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Gurren Lagann: The Anime That Hated Anti-Natalists & Life Extensionists
We analyze the hyper-optimistic mecha anime Gurren Lagann through a pronatalist lens, seeing its themes of spiral energy, intergenerational improvement, and struggle as virtues aligning with our philosophy. We discuss how it frames the expansion of human potentiality as the highest good, with forces that limit this potentiality as evil. It also models healthy ambition balanced by diligent work, irreverent humor lifting the low, and inspiration over coercion in leadership.
Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] I want to talk about why this show is so rare.
Because when you look at how this show frames good bad are the things that limit humanity's potentiality, and good is the expansion of human potentiality. When I look at the way good is framed in things like Hollywood,
we're good as just sort of general utilitarianism or the maintenance of the status quo. You know, I, I, I'd often say that my favorite villain song of a Disney movie is Akuna Matata.
Simone Collins: In Evangelion, they struggle to live, whereas in Gurren Lagann, they live to struggle, and that so resonates,
Malcolm Collins: this idea of struggle is bad. We need to live to in struggle instead of seeing struggle as the reason for living in Gurren Lagann when they're looking at the challenges ahead of them. They get excited about them. The challenges are what give life its purpose. And this, boundless optimism. Isn't [00:01:00] because we don't know that struggle exists. It isn't because we don't know how hard life is for people.
It's because we're excited at the challenge to overcome that both at the level of individuals And at the level of a species
Would you like to know more?
Malcolm Collins: I am so excited for our topic today because it is on what I think is the greatest of all pronatalist media pieces I've ever seen.
Yeah. And it's a piece that I also ascribe some religious significance to because I think it captures concepts that we try to convey in some of our like, religious episodes that are actually pretty difficult to capture unless you're doing it in this sort of goofy, , irreverent way. But I, I, I want to, the first, what I love is, is people like just to go over the pronatal is current login connection here, right?
Because I've, I mentioned this to some of my progressive friends. And they're like, what? Gurren Lagann's a pronatalist piece? Or, or the people who were surprised when Franks, we did an [00:02:00] episode on like the, the naughty anime topics, where we talked about this anime Franks, which was just an entirely Pronatalist anime very explicitly, and they were, people were really surprised by how pronatalist it was and how much it shamed ideas like life extensionism.
And I'm like, these are the people who did Gurren Lagann somehow, the world, like, collectively, when they were watching Gurren Lagann, they did not catch the enemy, and it's not even like a, an adult comparison, or an adult slander on ideas like, The carrying capacity of the Earth, it is as if I was creating a cartoon that was supposed to like go to a middle school.
And like cartoonishly, sort of brainwash kids into a specific perspective on topics where like, in, in Captain Planet, you know how the capitalists like look like pigs and like oink and everything like that and everything.
Does anything I like more than being mean? It's being [00:03:00] sneaky. The people who work in extractive industries are real people, not pigmen.
I'll be able to drill for oil anywhere!
Malcolm Collins: This is. That's basically the way Gurren Lagann treats the concept of antinatalism.
What it feels like to be a face!
Malcolm Collins: So, for those who don't know, I guess I should go over the broad plot structure of Gurren Lagann, because that would help people sort of get to where we're going with
Published on 1 year, 9 months ago