Zero Requiem was emotionally fulfilling because Lelouch intended everything, and it was one last great identity-switching flamboyant gambit from a character who had been all about flamboyant gambits and identity-switching from the start. I haven't seen Geass in a long time, but Lelouch's ending was kind of karmic.
This Slaine bullshit came out of nowhere. Slaine did things wrong, like continuing the war after Asseylum asked him to stop, putting Asseylum and Lemrina under house arrest, shooting Inaho, killing Saazbaum, and using Lemrina to warmonger. He plausibly deserves some karmic retribution for that. But being blamed for starting the war isn't related to that. Unlike Lelouch, the moral stigma Slaine got is qualitatively and quantitatively unrelated to his wrongdoing.
tl;dr Zero Requiem was an emotionally fulfilling ending because it was flowed logically from what Lelouch had done; Aldnoah Zero isn't emotionally fulfilling because blaming Slaine for everything came out of nowhere.
There are in-universe problems that make this stupid, too. First, are there really people who believe a sixteen-year-old boy orchestrated a royal assassination and interplanetary war? Second, by pinning the Slaine (who Martians can think of as a Terran, and Terrans can think of as a Martian), aren't they just exacerbating the racism/xenophobia that provoked war between Earth and Mars in the first place?
In the original drafts, Slaine was apparently a much more ambitious character, who actively resented the Orbital Knights for treating him like trash and who never met Asseylum before she came to him for tutoring a few months before her peace visit. Blaming a character like that might be more logically and emotionally palatable. "This character tried to advance himself and fell on his face." But Slaine wasn't ambitious, he was a fluffball. So the end was a nonsensical "This character tried to make someone he loved happy, and she told everyone he was literally worse than Hitler."
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This Slaine bullshit came out of nowhere. Slaine did things wrong, like continuing the war after Asseylum asked him to stop, putting Asseylum and Lemrina under house arrest, shooting Inaho, killing Saazbaum, and using Lemrina to warmonger. He plausibly deserves some karmic retribution for that. But being blamed for starting the war isn't related to that. Unlike Lelouch, the moral stigma Slaine got is qualitatively and quantitatively unrelated to his wrongdoing.
tl;dr Zero Requiem was an emotionally fulfilling ending because it was flowed logically from what Lelouch had done; Aldnoah Zero isn't emotionally fulfilling because blaming Slaine for everything came out of nowhere.
There are in-universe problems that make this stupid, too. First, are there really people who believe a sixteen-year-old boy orchestrated a royal assassination and interplanetary war? Second, by pinning the Slaine (who Martians can think of as a Terran, and Terrans can think of as a Martian), aren't they just exacerbating the racism/xenophobia that provoked war between Earth and Mars in the first place?
In the original drafts, Slaine was apparently a much more ambitious character, who actively resented the Orbital Knights for treating him like trash and who never met Asseylum before she came to him for tutoring a few months before her peace visit. Blaming a character like that might be more logically and emotionally palatable. "This character tried to advance himself and fell on his face." But Slaine wasn't ambitious, he was a fluffball. So the end was a nonsensical "This character tried to make someone he loved happy, and she told everyone he was literally worse than Hitler."