Character · Gurren Lagann
Simon
The best mecha pilot in the series spends its opening episode digging holes and apologising to people.
In Otakana the clue reads: Underground digger who finds a tiny drill
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Gurren Lagann
- Letters
- 5 · Normal
Simon lives in a buried village where the ceiling occasionally falls in and nobody has ever seen the sky. He digs, because digging is the job, and he is very good at it. What he turns up is a small glowing drill and a discarded face-shaped machine, and Kamina drags him and both objects up to the surface within a couple of episodes.
The timid version does not last. Gurren Lagann is built as a series of escalations and Simon escalates hardest, from a boy who cannot look anyone in the eye to a pilot whose machines end up measured against galaxies. The show knows this is absurd and does it anyway, at speed, spending its animation budget deliberately unevenly.
His drill carries the whole thesis in one object. Kamina tells him it is the drill that will pierce the heavens, which is exactly the sort of sentence this series says without blinking. Tetsuya Kakihara voices him in Japanese and ages the performance across the timeskip more than most shonen leads ever get to.
Spelling SIMON
SIMON is five letters and the trap is the sound: the Japanese シモン comes out as Shimon, while the English dub says Simon and the tiles want a plain S at the front. It is the ordinary English name, S-I-M-O-N, with vowels in the second and fourth slots, no silent letters and nothing doubled.