#rhea ask

[lady-byleth]

Imagine if Rhea/Seiros had a son, it'd give her more humanity besides "shady pope lady"

Not sure why a son specifically but strictly speaking she did care about Sitri and the other "failed clones" before her like they were family, perhaps even children to her. Only mentioning Sitri pains her visibly, and in the side story she mourns so deeply she doesn't bury her but preserves her body in the catacombs to visit her regularly. Unhealthy, but ultimately not harmful to anyone.

And she has plenty of humanity on her own as well. She worries the students find her intimidating, she constantly takes in orphans to be cared for at the monastery even at risk to her own safety (like the children of the thieves she had the Blue Lions fight, they end up attacking Dimitri instead of her but she did give the order and still took them in).

She cares deeply about the people in her care to a point she starts a religion and changes historical records to protect them, which is shady as fuck but very human.

Her favorite teas are Angelica, Crescent-Moon and Chamomile, she likes receiving landscape paintings, she loses her hair clip just like other people lose theirs

She likes talking about books, about gardening and cooking mishaps, she admits to being lonely in her position and being able to speak as herself to Byleth only. She leaves notes in the advice box

She loved her mother, she lost all of her family and friends aside from Seteth and Flayn, who only woke up recently after 1000 years of slumber, she's suffered immensely and all alone for so long she's become desperate and unstable, but she learns from her mistakes and genuinely tries to atone

She protects both the monastery and Byleth's forces at Shambhala at the expense of her own safety and even her life. And that is, as she admits herself, long after she stopped seeing Byleth as a replacement for Sothis

Rhea is incredibly human, with all the virtues and flaws that come with it. Perhaps even more so than the humans around her due to the depth of her emotions and immense age. Her good and bad deeds run fat deeper than and reach much farther than those of a person with less power and witnessed history.

Rhea is so much more than "shady pope lady", you just gotta know where to look.

[lady-byleth]

You know what annoys me most about the CF finale? They could have improved it easily, evacuate Fhirdiad. Have Rhea talking to Cyril and Catherine before the battle, giving the order to get everyone out. Then, at the start of the battle, you walk in there not expecting much, BOOM, fire everywhere. Still a pretty terrible thing to do, loses a lot of people their homes, but somewhat more understandable as a war strategy. Just, why? (Sorry for the salt)

Oh gods yeah, I've had this exact conversation before. There's literally no reason for the whole city to die. For one, Rhea and Dimitri know Edie is primarily after them so they could've easily evacuated the city while Dimitri's forces were clashing with Edie's

But noooooo, gotta make Rhea a monster so that fighting her somehow feels justified when it doesn't make any sense for her character

[lady-byleth]

Byleth: So I hope we all learned a valuable lesson today about not trying to resurrect our loved ones with sketchy rituals. Rhea: *Nervous sweating* / I am, perhaps, abnormally happy that we can have tea with her now though. She’s wonderful and terrible and I love her.

The fucking irony of Rhea being so against the attempt to bring back Sitri while also AT THE SAME TIME working to bring back her mother has me in goddamn stitches

She's so far removed from reality sometimes its at once funny and sad. I love this disaster made flesh, she needs some goddamn therapy

[lady-byleth]

Honestly as I play the game more and more, I find myself liking Rhea more than Eddie, strangely enough. I mean, I still like them both, but like, Rhea is by no means innocent, and she does a lot of fucked up shit (trying to essentially kill Byleth so Sothis can take over her body is one of them), but the things she has done are nowhere near as Eddie starting a war and causing so much bloodshed. And I say this as someone who did Crimson Flower first before any other route lol

Oh yeah, same. I think the difference for me is that Rhea shows actual remorse for the things she did once she comes to her senses while Edie just keeps her eyes firmly closed to any other possible solution

Rhea essentially sacrifices herself in half the routes so that Byleth and co can survive and make shit better, which is a big step in the right direction

Edie...well...Edie keeps a woman prisoner for five years and starves her the entire time which...is bad...

[lady-byleth]

I think what hurts Rhea (as a morally gray character) is that we barely see her kind side especially during pre time skip. It makes her actions seem as pure black than gray as it was supposed to be.

She shows it enough, people just miss it cuz it's not in the main story. She takes in dozens of orphans, she sends several notes to the counselor asking for advice on how to be more approachable, she made the three classes and the ability to change classes to encourage relations between the kingdoms...it's all there

[lady-byleth]

Gonna join in with some salt of my own—I legit hate it when Edelgard Fans™️ (not all, obviously) try to undermine everything learnt and established in VW by saying “Oh but we don’t actually know for sure because Rhea *could* be lying”, which is just...why would she have any reason to lie at that point?? She’s beaten, broken, (and fucking dying) so there’s no incentive to hide anything. Like, is it really so hard to admit that Edie might not have all the facts??

Not only that but several in game cutscenes fucking disprove everything Crimson Flower says. The first cutscene alone establishes that Nemesis and the 10 Elites were allies

As soon as he appears, so do the other Relics. That's one truth Rhea tells Claude right there, less than a minute into the game.

And then there's her obvious rage when facing him and his amusement at it

The overkill in how she kills him, which shows its personal

The cheering empire, that is way to big to let one woman trick them into fighting an all out war just because she holds a grudge

Not to mention that he is literally wielding a sword made from the corpse of her mother. You're not a good person if you make weapons out of corpses.

Additionally, there's no way the Empire would fight against Nemesis - who apparently freed them of the "evil gods" - only because Seiros said so, Wilhelm must've had a reason to raise an army and join with Seiros and her people. Namely, that Nemesis was a fucking menace and because wanting to rule all of Fódlan apparently runs in the family, Edie.

We can gather that from the first cutscene alone, and the 10 Elites being evil is a big fucking reveal in Verdant Wind.

As for in route specific things, it's just as you say. The woman is actively dying. She already admitted to being Seiros and if the absolute pain in her voice isn't enough to convince anyone that she's not lying, the fact that she comes clean about everything she did and tried to do to Byleth should.

She's already told us much more than any normal person could possibly forgive and Nemesis is knocking on her door, she's got no reason to lie. Fuck, she is just as tired as we are of the lies.

[lady-byleth]

Okay so IDK if this is an unpopular opinion or not, but I can 100% understand why Rhea chose to have Sitri’s body remain unburied after she died. I don’t even find it THAT creepy. Thoughts?

I'm actually gonna go with the majority on this one and say it's really weird... I mean, there's a difference between displaying a body in reverence and just straight up not burying it cuz you wanna go visit it once in a while. One of those is already weird and the other is just plain unsettling to me. Especially when you don't tell anyone about it and keep the body in what's basically the catacombs in secret while there's an actual grave that others visit and don't know is empty. No matter how you twist it, that's not the actions of a mentally healthy person, you don't just do that.

I find it especially weird since Rhea seems to put a lot of emphasis on letting the dead rest in peace, like the Holy Tomb mission where she basically sentences Edelgard to death for desecrating graves. But Sitri just kinda sitting there in the catacombs...never even got that final resting place. Not to mention that she must've done something to the body that it didn't decay of 20 odd years.

No, something is definitely not right with that whole situation.

Now the good thing is that that's not actual canon and it's safe to assume she dealt with Sitri's death better in the actual time line than she did in Cindered Shadows

Just..."I'm gonna go visit the corpse of my mother's clone" is not a point in my life that I ever want to reach...I don't find it creepy perse just really fucking sad and a bad sign for her mental health

But that's my take on it, I can't speak for others

[lady-byleth]

Not to mention if we're going by war crimes, there's a lot you can argue for. Using child soldiers is a war crime, and if I remember correctly due to birthdays, the house leaders were legal adults, and Edelgard and Claude specifically led their classmates, some of whom were underage, into battle. Mistreating prisoners of war is a war crime, look at how weak Rhea is after rescue. Attacking civlian settlements is a war crime, Rhea does this in CF. Everyone's a war criminal at this point.

The child soldier thing is moot though since the House Leaders, aside from Edie obviously, aren't the ones who lead the battle of Garreg Mach. Rhea is the commander as leader of both church and Academy and the Professors are technically her subordinates so they too are above the House Leaders

Plus, the existence of the Officers Academy and Dimitri and Felix's involvement in quelling the western rebellion already says that the age limit for kids participating in wars is pretty darn low

Rhea's treatment would probably even fall under torture since she was starved to keep her from turning into the Immaculate One, which they did for five years and that's pretty horrific.

Fhirdiad would be one, yeah.

So, by my math, Edie and Rhea would end up war criminals in a real world setting but the boys wouldn't? Interesting.