a lot of people miss the point when they criticize suzaku for siding with britannia and wanting to change from within. that is literally what kallen and lelouch (as zero) criticize him for, and we are LITERALLY told why: because it matters to suzaku. After killing his dad and going unpunished, suzaku has had no purpose in life. He tells euphy that she was the light for him, a door opening in what he thought was a world that did not accept his wish. This is flat-out clear when zero first saved him, how suzaku’s psyche and anger is unchecked: he’d rather die than live in a world that would falsely execute him as scapegoat. He didn’t care about living. He refuses to accept a world that would let the guilty go unpunished: him.
He refuses to accept a world where murdering your own father is actually okay. Even if that meant saving your own nation. The guilt was killing him as the murdered father’s son, as a child, as a teenager alone in a world, left to his own devices as foreign powers occupy the land he grew up in and love.
And the study of suzaku always involves the mention of lelouch. Both of them reject the way the world was, but they reacted to pain very differently. Lelouch’s father denied his very existence: his clothes, his position, his life were all his and declared lelouch, a child who had just lost his mother and his sister in critical condition, to be a dead man walking. Lelouch remembers this scene while alone in his dimly lit room. He feels dead. His quest of vengeance was to prove that he was alive. Opposite of suzaku, he DEMANDS that the world acknowledge his life. That he built who he was now by his own work. This is why lelouch is such an ass to the black knights. He refuses to think he owes them anything and vice versa. His father’s words haunt him, and also set him on a path of independence that excluded others. Lelouch continuously justifies that they are benefitting from each other, hence they owe nothing to each other. There should only be coldness, not warmth. Warmth is weakness.
Suzaku craved for warmth. He was a dead man since he killed his father. He saw no reason to be alive, saw no place for himself in the world. Lelouch, Nunnally, the student council, Lloyd and Cecil, Euphy - they brought happiness back. He had a place to return to. He had people who accepted him.
Lelouch had them too. But Lelouch did not realize how important they were. That’s why near the end of the series, during the fireworks. Lelouch has this realization. He finally regretted his actions and admitted he was wrong. He had been happy. He did not need to prove himself to the world. He was so focused on his anger he did not open his heart to his loved ones, not even nunnally. And now they were gone. He was far too gone. And so was suzaku.
Both of them were in so much pain from the world when war broke out in japan. They allowed that pain to determine them, and it cost them both in their quest of fighting a world that wasn’t their enemy in the first place.
code geass is such a tragedy. such a damn tragedy the more you look into it esp through the eyes of an adult, having watched this when i was a young teen
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