The Pentagna Paradigm
Are we trapped in a forty-year-old Japanese cartoon?
Today is the fortieth anniversary of the series finale of the anime Heavy Metal L.Gaim (1984-1985). A show that took me to another world in the eighties - the Pentagna World.
Four decades later, I realized it might be a model for our world. The opening theme lyrics speak to me in a way they never did when I was growing up (my translation - the one in the video is not quite right; the words in bold are in English in the original):
Not a thing is certain
Why am I here ….
Tell me why
Show me the way to you
Heavy metal [although this seems like a non sequitur now, stick with me]
Lead me now where you are
But before I lead you where I am …
Caveats
Heavy Metal L.Gaim is a vast subject. It is not only a TV show but also three straight-to-video releases, a novel trilogy, and three different manga plus The Five Star Stories, a long-running (1986-present!) paraspinoff manga that has long since overshadowed its source. I am only going to write about the TV and video1 version of the continuity … from memory.
Even the TV and video version alone is full of lore. I am going to ignore almost everything that is of no direct interest to dissidents. So major characters and subplots will go completely unmentioned here. What remains may be relevant to the real world.
This piece is not intended as an endorsement of L.Gaim as a work of art. I have mixed feelings about it, but with a few exceptions I will try to keep those feelings out of this piece.
Names in L.Gaim are complicated, so for simplicity’s sake I will refer to characters by only one name with one necessary exception.
I have taken the Roman letter spellings of those names from Japanese reference works. In some cases, sources conflict, and I have chosen the spelling that I arbitrarily prefer: e.g., “Pentagna” to “Pentagona” because the latter brings a certain USSA building to mind. You may see different spellings on other sites about L.Gaim. My stance is that none of these spellings matter because the only spellings that do matter are the original Japanese names in katakana: e.g., ペンタゴナ Pentagona ‘Pentag(o)na’.
Enough. Let’s go to …
The Pentagna World
consists of five planets orbiting the binary star Sunz2.
Four of the five planets are inhabited by people who look like humans from Earth and who even conveniently speak Japanese. But their civilization has no known connection with our own, and any similarities to ours are presumably coincidental.
Each inhabited planet originally had its own kingdom.
Big Sister
Poseidal and the Temple Knights won the Saint Wars and forced those planets into the Pentago Alliance.
Years later, the Temple Knights are almost all gone. The unified world is rotting and regressing under the Pentagna version of globalism (solar systemism?). An ageless Poseidal remains as supreme leader, overseeing the decay of her realm like a cosmic butterfly.
The Giwaza Gang
Probably everyone in the Pentagna World recognizes Poseidal, the immortal symbol of her domination.
But I suspect far fewer are aware of The Thirteen led by spook Giwaza, the most powerful man in the Alliance government.
The Thirteen are the Pentagna World’s top spies and soldiers.
The Thirteen don’t have fancy costumes like Poseidal, much less giant statues in their likeness overlooking a city.
The Thirteen plot in the shadows … and turn on one another.
Here Giwaza gets his arm cut off by his own right-hand woman, Nei, fourth of The Thirteen.
Giwaza himself turns on Poseidal.
He and his allies are hardly her own enemies.
Rebel Remnants
Daba grew up on the backwater world of Coam, unaware of his true heritage until he heard his ‘father’ Hatzer’s last words.
Fifteen years ago, royal servant Hatzer fled from the planet Mizun with its young prince, the last of its royal line - who of course was none other than Daba - and the royal robot Ahamess 0021, designed by Daba’s great-grandfather (?)3 King Warller III of the Yarman dynasty. Hatzer modified the Ahamess into the 68-foot (20.7-meter)-tall L.Gaim.
Sorry, can’t help but dive into the lore.
L.Gaim is one of the few remaining heavy metals - giant robots - from the Saint Wars. Many heavy metals have been built since then, but they are almost always Class B, inferior to the older Class A models like the Ahamess. Technical expertise has gone downhill since the Unification. Even the better modern heavy metals are just replicas or modifications of the old ones.
Piloting the L.Gaim and easily defeating one Class B heavy metal after another, Daba becomes the leader of the rebels against Poseidal.
Generally Wrong
Along the way, Daba encounters ‘General’ Croso4 (right), a rebel leader who is actually an impersonator taking orders (and money) from Nei of The Thirteen (left).
Daba figures out that Croso is fake but spares his life and doesn’t tell anyone. Pseudo-Croso dies shielding a fallen L.Gaim from a beam fired by Nei’s heavy metal, the croissant-shouldered Auge.
Daba even goes so far as to assure his fellow rebels that Pseudo-Croso was the real thing. They believe him.
“Say Mark II”
Shortly after the Pseudo-Croso mess, Daba upgrades to the L.Gaim Mark II. My name is partly a tribute to this heavy metal.
The Mark II can transform into the Plloler (sic!).5
“He Looked like a Smudge”
Who got the Rick and Morty reference?
Daba runs into yet another rebel leader, Semuge.
Guess what Daba learns about Semuge.
He’s a spook assigned to control the rebels. Shocker.
At least he admits it in public.
Too bad the gun doesn’t fire.
Daba doesn’t just forgive Semuge and shake his hand.
He lets Semuge stay as his second-in-command!
AAAARRRRGGGGHHHH
You’d think Daba would have learned from Pseudo-Croso, but NO.
The Death Merchant
Daba has a history of dealing with … less than savory people.
Like Amandra, a businessman who arms the rebels.
Amandra doesn’t just sell weapons. He designs them. He came up with the basic design of the Amonduul Stack, an Alliance transforming heavy metal that was modified into the L.Gaim Mark II.
Nei of The Thirteen pilots the Auge, a replica of an Amandra design going back to the Saint Wars.
Yes, Poseidal’s forces are also Amandra’s customers. He profits from both sides of the war.
Daba has no choice but to buy from him. The rebels don’t have the resources or even talent to build heavy metals from scratch. The average rebel isn’t lucky enough to inherit a Class A heavy metal like Daba did. And Daba’s L.Gaim Mark I, great as it is, cannot win the war alone. He gave up that modified relic of the Kingdom of Mizun for the Mark II which wouldn’t exist without Amandra.
The whole Pentagna World wouldn’t exist without Amandra.
The Mastermind Unmasked
At the end of the series, we learn that Amandra engineered not only heavy metals but the entire situation. He deals not only in death, but deception and domination. Beneath his glasses …
… beneath a false beard … is the face of Poseidal! The real Poseidal.
Complete with heterochromatic eyes.
The public Poseidal with the same eyes has been his lover Mian, whom he had brainwashed into becoming his puppet on the throne.
Amandra has been in control the entire time. Controlling both sides of the war.
He even engineered Daba’s rapid ascent from rural nobody to rebel leader. The hero’s journey was artificial!
So was the villain’s. Daba’s archenemy Gavlet also had his career from raw recruit to planet bomber6 strategist and hotshot heavy metal pilot accelerated by Amandra.
Gavlet pilots a number of heavy metals over the course of the series. The Bat-Shu is an Amandra/real Poseidal design.
For years, the real Poseidal had been watching the Pentagna World in disguise as Amandra, using the rebels he armed to keep the fake Poseidal’s forces on their toes. As degenerate as the Pentagna World is now, total victory would have made the Alliance even more complacent.
The real Poseidal had hoped that his two youngest pawns, Daba and Gavlet, would reinvigorate his realm with their rivalry, keeping the scam going for at least another generation.
Had hoped.
Because the truth is out now. There’s no going back. Not even if the fake Poseidal, driven insane by decades of mind control, believes she’s the real thing.
If You Can’t Control ’Em, Kill ’Em
The real Poseidal drops all pretense of being a mere businessman. He boards the most powerful heavy metal, the Original Aug7, an amalgam of relics from the Saint War, and literally disarms and beheads Daba’s L.Gaim Mark II, whose basic concept was his.
But just when the real Poseidal is about to finish off Daba, Poseidal’s other creation Gavlet jumps in with his blue Bat-Shu (yet another Poseidal design) and blocks the Original Aug’s scythe.
Gavlet asks, “You’re still alive, Daba!?”
“Your Era Is Over!”
After fighting like Itchy and Scratchy across the entire series, Daba (left) and Gavlet (right) can at last agree on one thing: Poseidal’s time is up.
But there’s no way they can defeat him with heavy metals that he designed - heavy metals inferior to his personal unit.
So his undoing turns out to be the other Poseidal, his ex-lover Mian. She is sick of being his puppet. Sick of living a lie. She and the real Poseidal have had their lives extended by biorelation technology. The same technology that charges the Original Aug, making it invincible. Mian makes her way to the Heart of Lachesis8.
Mian settles into the control chair for the biorelation system …
… and turns it off, reducing her to dust.
Losing the biorelation energy that kept him young, Poseidal rapidly ages and dies. “You little punks -”
Head spook Giwaza’s plans to take over have come to naught. He tries to get away, but Daba dumps the L.Gaim Mark II, switches to the Mark I, charges up its buster launcher …
… and blasts Giwaza’s shuttle out of the sky!
Obscure last words: “I’ll strike you all down!”
But it is Giwaza who is struck down. Or more precisely, vaporized.
Without either Poseidal, without Giwaza and The Thirteen, the Alliance is no more, and the rebellion has no reason to exist.
A new order shall arise, but Daba wants nothing to do with it. He takes off with his adopted sister Olibee. Her brain has been irreversibly damaged by the biorelation system that the fake Poseidal had used to manipulate her (just as the real Poseidal had used that system to manipulate the fake one).
Forsaking the throne that is rightfully his, the man who could have been King Warller VI of Mizun will spend the rest of his life in a village on his adopted planet Coam taking care of a woman who cannot take care of herself.
Leccee, the last certain surviving member of The Thirteen, cries after she realizes that the real Poseidal got his revenge on the Yarman dynasty that wiped out his family.
Daba, the last Yarman, will have no throne or issue and not even be on his ancestral planet. Because he cares more about a genetically unrelated woman. A madwoman who can never return his love.
Poseidal has won.
THE END
How Is the Pentagna World like Our Own?
Every episode of L.Gaim ends with the song “Starlight Shower”:
Why are you wandering?
Why are you searching?
Do you feel like Daba, lost in the Pentagna World of lies?
Do you see how that world is like our own? With heavy metals we don’t have, of course.
Here are the parallels I see:
World leaders are actors. The Poseidal everyone saw was just a puppet of the real thing.
Major heroes are fake. The rebel leader Croso was so acclaimed that he got the nickname ‘General’. But he was a spook for the other side. As was another rebel leader, Semuge. Not that the ‘other side’ actually means anything, because …
Both sides are controlled. As ‘Amandra’, Poseidal armed both sides and wanted them to fight each other forever, oblivious to his secret rule.
Sincere people on both sides are clueless. Daba and Gavlet actually thought their ascent was organic. But I am reminded of what
just wrote (emphasis mine):
Kissinger had a meteoric rise to power from relative obscurity that is indicative of spook state ties.
Like everything Rurik writes, this article is a gem mine:
Why is the American Deep State arming Russia on the sly? Why was Amandra arming both sides in the Pentagna World? Rurik explains,
It’s all just one big laundering, peddling and killing operation between them out there.
They could end the wars tomorrow, but they won’t.
All ideologies and Culture War narratives and election dramas and even the toy soldiers moving across blown-out moonscape battlefields in Eastern Europe are irrelevant to the true nature of the political games that are being played by the elites behind the scenes.
99.99% of the Pentagna World beLIEved there was a real war between the Alliance and the ‘rebels’, unaware of the common denominator between them … the spooks.
Spooks rule. Our world as well as Pentagna. Giwaza on the Alliance side, Croso and Semuge on the ‘rebel’ side. The former KGB in both Ukraine and Russia … and beyond:
And on a more serious note, if Ukraine was basically under the control of a sprawling KGB crime network in 2013, how did Putin end up “losing” Ukraine less than 2 years later? There is no way that you could so colossally mess up and lose any FSU country because all FSU countries are run by KGB agents. Every single one. From Latvia to Kazakhstan and Georgia.
The USSA is no better. Why do the media in Hawaii never dare to investigate its all-powerful hotel industry? Could Rurik have the answer (emphasis mine)?
Also, hotels never actually make money; they’re subsidized by the government to stay afloat and so are very politically dependent on the successful bribery of key politicians to make sure that subsidies keep flowing. All hotel chains in America are actually CIA cutouts lol like I’m not even joking although I’m chuckling as I type this sentence out while reminiscing about diving down this particular rabbit hole a few years ago. Who ever said that conspiracizing had to be all doom and gloom? Not me.
Or me. L.Gaim at its best is entertaining. Revisiting it for this article was so much fun!
I expect to have even more fun exploring Rurik’s thesis. If spooks run Hawaii hotels, imagine how agents from both sides of the Pacific meet in those hotels … and discuss God knows what. Like how to implement an even higher agenda … from whom?
Spooks rule, but nobody really knows who RULES.
Okay, almost nobody. In the Pentagna World, only the two Poseidals - ‘Amandra’ and the impostor Mian, Amandra’s secretary Eaiman, and Full Flat (goofy name, I know; I won’t go into her story here) know what’s really going on.
Spooks like Giwaza and other members of The Thirteen - not household names in the Pentagna World - do all the heavy lifting, but they don’t know how ‘Amandra’ is pulling their strings.
In our world, there is no agreement on who the equivalent of Poseidal is. I don’t see any conclusive evidence, but I’m nowhere near omniscient, and no conspiracy theorist I know of is anywhere near the halls of power. We’re all guessing here, though yes, some guesses are more plausible than others.
How many in the Pentagna World could guess that ‘Amandra’ was the real ruler? He’s the obvious candidate in hindsight, yet I certainly didn’t see the surprise ending of L.Gaim back in the eighties.
I use the generic term Regime not only to avoid tedious arguments over ideology and all the baggage of ideolabels but also to stand in for ‘Poseidal’, a term that would be too obscure even for most otaku.
I will probably never know who our Poseidal is. I’m fine with that.
What matters to me is knowing I’m being scammed. Which leads me to my penultimate parallel:
The few who even notice something amiss with their Heroes™ make excuses for them. In our world, TAnons and ZAnons love the 42D chess copout. In the Pentagna World, Daba covered for rebel ‘general’ Pseudo-Croso and even forgave
SmudgeSemuge for controlling the rebels for who knows how long.
Don’t be like Daba!
Remember, he arguably didn’t even win the war. Yes, he did fire the last shot and take out Giwaza, but Poseidal would have taken him out if his enemy Gavlet hadn’t showed up. More importantly, if Poseidal’s ex hadn’t pulled the plug on the biorelation system. Poseidal was killed not by the two men he manipulated on supposedly opposite sides - Daba and Gavlet - but by his ex. His peer, his former fellow Temple Knight Mian. And Giwaza of The Thirteen was intent on wiping out both Poseidals.
The bad guys are not all buddies.
And I think internal conflict might bring about the end of the current Regime, just as it ended the Pentagna World that Poseidal created.
While we can have small victories - I walked freely in CONvid-fearing Honolulu and rejected the vax - if all of us dissidents on Substack died, nothing would change. We cannot compete with Regimedia - not just CNNBBC but also ‘alternatives’ like Tucker, descended from “old CIA spook blue-bloods based in Washington, DC with ties to the USSR from the good old days under Andropov”. Kurated CONtent is addictive in a way our screeds aren’t.
If someone can prove me wrong, if someone can lead a peasant revolution that conclusively wins by overthrowing the Regime - let them go for it!
But I believe it’s more likely that the Regime could self-destruct. Possibly even over something trivial and personal like the relationship gone wrong between the lovers who became the Poseidals.
Will our Poseidal win?
At what? Wiping us out?
I think our species is doomed. It is a vast mass of suckers led by a handful of scammers while a handful of Stalkers watches the staged wrestling match in horror. The suckers are too invested in the show to turn it off. It’s still real to them.
There will be no awakening.
But what about the neocons I knew twenty years ago who stopped cheerleading for war? Did they wake up? No, they put down the pom-poms only because their laser pointers have moved on, not because they learned anything. Whoever holds the laser pointer wins, and they’re not us. When the laser pointer aims at Godland, they will beat the war drums again.
Even the atheists among them cannot overcome their Abrahamic conditioning - their sand implants. They are forever slaves.
They can’t bear to face the truth. The other day I heard a 2003 Iraq vet talk about keeping Murrica safe. Not about how he went over there for nothing - relevant to him, that is. He and the (for now) ex-neocons I know all have perpetual hero syndrome. They are always ‘good’ in their minds - ‘good’ as defined by their laser pointers - their Chosen Thought Leaders like Ben Shapiro.
The cattle must be controlled. The extinction must be managed.
There are only two flavors of doom, orderly or chaotic.
May our Poseidal choose wisely while cheap energy runs out.
Addendum: The Fatal Flaw of L.Gaim
It’s taken me four decades to realize that no Japanese source I’ve never seen has been bothered by a problem that’s obvious to me. Given that the original Poseidal was a galactic10 Genghis Khan during the Saint Wars, surely everyone would have known he was a man unlike the postwar Poseidal.
Here’s Poseidal (right) during the Second Saint War. On his right is Full Flat, his other lover (and the fake rebel leader Semuge’s secret superior).
Even though he is androgynous, he still does not look like Mian as Poseidal who is much shorter and slighter (he is 6’2” = 190 cm tall):
The entry for “Posaydal” (the HTML file is named “poseidal”!) on the official fortieth anniversary website for L.Gaim says, “Sex: Female”.
How could Mian fool the whole Pentagna World into believing she was the he who conquered the whole solar system?
Today I’ve been thinking of workarounds. The fake Poseidal could claim to be trans or even nonbinary. But such a solution would be anachronistic for 1985. (Not that trans didn’t exist forty years ago, of course.) And it doesn’t explain the difference in height and build.
Then again, Pentagna technology is so advanced that male-to-female transformation with height removal might be plausible (though the truth is that neither Poseidal ever changed their sex).
In the Pentagna World, the fake Poseidal was rumored to be a cyborg because she didn’t age (and I might have thought so too because of the metal things attached to her shoulders). But I can’t find any rumors of sex change in the canon.
I suspect Poseidal’s sex switch reflects L.Gaim lore lord Nagano Mamoru’s interest in gender bending. The star of his later Five Star Stories manga - the Poseidal of that universe - is Amaterasu, a man with the name of a Japanese goddess and the looks of a woman.
Amaterasu’s alter ego Ladios Sopp (almost “Poseidal” backwards)
is often times mistaken for a lovely young woman (which causes him no end of trouble).
Does anyone make manga or anime about women who look like men? Like the bald, male-presenting-ish person who demanded to use the bathroom at Burger King here last month?
I’d rather not end by making you imagine that person, so instead I’ll post a picture of the mortar headd (sic) Jünchoon11, the Five Star Stories counterpart of the L.Gaim Mark I.
Nagano Mamoru is my favorite mecha designer. I could never build a model kit of a heavy metal or a mortar headd (sic; a play on the band Motörhead12) not only because I can’t afford one but also because I’d mess it up. I couldn’t do Nagano’s visions justice.
Unlike most science-fiction mecha, mortar headds are not merely humanoid vehicles that are built and disassembled as needed. Each one is a unique creation and highly prized by both its pilots and home nation.
[…]
Mortar headds are not only designed for battle but are also works of art. In a galactic society of knights and royal families a mortar headd serves as a representation of a knight’s status and is a focal point for national pride. They are thus designed to be fearsome to behold on the battlefield and beautiful to see in parades and processions. Many mortar headds have intricate frescoes permanently fixed to their external armor plates and colorful designs worked into their paint jobs. If not destroyed in combat, a mortar headd can continue operating for hundreds of years and is passed to a successor after a headdliner [sic; mortar headd pilot] retires from service.
I hope you have enjoyed these samples of Nagano’s universes.
This is anime and manga to me.
There are a few subtle differences between the TV and video versions of L.Gaim, but none are important enough to mention here. Hence I have freely mixed screencaps from both.
The obviously English-based name Sunz (サンズ Sanzu in Japanese) sounds better to Japanese speakers whose words for ‘sun’ bear no resemblance to it: taiyō and hi.
King Warller V was Daba’s father, so I’m guessing King Warller III was Daba’s great-grandfather.
Pretty sure this name (クロソ Kuroso) is taken from the Fate Clotho, though Croso is a man. Character designer and concept man Nagano Mamoru was fond of the name Clotho which he later reused in The Five Star Stories.
プローラー Purōrā ‘Plloler’ may be based on a mispronunciation of prowler as if it rhymed with bowler rather than with fowler. @#$% English spelling … ! Can’t blame the Japanese (or anyone) for struggling with it. Japanese spelling is already more than enough of a nightmare. The worst in the world.
A type of space warship. Gavlet’s planet bomber is the Sllenderscala (sic).
Also called “Auge”, but I prefer the “e”-less spelling to keep the two distinct. Despite the name, the Original Aug is not quite original: it is an amalgam of three heavy metals from the Saint Wars: (1) an original Auge’s (with an “e”) upper body, (2) the Blood Temple’s right shoulder, and (3) the Pudin Auge’s legs. The Mark II has the Blood Temple’s head. The fate of the rest of the Blood Temple is unknown - at least in the fictional universe of L.Gaim.
In our universe, Nagano’s Blood Temple design - which never appeared in full in the series -
- evolved into the LED Mirage of The Five Star Stories:
Here’s the name of another Fate. (See “Croso” for Clotho in note 4.) Lachesis is later the name of one of the main characters of the para-L.Gaim series The Five Star Stories, which also features Atropos (a name not used in L.Gaim).
I would be shocked if our world’s Poseidal was a woman.
Couldn’t resist alliteration. “Galactic” is hyperbole, as Poseidal only unified his solar system. “Systemic” sounds silly, though. And makes me think of “systemic racism”. Such an un-1985 phrase. Yes, I was proto-Woke and opposed to ‘White oppressors’ back then, but I wouldn’t have used that term which didn’t yet exist.
Pronounced “June-own”.
Five Star Stories creator and L.Gaim cocreator Nagano Mamoru loves music references because he is a musician and a huge music fan. Ironically, he hated the term “heavy metal” for the robots in L.Gaim, though it was a reference to his love of music. I don’t know who came up with the term. It may have initially been a placeholder that became permanent. L.Gaim cocreator director Tomino Yoshiyuki considered the name to be embarrassing and proposed “flosser silhouette” as an alternative. The term “flosser” came to be the canonical term for hovercraft in the Pentagna World.
This show looks great although I worry the animation is bare bones. Can you tell me where I should start watching? I’ve never looked into the gundam genre because I found it too confusing.