, this post is IKnight’s fault — he asked for it.  Don’t blame me, I’m just the piano player.

[EDIT:  I realized that I claimed, earlier, that I would get to Barthes.  I didn't.  Sorry about that.  Some other time, hopefully?]

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).