Code Geass Season 3

The Mood Whiplash in Code Geass never bothered me for some reason, and the Euphinator incident struck me as a case of Fridge Brilliance. The metaphysical stuff near the end of R2 struck me as quite silly, though.

Maybe what happened in the Euphinator incident was Fridge Brilliance but absolutely nothing can justify why Lelouch would even think to use "kill all the Japanese" as an example nor can the situation's over-the-top resolution be excused. The whole thing was just poorly done.

edited 5th Aug '11 10:45:24 PM by ManwiththePlan

I agree.

It might be because it was fated, in which case fate in the Geass universe is retarded.

Turn A Gundam has a Gundam vs. cow fight? There is now no way I am not watching that series eventually.

Yeah; hell, saying something like "Command you to screw me right now" would've made more sense in context than.... that.

Yeah. Hell, Lelouch could've said "Do a hundred jumping jacks".

Well, it demonstrated that Lelouch had a far greater interest in screwing over Euphemia than screwing her. Aside from, you know, also being vastly OOC. It always shocks me how many people seem to wish Lelouch was a rapist.

That said, in context at that point Lelouch was dwelling on things that would benefit Zero - his other potential Geass suggestions were all things that would mess with Euphemia's plans and help out Zero/Lelouch (Like, firing Suzaku as her knight).

The most plausible AU suggestion I have seen was just "Kill someone" instead of "Kill all Japanese", because it keeps the context of the discussion in mind.

Hmm. I actually like that. It's especially interesting to consider who the "someone" might be. Just for starters, since Lelouch is the only other person in the room, Euphemia might try to kill him!

edited 6th Aug '11 1:59:00 AM by Sporkaganza

I dunno about that one... She would probably try to kill Lelouch as the closest person ... Actually that might not be such a bad idea (she probably even has the strength to wrest the gun from him). Lelouch would have to survive but at least so would Euphie.

How about "For instance, if I commanded you to hand Area 11 over to me-"

And then she would try... and things would go wrong and it would gradually become obvious that she was under a compulsion, and it might even emerge that Lelouch was more than a simple student...

Yeah, I really don't see why they couldn't have thought their way around that one. It was just for drama.

To paraphrase a comment I've seen elsewhere, the majority of Code Geass consists of more and more dramatic reasons preventing Suzaku and Lelouch from teaming up, because a Suzaku-Lelouch team-up is the Instant-Win Condition of the show. As soon as they stop being on opposite sides, the show's about to end.

I imagine Lelouch used "kill all the Japanese" as an example because, in planning for how to handle the Special Zone, he probably realized that having Euphemia commit genocide would benefit his plans the most. He rejected that option, of course, but it was still in his mind, so it makes sense to me that it was the first thing he thought of when thinking, "What is the absolute last thing Euphemia would do of her own free will?"

Yeah, I theorize that Lelouch still had his desire for Euphie's plan to fail on his subconscience but...Euphie killing Elevens is something I highly doubt he'd want to happen even if it ended up helping Zero's cause at that point. So why would that be the one thing among many he could've said that he'd say? I thought this guy was supposed to be super intelligent!

I think the whole crux of the problem is that its a blatant Diabolus ex Machina any way you slice it. The writers had plotted themselves into corner by offering the Japanese Special Administration Zone as Taking a Third Option between Japan being brutally repressed and a violent revolution. Instead of coming up with something interesting to make it all fall apart (like say, have Euphy's intentions for the Special Administration Zone not be completely altruistic). Instead they go to the lowest common denominator and use Lelouch's magic to complicate the situation.

Which comes to the problem of Lelouch's Geass. To be frank, its pretty overpowered and illdefined,and really the only thing that's keeping Lelouch from winning earlier on is his sense of principle.... but Lelouch on several occasions shows he's perfectly wiling to sacrifice his subordinates to achieve victory, so restricting his usage of Geass merely on principle to me seems like an arbitrary and contrived way of creating dram.

edited 6th Aug '11 10:54:06 AM by Scherzo09

Lelouch has a weird double-standard with his principles. Geassing his loved ones is an unforgivable sin, except when he does it. And except when the person being Geassed is a stranger, at which point he is a-okay with permanently fucking up their lives.

He's principled, he's just really terrible at keeping his principles consistent. (Which is interestingly played at the end of the first series. He puts the good of the many ahead of the good of his loved ones in dealing with Euphie, and then he puts the good of Nunnally ahead of the good of the many. And as a result he achieves... no good at all. If he'd picked one ideal and stuck with it, he probably would have succeeded.)

Yeah, I can see that, but I still think the Geass needed more defined rules.

I'd agree that it's a blatant coincidence working against him, but I also think that the idea of his geass working against him was a long time coming anyway. He'd already used it to get himself out of a situation with Shirley on really silly pretenses.

In some ways, it's a lot harder for me to believe that somehow Milly and Rivalz and crew somehow didn't decide that Shirley was being too weird around Lelouch and call both of them out on it, which could have led to some significant problems what with Suzaku still attending school at the time. Along with the fact that Shirley could have rediscovered that diary on similarly contrived chances and might have gone to the police or something.

A geass like Lelouch's demands extremely precise explanation on his part. It's just asking for an Exact Words moment to come and completely wreck his plans.

Sure, he can give people any command he wants, but exactly how does that work? He goes to some lengths to figure it out, but the experiments we're shown aren't nearly enough.

What happens if he quickly gives a command but then says "Just kidding!" afterwards? Or if he gives a command to someone who doesn't understand his language? Could he give a command through sign language? Or if he gives someone a command to do something that a person can't do, but in theory could do (like some kind of complex math equation), then what happens next? Do they go find a textbook to figure out how to do it? So if he gives a really vague command like "Live on," how interpretable is it going to be? Is it based on his own interpretation, that is somehow transmitted to them through the geass, or is it instead sort of ad libbed by the target's own brain whenever it comes up?

Bringing something like memory into the equation just makes it even more complex. If we think about Shirley's situation, when he made her "forget" her memories, does that mean that it's more of a willful thing, where every time she starts recollecting something related to Lulu, she immediately stuffs it back down? Or is it more of a literal memory wipe, with her subconscious using some mechanism to repress anything even vaguely related to him? Wouldn't the latter leave a rather large hole in her life? Like, would she not even remember the teaching from classes that she shared with Lulu? Or are we pretending that Shirley has some kind of superhuman means of excising only him from every one of her memories, like cutting him out of a series of photographs?

So in a way, while the whole Euphinator incident is contrived, I'd say it takes the series somewhere interesting, and potentially ties in thematically with the power of geass and how it affects those who obtain it. Sure, it might be one of the defining moment of why Code Geass is called a trainwreck, but one of Code Geass' biggest draws was that it used relatively unlikely coincidences to take the story to really engaging heights. As long as it was remotely plausible, it was a possibility.

I'm still pretty sure it wouldn't be hard to find more in-character dialogue to make Euphemia do something violent and diplomatically catastrophic by complete accident, though. I think it would be interesting to see how different the reaction towards this plot point would be if it had been fixed up better on the first time showing.

edited 6th Aug '11 1:50:46 PM by Toodle

The principles thing is odd. The reason he never made people his slaves until the end of R2 was because of his principles and not because he didn't think of it right?

My problem is that the Geass mechanic is just too cheap a way to screw things up. Yeah they setup that Lelouch was losing control of his Geass earlier in the episode, but that just makes him cracking a joke like that even worse. You can rationalize it in-verse all you want, but the fact is as a plot device its sloppy and contrived.

Well what about this?

The two are alone in the mobile base. Euphemia's tense, but even when Lelouch pulls the gun out, she's never afraid that he'd do anything to hurt her.

Eventually he admits that indeed, he can't oppose Euphemia with violence, and that ironically, even though he had gone toe-to-toe with Cornelia and Schneizel, considered two of the Empire's greatest generals, it was ultimately Euphie's benevolent nature that let her cook up a plan capable of defeating him so soundly.

Seeing how he's already shown a sort of affection and outgoingness with her, he might begin talking about how he wracked his brain trying to figure out some kind of way to work around her Administrative Zone, but ultimately, there's nothing he can conceive that wouldn't result in his resistance movement being bled dry. He admits that he started thinking about some rather atrocious things he got so desperate, like the idea of making her shoot him on stage. At the height of his frustration, he even briefly considered having her order a massacre of all the Japanese in the stadium, or having her gun down Japanese people in the street.

And of course that's where the geass kicks in and catches on just the wrong words, and then everything goes to hell.

Like you said, it's a completely contrived coincidence, but thematically, it's still consistent, and it's an extremely definitive demonstration of how drastically a power like geass can change the world even through mere casual banter between two siblings.

Sure, it's not a direct, logical, world building convention, but there is a very concrete dramatic aesop to establish here (the "power of the king" carries enormous societal consequences). Other people may be upset over such an obvious switch in gears between drama and world building as the driving force of the plot, but the thematic concept is very hard to miss, and it still maintains a very consistent set of internal narrative rules (ie; the drama only hijacks the plot for very defined reasons).

I, at the least, think it's a bit more universal than subjectively engaging theme, but that's sort of why I was asking in the other thread what people would think of a more believable take on the scene.

edited 6th Aug '11 4:27:27 PM by Toodle

Lelouch's principle regarding Geass for most of the series was that he wouldn't use it to completely take over a person's life. He might use it to kill someone, or get them to do a certain task for him, or prevent them from doing something else, but making them his permanent slaves was something he didn't go in for.

He did that more or less to Schniezel though though doesn't really hold up.

Really Lelouch isn't that deep a character. Got pissy over his Mom dying, then pissy at his Dad for being so nonchalant about; decided to be a thorn in his ass because of it and then tight ropes between his principles/friends and his end result.

Hence why I said for most of the series. Zero Requiem was a big shift from the norm for him.

That started just before the destruction of the Ragnarok connection. Like when he Geassed all those soldiers to obey him.

But he was kind of in despair at that point, so maybe only the people he commanded with Geass on a large scale after that count.

The reason why CG is a good show isn't because every character acts with android logic, it's because people are people and make horrible mistakes. If half of the complaints in this thread were used to modify the actual show, you'd get a lifeless husk of a story where everyone acts with perfect sensibility.

Uh, no. Not ALL instances of characters acting like idiots equal them acting like flawed human beings. Some of it IS just poor writing that turns people off the characters.

edited 6th Aug '11 8:51:13 PM by ManwiththePlan