“It's the same for us all. You won't find too many people who wish to fight for no reason at all. We fight because unless we fight, we cannot protect.”
Mu La Flaga Quotes
3 quotes from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
The adult on the Archangel who talks a civilian into a cockpit and then spends the war standing between that boy and the consequences. His catchphrase is the least of him.
“I am a man who can make the impossible possible.”
Mu's catchphrase is the most-quoted line in the series and the least interesting thing he says. It is introduced as a joke, repeated as a boast, and cashed in at episode forty-nine when he puts the Strike between the Archangel and the Dominion's positron cannon, at which point the show wants it to become a creed. The trouble is that the sequel undoes the sacrifice. Destiny brings him back as Neo Roanoke with his memory gone, and the impossible thing he made possible turns out to be surviving, which robs the original line of the one meaning that had earned it. As a character note it works: Mu is a pilot who talks big because someone on that ship has to. As a motto it is a bumper sticker, and the writers' own decision to reverse his death is the strongest evidence that they thought so too.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“We're soldiers. We're not murderers. We're fighting a war! If one doesn't shoot, one gets shot!”
Kira has just come back from the fight in which he killed Nicol, and Mu's answer to a boy who cannot stop shaking is the professional's distinction. The line is meant kindly and it is the least convincing thing Mu says all series, because the show has already spent thirty episodes dismantling it. Athrun, in the same episode on the other side, is swearing to kill Kira for the same death; the distinction Mu offers between a soldier and a murderer is exactly the one Athrun cannot hold onto. What SEED does that earlier Gundam mostly did not is put the teenage pilots' grief at the center and treat the adults' consolations as the thing that fails. Mu is a good officer giving the standard speech. The series lets the speech land on Kira and then shows him, two episodes later, letting the Aegis blow the Strike apart around him rather than shoot first.
Read Mu La Flaga'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.
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Mu is the adult in the room for the first half of SEED, and this is the pitch by which he turns a civilian into the Archangel's only mobile-suit pilot. Set it against Patrick Zala three episodes later, who tells the PLANT Supreme Council almost the identical sentence about ZAFT: fighting because fighting is the only way to protect. The series rhymes the two lines on purpose. One is a warm and decent man talking a frightened boy into a cockpit; the other is a politician justifying an extermination, and the words are the same. That is the show's real subject, more than Naturals and Coordinators: the reasoning that puts a good person in a war is indistinguishable, sentence by sentence, from the reasoning that runs one. Mu never notices the echo. The viewer is supposed to.