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Moral Myopia / Code Geass

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  • Suzaku Kururugi
    • Suzaku has some moments which qualify for this. In the first episode, he chastises Lelouch (he didn't know it was Lelouch at the time, though), for causing violence. This is in the middle of an operation to cleanse the entire ghetto, though it's likely he didn't know that considering he's just a grunt and was unconscious when the order went out (and the ones he was with were apparently not informed either). Once he gets the Lancelot, he puts a stop to the resistance under the impression that the violence will just go away when he wins. The future Black Knights and surviving ghetto residences are nearly liquidated by the suddenly unimpeded forces of Britannia moving in (Lelouch saves them by having the Viceroy call it off at gun point).
    • This trope is Suzaku's character. As much as he claims to use right means to achieve his ends, those "right means" include aiding The Empire in subjugating his own people and others, fighting off any resistance groups that dare oppose Britannia's brutality and illegitimate rule, and later on condemning the rest of the world to Britannian conquest, all so that he can advance up the ladder and "change Britannia from within". And whenever he's confronted on this mindset, Suzaku simply diverts the blame and makes it sound like he was forced into doing all of it, with his usual excuse being his father's legacy. All of that, and yet somehow he always has a problem with Lelouch's way of doing things, even when the only difference between them is that Lelouch actually admits that his means are (at times) deplorable, to the point that he even suffers guilt and anguish over them (whereas Suzaku, again, simply passes the blame and doesn't so much as lose sleep over his actions). This is actively pointed out a lot in fact and is a product of him hiding from the fact everything he does is because he's actually a Death Seeker who wishes to "atone" for having killed his father when he was youngernote . To say the least, he's very messed up and it takes him inadvertently crossing the Moral Event Horizon by dropping a nuke on a city for Suzaku to break out of this.
    • The kicker is arguably Suzaku's differing reactions to the power of Geass. When Lelouch uses it to further his goals, Suzaku's views it as a despicable power that proves Lelouch to be a coward making others take the blame for his dirty work. However, when the Emperor uses it to further his goals by replacing Lelouch's memories with false ones, Suzaku is quite willing to go along with the whole thing without any judgement or objection whatsoever. A Hypocrite, indeed.
  • The show also invokes and plays around with the trope a bit with Mao. He can read the minds of anyone and hear any of their thoughts or urges, good or bad; but he's so immature, and has so little experience with dealing with people, that he automatically assumes that these thoughts make the people bad and will do terrible things to them for it (or talk them into doing said terrible things, or, if they actually do have real skeletons in the closet, simply berate them to Heroic BSoD). He's an Ax-Crazy maniac!
  • Those two examples are just the tip of the iceberg for a show full of possibly morally myopic characters. It's a recurring theme and by the end Lelouch has pointed it out as a major reason why the world is locked in a vicious cycle of war as no one stops to consider their enemies as still being people themselves because their own suffering at the enemies hands out-weighs that. Even early on a lot of what Lelouch's half-siblings do (such as Cornelia wiping out the Saitama ghetto) is in part motivated by them blaming the Japanese for the "death" of Lelouch and Nunnally. So they go on to kill more people for "revenge" which creates more suffering, more people to hate Britannia, who kill others with similar results etc. Lelouch decides enough is enough and cuts through it by making him the one everyone hates and having himself cut down publicly by a new Zero to guide the world into a brighter future.
  • The idea is invoked by Luciano Bradley, who comments that people generally condemn murder unless it's done by their country's respective military. He doesn't qualify himself, freely admitting that he's just using his country's policies as an excuse to kill people For the Evulz.

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