#because of magic that comes directly from *GASP* not shitting on religious faith! and we can't have that lmao

[butwhatifidothis]

Cap: Look at Bernadetta have a cool and big epic moment!!!! That I will not write because??? No but seriously why would he not write the actual scene of Bernadetta saving Woobiegard, Byleth and Alois? Like was he experiencing a Woobiegard drought and just HAD to go back to writing her?

Mean answer: No Woobiegard being able to watch? Not important enough to actually write out.

Potential actual answer (that's still kinda mean): He couldn't.

Like, I detail it out in the notes, but really think about it. Woobiegard is in heavy armor, and she and Byleth are both grown ass, muscly women. Alois is also in fairly heavy armor and is an even thicker muscly guy. Woobiegard dragged her and Byleth under rubble in her last-ditch attempt to get away from the fire, while Alois himself would likely be around or in the actual center of said fire given that he was completely unable to move from where he set it off at.

So, can anyone please explain to the class how, exactly, Bernadetta - who is approximately 5lbs soaking wet with noodly lil' twig arms to match - managed to do the following:

Find Byleth and Woobiegard in the first place, as, again, they were not in the spot Bernadetta would have thought they were in

Get Byleth's dead weight on top of the horse

Get Alois' (more literal) dead weight on top of the horse, while he was still in his fairly heavy armor and while managing to talk with him and get his last words said to her

Pick up and support Woobiegard's dead weight, while she was in straight up heavy armor

Convince her horse to stay still long enough in the middle of the raging flames for her to put two dead weights onto it

All ^^^ without suffering any burns whatsoever save for the ones she got just from touching Woobiegard's armor while supporting her (and not, say, Alois' armor while she put him on the horse, or from the horse's armor that also would have been heated, or, y'know, FROM THE FUCKIN' FIRE ITSELF)

And all of that ^^^ in a fairly quick manner

And ALL of THAT without anyone involved - save Alois who died from injuries gotten before the fire - suffering any sort of permanent injury, whether from burns from the fire or from smoke inhalation from the fumes (the latter mostly for Bernadetta who had to stand in the flames for a while)

I'll give you the quick answer: you literally can't. It's impossible. Bernadetta - or most anyone - could not have done all of this, and no writer in the world could have made it make sense. So Cap'n, instead of, like, just writing something else for Bernadetta to do, he just has it to where this all TOTALLY DID FOR REAL HAPPEN and everyone AROUND Woobiegard saw it happen and said it was really super duper cool of Bernadetta to do, but it, uh, just so happened to happen while she was knocked out. And the POV just so happened to switch from the one actually doing this to the one of the three possible people who were present that couldn't have seen this happen, just before it happened.

And that's mostly because Cap'n, uh, really doesn't know what to do with all these characters he has deemed as Totally Important. And, like, there's the argument that some characters can get away with this sort of treatment because of the background knowledge readers have that they actually are doing something important (for example, Whohardt healing people), but Bernadetta is. Uh. Definitely not that kind of character. She has done jack and shit this entire time; she's been a background character at best, being mentioned to hang around the other Black Eagles but rarely actually doing anything worthy of focus.

But Cap'n didn't want her to stay like that, so he imagined up this epic and cool rescue sequence where she saves the heroes through her bravery and determination, which is fine in theory... but then he got to actually trying to write it out, and saw that oops, wait, this is objectively impossible. This can happen a lot when thinking about scenes - in isolation, they look cool and amazing and you love how they look in your head, but as soon as you try to actually write it out in context you realize the difficulty (or impossibility) of actually making it reality.

Now, if this were a fic that had a better outline - where this pivotal character moment was planned out far earlier in the writing process, Cap'n could've used the fact that Bernadetta is actually one of the few units in all of Three Houses that learns the Rescue spell (the one other non-DLC unit to be able to do so being Flayn, and even including DLC that just adds Constance and Anna) and integrated that into his writing process. Where Bernadetta - timid, fearful Bernadetta, who takes to the bow precisely due to being able to better stay away from the fighting - could use her time that she spends with Marianne (that she does often enough in this fic already) to touch up on Faith magic, to maybe find uses to the army that don't involve her fighting at all. She's still primarily an archer, but it never hurts to learn new things, y'know? And she could use this Faith magic learning - that she got specifically due to her connection with Marianne, who is only in the army in this fic because of Woobiegard - to learn the rare Rescue spell. And this could tie back into how faith can be a good thing, how the Magic of Friendship (with specifically Woobiegard) helps all, and can give Bernadetta that cool moment of doing something that literally no one else in the army can do. And all of this while being, like, possible!

As it stands though, there's just this: a completely impossible maneuver from Bernadetta that Totally Happened off screen to the left of Camera 2 that everyone got to see but the reader