#I never thought someone would ever just BRING UP YIIK unprompted lmaoooo it's such a garbage game

[butwhatifidothis]

You know what this constant Edelgard pity-party reminds me of? Probably the worst game I've played in some time - YIIK: A Postmodern RPG. One of your party members, Rory, will end up taking his own life if you choose wrong answers throughout the game. The protag ends up going on a way-too-long monologue about how much it affects HIM. It's both upsetting and enraging at the same time, look up "YIIK: The Worst Scenes" and bring the booze.

OOOOH MY GOD that's such a brutal fuckin' comparison but I can see it. I've seen a lot of videos of people talking about YIIK but those scenes in the videos were either briefly mentioned to make a point or, in the case of the second one, literally never mentioned. Hooooly shit is that bad.

But the thing is, that first scene makes perfect sense to be that fuckin' terrible! Shitty as it becomes when mixed in the overall narrative, the game creator's even said that Alex is supposed to be a self-centered, narcissistic piece of shit. He's a bad person. The reactions he has to things are supposed to come off as enraging and insulting. What goes on to ruin it is the shift of blame off of his shoulders for his actions and how he becomes the universe's literal most important person ever, but that first scene in a vacuum actually encapsulates just how much of a shitty guy Alex is supposed to be. Him making his friend's suicide - of which the gameplay dictates that he had a direct hand in due to his treatment (if you, the player, do certain things) of said friend - all about him and how he feels and how he's so sad that he was such a bad friend (to the point where Rory - the friend in question - has his name crop up a whopping two times in all of Alex's self-centered monologuing) is in character for the utter shitwad of a guy he's supposed to be.

He's ass! Terrible, horrible, no good very bad! But holy shit, yeah, Edelgard killing innocent people and then going on about how sad SHE is, how much of a hard time SHE has because of it, how she wishes SHE was a better person to not have to murder all of these people, gives off vibes startlingly close to that of a character that is literally meant to be a self-important, self-centered asshole. Up to and including the narrative trying to push all accountability of what they did off of their shoulders! "No Alex, I was gonna commit suicide either way, so you didn't really do anything that pushed me (even though I only do this if the player does specific actions so it literally is your fault)!" "No Edelgard, those people were going to suffer under Rhea's rule anyway and they died for THEIR beliefs, so you're not actually at fault here (even though you started a war that dragged in countless people who were literally not suffering at all and made them suffer too)!"

The main difference being that YIIK, at the bare fuckin' minimum, flat out admits that Alex isn't supposed to be a likable, good person (even if they also say that he grows out of that which LOL no he doesn't). At some point in Alex's character he is deliberately written to be the worst person ever (and not the unintentional worst person ever that eventually happens). Edelgard doesn’t even have that in this fic, really. The most we get is that she was “pragmatic” and “icy,” but even that is just... not true. We see, what, two moments of her behaving anything like that? Ever? During the prologue where she thinks of Byleth as a tool (for two seconds before admitting to herself that she doesn’t really think of her like that) and during the Remire chapter where she kills a TWS dude (which fuckin’ lmao, as if that counts for anything when the guy was about to gleefully murder a child). Otherwise, Edelgard is presented as the nicest, sweetest, most caring person ever, even though she is incredibly self-centered. So like, uh, yiikes