day 25 of my own personal fire emblem femslash february. vanessa is lowkey my favorite sacred stones character and i havent drawn her in years, so this was a treat. who doesnt love a wlw ship with a light "jock/nerd" vibe?
Today's character is Lute. I'm currently reading the fe8 novel, and she's soooo like that in it (I can't really tell for in-game because I like. Never use her ;-;).
Also, as much as I like the story of sacred stones, I'm at chapter 10 of the first volume of the novel, and like, I don't like it that much? Idk, it feels like Eirika and Ephraim just win everything, without any cost, which, in the game is actually kinda good I'd say, or at least it's not really visible, but in a novel it's... Different. I get you want everyone to survive and things, but sometimes it feels like some kind of deus ex machina helps the protags...
💝MaryRose & Rosemary with Wendy Doll for me… so cute!💝Today is my birthday: July 26, 2026. I hope you continue to support my posts!
💗I sincerely thank everyone who appreciates what I share, especially those who love Black Butler and anime culture in general. 💗 Please, someone make a Black Butler mobile game with all the characters… it would instantly become my favorite app! And then… Shadow House deserves so much more!
It's one of the most beautiful anime I've ever seen and absolutely needs a new season. Finally, some love for the yuri couple Vanessa and Lute, please!! XD
Thanks Feh for Aided Lute I Love It but
💜like each Year Lute Halloween This Year For Big Spider Please ;)💜
To start us off, Lute gets rid of this last reinforcement. After this, we can finally start moving up to the chests and Tana above, and to the boss room entrance down and to the right.
Franz gets the Luna mage.
I mentioned Luna's bad hit rates and 0 might before, but here we can see just how dire it is. 28 is awful hit, and since all the attack comes from the user's magic stat with no added might from the tome itself, it isn't even that dangerous in a low-level enemy's hands. Even if this guy actually did hit and crit Franz, he still wouldn't kill him.
I start to move Vanessa forward, and...Oh! What's this? A support conversation?
...with Lute???
So, some of you may have been able to guess from the very tiny and subtle clues I've dropped here and there, but I absolutely love Lute, so I'm actually going to look at this support a bit.
It starts off with Vanessa saying, "Ah, you're...Lute, right?"
I remember at least a couple of other Lute supports start off with the other person not being sure of what her name is. It's consistent enough a factor that we can guess that Lute doesn't really socialize a whole lot with people in the army. It's not surprising given her personality and her obsessive interest in specific things.
After introducing herself, Vanessa introduces her pegasus, Titania.
At which point, Vanessa has stumbled on one of Lute's interests: creatures.
So Lute proceeds to monopolize the conversation and info dump on Vanessa.
She starts by talking about the different names for pegasus. This part in Japanese involves her not only using the katakana, foreign-derived word "pegasus", but also two kanji-based words, "sky horse" and "has wings horse".
Kind of like how we often use Latin or Greek based words in English when we want to sound fancy, or for technical terms (due to the history of Europe's obsession with the Greeks and Romans often being viewed as the "initiators of European civilization") in Japanese there is a tendency for words made up of combined Chinese characters to sound more stiff, or like technical terms. In many cases, this is because these are literal loan words that Japanese educated people adopted into their language, sometimes a couple hundred-thousand years ago when China was viewed as a center of culture and learning.
I think a good example could be the word she uses for "sky horse". The two characters are jammed together, and usually in those cases, the "Chinese" reading is used, which is true here too, "Tenma". (Like I mentioned above, the "Chinese" reading is based on the pronunciation of the characters that some Japanese guy got from the Asian mainland at some point in history. Many kanji have multiple readings like this since there are many different Chinese languages in different areas of what's now China, languages also change over time, and of course, Japanese phonology is radically different from any Chinese phonology, so the pronunciations are more like approximations of how some group of Chinese people read the character at some point in time. If you look in a detailed kanji dictionary, it will often tell you the Chinese dynasty/ies in power at the time the character's reading(s) was/were adopted into Japanese.)
If this word were using "Japanese" readings of the characters, it would probably be "Sora no uma". Just based on feels, "Tenma" sounds a bit fancier and stiffer, whereas "Sora no uma" sounds very straightforward because the words "sora" (sky) and "uma" (horse) are used in everyday conversation, whereas the parts of "Tenma", "ten" and "ma" are not used on their own usually.
I explain all of this because it's interesting how it's coincidently very similar to something we can see in English too. Take a word like "autograph". It's two Greek words, "self" and "write" jammed together. These words aren't used on their own usually. (I mean, maybe this is a bad example since these two parts both are used on their own, but that's only because "auto" can be short for "automobile", and "graph" can also mean a table or chart. What I really mean is, we don't use "graph" as the word "write" in English on its own. No one says, "Please graph your name on this line here.") But these parts are frequently used to express meaning as parts of words.
Imagine how "self write" (both Germanic words) would sound in place of "autograph"? It sounds very basic, almost too straightforward. This same thing that we do in English all the time with Latin/Greek/Norman based words is similar to what they do in Japanese with the distinction between words with an "original Japanese" origin versus a "Chinese" origin.
In English, germanic words often sound straightforward and basic. In Japanese, Japanese origin words often sound more straightforward. In the same way, in English, words made up of Latin/Greek/Norman French parts often sound more educated or technical. And in Japanese, that's often the case for words made up of combined kanji using the "Chinese" readings.
----END INFO DUMP---
At any rate, now that I've info dumped at you, you may see why I like Lute so much.
Lute goes on to explain to Vanessa (who rides a pegasus literally every single day) how they fly by kicking the air, not by flapping their wings, and that their wings are used more for gliding.
To which Vanessa kindly responds that, yes, it would be really hard to ride them if they flapped their wings all the time.
She responds like this instead of, you know, getting all prickly about this random girl lecturing her about the animal she knows better than any other.
God bless you, Vanessa. You're a saint.
Lute also continues to talk about the origin of the word "pegasus" and its connections to "springs" and "oceans", and basically, go look at Wikipedia if you want to see the rest of what she said. :)
Vanessa continues to be an absolute sweety and says, "Thank you for the very clear introduction. I'm glad we're allies."
And then Lute says, "I look forward to working with you, Titania!"
Vanessa: "I'm Vanessa!"
Like a lot of people, I've jumped on the Dungeon Meshi bandwagon recently, and it's hard not to get flavors of Laius from Lute.
At any rate, the original reason I moved Vanessa there was to block the soldier from hitting Lute, and Vanessa does an admirable job of that during enemy phase.
I also discover that there is another guy with a sleep staff in the throne room. He misses Vanessa though.
You can see how low his hit is on her, with her good res.
It's this guy, here.
I start sending people up to deal with the enemies around the chests and Tana. I leave Vanessa in range of the mercenary, and Ephraim in range of the armor, though it later on turns out that that guy doesn't move.
Next time: More reinforcements, more sleep staff nonsense, and maybe we'll finally save Tana
