#claude attacking faerghus for no fuckin reason ❌

[dimiclaudeblaigan]

What gets me about people trying to explain Hopes Claude's violent nature by pointing to the lack of Garreg Mach "teaching" Claude violence wouldn't solve anything is that says he... learned violence wouldn't do anything while at Garreg Mach? Which is like... the opposite thing that happens.

Edel.gard gets basically everything she wants through violence in 3H (at first anyway) - she kicks everyone out Garreg Mach, she kidnaps Rhea in 3 out of 4 routes, she gets super weapons in Demonic Beasts, and she got away with doing a LOT of other shit over the course of the year at Garreg Mach.

So if Claude really did need to learn that violence wouldn't get him what he wants, and if he really was always prone to violence WITHOUT this lesson taught to him, then his experience at Garreg Mach should be the LAST thing he needs to learn that peaceful means is better. Almost like Garreg Mach didn't teach him this at all and Hopes just wrote him to be violent to serve the plot/story the writers were desperate to write 🤔

Well, Claude already knew violence wouldn't get him what he wanted before GM. That being, that's just the kind of person he is and he didn't believe in violence to begin with. Even in Hopes he wasn't violent and didn't take the violent route until the second half of GW. That's why a lot of people say it just came out of nowhere, because Shahid alone isn't motivation enough for that. Shahid wasn't close to Claude, so it's not like Claude had to kill his most darling, precious, beloved sibling. If that happened, sure, I could understand the change in behavior more, but Shahid wasn't enough for that.

Like you said, GM didn't teach him that stuff. It's just part of him as a person. The reason his actions in the second half of GW come across as so jarring is because they were trying to write in a story for a character it wouldn't work for. I get that they wanted to explore another kind of story for him, but since they were using pre-existing characters, they had to write whatever story they had planned for him within the boundaries of an existing character (meaning less reign to do whatever they wanted and have it be believable to that character). The problem was the fact that they chose a character whose personality it wouldn't work for unless they manipulated some aspects of him to fit it into the story.

With Dimitri it worked just fine in Houses because we had hints dropped to us by Felix throughout, and we could slowly see Dimitri losing stability. Claude's change in behavior doesn't work because it can't be justified properly. If you notice, there are all these theories and guesses about why he acted like that, but that's the biggest issue here: we shouldn't have to guess. A good story, and good writing as well, wouldn't leave you guessing why someone did something. There's no concrete, told to us reason why he does what he does.

We don't actually know what caused the change, and I suspect that's because the writers couldn't really find a way to tell us outright that made sense with his character. Instead, we get a timeskip and just have to accept that this is how he is now, with no real explanation given to us. Shahid is just a fan theory in that regard, because half a year passed after Claude killed him and we had no insight as to whether or not it actually caused a change in his personality or if he was just grieving heavily at the time it happened.

I've mentioned this before, but Claude was written to serve the plot like you said. His change in personality was there to move the plot in the direction they wanted it to go in, because it couldn't go in that direction with his Houses character. I previously compared GW to AG in this sense, and how Dimitri's character wasn't sacrificed for the plot. The plot moved in the direction that best suited the main character of the route, not the character being altered this way and that way to work with the direction of the plot.

The thing is, to pull off that story, they would have to use another character for it to work without any hiccups. GW is such a largely controversial route, not because it's interesting and has values that people want to discuss, but because they took a character people loved and bent him backwards to stick him into a plot they wanted to try for him. They basically wanted to try a plot out, had no other available characters to do it with and so twisted and turned him to work him into the plot.

Personally what I think should've been done is for Claude to just finally snap and kill Shahid without actually feeling bad about it. I think it would've been more interesting if he finally had enough with people trying to kill him and targeted all the assassins who had tried to kill him. In a way you could even give him a hint of Dimitri's AM storyline in that sense and it would actually work. Claude was always so kind and patient, but when pushed far enough, while I don't think he'd ever target innocent people ( ex. re: Faerghus), I could definitely see him losing his shit and wanting to know why he, who had done nothing to anyone and had simply just been born, had to live like that all his life. I could see him deciding it wasn't fair and that he just couldn't put up with it anymore, emotionally spiraling and needing to be helped by the people of Leicester and Nader. It would give off the story vibes of how a person can only be pushed so far before they can't handle something anymore, and I think even for Claude that could work.

Not... you know... what we got. If they wanted to write Claude in a more compromised situation, that would have worked for him significantly better than dumbing him down to work him into the plot.