#Virion will never sacrifice anyone and acknowledges that his tactics suck

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What do you think about morally grey in three houses?

Hmm…

There has been several posts recently discussing this particular topic, which boiled down to “what is morally grey” and, well, this is an interesting question!

I’d say “grey” is when someone isn’t completely black or white, but has elements of both alignments. 

The obvious having been stated, it makes me think about several other tropes, like the “pet the dog” trope or “morality pet”.

Does having good intentions but shit execution means you’re grey? It depends! What is the “shit execution”? Eating babies? Forgeting to put the lid on your pan full of boiling water because you were super busy to, idk, bring pregnant wife to the hospital, so when your old mom tried to add pasta to the pan she burnt herself and died?

I’d say it depends on what are your limits and what you deem acceptable or not and uh, apparently, killing people in prevention they might do something wrong isn’t black enough to dilute the pool into “too black you will need to add 5 liters of bleach to get a clearer result”…

I’ve said it before, but the purple giant deciding to snap his fingers to get rid of half of the population to save the world isn’t, to my tastes, morally grey. It’s still 50% of people dying because someone decided and they weren’t consulted.

If those 50% agreed to it though? It’s immediatly more complicated, not for them, but for the guy/woman holding the trigger - they want to die to save the world, but will you really kill them? (i think this had been adressed in Tales of the Abyss at one point).

Look at Quanism - it has both good and bad aspects.

Quan will cross a desert twice (even if the second time he kind of failed) to save and help his best friend Sigurd, because he might need help and will even accompany him during his various journeys in foreign states. Quan will defend his country (mmh) and his people against Thracian invasions. Quan’s people have Leonster’s best interests at heart.

Quan will also shit on Thracia, put outrageous prices on food exported there, act as the High King of what seems to be a federation of several sovereign kingdoms and often call Verdane people barbarians.

Was Quan a bad guy, or a good guy?

Ultimately, in FE5, Leif refuses Quanism. Given a crapton of circumstances, he finds his own doctrine (well the peninsula is united under his rule, like Quan would have wanted, but Thracians aren’t exiled or relegated to shit like Quan might have done if he had been in his son’s shiny boots).

The Hero ™ isn’t grey, or tries his hardest not to be. Sometimes he manages to do that by disgusting asspulls, sometimes he succeeds by thinking out of the box, sometimes he doesn’t and falls in the grey spectrum - where we can still ask ourselves, is he still the hero, or how does the fact that falling in the grey spectrum impacts him?

FE9 Naesala, and arguably in FE10, refuses to be called a good king or a good leader. He will prioritise his kingdom and his people first, but is perfectly aware that he is not The Hero ™ Tibarn represents. Naesala has good intentions at heart, shit execution and refuses to be called or even thought as heroic. It is heavily implied that he “atones” for the rest of his life, and is willing to be used as a punching ball by Tibarn because of what happened in Phoenicis.

Arvis might have had the best intention, he completely crossed the line. I personally don’t think he knew Manfroy and co would hunt children and go on a murder spree in the 1st gen, but, and this is what is truly fightening, I don’t know if Arvis would have stopped his association with Manfroy if he knew (maybe he would have tried to backstab him to prevent such a thing from happening, but it’s the same dilemna we had with Lyon in FE8, are you really going to work with evil forces to do something because you think you can control them? If you do, then what does that make you?)

Ultimately Arvis tries to redeem himself, by asspulling saving all children and dying by Seliph’s hands - does that make him grey if associating with Manfroy and conquering the continent turned his color spectrum to black? Or was Arvis “morally black” since the beginning?

On the other end of the spectrum, Sigurd’s invasion of Augstria (and Verdane but no one cares about barbarians) feels wrong (at least I felt so). Sigurd is even called on it by Eldingan, and FE4′s biased narrator says that during the occupation, Sigurd’s occupying forces did some shit. 

Is his incompetence/reluctance/ignorance that his troops were “doing some shit” in Augstria dark enough to change his color spectrum? Can we hold the fact that he is a knight so he cannot disobey/doesn’t think about disobeying orders even if they are about subjugating a country and removing its king against him? Sigurd grows in Silesse, but then he dies :’(

But still, is Sigurd morally grey? I don’t think so. Maybe after his death he would have been, or he would have retained his knightly values, we will never know. Faced with Lewyn’s dilemna - continuing the fight that will kill many, or going home and letting many die - Sigurd doesn’t know how to answer. But this is a good thing, he might have turned into the Hero ™ who solves problems by thinking out of the box. Or he would have tried to, idk.

Sigurd isn’t loyal good, nope, he goes against orders to protect Shannan. I’d say chaotic good, but it ultimately doesn’t matter, imo, Sigurd’s pretty “morally white”.

This isn’t really on topic though, your question, and by extension the concept of morally grey is actually asking if said character is “moral” or “amoral” by your own standards!

On FE16 :

Boar!Dimitri is an interesting case. Boar!Dimitri wants and will, if Billy isn’t with him, fight until his last breath in a desperate attempt to kill Edelgard. In AM, where we see Boar!Dimitri and interact with him, it’s implied that Boar!Dimitri wants to be a boar and fight against Edel, but he will not force his former friends to join him in his quest. He tries to tell everyone off, saying “they’re too weak” or some liability, but we ultimately see it with Dedue and Rodrigue that despite his tuskers, Boar!Dimitri doesn’t want people to die for him.

Is Boar!Dimitri morally grey? He is driven by his revenge and yet, he will not do “everything” to get Edel’s head. He will not sacrifice his friends for Edel’s death (then of course comes the question “but they’re following him so if pulls a Leeroy Jenkins they will follow” which is right). Still, the fact that he prioritises his revenge and Edel over his people is pretty meh in my book especially since Rodrigue told him that they’re starving etc. Then there’s his useless cruelty dealing with Randolf which sucks. Everything taken into consideration I’d say that, imo, Dimitri’s a light shade of “morally grey”.

Claude isn’t morally grey at all. He desperatly wants to be, but imo, he reads more like Virion (and/or Innes, I totally forgot about him).

Given the dev’s interview and all, Claude will not sacrifice his friends, and puts survival as his top priority. He wants to look like a heartless schemer, ready to do anything to achieve his goals, but just like Virion, in a real life situation? Nope. Claude will escape, and find a way/lament if his friends fell because they weren’t supposed to. With the Innes comparison, I’d say Hilda might be his Gerik - he told/ordered her to get away and escape, she says fig it and stays until the end.

Claude might have been the Hero ™ who thinks out of the box, but there are no boxes in FE16… 

Claude’s morally white, he has his ambitions but won’t cross his own thresholds to achieve them. Of course there’s the “it’d be nice if Rhea disappeared” at the end of VW, but, because the plot asked for it or not, Rhea dies at the end of VW. Claude doesn’t have to get rid of her, and even if she didn’t, would he truly do it or wasn’t it a Virion-boast? Would Claude kill the person who sacrificed herself twice to save them, or have her killed? I don’t know. I don’t think so.

Also, given from his Flayn’s supports and the scenes where he loses his calm, while he really wants to find answers to his questions and about the true history of Fodlan, Claude will not try to force them out of someone who’s reluctant to tell them. Yes he lost his shit with Rhea, and yet, he didn’t force her to reveal the truth, and even let her go to catch some much needed rest acknowledging she only told him a half-truth, or avoided his question.

Edel? I confess I had a very serious case of bias towards Arvis when I joined the Jugdral fandom and the “for the greater good” motto. 

Allying with Thales and pals though, wait, i know I’ve said above that it wouldn’t have changed a thing about Arvis if he knew Manfroy’d hunt children - it wouldn’t have for the greater plot, but to me, Arvis would have fallen into the “morally black” pit way faster than he did. I like my Tumblr username, I like my mooks, I don’t like using them as war assets or the idea of even using them. FFS we’re using feral laguz randoms here, and even Miccy in her “i will do everything to protect Daien” didn’t use them.

She might have started a war, but shows regret for the bloodshed going as far as to lament at Dimitri’s death in CF despite the irony of that map - she knows that what she is doing is wrong, but thinks it needs to be done to build a better future. However, the “starting a war” + “Kostas in the prologue” look like Arvis in his best moments - and he is morally black - but “using beasts as backup” + “giving Emile hunting grounds” and everything about lizards and eradication sets her in the “morally black” spectrum.

Edel knows what are her limits between the “acceptable” and “not acceptable”, but for the sake of her goals, she will cross all of them. But she is no sociopath, or cruel person, she doesn’t enjoy crossing those lines and yet she feels it is compulsory to reach her goals.

i’d like to see an Arvis/Edel support convo

Rhea? I’d say grey, on the grounds of creating someone with the intent for it to be used as vessel is really creepy, but then, transmutation/alchemy/creating artificial sentient lives is creepy in itself and raises a ton of bioethical issues i’m not ready to deal with in this post because it’s already long as fuck and this is crossing beyond fandom discussion. Rhea knows that her experiments are questionable, and she’s ashamed of them but felt they were a necessity - pretty much like someone crossing their moral line and turning “morally black”. 

This point is neutralised in game though, because Rhea succeeded and the side Sothis choose ultimately won the war - so yes, Fodlan needed Sothis and Rhea’s homonculi were ultimately key to bring peace/prosperity to Fodlan... IMO, it’s still questionable, even if the game rewards it.

Rhea will not cross all of her lines though, she said the church will go against anyone who targets the students and the monastery, and she means it going as far as to blow her cover twice turning into a dragon to protect the students/Billy and his pals in part 2.

Also, national bias at play, but rewritting history not to alienate thousands of supporters of the side who lost the war is pretty grey in itself. Slowing technological progress? We know the reasons, if the book in the DLC, despite Linhardt’s warnings has to be believed, since the devs said so. Is it something that would count as morally “black”? Idk, maybe? Or maybe i’ve read/watched too much sci-fi stuff where one of the most common plot point is “humanity isn’t advanced enough to know how to use this technology”. It is grey, but Rhea doesn’t fall in the “morally black” spectrum, she’s a darker shade of grey than Boar!Dimitri, for sure, but she’s still, IMO, grey.

This is not to say that Edel’s evil and Claude’s good/whatever the contrary adjective of evil is! Or to say X/Y/Z is a better character than A/B/C! 

I love Arvis and Hilda (FE4!Hilda) to death, and I prefer them to Siggy and Eldie. But I also know that they’re not supposed to be liked because they were right or because what they did was the right thing, nope.

Tl;dr : Morally grey, black or white depends on who you’re talking to, and if FE16 brought us something new, it’s that not everyone thinks that doing a certain thing is evil, or, on the contrary, a good thing. 

There’s no consensus on what is “good” or “wrong” which can be interpretated in all kinds of worrying (?) ways.