alright so let's say, hypothetically, we get a season 5. the Battle of Manhattan is over. kronos is destroyed. underwater kiss and all that jazz. credits roll and end. screen goes black for a beat only for it, a second later, to show hundreds of teens dressed in purple celebrating and passing food and drinks around. clearly something big happened and they were victorious. scene cuts to this blond kid in the midst wearing a praetors cape and he looks directly into the camera. anyways-
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I'm sick so I'm sorry if this doesn't make sense, but I've been thinking about the nature of myths recently as I've been exploring hellenic polytheism.
For context: I'm ex-Mormon. I was raised in the church and, because of that, was taught biblical literalism but in, like, a more subtle way than most? I was raised believing that Adam & Eve and Noah's Ark, etc., were literally true, but that the story of Job specifically was not; I also always knew evolution and the Big Bang to be correct, despite there being a verse in the Doctrine & Covenants (a Mormon-specific religious book) where God apparently told Joseph Smith that the world is 6,000 years old- a passage I didn't know existed until my senior year of high school. I didn't realize I had believed in biblical literalism until I'd left the church, actually.
Now that I'm aware of it, it's a mindset I'm actively trying to combat while I explore Hellenic polytheism. It's definitely been a task to separate the nature of the Gods from their myths, as brutal as they often are. And it's something I've noticed within the community, too, which I think is interesting. It makes sense: Christianity, at least, has had a chokehold on much of the world for a long time, and so many of us have experienced literalism as our first interaction with any sort of holy text (though, of course, Greek myths as a whole aren't that) alongside our first experience with divinity as a wrathful God whose flaws are waved away, or ignored, or twisted into positive attributes. This also means that I'm trying to re-approach several deities with an open mind (Zeus, Hera, and Ares in particular, but many of them to some extent) while also trying to un-condition myself. I was already in the process of doing this, of course, but trying to figure out how to interact with a completely different pantheon has made that especially clear.
It extends to things like prayer and offerings, too. Prayers were very formulaic growing up, even though most of the time there wasn't a strict script to follow. There was always something you ask as part of the prayer, even if it's just 'please help me do better tomorrow' (alongside giving thanks, of course), so trying to craft a prayer without adding *everything* I'm used to including in makes it feel incomplete and, therefore, disrespectful. And daily prayer is something I'm resistant to because of prior experiences with it. I don't want to offend any of the gods by asking for something or asking for too much, especially so early on, and there's always a promised offering the few times I *have* asked. Add worries about exact obedience on top of that and it's proving to be a difficult thing to untangle. And I know that the gods are difficult to offend, figuring out how to do this takes trial & error and that's okay, it'll get better the more I do it, etc., etc.; this is more an issue with my own overthinking than anything else (hooray for ✨ mental health issues ✨). I'm not really asking for advice here, necessarily, just thinking out loud because I'm not comfortable talking to people in meat space about it yet.
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I think people will use Harry's death count when comparing him to Jean as a way to like. Make him seem like a worse person than Jean? I guess? But they're forgetting that a kill count of three is considered super low for precinct 41 meaning it's unlikely that Jean's is any lower. So. Yknow?
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IS and KT managing to make Edelgard the biggest Mary Sue in a verse where Byleth exists is still morbidly impressive to me lol
I wouldn't say Supreme Leader is a Mary Sue - depending on what you mean by being a Mary Sue, anon.
If you're talking about the 2000s usual critic thrown at fanfiction characters... well, you have Supreme Leader's depiction in the Aeneid that could fit this trope!
But in general...
Yep, that's what makes the Fodlan series so... weird ? Empty? As consistent as a cloud?
FE16 wise, characters (bar a few ones who are generally loved !) can piss on their background/convictions/ties/preexisting character to join Billy's side because Billy is awesome. No matter how hard people try to headcanon about it, Felix will join the GD and later Claude's army in VW because Billy had a kickass rank in swordfighting : Felix will ditch his childhood friends and leave his people to fend for themselves because Billy knows how to swordfight.
Remove Billy's player avatar powers, and suddenly, some characters cannot switch sides - in return they gain a much stronger characterisation and development (the BL peeps in Nopes!).
What makes the Fodlan verse so unique isn't Billy being at the forefront of player pandering, no, Fodlan verse will hammer instead the "waifu pandering". Sure, waifu is supposed to be your avatar's luf interest and the character you will spend thousands of dollars/euros/pick your currency for - but instead of pushing player pandering to 11, Fodlan verse instead pushes waifu pandering.
Supreme Leader cannot ever be challenged, whatever she does, people will praise her later on - or if we really have to fight her, it will not be willingly but the cast will be forced by circumstances (don't ask who created them!) and lament how they couldn't "walk with her uwu".
It culminates, imo, with SS S Support Rhea wondering if the War was her fault, and no one putting the blame on the character who declared said war on premises we learn, through the game, to be wrong. It's as if Rhea wonders if being tortured for 5 years I mean, having to dance Zumba for 5 years in Enbarr's dungeons, thousands of dead people, the monastery and its people being destroyed, Faerghus falling to anarchy, Adrestian made Demonic Beasts and Supreme Leader's beliefs that nonhumans should never have powers over humans because their ears aren't round is, well, her fault.
"See, Supreme Leader did nothing wrong, Rhea herself says she was responsible for her own torture zumba session!"
And FE16 being FE16... There is no "of course not".
To preserve Supreme Leader's selling points, those games amp up to unseen before in this franchise levels of victim blaming that seriously - regardless of real life world events - made a lot of people, myself included, uncomfortable.
So while I wouldn't say Supreme Leader is a 2000s Mary Sue, the writing around her feels somehow more gratting than what a fanfiction writer could have wrote in the 2000s for fun.
I mean, people were paid to write "if people don't want to die maybe they should just let me roll over them"!
That's way worse.
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