#edeldiscourse

[archer3-13]

Edelgard is an interesting character in everyway but this discourse really sucks since it limits any interesting takes you can have on her

eh, to be frank im not that found of her as shes written even putting aside the discourse and well a part of that is personal taste [i like my villain protagonists more on the eccentric side of things to say the least] it also just comes down to how i find her kinda boring. there are interesting threads that could be picked at there, how despite her overt demenour shes really rather childish, how shes wilfully misinformed to the point of constructing an elaborate personal narrative to make herself feel better/more secure in her beliefs, her 'only i can fix it' mindset inherited from so many red emperors of the past.

In a sense shes the manic pixie dream girl of red emperors in terms of the fire emblem meta narrative and that should express itself in a character with a lot of rather interesting quirks to her behaviour and story. But it just never gets there, and sadly her most interesting point as a character is when shes wearing the flame emperor mask which i so desperately wish had kept through her presentation as consistent characterization as opposed to being a separate persona on which to hoist all the 'bad karma'.

cause the flame emperor is interesting, that fascinating paradox of petty childish and insecure behaviour [hey, i know my allies just killed basically everyone in this village but that was toats not my fault so you shouldn't blame me and i'd be really sad if you did], combined with a brutal intimidating leader dragging her followers along through brute force and deception [i dont wanna play with you anymore kostas so im just gonna let you get killed, mkay.]

her speech is noticeably at its most crass as the flame emperor, and in many ways i've always viewed it as the 'mask off edelgard' where shes free to most be herself ironically well shes wearing a mask. most noticeably because as soon as the mask breaks she immediately drops any flame emperor mannerisms just as shes specifically attempting to leverage sympathy. thats not how i imagine your suppose to take it mind, but its the only way i can find to grapple with her as a character that i on an individual level find interesting.

[real-fire-emblem-takes]

foreword: im a lesbian

a lot of the edeldiscourse is just misogyny. same w rhea. like. look at me fire emblem fandom. look at me in my lesbian eyes. why do you people not also hate dmitri for actively saying "yeah lets massacre people" multiple times but when edelgard teams up w people who abused her all her life and are infesting her only accessible seat of power to do somthing genuinely good its worse. hello. hello? all dmitri wants is to kill edelgard because hes a sister in law fucker and she was too busy Having Opinions and Also Being Traumatized to be sad about his issues. i do also kind of like dmitri but in a "aw what a fucked up creature that has rabies that i have to put down. how sad. anyway" kind of way. edelgard, on the other hand, just. wants people to be equal? and she knows the church is corrupt and its been killing anyone who dissents? hello? hello?????

anyway its my opinion that 3H should have just been one fucking huge long and arduous Crimson Flower route and nothing else so edelgard couldve gotten the screentime beating slithies that claude ganked from her (im sorry claude but its true you are nothing)

.

[randomnameless]

As someone who's been living in ignorant bliss for years wrt Edeldiscourse, there are so many things that bother (yes, that's an understatement) me about the Edelstans' takes on Dimitri, Rhea (bless her), Faerghus, and checks notes whoever doesn't bow down to Edel's will. Like, the whole "Dimitri's man pain" thing is just so… Is it really necessary to downplay a character's trauma to emphasise how much another suffered? Dimitri's trauma doesn't just happen in the span of one day. IIRC, on top of losing his father, his bestie, his stepmother (as far as he knows, at least) and many knights, he got gravely injured and then basically put on house arrest whilst having to survive several assassination attempts by an uncle who dehumanised him and who dragged the Kingdom to the mud even more. And that's not counting the whole five years after the beginning of the war Edelgard started, during which he was completely alone and thought Dedue sacrificed himself for him. How is that 'man pain'? Yes, Edelgard suffered a lot too, do they need to turn it into a Trauma Contest though? And there's the whole "it's okay to invade Faerghus because they suck and need to be civilised under the banner of Adrestia" sprinkled with "unification wars are portrayed as a good thing in history books, so Edelgard's invasion is totally okay", which is… gross. I honestly fail to find the proper words to express how much these takes irk me.

Don't worry anon,

2019 or 2023, you can see the same arguments being recycled again and again.

Yay for being environment friendly!

We still have the same twitter vocabulary (manpain? Dimitri being a white boy or a centrist ?) and the same trauma contest "I suffered more than you and your suffering isn't real so shut up".

Granted, some people are now more hardcore about Nabateans deserving to be genocided either because they were "white" or in "positions of power" - real people making "lol jokes" about real life events like WW2 and what if the State with one of the biggest civilian victim count started the war - and all sort of stuff that I didn't notice in 2019, but maybe it was because some people were still pretending to be civil, even if the redshiter "he shouldn't have babies else his babies will also be mentally ill like him!!!!", imo, always had his nauseabond mindset, but at least tried to play nice about it.

Now some people aren't even pretending anymore.

FWIW, it seems a majority of the fanbase grew tired of it, so whenever someone tries to start a new discourse thread on the main/feh subredshits they're either downvoted or ignored.

Their takes aren't taken seriously anymore (or as seriously as they were) and it might be thanks, in part, to FEH (they gave Rhea more screentime than she had in 2 games!), to Nopes (that gave more voice to the invaded parties, even if it ends with a fart) and also, ironically, to those same stans !

[teaveetamer]

People are exagerating. Sure Engage has a plot that is less complex than 3 houses, more light hearted and clearly cheesey but the lore around Sombron is pretty solid. He isn't like the Agarthans who themselves lacked a bit of in depth since Arval/Epimenides lore was never further explored. But compared to Grima and Anankos, Sombron is good damnit.

Ok this reply got long and maybe a bit off topic

Counter-intuitively, the fact that Engage has a much more solid, comprehensible plot and clearly defined lore and character motivations is what makes it less interesting to talk about. At least on a metatextual level.

There is no need to debate "why does Alear go to Firene first?" because we know. Alear goes to Firene first because they were the first to ask for help. There's no need to debate about "how much of the evil done in the game was Sombron's fault?" because we know. All of it.

And really, you can see this in, like, every fandom. How many people spent years talking about the plot of ATLA? Now how many people spent years talking about the plot of Voltron? I don't have numbers, but I've watched ATLA at least a hundred times and spent many years in fan-communities for it and I've hardly seen any extensive discussion about the plot. Meanwhile I've never even seen an episode of VLD but I can give you a rough overview of its plot just based on all of the discussions about it.

With everyone on the same page the only thing to debate is how well it was executed, and that's going to be down to personal taste 100% of the time. On some level we all know that so once you've said your piece there's really no reason to continue arguing about it.

Think of all of the most enduring Fire Emblem wank. It's like, Ike sexuality, Edeldiscourse, and ship wars. So something that was left intentionally vague and ambiguous because homophobia, something that was intentionally muddied by the developers for marketing the waifu purposes, and something that is either not discussed at all in canon or is left completely player-determinant with no canon confirmation.

Like honestly I think 3H just broke our sense of what is "normal" for discussion about this series. Awakening and Fates did see some discussion, but the transformative side of the fandom, at least IME of those games' fandoms, faaaaaaaar outweighed the metatextual side.

Some people liked them, some people didn't, some people explained their positions. The people who liked it stuck around to make art and fic and whatnot, and the people who didn't moved onto other things.

In addition to being a mess, I think 3H was also just kind of got trapped in its own feedback loop/death spiral because of circumstance. With previous games, for the most part, if you didn't like the game you played it, maybe talked about it for a little while, and then moved on. You know, you found another game or another show or another hobby or something that held your interest. 3H came out right before the pandemic, and if you played it and didn't like it... you were probably still talking about it, because what the fuck else were you doing in 2020 while you were trapped in your house with nothing to do and no new games or shows or media coming out? And now it's like everyone has wasted so much time talking about it that Sunk Cost Fallacy is out in full force.

I mean it's anecdotal but I felt like, despite all of the wank, 3H discourse was largely winding down by the time we were hitting January/February of 2020. I might've even observed as much back then, too.

Unfortunately it's another one of those things where I can't create an alternate reality where COVID didn't happen, or where 3H released on schedule in 2018 and Engage was our Pandemic Fire Emblem instead. But given trends in every other industry (e.g. most youtubers saw a huge influx of views in pandemic times that tapered off as people got back to their lives, Netflix saw a huge jump in subscriptions in pandemic times that tapered off as people got back to their lives, heck, even pets got adopted at record rates and then taken back to shelters at record rates after the pandemic) it'd be silly to assume it couldn't have happened to FE as well.

And I'm sure I'm going to get That Anon that insists that 3H is the most specialist game ever and I'm just butthurt because games I like better didn't sell as well or get as much fanfic or whatever. But we, like as a species, have a tendency to believe that when we (or something we like) succeeds it was based on merit, and when we (or something we like) fails it was based on circumstance. But the reality is that it's usually a little bit of both. If 3H was a completely dogshit game with no redeeming qualities then all the pandemics in the world probably couldn't have saved it, but there were no doubt circumstances in the game's favor. Because frankly, it's rather mediocre and unpolished in many aspects, so who knows if it would have garnered the audience it did without being in the right place at the right time.

breathes

Anyway if you ask me, I think what Engage really lacks is a solid, un-permadeathable side character or side characters to draw the audience in. Like, Fates had the siblings (especially Takumi) as strong supporting cast that were likable and sometimes tragic and involved in the plot throughout. Tellius had its Laguz royals, Soren, and Ranulf to create drama and intrigue outside of Ike. 3H had the lords, obviously, but also characters who weren't recruited could shuffle around the various plots and play different roles.

Engage treats pretty much every cast member besides Alear and Veyle as disposable, even the royals (I mean IIRC Timerra barely speaks after you're done with Solm and even Alfred, Diamant, and Ivy start getting pushed to the sidelines toward the end). Which means there's not really a lot of time to get invested in them before they disappear. Which is very much a problem with FE as a series and how it handles its death mechanic so I can't exactly blame Engage for it, but there were games that did it better in the series, too.

[raxistaicho]

Have you read the fanfiction 'Spoils of War' ? It's a post CF fic supposed to show the bad consequences of her revolution

I'm mixed on it, some of the worldbuilding is interesting, and regardless of edeldiscourse the aftermaths of a war will always bring complications no matter the victor. Edelgard's characterization sometimes veers dangerously close to puppy kicking evil, and it's silly to watch but at least she's not incompetent

Just wondering if you had any thoughts or counter arguments on it, feel free to ignore this if you dont want to read stuff that annoy you constantly (sometimes reading your blog im worried interacting too much with discourse/negativity could put a toll on your mental)

I'd never heard about it, no, and sadly my fanfic backlog is seriously packed, lol. I still need to finish Our Professor is Strange and A Matched Pair. Sadly, this fic sounds like it'd be pretty low on my list of priorities, too.

[agoddamn]

now im thinking of comparisons between madara and the like and edel. its like, theyre characters who are defined by their reaction to an injustice theyve faced. obsessed with seeing their vision of the world through. edel at least says she cares about the common people, but they both ultimately think their goal is worth the sacrifice of many. idk where im going with this. fictional villains is the same i guess

Well, every villain ever believes their goal is worth the sacrifice of many, right?

If it comes down to Madara vs Edelgard in particular tho...it may just be my personal bias as someone who is entirely fed up with Edeldiscourse, but I gotta respect Madara's conclusion that true happiness is impossible. I disagree with it from an academic/real-life practicality stance, but I think that his logic is ultimately sound. He's correct that you cannot possibly satisfy everyone and make everyone happy at once.

Whereas, Edelgard...this depends on your personal perception of Edelgard a bit. Do you believe that she's so naive that she's convinced herself and honestly believes that her way will solve everything? Or do you think that she's lying and just pushing forward the belief, "your life can be better!" as bait to advance her position, using that to manipulate people?

Me personally, I think that both Edelgard and Madara shy away from critical pieces of reality but Edelgard manages to be in an even worse spot. Madara is deluding himself as to what will make others happy, but he's at least accepted that it's a real challenge. Edelgard either thinks that it's easy or thinks that it's impossible and she's simply manipulating others with the concept.

[electricprincess96]

CoS sexist? Yeah sure it's not like there's a female archbishop that's leading the place. Homophobic? Yeah it's not like there's a female knight that simps for the female archbishop and can have a relationship with another female knight. Not to mention a devotee is canonically bisexual and not just for the player character. Anti-communist? So conquering other countries over revanchist nationalism, establishing a meritocracy where those with "merits" will survive while the weak will perish, and outing and killing off a minority race counts as communism? Good to know. /s Seriously that anon is probably a tankie.

Honestly none of it made sense. It was peak EdelDiscourse bingo at its finest.

I just want Engage to come out purely to have something new to talk about. Anything new to talk about really, Edel Discourse dried up within like the first year of 3Hs lifespan and yet its been kept alive for over 3 years. This things on life support and we're still beating this dead horse.

[foxartisans]

You know, I’ve always wondered why people claim AM is the route that “makes Edelgard look bad” and blame it for people not liking her. I honestly thought VW was when my opinion of her soured most, and ironically playing AM actually made me like her a little more after playing CF first. But, while that’s the case for me personally, it’s undeniable that there does seem to be a connection between those who play AM first and those who don’t like Edelgard.

Obviously there’s many reasons why people who play AM first might be more inclined to dislike Edelgard, and while for some people it may just be “she goes against Dimitri,” I think the actual answer is a little more complicated than that.

For one, AM comes closest to presenting multiple sides to Edelgard’s actions and has people actively question her. While there is still some of that “but why can’t we walk with Edelgard???”, it’s much less apparent here. The absence of her VW and SS death cutscene, especially, is a big point since that scene is designed to make players feel sorry for her, and it’ll be the last impression they have of her before learning about TWSITD. Final impressions are powerful; one sad cutscene about her wanting to talk with you is probably going to hold much more weight in someone’s head than a quick line about her using her citizens as shields in VW.

I also think AM is the route that shows the ramifications of war the most. It has the most consistently serious tone and is very much a story about how violence and war can destroy people, from the literal war to showing the effects of the violence and death of the Tragedy of Duscur on the Kingdom’s politics, the survivors, the aftermath and subsequent genocide of the Duscur people, etc. And, of course, it shows the dangers of “revenge” mentality. So it’s natural that people who play it first and pick up on those themes are less inclined to like someone who does everything that AM cautions against and causes violence herself.

Basically, AM is not written to be “biased against Edelgard.” In fact it has probably the most fair portrayal of her of all the routes. It’s written to have consistent theming, and it just so happens that those themes that players pick up on outline all the ramifications of what Edelgard is doing in ways that other routes do not.

[avalonblue12]

I just want to add in my two cents: I don’t think Three Hopes necessarily makes Edelgard look better or worse, but reinforces some important parts of her character.

Like the fact that she turned against TWSITD? Pretty cool! We now also have confirmation that she knowingly and willingly allied herself with these people who experimented on her family and countless others in Three Houses proper despite probably not needing to. Even if it was primarily Hubert’s idea she still went along with it.

Her appointing Duke Varley as head of the Southern Church and a puppet ruler that the Church tried to assassinate? Reinforces the fact that conquest was a big part of her goal and that she didn’t see the other two countries as legitimate. She very much forced the Kingdom into either letting her control them via puppet Archbishop or facing her in battle.

Don’t think this is necessarily good or bad either, but I love that the game is still establishing her as ruthless and self-determining while making her feel more independent of TWSITD. I actually really love this because it feels so... Holy Roman Empire of her, which had very similar power struggles historically.

Seriously, FE now has our very FIRST POPE FIGHT! Now we just need the Leicester Alliance to add in ONE more anti-Pope so we can simulate fantasy 1048 AD.

[nerii-oleander]

Let’s play “Spot the similarities between how he talks about why people hated Daenerys’ ending in GoT and how people react every time someone criticizes Edelgard” (Spoilers for Game of Thrones)

[archer3-13]

I remember people getting mad at Ruby for being legitematley upset and people calling her names because she dared to interput a yuri kiss scene... like euhuhuhh ?

i heard about that yeah, and well that does sound pretty insane given a lot of 'edeldiscourse' it sadly didnt surprise me to hear about it. and given those similarities it also would not surprise me if half or more of the people doing that were just dudebros who wanted to gawk at a lesbian couple but also pretend to be allies.

[vilkalizer]

I absolutely do not have a real horse in edeldiscourse, but just as lateral fact provision: Three Hopes confirms that the School of Sorcery requires a minimum amount of preexisting magical talent out of anyone they'll admit -- and apparently they're strict enough about this that Dimitri, Future King Of The Entire Country The School Is On, doesn't bother actually applying even though he was interested (as a child).

Not having a horse is probably the wisest decision, the fuckers bite and kick and they eat like a ton of hay every day and wait what were we talking about-

yeah so that does not look a lot like public education, nor like it's supposed to be public education.

[lochnessies]

me: wow i hope this post doesn’t start edeldiscourse it’s a fucking joke

notes: hehe bernie go buuuurrnnnn 🔥

[teaveetamer]

What is people's obsession with putting Seteth and Flayn in Crimson Flower? I saw a long ass post of people like "Crimson Flower Seteth who just wants to make a world safe for Flayn" BY JOINING A WOMAN WHO WANTS THEIR KIND KILLED OFF?! How is that making a world safe for Flayn? JFC Made worse by the post saying that Flayn tells Seteth that their kind merely EXISTING has brought pain on the world. That's just horrible to me and it makes me sick to see.

Oh I actually know the answer to this one!

See, if Crimson Flower is the bestest most rightest route, that means absolutely nothing bad can happen in it ever. Which means they have three major points to contend with.

1) Felix because he will never have a happy ending outside of Azure Moon. This is why we get all of these weird mental gymnastics insisting that Felix’s life is somehow better without Dimitri, despite every single one of his endings being objectively worse in every way compared to their Azure Moon variation.

2) Seteth and Flayn because they, unlike Rhea, Catherine, and Cyril are generally universally likable characters that cannot coexist with a Crimson Flower run. Crimson Flower always results in bad things for them (and no I don’t count “being allowed to live and being forced to go into hiding for potentially hundreds of years” as better than just dying).

This is why we get all of this dialogue about how “isn’t it so great that you can let them live!” just don’t talk about what happens to them afterwards details details... Or we get the classic “the game messed up their writing and they would totally side with Edelgard!” Just ignore the fact that Edelgard is hella racist and the only way they live is if Byleth lets them go.

3) The other two lords because you have to take them down in Crimson Flower despite their complete lack of aggression towards Edelgard. So somehow you have to blame something that isn’t Edelgard for their conflict.

Claude, of course, they deal with by pointing out that you can spare him, and by making him Edelgard’s “black friend”. The whole “omg it’s so tragic that Claude and Edelgard never talked because they would have totally agreed with each other and killed Rhea together!” and “Edelgard isn’t racist because she totally would have gotten along with Claude!” thing.

Dimitri they deal with by dismissing everything he’s about, because he’s just crazy. It’s not Edelgard’s fault she had to kill him, he’s just obsessed with her and crazy. It’s not Edelgard’s fault she had to invade his country, he teamed up with the crazy dragon lady and is super crazy. And craaaaaaazy people deserve to die, so that’s obviously not a mark against Edelgard’s character. Though there is the slightly rarer variation of “Edelgard convinced Dimitri that he was totes wrong and he magically got over his craaaazy and all three lords got together and murdered Rhea #SlayQueen”

Basically... Shoehorning Seteth and Flayn into Crimson Flower is some sort of grotesque “fix it” fic hell bent on making Crimson Flower ~perfect~ and disregarding absolutely everything about the game in the process.

[fantasyinvader]

It’s the holidays, so I think I’m going to be nice. It’s a week until Christmas, and until boxing day I’m not going to engage myself in the ongoing Edeldiscourse. This next week will be me talking about things other that Three Houses.

Happy No El everyone.

[agoddamn]

"I can’t believe that the thing that made /feg/ finally split was Heroes players getting fed up with the constant Edelgard circlejerk." now I'm curious, what was this about?

You know how nobody shuts the fuck up about Edelgard here? Same thing on 4chan except people call you "cuck" instead of "sweetie". People very literally could not manage to talk about anything Fire Emblem because every thread had upwards of 600 posts wasted on Edeldiscourse.

Eventually people got so done with it that Heroes, being the only current FE game aside from the Edelgard Oppression Simulator, splintered into its own general.

And this was a thread that weathered Awakening! It had handled the sudden influx of very different new fans just fine! It didn't break under Fateswank, it maintained congruity when SoV came out and old vs new flared up again, Kagacucks vs newfags, Awakeningbabbies and Echoesfetuses.

But people being physically unable to shut the fuck up about Edelgard successfully broke the thread.