Hii! Welcome to my blog! I’m The Jinster, and this is where I yap into the voice about my favorite game, fire emblem three houses, and (eventually) share my art, aus, and answer questions! I’m very busy so my posts will probably be more on the infrequent side, but if you like what I have to say, feel free to stick around! My ask box is always open, and whether its thoughts, questions, or ideas, I’d love to hear it :)
My basic rules of interaction are simply: don’t be a meanie. Three houses controversy is welcome, although that is not the main purpose of this blog, as well as sillier debates (i.e. pasta vs noodles) but I will not engage with disrespect or harassment beyond blocking you. Y’all should know that I’m queer and nonbinary, so if you have a problem with that, then this blog isn’t for you.
With that out of the way, welcome!! I also play a couple other srpgs, as well as some other game, and other interests in general. So if you have any questions, go ahead! I’d also love to hear any au ideas, thoughts or comments on my own aus, etc! I have a couple of aus I’ve written a bit about but haven’t gotten to posting on this blog, so that should be coming soon. :)
P.S. If you can guess what musical my username is referencing, you get a gold star.
Just read ‘For the Love of Knowledge’ and omg I was smiling and kicking my feet the whole time I loved the way you wrote the two of them! It is CRIMINAL those two never got any supports in either game so I love seeing takes on what their support chain might have looked like.
I hope to see more of your writing in the future!
aww thank you so much! i’m glad to see you enjoyed it! i agree, the fact that they never interact is literally a crime. personally i think intsys just hates linclaude. if you want to see more stuff, i do actually have some more linclaude fics up that i wrote for cross house week that are on my ao3. my favorite of those was day two “from my heart to yours” and day 6 “eternally bright”. i’d love to know if you find my other fics just as good with the writing, especially since i’m not super consistent in my writing style lol. once again, thank you so much :)
as a follow-up to the ask you sent me about my fic, do you have linclaude thoughts 👀
I feel like linclaude is a ship that’s often overlooked not just because of their lack of interaction in the game, but because its not as big and bombastic as more popular ships like casphardt or dimiclaude. Linclaude is a lot more understated, and that’s one of the reasons why I like it.
I also feel like Claude’s likely one of the few character’s whose main impression of linhardt is the one that few other get to see, since they’re both night owls often holed up in the library.
Overall, I wouldn’t call it an otp of mine or anything, but I do really enjoy it! I do think it’s my favorite pairing for linhardt (I do like casphardt, but imo their dynamic is so much sillier as besties). So a solid 8/10 for me!
Character Analysis: Raphael Kirsten (Fire Emblem: Three Houses)
Who is Raphael?
Raphael is one of the most underestimated characters in Three Houses because the game lets his surface be so easy to summarise - he's big, cheerful, hungry, obsessed with training, and often used for comic rhythm in a cast full of sharper tongues and more obviously dramatic wounds. If you only stop at that level, he can look like a one-note joke about muscles and meals, but the supports tell a fuller story; Raphael has lost both parents, taken on a strong sense of responsibility toward his little sister Maya, and chosen to keep living in a way that's open, practical, and generous instead of letting grief turn him bitter. That choice is part of his depth, not evidence that he has none.
He also occupies a useful place in the Golden Deer because he stabilises the house without needing to dominate it intellectually or politically; Claude carries secrets, Lorenz ideology, Lysithea urgency, Marianne despair, Ignatz guilt, and Raphael often becomes the person least interested in making his own pain the centre of the room. That doesn't mean he lacks pain, but it means he has a very different relationship to it; he keeps moving, eating, training, trying to be dependable, and offering a kind of kindness that's direct enough to cut through other people's spirals. The game gives him less ornate writing than some of the flashier characters, but his emotional function is extremely deliberate.
There's also a maturity to him that people tend to miss because he isn't self-consciously profound. Raphael doesn't spend much time theorising about suffering or turning it into identity - he's capable of sadness, but he's much more interested in what can still be done next: get stronger, help Maya, eat well, protect people, keep going. A lot of media teaches players to read complexity only when it arrives through irony, bitterness, detachment, or elaborate self-analysis, while Raphael's complexity is much plainer than that. He understands loss very well and he's decided not to let it rot him from the inside.
Psychology
Raphael is one of the clearest examples in the game of someone who's experienced serious grief without organising his whole self around damage. His parents died in an accident, and that loss clearly changed the course of his life; he's taken on a much stronger sense of responsibility, especially toward Maya, and several of his supports make it obvious that he's had to grow up fast in very practical ways. The notable part isn't that he escaped pain, but that he responds to pain with appetite for life rather than withdrawal from it.
That doesn't make him shallow or emotionally simple. Raphael understands grief more than people give him credit for, especially in supports where someone else is stuck inside fear. The Ignatz material is the clearest example - Ignatz carries guilt over the circumstances connected to Raphael's parents' deaths, and Raphael refuses to let that guilt define their relationship. He doesn't do this because he's too dim to understand what happened, but because he understands very clearly that neither Ignatz nor his parents caused the tragedy, and he sees no value in making more lives smaller around an injury that's already happened.
He also has an unusually healthy relationship to embodiment compared with a lot of the cast; Raphael likes food, training, physical effort, and often approaches life through the body first - strength, stamina, work, hunger, growth. It would be easy to reduce that to comic simplicity, but it also reads like someone grounding himself very intentionally in what's alive and available. He isn't chasing abstractions about meaning all the time, but eating, moving, building, lifting, helping. For a character who's lost so much early on, that physical straightforwardness feels less like stupidity and more like a way of staying present.
Another thing the game handles quietly well is that Raphael isn't ashamed of needing joy. He doesn't act as though seriousness requires permanent austerity. He can grieve his parents and still want a good meal. He can miss them and still laugh loudly. He can worry about Maya and still get excited about muscles. Some players mistake his lack of visible self-punishment for lack of depth, when it often suggests the opposite: a person who's already decided that love for the dead doesn't have to look like destroying the life still in front of him.
Strengths and Flaws
Raphael's first major strength is emotional resilience. He has every reason to have become guarded, resentful, or fatalistic, and he simply hasn't. The game doesn't pretend his parents' deaths did nothing to him, but it shows a boy who's absorbed that loss and turned it into a more protective, grounded way of living, and that kind of resilience is easy to underrate because it doesn't come wrapped in dramatic speeches.
He's also genuinely kind. Raphael's kindness isn't polished or poetic, but it's unusually clean - he tends to mean what he says, help when he can, and react to other people's fear or awkwardness without much malice. His supports often work because his honesty strips away the elaborate defenses other characters are hiding behind. With someone like Marianne or Ignatz, he can sound almost startlingly simple, and that simplicity often helps more than a more delicate or intellectual response would.
A third strength is maturity in the practical sense. He isn't socially refined, but he's often more adult than people around him in the ways that matter most. He knows what responsibility looks like - he's thinking about Maya, earning enough, becoming strong enough to protect others, and continuing his life rather than freezing at the site of loss. He has a very clear sense of proportion - tragedy happened, but people still need to eat, work still needs doing, someone still has to keep going - which is very much a form of wisdom.
He also has a disarming lack of vanity about his own image. He likes his strength and takes visible pleasure in it, but he isn't really curating himself as impressive in the way some characters do. He isn't trying to seem tragic, sophisticated, noble, or mysterious, which makes him much easier to underestimate and, paradoxically, much more emotionally secure than a lot of the cast.
His flaws are real, just less severe than some players seem to want from a "serious" character. He can be blunt to the point of insensitivity, especially with people who are more anxious, private, or easily embarrassed. Raphael often charges through subtle emotional weather because he assumes sincerity and straightforwardness will be enough, and sometimes they aren't.
He can also be narrow in focus. Food, training, muscles, and immediate practical concerns take up a lot of his attention, and there are times when he seems less interested in complexity than in the next concrete thing he can do - which keeps him grounded, but can also make him seem less perceptive than he actually is until the game gives him a support where his deeper understanding becomes unmistakeable.
A third flaw is that he sometimes overcompensates through cheerfulness and motion. Raphael is healtheir than many of his classmates, but there are moments where his refusal to linger in sorrow can feel like a limit as well as a strength. He doesn't wallow, which is good, but he also doesn't always make much room for more unresolved or ambivalent versions of grief, either in himself or others. His answer is often to keep living, eating, training, moving, which is admirable, but it isn't the only emotional language people need.
Relationships
IGNATZ VICTOR
Ignatz is one of the most important relationships for understanding Raphael because the death of Raphael's parents is tangled up with Ignatz's family history. A lesser character would turn that into permanent bitterness or use it to claim moral superiority - Raphael does something more difficult. He refuses to hold Ignatz responsible for what neither boy chose, and that refusal says more about his character than almost any inspirational monologue could. He doesn't deny the tragedy, but he refuses to let inherited guilt become the centre of his friendship. That decision makes him look extraordinarily emotionally mature beside a cast full of people who are far more tempted to let pain dictate their relationships - take, for instance, Petra and her anger toward Caspar for his father killing hers (which is an equally understandable reaction).
MAYA KIRSTEN
Maya brings out the most responsible part of Raphael. His concern for her future gives his life a concrete direction that goes beyond eating and training jokes, and it makes clear that his optimism isn't the optimism of someone who's never had to carry real weight - he has, he simply carries it without theatricality. Thinking about Maya also helps explain why Raphael values strength in such a grounded way; he doesn't want strength only for self-image or competition, but to be capable enough that the people depending on him will be safe.
FLAYN
Flayn draws out Raphael's gentleness without requiring angst to do it. Their supports tend to make his warmth look almost domestic: patient, curious, good-humoured, and much softer than the Big Loud Muscle Guy impression would suggest. She helps show that his appetite and physicality aren't crude or threatening qualities in him - they exist alongside a very easy protectiveness and an ability to meet someone more delicate without trying to harden them.
MARIANNE VON EDMUND
Marianne is one of the clearest examples of Raphael helping someone whose suffering looks very different from his own. He doesn't overcomplicate her pain, and he doesn't romanticise it either - he tends to meet her with steadiness, normalcy, and a sense that life can still contain small pleasures and ordinary movement even when someone feels deeply stuck. Their dynamic works because Raphael never seems to need her to be brighter or easier in order to keep treating her kindly.
Just for Fun / Typology
MBTI - ESFP
What stands out first is how naturally he leads with Se - he lives through the body, appetite, action, and what's concretely in front of him. Food, muscles, training, work, movement, physical capability - none of that is decorative to him. It's the way he relates to life. He grounds himself in doing and in being alive in very immediate ways.
Fi fits the inner core that people often miss because it's expressed so plainly. Raphael has a strong personal value system, and it governs him much more than detached logic or social expectation does. His forgiveness of Ignatz, devotion to Maya, instinct to keep living fully after loss, and refusal to let grief calcify into spite all point to a private moral centre that's stable, sincere, and not especially performative. He doesn't spend much time arguing values abstractly, he simply lives by them.
MORAL ALIGNMENT - Neutral Good
He doesn't feel strongly Lawful or Chaotic. Structure is useful to him when it helps people live, train, eat, and stay safe, but he isn't especially invested in hierarchy, duty for its own sake, or rebellion for its own sake either. His attention stays much closer to immediate human wellbeing than to ideology or system.
The Good side is clearer; Raphael is consistently generous, protective, forgiving, and willing to orient his life around other people's needs without becoming self-righteous about it. He can be blunt, narrow, and occasionally tactless, but his instincts run toward care much more reliably than toward self-interest or domination. His version of goodness is earthy and practical, which is probably one reason it gets overlooked next to louder, more tortured characters.
Conclusion
Raphael has more depth than he's usually given credit for because the game gives him one of the quietest forms of maturity in the cast. He has trauma, but he doesn't turn trauma into identity. He has grief, but he doesn't mistake grief for the whole truth of his life. He understands suffering well enough to know that he'd rather answer it with food, strength, protection, laughter, and continued affection than with bitterness, which is a real character choice, not an absence of characterisation.
He's still funny, simple in some ways, and very much the big appetite-and-muscles guy on the surface - the point is that the surface isn't the whole thing. Raphael is one of the game's more emotionally grounded portraits of loss because he shows that pain doesn't always have to announce itself through collapse, cynicism, or overt self-destruction to be real.
we need to bring back old school tumblr communication and im so serious. sending an ask to a mutual just to say hello. seeing three different asks in your inbox all asking how your dentist appointment went. seeing a post you think one of your mutuals would enjoy and tagging them/sending it to them in the dms. nowadays its just silently liking a post or (if youre feeling extreme) replying under posts. WHAT HAPPENED TO US!! we used to be a proper community!!!! #LetsBringWhimsyBack
I think the main problem with choosing to associate with TWSITD or not is that if you don't you get killed, replaced by a TWSITD member or mind controlled so any character would be stuck between a rock and a hard place
( Sorry to respond to tags, but your roleswap au is truly a good though experiment :') )
Good point!! That’s another reason why its interesting to imagine how different characters under that kind of pressure might respond. Also I’m glad you like the concept! :)
It is finally time, my friends. For me to actually start posting about fire emblem (after having this vaguely fe centric blog for many moons). But I’m unsure where to start.
So, it’s poll time! For my *checks notes* three followers (and anyone else who happens to stumble across this),
it really is crazy that women's clothes don't fit anybody. fat women can't find clothes, skinny women can't find clothes, tall women can't find clothes, short women can't find clothes, big chested women can't find clothes, small chested women can't find clothes. who the fuck are these being made for
