see the thing that gets me about the nekoma v. nohebi match is that when naoi is helping yaku on the side of the court, he tells him, "shibayama may look weak, but he's strong" to try and reassure him and yaku just goes, "i know. it's not him i'm worried about" in response
and whenever i read that i'm just like "!!!" because yaku never doubted shibayama! yaku ALWAYS believed in him, even when shibayama didn't believe in himself! yaku trusted that he would carry! what the fuck was naoi even on! why would he say that in the first place! yaku is presumably the one who spent the most time with shibayama, training him and helping him and teaching him to grow! to connect! to become part of the team! that's YAKU'S number one pupil! how could yaku not have any faith in him? how could yaku think, even for a second, that shibayama wouldn't pull through?
also, his admission that it was lev he was worried about? which, yeah, i'm pretty sure all of us already knew — if anyone was going to be a weak link, it would be the cocky overconfident first-year brat who talked hot shit without anything to show for it. (and i'm saying this as someone who loves lev a lot, mind you.)
but what worried yaku the most was that lev didn't understand 'connection'. and while yaku could more than make up for it with his own skill, it's crazy to think that lev didn't understand it while yaku, of all people, was on the court. lev didn't understand until shibayama stepped in! and that's the crazier part: yaku couldn't connect with lev, but shibayama did. yaku and lev worked fine, yeah, but that wasn't what lev needed to understand. and that's okay! sometimes all it takes is the right person with the right words, and everything falls into place. and i think that's an absolutely brilliant and incredibly lovely lesson on how connection is also about finding the different ways to make puzzle pieces fit instead of sanding down their edges, because everyone is different and that should be something we are all understanding of!!!!
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Hi, I was talking with some friends, and wanted some help double checking some 3H shenanigans and figured you'd be the best to ask. Do you know when in the game Ionius's whole wives situation got mentioned and what he did that got all the nobles to depose him? I remember something about concubines, but don't know where exactly in the game it was talked about to check and cite. Thank you very much if you're able to help!
I hope I can help then!
In Hubert and Hanneman's C support, it's more or less explained, by Hanneman that Ionius wanted to concentrate power on himself :
In your father's defense, the emperor was attempting to take power from the Seven Houses.
The emperor's reform was an attempt to concentrate power in the hands of the throne.
While Hubert presents it the other way :
He conspired with the ministers to usurp power from the emperor. And Lady Edelgard...
But both he and Hanneman later agree, in their B support, that Hubert is aware he is not very objective.
The Jp version gives a bit more insight on Hanneman's explanations, that were removed from the localised version for... well, I suppose, some reasons I still can't understand?
当時の陛下は、“七貴族”と呼ばれる 大貴族や外戚の特権を徐々に廃止し…
There's a mention of the consort kin, that is absent in the localised version.
This translation translated it as :
At that time, His Majesty was gradually abolishing the privileges of the consort kin and the ones referred to as “The Seven Aristocrats” – the great noble [families]
Ionius was thus trying to centralise power on himself, remove privileges and powers of the 7 and the consort kin.
Now, unlike some other settings, Ionius having consorts isn't that developped in Fodlan, so we don't have any clues, in canon, about what those privileges are. We can only surmise things here'n'there based on rl, I guess, as long as it doesn't contradict canon.
So, what could have been those consort kin privileges?
Let's take the Arundel example.
Anselma is wooed by Ionius, bears him a daughter, but doesn't become his official/legal/legitimate wife. She becomes his consort wife.
What is she going to do? She cannot marry someone else, Papa Arundel "lost" his daughter and cannot secure a good wedding for her (as is apparently the fate of Adrestian noblewomen?) because she's already one of Ionius's consort. Hell, given how their daughter isn't the next in line for the Imperial succession, Anselma's role is very shaky -
In Fates, we have the background concubine wars, where the goal was to have their kid become the heir (iirc?) so they would have a place by the King's side, or at least not be demoted as "extras" when the kid from another mother will become, well, king.
In Fodlan, from this line, we know the "kin" of the Imperial consorts had some "privileges" - a sort of crass way to say the Emperor gives them "stuff" so they will shut up if he "wooes" a daughter, relegates her as a baby maker and doesn't marry her, thus her "market value" drops and the resulting child is only an extra?
From the Libary, it's confirmed that :
House Arundel
Formerly a minor noble house of the Empire. As head of the house,
when Volkhard's younger sister became betrothed to Emperor Ionius IX,
Volkhard was granted the title of Lord Arundel. Having worked closely
with House Aegir, House Arundel is seen as one of the chief instigators
of the Insurrection of the Seven.
House Arundel became "important" when Anselma was wooed by Ionius and became his wife (consort wife though!).
So when Ionius wants to remove the consort kin privileges, aka giving some importance to the families of the women he "wooes", Arundel isn't super happy and spearheads the insurrection.
Now, why was that system created? Was it a way to prevent the Emperor from, say, having their cake and eating it, aka, seducing women, giving them kids and then throwing them (both?) away without strings attached? Or to make sure consort wife #7 will have a role somewhere, and her family will get a "compensation" for her loss?
Or worse, the "consort kin" privileges maybe also applied to the children of the consorts - they would have a lower rank compared to the children of the legitimate wife - but still be worth something?
The Adrestian Imperial family is sadly under utilised, so we don't a thing about what was the status of the consorts or their children (they just poof away in the game events, we never hear anything about Ionius's surviving consorts or his legitimate wife!) - but we know there used to be some sort of compensation (super dowry?) Ionius/the Emperor had to give to families of the women he screwed -
And from what the JP version of Hubert and Hanneman's support says, Ionius wanted to get rid of that.
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Something else that makes me sympathetic to Pharma's situation is like. Idk if there's an actual term for this or if someone smarter and more academic wrote it about some real life context that actually matters.
But, so we've already established among Pharma stans that the circumstances at Delphi were blackmail/torture with no real way out that wouldn't involve Pharma being responsible for people getting killed (either killing patients for the deal or having everyone die bc he failed his end of the deal).
And I feel like while "he's still in the wrong because he killed people" is part of it, another sort of implicit part is the idea that Pharma should've been willing to take more personal risk, maybe even risk dying? I mean, Ratchet does ask "why didn't you just detonate it near the DJD" (to which Pharma responds that he did try to get Sonic and Boom to do it, but they refused) so like
Idk I feel like we do have this social notion of martyrs as a very romantic ideal, people you can praise for being so brave and strong and righteous that they ended their own lives for their cause, while you can also coo about how sad and tragic it is that dying is what it took for them to do the right thing. But at the same time I feel like in reality, having an expectation that people become martyrs is kind of a toxic social norm bc like. It's very easy to demand that others sacrifice their lives for some Ultimate Moral Good when you yourself aren't experiencing the same hardships as they are. And ultimately it is kind of fucked up to tell someone "the moral thing you should've done was risk your life/kill yourself" because asking someone to pay their life to do the right thing is no small request. And sure, the typical response would be to call them a "coward" for caring more about saving their own skin instead of doing the right thing... but again, death is a really scary thing and self-preservation is a really strong instinct, so it kind of feels like having this binary view of "you're either a Brave Hero who sacrifices your life for everyone else or a Dirty Coward who's too scared of dying to do what's right" is kind of fucked up?
I guess the best way to describe it is that if someone willingly gives up their life as a sacrifice to others, it can be a noble thing because it's a choice they made willingly, but if it becomes a Moral Standard that in order to be a Good Person you have to be unafraid of throwing your life away and if you aren't willing to die you're a Cowardly Bad Person, that's when it becomes toxic.
Idk, I guess how this ties back to Pharma is that he was never in a position where he expected to make these kinds of moral decisions/ultimatums. He's a doctor who doesn't even get into combat, his job is to heal and not to kill, he's behind the front lines in a hospital that's supposed to be a safe, neutral place for him to heal people. So in the face of suddenly having a "murder people on behalf of me, or I murder everyone you swore to protect" ultimatum thrust upon him, I understand why Pharma wasn't """"""""""brave enough"""""""""" to "do the right thing" (whatever that would've been in the case of Delphi). You could argue that maybe a frontliner soldier accepted the burden of possibly dying for their cause and they've become used to it as someone who lives that reality every single day, but I feel like for Pharma, who's a doctor and a protected non-combatant (from what we can tell), that sort of risking of his life/living with the fact his life could be snuffed out any day isn't something he would've been prepared for at all.
And for me personally, from an outsider's perspective, it strikes me as kind of unethical to go "oh well he should've just detonated the bomb himself even if it killed him" bc again, there's a difference between witnessing a moral conundrum as a bystander versus being the person living with it and being under time pressure where it's do-or-die. Just as part of my personal standards, I feel like death is such a huge consequence/burden of someone's actions (literally you are no longer alive, any potential you had left is cut short, you cease to exist on this plane) that it feels rather callous to go "Well you should've just been willing to die for your beliefs if you really cared that much!!!"
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