Freedom with a Conscience

While Gatchaman Crowds was able to convey its message, the poor direction and marketing propaganda of this series drags down its overall value.

Gatchaman Crowds portrayed the thin line that separates a utopia from a dystopia. The very basis coming from how society perceives and accepts such form of control. In this case, the potential system of GALAX to govern and collate all human information.

It’s not totally far-fetched considering a lot of us now has probably integrated social media applications such as Facebook in our daily lives. All it needs is an intelligent system capable of merging human thoughts into one and relaying it to the rest of humanity.

And to be honest, they did well in portraying that. A unified Japan where the Prime Minister consults GALAX for the opinions and thoughts of others to make a sound judgment is one kind of utopia that is possible with our technology. And to think that the very use of GALAX few episodes ago could lead to the same disaster of creating chaos and anarchy.

The concept of everyone becoming heroes and doing whatever they want backed up with the conscience that GALAX provides is perhaps one of the greatest good that humanity can achieve.

For instance, let’s say I wanted to steal and consulted GALAX about it. We all know that stealing is bad but people capable of understanding my reasons for it would probably sympathize and encourage such act. GALAX gathers information and opinion of others and from there, a sound judgment could be made. It’s still up to me to ignore GALAX’s advice and proceed with my plan but there’s where the kicker is. Human beings are ALWAYS governed by their conscience. Will the good coming from the decision “to steal” outweigh the good coming from “not stealing”?

It’s really good. The ideal situation presented in this series is really thought-provoking and delicious but as I mentioned, it got dragged down by a lot of things.

The titular Gatchaman potentially did nothing for this series other than being a fictitious group that protects the world from extra-terrestrial threats. And what threats were there aside from Katze? The MESS. And that MESS issue was resolved in just 2-3 episodes. After that, they simply presented GALAX and the speculah on who the enemy is. And it really blew up like that.

It would’ve been better if they gave this series a different title. One that probably made more sense rather than riding on the Gatchaman flagship and stoking the ire of those who valued the Gatchaman franchise.

Then there’s the fucked up plot. The inconsistency of the characters that’s not related to Hajime is in shambles. Take OD for instance. He’s supposed to be the almighty plot device meant to kick Katze’s ass but if he’s so powerful, why wasn’t he able to defeat him IN THE FIRST PLACE? Like, basing on his backstory, a couple of centuries ago when he first encountered him after Katze destroyed his homeworld? Did he have to level up for 3 centuries in order to get his ass handed back to him in the end?

And if Katze had a note, didn’t that mean that he can spy on the G-members and know whatever they plans were? If I recall correctly, Pai said that all members of the Gatchaman are able to see whatever is written in the note. So what the fuck. They’ve been letting themselves be one-upped by Katze right from the start? For 3 fucking centuries?

And how was Hajime able to absord Katze? Don’t tell me he just decided to stay in her boobs?

But whatever. Despite its faults, this series was still enjoyable. It had a good soundtrack, the OP and ED songs were enjoyable, the seiyuu are good especially the rookies (Maaya Uchida, Ohsaka Ryota), the visuals are definitely eye-candy and the ideal presented is good (on paper).