The terrorists are entirely justified in their violent resistance against the obviously evil and genocidal Britannian empire, which is something of a stand in for both the British Empire and the US.
The annoying liberal deuteragonist bumbles around for 2/3 of the show being a supersoldier for the Britannian Empire while constantly making these bizarre self righteous arguments that Lelouch’s rebellion is just too darn mean and violent, we have to support the Britannian Empire’s rule of law just a while longer guys! The longer this goes on, the more and more his world view crumbles around him as basically nothing goes to plan for this liberal who is just incapable of grappling with material reality. He ends up following his sense of liberal morality all the way to accidentally killing millions with a Britannian wunderwaffe nuke. This leads him on his jokerification arc wherein he realizes the error of his ways and actually supports Lelouch through the batshit last few episodes of this show.
Anyway, I can’t recommend this show to anyone in year of our lord 2024 because it’s obnoxiously, embarrassingly horny in a very mid 2000s anime way, because that’s exactly what it is. But I’m imagining what could have been.
It got more and more off the rails with the Geass magic at the end, but I found it pretty enjoyable
I thought the supernatural EoE-esque human instrumentality project ass shit King Charles was working on with his brother and wife came to a great conclusion and served the story pretty well in that regard.
Like Lelouch spends most of the anime with one of his leading motivations being finding his mother’s killer and taking revenge. But in what was meant to be his climactic showdown with his father, he finds his mother is actually still alive, her soul in some trippy subspace connected to the thought elevator by her geass ability. She reveals she’s totally into this “slaying god” shit King Charles (who is now immortal btw) and his brother were doing. Lelouch’s parents then drone on and on about how actually we had to exile you and Nunnally while ruling Britannia as a racist, genocidal empire built on the backs of subjugated colonies, those we’re just the conditions we needed to wield the Sword of Akasha! (the helical structure seen stabbing into the planet Jupiter). They claim this will kill the capability for deceit in human nature (???) thereby allowing the collective dead to all commune with the living (???) in an unchanging, perfect world frozen around the current status quo in terms of social structure (???)
Lelouch correctly rejects all of this out of hand for the nonsense it is. The supposedly good intentions of his parents buried this deep in metaphysical fascist nonsense are meaningless. In rejection of everything his parents believed and worked toward, Lelouch uses his Geass to request god not halt the march of time. God responds by erasing the immortal King Charles and his wife Marianne. Everything falls apart for them in an almost comical way, starting with the sword toppling over and falling away from Jupiter, and the subspace itself becomes unstable. King Charles dies, evaporating away in shocked disbelief, having previously demonstrated himself immortal. Marianne calls Lelouch an ungrateful child before she too disappears into a puff of smoke. I thought this was such a great twist to take the mystery of Lelouch’s mother, and it was a great way to tie up a lot of the lore threads before moving onto Lelouch’s confrontation with his older brother.