#like do you expect Cain and Alva to sell without a lot of retconning and creating new characters for them?

[randomnameless]

I feel like FEH's nature as a gacha game ocasionally causes IS to have to twist certain characters around so they can better sell them to FEH's audience, like the Fallen Corrins; they're taken from the end of Chapter 5 of Fates, a chapter where they're stuck in their dragon form, have practically devolved into a feral animal who attacks anyone they see, and whose maximum speech capacity is to grunt and roar in pain/exertion/anger.

Since a character that's completely incapable of speaking would be less desirable for the average player than someone with actual voice lines and confessions, they wrote themselves into a corner and had to invent a weird version of Chapter 5!Corrin where they've already gone on their rampage and returned to normal after Azura calmed them down, but for some reason are stuck being forced to unwittingly use their draconic powers in exchange for severe pain and an urge to give in to that side of themselves again; none of that tracks with what actually happens in chapter 5, where they show no signs of struggling to control themselves after regaining consciouness, especially not to the extent the Fallen ones do, and are very quickly given a dragonstone by Azura to make sure they can't go berserk again and can control their dragon powers properly.

The Fallen Corrins explicitly say that their friends and family helped them regain control of themselves and that they're ashamed for hurting Azura, so unless these Corrins both hail from a world where their dragon blood is inexplicably significantly more powerful and possessive than it ever was in Fates proper AND were summoned into Askr during the ridiculously short time-frame between being told that they went berserk and being given the dragonstone to stop that from happening again, the entire concept is broken from the start; all because IS couldn't just market a mute angry dragon to their playerbase in their gacha game.

It's the same reason they did what they did with Fallen Linus; sure, a mindless mute zombie isn't the most interesting of characters, but there was no need to include that version of the character into FEH if IS already knew they wouldn't sell well without heavy changes to the source material in order to make them more marketable.

Hmm

I still note they made mute!Soren an unit lol

More seriously, as a rule of thumb, I'd prefer if FEH kept characterisations the character had in their original games even if, as you said, some alts definitely need to be... modified.

You mentionned the Fallen Corns, but in general, a lot of Fallen Heroes fall under that banner, Fallen Julia exists for the last half of the last chapter in FE4, Fallen Ike is an AU, Grima(sses) were created from scotch and glue, Fallen!Bilthis apparently cares about her kid (obviously an AU lol), etc etc...

I still am completely baffled at what they did with Fallen!Vigarde like sure, he was given lines from his zombie self in FE8, but the part where he goes "my power is to great for this vessel" or something is completely bonkers, Fomortiis only possesses one dude from that family, and that dude is Lyon. Remove Fomor-Lyon moving zombie!Vigarde's strings, and Vigarde is barely something more, uh, "sentient" than Monica (yes, the one from FE8 if you're wondering).

I ranted enough about how I fucking hated the FB between Lyon and his possessed self - maybe to sell Lyon as something more than a mere tool played and sacrificed by Fomortiis who preyed on his ambitions - and if that was supposed to sell me more on Lyon, then good job devs, FEH's Lyon is, imo, not FE8!Lyon thus not the character I care about.

Granted, I rant and rant and rant, but I'm also someone who's overjoyed when, saaay, FEH pisses on the source material when the source material sucks, like Julia has more characterisation in her base intro than in her entire game(s) because the devs see her as something else than a falchion with legs, and I've already ranted about Fodlan, but in general, IS seems to want to "correct" some stuff that came out wrong in earlier games (or piss on certain lolcalisations).

And it's always kind of difficult, with seasonal units, to come up with lines, like take Deghinsea for instance, all of his lines in the games are, hm, very serious and not light at all. And yet, he has a cute Halloween alt that would feel in-character, so to say, with the giant bald lizard we kill at the end of FE10.

But when it comes to creating a new unit from scratch (Altina? Ullr?) sometimes things work because the new thing created from scratch feels coherent with the world they're supposed to come from, and sometimes it's way more, uh, muddy (Elimine?). And you can bet I'll be overjoyed if mythic!Willy is released, or mythic!Indech/Macuil, even if it means the devs will have to invent a lot of things to make those characters feel like characters and not... pixels with new skills (but then they didn't care about that when they made Nerthuz...).

In the end, I think it's still the old discussion when talking about a fanwork, is something OOC or IC ?

And even if Heroes was developped by IS too, like the base games, sometimes the OOC comes out too clearly. Sometimes, everything works because the fanwork that is heroes works. It all depends on the twist IS uses to, as you said, sell characters.

I just hope that potential remakes won't use FEH as a base (with the twist they brought to characters) but use the... game being remade as a base, even if it clashes with the FEH characterisation.

Like, I'd hate it if a Sacred Stones remake characterises Eirika only as the naive princess depicted in the FE13 DLC or the "I want to be like my brother" brave alt, while removing the "Enough. Hold your tongue." part of her character.