Of Clovis, Lelouch, and Killing Siblings: An Overly Critical Analysis
NOTE: THIS IS AN ADVANCE NOTICE THAT YOU ARE ABOUT TO READ A PIECE ON MURDER, MENTAL HEALTH AND OTHER TRAUMATIC THEMES. READER’S DISCRETION IS ADVISED.
Code Geass remains one of my top anime series of all time (second only to Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood). I first saw it back when I was still in gradeschool (2010), and I can still recall my incredibly malleable pubescent mind being blown to metaphorical tiny bits. Whatever I saw at that time, the characterization, the writing, the premise, (I can’t remember) really agreed to my appetite after having just finished consuming 37 episodes of Death Note in a span of two school nights. Now, a decade later, I decided to revisit the series and boy oh boy. It’s still as hair-raising as I remembered it to be. But now with the mind of (*cough) an adult with four years of serious college publication experience under her belt (I GOT PAID. YOU KNOW IT’S SERIOUS WHEN THERE’S MONEY INVOLVED), one diploma for a Bachelor’s degree, and two years in medical school, I came to appreciate the tiniest details that I may have missed during my first view of the series. One of which is the death of Clovis la Britannia, 3rd prince of the Holy Britannian Empire. It was a pivotal point in the story, but not in the way I had initially thought it to be . Yep. His death did cause Cornelia and Euphemia to transfer to Area 11 and for Jeremiah to start his purist rally, but those are not the best part about it.
SPOILERS ALERT! Fasten your seatbelts because things are about to get technical and overly critical.
Re;view: The day a demon was born was also the day a prince died. Viewers loved Lelouch vi Britannia and his flair for the dramatics. This is evident in the fact that he was voted the most popular male anime character in the Anime Grand Prix THREE TIMES. (How about you? How many times were you voted most popular? Kidding. Why am I hurting myself?) His main selling points are his genius-level intellect, good looks, good background, and machiavellianism going off the charts. We all love it when our heroes go all manipulative and cunning, and Lelouch is an absolute Slytherin. Looking back, I was eating it up like woah after watching L and Light Yagami double-double-cross each other in Death Note. It was the era of edgy heroes. But unlike Light, fans loved Lelouch- this is interesting because they are practically reflections of one another. (That’s not the point of this word vomit; I will write more on that in the future though.) Code Geass R1 started off with a very bold scene after the customary montage. The writers made an interesting choice with the chess battle between Lelouch and the noble. This effectively gave us a headshot of our main character: Lelouch Lamperouge. Student. Genius. Gambler. Maker of miracles. (Yes, the last one is intentional. Please laugh.) It was established early on that this Lelouch boy is different from all the other students you’ve encountered in the past. (Who would’ve thought Code Geass dipped into the Wu Xia pocket of tricks before it got popular ammaright? Errr... No. Actually this is more appropriately referenced to the Chunibyuu culture, but humor me in this one.) We were also given a glimpse of Clovis, then viceroy of Area 11. But the way he was eased into the series was more lackluster than the introduction of Lelouch. It’s quite an irony because Clovis’s first appearance is him giving a passionate televised speech about a truck of (cough) poison gas (cough) being stolen by the Eleven terrorists from the Britannian government. The scene panned out to reveal him giving the said speech in the middle of a party. At this moment, of course, I got the sense that Clovis was written as just another corrupt government official. But if you look at the script or storyboard sequence, you can see that this alone does not make a very compelling case for his death later on. He’s also Xenophobic and elitist, by the way. The episode proceeded with Lelouch briefing us to the world of Japan/Area 11 post-Britannian invasion. We see this bizarre alternate universe unfold right before us one petal at a time. This is a particularly great choice for the narrative, because the writers did a good job revealing to us how our protaginist sees his own world: Is he optimistic? Is he a committed critic? Etc. Etc. Fast forward to episode 3, where Lelouch killed Clovis, we weren’t really given a view of Lelouch shooting the prince into the head. If you think of it long and hard, this comes out peculiar. Code Geass is not one to shy away from depicting its characters shooting themselves at the command of His Highness, Lelouch vi Britannia, to “DIE.” But, why is it that we weren’t given the satisfaction of seeing Clovis’s lifeless body? Instead, we were treated with a screen blank.
No Joffrey Baratheon moment. Why was there no crime scene shot? The answer lies on the context of how the scene was closed. Lelouch vomited right after the screen blank, hence ending his remembrance of what happened to Clovis. Before shooting Clovis, he said, “You cannot change the world without getting your hands dirty.” Let me break this to you one by one. A. Lelouch has PTSD Vomiting in anime (and other pop media) is a common act presented right after killing someone. Medically speaking, it is actually a symptomatic presentation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). According to a paper by Michopoulos, et al. (2019), they found out from a cohort investigation that peri-traumatic nausea- or vomiting around the time of the accident- is a prospective predictor of PTSD symptom development. The list of potential traumatic events is quite long, but killing one of your brothers definitely made the list. We can also see in the series that everytime Lelouch remembers Clovis’s death, he gets this urge to vomit. Does it mean that our favorite anime character has PTSD or- at the very least- is slowly developing one? It could be. One very common misconception about Lelouch is that he is either a psychopath or a sociopath. But there has never been an indicator of him being one or the other. A true psychopath is someone who cannot feel remorse even after commiting a crime, but usually this person would have the presence of mind to evade capture and lead a normal everyday life. Whilst a true sociopath is someone who exhibits erratic and rage-prone behavior (mha-em.org). With Lelouch experiencing acceptable periods of highs or lows and having the capacity to plan extensively to achieve his goals, he is therefore disqualified from the criteria of both psychopathy and sociopathy. Furthermore, having a metaphorical “blank memory” in literature also meant that the event is something that’s far too scarring for the character to want to remember. Now, Code Geass is an anime that tells a story using a shifting point of view. This means that we can see what each character thinks during a specific situation so long as it is relevant to the narrative. For me, the blank screen effectively emphasized that Lelouch was traumatized from killing his own brother. But he already killed a group of Britannian soldiers earlier, why is there more weight emphasized on the former than the latter. Is this because they’re brothers? To resolve this, let me borrow a beloved quote from Joker in the Dark Knight, “Do you want to know why I use a knife? Guns are too quick. You can’t savor all the... little emotions. In... you see, in their last moments, people show you who they really are. So in a way, I know your friends better than you ever did. Would you like to know which of them were cowards?”
In Lelouch’s situation, the guns would be his geass and the knife would be the gun he used on Clovis. (Quite confusing but bear with me on this one.) Somehow, shooting Clovis himself made the situation more real than the detached death sentences (pun intended) he gave out using his geass. This puts meaning on his statement before shooting Clovis, and hence brings us to the next point- which could be the other implication of the blank screen. B. “You cannot change the world without getting your hands dirty,” is the true moment Lelouch the demon was born. If Clovis's death became Lelouch's true point of no return, it is only fitting to use a clean transition from it. The blank screen could be akin to awakening from a long slumber wherein he is nothing but another face in the crowd. But if you can recall, Lelouch has already given his long protagonist speech way before episode 3. It happened at the end of episode 1. So how did I arrive at the conclusion that the true birth of the demon happened after he murdered Clovis? Why is it the true point of no return? When Lelouch commanded the Britannian soldiers to kill themselves on episode 1, we were treated with an interesting facial expression. (Another interesting thing I've noticed; try playing this scene side by side with R2 episode 1's sequence of C.C. triggering the return of his memories.) It lasted approximately 20 seconds on screen. The expression itself is not just a single emotion, rather it is a series of emotions and thoughts. As if he does not know what to feel, culminating with- finally- our beloved smirk of triumph and realization. Here's my resolution: What if everything that transpired from that moment to the moment he killed Clovis, was just a showcase of his naivete. What if he hadn't trully realized that his life was about to change? Still one would feel compelled to ask, "Didn't he just command the Britannian soldiers to kill themselves? And didn't he just witness C.C. die? Plus, didn't we witness with him the massacre of Elevens in Shinjuku (which included babies by the way)?" I have already given a potential answer to the first. As for the second and third, it would do well to remember that Lelouch came from Britannia where the ultimate law is survival of the fittest (or so we are lead to believe from Charles's impassioned speeches). Using other people is the norm there. Additionally, we do know that Lelouch actually witnessed the murder of his own mother, plus Britannia invading Japan. He has already been desensitized to death and violence at some degree. But it is probably accurate to assume that he had not killed anyone prior to Clovis. Hence, justifying how pivotal it was for his character. He had effectively detached himself from the deaths he had caused, but not from the death of Clovis. Because quoting him, he "got his hands dirty".
So in summary, Clovis's death was valuable not only as a stepping stone to bringing Cornelia and Euphemia into the scene. It is valuable because it actually highlighted Lelouch as a weak human and then re-introduced him as an empowered "demon".