Simon's decision to leave is certainly understandable. He's Winston Churchill. He's a wartime leader. In times of peace he's already been shown to be a political liability in his conflict with Rossiu. The reality is that he's become a legend, and having become that he can never truly fit in. And it's no coincidence that the graves of Kamina and Nia are one of the shows very final images. He's buried everyone he ever really cared about along the way, and now having triumphed over the cosmic forces of death and stagnation in a battle so colossally huge that he'll never be able to process it all given a lifetime of wondering (how many unknown worlds and civilisations must have died as those galaxies were thrown like shuriken?) he journeys into the wilderness to come to terms with his own pain. If you don't agree with his decision then you simply have not paid attention to the text.
And what a final battle. Gainax have delivered depiction of something that I honestly don't think any of us have seen before and are likely to see again in a hurry, a conflict so beyond imagination that could not be achieved in any other medium bar comics. The nearest parallel I can find is in a recurring dreamstate I used to have, in which universe-scale forces played out against each other in a shifting dimensional state that has been described by an ex-girlfriend of mine as a birth-remembrance projected out onto a cosmic backdrop in order to process the intensity of the feeling and sensation. Utter brilliance, completely without any precedent that I'm aware of.
Gainax have also done something utterly right here in addressing many of the misconceptions about evolution that are thrown around, mainly by occultists... that evolution has an end point, a final state of perfection, a growth into an energy form... whatever your latest sci-fi new age goonery happens to pick up and run with this week.
Evolution is nothing more than mutation at a crisis point to make a species more adapted to its environment. To the best of my understanding HSP90 exists in all life as a chemical that supresses the manifestation of mutation until a threat to the environment appears, although mutation continues to stack up at a latent level. In times of environmental stress levels of HSP90 are reduced and the species goes bonkers, all sorts of weird and wonderful new forms are expressed that are then subject to natural selection, with those most successfully adapted being the ones that survive. There's a whole ton of interesting stuff that you can find online about this, look up the experiments they (*they*... I mean *evoliutionary biologists*) on fruit flies (the perenial can carriers and unsung heroes of scientific progress) that involved artificially reducing levels of HSP90. Different wing structures, eyes on stalks, some so totally different from their parents that they couldn't be said to be the same species.
Simon here is the will to live, the force that is determined to quit whining and adapt, change or die. With each new fight Gurren-Lagann adapts itself to its new environment, develops new abilities, changes shape, grows. The Spiral Knights are the forms that couldn't adapt, the previous attempts that were selected against and died in battle in the cosmic graveyards we encountered in the closing episodes. The Anti-Spirals are not only the forces of death and stagnation, they also stand for the hope-of-heaven New Agers and the moving-beyond-our-physical-selves sci-fi nerds, who... let's face it, the sci-fi geekers aren't usually the ones who are comfortable in their own bodies, and so are pretty likely to hypothesise pseudo-science scenarios in which we transcend physical form. The Anti-Spirals abandoned their bodies in a death-like state but they also believe that evolution will bring about the kind of cataclysmic end state so often depicted in texts like Akira in which all the universe will be destroyed. They limit evolution because they believe it to reach its climax as an end to all life, but that's the fallacy that they themselves have committed in choosing a state of death themselves. Evolution will never bring about a final end point... it is the very process by which life continues despite adversity.
And so when the series ends and death and stagnation are defeated we get life continuing as normal. No apocalypse, although you could say that the final battle transcended any apocalyses yet seen (that word really shouldn't have a pural). Just people about to travel off to make new friends, a wedding, people going about their lives, living in the world that they've won. The Anti-Spirals were wrong. That is all. Just plain wrong... there would be no end to life.
My only real gripe about the way the series ended was the wasted opportunity that was Boota. He evolves, gets his ass handed to him, then reappears in his earlier form. Perhaps in the state of soft reality that allowed Genome to reconstruct his body Boota simply decided to go back to his earlier state, although that's all my addition to the material and not something that was explained in the text. |
. Thanks for bringing it to my attention! 