We know the Anti-Spiral is terrifying, but damn...
For such an awesome, funny, and heartwarming show, Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann has some scenes that are pretty darn scary.Spoilers below... beware!
- The battle against multi-faced arm-sprouting huge Anti-Spiral ships. The opening mouths and eyes when the true strategy comes to surface (quite literally) will haunt viewers until the Grand Finale.
- The first Gunmen that appears is pretty creepy-looking, not to mention huge.
- Kamina's scream after he is horribly mutilated by Thymilph's spear in episode 8 is bone-chilling.
- Still... spinning...
- The results of Simon's Heroic BSoD following Kamina's death. Seeing the cute boy turn into The Berserker who vanquishes Mooks with a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, and is channeling so much Unstoppable Rage that his mech actually pukes and shuts down is... rather unsettling, to say the least.
- It doesn't help that the poor kid has an absolutely devastated look in his eyes for about three episodes straight. If it weren't for Nia, who knows what Simon would've done?
- The reveal of Dekabutsu: Simon and the crew are catching their breath after finishing off the last of the Four Generals, and for a brief moment it looks like the final confrontation with Lordgenome will be relatively straightforward...But then something very unexpected happens - the city of Teppelin begins collapsing. Building by building, tower by tower, the capital city crumbles apart to reveal its core: A gigantic torso with glowing eyes the size of small towns and a gigantic grimace taller than a skyscraper. Suddenly it becomes horrifyingly clear to Team Dai-Gurren that they're not looking at the Beastmen's capital city anymore; They're looking at a very powerful and very, very big Gunmen - bigger than all of the Gunmen they've fought up until now put together. And Lordgenome? He can pilot this behemoth with a mere wave of his hand. And to top it all off, the whole thing is set to an absolutely oppressive orchestral piece
, complete with a One-Woman Wail, that perfectly captures just how small our heroes are right now. - Nia becoming a brainwashed pawn of the Anti-Spirals is incredibly creepy in that she goes from a loving and ditzy girl who can barely work a phone to being a cold and stoic harbinger of doom plainly stating to Simon how the human race is going to die by the hands of the Anti-Spiral. Even worse is it's shown later that she's fully conscious of the fact she's not acting her usual self, is terrified, and painfully fighting being hijacked on the genetic level.
- Although it mainly doubles as a Tear Jerker, Rossiu's plan to essentially leave much of humanity to die while preserving a certain population before eventually attempting to commit suicide... is something.
- Watching the Anti-Spiral disassemble Nia is terrifying. Her body is literally being pulled apart digital bit by bit, and she's disappearing as it happens.
- It's even worse in Lagann-Hen. First, he disintegrates her bodysuit and then moves in on her with tentacles. Nia visibly struggles, and it's staged almost to make it look like he penetrated her.
- The Anti-Spirals. A Hive Mind with god-like powers that has committed the near-omnicide of Spirals, their rap sheet includes: ripping off Majora's moon trick; having digital drones that can Zerg Rush you: inserting Messengers within every Spiral Race that don't even know of their true nature until the time is right and could be ANYONE, even one of your loved ones; being able to trap their enemies in alternate realities that can be their greatest dream or (presumably, even though it never happened in the series) their worst nightmare; and they have an avatar who looks like Slendy that has naughty tentacles and isn't afraid to use them. Oh, and the scariest thing about them? They think they're doing the right thing, even as they cross the Moral Event Horizon over and over and over again. The only thing that prevents them from being one of the most depraved people in all of fiction is that they are truly convinced that they're the good guys; even then, that may not be enough to redeem them. Why? Because instead of just taking the easy way out and using their god tier powers to kill everyone in one blow, they prefer to defeat their enemies by sending them over the Despair Event Horizon - and they enjoy it.
- One of their most terrible aspects is their tendency to use I Am Not Left-Handed to repeatedly give the heroes a Hope Spot only to shortly afterwards Yank the Dog's Chain. The heroes seem to be doing well against the enemy? Surprise, they're now suddenly twice as fast and hit harder than before. They pull this so many times that it is practically their trademark, letting the heroes think they have a chance of winning, letting them think that they might pull things off, and then pulling the rug out from under them. The worst part is, it's possible that it isn't even intentional: Spiral Energy is the energy of evolution, so it is possible that this isn't an intentional strategy, but the enemies just evolve and adapt.
- The most terrifying aspects of the Anti-Spiral is not that they believe they are right. It's that they know they are, and even worse: they ARE. The overuse of Spiral Energy will eventually screw up the Law of Conservation of Mass so much it will lead to an event known as the Spiral Nemesis. If enough Spiral Power was to be generated, all Spiral lifeforms in the universe would eventually start evolving into full-sized galaxies. The sudden imbalance of mass in the universe would lead to these mega-galaxies devouring each other, forming a black hole that would consume all of existence. And as stated above, it's not a lie either, as Lordgenome confirms this to be an undeniable Awful Truth all spiral life knows at an instinctive level.
- The Extradimensional Labyrinth as a whole. Being trapped in an infinite series of parallel universes until your body and/or mind dies? Combine that with the fact that you're completely unaware that you're dreaming. That's a valid cause for paranoia.
- The details of Lordgenome's reign becomes heavy Nightmare Fuel when examined more closely. He was once a noble spiral immortal warrior leading humanity against the Anti-Spiral threat, was presented with the worst case result scenario of his efforts, and was convinced to slaughter his own forces, literally tearing them apart and blowing his own men and women to smithereens before forcing the rest of his own species to live underground as seen in the Parallel Works 8 OVA. He then has been spending the next hundreds of years sending his Beastmen armies to kill any humans who stumble to the surface. Additionally, he did all of this in a Morton's Fork justifiable attempt to preserve humanity as a species, since a planetary destruction device that impersonated the moon was placed by the Anti-Spirals to destroy the planet if the human population ever reached 1 million.
- However, during his time as the Spiral King and ruler of the world, Lordgenome has been biding his time with sex slaves consisting of young girls kidnapped from various human settlements and brainwashed by his former battle ally Guame in a village under his control to be trained as sex slaves. He also impregnates and has children with the brainwashed girls, whom he raises and leaves to die in pods thrown into a far off canyon when they become too self-aware and question their existence. As seen in the anime, he has done this multiple times, as the canyon Simon finds Nia in is filled with other "failed Nias" who died inside their pods. Worst of all, none of this was necessary for his plan to preserve humanity. He did all of this because he was bored.
- This shot◊ of Anti-Spiral Nia is just downright terrifying.
