Gunbuster (1988): My Thoughts
Date: 2025-1-10
Growing up is a really fascinating process. Try telling a 15 year old that there are foundational, fundamental things that they can’t grasp about the world and the response you’ll get will very likely be incredibly strong pushback. I was the sort of teenager you couldn’t tell anything to; I had everything figured out. When I read old Livejournal posts from high school, what I’m most struck by is the certainty. I expressed essentially zero doubt that I would ever change, or that my viewpoints would ever evolve, or that the world had anything left to show me. And I think, in some small part, that kind of certainty and purity of purpose has its own virtue, but it’s humbling reading those same Livejournal posts and seeing not only how wrong I was but how much I’ve grown.
But also, in the same surprising way, how similar my 16 year old self still is to me now 20 years later.
Part of that maturation and growth becomes most noticeable when one looks back at their thoughts and experiences with media as a teenager compared to their experiences with that same thing as an adult. While there’s tons and tons of things that still form foundational parts of me that I loved then that I still love now, the way those things make me feel and the way I think about those things are often radically different!
An archetypal example that also applies to me exactly is how, as a 14 year old watching Evangelion for the first time and being wildly, over-the-top frustrated with the characters. When the main characters are your peers, you identify with them differently—you see yourself in a more direct way, and with less worldly experience and less wisdom, growth and age, you miss the horror and the suffering. As an adult, I think most viewers would recognize the plight and empathize with being forced to do the things those particular characters are forced to endure. With age and experience comes a different set of lenses to view the world, and that changes the whole thing.
I watched Gunbuster as a young teenager as well and I’m mildly disappointed with myself at how little of it stuck with me. There’s an old Gundam-related meme with the RX-78 shooting a gun over someone’s head with the text “war is bad” while the person says “wow! Cool robot!” It’s perfect, A+, no notes. My remembrances of the first time I watched Gunbuster are mostly of the “wow! Cool robot!” variety: the incredible mechanical designs (I could watch the capital ship laser gunports open over and over again), the awe-inspiring power of and scale of the mecha and combat, the perfect Itano circuses.
When I started rewatching a couple weeks ago, I was a little shocked and embarrassed at how little I remembered, except from the mechanicals, which is even more surprising because this show is immediately memorable!
The overwhelming presence looming over Gunbuster (and Gainax, for that matter) is Hideaki Anno, and it needs be known that the man’s output are amongst some of my favorite shows—and what he explores throughout a lot of his shows is explored in the same way here in Gunbuster. Chiefly: the weaponisation and exploitation of youth (including youth sexuality and naïveté). As an aside, it needs to be noted of course that Anno/Gainax were far from the only ones exploring Japan and it’s youth—I know for a fact that actual literal academics and academics of Japanese art/literature have written extensively on the war/post-war and its relationship with especially teenagers, and especially during eras that were really formative for creators/mangaka who came of age in the 60s/70s—of special note being the student protests and whatnot.
But I digress!
I went a long, long way to say that I love how a show that ends with perhaps one of the most powerful (Non-Gurren-Lagann) mecha I’ve ever seen in a show begins with an episode that is more or less just High School sports hijinks. It makes sense how firmly tongue-in-cheek the ‘Aim for the Top’ is as a name when the first episode sure reads like we’re gonna get Oka (from ‘Aim for the Ace’) out into space.
From that point on, we journey into space as humanity wage a horrid war against space monsters. We get bits of Eva-style body horror (who doesn’t think for a second that it’s actually a space monster inside the Gunbuster? In fact, one of my favorite things about the sequel to Gunbuster is how it makes everything subtextual into text—including ‘Gunbusters are alive’), we get highly truncated romance as a way to teach our heroine that war brings real, actual death with it, and we also get one of the other core ideas of Gunbuster, which is how war separates soldiers from those at home—in this case demonstrated by literally arresting the development of those in space because of relativistic faster-than-light travel.
Watching Gunbuster as a teenager, I remember thinking it was pretty cool. Watching Gunbuster as an adult I recognized I was watching a stone cold classic. Gunbuster has a well-deserved reputation as the mother of a certain type of mecha show and viewpoint, and it’s essentially required viewing for anyone who has a love of anime of any kind.
