ok actually fuck it i will do that but put it under a read more. if u do not like my opinions don't bother me about it i'm here for a good time this is JUST MY THOUGHTSTREAM.
for starters, i played this game trying to highest support EVERYONE and didn't recruit anyone so it wouldn't affect my perspective.
so all in all i liked the BL route a lot more than i thought i would. as my friends who like fe3h know, the fandom gets testy when you say u like a lord but honestly i never understood the notion of making the lord you like the most Ethically Sourced War Figurehead(tm) of the three.
the idea of dimitri/edelgard/claude needing to NOT have the label of imperialist / 'conqueror' is so strange to me bc then the alternative is like. oh nooo ... i am a ruler .... oh this extra land kind of just fell into my lap ... now i must be like Shakespeare's caesar and refuse the land three times and also frown VERY HARD while i accept it otherwise i will be fandom interpreted as a bad person and a war tyrant ...
but then i kind of had this moment where i was like ok and if they all are what then. i think every lord has good and bad qualities and if you play their route their route makes them very sympathetic to YOU but at the same time YES they're still the leader of a nation and they are at war and they are killing people and so Frowning so the homies know I think Invading is BAD seems ... idk. kind of stupid to me? babying the lords so that they can somehow seem ethically better for ultimately achieving 1 of 3 versions of the same ending ("now I am the final Lord of all of Fodlan") just makes them less interesting to me. like shit let them be imperial because they ARE and trying to write that part out is just silly. like oooo no they didn't SEIZE this land we just won a battle here and the other guys ran away and the villagers pledged to us but i don't want to INVADE or anything could you IMAGINE !!!! < -- how some of these scenes played out
ok now onto dimitri. i didn't expect to like him as much as i did. i don't think he was lying about being a kind person i think he was just a lil (a lot) mentally unstable as well.
intsys always has a talent for approaching very heavy topics and then only going a certain depth with it. dimitri's 'white saviorism' was part of it. like they sure wrote that in. but then wrote in dimitri and dedue talking about it and dimitri acknowledging the power dynamic but also deeply wishing it wasn't there and expressing the urge to be rid of it. like they wrote in a very ... ehhh trope but then wrote the character criticizing that very trope. i wouldn't call that good writing, but i also wouldn't fault the character for it.
the blue lions route doesn't get as heavy into politics as you almost wish it does; instead it focuses on the personal relationships of the house itself which i did find very compelling.
ingrid ... ima be so for real; i expected worse. that does not at all excuse her bias against dedue but once again intsys had her have a prejudice against duscurian people and then had her desperately seek the truth in order to change what she always knew and then later apologize which none of the other racist characters do.
i will NOT call good writing but just like w/ putting a power dynamic of white saviorism w/ dimitri and dedue only to have dimitri acknowledge and condemn it ... why did they do that? is there a better way they could have done those things? yeah probably. dedue def doesn't have to forgive her for any of that tho and neither does the player in my opinion i just think they were bold / odd for writing that
i wish they had made some random NPC racist instead. luckily ingrid is so boring of a character that i don't care about her either way and don't understand why she had so many shooters back in the day. she is neither interesting nor sexy so i don't get it. at least with hilda i know people ignore her racism because of her boobs. ingrid aint even got none of that goin on. i digress
moving on. based on the f4's lack of knowledge that the duscurian people were innocent, it seems like dimitri didn't tell them. i wonder why that is, when he took a duscurian vassl? my guess is that given rufus and cornelia's manipulation, when he first started saying the duscurian people were innocent they were quick to make it clear they would make it seem like he was crazy / didn't see what he saw. which would THEN make sense as to why dimitri kept that information so close to his chest and couldn't do anything with it until he either got proof (which he was seeking, albeit in a cuckoo way) or became king (which he couldn't do if they positioned him as crazy when he still lacked support). i found that kind of an interesting perspective
the character who surprised me the most was sylvain. i know that i have hated that guy for years but i actually quite like him now. it was his support with dedue that did it for me -- where he basically said he didn't gaf what anyone said about him talking to dedue, and that he thought the duscurian people were innocent. like ok sylvain you ate that one little thing. he's a raging misogynist but it's also a form of self destruction and i think when you send him to a war to die in both post ts and hopes he stops doing that so he can be fixed. by ME of course ..... (yes i picked him up) ....
i find the gautier family in general soooo cool. i liked them a lot. i could write a whole separate essay about them but i will spare you all that for now.
felix ... um ... ah ... eto .... i no longer think he was (intentionally) racist because i think he would have called anyone a dog for serving dimitri. HOWEVER, like with ingrid i don't understand why he has shooters in houses because that being said he is still INCREDIBLY annoying to me. i will admit hopes felix was a lot less of a cuntiferous bitch so he was more tolerable in hopes but in houses he's so fuckin rude for no reason and no i don't think his traumatic backstory is an excuse because everyone has one Susan
MERCEDES ........ her story is so deeply tragic but it's like HIDDEN behind an empire plotline but honestly i would say of the blue lions her and dimitri have the darkest pasts.
annette was cute. i liked that she was the only person felix couldn't be mean to i guess.
ashe we already knew i liked ashe so i don't have to expend a paragraph saying something that hasn't changed. i feel ashe's character stays the same personality wise from houses to hopes, but he's less tragic and deepened by hopes' plotline
i keep mentioning hopes because for the blue lions at least, hopes supplements the lack of a political plotline in houses. rather than just focus on the characters hopes actually deep dives into the issues in faerghus and deepens the knowledge you build in houses
the lore of faerghus, duscur, and sreng is very cool and compelling. very very fun to worldbuild in. all in all i found pretty much all of the characters more interesting or better than i originally thought. some surprised me in how much i liked them. others surprised me because i genuinely thought they were worse.
claude in the AM route. bro was straight up dumb and i can say that bc he is still my favorite lord. i like how in one route he's very calculating and is navigating a war between the empire and the kingdom and then in the AM route he's like hi. have my country. and my bow. goodbye!
the abovementioned did make me realize that in each route it will make the lord of that route look better and the other two look bad or incompetent in comparison -- so, to me at least, it solidified the idea that there is no "right" route, it's just 3 different perspectives. what's right in one country won't work in another due to lack of resources or social constraints but it doesn't mean the other country doesn't desire the same things.
one day i'll do the crimson flower route but for now i had a great time in Fire Emblem: Russian Ireland
