1) PLOT ARMOR FOR DEDUE SO HE IS NOT OPTIONAL AND WHATEVER WRITING CHOICES SPIRAL OUT FROM THAT. I love Gilbert but godDAMN what a bad decision it was to make Dedue killable in White Clouds.
2) On the one hand, I appreciate that Azure Moon is doin’ something different with the plotline in the sense that it’s very much about Dimitri and Faerghus and not about the continent-wide mystery BUT the entire thing about the death cult with secret nukes really should’ve been handled in some way, even if it was a fucking title card at the end.
3) Better integration of the Church of Seiros peeps. If Cyril is gonna be underfoot, why do I have to play another goddamned route entirely to flesh him out? This is the route where Catherine can go off to be Rhea’s caretaker, so how about a scene with that? Yeah.
Kinda sounds like your preference for Ephraim is because of how much longer you’ve lingered on him combined with how you’ve managed to finagle his gacha quotes into being headcanon-compatible. Or in other words, he’s been grandfathered in as your favorite, alongside Innes and Leaf, thanks to the sheer tonnage of fanfic and speculation you’ve made about him. You think it’s ever gonna be possible for any FE character to unseat them in your headspace, even besides the “cannibalism” elephant?
Ephraim and Innes succeed not just because I’ve been playing with them for a damn decade, but because the information about them is relayed quite decently in a concise, self-encapsulated, non-contradictory way. To take Eph and Innes and then review their handful of A-supports and determine what it says about them as men and as kings is an entirely different process from sifting through all the damn potential pairings for Dimitri and Claude (including, of course, the damned cipher of a female self-insert) and figuring out what the essence of the character is beyond “Dimitri ain’t straight” and “Claude’s a political animal,” both of which were already pretty damn clear in the game and both of which are undermined by several of the endings.
FE has changed the way it does storytelling, whether it’s the use of self-inserts as a device or multiple routes that are fundamentally irreconcilable on a larger scale beyond “we recruited character X, sorry character Y” or the vast slew of Tab A Meets Slot B support chains wherein I’m expected to believe some dude like Virion is equally down with Cherche and Lissa AND Miriel AND Sully AND Nowi just because he’s a dude. FE16 did better but when you take cross-house relationships and such into account (not to mention DLC), you’re dealing with Too Much Stuff for the characters to be as good as they could be. It’s not a coincidence that many characters I favor thus far are actual route-locked characters where this sort of dilution happens less!
I mean, shit, reboot!Python and Lukas and Saber and Genny pole-vaulted over dozens and dozens of legacy characters in my esteem by dint of being well-written, concisely-written characters... and then the DLC that the Deliverance GOT was actually really, really good for their characters. If an entirely new FE were to just fuckin’ restrain itself and deliver on ONE core story with ONE cast of characters, they could absolutely deliver the goods.
(And FE15 didn’t manage integrating Alm’s arc and Celica’s arc into the single coherent story it was supposed to be as well as an NES game from the 1990s did, go figure!)
Since there’s no indication FE’s writers are interested in doing any such thing when there’s money to be made on multiple routes ‘n’ DLC ‘n’ shit, I just have to hope that whatever Jugdral/GBA/Tellius remakes are in the pipeline are crafted with FE15-level attention. I mean hell, giving the Deliverance treatment to the Selphina Scrub Squad could make them great characters. A remake could make something great out of Lester or Diarmuid or Ulster the way that Tobin and Gray and Mae and Boey all transcended their origins. It’s possible.
Or the remakes could just finally present the core Jugdral cast in one (or two) coherent, fully-realized installments so that collating artbooks and interview scraps and designer notes and the nuances of multiple fan translations is no longer necessary. Heroes already went some way in this regard. Just gotta wait and see, I guess.
i am e a g e r l y a w a i t i n g literally any 3h fic from you~
Heheh.
Sadly the longer I get exposed to 3H the less I want to ‘fic it because the more I learn the less makes enough sense for me to ‘fic it. Like, say I had House Dominic feels after my first PT of Azure Moon (I did). By now, I have no goddamned idea how to reconcile how Annette’s upbringing seemingly functioned in FE16 vs something she says about it in Heroes. And now the Sewer Wolves are a thing.
There’s more engaging detail about the world in FE16 as opposed to the “none of this is remotely plausible and in fact it’s dumb af” cardboard world of Ylisse-- little things like the merchants are delightful. But ultimately I am having the same issue with FE16 as with FE13, which is “there is a lot of text to sort through to research these characters and the more I learn the less it adds up to anything.” I swear the FE4 Gen2 kids have more plausible backstories than just about anyone in FE16 at this point. Like, Leif has one of the more convoluted and arguably contradictory Lord upbringings and it STILL makes more buckets more sense than what was going on with Dimitri and his stepmom and his secret stepsister/friend and... wtf. And Dimitri is probably the most fully developed character in the entire game!
Mostly I want to write a mashup AU set in the 1930s in which Ignatz, a student at a military school, starts hanging out with a jaded artist who served in the first World War (Forde from FE8) and has to decide on whether to stay in the army or answer the call of his art. And when I gravitate towards mashup AUs first and foremost, that says there’s something not working for me about the gameverse wrt ficcing.
Are there any popular fandom OTPs you only BroTP?*
Claude and Lorenz. Nice dynamic. Do not buy it as a couple one bit.
Do you have a NoTP in your fandom? Are they a popular OTP?*
So for me a NoTP is pretty extreme. Not “I don’t like it”-- it means I’ve reached the point where I ain’t “liking” the fanart however cute it may be or reading a ‘fic even if it’s by a writer I trust. So, even though Byleth is made outta pasteboard, if there’s cute Byleth/Whomever fanart out there... it’s cute. If a friend writes Byleth/Seteth, imma read it. But I got there pretty quick with Ingrid/Dorothea and Hilda/Marianne, not just because I don’t buy Ingrid/Dorothea for a second but because of the amount of hypocritical fandom bullshit enclosing both pairings.
11 Three Houses. Because I know it's probably going to be Gilbert.
“Is there an unpopular character you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why?”
Overall it’s totally Gilbert. “Sad aging knight who is still in there trying despite everything stacked against him” is kind of my thing, and honestly I think Gilbert is a damn good take on it. Yes, his backstory is made of fail. But I feel that a lot of the actual hate he gets comes from severely blinkered or even bad-faith readings that don’t try to understand what this sort of character even is about. If you can’t feel for the guy who has to cart Dimitri’s body away after Gronder Field when his only daughter is off on Team Claude... then I don’t want to talk to you.
I also want to put in a word for Ignatz since initial polling indicated he was hella unpopular. Yes, he’s a wet blanket with a dorky haircut who has the misfortune of being a sweet squishy archer boi in a game that already features Ashe. But, as FE16 allows most of its characters to grow up, Ignatz has some pretty appealing development over the years... and he loses the bad haircut, too. He’s a good boy.
I don't think you've made a post discussing all the 3h lords at once yet (and if you have, feel free to ignore this ask!), so for the meme: Claude or Dimitri? (I'd throw Edelgard in too but I don't know if you've finished CF yet)
Dimitri.
Claude’s great. I love that we finally have the Jeorge archetype as a main character with the shadiness, offbeat humor, and grand designs one would expect from a character family tree that includes Lewyn and Virion. I love his design, his backstory, his badass white wyvern. But god DAMN was it frustrating to see him make the Pasteboard Professor central to his plans-- like, as a figurehead/rallying point? Sure. But “Imma turn things over to you and fuck off for an unspecified amount of time, possibly forever?”
Dimitri’s arc of “Becoming a Good, Just, Compassionate King” works in no small part because Byleth isn’t nearly as instrumental to his recovery as the actual support of the Faerghus Home Team. I had M!Byleth fooling around with GILBERT on that route and it all worked just fine. But with Claude, even when you marry him to F!Byleth for his ideal grand-design ending, it still feels OFF by the end of things.
TL;DR, I feel Claude is hampered by the Avatar in a way that Dimitri is not, edge to Dimitri.
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….
How I feel about this character: Hmm. Cool concept of a character; I like the idea of an ass-kicking lady knight with a sketchy past and a holy weapon. But none of the support chains I’ve unlocked (and it sure hasn’t been all of them) have really worked for me. It’s like, OK, cool IDEA. Whatever’s underneath isn’t grabbing me yet.
All the people I ship romantically with this character: IDEK. Shamir I guess for lack of anything more compelling, even though that ship doesn’t really excite me so much as “yeah, I get it”
My non-romantic OTP for this character: With Rhea, lady knight to holy liege. I like the ending where Catherine follows Rhea to Zanado.
My unpopular opinion about this character: I just don’t really FEEL Catherine/Shamir. Not that I don’t believe in its shippiness, it’s just... not my thing on a visceral level.
One thing I wish would happen / had happened with this character in canon: I’d like the explanation of the whole shady shit with Ashe’s adoptive family to be more accessible, given the whole “fall of Lord Lonato” thing is part of the main Academy-phase plotline. I don’t think locking that stuff away helped her characterization.
my OTP: ???
my cross over ship: She needs to meet up with Mathilda and Titania and have a girls’ (k)night out. They could drag Shamir along, even.
