I’m not a huge fan of Gatchaman having only seen a few episodes of the original series (although I have somehow managed to watch all 3 dubs accidentally) but the show had a transformative influence on me. Gatchaman is the first anime I ever saw and even as a dumb kid I recognised at once that the animation, storytelling and character development were leagues beyond anything I was watching from western animation at the time.
I was therefore very enthusiastic about Gatchaman Crowds. An update of the Gatchaman concept of teenagers in bird themed costumes fighting aliens, done with modern day animation and storytelling conventions and a cool social media gimmick? Sign me up, that sounds great.
Gatchaman Crowds starts off by delivering pretty much exactly what I wanted from it. The first episode introduces the team, the concept and the villain. Hajime Ichinose is a high school girl obsessed with stationery, art and craft. When we first meet her she is having a serious geek out moment over a new notepad she has bought.
Hajime is relentlessly genki (a Japanese word meaning cheerful and energetic) almost to the point of obnoxiousness but she’s sweet, kind and enthusiastic. All positive traits that draw a mysterious figure named JJ (played by Katsuji Mori the original Gatchaman leader Ken the Eagle) who meets her in a dreamlike state and pulls a notebook from her body.
Hajime accidentally sees one of her classmates Sugane Tachibana transform into a Gatchaman, a super hero with a bird like costume, as he fights an alien that has disguised itself as a human. Sugane has an ability to wipe the minds of people that see his Gatchaman form but now that Hajime has a notebook it doesn’t work on her. Sugane realises that this means Hajime is also a Gatchaman so he takes her to their base to meet the other team members and reveal their mission.
JJ is a kind of godlike being who creates Gatchaman on planets all over the universe. The Gatchaman are civil servants who protect the people on their planets from extra-terrestrial threats but must do so in secret. On Earth this team has been fighting MESS, an alien intelligence that abducts humans.
Okay so, set up is basic but very functional. Secret team, wise mentor, super powers; all in service of fighting bad guys. It isn’t the most original idea in the world but hey, it provides a neat framework to hang a fight scene on every week and lots of opportunities to tell good stories. And it works as an update of the old series concept.
That set up lasts until the beginning of episode 2!
That is how uninterested the creators are in telling a by the numbers shonen anime story. All of your expectations, boom, thrown out the window my friends.
What happens at the start of episode 2 (well the end of episode 1 but it finishes at the start of episode 2) is that Hajime transforms into a Gatchaman against Sugane’s orders. Sugane is fighting a huge MESS and getting his ass kicked by it but Hajime hasn’t transformed to help him in the fight but instead to talk to the MESS. Something that everyone else thinks is impossible. However the moment she touches it with her scissor weapon she establishes a way to communicate with it, and when the MESS realises it has been harming humans it stops. See the MESS was only abducting us as a way to try and communicate in the first place, and now it can. Mission accomplished.
Well, that’s totally overthrown all the set-up, now what do we do? New alien threat? Well kind of. What Gatchaman Crowds is actually concerned with from episode 2 onwards is answering the questions:
What is the point of Super Heroes?
How can we make the world a better place?
What are the different ways in which different groups of people can make the world a better place?
On the question of Super Heroes Gatchaman Crowds represents one of the most radical reinventions of the Super Hero concept I have ever seen. I have now written an entirely separate post to discuss this but basically to be a Super Hero story your story needs to conform to the following criteria.
- Super Heroes have some kind of alternate identity, usually signified by a code name.
- Super Heroes have a distinctive appearance that separates them from normal people.
- Super Heroes possess the ability to do something beyond those of normal people.
- Utilising their abilities beyond those of a normal person and either by their direct actions or the consequences thereof the Super Hero acts to saves lives or improve the quality of lives for others in direct conflict to the intentions of a Super villain antagonist.
Gatchaman Crowds conforms perfectly to all 4 criteria…in episode 1 and then begins dismantling them all to point out why the Super Hero idea is flawed but how it can be re-purposed.
So starting with point 4. The shortened version of this, in Super Hero stories you usually end with the hero punching the bad guy. And so does episode one of Gatchaman Crowds where Sugane uses his sword to defeat some MESS. Genre conventions thus conformed to, Gatchaman establishes itself as a Super Hero story. But that is the last time that punching will ever be a solution in this series because in episode 2 Hajime tries talking to the MESS and it is immediately shown to be a superior strategy. The G-team has been fighting MESS for 5 years without winning. Hajime talks to them for one day and the problem is solved.
The message is quite simple, communication is better than punching when it comes to solving problems.
Now Gatchaman Crowds is not the first Super Hero work to make this message or to question the usefulness of the Super Hero to solve real world problems. Watchmen, Miracle Man, Squadron Supreme, The Authority, “what’s so funny about truth, justice and the American way?” I could keep going. The two main conclusions most of these stories fall into is either a) the power a Super Hero has can literally remake the world into a better place and so the hero proceeds to do that (Watchmen, Miracle Man, The Authority) or b) the power of a single man is limited and ultimately being a Super Hero can’t make the world better only maintain a status quo or deal with small threats (any Superman story in which he fails to save someone, almost all Daredevil stories, The Sentry).
You would think with its message of punching is worse than communication that Gatchaman Crowds falls into the b group but really it takes a third path. It’s arguing quite firmly that Super Heroes can change the world but not because they’re super-heroes, just because anyone can.*
This leads us to the second big plot point of Gatchaman Crowds the existence of GALAX and CROWDS.
GALAX is a social media app that, in true visual media tradition, doesn’t work by using words, lists and pictures but instead inefficiently populates a virtual world with virtual avatars that interact within it (see also Oz in Summer Wars). Its main purpose is twofold. Firstly it works to make the world a better place by connecting people based on their skillset and their location. For example, when one character is hit by a car their friend uses GALAX to describe the situation and GALAX alerts a nearby nurse that she should go and help.
GALAX then represents an argument that the world is better when people are doing what they do best for no reason other than doing what they do best benefits all. That is explicitly a Communist idea and like Communism it runs up against a major practical problem. Who decides what your job should be that best benefits society?
Gatchaman side steps the issue somewhat by having the entity in charge of all the decision making be an objective super-intelligent A.I. named X. But that A.I. still had to be invented by someone who created it to reflect their values, and that person is Rui Ninomiya aka LOAD aka the super genius boy who invented X, GALAX, CROWDS and tried to use his intelligence to make the world a better place. And the fact that GALAX isn’t objective but works to reflect the dictatorship of LOAD is not something the series will shy away from.
The other issue Communism and by extension GALAX runs into is how to motivate people to work. Sure some people will help for the sake of helping but not the majority, and not if the job is dangerous or difficult. Capitalism fixes this issue by use of currency as a motivator and GALAX does something similar through the use of gamification. See when that Nurse helped that kid, she got a higher score in her game of GALAX.
Gamification, the idea of turning real world activities into the equivalent of a video game with scores and rewards is sometimes posited as a real alternative economy for the future. The argument goes that when automisation eventually replaces the need for people to work the only way to get them to do the minimal jobs required by full automisation will be to turn work into a game with status and rewards for those who do well at it. Gamification is not some Sci-Fi future though, apps that give you points and badges for working out, organising your life or assisting in charity exist right now and in Gatchaman Crowds they’re the engine that runs GALAX and we see it spring into action when GALAX organises a group of school kids to stop a shipment of tainted milk (???) and they do it for the mix of helping and for the adventure of playing the game.
GALAX gives the power to improve the world to the people, not to Super Heroes and it goes one step further. LOAD has picked 100 special high scoring GALAX users and given them the power of CROWDS. A variation on the Gatchaman’s own powers CROWDS is a kind of faceless avatar for each GALAX user that inhabits the real world. Huge, strong and indestructible these weird monsters assist in clearing road accidents and rescuing people from a damaged cable car.
The Gatchaman then aren’t the only people with extraordinary power in this universe, anyone can be a Super Hero if they play enough GALAX i.e. if they help enough people.
Point 3 of my definition then, Super Heroes possess the ability to do something beyond those of normal people, is gone.
So what about point 1? Super Heroes have some kind of alternate identity, usually signified by a code name? Again this is initially true of The Gatchaman and is then discarded. They start out as secret heroes with secret identities but one of the first things Hajime does when CROWDS starts to become a threat rather than an asset is to take The Gatchaman public. She starts a PR campaign harnessing the power of the media (both traditional and newer forms like social and GALAX) to turn the public against the threat of CROWDS and unite people to help. When they were 5 people working in secret The Gatchaman had no chance to stop CROWDS, the only way to stop them is to enlist the aid of others and in doing that their fame and public profile are more useful than Sugane’s sword or Joe’s guns. Again, communication is more useful to fight a threat than punching.
It’s also not a coincidence that Hajime starts her PR campaign at an elementary school. Kids are the easiest hearts and minds to convince but also the most important. The beliefs we hold as children rarely stay with us into adulthood but those that do stand the test of time become our most strongly held principles. Inspiring children is an important part of making the world better and it is as inspirational figures that Super Heroes work, better than as warriors. Especially because kids respond to good vs evil Super Hero stories better than to complicated tales with multiple shades of morality. In both our real world and in the metafiction of Gatchaman Crowds the power of the Super Hero is in inspiring children to do good.
Point 1 is also shredded in Gatchaman Crowds by the fact that EVERYONE has a secret identity. Of course The Gatchaman do but Rui is a boy whereas his alter ego LOAD is a girl. Every user of GALAX has an online avatar, a second identity they can customise and which they show to the world. Even on a more mundane level Joe wears a suit and tie at work and has his hair tied up neatly in a ponytail as he plays the role of civil servant but then when he gets home he slips on cool clothes, lets his hair down, puts a cigarette in his mouth and goes out to the bar. Everyone has multiple identities and roles.
This might be a peculiarly Japanese thing since they have always strongly drawn the distinction between honne and tatemae, home and public, the face you show to the world and the face you only show to yourself. The principle is not alien to the West where we do understand the concept of politeness and not doing things in public you would in private but we’ve also told people to be themselves, express their emotions and be honest whereas in Japan the cultural norms have always been about putting on a false face for the benefit of others. The end result though is the concept of an alternate identity is not exclusive to the Super Hero, it’s an everyday thing for the Japanese. And as social media becomes increasingly the mainstream culture the difference between our real self and a cultivated public identity is becoming an issue we in the West also need to struggle with. What used to be an issue for celebrities and public figures now affects us all.
That just leaves point number 2, Super Heroes have a distinctive appearance that separates them from normal people, and whilst this is never subverted in Gatchaman Crowds in that The Gatchaman always have their costumes there are plenty of characters with outlandish appearances outside of costume from LOAD’s bunny ears, to the GALAX avatars to PaiPai (literally a talking toy Panda, and the leader of the Gatchaman).
So having completely upended the concept of a Super-Hero the series goes on to ask the question “How can we make the world a better place and what is stopping us?”
Let’s start with the characters who are failing to make the world a better place, the original Gatchaman, the 4 heroes who have been failing to save the world for 5 years until Hajime shows up and fixes everything.
Joe is the only direct carry over from the original Gatchaman. In that series Joe was the cocky bad boy rebel but one of the more competent and deadly team members. He was the Wolverine to use a TV Tropes comparison. Here he seems set up to be similar, he’s older than most team members, he goes to bars, he smokes and he often shows up late for meetings. He also has one of the more destructive sets of super powers, flight, guns and fire manipulation abilities.
Joe represents wasted potential. With all his powers Joe should be able to defeat the villain easily but he thinks he can’t, and because he thinks he can’t then he doesn’t try to. He has a lack of confidence and bemoans his lack of ability when the irony is, dude is a Super Hero! Joe stands in for every person who has ever said “I would make the world a better place if I had x power.” Where x = money, time, intelligence, etc. The irony with Joe is that he has the power and still makes the same argument and this should be read as a direct statement to every person who has ever made Joe’s argument. You do have the power to make the world a better place and wishing for more power will not help.
The defining moment for him as a character is in episode 2 where he is practicing darts. We see him hit the bull with three darts in a row and his friend suggests he should compete but Joe dismisses it out of hand, saying he isn’t as a good as people that compete. This kind of attitude, this feeling like you lack the ability to make the world better is a reason people don’t make the world better.
Sugane is the most straight forwardly heroic of the Gatchaman. He’s competent in the use of his powers able to easily take down the MESS in episode 1 and he’ll be the main character to transform and take on problems throughout the series. He’s also a good student, he’s always on time to meetings, he does what he’s told and he’s just generally a nice guy if a little bit stiff and little bit of a stickler for the rules. The problem with Sugane is he lacks creativity, ambition and crucially the ability to make decisions for himself. Sugane is always looking to others to tell him what to do, normally PaiPai as the official leader of the team but he also looks up to Joe, JJ and eventually Hajime. Sugane is a soldier basically, he is fully committed to making the world a better place but he wants orders, he wants somebody higher up to have made the decisions and to tell him what to do. He’s probably best summed up by his weapon, a sword. It’s a tool that does one thing and that thing is destroy. Unlike Hajime’s scissors which can destroy or create Sugane only knows how to do one thing and his lack of imagination is why he can’t make the world better.
PaiPai is a talking miniature Panda because….merchandise? He’s also the leader of the team and often an active coward. He’s like Sugane but even worse. Like Sugane he craves orders but whereas Sugane at least goes out of the base and does stuff PaiPai spends most of his time at home drinking and bemoaning the fact that he’s a coward and a terrible leader. As leader he should be giving orders but as another soldier he needs orders from someone else. And so he looks to JJ, the god of this Universe. PaiPai then represents religious people, who want God to make the world better either directly or at least by giving them instructions on what to do. And like Gods in our world JJ doesn’t talk to PaiPai so he has no new instructions, as such he has to make do with the old instructions even if they fail to take into account the changing situation. PaiPai is everyone who looks to religious authority to make the world better and why that won’t work.
He also has a nice parallel with the Prime Minister of Japan, another character who is too scared to make leadership decisions. Both are people in charge and how many times have you said to yourself, If only I were in charge I’d fix everything. However, now they’re in charge they both feel powerless to make decisions and instead look to the people/god for answers about what they should do. It’s another example of how power ultimately doesn’t make it any easier to make a difference.
Utsutsu and OD are very similar characters hence why they’re paired together often. Utsutsu is a very shy, almost to the point of mental illness, girl with long green hair who hangs out in her underpants because…perverts? OD is a flamboyantly gay man in appearance but is actually some kind of alien. OD is kind of awesome, although his voice is hella grating to begin with (I have no problem with people being camp but that doesn’t mean I have to like camp performers) he tones it down a bit when the voice actor settles into the character and OD is consistently one of the more measured, optimistic and pleasant people in this show. In contrast Utsutsu starts the show practically catatonic able to only say utsutsuhimasu (which can be read as I’m gloomy or I’m sleepy depending on the kanji used). She does grow as a character though gaining confidence in her desire to help others.
Utsutsu has numerous super powers. She possesses the ability to make multiple versions of herself and I’m honestly not sure what the symbolism behind that is. Easier to decode though is her other power, with one hand she can drain life, and with the other she can give it allowing her to kill or heal with a touch. To heal though requires her to use up energy. So to heal someone requires her either to kill something else or even risk killing herself. Utsutsu represents apathy, a feeling that nothing you can do will make anything better because it could end up worse for others or yourself, so why even try. This apathy extends to every aspect of her character initially but as she matures in confidence she decides to risk doing harm or even risk her life to help. Apathy is probably the thing preventing most people from making the world a better place I’d wager, a feeling that giving of one’s self to help is a waste of time at best and potentially harmful to you and Utsutsu’s arc comes in realising that the apathy disengages her from the world and risk is necessary to experience joy.
OD also has powers with a drawback, namely that he is easily the team’s most powerful member and easily capable of defeating the villain Berg Katse. And this is true, in the final episode OD transforms for the first time in the series and kicks Berg Katse’s ass. The issue is that OD is too powerful, when he transforms he risks destroying half the city. OD is a kind of personification of a nuclear option; something we know would be effective but cannot do because there are too many real and important consequences if we did. OD not using his powers is the equivalent of you not quitting that job you hate or leaving a person you don’t love. It is simple to do and undeniably effective but there are good reasons you aren’t doing it.
OD’s arc resolves itself in two ways. Firstly, he uses his powers and everything is fine. The city doesn’t blow up. It’s all good. Sometimes the nuclear option doesn’t have as bad a consequence as you might fear. Like Utsutsu OD allows his fear of consequences to prevent him from doing something and like Utsutsu he learns you get nothing good without risk.
The second way is that it turns out OD transforming and fighting Katse was completely unnecessary to saving the day. He didn’t need to do it. Sometimes the easy but risky way is unnecessary and the safer but more difficult way is better.
This brings us to Hajime. Hajime is pretty much perfect. She’s cute, she’s optimistic, she relentlessly energetic, she’s constantly saying or doing something every moment she’s on screen, people like her and she likes everyone, willing to see the best even in Berg Katse. There is a whole episode of the series where every other character basically tells her how amazing she is.
What an annoying Mary Sue right?
Well, she could be and god knows enough people who have watched Gatchaman Crowds interpreted her that way. Hajime is a real Marmite of a character. If you can’t at least tolerate her by the time episode 2 wraps up then you will not enjoy the rest of this show. But the thing for me that makes Hajime not a Mary Sue is that she ultimately isn’t the one to save the world. That role falls to the ordinary people of the world. What Hajime does do though is bring out the best in others. It is Hajime who convinces Rui to give the power of CROWDS to the common people and then convinces the common people to help. It’s Hajime who convinces the other Gatchaman that they do have the power to save the world. Hajime has only one power as an individual, the power to inspire, but in that power she gets others to collectively save the world.
The defining characteristic of Hajime is that she’s an artist. When we first meet she is massively geeking out over stationery and every moment we see her at home she is making something. Her Gatchaman forms with its scissors and brushes makes this clear, our heroine symbolises art. Gatchaman Crowds is pretty clear in its thesis that communication is what will save the day and what is art but just another kind of communication?
It’s also all very Meta. Super Heroes aren’t real of course so hoping for the power to be one (like Joe) or hoping one will show up to save the world for you (like Sugane and PaiPai) is pointless. It isn’t going to happen. But Super Hero stories are real and the power they have to inspire, particularly children, is as real and as effective at making the world better in the real world as it is in Gatchaman Crowds.
The Gatchaman are all a small part of a larger group of characters in the story we can loosely class as civil servants. This is made clear by the fact that Joe actually is a civil servant. The Gatchaman are anointed their power by another authority and have to abide by the rules. In this sense they’re like cops, soldiers, firemen and even politicians. They derive power from a system to serve that system. And being part of that system means they are limited in what they can do. The Mayor, the soldier lady and the cop lady all have power, ostensibly more power than Rui, a civilian, do but they can use that power only to maintain the safe running of the status quo. Being granted power by a system means you can’t change that system.
But all these civil servant characters are part of Hajime’s art club, a group that meets up to do literally whatever they want (in an artistic context) with the idea that their free expression will make the world better if only in a small way (decorating areas damaged by an earthquake). The message couldn’t be clearer, all of these servants are more effective at improving the world as people than as their roles, and their roles can only maintain the world.
This brings us to Rui/LOAD. Ultra genius boy wonder transvestite whom is going to level up the world. Unlike the Gatchaman (Hajime excepted) Rui doesn’t have anything stopping him from trying to make the world a better place. He’s already doing it, and doing it quite successfully. With GALAX Rui has created an entirely voluntary system that makes the world better, teaming up the best of people so their individual strengths can be harnessed for the good of all.
It’s a good plan and its working but it isn’t working fast enough. For Rui the main problem is that people still need an outside authority to tell them what to do. They still worship heroes and leaders rather than recognising that the strength lies within them to change the world. And GALAX in its present form is limited in what it can accomplish. Sure he can get a nurse to help with first aid but what can he do to stop a cable car disaster?
So he accepts a shortcut, CROWDS, giant strong avatars given to him by Berg Katse.
With CROWDS Rui can achieve much more, he has real physical power to save more people. He could even go further, he could tear down the government building and declare anarchy, murder criminals, do any of a million things with the power at his disposal. And he fears all that power being under the control of one person. So, ironically, he sets up a series of rules and guidelines to use it. The users of CROWDS, The Hundreds, are handpicked by LOAD to exacting specifications and they can only use their powers when he expressly okays it. This means Rui is now a leader, a dictator in fact with unlimited power that he doles out as he sees fit. He has the best of intentions but he has nonetheless turned into a leader, the very thing he wants to create a world without.
The Hundreds quickly tire of Rui’s self-prevaricating bullshit and when given the first opportunity to rebel, do so, using their powers to destroy the Diet building (where the government of Japan sits) and generally going on an anarchic rampage to try and trigger a revolution in Japan.
Rui/LOAD is another leader character but whereas Rui has the courage and the intelligence to lead he doesn’t want the power and authority that comes with it because he implicitly realises that power corrupts. Rui is an ideas person, he is at his best when coming up with plans and strategies to make the world better but he can’t be the one to accept the responsibility for putting those plans into action. His arc follows that of many revolutionaries. At an ideas stage Rui is full of good plans to improve the world and he quickly attracts followers (a crowd if you will) who agree with him. These followers give him the power to put his ideas into practice and he now has a choice. He can let his ideas go, to be used by others and risk seeing them perverted into something he doesn’t agree with or he can take the mantle of leadership and risk becoming corrupted himself, another authority or status quo he railed against to begin with. Neither solution is ideal and which decision the show ultimately favours brings us to Berg Katse.
Berg Katse is the villain and like all good Super Villains Berg Katse is symbolic of a larger real world problem that the heroes can solve symbolically by punching. Except you can’t defeat Berg Katse by punching him because Berg Katse isn’t an external force, Berg Katse is us. Berg Katse is androgynous and faceless. Berg Katse can literally wear the face of any person in the show and when Berg Katse uses their transformation ability they become invisible, a complete non-entity. Berg Katse represents the dark impulse in every human being, the impulse to strike out suddenly, to stab someone or push them over. An impulse we may have but which we normally ignore. Barge Katse can bring this impulse out and they do it most effectively with The Hundreds. Anonymous figures protected from the consequences of their actions by invulnerable avatars it isn’t a stretch to read The Hundreds as the faceless hordes of internet trolls mindlessly tearing down the art that others create. They may even think they do so in the name of a good cause but they’re misguided at best and malicious at worst as they destroy the world around them. Berg Katse manipulated The Hundreds into doing that because Berg Katse is nothing more and nothing else than the impulse in human beings to destroy, to not make the world a better place but a worse one.
You can’t defeat Berg Katse. OD fights him and takes his physical form down but even then he is regenerating. You can fight the symptoms of Berg Katse, undo the damage they have wrought but at the end he is still there, inside Hajime’s heart, trapped and repressed but still existing and still capable of manipulating someone again.
Berg Katse, the dark human impulse, is the reason all of Rui’s good ideas were perverted but even though his CROWDS became a problem they were defeated. And what were they defeated by……..?
Us, people, you and me, the common man, mankind.
Gatchaman Crowds is ultimately pretty clear in its philosophy. When asking how different groups of people can make the world a better place it firmly establishes that no individual can make the world better. No matter how much power they have, no matter how many followers they have, no matter how smart they are, no matter how much they want to, no individual can change the world.
The best an individual can do is inspire others to be better (Hajime) through their actions, through their art or through communication. Or maybe they can come up with something very clever that helps others to make the world better (Rui), a strategy, a plan, a new tool. Individuals can contribute to improving the world but the ultimate responsibility and the ultimate power to affect change lies with us.
So Gatchaman CROWDS ends with Rui’s Hundreds taken away from him by Berg Katse, manipulated into causing wanton destruction throughout Japan. And Rui saves the day by giving the power of CROWDS to everyone, creating a system where no one has power that someone else doesn’t have also and inspired by the actions of the Gatchaman and the words of the Prime Minister ordinary people band together to stop the threat.
But it doesn’t end there. Having stopped the threat people now use the power of CROWDS to repair the damage, make lunches for people, make new art, etc. Rui feared giving out the power would have bad consequences, and it did, but giving people that power also had good consequences he never imagined.
Gatchaman Crowds is quite simply a master piece. I have rarely seen a work in the Super Hero genre that so thoroughly interrogated the purpose of the Super Hero both within the fictional context and within the meta-context of why we as readers turn to Super Hero narratives. It was an almost life changing experience for me, causing me to rethink my own assumptions and actually question what I do with my life and how I am contributing to improving the world, or more often how I make excuses not to.
It is far from perfect, as a narrative and as a piece of animation it has technical and structural issues that often makes it a difficult watch. However, as a symbolic work of art this might just be the most important work in the Super Hero genre since Watchmen.
*Also most examples of super-hero stories that question the need for super-heroes to fight foes try to have their cake and eat it too by ending the story with a big fight sequence where the heroes win. This is because you can’t fight genre conventions. Your audience wants to see punching and if you deny them punching they will not like your story. Gatchaman Crowds nearly manages to deny the audience any Super Hero action for its entire run time but it capitulates towards the end. Even so all the scenes of the Gatchaman using their powers are heavily symbolically implied to be a failure on the character’s part that is not helping them achieve their goals.