#and it shows everyone singin' Kumbaya holdin' hands and dancin' a jig

[butwhatifidothis]

I think the thing that's getting me the most about TEatG's take on "fighting against fate" is that is the fate it's fighting against is like... the good ending.

got long lol under the cut it goes

Like - take Awakening for a second, another story that's about fighting fate. What exactly is Lucina fighting against? What's her fate? Well, her fate is to have her father be murdered by the one person he trusted most due to that person succumbing to their fate of being a vessel for the harbinger of the apocalypse, ushering in unfathomable loss for the entire world that Lucina has quite literally no hope to win against, to the point where her genuine only hope of rescuing anyone is to travel to a different timeline set before everything went to ruin to save everyone there instead.

Lucina, as well as pretty much everyone involved, of course did nothing to ever deserve such a horrific fate to befall them, and so it makes the audience sympathetic to her plight and understanding of what she is almost/full-on willing to resort to, even though that includes murdering someone who could potentially be her own mother and thus preventing the birth of her own brother. We feel the larger scale suffering Lucina is trying to prevent for others while also seeing the smaller scale personal suffering Lucina is trying to stop for her own personal peace of mind through the death of her father and how it affects her. The stakes are extremely high for her and the audience can thus feel the pressure she as a character is going through, and we're able to see that yes, despite what Lucina is willing to do she is genuinely only doing this because she feels she must.

In contrast, what is Woobiegard fighting against? What's her fate? Well, her fate is to... be defeated. After being the cause of immense suffering and torment of, in her own admission, thousands of people, and after working with people she knows are hurting even more innocents, and for reasons that are never properly shown to be justified. Even when her enemies do her work for her and say that they are totally evil, nothing is ever shown in the story to actually show off why or how that is. 

Unlike with Lucina, where we as the audience can very visibly see what it is she is fighting against, nothing of the Church's supposed oppression is truly on screen. We are told all the time that it’s the Church’s teachings that is the cause of suffering, but nothing in the story of the fic ever proves that to be true; even without the game, it seems more like bad apples opportunistically and deliberately misinterpreting the intention behind the Church’s teachings to do nefarious deeds more so than it ever feels like actual indorsement from the Church to commit these acts - this indorsement which would be an essential key in making Woobiegard’s methods in toppling the Church as violently as she does at least understandable. This is not the case with Grima, whom we see is the direct and nearly sole cause for the horror and destruction Lucina’s world falls into.

Having the context of the game makes this even worse, as that shows that the fic is deliberately leaving out details of the Church’s tenets in order to make them appear worse; not once has the “Dare not abuse the power gifted to you by the goddess” tenet ever been referred to in any way, and it is coincidentally the only tenet that is never mentioned in some way in the fic. It criticizes the Church for involving itself in the affairs of the three nations without ever mentioning that it was the three nations that asked for the Church to intervene. It also - paradoxically, mind - accuses the Church of never stepping into the affairs of the three nations when they’re in trouble, without realizing that the Church doing so would actually be them trampling across the sovereignty of the three nations. It thus makes it seems as though the Church hasn’t actually done anything to deserve all of this hatred and degradation thrown at it and it’s just Woobiegard hating the Church for simply existing, despite the Church’s existence never actually negatively impacting Fodlan as a whole. Again, unlike Grima, who proves time and again that did they not exist, the world would be at peace; the Church doesn’t come across as a suitable threat to justify the actions taken to bring it down.

On top of that, Woobiegard’s personal suffering of the loss of her family, narratively speaking, isn’t to give her a grounded presence for the audience to better get a feel for her character and understand why she does what she does; it’s just another of a nearly endless slew of Tragic Sad Boo Hoo Wah Wah’s to make the audience overlook the horrible actions she’s performing because She Was Sad Once. With Lucina, her pain and trauma are an explanation for her morally dubious actions, but not an outright justification for them; she isn’t suddenly completely right to try to murder Robin in cold blood just because of her experiences, since Robin is still an innocent at the time Lucina decided to attempt to murder them. With Woobiegard, her pain and trauma are so integral in justifying her character it is interwoven throughout the entire prose of the entire fic. The reader is bombarded with how Sad and Lonely Woobiegard is, and how that is why she is right and just to do the things she does, and everyone who is deemed good (enough) is always convinced of Woobiegard’s righteousness once they hear how Sad and Lonely she is. 

Or, to tie it back to the comparison: Chrom doesn’t give Lucina the thumbs up to murder Robin just because he knows how much trauma and horror Lucina has seen, whereas Ficleth would have murdered Robin herself with no hesitation or regret were she in the same position for Woobiegard.

Moving on from that: What did Grima do to have Lucina be so desperate to kill them? Literally end the world. How do they do this? Resurrecting the dead and forcing their bodies to attack and kill the living, as well as being a Holy-Fuck-sized dragon that will casually just destroy everything in their path, legit because Why Not Lol. Boom, Lucina's words about how awful her fate is has now been properly showcased to the audience, it is now an indisputable fact of the world, we can now properly understand her motivations, and the evil she is fighting against is solidly and decidedly evil.

What did Rhea do to have Woobiegard be so desperate to enact war with her? Well, uh, you see, some nobles hold Crests to be very important and used that to be assholes. Ignore all of the nobles that are nobles without Crests, or all of the Crested individuals that aren't nobles, or all of the nobles with Crests whose lives are just fine, some nobles are badly affected by Crests therefore Crest system therefore Bad. And how did Rhea do this? Nemesis and his Elites ruled over Fodlan with their newfound Crests for over a century before the Church was formed- *AHEM* sorry, tickle in my throat, it's actually totally strictly and only because the Church said that Crests were gifts from the goddess. Ignore that it also said not to abuse these gifts which means that anyone doing so is not doing so with backing from the Church and would thus just be selectively cherry-picking from the Church's tenets to thinly veil their shitty actions as righteous even though they know they're being shitty, Rhea made Crests bad because she totally directly made people think having a Crest made people better which means she totally needs to be gotten rid of for any change to happen even though she doesn't actually ever indorse the beliefs Woobiegard is fighting against and thus killing her will do literally nothing since the shitty nobles doing shitty things will just switch the reasons why they're doing shitty things since the actual root cause (basic human greed and cruelty that must be dealt with on an individual level and doesn't have Kill Rhea as a one-size-fit-all solution to it) has been fundamentally misidentified.

Hooray.

This lack of a proper showing as to how bad the situation actually is makes it nearly impossible for the audience to get a good grasp as to why the protagonist is fighting so hard and going to such desperate measures. With Lucina, it could not be more clear cut; her words, her actions, and what we the audience physically see with our own eyes all fall perfectly in line with each other. We can see that Lucina's fate is bad, and thus we root for her to fight against said fate, and thus we understand when that means taking actions we as the audience most likely wouldn't take ourselves. With Woobiegard, it's all over the place; nothing in the world - especially 3H's, but even the fic as a stand-alone entity - reflects why Woobiegard believes anything she does or takes the actions she does. It's just told to us, and nothing is ever grounded by physicality so that we the audience can get a feel as to the weight of everything going on - which is then made infinitely worse when Woobiegard herself performs the very actions she claims to be fighting against.

Lying to her allies when it benefits her, always - and I mean fuckin' always always - casting blame to others while trying to keep herself morally clean, manipulating those around her to follow her, performing blatant and repeated acts of hypocrisy - which includes being overly violent to those who stand against her and allowing Petra to force her people to bend to her whim under threat of death, two of the biggest things she lambasts the Church/Rhea for doing - utilizing her Crest(s) to better violently invade sovereign nations and assert her control over them. And the list goes on and on and on. Suffice to say that Lucina, uh, doesn't do this lmao.

So Woobiegard's goal in the fic - fighting her fate - isn't one that an audience that isn't already willing to overlook her actions can relate to. She is the one to directly cause immense suffering across all of Fodlan for half a decade; even by Woobiegard's own logic, Rhea is only at best an indirect cause, with the nobility that are willing to make others suffer being the true direct cause of Fodlan's current state. Meaning that going by Woobiegard's logic, she is the worse of the two of them. Commoner rebellions quelled by threat/use of lethal force, violently invading upon the sovereignty of other nations, blatantly disregarding morality whenever it doesn't let her get her way, all while justifying everything she does to herself as being for the greater good - her fate is her not being able to do this. That is what she is fighting against.

She wants to be allowed to do this - not necessarily that she actively wants to do these things, but that she is allowed to get away with doing all of these things. She wants to be the Hegemon while having the cute child-like lover, and the ever-loyal side-piece, and the mindless friends that always do what she wants and believes what she believes, and the nice peaceful life in the cottage with her art supplies, all without ever having to face a single consequence for her actions - because that'd be fate “undeservingly” making her life just oh so hard.

And the absolute kicker? Chapter 36. 

It shows the results of what happens if Ficleth were to follow fate and kill Woobiegard... and it leads to peace. Sure, she’s not happy, and the Black Eagles aren’t happy - well, some of them at least, who knows maybe Caspar and Whohardt are just livin’ it the fuck up in the background - but Fodlan as a whole is at peace. The people are safe. The day is saved. And the direct thing that led to that is the defeat of Woobiegard. Even when Ficleth leaves her position and takes up that cottagecore life, Flayn takes up the mantle and then also goes on to lead Fodlan to peace. Again, directly because Woobiegard was defeated. Like I said, the fate that Woobiegard and everyone on her side is fighting so hard and so desperately to prevent from happening in the CF timelines... is the one where Fodlan is saved and freed from Woobiegard’s actions.

So like. Uh. Yeah. Not exactly as compelling as past examples have shown to be able to be