Along the way, he loses some of his humanity and are eventually defeated by his close friend and rival who adheres to a stricter moral code.
Someone wasn't paying attention for... pretty much the second half of R2.
First, an alternate history that makes the show a nationalistic tale of revolutionary freedom fighters (that the downtrodden Nipponese are lead by a British aristocrat is never questioned).
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
a race of psychic, immortal aliens
I'll give you that, not-really-but-sorta, and nope.
Thus is born the world’s first alternate history, supernatural drama, high school comedy, royal succession, lesbian romance, mecha war tragedy anime, and its identical twin second season.
Wait, what? Am I missing something here, or am I really that desensitized to ship tease?
A score of almost entirely useless tertiary characters are created and given intimations of romance for no particular reason.
"If they aren't a central protagonist or antagonist they should be flat characters who only exist as plot devices."
That aside, for someone who speaks so authoritatively, the author has pretty clearly never read or watched anything with a style remotely similar--AH, space opera, high fantasy, etc.--they all have the same sort of feeling and setting, and they are all noted for having loads and loads of characters, often including a dozen or more POV characters. Even thirty seconds of screentime rounding out a side character is a meaningful contribution that makes the world seem more real, and hence more relevant to the audience.
And finally and most ridiculously, the show asks us to accept the idea that while this band of teenagers are directing a war that kills hundreds of thousands of people, they are all coincidentally attending the same high school, where they have wacky student council adventures.
I'll grant that in a purely abstract sense, it is sort of absurd to have a decent portion of the cast of a political drama as high school students attending the same academy, but this is also a pretty fundamental misrepresentation of both the actual proportions and the role of the school episodes in the dramatic framework of the series.
First, notable characters attending Ashford Academy as of the tail end of R1 who are also involved with the political/military side of things: Lelouch, Nunnally (unknowningly in her case), Kallen, Suzaku, and CC (if only because she hangs around there and occasionaly has hijinks).
R2: Add Rolo, Gino, Anya
aka Marianne, Sayoko, Villetta.
Nina, &c. don't count because by the time they're involved with the "serious" plot they've left. So, between the two seasons, we have a grand total of ten characters who are active participants in both the "serious" and "light" plots, out of a much larger cast, and of those ten it's roughly a 50/50 split between primary and secondary characters.
Leaving that aside, the author has sort of missed the point of the high school episodes. One of the notable points is that, by and large, they
aren't just there to cram fanservice (what there is of that is fairly evenly distributed, and apart from a certain episode early in R2--you all know which one--isn't terribly common). They exist for several reasons, by my interpretation of things:
They serve to break the tension between what we might think of as coherent units of "serious" plot, decompressing both the audience and the characters who exist in both worlds. There is particular importance in the dual nature of the "heavy" and "light" plots, in terms of how they affect the characters who are privy to both. This is most important in terms of the first six characters mentioned. The school episodes are quite often about displaying more of the natures of the characters through their reactions to the masquerade. This is actually not unlike the role played by the episodes focused more on post-operation recovery and internal politicking, although it approaches from a different angle. Put another way: try to imagine how different your perceptions of those characters would have been if their only appearances on-screen had been during battles, either military or political.
Obviously, taking bits from every sub-genre and mashing them together doesn’t make Code Geass greater than the sum of its parts.
If I had to name the worst crime of the genrification (yeah, let's call it that) of fiction, it's this poisonous notion that everything has to fit into a neat little box, that all stories must be definable with a handful of descriptors. This isn't an issue with the author so much as with the school of thought behind them.
As Leafsnail pointed out: Ye gods, this person really has no sense for subtlety at all. If I had to provide an archery metaphor for the degree to which they missed the mark on their reading of the show's stance on the morality of its characters, their arrow has now reached a significant fraction of c and is accelerating out of the solar system.
not-very-well-explained Sword of Akasha
Describe the Sword of Akasha in one sentence: It's Instrumentality except with a technological-bullshit construct instead of a clone of Shinji's mum crossed with the alien mother of humanity.
OR
It's the removal of discrete individual consciousness from humanity. Not fucking rocket science. (Okay that was two sentences.)
Which is all well and good except that the show ends with him forcing the world to unite by fooling them into hating him. That is to say, he uses deception to force his views on them after all. It’s silly to expect ethics in a TV anime deeper than ‘the power of friendship and love triumphs over all,’ but if the show could avoid directly contradicting itself it would be a lot more enjoyable.
ARE YOU DAFT, LELOUCH'S STUPID PLAN WAS NOT PRESENTED IN A GOOD LIGHT. ANYONE WITH AN IOTA OF COMMON SENSE CAN CLEARLY TELL THAT IT IS IMPRACTICAL. EVEN WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE SHOW OR HIS OWN MIND IT WAS CLEARLY A DESPERATE LAST-HOPE PLAN HE ONLY USED WHEN EVERY OTHER OPTION WAS REMOVED IN NO SMALL PART BECAUSE OF HIS LACK OF GOOD LONG-TERM PLANNING AND UNDERSTANDING OF HUMAN NATURE.
The whole damned
point of the Zero Requiem was to show that there aren't simple, elegant solutions to complex problems, and that human nature is such that no plan or system, however well-meaning or well-conceived, will survive long when it involves people. Hell, you could practically call the series "Code Geass: Nobody is as Competent as They Appear, Human Nature Foils Everything.
major failures in illustrating motivations
Ah, I see the problem now. This is one of those people that watches something like this and thinks, "Gee whiz, this sure is complicated, I don't understand anything that's going on! Why are all of those characters acting based on their established personalities, ideals, and goals?"
The issue at hand, then, is a basic inability to digest and comprehend consumed material.
Nina’s crazy one-sided lesbian crush
Oh. OOOOH. Now I get what they meant earlier; when the author says "romance" they really mean "teen's unrealized one-sided crush on an idealized image of someone else", rather than "romance". I will give points about the table thing being gratuitous, though in a sense the cringe potential did quite a lot for breaking the stereotypical image of the sort of lesbian-schoolgirl-crushes that anime has taught us to know and hate.
Although Lelouch is purportedly a grandmaster-level genius and several times uses a king-shaped control device, at the several points in the story where characters are playing chess the layout of the pieces is never shown. It’s pretty amusing that the writers of a show with a prominent chess theme couldn’t even be assed to google ‘chess stalemate’ or something to find a suitable scenario to rip off for Lelouch’s tie with his brother Schneizel in R2. When chess pieces do accidentally end up on-screen, their positioning generally appears to be nonsensical and random.
GAH. The whole point of that scene was to indicate that real-world maneuvering for power
doesn't have neat, clean little rules. Also, I don't do this often, but I absolutely cracked up. Because anime is known as a medium for spending money and time animating things that aren't absolutely necessary, to the point where studios often "accidentally" create entire unintended shots as if they were filming a live-action show with a bunch of incompetent camera operators.
The bottom line: There are a whole lot of things to complain about in regards to Code Greece. This blogger managed to hit precisely none of them, instead settling for a thorough demonstration of their misunderstanding of a lot of the subtleties that made it worth watching past the point where the ham started to grow stale.
Also, it's rather laughable to complain about fanservice in a posting that's absolutely riddled with the same. Crossdressing/genderflipped Lelouch and Suzaku to distract the portion of your audience with the attention span of a goldfish? Sure, whatever, cute. The upskirt drawings? It's going to happen, they're only averaging about a 6 on the scale of bad taste, and at least it's male characters for once. That last image of the genderflipped loli-bait Lelouch in the swimsuit? AHAHAHA GOODBYE LAST VESTIGES OF CREDIBILITY.
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Topic: I like anime, do you like anime? (Read 3140802 times)