I didn't like Gurren Lagann. Really, there was nothing special about this show. At all. Seriously, it wasn't that good.

Now, my main peeve with Gurren Lagann is it's inability to decide what it wants to be. It stuffs as many genres as it can, rather sloppily, into a tiny package with little-to-no substance. So, in my quest to figure out the appeal, I found myself questioning various fans, who, as a whole, appear to have the same difficulty as the show.
"So, what's the appeal? I found it to be, among, the least enjoyable shows I've seen. What made such a stupid show so popular?" I says.
"Well," nameless Gurren Lagann fan 1 replies, as-a-matter-of-factly, "It's that Gurren Lagann wasn't meant to be smart. It's a parody."
"Huh? A parody? But it certainly wasn't very funny," I respond.
"Oh, that's because it's not about the comedy!" exclaims Gurren Lagann fan 2! "It's about the adrenaline. It's a full-blown bona-fide action show!"
"Odd that you say that, I never once had adrenaline rise while watching GL. In fact, a good portion of the fights were snoozers, nearly fell asleep out of sheer repetition. The most exciting fight was the first one with Viral, and even then, I've felt my heart pound more intensely by watching two sleeping pandas duke it out."
"Oh, you're right about the fights," inquires Mr.3. "But, that's because GL isn't an action series, it's all about the characters" - What? The characters were so unoriginal it made my head hurt! - "and their interactions!"
"I'm not even going to go there. All the characters were weakly constructed."
"Kamina was the greatest character ever! That's why this show is so good! It's such a MANLY and EPIC series!" retorts an angry 4.
"So, having the mental capacity of a toddler is 'MANLY' and 'EPIC'?" I find myself asking.
"No! Everything was got really big! 'cause 'epic' means 'large'!" declares Mr. 5.
"But.... in 4th grade I came up with somthing far bigger than anything in GL. It was called 'Chickennuggetzilla'. He was 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles on all sides, and was shaped like a chicken nugget. He was very angry and had magical ice breath. Ice breath that was on fire. And the ice would freeze anything it touched forever, while confusing it due to the immense heat at the same time. Isn't that about the same level as GL?"
"You're dumb! That's not an insult, I'm stating that as a scientifically proven fact, although it clearly isn't and I'm actually the one who is stupid," explains 6, whom notable has fantasies of people brushing teeth with male genitals.
And thus sums up the fanbase of Gurren Lagann. Not a very pleasant sight, very few are remotely tolerable.

So, in conclusion, I feel I should dress my baby brother up like Odysseus and film him as he beats up evil teddy bears with a stick and indicates to the viewer the location of ones nose and toes, post it on YouYube, and it'll become an instant success - as the World's most MANLY and EPIC adventure ever. Even more than Gurren Lagann.

Now, enough of the rambling I suddenly felt the need to edit in, and on with the review:

Story:
Okay, so there's this dude and he digs a lot. It's, like, his job or something. Who knows why he's digging, and in a civilization that already lives underground, no less, simply making the whole "We're going to dig" that much dumber. So, he's an outcast and only one person likes him, but that guy happens to be an imbecile, so he doesn't count. So, we have a dude who hasn't got any balls and another whose balls have exploded from the overabundance of testosterone. Okay, then, this giant thing attacks the village and they use ball-less dude's silly robo-face - which he happens to have discovered not long ago. And they leave the village because..... actually, I don't really remember why, specifically, because Kamina was being too much of a dumbass to form a coherent explanation. And, somewhere along the lines, they discover boobs - really big, scantly clad boobs on a scantly clad lady - a scantly clad lady who's character was about as original as everything else in the whole bloody show, in other word, none of these characters took any talent to come up with. At all. And, as these characters are driving the story, the story manages to fall flat on it's lame, generic face. The plot is about these characters fighting against the evil king that has oppressed them to the underground. *twirls finger* How engrossing. Oh, and there's some stupid plot twist that leads up to the final handful of episodes. It's pretty stupid, but nobody watching really cared about the plot anyway.

Art:
Art? What art? There's nothing artistic about Gurren Lagann! It's GAINAX's pitiful attempt at making another FLCL! It tries to be outlandishly crazy, but it constantly to the exact same animation techniques as FLCL. The characters have cliche "cool" character designs; the backgrounds are nothing more than a bunch of rocks; the fights consist of someone hits their enemy who spins uncontrollaby through the air and crashes, then an overused power up sequence which gets add-ons later in the show, but it doesn't make a huge difference - there's an occasion where something gets an elongated limb, but it's still nothing interesting.

Sound:
Average quality. Nothing special. Voices were okay when they weren't yelling; when they yelled, it was usually done by an annoying character - which was often.

Characters:
Do I even have to talk about those? They were lame. Simon was irritatingly lame - he's afraid of everything for the first half of the series, then his character magically developes into someone whose not quite as much of a pansy, but still a loser. Where have we seen this before? Oh, every other freakin' anime ever created! Kamina needed to learn to shut the hell up, everything he ever says is stupid and he constantly states the "moral of the story", which has always been a peeve of mine. This is worse than usual, as it's an excessively stupid moral like "Don't believe in you who believes in yourself, believe in me who believes in you." Okay, it was funny the first 2.5 times, but after the 10th I wanted to shoot Kamina in the face, and that's not nearly the last time he says it before *SPOILERS!!!!11!1 like anyone gave a damn about this story* he dies *END SPOILERS!!!1!1!!*, and even after that, they continue to spew such a pathetic notion, making it painful to watch the show or care about any of said characters. Yoko has big, bouncy boobs and shoots a lot of stuff, that's about all.

Enjoyment:
Not very much. The story was bland, the characters were bland, the dialog was bland, the fights were bland, the art was bland, the sound was bland, everything was bland. There was no "Epicness" that I'd been promised so many times, just big robots. Big robots =/= epic.

Overall, 3. Bad. Didn't like it. Unenjoyable. Predictable. Uninteresting. Bland. Any other negative term you can possibly conjure. It was not good.