A recent anime discussion has prompted me to write about the most cringe-inducingly stupid moment of the second season of Code Geass and how it could have been avoided.
And I mean THAT moment, the one where Zero gets backstabbed by the Black Knights over what amounts to a biased set of witnesses, a bunch of paranoia, a lot of poorly reasoned assumptions, an idiot seeking short-term gains making a judgment call they had no good reason to be making in the first place, and a leader whose biggest flaw was understandable but made the situation worse.
Let's dissect the situation and analyze the stupid, shall we?
1. Zero (Lelouch vi Britannia) is accused of planning to sell out his own subordinates, based on an out of context conversation recorded between him and a member of the enemy with an obvious axe to grind (Suzaku Kururugi), and said proof is provided by another enemy (Schneizel El Britannia) who has every motive to profit from sowing dissension.
This alone should have made the Black Knights suspicious. Just because they suspect their leader wasn't entirely on the level is no reason to trust two guys who have been working for their destruction over him without more to go on save an out of context conversation recorded under pretenses they cannot be sure were not doctored for their benefit.
2. All they really had to go on prior to getting the supposed evidence their leader was not on the level was a bunch of paranoia. Said leader has done his utmost to otherwise prove themselves just as capable as when they first met him, wearing a mask or not, and at the point they were duped into betraying him, he has yet to actually commit an act of clear cut treason against them.
Treason meaning "giving aid and comfort to the enemy", which he had yet to do to anyone they did not know had defected to their side prior to their knowledge. Further, the only real witnesses had every reason to lie, BEING ON THE ENEMY SIDE.
3. Most of their assumptions for treason came from poor information on said leader, whose identity they discovered under bad circumstances but in no way made said leader a traitor (the fact he hid who he really was shady, but given who he was, understandable to avoid trust issues, part of the reason said leader masked himself to begin with).
If anything, all they got out of knowing Zero's true identity was that he was related to the enemy, but they already had Britannians on their team already, so this was a dumb thing to hold against Lelouch.
4. The idiot who made the biggest part of the judgment call to betray Zero was Oghi, a man who had ACTUALLY committed treason by sleeping with an enemy officer, hiding that information from his own allies, and refusing to take a stand for either his cause or his hormones, even at the time he was forced to make an actual choice. Somehow, this ACTUAL double-crosser was trusted, but Lelouch was not, even though Oghi's actions were clear-cut giving aid and comfort to enemy combatants.
5. Finally, if Lelouch can be reasonably blamed for anything, it was his refusal to explain anything, if only to prevent misunderstanding.
Part of it was understandable. He was hiding his identity for reasons that would hurt his own forces as well as to protect himself, a lot of what he knew would be more dangerous if widely known, not less, and a lot of what he knew could not be reasonably explained without divulging said information it would be deadly if widely known. The Geass powers at the source of the show were dangerous by their very existence, and Lelouch wisely knew that wider knowledge of them getting out could only make them more dangerous, hence his actions trying to keep a lid on their existence.
However, his hiding his identity and the Geass knowledge also put him in a position of having to order brutal but necessary acts for poorly explained reasons (like the slaughter of the Geass Cult, which made perfect military and strategic sense but also made his troops reasonably horrified to be party to what came off like war crimes due to their own lack of knowledge of the situation). His identity as the outcast prince of the very monarchy who were the chief antagonists of the Black Knights should have come out sooner, as Lelouch had been naive to try keeping it a secret when a wider group of people he had to keep ignorant risked blowing his secret as time went on and attempts to prevent it just caused the reveal when it did happen to occur at the worst possible time.
Short version, Zero was innocent of any of the actual charges against him but guilty of hiding a lot, though most of it was, in his defense, as much to protect himself as it was to protect the troops under his command.
The entire betrayal he got was rooted deeply in his own forces letting their paranoia get the best of them and taking the word of people they should not have trusted without getting confirmation via parties who did not have prior biases, and the people making the decision to let Zero free or to let him hang should have been people other than ACTUAL TRAITOR Ohgi, who frankly had should have answered for his own treason but never did.
tl;dr: He should have come clean earlier, but he refrained trying to prevent the very disaster his unmasking ensured would happen.
Now that we covered the stupidity, let's cover what should have happened.
1. The witnesses who attested to Zero being a traitor should have been countered by witnesses in his favor. He never got that, and the word of biased witnesses who were from the enemy camp should have never been accepted without independent verification. Double galling is that the Black Knights had actually military personnel amongst their number and should have been wise enough to consider all this.
2. When Lelouch's identity came out, that should have been when they demanded Lelouch explain himself. Despite their paranoia, they still didn't know if he did anything that would be provable as treason (aside from being an outcast Britiannian Royal, which meant nothing bad given he was working for the Black Knights since day one as a logical response to being an outcast), they just had assumptions, they should have gotten his side of the story instead of assuming he should swing from a gibbet based on partial information.
3. Oghi's own fraternization with the enemy should have come out. He was leading the side who wanted to see Lelouch hang, even though he should have been the one at the end of a rope under the orders of any competent military tribunal, especially since his treasonous acts were partially responsible for actual military losses people could point to during the failed Black Rebellion.
4. Once they got both sides of the story, the decision should have been made if Lelouch still deserved trust. True, they had partial information he had brainwashing powers and that colored their decision, but even with that in mind, that should have been weighed against any evidence said brainwashing was used to weaken the cause of the Black Knights, If not, he deserved the benefit of the doubt.
Now, before I close this out, I'm a fan of Super Robot Wars, a crossover video game series that combines multiple mecha shows into one plot and often fixes the stupid in said plots by rewriting canon stupidity into something that makes sense.
In Super Robot Wars Z2-2, they follow the events of Geass canon, but the characters original to the game on the good guy side and good guy crossover characters are also part of the Black Knights, and the game gives the player the choice to avert this moment of stupid.
To avoid having to write a novel for those who aren't aware of what SRW is all about, here's the non spoiler version.
In the route where you have the Black Knights trust Zero, he gets several key witnesses to figure out who he is prior to the betrayal who will all speak up in his defense when the decision to decide if Zero hangs for treason happens. This causes Oghi to be forced to think for more than five seconds and make a judgment call to hear Lelouch out before they execute him.
If you pull off the conditions to achieve this route, the Black Knights stay loyal, the plot avoids Lelouch having to plot his own assassination later, and while the Black Knights are understandably not happy with all the lies and omitted information they had been fed prior, they decide that ultimately, based on the evidence, they can't really claim Lelouch ever planned to sell them out, even if they can at least accuse him of not being honest about all of his long-term intentions.
This history change means they still work with him for practical reasons to achieve their goals once the initial anger over their lack of knowledge of the situation they were not privy to is explained to them.
Short version, I like how SRW rewrote the story. It basically plays out that scene where he gets betrayed, only as it should have happened had everyone involved not acted like their IQ hit sub-zero.
And, if the player of SRW chooses, they can have the cast of Code Geass not do that stupid betrayal scene and thus avoid the dumbest moment in the show.
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