#Three Houses discourse

[faroreswinds]

It's been 5 years. And today, I saw a post on the FE TH subreddit that said Dimitri and Claude owe their successes and their goals to Edelgard.

Unironically.

And then, someone else followed up with a second post asking how could Dimitri and Claude have found success with the obstacles in their way without Edelgard being there?!

[emblemxeno]

Definitive “Feelings On 3H” Post

So I’m making one big post on my feelings on major things worth discussing about 3H and how I feel about it. Don’t feel obligated to really interact with this one much, it’s mostly just for my sake, as something I can just link to and say “go to section X about how I feel about Y”.

The reason behind this is I just don’t really want to actively engage in 3H discourse anymore. I feel as if I’m a broken record at this point. If I have new things to say about it somehow, I’ll say it, but for the most part, I’ll refer people to this if they wanna know how I feel about general 3H talk. 

Story

Story Section 1- General narrative feelings on each route.

Azure Moon is, in my opinion, the most solidly constructed route in terms of writing, character development, and storytelling. It knows what it wants to accomplish and, aside from a few gripes, I will always applaud it for that. Verdant Wind and Silver Snow meanwhile, aren’t bad and I certainly didn’t have a terrible time playing through them. However, the unique story bits in each route don’t justify the gameplay experience you have to work through in order to get to them. Still, the big reveals in each route were nice to hear for the first time, and specifically for VW I enjoy Claude very much. Crimson Flower I don’t enjoy that much at all. Its story is what I can only describe as a static, eye-roll inducing victory march, which makes up for its lack of length with its seemingly intentional negative character development; everyone is ignorant, an asshole, or sad as fuck aside from the CF exlcusive cast. I would give the route props had the game bothered to stand in its foundation rather than flounder and make numerous attempts to depict every perspective as absolutely equally valid and righteous. 

Story Section 2- In trying to appeal to every perspective, the game lacks focus, foundation, and respect for itself.

It should be expected that a game with multiple routes tackle different specific subjects. However, in Fire Emblem, there always, always manages to be a unifying theme or foundational story philosophy-an Aesopian type moral if you will-no matter the route. Alm and Celica learn that their one individual philosophies can’t exist on their own, and that leadership requires strength and compassion of equal measure. Eirika and Ephraim learn that personal wishes must take a backseat for the good of Renais and Magvel as a whole, as their routes in FE8 use their own weaknesses to develop them as leaders and royalty. Corrin’s one constant in the Fates games is that conflict is inherently meaningless and does nothing but perpetuate a brutal cycle of hatred, vengeance, and violence. 

Even in games like FE7 and FE10, where the technical ‘route splits’ are more unconventional, there’s still unifying themes that manage to wrap back around at the end (7′s ‘single-minded pursuit of justice and strength/power to protect can actively hurt you and those around you, especially if you are ignorant to the pain others are going through’ and 10′s ‘people have as much capacity to be good as they have to be evil, they will hurt each other due to petty misunderstandings and bigoted views, however, they are worthy of living as they are because of the ability to grow, change, and aspire to something better’).

3H, to put it simply, does not have any grand unifying theme unique to itself. The closest examples I can think of is ‘It’s worth it to reach out to those around you to share your pain so you don’t become engulfed in it’ and ‘no matter what side you fight for, war makes everyday life a living hell for everyone’.

But to me, both of those things are just... basic truths and story elements present in every dialogue heavy FE game. War has been showcased as being terrible since FE1, where characters were held hostage, threatened to fight for a cause they didn’t believe in, innocent villages were destroyed, there was a literal child slave market, etc. And sharing your pain with those close to you in order to bear life’s challenges has been a constant trope with many FE characters, story significant or otherwise, since at least FE6 with Guninivere (probably earlier if I’m missing something from FE4 or 5). The only difference is that 3H has a fun little song to go with it.

That leaves the specific themes of each route and perspective, but because each leading character is so different from the other, and the writers didn’t want to overtly favor one over the rest, every dialogue regarding these things feels compromised; half baked, or lacking a point. 

‘Crests are symbolic of a harmful power structure but also are a symbol of justice used to ward away threats but also are a tool used to gain social and political capital in order to change the world but also are an ancient power obtained through destruction that must be used with wisdom.’ Four different perspectives from four different routes that the game attempts to depict in a balance in almost every single dialogue regarding them. And this same process is applicable to the game’s attempts at discussing race/ethnicity, xenophobia, classism, religious views, mental health, etc. There always has to be two, three, four, or five sides to every story in 3H, and that results in an exhuasting and stretched thin narrative that, in its attempts to appeal to everyone, ends up lacking substance in every point it tries to make.

Now, that itself would make for a fascinating and meta theme for the game to uphold, where ‘attempts at trying to balance and accept every perspective leads to an ineffective world that desperately needs unwavering, unconditional, and compassionate leadership’ but 1) that would require the game to play up the need for ‘seeing every side’ as something to be deconstructed, and the game doesn’t do that, it’s played painfully straight, and 2) when it’s one major power (Edelgard) vs. three major powers (Dimitri, Claude, and Rhea), the attempt at balance fails no matter what you do. This lack of focus reads to me that there was lack of respect for the game’s story itself.

Story Section 3- “It insists upon itself, Lois.”

Every time I think about the finer details of story bits in 3H I don’t care for, my brain always comes back to that Family Guy scene where Peter talks about not caring for The Godfather and saying that it’s because the movie insists upon itself. Now, that was done for comedy, but for 3H I must say that it’s a perfect sentence to use. 3H insists upon itself. This is in spite of the fact that there’s no one unifying point that it’s trying to convey to the player, beyond what any other FE games was able to do. So to make up for that, each small instance reads like the game beating the player over the head with whatever minute moral or lesson it’s trying to convey.

Crests are bad? Roll out the Edelgard, Sylvain, or Lysithea dialogue saying so. Church is sus? Get Edelgard or occasionally Claude. Nobles are pretentious? Get the sad NPCs or the few actual commoner characters to imply it. War is bad and cruel? Fire the next “Sad Dorothea” dialogue at the player’s face. Interactions feel artificial, ostentatious even. Part of that is because there’s no other way to get these points across due to Byleth being a silent avatar, the other part though? Feels as if the writers were overtly proud of themselves. “Wow, the war means Bernadetta leaves her room more often, isn’t that a sign that it really changes people?” Yeah, no shit. 

Perhaps the most egregious example is the endless instances of the game pushing the idea that there’s “no good side” in war or that “war is a battle of ideals and no one is fully correct” or other moments that want the player to know how deep and Morally Gray the narrative is. It’s cheap and inauthentic, especially when you have a faction like the Slithers. You can’t prop up Gray Morality and have an inarguably evil underground terrorist group. 

To be crude, this game explains things to you like you’re five despite being rated T for teens in a series catered mostly to young adults. I get the point you’re trying to make, you did it poorly, now stop repeating yourself, your final grade is a D+.

Story Section 4- 3H likes spectacle over substance.

3H revels in being showy over being constructive. There’s great moments, but there’s not a great plot. 

For example, Byleth has many flashy moments that show how awesome they are! They’re connected to a goddess, they can wind back time, they have a super cool historical sword, they’re a top tier mercenary, they’re a great teacher, they’re next in line for Archbishop or the throne for all of Fodlan, their Crest is the game’s version of the Fire Emblem!

Cool! What’s the significance behind all these choices in the writing room? Seemingly next to nothing other than it sounded cool. That’s how it feels anyway.

The SotC doesn’t do anything in the story beyond be Sothis’ bones, likewise the Crest of Flames is nothing other than symbolic since it lacks gameplay or story significance beyond “main characters have it”, Divine Pulse has weak narrative justification for what should be a simple gameplay exclusive rewind, the goddess in question is an underutilized character who checks out before part 1 ends, there’s no gameplay basis showcasing that they’re any better at fighting than their students, and every high level position Byleth is granted makes no sense for them to have given what little established character we get.

That’s 3H in a nutshell. Crests don’t matter other than to be a story device. Being noble or commoner doesn’t matter. The hidden technology doesn’t matter. Abyss is a joke. And on and on and on. 3H profits off of being enticing and cool looking for the sake of it, without actually utilizing or explaining any of this flashy stuff that matters for a video game medium. It makes for underwhelming gameplay and artificial characters. Example, for as much as I love Yuri, take a few minutes to read his backstory; it’s batshit and nigh unbelievable. And it’s indicative of the fact that 3H cares more about including things that sound cool than it does about making sense of anything. We see the impact, but never any material significance, which is the opposite of what you want in a detail oriented narrative like this.

Story Section 5- 3H has very gross tropes.

During 3H’s first year of being out, I desperately wanted to stay true to a view that “hey now, just because it’s depicted like this, doesn’t mean we should blast it, it’s just a video game” but, y’know. I grew up. And part of growing up is recognizing the nuanced parts of these kinds of things. 

I won’t accuse the writers of being actively ignorant or bigoted, cuz I don’t know anything about them. But fuck. Fuck, does this game read worse and worse over the years in terms of how utterly terribly it handles sensitive issues.

Multiple brown characters treated like trash by the white/pale majority, with countries said brown characters hail from described as savage and animalistic. Rampant misogynistic tropes, most notably selling women off to be married. Strange, and incessant sympathy for the character starting a war that upends the lives of common people, said character also allowing human experimentation to occur. The offensive and archaic handling of mental illnesses, specifically anxiety disorders, personality disorders, and PTSD in certain instances (IMO only Dimitri and Marianne are done with any sort of grace). And that’s just the explicit stuff! Just the other day I was talking about how there’s incredibly disturbing anti-Semitic undertones regarding the Empire (confirmed to be based on Germany btw) and the Nabateans, something that’s, at times, uncritically repeated by people in this game’s community. This game is mired in terrible allegories and metaphors, which make me cringe the more I think about the real world implications that these lines of thought can have on people in volatile corners of the Internet.

And the kicker is that the writers are so committed to making these things relate to Crests or nobility, as if either of those things are strictly the reason why oppression or discrimination occurs.

The game employs drastic harmful stereotypes, and undercuts all of them by foisting its half-baked unique gameplay/lore toy onto the conversations. It fumbles the ball and didn’t even clean up the mess well.

Characters

I have a tier list of how much I enjoy the characters right here. 

Long story short, when the characters are good, they’re good. Like, holy fuck, love them. But when they’re bad? Throw them away. Can’t stand them. And sometimes characters fall in the middle where I see the good but they’re at times written in ways that piss me off.

Worldbuilding/Setting - More is not always better

First off, when you make a character tell the player “Go read in the library for lore”, you’ve lost me. There’s nothing fun and interesting in 3H as a game for you to read in the library.

Fire Emblem’s gameplay cycle doesn’t mesh too well with the typical JRPG standard of storytelling, so the common solutions to building the world and crafting the stories was 1) make as much use as possible of cutscenes, art/cgs, and narrations to communicate the important details before and after battles and/or 2) make an intuitive inclusion to ‘break the pace’ between maps, such as a home base, in order to supplement what’s already present. Alongside this, support conversations were an ingenious tool to develop the characters and the world at the same time, as your varied and quirky cast can help you infer what their place of origin is like. Plus, the game actively rewards the player for seeking this auxiliary information out, granting extra stat bonuses when you purposefully put characters next to each other.

3H, on paper, understands this well. However, the game has too many minute details for a typical FE game structure to handle. The devs themselves even said the game became a “living creature on its own” and claimed no one on the team knows everything about 3H’s story or world. Ignoring how that’s a serious flaw for a video game narrative, what this ultimately means is that since cutscnes and a standard base can’t cut it, we need more and more and more. Libraries, side quests, tea time, ally notes, gifts, NPCs that exposit at you, etc. The DLC even added another damn library for you to sift through, as if the first one wasn’t a pain already.

And though these little flavor texts, landmarks, and set pieces are fun to read about... that’s it. The game hardly uses any of it. It’s flavor without substance, once again. It’s why half the fucking fandom is confused every other day when you bring up these tertiary details as evidence to prove a point, since the active story is too busy trying to weave the other 600 plot threads together to use any of it. That means, for all of this supposed great details regarding each nation and the important territories, we hardly see a damn thing that’s actually different. More is not always better, and in this case, it’s actively worse for both the game experience and the community experience. Not a good look for a game that the devs explicitly wanted people to talk to each other about.

As a fan of FE ever since 2013, who has gone back to play several of the games to see how they tick, 3H’s methods of describing its setting are just so antithetical to what makes the series enjoyable, and for so little reward. It sounds hypocritical given that I love Fates and Engage, but those games actively set up their glorified bases to be as unintrusive as you want them to be. 3H, however, has its gameplay built around a boring and unintuitive cycle.

Gameplay- Fire Emblem but half the time you’re not playing Fire Emblem

Gameplay Section 1-Monastery

The monastery is the most debated gameplay aspect of 3H, and IMO, for good reason.

It sucks.

Worldbuilding wise, while it makes sense that an important location is the hub for the game, that doesn’t account for how dull it is. 12 months and 4 seasons pass and does the place ever look different? No. A shame, since an improved aesthetic would drastically help ignoring the fact that the place is a bitch to traverse. For as fast as Byleth can run, they can’t outspeed the load times. Quick travel only makes the issue more apparent, as well. From door to door, and from week to week, you’ll endure more load times in one in-game month than an entire playthrough of a GBA FE game.

The other aspects of the monastery gameplay, such as teaching, activities, professor level, and motivation, while freshly fun in a first playthrough, become a repetitive slog in subsequent playthroughs. Giving gifts and lost items, eating meals, planting the right things for the garden, optimizing support point gains, using the sauna, taking care of the statues, etc. This cycle is not something I enjoy in an FE game, and unlike Fates or Engage, I can’t actively ignore it without huge penalty. 

You can skip right to each main mission, but you’d be giving yourself a huge handicap by doing so; not actively teaching students at max motivation in order to maximize skill point gain is a huge detriment in the long term. It means longer wait for better weapons, longer wait for better spells, longer wait for class change, and longer wait for better skills and battalions. Now on Normal you can get away with this, not as much on Hard, and sure the fuck not on Maddening. To me, it feels like sloppy balancing on top of an already exhausting and dull game cycle. Why let the player skip months if you didn’t bother to carefully balance the game so that the players who do skip months could have even a small chance to clear the game? Honestly, it just feels as if they thought “people might find it annoying so let’s just tack on a skip feature”, and that’s disappointing and lazy.

Overall, I hope nothing similar to the monastery’s implementation is included in any future Fire Emblem game. It’s too antithetical to FE’s main gameplay structure, IMO.

Gameplay Section 2-Battles

To be honest, Fire Emblem has never been the pinnacle of balanced gameplay, and frankly I don’t want it to be. It’s a single player game with fun anime sword guys, magic powers, and dragons. So long as it’s not dreadfully easy or overly complicated, I have no qualms about certain classes or characters being better or worse than others.

3H though is a mess. A fun mess, but still a mess. Movement decrease to foot units means you want a mount cuz the game’s maps are big, and the speed penalty for cav classes means you want a wyvern or a pegasus. Physical units do just that (or maybe War Master for Quick Riposte), you get your dancer, have a Stride unit, have your Magic units and warpers where you need them, and congrats! You solved the 3H meta. 

Half-joking, honestly. The game is extremely easy to break, the hardest part is getting to that point (after all, slugging through the monastery is a bigger test of your patience than anything else). Maddening mode, of course, you have be extra careful in the beginning (cuz they probably didn’t play test it cough cough) and utilize your combat arts and gambits effectively, and being extremely conscious of positioning. But, much like Awakening before it, 3H is very easy to snowball. Especially on NG+. That doesn’t mean it’s not fun, but it can get mindless. I don’t personally play that way, but even still, tools such as weapons mostly not being class restricted, Crests, combat arts, gambits, and accessories make the game incredibly simple. It’s a breeze, and only gets harder when certain things are stripped away from you or your debilitated somehow. Again, it’s still fun, because FE is always fun, but challenging? No. Not in a way that I find meaningful, anyway.

The maps themselves? Meh. They look pretty! Lots of small missable details that you wouldn’t see if not for the zoomed in view, that was a neat feature. Not at all useable for actually playing the game, of course, but fun to mess with and to sight see. It does make me resentful, cuz again, we could’ve potentially seen lots of rich, detailed, and varied locations bustling with townsfolk and entering villages to really feel each location. But alas, this is as good as we get.

Anyway, the maps are...fine-ish? Part 1′s maps are seared into my brain, for better and for worse (mostly worse) cuz you have to play them at least 3 different times for all the routes. Prologue through Chapter 5 are either boring, terrible, or both. Chapter 6 is the first map on my most recent playthrough that I say I had fun with in Part 1, then it continues for 7 and 8, then nosedives for 9 and 10, before picking back up for 11 and 12. In short, more than half the story maps for part 1 I find are either unexceptional or plain bad.

Now Part 2? Hunting By Daybreak is atrocious, Garreg Mach defense is pretty fun, Ailell is boring as fuck, Myrddin Bridge and Deirdru are good, Gronder Part 2 ebbs and flows between being awesome and awful, Merceus, Enbarr, and Fhirdiad are okay but tend to drag, Tailtean is alright, Shambhala is hot garbage, CF endgame is pretty fun, AM endgame is okay, VW endgame is awesome, Snow endgame is terrible. I think all routes’ part 2 is better than part 1, but not by much.

All of Cindered Shadows is peak, every map was good IMO.

Paralogue maps I have no opinions on, they are recycled maps with nothing meaningfully interesting about them that I remember aside from Dedue’s, Ashe’s, and Petra’s. 

In short, the battle maps in 3H are okay for FE standards. It’s just pretty fucking insane how many times they get reused, so I got tired of them very quickly.

Fandom

Last but not least, just a shoutout to a very unpleasant community experience. Though it might be the best selling FE game as of now, it comes with the price of having some incredibly disrespectful, vicious, and ignorant fans.

Never have I been witness to or been the target of as much harassment on the internet as I have with certain 3H fans. Entire discord servers made to make fun of groups of people with differing opinions, taking over old blog domains to mock people, deliberately seeking out people who want nothing to do with you just so you can defend your favs, etc. And that’s just on this site! There’s editing wars on TV tropes and the wikis, mods on various sites having to do deleting sprees of 3H discourse, artists being harassed on Twitter, and in general just... inserting yourselves into places and spaces where you were not invited nor encouraged to comment. Some of these people lack basic human deceny, respect, and boundaries, and it’s not cool.

Part of the reason why I’m breaking away from 3H now is because this behavior is something I got wrapped up in too, and I’m deeply ashamed of it. It’s toxic, and not at all something I want associated with one of my favorite video game series anymore. I got real life things to worry about and other games to play.

-

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. All of my general thoughts on 3H, localized on one post. Sayonara, Fodlan Discourse, you won’t be missed. 🤗

[pollyanna-nana]

Look. I know some people are going to want to mail a pipe bomb to my house for three houses discoursing again in 2023-almost-2024 but can we please, for the sake of my goddamn sanity, agree that Edelgard waging war for any reason was objectively bad. “Well it was to oppose the church-“ Starting a war is bad. “The other countries didn’t give in so she had to-“ Starting a war is bad. “Well there was nothing else she could have done-“ Starting. A. War. Is. Bad. There is no possible justification on this planet for doing so that makes it a remotely okay thing to do. It is not a “necessary evil” and I hope people don’t take this mindset into actual real life conflicts happening right now as we speak. Yes she’s hot and cool and interesting but if I see one more person genuinely saying she was 100% correct I’m going to eat glass on live TV.

[kid-az]

Three Houses discourse terrifies me

That’s it. That’s the post.

[skelezomperman]

On "Discussion = Good Story" with FE3H

I wrote this originally as a reply to someone on Discord, but I think I want to dump this on Tumblr for future reference. The person whom I was talking to asked about a point that I see being made a lot with the Three Houses vs. Engage discussions: "Three Houses had a better story and you can see because it had enthralling discussions that lasted for a long time." I don't really take a side because both of these games are degrees of "eh" to me (though I'm currently playing Engage) but here's my thoughts on this point.

Firstly, I need to address the elephant in the room. There are indeed people who spend hours every day looking for opinions about fictional characters that offend them about fictional characters and hunting them down. I don't exaggerate - there are groups of people who still do this to their day across various platforms for a game that came out nearly four years ago. It is very, very sad that this evil has not only taken control of their lives but has compelled them to cause harm to other people (and I don't mean "they said mean things," I mean actual harm like stalking). But this isn't unique to our fandom. People do this a lot because people are susceptible to misbehaving. I'm personally bitter about this entire affair, but I don't want to immediately bring down 3H just because of the bad behavior of a few people. That's immature.

To the broader point of discourse, it was really bad around late 2019-2020 and even into 2021. I think a contributing factor was that people had retreated into echo chambers which make them think their side is good and think the other side is bad. If one keeps seeing "bad takes" from the other side and keeps getting exposed to that and circlejerking about that, it makes one get a very warped perception of the community. Many people still have this warped perception, even, that the community has an inherent bias towards or against one side. I cannot underemphasize how bad it was and to an extent still is - it even caused a moderator on the r/fireemblem subreddit to resign, citing the 3H debates as the cause.

I will say, however, that I don't think people who are citing increased discussions from 3H are wishing for these kinds of crazy shitfests. It's more that people perceive that deeper discussions were happening at all with 3H's story, whereas with Engage there hasn't been too much deep discussion on story. I don't think people are wishing for Engage to have generated "ultras" in the same way that Three Houses did - they're not saying that 3H is good because of the tribalism it caused. (I would also note that most people have move passed 3H discourse to the point where even an innocuous post asking "why did Edelgard start war?" will get mass-downvotes and accusations of OP being a flamebaiter.)

That said, I still personally disagree with the point that 3H is better because of discourse. I don't think increased discussions is an inherent sign that a story is better written. There were a lot of holes with the Three Houses story which contributed to confusion which in turn contributed to discourse. Let's not mistake confusion between different points for an intricately crafted story.

[jtavington]

“Fodlan has deep structural issues that require radical reform and will not be solved by one good person” and “It is not Edelgard’s right or responsibility to fix other countries” and “the writers can be wildly inconsistent on some things so that all sides can pull from canon” are things that really should coexist more often.

[stellarluminary]

Yeah, I've also seen a lot of reads of Dimitri from dudes on reddit (not just the FE subreddits) that seem to believe that the core of Dimitri's character is rage and bloodlust. I think it's the "kill every last one of them" meme. If you don't deep-dive into the support conversations and the scattered chunks of world-building, it's really easy to project/fanfic-editorialize the characters into whatever you want because the game is so into player gratification (in-game with a divine self-insert and on a meta level in always making sure that the player is always “right”).

Even without memes pummeling characterization and plot points into oblivion, this game really enables players who want to pick and choose their characterization in a way that Fire Emblem has never done before. Want to LARP a princess who leads a campaign that changes the course of an entire continent? Then don’t think too hard about what you’re doing and you’re golden! Are you an atheist who thinks religion is bad? You can blame the Church in this game! Parents don’t understand? Then you, Felix, are always right (except when you regret your choices)!

Do You Ever Feel People Just Don't "Get" Dimitri?

I talked to my brother about Three Hopes, and he wanted to see an "evil" Dimitri. He wanted Dimitri to kill innocent people and other horrible stuff he didn't get to do in Three Houses.

I was just flabbergasted. Because that's so counter to the core of who Dimitri is that even thinking there's a chance you could see it in an official piece of Fodlan media just floored me.

He's not a Dimitri hater at all. He's primarily a Claude fan, but thinks Azure Moon and Dimitri got the best story. He doesn't like Edelgard and doesn't care about Rhea. He never participates in discourse and doesn't know anything about famous "takes." Just your average FE fan being honest about what they would enjoy.

I get where he came from. He felt Dimitri's actions didn't go far enough in Azure Moon - too justifiable for the "fallen man" plot. I disagree, but I get it. I also get the desire to see villain!Dimitri, in fanfiction only though.

I think some people want Dimitri to be something he's not - morally grey like Claude and Edelgard. Core parts of them are "grey." Dimitri's just not. He's black-and-white - good or bad. Dimitri's driving principle is to protect and serve the disadvantaged. Injustice and others' suffering infuriates him to a detrimental degree and mixes it up with his own unresolved trauma. Having him willingly and gleefully injure someone innocent is against the most prominent part of his character.

Dimitri's black-and-white in a universe of grey. He's the "square peg in a round hole." When the character doesn't fit the role they're supposed to play, the conflict created makes things more interesting. He's a Lord of the Rings character trying to survive Game of Thrones, if you will. And that makes him soooo interesting - how he doesn't fit. I understand people wishing Dimitri to be something he's not, but I think it's exactly what they wish wasn't true that makes him stand out so much.

I was just so amazed someone so neutral could get Dimitri so horribly wrong.

[loki-zen]

Speaking of fire emblem the three houses what is the actual point of the genderlocked character classes anyway. Girls can't be the class "dark mage" but most of the characters that get dark magic are girls. Women can't get advanced brawling classes, but gender doesn't change the protagonist's natural skill strengths so I sure hope you picked the correct one of the protagonist's two favoured weapon skills to focus on if you made her a girl. Pegasuses are sexist. Men and women don't actually have different stats in any way, they're entirely capable of mastering the prerequisites to a given class, they're just arbitrarily prevented from selecting them. None of this is attested to in actual dialogue or worldbuilding, nor is it pointed out to the player in any OOC way.

[raxistaicho]

An ill-fitting throne, like an ill-fitting crown

When I was last playing Three Houses, I was struck again by how small Byleth looks, seated on Sothis's throne:

They just look so fantastically unfitting for the throne.

Female Byleth can't even touch her heels to the ground, and while male Byleth can do that much, the arm rests are too far apart for him to use them properly, and he visibly has to sit so far forward that he can't rest his back against the back of the throne, either.

A pretty common theory is that Sothis was huge when she was alive, and aside from just the sheer size of the throne this is supported by, of all the grotesque things, the Sword of the Creator itself:

It's pretty easy to infer that the serrated portion of the blade was crafted from Sothis's spine. A person's spine generally constitutes 25% of their total height, and the Sword of the Creator is huge, especially compared to Female Byleth:

With Byleth being 5'4'', Sothis could easily be between seven and eight feet tall. She'd easily dwarf everyone else in the game, including Dedue and Nemesis.

Where am I going with this?

Byleth not being big enough to sit properly upon Sothis's throne is symbolic in a way: they're being pressed into a position that doesn't suit them. Just look at how uncomfortable and uncertain they seem, particularly female Byleth.

[faroreswinds]

I'm amazed that even after 3+ years we're still having people refusing to admit that the Ladle and by extension the Empire are the antagonists. She's not a mustache twirling villain like the Slithers are, but she's still doing and causing bad things. Like even if the game gives her a hefty amount of sympathy, it shouldn't be hard to deduce that conquering two countries over misguided information and revanchist nationalism and trying to extinct a race that had already suffered a genocide while spewing out racist rhetoric are not heroic at all.

Ah, but you see, that is not what people see. They see

She is saving the other nations from the control of the Church.

She is lying to protect people from the truth right now, because the truth would be too much for them to handle

There is no nationalism!

She doesn't actually want to kill Nabateans. She even spares Seteth and Flayn, and offers mercy to Rhea! See? She's not trying to kill anyone!

Etc.

As such, it becomes much easier to defend her unilateral grab of power and dictatorship.

[royalparaselene]

Even further thoughts but a friend brought up how a number of her haters could be coming from a place of misogynist thinking, and that if she were a man, it would be thought of as an epic tale of revenge. I agree, but I also think a great majority of Rhea’s haters just misunderstand her and in some cases even go to great lengths to misinterpret her character. I won’t be coy, yes she lied. I’m not going to argue against this, but I think it came from a place of love as well as the self preservation instinct. Who wouldn’t want to not be murdered for your special blood that grants super powers?

As for it coming from a place of love, we see how she acts towards others in the game: gentle, maternal, the likes. She’s a leader that with Wilhelm, rallied an army to fight off Nemesis. She’s thrust responsibility upon herself (I don’t believe she has any political power in the three countries and I don’t believe she’s controlling anything other than the central church) that weighs very heavily on her. Her counseling box questions show wants to be able to take walks without people surrounding her to protect her, and she wants to go to the dining hall and interact with church goers, students, commoners… but worries she might come off too intimidating. Her and Edelgard are much the same in this regard: she’s a sad, lonely girl that really just wants connection and to be heard. And like it or not, she deserves to be heard.

The game in general has too much conflicting information about the church. I don’t think it’s an institution without merit and it helps countless people. Reforms are needed, yes, but it’s not like that can’t come about while she’s serving Archbishop, they obviously happen in endings where she lives and even continues to serve as archbishop if married by Byleth. I think, in general, Three Houses does Rhea a HUGE disservice and I believe Silver Snow should’ve been much different: Rhea should’ve remained uncaptured, and functioned as the “lord” of that route, and it should’ve ended with Rhea donning her persona of Seiros once more (or going back to being called Seiros as she was originally, another thing the game isn’t clear on) and having a climactic final battle rematch with reanimated Nemesis. It’s crazy Rhea doesn’t even get to see Nemesis again in VW!

Anyway, that’s my thoughts in a nutshell. I’d like to hear other people’s perspectives but I really don’t want to hear people hating on her, please

I think it’s really really depressing five years out discourse hasn’t changed around three houses and I think most disappointing of all is how some people still have this vitriolic hatred of Rhea and think she deserves to be murdered. I’m sorry but that’s like a really really odd line of thinking and it reflects poorly on you to put that out there idk

[kastillia]

[wild-moss-art]

For disability pride month I’d like to give a shout out to fe3h for all the canonically disabled characters included. Dimitri’s schizophrenia and eye, Constance and Jeritza’s DID, Bernadetta’s agoraphobia and panic disorder, Marianne’s depression, Lysithea and Edelgard’s cptsd and chronic health issues, and a number of other subtextual inclusions. I know people love to poke holes in these things, but I think overall they are well done and I appreciate the game’s obvious attempts to portray them sensitively.

[risingsunfish]

Good morning, Deer! Here's a very normal question from Reddit. 🙃

Twitter

[faroreswinds]

The Edelgard discourse really is a never ending nightmare, that's incredible how someone can fight over how" you misunderstood a character" because they like her so "she has to be clean", in a game designed for 12 year old little boys. Man, it's like the MHA fandom fighting to death over ships in a manga designed for teenagers

I think the thing that baffles me—the thing that has always baffled me—about this discussion is just how much of a no-win situation it is to try and discuss any interpretation of Edelgard besides the one they obviously want you to have.

It's always like:

Them: Guys Edelgard is such an amazing, complex, morally grey character! Me: Yeah, but I really didn't like how she sided with the Agarthans and continued working with them even after she found out about the fact that they were doing human experimentations. I don't think that was worth the cost. Them: Wait no you're wrong she never did that and even if she did she totally had to because they were forcing her. If she had it her way she would never do anything bad ever we swear.

Like? That doesn't make her a morally complex character? In either scenario? If she would never do anything bad ever then she's not morally complex she's literally an angel. If she only did bad things because she was forced to, not of her own volition, then that strips her of the agency that would be required to make her morally complex.

And the absolute irony of parading out "she's morally grey" as a conversation ender or to get you to stop talking about the bad things she's done. "Morally grey" should not be the end of the conversation. It's the start. Things that are "morally grey" are inherently things that can be argued about, because the entire point is that it is not clear-cut as to what is the correct decision.

Look at the classic Trolly Problem. For the five people in the audience who are unfamiliar:

If you do nothing, five people will die. If you divert the train then one person will die. How you answer will depend on your own morals and values, and there's not really a right answer. Someone is going to die no matter what you do, and that's horrible.

You could argue that diverting the train is the correct thing to do, because you would have overall less loss of life (one death vs. five).

You could also argue that not diverting the train is the correct thing to do, because flipping the switch is an action on your part. You, specifically you, killed the one person because you are the one who made the decision to flip the switch.

When it's laid out like this, many people choose to flip the switch. However, there are variations on the Trolly Problem. If, for example, the choice was between doing nothing and physically shoving one person onto the tracks to stop the train, the number of people who are willing to sacrifice one person for the sake of five drops pretty significantly. Being closer to the consequences of their actions (it's much easier to justify choosing to kill someone when it's just flipping a switch vs. physically shoving them onto the track) weighs on their conscience more heavily.

But if you were the person being shoved? There's nothing morally complex about your role in things. You didn't decide to stop the train yourself.

That's how conversation around the moral complexity of Edelgard feels. Her stans want to insist that she's simultaneously morally complex while also not believing that it's possible to hold an honest, good faith opinion that she's anything other than completely, 100% correct to do what she does. She's supposed to be complex while also being the body being shoved onto the tracks by powers greater than she. They treat every conversation like it's a foregone conclusion that Edelgard is the body, so they can't comprehend why you might want to talk about complexity.

And just as a side note because I know someone is going to send this post around or screencap it or something and say "look at Vee, she's such a fucking idiot for not getting that Edelgard is pulling the switch in her metaphor! Fodlan was going to be ruined without her!"

I would actually argue that Edelgard's action might have done more harm than her inaction would have. Dimitri and Claude were already reform-minded people who had plans to institute changes in their countries as soon as they were old enough to succeed their positions. Dimitri openly defines his positions on crests (they are powerful and useful tools, but ultimately he believes people without them have their own unique abilities that should be elevated as well) and states his intent to exonerate the people of Duscur and provide reparations to them for what Faerghus did. Claude talks numerous times about his desire to tear down the barriers between Fodlan and Almyra and foster understanding and mutual trust between them. Rhea had always intended to step away from the Church of Serios once she'd revived Sothis, and she wanted to pass that responsibility to Byleth when the war began. Crests were already dying out anyway, and Hanneman was already working on tools that would narrow the gap between crested and non-crested people. If she had done absolutely nothing it is incredibly likely that Fodlan would have taken the course of reform anyway, just without one country being in charge of the entire continent. Nothing about the war actually changed either Dimitri or Claude's perspectives on anything, and in fact at the end of AM and VW they go on to do... basically exactly what they said they were going to do from chapter 5.

Her war actually delayed major reforms in Faerghus and Leicester, because Dimitri and Claude had to put all of their energy toward fighting the war (and in Dimitri's case, surviving on the streets) instead of focusing on reforms.

[monstierider]

Please tell me I'm not the only one who feels like Crimson flower did a terrible job of making Edelgard....not a villain

Like, I feel like IS sort of couldn't find a good way to justify siding with Edelgard to the player beyond liking her as a character and the only way the could sort of doing it was by reducing Rhea to near Duma levels of insane, but even then while I won't condone her actions I can understand why she lost it, from her perspective she just saw someone she allowed into her home, break into the burial site of her dead siblings with the intention of desecrating them and robbing their graves and then watched what is, from her sad, broken perspective, her own mother choose to side with the person trying to take all she has left of her family away from her, I too would lose it under those circumstances. And then there's Edelgard not even being very smart, like, does she really believe her troops would hear "the church has nukes" and not either, question why they only dropped the one on the one location and why only now or just....lose all morale??? And then there's the battle at the Tailtean plains and the good old conversation between Dimitri and Edelgard, "must you continue to conquer?continue to kill?!" "Must you continue to re-conquer? Continue to kill in retaliation?" Like.....it's like even she realises she has no moral high ground over him and is just trying some desperate redirection to not be the villain she knows she is. And also the entire "king of delusion" scene where Dimitri, in his final moments, swears to avenge everyone who died for her, who she killed, to avenge all his fallen friends and family who died because of her and her ambitions and she basically just calls him a nut job.

Like??? Did IS just....give up on trying to make Edelgard look good and just hope that off her fucking rocker Rhea and Edelgards tragic backstory would cover that up???