The terrorists are entirely justified in their violent resistance against the obviously evil and genocidal Britannian empire, which is something of a stand in for both the British Empire and the US.
The annoying liberal deuteragonist bumbles around for 2/3 of the show being a supersoldier for the Britannian Empire while constantly making these bizarre self righteous arguments that Lelouch’s rebellion is just too darn mean and violent, we have to support the Britannian Empire’s rule of law just a while longer guys! The longer this goes on, the more and more his world view crumbles around him as basically nothing goes to plan for this liberal who is just incapable of grappling with material reality. He ends up following his sense of liberal morality all the way to accidentally killing millions with a Britannian wunderwaffe nuke. This leads him on his jokerification arc wherein he realizes the error of his ways and actually supports Lelouch through the batshit last few episodes of this show.
Anyway, I can’t recommend this show to anyone in year of our lord 2024 because it’s obnoxiously, embarrassingly horny in a very mid 2000s anime way, because that’s exactly what it is. But I’m imagining what could have been.
It got more and more off the rails with the Geass magic at the end, but I found it pretty enjoyable
I thought the supernatural EoE-esque human instrumentality project ass shit King Charles was working on with his brother and wife came to a great conclusion and served the story pretty well in that regard.
Like Lelouch spends most of the anime with one of his leading motivations being finding his mother’s killer and taking revenge. But in what was meant to be his climactic showdown with his father, he finds his mother is actually still alive, her soul in some trippy subspace connected to the thought elevator by her geass ability. She reveals she’s totally into this “slaying god” shit King Charles (who is now immortal btw) and his brother were doing. Lelouch’s parents then drone on and on about how actually we had to exile you and Nunnally while ruling Britannia as a racist, genocidal empire built on the backs of subjugated colonies, those we’re just the conditions we needed to wield the Sword of Akasha! (the helical structure seen stabbing into the planet Jupiter). They claim this will kill the capability for deceit in human nature (???) thereby allowing the collective dead to all commune with the living (???) in an unchanging, perfect world frozen around the current status quo in terms of social structure (???)
Lelouch correctly rejects all of this out of hand for the nonsense it is. The supposedly good intentions of his parents buried this deep in metaphysical fascist nonsense are meaningless. In rejection of everything his parents believed and worked toward, Lelouch uses his Geass to request god not halt the march of time. God responds by erasing the immortal King Charles and his wife Marianne. Everything falls apart for them in an almost comical way, starting with the sword toppling over and falling away from Jupiter, and the subspace itself becomes unstable. King Charles dies, evaporating away in shocked disbelief, having previously demonstrated himself immortal. Marianne calls Lelouch an ungrateful child before she too disappears into a puff of smoke. I thought this was such a great twist to take the mystery of Lelouch’s mother, and it was a great way to tie up a lot of the lore threads before moving onto Lelouch’s confrontation with his older brother.
I think that kinda reflect the core message of the show, which is pretty libby, though. “society is bad because of bad people, and you can totally just simply wish them away”. At the end of the day, all evils can be fixed by magic. From the imperialistic empire, monarchism, fascism, capitalism and classism can be fixed by just magic them away with your command. It smell a lot like the liberal enlightenment centrist idea that everyone but them are know the truth and that the truth will destroy every opposition regardless of material conditions.
Even before that, Lelouch’s comrades who is a pretty mixed group of different nationality just give up on him when he lost his mask and reveal that he had been a Britannian prince all along. Sure there were other mistakes that he made that lead to a bunch of genocide and loses before that, but I don’t remember his comrades (outside of Kallen, his lover) even let him explain. This spoke lowly of the capability of revolutions and freedom movements by showing them as a bunch of morons who are just led by conman that’s just one revelation away from getting lynched.
I think that kinda reflect the core message of the show, which is pretty libby, though. “society is bad because of bad people, and you can totally just simply wish them away”.
See, I disagree because the events I described in my comment are not actually the conclusion of the show. Nothing is inherently solved by the death of King Charles. What killing King Charles actually accomplishes is that merely Lelouch has one less enemy so he can focus on stopping his brother Schneizel, who represents a much more competent threat than his father did, one with the connections to build the Sword of Damocles. Lelouch does ultimately use his geass to neutralize Schneizel, but he is only in a position to do so because a war is fought that spills an unfathomable sea of blood, and that is where the big shift in power structure comes from that allows for the effective revolution we see toward the end.
Now, the very existence of geass magic fundamentally divorces the world of Code Geass from ours, but I thought the Black Knight reaction to Zero’s identity and the power of Geass made a lot of sense. Learning about the very existence of geass is such a mind fuck because being put under the command of Lelouch’s geass is an extremely gross violation of bodily autonomy. It’s a serious crime to use it in such a way that isn’t directly advancing the goal of the proletariat in class war. Lelouch’s identity as a Britannian prince isn’t what necessarily loses him the support of his comrades, it’s his ability to violate people in such a way with absolutely zero accountability or oversight. They also learn that Euphemia’s massacre of the Japanese people was orchestrated entirely by geass, Lelouch never tells anyone but CC that it was an accident.
They all start to question whether their very involvement in the resistance is their own will or not. Kallen is the only member of the Black Knights to give Lelouch a chance because she is the only one who knows him personally enough to continue trusting him. Which is ironic because Lelouch did in fact use his geass on her previously, as minor an order it was.
is this the one where a character masturbates with a table?
I mean lelouch technically did the same thing by working within the system but instead of slow incremental change he just overthrew the king and psych forced everyone.
It’s been a while since i watched it but i remember thinking suzaku was a total asshole who lived to ruin things
one of my friends is absolutely convinced it is a LaRouchite anime and I’m intrigued as to what their actual analysis of it is, besides the Lelouch-LaRouche homophone
