It Takes Two: Sacrifice, People in Gunbuster, Diebuster

Gunbuster is important to me. It is a part of who I am. The cosmic heroism of Noriko Takaya and Yukiko Amano is a thing engraved into me. When I first watched it, I had just burned through being the person I hated most in this world to graduate high school. I was interested for the first three episodes. I was enraptured by the fourth. Right before I could watch the sixth I was told my grandmother died.

I watched episode six and I would never forget it.

I rewatch Gunbuster four years later. I reach episode 6 a second time and it is the first time a piece of fiction makes me cry in 16 years. I tell you these numbers because these numbers have weight. The accumulation haunts. I tell you these numbers because they are dates of loss. They are dates of gain.

I write to you these dates because they are the passing of time and there is nothing so constant to Buster as the passage of time. I pray to you these words, because they are what the Buster duology are to me and what they can be, strive to be towards others.

The Buster duology is about sacrifice. Gunbuster is the loss, both in the preamble to sacrifice and in the sacrificing itself. It is about our capacity to endure, to give. Diebuster is about what is granted, during and after the sacrifice, because a sacrifice is but a moment and life is much, much more than that.

We begin 12 thousand years ago, with a species facing their most existential and absolute threat:: the very milky way that spawned them. Space monsters, a title not so much generic as ideal, come from the heart of the galaxy, have made martyrs of the first patrol out into space, and are set to make humanity more corpse than widow. Against this antibody of the universe, humanity trains youths from all over the world, the best of which are selected to pilot mechs. There is a flagship more than reminiscent of a Star Destroyer, there are gymnast uniforms with an undercut so v that the internet is once again confronted with a debate on the existence of vagina bones, and there are scores of brave men and women willing to lay down their lives for the sake of both loved ones and strangers alike.

This is the story of Gunbuster and this is the story of Noriko Takaya.

Gunbuster’s first equation is a simple one: You Lose, subtraction all the way down. Noriko’s father is already a memory by the time the opening theme rolls by. When Noriko goes chasing after his ghost, a ship locked in time through relativistic motion, what awaits her is Nothing, She arrives at the date of her father’s death, where she’s always been, really, but she is already too late. The time lost during her doomed search near the speed of light is months. Living in the past costs her time she could have spent preparing to fight the monsters of the present, far from the first time the inevitable march of loss fucks her over. Later, it’s her first male crush and fellow pilot, Smith who has to pay with his life the price for her indecision.

Every time Noriko fails to live in the present, it costs her immediately. She loses.

Loss is a rhythm that never goes away in either series. It cannot be disturbed, only played with. What Gunbuster posits alongside loss though, is barter. That by giving time and toil, something might be kept for just a little longer. That maybe something might even be gained. Through a megaphone Norio Wakamoto’s Coach preaches the gospel of hard work and guts; of sacrifice. It is bellowed in the backdrop of an openly hostile void. Under the friendly microscope of an animator’s pen, our lives have depth and character and color, but in the Galaxy’s limb we are a thing spreading too fast. The cosmos is hateful to our existence and it is murderous of our joy.

So, time keeps on taking from Noriko. Even as she becomes all she can be to save the lives of others, she is denied a life of her own. Posters from movies decades old still plaster her wall, her best friend from school is married w/ child while she is out in space, her only life is that of service at relativistic speed. Yet Noriko continues to fight. She is no deluded protagonist: she knows what she is giving up and she knows failure is the most likely outcome, but she does her utmost to make a miracle happen anyway. She fights to keep families together, to save others from all the loss and pain she’s known in her short-long life. Gunbuster’s optimism comes from its faith in humanity as a community. That some can take the bullets so that others don’t have to. That it is heroic to sacrifice for others, because we are all in this together.

It is more than heroic, it is necessary. For humanity and humans to survive is first and foremost, because humanity itself is the ultimate good, is just. We are small but we are also all we’ve got and it is in through the other that we are made valuably immortal, no matter how little.

Noriko is rewarded, twelve thousand years after she set out, not with the life she can never have, but with the eternal remembrance and gratitude given by the countless people for whom she gave that life up. Noriko loses what she has but keeps what she gives. Those are the terms she imposes on the passage of time and the death of all things. That is our stand against it.

Everyone in Diebuster gives all of that the middle finger. Everyone trying to die young or lamenting growing old. Diebuster concerns a human race that is literally only possible because of sacrifice but acts as if there is only loss. Loss of youth, loss of power, loss of potential – to mature is to be shuffled off into uselessness unlife upon reaching adulthood.

Mankind has forgotten the real power that made the victory at the heart of the galaxy possible those twelve thousand years ago: both the camaraderie and the technology of the degeneracy reactor. It has forgotten the company that may still be gained up till the very end of life. It is isolated. It is inert.

Gunbuster starts with our lives stripped down to the bare essentials. You have yourself and you have others. Those are your reason for fighting, your means and reward. Diebuster expounds upon Gunbuster’s central thesis by decoupling it from its survivalism.) It provides nuance by moving through the reality of loss after the moment of sacrifice is long past. How do we keep living, for ourselves, after having lost? In asking this, Diebuster moves the event horizon of loss from death to a point in life. If Gunbuster is defending the value of life from the former, Diebuster is defending it from the latter: the grind, the slog, the mundanity of it.

When the great advancements of our ages have become ghettos, when the material fight for our very existence becomes just another day’s work, is there still meaning in our prime directive? Is survival worth it in the dog days of dreams past and bones weary?

Fuck and Yes, sayeth Diebuster, and it tries its hand at a lot more answers than Gunbuster.

Diebuster considers youth, potential, power, pride. It does so because those things are are real and they matter. Yet, they do not matter in comparison. Diebuster is a reductio ad absurdum of what is best in life. It works through things that some people have and some people do not and ends up agreeing with Gunbuster anyway. It even goes a step further, by claiming the things the young pursue and the old miss keep them from truly happy lives. They act as isolating factors, obscuring the ultimate good of being together. The people of Diebuster are blind: blind to their history, their desires, their potential. They make play of becoming self-sufficient, when dependency is the fact of a worthwhile life. One buster pilot seals his powers prematurely, so he never has to deal with their loss. Another forgets that they themselves were ever a mighty buster machine to begin with.

Yet although they lack true sight, they still hunger for what dazzles in front of their eyes. The young topless are radiant in the buster machines they pilot . The lucky few have the power to bend space, freeze time, and play w/ matter at heightened will. Diebuster is often a gorgeous anime and its glamor is at its peak when its child prodigies are at play. So much so that the adults of Diebuster long for the power of youth – their own, that of the topless, the glories of ages past -, with despondency.

Excuse me, we do not meet anyone already adult in Diebuster; we meet undead children. They look at the loss of youth with the finality one grants to death. They take their first loss prematurely as their very last and are trapped in stasis ever more.

Even so, if they cannot have youth, they will use it. They will see it spark, burn brightly, and fizzle out into death or unlife, all to extend the life they hate so much. They do so, partly out of spite, but mostly because they still hold hope, hope that life is worth living after all.

They themselves are without anything to give, because they continue to deny the ethos of Gunbuster: sacrifice. They miss that, because they can keep losing, they can also keep giving, that having something to lose is the ontological basis on which relationships form. They are suspended in want for a moment in time, when instead they could be moving through time in constant, joyous give and take.

The young and old question the point of being around past their prime, because what they value in life and in themselves are those fleeting values they cannot bring back, that long past moment in time. The power of youth is the promise that everything can still be done and the psychosomatic buster machines reflect that truly impossible power, but once more humanity lies to itself. To age is an ever narrowing of potential, but the real freedom to meet and love people endures. It is so bright that it blinds us into thinking it background radiation, but it is the foundation to our lives, not the wallpaper.

L’alc and Nono are two girls that have to get this into their heads. They live on the other side of the fake divide of age. They are Young and so they are doing everything in their power to prevent youth’s loss from ever taking place. They cling to their false powers in an attempt to stall their personal doomsdays.

The series is one long back-and-forth of Nono, an aspiring space pilot with a lot of chutzpah, and L’alc, a buster machine ace. Both hope to prove their worth to each other through their own self-sufficiency. Both fear the other becoming so self-sufficient that they will not need them. They want the impossible dream of another’s warmth without the possibility of being hurt by the them, blind to the fact that they are already needed AND need each other.

What’s more, these relationships are only the conscious manifestation of feelings that are already there. Nono and L’alc already love each other, but force themselves through a facsimile of courtship, because they are scared dummies. The thing about accepting each other is that it opens you to new loss. It opens you up to the only loss that matters. Yet that is only because that relationship with another is the only thing you can meaningfully have. Noriko and Yukiko had to accept the existence of loss in order to instantiate meaningful sacrifice. Likewise, L’alc and Nono forming a meaningful relationship means accepting that they have something they will lose, painfully. Just as Amano is necessary to Noriko and Gunbuster because it is together that they have power, real power, so too for L’alc and Nono.

What forces them closer, past their illusions and into each other’s arms is the same thing that pushed humanity to its glorious breaking point 12,000 years ago. See, as blind as mankind has become in the future of Diebuster, they cannot even recognize their enemies anymore. What they call “space monster” is but a rogue defense grid that kept them paralyzed in their solar system out of past fear of their true enemy. The true enemy of mankind is the true space monster. It is death itself. Against this foe all the youth of the topless and the power of their buster machines is useless. The elderly once again demand lonely sacrifice, this time from young Nono and L’alc, but this time Nono refuses.

It is here things get tricky.  

What makes Diebuster possible is also what makes it messy: its trudging through fake answers when Gunbuster already gave the real one. It is checking Gunbuster’s work by searching for alternatives. Both that search and the ultimate embrace of Gunbuster are valid. Diebuster is building up arguments to the best of their ability, only to tear them down. It does this to show the value of these arguments, while at the same time showing their worthlessness in the face of the real argument. The problem is, the direction supporting falsehoods in the moment makes it harder to figure out what that real argument is. Diebuster’s reversal makes those early triumphant moments feel fickle, dishonest, like it is trying to have its hot blooded cake and eat it too.

It is this constant overturning of stakes that make the buster machines feel kind of bullshit. Their power is extraordinarily variable according to the needs of the plot. Gunbuster is fixed: it offers unlimited martial power but only after the decision of self sacrifice, to ensure it. The topless buster machines respond to will and grow in power as the characters do. They are infinite in potential in youth, but fail in adulthood to what is ultimately other: death the space monster

The same goes for Nono. She has several showy moments of apparent wisdom, in episode #4 and #6 in particular. Trumpets sounds, volcanoes erupt in the background, The Pose is struck – Nono is awesome. She overturns an accepted truth of the world and seems to find a deeper truth of her own. Yet even in these moments, she is still wrong. Time and time again, Nono equates hard work and guts with a power not to lose anything, while if Gunbuster has taught us anything, it is that principle is some bullshit. Faced with the final, genocidal space monster, L’alc tries to use Earth as a bomb and Nono once again stops her sacrifice. Whether Nono considers it or not, she is risking all of mankind to preserve an infinitely less valuable keepsake. It is a slap in the face to Gunbuster that Earth is a thing worth risking our existence over, that we would not pull through without it as long as we had each other.

L’alc, in contrast, is golden by series end. She marries the infinite possibility of youth with the resolve to sacrifice as necessary. It would be beautiful if this won her the day, but it does not. L’alc’s plan goes South, because going through with it would miss the point of the lesson Diebuster is ultimately trying to teach. What both L’alc and Nono do wrong is that they try to do it alone. It is together that living is possibly worthwhile. Nono’s faith in her own capabilities is deluded. Even though she once rejected dying together, she did so as much out of faith in her own power to pull through as she did out of rejection for L’alc’s fatalism. Up until L’alc herself gives ups all pride and pretense, Nono does not understand that living together means struggling, winning together. She relies on her own strength to get the job done.

See, it was never just sacrifice that was the power of Gunbuster. Rather, it drew equal strength from the very companionship it sought to protect. That companionship is valuable enough to sacrifice everything for, because it is ultimately meaningful. That meaning, even in the face of entropy, is our power against it. It was not just that Noriko drew determination from the thing she wanted to protect, but that she did not have to sacrifice alone. Noriko piloted Gunbuster with Yuikiko Amano. They fought, won, lost loved ones, and made the final, lonely journey home to Earth – together.

Yukiko is there because Noriko sacrificing alone isn’t enough. She needs that relationship with one other person, someone who can sympathize with her sacrifice of everything else in order to give humanity full lives. Noriko and Yukiko do not give everything, because their bond is the thing that allows them to sacrifice anything at all. Alone they would merely fail and lose.

In the finale, Lal’c’s buster machine Dix-Neuf grants the ultimate power of Gunbuster, but only in return for likewise abandoning everything but your fellow man. Nono and L’alc, meeting each other in the climax have their false individual powers stripped from them together with their youth. In their adult dedication to each other, for the rest of their lives, they find the degeneracy reactor and the camaraderie both necessary to defeat the space monster. Nono’s desire not to lose anything and L’alc’s youthful power both give out against the existential threat of death, but simply being there for one another saves the day.

And then Nono is swallowed by a black hole, because it would not be Buster without personal sacrifice. Apologies, that’s a slight way of putting it; Nono’s sacrifice also allows Diebuster to sublimate the connection at its heart and to continue to pay it forward. There is a point here. Noriko and Amano’s sacrifice 12 thousand years ago inspired Nono to become the heroic person to bring L’alc out of her shell. L’alc in turn ends the series waiting for the martyrs of yesteryear, ready to extend them new friendship and thanks.

Diebuster ends with Nono absent because L’alc’s adulthood is as much moving past the loss of another as it is her coming to treasure her relationship with them. The illusion holding the people of Diebuster down was that there was no life past sacrifice, but there is always life past sacrifice. Life is always sacrifice and another sacrifice and another and another until the void finally does collect. We move past loss, through loss, always losing, always gaining, transmuting sacrifice into a life lived.

There is a character in Diebuster, Tycho, who becomes mature halfway through the series. Bless already did a good post about that episode and rightly points to her moment of sacrifice as her growing into adulthood. But what is also happening, also her adulthood is her moving past one lost relationship to form new relationships with others. She carries the pain of one lost relationship and turns it into the promise of another. True adulthood is recognizing the truth of sacrifice, of just what can be lost and what can still be gained, so that we recognize that the relationships we treasure imply the possibility of further treasure still.

As powerful and good as L’alc’s relationship with Nono is, it is not the thing Diebuster puts on top of the ultimate pedestal. People and the relationships we have, in general, are. Noriko and Amano’s comfort, L’alc’s gift to them in kind, is that as long as there are people, new,

wonderful,

magical relationships can still be.

What better reason to live is there than that?