"We evolve beyond the person we were a minute before! Little by little we advance a bit further with each turn! That's how a drill works!!" -Simon

Okay! I simply had to do this despite everything I've got going, just to get things out of my head. I've been wanting to draw this for a long time, simultaneously as a test of how much I've improved this year, and as a homage of sorts to one of my favorite characters, in anime, manga, books, whatever: Simon of Gurren Lagann.

I did Kamina a while back, and I'm pretty sure I listed the reasons I admired him too. Simon's a bit different. He starts out a total wimp, and only gets wimpier as the series goes on, until finally something clicks inside of him, and he realizes that all that whining, all that moping, all of that waste of time and energy he's been doing isn't going to help anyone (and in fact might lead to someone being killed). People need him, his friends especially, and even if he doesn't want to he has to "man up" as it were, and face reality.

Course, that doesn't mean he has to buckle under to it either, and I think that's what the grown-up version of Simon here represents: the capacity for change, for improvement. No matter how bad things get, no matter what situation he's stuck in, he always pushes through. Sure, he doesn't get everything right, and often times ends up making things worse, but he doesn't spend time beating himself up about it, he just keeps going.

I know I'd like to be more like that. Heck, I still beat myself up for things that happened years ago, and things I really wish I could have done differently. I'm afraid that spending all that time in the past is making me miss opportunities here in the present, and that I may have already messed up certain things beyond repair.

So what though? I'm not dead yet, so there's always time to change things, so long as I'm willing to put in the effort.

I feel these get more and more preachy the more I do, lol. X3