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.@ahaharukard okay I promised I would write a thing about Suzaku that's a bit of a different perspective so here it is! :D
I say that I really have a soft spot for Suzaku but tbh it's not that it puts me in opposition to, or makes me dislike Lelouch in any way. Like I was tweeting yesterday, I don't think you can have one without the other ... and that's not to say you can't hate one or the other or both (but then WHY ARE YOU HERE :V ) but rather that my being a Suzaku fan makes me no less of a Lelouch fan. Er. Anyway
So actually one of the things I like about CG is that season 1 goes out of its way to make Suzaku and Lelouch perfect foils to one another, and one of those ways is how they respond to personal tragedy and difficulties, I guess you could say. Both suffer a lot in different ways, and both shoulder and endure their suffering in different ways. But their attitudes towards 'why is this happening to me' are also very different, and that plays in to how they react. They also both do very destructive things over the course of the series and their reactions to the fallout of those things are dramatically different. Code Geass as a series, especially in R2, settles on presenting Lelouch's way of handling these difficulties as the 'correct' one, or at least 'the way that gets things done', while Suzaku's way of handling these things becomes utterly ineffective, but I'll get to that I guess. (when did this become an actual essay orz)
The thing is, Suzaku and Lelouch are in very different mental places in relation to the world. Lelouch's mother is killed and he is disgraced by his father, then thrown to Japan as bait. In about the same timeframe, Suzaku kills his own father in an effort to prevent additional suffering for people he knows, and thus throws Japan into chaos, allowing it to fall quickly to Britannia. Lelouch perceives that the world has betrayed him; Suzaku perceives that he has betrayed the world. As a result, Lelouch is a constant state of 'betterment' - he wants to make the world a better place so that he and his sister will not be betrayed by it again. Suzaku is in a constant state of atonement - he too wants to make the world a better place, but to correct the things he did to make it awful in the first place.
(There's something about sweet, sweet revenge in there against his father for being an arrogant dick, but it's not like that won't better the world too. XD; )
Anyway. So as you've noted Suzaku is constantly all apologies and self-hate, and yet he does continuously more destructive shit over the course of the series culminating with FLEIJA and, on a more personal level, attempting to inject Kallen with Refrain, both of which are huge violations of human rights and terrible tragedies, not necessarily in that order. It's terrible. So let's talk about what brings him down this terrible route, starting with:
1) killing his dad! or more specifically, what happens after he kills his dad per the season 0 novel. Kururugi senior is no picnic of a man; the novel paints his relationship with Suzaku as distant, and as Suzaku is a pretty violent, aggressive child who is still intimidated enough by his father to not act up around him, it's not really a wonder that he concludes that nothing less than a show of lethal force will be enough to stop his father from hurting/killing the vi Britannias.
but honestly it's Kirihara who kind of left me going 'OH SO THAT'S WHY' because he just straight up tells (10-year-old Suzaku who just killed his father in a desperate attempt to save his friends' lives) that he should kill himself. Just like 'yo kid this was really useful and all but if you don't have the guts to kill yourself for this, then you're worse than dirt'.
Suzaku takes that to heart and I think that informs all his actions for the rest of his life - the assumption that his life is worth less than dirt, and since he's too much of a coward to off himself, the only thing he can hope to do is erase the effect of his existence from the earth - that is, atone for his sins.
If that gets him killed in the process, well, all the better. And that's absolutely his modus operandi through all of season 1; his actions are all altruistic, and he does his best to help everyone and fix everything, and he takes all the shit sent his way because as far as he's concerned, he deserves it. Because Suzaku caused so many problems by taking a life, he holds life (that isn't his) at the highest regard, which makes him a pretty shitty soldier and also forces him to focus on the microcosm of every life in front of him - he can't act on the big picture when he's getting hung up on causing a single death. That's why he's chosen the 'peaceful' way to correct his act of murder by giving Japan its freedom without bloodshed. And then he meets Euphie - Euphie, who is a wonderful, beautiful Mary Sue who literally falls out of the sky into his life and promises to turn around the absolutely shittiest decision Suzaku ever made in his whole life and turn it into the best thing to happen to Japan in 7 years - and *he can help make it happen.*
Holy shit, actual redemption! It's RIGHT THERE IN ARM'S REACH. And then--
2) And then Lelouch takes it away.
like fuck you could write a whole essay JUST about how how Suzaku and Lelouch are effected by The Euphinator and Euphie's subsequent death. In fact, I think it's kind of a crucial example of how they react differently to tragedy in their lives.
Lelouch tends to take tragedy and turn it into gain as much as he can. It's not that he doesn't feel bad about it - especially if he caused it, because he feels guilty as hell about what he does to Euphemia - but he's very pragmatic in how he handles it. He also won't admit to anyone who isn't himself that he fucked up in the first place (he barely admits to himself that he fucked up). It was All Part of the Plan (TM). It's very much a good thing he has the ability to soldier on through all the hurt he causes himself, and that is caused to him by others, but all that hubris also helps lead to the ending of Season 1 in the first place.
Suzaku, meanwhile, tends to take a tragedy and nurse it, holding it in front of himself as an example of how he fucked up. In Euphemia's case, he feels guilty that he wasn't able to prevent her downfall and death. He's also infuriated because he lost his one chance to be totally redeemed for throwing Japan into chaos. When that chance falls apart, he's destroyed along with it as a result because I think he hung his hat on Euphemia - because Euphemia believed in him, and he believed in her.
And when it turns out that Lelouch is the reason Euphemia is dead? Suzaku takes that as *self-sabotage*. Suzaku's guilt complex takes on a whole other level with Euphie's death. He perceives that the reason Lelouch has become Zero - whom he believes to callously disregard life (while Suzaku values it over everything else) - he feels it's his own fault because *he didn't stop Lelouch when they were kids.* This isn't even that rational, to be honest, but Suzaku, in a pile of self-hatred so deep that it rivals Lelouch's hubris for intensity, decides that he must stop Lelouch at all costs.
He must correct his second great mistake, which was letting Lelouch become Zero.
So the season 1 finale is basically a showdown between Lelouch's arrogance and Suzaku's self-hate, fueled by pure rage at one another (they both feel deeply betrayed by one another at this point), and shit goes down how it does and Suzaku wins and puts Lelouch down.
From that point on, Suzaku is pretty fucking dead inside.
So now that Suzaku has 1) fucked Japan up by killing his dad, and 2) fucked Japan up again by getting Euphemia killed, Suzaku just kind of gives up hope on ever being redeemed. Since Lelouch is the one that made Euphemia commit mass murder, and Suzaku is the one that made Lelouch make Euphemia commit mass murder, he's responsible for that, too - and I think he kind of gives up on the idea of preserving lives at that point.
In order to rescue Lelouch from himself, Suzaku gets Lelouch brainwashed by the emperor and utilizes that leverage to get himself close to his goal of, once again, attempting to get Japan free without bloodshed. He knows full well he just betrayed his best and only friend in the world. He feels like shit for it, but more importantly, he was always shit and the fact Lelouch trusted him never even registers for him. He's not trustworthy, so why would Lelouch trust him? And the fact that he goes that far - actively holds Lelouch down so that he can be geassed, guards Nunally's life as she's held hostage against Lelouch regaining his memories - kind of washes him out to a morally gray dark place. Suzaku doesn't think he made a good decision; he made the one that comes closest to erasing his own mistakes. Zero is his mistake.
Oh, and let's not forget that Suzaku cannot passively die; he can't even actively commit suicide, thanks to Zero. So that's also messing with him pretty badly. (I think Suzaku kind of always hoped he would literally save Japan with his dying breath.)
If Suzaku in season 1 was a mental wreck who only wanted to be redeemed, Suzaku of season 2 is a mental wreck who knows that redemption is an illusion. And that lets him go to really awful moral places. He gets a few smackdowns that he desperately needs, such as Kallen wailing on him for considering injecting her with Refrain (which he takes because he knows that he done wrong, yo) and the wakeup call that he can't just kill the Emperor because the Knight of One will kill him first, but what actually snaps him out of continuing to be totally destroyed is when he sees, yet again, a glimmer of a chance to pay back the world for his screwups in Zero Requiem. He's so much more likeable with Zero Requiem, though - because finally, after an entire season of being this mysterious emo blob of shitty attitude and terrible life choices combined with shifting loyalties and no character development, he's finally aligned with Lelouch's life goals. (Sorry, Sunrise, but by the end of R2 you had basically just gone 'fuck it, Lelouch's morals are the ones we like so everyone who disagrees is wrong'.)
Before getting to Requiem there's that really important conversation that Suzaku and Lelouch have at the shrine - the one where Suzaku makes Lelouch bow and Schneizel is a douche who crashes the party. It's important because we see that despite blaming himself, Suzaku has spent the entire time wondering why Lelouch did what he did. He doesn't understand why Euphemia was geassed, for instance, and Lelouch still can't admit it was a mistake. (That missing month before Requiem is always going to KILL ME but whatever conversations Suzaku and Lelouch had must have been basically a continuance of this interrupted conversation). It's the forever problem of them being so terrible at communication, but they come closer than ever before with Suzaku having a modicrum of self-worth by demanding Lelouch apologize and Lelouch having to admit that he needs help. Nothing much happens I guess but it does lay the groundwork for Requiem to be a thing.
Requiem Suzaku isn't that different, but I think a couple of important things happen:
1) he helps Lelouch stand his ground in the Thought Elevator against the Emperor, which kind of boosts his self-esteem a little? Not really the right word, but I mean that it wakes up this wrecked, depressed R2!Suzaku to the fact there is more going on than own existence being a mistake and these things are worth fighting for beyond redeeming his failures. Suzaku desperately needs that. It also shows him that Lelouch isn't a monster despite his being Zero, that maybe Lelouch wasn't a great big mistake that Suzaku caused when they were kids. It takes away their being at odds and gives them a brief common enemy, which is so very crucial at that moment.
2) Lelouch promises Suzaku an ending that is as close to what Suzaku wanted all this time as he's going to ever get, and Suzaku jumps at the chance. (I think he might be under some illusions that Lelouch wants to die to redeem himself for his sins too, and that Suzaku gets to help with that, but yeah. :V They also think Nunally is dead so Lelouch is pretty YOLO about his life at the moment also.) But Lelouch took away Suzaku's ability to get himself killed, and then gives it back in a way by offering this solution, so. that brightens Suzaku's gray existence somewhat.
Also, Suzaku's ending is Punishment Ever After, yes, but it's also A Liberated World Ever After, which is even more important. As much as Suzaku wants to suffer, he wants to erase the negative effects of his existence from the world even more - that's what he spends all of both seasons attempting to do. Requiem achieves that and more, freeing the world from tyranny presumably forever, and he gets to help - which, oops, is exactly what Euphemia offered him at the end of season 1.
Only this time it sticks.
And wow that was really really long huff huff /rolls over and dies.
the POINT is yes Suzaku is a wreck that hates himself and wallows in that self-hatred but that self-hatred is the reason why he tries to make the world a better place, even if he really sucks at it especially in season 2.
the end
I say that I really have a soft spot for Suzaku but tbh it's not that it puts me in opposition to, or makes me dislike Lelouch in any way. Like I was tweeting yesterday, I don't think you can have one without the other ... and that's not to say you can't hate one or the other or both (but then WHY ARE YOU HERE :V ) but rather that my being a Suzaku fan makes me no less of a Lelouch fan. Er. Anyway
So actually one of the things I like about CG is that season 1 goes out of its way to make Suzaku and Lelouch perfect foils to one another, and one of those ways is how they respond to personal tragedy and difficulties, I guess you could say. Both suffer a lot in different ways, and both shoulder and endure their suffering in different ways. But their attitudes towards 'why is this happening to me' are also very different, and that plays in to how they react. They also both do very destructive things over the course of the series and their reactions to the fallout of those things are dramatically different. Code Geass as a series, especially in R2, settles on presenting Lelouch's way of handling these difficulties as the 'correct' one, or at least 'the way that gets things done', while Suzaku's way of handling these things becomes utterly ineffective, but I'll get to that I guess. (when did this become an actual essay orz)
The thing is, Suzaku and Lelouch are in very different mental places in relation to the world. Lelouch's mother is killed and he is disgraced by his father, then thrown to Japan as bait. In about the same timeframe, Suzaku kills his own father in an effort to prevent additional suffering for people he knows, and thus throws Japan into chaos, allowing it to fall quickly to Britannia. Lelouch perceives that the world has betrayed him; Suzaku perceives that he has betrayed the world. As a result, Lelouch is a constant state of 'betterment' - he wants to make the world a better place so that he and his sister will not be betrayed by it again. Suzaku is in a constant state of atonement - he too wants to make the world a better place, but to correct the things he did to make it awful in the first place.
(There's something about sweet, sweet revenge in there against his father for being an arrogant dick, but it's not like that won't better the world too. XD; )
Anyway. So as you've noted Suzaku is constantly all apologies and self-hate, and yet he does continuously more destructive shit over the course of the series culminating with FLEIJA and, on a more personal level, attempting to inject Kallen with Refrain, both of which are huge violations of human rights and terrible tragedies, not necessarily in that order. It's terrible. So let's talk about what brings him down this terrible route, starting with:
1) killing his dad! or more specifically, what happens after he kills his dad per the season 0 novel. Kururugi senior is no picnic of a man; the novel paints his relationship with Suzaku as distant, and as Suzaku is a pretty violent, aggressive child who is still intimidated enough by his father to not act up around him, it's not really a wonder that he concludes that nothing less than a show of lethal force will be enough to stop his father from hurting/killing the vi Britannias.
but honestly it's Kirihara who kind of left me going 'OH SO THAT'S WHY' because he just straight up tells (10-year-old Suzaku who just killed his father in a desperate attempt to save his friends' lives) that he should kill himself. Just like 'yo kid this was really useful and all but if you don't have the guts to kill yourself for this, then you're worse than dirt'.
Suzaku takes that to heart and I think that informs all his actions for the rest of his life - the assumption that his life is worth less than dirt, and since he's too much of a coward to off himself, the only thing he can hope to do is erase the effect of his existence from the earth - that is, atone for his sins.
If that gets him killed in the process, well, all the better. And that's absolutely his modus operandi through all of season 1; his actions are all altruistic, and he does his best to help everyone and fix everything, and he takes all the shit sent his way because as far as he's concerned, he deserves it. Because Suzaku caused so many problems by taking a life, he holds life (that isn't his) at the highest regard, which makes him a pretty shitty soldier and also forces him to focus on the microcosm of every life in front of him - he can't act on the big picture when he's getting hung up on causing a single death. That's why he's chosen the 'peaceful' way to correct his act of murder by giving Japan its freedom without bloodshed. And then he meets Euphie - Euphie, who is a wonderful, beautiful Mary Sue who literally falls out of the sky into his life and promises to turn around the absolutely shittiest decision Suzaku ever made in his whole life and turn it into the best thing to happen to Japan in 7 years - and *he can help make it happen.*
Holy shit, actual redemption! It's RIGHT THERE IN ARM'S REACH. And then--
2) And then Lelouch takes it away.
like fuck you could write a whole essay JUST about how how Suzaku and Lelouch are effected by The Euphinator and Euphie's subsequent death. In fact, I think it's kind of a crucial example of how they react differently to tragedy in their lives.
Lelouch tends to take tragedy and turn it into gain as much as he can. It's not that he doesn't feel bad about it - especially if he caused it, because he feels guilty as hell about what he does to Euphemia - but he's very pragmatic in how he handles it. He also won't admit to anyone who isn't himself that he fucked up in the first place (he barely admits to himself that he fucked up). It was All Part of the Plan (TM). It's very much a good thing he has the ability to soldier on through all the hurt he causes himself, and that is caused to him by others, but all that hubris also helps lead to the ending of Season 1 in the first place.
Suzaku, meanwhile, tends to take a tragedy and nurse it, holding it in front of himself as an example of how he fucked up. In Euphemia's case, he feels guilty that he wasn't able to prevent her downfall and death. He's also infuriated because he lost his one chance to be totally redeemed for throwing Japan into chaos. When that chance falls apart, he's destroyed along with it as a result because I think he hung his hat on Euphemia - because Euphemia believed in him, and he believed in her.
And when it turns out that Lelouch is the reason Euphemia is dead? Suzaku takes that as *self-sabotage*. Suzaku's guilt complex takes on a whole other level with Euphie's death. He perceives that the reason Lelouch has become Zero - whom he believes to callously disregard life (while Suzaku values it over everything else) - he feels it's his own fault because *he didn't stop Lelouch when they were kids.* This isn't even that rational, to be honest, but Suzaku, in a pile of self-hatred so deep that it rivals Lelouch's hubris for intensity, decides that he must stop Lelouch at all costs.
He must correct his second great mistake, which was letting Lelouch become Zero.
So the season 1 finale is basically a showdown between Lelouch's arrogance and Suzaku's self-hate, fueled by pure rage at one another (they both feel deeply betrayed by one another at this point), and shit goes down how it does and Suzaku wins and puts Lelouch down.
From that point on, Suzaku is pretty fucking dead inside.
So now that Suzaku has 1) fucked Japan up by killing his dad, and 2) fucked Japan up again by getting Euphemia killed, Suzaku just kind of gives up hope on ever being redeemed. Since Lelouch is the one that made Euphemia commit mass murder, and Suzaku is the one that made Lelouch make Euphemia commit mass murder, he's responsible for that, too - and I think he kind of gives up on the idea of preserving lives at that point.
In order to rescue Lelouch from himself, Suzaku gets Lelouch brainwashed by the emperor and utilizes that leverage to get himself close to his goal of, once again, attempting to get Japan free without bloodshed. He knows full well he just betrayed his best and only friend in the world. He feels like shit for it, but more importantly, he was always shit and the fact Lelouch trusted him never even registers for him. He's not trustworthy, so why would Lelouch trust him? And the fact that he goes that far - actively holds Lelouch down so that he can be geassed, guards Nunally's life as she's held hostage against Lelouch regaining his memories - kind of washes him out to a morally gray dark place. Suzaku doesn't think he made a good decision; he made the one that comes closest to erasing his own mistakes. Zero is his mistake.
Oh, and let's not forget that Suzaku cannot passively die; he can't even actively commit suicide, thanks to Zero. So that's also messing with him pretty badly. (I think Suzaku kind of always hoped he would literally save Japan with his dying breath.)
If Suzaku in season 1 was a mental wreck who only wanted to be redeemed, Suzaku of season 2 is a mental wreck who knows that redemption is an illusion. And that lets him go to really awful moral places. He gets a few smackdowns that he desperately needs, such as Kallen wailing on him for considering injecting her with Refrain (which he takes because he knows that he done wrong, yo) and the wakeup call that he can't just kill the Emperor because the Knight of One will kill him first, but what actually snaps him out of continuing to be totally destroyed is when he sees, yet again, a glimmer of a chance to pay back the world for his screwups in Zero Requiem. He's so much more likeable with Zero Requiem, though - because finally, after an entire season of being this mysterious emo blob of shitty attitude and terrible life choices combined with shifting loyalties and no character development, he's finally aligned with Lelouch's life goals. (Sorry, Sunrise, but by the end of R2 you had basically just gone 'fuck it, Lelouch's morals are the ones we like so everyone who disagrees is wrong'.)
Before getting to Requiem there's that really important conversation that Suzaku and Lelouch have at the shrine - the one where Suzaku makes Lelouch bow and Schneizel is a douche who crashes the party. It's important because we see that despite blaming himself, Suzaku has spent the entire time wondering why Lelouch did what he did. He doesn't understand why Euphemia was geassed, for instance, and Lelouch still can't admit it was a mistake. (That missing month before Requiem is always going to KILL ME but whatever conversations Suzaku and Lelouch had must have been basically a continuance of this interrupted conversation). It's the forever problem of them being so terrible at communication, but they come closer than ever before with Suzaku having a modicrum of self-worth by demanding Lelouch apologize and Lelouch having to admit that he needs help. Nothing much happens I guess but it does lay the groundwork for Requiem to be a thing.
Requiem Suzaku isn't that different, but I think a couple of important things happen:
1) he helps Lelouch stand his ground in the Thought Elevator against the Emperor, which kind of boosts his self-esteem a little? Not really the right word, but I mean that it wakes up this wrecked, depressed R2!Suzaku to the fact there is more going on than own existence being a mistake and these things are worth fighting for beyond redeeming his failures. Suzaku desperately needs that. It also shows him that Lelouch isn't a monster despite his being Zero, that maybe Lelouch wasn't a great big mistake that Suzaku caused when they were kids. It takes away their being at odds and gives them a brief common enemy, which is so very crucial at that moment.
2) Lelouch promises Suzaku an ending that is as close to what Suzaku wanted all this time as he's going to ever get, and Suzaku jumps at the chance. (I think he might be under some illusions that Lelouch wants to die to redeem himself for his sins too, and that Suzaku gets to help with that, but yeah. :V They also think Nunally is dead so Lelouch is pretty YOLO about his life at the moment also.) But Lelouch took away Suzaku's ability to get himself killed, and then gives it back in a way by offering this solution, so. that brightens Suzaku's gray existence somewhat.
Also, Suzaku's ending is Punishment Ever After, yes, but it's also A Liberated World Ever After, which is even more important. As much as Suzaku wants to suffer, he wants to erase the negative effects of his existence from the world even more - that's what he spends all of both seasons attempting to do. Requiem achieves that and more, freeing the world from tyranny presumably forever, and he gets to help - which, oops, is exactly what Euphemia offered him at the end of season 1.
Only this time it sticks.
And wow that was really really long huff huff /rolls over and dies.
the POINT is yes Suzaku is a wreck that hates himself and wallows in that self-hatred but that self-hatred is the reason why he tries to make the world a better place, even if he really sucks at it especially in season 2.
the end