Yzak Joule and Dearka Elsman are easy to dismiss when Mobile Suit Gundam SEED begins.

Yzak is loud, cruel, arrogant, and furious at anything that threatens his pride. Dearka is smug, sarcastic, and far too comfortable treating war like something he can laugh his way through. They are not introduced as reluctant soldiers. They are not introduced as boys who obviously hate what they are doing. They are introduced as elite ZAFT pilots, members of Rau Le Creuset’s team, and two young Coordinators who have been taught exactly what to believe about themselves, Naturals, PLANT, and the war.

That is what makes them interesting.

Yzak and Dearka are not outsiders to ZAFT’s ideology. They are products of it. They are young, talented, politically connected, and raised inside a society that has every reason to fear the Earth Alliance but also every reason to turn that fear into superiority. They are soldiers before they are fully adults, and the story does not let us forget what happens when boys are given both trauma and weapons before they are given perspective.

Their arc is not about becoming pacifists. It is not about abandoning ZAFT entirely. By Gundam SEED Destiny, Yzak is still a ZAFT commander, and Dearka serves under him in the Joule Team. By Gundam SEED Freedom, they are still working within PLANT’s military and intelligence structure. Their growth is more complicated than simply “they stopped fighting.”

They do not outgrow the military.

They outgrow the propaganda.

They begin as boys who believe the war’s cleanest story: Coordinators are superior, Naturals are weak, ZAFT is righteous, and the enemy deserves what happens to them. But over the course of SEED, Destiny, and Freedom, both Yzak and Dearka are forced to confront the human cost hidden underneath that story. Dearka changes because captivity aboard the Archangel forces him to see Naturals as people. Yzak changes because the battlefield forces him to see what ZAFT’s righteousness looks like when it becomes massacre.

They do not become saints.

They become soldiers who know better.

And in Gundam SEED, that matters.

ZAFT’s Perfect Sons

Yzak and Dearka are not random recruits. They are elite ZAFT pilots from PLANT society, and both come from politically connected families. Yzak’s mother, Ezalia Joule, is a member of the PLANT Supreme Council. Dearka’s father, Tad Elsman, is also politically connected within PLANT. Their prejudice toward Naturals is not just personal meanness. It is political inheritance.

They are boys raised in a world where Coordinator identity has been militarized. PLANT has suffered. The Bloody Valentine tragedy hangs over everything. The Earth Alliance contains people who openly want Coordinators wiped out. ZAFT’s anger does not come from nowhere. But SEED is interested in what happens when legitimate fear becomes dehumanizing ideology.

Yzak and Dearka both begin with a superiority complex toward Naturals. They mock them. They underestimate them. They treat the war as if Coordinator superiority makes their own violence naturally justified. This is especially clear in the early pursuit of the Archangel, where their confidence is not just military confidence but ideological certainty. (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, PHASE-02, “Its Name: Gundam”; PHASE-05, “Phase Shift Down.”)

That is propaganda working exactly as intended.

It gives them a hierarchy. Coordinators are better. Naturals are lesser. ZAFT is defending civilization. The enemy is weak, stupid, dangerous, or disposable. It gives boys like Yzak and Dearka a way to feel righteous while fighting a war they barely understand beyond the version handed to them by adults.

They are not stupid. They are not cowards. They are not incapable of loyalty or affection. In fact, Yzak deeply cares about his teammates, especially after Nicol’s death. But that is part of what makes propaganda powerful. It does not require people to be empty. It attaches itself to real emotions: grief, loyalty, pride, fear, humiliation, and love for one’s homeland.

Yzak and Dearka believe because believing gives them purpose.

Then the war starts making that belief impossible to keep clean.

Dearka: When the Enemy Becomes Human

Dearka’s transformation begins with defeat.

During the fighting against the Archangel, Dearka is eventually isolated, the Buster Gundam is disabled, and with the Archangel’s guns locked onto him, he is forced to surrender. This is the moment that changes his story. He does not leave ZAFT because he has already carefully worked through the ethics of the war. He is captured. He is forced into proximity with the people he has been taught to despise. (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, PHASE-29, “The Turning Point.”)

That proximity is everything.

Propaganda depends on distance. It is much easier to hate “Naturals” than it is to sit across from actual people with names, grief, exhaustion, loyalties, and fear. Dearka’s time aboard the Archangel strips away the abstraction. The people on that ship are not slogans. They are not just targets. They are young, scared, angry, traumatized people trying to survive the same war he is.

And then there is Miriallia Haw.

Dearka’s relationship with Miriallia should not be flattened into a simple romance arc, because what happens between them is much messier and more important than that. When Dearka is held aboard the Archangel, he says something cruel about Tolle, not understanding the full weight of Miriallia’s grief. Miriallia, overwhelmed by rage and loss, grabs a knife and tries to kill him. (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, PHASE-30, “Flashing Blades.”)

That scene is one of the clearest examples of what SEED does well: it refuses to let hatred belong to only one side.

Miriallia is not evil in that moment. She is grieving. Dearka is not innocent either. He is an enemy soldier who has treated Naturals with contempt and has participated in the violence that destroyed the lives of people aboard the Archangel. The scene is ugly because war is ugly. It turns grief into a weapon. It turns teenagers into enemies before they have any idea how to process what has been taken from them.

For Dearka, this is the beginning of understanding.

The enemy is not weak. The enemy is not faceless. The enemy is not a joke. The enemy is a girl in pain, and he helped create the world that hurt her.

That does not magically make him good. Dearka’s growth is not instant absolution. But his experiences aboard the Archangel force him to reevaluate his assumptions. Once he sees the humanity of the people he was told to dismiss, his old worldview starts to collapse.

By the end of SEED, Dearka fights alongside the Archangel and supports Yzak during the Second Battle of Jachin Due, including when PLANT is targeted by Earth Alliance nuclear missiles. He also helps Yzak take down the Forbidden Gundam and later protects the damaged Archangel while the others focus on stopping GENESIS. (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, PHASE-48, “Day of Wrath”; PHASE-49, “The Final Light”; PHASE-50, “To a Future That Never Ends.”)

That matters because Dearka’s arc does not ask him to stop caring about PLANT.

He still does.

What changes is that PLANT is no longer the only life he can recognize as worth protecting.

Yzak: The Soldier Who Believed Too Hard

Yzak’s arc is slower, harsher, and less emotionally tidy.

Dearka’s growth is built through captivity and human connection. Yzak’s growth is built through humiliation, guilt, battlefield horror, and the gradual realization that loyalty to ZAFT does not automatically mean righteousness.

At the beginning, Yzak is the most aggressively loyal of the young pilots. He wants victory. He wants recognition. He wants to surpass Athrun. He wants to defeat Kira. When Kira scars his face, that injury becomes personal. Yzak keeps the scar as a reminder of the Strike. (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, PHASE-05, “Phase Shift Down.”)

That scar is important because Yzak’s war becomes personal very quickly.

His hatred of Kira is not only ideological. It is humiliation. He was supposed to be elite. He was supposed to be superior. He was supposed to win. Instead, he is marked by the enemy, and every time he sees his own reflection, he sees failure.

That is the emotional context for one of Yzak’s worst moments: the civilian shuttle.

Canon matters here. Yzak does not knowingly shoot down a shuttle full of civilians while calmly deciding civilians deserve to die. He shoots it down under the mistaken belief that it is carrying retreating soldiers. That distinction matters because it keeps the analysis honest. But it does not erase the horror of what happens. Yzak’s impulsiveness, rage, and dehumanized view of the enemy still lead him to destroy a shuttle that is actually carrying civilians. (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, PHASE-13, “Stars Falling in Space.”)

This is where SEED makes Yzak uncomfortable.

He is not a cartoon villain. He is not a mustache-twirling monster. He is a teenage soldier whose worldview has trained him to act before he sees. He assumes the target is legitimate because it belongs to the enemy’s side of the war. He fires, and people die.

That is what propaganda does at its most dangerous. It narrows the imagination. It teaches soldiers to see categories before they see human beings.

Enemy. Natural. Soldier. Target.

By the time reality catches up, the dead are already dead.

Panama and the First Crack in Yzak’s Faith

Yzak’s clearest turning point is not a sentimental one. It is not even necessarily about regret for the shuttle, at least not in a direct confessional way. It is the Battle of Panama.

At Panama, ZAFT uses the Gungnir device, disabling the Earth Alliance’s mobile suits. With the enemy unable to fight back, ZAFT soldiers begin firing on defenseless opponents and executing surrendering soldiers. Yzak refuses to participate and expresses disgust at shooting targets that cannot shoot back. (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, PHASE-37, “Divine Thunder.”)

This is crucial to understanding Yzak.

He is arrogant. He is violent. He is loyal to ZAFT. But he still has a soldier’s idea of honor. He wants to defeat enemies in combat. He wants to win through strength. He does not take pleasure in slaughtering people who cannot resist.

And that is the crack in the propaganda.

Up until this point, Yzak can believe ZAFT is fighting a necessary war. He can believe Naturals are inferior. He can believe his side is justified. But Panama forces him to see ZAFT soldiers behaving with the same cruelty they claim to oppose. It forces him to confront a truth he does not want: being Coordinator does not make someone morally superior. Wearing ZAFT red does not make violence honorable. The people on his side are capable of barbarism too.

This does not make Yzak abandon ZAFT. That would be too simple, and it would not be canon. Instead, it makes him doubt.

For Yzak, doubt is a major step.

Because Yzak’s entire identity has been built around certainty.

Mendel, Dearka, and the Question of Who Is Being Deceived

Yzak’s confrontation with Dearka at Mendel is another key moment because it brings the two arcs together.

Dearka has already changed. He has seen the Archangel from the inside. He has seen Naturals as people. He has learned that the war cannot be reduced to Coordinator righteousness versus Natural evil. Yzak, meanwhile, is still trying to hold onto the structure that has defined him.

When Yzak accuses Dearka of betraying PLANT, Dearka denies that framing. He does not say he has stopped caring about his people. He says he will not fight to wipe out all Naturals. That distinction is everything. Dearka is not betraying PLANT; he is rejecting Patrick Zala’s genocidal end point. When Yzak insists Dearka is being deceived, Dearka throws the question back at him: which one of them is really being deceived? (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, PHASE-44, “The Spiral of Encounters.”)

That is the central question of Yzak and Dearka’s shared arc.

Dearka looks like the traitor because he has crossed the visible line. He is no longer where ZAFT expects him to be. But SEED asks whether loyalty to an institution still counts as loyalty when that institution is leading its people toward mass murder.

Yzak cannot answer that immediately.

He is too proud. Too loyal. Too shaped by the world that raised him. But the question stays with him, especially as GENESIS reveals how far ZAFT’s leadership is willing to go.

Dearka’s defection does not instantly convert Yzak. It does something more believable: it destabilizes him.

It makes him look at the war differently.

GENESIS and the End of the Clean Story

GENESIS is the logical endpoint of extremist wartime thinking in SEED.

Both sides in the First Alliance–PLANT War escalate toward annihilation. The Earth Alliance uses nuclear weapons against PLANT. Patrick Zala’s faction responds with GENESIS, a superweapon capable of catastrophic mass destruction. By the Second Battle of Jachin Due, the war is no longer about victory in any honorable sense. It is about extermination.

This is where Yzak and Dearka’s arcs fully separate them from the propaganda that shaped them.

Dearka is already fighting alongside the Three Ships Alliance. Yzak initially remains within ZAFT’s structure, but even he warns Athrun and Kira to flee GENESIS’s firing range after the Three Ships Alliance helps stop the nuclear attack on PLANT. (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED, PHASE-48, “Day of Wrath.”)

That moment does not turn Yzak into Lacus. It does not make him ideologically identical to the Archangel crew. But it shows that his loyalty is no longer blind. He can recognize that the people he once defined as enemies are trying to prevent mass death. He can recognize that GENESIS is not just a weapon of defense. It is horror wearing the language of victory.

This is why Yzak’s growth is compelling.

He does not become gentle. He does not become soft-spoken. He does not suddenly apologize his way through the entire series. He remains Yzak: sharp, proud, temperamental, and intensely military. But he is not the same boy who started the war convinced that ZAFT’s cause excused everything.

He has seen too much.

Destiny: Still Soldiers, Not the Same Boys

By Gundam SEED Destiny, both Yzak and Dearka remain in ZAFT. That is important. Their arcs are not about leaving the military behind. They are about becoming more discerning inside the military world that still defines them.

Yzak becomes the commander of the Joule Team, and Dearka serves under him. Yzak is more level-headed and more of a leader, even if he is still hotheaded. He is not rewritten into someone unrecognizable. He still snaps. He still gets angry. He still has pride. But he has learned restraint. Dearka’s growth is visible too. In SEED, he often fans Yzak’s temper. By Destiny, he is more likely to calm Yzak down when Yzak starts losing his temper. (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, PHASE-22, “Sword of the Blue Skies.”)

That small reversal says a lot.

The boy who once laughed at Naturals as weaklings becomes the man who can pull his friend back from the edge. The boy who once treated war as a game has learned what words and assumptions can cost. Dearka does not become the moral center of the franchise, but he becomes steadier. More aware. Less intoxicated by the worldview that once made cruelty feel easy.

Yzak also carries the consequences of the first war into the second. His later military service is tied to Gilbert Durandal’s intervention and the idea of sparing the youth so they can rebuild the future. Yzak sees his return to the military as a way to honor friends lost in the previous war. (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, referenced through Yzak’s postwar status and return to ZAFT.)

This is where Yzak becomes especially useful for talking about war, punishment, and political power.

He is guilty. He is also young. He is responsible for what he did. He was also shaped by adults and institutions that trained him into exactly the kind of weapon they needed. Durandal saving him from execution can be read as mercy, political calculation, or both — and with Durandal, it is almost always both.

Yzak survives, but survival does not erase the past. It gives him the burden of living differently.

Freedom: The Men They Become

By Gundam SEED Freedom, Yzak and Dearka’s growth has moved beyond personal disillusionment and into institutional responsibility.

They are no longer simply the angry young ZAFT Reds from the first war or the more mature Joule Team soldiers from Destiny. In C.E. 75, Yzak and Dearka are still connected to PLANT’s military structure, but they are no longer boys being shaped by whatever story that structure hands them. They are men with experience, authority, and the memory of what happens when soldiers stop questioning the political machine around them. (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom.)

That is why their role in Freedom matters to this post.

The Foundation conflict is another crisis built on manipulation, militarized ideology, and the temptation to decide the future through force. Once again, the world is being pushed toward a “clean” answer. Once again, powerful people try to use war, hierarchy, and political control to impose their vision on everyone else. For Yzak and Dearka, this is familiar territory. They have already lived through the First Alliance–PLANT War. They have already seen Patrick Zala’s extremism. They have already watched Durandal offer a controlled future through the Destiny Plan.

By Freedom, they know what political certainty can become.

Yzak, especially, has come a long way from the boy who once treated loyalty as obedience. His loyalty to PLANT is still real, but it is no longer blind. That is the point. He can serve his country without surrendering his judgment to every faction or leader that claims to speak for it.

Dearka’s role beside him matters just as much. In the beginning, Dearka often encouraged Yzak’s worst impulses. He fed the sarcasm, the arrogance, the easy contempt. By Destiny and Freedom, their dynamic has matured. Dearka is still Dearka — dry, teasing, sharp around the edges — but he is no longer just the friend who laughs along. He is the steadier partner, the one who knows Yzak well enough to stand with him without simply becoming an echo of him.

Their mobile suits in Freedom also carry symbolic weight. Yzak pilots the Duel Blitz Gundam, while Dearka pilots the Lightning Buster Gundam. These are not just nostalgic callbacks. They are echoes of the boys they used to be: Duel and Buster, the stolen Gundams from Heliopolis, now transformed and placed in the hands of men who are no longer fighting for the same simple worldview. (Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Freedom.)

That is the real beauty of their presence in the film.

Yzak and Dearka are still soldiers. They are still ZAFT men. They are still loud, sharp, proud, and recognizably themselves. But they are not propaganda’s children anymore.

They are men who have seen where propaganda leads.

When they fight in Freedom, they are not fighting because a faction told them who to hate. They are fighting because they have learned that protecting PLANT cannot mean blindly obeying every power structure inside PLANT. They know the difference between defending their people and serving the ambitions of those who would use their people as tools.

For Yzak and Dearka, that is the real proof of growth.

Not that they left ZAFT.

Not that they became saints.

But that they learned to tell the difference between loyalty and obedience.

What Yzak and Dearka Actually Outgrow

Yzak and Dearka do not outgrow loyalty. They remain loyal men.

They do not outgrow soldiering. They remain soldiers.

They do not outgrow PLANT. They still fight to protect their homeland.

What they outgrow is the simple story.

They outgrow the idea that Coordinators are automatically righteous because they are Coordinators. They outgrow the idea that Naturals are disposable because they are Naturals. They outgrow the idea that military obedience is the same thing as moral clarity.

Dearka’s arc says: once you see the enemy’s humanity, propaganda cannot work on you the same way again.

Yzak’s arc says: once you see your own side commit atrocities, loyalty can no longer mean blindness.

Together, they show two different paths out of indoctrination.

Dearka changes through intimacy. Yzak changes through disgust.

Dearka has to meet the people he was taught to hate. Yzak has to witness what his own side becomes when hatred takes command.

Neither path is clean. Neither path is complete. Neither man becomes perfect.

But that is why their arcs work.

Soldiers Who Know Better

Yzak Joule and Dearka Elsman are not important because they were secretly good all along.

They are important because they were not.

They begin Gundam SEED as privileged, elite, propaganda-shaped soldiers who believe in Coordinator superiority and ZAFT’s righteous cause. They mock Naturals. They chase the Archangel. They participate in a war machine built by adults who know exactly how useful young anger can be.

And then the war teaches them what propaganda hides.

Dearka learns that the enemy has a face, a voice, and grief of her own.

Yzak learns that his own side is capable of cruelty, massacre, and extermination.

Neither revelation erases what they did. Dearka’s change does not undo his earlier contempt. Yzak’s later restraint does not undo the civilian shuttle. Their growth matters precisely because the story does not make them innocent. It makes them responsible.

By Destiny, they are still ZAFT soldiers. By Freedom, they are still tied to PLANT’s military and political world. But they are no longer the same boys who entered the first war. Yzak is more controlled, more aware, and more capable of leadership. Dearka is more empathetic, more grounded, and more willing to pull Yzak back instead of pushing him forward.

They have not escaped war.

But they have escaped the version of themselves that propaganda needed them to be.

And in a franchise where so many young people are used, broken, and pointed at the enemy, Yzak and Dearka’s survival is not just physical. It is moral.

They live long enough to know better.

That does not make them saints.

It makes them men.