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Gatchaman Crowds insight
Episodes 1-3

by Nick Creamer,

How would you rate episode 1 of
Gatchaman Crowds insight ?
Community score: 3.8

How would you rate episode 2 of
Gatchaman Crowds insight ?
Community score: 3.9

How would you rate episode 3 of
Gatchaman Crowds insight ?
Community score: 4.3

There's a handy rule I like to apply to the governing of online communities: “you create the worst community you allow.” Whatever is the most violent, most antisocial behavior that is accepted by your community, that is the level of discourse you will create. If you allow people to attack others, people who prefer more socially positive discussion may stick around for a while, but they will eventually be driven out, seeking less violent pastures. Your community's most aggressive members will attract equally aggressive company and discourage those who don't respond in kind. Civil engagement settles to the bottom of an empty glass.

Gatchaman Crowds is a show about online communities. More than that, it's a show about communities in general, about what makes social groups and larger societies work. It's about what drives people, and what makes them tick. It's about trying to build a better world.

In its first season, Gatchaman Crowds pitted Hajime Ichinose against Berg Katze, and the Gatchaman against Rui Ninomiya. The Gatchaman are traditional heroes - they fight, they transform, they punch evil in the face. Rui Ninomiya was a different kind of hero; though she too possessed a NOTE, giving her great powers, her main force for good was GALAX, a social media network that allowed everyone to participate in creating a better world. GALAX connected “heroes” with their “villains” all over the world, allowing a person in need to send out a call for the nearest GALAX-connected person with medical training, or simply helping like-minded people find each other.

But GALAX wasn't Rui's only weapon. Rui also commanded CROWDS, a power that allowed her to give GALAX users digital avatars to “update the world” manually. Rui believed this power was too great for humanity, and so she restrained its use to one hundred specially chosen revolutionaries.

Berg Katze wasn't a fan of that. Less of an individual perspective, Katze essentially represents the darkness in humanity - Katze is violence, Katze is chaos, Katze is schadenfreude, Katze is trolling. In contrast to Hajime, a more-than-human beacon of trust and charity and communal good-feeling, Katze preached selfish self-indulgence and social destruction. When Katze offered CROWDS to thousands of trolls, Rui was forced to make good on the most extreme version of her ideals, and give CROWDS to everyone. By making “save the city” a kind of game (hurray for gamification!) and banking on positivity outweighing negativity, Rui's gambit stopped Katze and made CROWDS an accepted extension of everyday life in one. But was that really such a good idea?

If people considered the first season of Gatchaman Crowds maybe a bit too optimistic, it seems the show itself agrees. Hajime beat Katze by literally swallowing him and making him a part of herself, but you can't literally swallow the dark instincts of humanity altogether. Insight introduces three major characters - Tsubasa, a new Gatchaman who embodies all the idealistic “I'll save everyone” simple heroism and emotional hot-headedness that Hajime lacked, Gelsadra, an alien who can actually make people's feelings appear above their head, and Suzuki Rizumu, leader of VAPE, an organization that believes CROWDS are too dangerous for human use.

Suzuki is essentially the doubting Dostoevsky voice of Gatchaman - “you could never create a utopia, because there will always be people who spoil it. Here, let me spoil it myself to show you.” He believes CROWDS is far too great a power to be given to to everyone, that people are too easily led for horizontal power to extend this far. And he's probably right; even within these first three episodes, the optimism of Gatchaman's brightest lights is being sorely tested. “You're welcome to believe in evolution, but what if the world collapses before then?” classic Gatchaman Jou asks Rui, to which Rui can only respond “what's the point of a world without ideals?” There's a sharp disconnect between the stated universal enfranchisement of a power like CROWDS and the clear necessity of people policing that freedom. When Suzuki employs his followers to cause chaos, the “good” CROWDS can't stand against them, disorganized as they are. It comes down to the Gatchaman to police society, demonstrating both the necessity of community moderation (“you create the worst society you allow”) and the underlying hypocrisy and fragility of CROWDS as an ideal. Rui thinks people can get “better.” The world continues to say that people aren't there yet.

Rui's fatal flaw might be that she fails to see violence as an inherent aspect of human nature. She thinks she can “update the world,” and that people will simply "evolve past" their antisocial urges. But violence isn't some foreign aggressor foiling our plans - violence is a part of us. Hajime's absorbing Katze may well represent Gatchaman Crowds' acceptance of that reality - the light of humanity has absorbed the darkness, and now the two must work together, because you can't create a society that just assumes positive action. Gelsadra simply wishes everyone would get along, but people are more complicated than that.

So far, Insight has maintained both a wild pace and a sense of fun, filling out its rich ideas with cute moments between solidly developed characters and even a couple thrilling fights. The soundtrack is as full of dynamic electronic tracks as the original, the art style just as lively. It's hard not to dive immediately into the compelling philosophical debates underlying Gatchaman's external conflicts, but there is a whole lot to like here on basically every level. Gatchaman Crowds insight seems poised to interrogate all that the first season held dear, and I'm eager to see where it goes from here.

Rating: A

Gatchaman Crowds insight is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.

Nick writes about anime, storytelling, and the meaning of life at Wrong Every Time.


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