#fe3h theory

[shadow-academic]

I do like a lot of the points in this theory, but I’ve got additional context to add from Three Hopes regarding the Four Apostles in general and Saint Aubin specifically. Spoilers under the cut.

The thing about the Four Apostles is that they all have Hero’s Relics (except for Saint Noa, who has a Sacred Weapon, but that’s kinda beside the point). They weren’t Nabateans, but instead humans, like the Ten Elites. The primary difference between the Four Apostles and the Ten Elites is that the Apostles ended up siding with the Saints against the Elites in the War of Heroes. That’s why they have Hero’s Relics made from the corpses of the Nabateans whose blood flows in their veins, and also may be why they later attempt the Rite of Rebirth in an attempt to make up for their sin of being complicit in the initial genocide by reviving Sothis.

Despite being human, though, the Four Apostles are first-generation Major Crest bearers, and thus have unnaturally long lifespans themselves. We see what that sort of thing looks like firsthand with Jeralt, a first-generation Major Crest of Seiros bearer, who got a blood transfusion directly from Rhea/Seiros and as a result is both well over a hundred years old and doesn’t look to have aged a day in the twenty years he’d been gone from the monastery. (Speaking of Jeralt, one of the most compelling bits of evidence for your theory is the fact that Anna mentions that she’s known Jeralt for a long time, long before she ever met Byleth.)

Unfortunately, we know for certain that Saint Aubin is not alive thanks to a line of support conversations from Three Hopes, namely between Yuri and Seteth. Yuri is, of course, the only known bearer of the Major Crest of Aubin in the present day. His backstory, established back in Three Houses through support conversations with Byleth and Balthus, he tells of when he was young, and his mother took a wandering mysterious elder into their home for a few months. The elder is already an interesting figure, with a surprisingly deep knowledge of diverse areas including medicine despite appearing to be a homeless old man; among other things, he’s the one who taught little Yuri how to read and write. During the elder’s stay in their home, little Yuri comes down with a really nasty case of plague. While it looks like he’s gonna die for sure, the elder gives him a mysterious red liquid, which miraculously lets him make a full recovery. Not long after that, the elder passes away, presumably of old age. When Yuri tells this story to Seteth, aka Saint Cichol, who of course knew Saint Aubin personally way back in the day, Seteth is able to deduce that the mysterious elder from Yuri’s backstory was none other than Saint Aubin himself.

So, between Saint Aubin actually being human and also having passed away within the past twenty years or so, I’m not sure he’s necessarily connected to Anna just because their Crests do the same thing. After all, we do know for a fact that Macuil, Indech, and Cichol are brothers, and Cethleann is Cichol’s daughter, and all four of their Crests do different things. Other than that, I do like the theory that Anna’s been a Nabatean in disguise all along and has been around for well over a thousand years.

fe3h // analysis/discussion/theory - lore, game mechanics // mild spoilers

CW: this post touches on issues of wartime child brutality and wartime trauma; reader discretion is encouraged.

3h!Anna’s Identity and the Crest of Ernest

@threehousing i actually have a theory/hc about the Crest of Ernest.

So, Ernest is literally the only crest that we know literally nothing about—apart from its symbol, ability, sole bearer (Anna) and progenitor dragon (Thorn Dragon). Its crest type implies that it may be (closely?) related to the Crest of Aubin. What’s more relevant is looking at Heroes’ Relics—each Crest apart from Ernest has either a Sacred Weapon or Hero’s Relic. And, notably, Crests that don’t have Heroes’ Relics are, of course Seiros, Cichol, Cethleann, Macuil and Indech, which all instead have a Sacred Weapon, because their progenitor dragon is still alive.

And what does the Crest of Ernest not have? A Hero’s Relic. Which if the trend continues, means that the Thorn Dragon is still alive. Also, each surviving Nabatean has their Major Crest. So, who happens to bear the only Major Crest of Ernest? Anna.

But Lyte!, you cry, Ernest doesn’t have a Sacred Weapon either! Well, let’s have a look at the list of weapons:

Sword of Seiros

Shield of Seiros

Spear of Assal

Ochain Shield

Caduceus Staff

Sword of Begalta

The Inexhaustible

These are all weapons, made by Indech, for a time of war—these are intended for combat (which could mean that the crests for which there are sacred weapons are the dragons that were the oldest/commissioned them/survived perhaps the longest?)

But I digress—my main point is that if Anna survives, why doesn’t she have a Sacred Weapon?

This is about to get a bit…depressing, but, look at the amount of bone in the Fetters of Dromi, and the size of the Crest Stone:

That’s not much, is it? Not to get dark but, this leads me to hypothesise that when the Red Canyon happened, Aubin was a child. But what does this have to do with anything?

Well, Aubin and Ernest’s Crests, gameplay-wise, have identical abilities, and, well, in terms of the couple of crests that resemble each other,

Ernest and Aubin are almost inverses/complements to each other. So, I think, twins. Anna and Aubin are twins. (Keyword are; I think that Aubin’s still alive but that’s for another post)

This is a depressing and long-winded way to say that Anna doesn’t have a Sacred Weapon because she was a child when Zanado happened. Aubin survived, but lost many of his Nabatean abilities because of his injuries.

So I theorise/hc that Anna is a Nabatean—but the Crest still bears her deadname, perhaps because she resents being a Nabatean so much because of what happened to her brother while the Saints and the rest of the Apostles all survived relatively unscathed (again for another post)—it could also explain why she doesn’t have green hair/eyes; either its the her power as the Thorn Dragon to changer her appearance or something else, but she doesn’t appear Nabatean because she doesn’t want to draw attention to herself, and/or because she doesn’t want to.

Another big piece of evidence is that in her ending it’s implied that she may be immortal/relatively ageless—and the only other characters we know about that can do this are the Nabateans and those with Nabatean souls/blood.

Regardless, I believe that Anna is her crest’s original bearer and hence a Nabatean and survivor of Zanado.

And while this is only minor, it could be well-noted that while Ernest means “serious”, “resolute”, “battle to the death”, and is associated with war, Anna means “grace”, “favour” or “beautiful”

I would want to say more but I’m far from an expert on trauma, ptsd, and trans identities and experiences, and don’t want to make any potentially harmful assumptions and/or generalisations.

But, from the pieces and crumbs we’ve got in-game, that’s my thoughts on Anna, “Ernest”, and her crest.

And although some might say that Anna isn’t that great statwise, this HC makes me appreciate her all the more.

[finnicksghost]

dimitri and felix in fire emblem: three houses [azure moon] / boot theory by richard siken

[wild-moss-art]

Regular normal au where nothing weird happened

[stormsbourne]

"edelgard is my revolutionary communist queen" girl says she wants a meritocracy I don't know how to tell you this

[sorbriquette]

Okay so like, can someone explain me a thing???

Hubert like organises Flayn's kidnapping right? Like he literally has an ominous scene about 'taking matters into his own hands' right before she gets kidnapped.

And yet??? there is no mention or extrapolation of this on the wiki.

Am I crazy or did he orchestrate it??? If so why???

[t0bey]

something deeply funny about how relatively mild the state of adrestia and leicester is post-timeskip in most routes and then faerghus which was already a shithole somehow got 12x worse

[creativesplat]

Fire Emblem Three Houses and Fire Emblem Engage are like the sun and the moon, or odd and even. They're so different in such deliberate ways and I love them for it. Let's have a little ramble! This time on design:

Byleth and Alear's colour schemes could not be more different. First Byleth's: black, grey, bone-brass and silver for metals, and muted turquoise-y green hair.

Then Alear's: White, black, bright golden for metals, and vibrant red and blue hair.

The purple created when you mix Alear's hair colour is a brighter version of the complimentary colour of the turquoise/grey that is created when you mix the two hair colours of Byleth.

Their inverted colours are (nearly) the same as the other, minus being brighter/ more muted than the other.

Byleth has a short wolf cut (male) and a long(ish) wolf cut (female) with side swept bangs both times, Alear has massively long hair with central hime bangs (female) and a wolf cut with central layered bangs (male).

Byleth wears black, Alear wears white, Byleth's hair is green, Alear's is red and blue.

Their designs speak so well to their games, one muted and dark, the other vibrant and light. Both so well made, honestly I feel like they were made for each other with how opposite they are! I love it!

Part one:

Part three:

Part four:

[khalidistan]

claude von riegan fe3h required reading list. the UN charter declares that you can no longer talk or write about claude if you have not read every book here. finally. world peace

some notes in no particular order: everything but namesake is nonfiction. this list is non-exhaustive. robeson and kwame ture I've listened to their speeches/essays but not their books. if you HAVE to pick only 1-2 please read saïd and puar.

most of these readings are available on my mega asian-american reading list gdrive and if there are some you wanna read on here that arent in there lmk and I can upload a link for you.

I accidentally forgot black skin white masks by fanon :( but I have wretched on there so there's at least that. happy reading

fun fact the background is a grayscale version of orientalism's book cover

[per-se-idit]

Serving Shade -Felix

(more summer alt ideas)

[moltz23]

Did a Potential Overhaul in the Post-Timeskip Cutscenes mess up with 3H's Development? - Development Mystery/Theory

Back in 2021, Nintendo released a video called Fire Emblem : Vol 1 to celebrate the franchise's 30th anniversary. And around 30:35, the video shows the 3H Movie "Rematch", used for Chapter 17 of the Azure Moon and Verdant Wind routes.

With a catch.

It's not the same one that ended up on the final game:

A glimpse into an alternate reality?

People went wild back when they noticed Edelgard and Claude in this version are using the outfits of their Emperor & Barbsrossa classes rather than the Armored Lord and Wyvern Master ones seen in the game we got, leading to much speculation surrounding what this meant for Three Houses. And it goes without saying that, while unseen, fans suspect that Dimitri uses his Great Lord outfit rather than the High Lord's in this version. So... The heck is up with this movie???

Well, as uncovered by VincentASM from sereneforest.net, it's highly likely this take of the movie shown in the promotional Nintendo/FE video is from an early build of the game. A build so early, that Edelgard skin and eyes were more saturated, and characters still didn't use unique palettes when using generic classes (which was incidentally used in February's JP Nintendo Direct of 2019).

Your call as for which version looks better.

It doesn't just end there though; if Three Houses' datamine is anything to go by - namely, the internal order the classes have in the code - we can find evidence that can answer why the endgame lord classes were used in this variation rather than the "middle ones" early on: simply put, Armored Lord, High Lord, and Wyvern Master did not exist during most of 3H' development. In turn, this explains why the Flame Emperor Class - Edelgard's enemy-only class for Part 1 - is internally, a model swap of her Emperor class rather than Armored Lord's: the latter didn't exist during development of Part 1, so Emperor was used as a base instead.

With this evidence uncovered and the answer giving resolution to the promotional footage shown, hopes waned down for the future of 3H, and everyone moved on.

This raises two questions I haven’t seen anyone point out before, though.

How much (if any) did this change mess up the post-timeskip movies? Is it the reason why the Silver Snow Theorem happened?

To explain these inquiries further, I'll go into greater detail about each one:

1. Two Types of Animated Movies.

Corporate needs you to find the differences between these two pictures.

Three Houses uses 2 types of animated movies for important scenes. The first one (see the one on the left), was done in-house by KT through pre-rendering shenanigans with the 3H engine. Meanwhile, the second one (on the right) was outsourced to SANZIGEN.

The distinction between both is relevant because the movie showcased in the FE Castle Conversations video - as well its final version - belong to the former category. Meaning that, should the character designs get tweaked during development, in the best case scenario, as far IS & KT were concerned, swapping models should be enough to keep things up to date, which might as well be what happened with the "Rematch" movie once the House Leader's main post-timeskip designs were swapped.

But what about tweaking the other type of movies, though? The ones commissioned to the animation studio? I can't imagine the whole process being cheap in their case, more so given that 8 out of the 11 movies commissioned to SANZIGEN feature the 3H lords post-timeskip:

What's important here is that ☆ = Doesn't feature any 3H lord in any capacity.

Granted, the smartest course of action in this instance would've been to simply commission the post-timeskip movies near the end of development to avoid consistency/revision issues, for which there is a plausible chance that’s the case. After all, in the E3 2018 trailer for the game - which was the first instance we ever saw footage of it - the only animated movie outsourced seen was the one from the intro.

But... What if that’s not the case?

Call me paranoid if you want, but I raise this worry for a reason-

2. "The Theorem of What?????"

Love this banner so much.

A few months ago I did a breakdown on how 3H distributes it's movies across routes, and if there's anything that stood up a ton besides the predictable stuff, is that the game followed a clear pattern which determined which routes would get the most movies, versus which ones would get screwed instead. In my breakdown, I coined this pattern "The Silver Snow Theorem" which proposes the following:

"The amount of movies and fullscreen CGs present in a route’s main story by Part 2, is directly and inversely proportional respectively, to how much the narrative follows Silver Snow’s story beats."

And as a refresher, Silver Snow matters to the development of Three Houses because: A. That's the first route the developers worked on; and B. was used as the basis for the other 3:

Which route specifically did you create in the beginning to establish the world-building? Kusakihara: It was one of the two paths in the Empire route—the one fans refer to as the “church route”: “Silver Snow” [...] afterwards, we had Koei Tecmo’s scripting team start work on the nitty-gritty of the other house leaders and the story of their respective routes.

While Silver Snow having this much influence over the Part 2 movies is noticeable in hindsight, truth be told, I did initially brush it off as just a side effect of being used as a template for development. Looking back now though, a part of me now wonders if the Part 2 movies were first commissioned once Silver Snow was late into development and AM and VW had been already decided to borrow a ton from the route’s first half. Because if that’s the case, then there might have been cutscenes outsourced to SANZIGEN that did feature Edelgard, Dimitri and Claude with their second post-timeskip lord classes rather than one ones fans are most familiar with.

But then, it was decided during development that the house leaders would rather use different outfits instead. And this might have caused problems with budget since changing those outsourced cutscenes ain’t an easy task compared to the ones KT made in-house.

Like, seriously.

Goes without saying that all this is merely conjecture. But I feel it’s worth making the question because, to reiterate, the Silver Snow Theorem highlights that the more a route follows Silver Snow’s story beats to a tee, the more animated cutscenes (and less CGs) it gets. And given evidence points out the lord’s main post-timeskip classes fans are familiar with were a late addition… I guess y’all know where I’m going by now.

I usually don’t make threads focusing on fan theories and stuff, but this has been in my mind for a long while so I wanted to see what you guys think about it. Do you think more movies with the lord’s 2nd classes got made before the outfit swap was made? Or perhaps the issue the devs ran with that caused the Silver Snow Threorem might be due to something else entirely…? Also, what's y'all's opinion on SANZIGEN's movies compared to the ones done by KT?

[maslosstuff]

Me trying to explain to Casphardt/Linspar fans that this line is a metaphor that the Caspar we knew is gone and will never come back due to fact of the new responsibilities and attention he thought he wanted from his father but realized he didn’t wanted and without linhardt to stir him on the right path since he was taken on the Bridge of Myrddin made Caspar go on a downward spiral and when he did managed to “reunite” or “rescue” Linhardt it was too late he was already to far gone:

[tea-cat-arts]

I will die salty about Ingrid and Dorothea's support chain. What kind of self respecting bisexual looks at Ingrid and goes "let's get that girl in a dress." Dorothea, I'm disappointed in you- get that girl in a suit (I've also seen some more formal/classy leather jacket and pants looks that I think would work on Ingrid)

[omegablade0]

These were just some sketches I did one day for practice. We have Best Girl Bernie from Fire Emblem, Jahy-Sama from Jahy-Sama, Shamiko from Machikado Mazoku, Praxis and Theory from Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Mega Man (again) from Mega Man Star Force, Anya from Spy x Family, and Nezuko from Demon Slayer.

[festivalofthe12]

I don't disagree with most of this, but...

Communists having trouble with the concept of people not wanting to work... Has a pretty long history, actually.

a long time mutual of mine called edel a communist icon and i felt my whole being recoil........ its so hard sometimes because i dont interact with 3h or 3h fandom since im active for a different fe game but a lot of my fe acquaintances reveal they have positive feelings about her in a "shes right" kind of way and i hate that it automatically makes me lose respect for them. i hate that i even have to even think about this 3h discourse but it bugs me /so much/ how shes still viewed like that, 5 years and many extreme world events later. also thank you for your posts you make me feel sane again.

You're welcome and thank you for the kind words

What's crazy about giving Edelgard the communist label is that she misses many important marks of communist theory pretty handily: allocating resources to everyone according to their needs and ability, complete absence of private property or social statuses, eventually eliminating money and the nation-state.

She doesn't believe in allocation of resources based on needs and ability, she only believes in "people who work hard enough and correctly according to the emperor will get more"; she gets closest in her support with Linhardt but ultimately misses the swing by a mile because if she were an actual communist, she wouldn't have to twist her brain into a pretzel to accomodate someone who'd rather not work, and that's including a friend of hers.

She doesn't believe in the absence of private property or social status, because there are still high status, private property owners under her rule in CF. No, the only problem she has with status and property in Fodlan is the current method of attaining them, which is mostly hereditary and blood based. She has no issue of there being higher classes and privatized property so long as they prove to her and future emperors that they "worked for it."

There's never an indication that she wants money to eventually be done away with.

And desiring collapse of the nation state? The one with the map select line "for the Empire" and the goal of forced militarized unification of those who she deems are opponents who disagree with her aims? Yeah, that ain't her lmao.

Hell, take an example from Xenoblade 3, where the entire game is about rejecting wealth established leadership that profits off of militarization, and Noah, in response to Alexandria asking if her and Colony Iota (themselves a blend of merit/harworking allocation and utilitarianism) will be "useful" he says, "It doesn't matter. I don't see people that way."

People don't have to be useful, have merit, or anything similar to be deserving of basic rights, decency, security and comfort. Everyone deserves the baseline and the ability to get ahead, not rejected the opportunity nor have a lowered ceiling of accomplishment due to a single individual's (i.e. an Emperor's) perception of their failings.

Hell, Edelgard and Hubert's 'Likes' include "Talented individuals" and "Useful people" respectively. They like preaching that only they know what's best and what's worth it in the end, centralizing knowledge and power to their positions and letting people they deem worthy to have higher capabilities.

Pretty anti-communist to me idk

[hesperidia]

one thing about me is that i never stopped thinking about fire emblem three houses in the last 4 years even though i never played it firsthand it rewired my brain and i wish i could reach the same levels of investment i had in 2020 it bringed so much serotonin to me

[moltz23]

The Achilles Heel of Fodlan's Most Fantastic Weapon - Analysis & Theory.

As a mere concept, futuristic missiles showing up from nowhere in a medieval-western fantasy setting like Fire Emblem makes for some pretty neat spectacle. In Three Houses, though? This unfortunately comes with some questions left unanswered, forcing people (like me) to come up and find answers of our own. So after considering what 3H tells the player about these fantastic weapons, as well of our current world’s (known) weapon development, I think I might have finally stumbled across why, as cool and seemingly overpowered the “Javelins of Light” appear to be, are ultimately highly impractical pieces of tech which should honestly get whoever worked on them fired.

I feel I must stress however, that at the end of the day, no matter how much in-game evidence I used to back things up, a portion of this analysis should fall into the theory spectrum. Also, I’m not a weapon/missile expert by trade, so there’s that.

So without further ado, here’s the introduction to our topic at hand:

What are the “Javelins of Light”?

Live footage of the things in action.

In Three Houses’ Fódlan, the “Javelins of Light” are “those who slither in the dark” ‘s trump card; highly destructive yet suggested to be impractical (more on this later) missile-shaped objects that fall from the sky and explode upon impact.

Lore-wise, the Javelins of Light - or Pillars of Light, as the Agarthan that wrote Romance of the World’s Perdition (found in the DLC Shadow Library) calls them - are mentioned to have been built by the civilization of Agartha over 1000 years before the main story, for the purpose of killing Sothis. And in spite of all the destruction and death caused, they weren’t enough to do the job, forcing Agartha’s survivors to flee and hide as Sothis erased their civilization from the map. Many centuries later - after Nemesis’ defeat, but before the War of the Eagle and Lion -, “those who slither in the dark'' attempted to use the javelins to blow up the Holy Tomb, but were redirected thanks to a spell Sothis had placed in the area which disrupted their trajectory, blowing up Ailell instead and turning it into Fodlan’s equivalent of Lethal Lava Land.

Afterwards, TWSITD refrained from using them ever again… For a few more centuries at least.

in the Verdant Wind & Silver Snow routes, the trump card returns once the story mission that takes place in the Empire’s Fort Merceus is beaten, blowing up the fortification to smithereens just as Byleth’s faction luckily avoids the danger by chasing the Death Knight (who was all to aware of what would happen, luring the gang on purpose). After Edelgard’s death, Hubert reveals post-mortem that he detected the exact moment when the sorcery triggering the missiles was used, and somehow used that to find the Agarthans headquarters, which he discloses in a letter. And once Shambhala is invaded and Thales (TWSITD’s boss) is defeated, as a last resort, the dude summons multiple missiles to destroy his enemies, but fails due to Rhea literally tanking some them for Byleth and his crew, causing Thales to die from random debris, and Rhea to be wounded lethally (whether she dies or not in SS depends on the player’s choices).

This shot will never not crack me up. Honestly.

In the Crimson Flower path, Thales - masquerading as Edelgard’s uncle, Lord Arundel - arranges a few javelins of light to drop on the Kingdom’s Arianrhod as revenge once he gets the confirmation from Edelgard that Cornelia’s death - in truth, Cleobulus and an Agarthan plant - was fully intentional, and the choice of words used (“I will be praying [...] that the Empire will not become another Arianrhod”) make clear his move was meant to be a deterrent against future backstabs. Given how Edelgard quickly covers up the event and later unleashes the Imperial army over the Agarthans sometime after dealing with Rhea and the Kingdom anyways, Thales’ gambit ultimately ends up being for naught.

Lastly, no javelins of light are ever used in the Azure Moon branch, though incidentally, it’s also the only non-Edelgard route which kills Arundel before Byleth’s chosen faction makes their way to Fort Merceus…

…Oh, and as far story-purpose goes, in Verdant Wind and Silver Snow, they’re used to having Byleth and co. go to Shambhala, while in Crimson Flower they’re used to explore further Edelgard’s relationship with the slitherers.

The Implications Behind the Trump Card

First, let’s go over what the game suggests about the things which make them so damn impractical:

Two routes point out that the weapons can't be abused at their leisure. For what’s worth, TWSITD blows up Fort Merceus in Verdant Wind and Silver Snow only because they were confident Byleth and co. would be there, and not to mention, both Hubert and the Death Knight knowing it would happen all but states Byleth’s group was intended to be killed there).

The only other instances where the “pillars of light” are used rashly are either because: 1. Thales has been cornered and has nothing left to lose (VW/SS): and 2. Thales is visibly pissed over his “pawn” killing his spies like nothing, and is trying to exert some control over her (CF). This stands out a lot given the Agarthans have a serious problem of hubris clouding their judgment at times, so seeing them being so careful with their usage implies a lot of how much they value them.

Thales has exclusive access to them: He’s seen summoning them in Shambhala in the Verdant Wind and Silver Snow routes; in Crimson Flower, he alludes something will befall Arianrhod upon finding out the circumstances behind Cornelia’s death - which turn to be the his trump card-; and in Azure Moon… Thales dies before everyone goes to Fort Merceus, and no missiles ever rain over the location. Thus, it would be criminal to ignore him entirely for his analysis given how much the story points out all the “javelins” employed are due to his will.

Whatever happened with Ailell was an exception, not the rule: Ailell by the time the plot takes place is a living wasteland of lava due to the “javelins of light”, and yet, none of the missiles used in animated cutscenes or even described in person carry this much destructive potential. Meaning, either Ailell was a dormant volcano before missiles fell on it, or the specific “javelins” used were, simply put, “built different“ and are no longer an option.

How a ballistic missile works, courtesy of Wikipedia.

By now, it goes without saying that the biggest criticisms the “javelins of light” have as a plot device, is that their weaknesses are never openly addressed and just merely “suggested”, and that’s understandably an issue if one’s trying to convince beyond reasonable doubt that there’s a good reason why the slitherers use them so seldomly, and prefer to scheme and attempt to manipulate important people in Foldan instead.

So in the end, how do we prove these fantastic weapons have an achilles heel at all? Well, I think we can reach a highly likely (yet ultimately theoretical) answer to this dilemma… By answering yet another question:

What truly are the “Javelins of Light"?

I’ve seen many, many people call the “javelins of light" online as nukes or ballistic missiles/ICBMs. But given what in-game evidence we have, both proposals just can’t be true:

First, and as previously mentioned, none of the weapons deployed in the present ever reach a comparable amount of destruction to a nuke, and Aillel’s aftermath being such a peculiar case makes it more of an exception rather than the rule of thumb.

And second, none of the missiles are even seen being launched from the ground. In all cutscenes they appear, the first thing that pops up are purple rings, which are then followed by the “javelin” falling through the path those rings set for it. This happens even near Shambhala, where one would otherwise expect them to launch from the ground if we go by the assumption these are indeed ordinary ballistic missiles/ICBMs Hubert used to find Shambhala’s location through analyzing their trajectory…

How a ballistic missile works, courtesy of Wikipedia.

In turn and, by process of the elimination, this leaves us with one kind of missile that fits behavior of the Javelins of Light to a tee, which as of this post, is still just hypothetical.

The Kinetic / Orbital Missile.

The idea behind them is simple; have missiles fall from the sky anywhere you would ever want, and let the kinetic force - AKA, the fall - do most of the job. And not only that, these can be - design wise - as simple as a giant pillar as a result, leading many people to nickname this idea as “rods from god” due to the weapons being seemingly launched from the heavens themselves. Sounds familiar?

If all this sounds too good to be true, then that’s because it is. As stated before, the concept behind this type of missile is still - currently - just an idea due to the logistics behind them being nothing short of a nightmare. Most importantly for the topic at hand though, a key step in setting them up involves sending them to space first, so they may later be launched from a satellite or something floating in the atmosphere.

And it’s right here where 3H’s lore screws the Agarthans hard, as the only existing reports where there’s anything remotely hinting the missiles were launched from the ground at some point (knowingly, implied, or otherwise) comes from “Romance of the World’s Perdition”:

"The False God must be defeated before the world sinks into a watery grave. To this end, the children of men have erected pillars of light upon the land. Thinis, Malum, Septen, and Llium were utterly destroyed. Those lands have vanished from this world. Yet even still, the False God stands. And soon, a flood aptly named Despair will drown this world."

As a quick reminder, this book is pretty much a relic from the era the Agarthan civilization that existed over 1000 years before the main story, as all of the cities being blown up mentioned in the book no longer exist in Fodlan. The missiles clearly were once on land before, but not anymore, given how they always drop from the sky…

The Achilles Heel of the “Divine Retribution”

In the end, with all the evidence at our disposal, I believe it’s possible to identify - to a theoretical level at least - why the “Javelins of Light” aren’t truly a “press the button to win” for the Agarthans. This achilles heel is split into 3 key points:

Finite number: If TWSITD doesn’t have the means to send new “pillars” into space, then logic dictates they just simply have a very finite number of missiles they’re forced to work with, so it’s best to make every one of them count. After all, if they had found a solution to the javelin problem (which didn’t give away the location of their HQ so blatantly, like teleporting them through magic or something), chances are they would have already used it.

Thales: Besides being the one that calls the shots on the javelins used, people often forget that the dude at his core is a schemer, not a fighter. Unless you really force his hand/piss him off, he will give the missiles the most strategic use possible, and will refrain from abusing them if he sees value in other methods and ideas, such as in CF where he wants to keep his partnership with Edelgard and the Empire going post-war and even have her potentially conquer the world later (it never pans out, but it’s the thought that counts).

Garreg Mach/Holy Tomb has a jamming spell. Sothis did something to the area so it’s 100% invulnerable to missiles, thus forcing the Agarthans to come up with another way to get rid of the Church and Rhea. Incidentally, this is why Thales never uses the missiles during his final fights in both Scarlet Blaze and Azure Gleam routes from the Warriors: Three Hopes spinoff; because it would be a resounding failure.

Thales, probably having to remind his cronies every century or so why blowing up Fodlan up with missiles isn't an option.

So in Conclusion…?

Whatever FE game we get later down the line that puts similar emphasis to lore as 3H did really needs to be clear on why your antagonistic forces can’t brute-force their way into victory. Truth be told, It’s not a dealbreaker to me (more so once I figured all this out), but it definitely adds to the frustration and belief the Agarthans should not have been in Three Houses to begin with (which is easier said than done, but that’s a topic for another day…)

And like always, many thanks to those who have kept up with all this wall of text up until now! If I had to ask a question to y’all though, it would be something like: if you had the choice to change something about the “Javelins of Light”, what would it be?