Note, before I get any haters...when I say Tiga is the most important modern Ultra, I do not mean he is the strongest, or that other Ultras don't matter. Take you fanboyism and...go away. For you sane folk let's begin.
Themes
Here's a question you don't need to answer, what is the overall theme of Ultraman? No, not theme song, I got hit by that joke alteady. No theme, like good vs evil, sacrifice, responsbility. Don't say light versus darkness because red versus blue is an almost as common theme in the series that dates back to the first episode of Ultraman.
I asked this question and the answers I got were:
- stronger together
- not judging those who are different
- trying to find peaceful solutions unless there are not other options.
- Hope
These are all wrong. I will explain later.
First, lets look across the aisle and look at monsters, what is their theme? A difficult question no? Well, let's go further back and look at monsters in general. Monsters have always have themes to them, at least the best ones. They represent more than an antagonistic force, at leas the best ones. Let's take Godzilla, king of monsters himself. His most common themes are; fear of nuclear annihilation, sins of the past coming forth to harass you, and various other things. Truth be told he has taken on different themes, as of late. Shin Godzilla represented the fear of natural disaster and the government's inability to properly respond. Godzilla Earth represented mankind's pollution coming to back bite them down the line. You can see how these themes affect the nature and form the character takes.
Now other monsters have other themes, that affect their powers and forms. Mothra is a divine, Ghidorah is a destroyer, Hedorah is pollution given physical form. It's similar to Ultra Kaiju, however many...really are just monster to fight, but they do have an overall general theme.
I have heard that the idea of Ultraman fighting Monsters follows the theme of enlightened beings fighting the manifestations of mankind's sins and negative traits. That...isn't wrong. Some traits are better represented by Seijin as opposed to kaiju, but same basic premise. Now that's Kaiju vs Ultras, not really the overall series theme, and to answer that question, to get on with it all, the series theme is 'fighting for a better/bright future'. I say this because that is the overall theme of the series, thanks to Tiga.
Why Tiga Matters So Much
You know that I often heap praises on Nexus, it is a deconstruction/reconstruction of Ultraman, the series, as a concept. It deconstructs many of its tropes, and made new ones, such as every Ultra more or less charing their finisher beams now to justify why they don't automatically use them at the start. This does not make that important in the grand scheme of things. I love, I adore it, but it isn't that important. Not Mebius, Gaia, Dyna, or even Orb can make the claim that Tiga does.
Tiga didn't just revive the Ultra Series, it redefined it, or more accurately, it refined what it was, what it meant going forward. In Tiga, we had the concept of Light and Darkness brought ot a forefront. Ultras were always called 'Giants of Light', but Tiga made that mean something, something more than any series before. It did this by attaching the concept of Light and Dark to specific themes.
The Side of Light came to be representative of:
- Hope
- The Bright Future
- Anything Working Towards That Brighter, Better Future.
- Enlightenment
- Human Perserverance
- Free Will/Choice: The Ancient Giants would not interferre with mankind's choices for itself.
Those sort of ideas. Likewise darkness came to be representative of
- Despair
- Trauma and Tragedy
- Being Stuck in the Past
- Those, or things who would hijack mankind's future for their own ends, such as with the Kyleroids, Gijera and Evil Tiga.
- and Finally, the Great Filter, in the form of the big boss at the end.
These are things that have been practically consistent even to modern day, and have been retroactively attached to the older series. See thing is, the Showa Series was as gimmicky as modern shows, just in a different way. Instead of toys it was the stories and themes of each show. Jack's show was banking on nostalgia. Ace was specifically trying to be different. Taro was trying for a fairytale, Leo was darker, The Ultraman was...welll it was an anime, and had a lot in common with Super Robot Anime at the time. Finally, 80 tried out a gimmick in the form of the Main Character also being a teacher, before dropping it. There wasn't really a clear theme or such that universally carried over into future series.
Then came Tiga, and curiously there was another gimmick, Tiga/Daigo, was a human that could turn into an Ultra. He wasn't born on some distant world, he wasn't merged with an alien being. He was an inverse of Ultraseven. Instead of an Ultra taking human form, he was a human that could take Ultra form. That was not really the point of the story ,but the vehicle by which things could be asked. Unlike protagonists before Daigo, Daigo pondered why it was he was fighting, why he had to bare the burden he did, why he was Ultraman, and more or less, what being Ultraman meant.
Daigo being different from the Ultra before him, both in story and in the meta-context of the series, was a major point of the series, and basically we dived into what being Ultraman meant. Ultraman fought the darkness clouding the path to the Bright Future, which came in the form of monsters. The Darkness took on certain characteristics, traits, themes, but so did the light, with quotes like 'the power of light is within humanity' a fact made clear with the series ending. Yet it was also made clear that darkness was also in humanity.
So it was the theme of enlightened being fighting manifestations of our fears and nightmare, suddenly had more weight to it. It wasn't just a vague theme noticed by the sort of overeager intellects that dissect everything, it was literally the context of the ending of the series, what everything was building up to.
So Tiga ended, refining what Ultraman was, a giant of light fighting to protect the bright future from the monsters, the darkness that would prevent it. This is Tiga's legacy to the series, and it has been inherited by every Ultraman who has come after, and even those that came before. Fighting them, that in-universe, he's technically the oldest Ultra in the series, no?