Gachiakuta

Episode 12

It was right when we got that title card drop, a full sixteen minutes into the episode, that I realized Gachiakuta was taking its story into a very interesting direction. Everything up to that point had already been excellent; Tamsy's cool thread-staff made for one hell of a vital instrument to show off in the first half of the episode, and I ended up really digging how the conflict with Amo concluded with a more strategic victory rather than a big, action-packed blowout. The emotional fallout of Amo's manipulative stink powers was communicated surprisingly well, considering that all we get is one flashback to Delmon's memories of gardening with his now-deceased wife and a simple monologue from Zanka about the danger of carving open the scars left behind by people's most cherished memories. I was honestly wondering just where else the episode was going to go with the few minutes it had left. Then, Rudo took off his mask, just as Semiu explained to her boss what had caused the boy to leave such an impression on her so quickly.

She's scared of Rudo. Or at least, Semiu is justifiably wary of the deep wellspring of bitterness and rage that Rudo still holds in his heart. It's not just a drive to keep our young protagonist pushing forward against the odds, nor is it even something as simple as a need for revenge that can be fixed by punching the right people the right number of times in the right vital organs. Rudo has been hurt by this world, treated like worthless trash his entire life until he was literally sent to die on a planet-sized garbage dump. It's so common for action stories to take this kind of broad and easily identifiable source of a character's misanthropy and use it as window dressing for a simple conflict of Wronged Good Guy Vs. All the Baddies That Have It Coming. Rudo's just a kid, though. A kid with too much power, too little trust in the people around him, and none of the life experience and personal development needed to know how to handle all of his pain. His rage isn't just fuel for cool fight scenes and convenient, emotionally charged power-ups. Like Semiu explained to Arkha, it's something more like a curse that has been carved into his soul.

This is why, when Amo has been well and truly disarmed and taken in as a prisoner, it is so shocking to see Rudo take off his breather, walk straight up to the girl, and beat her senseless and bloody. I can't tell you how many anime have starred edgy protagonists who've been betrayed by some haughty Jezebel and her flock of sycophants, stinking to high heaven of the sort of casual, seething misogyny that makes it impossible for these shows to be any fun at all to watch. It's so wild to me, then, that Gachiakuta is the first anime I can recall seeing where the main character actually crosses that line into becoming violent and uncontrollable against the woman he sees as the enemy.

The entire scene is framed in a way that very intentionally shifts our perception of the two characters. Amo, who has spent the last two episodes gleefully puppeting our heroes and nearly getting them to kill each other, is reduced to a shocked and helpless child. Her skimpy outfit and childish mannerisms, which only minutes earlier felt like little more than brazen fan service, now only highlight how vulnerable she is compared to Rudo. Our “hero”, who was only minutes ago desperately trying to understand how to bring this conflict to a close without violence, is now straddling a girl and knocking her teeth out. Worse yet, in the immediate aftermath, he keeps trying to justify his terrible actions, going on about how it shouldn't matter if someone is smaller than him, or helpless, or “just a girl”, because he has been hurt, and that means that whoever got had it coming.

I won't get into the messy details, but I spent my early childhood in an environment where domestic violence and truly toxic displays of angry, bitter masculinity left marks on my psyche that I'm still dealing with, thirty years later. Seeing this particular kind of brutality is always triggering for me, but it was especially shocking to see in Gachiakuta of all shows, which I thought had mostly left behind its edgelord tendencies after those first couple of episodes. I could easily see viewers instantly turning on Rudo and feeling unable to continue watching this show. The episode's intense visuals make one thing absolutely clear: Amo may have been the villain of the week, but Rudo is the one who became a monster.

Here's the thing, though: I think that this was an incredible direction to take the story. Not because of the awful violence, obviously, but because of how the episode immediately pivots to confronting Rudo's mistake head-on. For one, the show benefits from being a heightened work of fantasy that uses violence as a primary story element. It takes a very real and relatable scenario and abstracts it just enough to become a situation that we can process, and that Rudo can come back from, because Gachiakuta is a world where magical stinky boots can control people's minds and guys can use garden hoses to do some serious damage on the battlefield. Amo is not innocent, and she wasn't technically defenseless when Rudo attacked her.

More importantly, however, is the scene where Enjin takes Rudo aside, lets the kid vent his own shame and frustration, and then lays out the facts: What Rudo did was fucked up, yes, and it was absolutely wrong, but it genuinely does mean something that Rudo recognizes where the mistake came from. Rudo wants to grow, he wants to be better, and for all of its anime tropes and cliches, Gachiakuta is smart enough to realize that all of Rudo's trauma isn't going to be solved by a new job, some new clothes, and few days of hanging out with some new friends. If your brain has been all jacked up by neglect, abuse, and a lifetime of swallowing all of your heaviest and darkest feelings, you don't just get over that thanks to the power of friendship. You might even still end up lashing out and hurting someone, even when you know it is wrong and selfish and stupid. It doesn't make things better to beat yourself up and cry about how unfair life has been, either. You have to own up to your mistakes, find the path forward that will lead to genuine healing, and put in the incredibly difficult work that comes with actually being better.

It's such a challenging and nuanced perspective on the ways that even the most well-meaning boys can be consumed by the toxic emotions and ugly instincts that got drilled into them at far too young an age. I was convinced that Gachiakuta was only concerned with slapping its grungy, greasy aesthetic onto a fairly typical shonen manga template, but this episode has proven me dead wrong. This stinky little toon about a gang of literal Garbage Pail Kids has utterly blown me away.

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James is a writer with many thoughts and feelings about anime and other pop-culture, which can also be found on BlueSky, his blog, and his podcast.

Gachiakuta is currently streaming on Crunchyroll.