#shambalalala

[tk-duveraun]

I finished!

FINALLY! All four routes are complete in FE:3H

 For anyone new here, the ground rules are thus:

1) We love OCs/Self-inserts/???

2) Canon is only what you can explicitly learn in game 

3) Fuck canon

Spoilers below! Spoilery ones! For all routes! I suggest you play in this order:

Blue Lions, Black Eagles, Your Decision Will Drastically Change the Story and then Golden Deer.

( Your Decision Will Drastically Change the Story starts from Black Eagles; have the C+ support conversation with Edelgard BEFORE starting Chapter 11, talk to her, and you’ll see the dialogue)

What the actual fuck is Hegemon Edelgard? From her dialogue just before the transformation, she was expecting it to come, like some blast of magic from the slithery boys, but what? 

I’ve been told that random what the actual fuck final bosses is de rigueur for Fire Emblem, but I am not used to this many plotholes and nonsensical just WHAT.

Also, what the fuck happened to Claude in the Church route? Where is my son? What did you do to my son?

Someone on reddit postulated a post-apocalyptic setting because of the Agarthans and their magitech (funfact “agarthan” is the unobtanium-esque word for people who moved under ground during the apocalypse). I can buy it from the explanation Rhea gives in GD about Nemesis and Slithery Boys.

Since Rhea collected the remaining Children of the Goddess after the massacre of Zanado and built up her forces in Enbarr before the final battle with Nemesis, I think we can assume that’s how the Cethleann, Cichol, Indech and Seiros Crests got into the blood lines.

Anyway.

Earth or something, but if you zoom in in Shambala it looks like Cyrillic writing

Sothis comes from Space(tm) 

Sothis makes her children and they chill, sharing their alien tech and maybe introducing magic or something

humans fuck everything up 

Slithery Boys go under ground

Sothis rebuilds the world 

Sothis passes the fuck out in the Holy Tomb (with magitech defenses) 

The Children of the Goddess live in Zanado to not fuck up the humans again 

Nemesis is picked up by Slithery Boys and steals the “remains” of Sothis

Slithery Boys make the SotC, put Sothis’ blood in Nemesis, slap him on the butt and tell him to slaughter everything in Zanado

Slithery Boys make “relic weapons” for the 10 Elites

Seiros collects Macuil, Seteth, Indech, Flayn, presumably also Flayn’s mum and they give their blood to the budding Imperial humans to power them up to fight the Slithery Boys

Seiros defeats Nemesis, but is too weak and without enough forces to take back the other weapons

Rhea designates the relic weapons as “holy artifacts” in hopes they won’t be used against the Church and to keep track of their locations

Why don’t the humans notice that the Archbishop literally never ages?

Flyan tells Byleth “It’s hard to remember after your first sleep.” This implies that CotG regularly do a long sleep kind of thing (see also Indech and Macuil being sleepy shits) so Rhea probably takes generational breaks to sleep and let the humans forget what she looked like.

This is also supported by the fact that Byleth’s mother was only attempt 12 in some 1100 years. Rhea is batshit trying to resurrect her mother, there’s no way there’d be that few attempts in that timespan if she wasn’t sleeping. You could maybe guess that these attempts lived a little longer than humans so she waited ~100 years for one to die before trying again with the Crest Stone, but naps makes more sense. (Note: Rhea is what we’ll call Fantasy Insane, not to be confused or conflated with real life neurodivergence or mental illness)

If Rhea’s story of the Zanado Massacre is correct, why does Edelgard never mention it? She acts like everything Rhea’s done with the Church and over history is all just to grab power.

I see two possible options:

1) She is an incredibly damaged, severely tortured young woman who either forgot about it or believed that Rhea was lying when she told the first Emperor

2) The Slithery Boys have spent generations tweaking the story that the Emperors pass down in order to fit their own narrative

I think it’s more a case of unreliable narrator to create a “villain route” that has a sympathetic leader. Everything about Edelgard’s route is slap dash. Fewer anime cut scenes, worse writing, it’s markedly shorter, etc.

Not to say there isn’t an astonishing amount of overlap between Church and GD, but anyway.

tl;dr: Claude is the best and I’ve already got three damn OCs for this godforsaken game.

ps. Felix’s romance scene was much better than I was expecting, though I still think Felix/Sylvain is where it’s at. Is Felix/Sylvain/Ingrid OT3 too weird with Glenn? It’s too weird.