Problematic because: "byakuya is what happens when a rich boy enters a murder game and decides the real tragedy is that everyone else is poor and annoying. he spends a lot of the first game treating the other trapped students like idiots, obstacles, or future corpses instead of people he should maybe cooperate with. like, everyone is locked in a school where the only way out is to kill someone and get away with it, and byakuya’s first instinct is still “interesting. i will now be unbearable.” the big obvious thing is chapter 2, where he messes with chihiro’s body/crime scene to make it look like the serial killer genocide jack did it, partly because he wants to test everyone and make the trial more interesting for himself. so yes, he sees a classmate dead and decides this is a fun little logic exercise. he also exposes toko’s secret in the trial, keeps using her obsession with him when it benefits him, and generally treats everyone’s fear and grief like it’s beneath him. he gets better later, but early-game byakuya is very much a human trust fund with glasses and no bedside manner."
Propaganda: 1. "Byakuya is terrible at the start, but that’s what makes his arc fun. He walks into the killing game acting like he’s above everyone else, then has to slowly realise that being rich, clever, and smug doesn’t actually make him untouchable. I like that he doesn’t suddenly become nice in a fake way - he’s still rude, still arrogant, still Byakuya, but you can see him start taking the others more seriously and actually working with them instead of treating them like background characters in his personal survival story. He’s awful, but he’s useful awful, and sometimes that’s exactly what a cast needs."
2. "emotional range of a bank statement"
Problematic because: "She's one of those characters where you can absolutely argue she has a point, but the methods are still a lot. Fodlan’s Crest/nobility system is awful, the Church is hiding history, and Edelgard herself was tortured as a child by the same faction she later ends up using for her war. But she still starts a continent-wide war to force her reforms through, and she’s very much willing to decide that everyone else’s lives can be thrown into the fire if the world that comes out the other side is better. As the Flame Emperor, she hires bandits to attack the students early on, works with the Death Knight, raids the Holy Tomb for Crest Stones, and keeps a working alliance with Those Who Slither in the Dark, even though they’re the people behind some of the worst experimentation and political violence in the setting. She hates them and does plan to turn on them eventually, but “I’ll use the evil mole cult until I can afford not to” is still a pretty questionable political strategy. And depending on the route, she can become the person who drags the entire continent through five years of war, conquers territory, treats classmates and former friends as acceptable losses, and in Azure Moon pushes herself into an even more monstrous form rather than surrender. I love her, but she is not just “girlboss emperor who wants equality.”"
Propaganda: 1. "She’s one of the few characters where I can understand the argument and still be horrified by what she does with it. She’s right that Fodlan is rotten. Crests decide people’s worth, nobles inherit power they haven’t earned, the Church has shaped history around itself, and people like Edelgard and Lysithea are living proof that the system grinds children up when power wants something from them. But she takes a real injustice, responds with real conviction, and then makes herself the person who gets to decide what everyone else must endure for the future she wants. She lies, allies with monsters, starts a war, and keeps going even when the cost is horrific. She’s driven, wounded, brilliant, ruthless, and sometimes genuinely right."
2. "sorry but if you grow up being tortured into a political weapon, watch your siblings die, and then look around and see the church/nobility/crest system still being treated as basically fine, you are probably not going to become a chill reformist who writes polite letters. does that excuse everything? no. obviously no. she still starts the war, she still lies, she still uses people she knows are dangerous because she thinks she can beat them later. but i do think people flatten her when they act like she just woke up one day and chose conquest because she likes red capes. she’s trying to destroy the system that destroyed her. the tragedy is that she’s willing to destroy a lot of other people’s lives to do it."
3. "She is fascinating because every route makes you deal with a different version of her. On her own route, she’s the revolutionary you can understand and even support if you buy into the cost. On other routes, she’s the former classmate across the battlefield who has decided the war matters more than anyone’s personal feelings about it. She’s sympathetic, stubborn, terrifying, painfully young, and somehow both the person trying to end the Crest system and the person willing to use a faction of nightmare scientists to get there. Incredible character."
