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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…
There is two problems with this conflict though. Firstly, the way that Lelouch built a resistance against his brother was not to win back his old allies and prove to them his trust worthiness, but by magically flip the whole chessboard and turn every Britannian into a mind slave willingly do his bidding. That sounds exactly like liberal fantasy fixing the system and transform it into a force for good. Secondly, Schneizel also did a board flip and get everyone on the rebel group to support him as their leader for a war which essentially is just a fight for the throne of the world. The rebel even complicit in a nuclear first strike attack on the Britannian capital which have unknown number of civilian in it.
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…
This plot point however shine the spot light on the structural problem of the whole rebels. They are just a bunch of people with no unified ideology that can let them look pass the fear of the power of geass to even offer Lelouch a chance to explain himself. They don’t even offer him a real trial before trying to gun him down in cold blood. While I’m sure there are many example in real life where people flipped out and assassinated their political leaders for less. The story decision here to let Lelouch be saved not by the quality of his ideology, or any of his policies but just purely because another broken and exploited character clung onto him and bailed him out with their life speak a lot for the quality of the rebels leadership and ideology.
That’s my main problem with Code Geass to be honest. Overall, it’s an entertaining show with the facade of anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, pretty twisting story line and some awesome mecha battle. However, the show stop short of offering any true solutions to the problems and instead just outright prescript great person theory and enlightenment dictatorship to imperialism. It doesn’t even have any representation for communism, anarchism or any more leftist groups. Instead, we had an imperial capitalist monarchism vs a bunch of nationalist monarchist of a different religion vs some liberal democracies in the background.
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.
Sadly I have heard this types of liberals pacifist both sides comments a lot from my own Viet communities. It’s highly concentrated in the new Viet dispora who came to the US after the 90s. Something about not having to pay the price for their freedom and peace and seeing how rich the imperial core is compared to their own country make them speak highly of the people who oppressed and killed their grandparents while shitting on said grandparents for fighting back.
Once again the West reminds people that “rules based order” means “you obey my rules and stop asking questions”
That table of breakdown in numbers of registration by brand in all models is wild. BYD is nearly more than all of the rest combined I think.
Westoid leaders ride on the cream of the crop aircrafts maintained by blood and sweat of millions of working classes people and billions of exploited global South citizens. Of course they have better quality and less likely to encounter problems. However the tendency to cutting maintenance and decrease parts availability to drive up profit will catch up to them eventually. Blinken already had to delay his tour this year multiple times due to maintenance issues.
I will trust it when I see it. The track record of the G7 in solving global warming is atrocious.
