On Watching Gungrave Again
Feb. 12th, 2021 08:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
labingiDespite its moments of silliness and its video-gamery, Gungrave remains one of the best anime I know. If you like seinen anime, you should see it. NB: It is a story created by Yasuhiro Nightow, hence my comparisons below to Trigun, another work of his.
It must be at least eight years since I've watched all of Gungrave. This is the first time I've watched it since I was cut off by a loved one, and that matters because Gungrave was, for a while, explicitly a text I used to understand the breakup between my former friend and me. I used to tell myself we had fallen out like Brandon and Harry and, like them, would find our way back. It took me about 2-3 years to figure out that wasn't so. Our society has changed too since then. It's much less tolerant, much more judgmental. So with those changes in mind, here are some thoughts on how my experience of Gungrave has and has not changed.
On the whole, I still love it for all the same reasons. I love the core friendship between Harry and Brandon. I love the humanity of (almost) all the characters. I love its very Nightow-like refusal to condemn the people for their actions; that is to say, the actions can be obviously egregious and lead to terrible outcomes, including for their perpetrators, but that doesn't reduce the humanity of the perpetrators or eliminate their ability to change, to learn. That great universal love so present in Trigun is present here too in a softer light. I am still very impressed by the plotting, the tightness of the themes, the way the characters serve as foils for each other. I may even be more impressed with the pacing than I used to be.
And I appreciate even more than I used to that Gungrave sticks the landing. Its final episode may be its best. Even Shouwa Shinjuu, which is the best anime I have seen in a very long time, does not stick the landing; it's the series' one flaw. Even Trigun (both anime and manga), which is, on the whole, a greater work, fizzles in comparison in its final beats. And on the other side of Game of Thrones, I am deeply impressed by a serialized story that can follow through in that way to the perfect conclusion, exquisitely executed. And now for some more detailed perceptions (spoilers follow)…
Video Gamery…
Gungrave is based on a PS-2 game, which I knew, but seeing it after having had a lot more exposure to video games, it's actually a little bit distracting how game-play-ish it is. It's not subtle about how the different adversaries get introduced as the player levels up. Occasionally, the fights look like old-school game play too.
And I feel like I can see the seams of a creative process that went something like: "Here are these four badass guys who are going be the main bosses in the battles. Can we give them interesting backstories?" And the answer is yes, but… especially with Bunji, I feel like the seams show. It doesn't really make sense that Bunji that would choose Harry over Brandon. In fact, Bunji's whole view of "loyalty" is inconsistent and somewhat hypocritical. He gets very righteous about betrayal, except when he doesn't, and he prioritizes Harry as the one who always gets a pass, even though he's emotionally much closer to Brandon. Now, it's fine for a character to be inconsistent: people are. And I still love him as a character, but I feel like I can see some creative twisting to maneuver this character created to be an enemy for Brandon to fight into an emotionally impactful former friend, and those two things just didn't quite gel logically, as they do with Harry and Brandon.
Harry's Villainy
Harry's villainy bothers me more than it used to. (By "villainy," I mean his obviously horrific behaviors.) Now, his villainy has always been obvious: he raises a zombie army to terrorize an entire region as "Bloody Harry" for thirteen years. I guess maybe that sounds so over the top and the story spends so little time on the details of it that I always dismissed it a bit as fantasy, not something to dwell on too deeply.
I find it harder to dismiss now, and that bothers me. Where does this new sensitivity come from, this sense of, "Man, can I really invest in this guy?"? (Yes, I can.) It may come from my being rather more compassionate now, which bothers me because it makes wonder what I was then. But it may also come from our society being less tolerant. I live in a world now where a guy loses a job because he spent more time teaching his daughter to open a can of beans (before giving her dinner) than people thought he should.* In that kind of world, you're always looking over your shoulder to see if anyone has seen you miss the "virtue" bar, and you start to do that with other people. So maybe I'm doing that with Harry, just judging him harder because I judge everything harder, and while Harry obviously misses the virtue bar, that judgmental tendency in me bothers me for reasons that should be plain.
Lastly, it bothers me because it does make me think, "Can I really invest in this guy?" It gives me a strain of contempt for him. And while I can still invest in him, I still think he's a great character, that strain of contempt worries me for the same reason I love the Nightow-esque compassion I noted above. Contempt is a sign of eroded compassion. I don't want it, not for anyone.
All this is doubtless compounded by the fact that I am a fundamentally Harry-like person. This realization was a significant turning point in my life around 2012. I am less actively Harry-like now because I've done a lot of work on it, but I still sympathize. I know exactly where he's coming from. I know exactly why he gleefully shoots Brandon in the elevator. I know exactly why he feels Brandon has betrayed him, though Brandon has clearly done no such thing. And so it makes sense, I suppose, that Harry's high villainy would bother me.
* Yes, I know that's an oversimplification. I still think it's intrinsically a decent summary of what happened.
Triggering… or Have I Changed?
I went into this rewatch a bit worried that it would trigger my trauma because Gungrave is associated in my mind with my being cut off. Did it trigger it? Yes… but not very much. In the days since I've watched it, I've been more inclined than usual to dwell on that cutoff. I've gone back into some old patterns of ranting to myself about it, often in explicitly Gungrave-related terms. That said, it was mostly enjoyable to watch it again. It didn't cause me any deep distress, which is a good sign of healing, I think.
Actually, in moment-to-moment emotions, the story moved me less than it ever has before. I still liked it, but I watched it from behind a kind of filter. I suspect a few reasons for this. 1) Exhaustion: I just don't have the mental-emotional space to deeply invest right now. 2) Detachment: I do think some combination of my Buddhist study has led to invest less in things in general, including stories, to them as if looking down from a distance rather than feeling them from inside. (I mostly feel okay about this, but it does give me nostalgia for the old days.) 3) The trauma? I do think one of my trauma responses has been divest emotionally. This is related to (2), which has been a coping mechanism, but it also has a dimension that is just more direct, fear-based self-defense. 4) Middle age: I've done a lot of work the past few years in coming to terms with age and dying, and that makes stories about youthful errors, their cost, and dying feel a bit less high stakes. Which brings me to…
A Story about a Life Cycle
Gungrave is a story about the course of human lives. Probably because I'm older now, this stood out to me more than before. Our heroes are 43 when they die, and while that's ancient in anime-protagonist terms, it's not old. But the trajectory of the story describes a human lifetime. We watch them scrap as teens trying to find their way, grow into adults of mounting power and capacity, become leaders, and then become very, abnormally powerful, each in his own way. That all follows the video game progression, but it's interesting that the ending backs away from the continual leveling up.
Harry, who is the Big Bad, has already been defeated before he and Brandon meet up again. His heavies are dead, his organization has turned on him, and it's just a matter of time before they take him out. Brandon is in a physical downslide from around the end of his battle with Bear Walken. He goes into fighting Bunji pretty worn out, and by the time he gets back together with Harry, he can still be formidable against ordinary humans with guns, but that's about all. Effectively, he's dropped back several levels.
But that's life. If you don't die young, you peak and slide down, and the consolation you get for ceasing to be "that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven" is what you learn along the way. We learn how to live by dying.
The Emotional vs. the Rational: How Relationships Work
It's fascinating to rewatch what Harry and Brandon learn. The healing between them makes a different kind of sense to me now, seen through a more Buddhist lens: to a large extent, it describes letting go of what doesn't matter.
It is notable that Harry and Brandon never talk out their differences. They never reach a reasoned resolution to who did what wrong or right. Their reunification involves words, and the fact that they are able to sit down and talk is a sign of healing, but the reunification itself is paraverbal and pararational. It begins with laughter, with the moment when Brandon aims his gun point blank at Harry and pulls the trigger, and it isn't loaded, and they laugh. At that moment, I'd argue, it's a fait accompli that their friendship will be healed—because they're on the same wavelength again. With that laughter, they are in accord. (It's worth noting, too, that laughter itself, in its ironic form, is a way of getting perspective, of realizing that the serious doesn't have to be that serious.)
When they sit down in the diner to talk, they still have a lot of anger to work out, all the BS of the past twenty years or so that they've never, ever talked about. Now, they talk about it. Harry mounts some defense. Brandon tells him he's wrong. The conversation itself is pretty short and doesn't actually go anywhere. Neither of them backs down. The conversation just sort of fizzles into Harry's realization that the jig is up and his asking Brandon to kill him, not by way of apology or admission but because he has nowhere else to go. And then, the Millennion guys attack and Brandon, of course, protects him. What brings them back together is not figuring things out but realizing those things don't matter anymore; they're over. The people involved matter, but the enmity doesn't.
I find this insufficiency of words particularly apt for Harry and Brandon. Harry is a man of a million words, but they haven't helped him live a good life. Brandon is a man of almost no words. He has never lived through language; he has never had to.
The final reconciliation does come in words, but the actual verbal exchange is the tip of the iceberg. Brandon says he made a mistake by choosing Harry over Millennion but he has no regrets. Harry bursts into tears and says he's sorry. The exchange itself only makes sense in context. Brandon has spent his entire adult life trying to square loyalty to Harry and to Millennion, and telling himself that Millennion has to come first. This is the same Brandon who, not long before, beat Bunji to a pulp for accusing him of betrayal, yet now he owns it without regret. And Harry finally hears what he needs to hear, what he couldn't hear over the noise before: that Brandon has never stopped loving him, that Harry was wrong to imagine he had. And, therefore, apology becomes inevitable: Harry must own he was wrong to shoot Brandon because Brandon never betrayed him. It's a sad and beautiful affirmation of the centrality of their friendship to both of their lives.
And that's why I love Gungrave.
Friendship Bonding
I am impressed all over again with how explicit this anime is about centrality of Harry and Brandon's love for each other. It's extremely rare in modern media to see a friendship between men portrayed that way. I feel bound to note it isn't sexual at all. It's a friendship. But it is the driving emotional force of both their lives. Nightow is very good at this. Indeed, I suspect him of being a fellow friendship bonder. He doesn't write romance very much, and when he does those relationships are generally not central and not very fleshed out. He's much more interested in writing friendship and family, and that's a large part of why I'm such a fan. It is so rare to find friendship taken seriously this way, as it with Harry and Brandon or Vash and Wolfwood. It's like an oasis in the desert.
It must be at least eight years since I've watched all of Gungrave. This is the first time I've watched it since I was cut off by a loved one, and that matters because Gungrave was, for a while, explicitly a text I used to understand the breakup between my former friend and me. I used to tell myself we had fallen out like Brandon and Harry and, like them, would find our way back. It took me about 2-3 years to figure out that wasn't so. Our society has changed too since then. It's much less tolerant, much more judgmental. So with those changes in mind, here are some thoughts on how my experience of Gungrave has and has not changed.
On the whole, I still love it for all the same reasons. I love the core friendship between Harry and Brandon. I love the humanity of (almost) all the characters. I love its very Nightow-like refusal to condemn the people for their actions; that is to say, the actions can be obviously egregious and lead to terrible outcomes, including for their perpetrators, but that doesn't reduce the humanity of the perpetrators or eliminate their ability to change, to learn. That great universal love so present in Trigun is present here too in a softer light. I am still very impressed by the plotting, the tightness of the themes, the way the characters serve as foils for each other. I may even be more impressed with the pacing than I used to be.
And I appreciate even more than I used to that Gungrave sticks the landing. Its final episode may be its best. Even Shouwa Shinjuu, which is the best anime I have seen in a very long time, does not stick the landing; it's the series' one flaw. Even Trigun (both anime and manga), which is, on the whole, a greater work, fizzles in comparison in its final beats. And on the other side of Game of Thrones, I am deeply impressed by a serialized story that can follow through in that way to the perfect conclusion, exquisitely executed. And now for some more detailed perceptions (spoilers follow)…
Video Gamery…
Gungrave is based on a PS-2 game, which I knew, but seeing it after having had a lot more exposure to video games, it's actually a little bit distracting how game-play-ish it is. It's not subtle about how the different adversaries get introduced as the player levels up. Occasionally, the fights look like old-school game play too.
And I feel like I can see the seams of a creative process that went something like: "Here are these four badass guys who are going be the main bosses in the battles. Can we give them interesting backstories?" And the answer is yes, but… especially with Bunji, I feel like the seams show. It doesn't really make sense that Bunji that would choose Harry over Brandon. In fact, Bunji's whole view of "loyalty" is inconsistent and somewhat hypocritical. He gets very righteous about betrayal, except when he doesn't, and he prioritizes Harry as the one who always gets a pass, even though he's emotionally much closer to Brandon. Now, it's fine for a character to be inconsistent: people are. And I still love him as a character, but I feel like I can see some creative twisting to maneuver this character created to be an enemy for Brandon to fight into an emotionally impactful former friend, and those two things just didn't quite gel logically, as they do with Harry and Brandon.
Harry's Villainy
Harry's villainy bothers me more than it used to. (By "villainy," I mean his obviously horrific behaviors.) Now, his villainy has always been obvious: he raises a zombie army to terrorize an entire region as "Bloody Harry" for thirteen years. I guess maybe that sounds so over the top and the story spends so little time on the details of it that I always dismissed it a bit as fantasy, not something to dwell on too deeply.
I find it harder to dismiss now, and that bothers me. Where does this new sensitivity come from, this sense of, "Man, can I really invest in this guy?"? (Yes, I can.) It may come from my being rather more compassionate now, which bothers me because it makes wonder what I was then. But it may also come from our society being less tolerant. I live in a world now where a guy loses a job because he spent more time teaching his daughter to open a can of beans (before giving her dinner) than people thought he should.* In that kind of world, you're always looking over your shoulder to see if anyone has seen you miss the "virtue" bar, and you start to do that with other people. So maybe I'm doing that with Harry, just judging him harder because I judge everything harder, and while Harry obviously misses the virtue bar, that judgmental tendency in me bothers me for reasons that should be plain.
Lastly, it bothers me because it does make me think, "Can I really invest in this guy?" It gives me a strain of contempt for him. And while I can still invest in him, I still think he's a great character, that strain of contempt worries me for the same reason I love the Nightow-esque compassion I noted above. Contempt is a sign of eroded compassion. I don't want it, not for anyone.
All this is doubtless compounded by the fact that I am a fundamentally Harry-like person. This realization was a significant turning point in my life around 2012. I am less actively Harry-like now because I've done a lot of work on it, but I still sympathize. I know exactly where he's coming from. I know exactly why he gleefully shoots Brandon in the elevator. I know exactly why he feels Brandon has betrayed him, though Brandon has clearly done no such thing. And so it makes sense, I suppose, that Harry's high villainy would bother me.
* Yes, I know that's an oversimplification. I still think it's intrinsically a decent summary of what happened.
Triggering… or Have I Changed?
I went into this rewatch a bit worried that it would trigger my trauma because Gungrave is associated in my mind with my being cut off. Did it trigger it? Yes… but not very much. In the days since I've watched it, I've been more inclined than usual to dwell on that cutoff. I've gone back into some old patterns of ranting to myself about it, often in explicitly Gungrave-related terms. That said, it was mostly enjoyable to watch it again. It didn't cause me any deep distress, which is a good sign of healing, I think.
Actually, in moment-to-moment emotions, the story moved me less than it ever has before. I still liked it, but I watched it from behind a kind of filter. I suspect a few reasons for this. 1) Exhaustion: I just don't have the mental-emotional space to deeply invest right now. 2) Detachment: I do think some combination of my Buddhist study has led to invest less in things in general, including stories, to them as if looking down from a distance rather than feeling them from inside. (I mostly feel okay about this, but it does give me nostalgia for the old days.) 3) The trauma? I do think one of my trauma responses has been divest emotionally. This is related to (2), which has been a coping mechanism, but it also has a dimension that is just more direct, fear-based self-defense. 4) Middle age: I've done a lot of work the past few years in coming to terms with age and dying, and that makes stories about youthful errors, their cost, and dying feel a bit less high stakes. Which brings me to…
A Story about a Life Cycle
Gungrave is a story about the course of human lives. Probably because I'm older now, this stood out to me more than before. Our heroes are 43 when they die, and while that's ancient in anime-protagonist terms, it's not old. But the trajectory of the story describes a human lifetime. We watch them scrap as teens trying to find their way, grow into adults of mounting power and capacity, become leaders, and then become very, abnormally powerful, each in his own way. That all follows the video game progression, but it's interesting that the ending backs away from the continual leveling up.
Harry, who is the Big Bad, has already been defeated before he and Brandon meet up again. His heavies are dead, his organization has turned on him, and it's just a matter of time before they take him out. Brandon is in a physical downslide from around the end of his battle with Bear Walken. He goes into fighting Bunji pretty worn out, and by the time he gets back together with Harry, he can still be formidable against ordinary humans with guns, but that's about all. Effectively, he's dropped back several levels.
But that's life. If you don't die young, you peak and slide down, and the consolation you get for ceasing to be "that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven" is what you learn along the way. We learn how to live by dying.
The Emotional vs. the Rational: How Relationships Work
It's fascinating to rewatch what Harry and Brandon learn. The healing between them makes a different kind of sense to me now, seen through a more Buddhist lens: to a large extent, it describes letting go of what doesn't matter.
It is notable that Harry and Brandon never talk out their differences. They never reach a reasoned resolution to who did what wrong or right. Their reunification involves words, and the fact that they are able to sit down and talk is a sign of healing, but the reunification itself is paraverbal and pararational. It begins with laughter, with the moment when Brandon aims his gun point blank at Harry and pulls the trigger, and it isn't loaded, and they laugh. At that moment, I'd argue, it's a fait accompli that their friendship will be healed—because they're on the same wavelength again. With that laughter, they are in accord. (It's worth noting, too, that laughter itself, in its ironic form, is a way of getting perspective, of realizing that the serious doesn't have to be that serious.)
When they sit down in the diner to talk, they still have a lot of anger to work out, all the BS of the past twenty years or so that they've never, ever talked about. Now, they talk about it. Harry mounts some defense. Brandon tells him he's wrong. The conversation itself is pretty short and doesn't actually go anywhere. Neither of them backs down. The conversation just sort of fizzles into Harry's realization that the jig is up and his asking Brandon to kill him, not by way of apology or admission but because he has nowhere else to go. And then, the Millennion guys attack and Brandon, of course, protects him. What brings them back together is not figuring things out but realizing those things don't matter anymore; they're over. The people involved matter, but the enmity doesn't.
I find this insufficiency of words particularly apt for Harry and Brandon. Harry is a man of a million words, but they haven't helped him live a good life. Brandon is a man of almost no words. He has never lived through language; he has never had to.
The final reconciliation does come in words, but the actual verbal exchange is the tip of the iceberg. Brandon says he made a mistake by choosing Harry over Millennion but he has no regrets. Harry bursts into tears and says he's sorry. The exchange itself only makes sense in context. Brandon has spent his entire adult life trying to square loyalty to Harry and to Millennion, and telling himself that Millennion has to come first. This is the same Brandon who, not long before, beat Bunji to a pulp for accusing him of betrayal, yet now he owns it without regret. And Harry finally hears what he needs to hear, what he couldn't hear over the noise before: that Brandon has never stopped loving him, that Harry was wrong to imagine he had. And, therefore, apology becomes inevitable: Harry must own he was wrong to shoot Brandon because Brandon never betrayed him. It's a sad and beautiful affirmation of the centrality of their friendship to both of their lives.
And that's why I love Gungrave.
Friendship Bonding
I am impressed all over again with how explicit this anime is about centrality of Harry and Brandon's love for each other. It's extremely rare in modern media to see a friendship between men portrayed that way. I feel bound to note it isn't sexual at all. It's a friendship. But it is the driving emotional force of both their lives. Nightow is very good at this. Indeed, I suspect him of being a fellow friendship bonder. He doesn't write romance very much, and when he does those relationships are generally not central and not very fleshed out. He's much more interested in writing friendship and family, and that's a large part of why I'm such a fan. It is so rare to find friendship taken seriously this way, as it with Harry and Brandon or Vash and Wolfwood. It's like an oasis in the desert.
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