#it baffles me to this day. i'm a nohr apologist i guess

[thousand-winters]

It has always bothered me, but after watching Arcane I keep thinking more and more about how much the framing of the narrative in Fire Emblem Fates bothers me.

Because the thing is we have very similar situations: Hoshido and Piltover as the privileged parts of these societies, with Nohr and Zaun struggling to get by. But where this unbalance is very clear in Arcane, it's framed SO differently in Fates.

Nohr is in the wrong for doing whatever they can to survive, despite the fact (iirc) they did ask Hoshido for help because they get no damn sunlight in Nohr because of the light and dark dragons or whatever and there's only so much cattle and crops you can get like that. People are dying everyday over there and Hoshido doesn't give a damn, but Nohr is in the wrong for being desperate enough to try and get territory on their side of the continent because they need to feed themselves.

It's insane. The retainers of the royal siblings in Hoshido are all children of nobles. The retainers of the royal siblings in Nohr are all like "oh, this was an assassin trying to kill me to get money to survive so I ended up taking her in", "this boy was trying to rob us to be able to eat and he was going to get executed so I took him under my wing", "I saved her from a gladiator wing and took her under my care", like ???. The difference in conditions is just insane.

Even the royal siblings aren't escaping this because despite being the ones who get the best standing, they had to murder a whole lot of their half siblings because of the sheer amount of women who became Garon's concubines in order to try and ensure themselves and their children a better life. And then they had to kill each other in order to have a chance. THEY WERE CHILDREN. THEY HAD TO KILL THEIR HALF SIBLINGS AS CHILDREN.

Meanwhile in Hoshido the biggest problems the siblings had was that they were insecure or shy or whatever.

And you're expected to go "you're right, Nohr is evil, Hoshido is good". Like... I don't even know, man. What were the writers on, it's insane. And the amount of stuff about Nohr that got censored in localization because it was too heavy due to how dark it got is also like... jesus fucking christ, these people were living in misery and you want to blame them for trying to get themselves a better life since Hoshido won't help? Be for real...

Fates, you would be so good if you were good 😞