#leonster bias

[randomnameless]

I mean… fire emblem shouldn't be taking in consideration when making points about representing real world issues or using it as a crutch for sociopolitical arguments irl. One of the best examples in this franchise of "culture bias" and "covet bigotry" is Fates, where Hoshido is too pure, too good, and Nohr is the bad, bad, evil barbaric nation. And this goes so far as to make birthright's story a more watered down version of blue units vs red units story from shadow dragon.

In 3H now the good, pure nation is Fodlan, and those who surround it are either filler to make the worldmap look prettier, or barbarians that like to hunt the good guys for sport (Almyra and Sreng, and possibly Dagda), with Brigid being a repetition of the noble savage trope. Just bc there's a poc guy that wants to unite people and get rid of prejudice in story, doesn't mean that the developpers agree to that or support that.

(Also, let's not talk about Hopes and how Claude's altruistic dream turns out to be unifying two different nations and make the cohabit by force with him as sole leader of both. AKA the typical fire emblem trope of uniting different countries under one ruler, something that's not progressive in the slightest)

Mmh,

Speaking on eggshells here because Fates isn't really my area of expertise, but basically, iirc you can thank Pat for scrubbing the worst of Hoshido!

Fates' best route is Revelation (rip izana) where both countries accept to set aside their differences to work together, meaning that, obviously, Hoshido wasn't only "blue unit land" against Nohr's "red units".

Even through Birthrout, you can catch here'n'there, even in the Pat version!, how Hoshido isn't roses'n'daisies, it's the land where Mikoto takes her niece "hostage" ffs as a measure against Corn's kidnapping (you can't tell me she never guessed Azura was Arete's kid!), where Ryoma (idk if you were the same anon as back then?) as the crown prince ignores the plight of the nohrians and why they were attacking Hoshido because life in Nohr sucks and they're starving (idk if, much like the Leonster/Thracia conflict, Hoshido refused to trade with them and let them starve instead), the fuckery with Mokushu and Shura's backstory, or Hoshido being Misogyny Land (tm).

Heck Birthrout has you march on Nohr's capital city iirc, and fight in the streets - it's in Birthrout that Corn's obsession with taking revenge/defeating Garon leads to Elise' death - so it's not the the "blue unit waltz on red unit lands, routs the enemy and calls a day".

So I don't think the Fates writers really wanted to push the "pure unproblematic land" card with Hoshido compared to Nohr, but rather depict them as both flawed - in different ways - and needing to work together.

Now, I wouldn't say the nations of Fodlan are good compared to the rest of the filler nations that make up this verse's world - after all it's Adrestia who starts hostilities against Dagda'n'Brigid and Adrestia who most recently flattened Brigid and made it its vassal! - but in a sense you're right calling them filler, the FE series in general don't spend a lot of time to depict nations in general, they're just "the place character X is from" and for all of its, hm, reknown writting, Fodlan is following the trend, Albinea is no less different than Cheve (wait, we have one map set in Cheve! kill that) so bar flavor text, they're effectively just "filler".

I disagree about Sreng and Almyra being filler though, if Sreng could be seen as a ref to the Thracia situation or Norh/Hoshido fight for ressources, Almyra?

Is basically Verdane all over again - with the dubious honor of having a Verdanite Lord who, unlike Jamke has some relevance to the plot bar his introduction, but most important, seems to appreciate and want to emulate/import the values/methods of his country to the cast/main plot.

Can you imagine FE4 where Jamke suggests to kidnap Deevtar to seduce lure Andrei in a trap and rekt him?

Of course not.

Just bc there's a poc guy that wants to unite people and get rid of prejudice in story, doesn't mean that the developpers agree to that or support that.

I guess they agreed with the "get rid of prejudice without dealing with the dragon in the room" idea, but the main issue I mentionned and talked about in the other anon reply was the how, and what, doylist wise, it conveys.

"I'll unite people and get rid of prejudice by busting open your country to my people who are as prejudiced as you supposedly are, and I will bring you new values"

That's... not a good way to bring people together lol.

Even in FE16 I found Claude and Almyra's writing a bit odd : why asking Timmy first to stop shunning Bob when Timmy started to avoid Bob because Bob keeps on stealing his lunch money? Shouldn't you ask Bob first to, uh, not be an ass?

In Nopes?

Bob ruins Timmy's house, hits Timmy's toddler sister in the face and still steals his lunch money - but now, Bob has the nerve to tell Timmy that he's doing this to "help" him.

Also, let's not talk about Hopes and how Claude's altruistic dream turns out to be unifying two different nations and make the cohabit by force with him as sole leader of both. AKA the typical fire emblem trope of uniting different countries under one ruler, something that's not progressive in the slightest

Hmmm,

I don't know if you played the older games (FE1 to FE10), but as far as I remember, bar Archanea verse, we have different rulers for each countries and the world is never an unified entity -

And even then, Marth doesn't unify the world by making people "cohabit by force", as forced as it is, everyone gives him their crown.

Sanaki doesn't tell Elincia to suck it as she annexes Crimea in FE10, ditto with Innes and Joshua, or Ced and Ares in Jugdral... I can see Leif's unification of Thracia falling under that criteria, but even then, it's not so much by force than Travant making suicide by cop because he wanted the peninsula to be united and understood he couldn't be the one to do it.

Uniting the continent by force is, on the contrary, what red emperors do, and in traditional FE games, red emperors are defeated.

To return to your main point :

I mean… fire emblem shouldn't be taking in consideration when making points about representing real world issues or using it as a crutch for sociopolitical arguments irl.

Of course, and I totally agree!

The FE series has always been, as its core, a series where a "rightful ruler" returns home to rule "rightfuly" and better than its predecessors, by acknowledging what they did wrong and what they can do now.

That being said, a game is never written in a vacuum : that's the doylist side of various discussions : "What were the devs thinking, was what their reasoning when they decided to make the game this way?"

In 2004, real world persons believed that putting Devdan in their game was okay.

You can give them some flak because different cultural references between Japan and the US world (hell, western world at this rate because damn if Devdan hit "international" racist stereotypes boxes!) - and yet, can you really suppose the devs wouldn't have known, in 2004, that those stereotypes are harmful to real life people and Devdan was basically an insult?

But Devdan was just a living (as much as a fictional character can be alive, but you catch my drift lol) stereotype, the issue was just with Devdan existing.

It was 2004, 15 years later, we expect of IS - not your backwater company! - to never ever fall in the same pits, right?

(well, we had FE13 with the Feroxi main characters who love to fight being dark skinned... so the Devdan dev might still have been there :/ )

FE Fodlan, let it be for design or even names, took some inspiration from RL (it was funny upon release to catch all those links and nods!), and while i appreciated the aesthetic, it was bound to create another "Devdan" issue.

You have Almyra, designed with several RL inspirations (they weren't being subtle with Claude's battalion called the Immortals lol), from design (Claude's clothes and braids!) to units (mounted archers!) to, well, names.

Okay, in itself, it's nothing as insulting as Devdan's existence. But taken with the context?

The devs wrote that Fodlan's aesthetic was supposed to be the Age of Discoveries (1500s and onwards?) so yes, during that Age, you had people who were prejudiced as fuck against people from other lands/different cultures.

But in 2019, we know that those prejudices were full of shit, and either fueled by ignorance, or just, the need to find a good "excuse" to get new lands/manpower/ressources.

Maybe the devs wanted to showcase this part of history : depict the characters being prejudiced against "foreigners" and have them later learn that their prejudice was unfounded !

But... they took the inverse path

Hilda's racist stereotypes? They're shown to be....

True through both games!

As you put it, Almyra are the "barbarians" who : attack the land the characters are from when they're at their weakest, for no reason than to get a good fight - even if it means dying which in turns create several orphans they don't give a fuck about - pillage and "rampage" in cities, let their allies die after accepting a "mutual support" alliance with them, and ultimately rave and scream at their "outdated" values and how you're going to bring them yours.

"You see those people who were derided as savages and barbarians back then in RL - and still are in some parts of the world because the early 2000s happened and in general because racism exists? - Well I'm going to base my fantasy "token barbarian country who is untrustworthy and backstabs everyone" based on them!"

:/

I know you can't compare tomatoes to watermelons, but the Baten Kaitos franchise also has a nation who's, more or less, full of assholes, racists and imperialist pieces of shit. But the devs in those games designed each island/country from scratch, there is no nation that immediately calls back to "RL country X or culture Y"!

you can make a farfetched point about the people wearing ceremonial masks and having totems being a mix of several RL inspirations or at least being a call back to them... but they're part of the most OP people of that universe!

So why? Why, doylist wise, FE Fodlan designed with care - you can't tell me those costumes and outfits were designed in 10 minutes! - Almyra and its characters... only to have them act out as what an english book from the 1780s depicted "oriental" people ?

Unlike Devdan, the racism doesn't ooze out from the way the characters/country was designed, but what role they fit in the story.

It's not a sociopolitical commentary or representing real world but more like another jab at IS for being as prejudiced against non western/japanese cultures and civilisations as they were when FE4 was released, which is problematic in 2019/2022.

(and then you have Square Enix giving us Hyzante in Triangle Strategy, which is even more in your face with the dubious parallels)

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So, one of the new Grandmaster Tactics Drills, ‘Beyond Destiny,’ literally has Finn and Leif dropping into the Yied to avert the massacre. Wow.

[gascon-en-exil]

Arvis and Edelgard are basically the same character, right? So why does one get rewarded for their actions and the other does not? Is it because Edelgard is playable, and bad endings can't happen?

It’s important to remember that the ending of Crimson Flower is roughly analogous to the ending of Gen 1 in FE4, the most triumphant moment in Arvis’s life. We know it’s all downhill for him from that point on, but with Edelgard we can only make inferences from the epilogue tapestry and character endings. Taking the game at face value seems to posit that everything works out perfectly for Edelgard and her new continental Empire, but the nods to Arvis are obvious enough such that fans familiar with this series’s general thesis on war can imagine plenty of ways that this situation can sour within the next generation. Of course Claude had other contingencies other than what Edelgard’s paralogue throws at you, of course there’d be a bunch of disgruntled Faerghus loyalists hungry for a revolution, of course the war against the Agarthans will be messy and protracted when the man leading it was working directly with them for over half a decade and is every bit as evil as they are, of course the people of Fòdlan aren’t going to just immediately accept the destruction of the church and the removal of its influence in their lives (see also: revolutionary France), and of course oldest nation in Fòdlan isn’t going to instantly modernize its bureaucracy when the people running it are almost entirely the children of the men they overthrew with plans for governmental reform that are vague at best. Even without a Loptous-esque cult worming its way into controlling the Empire (and hey, that’s kind of the Agarthans’ M.O. and they’ve already had one of their own in Edelgard’s inner circle for years) this thing is doomed to failure if you think about it for more than five minutes.

As for why players don’t get to see that...yeah, it’s protagonist bias pretty much. FE has never written a scenario where the playable cast has suffered a total, irreversible defeat other than the Battle of Belhalla, and that’s followed by a second half of the game dedicated to turning things around. The closest the series come other than that that I can think of would be Leif’s near-defeat when Bloom lays siege to Leonster in FE5 and the Dawn Brigade at the end of FE10’s Part 3, but in those cases they’re either saved by another protagonist at the last minute or there’s a perspective shift that lasts until there’s a common enemy for everyone to unite against. I genuinely can’t imagine a version of Crimson Flower where Edelgard is allowed to truly lose; the route’s already got tone problems all over the place, but that would utterly kill it.

[nobaettadr]

mun's ships for Leif?

ooc. 

i hope after camus mun’s post you’re not asking this because you feel the obligation to, anon. i’m just letting you know that at this point it may possibly start to come off sounding disingenuous to some people? but thank you for the ask, though, anyway.

canon.

of course, everyone in ferp who’s followed my previous thread with our ares or who has read some of my headcanons knows that my primary canon ship for leif is seliph/leif. i won’t really go into the details of it or why i ship it because we not only do we have a seliph, but they’re in a relationship in ferpverse and i don’t want to be inconsiderate. just know that i consider it a really good ship for leif’s character development and that i think that, from a personality standpoint, they click really well and would get each other.

moooving right along, i’ve mentioned them before, but my other canon ships for leif are leif/mareeta and leif/sara. the former i hc was definitely a strong crush pre-seliph, because i mean......it’s mareeta?? ( she could essentially proc aether before chrom made it cool eeyy ) there isn’t much about her character in the game but i think they’d be a cute pair that mutually supports and strengthens each other uvu

the latter is really sweet because she canonically spends the rest of her life in leif’s protection anyway, which means she lives at castle leonster. presumably they get to know each other better over time and i can see it definitely being something that develops naturally. i think he definitely saw her for the first time in-game and sort of went ‘whoa she’s pretty’ but distanced himself bc a. she sorta freaked him out and b. she’s been associated with the loptyrians and he still has a bias. i really like to think about love just developing as they talk more and learn more about each other, and i really like the arc it provides for leif, allowing him to overcome his biases towards the loptyr sect -- not that he still won’t think the stuff they did is evil, cause it is, but it’ll lessen the kneejerk ‘all loptyrians or people associated with them are Wrong’ attitude.

ferpverse.

the amount of leif ships i have genuinely considered. this boy needs love.... someone give it to him. 

and before someone gets on me with ‘you just want to ship him because seliph and ares are shipped and you don’t want to be left out’, just. removing seliph and ares from the picture entirely, leif is so affection-starved and needs so much love and support and affirmation anyway that i would want him to find that somewhere even if they weren’t a factor. seliph and ares being in a relationship exacerbates it, yes, because now he also feels left out of what he’d originally imagined to be a three-part friendship of equal standing ( whether this is true or justified or not, it’s how he feels ), and like he’s second-best again, the fall-back, the one people go to only when their first choice of company isn’t around.

it’s really important to me -- and to him -- that he has someone for whom he doesn’t feel like he’s second best or “the alternative”. it’s not just seliph and ares either; he feels this way about altena, about nanna, about finn ( who he’s coming to realize only really raised him out of responsibility and a promise to his father ), and it really colors his opinion of himself -- maybe i’m only worth being second-best after all, etc. that being said, i also realize that the probability of him actually finding a ship is......lmao. because it means tackling the seliph issue. it means finding a way for leif to move on from seliph and realize that he can love someone else -- perhaps differently, but just as much or possibly even more -- than he does seliph. it won’t be easy or a straight road, but it’s doable, and i think that development is as important for him as validation.

THAT BEING SAID, trash time. ( no intention of ship-pushing or strong-arming or expectation of reciprocation, just mun airing her thoughts, etc. )

i’ve thought about julius/leif, amazingly enough. it sounds impossible -- and it almost is -- but some part of me is like ‘ok but how incredible and fucking weird would it be if julius actually managed to learn from leif and grow up?? yeah, probably not going to happen. but it’s nuts enough to think about.

i’ve thought about leif/marth, because marth reminds him of seliph which yes starts out unhealthy but he’s also different from seliph and i can see leif coming to understand he’s his own person and finding feelings for him from that angle. leif loves his soft blues.

i’ve thought about leif/alm ( a shameful amount ). leif has so much to learn from alm -- confidence, leadership, self-assuredness. alm’s matter of fact, no-nonsense nature is something leif would appreciate and i think would really help reassure him. also they’re like literally the two most kickass little lords so y’know. muse may have contemplated what it’d be like to hold his hand once or twice. 

i’ve even spared a thought for leif/artur because he’s his type in guys HAHA leif likes cute, pretty boys.....heck, i even gave leif/ares a passing thought once for shiggles and then promptly laughed myself the fuck out of there because can you even imagine?? christ. ( on that note, why don’t we have more badass little girls who can kick his ass? he’d totally be into that. all the ones we do have are a lot older than him and leif isn’t really one to go for people who are a lot older than him HAH. )

[markoftheasphodel]

From @four-loose-screws (translation of FE4 novelization):

“And what should we do with Leif?”

“Finn changed his diaper earlier.”

“Wait, he’s even changing Leif’s diapers? Why don’t we just make him his wet nurse while we’re at it?”

“Ever since we ordered him to be Leif’s guard, he wants to do everything for him.”

As if on cue, Finn walked outside just then, carrying Leif.

“It looks like we’re just in time! We’re going to see your Mother and Father off, Lord Leif.” Finn said, then grabbed one of Leif’s little hands and waved it at his parents.

“What a surprise. So this is one of the great knights of Leonster?” Quan joked.

“Don’t say that! Finn’s doing his best!”

“I know, I know. Now let’s be off.”

LOL. Humor aside here (and I’ll point out this is the same adaptation in which Finn massacred a bunch of Agustrians single-handedly some chapters back), I’ve noticed that in multiple adaptations-- this and the Fujimori Nuts manga for a start-- Quan is, shall we say, uncomfortable with young men who don’t fully comply with gender norms. He was straight-out offended by Oifey’s maid outfit in the Fujimori manga and here he has some of the same dynamic; there and here, Ethlyn is kinder to Finn than Quan is. I dunno if that’s something that the authors of the various adaptations got out the nuances of FE4 itself or if they were both just playing off a character type common in the late 90s or what, but Quan’s own status as the (overly) supportive husband of a “tomboy” princess who breaks numerous gender norms makes this even more... layered. Def some subtle gender shit goin’ on with the Chalphys and the Leonster fam.

[markoftheasphodel]

Chapters: 1/? Fandom: Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu | Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Characters: Finn (Fire Emblem), Cian | Quan, Ethlyn (Fire Emblem), Glade (Fire Emblem), Aoife | Oifey, Dorias (Fire Emblem) Additional Tags: Coming of Age, Nonbinary Character, Any sketch thing implied or present in Jugdral canon is fair game, Other Additional Tags to Be Added Summary:

An orphaned child with an uncertain place in the world forges a self-identity at the intersection of dreams and duty.

(In a sense, I've been grappling with this story for years, ever since @runespoor7 answered a meme with something appropriate and perfect and YET made me consider the opposite. In a sense, it was sparked by pure spite over a handful of people being small-minded on Reddit and a scenario in a Forging Bonds event in FEH that ticked me off. And the Forging Bonds in question wasn’t even for Jugdral)

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Normally I don’t give a flying fuck about Røkkr Sieges ‘cause I hate the gameplay even more than I hate Tap Battles (RIP?) but I gotta say... Finn being Quan’s secret companion in this (along with Lucius for Serra) tickles my fancy.

So there.

[markoftheasphodel]

The basic story is this: Italy is a very young country made up of many very old kingdoms awkwardly stapled together to make a patchwork whole. Before 1861, these different kingdoms—Sardinia, Rome, Tuscany, Venice, Sicily (they were called different things at the time, but roughly correspond to those regions now)—those were, basically, different countries. Its citizens didn’t speak the same language, didn’t identify as countrymen, sometimes were even at war with each other. The country was unified over the period from around 1861 until World War I, and during that period, the wealthier northern parts of the newly-constructed Italy imposed unfair taxes and, basically, annexed the poorer southern parts. 

Thanks, Atlas Obscura, for laying out my “Leonster is totally Piedmont!” hypothesis for all to see :D

[markoftheasphodel]

These days I only dip into the FE subreddits to see if there’s anything interesting regarding characters in whom I am deeply invested in order to avoid seeing wank.

One recent character analysis of Quan mentioned in the comments that the commenter was surprised he was portrayed as such a “motor mouth” in Heroes but that seeing it laid out how impulsive and rash he can be, the rapid delivery made sense.

I thought that was a neat way of putting things, very much in keeping with my long-term reading that “Quan’s mouth writes checks his ass can’t cash.”

[markoftheasphodel]

Chapters: 2/? Fandom: Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu | Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War Rating: Mature Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Characters: Finn (Fire Emblem), Cian | Quan, Ethlyn (Fire Emblem), Glade (Fire Emblem), Aoife | Oifey, Dorias (Fire Emblem) Additional Tags: Coming of Age, Nonbinary Character, Any sketch thing implied or present in Jugdral canon is fair game, Other Additional Tags to Be Added Summary:

An orphaned child with an uncertain place in the world forges a self-identity at the intersection of dreams and duty.

[Finn's wish to become a knight in training is granted, but the path isn't exactly... prepared.]

[markoftheasphodel]

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Fire Emblem: Thracia 776, Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu | Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, Fire Emblem Series Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Cian | Quan/Ethlyn, Finn/Raquesis | Lachesis, Beowolf/Raquesis | Lachesis Characters: Finn (Fire Emblem), Cian | Quan, Ethlyn (Fire Emblem), Raquesis | Lachesis, Leif Faris Claus Additional Tags: Family Drama Summary:

Finn grows up in the space between polite fictions and the realities too *rude* for a well-brought-up person to embrace. It is, in a sense, what he's there for.

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Unfulfilled Dream: An Introduction to Finn and House Leonster

This is intended to assist fans of Three Houses, and specifically Blue Lions fans, in understanding what the hell FE old-timers are talking about when the names “Quan,” “Finn,” and “Leif” come up with regard to Dimitri and his retainers (and Dimitri/Dedue in particular). You may have encountered these characters in FE Heroes, but there’s a lot more stuff out there and it’s not all in one place, or even readily available in translation. So here goes.

So, as a starting point, Azure Moon route of Three Houses is heavily influenced by Thracia 776 (aka FE5) and the more familiar you are with FE5, the more evident the parallels/echoes are. But going backward from Azure Moon to its inspiration, or to Genealogy of the Holy War (FE4) which served as an inspiration for Three Houses itself, can be really confusing.

We have the two games, FE4 and FE5, both of them for the SNES, neither of them ever given a worldwide release. Both have modern, very good patches so if you want to play them, it’s a much better user experience than it used to be. We have two artbooks, Treasure for FE4 and Illustrated Works for FE5, both of them only partially translated via websites and translation blogs. We have developer notes and interviews. We have the appearances of these characters as Einherjar in Awakening. We have their modern appearances in Fire Emblem Heroes.  We have the modern run of Cipher cards as well as much older TCG cards. And finally, we have various manga and light novels, many of which have been fan-translated of late but also rather... dubious as “game canon.”

So, to grasp Quan, or Finn, or Leif, it’s a bit like being told “read 100 support conversations plus some DLC that never got translated,” right?

Here are the basics that might be of interest to Three Houses fans!

Quan is the prince of Leonster, a small but wealthy kingdom on the Thracian Peninsula, which juts eastward from the continent of Jugdral. He carries the Major Holy Blood (so, kind of like a Major Crest) of Njörun, one of the Twelve Crusaders who liberated Jugdral from an evil cult several generations before. His holy weapon is Gae Bolg, aka The Lance of Love and Sorrow, reputed to be cursed. Quan generally at war with his neighbor to the south, King Travant of Thracia (a poor nation), who also has Major Holy Blood and is a descendant of Dáinn, Njörun’s brother. Each of them wants to unite the Thracian peninsula and rule over the whole thing; despite an Irish naming scheme, Leonster was inspired by Italy and is supposed to be an elegant, fashionable place with a thriving middle class. Quan attended a fancy military academy in the center of the continent (the direct inspiration for Garreg Mach!) and has two close friends from other nations, Eldigan and Sigurd, also heirs to holy bloodlines. The three of them swear an oath to always have each others’ backs and Quan marries Sigurd’s sister Ethlyn, who has minor holy blood (like a minor crest but with no holy weapon access). They have two children, Altena and Leif.

Finn starts off as Quan’s page. I say “starts off” because FE4 and FE5 follow him over the course of twenty years. He’s the child of a noble house in Leonster, and when he was orphaned he was sent to the castle to be raised/educated. He’s not skilled at making friends but he does become Quan’s page and grows to think of Ethlyn as a big sister of sorts. When Quan and Ethlyn go to war across the continent to assist Sigurd, Finn wants to come along and they take him, even though he’s maybe fifteen and barely old enough to fight. Quan mentors Finn (which is something we see in FE4 itself), building his confidence up, telling Finn he’s the most promising knight of his generation, bequeathing Finn a special lance of his own, and ultimately entrusting Finn with guardianship of Quan’s son and heir, Leif. Finn in turn becomes utterly devoted to Quan and to Quan’s ambition of ruling all of Thracia.

A word about devotion. This is not “devotion” in the sense we’ve seen from Frederick or Jakob in recent FE games, where it’s performative and kind of amusing, with complicated tea rituals and recruiting slogans and whatnot. This is straight-up utter acceptance of someone else’s dreams and ambition as one’s own purpose in life. Hold that thought.

Anyway, Quan and Ethlyn are ambushed and killed by Travant shortly after Leif is born; every knight in their party is massacred in the Yied Desert. The rest of the continent is falling under the sway of the Grannvale Empire (Eldigan’s already dead, Sigurd dies shortly after Quan&Ethlyn), and Leonster is able to hold out for a couple of years before it falls to a one/two attack by Travant’s Thracian army and the Grannvale Empire. Finn, who’s been caring for Leif as his guard, escapes from the burning castle with Leif in his arms (Leif’s grandmother Queen Alfiona dies in the blaze; his grandfather King Kalf died shortly before on the battlefield, betrayed by allies).

The Yied Massacre and the Fall of Leonster are the Jugdrali psychological horror-show that parallel the Tragedy of Duscur’s impact on House Blaiddyd. Finn is devastated by the fact that his duty to Leif kept him from Quan&Ethlyn’s side during the massacre because dying with them would’ve been preferable to surviving them. He hasn’t recovered from that when Leonster falls in an inferno that traumatizes him for, as far as we can tell, the rest of his life. As Leif tells it, Finn then shut down emotionally to the point where he neither cries nor laughs. Of course, Leif himself is scarred by the memory of the burning castle, and that and the loss of his parents fuels his own rage and desire for revenge. Leif is also bothered by the fact that he only has minor holy blood from his parents, which is much less impressive than having two minor Crests because he can’t use any holy weapons. On the other hand, two types of minor holy blood don’t kill you.

(I think at this point many of y’all can see how these events are echoed in Azure Moon. The atrocity, the survivor’s guilt, the fallout on both a child prince with a heavy burden and his retainer who’s struggling with his own issues.)

After this, Finn has nothing aside from his duty to Leif, and as he sees it his duty to Leif is ultimately to see Leif placed on the throne of a unified Thracian peninsula as its sole king. He raises Leif and Leif’s companion Nanna/Jeanne (Jugdral is complicated) under a variety of harsh & tragic circumstances for the next thirteen years. Sometimes he has to forego meals to feed the kids. The people who assist him usually end up dead. At least once he gets betrayed by the citizens of the town they’re hiding in. And so on. These are not circumstances that really allow one to recover from trauma, and by the time Leif himself is fifteen years old and the game plot of Thracia 776 begins, Finn still doesn’t give a damn as to whether he lives or dies as long as he can see Leif made King of Thracia. This is where the portrayal of Finn in Fire Emblem Heroes comes from-- by this point he’s about thirty-four and he really hasn’t had a good day in his life since he was about nineteen.

One of the Cipher cards probably says it the best: His fallen master protected him, saw him through to adulthood, and entrusted him with an unfulfilled dream, and now Finn leads the way to a new era in his motherland! That complete, utter, unswerving dedication to Quan and his unfulfilled dream is what brings Finn to mind when discussing Dedue (cutscene after Gronder in Verdant Wind, anyone?) It’s not funny. It’s tragic. It’s kind of disturbing. Thracia 776 offers a lot of commentary on knights and knighthood-- not as savage as the discussions Felix has with his Blue Lions comrades, but pointed nonetheless-- and with Finn as the Jugdrali exemplar of A Knight, that criticism rebounds, directly or indirectly, on him. Knighthood is kind of effed up and so is Finn. 

Finn does get the opportunity to get his revenge on Travant in FE4, as both he and Leif have boss-battle conversations with Travant making it 100% clear they’re after revenge (Leif even speaks of killing Travant with his bare hands!). Travant’s death helps clear the way for Leif to take the throne of Thracia after the war... and with the dream at last fulfilled, Finn disappears, apparently into the Yied Desert where Quan and Ethlyn died. (He does come back three years later.) He’s got nothing else in his life. He’s seemingly not equipped to take over the usual veteran-knight role as some kind of advisor or general... or, after all that, he just WANTS to disappear for a while.

(You say, this is pretty TL;DR for “the basics”; I say, “I left a lot of stuff out, especially wrt shipping” because Jugdrali shipping is complicated.)

Anyway, so that’s the outline of the plot stuff. Note again, this takes more than twenty years to play out-- more than double the time elapsed between the Tragedy of Duscur and Dimitri’s final victory in Azure Moon. Jugdral is a long, long, hard slog for the characters that survive it.

Now, here’s where we get to the interpretive part. Finn’s devotion to Quan (and thence to Leif) and his trauma and self-abnegation are not up for debate. Hell, FE Heroes provides a pretty fair encapsulation of it. What Heroes also conveys is the sheer depth of his grief for Quan after fifteen, seventeen, twenty years... a grief that leads a number of fans, including me, to see a romantic subtext there. Maybe Quan, as a happily married man with two kids, wasn’t ever thinking of his page-turned-protege like that, but in between some interesting bits of dialogue in FE5 about Finn being “cold to women” and his current portrayal in Heroes, it does create the impression that at the very least Finn’s feelings for Quan went outside the ordinary bounds of the lord/retainer relationship. As Jugdral by its nature doesn’t lead to the sorts of paired endings we see in Three Houses, that’s really something fans have to experience for themselves. 

If that interests you, hopefully this essay has provided some pointers on where to find material. Have fun!

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Only had 15 orbs rolling into this banner and got Ethlyn off the final one!

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demoiselledefortune said: saaaaaame. I’ve been not enjoying this HoF as much as usual tbh

I thought the Sigurd/Eldigan/Quan/Lewyn HoF was the most fun I’ve had on one, tbh... though I was miffed Ethlyn wasn’t included. If they didn’t make all these ladies with natural sword prowess to be colorless healers, maybe they could ride with the boys in HoF... but no.

But yeah, having Reinhardt palling around with Leif and Finn is just... blech. No, buddy, you are NOT going to be allowed to redeem yourself, because you weren’t ever properly sorry.

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So, Leif is coming to Heroes again in his guise of “Unifier of Thracia.”

Been reading some meta/discussion on here, Reddit, and SF that hammers home to me that a lot of people haven’t played (or read) FE5 and so don’t know the full scope of Leif’s background... and also don’t know how FE5 & Leonster are echoed in FE16. Let’s take a little look at what House Leonster-- King Kalf, Prince Quan, and Leif-- and their partisans & retainers got up to in the name of unification, shall we?

1) Leonster exacerbated the poverty and famine of its southern neighbor Thracia via trade embargoes. This is the sort of situation that usually results in violence (see: Archanea Kingdom & Macedon) in Fire Emblem. This was also policy under Leif’s grandfather and by all accounts his dad Quan was on board with it.

2) House Leonster’s plan for resolving tension on the Thracian peninsula was via unification. Northern Thracia had three other ruling houses and Southern Thracia was ruled by a Crusader-lineage king (Travant). The games make it clear the Travant/Quan conflict wasn’t gonna end in diplomacy and the FE5 artbook makes it explicit the other houses of Northern Thracia weren’t much pleased with Quan’s antics. 

3) After Quan and Kalf died and Leonster fell, the House Leonster partisans responded by regrouping in Alster and plotting the assassination of the Empire’s new client king, Bloom. Assassination is murder. Retainers of House Leonster are canonically down with murder.

 4) Leif cherishes the idea of getting revenge on both Bloom and Travant. Bloody revenge. “This is what kept me alive all this time... I've lived for this alone: to choke the life from you with my bare hands!” says Leif as he meets Travant in battle for the first and last time. The only rebuke the game provides in FE4 is when Leif’s guardian Finn cautions him to not get killed in the process of executing his revenge on Bloom. Actually, their revenge, as Finn is 110% down with killing Travant. Finn is also 120% on board with forceful regime change, which is where Leif learned about it in the first place.

In short, House Leonster, despite being composed of vivid and sympathetic characters, is pretty damn morally nuanced for being the protagonist “good guys” in FE4 and FE5. The princes of Leonster and their retainers are A-OK with unification of the peninsula by force, up to and including the removal of the opposing house by regicide, and with straight-up murder if that’s what it takes to resolve a vendetta and/or remove obstacles to unification.

What makes this OK? Well, for one, the entire milieu of Jugdral in which just about everyone else is as bad or worse. Jugdral is a land in which executing child prisoners is the standard M.O. and merely kidnapping them makes one better than the times. House Leonster is juxtaposed with House Thracia, led by Travant, who openly admits his hands are bloodied and his soul is damned. So there’s context.

The other thing is that House Leonster and its supporters and allies pay dearly for this, again and again. Quan pays for his ambition with his life. If Leif ultimately becomes a good and wise king (The Sage-Lord) of the peninsula, it’s not because a sense of grievance and entitlement was instilled in him from infancy, it’s because of the hardships he suffered in a lifetime of exile, loss, and hard knocks. The handful of surviving Leonster partisans Leif has in his fold at the end of FE5 have lost just about everything save Leif himself and their honor (and in Xavier’s case, the honor itself is tarnished). Nobody’s unscathed by this generational conflict. 

TL;DR-- Leif’s role as “Unifier” is super-interesting and people really wanting to get deep in the weeds on FE16 and its moral shading need to take a long hard look at FE5.

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airlock said: on the flipside, I don’t know to what extent finn would have actually prevented leif from becoming a feral boar – it’d get him revenge on thracia faster, right? maybe the real point of difference there is that dimitri didn’t have enough august in his life – and this, despite all the contacts he has in the local church

Oh, sure, Gilbert bailing by itself didn’t put Dimitri’s head in a bad place. It was just One More Thing. Still, you can see from the difference between CF!Dimitri and the other versions the difference that one more support pillar can make in his life. Interesting point on Dimitri needing an “August” character tho!

As for feral!Leif, the ONE time we see Finn outright rebuke Leif (and implicitly criticize Quan in the bargain) it’s over Leif being reckless with his own life in pursuit of revenge on House Friege so no, I’m pretty sure Finn does not in fact want a feral prince running rampant over the peninsula. I mean, part of the whole way the Leonster gang dehumanize Thracians and the Verdanese is by calling them “savages” and animals, no?