Gatchaman Crowds: A surprising look on society

Spoiler warning: If you have not seen Gatchaman Crowds and would like to avoid even the smallest spoilers, turn back now. You have been warned.

I want to start this post by stating that I’m only talking about the first season of Gatchaman Crowds as well as the director’s cut episode Gatchaman Crowds: Embrace. Gatchaman Crowds: Insight will not be discussed, I haven’t seen Insight and it hasn’t even finished airing at the time of writing.

I honestly don’t have that grand of a story as to why I decided to watch Gatchaman Crowds, I was interested, a friend recommended it to me and…it actually really surprised me.

From the outside, Gatchaman Crowds has a super simple plot. There’s a group called the Gatchaman who have transformations with special powers thanks to a device called a NOTE, main girl joins them in the first episode. Heroes beat aliens whee. But from around the end of episode 2 is when it starts playing with the ideas of the standard superhero story and how they’d work in a modern society.

For instance, a commonly accepted idea of superheroes is the fact that their identities must always remain a secret, but the show immediately questions the relevance of this, and indeed by revealing their indentities and acting like celebrities they actually manage to gather a strong following which ends up helping them achieve their goals.

However, the superhero commentary is only a small part of what this show attempts to tackle, as it starts to take a look at how a society where every single member of it has an equally important role to play through social media can function.

Now, most of the post from here on out is me discussing and analyzing what I interpreted as the message and themes of Crowds, aswell as how it’s characters represent them. Unfortunately, I’m a big dumb idiot who’s probably looking at these things the wrong way, so take these with a grain of salt because I can be way off.

So in the universe of the show, there’s an online service called GALAX. This online service is basically the perfection of social media, not only does it allow you to contact other users around the world, it also immediately reports any kind of trouble, from a small personal one to a major crisis and perfectly calculates which kind of action with the people nearby would result in it being resolved.

This sounds almost utopian and for a while, the series almost seems like it’s going in that direction, the Prime Minister is portrayed as a lazy dunce and the population seems to be doing fine on their own with GALAX as their tool…cept there’s one problem. People aren’t perfect, in fact some people are outright shitty.

In episode 5 a power gets introduced called the CROWDS, these are controlled by the HUNDRED, a group of 100 GALAX users that’s led by the creator of the program. This power is only used for dire situations that have a very low success rate of being resloved with just the regular people available. However, some people within the HUNDRED start showing their true colors, having either more extreme or selfish girls. All the founder can do to solve the issue is kick them out and replace them. Which isn’t a conclusive answer and indeed comes back to bite them in the ass SUPER hard.

Oh right I should probably mention the characters before

Hajime is the best girl, no contest.

Hajime Ichinose is straight up one of the most wonderful female characters I’ve ever seen in an anime. Her upbeat nature, bizzare quirks and her outlook on life is something that resonated very strongly with me, the wonderful voice performance by Maaya Uchida truly sells the character and overall I really don’t have anything negative to say about her. I’ve heard some people call her a “Mary Sue”, I can see why someone would get the impression that her morals are always the right ones and she convinces every character of them. But honestly I feel her morals justify what she accomplishes in the story, she believes strongly in the fact that every person has their own reason and story, which means none of them are worth dismissing (or outright killing in the case of the villain. It’s a simple outlook on life but the way she manages to come off as so convincing and genuine about it help in the justification of why the other characters end up agreeing with them. A simple viewpoint can often be the right one and Hajime embodies that beautifully. A viewpoint which affects the other Gatchaman quite heavily.

I’d actually like to talk about Paiman and Sugane Tachibana together, they both embody more old school views of what a superhero is at the beginning, Paiman is the leader of the Gatchaman, someone who has fought for a while and has lost his best friend in a battle with the main villain, which has made him jaded, strict and scared to fight. Despite essentially being a cute little panda. Sugane holds the same values but not for the same rasons. Rather than being a jaded old man he instead holds said values since that was the kind of superhero squad that saved him when he was young, which left a super great impression on him. What Hajime changes about both of them is her more open look on things. When the Gatchaman start getting more out in the open Sugane starts seeing a positive impact that a more open relationship with the public has, and Paiman regains his reason to fight when he sees that people are worth working together with and protecting.

On a slightly more…depressing note, there are Utsutsu Miya and Joe Hibiki. Both figures who at the beginning of the show have basically given up on life. Utsutsu hates her very existence, feeling like she can never enjoy anything about it and considering herself an abomination. Joe’s case is less severe but still rather depressing. Having had all of his ambitions crushed in the past, he’s someone who considers himself worthless and he doesn’t strive to do anything great. Always working under his limits because he considers them so low. What’s really interesting about their character development is that it’s closely linked to the show. After an embarassing defeat Joe stops contributing to the Gatchaman force all together, feeling like literally anyone can do his job better than he could. But during the show’s climax he starts to realize that he is needed just as much as anyone else and that his powers can help others. So he jumps back into the fray. Utsutsu’s development is more of a straight uphill climb, she starts off the show like I described but thanks to Hajime’s influence she starts to enjoy herself, she starts feeling like she’s worthy of making friends and in the end, she realizes that she’s just as much of an important member of society as anyone else.

Sadly not much can be said about O.D he’s still a wonderfully entertaining character who also can become a total badass, there are some hints of Hajime having an influcence on him but it’s never fully explained.

Also this

Lastly, I want to talk about two main characters who aren’t part of the Gatchaman. Rui Ninomiya and Berg Katse.

Rui is the founder of GALAX who originally got the power of CROWDS through Katze, he wants to bring about a “bloodless revolution” through creating a society that functions completely self sufficiently. However as mentioned before, some of the members of the special group he created shows that not everyone is a nice enough person to want to help out others just for the sake of it. Which starts going even further when Katze takes control of GALAX and Rui starts seeing what kind of chaos human beings are capable of. Rui’s development seems like it could mostly be left up to interpretation, though I wouldn’t be writing this if I didn’t share mine.

My interpretation of Rui’s development is his realization of the show’s true message. That even though every person in society has an equally important role to play, some of said roles do have to be things like leaders and heroes in order to keep the populace in check. Without said people laying down laws and examples to follow and instead letting people do whatever they want can result in pure unadulterated madness that can end in total chaos. And what a better example of that than the main villain himself.

Katze is essentially everything that could go wrong with the original intentions of GALAX, a person with seemingly unlimited power and the kind of childlike mind that could cause maximum chaos. His power makes it possible for him to just ignore laws and the kind of people laying down says laws, which resulted in him murdering thousands and destroying worlds. During the end of the climax he gives some really crazy people the kind of power that could make them stand above regular laws, and the first thing they start doing is wrecking government buildings. The only thing that ended up being able to stop Katze were Hajime’s own morals of trying seeing people for what they are and what their story is. Which allows her to literally finally see Katze at the end of Gatchaman Crowds: Embrace, she then starts embracing who he is in the most literal sense I have ever seen and basically absorbs Katze. It’s a bizarre way of showing it but one that I still think has value.

Now I probably made it sound like I think Gatchaman Crowds is some super deep anime, and at the end of the day it’s really not. While the characters do have depth they also have really quircky and out there personalities and designs, plus most of the designs are kinda whacky.

I believe Gatchaman Crowds is a really fun show with a lot of good jokes and character chemistry but the fact that the show has these underlying themes that are actually supported by the characters and their actions is something I felt like digging into.

Or maybe I just look way too deep into this sort of thing because I’m a giant nerd who finds it interesting. I dunno.

Anyway, I could go on about the stylized art or one of the best anime OSTs I’ve heard in years but I’m over 1700 words at 3:30 AM and I’m just really tired.

So yeah, hope you enjoy my first blogpost, I hope it wasn’t too bad as I want to make more in depth posts about shows I really like. So hopefully I’ll see you whenever I post another one of those.

Thanks for reading!

-Scatteredtext

An extra Hajime because I adore her