#also Rhea abusing specifically religion and people’s faith was uhhh poignant for me in 2019/2020

[hello-eeveev]

With Matt saying it in that one 4-Sided Dive and reiterating it tonight, yeah sure, I’ll take Ludinus at his word that he was witness to horrific violence and suffered a lot of personal tragedy at the end of the Calamity. And in doing so, I am now considering him in relation to—interestingly, ironically—Rhea Fire Emblem Three Houses.

They both frustrate me and infuriate me. I don’t like them. At all. But I do have some sympathy at least for their past selves who went through the events that set them down this path.

Even so, their past trauma does not justify their present abuses of power and disregard for the lives of their fellow man. They are so caught up in their personal quest for revenge or “justice” that they’ve stopped caring about who or what becomes collateral along the way. They have an unwavering faith in the righteousness of their cause that makes them arrogant and patronizing and insufferable, but which also makes them quite capable of drawing people in and exploiting people’s desires for answers in order to bolster their own power. What might have started out as a just cause has festered in centuries of single-minded focus and self-pity until it has morphed into something unrecognizable, and they don’t even seem to realize it.

I need to crawl into the screen and shake them.