#...but then a lot of tharja's aren't great

[dcviated]

@shajaah sent: "Hey, sunshine. Mind helping a fella out? Can ya zap that beehive for me real quick?" no, he is not drooling over the myriad of ideas he got for that tasty honey. he can practically taste the sweetness on his lips.

Tharja already knows who it is before she turns her eyes to them. Who else in their right mind would use that nickname for the Dark Mage? Gaius... of course. One seemingly immune to her curses. She has, of course, improved since then.

"What. What?!" Attention is pivoted upward to the hive, her expression pivoting downward in disappointment. She hugs an arm around her middle, the other pointing indignantly at the swarm of bees. "You have got to be kidding. We've already established you're the skilled pilferer, haven't we? Can't you just... zip up there and get it yourself? Like a really sneaky bear?"

[emblemxeno]

Welcome back! <3 What's your opinion on the second generation of Shepards? There are definitely some that could use some more development imo

Thanks for the welcome back!

(Sorry for the long post, I just kept writing and writing lol)

I agree with the sentiment to a certain extent. The second generation I feel are as well written as they could be (especially since time travel is a story tool I'm not fond of), but definitely benefitted from Future Past. Even though the Future Past kids aren't the same exact characters we have, they act as a 'what if' version so I count the development as one and the same.

However, to be a bit specific, one thing about them stood out, and it's indicative of a peculiar, unfortunate aspect of FE13's cast as a whole.

The boys are written with more taste, consistency, and sensitivity than the girls. Though outliers exist (like Lucina and Severa), the second gen girls are kind of cheap? They get more "humorous" supports (i put humorous in quotes cuz I don't find a lot of the jokes funny), and are treated less seriously as a whole.

Cynthia is like a sidekick or guinea pig more than an actual participant in the conversation sometimes (which I guess is funny in an ironic sort of way); Kjelle's supports are really vapid, offering nothing that her mom didn't, and delivered with a less entertaining speech pattern, and there's only a few things worse than being boring to me; Nah... is honestly kind of a mess, teetering between playing the mature straight man, and being the most childish and annoying creature ever (e.g. I hate a lot of Nowi's supports, but Nah's support with Laurent is singularly worse than all of them and is a contender for the worst one in the game); and F!Morgan, while her actions and dialogue are supposed to be cute, I find them to be kind of boundary pushing, alarming, or even downright mean sometimes.

Again, Lucina (some of the best supports in the game period, being varied, having great dialogue) and Severa (her self esteem issues recontextualize every support chain in an artful matter) avoid this, as does Noire for the most part (she's written pretty sincerely as comedic or melancholy when she needs to be), but the four ladies I mentioned beforehand can just be... bleh. Being honest, were it not for Future Past, Cynthia, Nah, and F!Morgan would've been several marks lower. Their peaks are lower than what Inigo, Yarne, Laurent, and Brady provide, and Owain's comedy lands a lot better than theirs as well.

Though, like I said earlier, this is indicative of a larger problem I have with Awakening's writing. Since the game was written with the prospect of being the last, the popular Japanese entertainment tropes were all thrown into the mix, and they tend to be at the expense of the women. Sumia's clumisness, Sully's experience with sexism being kind of surface level (i.e. not something that feels connected to the world of the game), Tharja being Yandere 101, Nowi in general, etc. A third of them comment on being a mess in the kitchen, they blush due to crass comments or outright weirdo requests 3x more often than the men, a good chunk of them are written to get pissed at a drop of a hat, and so on.

Hell, lots of the women in my 'Favorite' or 'Love' tiers on my list, also have 1 or 2 utterly terrible supports that really exemplify this. Lucina's support with F!Robin (when they're not parent and child) is godawful; Maribelle suffers when her subtle desire to be loved or charmed is brought to the forefront (e.g. her support with Virion is like Gray/Clair if Gray was also a noble, and her support with Gregor is very tepid and flavorless when she's usually very entertaining); Cherche and Olivia suffer when they have zero chemistry with their conversation partner; Cordelia suffers when she plays straight into the 'superior perfectionist' bit (Frederick, Donnel), using her conversation partner as a way to vent about Chrom (Frederick again, Henry, Gregor), and outright becomes a nagging mom/wife who cleans up her man with Gaius; and Panne suffers when the writers decide to ignore how her race was enslaved and hunted to near extinction in favor of other characters (often men) getting to play with her ears, cuddling with her fur, or calling her cute when she doesn't want them to.

Most damningly, F!Robin is several marks lower than her male counterpart despite being the same character in-story, because a good deal of her unique supports write her badly (Chrom, Lucina, Aversa, Yarne) or barely at all (Brady, Anna, Owain). Even supports that got a laugh out of me-which is a big accomplishment-like with Lon'qu, still aren't stellar cuz they play on her being almost a caricature; like she's "Robin but a woman (derogatory)" instead of just... a version of Robin.