So, my biggest gripe with Relena in Gundam Wing is not that she's a 15 year old girl who, befitting her age, is totally full of herself and her Junior High "Intro to Philosophy 101" opinions of Total Pacifism. That by itself makes sense. It's that every single character looks at her and goes "YES. ABSOLUTELY. THIS 15 YEAR OLD STUCK UP GIRL IS THE ONE WHO WILL CREATE THE NEW ORDER OF THE WORLD."
Established thinkers and world leaders with decades of experience bow down at her feet, cry "oh what fools we have been! Clearly we were all simply waiting for your brilliance to come into this world!" Duke Dermail, a man in his 60's-70's, the goddamn LEADER of the Global Military Industrial Complex, considers her the greatest threat to his plans for some reason rather than the legions of very heavily armed and personally motivated Earth Sphere Alliance military holdouts who oppose him.
SHE'S FIFTEEN FUCKING YEARS OLD.
That being said, a lot of Gundam Wing's grade school philosophical whinging about War, Peace, Human Nature, and Philosophy can really be properly understood in its context when you understand that the average age of the named characters is in the 15-18 year old range, and even Treize (the most glorious Magnificent Bastard in Gundam history) is only 24.
It still doesn't excuse the Mary Sue way the whole damn fictional universe bends over itself backwards to make Relena out to be Jesus: After Colony Edition.
I mean, god, I love this series so much, but.... FFFFFFFFUUUUUUUCK it has such a messiah complex about Relena it's nothing short of aggravating. In reality, she's literally just as crazy as Dermail, or even the blood-and-battle fetishist Dorothy Catalonia, it's just that Relena's crazy manifests as "would totally let you murder her with no resistance because moral high ground" as opposed to "war for fun and profit", and therefore it's more acceptable.
I mean, am I swimming alone here? Relena is still ungodly popular in Japan and I just don't see it. She's either dangerously naive at best or at worst a self-centered egotist who is constantly being taught by others that she's right to be so and will inadvertently get thousands to millions killed when the world's brief flirtation with her views ends in a decade or two and the first nations or factions to resume weapons production realize it gives them a leg up on all the idealists -- I mean, there's a reason no modern nation with any sort of influence has ever managed it. Dorothy Catalonia might have been a psycho bitch, but she's definitely right when she says that people prefer fighting wars to negotiating. The disadvantage of Relena's views is that when it works, it works great, but as soon as it fails once, the failure is total, whereas in Dorothy's views, there is room for her to be wrong.
Hell, Relena's repeatedly proven wrong in her own universe and needs to be bailed out by people who don't share in those views, and yet she (and the authors, it would seem) remains steadfast and unwavering in this belief that it's weapons that are the Great Satan, and that if people could just gEt RiD oF ThEIr wEApONs, they'd sTOp fIGhTiNG all the time and learn that everybody is actually wonderful and we'd all frolic off into a world of bunnies and rainbows together. She pays some lip service to the notion that something as trivial as changing human nature isn't actually trivial (literally nothing ever comes of that though), but the core of her utopian vision remains that weapons are inherently evil, humans are inherently perfect (not just good, perfect), and the only reason they're not perfect right now is because they have weapons.
Truly, it is the thinking of a 15 year old who just discovered seminar class for the first time.
Which, again, is why it pisses me off that despite clearly showing numerous times that she's wrong (with catastrophic results each time), the After Colony universe actively moves out of her way to make her right in the end: after a "hiccup" a year after the series, wars end, all weapons are destroyed, and mankind lives Happily Ever After The End. In the end, as it turns out, she's perfectly right and humanity becomes a perfect utopian society within 18 months with frankly alarming ease.
I mean, there's your regular Mary Sue, and then there's the kind of Mary Sue where her Sueness is so overwhelmingly powerful that it actively rewrites the natural laws by which that universe and all that live within it operates. Relena is firmly that latter type, the God Sue, having successfully rewritten human nature by sheer force of... I hesitate to use the word "charisma" because it's not really correct, more like... she incessantly badgers human nature into permanently changing. Which is a shame because were that lessened (and the amount of philosophical whinging in general dialed down by about half), I'd recommend Gundam Wing to a hell of a lot more people because Relena's intended role is as a foil to characters like Dorothy and Dermail and if she weren't so overpoweringly Mary Sue she could have fulfilled that role quite nicely and created some interesting discussion.
Instead she just irritates guys like me to the point that we write massive thinkpieces on the internet explaining why she's so annoying.
Actually, you know what? I take back my reference to Relena being Jesus AC Edition.
No matter what version of the Jesus story you hold stock in, he has a way longer and more arduous road than Relena ever faced.
Thanks for listening to me blab about an anime that probably few people still care about.