Monday, January 24, 2011

Characters: Code Geass part 2

     C.C. 

C.C.
"Snow is white because it's forgotten what color it's supposed to be."

A sarcastic, green-haired girl first found inside an alleged 'poison gas bomb', sporting bondage gear and a big butt. C.C. (pronounced "C2" — or "Shi-Tsu") grants the Geass power to Lelouch, who apparently can give her her mysterious greatest wish, and later stays with him to watch over him. It's later revealed that she gave another Geass to a man named Mao. She has been a close attendant to Zero and has helped him various times, leading him to ally himself with her: "If you're a witch, then I'm the warlock".
Speaking of witches, her past and her name both remain a mystery. Rumor has it that she's been living for many years dating back to the era of Kings, and ever since then she's been repeatedly tortured or killed because of her powers (shot to the forehead, burned at the stake, put inside an Iron Maiden, etc.). She also has a penchant for pizza, and always orders some fromPizza Hut using Lelouch's credit card (not a problem, since he's filthy rich, but it's still an annoyance to him).

C.C. embodies these tropes:
  • Action Girl: Borderline. She doesn't do much actual fighting but she's perfectly capable of it; see Waif Fu below.
  • Alliterative Name: If those are indeed her initials.
  • And I Must Scream: Very nearly, with Mao. Probably happened to her a lot, given her immortality and healing powers.
  • Anti Hero: Type IV.
  • Baby Got Back: And HOW.
  • Badass: You know it!
  • The Beautiful People
  • Be Careful What You Wish For: Her offering Lelouch and Mao their Geass powers. And to a greater extent, her own wishes to be loved.
  • Belated Backstory: We didn't learn who she truly was until the second season.
  • Big Eater: Her love of pizza, which she can frequently be seen eating.
  • Bishoujo
  • Blessed With Suck: Her immortality and her own "love me" Geass before that.
  • Body Horror: See And I Must Scream, above.
  • Broken Bird: Due to her past, she came to not consider herself a human being anymore, and only now is starting to get her human feelings back thanks to Lelouch.
  • Cannot Spit It Out: Let's just say that the show wouldn't very interesting if she told Lelouch from the start that both his parents were in on the same plan, and that there was no real reason to rage against his father or avenge his mother's death.
  • Counterpart Comparison: There are those who see her as somewhat similar to Rei Ayanami.
  • Cry Cute: A cold-hearted, manipulative bitch like C.C. only cries with good reason ... but when she does, the sheer warmth makes you wonder if you are looking at the same person.
  • Cursed With Awesome: Oh, sure, she's got that immortality to worry about, but she can do just about anything thanks to her powers.
  • Dark Is Not Evil
  • Deadpan Snarker: Lord, yes.
  • Defrosting Ice Queen
  • Disney Death: In the first episode.
  • Doom Magnet
  • Draco In Leather Pants: People love to ignore that, despite her really terrible backstory, she's very, very morally ambiguous, and that many of her actions have her sitting on the fence of the Moral Event Horizon. (Just like Lulu, if you wonder)
    • Also, Mao gives C.C. the DILP treatment in-universe. He sees her as a perfect angel even though she robbed him of his life by giving him his Geass that ultimatelycompletely destroyed him when he was a little boy under the age of eight! After he refused to fulfill her contract, C.C abandoned him thinking that he would hate her, but yeah, it didn't work out....
      • Nightmare of Nunnally removes her truly negative deeds, and implies that she has no choice about the rest.
  • Evil Is Sexy
  • Eyes Of Gold
  • Fan Nickname: Pizza Butt.
  • Fanservice: Look up. She is also number twelve on the list. Yes, of course they have a list◊
  • Femme Fatale
  • Fetish Fuel Station Attendant: Her iconic costume is, to put it simply, a form-fitting straitjacket suit covered with belts. She's also got quite the body and the booty, to which the suit "clings" very well. You do the math.
    • And when she finally gets rid of that suit, she's seen sporting some quality Zettai Ryouiki.
  • Fish Out Of Temporal Water: After she was mentally reset to the person she was at the age of ten, which complicated matters greatly since she was Really Seven Hundred Years Old.
  • The Gadfly: Sometimes it seems as if she just likes to push Lelouch's buttons.
  • Girl In A Box: Or better said, Girl in a Poison Gas Tank.
  • Gratuitous English: Her "name" C.C. is pronounced See-Two on the English dub but more or less Shi-Tsu in the original Japanese.
  • Hartman Hips: Curious variation: she's got a large butt yet doesn't actually have the disproportionately narrow hips. Yet if you see how thin CLAMP's designs are, the size of her ass varies depending on the animation and how much focus it's given. Let's not even talk about the CLAMP design sketches. Lampshaded in the second half of this audio drama
  • High Octane Nightmare Fuel: In some respects, if you consider the above And I Must Scream and Body Horror examples. Not to mention her lack of touch with humanity and all the mystical images she conjures, some of which are very, very weird....
  • Hime Cut: Except green.
  • Honest Advisor: C.C. to Lelouch. Usually.
    • Well...not so much considering she willfully withheld plenty of information from him, especially concerning her history with Mao and the true horrific nature of her contract. But at least she admitted to Lelouch that she wouldn't tell him anything she didn't want to.
  • Immortality
  • Im Taking Her Home With Me: The child-like persona she regresses to when she loses her memories in R2 Episode was adorable enough to provoke this reaction from fans much the same as Nunnally below.
    • Mao also tries to take her to a house he bought in remote Australia where they can live away from all the thoughts his Geass forces him to hear.
  • Jerkass Woobie: No doubt for at least some. Especially once her past is revealed, for many of the same reasons as Mao.
  • Kate Higgins: Plays C.C. in the English dub.
  • Laser Guided Amnesia: R2 episode 15 ends with C.C. losing all her memories to the point where she first acquired her Geass (when she was no older than 10, by the looks of things). Reversed when Marianne in Anya's body invoked Forgot The Call and "reset" her.
  • Magnificent Bitch: Very much so. She's almost as Fabulous as Lelouch, and she's every bit his equal in intelligence and badassery.
    • Although C.C's plans for Mao backfire twice! The first one drives him insane. Then she abandons him and hopes he will come to hate her and forget about their contract. This failed miserably. She then kills him. This seems to work, though [1].
  • Manipulative Bitch
  • Mayfly December Romance: C.C. the ageless, deathless witch is romanced by Mao, a seventeen/eighteen-year-old boy.
  • What The Hell, Hero?/Kick The Dog: Your Milage May Vary. But it's a bit difficult to look at her in quite the same way after the flashback to Mao's childhood, as her treatment of him isn't any more excusable than his treatment of Shirley. Not only did she transform an innocent little boy into an insane, murderous animal; but she also in doing so created a major threat that comes back to drag both her and innocent bystanders down with him. Lelouch, for his part, calls her out when he learns about her and Mao because her carelessness in dealing with him indirectly led to Shirley's More Than Mind Control. Then she apparentlykills Mao, which may be the only thing that prevents it from being a genuine Moral Event Horizon-crossing action.
    • Also, she didn't abandon Mao just to be cruel. She thought that, in abandoning Mao, he'd come to hate her for it and get over the fact that she asked him to kill her. Sadly, she underestimated Mao's obsession, and it turns out that he blames everyone but C.C for her deserting him and is perfectly willing to kill anyone else who she tries to make a contract with (like Lelouch).
  • Mysterious Past: For a long time, we didn't know anything about her. This was reversed in R2 episode 15, which describes her past in detail but temporarily removes most of her memories after.
  • Mysterious Waif
  • Nice Job Breaking It Hero: That whole business with her and Mao. See also Kick The Dog, What An Idiot, and What The Hell, Hero?.
  • Nigh Invulnerability: Comes with being immortal.
  • No Name Given: Lelouch is the only one who knows of her true name, and the dialogue is muted both times it is mentioned.
  • No One Could Survive That: Takes a bullet to the head for Lelouch in the very first episode. Shows up fine as the fourth episode's cliffhanger, and Lelouch comes home to find her playing with Nunnally.
  • Not So Different: Invoked with her and Mao. Both of them received Geass at very young ages, under similarly desperate circumstances, and it proceeded to subsequently ruin their lives. C.C. was able to bounce back and take over the Code because her Geass was never as bad as Mao's and possibly also because she was slightly older than Mao when she received her Geass at first, in addition to the fact that she wasn't obsessively in love with the one who asked her to kill her and take her Code, unlike Mao. Whether she ever would have ended up like Mao if she hadn't taken over the Code when she did is never looked into.
  • Not So Stoic: She's nearly always The Stoic, but Code Geass being Code Geass, she does get emotional on several separate occasions.
  • Not What It Looks Like: Kallen keeps walking in on C.C. and Zero "just talking."
  • Older Than They Look: Although she looks like a teenager, she's Really Seven Hundred Years Old.
  • Pieta Plagiarism: C.C. in the first OP.
  • Power Incontinence: It's implied that she originally took over the Code to get out of hers.
  • Pretty Freeloaders: She gets to enjoy all the comforts of the academy on Lelouch's dime.
  • Purity Sue: How Mao sees her. But only Mao.
  • Rapunzel Hair
  • Really Seven Hundred Years Old: She's been alive for centuries, after she got her own Geass in the end of the Middle Ages, and was made immortal in the Era of Kings. She apparently even knew some of the masterminds behind the American Revolution on a personal basis.
  • Red Oni Blue Oni: She could be the blue to Lelouch's red.
  • Ron The Death Eater: Even after the Love Confession, Mercy Kill and obvious inner turmoil she showed over it, some people just can't let the whole Mao thing go...
  • Sarcasm Mode: Like there's some other mode.
  • The Spock
  • Strange Girl: Heck, it just happens to be the name of her theme song.
  • The Stoic: Nearly always. But, on rare occasion, Not So Stoic.
  • Tall, Dark, Green-Haired, and Bishoujo
  • Testosterone Brigade Bait
  • Time Dissonance
  • Tomboy And Girly Girl: Most often Kallen (tomboy) and C.C. (girly girl), but other pairings come up too. Like Kallen, C.C. herself is a mix of both types.
  • Trademark Favorite Food: Pizza.
  • Trickster Mentor
  • True Neutral
  • Uncanny Valley: See also High Octane Nightmare Fuel above, since it amounts to the same thing.
  • The Unfettered: Moreso than just about any other character, since she's not bound by anything, including death.
  • Waif Fu: While not on the same level as Kallen, she is quite an adept Knightmare Frame pilot, serving as Lelouch's copilot and once able to hold her own with limited support in a chaotic air battle against Suzaku, amongst others. She's also skilled in hand-to-hand combat, although it comes up much less frequently.
  • Walking The Earth: She did this when she left the Britannian palace after Marianne's death. And what she does after the Grand Finale.
  • What An Idiot: Really, C.C.? After all Mao's been through, did you really think that after walking out on him he'd just let it go?
  • Who Wants To Live Forever: Revealed to be her motivation in giving people the Geass in the first place; puts a whole new spin on "The Power of Kings will condemn you to a path of loneliness."
    • Word Of God turns this into a subversion after the Grand Finale, with the revelation that knowing that Lelouch honestly cared about her, and didn't blame her for the bad things that happened in his life after accepting the Geass, allowed her to open up to her true emotions and gave her the strength to carry on despite still being immortal.
  • Wife Husbandry: With Mao. Not C.C.'s plan, per se. (Probably.)
  • Woman In White: Though mostly when she's in her straitjacket.
  • You Gotta Have Green Hair: The Geass universe has quite different ethnic characteristics, with violet eyes common in the Britannian nobility, but even then C.C.'s green hair is unique. It might just be an uncommon trait like red hair, however, since it is never commented on in-show. It's not a supernatural characteristic either, since she had the same hair color way back when she was just a normal girl.
  • Yukana: Her seiyuu. In fact, this is one of the roles that got her Rescued From The Scrappy Heap (the other being Teletha "Tessa" Testarossa from Full Metal Panic) after a rather unpleasant incident that mixed The Other Darrin and Yoko Oh No.
     Kallen 

Kallen Kozuki/Kallen Stadtfeld
"If only you had justice on your side!"

Kallen is an outspoken half-Britannian, half-Japanese girl who is damn proud of her Japanese heritage and opposed to the hostile takeover of Britannia. She has a rather frail and gentle Japanese mother, whom she kind of despised at first, but eventually decided to make her the reason for fighting after directly witnessing how much she suffered for Kallen's sake. She also attends Ashford Academy with Lelouch, playing the Ill Girl role to avoid suspicion of her involvement with the movement against Britannia. She also has a rather nice pair of boobs.
Later, Kallen joins the Black Knights as the Ace Pilot of the Gurren Nishiki and becomes a bodyguard or sorts to Zero. She's one tough and tsun-tsun girl, but in front of Zero, she gets gushy and dere-dere.

Kallen embodies these tropes:
     Nunnally 

Nunnally Lamperouge/Princess Nunnally vi Britannia
"My wish is for a gentler world."

The daughter of Emperor Charles and his consort Marianne, as well as Lelouch's younger sister. The messy death of her mother left her not only contained in a wheelchair, but also blind out of the trauma of having her mom bleeding all over her and dying. She's shown as a sweet, gentle, Ill Girl who attends Ashford Academy's middle school and serves as Lelouch's Morality Pet: she certainly doesn't know that her beloved and very overprotective big brother is willing to fulfill the promise of "making the world better before she can see" through bloodshed, Xanatos Gambits and Roulettes, and all that jazz.
In R2, after Lelouch is given Fake Memories and sent back to Ashford with Tyke Bomb Rolo in tow, Nunnally gets her Imperial Princess status back and is given the command of Area 11 aka Japan, like Cornelia and Euphemia. As the new Viceroy, Nunners works as hard as she can to make things better and ensure the Japanese are well treated, but with Lelouch recovering his memories and re-building La Resistance, it will NOT be easy.
In Nightmare Of Nunnally, she is the main protagonist, who receives a Geass that allows her to see the future and an alternate personality derived from her anger and other negative emotions that can move and pilot a Knightmare Frame. She initially sets out to find Lelouch, but also expands her goal to stopping bloodshed between Britannians and the Japanese. At the end of the series, she saves the world by rejecting Charles and Marianne's Instrumentality plan by coming to terms with her feelings, resulting in her regaining her ability to see and walk, and their being erased from existence. She becomes a goodwill ambassador to Japan under Empress Euphemia.

Nunnally embodies these tropes:
     Rolo 

Rolo Haliburton/Rolo Lamperouge
Voiced by: Takahiro Mizushima (JP), Spike Spencer (EN)

"I can't remember how many people I've killed. Nobody counts the number of times they brush their teeth or eat a meal. Same with this."
This socially awkward, harmless-looking Cute Shotaro Boy is introduced at the beginning of R2. After Lelouch and the Ashford students are given Fake Memories (courtesy of Emperor Charles's Evil Eye) that erase Nunnally's image from their minds, Rolo was sent to pose as Lelouch's younger brother in the Academy. A boy raised by V.V.'s Geass cult members and trained as a Tyke Bomb, Rolo is perfect to keep an eye on Lelouch and kill him if it's needed. Or is he?.
In the Nightmare Of Nunnally Alternate Universe manga, he is Lelouch's twin brother and a Cardinal in the Geass order. He despises Lelouch and seeks to gain C.C.'s power, but loses to Alice and dies when his body rots away from the side-effects of C.C.'s cells.

Rolo embodies these tropes:
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