Gatchaman Crowds pulled a bunch of threads together this week in an episode that I felt had maybe the season’s first real missteps. The main issue was the handling of Rui’s arc – having X just talk Rui into feeling motivated again just felt way too simple, and Rui’s story felt poorly integrated with everything else that was going on. It made me think the story just kind of didn’t know what to do with Rui for a while, which is a disappointing thought. But there was also a whole bunch of great stuff in this episode, with my favorite parts concentrated in Millione and Rizumu’s choices. The two of them actually seem pretty alike in their assessment of humanity, but Millione embraces going with the flow for ratings, while Rizumu just uses it to make himself feel powerful. Cool guys, cool guys.
You can check out my full review over at ANN, or my notes below!
“Why are you lying like that? Wasn’t that your friend?”
Oh no, Mana’s dad gets swallowed. But one of Rizumu’s supporters records it. “I’ve got good material”
“Gelsadra, I’m going to drag you down. With that atmosphere you love so much.” Gelsadra’s reign is terrifying, but it’s based on popular whims, and those are always malleable. You just have to beat him at his own game, using his own empty tricks
Immediately jumping to Tsubasa at home, an echo of the show’s first episode
Looks like we’ll finally be covering how her grandfather is very familiar with how “going with the atmosphere” can lead to great tragedy
These lovely watercolor backgrounds
Footage of a crying girl losing her dad holds more popular sway than all the meaningful arguments about the Kuu-sama
Millione jumps from the sad girl to an exclusive interview with Gelsadra
And it’s Rizumu interviewing him. Striking while the iron is hot, directly linking the Kuu-sama to Gelsadra, making sure everyone is forced to make the connection
Rizumu’s letting Gelsadra’s own inhuman nature form his noose. He knows Gelsadra doesn’t hold human values, so he aims his questions at the places this is most apparent
“Those are the words of a dictator. This is a reign of terror!” I love love love how surprised Millione seems by all this
“This might be the time that the public needs to rise up! And now, our commercial break.” Beautiful. You have to laugh
But yeah, we’re led by news organizations that are essentially just sensational gossip rags that have turned politics into a game show with simple, engaging variables. Their goal is not to inform, it is to entertain, and to continue to get ratings for their advertisers
“You’re talking about Minister Sadra, right? How cruel. He wasn’t even smiling.” Because yes, it’s most important that politicians appear relatable, regardless of their policies
“What’s important is to make it seem like our opinion is the majority”
“The ones who voted for Sadra need to take responsibility!”
This Utsutsu bit is adorable
The atmosphere changed, and so the Kuu-sama have turned on Gelsadra
Millione just reflects the atmosphere, condemning Hajime for protecting Gelsadra
The Gatchaman were able to benefit from riding the atmosphere once, but it’s an unstable force. Another critique of Rui’s ending from the first season – just hoping people will exert pressure in a positive direction is naive
Millione is the real dictator
“I’ve experienced something like this before. The war. ‘Stand up for your country.’”
Yep. It was his younger brother who died in the way, when they were all caught up in the atmosphere
“When my brother died, I came to my senses.” Like with Tsubasa, it takes a shaking on the individual level to realize when you’re being caught up in something you don’t believe
“They hurt people without meaning to. You know why? Because they think they’re doing the right thing.”
Rizumu himself is a child, too, though. The upstart medical student who thinks he knows everything, thinks he’s transcended humanity’s apelike weaknesses
“To be able to think is only something you can do because you’re alone. Those were your words, Rui.”
“It’s not programming. It’s from being around you, and thinking for myself.”
“Hajime-chan, why does everyone hate me now?”
“I know, I’ll just ask everyone! Should I just disappear?”
Love this transition from Hajime asking “What do you want to do, Gel-chan?” to Tsubasa crying “What have I done?”
This conflict honestly feels a little low-stakes at the moment, though. Gelsadra’s the only one in danger
“And I’ve always been very proud of you because of that.” Awww
Hajime challenging Gelsadra to find his own answers
And Gelsadra dumps out all of the opinions he’d absorbed, and becomes a child again. “I want to stay because I want to see Tsubasa again”
And he gets his own white thought bubble!
Mirroring episode three with Hajime and Tsubasa’s reunion
Yeah, there’s just not that much tension in this battle. Too much has been solved, and the Kuu-sama are no threat
I don’t know about Rui’s story being poorly integrated – I think it was pretty well done. Rui, the revolutionary who kept being shot down by his own teammates (well, Jou and especially Tsubasa), and by the society whose ‘evolution’ he wanted to achieve. Rui has been completely defeated, and I think it was natural how he ended up giving up, no-one can fight forever. In this season Rui was increasingly estranged from his team, “his” society, even his goals, and in the end he was left completely alone. I feel that X’s little pep talk was in line with what Rui needed and in line with the story as well. Rui is not going to cede victory to Rizumu and give up CROWDS.
“You’re talking about Minister Sadra, right? How cruel. He wasn’t even smiling.” Because yes, it’s most important that politicians appear relatable, regardless of their policies –> I think you got this bit wrong; the line was “He was even smiling”, so the line’s implication was thag Sadra was smiling even while a kid got swallowed up.
I think it’s too early to judge whether things have been solved already though. There’s still two episodes left for the show to wrap up. Things could still happen. For one, I’m not sure if eliminating the Kuu-sama will actually eliminate the atmosphere permeating the populace; while the danger of getting forced into the atmosphere is gone, the Gatchaman still have to deal with preventing the crowd from lynching Gelsadra. I don’t think it’s a clean resolution like it seems.
I never thought of Millione as especially villainous or dictatorial. He definitely seems to have the least redeeming qualities but I think that being a villain implies some sort of imposition of will. Millione doesnt really incite anything, rather, he reads atmosphere and exacerbates things in order to feed off the ratings which seems more parasitic than predatory. If the atmosphere leaned in a less problematic direction, as it did at the beginning of the series, he would be pushing and profiting off of that instead. He’s selfish but, like kuu-sama and Gelsadra, acts only as a medium through which the averaged-out opinions of the people are amplified.
I disagree strongly about the Kuu-sama being no threat; in fact, I think the Gatchaman are doing the wrong thing in actually ‘fighting’ them. The Kuu-sama are the more or less auto-propagating manifestation of the atmosphere, and the atmosphere has manifestly not changed. Fighting individual groups of Kuu-sama looks spectacular but does nothing in the large scale, as there will always be more as long as the atmosphere exists and Kuu-samas can manifest from it. To actually fix the situation the Gatchaman need to change the atmosphere and they’re not going to do that in a splashy fight scene, not in this show.
(But the fight is very emotionally satisfying. I can understand why we like it and more than that, why all the Gatchaman like it. They liked the previous big fights they got to be in back in the first season, even if none of them were the real answer either.)
Fully expecting episode 11 to screw everything up so we can have a high-stakes finale like last time.
Good write up although I have to disagree on Gelsadra, I honestly don’t see him as inhumane rather he comes across to me as the attitude that Tsubasa has to an extreme, in a sense although he may be physically an adult he has a very simplistic worldview to the point that his morality is that of a child’s. It’s easy to take his line about uniting the world as inhumane and as a you will definitely because see it that, but his character’s motivation seems to be at heart making everyone happy, I honestly read his line “We have to become as one” as a child saying “why can’t everybody just get along, the world would be a much better place that way”. To me something that I personally noticed throughout the season is that nobody actually explained to Gelsadra why he was wrong, yeah it may seem obvious to them and even the too us but prior his arrival on earth Gelsadra was lionized as a savior, in a sense his ideals were never challenged, the whole universe was practically an oversized echo chamber, and nobody grows in that kind of environment, people need to have what they hold true challenged and sometimes told that they are outright wrong, to grow as people and this never happened to him before he came to earth. In a sense the biggest issue with the Gatchamen’s interaction with him is that they are explaining the issue’s with his world view like he is an adult, when although that may be technically true, he still has the attitude of a child, there’s a reason why children’s media tends to be very blunt with how it goes about teaching morals and that is because it might go over the audience’s heads overwise, kind of like what happened whenever anybody criticized him throughout the season, whenever the criticism was blunt see his interactions with the citizens and taking in the feelings of the people he reacted very quickly to take that criticism into account. Now note that whenever the Gatchmen, and Tsubasa’s grandpa criticized him they never articulated on the why, yeah it may obvious to us but that’s because we learned this through interaction with society and study of history, something that Gelsadra never seems to have experienced so what they said just went over his head. They didn’t get through to him until Hajime forced him outside of his comfort zone and make him think about what he wanted. Note how although people knew that when the kuu-sama’s ate people they didn’t take issue until what happened to Mana in episode 9 and the footage shown in 10 that people really seemed to push, now this may just be me but I didn’t really get why people were so protective of children myself until I was a teenager and it generally seems to be something you get, to adults the kuu-sama eating a childs parent and taking her father away from her may be seen has different from going after random criminals, but to Gelsadra it probably comes across the same thing that has being happening previously. Now on to his attitude towards death in general, if i was to ignore episode 11, I would chalk it up to how people tend to have a more black and white attitude to morality as a child. In a sense he would think that anyway getting in the way of becoming one, was disregarding the happiness of others. Okay if anyone is reading these as they watch the show stop as here as I am about to discuss the next episode on the other hand taking episode 11 into account I honestly think that at the time he hadn’t internalized the concept of death at time, kind of like Tsubasa and her grandpa needed a great personal shock to realize the issue with their attitudes, Gelsadra honestly, to me at least, didn’t seem to realize what somebody dying meant until the aftermath of the Gatchamen’s planned lead to Hajime basically dying, part of this is that he knew her more than he did Umada sure, but considering how he takes the aftermath you would think, he would have tried to stop the plan, I’d imagine he would have had to know what was happening at least, Maybe I am overthinking this, but that’s how Gelsadra came across as to me.