#at least not in terms with having to fight with Sreng

[randomnameless]

Re: Almyra, yes! YES! After Nopes especially, I'm so baffled that Claude (and I guess his fiercest stans?) wants to change FODLAN so they welcome Almyra. Like, he really is looking at Fódlan's Locket, its history (all three nations coming together to build it), the very real situation of Almyra constantly attacking and trying to invade Fódlan, as well as (once he meets Cyril) the reality of the Almyran army leaving kids to fend off for themselves on the battlefield/after a loss

And he just shrugs and says it's the Church's fault?

If he ever wanted peace between the two, he'd need to work on Almyra's favorite pastime first. Which I suppose he can only do once he's king, which doesn't seem like a soon-to-come opportunity. Not that he looks interested in changing Almyra, anyway. I don't think he ever mentions changing the Almyrans' mentalities?

It's always "Fódlan needs to open its borders, Fódlan needs to keep an open mind, Fódlan needs, Fódlan needs". We know Fódlan HAS open borders with others, at least enough so that have actual regular trade. (I could buy the Alliance not knowing too much about Brigid, Dagda and all because they're at the other side of the map, but the Empire trades with countries on the east, too. How is Claude not aware of that? It has to leak into the Alliance too.)

Sorry, I have a lot feelings about Claude's obsession with opening up Fódlan to people who regularly attacks it. (Considering he uses Sreng in GW to attack the Kingdom, it looks like a pattern lmao.)

No worries anon, you can rant away!

If it's any indication, after playing two games and looking at the script with more hindsight/in a more neutral way, some other players also noticed how this obsession - even in FE16 lol - was ridiculous lol

Correct me if I'm wrong friends, but iirc, Claude in FE16 isn't the first in line for the throne, or something like this? And it's only after helping Fodlan, and then returning to Almyra, that he can become king?

So much like Dimitri, I'd understand if, during the course of the game, as a random who has no real power in Almyra, he cannot do a lot of things to change their mindsets - even if he is still able to ask for Nader's help, who's far from being a random nobody in Almyra!

Maybe we could have had some scenes where he asks Nader what he thinks of Fodlan, and if he doesn't think it'd be nice if they stop raiding and start to interact and trade under more amiable terms, with Nader accepting after some persuasion (idk, witnessing how the so called Fodlan cowards are brave enough to fight 1 to 10 against an Empire who could fold them in two and uses mutated humans) even if that'd include retconning the Nader the devs had in mind that was revealed in Nopes lol

And when Nader's finally on his side, he can try to convince the GD - maybe some members would straight out refuse to help or ditch him, and have to be recruited later on (or persuaded if they got an A support at least with Claude thus no ditch him), with a special subplot regarding Hilda because she's a member of House Goneril and her House has bled for many decades to fend off against "invasions for funsies" - ultimately bringing more to his friendship speech against Nemesis than, this speech just being a Wedon speech thought in the spur of the moment that sounds cool (Nemesis symbolising, after the infodump, the culmination of Fodlan's rejection of "others", in this case, Nabateans, who weren't considered sentient beings but just "things" to be looted").

But no, instead we have church BaD, Rhea BaD, then Church not so BaD but Rhea's doctrine BaD, to Rhea's not so BaD but she still dies conveniently offscreen, and Church was still kind of BaD since it's ultimately reformed (how?) by King/Queen Billy.

Yay!

In a way, I'm wondering that even if the devs said they re-wrote Claude to fit Nopes, if FE16!Claude's mindset wasn't already that closer to Supreme Leader's than we first thought, especially if they're both wondering, basically "why are those people unhappy that I/we are invading them and fighting to prevent us from getting in?".

Supreme Leader does it when she invades and laments the "useless" deaths from people who die defending their lands, and Claude basically does it when he wants to "open" Fodlan to people who want to invade them (but ultimately manages to convinced them to sign a treaty at the end of his route, off-screen).

Also, anon, acknowledging the Empire, the Kingdom and FFS the Alliance trades with other countries in this verse would remove a part of the Church BaD/Rhea BaD spiel - and we can't have that :(

idk if it was on purpose, and we still don't know what Varley is preaching in Nopes, but I love how Gilbert is the first one who says Varley's teachings are full of shit and is basically the one who tells the cast that Varley's words are nonsense, because if they are close to what Claude is telling us about "uwu isolationism uwu", Dominic, in Nopes, is revealed to trade a lot with Albinea lol

Of course Gustave can't say this loud, otherwise no Church BaD and characters who are supposed to be loved looking like asses wouldn't look that rad (even if Claude already has a moment like this with Barney lol) - but imagine Claude saying "uwu church enforces isolationism and forbids foreign trade" and Annette shuts him up "what are you talking about? We've been trading with Albinea since the days of Loog, and the Central Church never asked us to stop?".

#anon #replies #fodlan nonsense #fodlan AU #imagine though a new VW #while there is a war going on in BG it's mostly used as a proof Claude's actions are beneficial to the people of Fodlan despite his origins #which makes people who would sideeye him reconsider #or having done more with Nader and Shahid and show a real conflict between Almyrans who want peace and the ones who want to raid #but no instead we got a whole route of nothing #a lot of off screen stuff and never connecting Claude's plot and dreams to events happening #imagine instead of getting one of the worst infodumps ever #if Rhea told Claude how Agarthans turned against Sothis who only wanted to live with humans #and him kind of losing faith because maybe coexistence between two people who feel they are too different will never work #instead the game we got has him look like an idiot #to drink Hresvelg Grey while still being a reasonable person #at least in FE16 lol #in Nopes he ditches reason

[butwhatifidothis]

Continued long rant about the competence of the Empire government from the same anon. Hope ya don’t mind:

I have always wanted to talk about this, but Adrestia is the literal worst country to live in among the three nations in Fodlan? This is a little analysis of which region in Fodlan is the most “liveable”:

1. Garreg Mach Monastery

Rhea is a good leader that cares about her people, the Church doesn’t discriminate based on social class, it is a meritocracy where you can climb the social ladder based on your skills and accomplishments, it has never been invaded (until Edelgard) and the land around it is apparently fertile enough to support a small army so you probably never have to starve living there. May or may not have free healthcare based on the incident that the Church goes to Remire to handle the plague there.

2. Riegan territory under Claude’s leadership (especially if you are a merchant)

Again, good leader that cares about people, burgeoning merchant class means you can rise to the middle class with your skills, has rarely been invaded and the land is reasonably fertile. Comes with the downside that it is very dangerous to travel around and there is some discrimination based on social rank as it has nobles as rulers who likely have much more leeway and privileges. Claude is also rather sheltered and ignorant when it comes to the plights of the common folk, so it is hard to judge the well-being of the citizens here, but since he is beloved by his people and believed to be a good leader, so I will give Riegan under Claude the second place. May be moved to the third place if travelling safely is very important to you.

3. Fhirdiad under Dimitri/King Lambert’s leadership (especially if you can use magic/is interested in it)

Two good leaders in succession who are shown to care about the people a lot (Dimitri literally has the idea that he lives to serve drained into him, not good for his personal health but hella nice for the commoners). One of them actively takes an anti-poverty stance by providing social welfare and works on creating a new form of government that allows commoner participation. Dimitri is better than Claude in this aspect as he is more “down-to-earth” in terms of being familiar with the plights of the common folk.

Apparently the rulers here were wise enough to see the value of education as they established the Royal Sorcery Academy in Fhirdiad and its tuition fee is low enough that Mercedes’ adoptive father who does give a shit about her and is only using her is willing to send her here and Constance, after her noble house is dissolved, is still able to afford the tuition. Annette also comes here because it is much cheaper than the Officers Academy. Therefore, we can surmise that the Sorcery Academy is relatively affordable for an education. Their King is also willing to give Cornelia a place in court because of her skills and accomplishments, so there is a lot social mobility if you are a magic user. Not so much if you aren’t (like Dedue who only has 10% magic growth)

Rarely has been invaded too, but comes with a significant drawback that the land surrounding the city is a barren, cold wasteland and there must be some discrimination based on social class too as they have a royal family and nobles.

4. the Edmund territory (if you are a merchant)

Competent leader who may or may not be morally good and may or may not care about the people. Rarely has been invaded. Has reasonably fertile land and a burgeoning merchant class too so there is social mobility. Still comes with class discrimination and it may be dangerous to travel around because there is a legendary demonic beast wandering in the territory.

5. Daphnel (and it’s the 4th if you aren’t a merchant)

Judith is a good leader and is morally good too. Rarely has been invaded. The land is reasonably fertile. Still a part if the Alliance so the burgeoning merchant class (middle class) exists here too which shows social mobility but relatively less than Riegan and Edmund. Still has discrimination based on social class. In fact, it likely exists all of the regions mentioned below so I am going to stop talking about it unless it is a particularly severe case.

6. Fraldarius

Good leader who cares about the people enough to go into battle himself with his heir to rescue the villagers from bandits. Rarely any invasion. Land is barren though.

7. pre-Duscur Gaspard

A leader kind enough to take a homeless thief into his household and raise them as his own children and is popular among the people that his citizens are willing to throw their lives away in a futile attempt to seek justice for his son. Rarely any invasion. The land may be barren wasteland but based on the geographical location and being so close to the apparently very fertile Garreg Mach lands, may not be that bad?

8. Goneril

Good leader. Land is reasonably fertile. Probably has a burgeoning middle class too as it is still in the Alliance. Constant invasions though so be careful about where you live and travel to. May have perks if you are a merchant willing to sneak into the Almyran territory for trade.

9. Dominic

A leader who cares enough that he surrenders to Cornelia just to protect the territory. Rarely invaded. No idea about the social mobility and it may be a barren wasteland too (but it’s in the southern part of the Kingdom so it may be an exception)

10. Charon

Not much is known about Charon, but based on Catherine, how he remains loyal to Dimitri and provides extra soldiers for his army I guess he is not THAT bad. Not sure about the land but it is close to Galatea so may be a barren wasteland again. Invasions are rare.

11. Galatea if you are rich

Good leader and rarely has been invaded. There is constant famine though but if you are a merchant who can import your own food from other territories, then you are fine.

12. All the other Alliance territories including Gloucester

These regions are likely more well-off than the others and provides good social mobility based on its large merchant class, but I wouldn’t bet on the morals of their leaders when they are willing to kill people just to stop them from trading with Riegan.

12. Galatea if you are poor/Gautier

If you can’t afford buying the food from elsewhere then you are screwed. Gautier is also a barren wasteland but based on Sylvain’s description it is probably more well-off than Galatea and it probably has a good leader too? Gautier, however, faces constant invasions to the point that the ruling house absolutely requires an heir with a crest just to scare them off. If you are a good fighter, you may have an easier chance rising in the social rank because they are constantly fighting Sreng and you may be able to distinguish yourself through military service, so there may be some social mobility. Still, be careful not to get caught up when the lord’s eldest wayward son decides he wants to take his anger on you by pillaging your villages and slaughtering your people.

13. All the other Kingdom territories

Not much is known about these regions, but they are likely worse than the Alliance since the lords here instigated the Western Rebellion and they don’t have the social mobility the Alliance has. They are also known as barren wasteland.

14. Aegir (would have been ranked the fifth place if it is under pre-timeskip Ferdinand’s leadership, and absolutely at the very least ranks the fourth if it’s post-SS/AM/VW Ferdinand)

Not much is known about Duke Aegir but he is shown to be taxing the hell out of the people in Hrym. However, his son and heir especially when he has spent five years living amongst the commoners will be the best leader you can find.

15. Bergliez

Very fertile land, but based on how its heir is described as morally bankrupt and how they deal with their thieves by executing them, probably not the best place to live even as a farmer.

16. Ordelia

Reasonably fertile land and would have ranked around the sixth place if it hadn’t been taken over by the Empire. They have morally good leaders who may be relatively competent and an heir who is hellbent on getting Ordelia back to its feet. There is a large middle class here too so good social mobility.

17. All the other Empire territories except Hrym and Arundel

Mentioned in the previous post and they have a future leader who is proud of the fact that she will throw their lives away for her goal.

18. Kleiman

19. Arundel

Horrible here because of their leadership and the high chance of getting kidnapped and turned into a biological weapon.

20. Hrym - absolute hellhole

This region has been taxed incredibly heavily for almost two decades and is likely piss poor because of it. The leadership here sucks and the Princess has let out a rabid mad dog on them as hunting grounds. Very likely to be kidnapped and turned into demonic beasts too. You are killed if you try to flee. People living here have a better chance at a decent life killing themselves and waiting for reincarnation somewhere else than staying here (since Fodlan believes in reincarnation)

I don’t mind at all!! As long as you don’t mind that I don’t have much to add lol, very interesting!

#ask #anon #I like how Dimitri and Claude can go back and forth for second place - really highlights how well they both lead #even though they prioritize different things #meanwhile Edelgard is uhhh not doin' as hot lmao #also fuckin' lol Kleiman's so ass the reason doesn't need to be explained

[iturbide]

Genuine question here: if Edelgard succeeded in her conquest, do you think she'd turn her eyes on Sreng and/or Almyra? She wouldn't have any real reason to - but then again, she never had any real reason to declare war on the church, and all it'd take is the Twisted framing Sreng or Almyra as their base of operations...

It’s a good question!  Interestingly, though, Edelgard herself brings up her feelings on the subject in CF, specifically after you either spare or kill Claude.  After the attack on the Alliance capital, a paralogue becomes available where the Imperial forces rally at the Locket to repel some Almyran skirmishers; in the aftermath, this is what she says:

Edelgard: The Almyran army retreated.  Their casualties were numerous.  As I understand it, they won’t be attempting another invasion anytime soon.  Still, we must prepare the local troops before their enemy returns. Byleth: They are an irritating neighbor. / Maybe we can befriend them?  Edelgard: That is my hope.  I would even consider a treaty.  Unlike Fodlan, Almyra is not a land ruled by blind fealty to the goddess.  I believe we need only to communicate openly with them and respect the differences between our cultures.  If we do that, we should be able to have a meaningful dialogue with them, one more promising than what we can expect from followers of the goddess.

So by her own admission, Edelgard has no interest in expanding her conquest to Sreng or Almyra.  She in fact has designs toward allying with them, or at least establishing peaceful relations, because she believes they’ll be more reasonable than anyone who follows the Church of Seiros.

(In all honesty I hate the ending of this paralogue because everything she says is pure hypocrisy.  It’s entirely possible that she just got done murdering Almyra’s prince but she assumed that Claude was a “believer in the goddess” and therefore couldn’t be reasoned with, even though he’s one of the very people she could have been working to forge an alliance with.  Way to poison the well, there, Edelgard!)

I don’t think it’s accurate to say that she never had a real reason to attack the Church of Seiros, though.  I actually do understand her sentiments -- I just think that her way of acting on them was completely blown out of proportion, because rather than just focusing her attention on the corrupt church hierarchy -- like the archbishop -- or on the principles it’s built on that end up being so toxic for humanity -- like the bias toward Crests -- she decides that everyone who worships the goddess is unreasonable and needs to be dealt with by force.  No one who holds faith in the goddess can be good in her eyes, which is the kind of horrific absolutism that makes my skin crawl.

As for the reason why she attacks the church, it’s really a combination of factors: first, it’s that she’s part of House Hresvelg, and therefore aware of the “true” history behind the Church of Seiros.  This is part of her pre-battle conversation with Byleth in Chapter 14, aka the battle where Claude can potentially die (and she unwittingly burns her bridge with Almyra regardless):

Edelgard: Professor...do you know the true story behind the legend?  The Relics were created by the hands of mankind.  Seiros collected them after killing the 10 Elites.  Seiros manipulated the people of the world and defeated the all-powerful King Nemesis.  Byleth: I thought he was corrupted by his power? / Why would she do that?  Edelgard: The church maintains the false history that he was corrupted and turned evil; however, it was little more than a simple dispute.  Should the one leading the people of the world be someone with humanity, or a creature that can merely masquerade as a human at will?  In the end, Seiros was victorious.  The Immaculate One and her family then took control of Fodlan.  I know this because this knowledge is passed down from emperor to emperor.  And that is because the first emperor is the human who cooperated with Seiros, allowing humanity to be controlled in secret.  Byleth: ... Edelgard: Perhaps it’s fate that you can wield the Sword of the Creator, just like Nemesis, the King of Liberation.  And that very fate will lead you to use that sword to stand against those who would distort history.

So a not insignificant part of her distrust in the Church of Seiros comes from the fact that she knows it’s been doctoring history which inevitably leads to suspicion because why is it being doctored?  On top of that, though, the entire reason why she was subjected to the Crest experiments that led to the deaths of her siblings and imbued her with the Crest of Flames is because of the ingrained systems founded by the Church of Sieros that so highly value Crests.  The church might not directly tell people to aim for Crests at all costs, but the fact that nobility is more or less predicated on the presence of a Crest has had negative effects on or outright ruined countless lives, including Sylvain’s (his older brother’s hatred), Mercedes’ (becoming a pawn to improve her stepfather’s status), Ingrid’s (becoming a pawn to improve her house’s long-term survival), and Hanneman’s (his sister’s abuse and eventual death). 

(The irony here is that the people least affected by this Crest bias are in the Alliance, where the Church of Seiros has the weakest influence.  The presence of a Crest in the family only seems to determine whether someone can be counted among the Great Lords at the roundtable, which is why Judith von Daphnel -- herself lacking a crest -- gave up her seat to Margrave Edmund following his adoption of Marianne who does.  Judith herself is still held in extremely high regard and House Daphnel appears well respected despite the fact that they don’t have any Crest-bearers.)

With all that in mind, Edelgard really does have a valid reason to go after the church.  Now, if she were being logical about it, she would have been fighting for reform: alter the existing structures to reduce and eventually eliminate Crest bias in the system so that it was no longer a requirement for inheritance of title, potentially leading to the eradication of the nobility/commoner system entirely.  Unfortunately, despite her loathing for them, the influence of Those who Slither likely stoked her negative feelings toward the church into outright hatred, and led to what we get in the game.  The fact that Edelgard routinely interacts with them and has even assisted in their plans (such as Flayn’s kidnapping -- even if she didn’t have a direct hand in it, she did help the Death Knight escape) heavily implies that for all that she hates them, she’s not immune to their influence.

#answered #anonymous #fire emblem: three houses #edelgard #as much as i might find edelgard frustrating #and as much as i might dislike her actions #because imperialism is never the answer #i do understand the underlying logic behind why she does this stuff #seriously though she shot herself in the foot in cf #there's no way there was ever a happy ending there

[ask-the-tempest-king]

//hello i saw the tags on your most recent ask and actually i would LOVE to hear your thoughts on how messed up faerghus is!! you have my full permission to go off, queen 💖//

//Edit: the full post will be put under the ‘read more’ so people don’t have to scroll through all of it

// Okay, okay. So. First of all. There’s the whole thing about chivalry and the toxic levels of hero worship they have for knights. To the point that the ideal of ‘dying for a good cause’ is seen as good. (Example: Glenn ‘he died like a true knight’ Fraldarius) The glorification of people dying for the sake of an ideal or a cause is just... not good. Glorifying people’s deaths in any way doesn’t sit well with me. People are in pain, the person who dies is usually one who dies in combat so they’re in a lot of pain before they die, and that’s not including the emotional toll their deaths leave behind. To simply say that it was all for the best is to wave away the pain that an ordeal like this causes, in more ways than one.

Secondly! The people of Faerghus are expected to be able to wield a weapon before they can write their own names, or they are trained to at the very least. To force a child, especially one that young to learn how to fight doesn’t sit well with me either. I understand that living in a kingdom where food is scarce because of the climate added onto the threat of invaders from the country of Sreng means that you’ll have to do some fighting in order to survive. But that shouldn’t be all a country should have. Fighting, knights, chivalry, they only get you so far. It’s not wholly sustainable. At least, I don’t think so. Thriving through violence shouldn’t be an answer. And to expect children to grow up and go off to war is an unpleasant thought to me. (Example: Sylvain Gautier {Crests are their own issue that’s common across Fódlan and not just in Faerghus}) People shouldn’t be raising their children to become instruments of war, they should allow them to grow up in an loving and caring environment so that they can in turn give kindness to others. A good example of this is Dimitri, whose forced to contend with the not only having his grief left ignored by his expectations to be a good fighter and a good future ruler. If you think about the timeline of the game, Dimitri was forced to suppress an insurrection at the age of 13. Thirteen. He’s not only trying to cope with the grief that comes from losing the people close to him in a horrific accident, but he has to commit even more violence because he’s expected to. It’s no wonder he snapped then. He was young, he was in an emotionally turbulent state of mind, and the people around him chose to ignore that. They tried to raise an chivalrous, idealistic person, empathy and kindness didn’t fit into this image of a gallant warrior. I may sound painfully idealistic, but I always think that peace is an option and that people can come together and resolve differences peacefully. The way Faerghus is in terms of the way they raise their children and the ideals they instill in these children only leads to a never ending cycle of violence. Violence begets violence, there’s no other way around it. Kindness and empathy are the best ways to reach out to people, to break the cycle of people hurting each other. Dimitri, as the way I’ve written him, would be seen as weak in accordance to Faerghus’s idealogies. Kindness and empathy aren’t bad things, they don’t make you weak. They do the exact opposite, in fact. But the current state of the kingdom wouldn’t see it this way. This is why I think it’s flawed. But this is all just my opinion, it’s not facts or anything like that. I’d like to know other people’s interpretations of how good or bad Faerghus is. Please don’t drag me for this;;;

#not an ask #fe3h spoilers #fire emblem three houses spoilers #long post #//mod azure rambles a lot

[teaveetamer]

When you compare the four endings, I have the impression that Azure Moon is the more 'sunshine' ending. Dimitri is in the good way of healing his traumas, even if it will take time. Dimitri starting a friendship with Claude, saving him, and it could end in a peace with Almyra in the future. The leaders of the snakes are killed. Dimitri's reign looks nice too. And also, the painting ending is the most happy of the 4. what do you think? (well the GD ending is happy too, but more serious)

Well keeping in mind that all of the endings are meant to be happy and one isn’t really meant to be happier than the others, I think Azure Moon, assuming no recruitment and everyone lives, probably leaves the continent and the characters in the best shape.

Dimitri establishes some form of participatory government.

Dedue is alive and can aid in the reconciliation between Faerghus and Duscur.

Sylvain is alive and can aid in making peace with the Sreng people.

Claude is guaranteed to be alive and friendly with Dimitri which means (hopefully) minimal threat from Almyra in the future.

Rhea is alive and can use her experience, knowledge, and influence to help calm the church’s followers in the wake of the war. She is also available to at least help guide Byleth in their new role as archbishop (which Byleth is grossly unqualified for, but Rhea would obviously be a big help here).

While the Slitherer’s base still exists, all of their major leaders are taken out, which is not true of any other path. Silver Snow and Verdant Wind leave Cornelia alive (and we know that comes back to bite them in VW) and Crimson Flower doesn’t deal with the Slitherers at all.

This is the only route where Ingrid can reconcile with her father.

This is the only route where Felix gets happy endings.

This is the only route where Annette can repair her relationship with her father.

You can ensure Hilda lives, which would leave Faerghus on good terms with Holst.

The biggest threat might be from Dagda (+maybe Brigid, if they’re upset enough about Petra dying) trying to take advantage of the weakened continent, but all those previous bullet points add up. With Sylvain making peace with Sreng and Claude on friendly terms with Fodlan then they’d only be fighting on one front with potential allies to back them up.

The Lions really seem to have the most characters with route-contingent outcomes now that I think about it. That’s probably a contributing factor in why they feel like the most cohesive house.

#Anonymous

[margridarnauds]

But what would your ideal adaptation of CMT be like?

Thank you for the ask! (And for giving me the chance to talk about my actual child!) 

I meant to get to this yesterday, but I was in the library at the time, then I was at the post office, getting some of my books shipped back to the States before my move back, and then came the news of Level 5 and....Well. I was around town. 

TOUGH question, and one that I’ve been thinking about for ages. CMT IS my baby, so my standards for adapting it are, frankly, both ridiculously low (CMT ON SCREEN!) and ridiculously high (I stg if you do this wrong....) 

Personally, I have two ideas for it, one of which is more serious than the other, so I’ll deal with it first: 

A miniseries. Because I don’t think you can really DO CMT well in the course of a film. You could try, but I don’t think it would work. I would personally want it to be a part of an overarching series that’s just there to adapt the Book of Invasions. That way, there’s context for this. (And because I’m a biased bitch, I’d probably want it to begin with the Fir Bolg, with the previous invasions recounted. You could have Fintan as an overarching narrator, holding the various series together. Have a season dedicated to them, end it on the TDD’s arrival.) 

Now, what I’d want this miniseries to do:  - Have a setup where both Lugh and Bres are given equal amounts of time. A thing that I’ve noticed a lot of retellings doing is to make it so that Lugh is the unambiguous, shining hero and set off with that idea in mind from the beginning, with Bres being a cliched villain, but if you read CMT from the beginning....Bres is given a LOT of traits that we associate with heroes. The story of CMT even begins with his conception and birth. Bres, whether people like it or not, is a protagonist of CMT. He’s a villain protagonist. But a protagonist, right alongside Lugh. You can’t have Lugh without Bres, you can’t have Bres without Lugh, and I would LOVE for an adaptation to get to the heart of that dynamic. Start off with Bres, devote a couple of episodes to him and what makes him tick (while also setting up Lugh’s birth, since that’s taking place during his reign), and then show it all falling down. 

- Have one of the first images being of the Fir Bolg, led by Sreng in retreat. Look, I’ve accepted that the only one who really cares about Sreng as much as me is....me, and the only adaptation that would feature him as much as I would want is one that I’d be writing (IF I EVER ACTUALLY FUCKING WRITE THE FUCKING THING), but, if we CAN’T get him in there as a major character in his own right and Bres’ love interest, I would like to at least start it off with the understanding that the Tuatha Dé’s settlement of Ireland did happen over a LOT of Fir Bolg bodies. It makes their fight with the Fomoire a little more gray, because it’s suddenly less “THE FOMOIRE ARE INVADING THE TUATHA DÉ, HOW EVIL” and more “The TDD’s sins coming back to kick them hard in the ass”. The Fir Bolg had the land, the TDD challenged them for it, the TDD won. By medieval Irish standards, that was justified, as was the subjugation of the Fir Bolg afterward. But this is a modern adaptation, for a modern audience, and that doesn’t mean we have to be objective. Especially given that it forced the Fir Bolg to flee to the Fomoire, for fear of the TDD enslaving them. Ideally, the Fir Bolg’s history with enslavement would have been dealt with in the previous season, which would have started off with the Sons of Dela breaking out of Greece. 

- Present the Fomoire as Vikings. This is BIG to me because it’s VERY easy to make the Fomoire a Generically Evil, Dark Fantasy Race, which makes it very, very easy to do a black and white version of things. But I would rather show the Fomoire as a group of people who have their own priorities, their own cultural mores, but are still PEOPLE. Bres isn’t evil because he’s Fomoire (I hesitate to call him “evil” to begin with, but if we’re going to use that term...); he makes a series of bad judgement calls and turns traitor to his own maternal kin-group. Balor isn’t really evil himself, even if we go into the folktale variation where he wants Lugh killed at birth (personally, I kind of favor the CMT version of it where Lugh was just...born of an arranged marriage), is acting with the authority of a medieval Norse head of the household. Tethra is perfectly willing to go along with the raids in Ireland...but we know, from what happens later, that it isn’t because he has a personal vendetta, it’s just probably more convenient to him. And I wouldn’t expect ALL the Fomoire to get a ton of attention, because we still have to be concerned with time, but just enough to fill them out. 

- The only time I want to make an exception is Ruadan. Because we HAVE to get him fleshed out as well. We’ve got to see him as a young kid under Bres and Bríg’s feet, we’ve got to see the two of them pausing from the arguments that dominate their relationship during Bres’ kingship when they see him standing at the door, we’ve got to see him trying to adjust to the Fomoire, not QUITE fitting in (just like his father before him), but trying so, so hard. We’ve got to see Bres clinging onto him during the twenty years in exile, promising him that, one day, it’ll be worth it. Got to see Bres trying to not show the exhaustion from those twenty years in front of his son, even if we can see on Ruadan’s face that he knows. We’ve got to understand WHY he takes the mission up, the mission that he has to know will destroy his reputation if he fails (and if he succeeds), and we’ve got to understand why Bríg screams out in anguish when she sees his broken body “in his father’s presence”, Bres helplessly rocking him back and forth. I know we probably can’t get all of Bres’ kids (which is a pity because, honestly, Dui Temen and Indusa are probably my favorites), but if we can’t get all six of the Sibs, we’ve got to make sure that Ruadan is given a ton of fleshing out and development to make that one, horrifying moment strike true. Because that’s honestly, in my opinion, the single most poignant moment of the text and, if we don’t establish Ruadan off the bat, it loses that importance. 

--Indech, Indech, Indech as the primary villain. I love this Fomorian bitch so much and he gets no respect, generally being shafted for Balor. I know, limited time, but I would at least like to give him one or two scenes to establish himself as THE king of the Fomoire, next to Elatha, give him a bit of time to establish himself as a bitch, and give him his moment of “Their bones will be dust soon.” Because, let’s be real, that’s a kind of metal moment. Bonus if, when Bres is standing next to him, there’s this distinct moment of “Oh, shit, I did NOT think this through.” Possibly change the timeline around so that his.......”kidneys of valor” (THAT ARE NOT HIS TESTICLES, ABSOLUTELY NOT) are removed by the Morrigan AFTER Macha’s death, so that there’s this sense of catharsis. 

- Potentially controversial, but I like Early Modern Nuada, who, by the time of CMT, is a broken, jealous king. Have him decide not to try Dían Cecht for Miach’s death because, hey, they need him, and he DID do Nuada a favor. Have him hand over the throne to Lugh so that he can get rid of the Fomoire, yeah, but have him have doubts. Have him be jealous at the easy love that Lugh gains, while he can’t save his own people. Have him be paranoid about Lugh taking everything for himself and leaving him with nothing. Have him, as in the Early Modern recession of CMT, getting the TDD to drug Lugh before the battle, because, in that one moment, it doesn’t matter if the TDD win or lose, all he wants is for Lugh to be *gone*. And then have him redeem himself by challenging Balor to single combat, only to lose. Have Lugh, in those last few moments, promise to look after the TDD, whatever it takes. 

-Speaking of the Bitch, I REALLY want to see Lugh’s ruthless side. I know, even with a full miniseries, that we can’t get into, say, the Sons of Tuireann, because even though I’d love to spend a whole episode on that....places to go, people to see. But I would like to see at least a little of that part of Lugh that is willing to do anything, ANYTHING for the sake of the TDD, and that makes him do, arguably, worse things than even Balor and Bres for the sake of it. When Bres goes to plead for his life at the end, I want Lugh staring down at him, completely impassive. Around the two of them, there are bodies scattered EVERYWHERE, the ground absolutely drenched in blood, Bres himself is absolutely covered in blood and gore, his body held to the ground by an Ogham stone that Ogma put there (in my ideal world, where we get to establish the brothers and their relationship, it would be his one, last ditch effort to save Bres from himself), and there’s Lugh, totally pristine, his blonde hair perfectly curled, looking down at him like you would at a cockroach. When he says “Less will save you”, I want him to not even really be looking at Bres, but more at his goblet of wine, and then, when he accepts Bres’ terms, I want a zoom-in on that wine goblet, and specifically the dark red liquid in it, as an ominous theme begins to play. (I KNOW we can’t get to Bres’ death, but also....let me have at least a call forward to it. There’s a lot of Dindshenchas CMT-aligned material that I would LOVE to see, including Duirgen, Carn Hui Néit, Nás, and Carmun, but that...well. Time. Which is a pity because Carmun is probably my FAVORITE of the Dindshenchas stories.)

- A little bit of screen time for the ladies. Again, time is time, but it’s very easy to turn CMT into a boys’ story, which isn’t helped by the message of the original being quite patriarchal (THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU LET LADIES GET INTO POLITICS: A HOT MESS). But I actually really am interested in the women of the text. Ériu loves her son SO MUCH that she’s willing to turn her back on her people for him, and I’d love at least one flashback sequence, probably when Bres is making the decision to leave the TDD, around the end of....episode 3-4 I want to say, and we get to see Ériu as a young mother, holding Bres in her arms and smiling, even as the rest of the TDD look on her with anxiety, with her promising her that, no matter what, they’ll have each other. I want to see the Morrigan and Macha both trying to convince her to abandon Bres, because they don’t want to lose their sister, but Ériu standing firm in her decision. (She isn’t a warrior like them, but she’s strong in an entirely different way, with a spine of steel, and the other two know it.) I want to see Macha’s death at Balor’s hands and see the Morrigan and Badb losing their absolute SHIT for the first time (as a future archnemesis of theirs would say: “All sport, all play until......” The battle’s been FUN up until this point, but then suddenly it becomes very, very real to them.) If we could get a little of Tailtiu’s fosterage of Lugh, her status as an outsider (the Spanish widow to the last king of the Fir Bolg, trying to find her way among the invaders, dealing with the loss of her only biological son), and her own trace of ruthlessness, I would be VERY happy, especially since you can....see how Lugh turns out the way he does. Both the good and the bad. And we could probably handle that in just one scene, possibly in around episodes 2-3 during Bres’ reign. I’d also LOVE it if we could get a moment where, after Ruadan’s death, she’s the one to go over to Bríg and clasp her hand. Because, even if their husbands (possibly ex-husband in Bríg’s case, depending on how we deal with her dynamic with Bres) hated one another, Tailtiu knows fully well how it feels to lose a son, and it gives a chance for there to be a moment of humanity in a text that can be very inhumane at times. I’d love to see Cethlenn BEGGING Balor to not go to the battle, since she does have the power of foresight, but for it to be very obvious in her eyes that she knows that he isn’t going to accept it and then for her to straighten her back and wish him well. Because their love story is built as much on shared duty as it is on passion, and she knows that it has to be this way, he’s got to choose this, and she’s got to let him and keep her dignity. 

-This is probably highly wishful thinking, but I kind of liked Vikings’ idea of switching between English and the historically accurate dialogue, depending on the perspective. I think it would be HARD to pull off, but I’d love to see it going between Old Irish, English, and Old Norse, just to really show off that these are two very different cultures. IDEALLY, I’d also, in my absolute, ideal world, have audio dubbing in Gaeilge as well. It would be a hell of a venture, but I’m very firmly of the belief that this is an Irish story, it deserves to be told in Irish. 

-Relating to that: Irish cast (for the TDD/Fir Bolg, Scandinavian for the Fomoire), as much as you can possibly do. (Given that the total population of the entire island’s around 5 million, it’s a tall order, but hey.) IDEALLY, I’d want there to be also be regional variation in the accents: The Dagda will always, to me, have a Dublin accent, Ogma coming from Roscommon, Bres having a Northern Irish accent. If Sreng shows up, I’d want him to have a Cork or a Limerick accent, etc. Again, it’s a tall order, and one that I don’t think could be easily done, but a girl can dream. My ultimate goal would be to at least have a higher Irish: English ratio than The Tudors. That’s my dream. (I have but one really HARD casting decision and that’s Sarah Bolger as Airmed. Please. Please. GIVE HER THE ANGST. GIVE HER THE QUIET TERROR AND THE DADDY ISSUES. WE KNOW SHE CAN DO IT. That and Ruth Negga as Tailtiu.) 

- Also, ideally, I would like to have a situation where you have experts in archaeology, medieval Ireland and, specifically, Irish mythology on set to make sure that it’s as historically accurate to the 9th century as you can get without becoming bogged down in it. (Medieval Irish costumes...aren’t really.....glamorous, but I would like to see a nice streamlining of it that keeps the feel of the era while also, frankly, looking really, really cool.) For Nuada’s hall, I’d want to make sure that we actually had a reconstruction of the Great Hall at Tara (WHICH IS REALLY COOL IF YOU EVER FIND YOURSELF IN TARA, NGL) as people in the middle ages would have imagined it. This long, narrow hall lit by torches, Lugh almost having to walk over a few people’s legs to get to the front, and there, at the head of it all, is the king. People from UCD, UCC, Trinity, etc. (Maybe even get some people from Maynooth, if they promise to behave.) If I know my fellow Celticists well enough, I think a few of them would even jump at the opportunity to be a part of something like this. (I know of at least one expert in Old Irish who actually translated a spell for the Grimm TV show.) Basically, medieval Ireland almost NEVER gets put on screen (Pilgrimage is the last example that I can really think of, if we’re not counting Secret of the Kells, which we probably should because, tbh, awesome), and Irish Mythology gets it even less, so this would, theoretically, probably be our ONE CHANCE to get this done and get this done right.  

-Animated opening screen, Secret of the Kells style, in the style of an illuminated manuscript. PLEASE. I NEED IT. Either that or, if we can’t get something like that, I would love to see something that covers the entirety of Ireland, matching up the different characters to different locations, since the landscape is SUCH a huge part of these myths. You know. Like. That one fantasy show. The one with the dragons. And the zombies. 

Now, for my SECOND idea for an adaptation: 

A musical. Of COURSE I would want a musical. Like, it’s a no-brainer for me. Musicals thrive off of emotion and drama, and CMT has a TON of it. Now, what type of musical? That is the question.

And I’m actually being serious when I say this. 

Even though it’s going to sound cracky and tbh, it definitely is. But it’s also me. And what is CMT if not a 9th century scribe’s crackfic of Irish Mythology, put to contemporary political themes and using traces of Indo-European tradition? 

.....

A Takarazuka style musical. Because, goddammit, with their high focus on glitter, I feel like they’re the only ones who could TRULY put Bres and Lugh on stage, and their habit of letting pretty villains off the hook could work really, really well in Bres’ favor. That and I find the idea of them trying to adapt a myth with as much blood, guts, and sex in it as CMT personally hilarious. Lugh/Bui becomes the Top Star combo. Does Bui have all that much to do in the original CMT? No. But she’s our love interest. So she gets Top Star role, and at least one solo song. That’s probably all about how she’ll wait for Lugh no matter what. (We, of course, ignore her cheating on him.) Bres gets only one song, but it’s a showstopper, probably when he decides to fuck off to the Fomoire, and he and Lugh have OODLES of homoerotic tension. (If it were an adaptation of the first battle, Bres and Sreng would get. So. So much. But, alas.) If we don’t have Bres acting like a jealous boyfriend whenever he sees the TDD supporting Lugh, causing him to break out into a song about how much he HATES stupidly-hot Lugh, what’s the point? (Also: The chance for Goth!Bres. Which is, tbh, the Bres that I need in my life.) Also: Glorious costumes all around. 

The Dagda is the hapless comic relief character, who goes on PG-at-most antics. Probably involving eating a lot of porridge, hitting on every lady in sight (but of course not doing ANYTHING else) and passing out. He and Tsundere!Morrigan function as the Beta couple. 

Elatha is like. The Older Villain character, along the lines of, say, Mazarin in All For One, Talleyrand in Robespierre, Don Ferdinando in El Japón, etc. Balor probably wouldn’t be able to make it on screen, but...as an admitted and confirmed Bres Stan...........I’ve seen so many adaptations that don’t include Bres and make Balor the principle villain that...................sorry :) Balor :) That’s :) Very :) Tragic :) For :) You :) I LIKE Balor, but if he and Bres were dangling off a cliff....I’ve got to go for the pretty one with daddy issues and poor life choices, sorry Balor. 

Personally, I WOULD rather have Bres as the viewpoint character, with a Frozen “Monster”-esque number where he realizes that he’s the villain of the story but, unlike Elsa, decides to succumb to it, but I also know fully well that Lugh is basically MADE for the Takarazuka stage as a hero so...

The last time Takarazuka did something Irish-themed was in....I want to say 1994, with the Afterglow of Eire, and you know what? It’s time. If they did this for me, I would buy the DVD and force every single Celticist I know to watch it. And then make enough gifsets that you wouldn’t be able to THINK about Takarazuka on here without also thinking of “CMT” and vice versa. I would love it so, so much, no matter what they did. And I would, of course, relentlessly make fun of it as well. But in a loving way. (Even if they went the predictable route and went for Creepy!Bres.)

Alright, I said “two” but ngl, I came up with a third while I was writing this up:  A comic book. Because I feel like, in some ways, it’s the only way you can really capture that larger than life aspect. (Ditto for works like the Táin, which can only really be done either via comic book or anime. Not that I’m opposed to an anime with Bishounen!Lugh/Bres. Which wasn’t intended to be a slash ship but I said what I said. Cursed. But hey.)  

#irish mythology #long post #Anonymous

[irandrura]

I will aim for three posts, I think, trying to give some general feelings on Three Houses after completing one route (Azure Moon). This post will be on world and plot, and will have a mixture of things I liked and things I thought could be improved. The second one will be on characters and will be mostly positive. The third one will be a grab bag of other thoughts on mechanics, tone, where I think 3H fits into the series’ overall trajectory, and other things that occur to me.

It’s also worth noting that at this point I think I’ll grant myself license to read spoilers for the other routes. This is mainly because I don’t think it’s reasonable to need to play dozens more hours, many of which just repeat content I’ve already done, in order to get a full picture of the plot. That said, I realise that reading a wiki and skimming the odd chapter transcript are not substitutes for the experience of actually playing a route, so I will not make any judgement on the other three routes in terms of quality. I do intend to play at least Crimson Flower and Verdant Wind at some point, and that should be a richer experience than just reading, but I probably won’t start another forty-to-fifty hour journey straight away.

So, world and plot!

I think worldbuilding is one of Three Houses’ strengths, and is definitely a big step up after Fates and Awakening. Fódlan’s worldbuilding is not perfect, and sometimes has a few cringeworthy elements – in particular the King Lear references in the Alliance are a bit cheesy – but for the most part it successfully presents itself as a rich, interesting world, containing diverse cultures, and a complex history.

The sense of history is particularly important to me, especially compared to the last few games. I’m glad that the game goes to some effort to give Adrestia, Faerghus, and Leicester a sense of a shared past, full of rivalries and alliances. I can imagine setting other stories at different points in Fódlan’s history – Loog’s revolt, the occupation of Brigid and invasion of Dagda, the Almyran invasion, etc. – and those stories still being interesting and fun to play. I can imagine using Fódlan, perhaps centuries in the past, perhaps in the future, as a D&D campaign setting and it being quite interesting. That to me is a sign of good worldbuilding. If the world could easily play host to many different stories, not just the one I’m currently playing, then it can probably stand on its own quite well. This contrasts strongly with, say, Nohr and Hoshido, which felt like they were really just built for Corrin’s adventure.

I also appreciate that it’s not just ancient history that matters, but also the twenty years or so before the game begins. The heroes did not burst on to the scene ex nihilo, but all come out of particular historical situations. Events like the Insurrection of the Seven or the Tragedy of Duscur give you context for what happens in the game. The heroes generally have parents and families, and those families are relevant. They all come from somewhere, and while the details often aren’t described, what you get is enough to start imagining their home lives, and what might be going on elsewhere in the world. I really liked that and felt it was missing from the last few games. Can you imagine asking most of the Shepherds about their familes, or about the lands where they grew up?

Similarly, the range of visible cultures is one that I quite appreciate. Even outside Fódlan itself, mentions of Dagda, Brigid, Sreng, and Almyra help to make the world feel populated. That’s only the other regions that we know much about: there’s also Morfis, Albinea, and Mach, so the world is clearly quite large. Further, these different regions all have some noticeable cultural traits: the people of Brigid are animists and believe in many spirits, the Almyrans are a warrior culture and seem vaguely Persian, and so on. Within Fódlan there are visible differences as well, so the titular three houses are nicely differentiated.

The role of crests in shaping the continent also appealed to me. I believe I commented before that it reminds me of Birthright, an AD&D setting from the 90s that I have a soft spot for. While crests aren’t quite as powerful as Birthright’s bloodlines and don’t have exactly the same effects, the idea of aristocrats with real superpowers passed down in the bloodline, but which if abused can twist people into horrible monsters, was quite reminiscent of that setting. It’s a premise I’ve always found relatively intriguing, and I like that Three Houses does spend a little while exploring the social stratification that crests have produced. There are some interesting marriage politics going on because of crests; that’s really fun for me. Nonetheless I think the game also takes the right approach by not making crests too overpowering, and by firmly asserting that a person’s worth is not dependent on whether they have a crest or not. If it hadn’t done that, crests might have had some uncomfortable implications.

That said if I have one quibble it would be etymological. I understand that the Empire is vaguely Germano-Nordic, Leicester is vaguely English, and Faerghus is Franco-Celtic, but these aren’t always incredibly consistent, and names can sometimes be a bit surprising. The name ‘Dimitri’, for instance, stands out as being slightly out of place. I suppose its origin, ‘Demetrius’, is a Latin name and thus appropriate enough, but today I hear ‘Dimitri’ as Slavic, which doesn’t fit the established pattern for Faerghus. Still, this is a minor quibble.

The one exception to my general praise for the worldbuilding is the church, which I think is a huge mess. Maybe another route fleshes this out, but from what I played, it is extremely unclear to me how the church actually works. Was there a previous archbishop, or has Rhea been succeeding herself over and over, changing her name each time? How has the church been involved in history? We’ve had the occasional mention of cardinals, possibly with secret identities, but they’re entirely invisible and don’t seem to do anything. I would have liked more details on the church and how it fits into Fódlan’s history, because right now it feels like the anomaly, to me.

Moving on to the plot…

This had a number of issues, in my opinion.

Azure Moon was very much Dimitri’s story. In some ways I like that Byleth is simply not very important to the story. You are not the hero; you are the hero’s mentor. Byleth is more active than, say, Mark was in Blazing Sword, but still fades into the background compared to the true protagonist. However, I have to stand by the judgement that Dimitri’s redemption was too fast, and it probably would have been better to drop some of the church-related content for this route and spend more time exploring the characters and relationships that are at the heart of this story. Azure Moon is about Dimitri, Dedue, Felix, Sylvain, Annette, and probably Ingrid at the core: this rising generation of Faerghus nobility, with the long shadow of the past over them, struggling to overcome the sins of yesteryear and the cycle of revenge in order to build a better world. This story is good and I liked it, but a bit more polish and focus could have made it shine.

In terms of actual events, though, I have to say that a lot of things in the story didn’t make a lot of sense. The most obvious case is probably the rematch at Gronder Field. I understand the desire for a three-way battle there as adults, a rematch that contrasts dramatically with the mock battle they fought as students. However, as cool as the scene is, I don’t feel the set-up for it made a lot of sense: in particular Claude and Dimitri have no reason to fight each other. Dimitri might still be bloodthirsty and vengeance-obsessed, but that should translate to a charge straight at Edelgard, and Claude seems cunning enough to let that happen without getting in the way. There might surely have been better ways to set up a conflict there, especially since the writers have the get-out-of-jail-free card of a faction of evil shapeshifters trying to foment conflict. All you need is for a few Slitherers to deliver false messages or instigate a skirmish or two to start a battle based on a tragic misunderstanding.

Similarly, my confusion at the Leicester Alliance disbanding and the Kingdom absorbing the Empire remains present. I can guess that they wanted every route to end with Fódlan united into a single realm, but in this particular story it seemed strange, given how much the story had focused on freeing Faerghus from Imperial occupation and on defeating Edelgard. Dimitri’s ambitions were personal, rather than the grand schemes to reorganise Fódlan politically that both Edelgard and Claude have.

I wonder if there might be an unspoken cultural difference here? As someone from a Western European background, I am quite comfortable with the idea that many different nations can rightly exist on the same continent, and see coexisting self-determining territories as a quite good result; but perhaps in Japan it might be more natural to think that “an empire divided longs to unite”? The game begins with the territories of the ancient Adrestian Empire split into three nations now. Perhaps, like Warring States of either China or Japan, they must be united back into one? Three Houses to parallel Three Kingdoms, perhaps? The Japanese title of the game does not mention Three Houses, to be fair, but the title is an allusion to classical Chinese poetry, so I wonder what assumptions or resonances might be in the background.

Moving along, the logistics of war in general stood out to me as rather odd. I can’t tell whether you’re supposed to be canonically returning the entire army to the monastery in between every battle or not, but even if you’re not, you march all over the continent with very little regard for things like plausible logistics. Invading the Empire, winning a battle at Gronder, and then stopping to run all the way back up to Fhirdiad and liberate it in a single battle seemed particularly odd, especially when you also somehow make time to visit Arianrhod way out in the west. I wouldn’t be that strict about this in most games, but Three Houses does have that lovely detailed map and shows coloured lines with armies moving around, so I felt that it drew attention to one of its own weak points. Here I think the game contrasts negatively with the Tellius pair, which also feature a bunch of continent-wide wars, but generally seem to avoid bizarre logistics.

Finally, let’s talk about the ending. As I mentioned in one of the linked posts above, I was a bit surprised that there was no resolution to the Slitherers subplot in this arc. I liked the scene where Dimitri asks Edelgard why she did all of this before the final battle, but unfortunately they just talk about ideals. If I were Edelgard I might have mentioned the part where I did all this at the behest of – while also hoping to turn on and destroy – a faction of evil subterranean wizards who have been fomenting conflict throughout all of Fódlan’s history. I might also have mentioned the part where I believe the Church of Seiros is run by a different faction of ancient immortal manipulators, since that also seems key to understanding why Edelgard thought such drastic measures were necessary.

Perhaps that didn’t come up because if Edelgard were to mention those motives, it would quickly become apparent that she has already achieved most of her goals, and there is no more reason to fight. By the time of Edelgard and Dimitri’s fateful meeting, the Slitherers have already been defeated (albeit inadvertently, when we killed Arundel), the Church of Seiros is already shattered, Fódlan is close to being reunited under one government, and both we and Edelgard know that Dimitri wants to establish a more participatory and egalitarian form of government that should resolve some of Edelgard’s worries about crests. If Edelgard were the utilitarian fighting for the greater good that she portrays herself as, she could simply surrender, arrange the sort of peace treaty that Dimitri clearly wants, share all her knowledge with Dimitri and Byleth, and work for a brighter future together.

The final cutscene was thus quite striking to me. By ‘Light and Shadow’, it is extremely clear that the war is over. Even if Edelgard were somehow to successfully kill Dimitri, she would be killed immediately afterwards, and no good could come of it. But Edelgard cannot surrender. It is the one thing she cannot do, that she will never do. After the heart of the story was Dimitri’s redemption, and his painful struggle to turn away from his crimes and start anew, it seems appropriate to draw this line between them.

Both Dimitri and Edelgard did terrible things: he from vengeful passion, she from sincere belief it was for the best. But he could change his ways, grow, and find a new beginning. She never could. At the midpoint of Azure Moon, Byleth offers Dimitri his hand, and taking that hand and accepting help is the point at which Dimitri’s redemption begins. At the end, Dimitri, having learned this lesson, offers Edelgard his hand… but she does not take it.

There were plenty of places where I thought the plot could be improved, in terms of time, pacing, focus, and even practical things like why certain battles happen or how troops get there. But ultimately the story worked for me, I think, because the emotions worked. I can excuse a lot of nonsense if I care about the characters and the emotions resonate. I would rather do that than have a story that makes perfect logistical sense, but in which all the characters are flat and boring.

Next time I’ll talk more about supports and all the other characters.

[theoretical-tactician]

Okay, so I was sent that video about how Rhea did mostly nothing wrong a week back and now that I’ve finished all the routes, I want to give my own thoughts in this. I’m looking at this as someone who completed Crimson Flower first and is very atheist. All of this is going under a read more because it is very, VERY long and I don’t want to subject people to too much.

First, I’d like to bring up that a reddit post was brought up to me responding to this video. I’ve actually read through it before and I agree with points brought up in it (thought I forget bits and pieces b/c it was days ago). Anyhow, here’s a link to the reddit thread if you want an interesting read.

Still, I want to give my own ideas and opinions on this front. For easy reference to what I’m responding to, here’s the video:

The first thing I will state is based on the talk of impressions at the start of the video. It should be noted that while first impressions can be strong, a person’s mind can be changed. I’ll be honest that my opinion on disliking Rhea has not changed, but that came before even starting Crimson Flower because Creepy Lady is Creepy. My opinions on other characters has changed throughout, though as I learn more of them. It should also be stated that Verdant Wind is a copy of Silver Snow, but even more pro Rhea (which I have my own beef with, but deserves its own analysis). As such, the writer of this video would likely start off with a strong pro Rhea bias (not to mention how they speak of Rhea, so).

But that aside, I want to talk about the actual points in this video. The first aspect I will agree upon is that both Rhea and Edelgard make mistakes. Both are flawed characters. And both do things right. The two are opposite sides of the same coin, in my opinion. They have tragedies that back their stories and actions. They do some things similar. It’s just they way they decide to approach such things and their reasoning is very different and leads to very different results. Since this is about Rhea, I will focus on her. Perhaps another time I will talk about the flaws and merits of other lords.

The first major point the video brings up is Edelgard talking about the church wishing to rule the world. Which, yeah, they don’t want to rule the world, instead acting as extremely isolationist. Rather, what the church prefers to do is having an iron grip on Fodlan. That is in fact another version of the use of the word “world” as world can also just refer to a region or group of countries. I believe that in this speech and every other of Edelgard’s, her use of the word “world” is meant to refer to Fodlan alone. That is what is meant to be taken away, at least.

Fodlan is a group of three countries and is the world Edelgard talks about in her speeches, as she talks about it in terms of the goddess, church, nobility, etc. These are things she speaks of as specifics to Fodlan, conveying that “the world” is Fodlan. One way to take complete control of an area is to enforce isolationism, something Rhea VERY much does.

It should be noted that after the division of the Empire into three countries, they were forced to band together beneath the church due to the threats of other countries invading. This suggests the church having isolationist policies which keep foreigners out of the country, fighting them and not welcoming them as brethren. Not only that, but people must obey the church. Look at Claude’s supports. There is legitimate fear in him speaking out against the goddess because doing such a thing is heresy and he could be put to death for saying such things in Fodlan. At least, I would assume this much, otherwise, that fear wouldn’t exist.

The next point I wish to speak on is about whether or not the church actually split up the Empire into three countries so as to weaken the power of humans and put down her authority in those countries. Now, I’m no politician--even if my friends want me to be one--and I definitely don’t know everything about politics, but I can definitely say that the church wasn’t totally neutral in these conflicts.

I, being the nerd I am, actually spent the time to read all of the books within the monastery library to get an idea of the history of Fodlan. Of course, these books do have lies and half-truths themselves (especially since Seteth chooses what to censor (shit, I’m getting war on Protestantism vibes again)). Anyways, we can’t actually tell what the full truth is of what happened in the past as history is written by the victors. And the church. But I’ll do my best with what information there is.

First, there was the war of the Eagle and Lion. This went on for years until the church intervened as a “neutral” party to end the conflict and allow the creation of the Kingdom. The thing is, the church isn’t exactly neutral in this. The result of the negotiations is that Loog gets crowned the first king of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus. Rhea made a deal with the Kingdom that they would get their independence so long as they followed the teachings of Seiros. As a result, all of the nobles of the Kingdom are required to be devout followers of the church.

This in’t neutral at all as it acts as a gain for the church who wasn’t even involved in the conflict as far as we know, just benefiting off of giving Loog the crown. I would also note that it makes sense for Rhea to do so in order to gain control, considering that the Empire’s relationship with the church strained over time, eventually leading to the destruction of the Southern Church 100 years before the start of the game. While the war of the Eagle and Lion happened long before then, there was likely still some strain between the Empire and church which would lead to Rhea making such a decision to take control of the Kingdom in this way.

The second part is with the Alliance. As far as I am aware, the church did not involve itself in any way with the conflict, but the effects of Rhea’s negotiation with the Kingdom does affect the Alliance in the long run, as it split off from the Kingdom with some of the ideals of the nobles carrying over. You can see this most clearly in Lornez. If you talk to him early on in the game, he actually comments on how the nobility are required to show faith to the church, even if he himself doesn’t necessarily believe in the faith. This is interesting because he is an Alliance noble, not a Kingdom noble, and ONLY the Kingdom was directly given this requirement to follow the faith. This means that when the Alliance did offshoot from the Kingdom, they kept that same die-hard religious stuff. So perhaps Rhea didn’t work in splitting off the Alliance, but her work still lingers there, digging its claws deep in controlling the people.

We don’t know the full events of either split, so Rhea could have been subtly involved, but we would never know. And while the person in this video says Rhea is never subtle due to how we see her act in game, we must keep in mind that people change with time. She likely could have been more stable then, but perhaps not. So past history is kind of up in the air. Though, it also could have been those who slither, like the video suggests. The truth is, we never learn what happened during those conflicts as they are not the main drive of the story, and, as such, we will never know the full story of such events, leaving us only to walk circles in speculation.

I will make a small comment that it’s interesting how Garreg Mach is perfectly in the center of all the regions, though. Like, why was there no country that cut off and had no borders next to the church? 🤔

Onto the next point in the video. There’s a relatively quick part on the church exploiting people for gold and living in extravagance. The creator of the video says there’s no proof of such, but there is a very, very tiny bit. Due to Dimitri’s research on Lord Arundel in Blue Lions (this part can easily be looked over b/c Arundel isn’t spoken of much in BL), it is discovered that Arundel would give very large donations on a regular basis to the church before suddenly stopping (which was likely when Thales replaced him).

Looking at this, we can take it that the church gets its money via donations and the very, VERY expensive fees for entering the Officer’s Academy. I don’t actually know where all of the money goes and what it’s used for, but it seems apparent that the church gets quite a bit of money from the nobility across Fodlan and through the academy. And with the nobility across Fodlan, look back to what I said about the founding of Faerghus.

Many of the nobility are required to follow the faith and making donations is likely a great show of faith. And money can act as a great way of gaining power. So all I’m saying is that the nobility are giving quite a bit of power to the church (because they feel they must or are required to) and we have no idea what this money is being used for.

The next point is about the hypocrisy of the church leading Fodlan when they can’t lead an era of peace. Now, I can agree that the church has led a long era of peace within Fodlan for quite some time. But if such peace was held in a similar fashion to how we see Rhea holding it (i.e. sentencing people who rise against the church to death without providing them a trial), then I would consider it a false peace. That would be a peace upheld by fear.

Of course, there weren’t many large wars within Fodlan for quite a long time, but there were other conflicts that the church has done nothing about, allowing conflict to destroy the borders of Fodlan. See, if it’s true that the church is isolationist, the locket can’t be torn down and the Almyrans can’t be reasoned with. As a result, we have this eternal conflict in the borders of the Alliance with Almyra, a war without end. The same can be said of Sreng, as The Gautier house is at constant war with Sreng to keep them out of Fodlan. Again, no peace could possibly be negotiated if it’s true that the church has isolationist ideas.

For true peace to exist in Fodlan, there must be no conflict with the outer world as well. But to end such conflicts, the church should help work to create a resolution of conflict with the outside world in a more peaceful way. So, no, the church does not entirely keep peace, and while I have no clue whether Edelgard would, too, she at least seems to wish to make an effort to speak with other countries to try and end conflict.

The next point is about the Crest system and governance. Rhea enforces feudalism, which is not a fun form of government and is very oppressive. I will also admit that Edelgard does not change the government from that of the Empire. But it should also be stated that the Empire isn’t an Imperial dictatorship. See, after the insurrection of the seven, power was taken away from the emperor, giving it to the most powerful nobles, who became ministers.

The emperor can’t actually do much without the support of the ministers. We see this through comments from people like Linhardt and how there are subtle details about Edelgard going off to talk to certain ministers, likely so they would join her side and allow her the power to start this war/help prepare for it. Without the ministers, Edelgard doesn’t actually have the people and resources for what she needs to do. So this isn’t a dictatorship, but rather an oligarchy. This is even further highlighted as ministers who didn’t support Edelgard were forcibly put under house arrest or killed and another would take their place.

I’m unsure of exactly what power the emperor does hold, so Edelgard was either able to put ministers under house arrest due to her power as emperor or through force (considering the people/soldiers seem loyal to her/her ideals and has a few soldiers of her own). Though it seems she cannot strip ministers of their power, as it was rather taken by family of said ministers who then vowed support to Edelgard (i.e. Ferdinand, Hubert, and Count Varley’s wife).

Edelgard wants to put a meritocracy on this existing oligarchy, which either would work, or would fail. The video points out that feudalism is far preferable to the fall of a meritocracy and I’d actually say otherwise. See, if there’s anything I’ve learned from this semester in my classes that spoke on the world and human rights, it’s this: progress can’t happen without change.

Rhea keeps the system stagnant, unchanging. Fodlan is to remain with feudalism eternally. Or at least so long as Rhea and her church have power. With Edelgard’s meritocracy, either one of two things will happen: (1) a change for the better where the government will be more inclusive or (2) the complete collapse (fast or slow) of the government and Empire, which will lead to a new era of change where the people will pick up the pieces and create their own government that will improve the world. This is simply how progress comes about.

I should also note that this is a theme I see within Silver Snow itself. When you follow Rhea and choose to support the church, everything remains stagnant. This is noticeable among the Black Eagles as they don’t get their full development. I don’t want to make this too long, so I won’t go in-depth, but the greatest example is how SS Bernie remains a recluse, unlike CF Bernie who has learned to be more outward. A lot of Silver Snow shows the church using people in a way to try and keep order, creating an unchanging and stagnant world. This is what Rhea does. And this creates more harm than good. Sometimes the best thing to happen is when all falls apart and the people build something new on the cleared foundation.

Next, the video states that Rhea isn’t enforcing the Crest system at all, but that’s not exactly true? Rhea, in a way, is enforcing the Crest system by giving the nobles access to the Relics. These are powerful weapons that can easily be used to hold people at bay or kill them. To provide such power to a select few ensures they hold their status high-up as nobles. I mean, we have an entire chapter which ends with us being required to give the Lance of Ruin back to Rhea so she may bestow it upon House Gautier. And if you don’t give it back to her, she gets PISSED. She is actively enforcing this system.

Not to mention that once again, she requires many nobles to follow the Seiros faith, and follow her as a result. She asks that the commoners have faith in the nobles, which is another hit at her basically enforcing the Crest system. I’d also like to note that the only place where she has less control is in the country that has no nobles with crests of the ten elites (and as such, no relics). Crests seem to matter less in the Empire as we can see many powerful nobles who lack Crests (like, our minister of military affairs has ZERO Crests), which may be part of the reason the church has less control. It just seems that the Crest system is so heavily tied to the church, and it’s only strengthened with the lie the faith spreads about Crests.

I also want to add that Silver Snow shows that the most powerful people within the church are actively given Rhea’s blood and Crest shards??? So she is actively providing Crests to people in power which would only further fuel those with Crests being higher/mightier/more important than anyone without Crests.

The next bit that the video speaks on is how the one major wrong Rhea does is her creation of a false faith and outright lying to people about the past. Here’s what I have to say: Rhea can think of Sothis as a goddess all she wants, but she then forces this upon humans. The forcing of humans to celebrate Sothis as a goddess is partially what led to Nemesis killing off the Nabateans (as far as we are aware, though even that could be a lie, but it remains consistent across routes (Seiros was not the one enforcing faith then, but likely Sothis herself)).

After Seiros killed Nemesis, she created the church of Seiros, which seems odd. Why would you name your faith after a saint (and yourself) and not the goddess you celebrate? It seems odd. I mean, Christianity is called Christianity, not Peterism or whatever (I do realize that there are subdivisions of Christianity like Lutheranism, but that is, again, part of Christianity).

By covering everything up and creating a religion, Rhea simply makes a new way for people to worship her mother as she so desires. It allows her to take control of Fodlan slowly so she might have complete religious control over the people, as that seems to be one of her desires.

There’s a statement in this ending part of the video that really struck a chord with me. The video states that if the church put its beliefs closer to reality, those who slither would have nothing to manipulate Edelgard with. But it should be noted that they aren’t manipulating her. In fact, they weren’t the ones to tell her this. She gained this information from her father, the emperor. This was information passed down to her through the generations.

Her tipping point was being experimented upon so that she might have a second Crest which is also a major Crest. The only way this could have been averted is if the church never took control of Fodlan and enforced the Crest system, preventing Edelgard from possibly being harmed by it and obtaining a secondary Crest. But the only way to do so would be to destroy the Crests and Relics, which I doubt Rhea wants to do (since those are her siblings). In fact, she herself ADDS to this problem as she and all of the saints (excluding Macuil) gave their blood to the nobles who assisted them, which would further assist the creation of a Crest system.

The last bit of the video I wish to comment on is about Rhea’s questionable experiments. No matter how you look at it, what she did was wrong. We don’t know what the first dozen experiments were like, but we know how Byleth’s went. Sure, at first it was to save their life. But then Rhea became obsessive, wishing to turn the child into the progenitor god.

The video states that it seems like Rhea simply wanted Sothis to be reborn in spirit outside of Crimson Flower. But I don’t think so. In every route, Rhea makes comments on Byleth being a vessel and wishing for the power to overcome them, making Sothis return. It seems that the entire time, no matter the route, Rhea has desired for Byleth to be a sort of human vessel to sacrifice for the return of her mother. It is only when this fails and Byleth fights against Edelgard that Rhea gives in and just sees Byleth as being the progenitor god in spirit, Sothis having had passed down her powers to her vessel.

Since the video speaks nothing on anything of the war phase, I will also speak nothing of Rhea’s actions during the war phase. It is then stated that many of Edelgard’s accusations towards Rhea are either outright false or missing context, but I believe otherwise. All of them are true in some form or another, and we never know everything Edelgard does. Edelgard does in fact know the truth of Rhea, but we never know how much of the truth she knows of the Relics (though it’s highly likely she does and just never speaks on it).

It should also be noted that the video says Edelgard is walking the same path as Rhea, though from a different direction. And I do agree. They are two sides of the same coin. People struck by tragedy who wish to right this wrong. The difference is how they choose to pursue fixing this. Rhea does so by becoming some almighty power. Edelgard does so by becoming a tool for her people.

After writing all of this, I will say that Rhea is one of my favorite characters in Three Houses for her writing, and that is due to her tragedy. She’s of so much interest because she’s someone stuck in their past, wishing for nothing more than what they used to have. But they can never have that back, dragging other people down with them as a result.

Rhea may have done some good things in her time, but if she did, I have yet to see or hear them. Perhaps the church has done things to help Fodlan, but it cannot be ignored how much harm Rhea has done as well.

#rhea #fe16 #fe16 spoilers #golden deer spoilers #black eagle spoilers #church spoilers #long post

[tiervain]

sent by @aegisheld​ 

Time was what he needed. To accept a few things, and come to terms with this ache in his heart. How he tried to cut those strings around his heart, but somehow Sylvain found another -- then another and another. Did not matter how light the tug was, it left his cheeks to burn, and eyes to avoid. He sat on the other side of the council, far away. Surely that was enough space between them. But, oh Sylvain was cunning, locking eyes with him from afar, eyes that did not cease to know, to tease 1/2

The fur of his hood was useful to hide in, only giving slight peaks to those watchful eyes. He couldn't bare it any longer. Council deformed, and with a swift grab, he had dragged Sylvain into yet another hidden corner, tugging his collar down as lips connected a little roughly. He only wanted a taste -- just a bite. Maybe it would satisfy his desire, but unknowing to him that would never be contained. As lips parted, face went hot, and chest heaved with breaths. "Stop looking at me like that."

MEETINGS WITHIN THE WAR ROOM WERE A MONOTONOUS AFFAIR; IT WAS THE SAME AS IT WAS THE PREVIOUS DAY AND THE DAY BEFORE THAT. Day after day after day, war and strategy talks were treated as a serious affair (and rightly so), for each member of the blue lions and other detrimental allies spent precious energy sitting through hours of discussing tactics and battle formations, gathering rations, weapons and other supplies. Having these talks of mechanization were helpful in planning the next move against the empire, this Sylvain knew, but after listening to the report on skirmishes along the border of Sreng for the umpteenth time (honestly what else was new?), his mind began to wander elsewhere. Inevitably, his eyes would meander, passing over each member of their counsel, until at long last it would settle upon Felix. 

THERE WAS SOMETHING TO BE SAID ABOUT HOW SYLVAIN’S THOUGHTS WOULD EVENTUALLY COME BACK TO HIM. Given the last time he had been caught staring at Felix, it was easy to shrug the affair off as indulgent but harmless accident(was it really?). Nothing more, nothing less. And yet he made no promises that he would stop gazing upon the swordsman; while everyone participated among the meeting and offered input to help their cause to rally allies and more troops against the empire in battle, Sylvain was prepared for an inevitable assault of his own. 

“--and that’s wraps up everything. We’ll convene later when the scouts have returned with more news.”

THE LOUD SCRAPE OF MULTIPLE CHAIR LEGS BROUGHT HIM OUT OF HIS TRANCE, JERKING HIM BACK TO THE PRESENT. With the meeting concluded for the moment, Sylvain sighed and raised his arms up to stretch, his torso rising to pop several vertebra along his spine that were rather bothersome from their last battle encounter (nothing serious but definitely didn’t leave him unscathed). When he had finished his stretch with another sigh, he rose up and began to walk towards the door when a hand cuffed him by the collar of his shirt, tugging him away from the rest of the party that exited the war room. His assailant was slightly shorter than himself, however his strength didn’t surprise Sylvain. After all, he knew the time and dedication it took for Felix to build his strength and speed while fighting on the battlefield. That he was quick to descend upon him, the fury marring his face tightening his mouth made his heart skip a beat was merely an starter. 

SYLVAIN COULD TELL BY HOW FELIX CRUSHED HIS MOUTH AGAINST HIS THAT HE WAS NOT AN EXPERIENCED KISSER. That was hardly unexpected to say the least, yet this little detail never bothered him in the slightest. Cracked lips slanted in desperation and anger were a language unique only to Felix; perhaps it was better to say that he wanted to bite him than kiss him, but that too was an endearment of its own right. Such clumsy affection was just him: brash, bold, a charging violence that attempted to remain soft, Sylvain met it and turned the interaction on itself and spoke with an answering kiss of his own. Tongue and teeth rasped the flesh of his bottom lip, marring it until it blushed red, a suck that acted to swallow a gasp-- he would have all of it, all the sounds Felix would utter, his curses, his pleas, his cries, his, his, his---

--he could smell oil and steel and a scent that was distinctly Felix-- and his heart would hammer in his chest, screaming to call him his, call him my beloved, my darling, my love-- my heart...

I’m terrified of love, but you would make this fear of mine disappear with your smile.

“You’re asking for the impossible, y’know that?” His laugh puffed out breathlessly. Several minutes after they separated from their contest to see whose tongue could touch the furthest recesses of their throat, Sylvain slumped his back against the wall. Head crowned in scarlet set atop Felix’s jet black mane and merely breathed deep. He made no secret that he was scenting him, though it would likely ruffle his feathers, Sylvain spared no thought to this. His focus was only on there here and now.

“You asked me before to stop looking at you, but I can’t Felix. I won’t stop-- because if I don’t, I might blink and you’ll be gone.” His hands cupped his neck, thumbs caressing his jawline and the pulse point of his throat and he watched how hard it beat. Was it his words that did this or was it the kiss? Was he angry with him for his honesty? That would be a question he would ask the swordsman. “You can hate me. Curse me, spite on me-- whatever your worst, I’ll accept it. As long as I can keep looking at you and know that you’re here, I’ll take whatever you’ll give me. I won’t ask you for anything more than that.” His words hardly disguised his greedy nature; longing whispered sweetly to have him dip into the honeyed well of Felix’s lips and he did. He took hold, capturing him in a kiss that thoroughly took the shape of his lips, tasting and feeling and committing every groove and curve to memory. Muffled moans and pants filled the empty space of the war room, where before the discussion of battle and strategy brought the unspoken call to swift domination: a battle that demanded immediate surrender or death. No such thoughts filled their heads in between them. Only a physical need, breaths fanned upon their faces and quiet murmurs pasted from one man to another.

EVENTUALLY THEY WOULD LEAVE-- TOGETHER OR SEPARATE, THAT REMAINED TO BE SEEN. But Sylvain walked away taking something close to his heart that was far more precious than a knowledge of intel for a battle they would die fighting for. Not a victory to present to a mad-king hellbent on rending and tearing the flesh of Adrestian soldiers to offer on an alter for the long dead. He walked away with the taste of an undying promise sworn from youth, his heartbeat steady and true in knowing that his dear friend carried that same promise inside his heart too. A promise sprung from a feeling they both wouldn’t name, couldn’t name yet. But in their dreams at least, the Goddess could laugh and say what they were too afraid to speak for them.

It was love-- pure and simple.

#ask. #aegisheld #verse: part ii / azure moon. #oh man oh man im in consolable these two kill me!!

[randomnameless]

Kaga had the idea of Verdane as a “barbarian nation” in mind when he developed it for Jugdral, but at least the idea is communicated that Jamke’s brothers are idiots, and Batu lost his way because Sandima was manipulating him. Houses Almyra was never really shown but we got the concept that it had its good sides and bad sides. Nopes? Nopes Almyra truly is a nation of barbarians, who pillage for fun, refuse to acknowledge the people it trods on (even its own people, like Cyril), populated by nobility who are incompetent and stupid (Shahid) and whose military has no respect for its own king (Nader). Invasions are treated like field trips and pillaging is given the same weight as strolling through a gift shop. Even Brigid was eggtivated and lolcalised to declare its oppressor a friend. I’m amazed Sreng was actually treated seriously and given legitimate gravitas compared to the asspull nonsense of the other two routes.

Now if only we can airlift the Church (and Byleth, sans their shitty drunkard of a father, since at least Nopes gives us a tiny crumb in the form of undeniably canon mint) out of Nopes and into Jugdral I will be content.

I'll be a bit less enthusiast about FE16's Almyra -

Where did we had any clue about Almyra having "good sides"? Of course, you can't resume a nation to what a bunch of people did, but even in FE16, Cyril depicted Almyrans in less than admirable terms, the paralogue does them no favours and Claude doesn't help in the slightest, being prejudiced as he is (but hey, Claude learns and reconsiders, something Clout never does) against Fodlan and its supposed "isolationism" and whatever beef he had against the Church of Seiros.

The only thing of interest about Almyra is their "bend the knee escape the noose" mindset - which seems to be very different from Fodlan's mindset which indicates the two countries have a different set of values - but at the end of the day (in an epilogue else the game would be good) we learn that they eventually managed to become allies.

(Yes, I also find it ultra weird that Nader the Undefeated, who always pulls back, would become BFF with Hilda "I said I would run away instead of defending the city... but I'm actually fighting to my dying breath to protect the city, its inhabitants, and Claude" 's brother but who knows, maybe they really were drunk when they signed their BFF charter).

Basically, FE16's Almyra is a country that has a different set of values, that is seen through rose tainted glasses and through mud tainted glasses, but that is seen raiding the border for reasons. It is BaD? No, but Claude has some serious self-reflection to do on his thoughts about international relationships.

Nopes?

As you pointed out, Nader, Shahir, King Dad, and Clout himself...

Well.

However, I partly disagree on Brigid, it was lolcalised, but not eggtivated. Eggtivated Brigid would mean that even in the JP script Brigid is always happy to fight for Adrestia - as seen in Tru Piss and non SS routes, Petra receives a lot of "information campaign" from the Empire, to the point where she thinks she's only the "will" of the Emperor, and nothing else.

But when recruited or in SS (even in her SS paralogue) the game (FE16 at least) made it clear that Brigid is a vassal state, under the heel of Adrestia and they are pretty unhappy about it.

Granted, for sure, the lack of close-up on Brigid's situation bar Petra's non Tru Piss paralogue can count as an exemple of eggtivation.

TFW a random named Leif who doesn't even have a personalised sprite is in the same situation, but his country isn't sidelined bcs "uwu" so it receives the gravitas it deserves.

Nopes really destroyed Jerry, didn't it?

#anon #replies #FE16 #3 nopes #eggtivation sucks #tfw the worldbuilding is warped to fit an uwu agenda #and you see tidbits of info about how petra feels about the situation in her caspar supports #but it's always leopold bad bad bad never Supreme Leader who uh uses Brigid as fodder and not the Empire in general #Supreme Leader became Emperor and could have freed Brigid but no

[randomnameless]

There was a “joke” post that circulated about lords siding with a certain person (the result is... no one picks her path), and I didn’t want to reblog it with serious thoughts - and I was like, the second any Lord hears about certain ideas regarding another race, they’d bail out immediately.

While fantastic racism is still racism, the main issue depicted in the game (but hidden or not picked upon because framing is a thing) is coexistence.

... Right ?

Each time Edel harps about “creatures” it is because she thinks they are controlling Fodlan, or are just living here with humans :

“You are a child of the goddess. You must not be allowed power over the people”

“Should the one leading the people of the world be someone with humanity or a creature that can merely masquerade as a human at will?”

A redditer once put it in simple terms, but it feels like the “Separate but Equals” doctrine, with all its implications - creatures should not have power over humans, but humans are allowed to have power over them.

Creatures are not allowed to live near human settlments and are allowed to “retire” from the world, but banned from interacting with it.

So while I do not think CF!Edel is going to destroy Macuil, who is living in Sreng (unless she uses him as a pretense, she will send troops to free her Sreng allies from his evil yoke and forget to pull them back when the bird’s dead?), CF!Edel still has the ominous

“You could have had a peaceful life... Why did you have to come to Garreg Mach?”

when pitted against... Flayn.

If Flayn never came to Garreg Mach, she would have been allowed to live a peaceful life, but far from... humans? Humanity? Civilisation?

But this? This is what we are supposed to think!

Bar the, um, ludicrousness of thinking Flayn rules over humans, especially since the person thinking this is the leader of the country who gave the biggest middle finger to the Church, there is the Indech paralogue.

No matter how many twists or paperwork involved, the fact is the BE knows Edel will terminate Indech. Euphemisms like “It will be troublesome” cannot shake the feeling that since day 1, Edelgard, who said she wishes to obliterate Children of the Goddess because they are controlling the world, obliterates many things to get control of various countries, but not Children of the Goddess.

Dimitri and Claude must disappear for Fodlan to be united, thus to gain control over the world, but Rhea? Why is she on the hit-list, especially after having been driven away from Garreg Mach and not having any power over “the people” anymore?

Again, CF is very revealing about her views on Children of the Goddess, even if the lolcalisation team tried to smooth the angles :

In the localised version, against Rhea, during their final fight, she says :

So it's true. You don't value human life at all. Isn't that right, Immaculate One? 

But in the original, jp, version, she says this instead :

やはり、貴方が大事なのは人ではないのね。 “白きもの”……女神の眷属よ !

After the “Immaculate One”, Edel pauses and adds... Child/ren of the Goddess.

So it isn’t Rhea, the IO, who doesn’t “value human life at all”, nope. It’s something inherent to all “children of the goddess” (or other reading, Edel thinks CoG is an insult, which... doesn’t help her case.at.all.).

From a doylist POV, I can see why this only comes late in the game, and was hidden, in CF at least, because Billy has to be misguided, starting with “I hate children of the goddess because they abuse power”.

Then it becomes “I hate children of the Goddess because they have power over humans”.

The ultimate CF golden nugget, is “I hate children of the Goddess because they do not value human life”. Indech’s paralogue (meaning you recruited someone else from the usual BE member, hinting at a second PT?) heavily suggests “I hate children of the Goddess, even if they don’t have power over humans”.

So, both to fit with the theme Billy’s lied to in CF and because finding justifications to hide why you hate a different race/species is what is commonly done to hide your most hideous opinions, Edel couldn’t have started CF saying, overtly, “I hate Children of the Goddess, they’re not like us, look they don’t value human lives!” - Watsonian wise... if the game didn’t have big issues with framing, it would sound weird because, hm, Flayn was a member of their House and apparently managed to get along with several people, you do not bother to get along with people you don’t care about and/or value.

But in a way, isn’t it, just the same thing?

By hiding behind “I don’t mind them, just hidden from my eyes and without influence over the world”, it doesn’t remove the main issue, coexistence with Nabateans is impossible.

Let it be their physical or spiritual presence, their existence is outright rejected - as I pointed out in an earlier post, wanting to get rid of “crests” effectively means, wanting to get rid of Nabateans.

“They” are not like “us”. They do not value our lives (or being called a “Child of the Goddess” is an insult).

This is where the most beautiful redshit takes grow, from the “it isn’t racist to call them beast because they technically are “beasts”” - I am sure if I call you an evolved paramecia, even if it might be technically true, you will not feel honored - to the emmy worthy takes “Nabateans are responsibles for what happened to them, it’s their fault because they flaunted their superpowers”.

As an evil person said :

Everyone has something that is unacceptable within them. I certainly do, and I'd wager you do as well.

I wonder which is best, Professor... To cut away that which is unacceptable, or to find a way to accept it anyway...

Post CF, Nabateans are effectively cut away, since their existence was unacceptable. Let it be physically or condamned to a life in hiding.

For someone who cannot accept Nabateans, the most suitable ending is to remove her love interest’s nabatean blood, Billy can reject their blood, their life support and even their tacky hair!

i forgot the point i wanted to make  In the FE series, coexistence is always sought after, let it be between two different species, or two different nations, or even two different people and their visions. In FE16? No one gives a frick about this issue, even when it is the leitmotiv of the primary force in the game (save for the aforementionned evil person).

We can even say this game, with its hard-on for unification, gives a negative answer - there is no need to accept the unacceptable or to try to get along or to coexist with others, if others are part of you.

CF at least had the balls to drop the mic and go full “you should cut away the things you cannot accept”, while it can be foggy at first, it hits hard when the “things you cannot accept” are... a group of people.

Tl; Dr : When usual lords pick the “find a way to accept and get along with everyone”, Edel fully embraces the “cut away and destroy it”, even if this mindset leads to finishing Nemesis’s party and removing Nabateans from Fodlan. The game doesn’t challenge it though, and it’s a pity.

#musings #it always happen #sometimes i'm writting something and i forget why i wanted to write #what was the point i wanted to make? idk #FE16 #claude wants people to accept each other #dimitri learns to accept the empire and edel and doesn't want to destroy her on sight #rhea had to accept Catherine and pals using relics and the fact crests were widespread #Edel? Cannot accept nabateans #discussions about racism #they abuse their power > they oppress us humans > they're not like us #lolcalisation issues #why cutting that part? I wonder

[margridarnauds]

laz, fox, ivanova, delenn, lyta

THANKS AVERY. 

Lazare de Ga-Peyrol

overall: who? / i hate them / i dislike them / kinda wanna fight them / they’re alright / i like them / i love them / *accidentally drops thousands of pictures of them*

opinion: again, who??? / the purest bean / cinnamon roll / who knows really / sinnamon roll / the problematic fav

otp(s): *Opens up Wip* *The ghost of a dozen Ronan/Lazare WIPs come back to haunt me*

other ship(s): Ronan/Laz/Olympe is still Very Important to me, I ship Charles/Laz in terms of “Things That Happened in Laz’s Past that fucked him up badly so now he can commiserate with Olympe over unrequited crushes on the royals”. Personally, I don’t see that one as anything more than a one-sided crush that Charles took advantage of, but, like, it’s a Thing. (Also, the curtain calls for Toho are…suspect for me, given that the two of them are paired together. Could be nothing, I don’t know, and I’m trying to keep myself from asking anyone who’s seen it because I want to see the Toho with as untouched a mind as possible. I know, I know that’s funny coming from me.) 

#noromo ship(s): Laz and Solene spend most of their time together laying back and talking shit about Ronan, with Laz occasionally going to her for advice because I THINK I BROKE HIM WHAT DO I DO which then involves Solene having to reassure him that, no, Ronan’s just Like That. 

When I don’t ship Olympe/Laz (which is…..90% of the time,) I highly support them as a BROTP who routinely beard for one another at important events, bullshitting some reason for why they can’t be together while they bond over both ditching the royals for their own respective Mazurier siblings and both being repressed in different ways. Olympe isn’t as emotionally represssed as Lazare, but “Les Mots que l'on ne dit Pas” confirms that she doesn’t say a LOT of what she thinks, and Takarazuka!Olympe is obviously always restraining herself to an absolutely insane degree of politeness, especially in her interactions with Charles. Also, Lazare would at least be aware of other gay men, though I can’t feel it was something Grandpapa de Fuck encouraged, whereas the extent to which women were allowed to know about the possibility of being in a sexual relationship with another woman is...debated. Like, the rumors around Marie Antoinette really were a watershed moment there and Olympe should PROBABLY be aware of that, but...it’s dicey. It’s very dicey

Also, Papa du Puget and Laz had a father/son type of relationship, with Pierre-Francois essentially taking one look at this broken, emotionless wreck of a human being and going “OLYMPE? DID YOU SAY YOU WANTED A BROTHER?” This was sadly cut short in the Zuka version by Laz doing…that, effectively losing two people close to him with one hastily made order. 

crack ship(s): Given Laz’s relative lack of screentime, nearly ANYTHING he’s involved with is inherently a crackship. As far as “things I’ve toyed around with but generally refuse to acknowledge”: Lazare/Louis. It would put a new perspective on Laz’s devotion to the royal family and drive to protect them, and parallel even closer to Olympe’s crush on the Queen. It would also make his eventual, inevitable failure to protect the King even worse. I did toy with a one-shot for Herbert from Tanz der Vampire and Laz, where an older Laz would have to fight off the vampire’s amorous advances while on a mission from Napoleon. 

fav headcanon(s): I will die on the hill of Sugar Daddy Laz, even if Toho seems dedicated to ruining my hopes and dreams. (”BUT THE COOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAATTTTSSSSSS” I cry out into the abyss, to which they reply, “Lol, what coats?”) Like, it’s a fantastic excuse for having Ronan and Laz be in regular contact, deepening that relationship while also explaining where the fuck Ronan is sleeping every night. (And gives us Insufferable Neatnik Lazare VS………Ronan)

Also, the idea that Laz never learned Latin or Greek and that, in general, his education was constrained only to military shit, which opens him up to ridicule when he’s around other aristocrats at Versailles or whenever he’s invited to, say, a ball in Paris. (Charles in particular enjoys playing with him, because it’s a means of asserting himself even if he himself doesn’t keep up with most of it, historically having said that he couldn’t read 4 pages without being bored.)

After the Bastille, no matter what, Laz resigns from the army or is yeeted out. Like, I genuinely can’t see any real way where he sees everything he’s seen and done everything he’s done and is still in the army. I think he’d either be a good scapegoat for the violence in the streets (with a HUGE possibility of retaliative violence by the mob, especially in the immediate aftermath), or he would resign himself out of guilt and the realization that the army that he joined and devoted himself to was never going to be the same again. 

ALSO. HE IS AUTISMS. I WILL FIGHT FOR THIS ONE. 

Fox

overall: who? / i hate them / i dislike them / kinda wanna fight them / they’re alright / i like them / i love them / *accidentally drops thousands of pictures of them*

opinion: again, who??? / the purest bean / cinnamon roll / who knows really / sinnamon roll / the problematic fav

otp(s): Xanatos/Fox/Owen 

other ship(s): I could ship Elisa/Fox, especially after “Eye of the Beholder.” I’m not sure where I stand on Hyena/Fox. Like, I think there’s *potential* there, given that OH MY GOD THEY WERE CELLMATES, but it’s not a dynamic I’m particularly interested in.

#noromo ship(s): Fox/Dingo, as the two members of the Pack who were able to break free of that shit.

crack ship(s): ….I don’t think I really have any, at least for her? I’d have to rewatch Gargoyles again (oh, the pain, the pain), but yeah, I don’t think I really have any solid crackships for her. 

fav headcanon(s): She, Owen, and Xanatos are a throuple who raise Alex together, with Owen looking after Alex when the other two are away. (I mean, this verges on canon but…) 

Also, we know that canonically, Irish Mythology exists in the Gargoyles, and Fox is half Third Race, so, like…there’s some huge magnificent crossover potential there. I have mixed feelings about how she and Bres would get along, but, like…Bres has always had a soft spot for the troublemakers, and they could bond over their shared daddy issues. (Real angsty shit: His son, Ruadan, was a redhead with a penchant for theft and trickery, and seeing Fox might trigger Dad Mode in him.) Catch her and him conspiring to steal back the sword Orna from Bres’ brother Ogma to give to his old friend and ally Tethra as a birthday present. (Though he was less than pleased when Puck tried to troll HIM, Bres and Puck have DEFINITELY conspired at some point to troll the Tuatha dé and might or might not have had a brief fling before Bres met Sreng, I don’t accept constructive criticisms on this one. Puck gives him Hell on occasion for being an absolute sap for a boring Fir Bolg with no sense of humor that he’d met [1] time, Bres is thrilled when he finds out about Xanatos/Fox/Owen because it gives him so much ammunition.) 

Titania is less than pleased with the situation, Oberon is amused, and Bres doesn’t give a fuck what either of them thinks because he ran out of fucks in the 18th Century BCE. Like, c’mon, my dude’s buried the body of a freaky Grecian witch, he’s died from being poisoned by a bunch of bogstuff, he’s died multiple times, he doesn’t care WHAT the King and Queen of the Third Race think. And, of course Fox is always going to be best bros with someone who doesn’t care about what her mother thinks, this is the woman who canonically went in a ninja outfit to break into her father’s airship just to tell him she was pregnant after trying to ruin his company. That woman lied to her for years and tried to steal her son, like...No. 

The only issue would be that Xanatos and he would probably get into intricate debates on Capitalism VS Socialism at the dinner table, both of them sporting smarmy little smirks as they do so. (Puck is thrilled even if Owen stoically handles the whole situation, exchanging long-suffering looks with Sreng.) Also at some point shortly after the debacle with Orna, Alex ends up with, like, a HUGE Irish wolfhound (not a Gargoyle beast like Bronx and Boudicca, since they’re too closely associated with Cu Chulainn and, by extension, Lugh for Bres’s taste), slightly bigger than a miniature pony with red ears, golden eyes, and a crimson and gold collar of velvet, which Owen has to explain is a gift fairly given and that to refuse it might be to offend him. (Bres’ initial idea was to give a giant pig, a descendant of his prized monstrosity Babgiter before Owen talked him out of it, which his inner Puck greatly resented because having a huge pig running around Xanatos enterprises would be hilarious.) Fox routinely threatens the thing, but somehow it can often be found curled up on the couch next to her or seated next to her during chess games with Xanatos. At some point, it bites Oberon’s leg when he gets a little too pushy in his opinions on childcare, earning Fox’s eternal love and respect (and the best kibble money can buy + unlimited scratchies because he’s a Good Boi.) 

Ivanova, 

overall: who? / i hate them / i dislike them / kinda wanna fight them / they’re alright / i like them / i love them / *accidentally drops thousands of pictures of them*

opinion: again, who??? / the purest bean / cinnamon roll / who knows really / sinnamon roll / the problematic fav

otp(s): Talia/Ivanova

other ship(s): Delenn/Ivanova. 

#noromo ship(s): Sheridan/Ivanova are so good as a brother/sister team

crack ship(s): I seem to vaguely recall shipping her/Kelsey from the one ep. with Jason Ironheart but I’m too scared to go back into our pm logs to find it because I feel like that would be going into a dark, dark abyss. Also, a lot of scrolling. 

fav headcanon(s): LET HER AND TALIA LIVE HAPPILY EVER AFTER, DAMMIT. THEY LEFT THE AVENUE OPEN.  

Delenn, 

overall: who? / i hate them / i dislike them / kinda wanna fight them / they’re alright / i like them / i love them / *accidentally drops thousands of pictures of them*

opinion: again, who??? / the purest bean / cinnamon roll / who knows really / sinnamon roll / the problematic fav

otp(s): Delenn/Sheridan (Fuck you JMS)

other ship(s): Ivanova/Delenn

#noromo ship(s): Lennier/Delenn, unfortunately for Lennier.

crack ship(s): None that I can think of, atm? I know I’ve probably thought of at least ONE with you during one of our Cursed conversations, but none spring to mind. 

fav headcanon(s): I didn’t want to say it, but fuck I’m starved for headcanons atm because thinking machine broke. (I blame it on the terrible combo of Bres + Lazare, AKA The Long-Haired Idiots With Daddy Issues And Terrible Coping Mechanisms Club).

That band around her head that is left over from when she was more...Minbari in appearance is hella sensitive. Most of the time, in the little amount of quiet time they get, she’ll lay her head on John’s shoulder and he’ll gently rub his fingers over it as she closes her eyes in meditation, the movement roughly akin rubbing the back of a cat’s neck. During frick fracks, it’s a little bit more...intense. 

Lyta

overall: who? / i hate them / i dislike them / kinda wanna fight them / they’re alright / i like them / i love them / *accidentally drops thousands of pictures of them*

opinion: again, who??? / the purest bean / cinnamon roll / who knows really / sinnamon roll / the problematic fav

otp(s): I don’t think I really have any solid Lyta ships yet? On some level, I feel like she’s kind of, unfortunately, flown under my radar? (Which is definitely going to impact the headcanon section as well) I feel like she’s going to be one of those characters where I’m going to have to watch things over a few times. Lyta/Black leather?  

other ship(s): Lyta/G’Kar, Lyta/Kosh (I hate that this is the extent of ships I’ve got for the obvious lesbian character, but Lyta is a kinky fuck and I’m going to expose the little vorlonfucker for who she is.)

#noromo ship(s): Zack/Lyta. LET ! LYTA ! HAVE ! A ! FRIEND !

crack ship(s): Lyta/Ezri Dax from DS9. Don’t ask me why, just…trust me on this one. 

fav headcanon(s): Honestly, I don’t feel like I know her well enough to have formed anything solid for her. I have a half-baked idea that her current issues as far as feeling kind of used and alone has its roots in first  being used by Psi Corps and then by the Vorlons, being in this position where she really couldn’t ask for or receive that recognition even when she was starved for it. 

#janetcarter #asks

[margridarnauds]

Top five characters from literature (and why, if you're feeling chatty)

I tend to forget about literally everything I’ve ever read when I’m in a position to talk about it, so I’m going to do my best. 

(1) Bres mac Elatha - Cath Maige Tuired, Cath Maige Tuired Conga, and a load of other assorted medieval Irish myths. 

My boy. My son.

There’s a lot I could say about him, and a lot of it I wasn’t able to fit into my 45 page Capstone. Sometimes, in my (fairly short) life, I’ve been lucky enough to come across something that happened to be exactly what I needed at the time and, for my 14-15 year old self, that happened to be an obscure Irish deity who ends up choking on bog water. As you will. 

I didn’t start out liking him; it’s very, very easy to accept a simple version of the text where he’s just a moustache twirling tyrant, and even though it’s not an interpretation I AGREE with, seeing as it’s…boring, as a concept to me, it’s just as valid as anything, given these texts were meant to be interpreted and reinterpreted and transmitted and then rewritten from the ground up to suit the times. Cath Maige Tuired Bres is actually an anomaly; before that, he seems to have been an esteemed member of the Tuatha dé. 

Which, I suppose, is part of why I like him. There’s an ambiguity about him, a crossing of lines. Even in CMT where he’s at his most villainous, he’s fairly unique, having many of the traits of a hero and, I would argue, he is as much the protagonist of the text as Lugh is. He has the heroic birth with a missing father, the strange childhood, the trial by combat, etc. And yet, in the world of CMT, with the context of the Viking invasions, he just doesn’t have a chance. He’s a fundamentally doomed character from the beginning, with his own actions damning him in the end. 

His very existence in the tribe, the son born out of the most “proper” form of medieval Irish wedlock (seeing as there were nine, I hesitate to apply the term “bastard” to Bres, but the circumstances were NOT the ideal) to an unbetrothed noblewoman of the Tuatha (THE FUCKING SOVEREIGNTY OF IRELAND) and the king of a neighboring tribe, really warps the social structure, and it’s something he kind of carries throughout his life. He isn’t like Cú Chulainn, who is probably the one character who comes closest to him as far as his place in the tribe; he’s not content to serve the maternal side of his family as a champion, doing as he’s commanded. He wants power, and, when he’s removed from power, he takes desperate measures to take it back and, in the process, loses everything.

And, really, that essential liminality extends into his relationship with gender and power structures. While he’s supposed to represent order, as the king, he has no taste for the nobility; he makes them work (!!!!), he doesn’t give a bard due hospitality, he doesn’t give the warriors ale and meat. You get this image of him as this kind of distant, isolated figure in the tribe; not particularly JOYLESS, per se, at least in my interpretation of him (given we don’t see him happy all that often, the interpretation is open), but one who takes joy in things very, very different from the rest of the tribe, or at least from the men. Instead, his closest relationships in the tribe are to the women, who are the ones who elect him. His mother is his most constant ally, being willing to travel with him to see his father, even if it means leaving her own tribe to do it, and she’s the one he goes to IMMEDIATELY for help. And, when his mother addresses her father, it’s notable that SHE’S the one who takes control of the narrative, not Bres. Bres only confirms it when his father asks him. I wouldn’t say that he’s a feminine-coded character, specifically, though I think there are elements of that, but he definitely does not fit the expectations of how a medieval Irish nobleman is to behave with his own sex and with the opposite sex. At the risk of going full-on Pretentious Academic here, it reminds me of what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen wrote in his Seven Monster Theses, where he wrote, “By revealing that difference is arbitrary and potentially free-floating, mutable rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of a society, but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is constituted and allowed.” 

And, in other texts, I think there’s decent enough subtext to do a queer reading of Bres. Like, in Cath Maige Tuired Conga, which is a sort of prequel to CMT, Bres appears as the champion of the Tuatha dé, a completely normal part of the tribe, and he meets with Sreng mac Sengann, the Fir Bolg champion, and their meeting is…interesting to me, in how intimate it is, as far as two men from opposing sides sent to essentially size up the enemy. There’s a certain…familiarity with one another. They know that if their tribes go to battle, it’s going to be a bloodbath, and there’s really no personal dislike for one another. They even ask each other where they spent the night! (Which, it’s a common enough phrase that I’m not going to tie it to The Wooing of Emer, but…) And then, at the end of their meeting, they each give each other one of their sharp, pointy weapons to bring back to the tribe as a show of what the other tribe can do, and the text says, “They parted in peace after making a compact of friendship with each other.” It’s just…a very unusual scene, in terms of champions meeting up with one another, and it’s one that I think I could spend a lot more time with if I was given the opportunity. And curiously enough, they keep the vow of friendship! Throughout the rest of the fight, you see everyone being paired off against their equal, but Bres and Sreng never go head to head even when Sreng takes the arm off of Bres’ king. Instead, Bres goes for Sreng’s king. 

Personally, for me, he only really clicked when I was going over CMT again and I was looking over the scene where Bres meets his father for the first time and he says, “Do you have any advice for me?” and I was like…fuck. This is the first time he’s ever met his father, and the first words that his father’s ever said to him are essentially, “Why aren’t you leading your own people? What have you done wrong?” which is doubly painful when you realize that his father was one of the Fomorian lords who were raiding Ireland earlier. At the risk of going personal here, at the time when I read those lines and had them hit me, I was in the process of divorcing myself from my own father, who, like Bres, I had had a distant relationship with, as he lived across the country and was happier with the idea of having a picture on a mantelplace than a daughter who wanted something as inconvenient as his attention. Reading that, and thinking about my own situation, I was like, “Yeah, I get you” and, from then on, I really read him and the text in a wildly different light, especially when I started to think about the repercussions of, say, Bres having the growth of a 14 year old at the age of 7. Like, if you take this text realistically (which…you can or you can’t, because these texts are over the top by their nature), he never had a childhood. He was just moving from one stage of growth to another, with the tribe probably being all too eager to put a spear in his hand because Well, he has the growth for it now and That’s Just What a Man Does. Which is something that I ALSO understood, deeply, and is something that I wish more adaptations of CMT would take into account besides just forcing Bres into the role of “Entitled Brat.” 

Also, if my dissertation up there wasn’t enough: According to some genealogies, he’s The Morrigan’s nephew, given that both Eriu, Bres’ mother, and she are both listed as daughters of Ernmas. Like, if you don’t love him for the batshit insane, Extra antics he finds himself in (like the time the Dagda, his half-brother/father-in-law decides to distract the husband of the woman he’s banging by sending him on a mission to Bres), you’ve got to love him for his batshit insane, extra, goth family. 

(2) The Countess - Makt Myrkanna (AKA Weird Ass Swedish Dracula.)

This will hopefully be briefer than my little essay up there, mainly because there’s really not all that much information on her in text and it’s been awhile since I read her scenes (and even then, a lot of that was me rereading it so that I could write the Countess/Lucy smutfic that I am probably never, ever going to let see the light of day. Which. Vampire smutfic. Light of day.) 

BUT…why I like her. Makt Myrkanna is a very, very different work than the original Dracula, extending the scenes in the castle while condensing the rest of the novel to a truly dizzying extent, to the point where we have no idea whether Arthur Holmwood’s actually…alive by the end of the book given that the last time he was mentioned, he was stalking Lucy’s grave given that he thought she’d been buried alive. RIP Artie. To me, though, it really, really shows in the figure of the Countess, who is very different from the three women Jonathan meets in the original novel. There, even though there is a lot of subtext about what their relationship to the Count is, some of which might not have been printable in a Victorian novel (at least not one to be sold to the public), the brides really only have the two key scenes: Once when they tempt Jonathan and Dracula intervenes, and then again when they try to get Mina to join them and then Van Helsing goes down and stakes them. They’re probably one of the most memorable parts of the novel and certainly a BIG influence on the portrayal of vampire women in fiction, but they’re not…there all that often. 

The Countess, however, is a far more formidable figure. She does not seem nearly as pleased in her current position, seeming to be held in place by Dracula, who it’s heavily, heavily implied might have been her husband (?), though he also shows just as much disdain for the man’s actions towards her in life that it’s kind of hard to tell one way or another. (Like a lot of things in Makt Myrkanna, it’s toyed with and then never picked up again.) No matter what, he definitely wants to bang her and probably has on multiple occasions, given that he describes her, uh, attributes to Thomas while showing him his collection of dirty paintings. (Yes, Dracula has a porn collection in this one.) For the Countess’ part, there seems to be a certain…fear that the Count inspires in her, or at least a sense of caution with her quickly ushering Thomas Harker (inexplicably, Jonathan becomes Thomas in this translation) away. Obviously, she’s on Team Dracula in the end, she very much wants to eat humans, and she’s not a Broken Bird, but you do get the sense that she has some sort of agenda of her own and that, perhaps, there’s a sort of power struggle being waged in Castle Dracula that Thomas is more or less oblivious to (he’s a bit busy dodging human sacrifices). 

She also represents far more of a temptation than the original brides, who Jonathan…is interested in, with the reference to “almost wanting them to kiss me” (or something; I don’t have Dracula on hand and, if I spend too long searching, I know I’ll never get this done), but it’s still not…..in depth. Like, Jonathan loves and is faithful to Mina, even though he’s ashamed when he shows her his diaries because of that line. Thomas Harker, his counterpart here, though, reacts…very differently, trying to keep his calm but, “The moment she turned towards me and locked her incomparable eyes with mine, it felt as though an electric current surged throughout my body. I grabbed a nearby chair and held onto its backrest. She looked steadily into my eyes, and it didn’t even occur to me that I should have greeted her, or that my behavior was doltish. But evidently neither did she see a need for salutations. It felt as though we had already known each other for a long time and therefore didn’t need to explain ourselves.” There’s this hypnotic effect that she has on him, and unlike her three counterparts, she is perfectly willing to wait and talk with him for long periods of time.             

Also, unlike her other counterparts, we get her backstory detailed to us, with her being described as being just as ruthless and cunning as the Count even as a child, with her being described as, holding, “the hearts of men at [her] fingertips, playing with them as a child plays with grapes before sucking out the liquid.” And in her lifetime, she was powerful, with Dracula saying she, “Held the destinies of whole nations in her hands, though few suspected it. Heads of state, kings, and emperors, lay at her feet–or in her arms.” Ultimately, her only downfall was when her husband ended up locking her and her lover in the bedroom together so she could sex him to death. Literally. He jumps out a window. And then her husband had a funeral service performed but, given she’s walking around the castle, we can presume it didn’t stick.                                                                                                                                

(3) Asriel/Mrs. Coulter - His Dark Materials

I’m including both of them because it’s not necessarily the two of them I like as individuals; it’s their dynamic. I mean, I do very much like them as individuals, they are each favs in their own right, but their dynamic is essential to that as well. They both complement and bounce off of each other very well, having this kind of spark where, even though they absolutely despise each other for most of the trilogy, they are really the only two who match each other. They’re both incredibly magnetic; like, in his first scene at Jordan College, I was pretty blown away by Asriel’s presentation, in his confidence, his ruthlessness, his intelligence, his pride and his ambition, all of which are also mirrored in Mrs Coulter. They simply happen to have landed on separate sides, with Asriel trying to essentially tear down everything that Coulter stands for and Coulter seizing control in the Church because it’s the only thing she really has as far as options, since she lacks the privileges Asriel has as a man. 

They both do horrible things in the pursuit of their goals, including killing children, with Coulter being essentially the embodiment of Stranger Danger, and they both harm Lyra both physically and mentally. Still, when they let their guard down, on the FEW occasions they let their guard down, it is shown that they have some amount of love for Lyra, but they fundamentally don’t know how to be parents when all their lives have been spent in the pursuit of power and knowledge and all the ways those two intertwine. 

I’m not sure how much I fully believe in Mrs Coulter’s swerve to motherhood, whether it was the best writing decision, whether it leans into the overall weakening of female characters in the last book or so, with Lyra being another notable victim, but I do think there’s a tragedy in there, as far as her trying but failing. And there is something in the classic femme fatale, generally seen as sexual but cold and unmaternal, dangerous in her embracing of sexuality sans procreation and motherhood (and monogamy!) being allowed to HAVE those kind of feelings and to have a complicated dynamic with the father of her child who she still has obviously holds some feelings for. And for Asriel’s part, he WAS ready to sacrifice Lyra, but he was also HORRIFIED by it, and in the end, he does repeatedly show that he cares, I just think that ultimately he let his own lofty goals get in the way of that until it was almost too late. 

I really think that the best showcasing of them as characters tends to be with them together, such as in the third book when she steals the Intention Craft. She comes in there a prisoner, Asriel doesn’t WANT her there because he knows she’ll pull something, but she’s able to trap him in his own words by playing his commanders like a fiddle, and then she takes advantage over his desire to show off his new toy to get her an in, with Asriel then letting her go with one of his spies in the craft with her, knowing fully well what she’s going to do next and then going back to his improved prototype for more scheming. Like, they’re always trying to one up the other; it’s essentially a form of foreplay for them (as much so as you can get in a kid’s series about killing God), and I can only imagine what they were like when they were actually in a relationship, because they must have been terrifying and yet, for whatever reason, they both fell in love with each other to embark on a forbidden affair with each other, when she was married to a highly powerful man, risking everything. 

So, I’m going to be curious to see what the new BBC series ends up doing with them, both as individuals and as a pair. 

(4) Morgan le Fay - Like, a hundred different Arthurian adaptations 

I’ll be honest: Morgan le Fay in The Magic Treehouse was one of my first crushes. I was always strangely drawn to books with her in them, looking at the pictures for a while. 

These days, I have broadened my Arthurian knowledge significantly, though not nearly as much as I’d like to, but she’s still my eternal favorite. (Literally any book or film that tries me to root for Arthur over Morgan is going to fail miserably.) She is the embodiment of the Other in a woman, being otherwordly in her name and in her powers, but, like Bres and any other character from a long tradition, she is ambiguous in her presentation. Sometimes, she loves her brother and truly wants to expose the love affair between Lancelot and Guinevere to save his honor. Sometimes, she wants to create destruction for destruction’s sake. Sometimes, she reconciles with her brother and gives up the fight, sometimes she only relents when she sees his dead body there. She is always powerful, but the way that power is applied and, at times, not applied is part of what makes her fascinating and why, I believe, she is still subject to so much study after all these years. 

 The backstory as far as her mother and Uther gives her VERY strong motivation for why she would be less than pleased with Arthur, though I tend to favor the story of her expulsion from Camelot for having an affair with a kinsman of Guinevere’s for the delicious, delicious irony involved. 

 She is more of a schemer than her sister Morgause who, despite the oddness of her family, tends to be a loving mother (who just…happens to take a lover many, many years her junior and pays the consequences) in works that don’t take off from sexist Victorian bullshit. (I have many, many feelings over the portrayal of Morgause, and they’re very complicated so I won’t vomit them out.) Like, she successfully steals the sheath of Excalibur, and came very, very close to killing both Arthur AND her husband with the whole Accolon thing. 

Also, she literally has a dude come into Camelot dressed in green so she could terrify Guinevere AT CHRISTMAS and then continues to troll her nephew for a year (and a day!) Like, name a greater icon. 

(5) Shiloh - Saving Shiloh

 A Very Good Boi. Doesn’t die at the end, unlike SOME literary dogs that I could mention whose authors thought that kids needed the slow, creeping inevitability of death forced into them. A+ pupper. 

#fey-and-sudden-and-unholy #about me