#how can such a traumatized and emotionally burdened character be so amusing to read?

[everythingloveandanimated]

And the funny thing is the things that just keep HAPPENING are things that Murtagh morally/ in good conscience CAN’T turn his back on.

Rumors of a growing threat in the northern reaches of Alagaesia- this is work for a dragon and a rider of old, and since we are the current generation of said establishment, it’s our responsibility to look into this.

Hears of Silna’s plight- damn it I hate this cat for baiting me like this, but I’ve been in that child’s place twice, and it is not pleasant… plus she’s a child and I’m all about protecting child innocence however I can. Also, I hate this cat for telling me that the best way to save said child is to commit the sin of grave robbery of a dragon that breaks my heart to know is dead.

Also amusing is the first obstacle on his mission to find information on Bachel is to find somebody who would know about the dreamers and the bird skull amulet. Best option, Gil’ead to see a woman who tried to pursue him at Galbatorix’s court. Murtagh’s immediate response is “Not her, not there, anything but that!!!!” The man is digging in his heels, trying desperately to find another way knowing that there is none, and needs his dragon to subtly call him out on his reluctance. 😆

This man! 😂

Murtagh is so upset about being upgraded from secondary antagonist to main character

[markoftheasphodel]

Unfulfilled Dream: An Introduction to Finn and House Leonster

This is intended to assist fans of Three Houses, and specifically Blue Lions fans, in understanding what the hell FE old-timers are talking about when the names “Quan,” “Finn,” and “Leif” come up with regard to Dimitri and his retainers (and Dimitri/Dedue in particular). You may have encountered these characters in FE Heroes, but there’s a lot more stuff out there and it’s not all in one place, or even readily available in translation. So here goes.

So, as a starting point, Azure Moon route of Three Houses is heavily influenced by Thracia 776 (aka FE5) and the more familiar you are with FE5, the more evident the parallels/echoes are. But going backward from Azure Moon to its inspiration, or to Genealogy of the Holy War (FE4) which served as an inspiration for Three Houses itself, can be really confusing.

We have the two games, FE4 and FE5, both of them for the SNES, neither of them ever given a worldwide release. Both have modern, very good patches so if you want to play them, it’s a much better user experience than it used to be. We have two artbooks, Treasure for FE4 and Illustrated Works for FE5, both of them only partially translated via websites and translation blogs. We have developer notes and interviews. We have the appearances of these characters as Einherjar in Awakening. We have their modern appearances in Fire Emblem Heroes.  We have the modern run of Cipher cards as well as much older TCG cards. And finally, we have various manga and light novels, many of which have been fan-translated of late but also rather... dubious as “game canon.”

So, to grasp Quan, or Finn, or Leif, it’s a bit like being told “read 100 support conversations plus some DLC that never got translated,” right?

Here are the basics that might be of interest to Three Houses fans!

Quan is the prince of Leonster, a small but wealthy kingdom on the Thracian Peninsula, which juts eastward from the continent of Jugdral. He carries the Major Holy Blood (so, kind of like a Major Crest) of Njörun, one of the Twelve Crusaders who liberated Jugdral from an evil cult several generations before. His holy weapon is Gae Bolg, aka The Lance of Love and Sorrow, reputed to be cursed. Quan generally at war with his neighbor to the south, King Travant of Thracia (a poor nation), who also has Major Holy Blood and is a descendant of Dáinn, Njörun’s brother. Each of them wants to unite the Thracian peninsula and rule over the whole thing; despite an Irish naming scheme, Leonster was inspired by Italy and is supposed to be an elegant, fashionable place with a thriving middle class. Quan attended a fancy military academy in the center of the continent (the direct inspiration for Garreg Mach!) and has two close friends from other nations, Eldigan and Sigurd, also heirs to holy bloodlines. The three of them swear an oath to always have each others’ backs and Quan marries Sigurd’s sister Ethlyn, who has minor holy blood (like a minor crest but with no holy weapon access). They have two children, Altena and Leif.

Finn starts off as Quan’s page. I say “starts off” because FE4 and FE5 follow him over the course of twenty years. He’s the child of a noble house in Leonster, and when he was orphaned he was sent to the castle to be raised/educated. He’s not skilled at making friends but he does become Quan’s page and grows to think of Ethlyn as a big sister of sorts. When Quan and Ethlyn go to war across the continent to assist Sigurd, Finn wants to come along and they take him, even though he’s maybe fifteen and barely old enough to fight. Quan mentors Finn (which is something we see in FE4 itself), building his confidence up, telling Finn he’s the most promising knight of his generation, bequeathing Finn a special lance of his own, and ultimately entrusting Finn with guardianship of Quan’s son and heir, Leif. Finn in turn becomes utterly devoted to Quan and to Quan’s ambition of ruling all of Thracia.

A word about devotion. This is not “devotion” in the sense we’ve seen from Frederick or Jakob in recent FE games, where it’s performative and kind of amusing, with complicated tea rituals and recruiting slogans and whatnot. This is straight-up utter acceptance of someone else’s dreams and ambition as one’s own purpose in life. Hold that thought.

Anyway, Quan and Ethlyn are ambushed and killed by Travant shortly after Leif is born; every knight in their party is massacred in the Yied Desert. The rest of the continent is falling under the sway of the Grannvale Empire (Eldigan’s already dead, Sigurd dies shortly after Quan&Ethlyn), and Leonster is able to hold out for a couple of years before it falls to a one/two attack by Travant’s Thracian army and the Grannvale Empire. Finn, who’s been caring for Leif as his guard, escapes from the burning castle with Leif in his arms (Leif’s grandmother Queen Alfiona dies in the blaze; his grandfather King Kalf died shortly before on the battlefield, betrayed by allies).

The Yied Massacre and the Fall of Leonster are the Jugdrali psychological horror-show that parallel the Tragedy of Duscur’s impact on House Blaiddyd. Finn is devastated by the fact that his duty to Leif kept him from Quan&Ethlyn’s side during the massacre because dying with them would’ve been preferable to surviving them. He hasn’t recovered from that when Leonster falls in an inferno that traumatizes him for, as far as we can tell, the rest of his life. As Leif tells it, Finn then shut down emotionally to the point where he neither cries nor laughs. Of course, Leif himself is scarred by the memory of the burning castle, and that and the loss of his parents fuels his own rage and desire for revenge. Leif is also bothered by the fact that he only has minor holy blood from his parents, which is much less impressive than having two minor Crests because he can’t use any holy weapons. On the other hand, two types of minor holy blood don’t kill you.

(I think at this point many of y’all can see how these events are echoed in Azure Moon. The atrocity, the survivor’s guilt, the fallout on both a child prince with a heavy burden and his retainer who’s struggling with his own issues.)

After this, Finn has nothing aside from his duty to Leif, and as he sees it his duty to Leif is ultimately to see Leif placed on the throne of a unified Thracian peninsula as its sole king. He raises Leif and Leif’s companion Nanna/Jeanne (Jugdral is complicated) under a variety of harsh & tragic circumstances for the next thirteen years. Sometimes he has to forego meals to feed the kids. The people who assist him usually end up dead. At least once he gets betrayed by the citizens of the town they’re hiding in. And so on. These are not circumstances that really allow one to recover from trauma, and by the time Leif himself is fifteen years old and the game plot of Thracia 776 begins, Finn still doesn’t give a damn as to whether he lives or dies as long as he can see Leif made King of Thracia. This is where the portrayal of Finn in Fire Emblem Heroes comes from-- by this point he’s about thirty-four and he really hasn’t had a good day in his life since he was about nineteen.

One of the Cipher cards probably says it the best: His fallen master protected him, saw him through to adulthood, and entrusted him with an unfulfilled dream, and now Finn leads the way to a new era in his motherland! That complete, utter, unswerving dedication to Quan and his unfulfilled dream is what brings Finn to mind when discussing Dedue (cutscene after Gronder in Verdant Wind, anyone?) It’s not funny. It’s tragic. It’s kind of disturbing. Thracia 776 offers a lot of commentary on knights and knighthood-- not as savage as the discussions Felix has with his Blue Lions comrades, but pointed nonetheless-- and with Finn as the Jugdrali exemplar of A Knight, that criticism rebounds, directly or indirectly, on him. Knighthood is kind of effed up and so is Finn. 

Finn does get the opportunity to get his revenge on Travant in FE4, as both he and Leif have boss-battle conversations with Travant making it 100% clear they’re after revenge (Leif even speaks of killing Travant with his bare hands!). Travant’s death helps clear the way for Leif to take the throne of Thracia after the war... and with the dream at last fulfilled, Finn disappears, apparently into the Yied Desert where Quan and Ethlyn died. (He does come back three years later.) He’s got nothing else in his life. He’s seemingly not equipped to take over the usual veteran-knight role as some kind of advisor or general... or, after all that, he just WANTS to disappear for a while.

(You say, this is pretty TL;DR for “the basics”; I say, “I left a lot of stuff out, especially wrt shipping” because Jugdrali shipping is complicated.)

Anyway, so that’s the outline of the plot stuff. Note again, this takes more than twenty years to play out-- more than double the time elapsed between the Tragedy of Duscur and Dimitri’s final victory in Azure Moon. Jugdral is a long, long, hard slog for the characters that survive it.

Now, here’s where we get to the interpretive part. Finn’s devotion to Quan (and thence to Leif) and his trauma and self-abnegation are not up for debate. Hell, FE Heroes provides a pretty fair encapsulation of it. What Heroes also conveys is the sheer depth of his grief for Quan after fifteen, seventeen, twenty years... a grief that leads a number of fans, including me, to see a romantic subtext there. Maybe Quan, as a happily married man with two kids, wasn’t ever thinking of his page-turned-protege like that, but in between some interesting bits of dialogue in FE5 about Finn being “cold to women” and his current portrayal in Heroes, it does create the impression that at the very least Finn’s feelings for Quan went outside the ordinary bounds of the lord/retainer relationship. As Jugdral by its nature doesn’t lead to the sorts of paired endings we see in Three Houses, that’s really something fans have to experience for themselves. 

If that interests you, hopefully this essay has provided some pointers on where to find material. Have fun!