Gatchaman Crowds Analysis 2

In any battle, no matter how cool looking the scene is, it isn't truly an epic battle unless it is really a clash of ideologies. Take for example Sparta 300. The clash present here is not how the 300 warriors fought against the entire Persian army, but more of how the 300 warriors challenged the entirety of Greece against their cowardice to bow down to an outside pressure. The reason why we are rooting for the warriors are because they have been left alone during their fight, with no help from the king's own country, who have been bought over by the power of money. It is a clash of money and loyalty, materialism and essence.

Such is the same with Gatchaman Crowds. I've researched on some of the opinions on the net for the series and some have stated that the opening of the series is pretty slow. While I do agreed to some extent, I cannot stress again how important the starting few episodes were important in setting up the status quo and all the foreshadowing for the clashes to come. Most of my analysis here will come from the first half of the show, since any mention of the second half would most likely spoil the story for you.

After looking at the conservationist and the realist last time, this time we would look at the idealist, Rui Ninomiya.

Instead of object metaphors as before, Rui himself (yes, he's a guy) is his own metaphor. He cross-dresses and walks around the streets watching people use Galax, a social game of his own creation. However, he lives alone with X, an artificial intelligence he created by himself. It is ironic that he seeks companionship with a computer program rather than with people when he himself is the creator of the application that brought the masses together. When he is outside, he wears elaborate clothes of the other gender and hides in plain view, preferring not to communicate directly with others. 

In fact, Rui is the ultimate cluster of clashes and irony in the series. Galax is his tool to bring humanity together by solving problems on their own. X, the AI is able to match people with needs with the right people with the ability to solve that need. Early in the series, we see posters hanging everywhere in the train where Sugane was in, stating that "the world is not updated by heroes, but by us". However, as we can see later on in the series, in spite of Rui's best intentions, humanity have not learnt to solve problems on their own, instead, they relied blindly on the machine like a faux God. It shows how humanity craves for leadership and an omnipotent character. They simply move their beliefs from superheroes to an AI. However, they don't do this lightly, and they only do it after X proves itself worthy and correct time over time. This is especially evident in a school scene where Rui and X prevents students from consuming spoilt milk. Every Galax user believes in X, while non users, some cynical, turn from non-believers to believers.

In the background, the TV is showing a bribery case of the vice-president of Japan.

Rui is obsessed with making the world a better place. Again, early in the series, we are shown how politicians are ruining Japan. In spite of being in a democratic country, the people still elected a leader that has shown himself incapable of running his country while allowing money embezzlement to occur. The democratic system is the one clashing with Galax, which itself is actually quite a despotic system. Democracy, where the people are given the power to rule themselves is shown to have led to a downward path of disappointment while despotism, which hides under the pretext of freedom, is shown to have positive results. This shows how information symmetry is important for the democratic system to actually work, since what Galax does is essentially sharing information. In this age where internet allows free trade of information, the one who holds the most information is king. The demographics of this is skewed towards the younger generation, but the ones holding the most information, is the search engine companies, but for a larger discussion on that you could watch the movie, Ex Machina. 

The Galax system itself also clashes with the notion of having heroes save the day. On one hand, Galax helps people with their everyday lives, while the Gatchaman fights with aliens and does not progress from there on. Rui does not place his hopes on superpowers and instead wishes to rely on humans, however, he does realizes that there are some cases where even humans can't do anything, which is shown in a scenario later on, and that is when he activates his own superpower to summon the Hundreds Crowds, which is paradoxical to his idea that humans should help themselves without superpowers. This places him in direct conflict of Hajime, who believes that people with superpowers are part of the everyone he was talking so fervently about. Hajime thinks that superpower or not, what can be used, should be used, but Rui thinks that only humans can help themselves.

I think that part of the charm of Gatchaman Crowds is in watching how Rui grows as an character. While Sugane may be one-dimensional, Hajime two-dimensional, Rui could be said as a multi-dimensional character, one that we can relate to as we grow as a person, having our ideals shattered one by one while we try to hold on to them, only to leave them once we've grown into an adult.