Mentalist, on 11 May 2016 - 01:37 AM, said:
Okay, i'll write about the first half, since I've only seen one epi of pt2 so far.
Overall, I obviously liked it- like I said, I'm a mecha fanboy, and this show's got that in spades. The fact that Simon can just steal whatever he needs was really cool.
Indeed, this I really like. TTGL pays a lot of homage to classic mechas (especially early Gainax shows and especially Diebuster), and I really like despite that they still mixed up the dynamic and styles by having the Lagann let Simon takeover stuff, by having drills be the primary weapon instead of swords or lasers, by the mechas having the whole face-bodies aesthetic, etc.
There's still tons of Diebuster references, deliberately copied poses and mecha designs from other shows, etc, but TTGL remains its own unique thing while simultaneously celebrating the genre that lead up to it.
Mentalist, on 11 May 2016 - 01:37 AM, said:
The plot in Part 1 was very simple, and actually it pretty much followed the opening credits- new chars appeared in basically the same order- Yoko, Leeron, Black Kinsmen, Rossiu + the orphans, and then the rest. Traditional "beat 4 lieutenants to get to the Big Bad" also in place. Simon had a few breakdowns, but gets better and becomes the Ace when he Believes in Himself™. All nice and neat. The couple of showdowns - 1st of the Big 4, and then the final assault- were multi-episodes of epic.
Mentalist, on 11 May 2016 - 01:37 AM, said:
niggles:
1) There's a bunch of secondary chars who just appeared with 0 backstory. I'm presuming they had more stuff about them in the manga, but it felt a bit jarring--the clown Attenborough (bonus jarring points, b/c LoGH had an important character with the same name), the female head engineer, some of the Ganmen pilots, etc
Actually, TTGL was an anime original. The manga came after, adapting from the anime!
Yes, there is definitely a bunch of secondary characters that are part of Team Dai-Gurren who just sort of show up and don't get elaborated on much. A lot of them got introduced rapidly back-to-back at the battle against Gorilla-Thymilph at the end of episode 7, when Kittan shows up again having captured his own Gunmen, and then a bunch of other folks who were inspired by the exploits of Team Dai-Gurren show up, too. All the leaders from those groups become part of that "Team Dai-Gurren core group", namely Zorthy (the smoker), Iraak, Kidd, Jorgun and Balinbow (the big twins) and Makken (the old samurai guy). Those guys (plus Kittan's sisters) all have unique Gunmen and we see them fighting alongside the primary characters through the rest of the first half, but yeah there's not a lot of elaboration on them. There's also a bunch of characters like Attenborough that join the bridge, and don't get much elaboration either. Leite (the chief engineer lady) especially appears out of nowhere as she was really minor in the first half but gets a more prominent role after the timeskip.
That being said, what is kind of interesting is that though there's very little shown about these characters and they mostly just seem to be there to make the team bigger, flesh out the bridge command roles, and represent the block-headed porward-forwards attitude of Team Dai-Gurren, many of them do actually have their own personal story going... we just never get it shown to us. At some point during the timeskip, Makken and Leite got married. Kidd and Iraak become very close friends. Tetsukan and Cybela either have feelings for each other or are secretly dating. And Old Coco is in a surprising number of scenes before either the viewer or any of the other characters seem to notice him.
Do I think this was supposed to be some grand intention of the creators, stating that while we are seeing the grand drama of Simon, Kamina, Yoko, Viral, Nia, etc, every character is going through their own grand struggles? Eh, not really, more likely they just couldn't fit proper introductions into their limited episodes or didn't want to drop the pace. But the sentiment is still valid nonetheless.
Mentalist, on 11 May 2016 - 01:37 AM, said:
2) Fanservice. I'm just not used to it. Like I said, LoGH is a very conservative show, and most other stuff I watched is pretty light on that as well. (And ones that have lots, like GiTS or Eva have waaay too much stuff going on to even bother noticing) Here, there's just lots, starting with Yoko and moving on. That beachside episode had it lampshaded, but, SO. MUCH. CRINIIINGE. I get it, primarily kid show, but, yeah, ugh.
It's been a while since I watched the first half, but I don't remember the fan-service being particularly extreme other than Yoko and the hot-springs episode (you can see why that episode got replaced by the alternate recap episode in the live airing), though? I found it easy enough to accept/ignore when it's all Yoko and the other women don't really get the same (though there's only one other female primary - who is too young in the first half anyways - and not that many secondaries, but still). TTGL's motto is to basically take everything to the extreme a la "Let's have the whole city turn into a giant robot!", so I can see why they would choose to have one character go ridiculous-fan-service. I dunno, it didn't bother me much in TTGL, and I usually am one to get ticked off by fan-service.
Maybe I was just too busy looking at Kamina's constant bare-chestedness
Mentalist, on 11 May 2016 - 01:37 AM, said:
New enemies don't look particularly impressive yet- they are more advanced and super-tough, but I'm not digging the CGI abstract shapes thing.
Yeah, it's a bit of a weird aesthetic, and unfortunatley this was made before the anime studios started getting good at CG. That being said, I think they were obviously trying to make the new enemies look as different from the human/beastmen characters and mecha as possible, and the CG does definitely achieve that. They're kinda supposed to look out-of-place and uncannily-weird, since they are the antithesis of human life.
Mentalist, on 11 May 2016 - 01:59 AM, said:
Lord Genome- I want to know more about him. Basically, how did he get to where he was, and how did he find out about the Moon, Anti-Spirals, etc. Was he human? if he was, what's with the head on fire during the fight?
There will be more information given on him to come, but additionally there's a series of "parallel works" that are basically short little music videos that give additional info on the universe (or just show the characters playing pachinko in space), and one of them is all about him, too.
I won't say anything for now, but we can definitely discuss it in-depth after you finish the main series.
Mentalist, on 11 May 2016 - 01:59 AM, said:
Kamina is just badass. The thing with Yoko was a bit too much afaik, Simon never told Yoko he was crushing hard on her. Makes sense since that's mostly why he's responsible for Kamina's death, + since he's got Nia now. Still, the thought lingers that this may end up being somehow important eventually
I don't know if I'd go so far as to say that he's responsible for Kamina's death because of that, but yeah it certainly mixed up his emotions and made the takeover of Dai-Gunzan not go as smoothly.
---
Lastly, Ment, any thoughts on some of the themes or subtext? What's with all these drills? What's with all this talk of pushing forward and piercing the heavens by evolving to overcome whatever wall stands in your way? Is it really just "fighting spirit" that lets them re-generate their robots, turn into giant drills, etc, or is that all supposed to be just style and not taken literally/seriously? Why is there spirals everywhere?
Any thoughts circulating around all that?
Bonus finger pointyness:
Help
. The battle atmosphere and creepy presence of awakened ones always excites me and anyone else i drag in on my rewatch. As is expected of most top tier anime the character development was fantastic. The pacing was solid and everything Theressa was pure Gold. 
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