| Like many of you, I was browsing the web/reddit, when I stumbled upon the news: Another season of Code Geass. Imagine my surprise when most of the comments are about “ruining the perfect ending”. I was dumbfounded, there was near universal loathing of the ending when it first aired, how on earth do so many people enjoy that locomotive accident of an ending? The ending was a rushed, convoluted mess that threw out good story telling in favor of a tidy wrap up. While there are a plethora of problems with R2 and specifically the ending, I wanna talk about the common mistakes I see people overlook: characterization and lack of tension. In regards to characterization, I feel most people miss this crucial yet simple point: Lelouch has never cared for anyone outside of his close friends and family. Yet somehow the ending was all about Lelouch sacrificing his own life for the sake of the greater good, a noble act, but wholly inconsistent with his characterization. The opening narration from R1 made Lelouch’s motivations incredibly clear: he’s trying to take revenge for his mother and sister. Nearly everyone else is meaningless to him, Lelouch repeatedly demonstrates, throughout the entire series, that he is able and willing to throw away the lives of his subordinates and innocents to further his own agenda: the ending of R1 made this abundantly clear when he left the entirety of the Black Knights to die, in order to find his sister. You might be tempted to argue he grows as a person in R2, but he doesn’t. R2 does nothing to develop Lelouch as a good or selfless person, in fact, it only further emphasizes he is he is driven by protecting his sister and righting the neglect he suffered as a child: all his ramblings about revenge against Brittania is really about retribution against neglectful parents, which he proudly declares before murdering his poor mother and father. So where did this selfless, worldly, Lelouch come from? My theory is that the writers wrote Lelouch’s motivations to be so centered on saving his sister and revenge that they couldn’t conceive of Lelouch doing anything that doesn’t relate to those two themes. I don’t see anything else to suggest it’s anything but lazy writing: they needed to find some way to end the show in a manner that’s more satisfying than our “hero” banishing two senior citizens to the shadow realm. So they completely rewrote Lelouch (and Suzaku), threw in Schneizel as the final boss, wrote a rushed (4 episode) final arc, and called it a day. People die when they are killed, except when they don’t I can already see some of the comments saying “Lelouch did what he did to make a better world for Nunally”, but how could he? When he formulated his grand scheme with Suzaku, Nunally was believed to be dead. Before the ass pull that was the final 10 minutes, there was nothing to suggest Lelouch wasn’t wiping out all opposition because that’s just all he knows how to do, he kills people in his way. Speaking of which, how did Nunally survive the nuclear blast? For that matter, how did Suzaku survive the Lancelot explosion, and Cornellea a barrage of bullets? Have they not read Fate/stay? I believe Redlettermedia said something along the lines of “the death of a character is the point in which the author can no longer use that character to further the narrative.” The surviving characters are forced to go on without the recently deceased, and this makes for some of the most powerful drama (see: Suzaku in R1). You see, there’s a trade-off: you lose a character but get a temporary boost in drama, but you can’t have it both ways - you can’t double dip by killing off a character to advance the plot, then bring that character back, later on, to advance the plot some more. Doing that R2 as a whole is terrible because it laughs at the rules of death and every important character is wearing plot armor thicker than Kallen’s booty. I find it incredibly ironic that people are complaining about this new series revealing that Lelouch (somehow) cheated death at the end of R2 – were they not paying attention to the rest of the series at all? Fool you six times, shame on you. “R2 tied up all the loose ends” Did it? What was CC’s name? What was the source of the Geass, they allude to so many details at the last few episodes of R1 that never has any pay off. Did Nunally’s maid survive? Considering Lelouch was 30 something in line for the throne, are we expected to believe all 30 other claimants just let Nunally take the throne? How many more resurrections will it take for Orange be more machine than man? There were more questions left unanswered than answers left at the end of the series. People often talk about how the middle of R2 was the low point but I don’t see it, frankly, I’d say the middle section was forgettable, after having watching the mess that was the ending. Sure, the middle section of R2 was a boring filler grind, but it wasn’t until the final half did the train fully go off the rails. Considering the benchmarks set by R1, R2 was a massive disappointment on every level. All that being said, I’m excited for the new season, because we’ve already hit rock bottom, and it can only go up from here. |
| Isn't this just a your review of R2? |
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| Implying R2 wasn't good. |
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| I blame the higher ups in Sunrise for stretching the episodes from its original count. |
Please learn about cel animation and its technical process. Learn how special effects and backlighting were done without computers. |
| I have a hard time believing you "just" found out R2's ending is generally very well received |
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| Everyone is so upset because they simply had a different opinion than yours, and actually liked R2. It's hard to believe that different opinions exist, I know. But the world is a very complicated place. |
sky977Feb 4, 2017 11:44 AM
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 BB-8 has had enough of Lelouch's shit. |
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