“Now that you've seen me, I can't let you live. My orders were only to destroy the spaceport...but now I will destroy everything! This is battle 001. Pilot's name: Trowa. For the record.”
Trowa Barton Quotes
2 quotes from Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, each with commentary on what it means and why it stuck.
Introduced narrating himself into a combat record that does not exist. A person assembled out of a mission, using a dead man's name.
“If you were me, and a girl cried for you, you would still kill yourself. I admire your strength.”
Grant that admiring a suicide is not a healthy thing to say to a fifteen-year-old. It is still the most honest exchange the pilots have in the first half of the series. Two boys raised as equipment compare notes on the one action they were built for, and neither has been given a vocabulary in which a girl crying counts as a reason. The series treats that deficit as the injury it is.
Read Trowa Barton'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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A soldier logging an engagement out loud, including his own name, to nobody. The show introduces its most withdrawn pilot by having him narrate himself into a record that does not exist, which is the whole character in one gesture: a person assembled out of a mission with no life attached to it. He borrowed the name Trowa Barton from a dead man that same week.