The Anime Philosopher: Of Gunslinger Girl and Its Ending
This article contains spoilers. This isn't a review, it's a discussion of the ending of the show. You might want to go back now if you don't want to read that.
This is the first article in my (planned) series of "Anime Philosopher" articles. Basically, here's the deal. I have really screwy taste in anime, and so I end up getting into shows that no one else on the planet seems to like. Things like Gunslinger Girl and RahXephon and Madlax.
These are serious, story-driven anime, so there's obviously a lot of things about the series I'd love to be able to discuss with someone. (By that I mean, someone who isn't telling me how these shows suck or patronizing me.) So, since I can't have an interesting plot discussion on these shows, I'm going to do the next best thing. I'm just going to write some articles where I babble on about the meaning of certain elements in the show.
Note that I'm not an actual philosopher and wouldn't recognize most of the classical schools of thought if I was reading them out of an essay labeled "Schools of Philosophical Thought." I am, of course, using "philosopher" in a more common sense of the term, that is, a person who's thinking way too much about the meaning of things.
The Premise
To understand the ending of this show, you have to understand the premise. If you've already seen the show, you probably know that already, but I'm going to explain it here for those of you who blatantly ignored the spoiler warnings.
Gunslinger Girl is set in Italy, where the government has developed a technique for rebuilding bodies with cybernetics. It's kinda like the Six-Million-Dollar Man--they end up being better, faster, stronger--but there's a catch: the process, and the conditioning that must follow the process, works better on children.
So the government uses this technique on young girls, building a department of military and police operatives under the guise of the Social Welfare Agency. Each girl is assigned to a handler, forming a team known as a fratello.
And here's where it gets interesting. The girls in the Social Welfare Agency were chosen (in most cases) because they would have died without the cybernetics implants. So the government truly has saved lives here. But, it turns out that implanting cybernetics in a human has a huge psychological and physiological cost. Cyborgs lose their memory, and need some form of treatment known as "conditioning"--both to help them handle their new state, and to allow the handlers to keep them in line. (I don't believe "conditioning" is ever actually detailed in the series, but it doesn't seem to be quite as simple as the psychological term "conditioning.")
Moreover, implanting cybernetics in a body tends to drastically decrease a child's lifespan. We learn later on that these girls are living on borrowed time, and the stronger their conditioning is, the less time they have.
So, that's the show in a nutshell. If you're familiar with anime at all, you probably have some idea of where this is going, and which clichés are going to pop up here. So, let's look at how we expect it to play out.
See more articles from: Reviews • Serious Commentary
The Maitre d'
Gunslinger Girl Season 2 (?)
Of course, I never did continue this "Anime Philosopher" series, despite giving some examples of shows I could babble about. Probably just as well. I'm not sure I could say any more about Madlax than I've already said. It's far too existential for me to really get into because I'm a very concrete, logical person. But holy crap is it an awesome show.
And the analysis I would write about RahXephon would probably boil down to "Megumi fails at life not because she's a 14-year-old trying to make her way in an adult's world, but because she's a secondary character and secondary characters fail at life." (Self-pity ahoy!) There's really not much more to analyze; it's all fairly cut-and-dried unless you want to dive into the "what makes a person who they are" angle, which I don't. Although I could probably do an article on how the world would be better if all stories ended with the bad guys all killing each other in a chain standoff.
The Busboy
I actually liked Madlax and Gunslinger Girl ...
But, of course, you know why they spelled RahXephon with an "X" don't you?
The Maitre d'
Indeed.
Also, have you actually watched through Madlax? Holy freaking crap it changes. Do not say you like it until you've seen the end. I would say more--like best death ever--but it might ruin it.