#my preferred knight style is patricide

[gascon-en-exil]

I can't put my finger on it, but Mercedes and Jeritza's supports and ending bothers me. It feels like an insult to Mercedes character and like they coddled Jeritza, as if the ending make up for what he did somehow.

The massive irony in this is that his Mercedes ending is the only one, including the two that were added in Wave 4, that punishes Jeritza in any way for his crimes. I’m more surprised that there’s any scenario where he lives that he serves any prison time at all, being one of Edelgard’s most useful minions. He’s noted to be hard to control, so maybe he killed someone the emperor didn’t want him to? Still, all of Jeritza’s supports go to ridiculous lengths to try to soften him, but you’re right that Mercedes’s may be the worst when so much of their dialogue is taken up by her inability to look past the sweet boy Emile used to be for the cosplaying serial killer with severe mental issues that he is now.

To sum up my feelings on Jeritza, let’s talk about retainers and the two Part 2-exclusive characters. Gilbert as a unit is almost a clone of Dedue. Yes, Dedue is better because unmatched early game tankiness + brawling proficiency for grappler/war master > riding proficiency for great knight, but nonetheless Gilbert is clearly intended to perform a similar role in your army. This is only because AM had to write Dedue out of its Part 2 because he and Dimitri were too gay for each other for the self-insert fantasy to work properly, so Dedue is turned into a sacrifice that the player has to opt into bringing back and Gilbert is brought in to fill the gap. Despite this however, Gilbert’s characterization and story arc are completely unlike Dedue’s, and they even have friction in their support lines over their loyalties to Dimitri and Gilbert’s past failures. I strongly dislike how AM handles both of them, particularly as they’re two of the three playable units exclusive to that route (and because, let’s be honest, we’re talking about armors here - they were always going to be lower tier anyway), but as characters I enjoy how their stories play off one another and how important each of them are in their own ways to Dimitri’s past and to his ongoing development. I don’t resent Gilbert for taking Dedue’s place in the story and on the battlefield; I would have just preferred an AM where they could have both been in there as roughly equal participants barring that Dedue is basically married to Dimitri and Gilbert is not.

Now, Jeritza on the other hand is a fantastically fun unit and always something to look forward to in my CF runs. He gets so many fun toys to play with - Mastermind, Counterattack, Darting Blow on a male unit - and while there’s a bit of crossover with Hubert’s role (death knight is a physically-oriented dark knight which is Hubert’s best endgame class) they play very differently even apart from the availability gap. Instead it’s in characterization where most of their similarities lie, and there’s no contest: Jeritza is an inferior Hubert in every respect. Both are patricidal murderers and kidnappers who wear evil as an aesthetic, but Hubert owns all that with a sinister panache and total sanity (if no regard for moral scruples whatsoever) and he’s even a better-realized bisexual character to boot. The attempts to rationalize and soften Jeritza’s actions with stuff like ice cream and roses and justifying the patricide with the threat of (step)parental incest feel painfully contrived, and it doesn’t help that half of them are stealing from Edelgard’s playbook on how to look like a sympathetic waifu when you’re out grinding the world beneath your heel. Others have dissected Jeritza’s mental situation much more thoroughly than I could, and suffice to say that his claim to having a second personality driven by bloodlust doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. He’s clearly not well, but the multiple personality thing just comes off as a weak attempt to make him somehow not culpable for being a serial killer*. All the characters who support Jeritza come off looking worse because they go to ridiculous lengths to downplay how terrible of a person he is. 

Jeritza’s one saving grace is how entertaining he is to use in battle, which goes a fair way toward distinguishing him from Gilbert, but in every other way he’s awful - possibly my least favorite character in FE16, if I’m being honest. Also his voice acting makes him sound perpetually catatonic and/or high.

*Unrelated tangent, but after taking a closer look at Jeritza in CF I have to conclude that the infamous “hunting grounds” remark in his Byleth support is not referring to a literal Hunger Games-style setup where Edelgard throws people she doesn’t like into the woods for Jeritza to hunt down and kill (while Hubert magically TiVos it so he can rewatch the goriest bits in super slow motion to take notes and/or jack off to). Jeritza says during exploration that he doesn’t care about the Empire or Edelgard’s cause but is only in the war because it gives him the opportunity to kill people relatively uninhibited. I think therefore that the hunting grounds line is meant to be him speaking metaphorically about the war itself in the overblown dramatic way that he often uses as the Death Knight. The alternative is a lot funnier in a very dark way, but I don’t think it’s something Edelgard has come up with (yet - Hubert’s got the proposal drawn up on his desk and is just waiting to present it to her, although of course he leaves out the potential for wank material out of respect for Her Majesty).