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markoftheasphodel · 5 years

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The New Dawn of the Golden Deer

A retrospective on the Verdant Wind route and its home characters is substantially more difficult for me, personally, to construct because it lacks the overt resonance with earlier games that allowed for Azure Moon’s descent in through FE1/3/5/8, etc. But here goes nothin’...

Part of it is the not unfair sense that the Golden Deer are the catch-all house of Garreg Mach compared to the thematic cohesion of the Blue Lions. The five nobles all bear a King Lear-themed naming scheme that’s slightly obscured in the localization, but it doesn’t appear to mean much of anything. The three commoners are distinctly “common” without the complicated ties to nobility that their Blue Lion counterparts all bear. While Dimitri was a known quantity to most of the Lions before they all enrolled at the Academy, Claude is very much an unknown to his fellow Alliance nobles. That’s part of the point.

If we take Claude’s big motivational speech to his House at face value (and there are reasons we should and yet shouldn’t), the actual through line of the Deer is separate people coming together as one, so we’ll roll with that as a starting point. How do they manage it? Well, the Deer are for the most part A++ in terms of character development-- not the revelation of sad and traumatic backstories, but development beyond where we first find them.

Hilda, in the face of actual responsibility, grows out of her cocoon of deliberate idleness to be Claude’s right-hand-woman, her ability to delegate and to get others to do work turned into strengths. Lorenz grudgingly adapts his persona of the perfect noble to be more in-keeping with what people actually want and need in a leader (and what a lady wants in a nobleman!), without surrendering his actual core identity. Marianne faces up to the literal Beast of her family history and moves past it, finding value in herself and her life. Ignatz, also hobbled by guilt and low self-worth initially, matures into a thoughtful and capable young man with contributions of value to the Deer war councils. Lysithea perhaps leans harder on the “backstory revelation” than upon onscreen development and Leonie and Raphael are arguably the least developed of the Deer. I’d vote for poor Raphael as the worst-written of the lot, as the decency and humanity we see in his supports and Paralogue is still buried under “muscles” and “food” even in Endgame.

And then we have Claude, a Fire Emblem protagonist unlike any other to date. Whereas Dimitri is unquestionably in the mold of previous FE princelings, Claude has more in common with a different lineage of character, the Snarky Sniper who often serves as a peer rival or frenemy of the Lord. Said “archetype” dates back to Archanea’s Jeorge, who also stands as the progenitor to a line of characters one might call “Wandering Nobles”-- Lewyn, Elffin, Joshua, etc. Claude, with his deliberate obscurity about who and what he is recalls Jeorge on both counts, and his pride in his stratagems can’t help but recall Innes, the Strategician Prince/peer rival of Ephraim’s from FE8. Innes, though, was quite straightforward in his goals even if his methods could be shady (spy networks, etc). Claude’s means and his end goals are both veiled; from the start we learn we can take nothing at face value including his smile. You can probably count on your fingers the number of times Claude reveals the unguarded and unvarnished truth to anyone.

Fortunately, Claude is able to harness his practiced charm to get and keep the other Deer on-board with his leadership even if he doesn’t trust them with the actual secrets of his full identity or his ultimate goal. I’ve been in FE fandom long enough to see several waves of fans clamoring for a “cool” lord like Joshua, and well... Claude has arrived. And he is, indeed, quite the charmer as well as quite the schemer. I must say I love him, even if his current status as a memelord misses the point (Claude, ever conscious as to his image he projects, would not do many of the things meme!Claude gets up to, sorry).

Claude breaks new protagonist ground even as his character “type” traces back to the dawn of Fire Emblem. Lorenz provides a superb example of the rival/foil to the protagonist-- as Innes to Ephraim, except both Claude and Lorenz fully acknowledge the game. Hilda gives us a noblewoman deft at wielding “soft power” and a reluctant adjutant to Claude who succeeds beyond her own expectations. Marianne steps beyond the shadow of her backstory to show genuine growth. The same goes for Ignatz, though he perhaps treads too hard on the “soft archer boy” trail already defined by Ashe. Lysithea takes the image of the pale-haired, sweets-eating gremlin/loli and gives it some heft, Leonie hits against barriers of class and gender expectation while making a surprisingly shaded portrait of an apprentice in thrall to a flawed master, and Raphael... was done dirty by the developers.

That’s the Golden Deer for you. What does it all mean, beyond the ideal of a bunch of disparate characters coming together under one banner to bring about a new dawn for the continent? Well... I’m not really sure, not least because the Deer don’t entirely understand the scheme Claude’s roped them into! Verdant Wind provides a great counterpoint to Azure Moon in that, thanks to Claude’s own zeal for getting to the bottom of things, we learn things that Dimitri and his route simply weren’t interested in. It’s an engaging crew of characters on a mad adventure that includes magical ICBMs, an underground city with a classic Star Wars/TRON aesthetic, and a final smackdown with the reanimated corpses of legendary heroes.

In the end, though, it didn’t have the sheer emotional resonance for me of the Dimitri and his Blue Lions-- perhaps because its parts are insufficiently tethered to the hoary “archetypes” of FE in a way that Azure Moon handled brilliantly. Or, perhaps because Claude’s reliance on Byleth instead of Lorenz and/or Hilda as his main partner in crime was dragged down by the fact Byleth isn’t really a character. On Azure Moon, Byleth’s presence isn’t enough to eclipse that Dimitri’s posse deeply love and deeply fear for their prince; it’s really the story of the redemption of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, whereas in Verdant Wind Claude makes a chessboard of all Fódlan and the nations beyond, a breadth of scope that does indeed evoke Genealogy of the Holy War even if the Deer themselves don’t summon many spectres of Jugdral.

In the end, neither really works in a vacuum. Azure Moon is deeply, viscerally felt and fails to ask, much less answer, many basic questions. Verdant Wind holds the entire spectacle at arms’ length while digging for answers that lead to more questions that lead to some very strange places. As two halves of the same coin, they make an interesting pair. But they are not, of course, merely two halves, as we now have another house to join and two more routes to consider...

#fe16 spoilers #golden deer love #golden deer meta

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