Anime of the late ’80s has an undeniable impact that extends beyond the medium into movies, TV shows, and video games. Many of the homages are to 1988’s Akira, which existed before Western culture had a grasp of what anime really was or could be. The “Akira slide”—an iconic shot of Kaneda sliding sideways on his bike in the 1988 movie adaptation of Akira—has become an icon of anime culture, referenced over and over in numerous cartoons and films, western and Japanese, ever since, including Jordan Peele’s Nope, Tron: Ares, and Metroid Prime 4: Beyond, amid an ocean of other Akira nods.
While Akira references are rife in new media like Naughty Dog’s Intergalactic, letting fans know that the creators are aware of its rule of cool, it’s hard not to feel a bit like the buck stopped at aping aesthetics for easy internet referential brownie points over carrying over its core narrative themes. Although most pop culture nods (Scavengers Reign aside) borrow Akira‘s surface style without echoing its thematic depth, every homage to fellow 1988 anime film Gunbuster‘s iconic arm-cross pose endures as a timeless gesture of steeled resolve wrapped in a badass stance.
The Gainax pose was popularized in Studio Gainax‘s 1988 original anime video (OVA) mech series Gunbuster, directed by Hideaki Anno, pre-Neon Genesis Evangelion. Despite the pose originating in Devilman creator Go Nagai and Ken Ishikawa’s 1975 manga Getter Robo G, the pose—which sees hero Noriko Tayaka piloting the eponymous mech in a commanding stance, crossing the goliath automaton’s arms like a cool guy—popularized it.
Since this pose first captured the anime community’s attention, it has been referenced repeatedly, much as the Akira slide has been featured in various shows. Such examples include Gurren Lagann and Studio Trigger series Kill La Kill and Space Patrol Luluco, as well as video games like Gravity Rush 2.
宇宙パトロールルル子の所謂ガイナ立ち。
Gaina stands of Space Patrol Luluco pic.twitter.com/KSjRVSCJ4s
— 堀 剛史 Takafumi Hori (@porigoshi) June 17, 2016
Crossing one’s arms is generally understood as shorthand for looking cool—sort of like how wearing sunglasses and walking away without looking at explosions goes along with being a badass. It’s also body language that suggests the person doing it is closing themselves off to the world on some Sigma grindset type beat. In this context, that couldn’t be further from the truth, given that Gainax takes a perennially inspiring (and gender-affirming) stance, and I have empirical proof to back it up.
There’s a common belief that crossing your arms is a defensive posture (that anyone in a job interview should avoid doing) or that physically cutting yourself off from whatever you’re being yadda yadda’d about expresses disinterest. But it’s actually something else entirely. Speaking to Wired in 2022, former FBI agent and body language expert Joe Navarro revealed that posture is more about comfort.
“It’s a self-hug. And even when you’re angry, the fact that you do this is to self-comfort yourself. Here you have two arms pressing against your visceral side, which provides a lot of comfort via the vagus nerve,” Navarro explained. “So there’s a lot of myths out there that this is a blocking behavior, or it’s a defensive behavior. It absolutely is not. It is a comforting behavior, and it needs to be recognized as such.”
And boy howdy does Noriko have a lot of self-hugging to do, with the wringer Gunbuster puts her through as its plucky teenage protagonist.
Long story short, Noriko suffers in the manner of Matthew McConaughey’s character in Interstellar, with a heavy dose of Evangelion‘s Shinji Ikari, in her distress at suddenly being important at work. Short story long, time dilation is a bitch that keeps Noriko from hanging out with her cherished school friends. She’s piloting a giant mech and conscripts the rest of her life to defend Earth from alien invasion. While her friends age in the blink of an eye, turning from fellow high schoolers into adults, she remains petrified at the same age, fighting an unwinnable war that only she can turn the tide of.
As Earth’s technological prowess surges—humanity is now capable of engineering a black hole bomb in mere months—time itself becomes the cruelest invention. From Noriko’s perspective, decades pass in seconds. Her best friend is now an adult with a daughter of her own, and the space-time bending forces working against her have robbed her of her own childhood.
What does Noriko do with all this immense pressure on her shoulders?
She strikes the Gunbuster pose.
The Gunbuster pose is, while unequivocally a fuck you to anyone at the other end of it, also a motif that crystallizes the burden of a girl torn from the springtime of her youth and cast into the cold machinery of interstellar war. Each second spent dodging tracer fire and blooming explosions stretches into an hour back home, where time slips through her fingers like stardust. With every stolen glance at Earth’s clock, she watches lives accelerate, relationships fade, and childhood vanish—just girl things, refracted through relativistic grief.
For her, the mission is not a suicidal one, even though the immense amount of time it would take to return to Earth, should she succeed, could span centuries. Still, it presents an opportunity to fight for others’ lives, even if she can only sit under the same tree she helped plant, offering them shade to rest in. Not as a flourish, but as a declaration. A hero’s defiant scream is carved from pressure, grief, and unshakable resolve that she’ll prevail no matter the cost. After all, “If you live, tomorrow will always come.”
Every time that pose is replicated, it transcends style cribbing and becomes a glyph of defiance and resolve. In essence, the Gainax pose is comparable to communicating Demon Slayer‘s rallying cry, “Set your heart ablaze,” or Naruto’s catchphrase, “Believe it.”
But even more so, it’s one of those rare anime artifacts that speaks to the female experience, the steeling of one’s resolve, even when the fight seems perilous, and defiantly standing like a boulder against the raging sea. It’s resonant, easily replicable, and damn cool.
You can watch Gunbuster on Hidive and Crunchyroll. It’s peak.
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