#annette cant actually learn fire at any point | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

smownan · 5 years

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dont mind me im just fire emblem posting..............

okay so like im in love with the magic overhaul in three houses. So in past games magic was equipped as an item in the form of tomes (attack magic) and staves (healing magic) and certain classes could only equip certain magic items (mages can use tomes but not staves and vice versa for priests). But in three houses magic is no longer an inventory item and, since they overhauled the item system as well to make it so any class can use any weapon, that means that now all magic classes have access to both attack and healing magic in the form of a spell list that you have full access to as long as your class is able to use magic. Because the game is themed around education and religion, the schools of magic are appropriately named reason (attack) and faith (healing), and characters will learn these magics at different rates as a means to nudge characters’ class upgrades in a certain direction. And oh boy they gave me an inch of lore and im taking it out a mile.

Okay so like in the game theres a conversation between two characters where. Do you guys mind if i just use their actual names? Okay so Annette is struggling with a math problem and she complains to Sylvain about it. Sylvain offers to take a look at it and not only solves it right away but solves it more efficiently than how the textbook says to do it and Annette gets mad that he’s naturally good at math while she has to work hard and study. The thing is Sylvain is a himbo and neither he nor Annette knew that he was good at math. And this lines up with their skill proficiencies where Annette learns reason magic at a faster rate than normal, while Sylvain picks up reason at a normal rate until you give him enough private tutoring in it, at which point it will become a “budding talent” and he’ll learn reason at the same boosted rate. And so this *unconfirmed* connection between reason magic and mathematics has me thinking about how magic works on a practical level. And so i thought about it a bunch and im starting to think that reason and faith in the world of fire emblem are akin to our fields of Physics and Biology.

Reason and physics line up pretty well because i imagine you’re altering the physical world at a molecular level to cast spells, like condensing and fusing hydrogen atoms in the air around you to create a fireball from the energy that process gives off . And i imagine that actually manifesting these changes involves some visualization tactics that differ from simply doing the calculations by themselves (not all mathematicians are mages, but all mages are mathematicians). I haven’t fully figured out the differences between Black and Dark magic (two subschools of Reason, characters will learn either Black or Dark magic when leveling up their reason skill, but never both); the best I can come up with is that Black magic is like alchemy, which is why Black magic spells are based on elements, and Dark magic is more like theoretical physics which makes the spells more shapeless and abstract, and there’s in-game lore for why certain characters will learn Dark magic instead of Black magic, but I havent come up with a practical explanation for it.

Faith also kind of stumped me for a bit because a lot of characters who are proficient in faith aren’t actually pious people. Some characters are both faithful and pious, some are pious but neutral or bad at learning faith, while others are apathetic toward religion but still good with faith magic. Ultimately i decided that “faith” was akin to biology because of how much it has to do with healing injuries, and the school is simply called “faith” because its being taught through a religious lens, sort of like how people would attribute plagues to divine punishment or how you might call a quick recovery from illness a “miracle”. Faith-oriented characters who aren’t pious still tend to be fairly intelligent; Manuela loves to get blackout drunk and have sex with different men every night, but she’s also a talented doctor, which is what made me think faith=biology in the first place (shes also bad at reason, but i guess doctors dont need to know physics); Linhardt couldn’t give a shit about the goddess herself but is obsessed with studying the “divine power” that she granted to humans in the form of Crests.

I also like this Religious Lens view because characters like Edelgard and Hubert, who are atheists, learn faith very slowly. They’re obviously intelligent people, and both are proficient in reason; they could probably pick up on “faith” (biology) quickly as well if it weren’t so connected to the goddess they don’t believe in. Similarly, Petra is a skilled hunter and therefore must know a lot about how bodies work, but since she believes in her home country’s religion and not the church of seiros, she has trouble learning and manifesting the concepts of faith-based biology. And just like reason, faith magic is manifested via visualization of molecular manipulation, but with cells instead of atoms; healing spells are simply accelerating mitosis; warp and rescue scatter the target at a molecular level and “rebuild” them elsewhere; nosferatu steals energy from the body and supplants it into the caster. UGH sorry everyone this game just tickles my brain in the best way i cant remember the last time i was this obsessed with something.

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