#archanea meta

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This is FE12 Michalis, though. The one who got to shove his middle finger in Marth’s face and get Macedon all to himself, threw both his sisters in a convent despite their reason for angst being alive, and then ran off to conquer another continent because he learned nothing.

Only if you let Minerva save his sorry ass. I wouldn’t.

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The Blue Lions and the Burden of Tradition

Note: spoilers related to multiple Fire Emblem games including FE1/11, FE2/15, FE3/12, FE5, and FE8 follow.

The classic Fire Emblem plot line is the one sketched out by its first installment, Dark Dragons and the Sword of Light, all the way back in ’90. Young Prince Marth loses homeland in surprise betrayal, mopes in exile, gathers allies, retakes homeland, unites continent, defeats dragon, settles down to become virtuous ruler with love interest at his side. Then Fire Emblem Gaiden offered a counterpoint narrative in which a scrappier hero, village boy Alm, unites half a continent through military prowess before he even finds out he’s the prince, whereupon he too can defeat a big bad monster and settle down with his childhood companion/love interest as his consort. Marth restores order to The Way Things Were, But Better. Alm sweeps away a corrupt order entirely and puts something else in its place. One can be viewed as fundamentally conservative, looking back to an idealized past and trying to recreate it without the old mistakes. The other is revolutionary, but the way the revolution plays out the New Boss has an awful lot in common with the Old Boss (kings, nobles, churches). Any way you slice it the best outcome is a Just Ruler with the blessings of heaven and democracy ain’t in the cards. These two basic narratives have shaped every single installment of Fire Emblem to date. Some lean more heavily on the Marth narrative (Binding Blade), some on the Alm narrative (Path of Radiance), and others combine elements of both— Thracia 776, Sacred Stones, and Awakening all take some of Column A and some of Column B and and achieve strikingly difference outcomes.

The Blue Lions route of Three Houses offers the latest iteration of that classic Marth narrative, and it proves the deepest, richest, most nuanced look at that storyline to date even if it’s ultimately constrained by its own tropes.

 Its protagonist, Prince Dimitri, is introduced as a polite and courtly young man, the image of a Fire Emblem princeling, and as Part I of Three Houses unfolds the viewer is let into just how much of a Fire Emblem Prince Dimitri is. He’s the last hope of his house and kingdom, an orphan who lost his family under traumatic circumstances, and he’s struggling to maintain his peaceful ideals in the face of his lingering trauma and suppressed rage. As Dimitri receives both character revelation and character development through Part I, he echoes not just Marth but Thracia 776’s Leif and Ephraim from Sacred Stones, and those echoes carry over strongly to Part II of this route.

Likewise, Dimitri’s fellow Blue Lions, initially just another lot of fresh-faced schoolchildren, reveal themselves to be the Three Houses iterations of some classic “archetypes” of Fire Emblem. We have the “steady” traditionalist knight in Ingrid, the more unruly “rowdy” knight in Sylvain, the sullen swordmaster in Felix, the bright-eyed archer in Ashe, the bright-eyed mage in Annette, the demure healer with the convoluted backstory in Mercedes, and the battered old retainer in Gilbert. If you expect your “Christmas Knights” and “Navarre” and “Lena” and whatnot out of a Fire Emblem game, Blue Lions offers the entire set; they’re just a little harder to detect thanks to the open class system and lack of convenient color-coding.

Where the Blue Lions breaks with three-decades-old expectations is in its handling of the resident heavy; Dedue fills a slot on the starting team usually given short shrift (see: Draug, Bors), but in terms of plot and character and— critically— personal value to Dimitri he transcends both the stale Armor Knight niche that his character design nudges him to be and the Devoted Retainer trope that’s gotten a bit weird in recent years. Some recent games presented “devotion” in ways that were kind of twisted yet the games didn’t seem to really acknowledge how off-key it all was; Three Houses takes a full dive into what Dedue’s devotion to Dimitri (and vice-versa!) can encompass, how it’s a double-edged blade that can uplift or utterly destroy. That Dedue manages this while also being saddled with the role of being The Stigmatized Other to the Blue Lions cast is nothing short of remarkable.

Your core Blue Lions party is essentially the conservative wing of the Officers’ Academy. Ingrid may be the most orthodox knight of your house, but ultimately the entire core party is royalist and traditionalist, even when the system they’re holding up has hurt them personally. Annette, Sylvain, and most especially Felix offer some degree of dissent, but ultimately all of them fall in line behind King Dimitri and his unified continent— and in supporting Dimitri, by default they support the Church of Seiros under its new archbishop. This unswerving support of the Church structure on the Blue Lions route is hardly happenstance, as the game is basically waving a flag at the audience to let them know yes, this is indeed the conservative Restorationist faction— un roi une loi une foi. Still, the inner tensions of these loyalists as they play out through supports and in-game chatter— Felix against Ingrid and Dedue and Dimitri, Annette against Gilbert, Sylvain in his asides to Byleth— provide a multifaceted critique of the very concepts of Knighthood and Faith that the franchise has been trying to pull off since at least Thracia 776, whose beats the Lions’ plot structure samples more than once.

The game takes some risks; New Mystery of the Emblem supplied Avatar Kris as a mechanism to keep Marth’s fingerless gloves from getting dirtied by the grunt work of conquering an continent; Three Houses lets Dimitri’s hands get so filthy that his knights and vassals are appalled by it. He regains his moral compass and everyone’s respect after a tragedy that is one of the clearest call-backs to Thracia 776, but in Leif’s case the shock he received was a spur for a naive youth to grow up and look at the larger picture instead of his narrow goals. In Dimitri’s case, he’s got about five years of atrocities to atone for. That said, Thracia 776 arguably had a more realistic resolution to the Lord’s character development, as endgame Leif STILL has some growing-up to do, whereas Dimitri gets markedly better after a couple of conversations despite spending five years in the abyss.

And then we get to the Childhood Friend, one of the moments of the Blue Lions route that strongly evokes Sacred Stones. On this route we learn that Dimitri and antagonist Edelgard shared a fleeting but precious bond in childhood— but whereas antagonist Lyon uses a similar bond to his repeated advantage against the Sacred Stones Lords Eirika and Ephraim, Edelgard doesn’t even make the connection between Dimitri and her own lost childhood friend until he confronts her with the memory. It’s a one-sided bond that fuels Dimitri’s rage and regrets but is essentially irrelevant to Edelgard’s ambitions. The final wordless confrontation between them finally has Edelgard use Dimitri’s nostalgia as a literal weapon against him… and he silently runs her through with his lance for it— far cry from Lyon whispering “C’mon Ephraim, smile like you used to” as he dies in Ephraim’s arms. For a series that has leaned heavily on the trope of “Friendship is Magic” in recent years, it’s interesting to have the idea of the sepia-tinted childhood memory rendered impotent— but then again, the developers were supposedly inspired by Genealogy of the Holy War and the way that events pitted sworn friends and allies against one another.

The grand scope of Genealogy may be more apparent on other routes of Three Houses, but the Blue Lions route is fundamentally more narrow in scope, with this Thracia-like focus on Dimitri’s traumas, Dimitri’s loves and losses, Dimitri’s redemption, Dimitri’s ability to spare enemies and kill former friends. This in turn hobbles the ending of the route, much as Thracia 776 was hobbled by its status as a midquel, a singular if vivid chapter in the overall saga of Jugdral. Alliance and Empire totter, everything falls into Dimitri’s lap, the church is bolstered without any significant onscreen reforms or even onscreen questions on what the hell was going on under Rhea, and everything becomes as it was, but better— one king, one law, one faith (or one major faith with ecumenical tolerance for the rest, per Seteth’s ending), and apparently some reforms for the sake of The People. Dimitri’s going to be fine, and we all just have to have faith in the rest of it.

All in all, it brings to mind that Marth’s most successful game (Mystery of the Emblem), and the GBA game that hewed most strongly to the Marth Narrative (Binding Blade) both had Bad Endings in which the real answers, the true resolution, was never achieved. The Blue Lions route feels at once like a beautiful love letter to the Marth plot-line in all its iterations, in which the elements of its predecessors are revisited to grand effect— and a Bad Ending, a dead-end, an eternity of the curtain abruptly coming down once Marth defeats Hardin or even the hollow “is that all there is” moment of Leif besting Veld. It almost feels like a rebuke to the player for choosing to spend eighty, ninety, one-hundred hours in the company of Dimitri and his traditionalists, for choosing to glory in the multi-layered nostalgia offered by the Blue Lions. Perhaps it’s simply a cue that this is the route to play first, that it’s best to be guided into Fodlan by a familiar set of faces before choosing to open the doors of perception that the Golden Deer or Black Eagles offer. Given how heavily the pre-game marketing hyped the Black Eagles, that seems a bit weird.

I suppose the only way to get answers is to play another 200+ hours of Three Houses….

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Would you be happy with another FE1&3 re-make with graphics that look not-embarrassing even if it has an avatar character?

I dunno. On a gameplay/artistic/presentation angle it might make more fans happy than the DS versions but in between FE12’s mass of boring-af Kris support conversations and the way Heroes has done poorly by a lot of the Archanea gang I would expect characterization to be pretty bad. Whereas the Jugdral gang in Heroes has on average been handled very, very well, giving me more hope for their characters in a remake. With Archanea it feels like the it’s a franchise being exploited, not a labor of love :/

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My spouse just recruit the Camus spirit in SSBU so I just got to explain to him what a ‘Camus’ was in terms of FE.

He’d assumed the dude in fancy dress with the big-ass weapon was a future king in MarthWorld.

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002 Linde for the meme?

How I feel about this character: I love her but she brings out the skeeve in people for some reason… including in official art.

All the people I ship romantically with this character: I’m bad and ship her with Merric.

My non-romantic OTP for this character: She and Merric could be friends too tho. Also in a different timeline she and Nyna could make a great big sis/little sis.

My unpopular opinion about this character: MerricShipping?

One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: her character arc is good but getting hit with the unresolved unrequited love stick is a little eh

my OTP: See above

my cross over ship: Put her in Jugdral in place of Linda and ship her with Linda’s predestineds. IDK maybe she gets with Kilff?

a headcanon fact: Got a feeling for adventures in disguise while avoiding the bad guyz and did it for lulz in later years.

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Since we're on the subject, I suppose I gotta ask. How exactly would Marth/Catria even work? By the way I did find your livejournal stuff scrolling and I agree with your sentiment that FE3 Catria has feelings for Marth in a sort of idealistic manner. But what would Marth see in a 2nd in command pegasus rider under Minerva's service?

Hahah, “How Marth/Catria would even work???” was something I puzzled over until I sidelined Marth & Friends for the Leonster/Nordion/Thracia shitshow.

I mean, the short answer is, “It wouldn’t.” Marth loves Caeda, and I think it’s safe to say her essential Caeda-ness is part of the appeal. Yes, she’s a cute blue-haired pegarider with a neato lance. Oh yes, and a princess. But she’s courageous and generous and tolerant, clever and kind and good with words. Caeda is one of the “princess knight” characters who has both the “princess” part of it and the “knight” part of it down. She’s unfailingly loyal to her superiors (ex: Marth, as her commander) and magnanimous to those who serve her and can be served by her. 

Caeda’s amazing. What is a mere Catria in comparison? A brave and capable knight, to be sure– one able to take on issues like “high treason against the crown for the greater good” and “some funky deicide stuff in a foreign country” with aplomb. And, a bundle of middle-sister complexes. Also, in the latest iteration, a sort of “cool girl” persona more suitable to IDK a 1990s alt-culture snark heroine than an ideal liege lady?

I think we now have seen enough (parceled out through different media over literal decades) of Marth and Caeda and Catria to declare the good ship Catria/Marth as “sunk in the g-damn harbor when the bottle of champagne cracked across its bow” and I can really only see it happening in one of two ways:

1) Caeda dies early, Marth needs a wife, and some brilliant person decides to shove a blue-haired pegarider of sterling reputation at him. Marth goes along with the flow but misses Caeda 5ever and Catria realizes being a substitute Caeda ain’t all that. I wrote a M-rated ‘fic about this and it wasn’t a happy one.

2) Maybe, given decades of service with Marth as her beacon, Catria leaves the facade of snark and the middle-sister issues behind her and becomes the sort of person that Marth might genuinely turn to for support in the event he’s widowed far later in life (which I don’t see happening anyway but w/e). See Also: Cain. By then Catria might love him more as a man with his own human foibles rather than as an idea of a prince. This featured in my weird Archanea/Valentia fusion WIP “When Mila Walks the Land.”

I mean #2 ain’t bad but it requires icing Caeda in some fashion and uh, let’s not.

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So Lewyn’s oh-so-classic-90s-anime Japanese voice in FEH gives me a good excuse to poke a little bit at certain tropes Fire Emblem employed in the 90s...

So here’s this guy. Zechs Merquise, aka the Lightning Count, aka Milliardo Peacecraft, aka... we’ll get to that later. Voiced by. you guessed it, Koyasu Takehito, now voicing NoJ!Lewyn on a cell phone somewhere. Anyway, he’s the prince of a fallen kingdom turned self-loathing soldier, though on the surface he and his buddy Treize Khushrenada are enjoying a life of fancy clothes, elite mobile suits, and plotting against the government. ‘N Stuff. Oh yeah, and as “Zechs” he’s wearing a mask.

Zechs is a very obvious offshoot of classic Gundam antagonist Char Aznable, who is also the obvious inspiration for...

This Guy. 

Anyway, back to Zechs. So he and Treize have a dramatic falling-out punctuated by Zechs’s mask cracking mid-battle and then Zechs washes up on a beach all pretty and unconscious ‘n’ stuff. Then he embraces his identity as Milliardo Peacecraft of the Sanc Kingdom and tries supporting his younger sister Relena, who's considered the rightful heiress to Sanc because Reasons. But then some more stuff happens and new and cooler mobile suits come into play and Treize deposes Relena from her role as Queen of the World (what) and then both he and Zechs die dramatically in the final battle because this is a fictional universe in which all major characters over the age of 19 gotta die... save for the comic relief (see also: FE3, pretty much).

Except a year later, when Treize’s illegitimate daughter that he had when he was like, 17, pops outta nowhere with an army at her back to Conquer The World, our buddy Zechs shows up again, this time under the codename Wind...

And I can stop right there because I think anyone counting things that sound awfully familiar probably ran out of fingers and possibly toes.

Who’s borrowing what from whom? Well, everyone and nobody, most likely. Gundam knowingly recycled its own tropes for Wing and dressed them up in very pretty packaging (hence Zechs). FE was establishing and recycling its own tropes as well as being influenced by the overall scene around it (hence Sirius). The character types being employed in the SNES era are ones you can spot in many, many notable series of the time, getting More So as the decade ground on because (I’d wager) a series like Utena was also very knowingly and skillfully deploying the tropes and then then anything influenced by Utena was essentially impacted by meta-tropes and on and on. But there was an era in which privileged young people with fabulous hair & snazzy uniforms, making big speeches about Grand Ideas and waging war with anachronistic weapons, having tragic bromances and weird romances and secret kids, was A Thing, and FE3/FE4/FE5 came out of that era. There’s not (AFAIK) anything to indicate a deliberate connection between Lewyn and his fellow wandering prince “Preventer Wind” but they share some kind of material, as bodies coalesced from the same cosmic soup.

[Yes, FE1 was the source material for half of FE3 but aesthetically it was overhauled and thematically well... Sirius happened.]

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caeda for the character meme please!

What is your opinion of this character? If you like, explain why you like him/her. Love Caeda. I think that FE kinda knocked it outta the park the first time around with this little princess who’s so brave that she a) saves a gladiator and b) when her kingdom gets attacked she helps her future boyfriend liberate it and c) goes around recruiting people. She, like Ethlyn, is an amazing warrior princess who handles both the warrior part and the princess part as easily (or more easily) than the guys do and she’s still cute and sweet and kind and can cook with none of this “lol she burned the salad” kinda crap.

Is he/she important to the general plot? Well…not to the point she has plot armor, sadly. It’s a relic of the genuine “anyone can die” nature of Marth’s games that only Marth and the NPCs have full plot relevance.

Can you relate to this character at all? Does he/she grip you emotionally? Oh yeah, I love Caeda. Maybe I related more to her ten years ago when I was younger but I had a lot of headcanons about Caeda’s life as the first princess of a newly forged backwater kingdom and how that shaped her view on both her subjects and the interesting exiled prince.

Do you ship this character with any other character? Or, are you particularly intrigued by his/her relationship with any other character(s)? (romance-wise or platonic). She’s perfect with Marth but (egged on by LJ-era friends) I used to have some Ideas about how, should Marth kick the bucket significantly before her, she might finally reach an interesting understanding with Ogma (x-ref Tana/Cormag in its ambiguities).

Is there anything about the character you would change? Wing Spear in FEH. She wuz robbed.

If you were in the fandom with this character or knew this character in real life, how would you see yourself interacting with him/her? Caeda comes across as someone who makes a little bit of time to check in with everyone so I can’t imagine not liking her. She’s a little dynamo.

Does this character make the cut as one of your all time favorites (if you like) or least favorites? Yes.

Would you hype up this character (if you like) or warn about this character (if you dislike) to someone new to fandom? Use Caeda in FE11, Wing Spear ftw.

Is this character popular with the fanbase? She’s never enjoyed the popularity worldwide that she deserves as one-half FE’s iconic founding couple (just as Marth’s popularity from Smash was… skewed from any roots in FE canon) but I think Warriors and Heroes have given her more fans, which is great. She deserves all the fans. She’ll always deserve to be more popular than she is!