Analysis: Granbelm
2021-08-05
This article contains full spoilers for Granbelm and Puella Magi Madoka Magica (TV series)
Granbelm is a 2018 original anime written by Jukki Hanada (A Place Further Than the Universe) and directed by Masaharu Watanabe (Re:ZERO). Although I didn’t it enjoy that much as a piece of entertainment because of a number of aesthetic & structural choices I can't hang with, I found the ideas & themes it focuses on interesting to unpack, so want to write down my thoughts on its more philosophical aspects.
Broadly, Granbelm is about main characters Mangetsu and Shingetsu (small pink sweetie and tall dark veteran, a dynamic familiar to you I'm sure) getting involved in a magic mecha battle royale in which the prize is all the world's magical power. Magic, Shingetsu explains, is not benign here, but rather it is the power to define other people's lives & place in the world, taking from them the ability to live on their own terms. Thus, rather than winning to use it, Shingetsu wishes to destroy it entirely.
Shingetsu: "Its strength diverts things from the paths they were meant to follow, makes what should be impossible possible, and makes things that shouldn’t exist come into being. Gaining that kind of power is not a wonderful thing, by any means." (Episode 2)
Indeed much of the show is taken up showing how the other competitors have had their lives derailed by magic. They hope victory will let them set things right, but the game is rigged; they are designated losers, disposable obstacles to overcome for the only person the system has deemed as mattering, Shingetsu herself.
Shingetsu, as the system's golden child, unwittingly warps the entire world around herself: Not free to define their own lives within all this magical bullshit, others instead have to define themselves in opposition to Shingetsu as their inherent superior. Fiery angry Anna could've been a cook or something, but instead destroys herself in her obsession with crushing Shingetsu. Mangetsu, after spending most of the show struggling with the feeling that she is nothing, fishing for recognition from those around her, turns out to be an artificial being created for Shingetsu’s sake, to be her companion & opposite. (Their names translate to “full moon” and “new moon” respectively”.)
Her thinking that in piloting she finally found something she’s good at? That was just the game master turning on god mode for her. All the recognition the system provides will only ever be that which feeds back into the system itself, and if it doesn’t deem you an acceptable subject, no amount of effort will change that, as strongest-competitor-for-a-1000-years-running Suishou found out the hard way. But unable to even imagine any other source of meaning, she’s stuck continuing her fruitless quest with increasing malicious desperation. Bad times.
Our leads find themselves unwittingly representing Hegel's master/slave dialectic, a philosophical model in which two consciousnesses seek recognition from the other, but end up with one dominating the other. The master seems like the winner of this arrangement, but becomes fully dependent on the slave to keep affirming their identity: Shingetsu ultimately admits that outside of her power as a mage, she is the one who truly has nothing, which is why she needed Mangetsu to complete her in the first place.
The slave, meanwhile, by virtue of doing actual labour in the world, can reach a more full understanding of their place within it: Mangetsu making boxed lunches for her classmates forms the grounds for her major personal revelation in episode 11 where she finds the meaning she was looking for in the simple pleasures of the mundane world.
The fundamental incompatibility of that new worldview with the heightened symbolic order of the magic-based values system is baked into the show’s aesthetics. I dislike the choice of SD proportions for the mechs because it makes their silhouette & posture hard to read in action scenes, but that is itself deliberate - they are not physical bodies in the way a Gundam is, but rather interface points where the body can become something abstract & conceptual, most vividly illustrated when Anna starts replacing limbs on her mech with ones made of elemental fire and ice. They cover the screen in flickering laser lights and make sounds like no earthly thing and their aesthetic is vague hermetic zazz. Magic is the Sublime, impossible and out of reach, but devoid of the harmony the girls finally find with each other and nature in the Yurucamp-esque outdoor trip scene in episode 11 which stands as a total contrast to it.
The lesson is clear: We don’t need abstract hierarchies and rigged rat races to define us, merely existing in the mundane world is enough for us to be complete beings. We're better off without systems that give us power over others. In fact, we don’t have to be reliant on external recognition at all: In the end, Shingetsu is content to become wholly imperceptible to others if it means destroying magic, and in doing so finally allows Mangetsu to exist as a fully autonomous being (well, that’s the implication anyway).
It’s a lovely thought, and can even be leveraged into an anticapitalist critique if one is so inclined, but it’s when we start to dig into the details that odd things start to happen.
Granbelm’s ending openly references that of Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011), in which the titular Madoka sacrifices her physical presence in the world to save the souls of magical girls from an evil system that exploits them and takes their lives away in exchange for granting one wish. One interesting choice of this ending is that Madoka does not get rid of the system altogether. Her argument is not that girls shouldn’t be dying young no matter what, but that selflessly giving all for the sake of one’s hopes and ideals is the most beautiful thing in the world, and deserves the ultimate reward.
Granbelm disagrees.
Mangetsu: "There are so many wishes that can’t be fulfilled. They’re forgotten, and then they gush forth again, eternally building this world. Humans live on, and that’s good enough. That’s how people can have hope, how they can live! [...] We don’t need magical power. Power that can warp the whole world just to grant one wish… Power that can erase things we don’t like… No one needs such tremendous power.
That’s not what hope is." (Episode 12)
MadoMagi is also preoccupied with dialectics, specifically thesis/antithesis/synthesis as a historical process. Homura’s hostile, transgressive version of idealism arises as a response to Madoka’s selflessness, her magic hella “diverting her from the path she was meant to follow”, but the resulting ordeals & conflicts are ultimately what enable a happier ending in their synthesis. Hegel argued that these processes, even the Master/Slave thing, are how we work toward attaining self-understanding and freedom.
There is little space in Granbelm’s thinking for the pursuit of utopian wishes as a necessary force for overcoming oppression. Conveniently, the person given the most power by the harmful system is the one bent on destroying it, as per no moment in history ever. Shingetsu doesn’t arrive at the right solution as a result of her interaction with Mangetsu, but has the right idea from the word go, and gains only the strength to not falter at the finish line. Rather than negotiating the Master's belief that freedom is more important than life with the Slave's belief of the obverse, it simply describes the Slave as right to begin with, and the Master knowing as much. It’s like, what if we just didn’t do dialectics? What if you checked your privilege so hard you deleted yourself from material existence? What if, instead of growing through constant messy negotiation between ideals and reality, we were just kinda,,,,, vibing,,,,,
Suishou: "Even if magic is lost, they’ll just create some other power."
Shingetsu: "Most likely. People are fools, after all. That includes me. They repeat the same mistakes over and over, and knowingly follow the wrong paths. But… I believe they still know what it means to learn. I believe they can grow, little by little." (Episode 13)
All that makes this exchange particularly odd - what is mankind supposed to learn from if you delete everyone’s memories of this whole fiasco, Shingetsu? Mankind can be trusted to learn this, but not how to handle wish-granting power without forming weird power dynamics? Granbelm a priori rejects the possibility of, say, democratizing magic, distributing it among everyone. We have to take on faith that this would only lead to violence. Why?
Suishou: "You only gave precedence to your own desires. All you cared about was yourself, your family, your lovers, your friends… You couldn’t care less about the world."
Mangetsu: "What’s… so bad about that? [...] I want to protect the ones I love! I want the people I care most about to smile! I want to be helpful to someone! I want to try my best! That’s all! I believe that’s what everyone wants!"
Suishou: "Then why did they create magical power?! [...] When it comes down to it, they try to brute force their way through. They give precedence to their own desires, and they’ll do whatever it takes to achieve them! For a thousand years! A thousand years, and not a *single* thing has changed!" (Episode 12)
Tracking the implicit assumptions made and finding this odd inability to imagine someone might care about the world beyond their own little circle (both in Mangetsu’s imaginary of what “everyone” is like and Suishou not having met a single truly selfless person in a thousand years) reveals an odd cynical streak I don’t know how to work with. I don’t think you can apply this thinking to challenge actual, material forms of power - there goes that anticapitalist critique, I suppose…
Granbelm presents a counterclaim (you might even say, antithesis) to MadoMagi and while it’s fun to think about and I appreciate its emphasis on living with harmony with the world, I find myself wishing its argument was a bit more robust, perhaps more grounded in a broader materialist or philosophical context. I won’t lie: I think I’d have more respect for Granbelm if it followed its ideas to their logical conclusion and went Full Daoism. But, well, without magic, that is just another wish that cannot be fulfilled...