Kira Yamato Quotes

Four episodes in, Kira has been in the Strike's cockpit twice, both times because nobody else could make it move, and Mu La Flaga has just told him plainly that the two of them are the only pilots the Archangel has. What Kira offers back is not consent to being a soldier. It is a much narrower bargain: not the war, not the Earth Forces, just this hull and the classmates sheltering in it. The series takes that narrowness seriously, because everything that goes wrong for him later comes from the ship's cause and the war's cause refusing to stay separate. Flay will turn his protectiveness into a weapon in episode fifteen, and the Earth Forces will fold his private loyalty into their own aims without asking. The distinction he draws here is honest and completely unsustainable, and the show's first half is the slow demonstration of why.

Cagalli has just been on the ground for a strafed town and is furious that Mu called the attack minor; Kira is the one who snaps at her, and it is the coldest thing he has said so far. Coming from the pilot who spent episode four insisting he only wanted to protect the ship, it lands as a report on what fourteen episodes of combat have done to him. He is not wrong on the tactical point (the Tiger's raid was a warning, not the real thing) and he is not talking to Cagalli at all, really; he is defending the version of himself that stopped crying and started shooting. The show lets the line stand as an accusation against himself. By the finale he is back to arguing that a person is more than their capabilities, which is the same question from the other side.

Spoken at the Clyne residence with Lacus, after Kira has been out of the war for several episodes and could stay out of it; this is him talking himself back into a cockpit he has every reason to avoid. The sentence is shaped like a syllogism, and the sub renders it almost as clumsily as the dub, which is a point in its favor: he is reasoning it out on the spot rather than reciting a creed. Line it up against Athrun's position at the same moment, still obeying orders on the other side of the front, and the pair make the show's real argument. Neither boy believes in his own army. Kira's answer is to fight without one, which the Freedom makes physically possible and the plot keeps punishing him for. The claim that inaction changes nothing is where the site would push back, gently; the Orb of episode twenty-five was an argument that staying out is also a choice, and it cost Uzumi his life to make it.