#like I thought Diamant and Alear for the men’s division

[yeyayeya]

Uhh

This is honestly kind of boring

But where are Diamant and Ivy????

[frauleinandry]

okay, so, the more I think about it, the less surprised I am about this year's CYL results?

so, like everyone else, I was expecting an engage sweep. yunaka and ivy/alear for the girls, and diamant and alear/alcryst for the boys. as everyone knows by now, that REALLY didn't happen. in fact, the only real contender was yunaka.

why was that the case? well, I have a few theories, which I'm read-more zoning because this post has gotten LONG

partially, I think this is caused by the year gap between engage's release and CYL 8. speaking as someone who's been hardcore into FE since awakening and has gone back to play all of the older games I could, I played engage, had mixed feelings, and then forgot about it.

... aaaaaand so did everyone else. yes, engage does have a fanbase, but compared to three houses and even fates/awakening... it's tiny!

I think there's a few reasons for this. firstly, there's the lack of shipping mechanics, which means it's less appealing to romance fans (which is a huge amount of people active in fanbases, and therefore voting for things like CYL).

secondly, the game is deliberately designed around dropping older units in favour of using your newest recruits, which means people are unlocking less supports, and are therefore less invested in the characters.

engage also lacks replay value due to said absence of romance mechanics and the difficulty of reclassing characters, which is another thing preventing people from actually unlocking the supports, and therefore caring about the cast.

truthfully, most of the people seriously invested in engage probably aren't active in a fandom sense, since they're playing it exclusively for the gameplay (and therefore aren't going to vote for it in things like CYL).

still, I don't think that's the only reason engage didn't win. for one, there's definitely botting - bernie winning isn't surprising, but by that much?? yeah, no.

I think that the engage vote being split - especially amongst the men's division - really didn't help. all of the three houses fans rallied behind felix and bernie, who have been consistently third place for years. meanwhile, you've got several serious candidates for both male and female engage characters, splitting the vote multiple ways - if all of the ivy voters had voted for yunaka instead, she would have easily scored second place.

alphonse and robin are a bit more surprising to me, but robin is the only major awakening character without a brave unit yet, and FEH characters historically do well. I also think the fans wanted to give intsys a message that OG alphonse/shareena/anna reeeeeally need an update.

for me, I believe the final factor in the engage loss of CLY8 is that... everyone thought they were a shoe in! everyone thought at bare minimum, yunaka and diamant were shoe ins, so why not vote for your fav minor character you'd like an alt for instead?

I think all of these factors combined is why engage did so poorly. now, do I think that this means we're never going to get any engage brave units? nah. with felix/bernie out of the pool, the three houses votes are going to be fractured between hilda, byleth, yuri, and the shezzes. truthfully, unless the rumoured genealogy remake drops between now and the next CYL, I'm very much expecting brave diamant and yunaka next year!

so, it's not all doom-and-gloom for engage fans, even if things didn't go their way this year