#lorenz always insists he's the correct choice for a leader of leicester and i am inclined to fucking agree

[dmclemblems]

I'm torn re: Edelgard's AG fate. I agree with you that it's absolutely what she deserves. She's essentially lost everything. It's almost as bad as death, and some might say it's worse even tho she's alive. And yet as you said, it prevents her from taking actual responsibility over her actions. Losing her memory and free will as a puppet is a consequence sure, but it's not a consequence of being a dictator/conqueror. It's only a consequence of opposing Thales. So she still gets off too easily.

I'm definitely torn about it because I think it's a mixed bag. In a way she (the personality we know) is kind of... dead? Which that stops the war, that stops innocents from dying, etc etc... but it doesn't make things better for the people who died. If this whole thing didn't happen to her then she might have actually had to take responsibility.

One of the biggest issues I take with the way she gets handled in both games is that, between all of Hopes and CF, she never has to take responsibility for what she does. Whether you like her or not, it's not fair that she doesn't have to take responsibility for her actions but everyone else does. Claude does nothing wrong in Houses (and I mean like, literally - he doesn't do anything or cause anything that he needs to take responsibility for), but yet he can literally die for betraying Edelgard in Hopes. If you recruited some of his allies, they all get mad at him and fight him for... betraying Edelgard. He gets killed for fighting back against the person who started the war and dies thinking of how he was trying to do the best he could but now look what he did to everyone (? seems more like they wanted to write him as a villain or something here even though the only one who suffered for it was him). The second he goes against her it's like oop gotta off him.

Even in AM, Rhea steps down as Archbishop and... goes into isolation. While I agree some of her measures were extreme, she didn't do those things to innocent people. While I think the western church's men who said "this isn't what they were told would happen" deserved to share their side and get a fair trial, it was at least her executing, you know, people who brought about harm to others/attacked the Church. It wasn't just executing some random guy off the street because he didn't like the Crest system or something. Isolation however is just too much and I don't think she deserved that, and it's part of the reason I feel like there's too much Edelgard bias in the writing.

That, in turn, loops back around to her fate in AG. That kind of bias kept her from having to take responsibility. While Seteth didn't really have any responsibility to take, hell, even in Houses he turns himself around and explains himself to Byleth after Flayn is saved (regarding why he didn't trust Byleth and was on edge around them). Every character that does anything wrong has to either make up for it, try to, die for it, or claim they have to right their wrongs that they didn't even cause (ex. Dimitri claiming he "started a war with the Empire" in Hopes which LITERALLY never happened and seemed like a writing excuse to prop up Edelgard as "not the villain").

In a way this is cruel for Edelgard because now she's lost everything. However, it's also true that, if my theory has any weight in canon, her entire war self might have been a persona created by Thales to begin with. He might have manipulated/erased her memories about Dimitri and created a different personality within her so that she'd hate the Church and go to war with them, so for Thales he can just watch his enemies fight each other. That means she might have been "reset" in a way with the dark magic removed from her, meaning she's not actually this horrible war starter etc etc.

While I'd agree that a twelve year old girl doesn't deserve to be killed or given punishment for if Thales was actually the one who created that personality, therein lies the problem. In the event that this wasn't the plan for Houses and the Edelgard we know is just... her as is, this is a cheap way to get her out of having any repercussions in Hopes. She either regresses to being twelve through losing all her memories of willingly starting war, OR her personality wasn't real the whole time.

If her personality was real, yeah, this is like a cruel twist of fate for her to lose everything, even her memories of who she was. I think she deserves something cruel to happen to her for the cruel things she did. Even with Dimitri, he technically had cruel things happen to him (physically and mentally), and he claims that over the five years in Houses he did cruel(? at least bad/not good) things. He still has some form of punishment. If Edelgard's fate in AG could be likened to if she died, sure I can tolerate that... though I still wish she had to take responsibility for what she did, even if that means rotting in a damn cell. Hell, even if she was pulled out of a cell years later only to be shown the happy world Dimitri, Claude, Seteth and Byleth (if it's Houses) created without her.

If the writers gave her proper repercussions, I wouldn't feel as strongly about what I think she deserves. The fact that the writers just want to help her evade what she did is frustrating. I don't like Hopes Claude in the second half but I don't think he deserved to die for what he did in non-Byleth SB. That, too, is an example of them giving repercussions that are more extreme than the person deserves. Meanwhile Edelgard is treated like a wonderful person who has no reason to be punished for her actions even in the routes she loses in in Hopes.

What I want from this game is for it to be written in a fair way to all the characters. I also don't like the whole concept of forced unification and war being the answer to everything, so that on top of her getting away with it at no cost is... annoying.