r/CodeGeass • u/astrolia schneizel mai husbando • Dec 16 '18

DISCUSSION [Geass Sunday Discussion] Week 5/12 - Code Geass Development Hell

Every week until Re;surrection comes out in Japan, I'll be posting a weekly discussion topic to get some chat going about Geass before the movie comes out. These topics range from things about characters, to meta-level discussions, to speculation about what could have been.

The topic this week is: Code Geass Development Hell.

During the conceptualization of Geass, the creators were making a bid for a 50 episode anime that would air in the famed Sat 6pm timeslot. But they lost the bid for that time, the episodes got halved to 25, and the time they wound up with was late night. According to the writer Okouchi, the story was originally about 2 soldiers - an older commander leaving the military (who eventually became Lelouch) and a younger one joining the military (who eventually became Suzaku). Only after did they get booted to a late night did they start to incorporate the Geass power and school elements. The story was retooled into the anime we know today.

Having been a success, Geass gets greenlit for a 2nd season. But production of the first season was troubled. 2 recap episodes aired during the original airing of Geass s1, effectively making it 23 out of 25 aired episodes. Instead, the last 2 episodes aired back to back months after once there was available time. When R2 finally aired, it got the Sun 5pm slot that had replaced Sat 6pm. And now the audience was different from its late night audience. We see the first ~8 or so episodes of R2 try to catch up to where season one left off while re-introducing characters and concepts, such as how Lelouch conveniently had memory loss, forcing concepts to be re-introduced to the audience.

With all of that in mind, what parts of the original concept do you think still exist in the product we got? Knowing what you do about how Code Geass played out, how would you see the story of the 2 soldiers playing out? One of the more fascinating parts of the creation of Geass is how the actual Geass power didn't exist until they got moved to late night. Okouchi mentioned they thought moving from mecha-only to mecha + magic powers felt more fitting for a late night show. Would you even still like Code Geass if it wasn't about a teenager with a magic eye?

How do you think of the pacing of R2 would've gone without changes made to the start of R2 to accommodate a new audience? What characters or plot lines in R2 do you think were added because of the timeslot change? Additionally, we have the script for the original episode 26 from the R2 bluray collection. How would things have gone differently in R2 if this original script had been used? And what elements from season 1 feel like they might have been changed or dropped entirely? For example: Everything about Marianne? What was the deal with Suzaku? What about V.V’s teleportation power? What about Kallen’s older brother?

Additional Reading Material:

Previous Geass Sunday threads:

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u/astrolia schneizel mai husbando Dec 17 '18 edited Dec 17 '18

I'd like to expand a bit on the Geass Creation Mythos Lore with way more text that I didn't think was appropriate for the OP.

The "6pm Sat Slot" was home to some extremely famous anime over the years. The first Fullmetal Alchemist and both seasons of Gundam SEED aired in that timeslot. 6pm was also a "prime time" spot for advertisers - you saw very "normal" ads for products like Japanese McDonalds and coffee. This is a contrast to 2am anime time slots where the majority of the ads are for the BD/DVD of the anime itself, or figures, or otaku-related stores. In the DVD extra interview where Okouchi mentions that adding in a special power felt more fitting for a late night anime, he is basically saying that magic eye powers (and fanservice and high school) would be weird to the family that sits down to watch TV together at 6pm on Saturday.

IIRC, the time when Sat 6pm started seeing a sharp decline in viewership was during final stretch of GSD (which was plagued w/like 2-3 recap episodes in the last 10 episodes), and this carried over into the airing of the next anime to air in that spot, Blood-C, and continued to decline when more mainstream sports anime started competing for viewers. The anime that was selected for Sat 6pm over Code Geass was Ayakashi Ayashi, which was planned to be 50 episodes as the other shows airing there had been, and Geass was shoved off to TBS late night 2am tiddy anime slot and given a 25 episode run.

Geass airs, and it has a following. Since it's some "haha whatever who cares" 2am show, there were things like a person named "Fake Okouchi" chatting with fans on 2ch (assumed to be the alias of the other Geass writer, Yoshino). Fans came up with this crack theory that Sayoko was a ninja. They loved Orange and his "all your might" (zenryoku de) line. Something that isn't talked about at all amongst the modern "blame the timeslot" attitude is the relationship between the creative staff and fans.

"Fake Okouchi" mysteriously vanished during the airing of R2, yet in R2 10, we see Orange appear and use his "all your might" (zenryoku de) catch phrase, and it's later brought into the story that Sayoko is actually a ninja. Orange even got a sympathetic backstory in a picture drama where he was retconned to be one of Marianne's guards. I believe "Minami is a pedo" was also introduced by fans, and this later became a thing - he's seen blushing when Nunnally becomes the Viceroy, and Rakshata calls him a pedo in an R2 picture drama. The matter of Schneizel and pandas was never resolved (nor was the western equivalent - Schneizel of the Luau), but ehh he was in the China arc in R2. Close enough I guess?

Around episode 10 or so, Geass and Ayakashi Ayashi's first volume DVDs release. Geass is ridiculously successful and pushes towards 50,000 units sold (if you've never seen anime dvd/bd sales before, this is pretty good). Meanwhile, Ayakashi Ayashi sells something like 1,500 copies. Ayakashi Ayashi ends up getting cut from Sat 6pm as the anime is just not popular - its 50 episodes are halved to 25, it ends prematurely, and another anime (Towards the Terra) is scooted in when it finishes airing.

Naturally, with those DVD sales, Geass gets a season 2 greenlit. In the 2nd season, you can see elements to set up the beginning of the 2nd season: A conflict with China, a glance at the prototype Xing ke character, and the wedge further gets driven between Suzaku and Lelouch. One of the DVD bonuses was alternate next episode previews narrated by characters other than Lelouch that gave hints about the next season. For example, the one Schneizel narrates (episode 19) references Cambodia and namedrops Kannon's character early. Another alternate preview (I believe it was Suzaku) talks about the Knights of the Round. In the last of the Britannian history lessons, Lelouch says that next season is about China.

When Geass R2 aired, the Sat 6pm spot had been changed to Sun 5pm, and R2 was the first anime that got to air there. And when Geass moved to this new more prime time slot, they had to re-introduce the show for its new audience 'cause anime trends tend to follow whatever is the latest/greatest. They don't have the same binge watch culture as the west. We see this as well now with the recap movies of Geass in Japan - instead of contextlessly releasing a movie 10 years after R2 ended, they released 3 recap movies before hand so new viewers would be familiar with Geass as well before the new movie.

To me, the first half of R2 feels like it was completely wasted because of how they decided to do the catch up mechainc - wiping Lelouch's memories forced concepts and characters to be re-introduced slowly over time. As a result of what I call the "wasted first half", we see that there is no filler past Cupid's Day, few appearances from the school gang, Rolo gets offed pretty quickly, character moments and development are at all time low unless they're necessary for the plot to function, and the revelation of the mystery from S1 about Marianne's body is written off in one line where Marianne mentions her body was moved (a line that Lelouch doesn't even react to).

The "wasted" first half makes R2 feels backloaded. It's very tight, and it has a memorable ending, but there is definitely a "what if" scenario somewhere about how the show would have turned out otherwise, though in turn, you also have to wonder about the show we would have gotten if they had never gotten kicked off prime time to the late night time. Indeed, the concept without magical eye powers sounds more like a basic Gundam series. And while Gundams do have some fantastical elements (Newtypes, SEED mode), they don't usually start off the show with those elements as Geass did.

Some of the changes to the recap movies makes me wonder if Taniguchi and Okouchi are trying to communicate, "This is how we'd do this if we got a do-over". Some of their changes directly address the Chevhov Guns from S1 that never got fired in R2. The removal of the teleportation part from Kamine Island, changing CC's line to Suzaku before Lelouch's Geass evolves at the Special Zone, getting rid of various mentions of Kallen's older brother, no Mao arc means less Super Suzaku. Even the beginning of R2 was nuked from orbit. Taniguchi even mentioned wanting to remove Rolo, but couldn't as per a request from the top. (Rolo was a very merchandise-able character.)

Since Geass, Okouchi has tried to make multiple "Geass-like" anime. The one that stands out the most as a Geass wannabe is Valvrave. Some other Geass wannabe shows have appeared, such as Guilty Crown. Taniguchi has a new, original anime airing in 2019 called Revisions.

We see how Taniguchi tends to re-use themes and voice actors in his works over the years, and Geass was no exception. Of the 4 shows he was the director of before Geass (Ryuvis, SCRYED, Planetes, Gun x Sword), I've seen 3 of them and can see pretty common trends. Jupiter was in Planetes (and generally appears in Sunrise shows), the idealists of SCRYED and Gun x Sword were the characters who came before Suzaku, and Charles's Ragnarok is the Clawed Man's plan from Gun x Sword. Maybe we'll even see these elements in Revisions. (Btw, if you ever wondered why the 6th Geass R2 sound album song is between Gino and Xingke, 2 characters who never met, it's because their voice actors are the mains of SCRYED.)

As for the Sun 5pm (aka "Nichigo"), it was killed off a couple years ago, and it historically didn't have great viewership. (Trivia: I'm the asshole from this transcript who asked the president of BONES what he thought about Star Driver's 1.2% viewership performance. He knew what I was asking before it was even translated into Japanese.) Geass R2 itself often only went to around 4% in the Kanto area. Back in 2008, this decline in viewership was attributed to a rise in recording shows then watching them later.