#but then Remire and SS is picked and it's just

[randomnameless]

I saw you make a comment on another post about Dorothea having lines but you think it doesn't improve her much. And yikes I can't help but agree. Dorothea is just awful in this game. Her sadness at the war came across as legit genuine in 3H. Here in Nopes it comes across as self righteous hypocrisy since there's no SS counterpart but only CF+ and CF 2.0. Even in AG she keeps bitching about how much she misses Edie and how war bad, even tho she is fine with it in SB apparently?! Dorothea, shut up

Daw,

To be fair, even in FE16 I found Doro...

well, kind of annoying bordering on irritating.

Her Church Sus comments are really the worst, like wtf is her "is it part of the church's teachings to teach us how to kill people", girl, you didn't join a monastery, you joined as a student of the Officer's Academy - a Military academy.

In a world where Kostases, Giant Beasts and Giant Worms are legion.

Idk, it's like someone joining Totsuki in Food Wars and complaing about having to cook??

I've also developped in the Nobles BaD post how Nobles are expected to have and perform certain duties, like, protecting their people. Doro refuses to consider this, and refuses to move a iota from her initial "nobles bad", even if... she is trying to end up with one of them to secure a good future.

And let's be clear, Doro being a sex worker or hating nobles but feeling like she has no other choice than ending up as a doll to have a future in Adrestia is fascinating, just like how she apparently hates herself.

The only support where this angle of hers is alluded to is in her Sylvain support - but seeing how Sylvain develops and exists in Nopes, I can't really see him end up on the long term with "Why the Goddess forces us to fight??" Doro, especially since Sylvain has real solutions he wants to try to stop the seemingly eternal conflict with people from Sreng.

(instead of blaming the Goddess).

Doro also has the dubious honor of being the only member of the BE to go "uwu don't want to kill Eddie" in SS, when everyone now knows about Flamey and their associates, Merceus being bombed and - say, Doro worries about the Opera Troupe in Enbarr, but apparently not because the Emperor might put them to the sword, no, she just worries about them for ~ reasons ~ and really regrets having to fight Eddie, when Caspar (i seriously love the dude when he's not a member of the bullshit eagle sus force) tells everyone in his very simple words "she got it coming".

Doro is moved to tears when Leopold offers his life in exchange of his soldier's - but apparently not when Leopold trounced randoms, and did very intelligent things as the Minister of War, nope.

Worst Doro moment for me is the "maybe we can keep the damages to the noble disctric of the city" which is... idk, as bigoted as saying an entire race of people has to die because their blood ruins the society.

First because it's especially icky to say this when her friends are nobles, and their families are still most likely living in those suburbs, Second because Dorothea more than anyone else know Nobles employ a lot of people, and if those areas are destroyed, one Ludwig might die, but 50 "Dorothea's mom" could also die.

Honestly, Doro should have been a Tru Piss exclusive character, refusing to consider other POVs (no Doro, Ingrid has a type, and it's not you), always blaming others Supreme Leader designed as the ones responsible for the war, not giving a frick about anyone who isn't in her immediate entourage, her "we killed Ferdie :'( " rings so hollow and empty (which is why fact she helped orphans is just jarring - if Doro helped those people who lost everything because of Supreme Leader, why the reluctance at having to fight her?).

IMO, Doro and Hubert are part of Edel's court, along with Monica. They are just here to make people feel bad/good for Supreme Leader. She could have been much more than the "sassy one liner kween" we got - for the only commoner POV we have in Adrestia, we have just "me me me church bad nobles bad me me nobles bad me me church bad".

She could have been better if she really sticked to one gun, like, idk, questionning nobles and what is their duty after Remire, something like

"They pretend to protect the people and yet the Church has to shelter those people! What are the Nobles in Enbarr doing?"

And if a Supreme Leader support is reached, maybe she could add

"Maybe this will change once Eddie becomes the Emperor..."

During the Ball maybe we could have a Doro reflect on her blindness and life in Adrestia

"They really throwing up a ball for everyone here! I even heard children from the monastery will attend to the festivities. I wonder would my life have been different if I had been sheltered by a church? ... Never mind me professor, Adrestia doesn't even have a church."

[butwhatifidothis]

Perhaps what baffles me the most about the people who shout “Rhea tried to sacrifice Byleth in the Holy Tomb!” as a reason why Byleth would side with Edelgard is like. Uh. Bro. If that’s such a big betrayal to you - which, hey, fair enough, if you don’t like Rhea for that then more to ya - then. Like. Am I gonna blow your mind as to what Edelgard reveals during that exact cutscene. 

Like dude??? Edelgard literally reveals that she’s been working with the people who’ve:

Murdered Jeralt

Massacred Remire

Kidnapped students and transformed them into Demonic Beasts

Kidnapped Flayn and drained her of her blood

Made it to where Sothis can no longer communicate with Byleth

Tried to kill Byleth and their students multiple times

As well as Edelgard herself ordering for her men to straight up kill Byleth and the Black Eagles should they try to intervene with her attempts to grave rob a holy tomb.

And like, this is just what Byleth would know at the moment. Being involved with Godfrey’s - and by extension, Raphael’s parents’ - murder, Lambert’s murder (and by extension the genocide of Duscur), the mutilation of Sothis’ body, instigating the Nabatean genocide, and plenty of other things Byleth just doesn’t know about (either yet or ever, on SS or CF), and with a few of these things (Lambert’s murder + Duscur) being things Edelgard does know about.

Let’s ignore how Rhea sacrifices herself to protect them as well as all of Garreg Mach, sees Byleth as their own person by the end of SS/VW, trusts them with the Church, before apologizing for her selfish actions in her S support (on SS) - alright, Rhea’s betrayed Byleth. So did Edelgard, using their trust in her to infiltrate the Holy Tomb to get what she wants. Rhea was going to sacrifice Byleth. So was Edelgard, to her path of ideals. “But Edelgard was doing this for the greater good!” So was Rhea, since she thought getting Sothis back would help everyone in Fodlan. By this logic, the player shouldn’t pick either Rhea or Edelgard and should instead restart their run to pick either Dimitri or Claude. 

Like, I get the game is pretty ass in showing the actual weight of Edelgard’s actions and tends to pretty her up for the player, but like, uh, no matter how much lipstick and eyeshadow you put on it that’s still a fuckin’ knife pointed at me. Edelgard is still very much trying to kill Byleth - and Byleth Byleth, as in she didn’t view Byleth as merely a vessel that Sothis needed to enter like Rhea did at the time, but she saw Byleth as Byleth and still tried to murder them. Along with the rest of the Black Eagles. 

But nah actually betrayal and attempted murder is fine because Edelgard is totally in the right when she tries to murder innocent people for not letting her commit crimes because maybe eventually in a hypothetical future her half-baked plans will make some people live kinda better lives if they happen to have merit, I guess

[gascon-en-exil]

Why would CF be considered bad? The devs say that it's the route about fighting for what you believe in, even if others get in your way. You may have to take down good people, but in the end her route ends with no more gods', nothing dangerous lurking anymore, etc. It doesn't seem like a bad route other than maybe killing good people.

I take it you mean “morally bad” rather than “badly written,” although the two are not mutually exclusive. I’d say that the CF we have is bad in both senses of the terms, and that a better-written CF would been have even more obviously morally objectionable but would have succeeded on that basis - a proper villain route where you get to enjoy being a genocidal conqueror (possibly with a side of your self-insert getting to sleep with your preferred flavor of villainous archetype between Edelgard, Hubert, and Jeritza).

Now, as for why it is, despite the muddled presentation, a villain route:

There are still dangers lurking in Fòdlan, and they’re called the Agarthans. CF is the only route where Thales survives, and where you make the least progress in dismantling his organization. AM gets him and potentially Myson in addition to Cornelia, while VW and SS leave out Cornelia but take care of Thales and raid Shambhala with VW additionally getting rid of zombie Nemesis and the Elites along with a handful of low-ranking Agarthans. CF kicks the Agarthans back to a postgame war waged entirely in character endings, which is neither satisfying as a player nor likely to remove the threat entirely, based on CF’s parallels with Genealogy of the Holy War (see below).

Fòdlan only has one (mainline) goddess, and she’s still alive at the end of CF. I’m not really sure where people got the impression that Rhea or any of the Nabateans consider themselves gods, but they don’t. Killing Rhea in CF causes Sothis’s Crest stone to disappear for no apparent reason (note that Rhea also dies by default in SS if you don’t raise your support with her, and yet Byleth’s hair does not revert to its original color in that ending), but Sothis herself “lives” because you can still S rank her in CF. This is two logical inconsistencies stacked on one another, the first being the bit about the disappearing Crest stone and the second being that Byleth survived its disappearance even though based on what we know of their birth their heart would not beat without the stone…meaning they should have died in that moment. When it comes to moral arguments however, Fire Emblem does not as a whole posit that the world would be any better or less prone to conflict without its gods. The “gods” of Fates and Echoes are really dragons undergoing mental deterioration in their old age, something Rhea does not show signs of except maybe in SS, and that only because the game realizes it still needs a final boss. In Radiant Dawn meanwhile, the game that evidently inspired Edelgard’s speech in the CF ending cutscene, Ike himself acknowledges the value of gods, and Ashera is not truly killed but is allowed to combine with Yune and become a complete entity again.

“Killing good people” is kind of a big deal. CF has the highest named character body count of any route, and although it lets you spare some of the people on its hit list you have to go out of your way to allow Claude, Seteth, and Flayn to live. You can never spare Dimitri, with the best you can do for him saving him from a humiliating execution at Edelgard’s hands and Dedue from becoming a Demonic Beast at the same time and letting them die together. CF Dimitri also doesn’t undergo the same trauma he experiences during the timeskip of the other routes, leaving him comparatively lucid and composed and thereby making all the route’s attempts to paint him as this violent madman who needs to be put down as little more than propaganda intended to rationalize conquering Faerghus and killing its king. Everything about CF positions it as the route of a conqueror; you invade two sovereign countries, take out their leaders, trample them underfoot (literally represented by the ending tapestry), and absorb them into a continental Empire. The bit about returning Fòdlan to the control of humans - incidentally also the goal of the Agarthans - means in this case dragon genocide, allowing you to participate in an event similar to the Scouring of Elibe’s backstory while also, like the Elibe games, forcing you to consider the ethical ramifications of such an act by giving you multiple examples of dragons who aren’t crazed monsters who need to be killed to ensure humanity’s survival.

The argument from Arvis. I went into it here, but the gist is that Edelgard’s similarities to FE’s original Flame Emperor are too significant to be ignored and notably do not make for a flattering comparison. Arvis also fights for his beliefs, a desire to unify Jugdral and create a better world with himself as emperor. In the process he allies himself with an assortment of unscrupulous backstabbing nobles as well as a shadowy cult that opposes a revered divine being and in the process commits multiple acts of murder up to and including most of the playable cast of the FE4′s first generation. He is no less an antagonist or a villain because he has arguably sympathetic ideals, and it’s only in the second generation when, broken and impotent (on account of the machinations of the aforementioned cult who only grew stronger under his reign - makes you wonder about CF’s postgame war, doesn’t it?) and with a new crop of playable characters coming for his head, he somewhat redeems himself by secretly delivering the divine sword Tyrfing to Seliph - tacitly acknowledging the inevitability of his impending death and that he was wrong in murdering Tyrfing’s previous wielder, Seliph’s father Sigurd, to advance his ambitions. Edelgard frustrates a lot of longtime fans of the series precisely because she never has any moment remotely similar to this, where her beliefs and actions are ever questioned in any meaningful way that forces her to confront what she’s doing. That’s to be expected when Arvis at the same point in his story was riding high off his triumph and couldn’t yet see how it would all unravel, but the constant echo chamber of Edelgard and her yes-men Hubert and Byleth is considerably more grating because it’s always in the player’s face. This brings me to…

CF isn’t about fighting for what you believe in, unless what you believe in is just Edelgard. The developers could make the argument that that’s the driving force behind Edelgard’s actions on any route, but choosing CF is never framed that way for the player via Byleth. It’s a spur-of-the-moment, purely emotional decision that asks you simply whether you should kill Edelgard for invading the Holy Tomb with an army and attempting to steal the Crest stones therein (which are, as a reminder, the remains of Rhea’s slaughtered kin - she’s got a pretty good reason to be as angry as she is). You’re not asked to reckon with the morality of Edelgard’s actions in that moment, and the game does its best to encourage you to forget about everything else she did as the Flame Emperor by simply never bringing up any of it ever again. This is why there are still fans arguing that Edelgard didn’t intend to have Dimitri and Claude assassinated in the Prologue, or that she wasn’t complicit in Flayn’s kidnapping, the experiments on the Remire villagers and students, and Jeralt’s death. The game refuses to let you judge her actions for what they are, even in some dialogue options in non-CF routes where you’re forced to pick one of two options sympathetic to Edelgard. Edelgard herself expresses surprise if you side with her, but there’s no explanation given for Byleth’s choice other than that they believe in her. Fates’s Conquest route has repeated moments where Corrin regrets siding with the family who raised them despite the presence of a more rational alternative (or two), as if they’re only there because they were railroaded into it by the player; Three Houses has the opposite problem, where it’s more prepared to question your decision if you take the less emotionally-driven option and side against Edelgard. To put it bluntly, the only reason from a storytelling/characterization perspective to pick CF is because you like Edelgard - possibly as an object for self-insert romance since the route itself leans hard into that interpretation even if you don’t S rank her.

[butwhatifidothis]

In the spirit of your Golden Deer and VW rewrite, do you have any plans for a similar rewrite of GW?

I do! I'm just trying to figure out the best ways in going about it, seeing how Hopes has a very strange way of going about how the routes interact with each other thematically, as well as having so little to work with wrt the obvious - and, frankly, almost inarguably best - road GW should have gone down (Claude's connections with Almyra + his family, and how that connects back to his trust issues with the Deer/in general, not giving too much focus to the war in Fodlan - you know, something that could directly place Claude's personal stories in the forefront instead of making him Bootleg Edelgard).

Unlike with SS vs VW, where even with VW being a copy/paste it could theoretically be bent to allow for personal growth for Claude given SS' story’s lack of contradictory elements to Claude's character, GW being a copy/paste of CF drastically makes things much more difficult to form a rewrite around in the same manner as I tried to do with VW's, as the story itself has Claude behaving in distinctly OOC ways.

Because even in the VW rewrite, there was little change done to what actually happens in the route's chapters - it's still prologue -> mock battle -> Lonato -> Holy Mausoleum -> Miklan -> Flayn -> Gronder 1 -> Remire -> Chapel -> Sealed Forest -> Holy Tomb -> Edelgard's siege -> get rid of the bandits -> defend Garreg Mach -> Aillel -> Great Bridge -> Gronder -> Merceus -> Hubert/Death Knight -> Edelgard -> Shambhala -> Nemesis. It's the bits of story that happens between the chapters that's ultimately what changes: motivations, dialogue, reactions, relationships, those were what changed (to the best of my ability in keeping them in line with the characters as possible). Nothing happens in the chapters themselves in SS that actively contradict Claude's character... which is very much not the case with GW.

On one hand, there's less chapters to work with: Chapters 1 and 2 have nothing to do with Claude, and Chapters 3-8 have him, for the most part, be perfectly in character (if waaaaaay more whiney about having to work, but that's the only real gripe I have with Part 1 GW!Claude and is easy enough to simply write out/lessen the amount it happens). It's only in Part 2 that Claude is unceremoniously replaced with Claudelgard, which means there's only Chapters 9-15 would have to have any major upheaval - maybe Chapter 8, to rework a certain thing that happens. Even adding in the route split at Chapter 10 on top of that, that’s still a collective 13 chapters compared to... all of GD and VW lmao. And to kick it off, GW will of 3H’s Claude character already there as a base, and unlike with the writers of Hopes I won’t be too busy chugging glue to remember that lmaooo.

On the other hand... the overwhelming majority of what happens in those chapters - both in between the story events and the story events themselves - would have to be immensely reworked, which would entail a bigger undertaking than VW’s rewrite would. I’d have to think of a story to rewrite, not just a character arc and the results of that on other characters. Though, given how completely half-assed GW’s story is, maybe that won’t be as big an issue as it seems like lmaooo a giraffe could slam its head against a typewriter and come up with a better story than what GW’s Part 2 gave.

Another, more minor thing that would make this difficult is that part of the reason I felt I could rewrite VW was due to just how many times I’ve played through the route or read through the datamine of its contents... which is something I just don’t want to do with GW. Went through the story once, felt fuckin’ awful playing through it, and I can barely stand watching Claudelgard act like a blithering, violent idiot in Part 2, even on a muted video on double speed. It’s something that’s necessary if only to pick up on anything that could be potential dusted off and spat-shined to be something workable, but... ugh. GW’s Part 2 is some of the least amount of fun I’ve ever sat through, so that’s gonna be a bummer lol.

All in all it’d likely take even longer for this rewrite to be written out lmao, but! I do want to give it a shot, seeing how fun it was to do so for VW - I even have Almyra to work around with this time, which I stopped myself from dipping too much into for VW’s. So once I get enough time to work on it I’ll try to lol