R3 Alter Launch

The power of Geass is the power of Kings...

Those granted the power of Geass gain a powerful authority that can be used to attain wealth, glory, and control. It is an absolute power… that corrupts absolutely. Those who are granted the gifts of Geass eventually know the cost to be much of what they hold dear as the power slowly whittles away at the sanity. Only in obtaining the Code can one be free of the curse of loneliness, isolation, and madness, that Geass offers… in exchange for an eternal ageless life where you cannot die, while you watch all those you love or could love slowly age and die before your eyes.

That is the Code and the Geass of the world that Euphemia Li Britannia is from. 

But this is not the same Euphemia. That Euphemia was an unintended victim of Geass. She was the loved one that was lost. But what if she weren’t? What if she were the one to wield the power of Geass? What would become of her?

In the Code Geass anime, Euphemia is portrayed as something of an ultimate good, a mostly pure white, in a world of dark grays and blacks. Her family, and by extension of his control of it, much of the world, is run by her despot of a father who advocates for an extreme form of social Darwinism. Most of her siblings are rotten neophytes or just as despotic as their father. She is surrounded by those who vilify others for no reason other than their not being native Britannians, or poorer than they are, or weaker than they are. The only semi-bright spots in her world are her blood-sister Cornelia, who while stern at times, dotes on her like they were mother and daughter, not sisters, and who was all too content to enforce their father’s despotic ideas and regime, until it cost Euphemia her life, and she got too close to finding out what was really going on behind the scenes.

Yet for all this, she somehow ends up being the one that wants to get along with other people, who dislikes the Numbers system and her homeland’s indiscriminate conquest coupled with discriminatory practices. She’s the one that is looking for peace. Tragically, on the cusp of a breakthrough, fate pulls a truly jerk move, and she ends up being another catalyst of future anger, violence, and hatred. A question of the time was, would things have been different if someone more like her had a Geass?

The universe of the Fate series says otherwise. Fate/Stay Night and its associated entries in the franchise, particularly Fate/Grand Order, tell us that when one receives a corrupted power, there is no soul that is too pure to avoid being corrupted. While it may not make them pure evil, it will certainly make them far from good.

Jeanne Alter and Artoria Alter are the most prominent examples. Jeanne is a particularly apt example as she is quite literally a saint. Unlike Euphemia who is regarded as like a saint, Jeanne is regarded as a saint. Yet, with the corruption and Angra Mainyu, a concept similar to the Collective Unconscious Charles zi Britannia sought to control, this pure being who only fights to protect the people of the country she loves and calls home, can be twisted to one who only wants to see them all dying while screaming in agony as they’re consumed in flames.

If even the Saint of Orleans, Jeanne d’Arc, can be tainted by corrupt power, why not Euphemia? That is what this project is – The Saint of Britannia, corrupted by the Power of Kings.

  

As I began to work on the intended short story, this is what resulted.

The original idea was a very brief piece, only a page or two. It was to be the moments before and after the scene of the image, i.e. the burning of the imperial castle. To emphasize impact of the event, the idea was that it would have to be the castle that Nunnally, as empress of Britannia, would call home. But, because I didn’t want to have Euphie kill Nunnally at the outset of a snippet of a story, Nunnally had to be away. Even so, leaving that moment without some form of confrontation was a letdown of an idea. I couldn’t let her burn the imperial castle and just walk away with no one even saying anything to her about it. There are only three people who would conceivably be in a position to confront Euphie in such a situation – her sister Cornelia, the current empress Nunnally, or her former knight Suzaku.

There is a sense of urgency, of tension, in the idea that it would be Nunnally, returning home, that would greet Euphie, rather than Cornelia or Suzaku showing up. They could fight back, they could potentially sway her with emotional arguments given the closeness of their relationships. But Nunnally is the most distant of the three, and in the position with the most responsibility. Opposing a woman who is back from the dead and decided to burn your house down, indifferent to whether you were in it or not, while you yourself are a rather frail woman, wheelchair bound, allows for Euphie to be presented with a bit more danger. In reality, and it’s realized rather quickly, Nunnally is helpless in that situation, and is entirely at the mercy of Euphemia’s whim – something of a recognizable state for Nunnally, and an uncommon conceptual position for Euphemia.

With the sudden reappearance of Euphemia into their world, I began to contemplate what the reunion of Euphie with Suzaku and Cornelia would be like. I knew right away that she would likely meet Suzaku before Cornelia. Unless seeking out her sister first, Euphemia would likely be on a battlefield somewhere, hunted down by the military for her crime. Being retired from the military, Cornelia wouldn’t be on a battlefield. Suzaku would be. And as the personal knights of the empress, Suzaku, as Zero, would have to lead his knights, most likely, in pursuit of whomever deigned to burn her majesty’s home.

This led to plotting the next scene, the attack on the Black Knights base. Many anime tend to have the important people perchance to be on vacation, or somehow predisposed, when such critical events happen. It’s unlikely that an enemy making an unplanned attack will happen to do so during one of the few times a year that someone of import is on vacation.

Given his station and role, Suzaku would be based not far from the imperial castle, as prominent military bases are like to be. He would therefore go to the base to take charge of his knights’ response to the emergency. It wouldn’t immediately seem likely that the enemy would turn so quickly to attack a functioning military base, so the surprise element is strong. While at the base getting briefed on the situation, it would be obvious, given what happened in Nunnally and Euphemia’s confrontation, that word would spread about what was allegedly seen.

I took this moment to really dig around into what Suzaku’s reaction might be. As I think most people would agree, he should be conflicted. He would know at a very direct level that what he was hearing is so impossible he shouldn’t even take any stock in it. He did hold her as she was dying, so he knows that she is dead. It’s not like she was a soldier that went missing on a battlefield and you can at least imagine numerous scenarios of how they escaped death and survived.

But at the same time, he did love her passionately, and would not be able to let go of that hope that she did live. Even if it made no sense at any scientific level, his heart would want to believe she was alive.

It couldn’t do so, however, because believing she was alive would mean believing she would do something so counter to who she was; kill dozens of people in a horrendous inferno, all while mocking and promising more to the empress, the similarly dispositioned in life Nunnally. The same Nunnally he’d spent the last five years serving faithfully as her knight. There is no way he can abandon Nunnally, forgive and forget anyone doing something so directly antagonistic.

Then you get the attack on the base, and you have Suzaku barely escaping death in the collapse and fires in the base, leading a small band of knights out with him. And you get the sense that this could be like other war stories, where you will see them have to scrape out of there, barely manage to survive, only to make it to a scene of ruin of a city. But instead they make it out and now stand face to face with a mythological beast that isn’t supposed to exist. And they see the commander of the beast… and it wasn’t Euphemia, but another person seemingly returning from the dead, Shirley Fenette.

The reveal of Shirley raises doubts. As expressed by characters later in the story, there’s plenty of reason not to think this is really Euphemia and Shirley back from the dead. Such a thing isn’t even supposed to be possible, so it’s all too easy to believe it to be a fraudster using their names and likenesses. Ultimately the revelation that this avenue of thought is wrong doesn’t take long; at the very least there is a Shirley and a Euphemia out there, real or not.

The Shirley introduced, Shirley Alter, is an attempt at two things. First, she is more “insane” than Euphemia Alter. Euphie Alter’s personality is like a mellowed version of Jeanne Alter – as if the influence of Altria Alter tampered down the madness of Jeanne Alter. Shirley is the opposite. The madness of Jeanne Alter is based in the twisted reaction to an unjust end to her life. Shirley Alter is this madness amplified, in response to her own unjust end.

Second, she is a model on which to place the image of the Jeanne Alter that was not worn by Euphemia. From an arm’s length view, Shirley’s design does hold a lot of affinity with Jeanne’s, so they work well together. The Jeanne Alter/Altria Alter dynamic was interesting for me from the start, so I wanted to recreate that dynamic for my story.

But there was a problem with that. To create the dynamic that exists between Jeanne and Altria Alter, with someone who is a slightly more Altria form of Jeanne Alter, would mean that Euphie would have to be either subservient to Shirley, or Shirley would have to be more Jeanne-like than Euphie already was. Therein lied the newest problem; to make Shirley more passive would be to make her indistinguishable from her normal self, thereby ruining the point of her being an “Alter”. That left the other option, not desirable because this story was intended to be about Euphie Alter and Nunnally, and having her subservient to another would either be too much of a distraction from that end or too unimportant to make much difference.

Then along came a certain other Massacre Princess.

I knew about Marrybell for some time before this project. I used her before. She appears for a time in Hime’s story, reprising her Geass role there too as the leader of an anti-terror military unit. I have her leading the Glinda Knights still, but she is a more reasonable and upstanding person, not a zealot. Her title as Massacre Princess is suggested to be nothing but slander from defeated terrorists.

The Marrybell in this story here is like the Marrybell of the official manga. She has a deep-seated hatred of terrorists that reaches the level of an indiscriminate obsession. To stem the tide of her unrelenting fury, the brother and sister who were once her closest friends and knights, end up taking her life.

If you want a vengeful monster, there would be no better candidate than someone who dies with an unfulfilled obsession. And it stands to reason that someone with an obsession as strong as Marrybell’s would view the matter of her death in the worst light. She’s not likely to learn a lesson about changing her life for the better, but instead double down on the ideology that defined it.

In this way, Marrybell Alter isn’t really a different Marrybell, but a Marrybell uninhibited. She is a Marrybell with enough power now to fully extricate herself of those things that bound her in life and contributed to keep her somewhat grounded. She has no emperor whose word she is bound to adhere to, no friends whom she has any cause to care about. All people are equally her would-be subjects or enemies. And with the power of her Geass intact and no reason to fear using it, they are ripe for her explicit control.

Thus, Marrybell becomes an unhinged horror. She announces her revival to the world by roasting a city and killed nearly half a million people. She follows that up by engulfing London in a fog of flames, killing some 10 million and the rest made into actors in some nightmarish vision of hell rife with torture and debauchery.

In that story I don’t interact with her very much.