Anpanman Character Reviews - KAIJU WEEK!
GOMIRA

Another Gojira pun, huh? This is a pretty good one in my book, too, as "gomi" is Japanese for garbage, and you know I love monsters associated with trash. That means his name translates out to more or less "Trashzilla," but while Ankora was a big dog, Gomira is inexplicably some sort of humongous platypus or at least a similarly ducky-billed tetropod, apparently perfect for chomping up scrap metal, waste paper, spoiled food and anything else people have thrown away.

Unlike our other monsters, Gomira was a peace-loving scavenger and friend to Anpanman from the very start...but he was also tiny, until Baikinman tricked him into swallowing a strange chemical concoction of his own design. This substance caused Gomira to grow in size the more he eats, and much more alarmingly, made him mindlessly violent by coating his HEART in mold. That.........happens? That's a thing Baikinman knows how to do?!

Anpanman and his freakish looking friend Vacuum Man end up literally entering Gomira and cleaning all the mold off of his heart, causing him to calm down and regain his gentle personality. Unfortunately, nothing can cure his size-changing problem, so he ends up exiling himself from society. That's pretty sad, but you'll be happy to know it doesn't last. Happy, and just a little bit weirded out.

An entire Anpanman movie actually gives Gomira some focus, when a space princess needs help cleaning up the polluted, trash-smothered asteroid that seems to serve as her kingdom. Nobody lives there anymore, but once Gomira is transplanted to help, the filth-eating dinosaur platypus and the more or less humanlike princess, uh, pretty blatantly fall in love with each other.

This relationship is never, ever touched upon again, but we do get some glimpses in subsequent stories that Gomira is still up there, still munching his way through a tiny world's environmental problems, and we can assume having a pretty sweet ass life with a wealthy aristocrat whose tastes are just a little more eccentric than most. GOOD JOB, Gomira!!!

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