Fire Emblem 16's Silent Protagonist

It’s long been my opinion that silent protagonists contribute nothing to a game’s quality, but rather have the potential only to worsen it. The general understanding is that the intention behind silent protagonists is to make it easier for the player to personally relate to the main character, but this reasoning is, frankly, stupid. Audiences of all forms of storytelling have been able to identify with characters who speak and act with a definite personality for thousands of years, without difficulty, and frankly, as someone whose communication options aren’t limited to basic hand gestures, I find protagonists’ silence to lessen my ability to relate to them. I’m a hell of a lot more likely to understand and empathize with, say, Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard, or Tales of Berseria’s Velvet Crowe, than I am to my partner in a game of Charades. Even considering that I have not and, hopefully, never will find myself in similar situations to those of Shepard and Velvet, their ability to emote and express themselves verbally connects me to them and allows me to empathize with and understand them as people, and become invested in their adventures and struggles. The idea that I’d have a better chance to form a bond with a silent marionette than with someone animated enough to reflect some form of the human condition is insane.

There’s also the reasoning behind silent protagonists that they allow the player an easier time of enjoying the wish fulfillment aspect of gaming, as they get to, in some RPGs, be adulated as a hero and have all manner of love interests thrown at their feet. I can’t say that I have many positive thoughts on this rationale, either.

There are, however, a few cases in which a game will use a silent protagonist for an actual, legitimate reason. In most Metroid games, for example, Samus, though not unable to do so, never speaks--and this is a shrewd move on the developers’ parts, because a major part of the Metroid style and theme is solitude. Metroid was designed to capture the same terrifying feeling of being alone in a hostile science-fiction environment that the movie Alien created, a survival-terror series rather than survival-horror, if you will. And the later installments of the Metroid Prime trilogy took this in a different direction, lessening the overbearing and frightening atmosphere, and instead making the style of the games about the solitude of exploration, the ability to quietly enjoy natural wonders all to oneself, and the entrancing thrill and fear of being made to challenge the wilds and beasts all on one’s own. Samus’s silence works toward the purpose of Metroid, not out of some idiotic misunderstanding of how human beings empathize with fiction, but rather because that silence allows the loneliness of the game’s atmosphere to be that much more complete.

Bringing things back to RPGs, another example would be found in Undertale’s No Mercy playthrough. Quirky and harmless during the Neutral and Pacifist routes, Frisk’s refusal to ever speak becomes chilling as Chara fully overtakes the final human child and mercilessly exterminates every living thing before them. As many slasher flicks have taken advantage of over the years, a horrifying, murderous figure becomes all the more terrifying when they are silent, unwilling to engage with others in any but a lethal way. Chara’s silence, broken only at the end of the game, substantially adds to the grim, disturbing nature of the No Mercy route.

Now, Fire Emblem 16’s Byleth is an interesting case.* Yes, it’s almost certain that the “put the player in her/his shoes more easily” school of thought was the primary motivating cause for Byleth’s silence--it’s hard to consider any alternative when so much of modern Fire Emblem revolves around the dozens-of-love-interests wish-fulfillment thing I mentioned, and everyone in the cast is always yapping about how great Byleth is at everything she/he does. But Nintendo actually went a step further on this front than most others do, in that they did consciously create a story reason for Byleth’s silence, incorporating her/his non-communicative nature into the actual, established character development and lore of the game. And I appreciate that, because just as confusing to me as the notion that I should find eternal laryngitis easy to relate to is the fact that the rest of the cast rarely acknowledges that they’re hitching their wagons to a leader who speaks less often than most RPG characters’ pets. Unfortunately...the most interesting part of all this is that, unlike Samus or Chara or probably any other silent-for-actual-legitimate-reasons heroes, it’s still a complete failure and Byleth is as crappy, worthless a character as any standard silent protagonist.

So, here’s the deal: Byleth’s schtick is a decent one, if you’re looking to make a silent protagonist. She (just gonna go with the gender that makes more sense thematically for Byleth to be, you’ll just have to bear with it, sorry) is an individual whose heart doesn’t beat, and is instead sustained through the divine magic of the goddess Sothis’s crystalized soul, which was implanted into Byleth during birth. While not explicitly stated, the clear implication is that this is the reason that Byleth has significant difficulty with interacting with others, and feels (and expresses) very little in terms of emotion. It’s not scientific, granted, but the world isn’t anywhere close to giving up that age-old, dumb misconception that one’s emotional nature is located in their body’s equivalent to a municipal pumping station. Anyway, a silent protagonist fits quite naturally to this idea of a character of stunted, bare emotional presence. The restriction of personal interactions to head-shaking and the occasional mildly different facial expression helps sell Byleth’s initial state of being humanely lacking. So even if the main intent was almost surely rooted in the typical, dumb reasons for a silent protagonist, Nintendo was clever enough to make Byleth’s status as such a legitimate part of her character.

Unfortunately, however, they couldn’t keep up with their own pace on this.

See, this all would have been fine if Byleth had been intended to be a static character (which is a trait shared by most other silent protagonists, presumably out of necessity). But she wasn’t. Byleth is meant to have a character arc over the period of Fire Emblem 16, in which her job as a teacher at the monastery and her interactions with the rest of the main characters cause humanity to bloom within her, bringing out new feelings within her and inspiring a fierce attachment to her students, fellow teachers, and (potentially) Rhea. Byleth wasn’t meant to be the reserved homunculus she starts out as all the way to the game’s end, but rather to grow into her humanity.

And that’s a problem, when the silent protagonist schtick she has at the beginning doesn’t likewise change with her. It’s okay for Chara and Samus to never change, because the nature of each’s game doesn’t change--the No Mercy route is chilling and horrible through to the end, so Chara’s silence continues to aid it throughout, and Samus’s solitude is, in most games, virtually uninterrupted, so her quietude never stops being thematically appropriate. But when your character’s development is supposed to go from an inhuman reserve to being substantially more in touch with her personhood and emotional state, the silence and accompanying reserved expressions go very quickly from a boon to a detriment to her character.

Let’s contrast Byleth for a moment to a character whose writers had similar intentions, and pulled it off successfully. There are quite a many RPG characters who go from an unemotional, robotic (usually literally) state to being stirring examples of human nature, such as Aigis from Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3, or Tio from Grandia 2, but I believe it’s the nature of Laphicet from Tales of Berseria that makes him our best example. He, too, is a being whose origin causes him to initially be very unemotional and reserved, more like an automaton than a person. And, also like Byleth, his character arc, which is of substantial importance to the game as a whole, is centered around his awakening humanity, and using his awareness of himself as a person to explore what kind of an individual he wants to be. And the result is an excellent, engaging story of personal growth, of the pursuit of personal growth, one which ends with Laphicet being perhaps the most authentically human member of the entire cast, and the player knowing and appreciating exactly how the kid got to that point.

On the other hand, the biggest change to have occurred within Byleth over the course of Fire Emblem 16 is that her hair turned green somewhere along the way.

Both characters began similarly, and had comparable goals, narratively-speaking. So what’s the disconnect? Well, for starters, there’s the obvious fact that Laphicet speaks and Byleth does not, which means that Laphicet simply has better opportunities to develop as a character, as the primary vehicle for showcasing character development and personality in an RPG (and most other mediums) is through dialogue and monologue. FE16 tells us, through the words of other characters, over and over again how much Byleth has changed over the course of the game’s events, but that’s all it is: telling. Because she never speaks, we almost never get to witness anything from her that could confirm these assertions--and the fact that her facial emoting is slightly less expressive or humanlike than the pantomimes of Chrono Trigger’s Crono, who was working with the limitations of 16-bit sprites, doesn’t help matters. Tales of Berseria, of course, also has Laphicet’s companions remark, from time to time, upon his growth as a person, but the difference there is that they’re observing something that the player him/herself has also noticed, because Laphicet’s growing personal awareness is shown through how he speaks with others, the topics he becomes interested in remarking on and exploring, the questions he asks, and the desires, preferences and reactions he makes known through his words. When ToB’s cast reflect on Laphicet’s growth, it’s a realistic reaction to the phenomenon the player can recognize--when FE16’s characters do the same about Byleth, it’s solely to convince the player of it, and a rather futile attempt, at that.

But there’s also another angle to the problem of Byleth’s character development being told and not shown, which can be seen once more through a contrast to Laphicet: beside the fact that being verbal affords Laphicet more opportunities to grow, the fact is that just the act of speaking itself is a vital component that Byleth’s character needed to succeed. Forget what is being said: just saying is an important act. After all, as I said, Byleth’s silence is an expressive component of her initial character state...so for the audience to believe FE16’s frequent assertions that she’s grown past that point, she has to talk. Forget the quality of the speech, forget the actual content of her dialogue contributing to character development--just at a basic, fundamental level, any claim that Byleth’s character has moved past its starting point requires her to actually say something, because to maintain her silence is to maintain her inhuman beginning state!

Laphicet, too, begins his character journey very quietly, requiring input from others to prompt him to speak at all, and initially having little to say even then. But as he becomes more and more a person in his own right, so too does he initiate conversation more frequently with others, voluntarily put forth ideas and opinions without them needing to be actively drawn from him, and just generally interacting with others with the same frequency and assertiveness as any given social, healthily self-confident human being. Laphicet could have some of the most ineptly-written dialogue and monologue in the history of gaming, and he’d still be a far, far superior example of the narrative archetype that he and Byleth share simply for the fact that the substance of change, regardless of its quality, is there for him, and it is not for Byleth.

It’s such a shame, because Nintendo could so easily have turned it around. They could have made Byleth silent for the first half of the game, up until the scene in which Jeralt dies--already a powerful scene (especially considering how little dramatic weight you’d expect Byleth to have for it), but imagine how much more moving and significant it would be if the first words we heard Byleth say, without our input and outside of a critical hit quote, were to express a loving goodbye to her father. And from that point on, she could speak normally, as a standard character would. It would give her the opportunity to show her growth as a person rather than having the game keep trying to force you to take it on faith, and having that scene be the turning point of that growth would retroactively sustain the importance and value of her protagonistic silence up until that moment, even when it had seemed to be getting old.

Or hell, they could’ve gone an interesting direction with it: have Byleth begin talking, but only once she had absorbed Sothis into her being and gone all greeny-green. While not a pleasant and rewarding prospect, it would at least pose an interesting question to the player thereon of whether Byleth had grown and the speech was a reflection of that fact...or whether she was no more the person she had been, and the speech was an unsettling evidence of a greater mind and will having largely overtaken the Byleth that had been. I probably wouldn’t have liked it, but at least it would have been interesting.

But no, we just get silent Byleth from start to finish. A self-defeating character created from a halfway decent idea executed in the worst possible way.

And it’s worth noting that this really, really didn’t need to be this way, in this series. Nor should it have been! Fire Emblem isn’t Dragon Quest. FE isn’t a series whose writers use a dogmatic adherence to traditions like silent protagonists as an excuse to never have to do their jobs. Fire Emblem games are ones built on speaking protagonists who interact with the plot, and as such, the FE story tends to be one which personally involves the protagonist as a major psychological focus. Fire Emblem 14 wasn’t a game written broadly and objectively about warring nations in danger of being overtaken by an evil, outside force--it was a game written about 2 specific nations, within both of which protagonist Corrin has a personal family stake, being threatened by an evil, outside force who has significant ties to Corrin’s true heritage. FE14 is a game written for and about its protagonist--and it would be immeasurably the worse if Corrin had not been able to voice her thoughts and reactions, nor possessed the ability to confide with Azura as the hardships of her struggles and choices weighed upon her.

What would FE4 be, if Sigurd could not profess his love for Deirdre? Would Fire Emblem 9 have had as much weight had Ike been forced to convey the entirety of his reactions to his father’s death, and the weight of that legacy, through non-verbal means? How the hell would we even have known Lyn’s deal and who she was as a person in Fire Emblem 7 if she couldn’t talk about herself?

Fire Emblems are written, as most RPGs are, with stories which very personally involve their protagonists, and FE16 is no different. Byleth’s existence has several substantial ties to the game’s lore and some of its most important characters, and several other major characters are written with the idea that Byleth is their rock of stability to depend upon. It’s a role that was written as all Fire Emblem protagonist roles I’ve seen have been--with the idea that the game’s sequence of events is something that she should interact with, be personally invested in, be affected by. And to expect any of that to work with a character who meets virtually every situation with reticence and an arsenal of no more than 3 facial expressions is lunacy!

I can give some credit to the idea of Byleth as a silent protagonist for the fact that it is, for her, a good starting point, as a character who’s intended to grow into her humanity. But the fact that it works for her in that capacity means that it immediately starts lessening her quality as a dynamic character, as visual, hard evidence undermines the game’s other (halfhearted) attempts to show her growth. It also, predictably, limits her depth in the general sense as it restricts her ability to express her personality, and it cuts her off from enjoying the benefits of a story designed to showcase her as its lead and most personally involved participant. Byleth is a colossal failure as a character and as a main hero, and I strongly hope that Nintendo won’t be foolish enough to again arbitrarily force a silent protagonist into a series that doesn’t know how to work around the stupid restrictions inherent thereof. Leave the silence schtick to The Legend of Zelda’s Link, Nintendo; he’s at least got the wide array of expressive constipation noises to make it funny, and his games don't require us to really give a crap about him to work.
















* I’m not sure whether it’s worth even noting, but yes, I do understand that Byleth is not completely silent to the other characters in-game--the idea is, I believe, that she/he IS interacting with them to some degree, and we, the audience, are just not privy to the exact nature of it, save for when we have to choose between 2 replies for her/him to make. This is usually the case with silent protagonists--one way or another, they’re clearly being understood by their companions and other NPCs. But from the perspective of we, the audience, they’re silent.