#and yet time after time after time history fucking repeats and nobody learns shit

[weregonnabecoolbeans]

Me: *Reading QoAaD*

The Cohort: *does cohorty things*

Downworlders and others who are aware of mundane history: Hey! This is not good! Like at all! This will just get worse! I know this because this has literally happened before and your stubborn refusal to admit that mundane history matters is gonna lead to some really tragic shit!!!

Shadowhunters (who are basically an endangered species rn because of two wars they fought only 5 years ago that happened because they fell for the exact same propaganda from a man just like Dearborn and the Cohort) :*falls for Circle Cohort propaganda*

Shadowhunters: Uhhhh you’re not trustworthy or something…shadowhunters are the best! We could never be wrong!! Let’s continue to scapegoat entire groups of people because we obviously are the only people worth anything at all!!!

Magnus Bane: *the most exasperated and exhausted sigh to ever be sighed*

Me: Wow this book is a great example of why learning from history is important in order to stop it from repeating itself.

Me: *thinks about everything that is CURRENTLY HAPPENING IN THE ACTUAL REAL WORLD RIGHT NOW*

Me: *through tears and gritted teeth* Good thing this book is fictional 🥲

[raxistaicho]

Fantasy Invader blaming Edelgard for literally everything

Ordinarily I try to work from old to new when it comes to Fantasy Invader because he likes to build on and constantly repeat older claims he’s made, so it’s convenient to be able to just pull back up my old posts to demonstrate he’s wrong. This new claim of his, however, was so juicy I couldn’t resist hitting it immediately. Let’s go!

First, for context:

He’s referring to a post by renisfan where they claimed that Edelgard’s line,

In the original Japanese allegedly meant something to the effect of, “I don’t care about that.”

I’ve used both DeepL and Google Translate and neither came up with anything close to that, (DeepL was closer and said, “that’s none of my business”), but I’ve learned a long time ago not to take an Edelgard detractor at their word without fact-checking them, and in this instance I can’t. So, moving on.

...Yes, you’re reading that right, folks. Fantasy Invader is comparing Edelgard concluding a partly-unwilling alliance of convenience with the perpetrators of the Tragedy of Duscur - whom she intends to punish for their misdeeds - with her actually orchestrating the Tragedy of Duscur.

I’m at a loss for words, most Edelgard detractors these days have realized that directly accusing Edelgard of responsibility for the Tragedy of Duscur is a lost cause and not something you’re meant to agree with Dimitri about (given he’s fully in Boar Mode when he accuses her of it), so they usually stick to just insisting she’s culpable by her association with the Agarthans, but Fantasy Invader is nothing if not behind the times on everything he says.

She doesn’t dehumanize her victims, you clown, she remains acutely aware of what she’s causing throughout the game:

She is.

Wow, what a notion, it takes someone from a position of power to overthrow those in power! Especially when they have an army at their command and super-genetics that allow them to command super human abilities and magic weapons.

We saw what happened in chapter 3 when what was mostly a civilian militia tried to rebel against the Knights of Seiros: they got destroyed, completely and mercilessly.

Also this reads like, “yet you participate in society, curious!”

(Snort) Fantasy Invader has no right to call anyone delusional.

Also, if Fantasy Invader was right and Edelgard didn’t really care about her victims, then Dimitri should get furious at her supposedly being dismissive of them. Or he should at least get angry. But he doesn’t, because the devs don’t want us to think she’s blinded herself to what she’s done.

Heh, should we start mentioning all the times Jeralt says Rhea’s pretty sus, tho?

And, again, she really did have nothing to do with Duscur. How could she? She was a powerless 14 year old at the time, fresh off from being mutilated by Thales. She lived across the continent from Duscur and had no authority in the Empire.

Also, isn’t it fascinating how Fantasy Invader focuses solely on the regicide part of the Tragedy but not the part where a genocide was done? It’s the same with all Edelgard’s detractors: they treat the genocide that followed as... basically a natural and unavoidable result of Lambert being killed. Like how a storm causes a mudslide: there’s nobody at fault for the mudslide, it just happened.

But no, the genocide didn’t just happen, it happened because the Faerghans got into a revenge frenzy, ignored the prince, the sole survivor of the Tragedy, when he said the people of Duscur weren’t to blame, and went to go kill the people of Duscur because Faerghans are just like that and will fuck your shit up if you ever inconvenience them at any point in history. They’re like those revenge monkeys from, So I’m a Spider, So What? where if you ever hurt one of their species they will come after you to kill you, regardless of how many lives they lose in the process.

This point gets ignored because addressing it means addressing the horrendous aspects of Faerghus’s knightly culture, but because Azure Moon is all about preserving Faerghus as a nation-state and not about criticizing Faerghus’s many failures (because why are you fighting for Faerghus if we’re acknowledging Faerghus is kinda fucked up?), it can’t do that, so they can’t do that.

Nope. Given how vague the line is, and how furious she was when she saw Remire, it’s very much premature to conclude she was fully aware of all the travesties the Agarthans would commit.

Yeeeeah, Edelgard detractors tend to be furious about Treehouse... portraying Rhea as a woman struggling with trauma that’s caused her to have a hair-trigger temper which she masks with an air of serenity.

How dare they portray Rhea... in character. And not as a sweet mommy who did nothing wrong. You know if you guys want Lumera you can go play Engage. Err, well, not really since Lumera’s barely in Engage, but eh.

Also they didn’t dress up “genocidal fascism” because there was none of that to dress up. Not even in the Japanese version.