#nobody's actually said anything about this but sometimes the headcase demons just poke and prod at me to clarify things

[obsidiansong]

For anyone concerned about the Main Verse being a sort of Golden Ending AU where everyone lives (except Byleth), allow me to clarify a few things - primarily concerning the fact that Obsidian Song is definitively not a Golden Ending that makes the other verses/routes pointless, like what Revelations did in Fates.

First and foremost - Byleth’s death. Sure, comparatively, only having the protagonist die and everyone else survive sounds as close to a Golden Ending as we can get on paper, but keep in mind that, for this verse to even exist, Byleth had to specifically go out of her way to bond with every student among all three houses pre-timeskip. Post-timeskip, even considering her reveal as the Lord of Ash at the end, she legitimately does her best to help everyone in all three nations, as well as the Church of Seiros and Rhea. She goes above and beyond what Byleth canonically does to try and ensure that everyone is happy and healthy, convinced she’s on the path to a Golden Ending... and then she lets herself be killed, not realizing that this will deeply sadden everyone who cared about her (and if she has a lover, will leave them heartbroken) at best, and leave the Lords she helped reconcile and potentially recover to a degree horrified at the fact that, y’know, they personally just killed the woman who did everything in her power to unify them and bring peace to Fodlan.

Secondly, there’s the fact that Byleth doesn’t plan for what might happen afterwards. Sure, she dismantles TWSITD, gets the Church to relinquish their iron grip on Fodlan peacefully, and persuaded the leaders of the nations to settle matters peacefully, but the fact of the matter is that she didn’t give them any hints on how to restructure after the fact. Especially when you consider that the changes that Byleth’s efforts instilled will likely only last during her students’ lifetimes, as there’s no guarantees that their successors (especially in the new Empire, now that it’s likely a meritocracy) will work towards the propagation of their predecessors��� goals.

Lastly, there’s the matter of Byleth’s own army - these people are hundreds of miles overseas and were soundly defeated in battle. Byleth was a hero to most, if not all of them, and even if the leaders spare them and allow them to return home, there’s no guarantee that a future conflict with Fodlan won’t be brewing on the horizon. And this time, it could potentially be worse, with greater levels of firepower, lead by someone (or a group of someones) who don’t ultimately intend to lose the war and will fight with everything they have and more sophisticated tactics than “steamroll the western coast to threaten the nations into uniting, then turtle up”.

Basically, Byleth’s unification plan has a lot of holes in it, and may ultimately lead to even more problems down the line. Some might be mitigated in an AU where she lives, but even in that case, Byleth herself remains a broken shell of the woman she was, doesn’t magically recover from her own identity issues and psychological damage (though the former could potentially be fixed, but that requires a whole lot of stuff and extra headcanons that I’m far too tired to brainstorm right now), and ultimately ends up too crippled to ever take to the battlefield again after the damage she sustains in the final battle.