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gascon-en-exil · 5 years

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FE16 Black Eagles (Edelgard) Liveblogging

Chapters 17-18, minus the colossal amount of Dimitri/Dedue content in the first chapter which I covered at length here.

Altogether I’d consider Edelgard’s last two chapters to be easier than Dimitri’s, in large part to due to far less long range magic. That’s actually quite reasonable in terms of story; as the nation renowned for its magic users - and, by the last chapter of the Lions route, openly allied with the remnants of Those Who Slither - Adrestia would logically field more of them. The knights of Faerghus and the church and Rhea’s “dolls” (more like fantasy-flavored mechs, but that’s what they call them) don’t offer as big a challenge by comparison.

The other obstacles unique to Chapter 18 weren’t much either. The fire makes the map hard to traverse for non-fliers, but it slows down enemies too. Rhea as the Immaculate One has a much smaller attack range than Hegemon Edelgard and only gets one attack per turn, in addition to being a bigger target that’s easier to surround. It makes sense that the climax of this route wouldn’t be as difficult if they used the number of chapters for scaling. The Strike Force has had four fewer chapters to grow compared to the Lions.

I liked that the last chapter plays out on a heavily modified version of the Fhirdiad map used in the Lions route for the Cornelia fight, although this does mean that I only got to see two entirely new maps on this route: the Petra/Bernadetta paralogue and the Tailtean Plains of Chapter 17.

Kill list: other than Dimitri and Dedue’s gay high tragedy, Sylvain and Mercedes in 17, Ashe, Gilbert, Annette, Catherine, and Cyril in 18. Catherine was much easier to take down from range with the fires limiting her movement, whereas Cyril (I thought he died in Chapter 12? I guess not) was surprisingly strong as a wyvern lord packing a brave axe. Wyvern enemies continue to catch me off guard.

Oh, yeah. Rhea shows up on the field in a Seiros cosplay in Chapter 17, but Edelgard one-rounded her (at a weapon triangle disadvantage, no less) and then she and almost all of the reinforcements she spawned with left the map. With everything else going on in that map, the church contribution was quite underwhelming.

Story/Character observations

Let’s get the small stuff out of the way first. There’s a few last bits of monastery dialogue worth noting. Shamir gets in some more heavy subtext re: Catherine, only now they’re enemies and you could potentially have Shamir kill Catherine. Dedue is a bear. Fleche, the girl who tries to kill Dimitri on the Lions route but instead kills Rodrigue, shows up one last time to show how curiously well-adjusted she is on this route after her brother’s death a few chapters earlier. It was interesting to see those two and the NPC general Ladislava show up during exploration and comment on ongoing events. I wouldn’t say it humanizes them too much since the most you get is an NPC fawning over how awesome Ladislava is or more pathos and less torture in Randolph’s death, but it’s appropriate for the alternative perspective this route offers.

I also need to call attention to a handy scholar NPC who appears in the library every chapter after the timeskip, dispensing info dumps that the books don’t cover and asking us to call into question the authorial intent of those books. Of course he’s obviously biased in favor of Edelgard and the Empire, but it’s a useful addition.

Onto supports. As a means of ensuring that I got the Hubert/Ferdinand paired ending I saved all their other A supports for the last minute, so that’s most of what I saw here. As per usual it’s Ferdinand who gets the more interesting stuff overall, with Hubert being more sedate and needing to be given practical reasons for marrying Dorothea or motivation to stop comparing Petra to Edelgard. Ferdinand’s high points come down even to something as mundane as what he’s drinking in various A supports - tea with Bernadetta, coffee (Hubert’s preferred drink) with Edelgard. Does Hubert/Ferdinand canonically happen before Edelgard/Ferdinand, and this is why the former’s paired ending has Edelgard jealous of them? Ferdinand’s A with Manuela is more theatre queen gushing, but his A with Dorothea walks a fine line between really sweet and really screwed up. Dorothea recalls bathing in a public fountain shortly after her singing talents were discovered and seeing a young Ferdinand staring at her and probably sporting his first erection. This is why she’s so hostile to him the whole time, and as said I don’t know how we’re meant to feel about that, or that this conversation resolves in romance. Or, rather, it would, if they didn’t then jump back to a confused simile about bees that’s now morphed into drones protecting a queen. From what little I know of insects male bees don’t have stingers and so can’t protect anything, so I do believe this metaphor subtly circles back around to lesbianism in the end. Everything with Dorothea inevitably does.

I’ve been neglecting it all this time, but I will say that Bernadetta improves slightly after the timeskip. She screams a lot less in her later supports, and in her dialogue in general she sounds more composed and less prone to immediately hiding herself away. Yay for actual emotional maturation.

I’m going to delicately sidestep the hotly-debated question of whether Edelgard’s goals justify her actions or whether this is in fact a bonafide villain route. The game itself wavers over this question at multiple points, not as shakily as Conquest does but still in ways that feel tonally off. The attempts at humanizing Edelgard by giving her a mundane fear of rats (that she acquired when she was being tortured as a child - totally normal circumstances!) and having her draw sketches of Byleth don’t land because they’re so disconnected from everything else, and her opinion of the religion of Seiros varies constantly. Sometimes she sees the value of spirituality in people’s lives and only takes issue with the corruption of the church, other times - including at the very end, when she’s about to cave Rhea’s head in - she’s declaring that humanity has no need for gods and will be better off without them. Having played her route it’s hard for me to call her a fantasy Protestant even in jest when she’s more of a dystheist (i.e. gods exist, but they are evil antagonistic forces) who will occasionally acknowledge that religion can have a positive impact on a strictly personal level. Even though she lays her plans out for Byleth early on, well before the timeskip, her ultimate aim remains unclear, not helped by the brevity of the epilogue which seems to be standard across all routes - just a short paragraph of text by the narrator over one of those stylized tapestries, cut to turn counts and character endings. Edelgard abolishes the nobility and the church after having conquered the other two nations by military force, and somehow we’re expected to believe that her regime will remain peaceful and stable and not collapse into anarchy in the space of a few years. Sure.

It does not help in the slightest that this route builds up Those Who Slither as a credible threat, only to shove them off onto an unseen postgame conflict. True, I theorized that allowing Claude and his various allies to live on the Lions route sets the stage for a massive Almyran invasion after the credits roll, but that’s more headcanon based on how FE doesn’t like to settle for unambiguously happy and resolved endings. Those Who Slither are the genuine antagonists of this route, and most of what Rhea has actually done is left unexplained. From a Doylist perspective I understand it, I really do: Those Who Slither take the focus for the Deer, and Rhea takes it for the church route, just as Dimitri’s revenge motivation only gets proper attention on the Lions route. However, these four stories are not all occurring simultaneously but are instead essentially AUs of one another, with Byleth choosing their starter Pokémon their house the catalyst for shaping all the events to follow. Looking at this route in isolation though it leaves Edelgard’s grand mission looking highly questionable.

One last thing, because I almost forgot about him: what happened to the Death Knight? He disappears from the game after the timeskip on this route. I assume you see him again if you recruit Mercedes and get her paralogue with Caspar, but it’s strange that one of Edelgard’s most loyal minions from Part 1 doesn’t even warrant a mention during her conquest of Fódlan.

Two routes down and two more to go - time to fear the Deer...’s lack of homoerotic content. Nothing makes me want to play something like knowing all the characters under my control are sexually uncreative prudes.

EDIT: Right, I remembered the DK but not the m!Byleth/Linhardt S rank. That should say something about how not particularly romantic it is. Really, the S rank with Gilbert and the one paired S rank with Alois where Byleth doesn’t marry someone else seem less offensive in light of how little there is to m!Byleth’s one “real” gay pairing. As always, you can get so much more out of conversations when both characters are allowed to speak and emote outside of irrelevant dialogue choices and stiff model gestures.

#Fire Emblem #FE16 #Fire Emblem Three Houses #Spoilers

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commodorecliche · 6 years

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Lindsey do you have advice for 1st time fic writers? I have ideas but I don't know where to beginning and it's honestly a bit scary

Gah I’m so sorry you had to wait, but I wanted to make sure I could give you a proper reply!

I totally understand it being scary! It really can be intimidating jumping into writing. But here a couple things that might help you along:

1. Write. Literally, just write. No matter what you think of your own writing, no matter how you think it compares to other people’s writing, no matter if you struggle or if it comes easy: write. You’re gunna write some stuff that’s great, you’re gunna write some stuff thats not that great. We literally all have written a huge mixture of great and shitty stuff. And it’s okay. But always keep writing. If it’s bad, it’s bad, so what? Write more and make it better. Remember that no matter what you write, even if you think it’s bad, someone out there is going to love it. So write the thing.

2. Know the characters you want to write. This is a biggie in fanfic - you gotta have at least a decent grasp on the characters’ basic traits before you write them. Because if you don’t, it’s going to stick out like a sore thumb. So look back at the source material, take note of the characters - how they act, how they speak, what they say, who they’re close with, etc... - and roll with it.

3. Have a plot already in mind. Start out with the idea you want to write. The more you can plan out to start with, the better. (Note: This doesn’t always work for everyone. Some people are more chaotic writers, who like to plan as they go. Which is totally fine. I tend to be a mixture of a pre-planner and a plan-as-you-go writer tbh. But I think when you’re first starting out, it’s helpful to give yourself an outline, a step-by-step of your plot and how you want it to progress.)

4. Start small and attainableFrankly, when you’re starting out, it’s best to write about stuff you know or are at least somewhat familiar with. And it’s best to start off kind of small. I personally wouldn’t jump into a massive multichapter fic about astrophysics on your first attempt. You’re welcome to try, if that’s what you have in mind, but smaller goals like oneshots and ficlets are easier to attain. Write about things you like, things you find interesting, things you understand. Then as you get more adept with your characters, you can branch out to bigger and more diverse projects.

5. Stay focusedA big issue I see in a lot of new writers, especially new fanfic writers, is the wandering mind. You really don’t want to include anything that isn’t actually important or relevant to your characters or the plot. A bunch of superfluous content will really only make your readers lose interest. If your plot or overall themes would be literally unchanged if you took out a section of the fic, then take the section out, because all it’s going to do is detract from the piece as a whole. This is also important for continuity. There’s an issue I like to call the Disappearing Horse, where a writer will bring up something (like a horse), only to forget about it very quickly and never mention it again because it ultimately didn’t serve a narrative purpose. If you don’t need the horse, don’t bring it out of the stable. If it doesn’t matter to the plot or the themes of the piece, then don’t bring it up.

6. Formatting/Spelling/GrammarPlease please, this isn’t about being a stickler, this is about ease of reading the fic: please make sure that your fic is properly formatted. Make sure your dialogue is properly spaced, make sure your grammar is correct, that things are spell checked.

7. GET A BETA READERSeriously. Literally everyone needs a beta, no matter how skilled they are. Have someone read your work, and they can look for grammar/spelling errors, formatting errors, continuity errors, awkward or weird phrasing, etc...

8. Practice your dialogue aloudI do this all the time. Speak your dialogue aloud, act like you’re having the conversation with yourself. It’s the easiest way to find out if your dialogue is natural or realistic. Nobody wants stilted dialogue, and this is a quick and easy way to avoid it.

9. Show, don’t tell. Avoid adverbs where you can. Adverbs are very alluring to writers - they’re a quick, easy way that we can describe something that’s happening. But they’re also pretty lazy and tend to hinder your writing’s flow. You are better off showing your readers rather than telling them. An adverbs tells the reader what’s happening, whereas active and descriptive verbs show a reader what’s happening Example: Don’t: “She walked slowly along the beach, happily enjoying the sea air.”Do: “She moseyed along the water’s edge, taking her time to enjoy the sea air.”You see how the second sentence is much more vivid? It shows the audience much more about the scene rather than just flatly telling us “she’s walking slow and she’s happy”.

Note: I highly recommend you check out the Hemingway text editor. It’s a very useful tool that can pinpoint issues with your writing such as overuse of adverbs, long/run on sentences, difficult phrasing, etc...

10. Literally everything is derivative, so don’t worry too much about your ideas not being “original enough”Look, this is fanfic. The concept itself is derivative. Fanon is also a big influence on fanfic. So some of your stuff is obviously going to take some tropes or ideas from other things. And that’s okay. Build on those tropes and make them your own. (Note: obviously don’t copy people. this is more about when you feel like an idea of yours has already been done. It’s okay if someone else has done that AU you were thinking of - their AU is going to be different from your AU, your AU is going to be yours. so go for it!)

11. WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE WRITE I know I said this already but write. And post what you write. You’re going to love writing sometimes. You’re going to hate writing sometimes. You’re going to go through spells where you feel wholly uncreative. You’re going to have times when you literally feel like a fountain of ideas. Creativity comes in seasons. Write as they come and as they change. No matter what, you’re going to get better, and no matter what, even if you think it’s bad or that no one wants to read it, you’re going to write something that someone out there is going to love. SO WRITE!! :D

Ahhh that’s all I can think of off the top of my head! I may think of others later and add to this post. But if anyone else has any other tips, please feel free to tack them on.

#writing #advice #lindsey knows stuff #Anonymous

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