Character · Gundam Wing
Relena Peacecraft
A girl who reacts to finding an armed soldier on a beach by inviting him to her birthday party.
In Otakana the clue reads: Diplomat's daughter who becomes a pacifist leader
- Type
- Character
- Series
- Gundam Wing
- Letters
- 6 · Hard
Relena Darlian starts the series as a diplomat's daughter in an expensive school, and finds out fairly quickly that she was adopted, that her birth family ruled a small pacifist kingdom, and that the kingdom was destroyed for refusing to arm itself. She takes the name Peacecraft and the position that comes with it. Everyone around her is holding a weapon. She decides to argue instead, in public, at length.
Fans spent years treating her as an obstacle, mostly because she keeps walking towards Heero while he points a gun at her. That reading undersells what the show does with her. Total pacifism as she practises it is a hard position with a body count, and Gundam Wing is honest about the cost. By the end she is running a country and negotiating with people the Gundams could not defeat by shooting.
Akiko Yajima voices her in Japanese. The character design gives her the pink dress and hair ribbon of a shoujo lead in a show otherwise full of military hardware, and that contrast is deliberate: the series was written to pull a female audience into a mecha franchise, and it worked so thoroughly that the fandom's shape changed. Gundam Wing sold Gundam to viewers with no interest in mobile suit specifications.
Spelling RELENA
RELENA is what the English releases settled on, and the Japanese script disagrees. The katakana reads closer to Ririina, which would give you Lilina, and Japanese material has used that spelling too. The dub name is the one on the tiles. Six letters, three consonants and three vowels strictly alternating, so RELENA falls into place once any two are green. Trust the English here, not the katakana.