WHY CAN’T KALLEN GET ANY PERSONAL SPACE?!

NICHOLAS WONOSAPUTRA - Senior Advisor, 4th Year, Neurobiology and Psychology

So... where's the new season?

One of the reasons why I fell in love with Code Geass’ style of storytelling was because of its precise selection of anime tropes that built on ideas that I liked seeing in other media, while subverting my expectations of what it’s like to watch anime. There’s so little I would change about it, as the bizarre, off-beat moments of levity and melodrama driven by the use of these tropes lend themselves to creating a thoroughly engaging viewing experience. Honestly, I’d like to celebrate that by talking about how its school setting is actually integral to the rhythm of its storytelling, but that’ll have to wait for another time. Instead, I wanted to ask: Why can’t Kallen get any personal space?!

Anyone familiar with Code Geass will instantly know what I’m talking about. There are an absurd amount of instances where someone either walks in on Kallen taking a shower, or something important interrupts her shower time before she could even put clothes on. Half of these could even be considered lore-critical because both Lelouch and Suzaku somehow stumble upon opportunities to manipulate her during these aforementioned moments of vulnerability.

Now, Code Geass, like many other anime of its tone and aesthetic, tends to feature plenty of overt, and necessarily absurd, scenes of sexualization for most characters in the show, guys and gals alike. Most of the time it’s played for comedy, and other times, such as Nina’s affection for tables, this “fanservice” plays an important role in characterization.

However, no other character is consistently shown through a specific fanservice trope like Kallen and her beloved shower. This feels like it’s meant to be played as a running joke, but it doesn’t come across that way to me because it doesn’t describe anything about the character. Like, what, she’s particular about being clean? Even with the benefit of the doubt, the best I can come up with is that she likes feeling comfortable, so she showers so often to get rid of sweat, supposedly more than Suzaku does. However, the thing that makes me uncomfortable with these scenes is that Kallen herself seems really uncomfortable and out of her element for the sake of cheap gap moe.

These scenes are also so irritating because they could easily be replaced with scenes that actually show something unique about Kallen’s daily activities, routine, and hobbies. We could have instead interrupted her while she’s air drumming to a rock song while half-reading the Guren’s manual and wearing civilian clothes, or when she’s trying to find ways to be productive and survive in new environments like the island by building a shelter, securing food, and collecting (non-shower) water. I would like to take this moment to remind everyone that Kallen has the top grades in her classes despite her absences and is a tactically-minded individual. The only reason why she doesn’t always come across as a genius is because she lives in a world filled with absurdly intelligent individuals that also happen to have superpowers, so she’s not particularly special in this regard. But, at the very least, her first reaction to finding herself stranded on an island wouldn’t be “man, I better use that clean, fresh water to take a shower right now.”

Perhaps, due to an assortment of corporate, and even creative, factors, there needs to be a quota of “fanservice” moments to maintain the engagement of a specific, yet statistically unclear, portion of the audience. Putting my skepticism of the notion that this is a significant portion of the viewing population aside, the most interesting, expressive, and, yes, attractive way to portray Kallen is to show her life as a multi-faceted one. Doing so would demonstrate that her multitasking capabilities are on-par with Lelouch’s, which would be fascinating to unpack, as well as lore-accurate.