Schneizel el Britannia Quotes

The usual reading has this as the humane prince showing his hand, and it is nothing of the sort. His officers have just proposed bombing ground forces from the air; he withdraws, and his stated reason is that the High Eunuchs have lost the people's support and are therefore no longer useful as partners. Nations are people is a claim about legitimacy, not compassion. An ally who loses the crowd is dropped that afternoon. The same calculation returns at the end of the series pointed the other way, when he decides that since people are people and driven by what they want, the reliable way to govern them is fear from orbit. Both sentences come from one premise, and the premise is a management theory. Read it as kindness and the Damocles comes out of nowhere. Read it as accounting and it is the first line of the ledger.

Light Yagami announces the same ambition in Death Note, two years before this aired, and the difference is entirely in temperature. Schneizel says it to his sister, in reply to her sarcasm, in the tone of a man agreeing to take the minutes. Cornelia has just told him only a god could discipline the whole human race and he accepts the job description without raising his voice. That flatness is the characterization. He is offering to become the thing Lelouch is fighting purely because the alternative, a war that never ends, offends his sense of tidiness. Death Note's god is a boy who wants to be worshipped. This one is an administrator who has noticed the vacancy.

Delivered to a room he is in the process of turning against his brother, which is what makes the affection credible rather than decorative. Schneizel is the only Britannian who never underestimated Lelouch, the one opponent Lelouch could never beat at chess as a child, and the sentence functions as both eulogy and indictment because he means every word of both halves.

The one moment the series lets someone explain the premise in plain administrative English, and it is the killing blow. Geass has been a private horror between Lelouch and the audience; the instant it is described to the Black Knights as a capability rather than a mystery, every loyalty in the organization becomes unverifiable, and the tribunal that follows is a formality.