#i get it the other way around too like contrived confusion over national differences is so boring after all these years 😭

[francisforever2014]

my toxic trait is that whenever i see one of those polls/posts like what do you think the CRAZIEST thing about the us is and the options are like. the existence of garbage disposals and other things that are just straight up lies i get all USA USA 🎺🎺🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🎺🇺🇸 not out of any actual loyalty obviously but just out of pure annoyance like can you find something new to talk about

[theironweasel]

Code Geass: With Characters Quantity does not equal Quality.

Spoilers for both this and Avatar: The Last Airbender!

I don’t think I’ve ever been quite as conflicted about a piece of fiction than I have after finishing Code Geass. First, before I get into all my issues with the show I want to share an experience I had watching it. Midway through the first episode I almost stopped watching it because I was getting sick of the racism in-show. Don’t get me wrong I’m totally willing to have racism as an issue discussed in a show, however, it didn’t come across as realistic. It just came across as undeserved smug superiority in the villains which is something I can’t stand and there was a lot of it in the first episode, I’ll also address this attitude of the Villains. It was toned down after the first episode, but part of me wishes I had given up because Code Geass is a very flawed show and I’m not sure the time investment was worth it.

The Humor: This is probably the worst aspect of the show, as the humor is really silly and lame and usually results from situations no sane person would create or be involved in, mostly involving idiotic stuff at the school. And for a show this serious, it could have benefited from some quality dark humor which would have fit the tone better.

The Music: There were a number of great tracks in this show lending to the emotional and epic moments, though I wish the editing was a bit better so the tracks could really take over the scenes.

Recap: I never thought that you could make a recap pretentious but Code Geass manages to do it. Some of what the narration says applies to what's going on but it feels less like it’s trying to say something interesting and more like it's just trying to SOUND deep.

The Fights: While there was some cool factor in the fights I found the different mechs to be rather generic. While there were different designs and powers, I never felt they were distinct enough or had enough personality to make most of the fight scenes very engaging.

The Pacing: This is probably the strongest aspect of the series as it is pretty good about building up tension and having events lead into each other pretty well. I will say the season 2 reset kinda hurt things but it did manage to get things back on track pretty fast.

The Plot: This is a bit of a mixed bag as many aspects of the plot are pretty strong but some really don’t work. The weakest of these was probably the Princess Massacre. I get the thematic implication of power corrupting a person, however, it was an accident and not a bad calculated decision, so it just feels contrived, especially since it was so close to being an ending. I feel this was done a lot better with the first F.L.E.I.J.A explosion because it was caused by the command Lelouch gave to Suzaku as he didn’t fully think through the consequences of this command into the future and his murder of Euphemia. There was also the season 1 cliffhanger which I would imagine annoyed the shit out of people at the time. This is something Avatar never did so the best comparison I can make is to the famous Star Trek TNG Best of Both Worlds cliffhanger, which I felt worked better for two reasons. One, it was a conclusion in some sense as it answered one of the big questions of the first episode of whether Riker could handle the responsibilities of Captain. Two, when the next season came out the story immediately continued instead of leading into a soft reset of the status quo. Also, there was the whole Ragnarok Connection (Which by the way, whenever someone said it made me think of the Rainbow Connection, so that took some of the drama out of things.) I’ll just say it right here, it made no goddamn sense. So God is the unconscious mind of humanity and killing it will somehow stagnate humanity, bring back the dead, and end lying maybe? Seriously even the wiki doesn’t really seem to understand it, the best I could get is that it would combine humanity into a single will, but I still don’t get how any of these things have to do with each other. In the end, the whole thing comes off as rather confusing and pretentious with all the metaphysical crap and the moralizing. This is unfortunate because it was a major plot point that the whole show was leading up to and leads into the final arc of the series.

The Villains: Ok I’m just going to come out and say it, the villains suck! One of the problems is CG’s rather fluid nature regarding its villains as a good number of the characters have done something awful and a number of villains don’t really seem to be villains anymore by the end. I appreciate the ability to turn villainous characters into gray or even good characters, but given the lack of character development for even some of the more central characters, it doesn’t work out well as often the villains are no longer villains because plot. Then there is Schneizel who at first seems like a charismatic and even somewhat reasonable villain who is willing to work with his enemies if it serves his interests. I even would have been fine if it had just been a part of a larger chess game to gain power, but then it went that extra step to make him a genocidal maniac who wants to kill billions of people to achieve world peace? Seriously, this makes Koko from Jormungand look sane by comparison. The best comparison I can make is between Princess Cornelia and Princess Azula from Avatar: The Last Airbender. Both are skilled, arrogant, self-assured soldiers who believe not only in their own superiority but in the superiority of their nation. While there are some significant differences such as Cornelia having a soft spot for her sister whereas Azula is almost a sociopath and cares nothing for her brother and whose only weakness is her absolute belief in the power of fear. (Yeah the 14-year-old from the kid’s show is the far more hardcore villain, while Cornelia is willing to kill people in battle, Azula is willing to straight up murder people.) Cornelia only wins against Lelouch when the men under his command refused to listen to him, and the battle is rather minor in the grand scheme of the story. Azula is able to conquer Ba Sing Se, the world's greatest city, kill the Avatar and defeat his friends all by manipulating the city’s own secret police into following her. But I think one of the best examples I can make is between their introduction scenes. While each of these characters has a brief scene or two where we see them before we get a proper introduction to them, the real intro scenes are where they show how serious they are about their jobs and how they deal with what they view as incompetence. Cornelia greets her sister but reminds her to refer to her by her title, which shows that she is serious about her job but is otherwise unremarkable. Then she points her rather stupid looking gun at some bureaucrat and scolds him for being corrupt and incompetent then screams at him to capture Zero. Azula enters by telling her royal guard that they are going to capture Zuko and Iroh and that she understands if they have mixed feelings about it but if they hesitate she will kill them. This establishes how serious she is about the job and it’s unnerving given how young she is. Then when she is told by the captain that the tides would not allow their ship to land when they want she responds with a couple of questions. “I'm sorry, Captain, but I do not know much about the tides. Can you explain something to me? Do the tides command this ship? You said the tides would not allow us to bring the ship in. Do the tides command this ship? And if I were to have you thrown overboard, would the tides think twice about smashing you against the rocky shore? Well, then, maybe you should worry less about the tides who've already made up their mind about killing you and worry more about me, who's still mulling it over.” Throughout the whole scene she never raises her voice or takes aggressive action and for most of her talk with the captain she is not even facing him and even plays with her hair a bit. Hell up to this point the only indication of how dangerous she is was a line about her being a firebending prodigy at the end of the last season. But one thing tells us how dangerous she truly is when she turns to face the captain and when she glares at him beating a hasty retreat it's with what Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood referred to as “The Eyes of a Killer.” She doesn’t need to shout or take violent action in order to intimidate those around her. In fact, it’s scarier because she doesn’t need to do it, she is so confident in herself that all she needs to do is put a thought in someone's head and they will do it because they know the cost of defying her. I think this is something anime generally tends to struggle with: Subtlety. From humor to characters to dialogue it's something the genre doesn’t always handle well. Not always obviously, The Devil Works Part Time had humor that was rather subtle compared to other anime, Cowboy Bebop had great subtle atmospheric touches, and Trigun was capable of having characters with subtle nuances and emotions. Code Geass was not that great at subtlety in really any capacity outside of some character aspects for Lelouch and a few others. Though I will give Cornelia the credit for throwing a knife into V.V.’s head mid-sentence which was both smart and funny.

Characters: Ok this is the weakest aspect of the show, the vast majority of characters in this show range from boring and shallow to insufferably stupid and annoying and there are WAY TOO MANY! I’ve stated how the anime I’ve seen often has a problem with too many characters such as both Fullmetal Alchemist series, Drifters and a few others. But Code Geass is by far the worst in this regard both in quantity and quality. To be honest I can’t remember at least half of their names which is not something that should happen after a 50 episode series. We range from completely forgettable characters like Ohgi whose connection to Kallen was barely looked into and whose love arc makes all the impact of a wet towel. Then you have annoying people like that whiny loudmouth rebel whose name I can’t even bother to look up. Rival and the council president are almost completely forgettable other than the president's habit of doing ridiculous shit that no one in their right mind would do or put up with. Then there’s Nina, the perverted, psychotic, genius, moron. Yeah, talk about someone whose characterization is all over the place. Compare: Robert Oppenheimer, after witnessing the result of the Atomic Bomb he had helped create thought of the line from the Hindu text The Bhagavad-Gita “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” Not only as a reflection on the awesome horror that he had unleashed onto the world but also questioning the meaning of that text as an argument for doing one’s duty and detaching oneself from the consequences which he found he could no longer do, that even if he believed it was ultimately the right thing to do he would have to live with the consequences of what he had done. Nina: “I didn’t realize how many people would die!” I get that she is supposed to be seriously unhinged, the creepy table masturbation scene made that abundantly clear, but that's not insane, it's just stupid. Then there are characters with aborted arcs like the Chinese pilot who is supposed to be dying but never does. Even some of the better characters are mostly better just because of the VAs like Lloyd who is mostly amusing because the Voice Actor is great at sounding condescending and aloof in an amazingly camp way. Or Tohdoh simply because he’s voiced by Steve Blum, who also seems to have a barely there arc with Suzaku that goes nowhere. Kallen is probably the best of the characters aside from Lelouch and Suzaku as they at least have an episode where they look into her character, and while it isn’t done that amazingly I’ll give them props for trying on that one. There’s also a trend of weird moments where characters have a reaction or do something that doesn’t make a lot of sense. Such as Kallen’s reaction to discovering Zero’s identity, I could understand a large amount of shock, but she collapses and then runs away, which I never really understood. Or Charles who insists that he really cared for his son despite treating him like dirt which totally wound up biting him in the ass in the end. There is also the problem with Shirley, who for a while just comes off as the boring love interest until her dad dies and suddenly she becomes much more interesting because she has an important connection to Lelouch that affects both their characters, though it would have been nice if they had established her relationship with her father beforehand. Then her memory gets erased returning her to boring status and would have been picked up on immediately if the school characters weren’t rock stupid. But they are so I can actually buy it. And then when she gets her memory back, making her interesting she almost immediately gets killed. It’s like Rollo killed her because she was threatening to become more interesting than him. When I was discussing the problem of too many characters with my dad he offered an explanation I had surprisingly not considered: Filler. While I was used to pointless scenes or plot points being used to kill time. I had never considered a character let alone many characters being used simply to fill up time and that's exactly what many of these characters feel like, just ways to generate plots that can fill a few minutes per episode and this sadly rings true to me given how little impact many of these characters had on the main plot or the main characters yet are present for so much of the story. Hell, there was one character in season 2 who was the son of another character who Zero killed in the first season who we only see twice and the second time is for like 5 seconds as he dies proclaiming he failed to avenge his father. WTF was that? At least Hahn from Avatar: The Last Airbender was an important plot device as Princess Yue’s fiancee and the show comically acknowledged how useless a character he was by making the weakest villain of the show only have to do half a second of tai chi to dispose of him before continuing with his monologue like nothing happened.

Suzaku: While I often got annoyed at how dense he seemed to be about how the system was never really going to change from the inside, he did work well off of Lelouch and his ultimate fate was very well done. I just wish he had more tolerance for Zero as the necessary evil to pressure the system to change from the outside.

Lelouch: This is probably the strongest element of the show as he was a pretty interesting character to start with and by the end of the show he had made a believable descent into basically being a villain. It hit me how well the show had done this when Schneizel reveals everything Lelouch had done to the black knights and at first I was with Diethard in that his actions were more important, but looking at all the people he had manipulated and killed some of whom were even close to different people it hit me how screwed up Lelouch had become.

So I said I was conflicted about the show but I’ve been for the most part pointing out negatives so where does the real positivity come in?

The Ending: This may be one of the most interesting and brilliant endings I have ever seen. I’ll start by saying when I got to the end of episode 21 of season 2 I almost wanted the show to just end with Lelouch and Suzaku seizing the throne because the whole mood was great with the crowd chanting “All Hail Lelouch!” and the implication that both have just straight up become villains, while I’m glad it didn’t and I’m sure it would have pissed off people more invested in the series, I still think it would have been a decent ending. However, that was overshadowed by the real ending of the show which was amazing! It perfectly wraps up the arcs of both Lelouch and Suzaku, condemning them both to the fates they and the world deserve. Lelouch the ultimate rebel must die as the ultimate dictator and Suzaku the Paladin must forever be his own worst enemy. It absolutely fits the themes of the show and gives us Lelouch’s ultimate scheme. While there may be logical problems with all this, from an emotional, thematic and character perspective it all works wonderfully! I wish they had given us fewer hints so that we truly thought that Lelouch and Suzaku had become evil and believed taking over the world was the right thing to do, as it would have made the end even more effective, but there were way too many hints that made it clear they had some sort of plan. I thought they were somehow going to use the Sword of Akasha to make it so Geass never existed but this worked way better. I just wish this ending was for a better show because Code Geass has too many faults to make this one of the greatest endings of all time, which it could have been in my opinion. We often see stories where it is great up until it bungles the ending. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a story with a fantastic ending undercut by the rest of it. However, despite everything, nothing could take away that ending from Code Geass… EXCEPT ANOTHER SEASON!!!!!! WHY!!!?? Ok, I get that the show is popular but why would you ruin that ending by making another season almost a decade later? For people who like the show a lot more than me that ending has to be the best of all time so it would be even worse for them. Unless they have a damn good story to tell with Lelouch of the Resurrection and they somehow make all the characters super interesting I don’t see a point to this asides from filling a demand from fans. Seriously how could it get any more epic or poignant than what we got at the end of season 2? I will probably watch the last season unless I hear it’s total crap but if I was a fan I would imagine I would refuse to watch it unless I heard it somehow gave us a better ending than season 2 did because that ending was near perfect. And please don’t tell me that there was always a plan for this, it’s almost a decade later and any lingering plot threads by the end of season 2 were pretty damn minor, hell Avatar: The Last Airbender’s penultimate scene was massive sequel bait and that just got resolved in the follow-up comic series.

In my opinion Code Geass is a flawed anime with a few very strong elements but it ultimately wasted a lot of its potential by giving us mountains of filler characters, unremarkable villains, awful attempts at comedy and fumbling a few important plot points. If there were an anime that could be totally remade from the ground up I think Code Geass would be an excellent candidate because the basic story and main characters are excellent but redoing the other aspects right could make one of the best Animes and stories of all time.