This Week in Anime

Gatchaman Standing Out in CROWDS Waving their Insights

Sylvia
Ring ring, Coop. We're receiving a long-distance collect call from the far-flung past of the mid-2010s. Sounds like this might be important. Will you accept the charges?

In the biz, they call that a gotcha. But in this biz, we call that a Gatchaman.

And yep, that's right, this week in "This Week in Anime," we are turning back the clock and looking at one of the most colorful, divisive, and arguably prescient anime series of the 21st century: Gatchaman Crowds and its sequel Gatchaman Crowds insight. Don't panic. We're all in this together.

Truthfully, this idea has been on the TWIA back burner for over two years. Reader Dan Blackwood suggested it over email back in September of 2023, so thank you, Dan! And sorry we have been so glacial in getting to it. On the bright(?) side, CROWDS certainly hasn't lost any of its relevance in the past couple of years. Quite the opposite, actually!

Even before we get to that, I think it's worthwhile to comment on how the series felt back in 2013. This was early enough that there was still some novelty in a mainstream series directly tackling social media. We were also in the middle of the big superhero craze, and CROWDS's unconventional approach with its unconventional protagonist stood out. A lot of people DID NOT like Hajime.

Not me, of course. I was pro Hajime-ssu from the get-go.

I mean, she's basically the antithesis of a superhero, at least as far as the popular conception of them is concerned. In season one, she shakes up the Gatchaman status quo by going for non-violent solutions with public transparency. She trades the traditional kicks and punches of tokusatsu for arts and crafts. She's unrepentantly bubbly and feminine in a way that bristled the 2013 audience (and still does to an extent, I'm sure). But the long arc of CROWDS always vindicates her and reveals her intelligence.

The most valid critique is that she functions as an avatar and/or mouthpiece for a set of ideas before she functions as a three-dimensional character. But that's kinda CROWDS in a nutshell. It is foremost a series all about interrogating big ideas, and it's very important to its themes that a figure like Hajime stands at the center of it.

The first season as a whole interrogates that link between social media and community, namely how one is a manifestation of the other, and it's a two-way street. Users accomplish positive changes with GALAX, which goes as far as gamifying and incentivizing good deeds. But by the same token, it also becomes a means of harassment and violence. Nowhere is this more blatant than in the existence of the antagonist Berg Katze, who is basically the cruel and wanton id of our social media selves personified. The troll of trolls.

Meanwhile, the secondary antagonist, Rui, is the creator of GALAX, who believes above all else that her technological disruptions and innovations are the key to pushing mankind further and democratizing heroism. She is, in other words, the tunnel-visioned tech CEO phenotype we all know too well.

Also, to head off the comments, yes, I know that Rui is gendered male in the show. But come on. Dressing like this for most of the series. Having an alter ego. Being into computers to a worrying degree. That's a trans girl.

This is why you need 2FA that takes alien doppelgangers into account.

In a series stuffed with metaphor and symbolism, Katze's ability to copy any person's appearance is one of the more obvious. He is, at once, all of our worst online instincts given form.

And I want to reiterate: we were not really seeing narratives like this in 2013 that dealt with online harassment and the potential of the still-novel phenomenon of ubiquitous social media. CROWDS took a lot of big swings at a fresh and complicated topic. In one of the more controversial moments, Hajime comforts Utsutsu by telling her she can just turn off her phone if people are bothering her.

A lot of viewers at the time interpreted this as Hajime saying that online bullying isn't real. And certainly, it's an oversimplification to tell people to just log off if they're getting death threats in their mentions. But if the past decade has taught me anything, it's that touching grass is more often than not the most correct move.

While I think the first season raises a lot of good questions and skepticism about the utility of social media, it ends on an overall optimistic note—that people, united, together, can do great things. We can all be heroes. Unfortunately, one year after the first season concluded, Gamergate happened and provided a far more compelling counterargument: that our baser instincts are easily hijacked and manipulated by malignant actors in these fast-paced online environments. Social media does not dissolve our prejudices. It reproduces and refines them.

And that's why I kind of like GALAX's cynically utilitarian take on that. Maybe that kind of gamification of good is the best we can ask for? It certainly beats much of the internet's contemporary usage. But this is a ridiculously complicated topic, and although CROWDS is a ridiculously dense series, it fails to address all of the relevant contingencies. There was a solid attempt, but the first season falls short of its ambitions.

insight, on the other hand, might be the craziest called shot in anime history.

The zoom-in on Hajime's chest whenever Katze speaks never stops being funny.

Side note: the original season finale was not finished when it aired. They got about half of it done and filled in the rest of the runtime with a clip show. It was a huge mess. So if you didn't eventually watch the director's cut of the finale, you completely missed the most important result of the first season: Hajime's fusion with Katze. The best and the worst of us, together in one high school girl whose favorite expression is : >

insight tries making up for this with an "episode 0" that catches the audience up, which is better than nothing.

Meanwhile, I'm insane and imported the Japanese BD collection for the first season, which does have the director's cut (and illustrator/character designer Kinako's lovely box art). But that certainly should not have been the only way I could legally obtain it.

Anyway, back to insight. The second season, in almost all of the ways that matter, feels like a direct response to the first. It is more careful with its thoughts. It is larger in scope. It is profoundly cynical. And it is one of the most important political works of the modern age—a narrative that takes a cold, hard, terrifying gaze into the heart of the Median Voter.

The fact that it aired in 2015 still boggles my mind.

How did they know?

insight covers a lot of ground, to be clear. But in its main plotline, it follows the most benevolent populist demagogue one could imagine. It's a thought experiment that invokes many simplifications, but still digs into profound questions about the nature of governance, liberty, democracy, groupthink, and social coercion. And despite its smoothed edges, the picture it paints is at every turn revolting, horrifying, and a mirror held up to our present fiasco of a country/world.

We are, collectively, a nation that hit the "Let Sadra handle it" button, and we are all reeling from the consequences.

This is what history's greatest monster looks like.

But seriously, as with every Gatchaman character, Tsubasa is a proxy for a particular mindset, and in insight's case, she is Hajime's foil. Whereas Hajime spends the entire season literally asking questions and refusing to give definitive answers, Tsubasa rushes into big decisions without thinking them through, as long as they align with the consensus. The keyword in insight is "atmosphere," which has the same double-meaning in Japanese as in English. The mood of any given collective is nebulous, malleable, hard to pin down, and as dangerous as a hurricane. It all depends on where it's pointed and who is doing the pointing.

And of course it's World War II and its aftermath that would inspire insight's story. There's nothing "new" in Gel's rise to power or the manifestation of the Kuu-sama. They are abstractions born from numerous historical examples of totalitarian leaders, cult mentality, jingoism, and the abdication of civic duty. insight didn't warn us about the next decade. It tried to remind us of what we already knew. Except for the Kuu-sama literally being AI chatbot sycophants that placate the masses with alarming speed and proficiency. That one I really didn't see coming. Scarily accurate.

It's a lesson humanity has had to relearn time and again, because it feels good to belong. We are a social species, so we want to fit in. Rui has a related arc happening in parallel, where her doubts in her convictions cause her to shut down entirely and give herself over to the Kuu-sama, becoming an "ape." Because that's easier.

And it's profoundly ironic that X (the Gatchaman version) snaps her out of it by challenging her. It doesn't say yes. It says no. X, the Everything App, could never.

Conflict, insight argues, is not in itself an unwanted or unneeded thing. Oftentimes, we need conflict, and especially so when we're marching down a dark path. Hajime's incorporation of Katze into herself is a perfect example of this philosophy. She internalizes and acknowledges him because it would be far more dangerous to ignore him and leave him to his own devices. That world of ignorance is what Gel and Tsubasa originally dream of, and it's where everything starts going wrong.

Yeah, Rizumu is basically CROWDS' way of saying, "hey, we may have been a little hasty with our optimistic outlook last time."

And in deliberate contrast, I think insight's conclusion is far more conservative, if not cynical and pessimistic. Because while Hajime, Gel, and everybody else get their happy ending, they only do so by deceiving the masses and exposing them to the bloodshed they think they crave. It's not a solution as much as it's an exploitation.

And like the 2:6:2 rule referenced earlier in the season, there always seems to be some segment of the population that will never budge, no matter what happens or what evidence is provided. But insight is about the fickleness of the Median Voter, and that is a profoundly frustrating topic. It should not take this degree of stove-touching—video evidence of wanton, civically sanctioned murder broadcast on every major news network—for this many people to realize the logical consequences of their choices. Yet there's a wealth of evidence, both anecdotal and objective, that this is the case. insight does not know how to solve this, and I don't either.

I hope so. I have to. Revisiting insight made me appreciate the show even more than I did in 2015, but in the end, it still can't come up with a more satisfying conclusion than "everyone gets distracted and moves onto the next thing." Will the people of Tachikawa truly know better next time? Or do we have to keep touching the stove, because there might be a chance the flames turn into diamonds before they char our palms?

And as insight teaches us, there's nothing more important than taking those questions and thinking seriously about them. That's what my girl Hajime would do. And I'd trust her (and her scissors) with my life.

On that note,