#Crimson Flower discourse

[problematic-fodlan]

Hey look, sapphic who was freaked out by CF in a non-horny way. A bunch of people came out of the woodwork to tell you that either you're a liar or your opinion doesn't matter.

Happens to all queer people who ever say anything negative about CF or the Eagles, or say they prefer any of the other routes or houses, I swear.

-

[bowbowis]

Counterintelligence is Evil!

One of my favorite aspects of Crimson Flower is how it touches on aspects of the war effort that are rarely acknowledged in other Fire Emblem games. In addition to directing frontline troop movements, we also see or hear about Edelgard concerning herself with espionage, counter-espionage, information control, propaganda, the management of occupied territories, and other things which are crucial to the success of any military campaign.

Of course, to the haters, Edelgard behaving like a competent military leader is actually a sign of her true, corrupt nature. Apparently compartmentalizing and keeping sensitive information on a need-to-know basis after Arianrhod is an unforgivable sin; and appointing Leopold to oversee the integration of the Leicester territories following the Alliance's dissolution is an act of unspeakable tyranny.

[raxistaicho]

Why do you think so many people consider Crimson Flower to be poorly written?

The vast majority of them that I've seen just don't like the route because they disagree with Edelgard, or they confuse a route being shorter than the rest with it being unfinished or poorly-written.

For my own part, I think the pacing of the other routes sucks and a lot of chapters are just about approaching the Empire and have nothing to do with advancing the plot. The Great Bridge, Garreg Mach Defense, and Aillel are good examples of this.

Hunting by Daybreak is really nice from a thematic standpoint, but from a gameplay standpoint it's fucking awful. Then you have Gronder II, which was created purely for trailer bait because it's totally missing from half the routes and the actual battle itself doesn't matter. No, not even in Azure Moon, honestly, because they could have had Rodrigue get shanked in just about any map and it's all the same in the end.

Like seriously, would Crimson Flower be any better if it had a Hunting By Daybreak, Gronder II, or Aillel analogue, which would equalize its chapter total with Silver Snow? Fuck no, lol.

And of course, to refute the "unfinished" argument, Crimson Flower has the most unique set of maps after chapter 11, and it's very clear the developers put a lot of work into rebalancing the campaign around its shorter length (there's a pretty well-done Reddit post that goes into this in more detail). Contrast that against Silver Snow where they did baffling shit like have Edelgard take her deployment slot with her when she left and put Miracle on about half the units in the endgame.

People complain about the lack of fighting the Agarthans, but they forget the Agarthans in and of themselves are always only fought and dispatched in a single chapter after the time skip (CF 16, AM 19, SS 20, and VW 21) and the actual fight with them is always a narrative afterthought (Dimitri doesn't even realize he fought them, in VW they're fought to justify Nemesis's return and in SS they're fought to put Rhea at near-death so Byleth can take over), so it's clear the writers considered them a distant second to the conflict of ideals between Edelgard and her adversaries.

The Agarthans are there to escalate the conflict and serve as a red herring that Three Houses is going to be an FE7-esque story where the conflict is a low-key one against an evil cult before chapter 11 changes everything, not to be the true villains of the story.

Just about the only problem I think is cogent is the lack of high quality cutscenes in Crimson Flower. It could really have stood to have one more (either Rhea striking down Byleth or Byleth reuniting with Edelgard) cutscene to equalize it with the number of unique ones in AM (Dimitri's freakout and Byleth's reunion) and VW (Byleth's reunion and Claude and Nader... shooting at each other.), but much of the problem is it can't reuse the shared cutscenes the other routes have for obvious reasons.

Then there's the nonsense, "Edelgard has no character development in Crimson Flower!" argument which just confuses character development they didn't like for not having character development at all.

Good question, thanks for dropping it!

[shiraishi--kanade]

I don't like the general fandom attitude of "fe3h is not about moral questions it's about romancing war criminals" very much. Like It's a Joke I Get It but some people really take it to be the truth and like... As bad as you think the game is at actually accomplishing that goal it Does try to present moral & ethical dilemmas. It would have had a very different tone and narrative if it didn't.

[wenja45]

Edelgard has little to no character arc in Scarlet Blaze

Lets be honest here does anyone remember Edelgard having any big heroic moments in Scarlet Blaze no well you are correct in not remembering any heroic or any character growth and even if there is it is barely noticeable in comparison to Dimitri and Claude in their own routes in Three Hopes. What could have been a heroic moment for Edelgard was stolen away by Rhea which is good for Rhea by the way.

The Black Eagles have way more development than Edelgard does for example Ferdinand essentially carried the emotional weight of the route, Dorothea explains why she is fighting despite hating to fight, Jeritza is shown more character and Shez has growth.

Scarlet Blaze is just another Crimson Flower as in a rushed and incomplete mess I mean seriously Edelgard has little to no character development and has no heroic moments in her own route and it was given to Rhea.

I would like to say thank you to @faerytells on twitter and PK Gaming on twitter and yes Crimson Flower is a rushed and incomplete mess of a route that is poorly written and Scarlet Blaze is just more polished CF and also yes IS are the biggest antis of Edelgard and she deserves to be hate

[pirdmystery]

legitimately and eternally grateful that every fellow dimitri stan i know is normal about edelgard

[bowbowis]

Oh hey, it's that list I made to try and explain to Reddit that the out-of-house recruits actually do make sense in CF.

Don’t mind me, just posting a list of reasons why people follow Edelgard/Byleth in CF (instead of it all being following Byleth like the other routes)

[alexissara]

5 Years Of Three Houses, 5 Years Of Loving Edelgard.

5 Years ago today, I was first able to enter the continent of Fodlan, I meet Edelgard and from there I fell for a character in a way I never had before. I was already a professional writer with published worked and focused on Character driven work but I was still blown away by what an amazing character Edelgard was. 5 years ago, I got Engaged at a queer con, I was playing my 2nd route of three houses having played from Three Houses. The game was with me at this wonderful landing point in my life, it was there during the rough covid era struggles, when I was deeply, deeply sick, I was sicker than I ever been, not with Covid but with stomach issues and was hospitalized multiple times in one month ending in a surgery. I ran a roleplay inspired by Three Houses in Thirsty Sword Lesbians which I played for many years, I dated one of my exes through the whole campaign and grew a lot closer to one of my current girlfriends through it. I refined a version of one of my favorite OCs Ever Lena to do a Three Houses OC AU version of her for a different roleplay and while that fell through she did end up being used for that previously mentioned TSL game.

I reviewed Three Houses after finishing all four routes, I wanted to be really through and experience every route, every story, every FF romance arc, etc before I reviewed it. I gave the game a 7/10, I think now I'd give it an 8/10 maybe but a review score is what I think of the game as an overall package. The life changing power of Crimson Flower was really the big deal for me. That was 10/10, that was peak, it was just that the other routes were nowhere near as good for me. Edelgard the revolutionary who is happy to cast herself as a villain if that's what it takes to change the oppression in the world, something that was so strong, so powerful that it was reflected into our world. She was so good at being a character who impacted a fictional world, the only reason things happen at all that people to this day get angry about people loving her, discourse about her, cast her off, make up shit, show their political asses, etc. What a fucking character to be hated so strongly, for so long by this rabid group. Keeping love from a small fan base over time is hard but maintaining hate as a fictional character, that's harder especially with a 24/7 culture war of new women to hate. However, she also maintained love, Edelgard is the most popular character in all of Fire Emblem, in the 5 years she's got the most fan art, the most votes in CYL, she clearly makes nearly the most money in the gacha given how often they make new versions of her or rerun her, she is the moment.

Of course, it is not just Edelgard I love but the Black Eagles as a whole from the classic roster to the extended family of Mercedes, Lyesthia, Shamir, Leonie, to the Hopes additions of Monica and Shez. Edelgard stands so tall but she doesn't overshadow her amazing allies in changing the world. Even the men, me a famous not man enjoyer, finds at worst like, kinda boring rather than like repulsive. Plus I really love Hubert and Jeritza both as characters and think they are lovely, brilliant characters I wouldn't want to see replaced.

Three Houses hit me in a way "better" games haven't hit me in. I still think about the characters, the world, the politics, the ideas, the lore, the romances, everything so often, daily. I love so much art, most of this little blog is me talking about art I engaged with and I struggle to think of another piece of art that took me by storm in the same ways that Three Houses has. I'd love to have another game sweep me off my feet and have me giggling like someone who just met their idol but even if it doesn't happen again I am glad it happened with Three Houses.

Then there was Three Hopes and I fucking love Three Hopes, it only exists in the context of Houses but Scarlet Blaze and Golden Wildfire blew me the fuck away. Both routes do a ton for the characters in the series, the plots are fantastic, bringing Monica back and making her one of the best characters in the Fire Emblem series was so fucking great, and I adore the Warriors gameplay. Three Houses was a gift that not only gave itself but Hopes which really just furthered helped put Houses in focus, tie in way more lore, way more context, and way more information. I could explore the world of Fodlan even more honestly, I still hope for Hopes DLC because I just love this game.

It was so amazing to see Edeglard freed of Those Who Slither in the dark and the way her revolution works if she could just have saved her lesbian best friend and probably girlfriend. I loved to see the new amazing paralogues, the way the war shakes out, how she operates free of enemies resting in her house, how the nobles react when Edelgard is a free agent, the way the church fights back in this new time line. It really exciting and it is fun to see how the world once again revolves around the actions and moves of Edelgard and how she sets Fodlan Ablaze with change but now with more time to do things more carefully. It is such a great alterative look.

I don't have enough glowing things to say about Three Houses but I do have some things to say for the future of my favorite video game series. I deeply hope the future of Fire Emblem is more like Houses and not like the games around it. Houses was a return to form and the first story that blew me away since Radiant Dawn. I want more games that have the style and budget and scope and ambition of a Houses. I don't really trust intelligent systems to bring me that kind of story, so I hope they work with Koei again in the future and let their writers do their thing,

I love the smaller scale Fire Emblems but I can play indie games and smaller budget SRPGs and get the scope and ambition of a smaller scale Fire Emblem but only Nintendo money can bring the kind of game Houses is to the table. I really want to see the expensive class system brought back hopefully without the sexism and the big roster of characters and so much of the little things that made houses so charming. I don't need multiple routes but I would like a good political message like Crimson Flower to be in the future. I don't know if I'll ever love a character not made by me or my loves ones as much as I love Edelgard again but I want them try and I want them to pull it off.

Happy 5 Years Fire Emblem Three Houses, you are something special. If you want to see more of me gushing about houses you can read my fics here https://archiveofourown.org/users/AlexisSara/works?fandom_id=23985107

[real-fire-emblem-takes]

oh yeah that one take about recruitment in 3h just wanted to add on a gameplay note (this isnt discourse pls dont snipe my mum) recruitment is simultaneously discouraged, not accounted for properly in game balancing, and not punished outside of one instance. the game is surprisingly stingy on deployment slots relative to map size and enemy density, especially in the war phase. you're supposed to be encouraged to bring your default students, and any extra you picked up along the way, but the low slot count means you either pick one or two extras, or replace your in-house students with new ones (or faculty). this discourages you from picking too many of your favourites and building a custom team of mix-match units, due to your limitations in slots, and, when paired with the effort expended during the monastery segments to recruit them via training a weapon/mov rank or building support, which is a time-resource affair you're balancing, and finally, with how utterly terrible Hunting By Daybreak is (especially on Hard/Maddening) if you neglect too many default students and the versions of them you get aint up to snuff despite the auto level due to wank ranks and shit weapons (and your recruits dont show up on this map even tho they have dialogue for it) leading to the player not being encouraged to engage with the mechanic paradoxically, outside of Hunting By Daybreak (common Crimson Flower W: not having this map) both everything before and after, the game does nothing to punish you ditching your homeboys to hang with the cool kids, so if you just plan for this one map (or not play it by protecting Discourse Girl) you can just go on unpunished provided you either optimise your team decision OR abuse NG+ to bypass all the nonsense. the game makes it a hassle to do all the recruiting if you want to do a lot of it, but also puts up only one fat fisting of resistance before giving up. finally, the game doesn't account for you recruiting anyone out of house, leading to funny things like silver snow permanently kneecapping you by two deployment slots for story reasons and not just, letting you replace them with recruitments slots. its very noticeable when compared to other routes. (common Silver Snow L). the devs also didn't account for you doing this, but then, due to 3H's amorphous map and enemy design, it ends up not mattering as much, since your units could be anything and it'd work, but you do end up having access, most of the time, to some of the most cracked units in the game, and devs didn't really design their routes with that in mind. not really paying attention to the tools you would or wouldn't have.

and yet, quadruple paradoxically, as if to prove me wrong and smack my nipples, they encourage it anyway, by having paralogues in the war phase require out of house pair ups, like caspar and mercedes, or linhardt and leonie. but these are only for random side maps, and are the most specific as shit big brain combos, so you'd assume they had this in mind all along, but then it begs the question of why they made it so irritating to recruit people to begin with, but then also why they didn't plan out any other campaign missions, slots, or other unit design factors when it came to recruitments, or even bother hinting at these combos so you wouldn't get locked out of content instead of shooting in the dark or looking it up and arghghghghgh 3H's gameplay choices are a mess

basically, recruiting is a series of weird as fuck paradoxical design choices that just sort of todd howard their way into Just Working but damn if the experience isn't baffling to think about in its' execution and impact on the game's core mechanical design

.

[featherquillpen]

My favorite Hubert support chains in Three Houses

My favorite Hubert supports and why I like them so much! Some possibly controversial opinions ahead! YOLO.

Hubert & Petra

I think the Hubert/Petra support chain is really underrated. There's a ton of Discourse about the Ingrid/Dedue support chain and racism and the overcoming thereof. But the Hubert and Petra support chain does a great job, I think, of showing someone working on their own racism. Hubert's behavior toward Petra in their C support is appalling, and I think Hubert's worst on-screen behavior. It's either the C support with Petra, or his threats toward her and Brigid on the Petra and Bernie paralogue in non-Crimson Flower routes.

The context is all-important. Petra is a political hostage. She was brought over to the Adrestian court at age 9. Hubert is an Adrestian noble. At the time of the C support pre-TS, Hubert is 20 and Petra is 15. The power dynamic between them is deeply skewed in Hubert's favor. He could do nearly anything to her short of kill her, and get away scot-free. It's pretty much Hubert's modus operandi to threaten people in C supports, because he's so paranoid about any potential enemy of Edelgard's. But to do so to someone who is already so utterly in his power, and Edelgard's, is just cruel.

The B support is still fairly bad. But in the A support, Hubert turns it around.

Hubert is now clear that he believes in the new accord between Brigid and the Empire. Indeed, it's obvious by implication, and more clearly spelled out in Hopes, that he was part of making that accord. And now he's stripped of his last excuse to keep judging Petra. I think one of the highest compliments Hubert can give is to say something like this:

Overall, I love this support as an example of a character working on their racist bullshit.

(I will briefly add that I adore their support chain in Three Hopes also. In that chain, it's Petra's turn to threaten Hubert, and he's SO INTO IT. Just like "Oh shit, a good threat. I respect that so much.")

Hubert & Dorothea

Talking of threatening people in C supports, you know who Hubert doesn't threaten in their C support? Dorothea.

Hubert just likes Dorothea right away. No threats. In fact he's quite open about his feelings about Edelgard right in the C support, and that's a very personal topic!

The whole support chain is about love. And it's even better because their ending together is platonic. And about being spies together, which is so sick. (As far as I can tell, and let the internet correct me if I'm wrong, Hubert is the male ("male") character with the most platonic endings with women, after Alois, who is already married.) I really love it because Hubert opens up very deeply to Dorothea about his feelings for Edelgard. As an aro-spec person, I really relate to the way Hubert and Dorothea talk about Hubert's feelings for Edelgard.

it's very lovely character growth for Dorothea because she sees how profound and transformative non-romantic love can be. That she doesn't need to have romantic love in her life to be happy, whatever society has told her about the necessity of marriage for women to be happy. And that's reflected in the fact that she has a platonic ending with Hubert.

I just can't find their A support anything but hilarious in the best way. They're talking about love, and superficially it's about them getting married, but they don't get married in their ending or have any romantic relationship, and the subtext is screaming that the A support is completely about both their feelings for Edelgard.

I'll take "very normal things to say when you're proposing to someone" for 500, Alex.

Hubert & Bernadetta

I have said it before and I will say it again: you can easily read a metaphor into this support about Bernie giving Hubert space to be gender non conforming or trans femme.

Bernie is way more scared of men than women, and behaves accordingly in their C support, but Hubert then expresses great gentleness toward Bernie and also a deep discomfort with this "scary vampire man" persona, which is sometimes useful but more often painful and heartbreaking. Bernie is really sweet and understanding about this, and even makes that flower in the A support, which you can interpret as Bernie saying "I see this side of you that doesn't fit into masculinity and I want to help you express it." After all, as Hubert says, it's a gift you'd give a female friend, or someone you have romantic feelings for.

What I really like about the moment where Bernie gives Hubert the flower is that it's a moment of Hubert being the one who needs support, through this feeling of pain and uncertainty about this frightening ghoul persona, and Bernie doing the caring. A lot of Bernie's supports are about people trying to help and support Bernie. And that's great! But I love that in this support chain, Bernie also gets to do the supporting.

That dynamic continues in their amazing paired ending, where Bernie goes on great adventures and Hubert stays at home and keeps house. Incredible. Iconic. Let Hubert be GNC. Let Hubert be a housewife.

Hubert & Ferdinand

Much has been said about this support, but I think I have a new take that I haven't seen before. Something that Hubert says to Ferdinand in Hopes helped me really unlock something important about their support chain in Houses.

In Hopes, Hubert and Ferdie are talking about Ludwig, and while Ferdie expresses hope that maybe his father can change, Hubert says something like, "Once someone strays from the path, they can never return." This reflects a broader aspect of Hubert's character, which is that he doesn't seem to believe in redemption. Not for nobles. Not for anyone who's done wrong. Especially not for himself.

Ferdinand does believe in redemption. Not only believes in it, but embodies it. Ferdinand has a remarkable redemption arc. Hubert in the C support with Ferdinand in Houses clearly believes that because of Ferdinand's really fucked up beliefs about nobility and about the power he deserves, Ferdie has strayed from the path and can never return. He's a lost cause. But then Ferdinand proves him wrong.

I think what a lot of fandom gets wrong about this relationship is that they think that Ferdie proved Hubert wrong because he was actually a good guy all along. That's not true. Ferdie pre-timeskip is in many ways genuinely toxic. He secretly believes that he should be Emperor. He bangs on about being the only legitimate heir of House Aegir, and his Aegir bloodline, all of this noble bloodline eugenics stuff that is ruining his classmates' lives. And in three out of four routes, he fights against Edelgard to preserve his noble power and prevent her taking it away from him, upholding this entire rotten system. But in Crimson Flower, he proves Hubert wrong, because he proves that people who stray from the path can return. That phrasing in Hopes about returning to the path gives me some feels, because in Judaism, the word for redemption, teshuvah, basically means "return." It's a belief in the goodness of people. You were on the path to start with. You left it, but you're returning. You're going back to your own fundamental goodness and ability to follow the path.

I think a big reason why Hubert is so impressed with Ferdie by the end of their support chain, and why he comes to love him, is because he proved to Hubert that people can change and can be redeemed. And if that's true of Ferdie…. then maybe that can also be true for Hubert. Ferdinand represents hope. Not just hope for a future after the war, with his visions of education for the masses, but hope that anyone, even the most spoiled noble, even a soul blackened by murder and moral compromise, can work toward redemption. I think it's really beautiful.

And then we get the A+ support which is just pure gay disaster tire fire. Absolute nightmares, both of them.

I find the Ferdibert paired ending deeply funny. Hubert thought he'd die in a ditch and be remembered as the Butcher of Fodlan or something, and now he's a Twin Jewel who everyone thinks is based. I'm also amused by the detail in the JP version of their ending where Edelgard is jealous of their romance. Poor Edie going "where's MY gay enemies to lovers slow burn, HUH?"

Hubert & Edelgard

Agggghhhhhkkkggghhkkkk so. Um. Finally. Last but not least. The Hubert and Edelgard support chain. This is my Hubert stan account origin story. This relationship is what made me go "I need to understand every last thing about Hubert von Vestra." Because here we have Hubert, who is leaving chloroform-soaked rags lying around, looming like a vampyr, cackling unhingedly in crit lines, and threatening people left and right in C supports, and then you see Hubert and Edelgard's C. And that's when you first get to see the real Hubert. That bright heart.

The direct JP-EN translation of this is "I shall make a show of spilling blood to paint the scarlet path1 you tread," where 'scarlet path' is a reference to the walkway in a theater, which is so sexy of Hubert to say.

I also love the C support because she's opening the door wide open for Hubert to leave. It shows the importance of consent and freedom in their relationship. All the people who talk about Hubert being "brainwashed" or "manipulated" into his role clearly left their brains at the door during this support.

I don't even know what to say about the B support, it's just the best. It's perfect. My heart is filled with rainbows. Nobody does it like them. Though I do love that at the end of the B support Edelgard's like "tell me ur secrets Hubert!!!" and he's like "OH LOOK AT THE TIME I GOTTA GO" and flees.

I can't talk about the A support without referring to the Teaspoon Translation because the EN is so badly botched. When I first saw their A support, I was disappointed. And then I discovered it was Treehouse at it again.

JP Edelgard would never dare assume that Hubert is heterosexual.

I also adore the JP version of their paired ending, from Teaspoon:

In their later years, after accomplishing what they set out to do, they found a talented successor and disappeared. Even in their retirement, spent just by themselves, there were likely no romantic exchanges even to the end.

Queerplatonic partner icons. Shipping is nice and all, but no romantic relationship between characters in this game will ever appeal to me more than what Hubert and Edelgard have going on.

[problematic-fodlan]

"There is no such title as Beyond Escape in Crimson Flower!"

*"Beyond Escape" is indeed a title in Crimson Flower.*

"You did not play the game" doesn't begin to describe this, lol.

-

[bowbowis]

In a World for Humanity... There's No Need for Gods...

People trying to make out that CF is the bad ending because Byleth loses their godhood really need to learn about context. As Edelgard says in the very same scene, "when humanity stands strong, and people reach out for each other, there's no need for gods." Byleth's loss of divinity isn't a tragedy because because their godhood is, and always has been, redundant.

Byleth the god didn't show Edelgard she could be loved, or help Dimitri find redemption, or teach Claude to trust others; Byleth the person did. Only one person in the game reduces Byleth to their status a vessel for Sothis's power, and that's Rhea, something even she admits she was wrong for doing in her S-Support. Edelgard doesn't weep in the end of CF because she's mourning that Byleth lost the Godess's power, she weeps because she's overjoyed that the person she loves, the part of Byleth that truly matters, survived.

[raxistaicho]

Just on the topic that Sothis might magically reconstitute herself and do a bunch of Goddess stuff, including overthrowing Edelgard like her detractors seem to think she will, Fire Emblem Heroes gives some context on what is actually happening with Byleth, courtesy of Seteth.

Fallen Rhea: I believed that if I could resurrect

my mother... I could regain all that had been lost...

Seteth: Your mother? Lady Rhea, you know

full well that such a thing is

forbidden, and yet...

[Alphonse asks what is happening, Seteth explains Rhea's deepest most secreted desire is to bring Sothis back to life.]

Seteth: Day by day, year by year, that desire must have grown, but...it would be the greatest affront of all.

For it was Sothis herself who forbade any and all attempts to return her to life.

Is this the consequence of Lady Rhea’s attempting to break that stricture?

If so, her words can mean only one thing...

1. Seteth says that it was Sothis herself that told the Nabateans not to bring her back to life.

This means she knows it's possible and DOES NOT want it to happen. (I personally have a theory that Sothis was attempting to tell Rhea to become the next "Goddess" to lead Fodlan onwards as their protector and guide when she speak to her in the Holy Tomb before she meets Wilhelm. This would make sense as Rhea says that the name Seiros was given to her in VW, which seems confusing at first until you remember that her birth name is likely "The Immaculate One" or "The White One," in the same way Sothis' is "The Beginning," and Byleth "The Enlightened One." Seiros being a name that references Sirius/The Blue Sea Star and Sothis herself, along with the entanglement of the Crest of Flames and Seiros being the first and last tarot card numbers to actually appear in Three Houses. But I digress.)

2. Not only were the Nabateans told not to bring Sothis back to life, Seteth readily assumes that Rhea is being PUNISHED for attempting to do so. Obviously he's wrong, but it paints a picture of the person Goddess Sothis was and just how taboo this act is.

3. We learn later in this event that Rhea's degeneration is caused by her despair at not being able to resurrect her mother, which obviously matches the in game reasoning. (It also heavily implies that this is THE only thing keeping Rhea from degeneration. She has no other purpose left, which I feel is why she is so so strangely distant, distracted, and unreachable throughout the game. Sothis even criticises her lack of observation that lead to Solon's presence in Garreg Mach. Detachment is clearly not a trait Goddess Sothis would have tolerated in her children. The Nabateans are often hinted at being warriors or at the very least militant by TWSitD and the Shadow Library records, combined with Seteth's intense nature, Rhea's reactions to opposition, Seiros' actions in battle, and the combat oriented nature of Crests. They're all obviously caring, but in the Greek Pantheon/Old Testament kind of way.)

All of this is to say that it's not Byleth or Sothis' heart that "breaks" at the end of Crimson Flower, it's Rhea's.

She's begging and demanding Byleth give her mother's heart back.

We know Sothis is still around. Her essence is in Byleth's soul ever since they merged.

Sothis also says the Crest Stone is nothing but a decoration in every ending of the game, the thing has been empty ever since that point. The only thing keeping it around was Rhea's magic.

There's some heavy implication there that even IF Rhea had been able to retrieve the Crest Stone from Byleth, there wouldn't be a Sothis within it to revive.

Sothis herself didn't just put herself into Byleth, she very likely, and intentionally, made it impossible to revive her from that point onwards.

Now, obviously Rhea can die in SS, but that's also the route where Byleth chooses divinity, that doesn't mean the Crest Stone is still actually doing something when Byleth absolutely should have the Major Crest of Seiros as Jeralt's child. It's literally the X factor Rhea claims to be the difference in Byleth compared to the other vessels. Byleth herself might be keeping the Stone whole, not intentionally, but subconsciously. The same way we all beat our hearts.

Just some thoughts. Rhea is the only one who wanted Sothis back, including Sothis herself. I mean Byleth also wants that, but they get what they want with soul merged Ghosthis.

Also, if Sothis didn't want Edelgard alive, why the hell would she help Byleth wake up? Or bring the rain in CF, or allow Byleth the ability to run through these cycles at all, which her opening dialogue of "It is almost time to begin" and "Drift through the flow of time to find the answers that you seek..."

Considering the Black Eagles is the only route where greater context and knowledge actually enables you to alter the outcome, these quotes show an awareness of that fact. Especially since AM requires the LEAST knowledge of grander events.

Sothis supporting Edelgard and not wanting to be revived is also supported by how "To the End of a Dream" serves as a reference to Rhea's dream to resurrect Sothis, Sothis' constant sleeping, AND Byleth being "The End/Ending" to Sothis' "Beginning."

Sothis canonically, endorses Edelgard through her opinions, actions, foreknowledge/hindsight, and the meta of the game.

It's no mistake that VW and CF titles make allusions to dawn, waking, change and spring, while SS and AM reference night, dreaming, conservation, and winter. The game and Sothis both have a preference.

(Sorry for the essay, I got carried away. I have a lot of thoughts on all four of these ladies.)

Not at all, that was a really interesting bit of analysis! I especially liked point 3 and the point on Sothis acting against Rhea in CF. I broadly knew most of the details from Heroes, but I didn't quite know all the specifics, so I appreciate you sharing them.

[trothplighted]

could you say more about the Black family and hereditary mental illness? I’ve seen the term “Black family madness” used in ways that made me feel kind of uncomfortable like there was a certain amount of voyeurism and sensationalizing occurring. I haven’t really seen the concept treated seriously/respectfully.

Sirius is clearly deeply depressed in OOTP, Tonks is deeply depressed in HBP (though I feel like HBP Tonks is in pretty stark contradiction of her OOTP characterization and I very much dislike her confronting Lupin about rejecting her in front of their whole social circle). Bellatrix clearly very much the worse for wear after Azkaban but not in an especially great place before going in either? Andromeda has almost no dialogue or action, so it’s hard to say how she’s doing, except that she gave Tonks a very Black Family First Name which is an odd choice for a person who was disowned after running away. Kreacher describes Walburga as mad with grief after losing Regulus. Do you think her portrait’s behavior accurately represents her end of life behavior? Other portraits don’t seem to deteriorate into that kind of instability. Regulus himself has a bit of Q-Anon energy.

I guess I sort of talked myself through this in your inbox! Still very interested in your thoughts, though!

There’s a couple things I want to get out of the way.

The first is that hereditary strangeness, illness, unspecified trouble, etc - all that is a pretty classic feature of gothic literature. If you’re a House Black fan and you haven’t read “The Fall of the House of Usher” (the Poe original. We don’t acknowledge Mike Flanagan’s existence on this blog) you really should, because it’s Patient Zero for a lot of fan discourse on this family and for a lot of tropes around gothic families. Beyond that I’ll recommend Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, the self-proclaimed ‘first gay gothic novel’ Gaywyck, V.C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic, and Ava Reid’s Juniper & Thorn if you want further reading/watching material in this vein. The idea that families in gothic novels pass down what’s wrong with them to their children and great steps must be taken to escape the influence of their houses and ancestries, and that inherited illness can define your life for good or ill, and that prestige or arrogant pride or aristocracy or some other kind of influence in a community is a corrupting rot, is a central theme in all of those cited stories. Incest is also a central theme, overtly or subtextually; those two threads wind about each other until they’re inextricably bound together.

So from that angle, the Black family madness is simply an expected end goal of putting a gothic family right out of The Shadow over Innsmouth into a middle grade urban fantasy series, especially with the motifs of decay and intermarriage/inbreeding and mouldering wealth and isolationism. Ignoring that is imo willfully ignoring their literary ancestry, and failing to engage with their narrative DNA. (An alternative flavor of gothic family is found in the Gaunts, and yet another flavor in the Dumbledores of 1899 - this is a trope Joanne returns to repeatedly.)

There are going to be people who discuss it in an ableist fashion, because ableism is baked into our society on a truly fundamental level. There are also going to be people who discuss it in a slightly sensationalized fashion, because in all of the above examples the sensational and sensual tone of the story is purposefully done. But it’s not a clear-cut question of “good, respectful representation” and “bad, voyeuristic representation”. People who see themselves rendered faithfully and respectfully in “bad” stories exist, and people who believe the most authentic versions of their mental illnesses or family relationships are found in “unrealistic” stories are going to continue to fight for their right to exist in an ugly, non-idealized fashion.

I’m one of them. I have an aunt who had multiple psychotic episodes with serious lasting delusions throughout her life and whose career and family and stability were all trashed and ruined thanks to her untreated illness, and I share many of her diagnoses. I have addicts and criminals in my immediate and extended family. I have a family history of incest on both sides and very narrowly avoided being one of the victims. I have deep and lasting generational trauma on both sides because fuck colonialism. And so I see myself in the Blacks, and especially in the complicated mess of loyalty and revulsion and yearning to escape and knowing nobody else will ever know you as well as the people who share your name do. Add in the homophobic repression and the abuse and the toxicity and it gets even more relatable, unfortunately.

So for me, ignoring the Black family madness or arguing it doesn’t exist because it’s all ableism by the fandom or claiming that nobody involved in the plot was mentally ill - it carries the implication that my own life and my own family history are Bad Rep, which is something that I get sick and tired of when it comes to fandom takes on mental illness. Sometimes you are going to be sick forever and sometimes you’re also going to either be heroic or villainous. Sometimes your illnesses will directly lead you into being cruel to other people. Sometimes you’ll be both intensely violent and toxic and highly highly susceptible to grooming and abuse. Sometimes you are also going to want to find some romance or dark beauty in your own life, and if your life is never going to be a healthy one by abled standards that can include finding things to sensationalize or render sensually about your own brain.

Because that’s what’s really at the heart of all this. I am not going to get well. I can get better. I can fight to become stable and keep myself in check. I can improve. I can settle into the house of my bones and find peace. But I won’t get well. Cognitive behavioral therapy and medication and being a Good Little Insane Person who’s properly ashamed of her illnesses and works to render them in fiction in ways that are palatable to sane readers won’t save me. And there’s nothing I or anyone else can do to make the sanes love me or tolerate me. There’s nothing gained by trying to make them accept me or love me, either. I’d rather take my chances with the Blacks.

There isn’t much for me to say on the individual characters that you didn’t say in your initial ask. Nobody we see who’s connected to that House seems to be okay. All of them are marked by tragedy and all of them are kind of nuts. The only thing I’d add is that it’s probably very likely that Walburga deteriorated over time as a result of personal stresses - the death of her brother, the death of her favorite son, the loss of her heir, the death of her husband. She suffered immensely, and she took it out on the world in warped and unhealthy ways. And that’s sadly typical of all of us who live inside brains full of knives. It doesn’t erase or justify her racism and eugenicist philosophy and abuse. She’s still responsible for all that. But being abusive and antagonistic doesn’t magically make her sane, either.

[catboy-autism]

♡♡ Love-Blooded ♡♡

A term under @rwuffles x-blooded where one has the blood/dna of love running through their veins.

This may be a form of alterhumanity, however, the user may interpret it however they want.

[ID: A 5-striped flag. The middle 3 stripes are scalloped outwards. The colors from top to bottom are crimson, light pink, pale yellow, light orange, and coral red. In the center is a simplistic pink DNA strand. It is backed with a light orange outline, and outlining that is a thick pale yellow outline. ID End]

tagging: @radiomogai

[ID 4: A thin brown line, in the center of it is an orange tabby maine coon mix laying down, staring to the side of the viewer. ID End]

[ID 5: A rectangular banner. The border of it has a gradient of orange to pink. In each corner are 3 strawberries and 4 strawberry flowers. Within the border is a light tan rectangle with text. From top to bottom the different blocks of text read, in all caps: "Do not involve my flags or labels in discourse", this is colored red and underlined; "Anyone can use my flags and labels", this is also red; "But I do block freely", this is colored pink. There is a line of small cartoonish strawberries, each separated by little leaves. On the center bottom is a pink to orange gradient rounded rectangle. Within it is a red text in all caps that reads "This blog loves mspec gays and lesbians". On the left of the rectangle is the mspec lesbian flag and on the right is the mspec gay flag. On the left and right of the main rectangle are drawings of calico cats stretching. There are muddy paw prints scattered across the banner. ID End]

[emblemxeno]

Definitive “Feelings On 3H” Post

So I’m making one big post on my feelings on major things worth discussing about 3H and how I feel about it. Don’t feel obligated to really interact with this one much, it’s mostly just for my sake, as something I can just link to and say “go to section X about how I feel about Y”.

The reason behind this is I just don’t really want to actively engage in 3H discourse anymore. I feel as if I’m a broken record at this point. If I have new things to say about it somehow, I’ll say it, but for the most part, I’ll refer people to this if they wanna know how I feel about general 3H talk. 

Story

Story Section 1- General narrative feelings on each route.

Azure Moon is, in my opinion, the most solidly constructed route in terms of writing, character development, and storytelling. It knows what it wants to accomplish and, aside from a few gripes, I will always applaud it for that. Verdant Wind and Silver Snow meanwhile, aren’t bad and I certainly didn’t have a terrible time playing through them. However, the unique story bits in each route don’t justify the gameplay experience you have to work through in order to get to them. Still, the big reveals in each route were nice to hear for the first time, and specifically for VW I enjoy Claude very much. Crimson Flower I don’t enjoy that much at all. Its story is what I can only describe as a static, eye-roll inducing victory march, which makes up for its lack of length with its seemingly intentional negative character development; everyone is ignorant, an asshole, or sad as fuck aside from the CF exlcusive cast. I would give the route props had the game bothered to stand in its foundation rather than flounder and make numerous attempts to depict every perspective as absolutely equally valid and righteous. 

Story Section 2- In trying to appeal to every perspective, the game lacks focus, foundation, and respect for itself.

It should be expected that a game with multiple routes tackle different specific subjects. However, in Fire Emblem, there always, always manages to be a unifying theme or foundational story philosophy-an Aesopian type moral if you will-no matter the route. Alm and Celica learn that their one individual philosophies can’t exist on their own, and that leadership requires strength and compassion of equal measure. Eirika and Ephraim learn that personal wishes must take a backseat for the good of Renais and Magvel as a whole, as their routes in FE8 use their own weaknesses to develop them as leaders and royalty. Corrin’s one constant in the Fates games is that conflict is inherently meaningless and does nothing but perpetuate a brutal cycle of hatred, vengeance, and violence. 

Even in games like FE7 and FE10, where the technical ‘route splits’ are more unconventional, there’s still unifying themes that manage to wrap back around at the end (7′s ‘single-minded pursuit of justice and strength/power to protect can actively hurt you and those around you, especially if you are ignorant to the pain others are going through’ and 10′s ‘people have as much capacity to be good as they have to be evil, they will hurt each other due to petty misunderstandings and bigoted views, however, they are worthy of living as they are because of the ability to grow, change, and aspire to something better’).

3H, to put it simply, does not have any grand unifying theme unique to itself. The closest examples I can think of is ‘It’s worth it to reach out to those around you to share your pain so you don’t become engulfed in it’ and ‘no matter what side you fight for, war makes everyday life a living hell for everyone’.

But to me, both of those things are just... basic truths and story elements present in every dialogue heavy FE game. War has been showcased as being terrible since FE1, where characters were held hostage, threatened to fight for a cause they didn’t believe in, innocent villages were destroyed, there was a literal child slave market, etc. And sharing your pain with those close to you in order to bear life’s challenges has been a constant trope with many FE characters, story significant or otherwise, since at least FE6 with Guninivere (probably earlier if I’m missing something from FE4 or 5). The only difference is that 3H has a fun little song to go with it.

That leaves the specific themes of each route and perspective, but because each leading character is so different from the other, and the writers didn’t want to overtly favor one over the rest, every dialogue regarding these things feels compromised; half baked, or lacking a point. 

‘Crests are symbolic of a harmful power structure but also are a symbol of justice used to ward away threats but also are a tool used to gain social and political capital in order to change the world but also are an ancient power obtained through destruction that must be used with wisdom.’ Four different perspectives from four different routes that the game attempts to depict in a balance in almost every single dialogue regarding them. And this same process is applicable to the game’s attempts at discussing race/ethnicity, xenophobia, classism, religious views, mental health, etc. There always has to be two, three, four, or five sides to every story in 3H, and that results in an exhuasting and stretched thin narrative that, in its attempts to appeal to everyone, ends up lacking substance in every point it tries to make.

Now, that itself would make for a fascinating and meta theme for the game to uphold, where ‘attempts at trying to balance and accept every perspective leads to an ineffective world that desperately needs unwavering, unconditional, and compassionate leadership’ but 1) that would require the game to play up the need for ‘seeing every side’ as something to be deconstructed, and the game doesn’t do that, it’s played painfully straight, and 2) when it’s one major power (Edelgard) vs. three major powers (Dimitri, Claude, and Rhea), the attempt at balance fails no matter what you do. This lack of focus reads to me that there was lack of respect for the game’s story itself.

Story Section 3- “It insists upon itself, Lois.”

Every time I think about the finer details of story bits in 3H I don’t care for, my brain always comes back to that Family Guy scene where Peter talks about not caring for The Godfather and saying that it’s because the movie insists upon itself. Now, that was done for comedy, but for 3H I must say that it’s a perfect sentence to use. 3H insists upon itself. This is in spite of the fact that there’s no one unifying point that it’s trying to convey to the player, beyond what any other FE games was able to do. So to make up for that, each small instance reads like the game beating the player over the head with whatever minute moral or lesson it’s trying to convey.

Crests are bad? Roll out the Edelgard, Sylvain, or Lysithea dialogue saying so. Church is sus? Get Edelgard or occasionally Claude. Nobles are pretentious? Get the sad NPCs or the few actual commoner characters to imply it. War is bad and cruel? Fire the next “Sad Dorothea” dialogue at the player’s face. Interactions feel artificial, ostentatious even. Part of that is because there’s no other way to get these points across due to Byleth being a silent avatar, the other part though? Feels as if the writers were overtly proud of themselves. “Wow, the war means Bernadetta leaves her room more often, isn’t that a sign that it really changes people?” Yeah, no shit. 

Perhaps the most egregious example is the endless instances of the game pushing the idea that there’s “no good side” in war or that “war is a battle of ideals and no one is fully correct” or other moments that want the player to know how deep and Morally Gray the narrative is. It’s cheap and inauthentic, especially when you have a faction like the Slithers. You can’t prop up Gray Morality and have an inarguably evil underground terrorist group. 

To be crude, this game explains things to you like you’re five despite being rated T for teens in a series catered mostly to young adults. I get the point you’re trying to make, you did it poorly, now stop repeating yourself, your final grade is a D+.

Story Section 4- 3H likes spectacle over substance.

3H revels in being showy over being constructive. There’s great moments, but there’s not a great plot. 

For example, Byleth has many flashy moments that show how awesome they are! They’re connected to a goddess, they can wind back time, they have a super cool historical sword, they’re a top tier mercenary, they’re a great teacher, they’re next in line for Archbishop or the throne for all of Fodlan, their Crest is the game’s version of the Fire Emblem!

Cool! What’s the significance behind all these choices in the writing room? Seemingly next to nothing other than it sounded cool. That’s how it feels anyway.

The SotC doesn’t do anything in the story beyond be Sothis’ bones, likewise the Crest of Flames is nothing other than symbolic since it lacks gameplay or story significance beyond “main characters have it”, Divine Pulse has weak narrative justification for what should be a simple gameplay exclusive rewind, the goddess in question is an underutilized character who checks out before part 1 ends, there’s no gameplay basis showcasing that they’re any better at fighting than their students, and every high level position Byleth is granted makes no sense for them to have given what little established character we get.

That’s 3H in a nutshell. Crests don’t matter other than to be a story device. Being noble or commoner doesn’t matter. The hidden technology doesn’t matter. Abyss is a joke. And on and on and on. 3H profits off of being enticing and cool looking for the sake of it, without actually utilizing or explaining any of this flashy stuff that matters for a video game medium. It makes for underwhelming gameplay and artificial characters. Example, for as much as I love Yuri, take a few minutes to read his backstory; it’s batshit and nigh unbelievable. And it’s indicative of the fact that 3H cares more about including things that sound cool than it does about making sense of anything. We see the impact, but never any material significance, which is the opposite of what you want in a detail oriented narrative like this.

Story Section 5- 3H has very gross tropes.

During 3H’s first year of being out, I desperately wanted to stay true to a view that “hey now, just because it’s depicted like this, doesn’t mean we should blast it, it’s just a video game” but, y’know. I grew up. And part of growing up is recognizing the nuanced parts of these kinds of things. 

I won’t accuse the writers of being actively ignorant or bigoted, cuz I don’t know anything about them. But fuck. Fuck, does this game read worse and worse over the years in terms of how utterly terribly it handles sensitive issues.

Multiple brown characters treated like trash by the white/pale majority, with countries said brown characters hail from described as savage and animalistic. Rampant misogynistic tropes, most notably selling women off to be married. Strange, and incessant sympathy for the character starting a war that upends the lives of common people, said character also allowing human experimentation to occur. The offensive and archaic handling of mental illnesses, specifically anxiety disorders, personality disorders, and PTSD in certain instances (IMO only Dimitri and Marianne are done with any sort of grace). And that’s just the explicit stuff! Just the other day I was talking about how there’s incredibly disturbing anti-Semitic undertones regarding the Empire (confirmed to be based on Germany btw) and the Nabateans, something that’s, at times, uncritically repeated by people in this game’s community. This game is mired in terrible allegories and metaphors, which make me cringe the more I think about the real world implications that these lines of thought can have on people in volatile corners of the Internet.

And the kicker is that the writers are so committed to making these things relate to Crests or nobility, as if either of those things are strictly the reason why oppression or discrimination occurs.

The game employs drastic harmful stereotypes, and undercuts all of them by foisting its half-baked unique gameplay/lore toy onto the conversations. It fumbles the ball and didn’t even clean up the mess well.

Characters

I have a tier list of how much I enjoy the characters right here. 

Long story short, when the characters are good, they’re good. Like, holy fuck, love them. But when they’re bad? Throw them away. Can’t stand them. And sometimes characters fall in the middle where I see the good but they’re at times written in ways that piss me off.

Worldbuilding/Setting - More is not always better

First off, when you make a character tell the player “Go read in the library for lore”, you’ve lost me. There’s nothing fun and interesting in 3H as a game for you to read in the library.

Fire Emblem’s gameplay cycle doesn’t mesh too well with the typical JRPG standard of storytelling, so the common solutions to building the world and crafting the stories was 1) make as much use as possible of cutscenes, art/cgs, and narrations to communicate the important details before and after battles and/or 2) make an intuitive inclusion to ‘break the pace’ between maps, such as a home base, in order to supplement what’s already present. Alongside this, support conversations were an ingenious tool to develop the characters and the world at the same time, as your varied and quirky cast can help you infer what their place of origin is like. Plus, the game actively rewards the player for seeking this auxiliary information out, granting extra stat bonuses when you purposefully put characters next to each other.

3H, on paper, understands this well. However, the game has too many minute details for a typical FE game structure to handle. The devs themselves even said the game became a “living creature on its own” and claimed no one on the team knows everything about 3H’s story or world. Ignoring how that’s a serious flaw for a video game narrative, what this ultimately means is that since cutscnes and a standard base can’t cut it, we need more and more and more. Libraries, side quests, tea time, ally notes, gifts, NPCs that exposit at you, etc. The DLC even added another damn library for you to sift through, as if the first one wasn’t a pain already.

And though these little flavor texts, landmarks, and set pieces are fun to read about... that’s it. The game hardly uses any of it. It’s flavor without substance, once again. It’s why half the fucking fandom is confused every other day when you bring up these tertiary details as evidence to prove a point, since the active story is too busy trying to weave the other 600 plot threads together to use any of it. That means, for all of this supposed great details regarding each nation and the important territories, we hardly see a damn thing that’s actually different. More is not always better, and in this case, it’s actively worse for both the game experience and the community experience. Not a good look for a game that the devs explicitly wanted people to talk to each other about.

As a fan of FE ever since 2013, who has gone back to play several of the games to see how they tick, 3H’s methods of describing its setting are just so antithetical to what makes the series enjoyable, and for so little reward. It sounds hypocritical given that I love Fates and Engage, but those games actively set up their glorified bases to be as unintrusive as you want them to be. 3H, however, has its gameplay built around a boring and unintuitive cycle.

Gameplay- Fire Emblem but half the time you’re not playing Fire Emblem

Gameplay Section 1-Monastery

The monastery is the most debated gameplay aspect of 3H, and IMO, for good reason.

It sucks.

Worldbuilding wise, while it makes sense that an important location is the hub for the game, that doesn’t account for how dull it is. 12 months and 4 seasons pass and does the place ever look different? No. A shame, since an improved aesthetic would drastically help ignoring the fact that the place is a bitch to traverse. For as fast as Byleth can run, they can’t outspeed the load times. Quick travel only makes the issue more apparent, as well. From door to door, and from week to week, you’ll endure more load times in one in-game month than an entire playthrough of a GBA FE game.

The other aspects of the monastery gameplay, such as teaching, activities, professor level, and motivation, while freshly fun in a first playthrough, become a repetitive slog in subsequent playthroughs. Giving gifts and lost items, eating meals, planting the right things for the garden, optimizing support point gains, using the sauna, taking care of the statues, etc. This cycle is not something I enjoy in an FE game, and unlike Fates or Engage, I can’t actively ignore it without huge penalty. 

You can skip right to each main mission, but you’d be giving yourself a huge handicap by doing so; not actively teaching students at max motivation in order to maximize skill point gain is a huge detriment in the long term. It means longer wait for better weapons, longer wait for better spells, longer wait for class change, and longer wait for better skills and battalions. Now on Normal you can get away with this, not as much on Hard, and sure the fuck not on Maddening. To me, it feels like sloppy balancing on top of an already exhausting and dull game cycle. Why let the player skip months if you didn’t bother to carefully balance the game so that the players who do skip months could have even a small chance to clear the game? Honestly, it just feels as if they thought “people might find it annoying so let’s just tack on a skip feature”, and that’s disappointing and lazy.

Overall, I hope nothing similar to the monastery’s implementation is included in any future Fire Emblem game. It’s too antithetical to FE’s main gameplay structure, IMO.

Gameplay Section 2-Battles

To be honest, Fire Emblem has never been the pinnacle of balanced gameplay, and frankly I don’t want it to be. It’s a single player game with fun anime sword guys, magic powers, and dragons. So long as it’s not dreadfully easy or overly complicated, I have no qualms about certain classes or characters being better or worse than others.

3H though is a mess. A fun mess, but still a mess. Movement decrease to foot units means you want a mount cuz the game’s maps are big, and the speed penalty for cav classes means you want a wyvern or a pegasus. Physical units do just that (or maybe War Master for Quick Riposte), you get your dancer, have a Stride unit, have your Magic units and warpers where you need them, and congrats! You solved the 3H meta. 

Half-joking, honestly. The game is extremely easy to break, the hardest part is getting to that point (after all, slugging through the monastery is a bigger test of your patience than anything else). Maddening mode, of course, you have be extra careful in the beginning (cuz they probably didn’t play test it cough cough) and utilize your combat arts and gambits effectively, and being extremely conscious of positioning. But, much like Awakening before it, 3H is very easy to snowball. Especially on NG+. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun, but it can get mindless. I don’t personally play that way, but even still, tools such as weapons mostly not being class restricted, Crests, combat arts, gambits, and accessories make the game incredibly simple. It’s a breeze, and only gets harder when certain things are stripped away from you or your debilitated somehow. Again, it’s still fun, because FE is always fun, but challenging? No. Not in a way that I find meaningful, anyway.

The maps themselves? Meh. They look pretty! Lots of small missable details that you wouldn’t see if not for the zoomed in view, that was a neat feature. Not at all useable for actually playing the game, of course, but fun to mess with and to sight see. It does make me resentful, cuz again, we could’ve potentially seen lots of rich, detailed, and varied locations bustling with townsfolk and entering villages to really feel each location. But alas, this is as good as we get.

Anyway, the maps are...fine-ish? Part 1′s maps are seared into my brain, for better and for worse (mostly worse) cuz you have to play them at least 3 different times for all the routes. Prologue through Chapter 5 are either boring, terrible, or both. Chapter 6 is the first map on my most recent playthrough that I say I had fun with in Part 1, then it continues for 7 and 8, then nosedives for 9 and 10, before picking back up for 11 and 12. In short, more than half the story maps for part 1 I find are either unexceptional or plain bad.

Now Part 2? Hunting By Daybreak is atrocious, Garreg Mach defense is pretty fun, Ailell is boring as fuck, Myrddin Bridge and Deirdru are good, Gronder Part 2 ebbs and flows between being awesome and awful, Merceus, Enbarr, and Fhirdiad are okay but tend to drag, Tailtean is alright, Shambhala is hot garbage, CF endgame is pretty fun, AM endgame is okay, VW endgame is awesome, Snow endgame is terrible. I think all routes’ part 2 is better than part 1, but not by much.

All of Cindered Shadows is peak, every map was good IMO.

Paralogue maps I have no opinions on, they are recycled maps with nothing meaningfully interesting about them that I remember aside from Dedue’s, Ashe’s, and Petra’s. 

In short, the battle maps in 3H are okay for FE standards. It’s just pretty fucking insane how many times they get reused, so I got tired of them very quickly.

Fandom

Last but not least, just a shoutout to a very unpleasant community experience. Though it might be the best selling FE game as of now, it comes with the price of having some incredibly disrespectful, vicious, and ignorant fans.

Never have I been witness to or been the target of as much harassment on the internet as I have with certain 3H fans. Entire discord servers made to make fun of groups of people with differing opinions, taking over old blog domains to mock people, deliberately seeking out people who want nothing to do with you just so you can defend your favs, etc. And that’s just on this site! There’s editing wars on TV tropes and the wikis, mods on various sites having to do deleting sprees of 3H discourse, artists being harassed on Twitter, and in general just... inserting yourselves into places and spaces where you were not invited nor encouraged to comment. Some of these people lack basic human deceny, respect, and boundaries, and it’s not cool.

Part of the reason why I’m breaking away from 3H now is because this behavior is something I got wrapped up in too, and I’m deeply ashamed of it. It’s toxic, and not at all something I want associated with one of my favorite video game series anymore. I got real life things to worry about and other games to play.

-

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. All of my general thoughts on 3H, localized on one post. Sayonara, Fodlan Discourse, you won’t be missed. 🤗