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#female ppets
soulwr1ter · 3 years
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even the stars in
the night sky
discuss among
themselves
all of the secrets
hidden in your eyes
-J.Wool, In Your Eyes
All writing belongs to me.
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fantasyinvader · 2 years
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I’ve been drinking.
As I’ve laid out before, Edelgard says she got her version of history, the version that spurs her into fighting the Church, from her father. She says her father was turned into a pu ppet of the nobility, but this is contradicted by Hubert in CF saying he was actually made a puppet by TWSITD. Ergo, there’s the implication that TWSITD indoctrinated Edelgard through her father into starting this war and Edelgard, as damaged as she is over the hell she’s been through, is unwilling to question that narrative.
Here’s the issue, how does her being a liar factor into this? Like, we know she lies, will put out false information to both secure her own position and demonize her enemies. Hell, even the Edge of Dawn mentions that she does knowingly lie...
And that’s where it fully hit me. The Edge of Dawn is the secret to Edelgard’s real character.
The song itself is full of contradictions. How Edelgard will soar away into the dawn if you give her your hand, but how she fears the dawn because time will betray her. How she can finally be herself, but at the same time is still hiding behind a mask but she has also become that mask. How everything right now is so peaceful, making her not want to go forward and later on how she views memories of the past as a trap. I started taking all these things together, combining them with my analysis and what was said in the Nintendo Dream interview and Heroes.
Here is my answer... and I don’t really like it.
We know from the interview that Edelgard was designed after past Fire Emblem villains, her gender being a major factor in separating her from them. That she is supposed to be this would-be conqueror, but at the same time there’s a girl under it all (that’s why they consider her well-written).
As said before, she was tortured, experimented on and indoctrinated by TWSITD. They turned her, both in body and in mind, into a weapon against Rhea. Into someone who’s been given this narrative that paints what she needs to do as her being the good guy, in addition to having these ideals of what it means to be Emperor passed down onto her.
In short, Edelgard is meant to be read as a victim. Yet another case of  female character being the bad guy because of the machinations of some man in Fire Emblem. Those attempts at moe we see in CF are meant to show us who Edelgard deep down, who is behind the mask that she has become. Deep down, as Edge of Dawn indicates, she does not want to go through with what she has been planning and instead wants to remain in these halcyon days as a student at the academy. But considering she’s repeatedly framed as in service to ideals, namely her social Darwinist outlook, she forces herself to push ahead despite her own feelings in the matter.
CF is in part meant to be this attempt to humanize her, so she wouldn’t just this generic villain for the game. It’s not saying that she’s supposed to be right, as those ideals push her crush any opposition to her rule no matter who it is. It’s in this route that we are given some really big pieces of information, both hearing the narrative she believes in and information that goes against it. If we take Heroes into consideration, she has never considered her power being a good thing because she can help others with it, in addition to her saying she wouldn’t be swayed even with the help of time travel. She is going through with this, averting her eyes when she sees how horrible her alliance with TWSITD really is. Not to mention, trying to reframe events so that everyone else is responsible for what is happening and that she is the hero.
It’s basically infantilizing the villain of the game. Rather than someone smart and driven pushing the plot, instead Edelgard is rendered someone pushed to be a dictator pursuing continental conquest despite her own wishes. Rather than being someone who commit all sorts of heinous acts in pursuit of her own idea of a greater good unblinkingly, she instead tries to avert her eyes and plugs her ears with convenient lies. She’s not someone who has come to some awful conclusions about the world through her own experiences, rather she’s been gaslit to such a point she will literally turn herself into a monster in order to win even after the people she’s doing it for have been practically wiped out.
She’s not like Senator Armstrong from Metal Gear Rising Revengeance. As batshit insane as he is, Armstrong believed in his own social Darwinist rhetoric as it was his own view of the world. If anything, he would fucking hate Edelgard both for fighting for other people’s ideals rather than her own, in addition to how she’s more for strict authoritarianism rather than the anarchy Armstrong craves.
These things are trying to make Edelgard out to be more sympathetic, and to some extent it has worked. People focus on her victimhood to the point it obscures the full extent of her character, not to mention it’s done in such a way that the player can choose not to see reality themselves. People suffer under Edelgard, yet the game only tells us this second hand rather than directly showing us. It’s putting Edelgard’s suffering in the forefront, while the suffering of the masses is left an optional experience. Which, kinda makes Edelgard less sympathetic, you know?
We can’t save her, our support only enables her behavior, so fighting Edelgard is meant to be a player punch in the greater context of Three Houses with us seeing that she was more than the tyrant she’s presented as. Again, she’s a cute girl. But the experience is just so disjointed, so poorly-executed that it’s not like the player having to pull the trigger on The Boss at the end of Snake Eater. Instead, it feels tone-dead and to the game’s detriment. There’s sympathetic parts to her, sure, but overall we’re still supposed to understand that she needs to be stopped as CF is a villain route.
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