“When the coffee is first-rate, so is everything else. All right, let's go fight a war.”
Andrew Waltfeld Quotes
3 quotes from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“The first time I actually ever had to shoot somebody, it turned my stomach. They told me I'd get used to it in time. And after a while, that's what happened.”
Waltfeld is captaining the Eternal before the last battle, with one arm and one eye left from his fight with Kira in the desert, and this is the closest SEED comes to a veteran's confession. The flatness is the achievement. He does not say getting used to it was wrong; he says it happened, which is a much harder thing to hear from a character the show has made likeable. Set it beside Mu's speech in episode thirty, that soldiers are not murderers, and the contrast is the series' whole position on adults: Mu offers a distinction, Waltfeld a prognosis. The Tiger has no advice and no philosophy in this scene, only a description of what the job does to a person who does it well, delivered by a man about to go and do it again.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“I can't see how getting rid of all the Coordinators would lead to a pure world. I don't even know what a pure world is.”
Murrue asks whether the Earth Forces are preparing an all-out attack on the PLANTs. Waltfeld answers with the slogan about preserving a blue and pure world, provoking Mu to tell him to stop before acknowledging the point. His question about purity follows that uncomfortable exchange, so it is not an abstract objection to an unfortunate word. They are discussing a possible military objective. The strongest reply to him would be that the slogan's audience already knows which people it excludes; a precise definition is unnecessary for mobilizing hatred. That does not make the endpoint coherent. Waltfeld separates knowing whom a movement wants removed from knowing what it proposes to create. His admission of incomprehension is useful because it refuses to let extermination borrow the appearance of a constructive plan. An army can act on a slogan whose promised world nobody could describe without naming its victims.
About Andrew Waltfeld
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Around Mobile Suit Gundam SEED
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The Desert Tiger is introduced with a cup of coffee, and this is the sentence that tells a viewer what kind of villain he is going to be: a professional who has arranged his life so that the war is a thing he goes to, like an office. Half the ZAFT officers in SEED are ideologues or careerists. Waltfeld is the first enemy Kira meets who plainly likes his work and dislikes the war, and the show uses him to make the strange point that competence can be a form of decency. Two episodes later he is asking whether people who boast that they would rather die honestly mean it. The coffee is not a quirk. It is the sign of a man who has kept something for himself, and the series treats that as the reason his judgment stays intact when almost no one else's on his side does.