#i'm just a bit wary from a realistic standpoint

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I don’t really see why everyone is so upset but the possible student/teacher(i’m assuming all the ‘students’ will be 18+ imo)it’s not like anybody pointed out any other power dynamics? Like any royal/General+any of their soldiers is as bad as teacher-student power dynamics wise if not worse. Your teacher doesn’t hold *that* much power over you meanwhile a royals could for sure have you executed if you don’t reciprocate? But everyone’s fine with those? Idk this might just be me missing something

I guess it’s just a sticky situation all around. Traditionally teacher/student relationships aren’t very good because there’s usually a significant power imbalance in terms of both age difference and the teacher being able to inflict some sort of payback on the student should things go badly. Which, for the student, can usually impact your future at the school quite negatively. Also, the student is then focusing on their romantic relationship with the teacher and not their studies. It’s a distraction. The fact Byleth seems to be the same age as everyone else (and presumably they’re all 18+ like you said, though I guess we’ll have to see) does help with at least part of it. But in any kind of educational setting, you definitely want your teacher to be unbiased. Romantic stuff means that they’re not being very unbiased in a pass/fail and favoritism sense, usually. Also they’re not a very good teacher if they’re mixing their job and personal life. (Again, speaking strictly from a “they’re all adults in the same age range” POV). (Also IRL, most of the time if you hear about student/teacher relationships, that situation often ends with the teacher needing to lose their job or be in jail, usually rightfully so. Granted, this is a video game and not real life, but a situation did happen in my hometown just recently that makes my gut reaction go “yikes” when I think of that sort of thing.) 

I think most of the “yikes” factor so far is we just don’t know the ages of everybody, and the school setting gives things more of a “high school” than “college” vibe at this point. If we can say definitively that nobody is underage when the game is released, that’s probably going to avert most of my “uh-oh” feelings about it. But from a realistic standpoint that’s still a conflict of interest. Which is usually against the rules for a reason.

I guess we’ll just have to see how the game handles it? I don’t want to get worked up about anything when I don’t actually know how the game is going to play out at this point. And yeah, you’re right that a General/Soldier dynamic does have the same kind of vibe! And those are often banned irl for similar reasons! I think because the FE games have always taken place in an army setting and they’ve been handled (usually) well, we the audience feel good about them in FE games. If those weren’t allowed, we usually wouldn’t have any S Ranks at all in FE. Also, sometimes your underling soldier is a dragon. So things are a little different in that context, lol. In contrast, we’ve never seen the school setting before, and students are usually at a huge disadvantage against teachers irl. (And again, usually the age thing, but we’ll see if that’s a factor here. Otherwise it’s just unprofessional). So that makes a lot of us wary at the prospect at this point.

tl;dr it’s the inherent power imbalance

Sidenote: I don’t really want to get into a debate with people or let my inbox become a space for this kind of debate/different people’s opinions to be posted nonstop, so if I get any other asks pertaining to this aspect of the game, I’ll probably just delete them automatically regardless of if I like what you have to say or not. Sorry! I just don’t want anything getting out of hand. And if the game handles S Ranks tastefully and well, I’ll be excited! I’m just a little wary right now but staying on the positive side. We won’t know until we know.