#though I still do love Dimitri and Rhea don't get me wrong lol

[butwhatifidothis]

For a change of pace I’m going to actually say something nice about a character, and that’s Claude (under the cut cuz it got a bit long and I remember!! that’s a fucking thing you can do lmaooo).

Like, there’s honestly a lot to this character that I find very striking and sadly gets overlooked in favor of either making him a complete joke or a complete/near complete sociopath. I like that Claude initially believes himself to be this beacon of hope to this silly land of Fodlan because of his view as an outsider... and then realizing and acknowledging he’s not, that while an outsider’s perspective takes away the bias of growing up steeped in certain ways it also leaves holes that he just can’t catch without someone showing him due to his ignorance of said culture. He thinks he has Cyril and Rhea pinned down to rights because of course he would, why wouldn’t he... and then he actually talks to them and is shown wrong, and he listens! With Cyril he likes being shown the truth even if it means it puts him and his previous beliefs in a nonperfect light! With Rhea he doesn’t just reject her words even though they blow a giant hole in what he thought of her for the vast majority of the game!

And the way his trust issues are handled, while I do think could have been dealt with better had the route focused on his character more, I still absolutely love it. It’s so subtle but consistent throughout pre ts/post ts VW, how often he “makes sure” the Golden Deer are by his side, how he always has to find the “right time” to reveal his plans to them because he genuinely thinks they won’t trust or believe in him, how he genuinely thought that Hilda and Judith would abandon him if things got too dangerous for them personally (in AM for Judith, Hilda for both CF and AM), how you never really get Claude’s full story anywhere even in the end or the S support (almost like that’s a big source of trauma for him and he’s a secretive guy because of that trauma that doesn’t magically stop being a thing because you wanna kiss him! Congrats IntSys for once you managed to get something kinda right!), how even something like you calling him a stalwart ally is responded with a wink and a deflection saying that you’re just flattering him (because you can’t actually believe he’s a good ally too, right?), but then you see him actually trust someone and oh. Oh man. The difference is night and day. How he pleads with Dimitri to stop fighting and join forces in both AM and VW despite Dimitri being off the fucking walls at the time, how he honestly believed that Dimitri would not only recover from his madness but still come to his aid in AM, hell even in CF he honestly believes that there’s no way Byleth would kill him despite them deliberately forcing the Alliance into the war by invading them, shown by his shock and hurt if you actually do - Claude puts his trust in few people but when he does he does and that’s honestly so indicative of how drastic his trust issues affect him.

You see that growth more blatantly in his supports as well - compare how worriedly Claude deflects Hilda’s observation about his knowledge of how Almyrans see the Gonerils pre ts to him inviting her to meet his parents post ts. Similar with Leonie, how he offers to take her to his homeland, something pre ts Claude would never dream of. 

And then there’s his empathy and compassion! Like often he’s very careless when it comes to trying to discover the truth yes, but when he sees there’s a line he’s going to cross if he does? He steps back, always. His supports with Marianne show this amazingly, with him thoughtlessly stepping on her insecurities, trying to apologize and make her feel better but failing, and then ending with him opening up to her about his own life - something he very, very rarely does - to make her feel less alone with her struggles. His ones with Flayn even say straight up that he dislike forcing secrets out of people, and when he says he’ll give up trying to get Flayn to talk herself... he does. Legitimately. Afterwards he just spitballs theories to her. Even when he sees he’s hitting close to home when he correctly guesses Flayn and Seteth’s relationship he doesn’t push farther than that despite the huge implications of what that means. And this “I don’t like to force secrets out of people” line is backed up by you losing support points with him if you try to dig at Flayn after Remire.

And we know that Claude doesn’t immediately think of the commonfolk in his dream via his supports with Cyril, but damn, when they’re in front of him, when they’re directly in his care? Claude arguably goes the farthest of the three lords to portect them. Mr. “Tactical Retreat” suddenly puts himself in direct danger by painting himself as a prime target for the Empire to attack in AM and CF. He involves none of the other houses and tell his men to retreat should things get dangerous for them (as shown in explore dialogue with CF!Lysithea and what he says if Judith and Hilda die in AM/CF in their respective maps). He calls in the Almyran army in CF and on the Kingdom army in AM - forces with trained soldiers ready to fight, not civilians desperate to live. And speaking of civilians, he evacuates all of Derdriu’s civilians and closes down entry into Derdriu. Even with him planning on retreating himself should things go badly that takes some nards to go through with given how easily things can go badly for him should just about anything go awry; he goes the distance for those under his care.

And also how readily he offers his support and understanding to the more emotionally abused characters. Look at his talk with Dimitri during Golden Deer’s Plea, back at his supports with Marianne, how he sympathizes with Rhea - someone he actively disliked/distrusted for most of the game - once he hears her story.

And yo, man, his backstory? Imma be real, very rarely do I get invested in “racism bad” storylines because so often they fall into “white man bad POC good” black-and-white (lol) mentality, but this? I actually felt this. So rarely is a mixed race person’s perspective shown in regards to racism since it’s more complicated than “whitey bad POC good”. No, both have people in them that are raised with beliefs that breed racism. They’re not evil people, they’re a result of the culture that raised them, and that raised those that raised them, and so on and so forth. He gets that his dream is unrealistic and that it’d take a very, very long time to implement even if it did happen and even then would face extreme backlash from people from both sides, but he believes in this dream. It’s what lets him face on Edelgard in CF despite the insignificant chance he has of winning if he does so, what pushed him to go beyond his familiar home of Almyra into the completely unknown Fodlan, what drives him to aim for Almyra’s throne despite his position as the youngest prince (aka his weak connection compared to his half-brothers).

And like, Claude shares with Rhea in that IntSys dropped the ball on their characters anyway, despite how much thought was put into them. Rhea is stripped of damn near any agency in post ts, non-CF routes and Claude has noticeably less direct attention given to his upbringing compared to Edelgard and Dimitri (and small things like no appearance from either of his parents’, no child portrait, stuff like that). This is most likely due to their routes basically being copy-pastes of each other so it had to be compatible with both characters so both characters had to suffer for it. But like, for what we got? I still love it.

[butwhatifidothis]

TEATG isn't some obscure fanfic that only a few people actually read; it's being actively updated and is, by AO3 statistics, one of the most popular 3H fanfics. It even has its own page on TV Tropes (the only other big ones I can think of are "An Eagle Among Lions" and "Wear Your Colours"). It's big enough to be critiqued.

I think there are a few more 3H fics on TVTropes but yeah, there aren't that many of them to be sure.

And it's like, I'm not asking for the fic to be taken down or anything drastic like that. It's just that there are so many things that are genuinely just bad that have become a core of the fic's structure: victim blaming, racism, misandry, benevolent sexism towards women, infantilization, manipulation, hypocrisy, imperialism, so many things that are just a part of the casual reading experience of this fic, and it seems like Cap'n and his audience just... don't notice any of it.

Like, when Ficleth is going on about how much being a mix of human and Nabatean is rotting her soul because she, to quote, "doesn't belong anywhere" and (per Chapter 58) "has to choose"? When any man that steps even slightly out of a woman's line gets assaulted? When the genocide survivors are groveling at the feet of the people who'd just tried to kill them because they, the genocide survivors, didn't do enough to help their almost-killers? When a grown ass woman who's lived the first 20-21 years of her life as a hardened mercenary gets consistently likened to a child? When almost all of the women are just broken flowers that can only be fixed by love? When "let me conquer you and if you don't you're to blame for the suffering I cause" is an unironic, genuine message the fic's narrative legitimately stands by?

Yeah that doesn't pass the vibe check.

Not to mention all of the things it gets objectively wrong. No, Byleth does not become more expressive on CF; they become the least expressive, even has it pointed out by Edelgard herself in her A support with them. No, Edelgard does not see herself as an ugly monster unworthy of company; literally nothing in the game supports that. No, Rhea wasn't "sacrificing Byleth" in her mind during the Holy Tomb; she thought she was just getting Sothis back her memories, hence her seeing Byleth as their own person when Sothis doesn't return. No, Marianne never thought her Crest was cursed because of the Church's teachings; she says herself that it was her father that told her about being wary of her Crest. No, Petra doesn't stop seeing herself as a hostage on CF; it is specifically on CF where she will still feel like a hostage, as she says in her CF-specific A support with Byleth.

Plus all of the "translation errors" that Cap'n """"""""""fixes"""""""""" in his fic - and all of the genuine mistakes that he conveniently leaves in. Ionius getting rid of the consort system entirely - wrong, he just wanted to get rid of the power given to the consort kin. Dimitri is far ruder in the JPN version - wrong, Cap'n just doesn't understand how the Japanese language works on a cultural level. Edelgard setting out to destroy the Crest Stones - a mistake he left in, the JPN version makes it clear that she planned on using them for herself. The "Unless such acts are committed under the will of the goddess" (or something along those lines) tenet - arguably one of the backbones as to why Woobiegard thinks Church Bad, and it's based on a translation error (a more accurate reading is "for no good reason").

All of this misinformation and not the best messages all crammed into one of the most popular 3H fics to date and which is also passed around as "basically canon" and must-read material to understand Edelgard. Yeah, not really gonna feel that bad for critiquing it lol, though I will again reiterate that me critiquing this fic here is not grounds for anyone to go to the fic and leave any unsavory comments