[
No, Relena was doubtlessly one of the most useless female leads in the franchise, As she was built up to be an important character that came into extremely high positions of political power, but did practically nothing worthy of her supposed importance, whether it was on-screen or off.
Kudelia, on the other hand, actually did something important to the plot from time to time, and it fit in with the type of character that the writers wanted to portray her as. She didn't go into battle herself, no, but using the media, she single-handedly stopped an attack on Tekkadan at the Dort colonies, in addition to a military massacre of oppressed and striking workers (Who were armed, yes, but their arms were mostly for show, and they had no intention of actually using force. When the workers were actually forced to fight back after a set-up, they were completely helpless when their equipment was found to be nonfunctional) At the end of S1, she delivered another speech that hit Gjallarhorn's public image pretty hard once again, which helped set the stage for the events of S2. She didn't really do much throughout S2, but a there was still evidence that she did a fair bit of minor stuff off-screen, but not really anything worth noting.
Kudelia also grew as a character throughout the series. At the beginning, she was naive, yes, but as the series progressed, she came to understand the motivations of the child mercenaries she had allied herself with, alongside other elements of the messed up world in which she lived, and her views and actions changed accordingly to change the things around her for the better, from educating Tekkadan's members to become literate to opening an orphanage to keep other children from suffering similar circumstances as Tekkadan and Human Debris. |