#Military Engagement

[urhoneycombwitch]

in case it wasn’t clear. this blog and this bitch do NOT support the industrial military complex.

[serpentface]

Interview Question for Etsushir:

What was the vibe like as a foot soldier during the suppression of the North Finn Rebellion? Did it feel doomed from the start or did it only fall apart once the Odomache was assaulted and killed?

[emblemxeno]

Rant ahead.

Honestly part of my confusion at people trashing on Engage's designs for either being too out there or crazy is that this is the same fandom that venerates Pantsless Marth, Dong Armor Alm, Pegasus Knights with short skirts and thigh highs, mages who don't have armor or practical clothes most of the time, the very existence of the dancer class, etc.

These things are classic and funny to poke at, but they were also things that happened 30+ years ago. Do you not think that Marth going commando and Jagen having eye gouging shoulder spikes in 1990 wasn't just as ridiculous, gaudy and impractical as Hortensia's cupcake circus dress in 2023? In Engage's immediate predecessor you had classes with tit separaters, characters with drill hair, Dorothea in opera garb during war time, Hilda's timeskip fit which looks like a prototype Hortensia fit, Petra's timeskip fit, Kronya's existence, and Female Byleth in general.

Impracticality and overdesign is the weakest criticism you can give FE designs. I get it, we long for the GBA era, but let's be real: those designs were made to complement class design in part to compensate for having character mugs and game sprites as the only constant presentation of the characters. "Crazy" designs and high fantasy armor and clothes started with the more decadent characters in the Tellius games because they had models and didn't have to strictly adhere to class design elements anymore.

[banbrotsu]

the way i cannot look at anything related to how all the death painting stuff was concluded in a light other than gege wrapping it all up as tightly, immediately and off-screen/little effort as possible bc even without eso and kechizou that's still 7 other paintings to address and the threat of them possibly incarnating is a terror too immense for a guy actively fighting to keep the world/plot creep at bay.

[world-of-wales]

❥ UPCOMING ENGAGEMENTS

The Prince of Wales, on behalf of the King, will attend the Sovereign’s Parade at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire on Thursday 12th September.

[decepti-geek]

tbh an important part of my take on the 'don't be like Sentinel' question is that hours earlier D16 had very decidedly assumed leadership of the High Guard, after which any attempt at resolving his very understandable personal trauma via murder was also, on a wider affects-everyone/your-new-power-means-something scale, inherently going to count as a military coup.

yknow. the thing Sentinel did to assume power/hand it over to the quintessons in the first place

[oreolesbian]

the absolute lack of media literacy from people who haven’t even seen oppenheimer is making my head spin but whatever

[hellothepixel]

"The story isn't the focus of ultrakill" i will ultrakill you if you say that again

[worstloki]

People who think Palestinians wanting equal rights to live on their own land equates to wanting to genocide Jewish people are actually telling on themselves

[commsroom]

It’s my birthday too! !! Happy Birthday! I wanted to ask you about Jacobi since he rotates around my brain like he’s on a microwave plate 24/7. Just, general Jacobi thoughts, go crazy , I think about him all the time

yayy, shared birthday!! i hope you had a good one. you're actually the second person who told me it was their birthday too... june 21st birthday club!!

i feel a little guilty saying this, since it was your birthday too, but jacobi is one of my least favorite characters. not to say i don't have things to say about him, but. i don't care for him at all.

some things i can say about jacobi:

i think the most compelling thing about him is that his character arc is a perfect loop back around to his backstory mini episode - two people are dead. he feels responsible. he's out of a job. what now? in things that break other things, he deflects. he rationalizes - "it wasn't anyone's fault; everyone was just doing their jobs" - but is that really true? or is that what he has to tell himself in order to live with himself, and to keep doing the work that he wants to do. when jacobi says "i was wrong and people died, and the only thing i can do is not be wrong again" to kepler in the finale, it's as much about the deaths that weigh on him. maxwell's most of all.

... and i think there's potential for change there, now that he's able to confront it, but in a lot of ways that's the start of a character arc rather than the culmination of one. i will never believe that jacobi wants to spend any more time around minkowski, eiffel, and hera (nor vice versa, really) - they are also the people who killed maxwell to him, and they will never be "his" people. but i think if you were going to write about post-canon jacobi and that theme of survivor's guilt + escaping destructive cycles, lovelace would be a good counterpart to him for that - she's further along on that journey, he expresses a kind of respect and even almost-friendship for her that he doesn't for the rest of the hephaestus crew, and she has a more... biting sense of humor; i think they could actually be friends (or at least narrative parallels) given the right conditions.

and speaking of narrative parallels: he actually has a lot in common with minkowski. jacobi plays at being a rebel, a loose cannon, etc. because it gets people's guards down, but he's very, very patient, calculating, and measured. he is not an impulsive person, and more than that - he's a follower by nature, and a rule follower. jacobi doesn't believe in the "bigger picture" for his own sake, but he is deeply committed to maxwell's bigger picture. he wants to be told what to do, he wants to feel like he has a purpose within a greater system/structure, and - crucially to dirty work - he wants to be able to shirk responsibility when something goes wrong. jacobi craves certainty, he needs that faith in the judgment of the people who give him orders, and i think what dirty work does by positioning jacobi and minkowski as narrative foils highlights a lot of similarities in their faults.

(it does drive me a little crazy when people compare him to eiffel or say they'd get along under different circumstances, like... no? for all his other faults, eiffel is distinctly anti-authoritarian and sincere. they're like, coworkers with different politics who would really rather not speak to each other if at all possible.)

appearance-wise: i firmly believe he needs glasses (the line about his eyesight not quite being good enough is the kind of thing he'd downplay + it's a fun inverse of people drawing maxwell with glasses when she canonically doesn't need them), he has very specific military masculinity issues (thanks to his father) (and gabriel urbina once said jacobi's car is probably the civilian model of something used in the military) so i think he keeps his hair very short, and. i actually don't think he has notable burn scars. i respect that it's a distinct design choice, but canonically i think it makes more thematic sense that he wasn't personally, physically hurt by that accident (and i think someone would probably have made a remark about visible burn scars on the guy insisting he "is that good" with explosives.)

[sysig]

Data is stored in the right eye (Patreon)

[hanzajesthanza]

i was so caught up in the examination of dehumanization in the imperialist regime in cahir’s character that i forgot he was supposed to be in love with a 15 year old

[sylvanfreckles]

I just keep imagining the conversation between the summoner or divine dragon or whoever and Chrom when they were trying to put him in the emblem bracelet...

Chrom walks in with a handful of protein bars and Robin tucked under his arm, like an oversized cat. "Okay, ready."

"Ready--what? Why are you bringing Robin?"

"In case I get bored. I might want someone to talk to."

"But as soon as we put you in the bracelet you'll be asleep until you're summoned for battle!"

"Well, sometimes I talk in my sleep."

[agirlinthegalaxy]

It's been rolling around in my brain the last few days for some reason, but I still hate the family backstory reveals for Sophie and Eliot. I've seen some of the meta for it, but quite frankly, it still makes no sense. If it had been something actually thought of and intentional in the original, I think it could have been so fascinating. I mean, Sophie's willing abandonment of Astrid to contrast with Nate's loss of Sam or Eliot's adoption in contrast with Hardison's and Parker's? Could have been excellent! But they came out of nowhere in Redemption and don't work with these characters.

Sophie was still actively using the fucking alias that she met Astrid under! She met with someone from her past on the show! Like. Quite frankly, that one is unequivocally bullshit that they made up and threw in and pretended could fit with the established canon. (And I'm sorry, but the idea of Sophie abandoning Astrid and never telling Nate about her just... So much of Nate's trauma was rooted in the loss of Sam, and I think that introducing this element after he's gone and unable to respond to it taints Sophie and Nate's relationship in a way bc I'm not exactly sure how Nate would've responded to learning about this but I think that it's something he'd have needed to know. I don't know how to fully express my thoughts on that but yeah.)

As for Eliot, I don't like the adoption aspect literally at all. The way that he would interact with his family and the memory of his family would be different, and I think that it's flat out ridiculous to think that he'd have never mentioned it to the team in the original show, especially when dealing with the kid cases. (I also dislike the biracial adoption as its own element because if Eliot was actually raised by Black parents in the... idk what 80s/90s? That just. doesn't feel congruent with how they write Eliot interacting with PoC, not necessarily in a bad way, but babe, he's written like a white southern man raised in a specific kind of culture that does not jell with that. It also makes Eliot look... really bad that he was apparently raised with the knowledge of how fucked up the military was and his parents' history and made the choices that he did.) Like the show may not have explicitly stated it but the implication of that relationship was vastly fucking different throughout the original show.

Just. These were not backstories that were congruent with their depiction and characters in the original show, and they're also just moves that I don't particularly like or find interesting directions for those characters. There's also something to be said about how it was apparently unacceptable for a woman to not have kids or someone not reconciling with their biological family when that was something that the original show handled a lot better. Out of all the directions to take Sophie and Eliot's stories, that's just not really one that I think was a good idea.

[daguerreotyping]

Extremely realistic and accurate depiction of a hussar in battle, 1826