(Note: I originally put this, this morning when I started writing it up, under Chat About Anything. But it kind of turned into a devotional sermon. 
So I’ve moved it here, and left a shadow link behind in the other category. I’ll be glad to move it somewhere else on mod/admin suggestion.)
I’m a big fan of anime (and related things), and I think it’s amusing and sometimes inspirational (if inadvertently so) when they pick up Christian content to use as background color.
Today’s example is Tengen Toppen Gurren Lagann. This is a crazy-awesome Japanese super-robot anime, expressly designed by its creators (the production house Gainax) to be the ultimate super-robot show. It’s a bit of a parody in a way, but a seriously affectionate one to the genre.
I don’t want to give away too much of the plot, since part of the appeal of the show is how far the characters manage to go in the space of a single-season show. Suffice to say, as entertaining as it may be in other ways, it isn’t Christian in underlying cosmology. (If anything it’s an evolutionary religion-of-man kind of thing. But it’s as goodhearted as it can be about that. 
)
That didn’t stop the producers from incorporating a VERY Christian Latin oratorio, combined with a Japanglish rap (Japanese rappers trying very hard to sound like black English rappers 
), as important background music for some of the climactic action. Instead of ominous Latin chanting, it’s awesome Latin chanting. But singing, not chanting.
The song is designed in its Latin/English counterpoints to probably refer to the scruffy human underdogs, represented by the English lyrics, fighting back against the alien oppressors–represented by the Latin lyrics.
But since the designers conveniently ignore the meaning of a few inconvenient lyrics in the Latin, I guess I’m allowed to do the same thing for their English lyrics, hm? (I wouldn’t intentionally treat the scriptures this way, but a climactic action song to a non-Christian anime based on a Latin Mass isn’t scripture. So there. 
)
So I’ve made a slightly abbreviated version of the combined song, which edits out the egotism of the rapper. I’ll email a version to anyone who posts asking for it (it’s in mp3 format).
Here’s a YouTube of the full version, not the best quality, but set to someone’s run using the song for the game Audiosurf. (You can search around for versions featuring screenshots or clips from the TV show if you prefer; people often set clips from other shows to it, too, such as Bleach and One Piece.) My mp3 is much better sound quality, btw. I tried uploading the modified version, but the forum software doesn’t accept .wav or .mp3 files yet (or anything else like that.)
I’ll provide the lyrics and some comments on them in the next posts for this thread, so as not to make one humongous entry.
So the lyrics in this case are REAAALLLLY indistinct. (Especially in the middle when talking about the wisdom of justice coming to judge the lower world in fire.) But I’ll present them below, Latin (with translation) and English both, as close to their relative order of occurrence as possible.
I bleeped out the also-pretty-standard scatological slang.
You can still hear them in the link I provided, of course (as well as most other YouTube presentations of the song.)
) rapper and his opponents who are incompetent fakers. I needed another line to make the timing come out right, though, so I decided to keep it, since it could be considered preparation by the Church speaker to meet in battle with the “fakers” holding power in hades. Leading in nicely to the next line…
)