Fire Emblem 15's Jedah and Celica are Both Pretty Stupid

Cult leaders are not really known for making good choices.  Which isn’t surprising, of course.  Much like psychopathy and a corporate executive, or compulsive lying and the publishing head of Bethesda, poor decision-making is essentially a requirement for the job of being a cult leader; without it you pretty much won’t be in the role to start with.  But even compared to notably dumb peers like Mr. Carpainter and Confessor Cromwell, Fire Emblem 15’s Jedah is a moron.

So here’s the scene:Jedah has persuaded protagonist Celica to at least consider the option he's offering. He’s convinced her to come over to his place to talk the deal over.  The man is so, so near to achieving his goals.  Depending on Celica's Tiresome Overwrought Self-Sacrificing Girl levels, Jedah might be just minutes away from the most important success in his life. Victory is so close.

And what does he do?

He announces--gleefully announces, mind you, this clearly tickles him pink, or at least a less putrescent shade of periwinkle than usual--to Celica that since her friends happen to be around, he's gonna kill them all right in front of her before he’ll continue to pursue their diplomatic discussion.

I mean holy shit dude, could you really not have eased off on the cliched villainy for 10 minutes until you’d secured Celica’s help?  What, it would’ve killed you to just have her entourage chill in the lobby for a few, while you take Celica to your office and secure the win?  Do you somehow think that it’s going to strengthen your bargaining position to announce that you’re a psychopath whose absolute highest priority is the pleasure of killing a dozen of your business partner’s closest friends, or something?  In terms of shooting yourself in the foot, this is basically loading your foot into a fucking cannon's barrel and cheerfully lighting the fuse...

...And yet somehow still managing, through truly miraculous contrivance, to completely miss that shot.  Because in spite of Jedah arbitrarily deciding that Celica’s allies, childhood friends, and brother should all die just for shits and giggles, Celica is STILL stupid enough an hour later to sell her soul to the jackass in exchange for Alm’s safety.  Jedah seriously hit the RPG Villain Lottery with this twit.  Any other RPG protagonist would see a spontaneous self-indulgent attempt at slaughtering said protagonist’s friends as a deal-breaker, but Jedah managed to get the ONLY heroine in the entire franchise that doesn’t buy into that Friendship is Magic bunk.  Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of other RPG narratives have been specifically based around the idea that a protagonist refuses to sacrifice even a single member of their party to save the world, and meanwhile Jedah doesn’t lose an iota of bargaining leverage for trying to kill them ALL as a villainous side hustle!  Ike may fight for his friends, but Celica sure as hell ain’t gonna.

So Celica, the fact that the guy trying to convince you to do as he says because it’s for the greater good of all is the same guy who has a truly irrepressible urge to see human beings die, that doesn’t bother you, huh?  No red flags?  Nothing that doesn’t add up about the murder-enthusiast making a case about what’s in the best interests of humanity as a whole?  You don’t see any conflict of interest on that one, Celica?

The fact that she later has the shameless audacity to be shocked when Jedah betrays her trust and doesn’t keep his end of their bargain--said end being “just, like, don’t kill this 1 single guy, please”; Celica didn’t exactly haggle very hard and yet it was still more than Jedah could deliver--is mind-boggling.  Hell, even if he hadn’t attempted to murder every one of her friends in front of her as a way to kick off their diplomatic talks, her surprise would still be absurd.  Oh gosh, Celica, did the cackling yellow-eyed cult leader who regularly sacrifices women’s souls to his dark god turn out not to be trustworthy?  Well, at least you can take comfort in the fact that there was just no way to tell that he wasn’t on the up and up.

So yeah, Jedah is a self-sabotaging idiot, and the only reason that he gets as far as he does in FE15’s narrative is that he luckily got matched against a protagonist who is not only really stupid, but also shockingly unconcerned with the well-being of those around her.

Fire Emblem 15's Downloadable Content

Ugh.  Is it even worth it to write an intro?  Let’s just make it quick, because we all know how this is gonna go down.  We’re looking at the add-ons for Fire Emblem Heroes: Shadows of Valentia today, DLC packages are bad wastes of money like 70% of the time in general, and if the Fire Emblems immediately preceding and proceding this one are anything to go by, this series’s add-ons are especially terrible.  And given that FE15 is kinda bad to begin with, I’m not exactly expecting great things, here.

Well, let’s get this over with. I can’t wait to see what halfhearted, careless money-grabs that Nintendo’s got on the roster.



Cipher Legends 1: Alright, so we’re gonna start here, because the 4 packages that come before Cipher Legends 1 are a linked set of stories that we’ll get into below, and the first crowd of add-ons that came before those are just a bunch of straightforward, trite little battle/dungeon things that have effectively no story components.  Either you have or somehow have not tired of this game’s repetitive Fire Emblem battles and cookie-cutter dungeons, and you can figure out for yourself whether you want to bother engaging further with them.

Anyway, Cipher Legends 1.  This DLC, which adds 2 characters from a small off-shoot installment of Fire Emblem, is an odd one to judge.  The inclusion of Emma and Randall feels extremely random, and I’m generally not big on introducing new characters for no reason beyond marketing--it’s bad enough that undeserving Fire Emblem schmucks like Byleth and Ike invade Smash like an ever growing number raccoons finding a way into your attic, but not EVERY Fire Emblem needs other Fire Emblem characters shoved into it! You’re not Nippon Ichi, Nintendo, people don’t give a crap about hamfistedly cramming your titles into a shared multiverse for shits and giggles!

On the other hand...Emma and Randall are reasonably amusing, and let’s be honest, there’s not all that many particularly fun characters to be found in Fire Emblem 15.  So...I can’t really say they’re unwelcome.

Anyway, the plot of this one is just that Emma and Randall get in a bind, the heroes show up to bail them out, and in gratitude the 2 join up with the army, because in Fire Emblem, there’s just no such thing as thank-you notes.  The add-on’s not much altogether, and Emma and Randall only have a single Support, with each other.  I really don’t know why a couple couldn’t have been made with the regular cast members--why in the world does Emma not at least have supports with the Whitewing sisters?  She’s all about the Triangle Attack, and it’s almost their signature move in the franchise!  Sadly, although I think these 2 add some far too uncommon likability to the cast, there’s just not enough content here to justify the price of $4 by a long shot, nor the price of $3 when considering the package deal of both Ciphers for $6.


Cipher Legends 2: Unsurprisingly, this one’s very similar to the first Cipher Legends package.  Shade and Yuzu’s inclusion feels forced, but conversely, they’re pretty likable as characters, once again more so than most of FE15’s main cast.  The plot of this one does actually relate to the main quest’s evil cultists, rather than just being the bread-and-butter bandit-beating that Fire Emblem is so incredibly fond of, and to its credit, there’s a good bit of extra dialogue available if you’ve already got Emma and Randall from the first DLC.  Still, while I do like Shade and Yuzu better than the FE15 average, one has to consider how much content there actually is in this DLC (which is very little), and once again, this add-on all boils down to a single battle, some dialogue before, during, and after it, a few more bits of character text in town, and only a single support chain for the new characters (Yuzu and Shade don’t even have supports with their own friends Emma and Randall!  How stupid is that?).  As with the first, there just isn’t enough content here to justify even a measly $4.


Battle of Zofia Harbor: Oh holy crap, ACTUAL story in a DLC?  I’d almost forgotten what it looked like.  This package provides a little bit of backstory as you take Fernand and Clive through a mission before the game’s events in which they have to reluctantly save that worm Slayde from the “finding out” phase of his fucking around.  Having to do an escort mission for fucking Slayde of all people is not exactly the most enticing prospect in the world, and he certainly goes to no great lengths during this DLC to make the matter any easier to swallow, but I suppose that 9S did warn me that existence was nothing but suffering.

Opening this DLC by having the entire lead-up to its events summarized unnaturally as Fernand goes into a grumpy tirade is fairly clumsy, but as a whole, this little side story does a halfway decent job humanizing Fernand, which is good, because the game proper wanted him to die a much more sympathetic villain than he did.  Although I’d prefer competent writing from the start, I can always appreciate it when a developer uses its DLC as a chance to correct its narrative mistakes.  I also appreciate that the DLC is used to establish the general unrest of the citizens, and the poor leadership of the Zofian king--it’s a pretty direct and simple affair, mind you, but at least it actually relates to the damn game and attempts to embellish a prior tell-don’t-show error of the game proper.  Otherwise, it’s a pretty cut-and-dry mini-plot, but the purpose of this DLC is obviously less about the events than the insight into its cast and lore, so that’s fine.

The Memory Prisms you get from completing the mission are also decent for developing Fernand, through depicting his relationship with Clair.  Although the conversation is mostly about how everyone in-game wants to de-legitimize Clair as a warrior by throwing her at the first eligible bachelor they can find just as much as the writers themselves want to.  Oh, and also, Clair describes her ideal man, who is the exact opposite of the dingbat she winds up stuck with by the game's end, because someone important on the staff for this game just really, really does not like women.  And as if the reassurance that Clair’s romantic future is shitty isn’t already frustrating enough, Fernand has to go and point out that the ideal mate that she’s describing is essentially her brother.  Jesus Christ Fire Emblem could you JUST stop toying and teasing at sibling incest for ONE FUCKING GAME?  And then it turns around and Clair talks about how Fernand likes his ladies the way he likes his oranges, full and ripe, and it’s like, could we PLEASE MOVE ON.  

...Where was I?  Well, whatever.  The DLC’s got ups and downs, but it does actually attempt to accomplish something of worth to the game as a whole by filling in a few of its narrative deficits.  It’s still overpriced at $4, as you’re gonna get maybe close to an hour of content out of it, max, so I can’t recommend it, but Battle of Zofia Harbor is at least of pretty decent quality.


Outpost Rescue: This little piece of backstory is about Lukas, Forsythe, and Python rescuing some comrades before Alm joined the Deliverance.  It’s...pretty bland, just like its stars.  I mean, I like the moment in which Lukas has some self-reflection and acknowledges that if the Deliverance fails because of Desaix’s ire at losing a match to him, then it is Lukas himself who will have doomed them all for indulging in his pride and not throwing the fight.  But honestly, that’s really about the only moment that stands out here for the DLC’s main story, and the extra Support conversations that come from its completion don’t stand out, either.  I mean, Forsythe and Lukas’s talk about each wanting what the other had as a child leading each to better value what he DID have is a decent set of interactions, but not amazing, and Lukas and Python’s Supports are kinda boring.

Is this a bad DLC?  Not really.  But it’s not an interesting one.  You could justify playing it if it came free with the game, but it’s certainly not worth paying for.


Flight From the Ruins: This DLC involves Clair and Mathilda trying to find an anti-magic ring and getting mixed up in fighting zombies or whatever.  There’s nothing wrong with it, but after Battle of Zofia Harbor, which gave some appreciated and much-needed development to Clive and especially Fernand, this is disappointing.  The fact that Outpost Rescue didn’t really do much with Lukas was less disappointing than it was simply expected, because Lukas is freakin’ boring and both Forsythe and Python are basically just in the game to pad out the cast a bit...but Mathilda and especially Clair actually have personalities and a little depth, so it’s too bad their DLC mini-adventure just doesn’t really do much of anything with them.  Aside, of course, from having Clair start getting uncomfortably territorial over her brother with Mathilda, Clive’s actual girlfriend, because apparently Nintendo felt that 1 of the biggest priorities of FE15’s DLCs was to make up for lost time with Fire Emblem’s traditional, cowardly noncommittal but undeniably ever-present fetish for incest.

The Supports that come with the DLC are far better, at least.  We get a bit of character history between Mathilda and Fernand, which is welcome, and a conversation chain between Mathilda and Clair about growing up--what good is gained from it, but also what good is lost in the process, too.  This actually feels like real, genuine interpersonal growth and character writing with a purpose, and is easily the best part of the FE15 DLCs thus far.  Sadly, though, even if this package’s Memory Prism Support Conversations are far better, there still just isn’t enough good stuff to justify the $4 price tag it released for.  You’re simply not gonna get more than about an hour from it, and only a bit of that hour is going to be earnestly good.


Siege of Zofia Castle: ...Huh.  Okay.  So...this add-on, which shows us how Zofia Castle was lost to the Deliverance before Alm’s arrival during the game proper’s events, is actually good.  Really good, even.  And I don’t mean that it’s got a couple really good moments that stand out while the rest of it is passable at best.  I mean Siege of Zofia Castle is actually, genuinely good in essentially its entirety!

This add-on, which is a culmination of the previous 3, actually does a very nice job of further characterizing Fernand, utilizing what we’ve seen of him in the previous packages as a foundation for continuing to flesh him out, and gives some backstory and reason as to why he’s such a douchebag in the main game.  Honestly, these DLCs, this one in particular, have managed to turn Fernand around from being an easily-dismissed, dime-a-dozen disingenuous antagonist into an actually sympathetic character.  That’s not an easy thing to believably, naturally pull off, especially after the fact, so I give full kudos to the writers on this one.  Seriously, whoever it was in the writer’s room that buckled the fuck down and hammered Fernand into an asset to the game instead of 1 of its flaws, my hat’s off to you, and considering how bad my haircut is as of the time of writing this, that means something.*

This DLC’s not just the Fernand show, either. I like Python and Forsythe’s exchange about whether what they’re doing is even worth it, as the murdered king was ruling Zofia poorly, and the common citizens care more about living decent and peaceful lives than about which noble jackass has the “right” to be on the throne.  It’s an unexpectedly thoughtful self-assessment of the heroes’ cause, particularly for a Fire Emblem game; this series is generally very fixated on the perspective of the nobles and knights and rights of succession and such.  The extra Support Conversation between Clive and Python that you get at the add-on’s end is really good, too.

And this time, it’s not JUST the character bits that shine in the DLC.  The actual plot, small though it is, is quite engaging and interesting.  The tension as the Deliverance fights its losing battle and especially the way that the Deliverance secures its safe retreat once there’s no other option is genuinely interesting and fun to witness.  The aftermath is just plain great--the demoralized and angry discussions between the members of the Deliverance after their defeat and retreat, the fact that you can see Fernand deciding that this dishonorable tactic of Lukas’s must be a result of his non-noble origins, Clive’s despair over the loss, the great development this ordeal provides for Lukas...

I am earnestly shocked at how good this DLC is.  The story is good, the character development is solid for every member of its cast as it shows us a rare perspective of these characters at their lowest moment, it gives us a far better understanding of how they got to where they are by the time we encounter them in the game, and it fully turns Fernand into a narrative strength rather than a weakness.  Siege of Zofia Castle is easily the best Fire Emblem add-on I’ve encountered, and for that matter, the best JRPG add-on I’ve played.  When I someday expand my Greatest Add-Ons list, you can almost surely expect to see this one upon it.  $4?  It won’t give you 4 hours of content, but fuck it, this one’s worth 4 bucks and more.  Solidly recommended.**



Well...that was a pleasant surprise.  I went into this game’s DLC sour, but I came out happy.  Granted, most of Fire Emblem 15’s add-ons are only passable with a few highlights, and not worth their cost, but they’re certainly still an improvement as a whole over the DLC situations of Fire Emblems 14 and 16.  And the fact that Siege of Zofia Castle is an unequivocally and fully high quality piece of writing is a terrific surprise!  This is the kind of offering that restores a bit of my enthusiasm for the add-on scene.  Thanks to Siege of Zofia Castle, I’m gonna go into the DLCs of the next game I play with some actual optimism!

We’ll see how long it lasts.












* It's a pineapple, if you're wondering.  My coworker shaved and dyed my head into a pineapple.  It's a very impressive piece of work, actually.


** I don’t really have anywhere else to put this observation, so I’m just throwing it here.  I can’t help but notice that all the major story DLCs are focused around a very specific handful of characters from Alm’s side of the story, and not Celica’s.  Just 1 more example of the imbalance between these 2 protagonists that I’ve spoken of before.

Fire Emblem 15's Imbalanced Storytelling

Why was Fire Emblem 15 split in half between Alm and Celica?  They are clearly not equals from the narrative’s standpoint.  FE15 treats Alm as the protagonist it was designed to have, but Celica feels more like a secondary cast member who was promoted to a narrative position she wasn’t qualified for.  In terms of being the heroes of the story, Alm and Celica are grossly imbalanced.

First of all, look at the level of relevance Alm and Celica’s respective journeys have to the plot as a whole.  Once the prologue is over and done with, and the game has started properly, Alm is caught up in and spearheading the major, action-driven part of the plot in which a resistance-turned-invasion army turns back an enemy army, then marches straight into the heart of enemy territory.  The momentum of the plot carries Alm along from answering the call to serve as defender of his nation, to recapturing the capitol, to striking out into the hostile northern empire with the intent of ending the war once and for all, which takes him directly to the game’s finale.  While there are plenty of steps along the way that are minor ventures of liberating and/or capturing territory, it’s all clearly, logically part of a plot in motion that connects to and accomplishes the narrative of Alm’s attempt to achieve peace through force.

And then look at Celica.  Where Alm is marching from 1 story goalpost to the next from Day 1, Celica spends a truly indefensible amount of time dicking around with pirates that are functionally irrelevant.  Seriously, it’s basically all she does in her whole half of the game’s first dual-act chapter.  Fire Emblem 15 clearly just doesn’t need Celica to really be doing anything for the majority of the first third of its tale.  Whereas the story of how Alm rose to military prominence, established himself a capable leader, defied the social system by (supposedly) being a peasant whose virtues outclass those of a noble, and took back his country’s freedom from the invaders is one which easily fills the span of the first chapter, all FE15 actually NEEDS from Celica is to display her kind nature and connect it to a determination to better the lives of all people, for her to be established as a competent crusader herself,* and for her to arrive at the capitol at roughly the same time as Alm so they can meet.

The problem is that that list doesn’t need a full chapter to accomplish.  A mere 2 detours against marauding pirates are ALL that you need to cement Celica’s nature inasmuch as has relevance to her position in the plot, and her fighting prowess (as well as establish the setting lore that conditions are bad all over the country by this point, which is a valuable secondary priority).  The pirates themselves don’t have any relevance to the game’s story, not the way squads of soldiers from Rigel do--the latter are a necessary gear in the machine of a story of Alm’s military conquests, but there’s no overarching part of the plot that the pirates actually relate to.  They’re just there to be tools of Celica’s character development, and once that’s done with, they’re no more than filler.  As such, Celica spends the majority of her first act wasting time.

Now, once the first chapter is done, both Alm and Celica each have a more competitive pace of moving toward their respective journeys’ goals, at least.  Although it does still feel like Alm is more steadily progressing forward in a sequence of story events, while Celica has spurts of starts and stops with it.  Still, her futzing around with pirates just for the hell of it is finally over.  But even once the pacing problem is fixed, Alm and Celica are still drastically mismatched as protagonists.

Once they’ve had their extremely forced parting of ways, Alm’s plan is to continue to fight for the safety of his homeland and end the war through force, while Celica's plan is to save everyone by getting the goddess to step in. Now obviously, trying to end things without extra bloodshed is the preferable option!  But in practice...Celica's plan turns out to be total bupkis, because Mila's not only unavailable via kidnap, but starting to go malevolently nuts anyway.  So even if she'd been around for Celica to petition, Mila wouldn't have been able to actually do anything useful.

So, Alm's approach succeeds, and continues to succeed fully as he marches straight into the enemy capitol and defeats the emperor...while Celica's approach achieves nothing beyond putting her in a necessary position for mucking about with self-sacrifice.**  And let me tell you, getting a magical plot girl into position for a weepy self-sacrifice is not exactly a difficult thing to accomplish in an RPG.  Fucking Kemco can do it without much effort.

And Celica’s penchant for being wrong is only further underscored with her decision to accept Jedah’s terms and be his sacrificial soul.  I mean, it’s an absurdly stupid, shortsighted decision to begin with, and it only gets worse as the game pads the closing to Celica’s story out by making it more and more clear how untrustworthy Jedah is by having him throw up obstacles to his own plan as he attempts to kill Celica’s allies in front of her.  While Alm is closing in on the emperor’s throne and forcefully uniting the 2 countries, Celica is hemming and hawing about selling her soul to an insane dark god, and moronically swallowing every lie an obvious villain is feeding her like she’s a prototype for Edelgard.

I mean, just, like, contrast the final climax of Alm and Celica’s respective journeys.  Alm defeats the emperor in battle, discovers the truth of his own origins, takes the Rigellian throne through both victory and birthright, and puts an end to the war between his nations.  Celica...willingly offers her soul to an insane god at the urging of a cult leader, mistakenly believing that it will get the dark god to calm his fucking tits for 2 seconds.  Alm is successful in his aim and achieves a demonstrable, significant positive result, while Celica’s entire journey has all been leading up to her voluntarily falling into the clutches of the game’s villain.  That’s what half of the game has been about!  Futzing around with pirates, doing a Twitter drama with Alm, fruitlessly trying to petition and then rescue Mila, following Jedah and trying to get him to concentrate on something other than random murder for long enough to make his sales pitch...ALL of it, to the end goal of having this “protagonist” get duped by the main bad guy.

I’m really supposed to buy that Celica is an equal partner in this game’s story?  Her major role in the course of Fire Emblem 15’s events is to be the idiot who donates her body to science a dark god, an action designed specifically for the purpose of allowing Alm to get the magic hero sword, do the magic hero things, and stab some basic fucking sense into her.  How exactly does FE15 expect me to look at Celica as a protagonist, when the entirety of her role as such is to be a mirror and vehicle for someone else’s heroics?

She doesn’t even work as a protagonist on a meta level.  Fire Emblem 15’s story is, in largest part, a message about the importance of we human beings relying upon ourselves to resolve our conflicts and govern our affairs, and that we can’t trust higher powers like gods to lead our species.  Alm’s story of a (supposed) peasant leading a resistance to forcibly unite warring nations, a human settling human matters without divine interference, is in perfect thematic alignment with this moral.  Celica’s entire story, on the other hand, is nothing but a series of follies that serve to underscore the idea that trusting in the gods rather than humanity is hopeless.  She is the goddamn Goofus to Alm’s Gallant.

Now, sure, it’s quite possible to have a very effective protagonist and successful story when the work’s message is made through a protagonist’s repeated failures rather than success--but that’s only gonna work when there’s 1 protagonist to work with.  When you’ve got 2 main characters, and 1 of them is always right as he proves the overall theme by successfully implementing its ideals, and 1 of them is always wrong as she proves the overall theme by acting against its ideals and consistently failing, then obviously the guy who actually embodies the story’s message is going to seem far more genuinely the protagonist of the game!

Hell, Celica’s side of the story isn’t even fun to play.  I mean, sure, it’s an RPG, so it’s not fun anyway, but there’s no denying that having to deal with poison terrain and mob spawns over and over in Celica’s story makes it far more of a slog than Alm’s.

Fire Emblem 15 presents itself as a joint story of multiple protagonists each journeying to save the world in their own way, but Treasure of the Rudras this ain’t.  Alm and Celica’s individual worth as protagonists is just completely lopsided.  The fact of the matter is that FE15 is just a regular RPG story of a hero and a supporting magical plot girl that he’s ultimately responsible for babysitting.













* And honestly, even this is kind of just unnecessary.  Since her goal is to find a non-violent means to end the war, first by appealing to a mother goddess and then by agreeing to a really, really stupid deal, Celica’s being a capable fighter and military leader isn’t actually important the way it is for Alm to be.


** Which, by the way, annoys me greatly from an ethical standpoint.  While I accept that there are times when a peaceful solution to international conflict is simply not possible, Fire Emblem 15 seems eager to make the case that attempting a diplomatic solution is invariably so ineffectual that it’s pointless to even try.  This is a game where crushing your enemies and annexing their territory is how peace is achieved, while attempting to involve greater powers as mediators and treating with your enemies only worsens the situation.  Yeah, very healthy perspective to have, Nintendo, thanks a bunch for the great insight.

Fire Emblem 15 Stray Thoughts

You know, I actually am finding that I really like these mini-rant collections quite a lot.  Most of my thoughts and criticisms about an RPG don’t necessarily amount to a full essay’s worth, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to say my piece about a game nonetheless.  This is turning out to be a really handy way to get this junk off my mind without having to pad it out.  And it’s handy for a game like Fire Emblem 15, a game which is fine, but not remarkable enough that most of my impressions about it have been particularly strong, but also juuuuuust dumb enough at times that I do want to poke fun at it a bit.



- Toward the end of the game’s prologue, Celica asks Mycen if he thinks she’ll ever meet Alm again, to which he responds, “I do.  So long as destiny wills it.”

Uhhh...so if I’m working with an adequate understanding of the definition of the word “destiny,” then what you’re saying, Mycen, is, “Yeah, I think it’ll happen, as long as it’s something that’s gonna happen.”  Yeah, uh, just as a heads-up: literally anything and everything that happens does so because destiny wills it.  That’s how destiny works.


- Nintendo made an interesting attempt in this game to add a more traditional battle encounter system with the incorporation of some (very mild) third-person POV dungeon-crawling.  It...doesn’t really work, honestly.  Generally speaking, Tactical RPG combat systems just make encounters take too long to get through for mundane run-into-enemy fights to feel like anything more than a chore.  Random encounters when you weren’t specifically hoping to grind some levels was easily the most annoying part of Final Fantasy Tactics for me, and FFT, at least, allowed for some proper leveling to come from them, whereas the capacity for unit growth in Fire Emblem games is pretty strictly controlled and thus these little battles generally don’t offer much reward for the time you put into them.  Additionally the actual process of navigating these dungeons is so rudimentary, and the dungeons themselves designed so half-heartedly, that the whole experience is bland and tasteless, even by RPG standards.

Still, it is kind of interesting that it happened at all.  Fire Emblem isn’t given to mixing up its formulaic gameplay elements with anything more than some benign window-dressing here and there, at least from what I’ve seen of it, so this approach did catch my eye.


- Hey, it turned out Mycen was right, the thing happened because it was fated to happen so it did!  What he didn’t realize, however, was that destiny also willed Celica and Alm’s reunion to be written by a goddamn pod-person whose only training at being human was reading tweets between feuding Youtubers.

Seriously, Alm and Celica’s reunion quarrel feels like 2 tabletop players were intentionally competing to see who could fail the most persuasion checks in a row.  I’ve seen incompetent writers artificially heap on the melodramatic short-tempered misunderstandings, but jeez.  We go from Celica tackle-hugging Alm so joyfully that she nearly sends them both tumbling over the balcony to their deaths, to stacking enough spontaneous accusations and truly absurd overreactions within a less than 3 minute conversation that Celica’s storms out in a huff at what a stubborn jerk Alm is, with him basically muttering “Nuh-uh, YOU ARE!” to her back.  If you programmed an AI to write scripts for 1 Life to Live and fed it nothing but dialogue written by George Lucas, this is the scene you’d get.


- Since we’re on the subject, the beginning part of that reunion isn’t handled much better.  Celica ecstatically exclaims that she’s finally found Alm after all this time, and it’s like...what do you mean, found him, and what do you mean, after all this time?  You’re only even on this continent for your own unrelated quest, Celica, you weren’t looking for Alm.  And if you had been, it wouldn’t have been all that hard; up until 2 weeks ago, the kid had been sitting in the same village you left him at for the past 7 years straight!  No “finding” was involved in this matter.


- Clair: “You think you can walk up to a woman and ply her with a few compliments?”
Me: “Clair honey are you aware of which franchise you’re in?”

Seriously, though, it’s a trite, cheap business that even after Clair properly and justifiably rejects Gray’s shallow wish to get into her pants, FE15’s ending tosses her to him like a piece of meat anyway.  Even if the writers want to completely disregard it, I completely agree with Clair’s proudly stated belief that the person she falls for should actually know her as a person before loving her.

In fact, I think I may agree with her sentiments a little more than SHE does, because her immediate, obvious, and skin-deep infatuation with Alm at the moment they met is exactly the behavior that she’s criticizing Gray for...


- They really oversold the whole conflict between Alm and Celica, to a degree so exaggerated that it ought to legally qualify as false advertising.  I mean, the title cinematic opens with Alm and Celica reading a book about how Mila and Duma fought each other, and, in just so natural a fashion, tell each other, “Oh well let’s promise to NEVER fight each other like that, how silly would that be, amirite?” which has never, ever been said by any children who weren’t 100% guaranteed to someday try to kill each other.  And then the game opens with a spoiler of the scene near the end of the game where Alm’s stabbed Celica with the Falchion.  The game’s selling you HARD on the tragedy of war pitting 2 people in love against each other fatally.

And it’s all just leading to this wet fart of a narrative payoff.  Yeah, Alm and Celica have a battle to the death--because Celica is under a villain’s mind control.  Yeah, Alm’s forced to kill Celica during the battle--a death she is immediately resurrected from; I’m talking from corpse to opening her eyes and striking up a conversation in 1.5 minutes.  Nintendo, you tremendous nincompoops, there is not the slightest element of epic tragedy nor irony in Celica and Alm taking up arms against each other if 1 doing it out of mind control instead of choice!  And there is likewise not a shred of weight or pathos to the idea of this fight leading to Alm unwillingly killing Celica if she’s gonna pop back right as rain in less time than it takes Hulu to run a commercial break!  Alm and Celica never willingly clash, Celica recovers from death at a rate of literally, mathematically more than 10,000 times the rate at which I recover from the mere inconvenience of a poison ivy rash, their armies are not marching in conflict with one another, and the one and only time they don’t get along, EVER, is, as mentioned above, so absurdly unnatural that I have to assume that it was actually penned by a bowl of yogurt.  The grand, dramatic tragedy of fate and circumstance turning cherished loves against one another that was implied and as good as promised is nowhere in Fire Emblem 15.


- So Alm and Celica were, at least for a little while, raised by the same grandfather figure.  And when they were reading that story about Mila and Duma’s conflict, their promise not to fight as did Mila and Duma draws a clear symbolic parallel between the pairs.  Similarly, in a few other ways late in the game and in the ending, this idea that Alm and Celica symbolically represent Mila and Duma is reinforced.  Alm and Celica, the main couple who get married in the end.  And Mila and Duma, the dragons, who are brother and sister.

Oh Fire Emblem, you are just incorrigible.  Even when you don’t actually have incest, I can tell you’re thinking about it, you rascal.


- I know that, by this point in the story, Berkut is certifiable for a stay in the looney bin or a stint as the CEO of Gearbox Entertainment, but I nonetheless cannot help but wonder about the logistics of his proposal to hold his and Rinea’s wedding atop Alm’s funeral.  How do you see this happening, exactly, Berky?  You gonna get down in the grave and balance on Alm’s casket, exchanging vows as the pallbearers start shoveling clumps of dirt down onto your tux?  Is there gonna be 1 preacher guy saying “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust” while another preacher guy sits on the first one’s shoulders and starts up with, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today,” each of them passing a Bible back and forth between them and hastily flipping between relevant passages?

Or maybe you see yourself climbing up on top of Alm’s funeral pyre--finally got to be king of that hill, buddy, congrats!--and exchange rings with Rinea as the mourners hose you and the pile down with kerosene and toss a match?  I mean you’ve already made Rinea into some eternally-burning witch, so I guess roasting yourself is in the spirit of the whole “what’s yours is mine” marital thing.


- I guess reasoning out how one conducts one’s wedding atop a funeral is a moot point when the intended deceased soundly whups your ass, though.  But at least Alm’s final victory over Berkut gives us this equally stupid gem to mull over, as Alm despairs over having been forced to kill his last blood relative: “Don’t you get it?  I’ve spent enough of my life alone!”

Oh, yeah, buddy, for sure.  Yeah, you were really spending your life alone, alright, what with the grandfather who raised you, and the 4 steadfast friends who were always there for you and even marched off to fucking WAR solely for the sake of supporting you.  Yeah, no, you’re right, I guess none of them fucking count because they don’t happen by dumb chance to share your genetics.  How fucking tragic, Alm, that you only had people who loved you and stood by you in your life, when you could have had Berkut instead.


- Duma’s final words are to advise Alm and Celica to let his and Mila’s “grave mistakes be warnings of where not to tread” as Alm and Celica lead the world into the future.  Um, weren't your "mistakes" just the fact that after enough time had passed, each of you lost your minds?  So...your advice boils down to "don't go violently insane."  Uh, yeah, thank heavens you mentioned it, Duma, doubtless that was at the top of their to-do list.


- Arguably the biggest point of Alm’s character development in the first half of the game is the fact that he’s proving that all men are equal and that social status does not dictate ability, as a peasant who achieves martial and leadership prowess that surpasses the nobles he’s surrounded by.  The game seems very intent on setting him up to be an icon of the idea that greatness is within anyone’s reach, and assuming importance based on circumstances of birth is foolish.

And then the writers go and reveal that he’s actually the son of the Rigellian emperor.  They throw 70% of the development they’ve given Alm over the course of the game, along with every single argument he’s ever made on the matter of merit through ability rather than birth, out the window.  They just rip up their own script, drop it in the toilet, take a big steamy dump on it, and slam their fist down on the flush lever like it owes them money.  There is now absolutely nothing whatsoever to say that all the villains’ sentiments in the game’s first half about nobles being the only individuals qualified to lead were in any way wrong.  Great fucking work, Nintendo, you really brought your goddamn A Game to this installment.


- So Faye is a woman who’s in love with Alm, but she never even stands a ghost of a chance of being with him because when filling out his Generic RPG Hero Application, he checked the “Path of Least Resistance” box under the Love Interest section.  And so this is the ending Faye gets:

“Unable to get Alm out of her mind, Faye returned to her old life in Ram Village. Eventually, she met and married a suitor who claimed he did not mind her pining for the king, though her habit of vanishing without notice for days at a time continued to worry her new family.”

Wow, awesome.  So Faye never gets over her love of Alm, lives a life so joyless that she frequently has to call in sick to her own marriage, and as a bonus, the innocent sod who married her gets to live the rest of his life knowing that he’s what his wife settled for--and it’s a transaction she regrets.

Faye wasn’t even in the original Fire Emblem 2, you know.  She was made exclusively for this remake.  Nintendo made the conscious, specific choice to invent Faye just so she could be miserable forever.


- You know, on that note...a lot of people criticize the direction that Fire Emblem has gone with its character interrelationships, making the games a veritable fleet of possible ships where each cast member has multiple potential romantic mates for the player to choose among.  And to be sure, it’s crassly indulgent pandering, it’s usually skewed unrealistically heavily and often even unfairly in favor of heterosexual pairings, it in large part caused the catastrophically idiotic Deeprealms Babysitters Club of FE14, and it frequently becomes a very troubling Eugenics 101 course for its audience.  Critiques of turning the series into the equivalent of a preteen giggling and mashing her dolls and action figures into each other in pairs according to whatever mad whimsy enters her head are quite fair.

But I’d like to point something out here: giving the player no agency over the romantic destinies of the cast of Fire Emblem 15 sure hasn’t done Clair, Faye, or Rinea any favors.  Especially Rinea, Jesus Christ.  I mean, not for nothing, but a more pandering Fire Emblem title would have meant that the player potentially could have saved Clair from a guy, one whom she’s outright and fervently said she has no romantic interest in, managing to brute-force his way into an off-screen marriage to her.  There might, after all, have been some options for Clair with someone whose romantic history with her could be summed up by more than just “Durr priddee gurrl hurr” and “Durr priddee gurrl yell at me and say she no like me? Even better!”  And excessive fanservice might at least have meant that Faye would get some love interest options written by an intern or a janitor or a guy who accidentally wandered into the wrong room or something, just anyone in the building who wasn’t a writer whose ex-girlfriend by suspicious coincidence also happened to be named Faye.

Rinea, not being an actual party member, would of course still be completely screwed and stuck in 1 of the Worst Romances in RPG history.  Look, it’s not a perfect solution.  But still, multiple romance options, even if motivated solely for juvenile and pandering reasons, at least means less chance of a decent character having her romantic fate railroaded without recourse by a writer whose subconscious resentment toward women seems to underscore a lot of the game.


- Let me see if I’ve got this right, Nintendo.  So in addition to everything else that makes Edelgard just truly, sincerely awful...you’re telling me that she’s not even a character in her own right, but rather a more gullible knock-off of Emperor Rudolf, from the Fire Emblem that directly preceded hers?

Fire Emblem 15's Royal Treasury

So...a treasury that only allows in those of the royal family.  How much use is that, exactly?

Think about this.  The royal treasury of the empire of Rigel in Fire Emblem 15 can only be accessed by those of royal blood.  So...doesn’t that mean that any time anyone needs something from the vault, whenever some relic or parchment in there is necessary for the sake of state business, they have to petition the emperor himself to haul his ass down to the basement to fetch it?  And it’s a good bit of a walk, too: this vault’s sitting smack dab in the middle of the final dungeon.  The emperor’s gotta clear his whole schedule and make a morning of it any time someone needs a particular national treasure for some reason or other.

And this uppity storage unit ain’t kidding about only opening to royalty, either.  This isn’t some situation where His Royal Highness can just show up, open the door, and get back to his business while some servants head in to procure whatever’s needed.  He really is the ONLY one that can go in.  No cargo-haulers, no dignitary from a neighboring nation that the emperor talked into helping him move this weekend, not even a goddamn intern with a dolly is following him in there.  Meaning that Emperor Amazon Fulfillment Center has to haul out anything he wants from the vault all on his own.  Yeah, that’s definitely what I want as ruler of a nation, alright--I want to keep important shit I might need in an emergency within a warehouse I have to drive 30 miles to get to, where I get to be a 1-man warehouse worker union.

And is it really such a good idea to keep Falchion in this vault?  Falchion, the god-slaying sword given to humanity as a safeguard against the day that the continent’s dragon overlords turn against their people?  The one weapon that gives humanity the capacity to defend itself against an otherwise theoretically unstoppable force?  You’re keeping Falchion in a treasury that only a tiny handful of very killable human beings can get into.  A tiny handful of very killable human beings who traditionally all congregate in the same palace, meeting with the same people, hanging out in the same throne room, eating at the same table!  The sword that represents the great and final hope of the human species is 1 really poorly-cooked fish dinner away from being lost forever to an uncooperative doorknob.

You know what would be a great way of keeping the stuff in your vault secure, but accessible to a highly reasonable degree?  A fucking key.  Just get some magical lock made that only recognizes a special royal crest or whatever--don’t pretend that’s gonna be less feasible than a goddamn DNA-scanning teleporter--and use that.  That way, the most important human being in the entire nation doesn’t have to lug himself through the catacombs every time Royal Gardener Harry needs the legendary +3 Vorpal Hedge Shears because those damned briars in the back are getting uppity again.  He can just give Harry--or a duly appointed designee, never put too much trust in a guy who has a wisteria as his emergency contact--the royal crest key thing, tell him to bring it right back afterwards, and get on with his day.

Hm?  What’s that?  Oh, “What if the Falchion falls into the wrong hands?”  Hmm, yeah, you know, I guess you’re right, it WOULD be pretty bad if someone were to kill the emperor, steal the key, and make a withdrawal of $God-Buster.  Yes, that’d be a real disaster!

But hey, you know what would also be pretty bad?  If instead of killing the emperor and getting the key to the vault, someone were to kill the emperor and there was no key and now no one can have the Falchion.  I mean, if we’re gonna suppose the possibility of a bad guy offing the emperor, I’d sure as hell rather run the risk of having to foil a villainous plot to abuse the power of the Falchion than to run the risk of the only defense against a malevolent god becoming eternally and irreversibly beyond anyone’s grasp.  Frankly, if it means not having to worry that humanity’s fate is 1 loose patch of carpeting on a palace stair away from sealed, I’ll happily run the risk of the royal treasury key being snatched up by any old pickpocket, some 2-bit usurper, or even just an intern who got mixed up and handed the emperor back the bathroom key by mistake.  A single detour from the main plot is all that’s required to fetch the damned key from a mortal holder.

But as the royal treasury stands now, a round of flu breaking out at the capital--or hell, even just a sole royal heir who doesn’t feel like walking all the way down there--is all it’ll take to make every single thing in that vault inaccessible forever.  Deus Ex Machina devices aren’t usually icons of intelligent thinking, but Fire Emblem 15’s royal treasury is a cut below nonetheless.

...And yes, I know that this is 1 of the least important things I’ve ever ranted about.  I’m not apologizing.

Fire Emblem 14's Unofficial Gay Fates Mod is Delightful

I’ve been trying to write this rant for a while now, and I always get stuck with it, because I keep trying to be a verbose grandstanding idiot about it, going on about the noble creative endeavors that RPG mods can be as works of love, creativity, and a desire to correct costly mistakes, and blah blah blah.  And all that is absolutely true and some of it’s even true for this particular mod, but in the end, it’s not what’s goddamn relevant.  What is, is the fact that Fire Emblem 14’s Unofficial Gay Fates mod is simple, delightful fun built on fans’ love for the game’s characters and the self-indulgence of shipping the hell out of all of them.  And damn it all, I like it for that, and so will you.

An expanded continuation of an abandoned mod that caught my eye some years ago,* the Unofficial Gay Fates Add-On mod is pretty simple and straightforward in concept: it adds social links Supports, both whole new ones altogether and also new S-Rank conversations for existing ones, written by a myriad number of fans who have collaborated on this project.  A lot of new Supports, for that matter.  And this takes many forms.

Now of course, this is most obviously represented by pairs of characters who didn’t have any kind of support connection in the original FE14 now, with this mod, able to form meaningful friendships, and even** become romantically involved.  This, of course, is going to most often be true for same-sex couples, since the characters already had a ton of heterosexual options available in the vanilla game.  Also, character pairs who had supports that had no romantic S rank before may now have this cherished Let’s Bone rank (which again is most often true for same-sex pairs), and characters who could romance Corrin heterosexually may now also get their gay on should Corrin be of their own sex, with the final romance interaction appropriately altered to represent Corrin’s gender (which in at leat 1 case involved actual re-writing beyond just pronoun switching (more on this case below)).  There’s, like, dozens of entirely new support conversation chains that the mod adds which end with romance.  FE14 was already packed full of potential love stories, but with the Unnoficial Gay Fates Add-On, you can just go absolutely hog wild with it.

Fanservicy?  Oh it’s fanservicy.  It’s fanservicy as fuck.  This is self-indulgence to an extreme within a franchise that is already unhealthily indulgent about such things.

But hang it all, it’s still fun.  This isn’t some game company gracelessly pandering in the hopes of making a cheap, sleazy buck off of its audience.  We, the audience ourselves, are the ones creating these indulgent scenarios.  Not out of some crass hope of hitting the lowest common denominator selling point, but because we actually like the work’s characters, and want to have more content of them to enjoy.  I think fanservice is a hell of a lot less deplorable when it’s massaging characters’ potential out of love than when it’s twisting characters’ essence out of greed.

And that love and gentle treatment shows in this work, because honestly, the overall level of writing to be found in this mod is solid.  Now I haven’t read all of them, and there’s some variation from 1 fan writer to the next...but overall, the characters are represented well, the scenarios in which they engage with one another and become friends and lovers are decent and at times even inventive, and the emotional progression generally checks out well (within reason; we’re still talking about going from 0 - 69 in just 4 conversations).  And most of them even still feel authentic to the general method and ambiance of the game’s original material.  Not ALL of them, admittedly, because some of us just can’t help being overly verbose garrulous windbags no matter what we do, resulting in conversations that are like 3x longer than anything you’d normally have found in the game, but eh.

Yes, I contributed some of the Supports in this mod, so yes, a lot of the last 2 paragraphs was me shamelessly patting myself on the back.  I don’t care.  I like what I wrote, and I like the characters I wrote for.  The world forgives show- and game-ruining narcissism from the likes of Dan Harmon and Randy Pitchford; I think I can be forgiven a little pride here and there.  I’ve still got a ways to go before I see David Cage in the mirror.

Beyond being genuinely enjoyable and giving the player a chance to do more shipping in an afternoon than their local FedEx hub, it should be noted that this mod DOES have its higher purposes.  Yes, its draw is primarily for the simple fun of it, but I wouldn’t be making a rant about it here if that truly were all there was to it.  The Unofficial Gay Fates Add-On also fixes some mistakes that the original FE14 made.  Remember my list of Fire Emblem 14’s romances?  After I celebrated the best the game had to offer and lamented its worst, I also listed out certain love story options that really should have been available to the player, such as the popularly desired Ryoma x Scarlet (given that they have an actual personal connection in the main story, which you sure as hell can’t say about most of the various shipping possibilities in the game), or the option for characters who very clearly, canonically already have romantic and/or sexual interests in their own gender to romance Corrin regardless of gender (how insane is it that Soleil’s only able to romance Male Corrin, yet her interest in him is based on closing her eyes and pretending that he’s a girl?).  Quite obviously, this mod corrects these mistakes of negligence, allowing for several romantic relationships whose absence in FE14 was a notable error.***

Additionally, I’m just pleased overall that FE14 now (unofficially) has a good number of homosexual relationships available to its characters.  I was really annoyed over how incredibly tiny a first step FE14 was for the series (and the publisher, for that matter) into realistically representative romance options, and I sincerely think this is what Fire Emblem 14 needed. And while you can certainly make the argument that giving every character multiple same-sex relationship options is overkill, that overkill is still a hell of a lot better than the previous state of inadequacy.  It’s not like you HAVE to engage in teh gayz with every character if you don’t want to, and even if it’s obvious where the main focus of the mod is, like I said earlier, there’s plenty of new heterosexual couples added in, too.

Also, I know it’s not a huge thing, but it’s a bit of a relief that Peri now has more than just 1 single romantic option that actually helps her grow and develop past being a mental-age-stinted murder-hobo.  And just for a little extra fun, this mod also incorporates a different one which makes Lilith a playable character, complete with her own Supports, which is nice, honestly, because she kinda got dropped and forgotten by the original game, and definitely deserved better.

The Unnofficial Gay Fates Add-On mod really displays just how much its community genuinely enjoys and cares for the characters of this game in ways that go far past the self-indulgence of shipping, too.  The mod also adds quite a few unique conversations between potential mothers and children (which, in the original game, were only represented by a single stock conversation per child), unique conversations between potential same-sex fathers and their children and between siblings created through male same-sex romances (so the mod opens up and then provides an entire new branch of parent-child and sibling interaction Supports),**** and even a bunch of purely platonic Supports between various other characters, often a first generation character and a second generation character who might have cause to have interactions and a connection.  You’ll come for the shipping, but you’ll stay for the tremendous expansion on the cast’s interrelationships.  And again, while I haven’t seen them all by a long shot, what I’ve experienced has been consistently good quality.

Worth noting is also the care and skill which the leader of this project, Babysauce, or Chicken McNuggies (depending on whether they prefer their name on GameBanana or Youtube), has transcribed these conversations into the game.  Not only does Babysauce transcribe all these conversations into the game--which by itself is a huge feat, considering there is, at the time I write this, 367 Supports***** that have been added or changed by the mod, and at least a few of them are pretty damn long--but they also add textual effects where appropriate.  It’s not just 2 people standing there exchanging text boxes; there are times when the mod’s conversations are almost like a Tales of skit with how effectively they’re executed.

Additionally, Babysauce has added a feature from Fire Emblem 13 that was cut from FE14: the use of characters’ spoken lines in their Support conversations.  In FE13, conversations would apparently (I still haven’t played it) use some basic, pre-packaged vocal lines for each character that, while not actually speaking the lines in the text box, would roughly represent the intent/mood of the dialogue.  A character might say, for example, “My heart flutters when mine eyes behold thy sublime countenance, oh cherished beloved,” in the text box, while the vocal line “WOOO YEAH BRO THAT’S THE GOOD SHIT” plays over it to emphasize the character’s positive excitement.  Exaggeration for humorous effect aside, though, it’s a cute quirk of the Support conversations that does add to their quality in FE13, and the fact that Babysauce has now used FE14’s existing voice acting lines recorded for battle scenarios is just 1 more feather in this mod’s cap.

And it’s worth a decent bit of respect, too, because it means that in addition to transcribing all these dozens and dozens of new conversations, Babysauce is also taking the time to review them for appropriate moments to add these vocal effects, too.  The amount of care and effort that’s been put into this mod is staggering the more I think about it.

Now, it’s all fine and dandy and well and good and nice and spiffy and peachy that this mod exists, and is a lot of fun, and is well done, but of course, not everyone’s got the know-how and tech wherewithal to go around modding their 3DS games.  Or maybe everyone actually does, and it’s just me who’s a slack-jawed moron.  But either way, the great thing about The Unnofficial Gay Fates Add-On is that you don’t actually HAVE to install it to enjoy its content.  Because, as it turns out, Babysauce has also gone and uploaded a video of basically every Support added by the mod to Youtube!  So you can even experience the joy of your favorite ships from the comfort of your own technological disinclination!

So if you like Fire Emblem 14’s cast, but were left in any way wanting about who could hook up, or you’d be interested to see the family dynamics of its first and second generations expanded upon, or even just want to see what happens when I try my hand at silly stupid sappy fanfiction,****** you should check out The Unofficial Gay Fates Add-On mod.  It’s earnest, skillful, and a heck of a lot of fun!















* Unassuming Venusaur’s Same-Sex Marriage Patch, to give proper credit.


** Ha!  “Even.”  As though the shipping isn’t entirely the reason for it.


*** I’m quite pleased that I got to be involved in 1 of these corrections, that being (re)writing the S Support I felt was most mistakenly left out of the game, Camilla with Female Corrin.


**** Children are linked to their fathers in this game, so the child character of Mitama, for example, is always the daughter of her father Azama, while her mother could be any of Azama’s Supports that can reach S Rank.  With this mod, though, Azama could potentially get together with, say, Silas.  Mitama still exists, whether through a surrogate mother or some magical conception-to-birth means, but obviously the stock conversations she could have with her mother are not viable.  But this mod also adds a unique Support, in that case, between Mitama and her second father Silas--it really goes all in on these.  Similarly, since child characters are linked to their fathers, male same-sex pairings in this game leads to 2 child characters who are now siblings--in the example I gave, Sophie, as Silas’s daughter, is also now Mitama’s sister.  And the mod also provides a unique Support between Mitama and Sophie in this scenario which reflects their connection.


***** In fairness, I would assume that the many, many Supports that originated in Unassuming Venusaur’s progenitor to this mod had most of the work done for them.  But Babysauce has still done probably more than half of the total conversations in this mod, I would say.


****** Oh you all KNOW I’m too shameless not to share these things with you directly.  AND share my thoughts on them as if anyone cares.  Enjoy, maybe!

Camilla x Corrin (S Rank): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rflb6JCnaHw
For most gay Corrin S conversations, a simple matter of pronoun-switching is all that’s needed, but Camilla’s specifically involves referencing a scenario--Corrin, a man, and Camilla, a woman, going on a vacation to a hot springs resort together--that just doesn’t have the same social context when it’s between 2 women, so some additional care was called for.  I know this is all a bunch of silly fanfiction, but I’m all the same very pleased with how I’ve reworked this conversation to stay generally in line with the original, but have Corrin’s concern about appearances make a bit more sense.

...And then use that slight alteration as a springboard to add juuuuust a bit of character stuff for Camilla and her obsession with Corrin.  Because Qi Jhong help me I just can’t stop myself.


Mitama x Selkie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWQMkdkLB_M
Mitama is my spirit animal and I fucking love her.*******  And Selkie just never ceases to amuse me.  I’m most proud of my Camilla x Corrin S rewrite, but I definitely had the most fun and personally like this Support the most of these.


Mitama x Ophelia: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSelw-egmi0
I just have a certain fondness for burdening Mitama with quirky, disruptive, and arguably mildly insane characters, it seems.  Camilla x Corrin is the one I’m proudest of, and Mitama x Selkie is the one I had the most fun with (not that I didn’t enjoy writing all of these, mind you), but objectively, I think the best overall of my Supports is probably this one; it just seems to flow right and bring them together very well.


******* YES I AM AWARE OF THE IRONY OF MY LIKING THE CHARACTER ALL ABOUT HAIKUS, THE FORM OF POETRY DEFINED BY COMMUNICATING WITH STRICT BREVITY.

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.

Fire Emblem 16's Dorothea Should have Sung More

Is it just me, or does Fire Emblem 16 fail to take full advantage of the perfection of Dorothea’s voice actress?  I mean, Dorothea’s a wonderful character as a whole, and Allegra Clark, the woman who plays her in the English translation, is actually capable of imbuing her performance as Dorothea with both the warm, engaging friendliness and the gripping, heartfelt sorrow that most define the character.  I honestly find her work here amazing: to be able to keep up with a character as personally nuanced as Dorothea is impressive enough, but Clark has talent enough to go beyond simply being equal to the task, and puts forth a performance that quickly becomes so signature to who Dorothea is that it’s hard to think of any other voice for her.

And she’s got a lovely singing voice!  Now yeah, I admittedly know dick-all about anything musical, but I think I can at least tell this much: Allegra Clark’s got some sweetly sonorous pipes.  And you’d think that’d be a perfect quality for this character, given that Dorothea’s famous across all of Fodlan for being the greatest diva of her time.  Right?

But as it turns out, Clark’s lovely talent for song is barely even touched upon in Fire Emblem 16!  Yeah, you’ve got a character defined in no small part by her status as a nationally renowned star of the opera, and a voice actress that can actually make you believe that, and yet Dorothea sings, what, twice in the entire game!?*

Ferdinand!  Fucking FERDINAND gets to belt out a tune as often as the character who’s an operatic superstar!  And don’t even get me started on Annette.  Annette gets to do some sing-song nonsense 4 times!  I have to sit through Annette’s painfully dumb little songs about her eating dinner or cleaning a room like she’s some Dreamworks princess reject twice as often as I get the pleasure of hearing Dorothea sing?**

Yeah, I know that the translation team probably can’t change Dorothea’s support conversations or main game dialogue just because this side of the ocean really lucked out with its casting call, but honestly, I still feel it’s not entirely unwarranted to complain.  Because really, regardless of the actors for the parts, does it make any sense that of all the characters who are given opportunities to sing in the game, the ones who do so the least often are the opera stars?  It's an error in logic no matter how you look at it.

It just seems like a real wasted opportunity to take advantage of the full range of an actress’s talent, especially when to do so would have been so easy and natural for the character.

















* And 1 of those times is for and about Edelgard, of all schmucks!  Jeez, Nintendo, you couldn’t at least have had Dorothea sing about a subject more worthy of her talents?  Manuela, Dorothea’s other friends, the goddess, the war currently raging across the land, a particularly good salad, pocket lint, almost anything I can think of would be more deserving of the praise of Dorothea/Allegra Clark’s musical talent than that gullible moron!


** Yes, yes, yes, I know Annette’s voice actress, Abby Trott, is the woman who sang the Super Smash Brothers Ultimate main theme and thus clearly also has substantial musical talent.  But that was Smash and this is Fire Emblem, and that talent is not on display with Annette.  I frankly think that the tortured groans of Draco as the Super Nintendo’s soundcard desperately threw its every limited faculty into imitating the voice of a human being (or possibly a troll-bulldog-washing-machine hybrid) in Final Fantasy 6’s opera made for a more melodious musical experience than Annette’s little ditties.