r/AkameGaKILL • u/Nervous_Wolverine669 • 7h ago
AGK Anime I'm going to explain why I don't consider Esdeath Evil as everyone likes to call her
Now, I'm going to be clear: I am in no way saying that she was a saint. I'm going to start from the beginning as to my reason. First of all, as we all know, her mother died when she was really young; for all you know, it might have happened just after giving birth. All we know is that she was killed and eaten by a danger Beast. All she had was her father, and her father was completely convinced about the notion that if you are weak, you don't deserve to live—only the strongest get the right to live. However, she didn't fully believe this until she saw her father's corpse with so many Spears impaling him, and his literal last words was, "C, this is what I meant, I was weak, so now I will die," and told her not to become the victim, to become the strongest. When you're only family dies and tells you something like that, it's going to stick with you, especially mentally.
Then there was the fact that for about a week or two, she was forced to travel through a blizzard with practically no food or water or any guidance until she finally made it out of the very place she was raised in. She joined the academy just like everybody else, became a soldier, and followed orders. As far as she was concerned, she was nothing more than a soldier that follows orders; her personal opinions don't matter. Eventually rose up to the rank of general, and as we all know, she went and obtained her imperial arms, which granted her the ice power. And I know some people are going to like, "Oh, what about the fact that she went and had her soldiers do whatever they wanted to the people of that tribe during the flashback we were shown?" I want to remind you that while it wasn't directly said, there was a lot of evidence that showed that that tribe they attacked and she let her men do whatever they wanted with the survivors—that tribe not only kidnap people regularly, but killed plenty of innocent people, including women and children, and forced the captured men and women to help them make more of their tribe.
Then there's the fact that, like I said, as far as she is concerned, her father's words have been proven right over and over again: only the Strong get the right to live, and that she is just a soldier; she is someone that is supposed to follow orders, nothing more, nothing less. Then we get to the fact that, while yes, she does torture people, however, that's more or less still part of her job. You don't exactly see her taking great pleasure in torturing anybody; you don't see I have a massive sadistic smile when she's performing interrogations and stuff. She has a very blank expression. Not only that, but she is not heartless; she has been shown to care about her comrades to the point where she went and visited the graves of the three beasts, which were pretty much her best soldiers she personally trained. We got to remember this is also someone who has a difficult time knowing how to express her emotions.
Then there was the fact that when she learned that the man she loved was part of the enemy faction, she did not hate him, and even during his execution, her plan was to fake his death, grab him, and run away. She was willing to betray the empire for the man she loved. Now, like I've said, I am not calling her a saint in any way or form. However, she is not a pure hearted sadistic woman that loves bloodshed and nothing else. Well, it's true she does absolutely love combat, especially against opponents that can actually stand a chance against her, she is not a sadistic cruel woman that just wants to torture people and murder them. It was also made clear that when it comes to killing her former comrade, who is now the leader of night raid, her plan was to simply kill her as quickly as possible because she didn't want to see her old comrade be tortured in a interrogation cell.
There is plenty of other stuff that I can go off of, but I've pretty much listed most of the major stuff. But like I said, I'm not calling her a saint; I'm just saying she's not pure evil like everyone says she is. I genuinely believe that if those weren't her father's last words and he said something else, and maybe if she was given proper opportunities to be able to express her emotions like a normal person before she met Tatsumi, she probably would have been a much nicer person to pretty much everybody. Plus, we have seen that she gets upset and borderline sad whenever a member of her team ended up dead. That is all I will say on the matter.
