Code Geass explained — the Role of Femininity in Man’s life
Main protagonists in Code Geass are Lelouch and Suzaku but if you were to take away “supporting” female characters, what is it that you’d be left with? Take C.C., Nunnally and Shirley away from Lelouch. Would he had become Zero? In the very first episode what got Lelouch in a position to be caught by the military was Shirley calling, if she doesn’t call, Lelouch isn’t exposed and nothing happens. If C.C. doesn’t offer him Geass power then Lelouch continues to be just a student. If Nunnally isn’t playing a role in Lelouch’s life then would Lelouch try to bring about a better world? Take Euphemia away from Suzaku, what does he do? Female characters play a significant role in the Code Geass world and they do it without taking the place of the masculine role which raises a question, what is the role of femininity in a man’s life?
There’s already a concept in psychology which can aid us in finding the answer to the previous question — it’s the idea of anima. In it’s essence the concept of anima is simple — it’s just the idea that there’s a suppressed feminine part in a man’s psyche. Even though the concept is simple in it’s formulation, the practical expression is anything but. Anima is most often experienced in a personified way as a woman in ether dreams, fantasies or as a projection on other women in a man’s life. In Code Geass we get all three expressions of anima but since it’s a fantasy genre what would typically happen in one’s own mind instead happens in the outside world.
Lelouch and his relationship C.C.
C.C. is the most magical female character. She’s none-human, immortal, able to give Geass power and she has a magical link to Lelouch by which I mean that she knows whether or not he’s alive and she intrinsically knows his reason for living. C.C. is a typical anima figure, if you were to take away all of the interactions she has with Lelouch and you looked at the character that’s left then there’s hardly anything to speak of. Sure there’s some back story on the character but ever since she met Lelouch, she’s all about Lelouch. You might as well think of her as a part of Lelouch, a suppressed feminine part, which is put in a body and says the words he would otherwise think in his mind.
There are dozens of meaningful interactions between C.C. and Lelouch but her influence isn’t strictly limited to Lelouch. On multiple occasions she changed Suzaku’s trajectory as well. C.C. was central in the event which led our protagonists into their roles. She’s the one being persuade by the military and by mere chance Lelouch and Suzaku got caught up in it. Because of her Suzaku gets in a position where he disobeys an order to execute Lelouch, gets shot in the back for it, is saved by a watch, gets seen by Lloyd and Cecile and is offered to become a pilot of arguably the strongest nightmare out there. In Suzaku’s hands, as strong of a weapon as Lelouch’s Geass power.
Her influence on Lelouch is similar, he’s in the same position as Suzaku was but instead of disobeying an order what got Lelouch at gun point was Shirley calling at the worst time. Then C.C. gives Lelouch Geass power and his world is turned upside down. Their relationship continues and I would characterize it as C.C. poking Lelouch. She questions his motivation, feelings and values especially if he doesn’t want to think about them. Here are just a few common examples of what I mean:
C.C.: “Destroying Britannia or discovering your mothers murderer, which is more important to you?” (S1E7)
C.C.: “So, do you love this girl called Shirley?”
Lelouch: “I don’t know”C.C.: “Do you hate her?”
Lelouch: “I don’t know.” (S1E14)
C.C.: “Hey! What’s so complicated, just use your Geass on Kururugi.”
Lelouch: “Drop it.”
C.C.: “So stubborn, why not? Because he’s your friend? Or is it pride?”
Lelouch: “All of it.” (S1E18)
You could imagine thoughts like that going trough Lelouch’s mind without the need of a magical girl saying them. Imagine if you were in a position where you liked a girl just like Lulu likes Shirley, wouldn’t you have thoughts that went the same direction: “Do I love her?”, “Do I hate her?“, “How do I feel about her?“. Even a better example, who of us hasn’t thought about the reason Lelouch didn’t use Geass on Suzaku to make him his allay? That would be the obvious move. The conversation he had with C.C. might have been him thinking if this wasn’t a fantasy world. As I said already C.C. might as well be the feminine part of Lelouch’s mind i.e. anima bringing forth these thoughts. The reason she’s a character is quite practical. If he experienced internal conflicts internally then it would be quite boring for us to watch Lelouch staring at the ceiling and saliently thinking.
If previous conversations would be best characterized as C.C. poking Lelouch then the other effect she has on him is that of a put down and pull up. When Lelouch faces challenges which he can’t resolve C.C. put’s him down and then when he’s down, she offers a way up. Here are two conversions between them displaying this dynamic:
Lelouch: “I wouldn’t have lost if the conditions were equal!”
C.C.: “You sore loser, if you’re really that good, you should be able to set up conditions the way you want.”
Lelouch: “That’s what I’ll do then, I’ll set them up. I’ll raise an army that can’t lose to them.” (S1E7)
C.C.: “Do you regret it, that your friends father was caught up in all this? You were just accusing Kirikhara of being too soft, what happened to the path of blood?”
Lelouch: “Shut up.”
C.C.: “But it turns out you’re the soft one. Did you think this was all just a game? You have already killed your fair share of people. By hand or words more often than not.
Lelouch: “Just shut up.”
C.C.: “All of them left family behind, all of them had lovers and friends. Are you really telling me you haven’t grasped that yet? I would have thought you to be better prepared.”
Lelouch: “Just shut up! I am prepared. I had been from the moment I killed Clovis.”
C.C.:“Then why this hesitation? Has she shaken you this badly? One kiss and you go to the pieces then, huh? So, for all your preening and posturing you’re just a little spoiled boy with a swollen head and a big, fat mouth.”
Lelouch gets on top of C.C.
C.C.: “Your in way to deep now to be turning back, you’re past the point of no return. You need a reason for living, don’t you? You’re not going to disappoint me, are you?” (S1E13)
If we take a closer look at how Lelouch deals with the realization that his actions have led to deaths of so many people, it reminds me of a book by Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment. There the main character though up every reason to kill an old lady, he succeed in doing so and didn’t get caught but despite all of his rationality he couldn’t escape his own guilt. Similarly Lelouch’s greatest weapon is his intellect and he’s very good at using it, he can intellectually justify his plans but he’s discovering that his emotions might not be on the same page. C.C. is bringing that which Lelouch doesn’t want to see into his awareness. In the second example C.C. kept on poking Lelouch until she got under his skin and then showed a path by which he can move forward.
It might seam that C.C. is influencing Lelouch in a way that brings too much chaos for him to be able to deal with. There’s a practical reason people have a tendency to shrug off responsibility and point fingers in other directions, there’s just so much one man can carry. Avoiding responsibility is a way to avoid being crushed by all the problems of the world. Additionally to chaos C.C. brings the right feeling, the motivation to overcome challenges that are ahead:
Lelouch: “Until I met you [C.C.] I was dead. An impotent corpse existing behind a false guise of life. A life in which I did nothing real. Day to day I merely went trough the motions of living as if I was a zombie and I had a feeling as if I was gradually dying. If I am condemned to go back to that then I rather… ”
Lelouch slightly squeezes the trigger of a gun pointing to his own head.
C.C.: “Stop it! I see now, it’s life without meaning and life like that…” (S1E7)
Lelouch and his relationships with Shirley and Nunnally
The relationship Lelouch has with Shirley and Nunnally is that of a loved one. In one case it’s a romantic love in the other that of a sibling. C.C. is a fantasy figure, as it’s better to think of her as a personified part of Lelouch’s mind. What Lelouch’s relationship with Shirley and Nunnally display is more of a realistic relationship. Since it’s a relationship between 2 different individuals with their own lives, insecurities, misunderstandings and uncertainty there’s more distance and less consistency. One aspect remains though — these relationships have a profound influence on Lelouch’s choices.
Lelouch for the longest time wasn’t aware of his own affections towards Shirley. Shirley found out that Lelouch was Zero and that he was responsible for her fathers death. She still loved and accepted him despite it. Lelouch used his Geass on her to make her forget him. What he essentially did is revert his relationship with Shirley to it’s former state where it’s safe and controllable which enabled him to focus on his goals while still having Shirley in his life.
After a while she fell in love with him again, remembered all her past and still loved him but this time Lelouch didn’t get a choice. Rolo, in his distorted view of reality, killed Shirley to presumably protect Lelouch’s interests. The relationship with Shirley brought him joy but now it was gone and he knew it was his fault. Lose of Shirley unhinged Lelouch and he became even more devoted to his goal of changing the world, which sounds like a good thing but it wasn’t. Lelouch became too inpatient and ordered the indiscriminate slaughter of the secret Geass research facility. That was too cruel for his Knights for Justice to swallow which ultimately led to Knights of Justice losing trust in Lelouch. If you want to change the world you better enjoy living other ways all you’re going to do is make a big mess. Unbeknownst to Lelouch, relationship with Shirley gave him joy and meaning. After he lost her, he lost a part of his motivation for changing the world.
Lelouch constantly reminds us that he’s doing all of this for the sake of Nunnally. That’s a lie. The real relationship Lelouch has with Nunnally is shallow. How can Lelouch bring forth a world that Nunnally wanted if he doesn’t really ask her what she wants. All she has spontaneously told him is that she wants a gentler world. Creating a terrorist organization is a funny way of trying to make the world a gentler place. Undoubtedly Lelouch cares sincerely about Nunnally but he has a much deeper relationship with the idea of Nunnally than with his own flesh and blood sister. He has idealized his sister to a point of some holy saint figure.
For almost all of the show Nunnally had zero impetus for self-challenge and change. The finale clearly showed that she’s able to rise to the challenge and in the process she regained her sight. If Lelouch had a relationship with the real Nunnally not the idolized version he might have helped her take on challenges in life, become stronger and get rid of the fantasy of gentle world. Lelouch as a character is opposite of Suzaku, he lacks idealism and so he rises and falls with the results of his actions. As a compensation he projects all the ideals on Nunnally, her idealized version becomes the reason for his living because in her he see’s the ideals he’s reaching for.
Suzaku and his relationship with Euphemia
It’s hard to compete with the amount of surrounding female characters Lelouch has. It’s also hard to compete with how absent female figures are in the life of Suzaku. Suzaku’s mother isn’t mentioned a single time, nor any sibling, nor any childhood friendship. For Suzaku there is really a single consistent girl — Euphemia. As an anima figure she’s somewhere between C.C. and Shirley, she’s not a magical creature but then again she literally fell from the skies into Suzaku’s arms. What makes her anima figure is Suzaku who projects anima onto her. In other worlds she’s an anima figure from his point of view, from any other, Euphemia is just a girl. This is the way in which most men interact with anima, they project it onto women and then see qualities in them that in fact aren’t there.
The relationship Suzaku has with Euphemia is a realistic version of to the relationship Lelouch has with C.C.. Euphemia introduces chaos and change into Suzaku’s life combined with the will to implement those changes. She made him go to high school, made him a knight and she was the reason he changed into a more pragmatic person. If Lelouch’s and C.C.’s relationship is that of a put down and pull up then Euphemia only pulls up. There’s no need to put down Suzaku since he’s already feeling down:
Euphemia: “I command you to love me, and in return I will love you, forever. Suzaku, I love your stubbornness, your kindness and your strength, your sad eyes, your clumsiness and the way you have trouble with cats. I love everything about you. So please don’t hate yourself!”
Suzaku: “Everything you do is impulsive, when we first met, when you told me you were a princess, when you selected my school, when you made me a knight, always.”
Euphemia: “Yes, they all were sudden, that’s because I suddenly realized.”
Suzaku: “But then again it’s that spur of the moment feeling that opened so many doors for me. Thank you.“ (S1E20)
What changed Suzaku even more than the relationship with Euphemia was her death. Just as Lelouch broke his character after the death of Shirley, so did Suzaku after the death of Euphemia. Suzaku is an idealist and he believes that contemptible means aren’t worth the results they produce. Idealism was the core of his personality but that changed after Euphemia died. He realized that sometimes contemptible means are worth the results. It depends on how contemptible the means are and how valuable the results are. No amount of reasoning with Lelouch could change his mind but Euphemia did it without presenting a single reason.
Last words
I could go on and show that the Chinese princess played the same role to Xingke as C.C. and Euphemia played to Lelouch and Suzaku or that sometimes Collin scolded Lelouch in a similar way to C.C. which brought the same results but it would be the same story with different names and circumstances. I think that the underlying theme of these relationships with feminine figures is quite clearly visible. Life is a balance between chaos and order, too much order and your too stiff to adapt to the ever changing world, too much chaos and your too flimsy to live in any environment.
The role of anima is to introduce change. It might come as a personal experience or it might come from a romantic partner or a random chick, it doesn’t really matter, the fundamental role of femininity in a man’s life is to introduce change. All change is chaotic because you need to get to an unknown place, you don’t know where it is or how it looks like or how to get there. C.C., Euphemia, Shirley — they all introduce chaos in the lives that they touch but it’s not all that they do. One way or another they induce the right emotional state in a man so that he would feel able to make order out of the chaos. Suzaku described it as: “The spur of the moment feeling,” while Lelouch hinted to it as the feeling of meaning. Helping men feel capable of facing challenges in front of them is the second role of femininity in a man — as important as the first.
