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.

Way back in the first Voice Module, Pontifus challenged me to apply mythology to Toradora!  I am here today to accept that challenge, no matter how many souls I destroy in my mad quest for the perfect explanation.   This is definitely exploratory writing, so I have no idea if I’ll arrive at any kind of useful conclusion by the essay’s end, but we’ll just find out, won’t we?

Typically I start a myth-post by defining each character according to some mythological analogue, the better to gauge their positions in my madly-constructed framework.  So let’s do that.  Ryuuji feels an awful lot like a mimetic version of the hero of a romance.  For a while I thought Ya-chan was his sister, and thus he was entirely orphaned.  Oops.  It’s pretty telling, thematically though, as he is effectively estranged from the society that spawned him in the way an orphan is:  his father is gone, his mother is, uh, not very motherly (though very loving, bless her), and his appearance has, like the Phantom underneath the opera house, removed him from society despite his other social graces.  He’s similar to Lancelot as portrayed in Steinbeck’s re-telling of the Arthur stories (in that version, Lancelot was incredibly ugly, but he found renown in Arthur’s court *cough* and Guinevere’s heart *cough* anyway).  In that sense Ryuuji is a kind of knight-errant, and I’m not just saying that because he reminds me of Lancelot.  He is fearsome, making people around him afraid at the sight of him, and yet he typically does good deeds for no reason, like turning in those wallets in the first episode.  There are a few Arthurian stories of knights winning tourneys or other challenges and renouncing or returning their gifts.

Taiga has two roles as I see her.  The first is from Ryuuji’s point of view.  She is a kind of mystical spirit — since I’m going with Arthurian stuff here, let’s see how far I can extend the comparison.  There are several Arthurian stories about witches, hags, or other nasty lady-folks who beg a boon of the questing knight — the one who gives it to her gets lots of good stuff, up to and including kingdoms, sometimes.  Taiga, for most people, would be a problem too big to countenance.  She doesn’t exactly ask Ryuuji for help, but what sort of knight would pass up the chance?  He promises, despite her prickly nature — which could be a kind of mimetic replacement for the physical loathesomeness the Arthurian hags typically hid behind — to help her with her own goal, that of netting Kitamura.  He is offered, instead of a kingdom, something perhaps better still:  Minorin.

There’s her second role, one of a quester on her own terms.  But while Ryuuji quests with no particular goal in mind (he has one, but his adventures aren’t furthering them at the time), Taiga is trying her best to head straight for Kitamura.  She is not only pursuing her love, but righting a past wrong.  Taiga accidentally rejected him, and we learn early on it weighs on her mind continually until she manages, with Ryuuji’s help, to, well, right that particular wrong.  Unfortunately I can’t remember particular names, but there are several Arthurian knights who don’t know their own strength until they learn how to control themselves — they’re analogous to Cuchulainn from Celtic myth, who was powerful but untrained until he met the witch Scathbad.  Taiga is this kind of untrained knight, and Ryuuji can serve as a model for her, in a sense.

Minorin, of course, is more than a goal:  she’s a fisher king.  Something is wrong in Minorin’s kingdom, and she needs a knight to say precisely the right words, or do the right task, to make everything bloom again.  As of yet (episode fifteen), I’m not precisely sure what’s turning her bounty to ash, aside from her growing affection for Ryuuji.

Ami is an interesting case.  I suspect she’s, at her core, a princess or queen figure — this comes as a surprise to no one — but filed down further into the world of the mimetic than the show normally bothers with.  Her problem is that she has no problems; she is a delicious paradox of the lower-mimetic / satirical world.  She is a high profile person with no iron in her backbone strong enough to withstand the pressure, because it was never forged properly.  Usually these royalty figures snap, like Guinevere or the ladies of several tragedies, such as Desdemona.  Ami isn’t going to, though, she’s getting better over time.  This is due, again, to our knights-errant, who now number two.

That’s a lot of words, around 700 I see, about analogies between characters and myth-figures.  You may be wondering what the point is.  I think I have discovered one, just in the writing of the last paragraph.  Toradora! is a quest after the Holy Grail.  These characters, in the act of trying to attain their loves (the surface level goal for almost all of them), are trying to make themselves good enough to have their own goals.  They are paragons of self-improvement, striving always to find the things that will lift them up, while simultaneously hefting themselves towards those things by their own power.  This quest can only end happily for all of them when they are all so much advanced that the loss of their perceived goal will no longer injure them.  The uneven cast distribution is, in this light, incredibly telling.  One of the characters will not end up with another of the characters (though I suppose, if a complete, sappy Happy End is required, Kitamura could finally win over the class president’s flinty heart).  They will only be happy when they can all accept the moment in which they are not the one their chosen love, in turn, chooses.  I can go so far as to say they will only be capable of attaining their chosen love in the moment that they accept that chosen love may turn away.

Contrast this with something like Lovely Complex (I showed TheKittyMeister the first episode this evening).  All the characters pair off by the end — or start off that way.  Neat, compact, like a Victorian ending which flourishes into a neat bow rather than trailing edges into the floor.  Toradora! can’t end that way.  It’s all very reminscient of Buddha and his quest for Enlightenment.  Rejecting it, or finally being able to do so, is the only way to attain it (forgive me if I’m paraphrasing the Buddha’s story poorly, but hopefully you’ll take my intention in this case if I have strayed too far).

So, you want me to bottom-line it for you?  Toradora is Enlightenment!

At least she has clothes in this one...

As you’re probably already aware, I’m blogging my way through Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism.  I already had an idea for an actual anime post, and I’ve only read the introduction.  Even though this was inspired by Frye, I probably won’t reference him too much.  Really, this is just my obligatory Kannagi post.  Everyone’s doing one, and who am I to argue with the crowd?  Well, I do it all the time, but never mind that now.

I’m not the best at keeping up with the otaku-rhombus, but I’m getting the impression that a lot of people are upset with Kannagi‘s ending.  I can say on a personal level that episode twelve irritated me somewhat, but thirteen seemed a natural progression, bringing the suddenly disparate elements back together.  Could it have been better?  Sure, but so could the Mona Lisa.  And here’s the part that concerns Northrop Frye:  I’m not here to talk about whether or not it was good.  That doesn’t matter.  I enjoyed it well enough to want to post about it, and since criticism is fun, I’m going to enjoy this no matter how much you wanted the show to end with teh pr0n.

It’s hard to find a lot of contemporary stuff to compare Shinto gods with.  If you know anything about Celtic animism, they’re pretty similar, at least in the idea that everything has a soul, including trees, wells, and maybe even rocks.  I’m sure there are loads of differences as well, but I’m not going to do much with that comparison, so we’ll just let it slide for now.  What did strike me, today, is the similarities between the Shinto gods and the ancient Greek Titans.  The Greek gods are, well, what a westerner expects gods to be:  mighty, demanding, and just a little inhuman.  But in-between these gods and the humans, who were still human for all their heroic traits, lie the Titans.  The Titans were really a kind of first-god-race, but most of the time they’re viewed as half-human, half-god (never mind that Greek mythology had plenty of characters who could claim that pedigree literally).  The Titans were not human, not at all, but they were weaker than the Olympians and, from what I remember, often tied to a place.  Prometheus was chained in the Caucasus until Herakles freed him; Atlas was believed to stand, holding up the heavens, at the world’s western edge, or, later, somewhere around the Atlas Mountains.  I mention this because Shinto gods are typically tied to places, like sacred trees or caves, maybe a waterfall or river.  [One must wonder if the civilization that the Greeks swept in and conquered / absorbed were animist, with beliefs like the Celts or the Shinto religion, as subordinated beings in conglomerated myths are often the remnants of the gods of the older, defeated religion -- hence all the saints in Christian mythology derived from gods and goddesses, such as Saint Bridget.  Not that this speculation is helpful to the essay at hand.]

The Titans acted almost as intermediaries between the humans and the gods.  We all know the story of Prometheus stealing fire from the Sun, but he also tricked the gods into choosing the useless, non-nutritive parts of sacrifices so the humans could keep the food and burn the bones and fat in honor of the gods, thus worshipping them in the way Zeus selected but staying alive longer.  So far as I know the Shinto gods aren’t intermediaries in the same way, but I think we could look at them as go-betweens for the earth itself and the humans who live on it.  This is important because I wonder if some people are misinterpreting Nagi’s status.  She is a god, this hypothetical reasoning could go, so why all these strange problems — the inability to properly destroy impurities, the memory loss, the weakness in power.  But unlike a Greek god, who just has power, the Shinto gods are just sort-of around, almost like a higher grouping of priests (there were cults to Prometheus, even though he couldn’t god-magic anything).  Nagi’s home has been effectively destroyed.  In mythic thinking, like in dream-logic, things often have more than one identity at the same time; that is, Nagi was both the goddess of the countryside and the tree in which the god was housed — there was no difference between the two.  Destroying the tree was akin to destroying the goddess, except she got a loophole:  Jin’s recreation of her using her body.  Technically she’s still made of wood, as they discuss early on — particularly when Zange’s father talks to her midway through the series.

The idea of a god needing worship has been familiar to me ever since I read Sir Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods.  This show deals with much the same thing.

If this is all true, the more astute of you might be wondering, why the shift into screwball comedy?  I would posit to you that the show’s genre is a fully-blended admixture of contemporary fantasy and said comedy.  Even its much-contested meta-humor helps support the theme; what else would a show about a goddess dealing with mortals have, but humor about the nature of the humor inherent in the relationship between them?  The blending means it’s something different than one borrowing elements of the other.  The portions of the show concerning Nagi’s status as a goddess, serious and angsty as they end up being, are absolutely necessary.  Contemporary fantasies are often concerned with a re-imagining of the crisis of faith (I’m thinking particularly of Charles de Lint’s Forests of the Heart.)  Without constructing the world in which Jin, who has lived his life pursuing this goddess, is suddenly, through the comedy, confronted with how mundane this magical presence can be, the contemporary fantasy’s drama can’t function.  And without the underlying drama the humor can’t work, either, as it relies on Nagi secretly being on a different level from the others.  She is comprised of certain elements, but they are synthesized by her status as a god, or mystical being of some sort, weak but not mortal-weak.  She is a bit of a Cloud Cuckoo Lander, but only through virtue of her being not human.  Once or twice she, like God in the old, sadly-cancelled NBC series God, the Devil, and Bob, appreciates the things these humans have come up with (God really appreciated Pop-Tarts and twist-off beer bottle caps, if you’re curious).

The two parts do function together.  Without the drama, the comedy wouldn’t be as funny.  Without the comedy, the drama wouldn’t be as touching, or as humanized.  Note that no episode wholly abandons one aspect.  I know.  I felt like episode twelve had abandoned the comedy as well, but that’s merely because all the angst is concentrated in the ending.  Try to remember the bits with Jin falling out of the bathroom trying to catch a butterfly.  The karaoke episode is already near-infamous for its weapons-grade comedy, but even then the undercurrent of Zange’s possession of a human being still colors everything.

Short version:  despite what it feels like, Kannagi never actually veers too wildly from its purpose.

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).