Review of Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion

Well, I watched this one a while back so I can't get down into many specifics. But this is an anime that you watch if you're bored and just looking for something fun to kill time with. If you're looking for an actiony dramatic wish-fulfillment superpower anime and aren't too picky about anything else, Code Geass might be for you. Some spoilers follow. Code Geass is unfortunately loaded with a lot of random crap and filler that doesn't make much sense. There's a ton of fanservice and a lot of time is inexplicably spent at some kind of private highschool where the highschoolers get up toa lot of random hijinks. There's tons of filler like chasing a cat around and going to random school events. It doesn't make much sense for Lelouch to even be attending classes since he gets nothing out of it. He might as well get a job and meet up with his pals on weekends, and the highschool basically exists to give Lelouch some kind of super secret identity that he has to hide as a way to generate drama.

Suzaku on paper sounds kind of interesting. He's basically the character who'd rather preserve peace for the majority even if the minority is getting abused horribly, because war is bad. He's all about changing the system from within despite him being in basically the worst possible position to accomplish that. Ironically Lelouch is in a pretty good position to help him but he doesn't because he doesn't like his dad. Anyways this isn't an obviously wrong philosophy to have, actually, so it makes it weird when the show tries to indicate that Lelouch is in the right for starting a war with Britannia without ever really exploring the nature of their conflicting views with any real depth. Suzaku ends up coming off as a complete hypocritical idiot.

Some of the plot was just plain incoherent. Lelouch confronts his dad and they immediately start spouting nonsensical philosophy buzzwords at each other. When you actually take the time to pick out what they are saying, his mom and dad apparently want to [SPOILERS FOR EVANGELION] go all Human Instrumentality Project [END SPOILERS] on the world using magic. It's not clear why the hell they would want this since they seem to be otherwise successful and well adjusted people, and it's not like they have any dead relatives they care much about. Lelouch makes a long speech about rejecting them because somehow lying is... related to evolution? And time? If you want to see this concept actually executed with proper consideration, go and watch Eva. The whole scenario is just bizarre and doesn't have any relationship to any of the themes that were established for the story beforehand.

The show does have its moments. Despite all the nonsense it's actually decently fun to watch for a couple of reasons. First of all, the main character is an active player. There's too many anime where the main character just lets himself be pushed around by the plot and things just happen to him. Lelouch goes out and gets shit done, for better or worse, and there's no attempt to make him "relatable" to general audiences. He's not a blank slate, he's an overdramatic flamboyant arrogant edgelord genius ex-prince who likes flourishing his cape and making big dramatic gestures on national television. This makes him enjoyable to watch. Second, the show actually makes some effort to make Lelouch seem clever, by coming up with some mildly clever ways to resolve battles which are new and surprising... even though sometimes they also feel not very feasible or like they came out of nowhere. But there's enough of these little twists that the show moves along nicely without getting boring. Third, the power fantasy element is lots of fun. Sometimes it's just satisfying to watch Lelouch steamroll over mooks with his hilariously overpowered Geass.

The ending was a mixed bag for me. If you actually think about it for 3 seconds Lelouch's grand plan makes no sense. He basically decides to turn into an evil dictator and make everyone hate his guts. They unify in their hate and then he gets Zero 2 to kill him, establishing Zero 2 as top dog. Since everyone got allied when he was still alive, they stay allied after he gets executed, and an era of peace happens.
Where to even start with this? First off, how does he plan to turn into an evil dictator? He needs to establish his evilness by committing mass genocide of random countries offscreen. Uh... doesn't this kind of defeat the point of bringing peace to people and preventing people from dying in future wars? How do you justify this? Is he ever shown to think about or calculate a cost benefit analysis of how many people he can murder as an emperor before he starts to get a negative return on lives saved for the next century or so? Second of all, isn't it kind of shady to install a shadow world leader in the form of Zero? Being the globally recognized enforcer who decides whether a world ruler is legitimate or not is an insane amount of power to just give to Suzaku, who is a teen boy with major psyche issues who knows nothing about politics. And after Suzaku dies, who will inherit the title? How is this different from yet another huge monarchy? Third, he can't even say for certain that the Requiem will bring peace! History is full of stories of countries who ally in a war and then once the war is won they turn on each other and start squabbling over other conflicts. People have short memories and a generation after a war they forget that they were ever enemies with the other country. The US and Britain were on very bad terms way back when but now Americans think British accents are cool and sophisticated. People in China get enthusiastic about Japanese anime and culture, so soon after Japan committed tons of war crimes against Chinese civilians. On the flip side, Athens and Sparta had a huge war with each other right after they had allied to fight off Persia. Why would Lelouch think that world leaders wouldn't ever try to seize power and advance their own interests as much as possible once the main threat was gone and thus come into conflict with each other again? A power vacuum that big would almost definitely only get resolved by fighting for years after he died.