Lordgenome

Lordgenome towers past seven feet, a wall of muscle under deeply tanned skin, with body hair thick enough to swirl into the pattern of a spiral galaxy across his chest. Though usually bald, he can erupt with a crown of red flame mid-battle, an apparent outward form of his spiral energy, and concentric spirals ring the red irises of his eyes. Guame reckons his age at more than a thousand years, yet he remains entirely human; only the red of his power signature separates him from the green glow of other Spirals.

None of this matches his youth. The boy shown in flashbacks is pale and light-haired, and the implication is that centuries of channeled Spiral Power gradually rewrote his body. He dresses in white trousers with a black belt, drapes a loose white robe around himself, and never once wears shoes.

The Spiral King rules through intellect and casual cruelty, sentencing surface dwellers to death while regarding rebellion as a welcome diversion from a millennium of boredom. Somber and shrewd, he carries an unmistakable weariness, and open defiance draws bemusement, even excitement, from him rather than anger. Underneath sits a conviction stranger than the tyranny: he counts himself mankind's protector and insists every atrocity served the species' survival, choosing suppression over the extinction he believes unchecked humanity would invite.

The warrior he once was could hardly differ more. That younger Lordgenome burns with determination beyond any Spiral Being of his era, carries a temperament the story compares to Kamina's, and hurls himself into combat with visible joy. Endless attrition against the Anti-Spirals, and then the revelation of the Spiral Nemesis, grinds that spirit to nothing and leaves behind a ruthless pragmatist. His resurrection as the Biocomputer brings out a dry, cynical wit he credits to the change of environment, and in the last battle he willingly dies to hand Team Dai-Gurren its chance, recovering the heroism he thought long lost. A lecherous streak runs through him as well, indulged through the young women of Beauty Village brought to satisfy him.

Long ago Lordgenome lives on the surface, part of an earlier human civilization, a loner whose companions are a handful of animals; one of them is the creature that becomes Guame. The Anti-Spiral attack pulls him into war. Armed with a Lagann he discovers, he joins the Spiral Warriors and climbs to the rank of Spiral General, celebrated equally as a fighter and as a scientific prodigy whose cloning research yields marvels: bodies held in biological stasis, applied to Guame and to himself; food animals that replicate without breeding; and the Beastmen, engineered soldiers that give off no Spiral Power. Victory never comes. The enemy homeworld stays hidden, the Spiral Warriors die by attrition, and at last the Anti-Spiral appears before Lordgenome personally, breaking his will with the revelation of the Spiral Nemesis. He tries to halt the doomed resistance; when his comrades refuse, he slaughters every warrior who stands against him. Aboard the Cathedral Lazengann he herds humanity back to Earth and accepts the enemy's terms: spiral life may continue provided only small pockets of humans survive below ground. He raises Teppelin, buries the Lagann deep in the planet's crust, and organizes the Beastmen into the Human Eradication Army, tasked with killing any human who reaches the surface so that fear itself will keep the species buried.

As the self-styled Spiral King, he splits that army into four branches under Supreme Generals patterned on the Spiral Generals of old, headed by Guame, his onetime pet now vaguely humanoid after centuries of soaking up his waning power. Guame also receives charge of Beauty Village, a settlement of abducted girls whom Lordgenome judges the likeliest carriers of an artificial dummy gene, one designed to turn its bearer into an Anti-Spiral scout on contact with surging Spiral Power. For centuries he takes women from the village and has the thousands of resulting children executed before any can grow into a threat, a purpose he keeps so private that even Guame misreads it as disgust at self-awareness; his daughter Nia is among the children he discards. The Anti-Spirals meanwhile refit his old flagship, the Cathedral Terra, into a false moon primed to fall on mankind should its numbers swell, hiding the true moon in another dimension to spare Earth's magnetic fields. Slowly his own Spiral Power turns against him, wearing down mind and body as more humans begin surfacing to challenge his armies.

He steps into the story after Kamina's death, informing the surviving generals of Thymilph's fall. When Team Dai-Gurren reaches Teppelin, he wakes the colossal Dekabutsu into battle mode, forcing the team to sacrifice its flagship to destroy the giant's iron hammer, while Simon, Rossiu, and Nia penetrate the throne room. There he nearly kills Nia by remotely driving one of Lazengann's flexible drills at her before mounting the machine and overwhelming Gurren Lagann with speed and maneuverability. Simon detaches Lagann to fight on without Rossiu and destroys Lazengann, but Lordgenome simply climbs out, punches the little Gunman into Dekabutsu's head, and cracks its arms apart barehanded. His gloating is his undoing: Simon rams the Core Drill into his chest and twists, and the resulting surge of Spiral Power blows his torso open. Dying, he leaves a cryptic warning, that when a million apes cover the land, the moon will arrive as the messenger of Hell and annihilate the spiral world, then smiles and lets his lifeless body drop from the tower.

Seven years on, Rossiu retrieves the Spiral King's brain and cultivates a copy of his head from sampled tissue, because the memories inside cannot be read by any ordinary machine; only a purpose-built Biocomputer lets Lordgenome relay them himself. The bemused head explains the Anti-Spirals, then powers Arc Gurren when the Mugann overrun Kamina City, and its knowledge later proves decisive in stopping the moon's fall and finding a road into the enemy dimension. Though built without a personality, the Biocomputer gradually recovers the self it used to be, joining the recommissioned Super Galaxy Dai-Gurren as navigator for the chance to face the Anti-Spiral directly. Within Super Spiral Space, where recognition becomes reality, he wills a complete body back into existence and takes his place among the thirteen key pilots of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. In the final exchange he launches a reborn Lazengann into the path of the Granzeboma's ultimate attack and gives himself up with it, refining that torrent of energy, and his own being, into Spiral Power condensed as a drill on a galactic scale. The team absorbs it, fulfilling his final purpose of opening a road for the spiral generations still to come.