#like compare the fates ships that came around launch to the 3h ones around launch and youll see a big difference

[poisonsteel]

thought i had whilst spacing out. is it just me or has three houses caused a Very big divide in the fandom when it comes to character interactions. i dont mean that in a "one side hates it, the other loves it" way, i mean that like.

in three houses, the vast majority of characters have some kind of canonical interaction with each other. but this actually makes it the outlier in the rest of the fire emblem franchise, where most characters dont even acknowledge the existence of the others. but 3h fans dont seem to really.. know this, or know that most ships used to exist on a "this dynamic would be fun" basis and not a "this support and this story chapter and this line of dialogue" basis. if the ships before only existed on what canon had as Evidence, 90% of fire emblem ships would literally not exist

i think 3h mightve given people so much story wise that they forgot you do kinda.. have to get creative with this franchise in every other game because 99.9% of character duos will just Never acknowledge each other as existing. going by canon is a limiter for every other fire emblem game where theres so much left blank you have to make shit up, like the games hated elaborating on anything ever

i am still mad takumi and keaton never got a support but i also dont care enough that theres nothing canonical of them together to think they wouldnt be stupidly good friends or maybe something more.....

tldr i hope engage brings back people being not afraid to be creative with their content of the games again because 3h canon was all you needed in those games and people got Very used to that

PS. I DO LIKE 3H THIS ISNT A "I DONT LIKE 3H BC DIFFERENT TO OTHER FES" POST. DONT HURT MWE

[a-pale-azure-moon]

I'm a day late on this, but happy 5th anniversary to FE3H, the game that unexpectedly rewired my brain chemistry!

I've been a Fire Emblem fan since I first played Blazing Blade back in 2003 (yes I'm old), so when 3H was announced, I immediately pre-ordered it. I purposely stayed away from rumors, leaks, and most official information about it because I wanted to enjoy it spoiler free. (Much of Fates got spoiled for me and I didn't want a repeat of that.) The most I indulged in was watching the trailers for the individual houses when they came out. And that trailer. You know the one.

So I got the game shortly after launch, once Amazon shipped it to me, and I had no idea which House I was going to pick. I was slightly leaning towards the Golden Deer, largely from Claude's design and how he seemed "different" from previous FE lords, but I was truly undecided when I started. It was really a coin flip between the Lions and Deer right up to the point where the game forces you to choose. What ultimately made me pick the Blue Lions was actually Mercedes; I wasn't aware that recruitment was a thing yet and her Live to Serve skill stood out as particularly useful to me. Healer who can keep herself healed? Yeah, I want that on my team!

If I'm being honest, I didn't find anything about Dimitri particularly special right away. I certainly liked him, mostly because of his amazing voice (thank you Chris), but I recognized him as a Marth clone right from the start, so a lot about his character felt "generic" to me at first. The tone around him was considerably more somber compared to previous lords, and I was curious about why that was so, particularly since the timeskip trailer had spoiled that he goes through a dramatic transformation later in the story. So I was paying close attention to him as the game unfolded, but it wasn't until his breakdown at Remire in chapter 8 that it hit me just how radically different he was compared to previous Marths. That's where I got super invested in his story and started sacrificing sleep to play the game so I could find out what happened next. By the time I finished, my whole brain had been transformed into this:

(I forget where I first saw this image, so my apologies to whomever made it.)

2019 was a difficult year for me; my mom was going through some health issues, and my dad wasn't being particularly helpful in the ways she needed, which left me to pick up the slack (my older sister lives out of state and was/is busy with her three kids). I was also still trying to break out of a festering creative slump that had gone on for way too long, but changing that mindset is hard, especially when you've convinced yourself that everything you write sucks (and that therefore you suck).

So 3H and Azure Moon in particular wound up being a great comfort to me through an emotionally draining year (and then the pandemic hit...). Dimitri's story and character arc resonated with me in all the right ways, and it lit a new creative spark inside of me, the likes of which I hadn't felt in a long, long time. I almost wish I hadn't picked the Lions first, because the other routes wound up being a big disappointment to me when they failed to reach the same emotional high. I think I would've become a Lions stan even if I'd saved their route for last. It left THAT strong of an impression on me. I mean, I became obsessed enough that I wrote a freaking book, lol.

I'll be the first to admit that this game isn't perfect; some of its mechanics are wonky, classes aren't well balanced, there's not enough map diversity, Maddening Mode was definitely not properly play tested, and there are genuine flaws in some of its writing. I won't even get into the trashfire that is 3H discourse (which is somehow still a thing after all this time). I don't even think it's my favorite overall game in the series, but it's in my top 3 with Awakening and Path of Radiance. But the impact the game left on me is difficult to understate. I'm so happy it's a thing that exists and that it helped guide me to my current path.