“Lelouch, do you know why snow is white? It's because it has forgotten what color it once was...”
C.C. Quotes
3 quotes from Code Geass, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Immortal, indifferent to almost everything, and the only person who has watched Lelouch's kind of ambition play out before. Her lines sound like riddles and are mostly autobiography; a few of them are the closest the series comes to a thesis.
“The one time a man never lies is when he makes a vow in his own heart.”
The strongest objection to this comes from her own biography. She has taken vows from contract partners for centuries, and the evidence she carries around is that they end badly: Mao, the last one before Lelouch, wanted her so completely that she had to shoot him in a Tokyo church, and Charles kept his to the letter and built a plan to end human individuality out of it. If private vows are the one honest thing, the honesty has not helped anyone. The answer is that she is not claiming vows are kept, or good, only that they are true in the moment of making, which is a much smaller and much sadder claim from someone whose own vow, revealed seven episodes later in C's World, is a wish to die. She is not consoling Lelouch. She is describing the only kind of sincerity she has been able to find, and it is the kind nobody else ever hears.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“If you have someone you don't want to lose, you should keep them at a distance.”
She says it inside the Sword of Akasha, as a gloss on Charles shouting that shipping his children to Japan as hostages was necessary, and she had said the same thing to Lelouch a season earlier when he was trying to keep Shirley out of the blast radius. Coming from her it is autobiography dressed as advice. A girl sold into slavery, handed a Code by the one person who was kind to her, and then given several hundred years to watch everyone she stood near die: distance is simply what she has, and calling it strategy makes it bearable. The same episode she tells Charles and Marianne that the love they have is only for themselves. Put the two lines together and she is arguing with herself within twenty minutes of screen time, and losing. The advice is what she practised. The accusation is what she learned.
Read C.C.'s story from the start
Every line above is a fragment. The manga is where the fragments come from, and the print edition is the one this site checks its quotes against.
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Links on this page are affiliate links, which cost you nothing extra. They never influence what appears on this site or what the commentary says about it.
This is the most-quoted thing she says and it is a riddle without an answer key. Lelouch's reply, an episode later, is that he does not know why snow is white but finds it beautiful, which is the show admitting the line was mood rather than meaning. It gestures at her centuries, at a girl who has outlived every name she was given, but nothing in the scene requires it, and the reveal that would give it a referent (her wish, her Code, the nun who gave it to her) is a full broadcast season away. A sentence doing its work now should not need fifteen months of credit. What it does have is placement. She is living in his closet at Ashford, eating his pizza, and dropping this from the bed while he plans a battle, and the contrast of setting and register is the joke. As foreshadowing, efficient. As the line that ends up on the posters, coasting.