The Insanity of Gantz and Why You Should Care

okay picture this you and a buddy are waiting for a train at your local train station when suddenly a homeless man falls down onto the tracks just as 3,000 tons of locomotive begins to barrel towards him and being the upstanding young gentleman you are you climb down onto the tracks in an attempt to save him which you do but both you and your well-intentioned friend are struck by these same train and killed you are now dead or are you you awaken in a small apartment overlooking Tokyo skyline with a group of other people who have all also recently died in the center of the room lies a giant black orb which begins singing and speaking and tells you that your lives are no forfeit and tasks you with hunting and killing this alien you're armed with some highly advanced alien weaponry and rather revealing body suits before being teleported into the streets of Tokyo where the hunt begins a hunt that seems simple at first until things go wrong things go very very wrong after a horrific struggle of which only a fraction of your team actually survives you're teleported back to the apartment to each given point totals based on your performance and hooray you may now return to your regular life but oh no you have to come back next week and do the same thing again and then again and again and welcome to God's Gant's is a story of ordinary people trapped in a nightmare taking recently deceased regular folk be paid office workers high school kids dogs or grandmas and making them compete in games of death where they must face the horrific and unimaginable these survivors of which are temporarily returned to their normal lives before having to do it all again next week alongside a fresh batch of participants and this is the cycle of ganas the only way to break free is to kill enough aliens to eventually collect 100 points and select the option to exit the game forever but that's a goal very few of these characters will ever reach death is brutal and frequent in guns it's not unusual for large swathes of the cast be wiped out in a single game and it's for reasons like this as well as the series use of excessive sex and violence oh and by the way a graphic content warning for this video the gaps has gained the reputation as an overtly edgy series and it is this is the kind of show I loved as a teenager as a kid I'd had my perception of media and reality obliterated by the shocking and violent imagery of Akira and I spent a lot of my teenage years trying to recapture that feeling which led me to show is like elf and lead 10/10 gay and of course guns but this side of Ganz has also drawn a lot of criticism I've seen more than one person argue that this is a series of unmitigated trash and while I actually can sympathize with those criticisms as you can guess by the existence of this video I do think there's some genuine heart to this series and that is what I want to talk of it today and to do so I want to start with the man behind Ganz hero you oku hero yoku is a strange fellow after the ending of Ganz was heavily criticized on the Japanese messaging board - Chan he included a scene in his next manga Inuyasha ki where an evil cyborg teenager murders every member of the online messaging forum he has a very distinctive approach to storytelling often focusing on the cruelty and violence humans are capable of and presenting it with a near nihilistic cynicism as seen in Gantz and each of his series that followed it but what's interesting is that he wasn't always like this in fact his first might get hen was a comparatively light heart - eg drama that found success in weekly young jump magazine however things would then take an unfortunate turn oku using the profits he'd made from hen to invest in cutting-edge 3d technology spending two years and all his money training himself and his assistants in the new software in the hopes of creating a new kind of 3d manga the only problem was that this was the mid-90s and 3d software still had a long way to go and so his resulting manga 0/1 in Paris looks like this yeah zero one was cancelled after only three volumes leaving oka without income and on the verge of bankruptcy and I have to wonder if the desperation of that situation contributed to the bleaker tonne of guns and perhaps why its struggle for survival feels so real because for oku it was there's a cynicism that runs through every part of Gans never more apparent than in its main character @k Corona and chrono kind of sucks he's cynical isolated and bitter having separated from his family with no friends or anyone he can even really talk to and because of this he's grown apathetic and cold only seeing other people for how they can benefit him even abusing the trust of the people placing him for his own ends and because of this it's very easy to dislike chrono especially in ganses early chapters but after a little while what becomes apparent is that he's a product of the world around him Corona school for example is presented as this Darwinian nightmare where older students so violence and humiliation among their younger peers one particular early story arc involving an upperclassman known as the dentist who tortures his classmates by ripping out their teeth and collecting them this is the world of guns it presents society at its most oblique and callous and because of this it's easy to see how coronal has become the way is how the life and enthusiasm he had as a child has been crushed out of him leaving a cold cynical shell of a person and in understanding this it gives us a believable baseline from which we can watch corona grow over the course of the story and that's a growth that starts when he's drawn into the game with guns while being summoned by guns is initially a very bad thing that forces Krone to face unimaginable horror it also does something else it shatters Coronas isolation of forcing him into contact with the other participants of the game their only hope for survival of being to work together to overcome whatever danger the night brings and so slowly over the course of the games people start to rely on chrono and he in turn begins to rely on them the group sharing a bond that is absent from Coronas ordinary life there's a chapter that illustrates this really beautifully called daytime Lantern which starts with one of Cronos teachers calling him a daytime Lantern ie that he is totally useless the name catches on in a way that names 10/2 in high school and he spends the rest of the day being harassed and insulted by his classmates but then that evening he's visited by his teammates from Gant's who have come to look on him as their leader and together they bound across rooftops and train for whatever challenge awaits them in the next game the chapter ending with Corona staring silently down at the people he's helping what's so cool about daytime Lantern is how it captures that feeling of being part of a profound family that in his daily life Corona is this nobody who is harassed and ignored but through Gantz he's found this group of people he's really important to and are important to him letting him grope us the selfish [ __ ] we met at the beginning of the story and what's cool about this chapter is that none of this is overtly stated okuu just presents us with a day in Chronos life and lets us come to our own conclusions about it and this is something I really like about aku's work he's a much stronger visual storyteller than he is actual storyteller often giving very little direct detail about his characters lives but revealing who they are either through their environments the subtle emotion of their facial expressions or taking an entire page layout and using it to convey a particular concept or emotion he has an ability to visually capture a moment's and use that moment to give us further insight into who these people are one of my favorite examples of this comes at the beginning of ganses third major story arc the first panel of the page showing corona lying in bed the isolation he feels conveyed by the empty negative space around him the next panel revealing his desire to go back to Gantz where he can be with other people but then immediately this layout is contrasted with the third panel showing ganses secondary main character Kaito in the same composition but that negative space is filled with his little brother cataract with anxiety over having to return to the apartments what I love about this page is how it just four simple panels it shows us the vast difference between these two characters and the impact Gantz is having on their lives unlike kurono Cato has something to lose his little brother both Cato's parents were killed in an accident when he was younger leaving him and his little brother in the care of their violent abusive relatives and so all the two have is each other Cato taking it upon himself to get a job and save up enough money to rent an apartment where he and his little brother can live in safety and peace but because of this his relationship with Ganz is totally different from Kronos as he knows that if he's killed he will vanish from his brother's life without explanation leaving the child alone and defenseless in a cruel violent world this page capturing that anxiety beautifully and it's from omens like this that I would really recommend the manga of Ganz over all other versions as well as the fact that it's the only way to experience the vast majority of the story okay you may have noticed from that previous section that Gant's is bleak really really bleak but part of what makes it such a strange series is that this is only one side of Ganz the other being that it's totally [ __ ] insane and to help illustrate this I'm going to bring back one of my favorite sections here's a few out of context moments from Ganz one of the later battles involves our heroes being attacked by Salvador Dali's 1936 surrealist painting soft construction with boiled beans there is a huge frog who steals people's shoes who is also a nightmarish hell creature one of the participants of Ganz is a panda who forms a loving meaningful relationship with a serial killer George Clooney is there this panel happens and finally one of the aliens encountered is a robotic version of the 1970s Japanese folk singer Seiji Tanaka who sings his songs in a creepy robotic voice and is piloted by giant sentient crow fetuses okuu you are a strange strange man if you got tonal whiplash from those two previous sections then yes now you know what ganz feels like but if anything rather than these two sides of guns clashing the absurdity of ganses world only adds to its nightmarish feel parts of Gant's feel like some bizarre fever dream with our characters facing things that can't possibly exist but they do and it's in these moments that ganz carries a near nihilistic horror like the universe itself is laughing at these people and their struggle that there are Horrors waiting for them both bizarre and imaginable and it's here where we can start to see the horror of Gantz every game of guns starts the same people begin appearing in the room one by one and one by one each person is teleported out into the streets of Tokyo and from here we know that somewhere in the sprawl of Japanese suburbia lies something dangerous and me and there's always this moments when a character notices something strange in the distance some vaguely humanoid figure emerging from the shadows and there's such a tension to these moments as there's no telling what these creatures are or how dangerous they might be they have this frightening unknowable alien feeling and that's a feeling that oku communicates beautifully through his artwork but simply he's exceptional at conveying creatures of raw visual horror there's a lot of different ways a creature can feel frightening they can feel monstrous they can feel ghostly they can feel demonic all of which play off different anxieties of the human condition to elicit different kinds of fear fear of violence animals fear of death and disease fear of religious ideology and the fear that the creatures of God specifically elicit is fear of the unknowable and the alien there's a disturbing quality to the creatures of Gans some of which look nearly uncannily human and others abstract and horrifying but either way they all carry this unsettling level of realism each one illustrated with a subtle sense of physicality grounding the absurdity of their designs in the tiny details of their Anatomy okuu meticulously rendering individual strands of hair folds of skin and nuts of muscle and in doing so sending our brain thousands of tiny subconscious messages that these creatures are real and physical and this is unsettling but particularly when oku uses that nuanced eye for detail to draw our attention to sharp bared fangs blade like claws and swollen dense muscle constantly reinforcing the idea that these creatures are powerful and dangerous where they start to feel alien however is in their intelligence these are not erotic beasts moving without purpose these are sentient intelligent creatures that think and feel and have a motion on par with their own and it's this that makes them particularly disturbing most of the creatures of Gant's aren't aggressors they're just beings trying to live their lives and blend in with human society which is why they dawn uncanny disguises and cloak themselves in our mythology they just wish to be left in peace and so to them we are the violent aggressors attacking with paused provocation and so they seed with emotion and hatred for the humans trying to kill them and that emotion makes them terrifying giving violent desperation to their actions and in some cases even developing vendetta's against the humans who hunt them one particularly chilling instance of this being when one of the aliens survives a game of Gantz only to appear at Corona school the next day looking to take beauty revenge for the friends he's lost this distinctly alien fear only escalates as the story continues in the beginning the creatures of Ganz carry the threat level of basically a very very dangerous human but as the games go on we begin to encounter beings of sheer cosmic terror creatures that cannot be understood or comprehended invincible alien nightmares whose mere existence causes our heroes to question reality and if a God would ever truly allow such horrors to exist and in these moments scans becomes taught with a mere excess tential terror adding to that feeling of horror is just how fragile the human participants feel and again this is something oku elicits beautifully through his panel layouts often placing his human characters in the foreground feeling tiny and insubstantial and then filling the rest of the frame with the alien beings they face and these moments are Gantz instances where ordinary people are forced to face things horrific and impossible well the human participants of Gant's are equipped with high-powered weaponry and suits that enhance their physical abilities that equipment is unreliable often not working the way the characters expect and the suits themselves only able to withstand a very limited amount of damage before they break and become useless leaving our characters naked and vulnerable against whatever terror as the night holds and so you have these horrifying alien creatures and these vulnerable fragile humans each arc of Gant's revolving around a single battle between the two sides but these are not lead sportsman like showdowns of shone and battle manga these are more like violent emotional car crashes where death is immediate and frequent on both sides and throughout it all there's this knowledge that neither side actually wants this that there are forces beyond the control of both that have trapped them in this scenario creating a deeply unfair nihilistic feeling that one's through dance all sides are suffering and that the universe at large does not care I think the only way I can properly show this is to actually take you through one of the arcs of Ganz and unfortunately to do that I'm gonna have to get kind of spoilery so skip to here if you want to avoid the buddha art comes at a point in ganses story when our protagonists have survived enough of these games that they're beginning to feel confident in their abilities but straightaway there's a problem with heavy casualties in the previous game most of the people so meant by ganz are brand-new ie people who have just died and have no idea what's about to happen one of which is a buddhist priest who insists that this is the afterlife and that people need to come practice sutures with him and not listen to corona Mercato whom he convinces everyone our evil demons trying to mislead them because of this very few of the new recruits actually equipped their suits and so by the time teleportation begins the team is left at a massive disadvantage however despite this things go surprisingly well in the early stage the aliens disguised as buddhist statues are quickly identified and eliminated helped by the fact that three of the newcomers are a goner Taku a professional sniper and a karate black belts until the boss alien of the round is introduced each game of Gans contains one alien that is exponentially more dangerous than the rest and for this round it's this thing and this thing is a [ __ ] nightmare using its high speed and variety of bizarre unpredictable attacks as well as its ability to heal itself from injury to Massacre several members of the team including some of the most experienced and from here the battle begins to take a nightmarish turn as one by one the team fall to the invincible monstrosity including kurono himself who during a brief skirmish with the creature has both his arm and leg severed leaving him in a bloody pile on the temple floor as his life begins to bleed out the only thing that can save him now is if he can live long enough for one of the other members of the team to defeat the alien and end the game at which point he'll be teleported back to the apartment his body fully restored a hope that grows ever fainter with each passing second as life after life is snuffed out by the demonic statue until only Kaito is left Kaito badly injured but desperate to save kurono and return home to his little brother fights the monstrosity with everything he has sustaining heavy damage and even losing an arm but just as things feel hopeless he strikes one final desperate fatal blow against the creature only it's not fatal the alien being emerges from its damaged shell and takes on the appearance of one of Cato's dead team members and from here begins viciously beating and mocking and exhausted Kaito and just as the light starts to fade Kaito makes one final desperate attack and it works he kills the creature ending the game he's done it Kaito can now return home to his little brother he and coronal are saved only for the creature in one final hateful gasp to impale Kaito before dying and in the pouring rain as Kat Zoe's life begins to slip away teleportation back to the rule begins and Corona awakens alone in the apartments but then in the Silence of the empty room he comes to a horrifying realization Kato along with every other member of his team is dead Corona is the only survivor he is alone what's so howling about this moment is that it's such a vicious cold pick shinee characters worst fears coming true chrono starts off from this place where he has no one and then after learning to rely on his teammates and even care for them it's all taken away and it's unfair and devastating an emblematic of the kind of nightmare that counts is willing to plunge its characters into and in doing so capturing those awful moments in life when our worst fears become reality and it feels like we've lost everything at this point I'm guessing some of you are asking what is the points to this is this just misery for misery sake or is there an actual message here before I answer that question I think it's important to acknowledge something and that is that Ganz will not be for everybody and that's for a variety of different reasons I enjoy against Allah and I'm not going to pretend I don't but I feel it's also my responsibility to warn people that there are aspects of Ganz that they could find upsetting aside from the sheer level of violence and cruelty that we've already talked about there's several aspects the story that I could ignore as a teenager but now not so much the early chapters are pretty terrible in how they treat their female characters especially Kay who gets a broad deal throughout and this is something that improves slightly later on when much better female characters are introduced but it can be pretty rough both the anime and manga have some pretty horrific depictions of sexual violence against both men and women there's a pretty horrendous depiction of a gay man and a absolutely bizarre instance of racial insensitivity as well as multiple occurrences of mass violence including a straight-up public shooting this is something I've struggled with a lot in writing videos and in particular this one when does a piece of media cross the line when covering sensitive material and when is it not okay and Gantz to me definitely crosses that line it frequently wanders into sensitive territory and uses it for shock value as opposed to building it into its narrative or exploring it in any kind of meaningful way and this is a side of Gantz and oak whose writing in general that I really don't like buts rewriting this paragraph what feels like eight dozen different times including nearly deciding to not make this video I've come to the conclusion that I am NOT the arbiter of what is and is not okay in media I think that's a line each person needs to draw for themselves and all I can do is flag that these issues exist in Gantz and to say that if you are uncomfortable with them parts of Gant's are going to be very difficult for you to get through and if you find them outright upsetting then I think you should avoid Gant's entirely as well as any of oak whose other work with sudden Minds I want to now return to the question what is the appeal of this series and is there a points to lead violence and misery and personally I think there is I think there is a heart to this nightmare and to explain what that is I want to use one final example from Kansas story and in particular that of my two favorite characters of the series spoilers incoming around halfway through God's a new character is pulled into the game of death kaze a tall extremely powerful man who practices bajiquan a Chinese martial art that involves channeling your entire body weight into a single explosive strike a style of fighting that he's become so proficient at that he's practically invincible kaze is an unusual addition to the cast of Gant's you have ordinary people like high school kids and office workers and then all of a sudden you have this 80s shown an action hero dropped among them and like those heroes his motivation is simple he wants to test himself against the strongest opponents he could find a quest that's cut short when he's killed in a mass shooting only to be brought back by Gantz and forced to participate in the Hunts where his monstrous fighting ability let him excel in the games of death finally kaze has found a battleground that lets him face to his full potential and he's content but things take a turn in the next game when kaze and his teammates realize that one of the new participants is a small child a boy who upon seeing kaze confuses him with his favorite tokusatsu hero muscle lighter and begins to follow kaze around the apartments Kaz I ignores the boy at first as he does anything that is not physical combat buts when the teleportation stage begins the child refuses to wear his suit despite the pleas of the other teammates until kaze reluctantly tells the boy to put it on for the first time showing concern for something beyond fighting the child continues to follow kaze whom he still is convinced is his hero muscle rider and slowly kaze softens towards the lad who he finds out is named Takashi with kaze protecting Takashi a for the remainder of the game after which kaze even takes the boy in while attempting to find his parents until he learns head Takashi died from being beaten by his mother's abuse boyfriend his life slipping away alone in an apartment of squalor calling out for his hero morsel rider kaze devastated and moved by Takashi story now takes the boy and his family the two becoming inseparable but then in the beginning of the next game things take a horrifying turn Takashi is the first one to be teleported into the battleground leaving the four-year-olds alone on the streets of Osaka vulnerable to whatever horror awaits one of which emerges from the shadows and begins making its way towards the hill Beast Boy Takashi tries to run away but it's useless the creature catches him in its cold alien grasp lowers its face to his and closing its jaws around his tiny skull Takashi is killed oh wait hang on no he isn't takashi channeling all his power into a single devastating strike destroys the creature by imitating the very movements he seemed has it performed countless times and upon witnessing this kaze is overcome with emotion and love the Takashi and he breaks down in tears that law of awakening a new strength in kaze they are fighting not just for himself but in the hope of one day freeing himself and Takashi a from Gans and starting a new life together in peace it was in this moment that the message of Gans clicked with me no matter how awful or horrifying the world might seem it's our connection to other people that let us survive it and make is worth surviving while oku doors create these instances of cruel violent nihilism it's how we contrast those moments with ones of intense humanity and love that make his stories worth reading and this to me is the heart of guns people trapped in this world of nightmares but finding each other through it and together surviving and that's what I think kind of beautiful about this series its ability to capture the bleakest dark and purest light and to say that even if the world is collapsing around us all we really need is each other that really that's all we'd ever have [Music] friends thank you for joining me today and I really hope you enjoyed this video a little quick knows the official super high factual t-shirt is back in stock at fangamer desalted pretty quick last time so it's a get him one we can I want to give a massive thank you to my patrons over at patreon it is literally entirely down to you guys that have the freedom to make videos like this so genuinely thank you so so much and hey if you'd like to become one for just a single dollar you can do so over at patreon.com forward slash super eyepatch wolf a personal thank you this week to mohammed Nahas young chick for original name Apple Bane Alana Ashley dead fish walking and I made this for super eyepatch wolf and it's super long I'll body um I'm gonna have to cut that down in Photoshop every time I do credits and it's just you're you're killing me here thank you for the support I love you as ever you can find you hosting me let's fight a boss video game podcast or on Twitter ad hype actual friends take care of yourselves and I'll see you next time

Channel: Super Eyepatch Wolf

Views: 2,246,657

Keywords: Gantz, Inuyashiki, anime, Hiroya Oku, Aliens, Kurono, Kato

Id: UsCflZqDtCw

Length: 32min 16sec (1936 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 29 2019