Code Geass

I’m honestly not sure how to phrase this review at all. Even when I was working on the preliminary review, I found myself unable to quite wrap my ideas around this show. Did it succeed? Did it fail? Is it possible for a show like Code Geass to ‘fail?’

At its very core, Code Geass R2 was a season directed by the Japanese fanbase. The popularity polls and questionnaires that circulated in Tokyo did more to define it than its production team, and that single fact turned what had been a decent series into a mockery of itself. The first half of the season flailed about itself in a strange mockery of season one. It then proceeded to lose sight of its own plot line entirely and embarked on a strange romp through the ‘World of C.’

Dabbling in metampsychosis aside, the show was, and is, wildly popular and despite adopting air of a fat kid falling down stairs, kept me riveted to episode twenty five, where it ended in a brilliant blaze of self-actualized justice. Never before have I seen a final episode so cleanly redeem a series. Not that the brilliant ending excuses all of the bullshit that Geass dragged us through, but that it admitted its own mistakes and worked to fix the problem.

Once again, I must state that I don’t know how to categorize this series. It certainly is not one of the finest examples of Anime in the universe, nor is it the pariah that large quantities of the reviewing community appear to be labeling it. It is, as it always has been, a machines for the combining of genres and stereotypes. By embracing them all, it has succeeded in becoming a rarity, an original idea. And I will salute it for that, if nothing else.

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