This quote comes from Lelouch near the beginning of episode 3 of Code Geass season 1, right before his first murder.
The thing about revisiting Code Geass now in the wake of my spending a lot of my post 2016 years engaging with DC fans who are really absolute on not wanting Superheroes to ever kill. Is how that mentality, that desire for Superheros to remain pure in their battle agaisnt Evil, kind of overlaps with the same Centrist principals that hold back real Revolution, the idealizing of MLK and Gahndi's "non violent" resistance over the Black Panthers and the violent Indian rebels who's names I don't even know.
I know full well the appeal of murderous vigilantes like The Punisher and Death Wish is to a very Conservative mentality, and that's why many Leftist media critics don't want a Batman who kills. I like Death Note for how it deconstructs that mentality and so no I don't think Batman should become an executioner of street thugs and mental patients.
But the real deeper Leftist critique of the Superhero genre is that the perpetual status quo always has the Superheroes fighting only the symptoms of society's problems and never bringing about any real systemic change, and if anything the worlds they protect seem to become more dangerous the longer they exist in them. Code Geass appealed to me over a decade ago because of how it had a lot of the trappings of a Costumed Superhero story but didn't have the perpetual status quo, Lelouch actually does change the world. And back when I first watched it I hadn't even developed my current Leftism yet.
Code Geass is also willing to criticize those who would abuse this sentiment to justify anything, like when Detard uses it in episode 18. I do feel it's important the next real life Revolution avoids the mistakes of The French Revolution, we don't want another Reign of Terror. I strongly oppose Capitol Punishment and that includes of the "Kings" we overthrow once the Revolution is victorious.
However a sentiment I sometimes see applied to historical analysis of the French Revolution is that The Terror somehow became inevitable as soon as the Revolution condoned any "political violence" at all, typically what happened when the Bastille was stormed. This sentiment also applies to Extra Credits critique of the history of the Gracchi brothers.
That absurd notion that you damn yourself to complete homicidal madness once you get any blood on your hands at all is exactly the common "explanation" for why Batman can't kill even once not even The Joker or Lex Luthor, that it would somehow be impossible for him to do it even once without inevitably becoming no different then who he killed. I've hated that logic since I first saw it expressed in
Under The Red Hood but now that I see it's connection to how people condemn violent Revolution I better understand why it's so insidious.
There are good reasons why not killing should be part of Batman's character, especially as long as he's fighting "crime" rather then those who really make the world suck. But more often then not this "if I do it even once I'll go insane" is the reasoning Batman writers and fans prefer to default to, putting that dialogue from
Under The Red Hood into their anti Snyder videos as if it's a serious legitimate reason.
Something I commonly see in the discussion around the killing of Zod in
Man Of Steel is that many people upset about it do not deny how justified it was, they are upset at the writers for writing Superman into that situation. They are so used to Superman being allowed to maintain his innocence that to them it's a contrivance only when he can't, when the truth is fighting the kinds of threats he fights it is far more contrived that he can in some timelines do this for years or decades and never be in that kind of situation. And it's fine to prefer those kinds of stories for Superman, I don't mind stories being contrived to suite what I prefer to see, but don't then insist there is an evil value in "contriving" the story differently then what you want.
KyleKallgrenBHH throws that scene into his video about the "Fascist" tendencies in modern Superhero and Action films. The problem is that whether you like Zach Snyder's personal politics or not Zod is the one being a Fascist (and unlike most fictional characters refereed to as "Space Nazis" he can legitimately be called a Nationalist) in this movie, having proclaimed his desire to kill every single human being on Earth. Saying Superman shouldn't have killed him is like saying it'd be wrong to kill an SS officer who is in the process of massacring Jews.
Suzaku can't really be compared to the kind of No Kill policy DC Superheroes usually have since he's a soldier fighting in a war. But season 1 Suzaku is as close as you can get to that in this context with his absolutist rejection of the ends ever justifying the means, his stated motivation is to prevent people from dying, for some writing him that is the same way Batman's driving motivation is described. He fits in very well with Linkara's preference for comparing Superheros to Medieval Knights as they are presented in the Musical version of Camelot (this Anime is kind of a reverse White Savior in how this Eleven is a more Chivalrous Knight then any actual Britanians). Thing is Suzaku is a pretty brutal deconstruction of that, much better then any western Superhero deconstructions that instead remove the aversion to killing when trying to say "Superheroes would be a bad thing actually". When you think about it, Suzaku is the ultimate deconstruction of Captian America.
Code Geass is a truly nuanced story, Lelocuh makes bad decisions, but that's how any Revolution will inevitably go, there isn't going to be a successful one that is perfectly innocent of anything for later generations to condemn. Though there will inevitably be defenders of it who will seek to deny those sins as we see in how American conservatives view the American Revolution.
Lelocuh does try to minimize civilian casualties as much as he can. This quote came from episode 3, it is however in episode 1 we get two quotes from Lelouch that will be brought up again later which really show why Lelocuh was an ideal leader for a Revolution. "How can the king expect his subordinates to follow if he doesn't lead" and "the only people who should Kill are those who are prepared to be killed".
