So, with the release of CS and a bit of new lore, I decided to do the Nemesis post.
Now, if you play CF (and as I’ve said, 3H kinda tries to get you to do so first) there’s references to Edelgard being like Nemesis. CF makes this sounds like a good thing, a legendary hero who never fell to evil and was killed over a minor dispute. Someone who believed that humanity should rule itself in the Japanese text iirc, and that is all well and good. But the problem is that the game is more than just CF, and we can get a clearer picture of Nemesis and what this says about Edelgard.
Now @bloomandcoffee did a great post a while back on the use of music themes in Three Houses. I’ll try to summarize it. There are three final boss themes in Three Houses, each using the music cues for that character. Funeral of Flowers has Rhea’s themes and plays at the end of SS. Apex of the World has parts of Edge of Dawn, a song from Edelgard’s pov and acts as the final theme for both AM and CF. This points to Edelgard being the real final boss of CF, a villain protagonist who wins the day. The cues of TWSITD are not present in God Shattering Star, Nemesis’s theme, but are instead in the Shambala theme. Instead, we get the music cues from the opening cutscene set during the War of Heroes.
A common defense I’ve seen is that for all we know TWSITD brainwashed Nemesis at the end of VW, but listen to his theme. No TWSITD cues, all his. We are fighting Nemesis here, as he was over a thousand years ago. Fodlan’s dark past come to light.
Now, the use of lighting also seems to tie into this symbolically. Everything is dark while that epic battle is waging on, but when Seiros/Rhea takes the stage dawn begins to break. At this point we can see a connection between Rhea and light, as well as Nemesis and the dark. But there are other lighting cues in cutscenes as well. The reunion with Dimitri sees him sitting in the dark, while Byleth offers their hand to join them into the light. AM ends with Dimitri offering his hand to Edelgard in a dark throne room, and when she refuses she is left there as Dimitri and Byleth exit into the light. We meet Claude again in the light, and fight Nemesis in the light. When Rhea is captured or tanks missiles, it appears to be sunset meaning darkness is coming. Her final battle also seems to be at sunset, but as she finds whatever salvation she gets in the end it all becomes bright. But with Edelgard, we reunite with her in the dark in SS when she is our enemy. Her route ends with Rhea’s death, the only light being the burning city around them as Byleth loses their divinity.
And in Edge of Dawn, Edelgard’s theme, it talks about her fearing the dawn and seeming to prefer darkness. Of having a blackened heart, and LYING to Byleth during the events of White Clouds. The structure of the song seems to point to Silver Snow specifically, with the second verse where they talk about lying being when she has Byleth’s hand/support and doesn’t want them to take it away.
I emphasized the lying bit for a reason. As we fight Nemesis in VW, if we zoom in on his unit we get this description. “Under the pretense of liberating Fodlan from a reign of deception, this king rallied his people to arms in the War of Heroes.” Under the pretense means that all of that stuff about liberating Fodlan, that wasn’t the real goal of Nemesis. He just said it was. The new DLC points to this, with a note from the Elites talking about how the Empire were a bunch of zealots of a religion less than a century old at war’s start. The Elites didn’t seem to know about the Red Canyon (or figured out who Seiros was) and there’s talk of an offer made by Nemesis.
I’m going to take a swing here, but Nemesis used liberating the people of the Empire from their new religion as his rallying cry. This would account for Edelgard’s belief that he never fell to darkness. But this was just a lie he told people in order to gain support, alongside giving them power in the forms of Crests and Relics. He said “hey, we’re going to save these people from a cult” when in reality he may have just been using it as a means to gain the allies who would help him take over the entire continent. Sound familiar to anyone else?
Because Nemesis wasn’t a hero. The was a thief. Thales says so right to Edelgard’s face. We even see that he’s not fighting alongside soldiers in the flashback, it’s brigands. And look at the Flame Emperor reveal. Edelgard is in the resting place of Rhea’s people, where Sothis was slain in her sleep, intending to steal the Crest stones and put them to use in her war. TWSITD can make her new weapons and tools and if the player goes CF she walks away with both the Sword of the Creator and Sothis’s Creststone as well.
Edelgard has also been gifted the Crest of Flames by the same people who gave it to Nemesis, so she can finish the job he failed to do all those years ago. They give her her own relic, Amyr, as well.
I think we can comfortably say that Nemesis was the bad guy back in the day, and the parallels between him and Edelgard are not meant to be good things. But that’s it really. The Black Eagles end up being her Elites, people fed her lies to support war against the Church. It can lead to both her success and downfall depending on our choices as players.
And since I haven’t done this in a while, have some Elric based music. Thanks for listening.
