Oh no it's gary

i will be the demise of your sanity (I write fanfic 💀 )

[sandycookie]

Info, links, rules, etc.

Hiya, it would seem you have stumbled upon this trash heap of a blog. I humbly welcome you to my abode. All you need to know is that I’m a random person on the internet who happens to write every so often, and is a complete stan for the Jugdral games in the Fire Emblem series. 

Currently writing: Paint Over Thinning Ink

Rules! 

Masterlist

Ao3

[circumgutter]

[fozmeadows]

I am in HYSTERICS

[sandycookie]

Hiatus (take two)

Hey y’all. Just wanted to announce that I’ve decided to put the fic on hiatus. I’m not entirely sure when ch19 is going to be released

A lot has been happening, and in general, I’ve just been writing a whole lot less these days. It’s a good way for me to process things, but nowadays I’m just kinda trying to do some more hands on sort of things lol. there’s also the fact that I’m not as into twst as I was three years ago (my god it’s been 3 years since that first chapter—). I haven’t really been keeping up with it these days, and as a whole my interest waned. I honestly aren’t very sure if it will come back; maybe when a Rook event comes out? I would never miss out on my king. Anyways, yeah. I’m still on the fence on if I want to just proceed with my plan for an early ending, or if I do want to try and continue with things. Anyways, thank you for reading! Sorry for the lousy holiday gift from me, I suppose, but I think I should’ve announced this sooner rather than later.

[goats-ablaze]

woke up today and realized that tumblr entirely killed fuck ya life bing bong so here ya go again

[thereisselfpreservation]

[sandycookie]

yes, I do believe twst has Christmas hallmark movies, except they’re for Halloween since that’s the biggest holiday

[yumenosakiacademy]

Ep 4 || Lilia Vanrouge

[enki2]

[petluck]

insane news, today a man in my city stole a bus and just. kept making all the stops.

[petluck]

the Assman rides again

[petluck]

an upstanding citizen of our great city

[sandycookie]

lobotomizing myself skdjdjdjjddjjss

[sandycookie]

twst anime was insane and got my brain tickled. I feared French Jotaro a lot too tbh. Overall everyone is so GOOFY I love it

[sandycookie]

still drafting ch19, and I’ve been fairly busy with life atm, as well as having gotten some old fandom interests reignited in me, so I’ve kinda been uninterested in twst for a bit (also prob has to do with having been so fixated on it for the better part of like…a year or two, lol). The anime is coming out tho so I can see myself getting hyper fixated again so maybe ch19 will come out early November? Idk; but as I’ve said before, chapter updates are going to be a lot slower than before. With that said, with ch19 I still would like to do a commission raffle like I did before, and maybe throw in a QnA bc why not lmao.

in some actual fic updates tho, I did write up chapter summaries for all the existing chapters! I’ve been finished with them for a while and aiming to release them with ch19, but since it’s becoming clear to me ch19 isn’t coming out soon, I’m going to just release them today; maybe in an hour or so, depends on when this couch and blankets decide to stop being so comfy…

[comfymoth]

i think the internet should transition from being so usa-centric to being brazil-centric. not cos i have any personal connection or bias towards brazil, i just think if anyone could possibly usurp america’s cultural dominance online it’d be them

[comfymoth]

“man i just woke up where are all these notifs coming fro—“

[thatweirdnoise]

[leslekieuart]

do y'all remember when they found all that tf art in Osamu Tezuka's drawer post-mortem because I think about it often

anyway keep chasing your bliss and draw weird shit, god knows we need that right now

[pathetic-gamer]

Fashion in Fódlan part iii: yet another very long and entirely unsolicited FE3H costume design analysis

This time, we're focusing specifically on the placement of quivers, because that's a very normal thing to get caught up in and I'm very normal.

[Part 1, focused on money and social aspects in all three countries; Part 2, focused on political aspects between church/empire; bonus part 2.5, regarding a crown]

This post came about because of this video from @blumineck (who posts lots of cool stuff btw, go check out his blog), which talks about quiver types and their purposes, pros and cons, etc.

Shall we?

So, while watching that video, I remembered for whatever reason that Cyril has a back quiver, but Ashe has a hip quiver.

The reason my brain went there was that I immediately thought "Oh, Cyril actually does more hunting and physical labor than Ashe, and as demonstrated in the video, a back quiver is more practical for him. That makes sense - great attention to detail, FE3H character designers!"

I figured that would likely carry over to other characters, specifically our other canonically talented hunters. Therefore, Leonie and Petra should also have back quivers, yes?

Wrong! Leonie has a hip quiver, and Petra has no quiver.

That's odd, so let's look into this a little deeper. Here are the other canon archers:

Shamir

Claude

Ignatz

Bernadetta

You will note that Ignatz and Claude don't have quivers in their outfits, but Claude does wear a hip quiver in an animated 2d cutscene. Ignatz we've already determined is a bit if an anarchist, so nothing interesting there - he will be benched from the discussion.

The really notable thing here, which I'm sure you've picked up on, is that everyone except Cyril uses hip quivers.

BUT WAIT!

Let's consider Claude again. Check out his final class, Barbarossa:

What's that I spy? A back quiver???

Surely you can make the connection easily: Our two token Almyrans are the *only* people with back quivers.

So, why is that?

Let's return to the others, briefly. What do Ashe, Leonie, and Bernadetta all have in common? Their skills set them up for becoming bow knights. Shamir just wants to remain a sniper, but can go that direction as well.

Mounted archery almost always uses hip quivers, according to my research (*cough cough duck duck go image search "mounted archery"*), so it makes sense that all of our innate archers have those hip quivers.

What makes Claude and Cyril different? Well, thanks to Almyran typecasting, they are both placed on wyverns, not horses! That means significantly more mobility than the bow knights (bow knights aren't doing loop-de-loops), so they need their quivers to be more secure! Boom, mystery solved!

...or is it?

Of course not. It always goes deeper.

Tell me, history buffs: Throughout world history, who are among the most famous horse archers? What group of people most immediately comes to mind? Among whom, exactly, were armies of mounted archers a defining feature?

If you said Mongolians, you were right.

And how, pray tell, do Mongolian horseback archers wear their quivers?

ON THEIR BACKS. CHECKMATE.

(I tried to find name of this archer to credit her but couldn't track it down. She was the winner of a competition that took place during a festival in Inner Mongolia, China at some point in the last like 15 years, so incredibly skilled. Wish I could point y'all in her direction for more cool stuff!)

[blumineck]

In archery, as in life, it's rarely as clear cut as 'this is the best', but we all have our preferences!

(Btw, if you want more details on the specific quivers that I use, I'll be chatting about them on Patreon this week)

[pathetic-gamer]

hi! your fashion in fodlan analyses are so lovely to read! i didn't even notice the similarities between byleth, rhea and edelgard's crowns before you pointed it out. and speaking of crowns, you might wanna take this with a grain of salt bc it's from... feh but did you know about the adrestian crown accessory's descriptions? apparently it's "made in the image of the adrestian empire's guardian" and "of the same design as the crowns worn by adrestian emperors of old." i thought that fact might interest you!

Ooh, that does interest me! I haven't played much FEH, so I don't have that accessory, so I hadn't seen it before.

For the folks at home, here's Part 1 of the series anon is referring to

I looked them up on the wiki, and it's interesting that the plain Horned Crown is "made in the image of" the guardian, because that implies that the Immaculate One is the guardian. I don't think we've seen that concept actually expressed in fe3h, but I like it a lot.

If the gold one is indeed the style of previous crowns (which of course means I'm wrong about Edelgard making her own), then that means the Emperor's crown is actually more closely related to the Goddess, now via the Immaculate One - who iirc is called a messenger of the Goddess - instead of through the institution of the church as a mediator. That could also be interesting as a symbol of the "true history" that is passed down through the Hresvelg family line.

There is still the fact that the crown from El's coronation doesn't match the other, so I'm wondering if it's a special symbolic one used for ceremonial purposes?

Either way, thank you for pointing this out!

[pathetic-gamer]

I'm really surprised yall liked that costume breakdown so much! Glad it wasn't a waste of time lol By popular demand, I'm back with more unnecessary analysis, this time of the lettuce fam (and the church as a whole).

I bring you:

Fashion in Fódlan part ii: a very long, still not comprehensive, but this time solicited analysis

FYI this post is way more detailed and is significantly more focused on the relationship between the Adrestian Empire and the Church of Seiros, especially relating to politics and power, rather than the clothes.

The Curch of Seiros: tradition!

The reason I didn't originally include these babies is simply that the pool seems at first to be very small. Besides, Flayn is in an academy uniform, and Sothis is a god, so there's really only two outfits and it's kinda hard to get a real feel for it overall.

Fortunately, I Am Very Smart (jk) and was able to gather a sizable amount of material by broadening my horizons a little

Statues from left to right: Macuil, Cichol, Indech, Cethleann

Trends:

The very first thing you will notice is that, unsurprisingly, there are a lot of similarities with the generic clergy outfits, and the Saints are just in regular class uniforms rather than unique clothes. You can actually see a sort of evolution from Sothis's dress (the og) to the generic female bishop and priest, and a sort of similar silhouette between the male monk and Seteth:

Also, Rhea, dead Sitri, and the mural version of Sothis are all wearing the same white dress but with decreasing amounts of embellishments :) dragon ladies :)

Flayn's version of the academy uniform actually keeps a couple of these influences, as well, primarily the center-front embellishments and the dropped shoulder bows.

Enlightened!Byleth, on the other hand, is a bizarre hodgepodge of stuff that doesn't immediately seem related to anything else.

The Saints being depicted in generic clothing makes sense, because the statues were probably erected after they had all "died." It is odd that Cichol, despite being a wyvern lord in game canon and a formidable warrior in CoS canon (whoa, so meta), is shown in the male bishop uniform in his statue. I think it's because they needed to differentiate between Cichol and Emperor Wilhelm.

The statue in the imperial palace of Wilhelm Paul Hresvelg, the first emperor, is in full armor, but the statue of Cichol is not - the years Cichol lived in Enbarr may have overlapped with Wilhelm's rule, so Cichol, despite being as much (or more) of a warrior as Wilhelm, held a more spiritually significant position. His association with Cethleann likely reinforced that, thus leading to the badass warrior-priest depiction.

*pointing at myself in the mirror* don't draw warrior-priest seteth on a wyvern don't draw warrior-priest seteth on a wyvern don't dr

"But pg," you say, "of course they all look like the monks and priests, they're literally the church. What does this have to do with the empire?"

Analysis:

The church and the empire grew hand-in-hand for a very, very long time, and that shows in lots of ways, including the prevelance of magic in the empire. I actually believe that the way the clergy dresses now is actually somewhat similar to how a lot of people used to dress, or at least influenced it. (Note that TWSITD, a group that has been around for longer than the empire and is separate from the church entirely, still wears their variations of clergy clothes, and Arval/Epimenides even have a similar silhouette to Sothis. That suggests that the styles are indeed very old.)

Now that more than 1000 years have passed, the Empire has continued to develop new styles and fashions, while the church, being a church, has maintained their ceremonial outfits. That being said, some similarities remain. I want to take a look at two of them:

Most units have outfits that draw from their canon classes, so that's not unusual, and all the magic classes are clearly influenced by the church, but what we should consider here is why the fashion aesthetics lean toward the faith classes when these two characters in particular are clearly specialized in reason and dislike the church.

Dorothea's dress is elegant and fashionable and also happens to bear a shocking resemblance to a generic priest outfit (outlined in red the points of interest on Dorothea). The sleeves are also similar to the mage outfit, of course, but it's the cut of the skirt, the thing at her neck, and the waistband that make it a priest.

For Lord Arundel, I'm mostly saying the general *shape* of the thing is similar, but there's also the deep round collar and the strong vertical lines, but only on one side instead of both.

As a side note, I'll argue that the military jackets we discussed in the last post are actually related to the church too, since the Officer's Academy (which is of course founded and run by the church) uses the same button styles, and we don't see it in the other two nations. (If this all seems like a stretch, that's because it is <3 a thousand years have passed, okay, things have changed.)

Besides just the practice of magic in general and some of the styles, the ceremonial importance of wearing some kind of uniform to show your role also remained, imo. We have two clear styles of uniform in the Imperial nobility - robes and jackets (it's unclear exactly what determines who wears which - I would think it's based on military roles vs political roles, which would explain the strike force being in jackets, but Jeritza is heavily involved in the military and he wears the robes. Possibly the exception that proves the rule?) - which are of course related to the two styles we see the most of at Garreg Mach, those being the clergy's robes and the officer's academy students. They may have evolved pretty substantially by this point, but I'm inclined to say the robes worn in the empire are related to the clergy robes, especially if they're meant to be associated with the people in more politically-oriented positions rather than soldiers.

We see the importance of these uniforms in the fact that they actually supersede armor/class uniforms. Hubert (canon class dark bishop), Ferdinand (canon class paladin), and Lord Arundel (canon class dark knight), all wear outfits that aren't actually related to their canon classes at all, and they still keep those outfits when in combat as enemies.

One more similarity I'd be remiss not to point out:

Love to be a bisexual God-King and wear a big tall collar and shoulder embellishment and gold stuff around my neck and a gold crown with a little dangly pearl thing on my forehead~

More analysis:

So, we've established that there's a connection between the clothes worn by empire nobility and church leadership, as well as the nature of those clothes. Cool. Now let's talk $$.

I'm not going to consider Sothis's outfit here, because she's a god and I don't think she's going popping into shops to buy ribbons. Likewise, I think Byleth's enlightened one outfit is more of a divine creation than an actual outfit that cost money.

Rhea's costume however, which as we discussed earlier takes inspiration from Sothis's, definitely did cost money, and a lot of it.

On the inner layer, we don't have a ton of excess stuff going on, as far as the cut of the clothing goes - the white dress is very simple, pretty fitted, not extravagant in any way, but we do have those extra gold details and the headdress, which is honestly a work of art.

What I want to pay attention to is the cloak in particular. That fabric with the beautiful, intricate repeating design of the Crest of Seiros is almost certainly a white and gold brocade (not only is that what it looks like, but it's also a typical fabric for liturgical vestments).

Brocade is a very expensive type of fabric that's woven to look like it's been heavily embroidered, example above (fabric plus a painting of somewhere wearing it). High quality, 100% silk brocade, especially hand woven and using precious metals like gold, costs literally hundreds of USD per yard, and a cloak of that size would be multiple yards (4? 5 maybe? idk I can't actually sew). That's a lot of money.

You'll notice that Seteth has a similar pattern on the inside of his cape, but I highly doubt it's a brocade. It could be damask (similar to brocade but cheaper and easier to take care of - example shown below), but I think it's just a patterned silk.

I think his main garment - cape included - is meant to be a play on a cassock, so it's probably a lightweight, soft wool with the decorative facing only on the cape part, possibly not lined at all in the rest of it. The details around his cuffs and shoulders and the back of the cape are probably embroidery or applique, I'm guessing the same as the academy uniforms, whatever those are.

It's definitely nicer than what most of the students or everyday people wear, but not nearly as extravagant as the jackets in the Empire. You'll also notice that Flayn's officer's academy uniform is a little fancier than the regular students, but not enough to be worth investigation.

The blue is probably a pretty expensive dye color, and you'll note that Rhea has it too. (The black of the academy uniforms would be similar in cost...)

(Speaking of blue dye, I did more research while writing this post and it turns out that the dull blues most of the folks in the kingdom have are actually some of the cheapest and easiest colors to get and maintain! Woad my beloved... Indigo is still extremely expensive, though.)

So anyway, as we can see, the issue of excess is really just Rhea. Being the Archbishop, it's understandable in the exact same way that Edelgard's outfit is - they're both trying to show their legitimacy as a sovereign, in part through their clothes.

However, I do want to point out something extremely important: Rhea didn't drop a shit ton of money on a fancy cloak any time in the last few centuries. When you observe her headdress during a tea party, she has this to say: "This crown is rather elaborate, but it has been passed down through generations of archbishops." So it was almost certainly created hundreds of years ago, likely during the early and much more prosperous years of the empire before the kingdom was a twinkle in Loog's eye. I think the cloak is probably the same way, created around the same time as the crown.

So, is she wasting a lot of money to make herself look powerful? Probably not. Is it still a little out of touch to be dressed so extravagantly? Yeah, on a social level. On a political level, she's reinforcing the idea that she's in control, especially while groups like the Western Church are acting up.

Because that's what this is all about: Control.

Conclusion

The church still has a significant impact on the culture of the empire, but it's more than just an old and famous church building still standing in the heart of Enbarr or the gown of an opera diva. It's explicit.

As our very last exhibit, I present a crown.

The crown Edelgard is given at her coronation is not the same crown she wears during the war, and - though we can only see the tip of the little spire in the front - it bears a striking resemblance to the crown worn by Sothis/enlightened!Byleth. (Using the Sothis regalia to show it bc it's a better image lol.)

I believe this crown may have been crafted at the same time as the Archbishop's, though you'll notice it's quite a bit smaller.

That's because the church and the empire didn't just grow up together - the church was the empire. Seiros named the capital, chose and crowned the first empire, and gifted him her own blood to give him power. The Adrestian Empire exists because Seiros wanted it to, but the church was the higher authority.

The Archbishop traditionally witnesses the coronation of each new emperor not as a show of friendship or an alliance or whatever; it's to remind everyone that originally, the Emperor served at the grace of the Archbishop, not by virtue of their own authority.

Edelgard wears a different crown when she declares war on the church, because she can't have anyone questioning her authority, especially not the church. That means all remaining influence the church has over the Empire and Fodlan as a whole simply must be destroyed. Unfortunately, it runs far too deep. What's she going to do, make Dorothea wear a different dress?

-fin- (lol)

working on a much more lighthearted part iii, which will literally just be ranking the outfits on how expensive I think they are lol no promises on that one though

EDIT: someone pointed me to an item description from FEH that confirms Edelgard did *not* have a new crown designed, it's just a different crown that already existed. Here's the ask where we talk about it a little