“Hatred will only result in bringing more hatred.”
Relena Peacecraft Quotes
2 quotes from Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
No mobile suit, no faction, and the character who actually ends the war. Her pacifism is written as a tactic requiring more nerve than piloting.
“Peace is not something that is just given to you.”
The most common criticism of her is that she is a bystander with a title who lectures soldiers. This is the rebuttal, and she is making it about herself as much as anyone. She inherited a pacifist kingdom, a dead father's politics and a name she did not choose, all of which were given to her, and the series is careful to show that none of it worked until she started doing something expensive with it. Peace here is not a state that follows victory. It is an ongoing administrative and personal cost, absorbed by someone in public, repeatedly. That is an unglamorous thing for a giant robot show to conclude, and it takes the entire runtime to arrive at it.
The least fashionable line in the series and the one it ultimately agrees with, which is worth saying because Wing's reputation rests entirely on the five boys in the machines. She has no mobile suit, no combat ability and no faction, and she is the character who actually ends the war — by absorbing hostility without returning it, in public, repeatedly, at real risk. The pacifism is not presented as gentle. It is presented as a tactic requiring more nerve than piloting, performed by a teenager with a title and no army. A genre built on the premise that conflicts are settled by whoever has the better weapon spends its finale conceding that this one was not.