first off : felix was the spare to the heir. it just so happened that he had a crest upon being born, which meant that rodrigue and geneva did not have to have another child for just in case purposes, especially given that, as per felix, in faerghus it’s just normal for for small children to be given swords, wave them about, and for nobility to enter the knighthood and risk their lives and so on and so forth. also, they’re a high nobility house, which means that having an extra child really can’t go amiss, especially for the purposes of forming alliances and whatnot.
regardless !! i will talk more about geneva and faerghus in general another time, since this is about specifically rodrigue and glenn.
we all know that felix despises his father by the time the game starts. we are furthermore given a reason for that hatred, in the form of : his glorification of his brother’s death and his dedication TO THE DEAD as opposed to to the living. more about that another time because there are a lot of intersecting headcanons go through in this but, yes. felix despises his father and what he stands for and nobility and the fact that he has his family’s name at the start of the game ; but that isn’t to say that he hates his father. far from it.
felix loves his father, because rodrigue is his father, and because there was not this rift between them when he was young. it’s less that they were particularly close in his childhood ( rodrigue had things to do as the duke of fraldarius and paid most of his attention to glenn as opposed to his youngest, and geneva spent more time with felix relative to rodrigue ) but more that he respected his father and the position that he held growing up. in fact, he held both rodrigue and glenn ( and his mother ) in high esteem and looked up to them as he grew up.
however, glenn’s death, obviously, changed all of that. for the worse.
when felix left home it was without a note. his father sent retainers after him, HIS SOLE HEIR, NOW, and he dispatched them with immense hatred in his heart. he left home after his first battle with dimitri, of course, but more on that later. i think that his father tried to reach out to him over the years, because felix became his only heir, but felix rebuffed any and all attempts at contact. he had become infuriated. embittered. terrified.
glenn, on the other hand, as i’ve mentioned : is someone whom felix respected, held in high esteem, and adored. they sparred often and i like to think that, when the childhood friends quartet weren’t together and glenn was around, he was often chasing behind him : his little shadow. felix wanted to be his equal above all else, back then ———— he wanted to beat him to show that they were on the same level ( and perhaps had a minor inferiority complex because he was THE SPARE TO THE HEIR ) but loved his brother with all of the childhood adoration that could be applied to an older sibling.
my older brother inspired love and loyalty. he loved him. deeply. endlessly. his brother, the boy and the man who he trailed LIKE A SHADOW so often that the servants of the household called him such. glenn’s shadow. where’s your little shadow today, my lord?
felix was destroyed by glenn’s death. so much so that ( in my head ) he began to adopt parts of glenn’s personality and overlaid them on top of his : his sarcasm / his aggressiveness / always looking for a fight. and through his death, his memories of glenn became steadily more tainted until there is no JOY in the recollection of his brother / so rare it is that he speaks of him with a smile on his face / the word brother when applied to him DIRTY.
he wields his brother’s name like a weapon. against ingrid and against his father and speaks of him as if he’s a GHOST HAUNTING HIM to mercedes ———— the only truly almost positive recollection of glenn in the entirety of the game is to byleth, which i both do and don’t count towards felix’s character in general. but, that’s a topic for another time. there is a bitterness with the remembrance of his brother years after his death and it takes years of introspection and the careful dismantling of it all to start to truly, truly, remember him almost fondly. of the time when he was his brother’s shadow.
i’m gonna close this out with : FELIX DOESN’T PROCESS GRIEF WELL. or, really, at all. how he speaks about it, how he deals with it, his anger towards placing the dead above the living and persistently prioritizing the living over the dead at the detriment to his relationships and memories of the people he loves isn’t precisely healthy. he justifies it, of course, as : the living are living, the dead are dead. but he allows his memories to be twisted. he does not grieve appropriately. which leads to his reaction to rodrigue’s death, but. that’s a topic for another time, i think.
@blutgangs & @gasbardian // META ( always, always accepting )
