Lacus Clyne Quotes

Lacus at this point is a pop singer and a politician's daughter who has been fished out of a lifeboat by the enemy, and this is her first real exchange with the pilot who will end up marrying her. The distinction she draws is the one SEED will spend the rest of its run on, and it is worth noticing who cannot draw it: Flay, in the same episode, is refusing to let Coordinators near her, and Athrun in episode five claimed Kira for ZAFT on the strength of his genes alone. Lacus is the first person on either side to treat what Kira is and who he is as separate questions. That she does it while being held prisoner, offhandedly, in a conversation about a robot toy, is why it works. The show's most-quoted political speeches come later and are worse than this, because they argue for the same thing at the volume of a rally.

Aboard the Eternal, with the Earth Forces about to send nuclear missiles at the PLANTs and her own father's faction preparing GENESIS to answer them, Lacus states the whole thesis of the Clyne faction in one sentence. It is plain and it is deliberately unmagical. There is no appeal to Newtypes, to evolution, or to the SEED factor that gives the series its name; the claim is only that a war is a thing people are doing and can therefore stop doing, which is the least mystical position anyone in a Gundam finale has ever held. Compare Char in Char's Counterattack, dropping an asteroid to force humanity's growth, or Rau in this same series, who agrees with Char that people are the problem and disagrees only about whether they deserve to survive it. Lacus is the one leader in the show who declines to make history the argument. That the series then gives her three warships and a pink Haro makes it easy to miss how unusual her position is.

A pacifist faction is about to launch the Freedom, the Justice and a warship into the largest battle of the war, and its leader's speech to her crew concedes the objection before anyone can make it. That concession is what separates Lacus from Relena Peacecraft, whose total pacifism in Gundam Wing refuses the weapons entirely and is written as brave for it. Lacus is not making that argument. She is saying the Clyne faction is armed, that arming was a choice, and that the choice may be wrong; the request for strength is a request to be forgiven for it in advance. The dub's phrasing is stiff, and a sub viewer will find the same thought put more simply. But the thought is the important one in the whole series: SEED does not believe clean hands are available, and its most idealistic character is the one who says so out loud.