#Three Houses discourse

[curse-d-owl]

Me: Rhea has power over Fodlan and she abuses her power to support racism and nationalism. She can protect Catherine from Faerghus despite being a wanted criminal, take away their heroes relics, allowed fodlan to oppress foreign nations, she aided Faerghus in killing Duscur rebels who are trying to reclaim their homeland, deported a Dagdan refugee for practicing their own religion and has religious tenets forbidding foreigners from freely entering Fodlan. Politicians with less power than her like Dimitri and Sylvain did what she refused to do by righting the wrongs of their territory. How can you argue otherwise?

The smartest Rhea fan: The devs build Three Houses around Silver Snow, Edelgard is meant to be a villain, Byleth is a reference to the Buddha's nutsack, Rhea is a genocide vic-

Me: That doesn't answer my fucking question.

[faroreswinds]

It's been 5 years. And today, I saw a post on the FE TH subreddit that said Dimitri and Claude owe their successes and their goals to Edelgard.

Unironically.

And then, someone else followed up with a second post asking how could Dimitri and Claude have found success with the obstacles in their way without Edelgard being there?!

[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. 🤗

[pollyanna-nana]

Look. I know some people are going to want to mail a pipe bomb to my house for three houses discoursing again in 2023-almost-2024 but can we please, for the sake of my goddamn sanity, agree that Edelgard waging war for any reason was objectively bad. “Well it was to oppose the church-“ Starting a war is bad. “The other countries didn’t give in so she had to-“ Starting a war is bad. “Well there was nothing else she could have done-“ Starting. A. War. Is. Bad. There is no possible justification on this planet for doing so that makes it a remotely okay thing to do. It is not a “necessary evil” and I hope people don’t take this mindset into actual real life conflicts happening right now as we speak. Yes she’s hot and cool and interesting but if I see one more person genuinely saying she was 100% correct I’m going to eat glass on live TV.

[kid-az]

Three Houses discourse terrifies me

That’s it. That’s the post.

[truejekart]

Valentine Edelgard 💗

[loki-zen]

Speaking of fire emblem the three houses what is the actual point of the genderlocked character classes anyway. Girls can't be the class "dark mage" but most of the characters that get dark magic are girls. Women can't get advanced brawling classes, but gender doesn't change the protagonist's natural skill strengths so I sure hope you picked the correct one of the protagonist's two favoured weapon skills to focus on if you made her a girl. Pegasuses are sexist. Men and women don't actually have different stats in any way, they're entirely capable of mastering the prerequisites to a given class, they're just arbitrarily prevented from selecting them. None of this is attested to in actual dialogue or worldbuilding, nor is it pointed out to the player in any OOC way.

[raxistaicho]

An ill-fitting throne, like an ill-fitting crown

When I was last playing Three Houses, I was struck again by how small Byleth looks, seated on Sothis's throne:

They just look so fantastically unfitting for the throne.

Female Byleth can't even touch her heels to the ground, and while male Byleth can do that much, the arm rests are too far apart for him to use them properly, and he visibly has to sit so far forward that he can't rest his back against the back of the throne, either.

A pretty common theory is that Sothis was huge when she was alive, and aside from just the sheer size of the throne this is supported by, of all the grotesque things, the Sword of the Creator itself:

It's pretty easy to infer that the serrated portion of the blade was crafted from Sothis's spine. A person's spine generally constitutes 25% of their total height, and the Sword of the Creator is huge, especially compared to Female Byleth:

With Byleth being 5'4'', Sothis could easily be between seven and eight feet tall. She'd easily dwarf everyone else in the game, including Dedue and Nemesis.

Where am I going with this?

Byleth not being big enough to sit properly upon Sothis's throne is symbolic in a way: they're being pressed into a position that doesn't suit them. Just look at how uncomfortable and uncertain they seem, particularly female Byleth.

[ferditheas]

I feel like a lot of people forget that Mercedes is 22 at the beginning of the game, and turns 23 after a month at Garreg Mach.

I'm 23 right now. Having to go to school with a bunch of teenagers sounds like an absolute nightmare. She is truly Serios's strongest soldier.

[royalparaselene]

Even further thoughts but a friend brought up how a number of her haters could be coming from a place of misogynist thinking, and that if she were a man, it would be thought of as an epic tale of revenge. I agree, but I also think a great majority of Rhea’s haters just misunderstand her and in some cases even go to great lengths to misinterpret her character. I won’t be coy, yes she lied. I’m not going to argue against this, but I think it came from a place of love as well as the self preservation instinct. Who wouldn’t want to not be murdered for your special blood that grants super powers?

As for it coming from a place of love, we see how she acts towards others in the game: gentle, maternal, the likes. She’s a leader that with Wilhelm, rallied an army to fight off Nemesis. She’s thrust responsibility upon herself (I don’t believe she has any political power in the three countries and I don’t believe she’s controlling anything other than the central church) that weighs very heavily on her. Her counseling box questions show wants to be able to take walks without people surrounding her to protect her, and she wants to go to the dining hall and interact with church goers, students, commoners… but worries she might come off too intimidating. Her and Edelgard are much the same in this regard: she’s a sad, lonely girl that really just wants connection and to be heard. And like it or not, she deserves to be heard.

The game in general has too much conflicting information about the church. I don’t think it’s an institution without merit and it helps countless people. Reforms are needed, yes, but it’s not like that can’t come about while she’s serving Archbishop, they obviously happen in endings where she lives and even continues to serve as archbishop if married by Byleth. I think, in general, Three Houses does Rhea a HUGE disservice and I believe Silver Snow should’ve been much different: Rhea should’ve remained uncaptured, and functioned as the “lord” of that route, and it should’ve ended with Rhea donning her persona of Seiros once more (or going back to being called Seiros as she was originally, another thing the game isn’t clear on) and having a climactic final battle rematch with reanimated Nemesis. It’s crazy Rhea doesn’t even get to see Nemesis again in VW!

Anyway, that’s my thoughts in a nutshell. I’d like to hear other people’s perspectives but I really don’t want to hear people hating on her, please

I think it’s really really depressing five years out discourse hasn’t changed around three houses and I think most disappointing of all is how some people still have this vitriolic hatred of Rhea and think she deserves to be murdered. I’m sorry but that’s like a really really odd line of thinking and it reflects poorly on you to put that out there idk

[curse-d-owl]

Engaging in Three Houses discourse in good faith is a waste of your time cause this is who you're arguing with:

They cant prove their precious fave/route is flawless so instead of acknowledging it like proper adults they resort childish insults, willful idiocy and all sorts of illogical arguments in a sad attempt to protect their fictional characters from the great tragedy that is valid criticism.

To name a few examples.

Edelgard wages war cause she under the delusion that you'll be violently killed for criticising the church, Rhea fans believes she's at the mercy of corrupt nobles and therefore isn't complicit in the oppression of Duscur and Golden Wildfire functions on the delusion that Rhea is violently against reforming Fodlan, establishing foreign relations and righting Fodlan's wrongs.

Edelgard's delusion is heavily debunked when she condemned the goddess Infront of a high ranking church member in defense of a scumbag like Miklan.

Rhea can take away heroes relics from nobles and protect Catherine from Faerghus.

And Azure Gleam literally proves otherwise by Rhea not condemning nor stopping Dimitri for reforming Faerghus and giving Duscur their independence back and their due reperations. It happened for 2 years straight during a time Rhea still had power and long before Edelgard declared war.

The only way to prove otherwise is debunk the blatant evidence as false and provide actual evidence of their claims.

Show me evidence of the church violently killing anyone for criticising their tenets, show me evidence of Rhea being at the mercy of house Gautier, show me evidence of Hopes!Rhea stopping Dimitri from giving Duscur their restitutions or at least speak out against it.

They can't and they know it but they'll never admit it. They instead want to get on your nerves with willful idiocy and pat themselves on the back.

[faroreswinds]

Guess that guy forgot Dimitri's support with Dedue where the crux of the conflict was that Dimitri and wanted to treat Dedue as equals but Dedue wanted to be seen as a vassal.

People use Dedue as some sort of "gotcha" character to prove how terrible and racist Dimitri is. How dare he keep a marginalized, colonized man of color as his vassal.

This completely removes any agency Dedue has himself. These people don't actually like Dedue. They only like what they perceive to be legitimacy to their argument.

They often ignore:

He is not forced to be by Dimitri's side. He actively chooses to be there.

Dedue was not just a prize for Dimitri to cling to. Dedue and Dimitri both relied on each other for recovery from shared trauma, and what one faced, the other faced with him.

Dedue is the one who chooses to keep the relationship professional. Dimitri actively begs him to treat him as an equal, not a superior.

They are both the most important person in each other's lives. They would die for each other.

In the rare cases Dedue chooses to leave Dimitri's side, Dimitri encourages it.

And so on.

A bit of a side-bar, but I noticed that many people in the thread also lamented that Yuri couldn't support Claude or Edelgard. I guess they feel that Yuri has something in common with them.

I don't see it. Yuri may be a rouge who chooses life and winning over morals, but he is also a church-boy at heart. He never expresses hatred for the church or crests the way Edelgard or Claude do. I don't even think he actually hates nobles, he just sees them as pawns for his schemes.

Claude and Edelgard "care" about the common folk but Dimitri walks the walk. He's the only one who actually gets into the dirt with the commoners, walks among them and interacts with more than just his inner circle of commoner friends. This is what Yuri values the most- his people, the down trodden. Of COURSE he would support Dimitri over the other two.

Also, Yuri is from the kingdom, and he doesn't hate his homeland. Which I'm sure some people would insist he should since it's a backwards country or something, idk.

[medicallyfascinating]

I don't like the agarthans.

And I don't mean this in the "Oh experimenting on children is bad" way because... yeah... obviously?

I mean this in the it takes away from other characters kind of way.

I'm mostly going to be focusing on Ferdinand in this rant but the agarthans take away from SO MANY CHARACTERS

One of the things that enrages me the most is how often Duke Aegir's actions are cushioned/absolved.

In three houses, in Ferdinand and Lysitheas paralogue, Lysithea says that Lord Arundel took over from Duke Aegir and upped the taxes so high that the people of Hrym couldn't survive.

WHY???

It is such an interesting plot point that Ludwig is greedy and self-serving and was slowly destroying Adrestia EVEN WITHOUT THE AGARTHANS

It's so interesting watching Ferdinand have to come to terms with all the awful things his father is done and, in turn, having to question his own beliefs and change and adapt his way of seeing the world so he can do the good he's always intended on doing.

This also jams a massive hole in Ferdinand's ENTIRE ARC during hopes where he's found tax reports and decides his father needs to be jailed because... it wasn't actually really Duke Aegir at all... it was the Agarthans???

MAKE IT MAKE SENSE

Don't even get me started on the brainwashing plot in hopes. WHY???? WHY SUGGEST THAT IS WHAT IS HAPPENING TO DUKE AEGIR???? It doesn't make sense and if it does, once again, it destroys Ferdinand's entire arc. He has to come to terms with something that DOESNT EXIST. And the excuse of "well edelgard and hubert made him think it" doesn't even work BECAUSE FERDINAND COMES TO THIS CONCLUSION HIMSELF- HE IS THE ONE WHO DECIDES THAT LUDWIG MUST BE EXECUTED- HE IS THE ONE WHO WANTS LUDWIG TO BE JAILED DESPITE HOW GUILTY HE FEELS

It deeply upsets me because Ferdinand's arc is so so so compelling in both houses and hopes. There are flaws, obviously, but in general, I love his arc so much and it's so frustrating to watch it be contradicted because for some reason the writers didn't want Ludwig to be a horrible awful terrible person.

Let Ludwig be a horrible awful terrible person.

Let Ferdinand have to come to terms with it.

Let Ferdinand break the cycle.

That is an infinitely more interesting and compelling plot than "Oh no, it was actually the evil guys all along haha"

And this is just Ferdinand. This isn't all the damage it does to ALL the other characters' storylines too.

[emblemxeno]

New FEH Forging Bonds Rant

Hey, so, I'm really pissed.

So in Fallen Dedue's forging bonds scenes in FEH, there's this exchange:

Dedue: I will use this power... to end those who threaten His Majesty... I will end Edelgard, the emperor of the Adrestian Empire.

Tormod: That's right... You're from Fodlan...

Sothe: But didn't you and Edelgard go to school together? What happened that you would fight each other to the death?

Dedue: Fate has lead to this. Unfortunately... My strength is not enough to stop Edelgard... However, if I use the power of the Demonic Beast, I can... take her down... with me-urrgh! That is why I use this- Rrraaagh!

The bolded and italicized part is exactly the dumb shit I'm talking about.

The writers (or translators, idk if the JP version writes something different) are fucking ALLERGIC to assigning blame where it's rightfully due.

When the framing is "it sucks that you two have to fight against each other, war is sad, and it's sad that this shit is happening to you", that is an intentional fucking removal of the actions that led to this point.

It's not goddamn ~fate~ or ~destiny~ that caused Dedue and Dimitri to be at odds with Edelgard, it's the fact that Edelgard invaded their fucking land!

This is the same depraved Passive Voice that journalists and reporters use to whitewash atrocities inflicted upon groups they deem not as "worthy" of attention or have implicit bias against.

To compare, it's like, rather than rightfully pointing out that "Racists are being terrible to Black people, so Black people are pushing back", journalists often say "Oh, Black people are just victims of a fate that makes them volatile and bitter towards racists" type shit.

This writing blurs Edelgard's actions and crimes towards the people of other countries and nations, to foist the blame on it being "inevitable" that Fodlan would fall into conflict. After all, why be meaningfully critical of the root issues at play when you can just write conflict off as "you're all victims of fate, so tragic :("

I know it's just one line among hundreds, but fuck this writing, disrespectfully.

[druvs-tavern-of-tea-and-books]

In highlight of some recent news

[faerghusfucker]

my evolution as a fe3h fan is rlly funny to me lol. i played the game for the first time when i was 15 and now at 19 im playing through three hopes (yes im super late dont ask) and the fact that there have been times where ive been obsessed with EVERY HOUSE is rlly funny to me

at the start i was a claude and golden deer stan through and through bc funny meme house and also the nemesis fight

then when i was starting to get a little more politically minded i fell into the “edelgard did nothing wrong” camp because. yeah!!!! meritocracy!!!! united!!!! fuck religion!!!

and now as an adult with a lot more awareness and a lot less edgy atheism i came to the conclusion that not only is imperialism and destroying people’s lives for an ideal you have no concrete way of upholding bad, but the entire “let’s get rid of crests” argument is not even a solid one because it centers adrestia and doesn’t take into account the other two regions’ need for heroes relics.

correct me if i’m missing something or if i’m wrong, but no one in adrestia’s nobility actually has a hero’s crest. if they have crests, they’re saint crests, and saint crests have compatibility with sacred weapons, which are different to heroes relics because anyone can use them without turning into a beast.

additionally, adrestia doesn’t have any immediate neighbors that could cause them trouble. it doesn’t directly border a non-fodlan country, and they seem to have taken care of their brigid situation by kidnapping petra. the empire has no immediate threats.

the kingdom and alliance tho????? they border sreng and almyra respectively, which seem to invade at the drop of a hat and force houses gautier and goneril respectively to be in constant combat. those two houses literally DEPEND ON THEIR RELICS FOR SURVIVAL. until someone figures out a better way for them to defend their lands, they NEED crests!!!

obviously this isn’t necessarily a good thing, since we see the path that miklan and rufus as crestless older sons go down, but it’s not like the kingdom is exactly keen on keeping this in place either. in three hopes they talk a ton abt how crest bloodlines are dying out and how something needs to change. hell, sylvain is someone who directly benefits from faerghus’ crest dependency and yet in his supports with shez, he’s going and devising powerful weapons that people without crests can use!!! we see time and time again that the young nobles of faerghus are interested in the same things edelgard is: establishing a more equal society, and decreasing the need for crests. but why doesn’t she just collaborate with them to that end???? why doesn’t she hear dimitri out when he tries to talk her out of continuing on this path????

oh yeah. the church.

i’m probably gonna yap abt the church later lol i’m running out of steam on this ramble. tiktok is banned and so this is what i’ve resolved to do while i sip my morning coffee lol bear with me