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 this. So it starts where they are in, A small underground shelter and they sort of believe that's their world. And the world iteratively expands.

It gets, it gets bigger at a logarithmic scale with each sort of turn of the show's plot. Where at the end of the show, they are [00:04:00] A like a fighting robot that's made out of galaxies and universes fighting another fighting robot that's made out of galaxies and universes. But at each stage, there's also this idea of.

It is dangerous to go further. So the key big bad of at least the first part of the show, believes that something terrible will happen to the Earth. You're not told vaguely what.

If the Earth ever gets more than a million human beings living on the surface. So this is this idea of carrying capacity. And then in the second part of the show, after they've defeated him and they are then moving to the surface and building this civilization, you see a character who is in a microbe, because this is, again, you keep seeing this logarithmic thing.

So this one character grew up in an underground bunker where they didn't have enough food, and whenever they got over 50 people, they had to kill whoever the new person was, or who, you know, so they had to draw lots, and then those people would go out and die. [00:05:00] Because You know, this idea of carrying capacity is just constantly reinforced, and then they learned that this idea of carrying capacity was forced upon them by this cosmic scale force called the anti spirals who fear humanities and all spiral races capacity for intergenerational improvement.

And that capacity for intergenerational improvement spiraling out of control. To just get to some exact quotes here, because I know that people who may only vaguely remember the show might, might be like, Oh, is that, is that exactly what it was about? So, and, and this will sound very much similar to something we'll say.

So when the nerdy gay engineering guy is explaining to everyone else what spiral energy is, he says, the genetic diversity stemming from gametogenesis is the key to evolution. It's that that keeps spiral power moving forwards. And then everybody's confused. They're like, what does he mean?

And he's like, in other words, it means love changes the [00:06:00] universe. But in this context, he doesn't mean love. He very explicitly means sex. And,

Simone Collins: or reproduction, let's be clear.

Malcolm Collins: Well, reproductive to assortative combining, which is very important to us. Like he says in that line, and it's very important in all of our philosophy and sort of teaching is that diversity is.

Key to this sort of power. You cannot have this power if you are just cloning, or if you are attempting to live forever. This is made very explicit. So the beastmen in the show are the sort of like, foot soldiers of the enemy, and they're said to not have the capacity for spiral power, because they are cloned.

Because they don't have this capacity for intergenerational improvement. And they also say this explicitly in the show as the main character saying, those who are dead are dead. If we bring them back to life, they will just get in the way of the next generation. And you really, like, like, all of this is just so irreverently our philosophy on, on, on sort of life and the power of [00:07:00] humanity.

But I want to highlight that, that I will say something like the goal of humanity is iterative intergenerational improvement and people hear this concept and it can seem so, I don't know, sort of hollow or tinny or like, how could that be this big explosive aspect? How could that be something of true good in the universe?

Right? And Gurren Lagann through art. And, and through low art, which I love, and this is something you constantly see throughout, you know, if you're, if you're reading Bible or anything like that, is that in, in, in the world