#idk how coherent this is so lmk if there are questions. or argue with me i'd love to debate

[stergeon]

Hi, Stergeon! I really love your Edeleth novels, and your amusing brainworm ideas have brought so much joy to me. I heard that you’ve only completed the CF and haven’t played 3Hopes yet? (If I’m mistaken, I apologize) I’m curious about your thoughts on Edeleth in the SS route and in 3Hopes! Which one do you think would be more compelling? (Personally, I lean toward 3Hopes—I just love seeing how a mercenary earns the emperor’s favor. It leaves so much room for imagination!)

hi anon thank you for your message!! so glad you enjoy my stuff <3 it means a lot to hear it!!!

i've played CF and verdant wind myself and watched playthroughs of AM and SS, although i haven't played cindered shadows or any of 3hopes :0( i have read recaps of the routes in Hopes though, and i'm planning to actually play through it soon. i want to meet this "shez" cat...

i'm putting the rest of this under a cut because i got Too Excited and wrote an essay, but given what i know of 3hopes, my short answer is: edeleth in 3hopes has so much to offer in terms of romance and kiss potential. edeleth in SS is a tragedy, and the angst-lover in me is obsessed with it.

ok, to elaborate,

the big thing is that in 3hopes, edeleth actually stands a chance of getting off the ground romantically.* they'd have an easier time of it, too (compared to CF, anyway), given there's less baggage between them in hopes' timeline: byleth was never edelgard's professor, eliminating the teacher-student dynamic; without a five-year timeskip, edelgard is mentally in a better place, less hardened by grief and loneliness and long, hard years of war. they could actually have something close to healthy relationship development. god i want that for them. i think it would be neat to explore how the differences in their dynamic affect how they grow, too. how does byleth handle the dissonance of her contractually-focused mercenary mindset vs. edelgard's focus on personal agency, while she's still actively a mercenary? how does edelgard go from being purely enamored with byleth's skill to appreciating who she is as a person? can she figure out how to do that for herself, too? do they make each other worse by enabling each other's propensity to allow themselves to be used as weapons, or can they overcome that and grow together?

the slow burn... the building of trust... i'm here for it. then add in crest resonance—the idea that they are drawn together by their very blood, the red thread of fate... ohhhh. juicy. delicious. as a gluttonous dyke who wants to see them girls kiss and have nice lives: sign me up.

* this is all assuming you get the “good ending” where you recruit byleth. otherwise, uh. good luck.

hmm. i might have to start this game, like, this week.

as for SS, i have. a lot of thoughts lmao. as far as i'm concerned, fe3h is a story about agency and choice, about how the decisions we make can shape the world.

given that, silver snow is a tragedy. it is a cavalcade of hubris and grief and squandered potential, of might-have- and should-have-beens. it is a veritable feast of angst and it makes me fucking insane. that route (and specifically, the edeleth aspects of it) got me so messed up that i had to go write The Victors; The Vestiges about it.

shameless plug aside,

i know it's not fair to deal in comparisons rather than letting the routes stand on their own, but what i find so compelling about SS is the contrast with CF. in my opinion, CF is the best route for byleth as a character because it's the only route in the game where she has any autonomy. sure, byleth picks a house at the start of the game, but it's not like it was a real choice: she had to choose one of them, having just met those kids, like, That Day, and it's not like she could say "no thanks" and go on her merry way. in SS/CF, byleth gets presented with an actual decision: she can follow orders like she's been doing her entire life, or defy orders and blaze her own path by standing with edelgard, knowing full well what the consequences will be. it’s her first real, fully informed choice where she gets to be the arbiter of her own fate.

at the end of CF, byleth's agency/personhood is cemented when her crest stone breaks and she severs her connection to the control of others, becoming fully "human." in SS, she has that agency within her grasp and yet she succumbs to her fatal flaw: she goes along with what she's told to do once again, just like she's always done.

does byleth want to kill edelgard? does she want to become archbishop? does she want to rule over fodlan, effectively alone? what does byleth think or feel about any of this? we'll never know. she won't know, either, because she's never made a choice for herself to affect the path of her own life. she follows jeralt, then she follows rhea, then she follows whatever seteth tells her to do. edelgard offers her the out, the chance to be her own person, and she says no.

ugh. tragic hamartia. i love it. i hate it. it hurts real good.

and all that's just focusing on byleth. we haven't even gotten into talking about edelgard in that route. holy crap, how she suffers. it is her loneliest route, where even those in her house have abandoned her, and all her worst fears have come to pass. in the months edelgard spends at garreg mach, she gets a taste of friendship, of solidarity, of trust, and in byleth, she also gets the chance to be known—to confide in someone else, to reveal what's beneath her armor, to get to be a kid and a friend and a person. and that terrifies her. in her dialogue and supports, she tiptoes around anytime she might reveal something of her true self, guarded and yet so badly wanting to let someone else in. in spite of herself, she starts to do that with byleth, fearing all along that she's making a mistake, that she's misplacing her trust, that she's compromising her mission and betraying those she's sworn to avenge by allowing herself any modicum of innocence and individuality, by re-opening her heart to allow others inside again.

and then when byleth sides with rhea in the holy tomb, all of those fears are proven true. instead of finding solidarity and choosing a path together, they both become set in their ways, serving the purposes for which they were designed, missing out on the chance to ever be anything more.

when byleth kills edelgard, she kills her last chance at true human connection, succumbing to fate, forever limited to being only what she was made to be and not who she could be. a weapon, a shell for another's soul, inheritor of another's destiny. a god without agency, with unchecked power and the contractual mindset of a mercenary. how sad. how lonely. how terrifying.

i've focused a lot on byleth in discussing this because she's the one whose perspective we follow in SS and the only one who's left at the end of it all. edelgard's path is consistent, doomed as it is. byleth is the one who's left at the end of it all, knowing what could have been different and that the decision was entirely hers. and, if you subscribe to byleth being immortal like other nabateans, she gets to carry that with her forever. she continues the cycle rhea began after sothis was killed, with edelgard at the epicenter of her grief.

yeah, i'm working a bit of a bad-faith angle by acting like byleth is completely incapable of seizing agency for herself without external help, as though she can't self-actualize, or like she can't want to choose the church over edelgard. but... frankly, we don't have any evidence to the contrary. we don't get many of her thoughts on things outside of her limited dialogue options in SS, like when she's asked if she is willing to take up rhea's mantle and become archbishop. she gives a lot of "..." answers and guarded looks, utterly noncommittal, in line with how she was at the very beginning of the story. she doesn't grow. she doesn't change. she simply falls into this role without raising her voice one way or another. and i think it's very telling that the one true, story-changing choice we're presented with results in her either embracing her own humanity, or her draconic/nabatean side.

at risk of getting further off-track, i'll wrap by saying that for me, the appeal of edeleth is in how they complement each other and make each other grow. edelgard strives for freedom and personal agency, and she introduces those concepts to byleth—"choice" simply wasn't a thing in byleth's world before edelgard offered her the chance to forge her own path. byleth, meanwhile, shows edelgard that it's possible to be more than what you're made for—that you can be a weapon and a person, that you can grow and change, that opening your heart doesn't mean you have to sacrifice your dreams. edelgard's hypocrisy is crippling in all other routes: she limits herself to her path while fighting for everyone else's freedom. in CF, edelgard shows byleth a different way forward, and byleth makes sure edelgard gives herself that chance, too.

that's love, babey. that's romance. getting to be your whole self, to find your whole self, to share yourself with someone else, your strengths and your weaknesses, your light and darkness, and have them accept you anyway. to accept those things about yourself, if only because they do, because they can see the light where you can't. to help someone else do all those same things, and to do them together, no matter what comes your way. to help each other be all you can be and achieve your dreams and ambitions and shit. that's hot!!!!!

in silver snow, we see byleth and edelgard come so close to that, occasionally even catching glimpses of the future they could build together if only they were in each other's lives. but they swerve away at the last second, and they haunt each other for the rest of their lives.

you get what i'm saying? like, this graph is sexy to me:

but this graph is also sooooo sexy:

fucking hell i love them girls.

ok i got really rambley BUT: that's the gist of my silver snow thoughts lol. AM is diet SS but worse because dimitri and i would need another post and a half to complain about that. VW slid right off my brain even though i played through the whole dang route. as far as i'm concerned, it's all about CF and SS, and particularly about how they intersect (or don't). once i get 3hopes and play through scarlet blaze i'm sure you'll see me consumed with Them Girls Fever again with all kinds of new feelings about 'em.