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DS Wants You! To Watch Toku(-inspired) Anime!
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12-09-2020, 10:57 PM
#
212
Fish Sandwich
The Immortal King Tasty
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Every diner you've ever been to.
Posts: 3,833
Quote:
Originally Posted by
DreamSword
Heck, the overall lesson the show seems to want to preach(and thus the one Akane learns) is that you shouldn't stay cooped up in your shell and you should give life a chance, because there's alot of wonderful things out there for you to experience.
...A lesson Akane only "learns" via being cooped up in own shell.
Cool.
Okay, I've rewatched the last episode, thought about everything a whole lot, and, thanks to your surprisingly negative take on a lot of what the show does with its story, I've figured out where to start. Or maybe it's more like where I want to end? I mentioned I have complicated feelings about this show. Describing my personal experience with it could easily involve saying a lot of very mean things if I really wanted to, but I don't *ever* want that. I don't think I'd be able to forgive myself for s***ing on something a lot of people love just for the sake of it. Now, arguing in favor of the creative vision of a work?
That
is the kind of thing I'm here for. Plus, it can still involve the personal stuff! (This will take a minute; apologies in advance for using this thread as an excuse to vent.)
I think it's fair to call myself a big fan of the original Gridman? I forget exactly when after getting into Rider and everything (which was 2011-ish, as a reminder) I found out about it, but I remember it catching my imagination immediately as soon as I heard about it, and it never really let go. He was basically Ultraman, but even cooler, because he fought in sweet digital cityscapes, had sick combining robot allies, and arguably the greatest toku hero theme song of all time. It was something I probably would've watched at the earliest opportunity if not for the issue of there being no English subs for it back then. Kind of a hurdle, but eventually it hit me in 2017 that I'd stumbled my way into picking up enough Japanese over half a decade that watching a show raw was becoming a legitimate option. But obviously I wouldn't want to test that theory out with a show that would be super heavy on complex dialogue or plotting; I needed something older, lighter, episodic, and simple. When I searched my head for a good candidate, the answer was as clear as day – I finally get to watch Gridman.
It went over way smoother than I expected. A joke or some technical jargon here or there would fly over my head, but I was following along, and I was having a great time doing it. The thing about learning a language and getting to the point where you ~kinda sorta~ understand the broad gist of it is that it's a lot like being a little kid again, and experiencing Gridman that way gave me a bit more of a profound connection to it than I think a lot of people have. It helps that the show itself is just plain awesome, and has the style and tone it does.
There's a line in Gridman's finale that's become one of my favorite lines I've ever heard in tokusatsu: "If you think you've done something wrong, why not try taking responsibility for it?" It's a pretty simple sentiment for a pretty straightforward show, but it hit me like a hammer first watching the episode because it embodies perfectly what my single favorite thing about Gridman is – it's a very proactive hero show. A series about a bunch of middle school kids who manage to put together a supercomputer out of trash they scraped up with the scarce money kids have, and who use that computer to save the world. Every one of Gridman's abilities, down to his typical ability to grow in size like any Ultraman style hero, is directly owed to the tireless work of these three children punching WAY beyond their weight.
Gridman has this attitude that's closely tied to its status as a new hero for the digital age, which is that people can overcome just about anything with enough ingenuity and hard work. That's what technology is, at its core. There's even a line in the chorus of that amazing theme song that goes "anyone can be a hero", and that's what Naoto, Ippei, and Yuka all are; they're people who won't crack no matter what you throw their way. Naturally, then, Takeshi is the main antagonist because he represents the opposite of all of that. He's a guy who will take half a step towards solving his problems, say it's too hard, say that he tried, and go back to his room to listen to the digital devil on his shoulder telling him he should waste his time with unproductive schemes for petty self-satisfaction instead. Takeshi avoids dealing with his feelings. Takeshi
retreats
.
In SSSS.Gridman, nearly every character is Takeshi, and that drove me absolutely insane.
I knew seeing the trailers and everything back in 2018 that it was going to be shooting for a very different story. To be honest, I think I even started expecting to hate it, which usually means I move on with my life right then and there, but SSSS.Gridman was receiving so much hype, and when it started airing, people generally seemed to be utterly enamored with it. I wanted to be able to make myself see it that way, but I just couldn't get over how
cold
the show felt.
Sure, there are hot-blooded battles and all that, but it all seemed superficial to me. The raw core of the anime was this group of dejected protagonists who have no idea how to communicate and always seem in a rush to leave every scene they're in – nothing like my precious Gridman and its warm, exuberant camaraderie. They seemed so
distant
. I could not get into it for the life of me, and by Full Power Gridman's debut in episode 8, I was broken. I gave up, and I stopped watching, but a month later, right after the show finished, the feeling of leaving business unfinished became unbearable, and I pounded out the last stretch of episodes in a day or two. And you know, maybe the time away helped, or maybe DreamSword is on to something about SSSS.Gridman being designed for binge-watching, but whatever the reason, I felt so much less miserable doing it. Heck, by the end of it, I felt like
apologizing
, because suddenly I felt like I understood what it was going for. It all felt purposeful. Like it was all worth it, from the very start.
Here's the part where I get to rave a whole lot about UNION; everyone reading this is encouraged to take the opportunity for a quick break first.
UNION is one of the best theme songs anything has ever had. I thought this song was a masterpiece even back when I hated the show it was attached to, and constantly questioned why it deserved a jam this good. And maybe if I wasn't being a f***ing idiot, I would've actually
listened
to the lyrics, and realized it was explaining all this to me from day one.
There are two things I've always suspected about the song that I never had confirmed until I looked it up to make this post and immediately found out were both dead on. One is that the lyrics were written after reading the scripts for the show, and the second is that those lyrics were also actively written in parts to be directed at the audience of adults who grew up watching the original Gridman.
Now, I'm not saying I'm some great detective for figuring that out on my own; quite the opposite. I'm complimenting UNION for having such
astonishing
precision in its word choice that it'd be harder not to notice. Each verse leans harder in one direction, but the entire song has this extremely clever double meaning to it where it's talking about the literal events of the anime while also being a sort of metaphor warning against growing into an emotionally detached person who sees the world as a cage. And it pulls that off so effortlessly because those two topics aren't mutually exclusive.
SSSS.Gridman was about cold people, but it wasn't a cold show. It was portraying these distant people in order to tell a story about the necessity of closing that distance. It's even a motif in that music video up there that was made after the series concluded. The original show represented the optimism of a world of rapidly advancing electronic technology, and the anime, in what is arguably a very smart and logical update, represents the remoteness of the world built atop that. It's a show about teenagers who know each other superficially, calling themselves friends, working together or hanging out for the odd shallow conversation about recent gossip or hobbies or what have you; all the while never really leaning on each other, never risking getting too close. Most of the characters in the show are running away from their feelings in some way. It's most obvious with Rikka and Akane, but extends to characters like Anti and even Yuuta in one way or another too.
And the thing is, eventually, they
do
learn to lean on each other, and they're all so much healthier for it. Gridman goes back to being that optimistic toku hero of old and lifts the literal sedative fog trapping everyone in their narrow world. Rikka is the one telling Utsumi to have more faith in his childish concept of the Gridman Alliance, and says it won't be a big deal if Yuuta doesn't remember the events of the show, because they can just make friends with him again. That isn't a big deal to her! And then there's Akane, who abandons the repetitive cycle she's resigned herself to in favor of facing a world that can give her happiness that will be more than a lie. She stops retreating.
Does she deserve that? S***, I don't know. I mean, I don't really like her, but I still know DreamSword's Daguva comparison is definitely way overboard when Akane's capacity for remorse alone disqualifies her from being that level of monstrous. I think there's a bit of a problem with the show trying to have its cake and eat it here; Akane getting off scott-free for murder kinda hinges on the idea that these virtual people are only as real to her as is convenient, but the audience is conditioned from the start to just see them as people, so even if all her evil gloating is merely a mask for deeply rooted self-loathing, it could come off pretty awkward in the end, for sure. But on a broad strokes level, Akane growing to realize other people
don't
exist at her convenience, and everybody being willing to see the human heart at the center of all that evil, it all makes total sense for a narrative that is, once again, about closing distances.
SSSS.Gridman starts and ends with an awakening. Literally; the titles of the first and last episodes are the same, with only one difference. Every episode title in the show is made up of a single word comprised of two kanji (
I swear I've heard that somewhere before...
), separated by this little dot: ・
It's used in Japanese to separate words in a few different contexts, such as when writing out foreign names. It can be a sort of decorative choice as well, however, with Kamen Rider Fourze even doing something similar with its titles. What's curious then about SSSS.Gridman doing it is that it's dropped solely for the final episode, which is written normally instead. That always baffled me. I could never figure out what the significance was, and even looking around for an official explanation, nothing turned up very quickly. But in writing this post, I think I finally figured it out. Like I said, the dot is there to
separate
things. To keep them apart. So to remove that at the very end of the series, well, what else could it symbolize but removing all that distance, too?
...I'm really sorry this ended up being so long? I feel decent about how it came out, which doesn't always happen when I ramble this much, but I don't know. I guess my whole point can just be condensed to what I've already said, which is that SSSS.Gridman is a series I wasn't super welcoming of that turned itself around for me with a final stretch I thought payed major dividends on so many elements I was previously quite grumpy about. Nowadays I still feel conflicted – removed from the initial excitement, it became clear again I wasn't exactly
imagining
a lot of my issues, either, but still, I'm an awful lot more inclined to say the show is owed its success these days. I'm also not too sure if I want to watch Dynazenon for fear of going through this emotional rollercoaster twice, though, so... yeah,
conflicted
.
Hopefully this wasn't a drag to read!
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