[Nogitsune]

Originally Posted by bladeofdarkness

really ?
he learned his lesson after euphie ?

well... what does he do immediately after his geass goes out of control ?

you see, learning your lesson, only works if you actually LEARN it

After you have shoved the kid into the stove for being sensible for once, don't expect it to give a damn afterwards.

if you automaticlly fall back on your old douchebag self when things AREN'T perfect, then you've learned nothing

Learning is a process.
Lelouch has a lot of issues. Sorting them out needs time.

but instead of owning up to what HE did, he BLAMES it on euphie and exploits it to his advantage

Uh, and what would he have achieved by taking the blame? Certainly not world peace.
Lelouch's way of honouring the dead is too keep on fighting, and corpses tend not to care about their reputation.
(By the way, what would you want him to do? Hand himself over for punishment, and cause his sister as well as a lot of other people even more grief? That's Suzaku's version of justice, and maybe yours, but not Lelouch's, and not mine.)

one would at least hope he'd recognize the sacrifice and at least man up and do what he has to do to the end
but he ditches the black rebellion in the middle of the battle, the moment he's at risk of losing something he REALLY cares about

Well, yes, sister complex. Nunnally was his world, and with that kind of history, I don't blame him.
The massacre didn't make him any more psychologically stable, by the way.

it is at THIS point that i would like to raise my idea of what makes lelouch/zero different then say ... Bruce Wayne/batman
in the case of batman, the identity of batman is a means by which Bruce Wayne can act on his true ideology and ethics
his civilian ID is a fake persona whicl batman is who he really is
batman is a symbol through which he can BE HIMSELF

I'm not an expert on batman, but I doubt he's a teenager, and I have no idea if he has a comparable shitty past that could screw with his morals.

this is NOT the case for lelouch/zero
zero is NOT a persona by which lelouch is able to enact his own "real" self
instead, the mask of zero is a tool that allows lelouch to PRETEND to be a heroic figure, in order to RALLY PEOPLE TO HIS SIDE
zero's stated ideals and Lelouch's actual world view are NOT the same, and lelouch admits this at several points during the story
SOME of the views he expresses as zero might be beliefs he also holds on his own, but his real goals and methods are far from his stated ones as zero
while, as zero, he claims to champion the weak and fight for justice, lelouch admits that he only created zero for nunnaly, and admits to suzaku that the mask is simply a tool to gather support for his cause

Lelouch says a lot of things, but not all of them should be taken at face-value.
Lelouch has proven several times that he has a sense of justice, but we already had this discussion, so I'm not going into it again. He's not the perfect hero he makes himself out to be, but Zero is a part of Lelouch, and Nunnally was at least partly a justification - he admits to that. It was him who wanted a place for the weak in society along with his revenge, not his sister - or at least, he didn't do it just for her.

Lelouch was meant to be a "modern hero", and that's the way I see him. Not a hero-hero, but someone who has a strong sense of justice that gets muddled by all the shit that has been thrown at him in his short life.
Lelouch has always been quicker to call himself a monster than a hero when he was speaking in earnest. That's not because he's a rotten human being, but because this is the impression he has of himself. Someone like him can not have a pure, innocent wish, so he projects it on Nunnally.
Episode 5, though, shows that to a not so small extent, he and Suzaku have the same goal and the same reasons - they are sick of seeing people suffer.