As is the case with Gundam groups, especially shitposting groups on social media, is we get locked into these weird debates about various Gundam series shit on the regular. And since G-QUACKS has ended and that towel has been wrung, we’re back to endlessly insisting IBO is the best Gundam, SEED sucks, Kamille is a girl, and some other nonsense.
And today’s nonsense, being one-man’ed by someone in the shitposting group, is that he really wants you to know that Flay Allster in Gundam SEED was the best girl. There have been at least five posts about this shit in the last twenty-four hours. My guy, you only need one.
Here’s the thing: Flay may have thought she was gaslighting and manipulating Kira to kill the COORDINATORs but the fact remains that Sai, Tolle, Miri, and Kuzzy are all aboard the Archangel. Kira had more than enough reasons to protect the ship even without her seduction.
On the other hand, whenever Kira does feel like he failed to protect people properly, was on the verge of tears and about to completely break, Flay was the one who held her together.
Kira says this when he and Sai had that confrontation “nobody has any idea or gives a shit what goes through my mind each time I go out there… but Flay, she holds me in her arms and gives me peace”.
Kira feels completely isolated in that ship full of naturals. Even offhand remarks of his friends about Lacus’ voice or how they don’t know how to approach him and gives him a free pass about having “a rough time” isolates him even more.
Mommy Murrue even confided to Mwu that given all the extraordinary situations they keep on facing one after another, and also because of his miraculous achievements in and out of the battlefield, she tends to forget that not only is Kira just a kid, but also that he is a civilian with no proper military training.
So hate her all you want, but despite her childish attempts at manipulation, it was in fact Flay who kept Kira sane for the first half of the show.
(That’s not to say that Cagalli or Lacus we’re not more positive influences on him, but that’s another post)
Now, normally I just reply to these posts with something like “cool story, bro” and leave it be, but the character of Flay, her morality, and similar topics comes up about as often as the people who still bitch about the hospital scene in The Last of Us and think Joel was right. Let us set the table for our main course tonight; Is Flay Allstar a Good Person? The answer is unequivocally, no. Is Flay Allastar a Good Character? The answer is unequivocally, yes. Let’s begin.
Flay Allster is a character you meet from the very start of Mobile Suit Gundam SEED. There, she is a resident of Heliopolis along with Kira, Sai, Kuzzy, Tolle, and Miriallia. Eventually, you learn that she is Sai’s girlfriend and fiancee, and that Kira knows her somewhat by association of his friend, but not with any real regularity. In fact, she shows zero interest in him whatsoever until after they all end up on the Archangel as a result of Heliopolis’ accidental destruction at the hands of ZAFT while trying to confiscate all of the G-weapons, failing to capture the GAT-X105 Strike, which Kira and Co. managed to obtain and leave aboard the Archangel with.
At first, Flay is shown to be somewhat of a Fraw Bow-esque character from the original Mobile Suit Gundam, only that initially, she insists on being a civilian, but won’t really do any of the civilian tasks around the ship others are doing. It’s here you learn she is kind of an affluent, high-class citizen within the colony, and her father is a Vice-Minister of the Atlantic Federation. In the video game Never Ending Tomorrow, you also learn he was a high-ranking member of Blue Cosmos, the quasi-terrorist organization that was fiercely anti-coordinator, and responsible for most of the acts against coordinators, PLANT, and much of the Mendel Colony explosions that forced its research abandoned, and led to the deaths of Kira and Cagalli’s birth parents. This sets the stage for Flay to be a sort of political antagonist, and her character shifted from being less like Fraw Bow, and more like Victory’s Katejina Loos. That is not a compliment, Katejina is fucking insane. But at least she lived. Apparently in an original draft of the series, she was going to become Strike Rouge’s pilot and be part of Earth Alliance propaganda, though I am not sure why Rouge given that it was Cagalli’s first personal unit. A Windham or Dagger seems a little more appropriate?
Because she did not really know Kira beyond “Sai’s friend” when her lifeboat was rescued early on, she had no idea he was a coordinator until Kuzzy let it slip fairly blatantly after an encounter between Mwu and Kira. Things then really came to a boil where upon meeting the 8th Fleet, ZAFT ambushes them and destroys its flagship, which her father was on, causing his death. Flay blamed Kira for her father’s death, arguing that he didn’t do more to protect everyone despite the fact that he was pinned down at every turn and outflanked. However, since they were now grounded on Earth as a result of de-orbting, and facing new enemies in North Africa, she then decided to begin manipulating him and his feelings by showing him love, affection, and having sex with him, to which he reciprocated, largely because no one else on the ship paid any attention to him outside of battle.
Now, up until this point, Flay’s actions and emotions have been pretty awful as she has demonstrated a fairly contemptuous nature of coordinators, much to everyone else’s kind-of disgust. This is somewhat important to consider because although Blue Cosmos was a thing, not everyone in the Earth Alliance, or naturals as a whole, were innately racist of coordinators. This was a good bit of social commentary by Fukuda and his wife, then-writer Chiaki Morosawa, who had incorporated aspects of 9/11, the conflicts in The Middle East, and previous conflicts into the story, despite it being an overall re-telling of the original series’ Federation versus Zeon. In MSG, there was always a very racist connotation made between earthnoids and spacenoids that drove the conflict, but here, you have two groups that are not just Earth and Space, but also Natural and Coordinator. That second layer, being entirely born out of the people living in space’s need to be able to handle the rigors of space, created an unintentional conflict when people began using that for vanity purposes, something you don’t really learn until the last quarter of the series in Colony Mendel.
But what really makes Flay’s actions start to define her character is that from JOSH-A onwards, she begins to experience what her fanboys and fans of the series call her “awakening”. Is it though? She gets separated from Mwu on their way to their next assignement after she had enlisted, but was then transferred due to her father’s namesake, and picked up by Rau Le Cruset. He brought her back to his ship, but instead of making her a prisoner, much to Yzak’s chagrin, he makes her his assistant. Why, is not really explained, but we can infer that he is aware of who she is, or of her ties to Blue Cosmos, and knowing that its head honco, Muruta Azrael will be coming into the picture soon, intends to send her back with some critical information he’d want to deepen the war, the technical specifications on the N-Jammer Canceller installed in the ZGMF-X10A Freedom and ZGMF-X09A Justice. We can also infer that maybe his newtype abilities allowed him to understand her emotions and correctly guess her internal conflict after she began to regret her manipulation of Kira. Either way, she was sent to the Dominion with the data in hand, and almost got rescued by Kira. Almost. She makes it to the Dominion, and gets hailed a hero by Azrael for the information and promoted to Chief Petty Officer in charge of communications, giving her a front-row seat to the renewed use of nuclear weapons on coordinators. She witnesses her actions with horror first-hand, and doesn’t know how to feel about it, still.
This is where I feel the whole “Flay Was A Good Person” angle really breaks down. She isn’t given the opportunity to really learn why her indoctrination by Blue Cosmos is shit, and even though every official and unofficial publication does this whole “Oh she spent time with Rau and began regretting her mistakes”, nah man, she regretted her actions, not her beliefs. The only reason she wasn’t giddy with joy at watching the nukes almost blow up PLANTs on the Dominion bridge is that she at minimum understood that by giving them the technology to enable the use of nuclear weapons again, she was not safe, anywhere, with anyone, and until she was, she had to abide by the power someone else had to ensure her safety. Sai, Kira, Mwu, Rau, Natrle, Azrael, someone else had the power over her life and death, not her, and never once did she try and take it upon herself to free herself from that situation by any means. I firmly believe that reason is she was selfish. She was raised with everything given to her and everyone around her promising her everything. You tend to come up like that with just a hand outstretched, expecting whatever it is you want, sometimes without even having to say it. This is the polar opposite of Lacus Clyne, who by contrast was the product of genetic manipulation (not known until the movie), political manipulation by her homeland, watched her father die, and instead of hiding forever, picked up a DaCosta and proceeded to build a political-military coalition between herself, the members of the Archangel, and Orb, and fight back. Other than handing Kira the Freedom for use in saving his friends, she never once expected anyone else to fight on her behalf. That became a central part of the movie, where Kira wrongly believed that he had to shoulder all of the fighting and pain on himself, because he was still traumatized by fucking Flay Allster insisting that was his role in the conflict, and that her love was conditional upon that aspect. Poor Lacus just wanted to make delicious food, ride motorbikes, and bang her ultimate coordinator of a man and she was stuck having to de-program him from his One Month Relationship.
Now, by the end of all this, Flay attempts to escape the Dominion and get back to the Archangel, before the escape shuttle she was in was destroyed by one of Rau’s funnels, this, after Kira had successfully guarded them from Rau’s rifle shot, forgetting funnels were in play. It was tragic, and the resulting death and newtype spirit scene was sad, as Force-Flay tried to explain that her love and emotions were genuine, she just didn’t know how to express them in a healthy way and regrets the pain she caused him. The jury is out on if Rau was able to interpret either of their feelings, but my guess is if he could, he did what he did to ensure that Kira fell into the same despair that he felt as a failed clone with no future. Rau is a whole other post for another day as to why he too is fucked up and not the legend fans make him out to be, but the TL;DR is that this guy, instead of either trying to science his way out of his problem, or just find a quiet part of the world to live out the rest of his years in peace, decided to make his unfortunate birth the entire wholeass problem of both Earth and Space humanity. Flay was unfortunately an accomplice to that end, and had she lived, I am unsure if she would have been Hague’d for it or put under house arrest until the movie. At least in Super Robot Wars DD mobile, Setsuna F. Seiei rescues her shuttle from Rau, and she goes on to be a supporter for Kira in Destiny.
But now, what if I told you that despite being a rich-bitch, affluenza, self-serving, racist space-karen throughout most of the show, she was actually one of the best, most human characters depicted on it? Is that weird?
The reason is not what our OP above tried to outline. OP’s argument is that Flay was a good character because “she was there for him”. She was there for him because for her manipulation to work, for her to ensure that he would fight for her “until he died”, she had to pretend to be his romantic interest. Although Lacus does become Kira’s better romantic interest, she didn’t need to manipulate him to protect her, he protected her because she gave him the space to be himself with her. Cagalli, well, again, that is another post entitled “How SEED”s Greatest and Best Character Was Robbed After SEED”.
The reason is that where the writers of this show could have easily just made Flay a bridge bunny, or a girl-next-door for Kira or someone else, or just blew her up with her father and been done with it, they did one of the more important things in the show, and that’s make you experience what it’s like to seethe, cope, and hate as a racist piece of shit. Again, we’ve built the case here that Flay was not a good person, and was in fact a massive racist bitch who masked herself enough of an okay person to string along Kira, only to encounter a better manipulator than herself because she’s Daddy’s Girl. And you might say “That seems like a bit much, she did seem like she at least regretted–” sure, she regretted her decisions, at the end when she blew up. The Lalah-esque scene of her confessing to Kira that she was wrong and she was sorry was her finally realizing how she led her life poorly and frankly put him through e v e r y t h i n g you’ve seen in this show. Seriously. Many of the events in the show occur because she either influenced them, or in the case of Azrael obtaining the N-Jammer Canceller tech, she allowed herself to be manipulated by Rau into thinking that the sooner they dispatched the coordinators, the faster the war ends. She didn’t explicitly want Kira to also be dispatched, but she was willing to make that sacrifice for her own safety, just as she reconciled with the possibility of him being KIA before. She is the realest fucking deal when it comes to Gundam characters who don’t just waffle back and forth between paper-thin ideals or sail with the wind, she’s a genuine bitch from start to finish. I respect the hell out of that. I respect the writers for not trying to redeem her until the very end, and the lesson you are supposed to learn is that you pour one out for how she died, not how she lived. She’s Hulk Hogan here. Everyone likes to remember him as this grandiose figure because he was relevant to the story of wrestling in the 80s. But then you found out not only was he a shitbag in the 80s, he was a shitbag ever decade after that. Rest in piss. #Packwatch
And in case people think “Oh, Delta must fucking HATE Flay, I actually liked Flay during the show’s run, and was sad to see her go. I do wish that like the video games, they had given her a second chance. But you know what I dislike the most? That because she got duped by Rau and handed the data over, the Dominion had to fight, and Natarle had to die. Natarle was one of SEED’s other best characters, a by-the-book, stone-faced soldier who might as well had concrete in her vagina cause no one was ever going to come close to her unless they were also enlisted and probably above her in rank. She was a force, and had she lived to fight in GSF, I would have wanted to see her crush Foundation in pieces before Mighty Strike Freedom even took the stage. Natarle was the real dommy mommy, and you fucking never forget what they took from us thanks to Flay’s bullshit daddy issues. Had they stuck to the original script and put Flay in the position of piloting the Rouge or maybe one of the M1s, as I said, it would have given her an actual opportunity to fully understand what Kira was going through trying to protect them.
And mind you, Flay is not the only true crime podcast character on this show, or in any Gundam. I would also include Muruta Azrael, Japan’s depiction of Stephen Miller decades before we ever realized it was him, but with hair. Andrew Waltfield, a man who would rather drink coffee and eat donar kebab than kill innocent people. But more importantly, Patrick Zala, a person so twisted and consumed with hate and revenge for Junius Seven that he abandoned his dreams with Siegel Clyne to create a peaceful nation of PLANTs and immediately made it a military superpower. While I doubt he was based on Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, I am sure Japan was keenly aware of the parallels between PLANT and the Israeli-Palestinian war.
And to conclude with the title of this post, namely the reference to the movie The Butterfly Effect, if Hideaki Anno were to make a Gundam SEEDuuuuuuX and we explore the 103920913930–2 timelines that emerge from Kira’s coked-out Newtype brain upon Flay’s death, I imagine he will have tried that many times to save her, only to realize, like Evan Treborn, the only possible way to save himself and his friends from all of his childhood mistakes was to go back far enough to where he first met Kayleigh Miller, and make it to where they never become friends, thus never setting off the cycle of events. Except, if you do make it to where Kira and Flay never interact, would this mean that Flay would never set forth the events that see Kira fight Athrun, nearly die, obtain Freedom, and end the GENESIS crisis? Would GENESIS win because Rau would never be able to give the data to Azreal, or would that data have gotten to him another way besides Flay? This sounds like a job for Captain Braxton, Conspiracy Theorist.
All I know is that when it comes to Flay Allstar, she just wasn’t the Four Murasame we were hoping for. Hell, even Saji Crossroad managed to get into a Gundam and make his wimpy ass fight. How do you lose to Saji Fucking Crossroad?
God I would have wanted to see Flay in GSF though, slapping the shit out of Agnes.
