#seriously this is the most analytical writing I've done since college what the fuck IntSys

[fostersffff]

Complete Black Eagle (read: Edelgard and Rhea) Thoughts

Now that I’ve finally finished both Silver Snow and Crimson Flower, I feel like I can put all of these thoughts out without worrying about a last minute twist. It’s entirely possible based on how much I’ve seen people talk about route differences that once I play Golden Deer and Blue Lions I’ll have changed my opinions, but barring some really wild and extreme stuff, I can’t imagine changing all that much. A ton of text under the break:

Edelgard

There was a Korean poll that was published recently where Edelgard was voted the #1 most disliked character in Three Houses... and also the #2 most liked character in Three Houses (behind Lysithea). It’s not a surprising result to see considering that she is the inciting antagonist, and that you don’t really understand why she does any of it unless you happened to start with the Black Eagles, but even then, IntSys felt it necessary to split Black Eagles into two routes, just in case you still didn’t want to side with her. But that’s what I think I found to be the most compelling thing about Edelgard: that she is a decidedly morally gray character, and how you feel about her comes down to looking at all of the things she does and asking “is this worth it?”

Part of what makes her so compelling to me is that no one understands her role better than Edelgard herself. She has no delusions about what she’s doing, and she never even makes an attempt to sugarcoat it to anyone around her. I made a post back when I first started the game about how I thought it was weird that her first support with Byleth ends with her talking about how she’s prepared to go down in the history books as History’s Greatest Monster without any context, but as the blanks fill in and time passes, it’s clear that she’s completely and utterly true to her word. "The ends justify the means” is the best description of her philosophy, but unlike a lot of characters (and people) who use that to justify their actions, she doesn’t take any solace in it, or use it as a way to offset the responsibility for all of the lives lost in the war. The end may justify the means, but it doesn’t make the means any less horrific, and even if the end result is a better world, it’s a small comfort to the countless people who died for it.

I think something crucial to sympathizing with Edelgard is that as far as she is concerned, she didn’t “initiate” hostilities with the church. When she kills Dimitri in the Crimson Flower route, she says “if only we were born in a time of peace, you might have enjoyed a joyful life as a benevolent ruler”, which sounds comically hypocritical in isolation coming from the person who declared war in the first place. But it’s because as far as she’s concerned, the systemic oppression resulting from the Church of Seiros’s influence on every Fodlan society means that true peace simply hasn’t existed since long before any of them were ever born. To Edelgard, there’s been a cold war between the Church of Seiros and humanity for a thousand years, and she took it upon herself to finally make it hot.

“Cold war” might sound exaggerated, but there’s something to that idea going on the evidence we’re presented with. At best, the church is ignorant to and/or idle on the suffering of the common folk and the corruption of the nobility all across the continent that exists because they grants noble status and political power to families that happen to have Crests. At worst, the church is intentionally passive about those problems because preserving the status quo and their absolute control is more important, and to act in any way to try to fix those problems directly could threaten their status as the center of power in Fodlan. Speaking of their control: isn’t it odd that the Church of Seiros was involved in each war for independence, maintaining their foothold in the old nation while also branching out and ensuring they were the dominant religion in the new ones? That the only time the church acts on their own (outside of an immediate threat like bandits) is when they are made aware of heresies, however mild, at which point they act decisively and without any shred of mercy, sending a sign to anyone who would dare try to cross the church? That, with the exception of Seteth and Flayn, the most devout members of the Knights of Seiros and the church have a fanatical devotion to Rhea specifically, and not Sothis or the doctrine of the church? The most insidious thing is that even if someone with the power to pose a threat to the church wanted to fight against them, the only people who could realistically muster up enough military might to challenge the Knights of Seiros would be nobles, and the fall of the church would also mean there would be nobody to legitimize their claims to nobility. Nobody would be willing to risk their noble status, and all of the perks that come with it, like that.

Except Edelgard.

This is actually what I like most about Edelgard, and why I was right to compare her to my favorite Fire Emblem villain: Zephiel. Zephiel’s goal in Fire Emblem 6 is the complete eradication of humanity and giving the world over to dragonkind, because he believes that humanity is a blight. He never says “I will lead this new world of dragons” or “My followers and I will live on to see the world of dragons”, which always led me to believe that he would eventually turn his sword on himself*. Edelgard, like Zephiel, does not intend to just conquer Fodlan and then just enjoy the spoils- once all of her affairs are in order (dismantling the church and nobility, re-establishing the church and turning nobility into a meritocracy, eradicating the Tunnel Snakes**) she finds a suitable successor (read: not her child) and then retires into the sunset (at least in the ending where she marries Byleth). And, if you don’t like Edelgard- or even if you do- this happy ending might rub you the wrong way, because even though her resolve was unshaken and she walks her path to the very end, it was still an incredibly violent path. This leads to another question that I’m sure people can argue forever: does Edelgard deserve to have a happy ending?

I’ve seen Edelgard described with a lot of terms that I don’t really think apply to her- like, at all- but I’d never seriously argue that she did nothing wrong. She is a dictator, and a warmonger, and regardless of which route you chose a tragic amount of life is lost as a direct result of her actions. Her alliance with the Tunnel Snakes is an entire can of worms of its own, because despite the fact that she has no control over what they choose to do on their own time, she is effectively still condoning their actions by relying on their power. The worst of it, as far as I’m concerned, is lying to her own people about who caused the destruction of Arianrhod and the loss of life there to prevent an internal conflict. I think with all that in mind, there are a lot of people who are locked into the conclusion that no, she doesn’t deserve to have a happy ending. 

But! To create the world she envisioned, one where Rhea was no longer manipulating the world from behind the scenes, a world that would improve the quality of life for everyone in future generations, she was never going to have a choice in how she did things. Think of how openly and casually Rhea talks about how enemies of the church must be eliminated, without any room for discussion. Would a diplomatic call for the Church of Seiros to disavow the current system of nobility based on the possession of crests and for Rhea to step down as archbishop be met with anything other than hostility not only from the church, but from the Kingdom and Alliance as well? Even something as simple as publicly renouncing her own faith to try to motivate a cultural change just within the empire would’ve probably had Rhea dispatching Catherine to cut her down for heresy, just like she did for Lord Lonato. And the final, most passive alternative- returning to the empire after graduating from the academy, ascending her father to become the next puppet of the cabinet, hoping that she eventually bears a child with a major Crest or else watch her own children undergo the same torture she and her family went through. That’s just completely unacceptable, especially when that kind of self-sacrifice is only to the benefit of the nobles and the preservation of a rotten status quo that also only benefits those same nobles- and Rhea, of course. No matter what, she was going to have to sacrifice, and while what she chose would involve the most bloodshed, it also had the best chance of making things better for the greatest number of people when all was said and done, so her getting to have at least one ending where she is completely successful and is rewarded on a personal level doesn’t strike me as inappropriate at all.

A lot of what I’ve talked about with Edelgard has to do with the church, which is inescapable considering every single action she takes is motivated by the church. So ultimately, one of the most important questions to consider when asking “is all of this worth it” is “is Rhea really that bad?” Well...

Rhea

This bitch is fucking insane holy shit.

It’s kind of a nice feeling to feel suspicious of a character from their introduction, only for things to actually be way worse than you could’ve ever expected. For what it’s worth, this isn’t a case of me hating the character on a writing level, it’s just that I find everything about her character to be loathsome even under the best possible circumstances.

What makes Rhea so despicable is how simple and selfish her entire motivation is. Every single action she takes and emotion she expresses can all be traced to an obsession with her mother. It’s not that she believes she needs Sothis’s guidance to deal with a problem that neither she nor the whole of humanity can’t deal with on their own, or that the world will only be at peace if Sothis is around to protect it, it is literally just for her own sake. And on its face, I can deeply sympathize with going to crazy lengths to want to see your mother after she was tragically taken away from you. I also love my mom! But there’s a bunch of lines- both explicitly stated and implied- Rhea sprints past at an Olympic pace that I (and hopefully most other people) would not cross. These include:

Having twelve children*** and trying to turn all of them into your mother.

Having a grandchild and trying to turn them into your mother.

Maintaining direct control and influence over multiple sovereign nations over a span of a thousand years so you can continue to try to bring back your mother without anyone bothering you.

Keeping your closest friends/relatives/allies out of the loop on all of your completely unethical experimentation because deep down inside you either know how fucked up it is, or that they would try to stop you.

Ordering your subordinates to burn down the city full of innocent bystanders you are currently occupying to try to kill the grandchild who you put your mother into.

The one that disturbs me the most is what’s implied by the ending of Crimson Flower. In Silver Snow, Rhea tells Byleth that they were stillborn, and that their mother begged Rhea to put the Crest Stone into Byleth to give them a chance to live. But at the end of Crimson Flower, Rhea’s death causes the Crest Stone on Byleth’s heart to fade away, which should result in their death. But after a few moments, their heart starts up normally and they go on living as normal. They lose Sothis’s power in the process, but they’re just as healthy as they were before they obtained it. This leads me to believe that Byleth may have actually been born healthy and that, after their mother had passed from complications due to childbirth, Rhea placed the Crest Stone on their heart anyway. Or- it’s even possible that Rhea killed the mother herself, removing her Crest Stone heart after sensing that Byleth might be a better vessel because of their parentage. After all, Rhea is the only person who truly knew what happened in there. Jeralt had no idea about the exact nature of Byleth’s heart, only that they had no heartbeat, and Seteth and Flayn didn’t know about anything at all. Obviously, that’s all just speculation, as far as I’m concerned something like this is totally in line with Rhea’s character.

Now, to revisit the question of “is Rhea really that bad”, Edelgard doesn’t know about any of Rhea’s personal fucked up shit. What she knows about is what the church has done and what has happened under their watch and thus with their implicit blessing, that Rhea is actually The Immaculate One, and that she has been the sole driving power of the Church of Seiros since the church was initially founded. On a personal level, her own life and the lives of all of her family members were destroyed by the Church of Seiros’s influence on society via crests. And it should be noted that Edelgard’s not stupid; she’s very likely aware that the Tunnel Snakes are the ones who performed the blood reconstruction on her and her siblings at the behest and/or with the consent of the Empire’s cabinet and Lord Arundel, and she even addresses how awful they are and that she really wants no part of them when she approaches Jeralt and Byleth as the Flame Emperor. But, back when I first suspected that Edelgard was the Flame Emperor, I made a joke about how she has to deal with the fact that the Tunnel Snakes are dabbing on a mountain of corpses while Rhea is cripwalking on an even bigger mountain of corpses. But that wasn’t accurate- it’s not just that Rhea’s mountain is bigger, it’s also composed of people who are still alive, but suffered because of the Church of Seiros: Dorothea’s childhood spent as a wretch because she was born a commoner, the abuse Bernadetta endured from her father to make her noble wife material, Caspar and Sylvain’s brother being shunned from their families for the crime of being born without a Crest, Lysithea suffering the exact same procedure as Edelgard to increase her family’s noble standing, Hanneman’s sister dying from trying to bear a child with a Crest, to say nothing of the characters I haven’t seen the stories of yet. In the grand scheme of the game’s universe, this is only a sample of about 30 characters: what about the potential hundreds of thousands of other lives with stories similar to- or possibly worse than- the main cast? And what’s more, Rhea is not gloating about how big her pile is. She’s so utterly preoccupied with her mother that doesn’t even notice the mountain beneath her, and that might actually be worse.

Both

Finally, I want to briefly touch on the way both characters interact with Byleth, and how they handle things when they’re made into the villain. No matter what route the player chooses, Byleth does something for Edelgard that she has never experienced before: unconditional protection. She was prepared to fight the bandit, and she saw him coming from a mile away so I imagine she could’ve handled it, but Byleth still jumps in front of her to protect her. This is why Edelgard puts so much stock into Byleth, much to the chagrin of Hubert. It’s not that she doesn’t trust that Hubert and the rest of the Black Eagles are capable of helping her, but to them, she is Edelgard von Hresvelg, heir apparent of the Adrestian Empire. Even if their friendships with her would suggest otherwise, there is an ocean of difference between them because of their stations. But to Byleth, she was “simply Edelgard”. She has never experienced that kind of interaction in her entire life, and especially not when there was danger involved. This is so ingrained in her that even in the route where you most directly oppose her, after having spent a full year getting to know and understand her and still choosing to fight against her, her last words are “I wanted to walk with you.” Even that phrasing- that she wanted to walk with them, not that she wanted them to walk with her- says so much about how strongly she feels about Byleth. Is it waifubaiting? Oh baby is it ever, but it doesn’t make it less solid

On the flipside: something I really genuinely hate in games (and stories in general, but it crops up the most in games) is when people have unflinching, unwavering faith in the player character for no good reason. It’s why I think Persona 4 is a worse game than 3 despite being better in almost every other meaningful way. This almost certainly has to do with me not liking Rhea from the start: appropros of seemingly nothing, she is as dotting as any mother would be, she entrust you with an entire class of students lives with zero credentials, and in addition to that she is constantly assigning Byleth the most important tasks because she just has so much faith that they’re destined for greatness. Unlike the situation with Edelgard, helping fight off some bandits is not reasonable precedent for trusting someone this much. And the biggest reason I appreciate Rhea as a villain is because all of this turns out to be a ruse. All of this is in service of currying Byleth’s favor, to get them to trust her, to make them feel special, so that when she asks them to sit on the throne so Sothis can take over their body, they wouldn’t think anything of it. And you know it’s all been a ruse because of how unbelievably fast her turn is if you side with Edelgard. There’s no consistency between the Rhea who gently stroked your hair and sang you a lullaby when you were recovering from your trip to the shadow realm and the Rhea who calls you a failure and is going to rip your heart out of your chest.

*I’m extrapolating a lot of information about Zephiel and the world of FE6 in general because we just don’t have access to as much lore as we do in Three Houses, but I think what I’m saying are reasonable conclusions

**I call Those Who Slither In The Dark “Tunnel Snakes” for a number of reasons: it’s shorter, it functionally means the same thing, and it’s funny to me

***I refer to the vessels Rhea created as her children because that’s what I understood them to be when I first played Silver Snow, but upon rewatching the cutscene what she actually says is “I tried to bring her back by creating a body, and then burying a Crest Stone within it”. This could mean her own children that she bore, but it could also mean a number of other things, like vessels “created” from normal humans she acquired. For my own headcanon, the utter detachment she shows for Byleth when they side with Edelgard leads me to believe that they are, in fact, her biological children, but she refers to them so clinically because she felt nothing for them except disdain for not being able to house Sothis.

#Fire Emblem #Fire Emblem Three Houses #FE3H #Edelgard #Rhea #Nintendo #video games #seriously this is the most analytical writing I've done since college what the fuck IntSys