Would people sympathize with Suzaku more if he were the protagonist?

Would people sympathize with Suzaku more if he were the protagonist?

No, people hate moralfags.

I don't understand how anyone could think he's anything but the hero.

Obviously. Looking at Shiroufags.

Do they, now?

he was in my mind
fuck lelouch

God I hate moralfags
I wish more anime had main characters who weren't pissy and had the balls to kill those who got in their way
Light, Guts, Lelouch, that's really all I can think of. We need more antiheroes in anime.

Yeah, probably. You'd look at things from his perspective and probably think Lelouch is the biggest cunt of all time for killing Euphy and shit.

Euphemia had it coming 2bh

Nah, I would have just ended up rooting for the antagonist.
I'm pretty sure Lelouch's character was built like an antagonist anyways. His backstory sounds like a villain origin story, and then there's the similarity with Char.

Nope. Lulu is douche bag cunt.

Most people in Code Geass were pretty unsympathetic to be honest.

Then they should love Suzaku because he's that character being viciously broken down.

No. Nobody wants Kira Yamato in disguise.
We need more Char-like MCs

Lolicons with mommy issues?

Exactly.

YES

Char wasn't a lolicon
Revolutionaries with mommy issues, that's right

no
Suzaku is about as interesting as harem anime MC 572
he's a dud, boring as fuck

His reasoning didnt make sense all the time. One episode he was against something but if it suited his needs he would do it. Like a moral fag would do.

Honestly, I hate him is because of the "killed his own father thinking it would prevent the war" thing and the bit where he's opposing the more charismatic and intelligent protagonist. He'd be fairly sympathetic to me otherwise.

You could say he just wasn't the hero his world needed.

Brittania, being a monarchy with an evil king, was corrupt and racist from the top down. Schneizel could be an okay successor, depending on how he governs when he's not trying to re-enact greek myth. Euphemia, while a good candidate for the throne based on not being a total monster, is pretty far down the line of succession. Frankly, the only way somebody suitable ends up on the throne of Brittania is if everyone else gets eliminated, and that's assuming you ignore the inevitable coup attempts and consider a monarchy with a single good ruler (and no real guarantee of a benevolent successor) to be an acceptable end goal.

Britannia isn't a system you can reform from any place but the throne, Lelouch understood that.

loli_master.jpg

The Code Geass camera wasn't very interested in making him too sympathetic, outside of a couple of situations, but it is likely that would have been the case if he were the protagonist. There are definitely a few super Suzaku fans either, just like there are those who don't like Lelouch as the protagonist.

>Suzaku is a hypocrite
Stop the presses.

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I liked Suzaku. He was incredibly naive but right.
The problem is that he was also a hypocrite. His method of working the system from within was noble and it's essentially what he ends up doing at the end. He reaches the top and plays an important role in reshaping all Britania.

What's cool about Suzaku and Lelouch is that both adopt the other's philosophy. Lelouch wants to assume control through force and that the ends justify the means. Suzaku doesn't think that the ends justify the ends and wants to fix the system from within.
So in the end, Lelouch fixes the system from within and Suzaku accepts that the ends justify the means when you play at a high level. What sucks is that the transition Suzaku went to switch philosophy just comes out of fucking nowhere. And it's weird when he seemed so stern about never changing his philosophy but then randomly changes it when the plot demands him to change his mind.

I feel that Suzaku would have been a much more sympathetic guy if he had had more doubts about what he was doing but still kept doing it. But the guy was always so sure he was doing the right thing all the time, and that terrorists were cunts despite Britannia killing numerous civilians and being jerks to elevens, it was mind numbingly annoying. The worst kind of moralfag.
In the end the guy just couldn't admit to being wrong because that would have meant he was wrong to kill his father. There was nothing noble or likeable about his motives.

Just a picture.

suzaku made me salty the entire fucking show, which is exactly what you want out of a rival, isn't it?

I had mixed feelings about the fight with kallen.

people say code geass was a trainwreck but I think they wrote it to do exactly what it did, just get people to yell at the tv.

yeah char definitely had a preference

He wouldn't really work as the protagonist. Up until he gets geassed, his goal is to literally be an obstacle and die in the process. Not to mention Code Geass was written as such that pretty much everything was either caused by or revolves around Lelouch. It'd be hard for him to be the star.

>which is exactly what you want out of a rival, isn't it?
Is it? I'm used to liking the rival more than the protagonist. Since he's usually the so much cooler than thou character.

>So in the end, Lelouch fixes the system from within
What? Lelouch kills Charles and usurps the system. You can't really say that's the same 'change from within' Suzaku wanted. It's exactly what Lelouch set out to do all along.

some people jizz themselves over moralfags though

I had a friend who moralfagged it up when we watched the departed. I kept yelling for dicaprio to shoot damon, and he was yelling at me that he can't do it.

that's really common these days before numales can't identify with non-shinjis, but personally I like rivals that actually feel like threats to the main character. the show is boring when the mc survives via plot armor and the rival is just there to make things happen

His moralfagging was a facade though. His philosophy was just him forcing his advice on others, because he didn't want people to feel the pain he felt from killing his father, and he risks his life for others just so he can die a good boy. That's part of why the Lelouch/Suzaku dynamic was so interesting. Lelouch was a false villain, and Suzaku was a false hero.

Suzaku's entire enterprise seemed like him trying to justify his action by making something of it, which isn't far from a consequentialist mindset. But Suzaku's conscience couldn't accept that. So he wound up fighting for Britannia out of an obsession with being right and doing things 'legitimately' in hopes of getting a good result, while hoping to self-martyr himself for the things he did. He was awfully confused and something was going to give eventually.

Like Lelouch, he had too many hangups and could only get somewhere by getting over himself.

Lelouch didn't want to rule Britannia. He wanted to wipe it off the face of the earth. There's a difference between forcing stealing the house and cleaning it up to fit your standards, and burning the fucker to the ground.

He had no preference. Lalah was the only underage female he loved. Quess was used because of her abilities. Just show her some signs of attention and she turns into ice cream in the oven.

It's pretty obvious he wanted to destroy the concept of Britannia rather than literally dissolving/glassing the nation/continent. It's like when he was forming the United State of Japan and told everyone to dismiss the 'old Japan', and that he'd be creating a 'new Japan'. And that's precisely what he did for Britannia as well. He destroyed the 'old Britannia' and created it anew, like he said he would with the world.

So let me get this straight:

Lelouch wanted to overthrow the government through violent means. He was accomplishing a "good" thing through the "wrong" methods, and was effective in his approach.

Suzaku wanted change as well, but he wouldn't take any short cuts. He was accomplishing a "good" thing through the "right" methods, but his approach was pretty much impotent.

Lelouch was only really driven by a desire to protect his younger sister though and Suzaku just wanted to be a good boy. In the end, Suzaku bit the bullet because he began to realize how cheap his facade was. He was pit between accepting that he was ineffective and maintaining the delusion, or adopting Lelouch's principles and taking the shortcut. If his objective was for the good of all, being caught up in his own vision of morality would not benefit anybody. Instead, the death of his own morality would benefit the world significantly.

Suzaku adopts some values of Lelouch, realizing that sometimes in order to accomplish great things, you must take unsavory paths.

lelouch only went false villain after he accidentally killed euphie

naw I think char was a lolicon because he's the self insert for a lot of the gundam fans

The only reason Shirou doesn't receive more hate is because Fate is full of dumb shit and so its detractors must spread their disdain equally across the multi-faceted failure.

He was a false villain from the beginning because he was pretty much a terrorist, not to mention all the 'evil' things he did to achieve his goals, and the fact that the typical moralfag gundam genius pilot MC character stood against him. After he kills Euphie he becomes something like a false savior, then eventually transitions into a true savior.

Lelouch didn't have a violent grudge against Japan and was prone to destroying things he despised. Only later he expanded his mindset and Britannia was also something he could bend to his will and use to shape the world as he saw fit.

What's the connection?

gundam fans are weird. that's the connection

did everyone ever come to a consensus? lelouch is obviously alive, right?

That's not a connection at all

I'm sure Lelouch is smart enough to understand that you can't literally physically destroy Britannia without massively inconveniencing the gorillians of citizens. I mean he's not that big of a douche. There was even one time where Lelouch explicitly states that the enemy is not "Britannians", but "Britannia". The Black Knights also comment that Lelouch was basically destroying Britannia when he first assumed the throne, doing things like demolishing the grave of emperors or something and dissolving all royalty (except for himself). Without a doubt he meant to figuratively destroy Britannia, not literally.

Let's be honest, his excuse that he was making the world a better place of Nunnally was complete bullshit. He probably didn't even believe it himself by the end.

What would he care if the house fell apart? "Britannia" was embodied by those ruling it. He cuts off the head and the body dies.

I don't see where before R2 ep21 he had any desire to be the new head of Britannia and direct actions. If the country fell to pieces, what of it?

u wot

in every episode up to the end the only thing that ever freaks him out is when nunnaly isn't safe

he throws the battle at the end of the first season to save her

he exposes himself to suzaku, potentially threatening everything, just to save her

degenerate detected

Again, he's not so evil as to not care about millions of innocent citizens.

It wasn't an excuse, not in Code Geass, he truly wanted to make a better world for Nunnally.

He literally gave everything up for Nunnally.

If Season 1 existed in a vacuum and had never been followed up on, Suzaku's status as The Hero Of The Story wouldn't even be questioned.

The whole arc of season 1 is a classic "stare into the abyss and it stares back," narrative. Lelouche is doing good, but he uses impure methods AND he has impure motives, and CC's old pet even shows up as a foil for him to foreshadow what will happen if he doesn't change his course... and inevitably he doesn't and it happens, leading to an absolutely unforgivable sin (its still tragic in that he ended up doing it involuntarily, but its not like he didn't go into that room planning to do it).

Menewhile Suzaku maintains the purity of his beliefs AND his methods even if at times he's forced to do things he knows are wrong. He swallows his own pride for the sake of a greater good, and as a result he has the opportunity to do objective good along the way.

When Season 1 ended with Lelouche in chains at the feet of the Emperor, and Suzaku asking to be raised to the Knights Of The Round for his service and getting it, I honestly thought Geass was one of the best animes I'd seen in a decade. The twist of the Antihero MC who had slowly downward sloped toward outright villain actually LOSING and Moralfag Antagonist Character actually TURNING HIS FRIEND IN TO ACHIEVE HIS GOALS BECAUSE HIS BETRAYAL AND DEEDS WERE BEYOND FORGIVENESS blew my mind, it was so unlike what was typical for the genre at the time.

Too bad Season 2 cocked it all up with needless complexity and hamfisted forced character changes and dumb plot devices.

Well yeah. At one point he thought she was dead and Suzaku pushed him to stop bullshitting and admit it was something he wanted to do. He started his rebellion before he even got the idea from her.
Because she was his sister and also his excuse for justify his actions. Walter White did the same shit with "muh family" and "muh Jesse" and while he cared about them, they were excuses for him to do what he wanted. Trying to put everything on your loved ones like that is wrong; it's practically blaming them for your actions.

Plus at the end of the series, Nunnally's comeback through a wrench in his plans and Suzaku had to get him to accept that even she may have to be sacrificed to achieve their aims.

Suzaku "kill my father because I'm a cunt" Kururugi, a moralfag? He was one of the most selfish fucking characters in the entire series and just used his bullshit morality to try to hide how shitty he was.

he started the revolution because he was bored, and he accepted the price of that. he also did it because he thought he and nunnally would be killed if their secret was ever discovered

there's not really any point where he willingly puts nunnally in danger. it's just that in the end, he knows schneizel will kill her willingly, and so he can't back down.

Britannia doesn't have to exist for him to show his concern though. What if revolutions broke out? Would it be compassionate for Lelouch to keep it together even if that's not what they desire? Would he have to force something on them?

Yeah, I mean, when a Monkey's Paw gives you a Superpower and the very first thing you do with it after you have time to really weigh your options is ride into a warzone so you can grill a family member for information and then murder him in cold and blood, its pretty laughable when you turn around and say you did it for your poor blind sister who hates violence and doesn't want a thing in the world except you to be safe and spend time with her.

Lelouche may be among the most selfish of all anime protagonists. At least if you don't count outright Villain MCs like Light.

So it was something he wanted to do, not something he had to do for someone else's sake. Nunnally's dream world was a desire, not a request, and it conveniently fit into what he wanted to do anyway.
>there's not really any point where he willingly puts nunnally in danger
That does not matter. Of course he wouldn't put her in danger. But by the end, if he had no choice, she would have to go. That had been decided.

His motivations were certainly self-serving, but you can't argue against the results. Hell, the only reason he even went through with his final plans was because that dumb cunt Jewgi forced him out of the Black Knights over some dumb horseshit.

you've got very ambiguous and poorly defined problems

lelouch is evil because some small aspect of what he wanted to do wasn't completely and 100% self-sacrificing? therefore he's an evil, ruthless murderer?

he never said he'd sacrifice nunnally. he said he couldn't just stop just because she was in schneizel's hands.

Considering all the completely innocent people he used, lied to, butchered and ruined, I don't think its all that unreasonable to consider Lelouche evil regardless of the purity-to-impurity ratio of his motives, desu.

Remember that time he killed an entire other rebel army and framed their mutual enemies so their best soldiers would join his army in a vengeful rage? What a hero.

I'm not even calling him evil, I'm having him own up to his actions and beliefs. I think you're being overemotional and fanboyish.
>he never said he'd sacrifice nunnally.
I didn't say that he said that but the implication is that if, for whatever reason, his sister is an insurmountable obstacle, she would have to be surmounted in order to achieve his aim. This had been decided while his sister was presumed dead and she couldn't get in the way. The ball would have to keep rolling.

why is lelouch evil for killing the rebels? they heavily hint that the rebels are just as evil as the britannians.

you're arbitrarily throwing some people into "can't kill THESE guys, that's evil" groups when pretty much everyone in the show is a killer.

zero never even geassed anyone in the black knights. how was he "using" them?

only real dick thing he ever did was smack pizzabitch

No need. We already know Lelouch fucked up even if he never intended to.

He was using them because he didn't really care about freedom for the 11s and just wanted to kill his family, most especially his father, as vengeance for his mother. The fact that when he went after Clovis the only thing he cared about was finding out about his mom's murder and killing him rather than, you know, anything else you could do with the ability to give absolute commands to the absolute ruler of the territory, is pretty telling.

Also, the fact that your verdict is that its OK for Lelouche to mass murder the entire rebel army down the last man except the ones he decided were useful to him as tools might indicate a fucked up moral compass.

The fact that he didn't Geass the black knights in no way means he wasn't using them. Manipulation is still manipulation even if there's no magic involved.

He has no grudge against regular Britannian citizens and he's not the type of person to step over them for his own gain. If he was a douche like that he wouldn't have been mortified about geassing Euphy and sacrificing a ton of elevens for his cause, and in fact that probably would've been his plan.

Look at it this way: when he said he would destroy the world and create it anew, do you think he meant he was literally going to nuke every continent and then call in the Black Knight construction crew to rebuild? He was obviously speaking figuratively about destroying the current world order, the one whereby Britannia rules half the world with an iron fist. And at the same time he even brazenly called himself the man who would rule the world back when Suzaku discovered his identity. So it's always been clear that he isn't a stranger to speaking figuratively, and that his idea of figuratively destroying things meant taking over by force and changing things to his liking, thereby 'destroying' the original. It's not at all the same as Suzaku who wanted to peacefully get promoted and be able to wield some authority but ultimately be a lapdog to the emperor who he cannot challenge.

his goal was to dismantle the britannian empire, because it was killing japanese people indiscriminately. you don't get freedom for the japanese by giving them kinder masters. the first few episodes fucking ram this into your skull forcefully

also, it was a base, full of soldiers, not a colony

>manipulation is bad
>being a commander is bad
>commanding an army is bad
>being mean to get people to follow you is bad
>so is being nice, it's "manipulation."
>everything is bad
I get it, you think everyone is evil, always, forever. we get it.

Is Akito worth watching?

>they heavily hint that the rebels are just as evil as the britannians.
Someone's morality isn't even a concern for him. Everyone is just a chess piece in his game. He didn't really care about the evil of the backstabbing Britannian journalist did he?

Ah, so you're using the "as long as people are soldiers its OK to kill them all down to the last man leaving no survivors," logic. And also you are either ignoring or giving a pass to the fact that Lelouche made sure all the people from the army he thought had value were away from the mass murder so he could then lie to them, tell them people other than him killed their friends, and use that lie to manipulate them into joining his team.

What a hero.

Also, fucking L. O. L. at the idea that Lelouche's ideals about dismantling the Brittanian empire were high minded or moral in nature. He cared about killing everyone in the royal family who he blamed for his mother's death. His actions prove that a hell of a lot more than his fucking words about what he was trying to accomplish. There's a reason that other user compared him to Walter White.

Lelouche was a hero, Suzaku was a cunt

Suzaku is fairly standard villain
Killed his dad for selfish reasons, ended up broken because of this and then was just a dumb lawfag
Not a moralfag, a lawfag, he has no loyalty except to whoever is in power
He's literally and simply a pawn, nothing less nothing more

I'm not saying he was going to kill everyone or wanted to, but he was more than willing to burn down the house or let it burn down and have it split into pieces, and innocent people were inevitably going to casualties and he knew that.

The Lelouch at the end of the series was willing to let Britannia exist after gutting it out but before that I don't believe he wanted to preserve it. Even if he rules the world, it doesn't have to be a world with Britannia in it. Lelouch, who hated the country and what it embodied, wouldn't weep its downfall; if a Second American Revolution resulted, he'd probably support it even if some innocents die. It's no different from what he has been doing all along.

we get it user, here, I can summarize your post in a lot shorter time

>everything I don't like is evil
>everything that I'm not sure is good or bad is evil
>everything is. htere's no such thing as morally grey. just evil.

you're welcome

I quite enjoyed suzaku as a character. Nina now that's one character I absolutely despised, the show could have been doing without her bullshit

There's moral grey all over Code Geass. Many of the characters are overflowing with grey morality.

Lelouche isn't one. Lelouche is evil. He causes two mass murders of people who were not his enemies in order to further his campaign against his enemies just in the first season. One was completely voluntary, and the other was exactly what he planned to do anyway so the fact that it happened involuntarily only partially exonerates him. You do not get to personally choose to slaughter innocents and not be evil.

calm down buddy

1. it's a cartoon for children
2. you don't get to decide what's evil and what's not
3. you've got a strange idea fo what "innocent" means in the first slaughter

he was fighting people who literally gunned down warehouses full of children. he was certainly more morally grey than those people.

But he did nothing wrong.
The whole point of the anime was to show that Lelouch was a cunt but you could still emphasis with him because how he was portrayed, in opposition to Suzaku. It's subversiveness 101

>When Season 1 ended with Lelouche in chains at the feet of the Emperor
But you're either trying to troll or have memory problems, because that's not how 1st season ended. The scene with Lelouch in chains is from R2. Checkmate, salty R2 hater.

Not as many people would have been watching to begin with.

Lelouch is Code Geass, which is why I've always felt that spin offs were a bad idea.

The Japanese Rebel Army were "innocent," because Lelouche didn't give a damn about their morality. He didn't kill them to punish them for their misdeeds or to send a message about his own methods as a rebel being the proper course, he killed them for convenience and so he could manipulate the survivors, whom he hand picked based on their usefulness, into working for him. They were "innocent," because he didn't think of them as his enemies and he butchered them to further his own ends.

I don't "decide," that that is evil, society does. Cold-blooded murder of those whom you no hold no ill will toward to further your selfish gains is a pretty universally recognized moral evil. I'm not saying anything controversial here.

Just deal with the fact that a character you like is evil. I like a lot of evil characters.

I was speaking more of a metaphorical "in chains." He was the Emperor and Suzaku's prisoner.

>says it's a cartoon for children
>complains about his husbando being called evil
Even Lelouch says he's a bad dude. Says "I will be defeat evil with evil", calls himself a demon, evil laugh. He doesn't care as long as he gets the job done. It's funny you're so spooked over this.

the japanese rebel army isn't innocent. they're soldiers and they might have killed more innocents than lelouche.

being uninvolved with a current conflict doesn't make them innocent. a murder victim is "involved" with his assault but that doesn't mean he's "not innocent" just because he's involved.

if society decides who is evil, then most people in this thread agree he didn't really do things that badly, because they realize that war is a choice between the lesser of two evils, and lelouch didn't kill warehouses full of children, like the "totally not evil" britannians.

Ah, code geass, the gay lovechild of mobile suit gundam and legend of the galactic heroes.

I have a feeling that Nina was gangraped by elevens. That would explain almost everything about her behavior.
(She acts like a typical rape victim, really hates 11's, fears men in general, is more comfortable around girls and familiar/safe environments, emotionaly unstable, sexually frustrated)

fun fact. If Suzaku was a cute girl Sup Forums would defend her full force.

Everything Lelouch did he did for the greater good. He wanted to 'destroy' Britannia because even though there would be bloodshed he figured it would result in a better world. It would make no sense for him to nuke Britannia or something and then leave the citizens alone in the chaos.

Actually it'd probably magnify the hate and everyone would call her a huge bitch. Although she would be waifu'd by everyone the moment she drops from the ceiling to protect Lelouch from the guards.

>Everything Lelouch did he did for the greater good.

>initially opposed the SAZ because his actions would lose meaning
>abandoned his army in the middle of battle to go look for sister
>massacred numbers of people (including children) out of rage because his not-gf got killed by his dog

Britannia doesn't have to exist to assist the people. If it falls apart, he could deal with the pieces. I don't see how he could wage war against such a dictatorship and it not result in countless dead and turmoil.

Like Saber? I remember people enjoyed her grilling in F/Z.

standing on the sidelines while millions of innocents get slaughtered isn't the "good" option

>implying special "zone" is better than country-wide freedom
>implying greater good means anything to him if nunnally can't enjoy it
>implying geass experimental army isn't an abomination that should be allowed to exist

In any case, do you really think anyone on the Black Knights executive committee would approve of glassing Britannia and leaving it at that? Even if all he wanted to do was nuke it out of existence there's no way at all he would be able to do it.

No. The guy was a traitorous cunt.

You're the one making a stink about "good" and "bad" here, buddy.

So Lelouch doesn't do everything for the 'greater good'. Thanks for not contesting that.

And why do you keep talking about nuking and extermination? I said Britannia existing is not necessary and at first he likely would rather it not exist. Empires dissolve and new countries are formed in their place. Is that idea foreign to you?

So you're saying that what he actually wanted to do was take over Britannia and remake it to his liking but also rename it into Lulu-land or whatever to fulfill the condition of erasing Britannia completely?

There are so many cases of Lelouch speaking figuratively, especially of countries, that I don't know why it's so hard to understand that he was speaking figuratively of Britannia as well. Not to mention he did in fact have a chance at doing what you suggest after he killed Charles, but decided to do what I'm saying he wanted to do before killing himself for world peace. If he really did hate Britannia as a whole and not just the Charles-ruled version he would've dissolved the nation as his first act as emperor then disappear.