#but this is the first time he would see Rodrigue in a romantic light

[lumeha]

7, 8, 13, 30, 44?

7 - Which side quest / paralogue was your favorite?

It’s a toss-up between Leonie’s paralogue, mostly because Indech is delight to meet and I would love to have more time to see him, and I quite like the map it i set in, so it’s a v lovely paralogue in general, and Seteth and Flayn’s paralogue, because 1 - WYVERN ??? discovery, 2 - I love how it’s the moment you learn more about them and their relation, 3 - Seteth being called an heretic is hilarious

8 - What storyline threads should have had more development / been further explored?

The Tragedy of Duscur. The game kinda wish-wash over it and I feel like they could and should have done more with it, both what happened, why it happened, and the consequences of it.

Like. The whole Patricia situation is a complete mess ? And it is implied that everything was caused by TWSITD via Cornelia and Arundel, of course, and that it is to destabilize Faerghus, but... It feels just so... wishy-washy in the way it is resolved. And there is no Dedue part of this storyline that is added to explore more the post-Tragedy story.

There are other things I would have wanted more explored, mostly related to the Nabateans, but this ? This is the thing that stood up to me while I was playing. It just looked like an outline rather than a fully fleshed out story.

13 - Post a link to your favorite FE3H fanfic.

never was untrue by Jagged (that I podficced) (which is about Ingrid, gender, and remaking yourself, in a way)

&

Follow the Pale Moonlight by leporidae (werewolf / monster fic ! written for me)

30 - What characters should have more support options and who should have been their support options?

(deep breath)

First of all : Rhea. Even not playable, Rhea should have had more supports, with staff and Knights of Seiros characters, to help expand her character. There is a lot about her character that we never get to see directly, and that is told to us, and I think it is a genuinely missed opportunity. Characters like Cyril, Seteth, Flayn, Catherine, Shamir, hell, Gilbert, would have benefitted from having a support with Rhea to explore the world of the Church, Rhea’s herself, her actions, her views of the world, without limiting her to a very specific support with Byleth related to her quest to bring back the Goddess to Fodlan.

Next to that : while I do agree that Sylvain having short, stopped at B level supports, I feel like the selection is... not well done, and could have actually be made more meaningful. Just. Go rewrite the Dimitri support, keep it light and stupid for C and B, and go hard with an A support about discussing deeper stuff, because Sylvain actually has some interesting things to say to Dimitri in explore and cutscenes dialogue, basically, but also play a little more with what supports he does have.

Just create some damn supports for Anna, too. I paid money for her. Give her supports. What the hell was going on with this decision. I do not care about who she supports, but she’s here, she’s in my team, let her support some people. Even if it’s limited to Byleth and the lords. Though I would love to see Anna - Ignatz, or Anna - Raphael, for their relationship with merchants, ngl, but just, GIVE HER SUPPORTS ???

(also give Gilbert and Dedue an A support, I just want it)

44 - Who is your favorite headcanon ship (meaning they either have supports but not necessarily a romantic ending or they may have no supports at all)?

(slides in) .................. is anyone here ready to hear about my love for Rodrigue / Gilbert, a ship based entirely on the fact that Gilbert spends the five years between White Clouds and War Phase in the Fraldarius territory, and the tiredness of two older men who are carrying around a grief that will never quite die, and the complexity of knowing someone but also realizing they are not quite who you remembered and discovering this person who is both old and new at the same time ? yes ? yes ?

[iturbide]

OK FOR A CHARACTER ASK hit me with those claude ones

Oho we get a Claude double-header

How do I feel about this character?

Now I know I’ve already talked about how much I love Robin (which is a lot).  I think we’re all pretty well aware of how much I love my resident tactician, and the fell dragon associated with them.  

I personally feel Claude von Riegan is the best thing that has ever happened to Fire Emblem as a franchise.  There are very few characters who inspire as much joy and respect and affection as he does.  From his personality to his history to his dreams to his way of achieving them, Claude is hands-down my absolute favorite character in the entirety of Three Houses and I cannot say enough good things about him.  It is entirely possible I might devolve into gibberish trying.

Who do I ship this character with romantically?

TRICK QUESTION Claude is someone I find unshippable, because he gives off intense aroace vibes to me.  This is not to say I don’t enjoy the ship art I see of him around, but it’s not something that I think about of my own volition because I love Claude as this charming, outgoing, utterly kind person who has absolutely no interest in romance, instead making droves of friends that he cares for with all his heart.

Who is my brOTP for this character?

Claude is the kind of person who could be friends with just about everyone and I love that about him.  He and Dimitri are pretty obvious by now, I think, given that I have a whole fic for them with Spite Project (and they’re also a key feature in both Kintsugi and Pre-Timeskip).  Claude and Hilda is also a no-brainer: she becomes his right hand throughout the school year and I love the idea of them being super close, to the point that Hilda is Claude’s agent even if she does join another class (a la this great comic).  

I also love the idea of Claude and Annette hanging out and making music together like they do in their Supports; he writes a verse for her song, after all, and I think the two of them sharing music would be really sweet.  I feel the same way about Dorothea, actually, and really wish they could have had Supports: given that they’re both something of an odd duck in their respective classes, they could have had a lot of interesting conversations, and I’d love it if they could have made music together (which is the subject of a one-shot I have sitting in my drafts).

What’s my Unpopular Opinion™ about this character?

Quite a while back now fandom at large collectively seemed to shift in their discussions of Claude and say that he’s actually very selfish with his ambitions, and his Academy-phase combat lines (the stuff like ‘don’t hold a grudge’) were shows of his own insecurity and how he wanted people to like him.

That, to me, is a load of bullshit.

Claude is well aware that people are going to dislike him and distrust him if they know where he came from.  He grew up being looked down on because he was half-Fodlani in Almyra, and things were no easier in Fodlan with those aware of his Almyran heritage.  That’s what inspired his dream of breaking down the borders and ushering in understanding in the first place.  He doesn’t need people to like him -- if he did, he wouldn’t be actively embracing the image people like Edelgard concoct of him as an underhanded schemer.  His Academy-phase lines are flippant, even light-hearted, because they’re calculated that way: the less people think he’s a real threat, the better his odds are of winning, because he never slacks off.  The stakes are significantly higher in the War Phase, though, so he drops the act entirely: “hold a grudge if you must” is a show of his true resolve, rather than some change in mentality.

And as for him being selfish: I can’t see anything further from the truth. Let’s not forget that his dream is one he admits is far in the future: even if he succeeds at pushing the Empire back during the war, he has a lot of work ahead of him paving the way in Almyra for his dream to be made real.  And nothing he does is going to change the fact that his history was still one where he suffered.  Nothing he does is going to undo that pain.  His goal is to break down borders so that no one else has to go through what he did growing up -- and there is nothing more selfless than that.

What’s one thing I wish would have happened with this character in canon?

I desperately wish that Claude could have been recruited post-Derdriu in Azure Moon.   Instead of leaving Failnaught with Dimitri and returning to Almyra, it would have been so powerful if he’d instead stuck around and seen the war through to the end, establishing yet more powerful relations between the Alliance and Faerghus before departing for Almyra to pave the way for his dream.  It’s really a shame to me that we missed out on a chance for not only a true alliance between these two anti-Imperial nations, but more Supports between Claude and the Blue Lions cast.  We could have had Claude and Dedue supports if Claude could be recruited after Derdriu.  We were cheated.

And who could forget Dima

How do I feel about this character?

I have a major soft spot for Dimitri.  He’s such a good character, and the way his character arc develops throughout Azure Moon is just shy of perfection (the only thing that could make it better is a slower turn-around rather than the abrupt 180 after Rodrigue -- and even that is somewhat forgivable since it’s made fairly clear he deals with a lot of his issues for life, rather than it being a “miraculous recovery”).   The fact that he has both lingering trauma and unaddressed mental issues, which are so often taboo topics in media or outright maligned, coupled with the fact that his issues and his recovery both are arguably handled pretty well, makes him an absolute standout example of what can be done with character growth arcs and narratives.

Also he’s just a very good guy.  He’s outrageously strong and works so hard to avoid hurting people.  He’s gentle and compassionate and cares for the people around him, often at his own expense.  I love him and I want to see him heal from his trauma and lead a happy life with lots of friends because he deserves it after everything he’s been through.

Who do I ship this character with romantically?

I actually have an answer this time.  Because of my extremely limited ships for Three Houses, Dimitri and Marianne is one.  I’m not a hard-core shipper for them, but the idea of these two broken people finding in one another someone who understands what they’re going through, who isn’t going to tell them “it’ll be okay,” who will provide them with support rooted in a deep understanding of how hard it really is...that’s absolutely beautiful to me.  I love the idea of them starting out as friends, becoming partners and supporting each other in their gradual recovery, and eventually developing feelings for each other that they’re able to act on once they’re both in a mentally stable place where they can do so.  It’s just...beautiful to me (and it’s why I’m angling for their endcard in my AM run).

Who is my brOTP for this character?

If you guessed Claude you would be right.  Spite Project exists for a reason, after all.  Dedue is another big one, and I love the two of them supporting one another, with Dedue trying to keep Dimitri safe and healthy when he won’t take care of himself and Dimitri doing everything he can to counter anti-Duscur sentiment for Dedue’s sake (and also I love the idea of Dimitri learning all he can about Duscur culture and language and working hard to help the Duscur survivors during his reign).  Dimitri and Ashe’s friendship is also severely underrated, as is his friendship with Annette, who I think would be able to cheer him up even when he’s trying to cling to grumpiness -- she’s just that much of a joy.

What’s my Unpopular Opinion™ about this character?

My unpopular opinion is that fandom really needs to let the man heal.   Dimitri’s popularity seems in large part predicated on how attractive he is and his mental issues, and a not insignificant part of fandom seems to think that a relationship is exactly what he needs to “fix” him. 

Fun Fact: you can’t magically undo trauma or alleviate mental problems by putting someone in a relationship, romantic or otherwise.

What Dimitri needs, more than anything else, is help.  He needs therapy.  He needs to be able to address his traumatic history, likely in small steps, and he needs to find ways to manage his mental issues.  What he needs, above all, is a stable situation without the stress of responsibilities exacerbating those problems -- and a relationship does not fit that bill.  I desperately wish that people would just let him get to a stable mental place rather than forcing romance on him while he’s still traumatized or even feral, because romance is not going to heal what ails him.

What’s one thing I wish would have happened with this character in canon?

Rather similar to Claude, I desperately wish they hadn’t killed Dimitri at Gronder in VW.  He’d already been through so much by that point, and killing him -- offscreen no less -- just adds insult to injury.  I would have loved to have seen Hilda save him, or Claude manage to stop him before he left the field, bringing him back into the fold and eventually gaining a new ally in the fight as he works through his issues in the company of old friends (and unlocking more Supports because we were robbed okay).  It’s an absolute shame that they decided to kill him rather than give him a chance at a better life -- I shouldn’t need to write this much fanfic in order to see Dimitri have a chance at happiness.

Give Me a Character  

[gascon-en-exil]

FE16 Golden Deer Liveblogging

Chapters 16-18. Just like the Lions route, until it isn’t. There’s also some Dimidue content here, but not enough for its own post.

Chapters 16 and 17 are virtually identical to those chapters for the Lions apart from which army you’re controlling. Ferdinand still shows up to die on the Great Bridge, with a generic taking the place of Lorenz. (Oh, and I’d forgotten to say last time that Ashe appears in Ailell. I read somewhere that he can be recruited somehow here, but I didn’t see it.) The big battle at Gronder Field is a fair bit easier with the Deer; the Lions are less mobile and I believe fewer in number, with the only thing that surprised me being Sylvain and Ingrid coming from behind with reinforcements a few turns in.

Keeping Dedue alive is fairly simple in Chapter 17 since you only have to defeat Edelgard and Dimitri to end the chapter, but I’m not entirely certain I got anything special out of it? In any case, I did so by rushing Edelgard’s lines as fast as possible to get close to taking her out before the Lions start moving. Once they move it looks like Dimitri and his two boyfriends’ AI is specifically trained on Byleth (...why?) unless that’s only because mine was about 30 levels below the rest of my army and cowering in a bush because I’m not using him. It’s therefore not too hard to leave a few units behind to rush Dimitri on his way north as soon as Edelgard is down.

Chapter 18 at first looks like it’s going to be a retread of the Lions’ Chapter 20, the showdown vs. the Death Knight in Fort Merceus, but then the plot happens and you’ve got a bunch of Almyran NPCs led by Nader backing you up while everyone other than Claude assaults the fort from a different starting location. Then the DK surprises everyone by retreating, turning it until a rout map unless you can kill him before he leaves. On that plot point, see below.

Claude’s paralogue is technically the first new map I’ve seen on this route, although it’s really just the story map for the Sreng desert one used for skirmishes. It’s not completely awful to navigate once you realize that there’s a path of normal terrain circling the central structure, which was very helpful when trying to grab the loot from a bunch of thieves determined to commit suicide by dragon. The Wind Caller/Macuil wasn’t particularly worse than any other major monster boss I’ve yet encountered, and he was great for dropping little worldbuilding hints. It’s funny to me that the other house leaders’ paralogues target major military installations while Claude goes on a field trip to another country for information.

Character/Story observations

Let’s start with the Dimidue. The reason I say that I’m not sure that sparing Dedue accomplishes anything is that he retreats from battle and the post-chapter cutscenes play out as if this had happened anyway. Hilda describes Dimitri charging after Edelgard alone before collapsing and getting run through by Imperial soldiers. Claude then asks after Dimitri’s vassal whose fate was unknown - and then it cuts to Dedue alone, saying this: “Your Highness! Your ambitions are my own now! I...I will bring you Edelgard’s head... I swear it!” This is indeed the route where these two go full Quan/Finn, and although Dimitri’s offscreen end lacks the poignancy of Yied the results are no less tragic or less gay. And because Dimitri has no son to be fueled with righteous anger, Dedue has to carry within him not only Finn’s unbroken loyalty but Leif’s rage. I know he’ll be making a reappearance in a later chapter, too, so this isn’t the end for them. I wouldn’t be surprised if the anons I’ve gotten on the subject were really about the chapter where you kill Edelgard.

I made a point to defeat Dedue first before rewinding time to see what would come of it, and actually I think that adds even more to where their relationship is/was on this route. In this version of events it’s left ambiguous who’s leading the mysterious Faerghus army until Dimitri appears on the battlefield, and apart from the bit about Cornelia’s coup right after the timeskip no explanation is given for why Dimitri is his one-eyed feral self. Unless the game says otherwise, I’m going to assume that events played out as they did in the Lions, with Dedue rescuing him from prison but needing to sacrifice himself and inadvertently leaving Dimitri to wander alone as a vagrant for five years. This Dimitri is as such violent, contemptuous, and obsessed with revenge, and when his allies die in battle his “mourning” quotes are nothing but ellipses (Sylvain), dismissive grunts (Mercedes), or their names (Felix, Ingrid). For Dedue, though, who protests that he can keep fighting after being defeated, Dimitri says this:  “Shut up and retreat. You must live, Dedue.” So I was right about how this storyline plays out; per his Gilbert support, Dedue has to have his prince command him to live for him to have not charged to his death alongside Dimitri. Also, way to have all that homoromantic co-dependence flow both ways to have even a feral, death-seeking Dimitri insist on Dedue’s survival while all his childhood friends (and Mercedes) are dying around him and he barely spares them a word.

Anyway...let’s talk about lighter things. Not many supports left for me to get; I finally finished off Catherine and Shamir’s line, and it is blatantly romantic down to marriage propositions. As a counterpoint Claude’s last support with Shamir is one of his more romantic and one of the few endings that sees him eventually abandon Almyra. Flayn/Manuela dances around prostitution - good thing Flayn is secretly hundreds of years old, right?

Monastery tidbits: an NPC soldier confirms that the Fódlan year begins with the Great Tree Moon - the April equivalent. This means that numbering the months to match up with the Gregorian calendar was solely so the player could give Byleth a real world birthday. So worth it. I’ve also noticed that there’s a line of minor quests for supplies and skirmishes in Part 2 that are the same across all routes, with the only difference coming from who’s handing them out. For Edelgard it’s Hubert and for Claude it’s Hilda, but for Dimitri it’s Gilbert as yet another thing Dedue misses out on by being dead by default.

In a rare bit of honesty that’s kind of hilarious, Claude admits that he’s using Byleth for their connection to the church, now as a means of smoothing over tensions within the Alliance.

I complained about how the Alliance’s presence and behavior at the Gronder Field rematch on the Lions route has little explanation, and unfortunately the way the Kingdom remnant is handled is only slightly better here. Claude’s forces don’t try allying with them first because their movements have been erratic, and then later because it’s foggy at Gronder...fog that doesn’t stick around for the map itself, thankfully. Dimitri may be feral and unable to be reasoned with, but what about Gilbert or Rodrigue? The rematch is a big marketing moment, but having the Kingdom and Alliance fight each other instead of unifying against the Empire feels like a contrivance either way.

One thing I think Three Houses does really well compared to earlier games is that there’s less of a sense of what I think of as arbitrary chorus characters: people aside from the leads who show up in most dialogue scenes for the protagonist(s) to play off, who get to be there because they have plot armor or are NPCs so they can’t die in battle and therefore don’t need to be written around. FE16 goes out of its way to include every character in your army at one point or another in story cutscenes, sometimes even in plot critical ways. For example, after Chapter 17 it’s Lysithea who provides the plot hook to bring Those Who Slither back into the story by sharing her traumatic past. Meanwhile in Chapter 18 it’s Hilda who comes up with the ruse of invading Fort Merceus disguised as Imperial soldiers...as well as a gag about dressing Claude in drag that’s mildly amusing but goes nowhere.

Oh, right...I need to talk about the DK, and Those Who Slither’s nukes. The DK retreats from Fort Merceus because his side has “javelins of light” that totally obliterate it in the same way that Arianrhod gets obliterated in Edelgard’s route. As this happens in a cutscene I assume the DK doesn’t die there if you defeat him, as he does in the Lions route. If it seems odd that I’m not dwelling on the fact that the enemy now has anachronistic nukes, it’s nothing compared to Claude, who takes the opportunity to have an extended discussion on racism. Lorenz takes him to task for allying with the Almyran general Nader, and Claude reveals his plan to solve racism with imperialism. As silly as that is, he’s still deft (and manipulative) enough not to do so by revealing his own heritage but rather by dragging Cyril into the spotlight as an example of an Almyran among their own forces. Cyril protests, but that’s just how Claude rolls.

Part of Claude’s big speech references the Officer’s Academy bringing together people from many different backgrounds, among them the princess of Brigid and a man of Duscur. You know, an Imperial hostage and the vassal/boyfriend of the mentally unstable crown prince of Faerghus, because those are completely normal circumstances for adding diversity to the student body. It’s also strange to me that he considers Duscur as outside Fódlan. Ethnically and culturally distinct from Faerghus, yes, but Fódlan is a continent with three independent political entities that also includes the peninsula on which Duscur rests. To use a real world comparison close to how I imagine the relations in question, this would be comparable to saying that the Basque people do not live in Europe because they are an ethnic group distinct from the people of France/Spain. I’m clearly putting more thought into this than the game does, but still.

[virginiamurrayblog]

For the Longest Time, I Didn’t Identify as Black

Pollyanna Rodrigues De La Rosa, who only recently began identifying as Afro-Latina (Photo: Roberto Caruso)

Pollyanna Rodrigues De La Rosa sat in the back of a cab, on her way to her favourite Toronto Latin music club, El Rancho. To get herself in the mood for a Saturday night of salsa, bachata and reggaeton, she asked the driver for the auxiliary cord to play “Eres Mia” by Romeo Santos from her phone. The music filled the cab and she sang along, the lyrics flowing smoothly off her tongue in Spanish, the language she speaks at home with her family. The driver raised his voice over the music and asked Rodrigues De La Rosa about her background—but her answer wasn’t what he was expecting.

“I thought you were Black!” he said. Rodrigues De La Rosa, who is part Cuban and part Panamanian, is used to this type of reaction. She stands at just over five feet tall, with big, long, black curly hair. Her dark skin matches her brown eyes, and if you saw her on the street you’d probably have no doubts about her racial identity, either.

But what the cab driver didn’t understand was that while she is indeed Black, she is also Latina. To be fair, Rodrigues De La Rosa didn’t always understand the nuances of her racial identity, either. “For the longest time, I actually didn’t know I was Black,” she says. That’s because, growing up, her family considered themselves Latino.

Though they shared the same skin tone and hair texture, her family never talked about their African heritage—in fact, they preferred to pretend it didn’t exist. Rodrigues De La Rosa’s mother even pressed her about her romantic choices, questioning why she dated Black men instead of white men. And the anti-Black racism was present in her extended family, too. When she visited Cuba in 2015, many of her family members would ask her to straighten her hair for a “better” look.

Between her family’s Latino identity and the anti-Black rhetoric she internalized, Rodrigues De La Rosa questioned whether or not she identified as Black.

Then, in 2015, she discovered a term on social media that she truly felt described her: Afro-Latina. The broad definition is simple—someone who identifies as Afro-Latina, Afro-Latino or the more inclusive and gender-neutral Afro-Latinx is Black and from Latin America. But the term’s meaning is much more political.

In these communities, which have a deep history of anti-Black racism, Afro-Latinx refers to “someone [from the Latino community] who reclaims their Africanness and Blackness, which for so many years was erased,” explains Columbian-Canadian academic Andrea Vasquez Jimenez, the co-director of the Latinx, Afro-Latin-America, Abya Yala Education Network (LAEN). “Utilizing terms such as Hispanic erases our Blackness.”

While Rodrigues De La Rosa may have felt like she stood out among her peers, she is actually part of a large cultural community. A quarter of the Hispanic population in the U.S. identifies as Afro-Latino according to a 2014 study. (Similar data is not available in Canada in part because though the census includes Black and Latin American as visible minority categories, there is no category combining the two identities. Respondents can write in their own classification, or mark all the categories that apply, but the data is counted towards the Black and Latin American categories separately.)

“I get looked at all the time when I start speaking Spanish. It’s still a culture shock, especially to old farts. I quickly let them know that there are Black people in [Cuba and Panama],” says Rodrigues De La Rosa, adding that people often seem to think that it’s impossible to be both Black and a Spanish-speaking Latina.

“When I heard the term Afro-Latina, as sad as this is going to sound, it was the first time I thought I was considered Black,” says Rodrigues De La Rosa. “I loved it.”

Unlearning anti-Black racism as an Afro-Latina

People like Rodrigues De La Rosa are why Jimenez started LAEN. She made sure the organization was a space for Afro-Latinx people to not only have a voice, but learn about their heritage.

“Blackness is global. An extremely high percentage of [people from Latin America] have African ancestry. The identities of Blackness, Africanness and being Latinx are not mutually exclusive,” says Jimenez.

The African diaspora originated with the transatlantic slave trade, when European colonizers dispersed millions of people from Africa to North America, South America and the Caribbean. And regardless of where slaves were taken, sexual violence was common. “This is the most f-cked up part, I don’t know if my Spanish ancestor loved my great-great-great-grandma or raped her,” says Rodrigues De La Rosa.

The intersectionality of Afro-Latinx people can get even more complex, especially for people like CityNews reporter Ginella Massa, who wears a hijab and is from Panama.

“Often, in the realm of my work, my Muslim identity is discussed; my ethnicity or my heritage are rarely ever mentioned,” says Massa. When she made headlines in 2016 for being the first hijabi news anchor, the coverage described her as a Muslim Canadian, but the Afro-Latinx aspect of her identity took a back seat.

CityNews reporter Ginella Massa

Even within Canadian Afro-Latinx communities, positive discussions about embracing all aspects of this intersectional identity are rare.

“Because of anti-Black racism, many folks don’t necessarily speak nor highlight our Blackness within families,” says Jimenez.

That’s especially true among older generations of Afro-Latinx people, who have internalized centuries of institutionalized anti-Black racism. Massa says her family’s Blackness was rarely discussed at home. Her family only focused on their Latin heritage.

“My grandmother, I can say this certainty, would never identify as Black,” says Massa. “I’m not sure where she got this from because to look at her, you would say she is a Black woman. But there is this obsession with light skin and desire to distance ourselves from Blackness.”

For Rodrigues De La Rosa, learning the term Afro-Latina was the catalyst that allowed her to understand her who she really was. She was tired of people constantly denying her parts of her heritage—but in embracing this term, she also had to go through a process of unlearning the anti-Black racism rooted in her community.

As she learned more, Rodrigues De La Rosa also tried teaching her family about their Afro-Latinx history. But it was challenging, especially since her mother, who grew up in Cuba, was ridiculed by other Cubans for her darker skin and tightly coiled hair.

“I’ve had to teach my mother to love herself more,” she says.

Amara La Negra and Afro-Latina celebs stepping into the spotlight

Celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Gina Rodriguez, and Camila Cabello are readily identified as representations of the Latinx community in Hollywood—yet celebs like Zoe Saldana, Orange is the New Black‘s Dascha Polanco and Cardi B are often denied their intersectional identity and instead solely seen as Black.

Earlier this year, reality TV star and singer Amara La Negra, whose parents are from the Dominican Republic, reignited the conversation about Afro-Latinx identity on Love and Hip Hop Miami. In the debut episode, La Negra and producer Young Hollywood were discussing ideas about how she should change her image to better promote her music. La Negra insisted her look represented her Afro-Latina heritage. In response, Hollywood proceeded to question her identity by asking, “Hold on! Afro-Latina? Elaborate, are you African or is that just because you have an afro?”

Reducing an identity to a hair type exemplifies why the Afro-Latinx community struggles with their identity. What Hollywood said demonstrated the common misperception that someone can only a singular racial or cultural identity, which for people like La Negra and Rodrigues De La Rosa is not the case. Immediately after the conversation aired, social media feeds were filled with discussions about what it meant to be Afro-Latinx.

“It’s annoying the fact I feel I always have to defend myself. Defend my race, defend my looks, defend my fro… so if I want to wear it a certain type of way that shouldn’t affect who I am as a person or my music,” La Negra said at the reunion episode.

The type of representation La Negra is bringing for Afro-Latinx women was totally absent from Rodrigues De La Rosa’s childhood. Growing up, she remembers watching telenovelas on TLN. In all the Spanish-language dramas she watched as a child, she doesn’t remember seeing a single Black actor. Celebs like La Negra are changing that.

“What Amara’s trying to do is, she trying to show that’s there are all types of Latino women, she’s showing the darkest shade,” says Rodrigues De La Rosa.

What’s in a name?

With her newfound sense of identity, Rodrigues De La Rosa is now confident in herself to identify as both Black and Latina—and sets people straight when they question her background.

“Now when I say a sentence in Spanish and people be like ‘Oh my God you speak Spanish? I thought you were Black!’ I don’t find it surprising, I find it ignorant. I choose to enlighten them,” she says.

Her struggle with identity has become less about unlearning her internalized anti-Black racism, and more about educating others every time they question her ethnicity or race. Rodrigues De La Rosa will probably always face questions from people who don’t understand intersectional identities. But that doesn’t stop her from letting them know she exists, and so does the Afro-Latinx community.

Related: 

I Can’t Stop Thinking About Ellen Asking Constance Wu “Where Are You From?” Could a DNA Test *Really* Help Me Figure Out My Biracial Identity? Anyone Can Participate in Caribana, and Maybe That’s a Problem

The post For the Longest Time, I Didn’t Identify as Black appeared first on Flare.

For the Longest Time, I Didn’t Identify as Black published first on https://wholesalescarvescity.tumblr.com/

[gascon-en-exil]

FE16 Black Eagles (Edelgard) Liveblogging

Chapters 17-18, minus the colossal amount of Dimitri/Dedue content in the first chapter which I covered at length here.

Altogether I’d consider Edelgard’s last two chapters to be easier than Dimitri’s, in large part to due to far less long range magic. That’s actually quite reasonable in terms of story; as the nation renowned for its magic users - and, by the last chapter of the Lions route, openly allied with the remnants of Those Who Slither - Adrestia would logically field more of them. The knights of Faerghus and the church and Rhea’s “dolls” (more like fantasy-flavored mechs, but that’s what they call them) don’t offer as big a challenge by comparison.

The other obstacles unique to Chapter 18 weren’t much either. The fire makes the map hard to traverse for non-fliers, but it slows down enemies too. Rhea as the Immaculate One has a much smaller attack range than Hegemon Edelgard and only gets one attack per turn, in addition to being a bigger target that’s easier to surround. It makes sense that the climax of this route wouldn’t be as difficult if they used the number of chapters for scaling. The Strike Force has had four fewer chapters to grow compared to the Lions.

I liked that the last chapter plays out on a heavily modified version of the Fhirdiad map used in the Lions route for the Cornelia fight, although this does mean that I only got to see two entirely new maps on this route: the Petra/Bernadetta paralogue and the Tailtean Plains of Chapter 17.

Kill list: other than Dimitri and Dedue’s gay high tragedy, Sylvain and Mercedes in 17, Ashe, Gilbert, Annette, Catherine, and Cyril in 18. Catherine was much easier to take down from range with the fires limiting her movement, whereas Cyril (I thought he died in Chapter 12? I guess not) was surprisingly strong as a wyvern lord packing a brave axe. Wyvern enemies continue to catch me off guard.

Oh, yeah. Rhea shows up on the field in a Seiros cosplay in Chapter 17, but Edelgard one-rounded her (at a weapon triangle disadvantage, no less) and then she and almost all of the reinforcements she spawned with left the map. With everything else going on in that map, the church contribution was quite underwhelming.

Story/Character observations

Let’s get the small stuff out of the way first. There’s a few last bits of monastery dialogue worth noting. Shamir gets in some more heavy subtext re: Catherine, only now they’re enemies and you could potentially have Shamir kill Catherine. Dedue is a bear. Fleche, the girl who tries to kill Dimitri on the Lions route but instead kills Rodrigue, shows up one last time to show how curiously well-adjusted she is on this route after her brother’s death a few chapters earlier. It was interesting to see those two and the NPC general Ladislava show up during exploration and comment on ongoing events. I wouldn’t say it humanizes them too much since the most you get is an NPC fawning over how awesome Ladislava is or more pathos and less torture in Randolph’s death, but it’s appropriate for the alternative perspective this route offers. 

I also need to call attention to a handy scholar NPC who appears in the library every chapter after the timeskip, dispensing info dumps that the books don’t cover and asking us to call into question the authorial intent of those books. Of course he’s obviously biased in favor of Edelgard and the Empire, but it’s a useful addition.

Onto supports. As a means of ensuring that I got the Hubert/Ferdinand paired ending I saved all their other A supports for the last minute, so that’s most of what I saw here. As per usual it’s Ferdinand who gets the more interesting stuff overall, with Hubert being more sedate and needing to be given practical reasons for marrying Dorothea or motivation to stop comparing Petra to Edelgard. Ferdinand’s high points come down even to something as mundane as what he’s drinking in various A supports - tea with Bernadetta, coffee (Hubert’s preferred drink) with Edelgard. Does Hubert/Ferdinand canonically happen before Edelgard/Ferdinand, and this is why the former’s paired ending has Edelgard jealous of them? Ferdinand’s A with Manuela is more theatre queen gushing, but his A with Dorothea walks a fine line between really sweet and really screwed up. Dorothea recalls bathing in a public fountain shortly after her singing talents were discovered and seeing a young Ferdinand staring at her and probably sporting his first erection. This is why she’s so hostile to him the whole time, and as said I don’t know how we’re meant to feel about that, or that this conversation resolves in romance. Or, rather, it would, if they didn’t then jump back to a confused simile about bees that’s now morphed into drones protecting a queen. From what little I know of insects male bees don’t have stingers and so can’t protect anything, so I do believe this metaphor subtly circles back around to lesbianism in the end. Everything with Dorothea inevitably does.

I’ve been neglecting it all this time, but I will say that Bernadetta improves slightly after the timeskip. She screams a lot less in her later supports, and in her dialogue in general she sounds more composed and less prone to immediately hiding herself away. Yay for actual emotional maturation.

I’m going to delicately sidestep the hotly-debated question of whether Edelgard’s goals justify her actions or whether this is in fact a bonafide villain route. The game itself wavers over this question at multiple points, not as shakily as Conquest does but still in ways that feel tonally off. The attempts at humanizing Edelgard by giving her a mundane fear of rats (that she acquired when she was being tortured as a child - totally normal circumstances!) and having her draw sketches of Byleth don’t land because they’re so disconnected from everything else, and her opinion of the religion of Seiros varies constantly. Sometimes she sees the value of spirituality in people’s lives and only takes issue with the corruption of the church, other times - including at the very end, when she’s about to cave Rhea’s head in - she’s declaring that humanity has no need for gods and will be better off without them. Having played her route it’s hard for me to call her a fantasy Protestant even in jest when she’s more of a dystheist (i.e. gods exist, but they are evil antagonistic forces) who will occasionally acknowledge that religion can have a positive impact on a strictly personal level. Even though she lays her plans out for Byleth early on, well before the timeskip, her ultimate aim remains unclear, not helped by the brevity of the epilogue which seems to be standard across all routes - just a short paragraph of text by the narrator over one of those stylized tapestries, cut to turn counts and character endings. Edelgard abolishes the nobility and the church after having conquered the other two nations by military force, and somehow we’re expected to believe that her regime will remain peaceful and stable and not collapse into anarchy in the space of a few years. Sure.

It does not help in the slightest that this route builds up Those Who Slither as a credible threat, only to shove them off onto an unseen postgame conflict. True, I theorized that allowing Claude and his various allies to live on the Lions route sets the stage for a massive Almyran invasion after the credits roll, but that’s more headcanon based on how FE doesn’t like to settle for unambiguously happy and resolved endings. Those Who Slither are the genuine antagonists of this route, and most of what Rhea has actually done is left unexplained. From a Doylist perspective I understand it, I really do: Those Who Slither take the focus for the Deer, and Rhea takes it for the church route, just as Dimitri’s revenge motivation only gets proper attention on the Lions route. However, these four stories are not all occurring simultaneously but are instead essentially AUs of one another, with Byleth choosing their starter Pokémon their house the catalyst for shaping all the events to follow. Looking at this route in isolation though it leaves Edelgard’s grand mission looking highly questionable.

One last thing, because I almost forgot about him: what happened to the Death Knight? He disappears from the game after the timeskip on this route. I assume you see him again if you recruit Mercedes and get her paralogue with Caspar, but it’s strange that one of Edelgard’s most loyal minions from Part 1 doesn’t even warrant a mention during her conquest of Fódlan.

Two routes down and two more to go - time to fear the Deer...’s lack of homoerotic content. Nothing makes me want to play something like knowing all the characters under my control are sexually uncreative prudes.

EDIT: Right, I remembered the DK but not the m!Byleth/Linhardt S rank. That should say something about how not particularly romantic it is. Really, the S rank with Gilbert and the one paired S rank with Alois where Byleth doesn’t marry someone else seem less offensive in light of how little there is to m!Byleth’s one “real” gay pairing. As always, you can get so much more out of conversations when both characters are allowed to speak and emote outside of irrelevant dialogue choices and stiff model gestures.

[virginiamurrayblog]

For the Longest Time, I Didn’t Identify as Black

Pollyanna Rodrigues De La Rosa, who only recently began identifying as Afro-Latina (Photo: Roberto Caruso)

Pollyanna Rodrigues De La Rosa sat in the back of a cab, on her way to her favourite Toronto Latin music club, El Rancho. To get herself in the mood for a Saturday night of salsa, bachata and reggaeton, she asked the driver for the auxiliary cord to play “Eres Mia” by Romeo Santos from her phone. The music filled the cab and she sang along, the lyrics flowing smoothly off her tongue in Spanish, the language she speaks at home with her family. The driver raised his voice over the music and asked Rodrigues De La Rosa about her background—but her answer wasn’t what he was expecting.

“I thought you were Black!” he said. Rodrigues De La Rosa, who is part Cuban and part Panamanian, is used to this type of reaction. She stands at just over five feet tall, with big, long, black curly hair. Her dark skin matches her brown eyes, and if you saw her on the street you’d probably have no doubts about her racial identity, either.

But what the cab driver didn’t understand was that while she is indeed Black, she is also Latina. To be fair, Rodrigues De La Rosa didn’t always understand the nuances of her racial identity, either. “For the longest time, I actually didn’t know I was Black,” she says. That’s because, growing up, her family considered themselves Latino.

Though they shared the same skin tone and hair texture, her family never talked about their African heritage—in fact, they preferred to pretend it didn’t exist. Rodrigues De La Rosa’s mother even pressed her about her romantic choices, questioning why she dated Black men instead of white men. And the anti-Black racism was present in her extended family, too. When she visited Cuba in 2015, many of her family members would ask her to straighten her hair for a “better” look.

Between her family’s Latino identity and the anti-Black rhetoric she internalized, Rodrigues De La Rosa questioned whether or not she identified as Black.

Then, in 2015, she discovered a term on social media that she truly felt described her: Afro-Latina. The broad definition is simple—someone who identifies as Afro-Latina, Afro-Latino or the more inclusive and gender-neutral Afro-Latinx is Black and from Latin America. But the term’s meaning is much more political.

In these communities, which have a deep history of anti-Black racism, Afro-Latinx refers to “someone [from the Latino community] who reclaims their Africanness and Blackness, which for so many years was erased,” explains Columbian-Canadian academic Andrea Vasquez Jimenez, the co-director of the Latinx, Afro-Latin-America, Abya Yala Education Network (LAEN). “Utilizing terms such as Hispanic erases our Blackness.”

While Rodrigues De La Rosa may have felt like she stood out among her peers, she is actually part of a large cultural community. A quarter of the Hispanic population in the U.S. identifies as Afro-Latino according to a 2014 study. (Similar data is not available in Canada in part because though the census includes Black and Latin American as visible minority categories, there is no category combining the two identities. Respondents can write in their own classification, or mark all the categories that apply, but the data is counted towards the Black and Latin American categories separately.)

“I get looked at all the time when I start speaking Spanish. It’s still a culture shock, especially to old farts. I quickly let them know that there are Black people in [Cuba and Panama],” says Rodrigues De La Rosa, adding that people often seem to think that it’s impossible to be both Black and a Spanish-speaking Latina.

“When I heard the term Afro-Latina, as sad as this is going to sound, it was the first time I thought I was considered Black,” says Rodrigues De La Rosa. “I loved it.”

Unlearning anti-Black racism as an Afro-Latina

People like Rodrigues De La Rosa are why Jimenez started LAEN. She made sure the organization was a space for Afro-Latinx people to not only have a voice, but learn about their heritage.

“Blackness is global. An extremely high percentage of [people from Latin America] have African ancestry. The identities of Blackness, Africanness and being Latinx are not mutually exclusive,” says Jimenez.

The African diaspora originated with the transatlantic slave trade, when European colonizers dispersed millions of people from Africa to North America, South America and the Caribbean. And regardless of where slaves were taken, sexual violence was common. “This is the most f-cked up part, I don’t know if my Spanish ancestor loved my great-great-great-grandma or raped her,” says Rodrigues De La Rosa.

The intersectionality of Afro-Latinx people can get even more complex, especially for people like CityNews reporter Ginella Massa, who wears a hijab and is from Panama.

“Often, in the realm of my work, my Muslim identity is discussed; my ethnicity or my heritage are rarely ever mentioned,” says Massa. When she made headlines in 2016 for being the first hijabi news anchor, the coverage described her as a Muslim Canadian, but the Afro-Latinx aspect of her identity took a back seat.

CityNews reporter Ginella Massa

Even within Canadian Afro-Latinx communities, positive discussions about embracing all aspects of this intersectional identity are rare.

“Because of anti-Black racism, many folks don’t necessarily speak nor highlight our Blackness within families,” says Jimenez.

That’s especially true among older generations of Afro-Latinx people, who have internalized centuries of institutionalized anti-Black racism. Massa says her family’s Blackness was rarely discussed at home. Her family only focused on their Latin heritage.

“My grandmother, I can say this certainty, would never identify as Black,” says Massa. “I’m not sure where she got this from because to look at her, you would say she is a Black woman. But there is this obsession with light skin and desire to distance ourselves from Blackness.”

For Rodrigues De La Rosa, learning the term Afro-Latina was the catalyst that allowed her to understand her who she really was. She was tired of people constantly denying her parts of her heritage—but in embracing this term, she also had to go through a process of unlearning the anti-Black racism rooted in her community.

As she learned more, Rodrigues De La Rosa also tried teaching her family about their Afro-Latinx history. But it was challenging, especially since her mother, who grew up in Cuba, was ridiculed by other Cubans for her darker skin and tightly coiled hair.

“I’ve had to teach my mother to love herself more,” she says.

Amara La Negra and Afro-Latina celebs stepping into the spotlight

Celebrities such as Jennifer Lopez, Gina Rodriguez, and Camila Cabello are readily identified as representations of the Latinx community in Hollywood—yet celebs like Zoe Saldana, Orange is the New Black‘s Dascha Polanco and Cardi B are often denied their intersectional identity and instead solely seen as Black.

Earlier this year, reality TV star and singer Amara La Negra, whose parents are from the Dominican Republic, reignited the conversation about Afro-Latinx identity on Love and Hip Hop Miami. In the debut episode, La Negra and producer Young Hollywood were discussing ideas about how she should change her image to better promote her music. La Negra insisted her look represented her Afro-Latina heritage. In response, Hollywood proceeded to question her identity by asking, “Hold on! Afro-Latina? Elaborate, are you African or is that just because you have an afro?”

Reducing an identity to a hair type exemplifies why the Afro-Latinx community struggles with their identity. What Hollywood said demonstrated the common misperception that someone can only a singular racial or cultural identity, which for people like La Negra and Rodrigues De La Rosa is not the case. Immediately after the conversation aired, social media feeds were filled with discussions about what it meant to be Afro-Latinx.

“It’s annoying the fact I feel I always have to defend myself. Defend my race, defend my looks, defend my fro… so if I want to wear it a certain type of way that shouldn’t affect who I am as a person or my music,” La Negra said at the reunion episode.

The type of representation La Negra is bringing for Afro-Latinx women was totally absent from Rodrigues De La Rosa’s childhood. Growing up, she remembers watching telenovelas on TLN. In all the Spanish-language dramas she watched as a child, she doesn’t remember seeing a single Black actor. Celebs like La Negra are changing that.

“What Amara’s trying to do is, she trying to show that’s there are all types of Latino women, she’s showing the darkest shade,” says Rodrigues De La Rosa.

What’s in a name?

With her newfound sense of identity, Rodrigues De La Rosa is now confident in herself to identify as both Black and Latina—and sets people straight when they question her background.

“Now when I say a sentence in Spanish and people be like ‘Oh my God you speak Spanish? I thought you were Black!’ I don’t find it surprising, I find it ignorant. I choose to enlighten them,” she says.

Her struggle with identity has become less about unlearning her internalized anti-Black racism, and more about educating others every time they question her ethnicity or race. Rodrigues De La Rosa will probably always face questions from people who don’t understand intersectional identities. But that doesn’t stop her from letting them know she exists, and so does the Afro-Latinx community.

Related: 

I Can’t Stop Thinking About Ellen Asking Constance Wu “Where Are You From?” Could a DNA Test *Really* Help Me Figure Out My Biracial Identity? Anyone Can Participate in Caribana, and Maybe That’s a Problem

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