Character Study?

Time to start off something new.

With character study, I’m going to randomly pick characters and take a good look into  who they are. It’s fair to say that I’m probably going to end up spoiling some good stuff, so if people don’t recognize the character when they see the image then they should probably leave the post alone. With that out of the way, I plan on doing this pretty often and I figured I’ll start now.

This time, the character is…

Flay Allster, one of the more interesting characters from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED.

To talk about the series for a moment, SEED wasn’t exactly the best of Gundam. It was an alright series, but it suffered from quite a few problems that made the old school and hardcore avoid it, made the casual watcher balk, and even made new mecha fans shy away from it. SEED had some lows, but it did have some high points and, to me, Flay was one of them.

The daughter of a high ranking official, it wasn’t odd to me that Flay was spoiled and demanding. As the series went on Flay proved time and time again that, quite frankly, that she was a bitch. There are plenty of characters that are mean-spirited, that are selfish, and all that, but what attracted me to her character was that she gradually started to move forward in a role where most characters stagnate.

In the series, Flay developed an overwhelming loathing of coordinators and goes as far as breaking things off with her fiance to manipulate the main character to fight. From enlisting to having sex with Kira, a coordinator himself, Flay utilized every effort she could to keep him in the fight. Taking things that far was nice to see because most series backed off before things got too heavy, but what made Flay a memorable character wasn’t so much the things she did on account of being short-sighted, but, instead, the things she did after she really opened her eyes to what was happening. The young girl that used to believe all coordinators should be eliminated realized that wasn’t what she wanted at all. Towards the end of the series, she becomes a much more meaningful character in the way that she left her former self in the past and makes an honest attempt to move forward before getting cut down.

I know she served as the perfect foil to get Kira to power up and all that, but, more than just being an effective character, I think she was a particularly good one. Kira obviously thought enough of her to never question the way she acted and her former fiance kept a pendant with her picture long after her death, but Flay’s feelings remained cloudy even as the series continued into Destiny.

Did she really love Kira? What would have happened on the event that she lived? How much did abandoning Sai, the former fiance, really bother her? To answer one of those questions, I believe that she didn’t really fall in love with Kira or anything like that. She used him to fuel her own agenda, but, as time passed, she started to value him as an important person, perhaps something closer to a friend she could talk with rather than a love.

It doesn’t have much bearing on her character in SEED, but one of the thing that stood out to me in Destiny was one of the ending theme animations. In the animation for Rie Fu’s “I Wanna Go To A Place…”, pretty much everyone is happy spending time with each other and even some of the characters that died are present, but Flay is a little off to the side standing alone watching Kira and Lacus in the foreground. Back when I saw it, I remembered being struck not by the cameo itself but by how much I thought it fitting for Flay to boldly make such an appearance yet still somehow find herself in the background.