Little GW Things #11: The Little Prince.
On Relena’s birthday (Episode 02: The Gundam Deathscythe), she hears a news disputing the rumours that the five “meteorites” that entered the atmosphere were manned spacecrafts. She immediately thinks it’s a lie as she knows Heero is one of them. Then she wonders, “Is he a little prince?”
It could be that Relena is dreamily thinking of a prince who will “save” her from her lonely life, but I’m taking that as a reference to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella Le Petit Prince. Some translations say she refers to him as “Star Prince”, which furthers supports this.
The novella’s title character refers to a young boy who falls to Earth from a tiny asteroid called the B-612; Heero came from a colony in L1 and went to Earth as a “meteor”. The novella’s narrator, a pilot (who we can say is also a frustrated artist), crashes in the Sahara desert and meets the prince. He shows the boy his drawings from his younger days and realizes that unlike the grown-ups, the boy can completely understand what his drawings are portraying.
Maybe Relena thinks Heero is more than that new “spark” in her life that will wash away her boredom or loneliness. Maybe for some reason she feels she could connect with Heero—that she could understand him and he could understand her. Remember that she felt this way too with the strange boy she met in school in her Episode Zero. Whatever this reference may mean, only one thing is clear: the whole situation just colored Relena more and more curious.
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Fun fact #01: Heero isn’t the first person Relena called the “Little Prince”. She used it first on a younger Milliardo in her Episode Zero when he asked her,”Are you all right, Princess?” She also saw a shooting star the day she met him.
Fun fact #02: Saint-Exupéry’s novella was translated into various media, one of them an anime series aired in 1978. Yoshikazu Yasuhiko (character designer of Mobile Suit Gundam, Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, and Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn) was involved in the series as a director and character designer.