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Row! Row! Fight The Power!

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann

Row! Row! Fight the power! is from the Japanese mecha anime series Gurren Lagann (Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann天元突破グレンラガン, “Pierce the heavens, Gurren Lagann”).

Gurren Lagann is on a future Earth ruled by the Spiral King Lordgenome. Lordgenome forces humans to survive underground in isolated groups. Two teenagers named Simon and Kamina dream of going to the surface. Using a mecha known as a Gunmen, Simon and Kamina escape to the surface. Kamina hijacks another Gunmen and names it Gurren Lagann. Then, they begin fighting Lordgenome’s beastmen army along with other humans.

The lyrics are actually translated as Raw! Raw! Fight the power! on the anime series’ original soundtrack and are found in three different songs:

Do the impossible!
See the invisible!
Raw! Raw!
Fight the power!

Touch the untouchable!
Break the unbreakable!
Raw! Raw!
Fight the power!

The lyrics gained another context when they also became associated with the imageboards of 4chan.

Last September 10, Moot changed the layout of the random board /b/ so that every new post was replaced by the phrase Row Row Fight The Powah, because of the start of the Large Hadron Collider. The /b/ users started spreading this phrase to other 4chan boards such as the Japan/General board /jp/ and the travel board /trv/ in an enthusiastic effort to popularize the phrase. However, the phrase did not receive much of a following from the other boards and, in fact, several of them tried to resist the invasion, especially the video games board /v/. The /v/ retaliation became known as V-rage.

The 4chan civil war between /b/ and /v/ was depicted, at first, in a Rage Vs. Cancer webcomic by 3-Angled-Blue, followed by an Adobe Flash version of the comic, and, finally, uploaded as a video to YouTube:

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