Duo Maxwell Quotes

A code with one clause, chosen by someone who grew up on a colony's streets and in a church that was destroyed around him. Notice which virtue he keeps and which he explicitly gives up. Courage is discarded openly (he will run, he says so first), and honesty is retained, which is the inverse of the priority every other pilot in the series holds. For boys whose entire function is covert deployment under false papers, refusing to lie is close to professionally disqualifying. He does it anyway, and calls himself the god of death while doing it, which is either a joke or the most honest thing about him depending on the episode.

He named himself this, which is the detail that changes it. A boy who watched a church and everyone in it destroyed picked the grandest available title for the thing that kept happening around him, and then wore it as a joke he never stops telling. Read as bravado it is adolescent. Read as management it is more coherent — if death is going to follow you, becoming its proprietor is at least a position with agency in it. The series never asks him to drop the act and be sincere, which most shows would. It simply lets the act be load-bearing, and lets the one time he tells the truth about it land harder for the contrast.

Standard menace, and the series spends forty-seven episodes contradicting it. He does not, in fact, kill everyone who sees him — he takes prisoners, he lets people go, he is visibly troubled by casualties and says so. Set against Trowa, who makes the identical threat in the first episode and means it, the difference is the whole characterisation. Both boys were handed the same doctrine about operational security and only one of them can carry it out. The threat is a costume, worn early and loudly, and what makes the character work is that nobody in the story ever calls him on it. He is simply allowed to be worse at atrocity than his cover story requires.