"God's gonna get Edelgard for this!"
Yup, we sure have gone there!
So a while, RandomNameless got an anon ask:
Insane that Sothis can watch Billy slaughter her children and subjugate Fodlan in twu piss, and still say she adores him. The devs were drinking the El Grey that day.
You know it's RN because the stupid nicknames.
So yeah, Anon's just angrily ranting that Sothis doesn't care about her daughter which established a false religion, made people suffer for a millennia, and tried to violate the laws of life and death, which, when Ashera did it in Radiant Dawn, was treated by Caineghis as an utter betrayal of her supposed core attribute of order.
“A blasphemy, you mean! How could the goddess of order violate the most fundamental natural law?”
Stay salty, anon.
RN herself weighs in on it next. I'm gonna let her go on a bit because the actual argument she's making needs to be stated in full.
That's what baffled me in Tru Piss lol, and first route bias etc etc meant Sothis was unsalvageable given how it became painfully obvious, even for someone who didn't complete the other routes, that the goddess Rhea calls "mother" is Sothis herself ! Bear in mind Hresvelg Grey meant Sothis couldn't interact with the cast bar Billy, will never talk to her relatives and will never have any influence on the plot. It's as if Elbert only talk to Mark, while Eliwood is still frantically looking for him, and Mark never tells Eli where his dad is.
So here, RN is misunderstanding the point of Sothis in the broader narrative. Yes, Sothis happens to be Rhea's mother, but "being Rhea's mom" isn't her role in the story. RN, because she's a huge fan of the Nabateans, wants the story to be more about the Nabateans, but it really isn't.
See, there's a reason the Agarthans are dispatched in one chapter in all routes and are never the final bosses or the true villains of the story: the story isn't about them. They're important to its background, but they're important for what they represent and what they do, not who they are. The Nabateans are the same.
Ultimately, the story of Three Houses is a tale of the conflicts between mortals and the divine, and the differing ideologies espoused by those who represent those sides. Edelgard firmly represents the will of mortal humans. Rhea, her antithesis, represents the desire of the divine to watch over mortals. Rhea, unlike her species is important because she is Edelgard's opposite. Thales, who might have been Rhea's opposite, is not as important because he isn't: Edelgard already serves that role. Dimitri leans more toward the necessity of the divine in human affairs, while Claude leans more toward the self-governance of humans while using the divine when necessary. There's a reason Claude sides with the Empire when he must, and the church only when he can control it for the purposes of promoting humanism.
Byleth is smack in the middle, fitting their dual-nature as both human and god, but they must choose a side in the end. In CF, they fully embrace the human, while in SS they fully embrace the god. VW and AM are something more in the middle.
Sothis is similar in a way, as a being who was once a god, died, came back as something less than a god, and chooses to sacrifice her powers to Byleth, thus remaining something less than a god. Sothis willingly chooses not to resume her role as the goddess (in Zahras when she decides to give her powers to Byleth rather than taking Byleth's body as her own in order to escape), and so her role in the story is not to be the goddess or Rhea's mother, but to be Byleth's guide, setting them at the start of their path and then departing so they might make the rest of the way.
But Rhea BaD BaD BaD,
And now we dip into the anti-Rhea conspiracy theory...
so her mother cannot take over Billy (something she canonically does in Nopes) to save her,
Here's another fact RN can't accept - and she calls Sothis a horrible mother for it - but Sothis doesn't approve of Rhea. Furthermore, Rhea's downfall in CF is almost entirely of her own making. She set the groundwork for Fodlan's oppressive social system, she refuses to allow it to be reformed, and she never questions why anyone would disagree with her. Because, for Rhea, reforming the church and Fodlan means resurrecting Sothis and submitting Fodlan to her divine rule, which becomes impossible without her church (it's already impossible because Sothis knows her time as the goddess is over and she's respecting the laws of life and death, but still).
and to erase Supreme Leader who hilariously tells everyone she doesn't exist.
It's not even that "hilarious". Edelgard's right in that the goddess worshipped by the Church of Seiros no longer exists: she's dead, and when she had the chance to come back, she chose not to. The Church of Seiros might worship a being with the same name as the gremlin in Byleth's head, but Sothis the head-gremlin and Sothis the goddess are a whole life apart from one another, and the Sothis we know chooses to remain the former.
But now we get to the real meat of this post.
Fantasy Invader.
Oh yeah!
I think this is a translation issue as Japanese Sothis doesn't say that "the stone in your chest is gone," she says "the stone in your chest...shattered."
Teaspoon Translations has it as "crumbled away" and has no ellipse, but who am I to question Fantasy Invader trying to make things look as sad as possible?
It broke, which would mean something considering it's supposedly her heart.
We bwoke Sothis's heart by killing poor baby Whea T_T
What's more, the game changed Byleth's Nirvana class to Enlightened One, and part of achieving Nirvana is purging oneself of attachments that might cloud your judgement.
But only if it's Edelgard. If it's Dimitri or Rhea, attach yourself as hard as possible in the hope they come around.
Also, in the context of Three Houses, detachment is a bad thing. Byleth grows out of being the Ashen Demon through attachment to others. Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude become their best selves when they open up and allow others in. Attachment is a good thing in Three Houses.
Ergo, by playing Safflower (the route being named after a type of thistle, a path of thorns if you will)
Ah, yes, I remember that one. It wasn't very good.
the player breaks Sothis's heart,
Oh he actually just said, "you break her heart :("
the thing that holds her essence,
No, because by then Byleth held her essence. Not the crude, physical matter Rhea shoved into their chest.
You'd think the person who goes all-in on religious symbolism would value the eternal soul over the ephemeral body.
causing it to seemingly disappear,
Except it doesn't? Her essence, I mean, not the Crest Stone. That's what the S support is for.
But sadly, Fantasy Invader has a way to explain that away.
It's a really bad way, but a bad way is still a way!
yet she leaves behind the Sothis you knew.
I'm sorry, what. Nothing indicates the Sothis from her S support is some... bizarre cast-off shadow of her.
Sothis, the real Sothis, abandons Byleth at the end of Safflower, leaving behind any attachment she once held as Byleth walked down the path of the Beast as per Dimitri's comment.
I'm sorry, what. Is it too much to ask that FI provide some evidence for this claim? I mean actual evidence, not his headcanon derived from his poor attempts at analyzing Buddhist symbolism.
Wouldn't leaving behind a part of herself to remain with Byleth go against this whole no attachments thing? That's a pretty big attachment! And if Sothis rejected Byleth, why would she do that? She can't just make a clean break from Byleth, she has to literally detach the parts of her... soul... personality, that care for them? Wouldn't that make her an incomplete being? It was a bad thing in the Tellius games when Ashunera split her soul into parts!
Combine this with the implications Sothis can come back if she recreates her body,
You know, that thing she demonstrates no ability to do! If Sothis could just make herself another meat puppet to incarnate into, Rhea wouldn't have had to spend a millennia trying and failing to do that for her.
and why Nemesis needed to kill her when she was asleep,
Because she would have defended herself and killed him if she wasn't? He didn't have a Relic or a Crest back then, he was just a bandit trying to kill the most powerful Nabatean in the world.
What, is FI trying to imply Sothis's soul just got stuck asleep because she died asleep and that's why she never bothered to come back the first time she died?
and you get an idea what's going to happen when that occurs as well as another piece of evidence Edelgard is an Agarthan in all but name.
And there we go, "God's gonna get Edelgard for this!" Sothis will totally self-restore herself at some unknown period of time in the future, kill Bad Red Lady, and make everything right.
Well if that's the case, why do you bother getting upset at anything Byleth does, FI? Just be like those Christians who are sure Jesus is coming back any day now and he'll fix everything on Earth when he does.
So yeah, yet more salty desperate self-assurance that Edelgard's totally gonna lose the minute the credits start, trust me bro.
I mean seriously, if her detractors are so certain she'll fail, why bother getting upset when she wins? It really makes you think.