bowbowis

[bowbowis]

Just to hammer it home, while Edelgard is sneaking around, cutting backroom deals, and generally working her ass off to seize the power she needs to make change, all the powerful nobles around Dimitri are literally begging him to take the throne early and become their absolute monarch. Truly the only thing stopping him is his insistence on adhering to tradition.

Y'know, I think one of the many elegant ways that Three Houses shows the difference between Dimitri and Edelgard comes with Dimitri's comments about wishing he could assume his throne for the good of the kingdom but being "rendered powerless by age." Like, he says this, but doesn't seem to actually do anything about it. He clearly has ideas about how to help his people (whatever those ideas may have been) and at least the appearance of desire to enact them, yet he never fights for that. He doesn't push to take his throne early. He never even tries to get his uncle to act in his stead. He encounters one barrier that has any weight of the status quo behind it and gives up. He complains, but he never rocks the boat.

Meanwhile, Edelgard has been amassing influence and allies for quite some time before you even meet her. She gathers the backing she needs and then takes her throne as soon as possible because she has fucking work to do, goddess damn it. To her, the work that must be done a.d the people she must do it for is always more important than the traditions that would stand in her way. To Dimitri, if he must choose, no work and no people could ever hope to outweigh the sanctity of tradition.

[bowbowis]

Not to mention the countless home invasions and his habit of smuggling goods across international borders.

Plus, I always thought the whole watching little kids while they're sleeping thing was kind of sketchy.

i hope you all realize that literally nobody is going around forcefemming cis men in real life, right? like that is Not A Thing that is happening. everyone who posts forcefem jokes on tumblr is well aware that doing that would be. you know. a crime. it's barely even legal to consentfem trans women in a lot of places.

[bowbowis]

Why are we putting off such fundamental communication skills until college anyway? Especially when the bullshit peddlers are producing content specifically targeted at the K-12 demographic? Kids should be learning basic logic and skepticism right alongside 1 + 1 =2 and the alphabet song, before they've had a chance to build an entire worldview based on nonsense.

Ken Ham (who you may know as "that creationist guy who debated Bill Nye and got obliterated so hard that even his own followers couldn't pretend he'd won") just opened an unaccredited K-12 school, where he teaches children that evolution is myth; Earth is 6,000 years old; that humans coexisted with non-avian dinosaurs (which are also dragons); and that a 600 year old man and two of every kind of animal survived a physically impossible flood on a wooden boat that was both smaller than an American football field and still too big to be seaworthy. And that's not even touching on his views about LGBTQ+ people, atheists, and basically anyone who doesn't follow his particular interpretation of Christianity.

Parents will send their children to that school because they never learned the necessary skills to avoid being taken in by grifters, and now their kids will never even have the chance.

[bowbowis]

It occurs to me that modern AU Boar!Dimitri would be an Alex Jones expy screaming about how Edelgard did 9/11 as a newborn.

[bowbowis]

so many amazing words in the english language. you have clandestine and precarious and serendipity and iconoclast and then you also have staunch and sludge and slurp and smudge

[bowbowis]

What if the cat is simultaneously okay and not okay until you observe it?

I'm not usually a fan of games where the Shocking Twist™ is that the cozy life sim is secretly Lovecraftian survival horror, but I make a specific exception for the hypothetical game about a young witch trying to solve the disappearance of her neighbour's cat in a small village in the Alps.

[bowbowis]

I just drop the factoid without context first, then proceed explain cladistics after I've sufficiently enjoyed the initial reactions.

It's the best of both worlds.

Frankly, I don't believe that most of the people who go around giving folks a hard time for, e.g., using the word "dinosaur" in way which implicitly excludes modern birds actually give a shit about taxonomic accuracy; they're just using cladistics as an excuse to indulge in linguistic prescriptivism.

[bowbowis]

Sonic the Hedgehog 3 may not take home any Oscars but it did get "cancelled" by Matt Walsh, which is a far more prestigious honor in my book.

[bowbowis]

Oh hey, it's that list I made to try and explain to Reddit that the out-of-house recruits actually do make sense in CF.

Don’t mind me, just posting a list of reasons why people follow Edelgard/Byleth in CF (instead of it all being following Byleth like the other routes)

[bowbowis]

I mean, that's bad, but two chapters prior you see Rhea dispatching the Knights to deal with rebels and sending students (potentially including the rebel leader's son) to observe the slaughter with the stated purpose being to teach them a lesson about defying the church. Then in the chapter immediately prior you see her order the execution of members of the Western Church without a trial.

The point is "Tower of Black Winds" isn't the first time you see Rhea doing sketchy shit. It's just the first time you see trying to conceal it rather than openly acting like a zealot.

Tower of Black Winds' place in Crimson Flower's narrative

A rather common take I see in the fandom is that White Clouds was written around the Blue Lions. The evidence for this is largely that you spend a lot of time interfacing with Kingdom politics early, with you fighting a rebellious Kingdom lord in chapter 3, the Kingdom's branch of the Church of Seiros in chapter 4, and a disowned Kingdom noble in chapter 5.

While it's true that you encounter elements of the Kingdom often in the early portions of White Clouds, this doesn't mean those portions of the game are written around the Kingdom students, and in fact changing the relationships Lonato and Miklan have to Ashe and Sylvain wouldn't change the focus of their respective chapters, evidenced in that they work for the Black Eagle and Golden Deer stories as well (better than the Blue Lions even, in the case of chapter 5).

Getting the easiest example out of the way, chapter 4 is not about Faerghus or the Kingdom at all, it's about the Church of Seiros's fractured state and the discovery of the Sword of the Creator. I would almost argue the first narrative hook matters least in Azure Moon because the Church of Seiros is a borderline non-entity in Azure Moon, or at least has less influence than in other routes.

Chapter 3 introduces... a lot of plot elements, honestly. It shows Faerghus's crumbling state, it brings up the Tragedy of Duscur, it introduces Catherine, it shows Rhea's harsh mindset toward rebellious elements, and it ends with your House Leader revealing something more about their mindset. Of these, I would argue the last two are the most important, as it's what the chapter ends on. By contrast, the Tragedy of Duscur quickly ends up buried by the frantic pace of the battle.

Chapter 5 is about Crests and Relics, not Faerghus or House Gautier. You can see this in what the three House Leaders have to talk primarily about once the chapter is over:

Edelgard rages against the injustice of Fodlan's Crest-based society.

Dimitri laments the importance Faerghus places on Crests and Relics.

Claude ponders the mysteries behind Relics.

The first of these is the heart of Edelgard's ideals, which are integral to Crimson Flower and Silver Snow.

The last, a major reveal that happens only at the end of Verdant Wind.

Azure Moon, on the other hand... is entirely about Dimitri's personal tragedy. What role does the influence of Crests and Relics have in Dimitri's backstory or his relationship with Edelgard? Uhh, none at all.

If anything, chapter 5 suits Azure Moon the least of all routes, despite taking place in Faerghus and being centered around the brother of one of the Blue Lions.

So although early White Clouds features a lot of Faerghus, not much of it is about Faerghus. Burying this theory even further is the reality that a good chunk of middle and later White Clouds transitions over to the Empire.

Now, going further, one of the main reveals that takes place in chapter 5 is about what Relics do the Crestless. We even see a whole cutscene which reveals the process in all its horror. This is used to an extent later in White Clouds when it's revealed the students were transformed into Demonic Beasts using the power of Crest Stone fragments, but the technique is only used for its full and true horror in one single route.

It's tragic that one of Dedue's most stand-out moments of agency comes on the route that isn't his :/

But yeah, if Tower of Black Winds works best in any route, it's Crimson Flower, which has Field of Revenge in it. You lived the nightmare of Conand Tower once, faced it in the form of Agarthan Demonic Beasts, and now you're finally coming up against it one last time on the Tailltean Plains, such that Dedue's plan ends up stealing the narrative weight from the Church of Seiros entirely. It works staggeringly well.

[bowbowis]

Maybe it was to paint Fraud as bootleg copy of Best Dad, who also erased Hrym when it wanted to say Adrestia goodbye and join the Alliance?

Sure, maybe it's to try and paint Claude as a copy of Ionius and maybe when Dimitri calls for the killing of all Adrestians and tries to retake the Faerghus Dukedom they're trying to paint him as a knockoff Thales who was also forced out of his home and wants to retake it via genocide.

Or maybe it's because those houses are committing treason and effectively declaring war on the Federation by defecting to a hostile power, which the writers felt that was sufficient explanation for Claude's actions.

Seriously, do you have some sort of reverse Occam's Razor heuristic? Like, instead of accepting the answer that makes the fewest assumptions as most likely true, you reject perfectly straightforward explanations and spin wild conspiracy theories instead?

Of course, actions having consequences is a concept alien to Fodlan, except when it's to bash some Northern barbarians, or to give more fuel to "Church BaD".

Edelgard gets killed for starting the war in three out of seven routes, and mindraped for defying TWSitD in a fourth, with her dreams of a more egalitarian Fódlan never being realized in either case; she has to let her friend (Monica) die to maintain her cover in four routes; she has to pay reparations to the Federation for attacking them in GW; she has to give up her momentum against the Kingdom to deal with the fallout of betraying TWSitD and showing mercy to Duke Aegir in SB; and Arianrhod gets nuked because she was too brazen in her defiance of TWSitD in CF.

Claude's refusal to commit to the war leads to his death or him being forced to give up on his ambitions and leave Fódlan in three out of seven routes. He can also be killed for betraying the Empire in SB. In the bad end route of GW his sacrificing Randolph leads to Judith being killed by Byleth when Fleche hires Jeralt's mercenaries.

Conversely, the worst consequence Dimitri ever faces for going on a five year torture and murder spree is Rodrigue dying (by jumping in front a blow meant for Dimitri, so even when his actions have consequences he's still being shielded from the worst of it). Notably, while whether Edelgard deserves punishment for her actions is left to the player's discretion (via the choice to kill or protect her in the Holy Tomb), there is no choice to make Dimitri answer for his crimes, not even picking a different house because in those routes he either gets himself killed making an unrelated tactical blunder (VW/SS) or never goes on the killing spree in the first place (CF). The lack of consequences is even more noticeable when you compare Dimitri to Jeritza, a character with a similarly murderous history who, rather than becoming king, insists on facing prison time after the war.

Did Hans 2 exist?

Who? Can you please just use the characters' actual names? These little insulting nicknames you make up are just childish and, in cases like this can make it impossible to tell who you're talking about. Like, I assume you're referring to someone who reminds you of Hans from Fates. The character who most reminds me of Hans from Fates is Metodey, but for all I know you could mean Kostas, or Kronya, or Hubert, or Jeritza, or Dimitri, or Caspar (it wouldn't be your most bizarre take on a character), or anyone else.

Did Supreme Leader have agency?

Yes, but that doesn't mean she can just do whatever she wants without consequences. A big part of her story is that she's stuck in a really shitty situation through no real fault of her own, and how she chooses to work with and eventually overcome the limitations she's been given to fulfill her dream. There's a reason Aymr is marked with the Devil Arcana (Crest of the Beast), which when upright represents being constrained by outside forces (as Edelgard is with her reliance on TWSitD), but which when reversed represents breaking free and retaking control of your life (as she does in CF).

Why Supreme Leader never offered the same offer of service she offered Leopold to Ludwig?

Because Ludwig is corrupt, was the ringleader of the insurrection that stripped her father of power, was responsible for all the torture and loss she and her siblings suffered in the dungeons, and is also not half as useful to have on her side as Fódlan's mightiest general is.

Is Bernie dad an asshat for beating up the assassin who wanted to murder his heir?

No. He's an asshat for abusing her until she developed a severe anxiety disorder and for protecting her only because he can't use her as a pawn in a political marriage if she's dead.

Is Rhea keeping Colonel Sanders locked in the Abyss?

Again, who? Could you at least put the actual name in parentheses? I'm guessing maybe you mean Hanneman, in which case no. What has exactly has he done to get sent Rhea's sewer ghetto?

Also I can't help but notice you don't have an insulting nickname for Rhea yet. Maybe you call her something like "Dumilla", or "Pope Fatass", or "Grandma Bad-Touch"?

Why Uncle Thales didn't target Enbarr with Javelins in Tru Piss, or pulled out Nemesis from his tupperware?

Because Edelgard pretended to be cowed be the attack on Arianrhod and the rest of their conflict is unfortunately relegated to the epilogue.

I joke a lot about the 10k years of lore, but let's be real, any game with plot threads as vague and weirdly hanging as the ones existing in that verse would have been roasted to oblivion if it didn't benefit from the same "circumstances" Fodlan did.

I mean, there are some areas that are left vague, but I think a lot of the confusion you're facing would be cleared up if you tried approaching the story without assuming that Edelgard is lying or wrong about everything ever.

Why did KT go out of it's way to state that Clout wiped out all the houses that tried to leave the Alliance only to ignore it for the rest of the route

Literally what does it even add other than making Clout look like an evil, power-hungry dictator whose cruel actions are never acknowledged by the story or characters

Maybe it was to paint Fraud as bootleg copy of Best Dad, who also erased Hrym when it wanted to say Adrestia goodbye and join the Alliance?

Of course, actions having consequences is a concept alien to Fodlan, except when it's to bash some Northern barbarians, or to give more fuel to "Church BaD".

Fodlan's plot is... foggy at best, which is why some people earlier theorised that we have a lot of fanworks about it, whenever fans are unhappy or not satisfied with plot threads, they tend to write fanfics/come up with HCs, and that's how we got 5 years of Discourse (tm).

Did Hans 2 exist? Did Supreme Leader have agency? Why Supreme Leader never offered the same offer of service she offered Leopold to Ludwig? Is Bernie dad an asshat for beating up the assassin who wanted to murder his heir? Is Rhea keeping Colonel Sanders locked in the Abyss? Why Uncle Thales didn't target Enbarr with Javelins in Tru Piss, or pulled out Nemesis from his tupperware?

We will never know.

I joke a lot about the 10k years of lore, but let's be real, any game with plot threads as vague and weirdly hanging as the ones existing in that verse would have been roasted to oblivion if it didn't benefit from the same "circumstances" Fodlan did.

[bowbowis]

I'm sure Faerghus's sense of justice appeals to them too.

So I pissed off a zionist and got them cope posting today before blocking, so I feel good about myself. Btw, is it me or are the Zionists in FE Fandom always in on the Anti-Edelgard crowd?

[bowbowis]

#i think especially zoomers forget also that she had a pretty sterling progressive reputation for a long time #like we dunk on the dumbledore gay reveal now but in 2007 even doing that post-publication in an interview #one that involved a bunch of fans including little kids asking her questions about the characters btw #was a pretty huge fucking deal for children's literature

It is worth taking a moment to appreciate just how far we've come in the last two decades. People may call JKR a coward for not addressing Dumbledore's sexuality in the books proper, but at that time it's likely the publisher would have flat out refused to print it if she'd tried.

I remember being floored back in 2013 when The House of Hades revealed that Nico was gay and had once had a crush on Percy. Not because I particularly thought Rick Riordan was averse to including LGBTQ+ characters in his works, but because he was able to get the book onto shelves without it being censored. My first thought was "I can't believe he got away with that", because up until then children's media had always treated same-sex attraction the same as straight-up intercourse: something age-inappropriate that you just didn't acknowledge.

Hell, it honestly wouldn't surprise if the Dumbledore gay reveal actually helped pave the way for authors like Riordan to publish books with characters who are explicitly shown to be LGBTQ+ in the text proper.

None of this is to defend JKR's more recent behavior, of course. She can go fuck herself. It's just something that's interesting to look back on.

There are people who actually worshipped JKR and there are people who gushed about her because she wrote Harry Potter and they loved Harry Potter who literally knew nothing about her that wasn't in the author bio on the dust jacket. I think fandom oriented people tend to forget how big a population the latter was! But Harry Potter was so huge at its peak that it had a lot of casual fans who deeply, deeply loved the series, maybe even knew the trivia of the actual books inside and out, but never engaged with the fandom side of things or dove deep into meta information. There were normies attending midnight release parties, the series was that big.

[bowbowis]

I'm begging gender essentialists to take a goddamn anthropology class, or at least crack open a fucking ethnography, and learn that their culture's norms are not immutable truths written into the fabric of the universe.

stop worrying about whether or not queer identities "make sense". gender itself doesn't make sense. "woman" and "man" are arbitrary constellations of traits and features that don't reflect how people who fall into those genders actually think, feel and behave. the definitions we have for manhood and womanhood don't make sense, either. according to cisheteronormative society, feminine men and masculine women don't "make sense" either. the biological sex binary makes ABSOLUTELY no sense, with intersex people proving that it quite literally doesn't exist.

why do queer identities have to "make sense" in order for you to see them as valid? they shouldn't have to. let go and accept that identity is not a scientific theory. it doesn't have to "make sense". none of this does. stop running others' identities through such scrutiny and realize your identity doesn't "make sense", either. embrace it. it's a good thing.

[bowbowis]

No. Petting cats is all part of her fourth-wall breaking, 8D chess, succubus mind games to trick horny men into thinking she's likable so she can sell Heroes alts.

“Rhea’s a genocide survivor and likes cats so she should be allowed to do whatever she wants!”

From the group that brought you - “Edelgard getting tortured and experimented on during her childhood doesn’t justify a continent-wide war” and “Edelgard liking sweets and having ‘cute moments’ is just fetish bait to make the war crimes seem less bad”!

“Edelgard getting tortured and experimented on during her childhood doesn’t justify a continent-wide war”

Well, that alone definitely wouldn't justify starting a continental war, so it's fortunate that's not why she does it :)

But yeah, it's so petty.

[bowbowis]

I noticed it early by playing Tru Piss but, basically, if Seteth's wrong when he suggests she deposed her dad from the throne to become Emperor, the scene when she talks to Best Dad is actually a coup! Not against Best Dad himself, but against Ludwig!

No more of a coup than Dimitri marching into Fhirdiad to depose Cornelia in AM or Rufus in AG. Edelgard is a lot nicer about it though.

We know she already has, during the coronation scene, access to the Military because Leopold is even more fickle than Asheron. So when she politely asks Ionius to give her the crown, and explains to Ludwig that she is now the Emperor, she is accompanied by Billy, and several soldiers :

There's a soldier standing next to Ionius too. It's almost like there are guards stationed in Imperial Palace to protect the Emperor and his heir.

The way the scene plays, she, Billy, Best Dad and the soldiers are on the same side, against Ludwig who just popped up, and well, when she dismisses him, a loldier is in the shot. Same when Best Dad tells her he leaves Fodlan in her hands, she agrees... with a soldier in the plan, not Billy, but a loldier :

Cool. No continuity errors with them just disappearing between shots then.

Seriously what's your point with this?

It's not a bloody one (not yet!), but it's a coup against Ludwig, where she takes back authority/power from his hands, and jails him.

What do you mean "yet". Edelgard is coronated and has Ludwig arrested. That's the coup. The war is something that happens after Edelgard has seized power.

(I wonder what the "she BaD bcs no fair TrIaL" crowd has to say about this scene lol, especially as Hopes!Ferdie notes there's no proof Ludwig is guilty of what he is accused of!)

Edelgard saw Ludwig participating in the kidnapping, torture, and murder of her siblings. That's probable cause to make an arrest and Hopes is explicit that the plan is to give him a fair trial. Edelgard's treatment of Ludwig is pretty well in line with how modern first-world justice systems are supposed operate. It is in no way comparable to Rhea skipping straight from arraignment to execution.

Back to your post, yep, it's a purge!

A purge of the corrupt and criminal elements in her government, not of ideological opponents. Big difference.

*Hopes retconned a lot of stuff, but imo Grégoire is notable as in, in Houses, Supreme Leader gets rid of him but in Hopes, he is used as a pawn. What warranted this difference? Is Grégoire less morally corrupt in Houses, or Supreme Leader gets rid of him because of his ties to Ludwig (after all, they were on good enough terms if Ludwig wanted to arrange a wedding between his precious heir and Grégoire's daughter!) without asking him to side with her, or she asked and he refused?

The difference is whether Edelgard has a use for him. In Hopes she revives the Southern Church to challenge the Central Church's monopoly on religious authority and build support for her cause among the populace in the two years leading up to the war. In Houses Edelgard has only a month between taking power and making her move, so there isn't time to use Varley to drive that wedge between Adrestia and the Church and thus no reason not to arrest him for his crimes.

But in Hopes, he accepts to betray Ludwig because, why not, and being the Leader of the Imperial Information Campaign, I mean, Southern Church, is more attractive than the ties he used to have with Ludwig?

Yes? Varley is a cowardly, dishonorable piece of shit who cares more about his wealth and status than his own daughter. What on Earth makes you think he'd stick his neck out for Ludwig, who has been arrested and stripped of power, instead of trying to ingratiate himself with Edelgard?

(or because KT new some players wanted to meet Bernie's dad, but since the fanbase never gaf about Vestra Sr, dude was off-screened in both games?)

Pretty much, yeah. People wanted to see Gregoire suffer for what he did to Bernie and Hopes delivered.

why the hate boner against the dude? Is it because she really believes he led the experiments? . . . #or is it something else? #Best Dad also blames Ludwig for the experiments #do they hate Ludwig because he dared to lead an insurrection against House Hresvelg? #idk but it'd make more sense than #the fog we have #10k years of lore

Edelgard and Ionius KNOW Ludwig was involved in the experiments. Neither game presents us with any reason to doubt the fact that he was collaborating with Those Who Slither in the Dark, Hopes even has two routes which flat out show him doing it. Even if he somehow wasn't involved, treason is also a pretty good reason to hate the guy. Not to mention Ferdinand and Lysithea independently confirming that he was corrupt and treated the people of Hyrm cruelly.

Ludwig is scum. Scum who is personally responsible for ruining Edelgard's life, and she still treats him with more decency than the other lords treat their prisoners. There's no ambiguity here, you seemingly just can't accept a scenario in which Edelgard isn't either the bad guy or a fool.

#and yet she works with Thales!

Edelgard hates Thales too, but like Varley in Hopes, he's useful to her for the time being, plus getting rid of him is much harder and much riskier than getting rid of Ludwig.

I think you should think long and hard when you start to reach the point where you sympathize with convicted childkiller Ludwig von Aegir and child abuser Gregoire von Varley @randomnameless

Also isn't Fantasyinvader kinda fascist? All I see posted from him in social media through screens is arguments ranting against modernity and being all pro-feudalism.

[bowbowis]

As somebody who majored in anthropology in undergrad, it's endlessly frustrating to hear these people bang on about "traditional" whatever because it always - always - betrays their abject ignorance of vast diversity of cultural practices and lifestyles which have existed in an equally diverse array of times and places. To them human history was just one long episode of Leave it to Beaver until women, or blacks, or hippies, or gays, or immigrants, or jews, or transexuals, or whatever else their particular bugbear may be came and fucked it all up.

Do women drunk on the trad wife fantasy know that women have been working in factories since the 1800s?

Like, why do you always assume you’re going to be middle to upper class living in the suburbs being a full time homemaker?

You’re more likely to be living in a multigenerational household while also doing some work on the side while raising your kids. Your money will go straight to your husband and he gets to decide what happens to it.