Gunmen

Gunmen, also spelled Ganmen, are the primary mecha of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann. The label reads as face, and true to that, every unit is built around a face, so the models vary wildly and seldom repeat. A human pilot drives one on Spiral Power, or fighting spirit, while a Beastman runs it on electricity instead.

Weaponry ranges widely: the crudest machines swing clubs or fight bare-handed, while more advanced ones carry solid or beam arms. The gunmen codename was pinned on a system first described in far clunkier terms, a man-machine interface meant to share expanded awareness between pilot and mecha. The face houses an array laid out like the cortices of a brain, echoing its functions, and information passes straight into the pilot's mind, shown on a central screen through specialized symbols.

Working control sticks, the pilot sends neural signals to the unit, reads the battlefield in fine detail, and moves the machine as naturally as moving their own limbs. Because the design already accounted for fighting in space, no retrofit was needed when Team Dai-Gurren rode their Gunmen up into orbit to face the Anti-Spirals.

Lordgenome engineered the Gunmen roughly a millennium before the series, at first for mining resources on the moon, then turned them against the Anti-Spirals; his fleets leaned on gigantic Dai-Gun models such as the Arc-Gurren and the Dai-Gunzan, far more common than the smaller units seen later. Once he bent to the Anti-Spirals and came back to Earth, he handed the machines to the Beastmen to wipe out surface humans. The rebellion that Team Dai-Gurren sparked spread as people tore Gunmen away from the Beastmen and marched on Teppelin.

After Lordgenome fell, the new regime outlawed the Gunmen, scrapped them, and rolled out the Grapearls in their place, drawn from study of Gurren Lagann; those replacements floundered against the Mugann for want of Spiral Power. By the epilogue barely any Gunmen survive beyond the Super Galaxy Dai-Gurren and Gurren Lagann itself, with Grapearls filling out most of Earth's armed forces.