Oh navel, how I gaze at thee. And quite right, take some time to myself, work things out. And, were I one of those fictional complete innocents (Gurren-Lagann’s Nia, the whale in Hitchikers) I guess I’d have to get to grips with “what am I?”. Since I’ve been provided with an answer by education (I’m a human) I’ll have to make do with a different question – what does it mean to be human?

Not all shows explicitly engage with this, many imply it – romantic comedy and combat stories at the very least privilege certain goals and priorities. If you ask most people they won’t provide you with a clear answer to the question, they’ll provide you with a list of ideas which may well be incoherent. Essentially there’s a (often subconscious) conflict as to what humanity means.

This matters because it affects people’s ethics, if your actions are predetermined by your human nature that changes your view of them. It can have a major impact on your politics, since it’ll decide what kind of society the human is best suited to. the discussion of human nature matters.

So then, Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann, in which we are spiral organisms driving inevitably forward – driving ourselves towards our own destruction but with the intention of overcoming it, kicking reason to the curb. It’s a youthful view of humanity, and a firm one – a very clear view of human nature. It doesn’t dismiss love, contentedness etc. – it subsumes them, brings them into the big tent of forward momentum.

That momentum is seemingly instinctual, it’s the humans as champions of evolution. I can’t help but be sceptical – not sceptical of our ability to go beyond the impossible, but about what that means for how society should be run. What of morality, are we just creatures of spectacular instinct? Clearly reason is needed to define our moral positions.

It’s a creditable aspect of the show that Simon does eventually give way to Rossiu, that the hero isn’t the brash and irresponsible Kamina. Simon doesn’t kill the Spiral Nemesis (i.e. everybody), the answer isn’t actually to blast away infinitely. The conclusion is a universe of diplomatic missions, a sensible goal which isn’t the product of a straightforward fighting mentality.

There’s a mixture of the attractive and repulsive in the idea that humans are just beasts of instinct and emotion. It’s a contrast to the Enlightenment view of us as the animals privileged with reason (by God or nature). That idea offers reasoned answers, and the well known threat of the utterly grotesque as justified by forms of reason.

A show like Gurren-Lagann essentially constructs the champion of instinct as the tutor to the champion of reason (Rossiu). Sure, Simon is a more balanced version of GAR than Kamina – but the roles played by Rossiu and Kamina in the plot are completely different. Imagine a version where Kamina is a Yagami Light style ruthless genius who can defeat the enemy, and Rossiu is an emotional man who drives the world into the ground with irrational policy. Gurren-Lagann doesn’t tell us something blatantly wrong (thanks to the ending) but it does put an emphasis on Kamina’s approach as the solution.

It’s worth considering the crimes committed in the name of reason as connected to works which lionised the rationalist hero. Likewise I think that a work which places fighting spirit over reason necessitates criticism.

Gurren-Lagann doesn’t tell us that fighting on forever will solve all our problems, but it does privilege that vision of humanity. It doesn’t tell us that that’s the key to the human animal, it tells us that that spirit (symbolised by the old-school chunky mechs) is what we need to remember.

I was about to write a paragraph on why we didn’t necessarily need to be told that. Then I thought, what do be need to be told? And got stuck. Pessimistically I started wondering if fiction could ever provide a vision of human nature that changed society for the better. It wasn’t even a concern with the difficulty of expressing a coherent view, it was whether our view of human nature can ever trump, well, human nature itself.

To cut a long story short, I think that, to some extent, it can. But here I need to emphasise that the vision of humanity presented in fiction is a reflection of as well as a contribution to the debate regarding the definition of human beings. Is fiction even appropriate? Does the medium used bias the process in favour of certain definitions? I began to realise that it isn’t right to lay the responsibility solely at the door of the writer, that the overarching structures of human communication affect how our view is formed – and therefore change our approach to everything we do.

Back to Gurren-Lagann. It’s a class act, not perfect, but brilliant, a product of wit and verve, and greater than the sum of its parts. Its theme was pretty inspiring, but I wasn’t entirely OK with it – I stayed on board for the fun and the characters, not for the theme. Were it more Kamina’s show, were it not for the cautious (reasonable) notes struck, I would have had a massive problem with it. To the credit of GAINAX it rounds out the view of humanity set forth. It does privilege the reason-kicking perspective, but it steps back from crudeness – makes a case for emphasising GAR behaviour, not making it into a code. I think my concerns, raised by the clear trajectory in its second half towards delivering a pretty well trodden and not unusually convincing “dangers of pure reason” message, were essentially assuaged by the end.

Thing is, had Gurren-Lagann not been out to throw up a clear message, I might not have become the least bit interested in what it had to say about humanity. Had it been content to imply a perspective I doubt I would have felt such concern at its championing of combative energy. I’d have been happy with just the adventures of cool stylish mecha team. Gurren-Lagann allowed its viewer to think over what it said, and it qualified itself when necessary. Explicitly offering its message about humanity allowed for those nuances to be inserted. Meanwhile the discourse in our heads is being shaped in peculiar ways by the implied versions floating around – by the styles and characters shown in embodiments of interpretations, by the sort of mecha that the hero rides, by the style of speech he gives. Just because human nature is an old question doesn’t mean we can let it lie, writers have to engage with it to avoid the school of implication taking over. Fortunately it’s such a fundamental question that I think that we’ll always have writers prepared to do just that.