#they COULD have potentially balanced that sick church lore with the emotional beats of the beagles fighting their former classmate

[burr-ell]

"(And the church, not-so-accordingly, but we don’t have time for me to list all the things that annoy me about Dorothea.)" 👀 if you don't mind I'm kinda curious about that lol :o

Speak to me everything about your dislikes about Dorothea. I'd 100% love to hear it. She's not high on my BE list, either, but aside from two from that class, maybe three, if I push it, the rest fall fast on my, "Nah", list.

oh gods anons yall tryna get me in trouble with ALL of twitter

As far as story is concerned, Dorothea just falls flat for me. I don't get much of a dynamic character arc from her. The game tries to go with this "ooh, she starts out flirty and sexy, and then the war starts and she's sad and pretty and hates war! isnt that different? isn't that sad??" like no........it's not?? really??? That's not an arc. I found that Dorothea's comments about the war read more like the game trying to hamfistedly declare that War Bad because War Made Pretty Girl Sad, rather than actually taking the time to show it. They at least gave her a little more meat when they included that line in SS about her taking care of orphans, but it never goes anywhere.

On top of that, I found a lot of her lines and views to be flat-out mopey and whiny. The worst offender I can think of is her post-kill line in the Red Canyon:

maam this is a military school

Like, this school was canonically founded to unite the three nations to fend off Almyran invasions. It's called the Officers' Academy. What'd you THINK you were gonna do? But no, it's a Very Incisive And Thought-Provoking Line About The Evils Of Crusading Religion, or something. Did they not give yall like.....pamphlets at orientation??

Her hatred of the Church and the goddess is also misplaced—which could be interesting, but it's written in such a way that she never has to confront it. No, the Church didn't do anything to help her when she was impoverished...because the church got chased out of the empire over a century beforehand. No, the goddess didn't do anything to fix her situation...because the goddess was slumbering inside Byleth. But Dorothea never canonically learns those things, so she never has to deal with her preconceived notions being challenged. Now she can access a Hidden Talent in Faith, but I find it. hmm. that when she brings it up to Byleth in one of the student goal change requests, she explicitly frames it as "I don't believe in the goddess, but I believe in you". In other words, it's resolved by more player pandering instead of taking a real opportunity for character growth.

(I love Byleth, she’s my pfp and I stan Claudeleth, but the Black Eagles are full to bursting with player pandering to a degree that the other houses just. don’t have, and it hurts the characters and the group dynamic as a result.)

She wants to attract a rich husband and secure her future financially, but doesn't actually do anything other than shove her boobs out and sing—she doesn't want to learn any military or diplomatic skills, she doesn't seem to have any interest in learning hospitality or statesmanship, and she actively insults many of the nobles she can support with. As Lorenz points out, being even a minor noblewoman is harder than that; it requires an actual formal education in politics and running a household. Now that could be an interesting character beat, that she unconsciously sabotages herself because she believes she's not really worthy of the future she claims to want, or because she just tells everyone she wants to be a gold digger but really she wants true love, but that's not a concept that's addressed in the story. She comes off—at least in the lolcalization—as a shallow, Sad But Pretty Yas Kween Slay archetype rather than an actual well-rounded dynamic character.

Like other characters in the Empire, she's incredibly self-pitying, hypocritical, and annoying to watch, and often behaves as waifu bait because the devs wanted you to pick Black Eagles first. She's at her most interesting on Silver Snow, but it still feels incomplete, and fandom hates that route and only wants Communist Kween Who Says Eat The Rich—and that means that the most utterly stale and boring versions of her are the popular versions that I see everywhere.

(There's this idea that because Dorothea had it rough, she should be allowed to do and say whatever she wants and get whatever prizes she wants, and you're obviously a bad person if you don't like her. Like with Ashe and Bernie, fandom turned a character who just sort of mildly annoys me into a character I find utterly insufferable.)

#fe3h meta #fe3h #i enjoy individual eagles as characters but as a unit they're really just. blah #silver snow was a slog. though i maintain it's better than fandom insists it is #although admittedly that final cinematic lives rent free in my head #they COULD have potentially balanced that sick church lore with the emotional beats of the beagles fighting their former classmate #but edelgard was so distant from them and never really seemed like their friend so it mostly just falls flat #and because they devoted time to that they had less time to focus on nabatean lore. so we end up learning more about it from VW instead