I think Edelgard would've been a more compelling villain that's as iconic as Sephiroth if developers just made her as evil and villainous as possible in the game.
She has all of Sephiroth's story beats but the game constantly simping for her and her detractors being treated as bad guys just hurt her character.
I mean Sephiroth is pretty and hot with a heartwrenching backstory. Yet, the game does not sugarcoat the fact that he's mad and evil. AVALANCHE and Zack were never painted as bad. We were just compelled to feel sorry for Sephiroth but he must still be taken down.
The same case can be applied to Azula from ATLA, Misa Amane & Light Yagami from Death Note, and Darth Vader drom Star Wars.
It's such a same. We could've had Edelgard as a nightmare fuel female villain. But what we got is just a bootleg uwu version of it.
TLDR: Evil is cool and sexy but Edelgard is a halfhearted attempt at it which made her lesser than what she could have been.
Oh definitely. They tried to have it both ways - Edelgard is this ruthless villainess who’s willing to “sacrifice” (kill) anyone who stands up against her, who’s willing to use regicide and genocide as stepping stones to her pathway to power, willing to betray people who thought of her as friends, willing to kill off the rest of an endangered race of people, all so that she can gain unmatched power within the land she lives... but also she’s totally not that bad of a person. Look at how she acts around Byleth! And don’t you feel so sad when you have to kill her in VW and SS?
They try to portray her as though she’s this morally gray character who’s shown she wouldn’t go too far for her goals, when she’s... literally not. Edelgard is the closest among the 3H cast, outside of the literal murder cult and her evil butler, to being the most morally black character in the game. She’s self-centered, arrogant, she endangers and ends the lives of countless innocent people to further her own goals, she’s a hypocrite and a liar, she’s an opportunist, she literally wants to commit genocide, she’s uncaring for the lives of those that ought to be close to her (Whobert?), she’s narrow-minded and racist, among any other number of flaws that I can’t think of off the top of my head,
Sure, a character can a one of these traits, or even maybe a few of them, and still be a relatively good person - or at least, not a monster (being self-centered and hypocritical for example, while certainly bad, doesn’t inherently make someone evil), but to have all of these traits while not growing out of the most egregious of them (she never stops being racist and wanting to kill all of the Children of the Goddess, she never stops being willing to endanger the lives of innocents) is a staple point of being a villain. Villains don’t have to grow out of their horrible flaws! Many of them don’t, to the betterment of the story they’re in (like Ozai from ATLA)! But the game wants to behave as though Edelgard either doesn’t have these traits or they go away with Byleth’s influence, when neither of these things are true.
They either should have had Edelgard recognize and try to rectify the horrible decisions she’s made and mindsets she held, or embrace her villainous nature and ran with it (the closest we see of this happening is AM). Like I’ve said before, I almost like CF due to my personal viewing of it (the rose-tinted glasses of Edelgard’s side with undertones of reality seeping through the nice empowering words), but if we’re being more realistic it’s trying to prop Edelgard up as just as morally gray as the other lords + Rhea when she’s just worst
