Beets: Deaths in the Story

My mother and I planted beets in the garden back in the spring. My grandfather had a Greek recipe for vinegar and beets we wanted to make. Then we forgot about the beets. They became...huge. My roommate had never eaten beets before, and we needed to see if the beets were still even edible… So I peeled and cut the biggest one we had. Turns out, when you peel and cut a beet, that beautiful red coloring gets all over your hands, your knife, and your cutting board. My roommate was horrified and told me I looked like I had just killed something. After pointing out I had essentially just killed the beet, but also that the beet wasn’t really alive, I placed the slices of beet in a casserole dish, covered them with water, and nuked them in the microwave for seven minutes so we could have a side of boiled beets with our dinner that evening—assuming the beets were still good.

Something you may not know about beets: they are super flavorful. And, they’re pretty sweet. Beets are really difficult to eat if they’re raw, but they become a delicious warm side to dinner or cold topping to a salad once they’re boiled. There are actually a lot of recipes for beet salad. Like this one with walnuts, and this one with mint and garlic, and this one with cucumbers... Reading them has my mouth watering, but that’s not all beets are good for! There’s also soup! If you decide to chop your beets finely before boiling them, you can just leave them in the water and have a lovely beet soup as the water will thicken a little with the same color and sweetness as the beets. This is a really simplistic beet soup, however, and if you’re not trying to make tasty beet broth boil the beets in a pot on the stove with their skins on. Then you can peel and cut them however you like, although it’s a little messier than peeling and cutting them when raw. But, if what you’re after is a more traditional, heartier beet soup, there’s no better place to turn than borscht. Like this Russian one with bacon, or this Ukrainian one with potatoes. Borscht is delicious both hot and cold, so you don’t even have to worry about forgetting about it!

Essentially, what I’m saying is that these red root vegetables are so versatile and easy to prepare you literally have no excuse for not preparing and eating them. Also, that when preparing them you may look like a blood-spattered murderer.

Speaking of blood, let’s talk about other things that might be good for you, such as a poignant death in a piece of media you love. I know, seems like a strange segue, but I’m about to relate a very personal story to you about how dealing with the death of a character I loved prepared me to deal with the death of my grandfather, who loved beets.

Gurren Lagann is what is commonly known as “a mecha anime.” This means one of the main things this anime revolves around is giant robots! These animes tend to fall into a bunch of tropes, mainly the shounen anime ones. If you’re unfamiliar with these tropes or need a refresher course, allow me to direct you to the informational treasure trove that is TV Tropes. What I like about Gurren Lagann is that it breaks a ton of those tropes. This may be a coming of age story about a boy with a giant robot, but it’s also a motivating and humbling epic about family, what constitutes humanity, and the right to really live.

But what story about life can really drive home its point without pointing out the transience of it?

The three main characters of Gurren Lagann are Simon, Kamina, and Yoko. Simon is the main character, a little boy from an underground village who spends his days looking for materials to bring back to the village. Kamina is the village trouble maker, always rambling about how they should break the earthen roof of their village and go to the surface. Yoko is a girl from the surface that the two boys meet when a giant mechanized monster breaks through the ceiling of their village. Yoko is fighting it. Kamina and Simon end up helping—Kamina with the only sword in the village and his trademark wise-idiot routine, and Simon with the strange mecha he found while digging that day that couldn’t possibly play an important part in the overarching story, why would you say that, no. Next thing you know, Kamina and Simon have joined Yoko’s band of surface dwellers, fighting against the beastmen who control the giant robots called Gunmen.

But even though it’s Simon that’s the main character, it’s Kamina that affects change throughout the first half of the series. He’s the one that thought bigger than the villagers by trying to break through the roof to the surface. And he thinks bigger than the surface resistance party by suggesting that instead of just fighting off the beastmen and their giant mecha every day, they take their mecha from them instead and take the fight to the beastmen at their own base. Kamina is an interesting blend of anime character tropes. He is the “big brother mentor” character to Simon. He also presents aspects of “the leader” and the “wise fool.” TV Tropes seems to consider this particular blend of tropes to be a trope called “the fearless fool”—because as you will see when you click on this link, Kamina and two of his quotes are being used as the image and caption for this trope—but I would have to disagree to some extent. What is interesting about Kamina is that he appears to be the fearless fool. He seems like a character full of bluster and wise-sounding bits of nonsense, but what he often reveals in quiet moments of clarity is that he knows the risks and dangers of his actions, but chooses to be courageous in spite of them because he can’t bear the alternative of living in fear below the surface of the earth. Kamina’s actually forced to confront very early in the series that he may well die trying to take a Gunman from the beastmen.

Kamina is full of memorable and inspirational bits of dialogue. Like this one:

And this one:

And this one:

That last one is so popular with the fans, it’s been turned into several variations of motivational poster.

The point is, to both Simon and the viewer, that can be a real inspiration. I know it was for me. Kamina was the driving force behind Simon’s courage and Yoko’s belief in their success of winning a war against the beastmen.

And then he died.

It was unexpected. Kamina was the sort of character that wasn’t supposed to die. He was the leader. He was the fool. He was the big brother mentor. He was the sort of character the tropes told the audience was invaluable to the story. He wasn’t supposed to die.

It took me two weeks of crying and trying to rationalize what had happened to come back to the show. I was incapable of understanding where we were supposed to go from there. Kamina was not the main character, but I didn’t understand how Simon and Yoko were supposed to continue without him. Where would Simon find the courage? How could Yoko believe her small band of rebels could be victorious?

Ultimately what brought me back to the show was deciding that Kamina wouldn’t have wanted me to give up. I came back and cued up the next episode to watch Yoko and Simon dealing in the same way. Yoko went into hyperdrive trying to fill Kamina’s shoes, spurning people from her and trying to do everything by herself. Simon was an inconsolable lump. Both of them were grieving, both of them unhealthily. Now, we don’t live a world that requires us to deal with our grief in the span of a twenty-two minute episode, but for the sake of argument, let’s say that the course of Simon and Yoko resolving their grief within that time period is both realistic and doable. Simon finds the strength to fight again and Yoko finds the strength to cry. Both of them find this when they are reminded of the aspects of Kamina they were forgetting about in their grief. Even from beyond the grave, he is inspiring them to grow and evolve.

Kamina had to die in the narrative for Simon to develop into the real main character, the one that carries us through the second half of the series, fighting for humanity’s right to exist without chains, restrictions, or limitations. And none of that would have been possible if Simon had won the first war fighting from behind the shield of Kamina.

What I’m trying to say is that Kamina’s death achieved two things: it furthered the development of the story and other characters, and had a great effect upon the audience. The best deaths in fiction are the ones that help us carry the effect of the real thing when it unexpectedly sneaks into our lives. Carry the burdens you can afford to without letting life be a prison. That’s different for everyone, and I don’t have a perfect answer for how to grieve or deal with death. But I know this death in this piece of media helped me to remember my Papu when he died in a way that helped me to continue to work towards my own goals, cry, and eat yummy vinegar beets with my mother.

One last note: don’t watch the English dub of this one. It’s so lackluster in comparison to the Japanese. Trust me on this.