#but for me i think it's easy to assign horrible traits to villainous characters despite lack of evidence | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

irandrura · 4 years

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Anyway, more serious thoughts on chapters five and six...

The Heroes’ Relics make people turn into horrific dragon monsters. Okay. I know people assured me that this game wasn’t playing the ‘Corrupt Church’ trope entirely straight, but still, the Church of Seiros, the thirteen relics, and the crests have a million warning signs going off around them right now. Maybe most members of the church are well-meaning, but there are clearly dark and horrible secrets in Fódlan’s past.

Knowing previous Fire Emblem games, my bet is that it’s something to do with dragons, gods, betrayal, and fraught relationships with humanity. The relics look like fossilised bone to me, and I suspect that Seteth and Flayn are either dragons themselves, or somehow related to them. (I have not read spoilers on this, or if I have I’ve forgotten them, but there is something very Ninian-ish about her.) Flayn’s blood was mentioned as being special, so I wonder if crests are the results of some ancient blasphemy where dragon blood was fused with humans, or something along those lines? Add in that we have Sothis playing a Yune-like role and it’s easy to guess what might be going on.

Still, the relics and crests themselves seem dangerous, and possibly maddening. I suppose it’s for the best that I’ve never actually used the Sword of the Creator in battle. It wasn’t a principled decision or anything: I just never needed to.

There’s been some discussion of crests. As I said before, I find it strange that Dimitri is taking such an egalitarian, meritocratic line. He thinks that lineage shouldn’t matter? Nor should race, religion, or crest? Really? That’s an odd thing for a prince to believe. Who taught him those ideas? For some reason it surprises me more with Dimitri than with Edelgard, who I already had pegged as an egalitarian revolutionary in the same vein as Ashnard (albeit less over-the-top evil). There has to be something interesting going on in terms of the intellectual history of Fódlan - maybe it’s the Fódlan equivalent of the Renaissance, and old aristocratic houses are being pressured by a rising tide of enlightened humanism?

Actually, what crests most remind me of is an old AD&D setting, Birthright. I always really liked Birthright despite its lack of popularity, mainly because I loved its colourfully monstrous collection of villains in the awnsheghlien. Fódlan’s crests seem to have shaped aristocratic politics in the same way that Cerilia’s bloodlines have.

Moving on to chapter six...

Right now I am stressing more about recruiting out-of-house characters. So far I’ve only managed to grab Leonie, but hopefully I can get a few more. I hear Dorothea is pretty much a gimme - maybe that’s why she’s always on the top of the list of most-used characters it shows me via the online feature.

It’s starting to nag me that Byleth has a very specific level of ignorance about Fódlan. He’s wandered all across the continent with Jeralt and has become an experienced mercenary, the Ashen Demon, but somehow he doesn’t know anything whatsoever about the church or about geopolitics. That’s rather straining the suspension of disbelief.

I say this every time, but I wonder if the game or the story couldn’t be improved by just cutting the avatar character? I suppose Byleth is useful for allowing the player to take the teacher role, at least, and maybe he’s necessary for the Sothis plot? Even so, right now I find myself wondering why Dimitri, Claude, or Edelgard can’t just be the protagonist. I don’t hate Byleth or anything, but he’s definitely less interesting than the others.

Other character stuff has been fun so far. I did the paralogue, ‘War for the Weak’, where you try to resolve a Duscur rebellion. I was a bit confused there: judging from Dedue, I thought the people of Duscur were generally dark-skinned, but that didn’t seem to be the case with the Duscur units on the map. I guess Duscur is in the northern part of the continent, and Faerghus is supposed to be quite cold, so it would be unusual for there to be a whole nation of dark-skinned people there? I don’t know. The impression I got was that Duscurs generally have bronze skin, dark eyes, and white or red hair, as opposed to the extremely pale and frequently blond, blue-or-green-eyed Faerghans. But I don’t know how much thought was put into the ethnography of this world.

On the chapter six battle itself... so, okay, the Death Knight and the Flame Emperor escaped, but I did defeat thirty or so of their minions. Did we not take any of them alive? I feel like we should be able to interrogate some of them. At the very least, I’d like to take this conspiracy a bit more seriously? Could we maybe ransack Jeritza’s quarters? Search for papers? Maybe Byleth’s class can’t do that - I would say that they’re students and shouldn’t be trusted with such sensitive assignments, except that they were tasked to recover the Lance of Ruin and trusted to keep quiet about the relics turning people into monsters - but it’d be nice to know that someone is doing that.

But instead apparently we’re going to go off and have a mock battle between the three houses. I feel like I should be able to make joke about the Hogwarts House Cup, but I can’t figure out a good way into it...

Finally, on characters and supports:

I have gotten a handful of supports with out-of-house characters, and they feel odd. It’s bizarre to have a C support with Ferdinand where he asks how I think he stacks up compared to Edelgard: it is clearly written with the assumption that I’m the Black Eagle teacher. If the game was going to allow you to do out-of-house supports, I would have expected the supports to be written to avoid that issue.

Among the Blue Lions, the supports so far have ranged from the genuinely insightful or heartwarming to the merely banal. I have gotten a few C supports that feel like this, although to be fair mostly featuring Felix, and Felix is an arse. Nonetheless, by being the only Blue Lion who’s just a jerk, Felix’s supports have actually helped to illustrate some of the internal tensions. He is genuinely awful to Dedue and Dimitri, but if he wasn’t, it would not clarify for the player that there’s some sort of dark, angsty secret in Dimitri’s past.

(I don’t know what that secret is: he didn’t explain it in Heroes. I believe it has something to do with knowing Edelgard as a child, and perhaps Edelgard’s secret second crest; and perhaps also it’s hinted that Dimitri was involved in a massacre? But I don’t know or remember the details.)

As for the others, oho, Gilbert is Annette’s dad, Mercedes has some Birthright-esque drama with a noble house in the Empire (and, okay, I did read enough to know about Jeritza), Ingrid and Ashe continue to be generally nice, and Sylvain would be an excellent person if he wasn’t bent on harassing women all the time.

I do wonder sometimes what’s going on with that... is it just a Fire Emblem series trope that there’s always a guy who vocally flirts with every women he sees and is genuinely unable to control himself? Is it a Japanese thing? To my Western eyes it’s starting to get a bit tiresome. I don’t want to get super-political, but I feel like after the whole #MeToo thing Western commentators are going to be a lot more sensitive to stories that depict constant unwanted flirting as a harmless, even entertaining character trait. I don’t know. There’s probably something going on there that I don’t get.

Oh, well. I still made Sylvain kill his brother. Was that cruel of me? I guess his brother was a horrible monstrous dragon at the time...

Anyway, on with trying to recruit more characters, and then the tournament!

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