Kamina

Everything about Kamina's look announces him before he speaks. He stands tall on a hard athletic frame, tanned, blue hair spiking upward, red eyes hidden behind pointed crimson shades he almost never removes. Bluish tattoos run the length of both arms and continue over his shoulders onto his upper back. The nodachi he carries serves as his banner of defiance.

His clothing is simple but loud: long dark-brown pants ringed twice in red at the ankles, a double-grommet belt, sandals, and traditional sarashi wrappings binding his stomach and forearms. He eventually adds the red and orange cape his father once wore, stitching the Team Dai-Gurren emblem onto it. The famous sunglasses are smashed to pieces during Thymilph's final assault.

On the surface Kamina is all noise: hotheaded, swaggering, hungry for recognition, prone to announcing himself as the Mighty Kamina. His idealism shades into willful ignorance, enough that Yoko brands him a man of unlimited stupidity, and he cheerfully insists that ogling beautiful women defines manhood.

Underneath runs something sturdier. Nothing keeps him down for long, not even learning his father has died, which costs him only a night or two of visible grief. He fights hardest for the people he loves, and in battle his charisma becomes a weapon in its own right, lifting even the timid Simon toward feats neither could manage alone and laying the foundation of Team Dai-Gurren almost single-handed.

The bravado, by his own admission, is a mask. He confesses that his fearlessness is a device for hiding his worries and propping others up, and that people like Simon are the genuine heroes. His war on the Beastmen was never about glory or revenge; he wants the next generation to inherit a world with nothing left to fear. Flashes of tactical sense surface too. The idiot act conceals a far more complicated man.

Kamina's father reaches the surface during his childhood and invites the boy along, but fear wins and Kamina stays underground with only a promise of reunion. Years later a cave-in traps him, Simon, and others in an unfinished tunnel; Kamina keeps morale alive while Simon drills everyone free. From that day he swears to match Simon's persistence, bury his own terror, and back the younger boy no matter what.

His bid for the sky begins with Team Gurren, a two-man outfit built around a failed plan to bore through the village ceiling. Jailed for the disturbance, he is broken out by Simon, who wants to show him a strange artifact unearthed in the digs. A Gunman crashing through the cavern roof interrupts them, followed by the sharpshooter Yoko Littner. Piloting the excavated machine, which Kamina names Lagann, the three destroy the invader and ride the fight to open sky.

On the surface, Team Gurren swells from two members into a full resistance army, renamed Team Dai-Gurren, with Kamina at its head. Its defining operation targets the Dai-Gunzan, a walking fortress commanded by the general Thymilph. The capture succeeds at a terrible price: Thymilph runs Kamina through and follows with a beam blast. Kamina rises once more, merges Gurren with Lagann into Gurren Lagann, and destroys the general with the first Giga Drill Break before dying in the cockpit, his parting words steering Simon away from borrowed faith and toward belief in himself. His grave is the battlefield itself, his nodachi driven into the earth with his cloak knotted to the sheath.

Death does not remove him from the story. The city raised on Teppelin's ruins takes the name Kamina City and centers on a giant statue of him, later torn down when the public turns on the government over the Human Annihilation System. Inside the Anti-Spirals' dream labyrinth, the true Kamina appears to a broken Simon, reminds him the drill he carries is his soul, and sends him back to gather the team for the last battle, sharing a final laugh over how much taller Simon has grown. He also appears briefly to Yoko before she rejoins the fight.