DON'T Stand With Them: Part 2 - The Mattress

Name: Lelouch Vi Britannia (Alias: Lelouch Lamperouge)

Series: Code Geass

Description: An exiled prince turned Machiavellan schemer who is on a selfish quest for revenge against his nation and will manipulate anyone and everyone in his path to achieve success.

So why do people “stand with him”?

First off, it must be admitted that Lelouch initially is a truly sympathetic and wronged party. As a young boy, his mother was murdered and his little sister Nunnally was the only witness to this tragedy, becoming blind and crippled in the process. Rather than pursue justice, Lelouch’s father the Emperor of Britannia opted to cover the whole event up, which infuriated Lelouch and led him to confront his father about it. As punishment for insolence, the Emperor disowns and exiles Lelouch to Japan alongside Nunnally, who is deemed worthless now. And to add insult to injury, just when Lelouch and Nunnally grow to consider Japan to be a true home, Britannia invades and conquers it. With all of this pushed on a child, it’s little wonder that he would swear vengeance on Britannia, even if he had no way of backing that up.

That is, until he was a teenage high school student going under the alias of Lelouch Lamperouge. Then he received the “gift” of Geass from C.C, granting him the power to give a single command to any person and have them obey it without fail, something akin to hypnosis except much creepier. With this power, he could finally make his dream of crushing Britannia a reality. Lelouch becomes the masked revolutionary known as Zero and wages a great rebellion against Britannia from within Japan, putting him at odds with his best friend / surrogate brother Suzaku Kururugi, who believes in changing Britannia’s oppressive dictatorship from within the system and has thus joined them. Get it? The Britannian guy is fighting on the side of Japan and the Japanese guy is fighting on the side of Britannia! Ain’t that ironic?

The first big thing that attracts so many fans to consider Lelouch the “hero” is his stated reasons for the rebellion, which are:

- Finding out who was responsible for his mother’s death, and subsequently avenging it.

- Liberating Japan from Britannia’s tyranny, thus making good on his promise to Suzaku.

- Creating a better world for Nunnally to live in, the kind of peaceful world she’s always dreamed of.

Here’s the problem, though: none of these are actual reasons. They are merely justifications. They are the things Lelouch tells himself in order to convince himself that his path is a righteous one. But the truth is that he isn’t really motivated by any of those things: his motivation is purely self-satisfaction and revenge. The daddy issues he’s never been able to move beyond are at the core of what he does. He tries to convince himself that the people he truly loves will benefit, and so will the world at large, but his plans and actions to achieve his goals constantly jeopardize or flat-out hurt those very people. He doesn’t want to avenge his mother’s death, free the Japanese, or (his most repeated justification) make a better world for his sister solely for the sake of those objectives. He just wants to defeat his father.

He just wants to WIN.

The other big reason people think Lelouch is completely justified in what he does is that the writers of the anime sadly stacked the deck in his favor when it came to presenting the other side. The Britannian Empire is mostly portrayed as full of raging oppressive, bigoted assholes who commit evil deeds far worse than what Lelouch is doing for most of the series, and thus fan consensus becomes that any evil deeds Lelouch commits are worth it if it ultimately means taking down something much more evil than him. Even poor Suzaku gets screwed, his argument for changing the system from within sounds perfectly reasonable, and yet it’s undermined with how totally inept he is at putting his money where his mouth is! Despite being a Japanese citizen rising among the ranks of the Britannian army, he accomplishes next to nothing that would change things for his people. His girlfriend Princess Euphemia is far more competent at fulfilling his stated objective than he is!

And the third and final strike when it comes to the audience siding against Lelouch would be his charisma. Good lord, does this man have charisma! Whether he’s playing the part of the aristocratic high school student, the bold and bombastic masked revolutionary, or the emotionally unstable Byronic character he truly is, Lelouch is thoroughly captivating to watch. He is a complex figure who maintains a core of humanity no matter how demonic he becomes, and that naturally makes for a fascinating and enjoyable protagonist that many find difficult to hate. And make no mistake, I don’t hate him either.

But that doesn’t mean I’m going to tolerate all the absolving that fans grant him!

Lelouch is a villain protagonist. He is both a tragic hero and a tragic villain, all for the same reasons! No matter how good he claims his motivations are, no matter how evil some of his opponents may be, no matter how complex and charismatic and enjoyable to watch he might be…Lelouch Vi Britannia is still a despicable human being.

One of the first things he does with his Geass power is to extract information out of his half-brother Prince Clovis, Viceroy of Japan, before murdering him in cold blood despite his pleas for mercy. Granted, Clovis was kind of an asshole, but he was still family and had actually been relatively close to Lelouch when they were young. The kind of man who could murder a once cherished family member with little hesitation in order to further his plans is not the kind of man you should trust for anything. What’s more, how hypocritical is this guy? He wants revenge on his father for his lack of concern for him, Nunnally and their mother…yet in seeking this he’s willing to show even less concern for his brother? There’s no spinning this, killing Clovis was wrong, and this act started Lelouch down the path of darkness (and believe me, it will come full circle….)

Over the course of the series he repeatedly uses his Geass to control peoples’ minds, which is a horrific violation of another human being regardless of what the goal behind using it is. But even more twisted is that he doesn’t always need the Geass to make others dance for him like puppets on a string. Lelouch is not only strategic, he is highly manipulative. Everything he does under the guise of Zero is elaborate manipulation of just about everyone, particularly the Japanese public whom he encourages to view him as a “hero of justice” who fights for them, when in fact he’s truly fighting for himself. The Japanese resistance group he takes control of, dubbed the Black Knights, are his chief pawns, putting all of their faith and even their lives in this man they truly believe to be their savior, not knowing that he’s an exiled Britannian prince out to settle a grudge match.

The worst case of this is poor Kallen Kozuki, who is pathologically obsessed with liberating Japan and actually romantically pines for Zero. Not only is this ironic since she dislikes Lelouch Lamperouge at school, but it’s sad because she is actually pretty low on the totem pole of people Lelouch truly cares about. His chief love for Kallen is as a reliable pawn, not as a human being, let alone a romantic interest. It really says it all when the data file he creates on Kallen lists her charisma as remarkably low.

As Zero, Lelouch’s revolutionary actions escalate to the point of terrorism, even causing the death of his classmate Shirley Fennette’s father and sending her on a grief-driven spiral toward near-insanity. Shirley is in love with Lelouch Lamperouge and, unlike with Kallen, Lelouch reciprocates enough to care for her well-being. He does some good with his Geass for once by erasing Shirley’s mind of the memories that were plaguing her, but he fails to learn from his mistakes and continues with his extremist actions against Britannia. The most blatant showcase of just how little he really cares about Japan’s welfare is when the new Viceroy, Princess Euphemia, annouces the Special Administrative Zone of Japan, in which the Japanese can have their names, rights and culture back. And how does Lelouch react to this? He is freaking livid. The SAZ would essentially end the rebellion; with nothing to fight for, the Japanese won’t have to support Zero anymore, which means his revenge against Britannia can never come to pass.

And this leads us to that full circle I mentioned earlier. Choosing his revenge over the happiness of the Japanese people, Lelouch tries to interfere with the SAZ opening as Zero, planning on using his Geass on Euphie and commanding her to shoot and injure him so that he will become a martyr to the Japanese, who would reject the SAZ as a result. But as rotten as this is, what actually happens is far worse. A contrived freak accident with his Geass and a stupid joke from Lelouch about how he could make Euphie kill all the Japanese if he wanted (seriously, who the fuck jokes about that!?) brainwashes Euphie into ordering a massacre on all the Japanese in attendance. And what does Lelouch do then? Does he take any damn responsibility for what he has done? Does he do what he can to right this wrong?

Nope! He just flat-out murders Euphemia. He shoots yet another half-sibling Viceroy in cold blood, even when he doesn’t need to (Kallen even suggests taking Euphie prisoner, which would be a far smarter tactic, but Lelouch just can’t risk his involvement in this becoming exposed). And as if he couldn’t possibly sink any lower, he then immediately proceeds to use this whole tragedy that HE CREATED as a means to advance HIS agenda, re-enforcing himself as the “hero” of the Japanese and declaring to all of them that Euphie was a treacherous monster representative of all Britannia, which must be destroyed if Japan is ever to have peace, and that he will guide them to true freedom.

Oh, what’s this? Lelouch crying to C.C about having to kill Euphie, whom he truly loved, and seeking comfort in her arms as he has a breakdown of man-pain? FUCK THAT. Remember when I said I didn’t hate Lelouch? Yeah, this is the exception. Causing the massacre was an accident on his part, but the way he dealt with it is just so evil, so selfish, so heartless…this is his definitive Moral Event Horizon, no question about it. How dare he kill Euphemia and then destroy her entire reputation and life’s work in order to boost himself up? How dare he flaunt himself as a great hero and freedom fighter for the Japanese people at the expense of a girl who was ACTUALLY fighting for their freedom solely for the sake of it being the right thing to do? And how dare he cry and wallow in self-loathing about it afterward, as if he didn’t have a choice, as if the hurt he feels at having to do it outweighs the hurt Suzaku feels at having to watch her die, or the hurt she must have felt from his betrayal of her?

And if you think I’m just overreacting when I describe this as being the point of no return for Lelouch, the point where he discards almost all humanity and officially becomes a monster, then just look at the epiphany Lelouch comes to once he’s collected himself:

LELOUCH: Perhaps this is what I’ve longed for ever since that day: the destruction and loss of everything. That’s right – destruction always comes before creation, and for that goal, even my own conscience must be cast aside. The only path left to me is straight ahead.

Now then…

Yep, Lelouch has gone batshit crazy and is going to launch total war on Britannia to the point of…destroying the world.

I believe my point has been made, Lelouch is unambiguously a villain now. He launches the Black Rebellion, throwing all of Japan into chaos and dissaray. He might have been able to succeed, were it not for the only shred of humanity left within his dark heart: the love he has for his sister Nunnally. When Nunnally is kidnapped by V.V, Lelouch just up and abandons the Black Knights, leaving them to fight, lose, and most likely die on their own. Suzaku heads him off at Kamine Island, exposing the identiy of Zero to be Lelouch (much to the horror of Kallen, who had followed him there), and Lelouch straps a bomb onto himself declaring that if Suzaku shoots him, it will go off and take Suzaku (and Kallen, whom he doesn’t give a damn about) with it! This leads to a fantastic ending setup for the series that is essentially this:

And theeeen…a crappy sequel series called Code Geass R2 fucked everything up.

Lelouch got completely reset in his development and had to go through the moral conflict shit all over again even though he crossed the fucking Moral Event Horizon already so that shouldn’t happen, Kallen lost all self respect and dignity as a character by sticking with Lelouch despite what she’d just learned, and the deck was stacked even more in Lelouch’s favor by having Suzaku also become increasingly corrupted into a villain due to a promotion he received from the Emperor. Lelouch, usually whitewashed into a genuine anti-hero instead of a villain, become a complete Marty Tzu who won all the time and whose former brilliance was replaced by unrealistic contrivance. Everything plot-wise that was wrong about the SAZ massacre incident was almost constantly repeated (to its most literal degree with the fridging of poor Shirley), and even the SAZ massacre incident itself didn’t receive any mending like it could have (there supposedly were plans to have Euphie brought back by V.V, as part of the same reason he kidnapped Nunnally, and these plans actually play out in a video game, but it ended up not happening and V.V was given an entirely different course to take, his kidnapping of Nunnally rendered totally meaningless.)

But no matter how hard the narrative pandered to the fanbase and tried to frame Lelouch as righteous, two big moments toward the end of the series just drove home what a bastard he is. One is when he uses his Geass on God (seriously, he does this) and has his father and mother (who turned out to be alive and complicit in Britannia’s evildoing all along) erased from existence. His reasoning? He rejects their plan for a better world, since Nunnally wouldn’t agree with it either and they had “missed the meaning in Nunnally’s smile”. So did you, you asshole! This is even proven later, when Nunnally finds out just what her brother’s been up to this whole time! Oh, and after all that broo-ha-ha about avenging your mother, you end up wiping her from existence!? Lelouch just surpassed himself in hypocrisy here!

And then there’s the Zero Requiem, the plan for world peace that involves crowning himself Emperor, becoming a mass-murdering tyrant even worse than his father, getting all the world to hate him, and then having Suzaku as Zero kill him, since a better world can never exist so long as a monster like him is living in it. Afterward the people of the world would unite in restoring order after the damage Lelouch had inflicted, plus Euphemia’s good name would be cleared now that everyone knows she was a victim of Lelouch’s Geass, and Lelouch would receive the karmic fate of being villified in history while everyone cheers for Zero just like with what happened to Euphie.

I appreciate the sentiment behind this, Lelouch, but, uh….

Do you really think this is what Euphemia would want? Clearing her of massacre charges through causing even more massacres? More bloodshed? And what about Nunnally? You really want to traumatize her like this just to fulfill your own warped view of atonement? And you honestly believe that this will create world peace, or that even if it does, it will last?

Now if these were all questions we were meant to be left asking ourselves, I’d be fine. But the ending is framed in a way that leaves no room for interpretation: Lelouch is doing something right, it’s a noble sacrifice, it will successfully create a peaceful world. A bullshit conclusion to a bullshit series.

This could have been done better, in fact, it has been done better with Alan Moore’s Watchmen, in which a villain launches a similar destructive plan for world peace (except that he doesn’t have to die for it) and it’s left ambiguous as to whether he was in the right or in the wrong to do this, or whether it will last or not. Alan Moore also did the Zero vs. Britannia idea better with V is for Vendetta, in which a selfishly motivated masked vigilante leads a revolution against an oppressive government using terrorist tactics, with the questions raised but never truly answered about whether the courses of actions he takes are correct, and if maybe it would be better to keep the dictatorship in place rather than risk destroying the world beyond repair.

Well, regardless of the writing failures in Code Geass and (especially) its sequel, it should be beyond doubt that Lelouch is a selfish, egocentric, sinister man who is responsible for millions of deaths and untold destruction in the pursuit of revenge. He let his own personal demons turn him into a sociopathic dickwad who uses people like pawns, who kills family members, who constantly hurts the ones he loves through his stubborn refusal to accept defeat and turn from the path he set himself on.

Don’t stand with Lelouch, folks. You’ll live to regret it….or maybe not.