Simon

Wild, dark blue hair and indigo eyes mark Simon at every age, though little else about him stays constant. At fourteen he stands barely five feet tall, shorter than Yoko, Nia, and Rossiu, with a baby face that makes him read as younger than he is. The twenty-one-year-old of the war's second half towers at six foot two, taller than Kamina or Kittan ever were, with a hardened jawline, lean muscle, and a far deeper voice. By the epilogue his hair has grayed and been cropped into a style recalling Kamina's, and one eye carries a spiral pattern born of decades of unspent power.

His wardrobe evolves alongside him. The young digger wears a brown cloak over shorts and boots, with the Core Drill hanging at his neck; on the surface he trades the cloak for a blue jacket bearing the team emblem, plus a red armband cut from the cape of Kamina's late father. After the timeskip he favors a long navy trench coat with gold studs, and his digging goggles transform into red, star-pointed sunglasses honoring both Kamina and the fallen Kittan. His wandering years add a hooded cloak and a staff tipped with a great drill.

Few characters change as much as Simon does. The boy of the early episodes is polite, humble, and painfully withdrawn, haunted by an earthquake phobia rooted in watching his parents die. Kamina's relentless encouragement props him up, while Simon's cool head reins in his brother's recklessness; Kamina admits that level-headedness is the only reason he is still alive. Beneath the shyness sit a genuine gift for combat and a stubborn courage that surfaces whenever someone he cares about is threatened.

Kamina's death shatters him. Simon turns bitter and hostile, alienates the crew, and destabilizes Lagann itself until the machine rejects him as a pilot. Meeting Nia, then clawing his own way out of Guame's stone trap while the whole team watches, rebuilds him. He stops trying to imitate his brother and names himself Simon the Digger, a man defined on his own terms; even after mastering near-limitless Spiral Power he refuses to be treated as a god.

Peace dulls him into bureaucratic lethargy, but war restores his fire, and against the Antispiral he fuses Kamina's bravado with his own discipline, leading hot-blooded charges without the foolhardiness that kept landing his brother in trouble. His instinct to put others first runs so deep that he asks Rossiu to plant a bomb inside Gurren Lagann during his own trial, guaranteeing he cannot flee after saving the city.

Born in the subterranean Giha Village, Simon loses both parents to a cave-in at age seven and pours himself into digging. Only the gang leader Kamina befriends him, treating him as a blood brother. Everything changes when Simon unearths a glowing drill-shaped key and a buried mechanical face: the Gunman Lagann. With it he saves the village from an attacking Gunman and breaks through to the surface alongside Kamina and the rifle-toting Yoko.

Simon's digging wins the young Team Gurren its earliest victories, including the capture of the Gurren and the entrapment of the flagship Dai-Gunzan. But after seeing Yoko kiss Kamina, he falters in the decisive battle, and Kamina dies bringing down General Thymilph. Simon sinks into a depression so deep that Lagann refuses to respond, until Nia, the discarded daughter of the Spiral King, restores his resolve. Reborn as leader, he takes Team Dai-Gurren to Teppelin and fells Lordgenome with the Core Drill.

Seven years of peace follow with Simon as Supreme Commander of Kamina City. On the day Nia accepts his marriage proposal, humanity's millionth child is born, waking the Anti-Spiral extermination protocol and overwriting Nia into its messenger. Rossiu deposes Simon and sentences him to death, but Yoko breaks him out, and with his old rival Viral piloting Gurren, Simon seizes the moon-ship Cathedral Terra and carries the war into deep space. He endures the Sea of Despair, Kittan's sacrifice, and the Multiverse Labyrinth, where a vision of Kamina sets him free. United with his surviving allies in the galaxy-sized Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, he destroys the Antispiral with Nia beside him.

The two marry, and Nia dissolves days later. Simon hands the Core Drill to Gimmy and wanders the earth with Boota, asking those he helps to plant flowers in return. Twenty years on he is revealed as the story's narrator, an aging drifter telling a child that the lights in the sky are stars where humanity's Spiral cousins wait.