#it's POSSIBLE they'll give us fallen seiros and have her be CF!rhea but idk. i kinda doubt it

[burr-ell]

after three hopes it really does seem like the writers consider the agarthan and nabatean factions about equally severe, since 3/6 routes have you fulfil the agarthan plan to remove the church (cf/sb/gw) and 3/6 have you fulfil the nabatean plan to root out the agarthans (ss/am/ag) - the fact they made an agarthan the player and let you kill sothis/byleth permanently in this game kinda cements this idea.

I can see your perspective, nonnie, and I'm definitely frustrated by Fodlanverse's disinterest in really examining the Nabatean/Agarthan conflict, but I think it's important to look at how those things are framed.

For one thing, we actually have 7 routes to look at: Scarlet Blaze, Crimson Flower, Silver Snow, Azure Gleam, Azure Moon, Golden Wildfire, and Verdant Wind. Four of them end with the Agarthans being destroyed and the Nabateans surviving, and in all of them this is presented positively. It's worth noting that the one route in canon where the Nabateans are destroyed first is the only one that ends at night with the characters surrounded by flames, and perhaps the most unambiguously positive and hopeful ending—Verdant Wind—has the Agarthans and Nemesis destroyed while the characters are bathed in sunlight. (@electricprincess96 has a really good meta on lighting in 3H for more thoughts on this.) And on Crimson Flower, where you do an ethnic cleansing of the Nabateans, the ensuing war against the Agarthans is implied to have been long and bloody; on Verdant Wind, where you side with the Nabateans and learn the full truth, it's over with the last stand at Derdriu. I think the writers handled the conflict too ambiguously at times, mostly so the Waifu Du Jour™ doesn't look bad for siding with the mole man Proud Boys, but if you look purely at how it's framed in canon, it seems clear whose side they're ultimately on.

Hopes, meanwhile, is mitigated to me by the fact that it's pretty clearly a bad end by series standards. Fire Emblem games are, historically, about fighting a war to achieve peace, and iirc all of Hopes' endings are basically "and then the continent was plunged into perpetual war :)". For its faults, Hopes doesn't appear to be framing any of the paths as a 'golden route' or even an especially good one—and why would it? The last thing Intsys wants to do is to retroactively declare its most popular, best-selling game to be pointless.

(While FEH isn't the best metric, it's still worth noting that Rhea is portrayed entirely sympathetically there, while the two playable Agarthans are not. Summer Rhea is supportive and kind to Byleth and wants the students to have fun at the beach, and Halloween Rhea doesn't understand how to cause mischief but wants to enjoy the harvest festival all the same and laments how Seteth would think her outfit is inappropriate. Intsys had a golden opportunity to use CF!Rhea for her fallen alt...and they didn't; they used SS!Rhea instead and went out of their way to say that she wasn't a victim of dragon degeneration and that there's hope for her. Meanwhile, Solon and Kronya are unambiguously the same card-carrying villains they were in-game. FEH has its problems, but those choices are still deliberate, and that should tell us something.)