Nunnally Lamperouge
Nunnally Lamperouge is a key character of Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion, Lelouch's sister and his reason for fighting. She is voiced by Kaori Nazuka in Japanese and Rebecca Forstadt in English.
About Nunnally Lamperouge
Nunnally Lamperouge is a key character of Code Geass, Lelouch's younger sister. Blind and using a wheelchair since the attack that killed their mother, she lives quietly at Ashford Academy while her brother wages war in her name. Nunnally is the moral centre of the series: kind, perceptive in ways sighted people miss, and utterly unaware, for most of the story, that Zero's rebellion exists to build her the gentler world she keeps asking for.
Appearance
Nunnally is a gentle girl of fourteen with long, wavy light brown hair, violet eyes that have not opened since she was a small child, and a frail build. She uses a wheelchair and dresses in soft colours, usually with a ribbon, and she folds paper cranes with a skill her fingers learned in place of her eyes. Everything about her design is softness in a series of sharp edges, and the animators protect that softness visually: scenes in the Lamperouge residence are lit warmer than anywhere else in the show, because to Lelouch, that is what they are.
Personality
Nunnally is sweet, patient and frighteningly perceptive about voices and hands, the senses she has left. She reads Lelouch's moods by touch, knows when her friends are lying to protect her, and files it all away with a smile. She is not fragile in spirit. When Britannia makes her a viceroy she uses the little power she is given exactly as she promised she would, for schools and for the Japanese, against her handlers' wishes. Her gentleness is a position, not a weakness, and the series' ending argues she understood the assignment better than her brother did.
Background & Story
Nunnally vi Britannia was six when assassins killed her mother Marianne in front of her. The attack, and her father's coldness afterwards, left her blind by psychological trauma and unable to walk. Exiled to Japan with Lelouch, sheltered through an invasion, then hidden at Ashford Academy under a false name, she grew up in the small safe world her brother built around her, making friends, folding cranes and wishing, aloud, for a gentler world. She does not know that wish is the stated aim of a global war. In R2, Britannia finds her, and the empire installs her as Viceroy of Area 11, turning Lelouch's reason for fighting into the figurehead of the thing he is fighting.
Powers & Abilities
- Touch Reading: Nunnally can read a person's tension and honesty through their hands, a skill she developed living without sight. She detects lies from people who fool everyone else in the room.
- Paper Cranes: Her signature craft, folded constantly and given as gifts. In a series about wishes, the girl who folds a thousand cranes is making her own kind of strategy.
- Moral Authority: Not a power on paper, but the plot treats it as one. Armies are raised in her name, and her disapproval, when it finally lands, is the one verdict Lelouch cannot argue with.
Key Relationships
- Lelouch Lamperouge: Her brother, protector and, secretly, a revolutionary fighting in her name. Their small domestic scenes are the warmest in the series and the standard everything else is measured against.
- Suzaku Kururugi: Her childhood friend from Japan, whose voice she recognises instantly years later. Suzaku's protectiveness of Nunnally is the one thing he and Lelouch never disagree about.
- Sayoko Shinozaki: The Lamperouges' maid and quietly a trained ninja in Britannian service fiction's proud tradition, who cares for Nunnally daily and protects the household's secrets with her life.
Quick Answers
Who voices Nunnally Lamperouge?
Nunnally is voiced by Kaori Nazuka in Japanese and Rebecca Forstadt in the English dub.
Nunnally's blindness is psychogenic: the trauma of witnessing her mother's assassination, compounded by her father's Geass, in the fuller account the series gives later, sealed her eyes shut. Her inability to walk comes from injuries in the same attack. Both are central to why Lelouch treats the world as guilty.
For most of the television series, no. Nunnally knows her brother as a kind student and Zero as a news story. The truth reaches her in R2, at the worst possible time and from the worst possible people, and her reaction is one of the endgame's sharpest turns.
What does Nunnally wish for?
A gentler world. It is the phrase she returns to throughout the series, in conversations with Lelouch, and he adopts it as the stated purpose of his rebellion. The ending of Code Geass is, in large part, an argument about whether her wish was ever really his.