GARGANTIA #4 - - Watch & Learn

| Sunday, May 26, 2013



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GARGANTIA #4 - - Watch & Learn



Now, I’ve actually been waiting for this sort of premise to get played
out in a show. For all the hot air I’ve blown out over deconstructionism and
the like, wouldn’t it be the greatest genre inversion to have your typical anime
killing machine getting stuck in a predicament where he can’t use
force to solve anything?

I’m about a third of the way into this show, now. It’d be easy to fall
into the trap of calling things too early. Still, I’ll put a wish out there and
hope that GARGANTIA actually goes ahead with something fearless
here. I’d love if it turns out that Ledo really has wiped out all the
bad guys, and the rest of this series is just about him and his mech learning
how to cope with more benign communication and relationship challenges. He’d be
the knife with nothing to cut, searching for a more benevolent reason for his existence.

== TEASER ==

The last time I used that whole “knife that doesn’t cut” phrase was
when I was reviewing CASSHERN SINS. It’s not too much of a stretch here,
honestly. Ledo’s basically another battle bot grappling with questions of
purpose; only his struggle with humanization doesn’t have the sort of pesky
qualifiers that’d come with him actually being synthetic. His conversation with Amy’s little brother is a rather bittersweet
distillation of all the lengthy philosophical dialogs in CASSHERN.

On the one
hand, the kid is so heartbreakingly naïve for not even comprehending how
anybody could see him as worthless. On the other hand, there’s something undeniably life-affirming to the way
he sort-of just shrugs off Ledo’s bleak worldview for the grumpiness it really
is. The gloom simply doesn’t apply to him.

Whether the show winds up becoming more conventional - - either with
the appearance of new Terran enemies or with the arrival of Ledo’ss alien foes
-
- I’ll prize this episode for having more Urobuchi-brand dialog that are
legitimately thought-provoking without the pretension that usually accompanies
the term.

Watch this episode, “The Flute of
Recollection" here and decide for yourself, then read my comments on the
previous episode here.

Tom Pinchuk’s a writer and personality with a large number
of comics, videos and features like this to his credit. Visit his website - -
tompinchuk.com - - and follow his Twitter: @tompinchuk








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