Fire Emblem 16's Edelgard is the Worst

I don’t get why so many people sympathize with Edelgard, and even like her.  Because Edelgard von Hresvelg? She is a fucking moron.

First of all, let’s start with the most obvious, glaring fault in everything that Edelgard does: she is the most gullible fucking idiot she possibly could be.  Seriously, with the exception of Byleth herself, it’s like you have to have “CLEARLY EVIL” stamped on your forehead before Edelgard will even consider taking you into her confidence.  First and foremost example?  The Agarthans, or, as she herself calls them, Those Who Slither in the Dark.  Because that’s the title you give to someone you trust enough to watch your back, right?

And oh, here it comes.  Here comes the major, obvious objection you’ll have to this: “But Edelgard doesn’t trust the Agarthans.  She knows they’re using her, and plans to turn against them after she’s won against the Church!”  And yes, you’re right!  That is completely true--Eddy knows that her secret allies are snakes and evil, and she has every intention of turning on them once she has the opportunity.  Great.  Good.  Yes.  Fine.  Point for Edelgard.  I don’t dispute that.  What I do dispute, however, is the assertion that this clears her of being considered gullible, in relation to her alliance with the Agarthans.  In fact, I assert that if anything, this makes Edelgard even dumber.

Because, see, look at it like this.  Edelgard knows she’s in bed with backstabbers, and she’s taking steps to protect herself from their inevitable betrayal, and all that.  Good.  But HERE is the kicker!  It’s the Agarthans that told Edelgard that the Crests are Rhea’s fault.

So, just to establish and clarify: the Crests are inherited traits that signify individuals who have some demonstrable, though usually tiny, bit of divinity (in actuality, less “divine” and more “dragon”) within them, which can manifest itself as special abilities.  The Crests showed up way, way back in the times of yore as, to crudely summarize, the Agarthans’ original stooge Nemesis injected some of his buddies with dragon blood so they’d be stronger, and Rhea/Seiros responded in kind with a couple of her most trusted allies.  As a way to maintain a controlled society wherein a handful of people had slight superpowers and no viable explanation for why, Rhea invented some jazzy story of these folks being blessed by the goddess, which led to the establishing of a caste system of nobility and commoners (in which having a Crest makes you a noble) which would be a plague on Fodland’s society thereafter, as such systems almost inevitably are.  Hell, it’s even worse than most normal inheritance-based nobility systems, since there’s really no guarantee that a noble’s kid will inherit a crest, so your entire family’s fortunes aren’t even guaranteed to survive another generation once you’ve produced an heir.  So there’s more familial bad feelings and in-fighting and arranged marriage maneuvering and such than there already would be, as a result.  And there’s dark shit that goes on behind the scenes sometimes, because the Agarthans like to perform terrible experiments on Crest-bearers to see if they can make them more powerful, which has led people like Lysithia and Edelgard herself to suffer greatly from it.

Basically Crests are just a raw deal all around.

But the thing is, the Agarthans have deliberately led Edelgard to believe that Rhea is responsible for the Crests in Fodlan.  Which is essentially untrue--it was Nemesis, and thus by extension the Agarthans themselves, who are responsible for humans having Crests, and while Rhea did give some of her own allies radioactive spider dragon blood, it was fewer than Nemesis did, and it’s safe to say that she probably only did so initially as a way of countering Nemesis’s actions.  Hell, she might not have even known it was possible to empower human beings with Crests until Nemesis provided the example.  She sure as hell doesn’t seem the type to think enough of human beings under normal circumstances to have had any interest in doing so (although admittedly most of her disdain for the human species seems to have arisen from the fact that 1 of them ripped her mother’s spine out of her and whittled it into a sword).  While the lousy caste system of Fodlan is largely Rhea’s fault, and shame on her for that,* the Crests that provide the foundation and fuel for that lousy system are most certainly not.

And yeah, okay, Edelgard obviously wasn’t there, and the true events of the battle against Nemesis aren’t exactly easy to find an account of, so it would be understandable for her to believe misinformation given to her about that time period...if she was being fed that misinformation by ANYONE other than the Agarthans!  She knows these guys are assholes, she knows that they’re using her for their own gain, she knows that their greatest and most frequently employed tactic is deception...and she just chooses to completely buy the story that Rhea’s responsible for the Crests that Edelgard hates so much.  She knows the Agarthans are untrustworthy, knows they want to manipulate her, and yet decides to implicitly believe them on the 1 subject that they have the absolute most to gain from lying about.

I’m not saying that Edelgard wouldn’t have ended up making war with Rhea anyways, if Rhea had been a strong enough stickler for the Crest system that no peaceful option was available.  But the fact that Eddy just works on the assumption that peace is not an option from the start, the fact that she hates Rhea so personally that she wouldn’t even want to pursue an option beyond war to deal with her...that all stems from a lie that Edelgard was a fool to believe.

And her gullibility does not end there.  Actually, her idiotic trust in Hubert is arguably worse!

Hubert, who looks like Severus Snape did a fusion dance with Loki, is Edelgard’s second in command, her aide, her go-to guy for keeping her plans proceeding smoothly.  She tells him what she wants, and Hubert gets it done.  Edelgard says she wants him to investigate someone, Hubert gets a spy network on the matter.  Edelgard says she wants him to have her armies in place and ready to fight at a moment’s notice, Hubert sends the messages to her generals.  Edelgard says she wants to rule as a just, ethical sovereign, Hubert disregards this and keeps on having inconvenient people secretly killed, including instances when she specifically ordered them not to be.

Yes, that’s right.  Hubert doesn’t just look, act, and sound like he majored in Wormtongue and minored in Jafar, he follows through on it.  The person that Edelgard places the most faith in to bring her dream of a better society to fruition is also the guy who has no qualms whatsoever in acting 100% contrary to the entire point of that dream.  Edelgard didn’t seem to like it very much, earlier in the game, when she witnessed Rhea order her defeated enemies to be executed, rather than show mercy--but if Hubert is just going to go behind Edelegard’s back and do the exact same thing in a similar situation regardless of Edelgard’s official order to show mercy, then as a ruler, what’s the difference between Edelgard and Rhea, really?  It’s like a few months back, when China voted for the UN resolution to condemn Nazism, even while the CCP was (and is still) actively engaged in perpetrating a genocide on its own people that’s so Nazi-like that it’s hard to tell whether the CCP are plagiarizing Hitler, or just trying to make a loving homage to him.  Edelgard, what you SAY about being a morally good ruler doesn’t really matter if what your administration is DOING is ethically horrifying!

At least with the Agarthans, Edelgard’s (insanely stupid) belief in what they tell her is a case of her being manipulated by an outside force.  Hubert, on the other hand?  He’s on her side.  He’s a major factor in how her ideal world is going to be run, because she’s trusting him to carry out what she says.  In deposing Rhea, all Edelgard’s done, in terms of overall national leadership, is replace a politely openly tyrannical and merciless regime with a more secret tyrannical and merciless regime.  She puts her faith in a guy who’s basically Count Dracula’s creepy little brother, and she gets exactly what you’d expect from that, only she’s too gullible and stupid to realize it.**

And that illustrates another point on why Edelgard is an utter dipshit: she is her own biggest obstacle, and it’s frankly amazing that things go as well for her as they do, even in the paths of the game where she loses and dies.

First of all, of course, there’s the Hubert situation, wherein even if she’s successful and becomes the ruler of Fodlan, her government is in practice still a ruthless, heartless, murderous one in which she’s a goodnatured but utterly helpless and inconsequential figurehead, as Hubert breaks a bloody, nightmarish dawn on the better tomorrow she wanted.  But secondly, there’s who she prioritizes as an enemy.

Forget the moral implications of her alliance with the Agarthans, and forget how she’s an idiot for trusting what they tell her.  Let’s focus more on the fact that any fool can see that they’re a far bigger danger to Fodlan’s people than Rhea’s semi-tyranny is.  She knows from firsthand experience that the Agarthans are the kind of monsters who will do anything and everything they have to in order to achieve their goals (much like her trusted advisor Hubert, I’d like to point out yet again), and that includes awful human experimentation that results in the deaths of its subjects most often, and even in its success winds up causing pain and misery in those subjected to it.  And she knows that they’ll do this to anyone, not just her family, since she can recognize that they’ve done it to Lysithia, too.  Those Who Slither in the Dark are a real and terrible threat to Fodlan, as a whole, not just to the Church.

But what does Edelgard do?  She prioritizes making an enemy of Rhea, instead.  If it’s Edelgard’s intent to destroy both the Church and the Agarthans, then she absolutely should have been going after the latter first!  Simple risk assessment: if Edelgard defeats the Agarthans but falls to the Church, then Fodlan continues on as it has, and that’s not great, but Rhea’s reign and sins are a known quantity and Edelgard hasn’t created a worse situation for her country.  But if Edelgard defeats the Church but falls to the Agarthans, she’s left the entirety of her nation wide open and defenseless against a malicious organization possessing none of Rhea’s moral safeguards against excessive, needless, or extreme cruelty to human beings.  And yet, it’s Rhea, not the brutal terrorists and torturers, that Edelgard decides she needs destroy first and foremost.

Not to mention that Edelgard isn’t exactly chummy with her Agarthan allies.  True, Edelgard’s got a great poker face, owing to her being so stiff and poorly-written that she has all the emotional range of Hillary Clinton, or a block of granite.  But it still isn’t exactly hard for any Agarthan representative to glean, from any interaction with her, that Edelgard is not a big fan of theirs.  With their specialty being deception and back-stabbing, the Agarthans are plenty likely to see Edelgard’s betrayal ahead of time, and plan for it.  This isn’t like in the Golden Deer path, when Claude and company show up on the Agarthans’ doorstep unexpected and steamroll them as a result--the only way these assholes don’t see Edelgard’s betrayal coming a mile away is if they’re somehow even less intelligent than she is.  So they’ve got ample time to prepare countermeasures, a fact which is born out by the fact that the epilogue of Edelgard’s path implies that the war with the Agarthans was a long and difficult affair.

Here’s an alternative path Edelgard could have taken:

1. Establish self at monastery academy adequately, and meet with Rhea.
2. Spill guts about Agarthans.
3. Make a big show of helping Rhea to fight the Agarthans.  Knowing the initial movements of Kronya gives the opportunity to capture her and learn the location of Shambhala--her little panic in the game when Byleth’s coming for her ass gives me the impression that Kronya ain’t gonna be hard to make talk.***
4. During this campaign, do all the same stuff as was planned regarding having the Empire’s nobles replaced and forced to obey.
5. Once established as a hero who helped the Church save Fodlan from a secret threat, capitalize off the positive celebrity and the Church’s gratitude to ask that the Church pass a decree that Crests are no longer to be a determining factor in the selection of nobility.  Who knows, Rhea might just be happy enough at finally fully avenging her mom, and at the fact that she doesn’t have to keep such a close control over this whole Crest issue, that she’ll agree.
6. In the likely case that she doesn’t, however, use the occasion to launch an attack, as was planned originally.  Not only will Rhea expect it even less from Edelgard now that she’s been an ally, and not only will the Church have been weakened from its war against the Agarthans, but there will be FAR more discord within Rhea’s potential allies in the Kingdom and the Alliance over the circumstances.  After all, Edelgard has been established as a selfless hero, and even now her betrayal is coming after being publicly denied a request she’s made with the expressed intention of improving society.  She still may not find sympathizers in the Kingdom and the Alliance, but they also won’t be so quick to stand at Rhea’s side as they would have been.
7. Swiftly defeat the Church, capture Rhea, and display mercy to her in her incarceration, insisting that all that is wanted is the opportunity to create a Fodlan where ability rather than Crests determine worth.  With the Alliance and the Kingdom not already at arms over Rhea’s defeat, diplomatic methods of social change may be possible--and if not, they’re at least going to be easier to conquer and annex while not fully united against their enemy, and when their enemy’s victory would mean an improvement in the lives of a substantial number of rank-and-file soldiers and the majority of the citizens.

It requires a few lucky moments, but most of them are the same lucky moments that Edelgard’s existing canon plan relied on.  The main thing I’m trying to express here, is that there was an entirely separate gameplan that could have been explored by uniting with and manipulating Rhea, rather than the Agarthans, who are transparently as evil as Edelgard incorrectly believes Rhea to be.  And this alternate strategy provided more opportunities to change the world for the better peacefully, and gave her potential enemies less cause to unite against a clear villain.

But no, Edelgard’s let herself be convinced by the Snidely Whiplash Foundation that Rhea’s too evil to even bother trying to negotiate with, or treating humanely as a prisoner of war.****  So Fodlan’s transition to a Crestless society is going to have to come at the cost of a bloody, protracted war, at least 1 war crime, and then another bloody, protracted war right after the first.  Because Edelgard is an amoral nitwit.

You know, had Edelgard bothered to look into who her most prominent classmates at the monastery were, a longer but far less violent option for her social revolution could have presented itself.  I mean, consider this: during the same year as her own attendance, Sylvain, Claude, Mercedes, Lysithea, and Marianne are all her fellow students.  Sylvain, who hates Crests with a passion.  Mercedes, whose familial miseries are all founded in the Crest she and her brother bear.  Marianne, who feels that her Crest is a curse upon her existence.  Lysithea, whose future has been robbed by Crests.  Claude, who has an outsider’s perspective on the traditions of Fodlan and can see that there’s a lot about the country that doesn’t work well.  And hell, plenty of other significant figures of the Kingdom and Alliance would take very little convincing to agree that the Crest system is wrong--Felix values personal ability (as evidenced by his single-minded drive for combat perfection) and would thus likely be amenable to the idea of a society where that’s the measure of worth.  Hilda, meanwhile, hates the expectations people have of her due to her family, which is only a step away from the way the world views the holders of Crests.

These are all individuals who would have major influence on the Kingdom and the Alliance once they graduated.  Had Edelgard made a bid to win them to her way of thinking, she almost surely would have been successful, and at that point, she’d have the leader of the Alliance on her side, as well as nobles from the Kingdom who could bend Dimitri’s ear to support her (as Dimitri doesn’t really care 1 way or another about Crests, and his confessional note proves that he genuinely cares about the common people of his nation greatly).  Being at Gareg Mach means that Edelgard is rubbing shoulders with the leaders of nations and the most influential figures below them, and half of them already have good reason to want the same world that she wants.  If she’d made even the slightest effort to capitalize on this amazing opportunity to form friendships and make pacts, there’s every chance that upon graduation, the new leaders of the people of Fodlan would by and large be united in the cause of eliminating Crests from the social structure of their joint nation.  At that point, there wouldn’t be anything Rhea could do about the matter, even if she really did care about the Crest social foundation that much.  What’s she gonna do, declare war on 3 nations at the same time, all of which surround her?

Edelgard’s also a self-defeating dumbass in a few smaller ways, too, all of which are illustrated in the Blue Lion route of the game.*****  First of all, she’s 1 of those morons who remain tight-lipped for absolutely no reason even though it’s only going to cause her a bunch of problems due to misunderstandings.  When Dimitri decides, for some inexplicable reason, that Edelgard must have been responsible for the Tragedy of Duscur, Edelgard makes absolutely no attempt to correct his assumption.  Allowing this misunderstanding to stand makes her Dimitri’s sworn enemy and drives him to relentlessly pursue her death, which will eventually lead to her downfall.  And while she can’t know that this guy in particular is going to be the one to defeat her, what sense does it make to just allow a heated enmity to be formed over the only crime she didn’t commit?  What is there to gain by not saying, “That wasn’t me” even once?  Sure, there’s a good chance Dimitri isn’t gonna believe her, but surely she should at least make the effort, right?

She’s even more stupidly close-lipped later on in the Blue Lions story, too.  Once Dimitri finally snaps out of his tiresome Enraged Goth phase, he sets up a private meeting with Edelgard, because he wants to understand why she’s doing all this, what purpose she had for overthrowing the Church and trying to conquer the entirety of Fodlan, with the intent that perhaps it’s not too late for a resolution that doesn’t end in violent death for everyone on the losing side.  Which is surprisingly levelheaded, decent, and patient of Dimitri, honestly, and good on him for it.

So Edelgard shows up at this private meeting, and...refuses to tell Dimitri anything.  The leader of the opposing army--one which is currently kicking her ass, incidentally; it’s late enough in the story that Eddy’s steadily losing ground to Dimitri’s forces--asks her to explain her actions, clearly hoping that her reasons might be good enough that he doesn’t have to pursue her death.  And all she does is answer with a bunch of vague platitudes about how this will change the world for the better and it’s the way with the fewest possible casualties and blah blah blah.  At no point, at NO POINT, does Edelgard actually give any relevant detail or clarification of what she wants, why she wants it, how this was the only possible way to achieve it, ANYTHING.  She doesn’t explain why she believes Crest-based society and the Church need to be abolished, she doesn’t explain how she concluded that a backstabbing military coup championed by murder-obsessed mental patients like the Death Knight and amoral scumbags like Hubert would be the best way to bring about a just and peaceful world, she doesn’t explain why she (incorrectly, stupidly, gullibly) believes that the Crests are Rhea’s fault...Edelgard can’t be bothered to tell Dimitri ANYTHING beyond overgeneralized, grandstanding vagaries in this entire conversation.

Nor does she even make an attempt--hell, she doesn’t even seem to consider the possibility--to settle this conflict with Dimitri by, I dunno, saying that she’d leave the rest of Fodlan alone if he agreed to revolutionize society the way she desires.  I mean, if what Edelgard really cares about is creating a better world, and truly isn’t just seeking power for her own selfish ambitions, then shouldn’t she make an effort, when her enemy is approaching her with the intent of hearing her side, to offer an alternative resolution to war that will still accomplish what she most cares about?  Especially since, at this point, Dimitri’s army is basically knocking at her goddamn door; there is every reason for Edeglard to believe, going into this meeting, that she will lose this war.  She should be jumping at this opportunity to make her enemy understand how important her cause is since he’s looking to perhaps be the one who’s gonna wind up ruling this nation after all, and even more, she should be scrambling to make the most of this chance to find a solution that might accomplish what she set out to or at the very least allow her social revolution to live on in her Empire, if nowhere else.

But instead of laying her cards on the table, instead of pursuing a chance to turn her greatest foe into an ally and save the cause that she claims is more important than anything else, Edelgard doubles down and refuses to consider any possible alternative route to what she wants to achieve, even as her preferred method is falling apart around her.  Why did she even show up to this meeting if all she wasn’t gonna bother to talk?  It’s idiocy, lunacy, or egotism at work, and whichever it may be, it just proves that much more concretely what a stupid fool Edelgard is.

And there’s 1 more instance in this route where we see that the biggest obstacle to Edelgard’s cause is Edelgard herself.  At the end of the game, when the good guys have finally overcome her armies, stormed her palace, and defeated her, Edelgard spurns Dimitri’s attempt to spare her.  He offers her his hand, and she spits on this kindness as violently as she possibly could by throwing the dagger that symbolizes their former friendship straight at him, presumably aiming for his heart, given how close it winds up being.  This, of course, prompts Dimitri to finish her off, which one can hardly blame him for at this point.

But tell me: if Edelgard truly values accomplishing her goals for a new, better world as much as she enjoys claiming, then shouldn’t she have accepted Dimitri’s mercy?  If creating a more just, righteous society in Fodlan really is her greatest priority, then Edelgard is truly a self-defeating fucktard to provoke Dimitri into killing her.  Even defeated, even imprisoned, even put on trial, Edelgard would at least have some tiny chance of influencing Fodlan for the better.  As a prisoner she could still be in some contact with Dimitri as he begins the process of ruling and rebuilding Fodlan and might have some opportunity to convince him to work to undo or at least lessen the hold of Crests over Fodlan’s social structure.  Had she lived, there’d be no way Dimitri wouldn’t have needed to consult with her on many aspects of his becoming ruler of the former Empire’s territories; she absolutely would have had opportunities to convince him, to beg him, not to let her dream die in entirety.  Even if she were put on trial for her villainy, it at least would provide her with a platform to speak against the social structure of Fodlan and perhaps convince some of the war’s victors that change was still needed.

But no.  She’d rather die and accomplish nothing than to live and strive to accomplish at least a little.  For all the lip-service Edelgard pays to her goal of a free, merit-based society for Fodlan, the truth is that she only cares about it enough to accomplish it 1 way and 1 way only.  If Edelgard doesn’t get to have a better Fodlan her way, exactly the way she wants it, then to her it’s simply not worth fighting for.  What a self-important fucking child.

Oh, and let’s not forget, Edelgard hurls Dimitri’s mercy in his face and dagger in his shoulder without saying a single word about Those Who Slither in the Dark.  With her dies the knowledge of their existence, meaning that the Blue Lions route concludes with the greater villains of the story alive, well, and now able to operate entirely unchecked within the shadows.  Dimitri will take the throne of a land completely and utterly at the mercy of heartless, monstrous villains hidden behind every curtain of his throne room.  She could’ve said something to Dimitri, now the most powerful man in Fodlan, about the Agarthans, warned him, so that he could lead his forces against them while there’s still a chance to end the threat they represent, but nope, she chooses to silently defy him and force Dimitri to finish her off.  Because Edelgard may pretend to love Fodlan and want what’s best for it, but in reality, she’s a sore enough loser that she doesn’t mind condemning its people to the cloak-and-dagger terror and torment that the Agarthans will inflict upon it now that everything holding them back has been eliminated.

Edelgard is not a particularly likable, well-written character overall.  She’s stiff, defined largely by vices like stubbornness and spite, and she manages to somehow be shockingly 1-dimensional even while having more time and character development than just about any other character in the game.  But though her personality and lack of depth make her mildly unlikable, what truly condemns Edelgard as a person and a leader is the fact that she is incredibly gullible, has no sense of priority, chooses to close her mind to all alternatives to what she wants to do and believe, possesses catastrophic taste in allies and subordinates, and prefers complete failure to partial success, even if it means death and great harm coming to countless lives as a result.

Edelgard is the worst.























* Although I do want to say that it doesn’t take much imagination to see the way the Crests in Fodlan turned out to be a case of Rhea making the most of a bad situation she hadn’t been able to prevent, and just not being able to think of any better way to maintain some control over the land.  Frankly, it’s not exactly difficult to conceive the resulting class system being more or less the same even if Rhea hadn’t had any part in its creation, because, as the history of our own Crest-less world bears out, we human beings are drawn to creating these stupid shitty societies all on our own, anyway.  She’s obviously not blameless by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have a certain respect for Rhea trying to oversee, protect, and be caretaker to a species of creatures she despises out of love and honor for her mother’s memory, and the fact that she’s not able to do so perfectly can only be held against her so far.  If my own mother had been brutally murdered in her sleep, and had her bones turned into weapons that had been used in attempts to kill me and my siblings, you better believe I probably wouldn’t be as gracious and hard-working a caretaker to the people I blamed for it as Rhea is to Fodlan’s humanity.


** In fairness, if you pursue the support conversations for Edelgard and Hubert, she does get an understanding by their end of what he’s doing.  But this might actually be even more damning, because Edelgard doesn’t actually tell him, or even lightly suggest, to stop pulling this Yakra XIII shit.  The most that comes of this is basically just that she insists on knowing about the immoral acts he performs for her benefit, which, to me, sounds like an unspoken agreement to condone them.


*** This may seem like a slight leap of faith, but I’ll remind you that Edelgard’s canon actions are to wait until the Agarthans launch a nuke to figure out where it’s coming from.  She doesn’t have any real guarantee they’re ever going to do so (or that she’ll necessarily be out of its way when they do) before she finishes her campaign against the Church, so my proposal is no less a case of hoping things just work out than what actually happened in the game.


**** Just 1 more in the long list of Edelgard's fine qualities: crimes against prisoners of war.  Rhea can barely stand by the time she's rescued from Edelgard's clutches, and in most endings never recovers from this ordeal.  And keep in mind, Rhea is a goddamn DRAGON, a living goddess by the Fire Emblem series's reckoning.  She's not a frail, easily harmed being.  To bring Rhea to such a state, the only reasonable conclusion we can draw is that Edelgard was treating her defenseless prisoner terribly, and quite possibly actively torturing the woman.  And did so for years.  Because that's just the kind of Class Act that Edelgard is.


***** It took a couple years, but I finally found something this stupid route was good for!

...Although I already was well aware that Edelgard is a fucking idiot, so maybe not, after all.