“You bastard…! He's taken every Britannian here hostage… and he's done it without them even knowing!”
Jeremiah Gottwald Quotes
3 quotes from Code Geass, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Read the character analysis and its source limits
Rebuilt around the question of who he serves, and ends up devoted to the man who ruined him. His loyalty needed a machine because nobody would take his word for it.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“That machine was made so that I could prove my loyalty.”
Said by a man who has been rebuilt, twice, around the question of who he serves. Jeremiah begins as a purist officer humiliated by Zero, is remade as a cyborg by the Empire he worships, and ends up devoted to the person who ruined him. Read across those three positions, the sentence is not about hardware. It is a man explaining that his loyalty needed a machine because nobody would take his word for it.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“Oh, I beseech you! I'm begging you, please die.”
Twenty-one episodes earlier this man was an officer with a career, publicly humiliated when Zero made him release a prisoner in front of his own unit and the press. The nickname that followed him out of that scene was invented on the spot and stuck, and the show never lets him forget it. So the courtesy here is both the joke and the damage. He has retained the entire vocabulary of a Britannian officer, the formal register and the deference, and hung it on a request that Zero die. Nothing else about him survived. What makes the character work is where it goes next: the same absolute quality that makes him ridiculous in this moment makes him, once he learns who is behind the mask, the only subordinate Lelouch never has to command twice. Jeremiah is a study in loyalty so total it is indifferent to its object. The comedy and the pathos are one trait seen from either end of the series.
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Jeremiah recognizes the capsule and assumes it contains poison gas, while the reporter can only tell the audience that Zero has revealed a device. The imbalance in knowledge is the trick. The threat need not be understood by everyone it supposedly endangers; it needs to be believed by the officer who can order a response. His private realization lets the audience see why a military advantage has suddenly become awkward to use. It also limits what his insight amounts to. He has understood the consequence of the belief Zero wants him to hold, without discovering whether that belief is true. Zero is exploiting an assumption as effectively as a weapon. Calling this simple cleverness misses the uglier part: the maneuver makes the surrounding crowd useful precisely because its members cannot assess what is being done in their name. Jeremiah's anger acknowledges a loss of control, but his recognition is incomplete. He sees the hostage situation his own information has helped create, and still has to decide from inside it.