Rau Le Creuset Quotes
3 quotes from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
A masked commander whose advice to the young pilots under him is sound, sincere and aimed at ending the species. The series' most quotable villain because he is usually right about the facts.
“War is really about the conflicting ideas of different people. What is it that one should be fighting against? Never lose sight of that.”
The question is the same one Lacus asked in episode twelve, and Kira asks Murrue in episode thirty-six, and Athrun will hand to Shinn in the sequel, which tells you the writers considered it the spine of the show. Rau asking it is the interesting version, because he already has an answer: everyone, on every side, since humanity itself is the thing to fight against. The line is delivered to Yzak and Dearka's replacements as sound advice, and it is sound; what is missing is that the man giving it has been arranging both sides' escalation for forty episodes, from leaking the N-Jammer canceler to the Earth Forces to shooting Flay's father's ship. The scene rewards a second viewing more than almost any other in the series. On the first pass it is a mentor's counsel; on the second it is a man telling children to look for a target while he stands directly behind them.
Spoiler — from the ending. Tap to reveal.
“You shouldn't blame me! This is mankind's dream, mankind's desire, mankind's destiny! To be the strongest, to go the farthest, to climb the highest!”
The genocidal villain's manifesto in a Gundam finale is a fixed institution, and Rau's is more interesting than Gihren Zabi's or Rau's own copy in later Cosmic Era material because he is not proposing to rule anything. He wants the species to finish what it started. What he says here is a theory of history: that GENESIS, nuclear missiles and the artificial womb that produced Kira are not aberrations but the same appetite reaching its logical end, and that stopping it would be dishonest. The delivery, to Mu over the open channel in the middle of a fleet battle, is theatrical, and the dub leans into it. But the argument is not stupid, and the series has spent forty-nine episodes providing evidence for it, which is why Kira's rebuttal in the final phase is a stammer rather than a speech. A villain the story can prove wrong is a weak villain. This one it can only kill.
Read Rau Le Creuset'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.
Find Mobile Suit Gundam SEED on Amazon
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases. Links on this page are affiliate links, which cost you nothing extra. They never influence what appears on this site or what the commentary says about it.
Rau says this to Flay, aboard his ship, having rescued her from the Earth Forces so he can hand her a disk and use her as a delivery system. A viewer who knows nothing else about him could take it as compassion. Two episodes later he tells Mu La Flaga that he is a defective clone of Mu's father, made to order, aged prematurely, and kept alive on medication, which retroactively turns this sentence into the most personal thing he says all series. He was, in the only sense that matters to him, born as a weapon. The line is also a precise description of Kira, Flay, and every other teenager on the Archangel, none of whom chose the cockpit, and Rau's contempt for humanity does not stop him from being the character who notices that most clearly.