Darth Walrus posted:

I don't think that's precisely what they were going for, simply because by all indications, Agnika Kaeru really was all that and a bag of chips. He was a classic shonen hero - brave, charismatic, always put his friends first, the first of the Gundam pilots and the last to die. He was the boy who saved humanity with nothing but a couple of dinky little swords.

His tragedy was twofold. First, that he did indeed die at the end, without shaping what came after his victory (in other words, even the most perfect human cannot create a world if they follow his path, only create the conditions for one), and second, that Gjallarhorn's world has decayed to the point where the haves are too complacent to see any value in what he did, and the have-nots are too brutalised to see him as a symbol of anything other than strength through violence. They don't remember or care for where that strength came from.

The tragedy of IBO is not so much that someone tried to be Agnika Kaeru as that the world is too broken for someone like him to exist any more. Humanity is a luxury that no-one desperate enough to want his throne can afford.