Mu La Flaga Quotes

Mu's catchphrase is 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.

It comes after Kira has killed Nicol, and it 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 then, in the same episode, sends Kira into a fight with Athrun in which each tries to kill the other.

Aisha tells Waltfeld in this episode that she can see how fond he is of his opponent. He asks whether the opponent will surrender; she says there is no chance. That exchange places Mu's advice beside an enemy who already knows the difficulty it tries to remove. Forgetting a person can make fighting easier, but ease is not an adequate measure of whether the forgetting is good. Mu's formulation quietly promotes a practical obstacle into something the pilot ought to discard. Waltfeld also declares that one of them must be destroyed, and Kira protests that the ending was unnecessary. Neither statement proves that knowing each other would have prevented the battle. They do make the advice look poorer than professional realism. Recognition supplies reasons to question what the encounter demands. Removing those reasons may improve execution while leaving the decision to fight exactly as unexamined as before.

Athrun calls the use of a rescued civilian as a hostage cowardice and demands that Kira justify fighting beside the people responsible. Mu's explanation follows in the same episode, locating the tactic in his side's weakness. That account contests the easy picture of military wrongdoing as an excess of confidence. A force can endanger a protected person because it lacks the power to obtain what it wants by direct combat. But identifying the pressure does not distribute responsibility back onto the hostage. The officers still choose the means, and Mu's own word for their conduct admits its moral problem. His explanation is most useful when it sharpens that distinction: weakness can predict a decision without making it necessary or defensible. If heard instead as a request for indulgence because the ship has few options, it turns the endangered civilian into the resource by which everyone else's scarcity is managed.

Cagalli objects to Mu calling the burning of a town minor and its attacker kind. His reply apologizes for upsetting her but preserves the assessment behind those words: an established army could have done much worse. He is measuring unused destructive capacity while she is challenging the description of what has already been destroyed. There is useful judgment in Mu's distinction. Knowing that an enemy has withheld part of its force can matter to anyone deciding how to respond. Cagalli's anger does not make that assessment worthless. But the comparison cannot do all the work Mu gives it. A worse attack remaining possible does not make a burned town a small loss, and relative restraint does not by itself make the attacker kind. His apology acknowledges the emotional effect of his phrasing without withdrawing either implication. The exchange would be stronger military advice if he separated what the army could still do from the praise he has attached to what it already did.