#unspiralled

Kamina falls to his knees, crushing Simon in a hug and failing to hold back his tears. "No. No. Don't make me leave, please. I already lost you once, I can't do it again."

"Aw, c'mon Bro, you never lost me in the first place. I'm right here." Simon puts his hand over Kamina's heart "I've been with you all along, and I'm not going anywhere."

Simon has to talk him into escaping because Kamina's honestly considering abandoning the fight against the antispirals so he can stay with Simon. In the end he only leaves because of Nia, if he stays instead of rescuing her then he'll have failed two baby siblings and failing one already nearly killed him.

Tw suicide under the cut for an alternate ending

The good thing is that the various ways he survives opens up opportunities for different arcs in each verse, so I won't bore anyone who reads all of them with the same arc for Kamina multiple times.

His arc in Dying is Easy is the easiest to define, he has to learn to live within his new limitations, learn to have compassion for himself when he falls short of his own expectations, and learn to accept help from those around him when he needs it even when it hurts his pride.

Transitive Property of Belief Kamina faces a very different set of challenges, with him needing to re-learn to trust and rely on Simon and not let his fear of losing Simon blind him to the competence and confidence he himself has instilled in Simon. As well as muster up some actual confidence in himself.

Aniki ex Machina is harder to define, because this verse isn't starting with canon Kamina exactly. This one is more about Lagann learning to balance its primary directives with the human attachments it's developed while living as Kamina. It fucks up once by letting the Kamina avatar die when it's no longer necessary, and Lagann gets to experience the delightful human emotion of regret for the first time. Lagann has to grapple with its own programming and decide whether Simon's spiral power growth alone is still the only thing that matters to it anymore.

And Unspiralled. Oh, Unspiralled. The Simon grief arc but what if it lasted the whole show? Kamina has a lot of different problems to solve and he doesn't manage to solve all of them by the end of the show. He needs to learn to actually give a shit about his own wellbeing for his own sake, he has to learn to believe in himself or Lagann will never work for him. He needs to learn to see Nia as her own person and not a replacement goldfish for Simon (that one's more subtle but it is a conflict he'll need to face sooner rather than later).

So yeah we're not doing that in Unspiralled

After the battle that kills Simon and secures them Dai Gurren, Kamina doesn't run off right away, he sticks around for maybe a week before the pressure and grief finally overwhelm him.

He keeps the core drill around his neck but he knows Lagann won't work for him. The core drill doesn't glow in his hand even a little bit, it just sits there as cold and dead as Kamina's heart feels. He's not sure Lagann will work for anyone again, Simon might have been just That Special as far as he knows. So while everyone is getting settled into Dai Gurren, Kamina pops Lagann off Gurren's head and sets it down in an out of the way spot in the hanger bay. Kamina had to leave Simon's body behind, buried on a hill near the battlefield, but Lagann can serve as a sort of shrine that comes with them. Instead of getting covered by trash, Lagann gets covered in offerings. Flowers, trinkets, candy, candles, whatever anyone has to give to honor the kid who died to get them this ship.

No one moves it while Kamina is gone, and Kamina is relieved to find it undisturbed when he returns a month later. He often wanders down to Lagann during the night when the grief gets so bad he can't sleep, and Yoko will find him the next morning leaning up against it's side. Yoko doesn't think it's very healthy, but at least he's getting some sleep.

So

Unspiralled

Kinda the whole point (aside from the sweet sweet Kamina angst) is to have everything go a lot worse for team dai gurren without Simon, even after Kamina gets Lagann working for him. Kamina doesn't have the spiral power for Simon's fancy finishing moves, he has to slog it out and win by inches every time. And to emphasize the sheer struggle, that the team has to claw and scrape and fight for every small success, I feel like I need to kill more characters off

It doesn't really serve the purpose of the story if more characters make it out alive without Simon than with him. But uurrgghh I hate major character deathhhhh. I don't wanna kill off anyone else 😭

There aren't hardly enough characters for me to kill off, even! I need at least some of the ganman pilots to survive to post skip to die against the antispirals, I need Dayyaka and Kiyoh to survive to have their kid, I need Rossiu to survive for his whole villain arc however it ends up happening, and obvs I can't kill Yoko, Kittan, and Nia