#octopath dorothea

[blazlngblade]

TRAVELERS 73 - 80

73 - Kenneth | 74 - Tressa | 75 - Lionel | 76 - Efrain 77 - Dorothea | 78 - Z'aanta | 79 - Paula | 80 - Tikilen

73 - 80's ARTISTS

73 - @viridiave 74 - vyntuse (Twitter) 75 - @marevision 76 - CelestialViolet (Twitter) 77 - FeatherGamer555 (Twitter) 78 - Nick Crow (Twitter) 79 - Curvanelli (Instagram) 80 - @celifin

Full Credit List:

If you are the artists of these Travelers (73-80), you are now welcome to upload them independently!

Feel free to tag me (@blazlngblade) so I can update the Full List with your posted drawings for additional credit!

[eng-subs-octopathcotc-jpn]

[ENG Subs] Dorothea's Traveler Story

Overall Game Content Warnings: - Violence, blood, and minor body horror. - Sexual and suggestive themes. - Various types of abuse, including child abuse. - Drug usage, including overdosing. - Crude language (our translations don't soften the language). - And more...

"Dorothea's Traveler Story" Content Warnings: - Implied sexism. - Drug usage.

Dorothea 5-Star | Wealth | Merchant & Fire | Highlands, Shepherds Rock Original Release Date: January 21st, 2021

Full Playlist of "Traveler Stories"

[orcamorca]

Been taking a break from digital painting.

So been taking a break with my sketchbook. Will be posting a few images

[aptericia]

Just like #2,460,012 of "sketches I want to color eventually but are too silly to spend that much time on"

(These are all victory quotes from the respective 3H character)

[archerestarcher]

Decided to order it in the order I remember getting into the franchises I chose to include (and then games are in release order within franchises)

Favourite female character

thank you for the tag @pegasusdrawnchariots!

Rules: make a poll with as many or as few of your favorite female characters, to see which your followers like best!

tagging >:3 (no pressure <3)

@nerdyratz @musicalfan78 @abstinence-camper @rainanerdz @lunarmoonheart @inkwell-illustrations

[zazu75]

@sweetspicybingo's Hurt/Comfort Bingo done! I used an RNG for 1-25 and let it give me the prompts to do. (I absolutely cheated and chose number 11 by myself when I noticed where 10 landed). It was a lot of fun! They kinda got posted on AO3 out of order (two fics got their spots switched) but I'm gonna put them in order on the pic up there.

Without further ado, here's the fics!

1 - Their Worst Fear

Title: A Flicker in the Elevator Fandom: OCTOPATH Traveler: Champions of the Continent Modern AU, Claustrophobia, Panic Attack, anxiety attack Summary: Auguste had noticed Gilderoy's aversion to elevators. He didn't find out what it was about until they almost got stuck in one.

2 - "Can I give you a hug?"

Title: Hugs to Calm Down Fandom: OCTOPATH Traveler: Champions of the Continent fear for life, out of control monsters, Panic, Hugs, Hurt/Comfort, Mentions of Murder, Facing your own mortality Summary: Ashlan is out looking for the monsters that target merchants, and hears Dorothea scream.

3 - Wound Care

Title: Treatment from a Cait when you're Allergic to Caits Fandom: OCTOPATH Traveler: Champions of the Continent Injury, Cat allergy Summary: Wingate is allergic to caits. Unfortunately for him, Isla is the only one available to treat his wounds at the moment.

4 - Magic Healing

Title: From the Brink of Death Fandom: OCTOPATH Traveler: Champions of the Continent hurt almost no comfort, Almost death, Magic Healing, child hurt Summary: Mikhail's thoughts as he almost dies from poison, and the blue flame that saves him.

5 - Wiping Away Tears

Title: Cat Scratch Fandom: OCTOPATH Traveler: Champions of the Continent minor injury, hurt (literally)/comfort Summary: Rodion's work is interrupted when his daughter bursts into his workshop. His cat had scratched her, and she wanted comfort.

6 - Flashback

Title: The Red Cathedral Fandom: OCTOPATH Traveler: Champions of the Continent Flashbacks, Fear, Mentions of Death Summary: Eliza did not want to be in the Cathedral of Tytos, but gave herself no choice.

7 - Deep Breath

Title: The Lost and the Overprotective Fandom: OCTOPATH Traveler: Champions of the Continent Getting Lost, bugs mention, Spiders, getting stuck in a tree root, Overprotectiveness, sucky cousins, back in the past Summary: Schwartz was studying a spider when he comes across his cousin, Cyrus, who's very lost in the woods.

8 - Emergency Room

Title: The Stabbening Fandom: OCTOPATH Traveler: Champions of the Continent Accidental Stabbing, Physical hurt Summary: Theo stared. Fiore looked much too cheerful for someone who had been accidentally stabbed by having a knife thrown at her.

9 - "Do you even care?"

Title: A Pious Idiot Fandom: OCTOPATH Traveler: Champions of the Continent Threats of Bodily Harm Summary: Mabel is used to Prome's antics, but him saying that if he wasn't dating his boyfriend, that he would have killed him already… She's not sure he knows how much that must have hurt Stead to hear. (She's right.) (He's an idiot.) (She gets nowhere with him.)

10 - Held Captive

Title: Held Captive Fandom: OCTOPATH Traveler: Champions of the Continent Implied Torture, Hurt No Comfort, Angst Summary: It was Gilderoy's third day here. Third day of imprisonment for a crime he didn't commit. Third day on death row for a murder committed by the stupid, rancid, corrupt king of this kingdom.

11 - Visiting a Grave

Title: A Closure Fandom: OCTOPATH Traveler Remembrance, missing people, graveyard Summary: Therion goes to visit a grave of an old partner.

[berryzawati]

A list of characters who share similarities to my Warrior of Light Layla:

Dorothea (Fire Emblem Three Houses)

Tohru (Fruits Basket)

Michiru/Sailor Neptune (Sailor Moon)

Violet (Violet Evergarden)

Eirika (Fire Emblem The Sacred Stones)

Primrose (Octopath Traveler)

Frederica (Triangle Strategy)

Sophie (Howl's Moving Castle)

Sophitia (Soul Calibur franchise)

Josephine (Dragon Age Inquisition)

Whether it's personalitiy traits, character arcs or fighting styles. These characters continue to inspire me to write my wol lore and headcanons. Also I love all of them very much and that helps too. lol

[chorusmusarum]

MUSE LIST (MOBILE EDITION)

Heacanon links are on the desktop page. DM if you’d like a link to a character’s tag!

Persona 3:

Kotone Shiomi (f!protag)

Persona 5:

Akira Kurusu Ann Takamaki Futaba Sakura Sojiro Sakura

Ace Attorney:

Trucy Wright Dahlia Hawthorne (heavily canon-divergent)

Square Enix/Team Asano:

Cyrus Albright (Octopath Traveler) Ringabel (Bravely Default/Bravely Second)

Zero Escape:

Junpei Tenmyouji Akane Kurashiki Clover Field Sigma Klim

AI: The Somnium Files:

Kaname Date Mizuki Okiura Saito Sejima

Naruto:

Sasuke Uchiha Karin Uzumaki Minato Namikaze

Fire Emblem Engage:

Alear (she/them) Ivy Veyle Yunaka

Fire Emblem Three Houses:

Byleth Eisner (they/them)

Edelgard von Hresvelg Hubert von Vestra Dorothea Arnault Bernadetta von Varley Monica von Ochs

Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd Felix Hugo Fraldarius

Claude von Riegan Hilda Valentine Goneril

Constance von Nuvelle

Fire Emblem Awakening:

Chrom Frederick Maribelle Tharja Morgan (male) Marc (female!Morgan) Severa (Selena available) Inigo (Laslow available) Accalon (Emm!fankid)

Fire Emblem Fates:

Xander Camilla Selena (Severa available) Laslow (Inigo available) Zero (Niles’ JP name) Charlotte Flora Nina

Oboro

Lilith Arete

Fire Emblem Echoes:

Alm Ezekiel (Camus and Sirius also available) Fernand Berkut

And here are the secret muses, if you're curious

[eros-vigilante]

octopath champions of the continent . red dot is for the main story/campaign and blue is for playables & their traveler stories. theres a Lot of women in the main story but very few of them are written very well. however theres also a fuckton of playable women (it is a gacha also. sorry) and all of their stories are amazing (including the second-highest rarity)

chloe. her story is about how shes a femme fatale who's practically the union leader of her town's sex workers despite not being one herself. "Her Girls" start disappearing and she beats up the guys kidnapping them. very pro-swer-rights

zenia. she used to make potent poisons for commissions that she knew were being used to kill people. eventually she decided she had enough and ran away, changing her name and trying to make healing tonics instead. she's silly

odette. side character from ot1 with too little screen time and my favorite ot woman. autistic coded, best friend of cyrus, (but her cotc story is not about him). her story is about how she's been taking in and teaching impoverished children and trying to raise them without violence while researching an ancient ritual for summoning rain (setting is a desert town). she's so funny and i love her so much

tithi's story is footloose if footloose included beating up cops. she returns to a town she left where dancing is banned and just. starts dancing and runs away or fights whenever the cops try to stop her. eventually she beats up one of the aristocrats and theyre like oh my fucking god iv had enough of you fine whatever. she's silly and sweet and i like her

dorothea is a socialist merchant. shes a nepo baby who found everything but her parents casino boring so she just left. she likes gambling and makes this her career by seeing investments as a form of it. she goes to visit one of her friends and finds out theres some asshole overpricing the only cure to a mysteriously localized illness. she threatens the guy making the poison into making her a ton of the cure then tricks the asshole into giving her literally all of his money. then beats him up. and invests the money back into the towns recovery and her friends hobby. shes so funny and clever "i poisoned this wine btw. ill give you the cure for your entire net worth. awesome thanks. jk i wouldnt ruin such good wine. teehee"

Aedelgard and Sarisa!!!!! are two women who are in each others traveler stories bc they were released as a trio with Yukes (her servant, boy, so doesnt matter here). aedelgard is a princess of a small nation and she has a lot of siblings. she's her father's favorite bc shes silly and kind so her siblings all hate her to various degrees. her story is about a tournament she participates in for funsies where one of her brothers tries to rig it against her and fails. sarisa's story is. super gay subtext. they're yuri. sarisa is her maid who was taken in by another of aedelgards brothers and assigned to her. she has "many talents" from tea to killing people. her story starts with her fighting thieves targeting aedelgard and fighting a guy who bought all the best sugar to resell bc she wants to get better at baking. then aedelgards brother shows up and tries to assassinate her. sarisa instinctively dismantles the trap herself despite her owing her life to him, justifying it by telling him that "that wouldnt have been strong enough to kill her." so he tells her she should assassinate aedelgard, because she "wouldnt question" poison given to her by sarisa. comedy scene where your set protag thinks the tea sarisa gives aedelgard is poisoned but its just not. protag confronts her about how clearly she is having a conflict about this (the brother has the trope line of "you havent grown attached to her, have you?") and she doesnt know why she wont kill her. yukes finds them to say that aedelgard was invited to her brothers house and sarisa goes Fuck. Shit. and you go there. andits. auughmhm. sarisa runs to where aedelgard is and she is just. chilling. shes used to her siblings wanting to kill her. and her brother tells sarisa this is her last chance to kill aedelgard herself otherwise he will. and she TRIES. she walks up to her and stares at her and has a breakdown. aedelgard says some really gay shit and sarisa turns on the brothers guards and fights them. aedelgard implied she spares her brothers life because she wouldnt have met sarisa without him. (!!!!!!!) and then she asks sarisa to make her some awful fucking cakes and they leave. ("i'll make as many as you want!") i love them soooo much.

i really only put the blue dot so low bc traveler stories are at most an hour each. but god i love them so much. here's where i record and upload traveler stories, it has chloe odette tithi dorothea aedelgard sarisas and more. @scholarlycait is my friend who also uploads stories i dont have including zenia.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5eHPUAIpOeVt6DvR0Cqf9vlCPoXuCLU7

ilove you cotc women traveler story. would not suggest getting the game just for them bc youd have to pull them to do their full stories. Would suggest watching their stories on youtube you do not need any knowledge on octopath to enjoy them as they are

okay guys i'm going to open the floor for media recs: what is your favorite media wrt Lots of Female Characters or Really Good Female Character Writing? please put it in the replies so everything is in one place, i don't want any asks or dms. please refer to the following chart for how im grading these.

any media format, any genre. actually that's a lie. don't recommend concept albums to me. a concept album isn't real media they made that shit up for theater kids. femslash is a bonus but not necessary, however if you recommend anythign really het i will probably side eye you. okay thanks xx

[kandayoyo]

[blazlngblade]

My first twelve drawings for the Project Path Action Eight Day Prompts!

It's really enjoyable drawing characters I don't often draw and doing something for them!

Here are the finished chibis!

My favourites are Oskha, Sonia, and Elletrix.

[her-wind-cleaver]

dorothea

[hestia-and-the-court]

god how are we supposed to choose

Um. In no particular order...

Robin (Heretical Edge)

The Carnival (Heretical Edge)

Kamala Khan (Marvel Comics)

Laura Kinney (Marvel Comics)

Cassandra Cain (DC Comics)

Stephanie Brown (DC Comics)

Bernadetta von Varley (Fire Emblem: Three Houses)

Dorothea Arnault (Fire Emblem: Three Houses)

Cassti (Octopath Traveler 2)

Chiroptera (A Little Vice)

Veyle (Fire Emblem: Engage)

Samus Aran (Metroid)

Oops, that's twelve. which is a problem because we can't choose which ones to remove. oh well, you're getting a top twelve, I guess

tagging @junequeer and @tamahori, if y'all want

Tagged by @celesticnova. I'm tagging @hestia-and-the-court and @callmeshei.

My top 10 favorite characters across fandoms are

1. Mio (Xenoblade Chronicles 3)

2. Noah (Xenoblade Chronicles 3)

3. Marcille (Dungeon Meshi/Delicious in Dungeon)

4. Garnet (Steven Universe)

5. Steven Universe (Steven Universe)

6. Felicity "Flick" Chambers (Heretical Edge)

7. Cassidy Evans (Summus Proelium)

8. Shulk (Xenoblade Chronicles)

9. Roy Mustang (Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood)

10. Kurogane (Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle)

Honorable mentions in no particular order (aka characters who easily could be in the top 10 on a different day)

Melia (Xenoblade Chronicles)

Nia (Xenoblade Chronicles 2)

Eunie (Xenoblade Chronicles 3)

(Honestly most of the casts of Xenoblade 1 2 and 3 could go here)

Laios Touden (Dungeon Meshi/Delicious in Dungeon)

Senshi (Dungeon Meshi/Delicious in Dungeon)

Laurel (Labyrinthian by @celesticnova)

2B (NieR Automata)

A2 (NieR Automata)

Kaine (NieR Replicant)

Fai (Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle)

Syaoran (Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle)

Sakura (Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicle)

Frog (Chrono Trigger)

Neku Sakuraba (The World Ends With You)

Shiki Misaki (The World Ends With You)

Beat (The World Ends With You)

Rindo Kanade (NEO: The World Ends With You)

Shoka Sakurane (NEO: The World Ends With You)

Grace (Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical)

Edward Elric (Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood)

Alphonse Elric (Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood)

Ling (Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood)

Greed (Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood)

Risa Hawkeye (Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood)

Peter Parker/Spider-Man (Various Iterations)

Miles Morales/Spider-Man (Spiderverse films and the Insomniac games)

Gwen Stacy/Spiderwoman/Ghost Spider/Spider-Gwen (Spiderverse films)

Vin (Mistborn)

Kelsier (Mistborn)

Sazed (Mistborn)

TenSoon (Mistborn)

Lelouch (Code Geass)

Mob (Mob Psycho 100)

Clark Kent/Superman (My Adventures With Superman and Superman the Animated Series)

Bruce Wayne/Batman (Batman the Animated Series)

Pearl (Steven Universe)

Amethyst (Steven Universe)

Sol Badguy (Guilty Gear)

Ramlethal Valentine (Guilty Gear)

Baiken (Guilty Gear)

Axl Low (Guilty Gear)

I-No (Guilty Gear)

Jack-O' Valentine (Guilty Gear)

Sin Kiske (Guilty Gear)

Phoenix Wright (Ace Attorney)

Maya Fey (Ace Attorney)

Miles Edgeworth (Ace Attorney)

[storiesoforsterra]

Therion finds Dorothea during his chapter 2 as a kitten so when all the post redacted stuff goes down she is almost a year old; and stays in the Everhold inn waiting for Therion to come back.

[wolffyluna]

list 10 different female faves from 10 different fandoms, then tag 10 people

I was tagged by @chocochipbiscuit!

Characters listed in no particular order, faves are subject to change

Mu Nihuang: okay, so this pick is a risky one because I am less that 1/5th of the way through Nirvana in Fire, and it’s quite possible that by the end of the show I’ll be like, “[Liyang/Gong Yu/Someone I haven’t met yet] is my fave!” but at the moment it is Nihuang. I love her moral centre, and the way she is so good at ~improving with Mei Changsu, and the pining, oh god the dramatic irony pining is so good. Also, I am always a sucker for warrior princesses.

Ling Wen: LING WEN DID NOTHING WRONG. She has done many bad things, but your Honour, I love her. She is a wonderful character. I am a sucker for  characters who are the one person good at organisation, and everyone will rue the day they take them for granted, because without them the trains do not run on time and dramatically derail. I wish we got more detail about the Bai Jing thing, but I do feel like we were given enough to make a good guess at what was going on there.

Zana Mathos: I love hard bitten mercenaries, I love her “I CAN’T TAKE YOU ANYWHERE” and her threatening to kill Owain if he nearly gets himself killed again. She is great. I also love the fight between the voice actors and the author about her and Owain’s relationship.

Dorothea Arnault: Picking a fave from Three Houses, but it’s gotta be Dorothea. I love how driven she is, I love her charisma and how she makes a point to befriend the outcasts I love how the narrative treats her (relatively) sympathetically about her desire to marry for gain. She’s really great.

Alphys: Nerdy socially anxious lizard scientists for the win! (I also have a lot of feelings about what happens to her in a [spoiler] run, and also how she’s mentally ill and gets to be ~messy and fucked up about it, but she’s still a sympathetic character.)

Wen Qing: I didn’t expect there to be such a theme of people being nerds, tough and no nonsense, or in this case, a no nonsense nerd. I prefer the book version of her: even if we see less of her, she gets to be less of a ~fluffy-fluff good guy. She has presumably done some bad shit. She is understandably annoyed about her brother dragging her into his betrayal scheme. But she’s still a person who cares about people, and who doesn’t deserve to be executed.

Tar Miriel: I love the tragedy of her. The last Faithful Queen before the fall of Númenor, too late to fix things, relatively powerless despite being the literal queen-- I love her

Merrill: Merrill is smarter than she looks! She is very smart and I love her ambition (her audacity--) and I love the glimpse we get through her of the Dalish attitude to the fade. (”All spirits are dangerous.”)

Primrose: I haven’t finished Octopath Traveler yet (and it’s been [mumblemumble] since I played, but I love her story so far. Revenge plots are great. And I love performer characters in general.

Gertrude Robinson: She tried to save the world! Okay, her methods had flaws, but with the information she had, what she did make sense. Valid to be ruthless when trying to stop the literal apocalypse.

I tag: anyone who wants to do this! :D

[gascon-en-exil]

I'm genuinely curious about your "Black Eagles most to least favourite" list.

Here you are.

#1: Hubert

Could there be any other? I remember back when there was a promo introducing the house retainers (well, Lorenz for the Deer) and everyone was saying that Hubert looked so obviously evil that there had to be some deeper explanation, that someone who took design cues from a two-dimensional villain like Fates’s Iago couldn’t possibly be Edelgard’s retainer. Then the game came out, and we all realized that Hubert was exactly as advertised and then some: a cold and calculating murderer and war criminal with his fingerprints all over almost every terrible thing that happens over the course of the story, as comfortable with chloroform and a razor as dark magic and down to perform unspeakable experiments on innocent civilians to turn them into war machines and then backstab his co-conspirators because he will suffer no rivals for his title of the Most Evil Man in Fòdlan. And yep, he looks like Dracula and Severus Snape had a one-night stand and their mpreg love child went to an anime convention...but when Ferdinand looks at Hubert he sees Mr. Darcy and the Phantom of the Opera and Edward Cullen/Christian Grey, and soon enough that snake in Hubert’s breeches will be singing quite the aria indeed. You do you, Ferdinand.

Ok, I’ve already rambled at length on Hubert’s bisexuality and the interesting things it reveals about both him and his two primary love interests, but I do also have to admire the sheer audacity both of Hubert as an incel/Nice Guy-flavored romantic false lead for Edelgard who never had a serious chance because of the self-insert fantasy and of the decision to follow that up with a trope-laden queer romance that perfectly counterbalances Hubert’s attraction to Edelgard and puts Ferdinand firmly in the place he was destined to occupy by choosing to side with the Empire. It’s nearly as outrageous as just how casually evil Hubert gets to be, as well as the immense potential for dark humor that lies with that. You have to bend over backwards to say that Hubert isn’t unapologetically, irredeemably evil, and if you try there will be significantly more fans just waiting to tell you that you’re wrong - myself included. He’s the Manfroy to Edelgard’s Arvis but so much than that, and I look forward to the point in the CF postgame where he effectively takes over the Empire in true evil chancellor fashion and unleashes the full extent of his horrors upon Fòdlan. He somehow got even better in the DLC too despite being absent from CS and getting no new supports, because the Abyssians in CF just can’t stop talking about his nefarious antics down there. I just can’t get enough of how good this guy is at being bad, and I love that FE gave us exactly what was advertised here.

#2: Ferdinand

Now here’s a case of the opposite, where what’s on the packaging didn’t prepare me for what was to come. If I remarked on Ferdinand at all during pre-release it was only to think that he might be part of a Christmas knight duo with Sylvain since the game looked like it wouldn’t have one of those. Early on there wasn’t much else to be said about Ferdinand; he was like Claude in that his popularity ran off a meme (except just the one rather than several), and in appearance and personality he was basically Lorenz with less ridiculous hair. But then came his supports, and his post-timeskip look, and suddenly Ferdinand blossomed into the subtext-laden fem with very bizarre taste in men - see above - that he could have only dreamed of being if he’d stuck to such well-trod ground as the Christmas knight archetype. We learn of his love for opera, his complicated relationship with his father, his worship of the hot mess diva Manuela and how he learned swordplay specifically to imitate her roles on the stage, and - yes - how some backhanded compliments and expensive gifts of tea turn him into a blushing Regency heroine. It all casts his unusually rote romances with women in a performative light (as opposed to Lorenz who is similarly performative but seems genuinely interested in the marriage market), to say nothing of his one-sided rivalry with Edelgard that brushes against jealousy over Hubert’s devotion to her more often than against romantic attraction to her, and that toys around with gendered behavior in a manner complementary to Edelgard’s own bucking of the gender status quo.

And while not to the same extent as Felix, I do appreciate that Ferdinand has two distinct arcs depending on the route - and unlike some who feel that one or the other detracts from his character as a whole I personally find that they complement each other well. In SS and if recruited to AM and VW he makes the hard choice to oppose his homeland, spending the timeskip waging a solitary battle against the Empire with his private militia and then joining back up with Byleth’s army at Garreg Mach because he knows Edelgard is in the wrong even as it pains him to depose the Adrestian emperor and leave his own status uncertain...not to mention fight Hubert, which merits a curious boss conversation as well as some extra lines in SS (plus the infamous Huge Hole™ remark that I will never stop referencing because it is hilarious) that, while not elevating Ferdibert anywhere near the level of Dimidue in terms of cross-route canon endorsement, nonetheless are suggestive of something deeper between them that exists even if they find themselves on opposite sides of a war. In CF by contrast Ferdinand gives into his craving for the title and holdings that Edelgard has just stripped from his father and embraces nationalism and his long-held ideal of what the office of the prime minister should to do as a means of justifying the Empire’s conquests. Of course in the process he also succumbs to Hubert’s, er, charms(?) and becomes the charismatic bureaucrat who is presumably saddled with the task of putting a positive spin on the Empire’s dystopian atrocities while Edelgard and Hubert do all the actual work...and Hubert does all the actual actual work, which includes a lot of murder and kidnapping and all manner of other things that he doesn’t share with his pretty lover and about which Ferdinand quickly learns not to ask. Two Jewels of the Empire, indeed.

#3-4: Edelgard and Dorothea

I go back and forth on these so I’m not going to bother putting them in a definitive order, particularly because I like them for very different reasons that are difficult to compare. For Edelgard, it would be most accurate to say that I enjoy her potential much more than her execution; she gets some meaty material to work with as a lord and as the driving antagonist of the whole game outside of CF, and while I still prefer Micaiah for female lords there’s something darkly satisfying about her need for control and domination and her utter refusal to compromise or remain stagnant...except where Byleth is concerned, and Edeleth drags her down so badly that it would be painful if I cared more about that type of strong female character. Had the game axed the self-insert obsession (even if that meant axing her bisexuality along with it) and focused on her experiences during the Insurrection as the source of her worldview and motivations I’d be inclined to like the final product far more, because that’s a hell of a lot more in line with what she actually does and conveniently also maps to the life of a real world ruler with whom I’m relatively familiar and whom history regards in appropriately ambivalent terms.

Dorothea on the other hand is someone I can relate to on a more personal level, mostly as a sex worker. She’s similar to Primrose from Octopath Traveler, both of them prostitutes and playing coy with the implications of the RPG dancer class archetype, although Primrose hits a few more of my buttons for being former nobility and being motivated by revenge. Then again, I fully understand Dorothea’s anxieties about growing old without a man to take care of her, even if she loses me (and Yuri picks up from where she leaves off) when she dips into lesbianism as an alternative option. She’s got her ups and downs for me - I love that she brings up incest kink with Caspar as opposed to this series’s usual outright incest, while I love less her strange Ferdinand supports that are suspended oddly between friendship and romance and...something else undefinable - and I don’t have much to say on her life as an opera diva except that it doesn’t surprise me in the slightest that she’s been turning tricks on the side and even got a sugar daddy to pay her way into the academy. Theatre and sex work have always gone hand-in-hand like that.

#5-7: Linhardt, Caspar, and Petra

This is why I couldn’t make up a list like this for the Lions or Deer, because most of their students would be in big clumps like this. I have no strong opinions on any of these characters; they each have their moments, but not enough to elevate them to where I actively like them or drop them down into real dislike. I suppose you could say I’m disappointed by how Caspar and Linhardt are visual allusions to Ike/Soren who do absolutely nothing else with that similarity except eloping in their paired ending...which is preceded by virtually nothing in the way of real chemistry. If I enjoy them for anything in particular it’s Linhardt’s wit and Caspar’s occasional bouts of emotional vulnerability, like his mini-arc in AM where he has to deal with his feelings surrounding Randolph’s death and then later gets an apology from Dimitri for it.

Petra is awkward all around as the game dances around her delicate political situation, and I also happen to agree with the VA who (if I recall) thought the character should have some sort of accent but wasn’t allowed to do one. (If anyone is wondering, based on her last name and Brigid being an island nation I headcanon it as a Celtic-derived culture, but as with my personal reading of Dedue and Duscur I know that doesn’t play well to the fandom at large).  All in all Petra feels like a more self-aware rendition of the exotic swordswoman archetype begun by Ayra in Jugdral, but there’s clearly still some work to be done on that front.

#8: Bernadetta

Ugh. With apologies to @capriciouscorvid for explaining how even unintentional disability representation can be taken as a positive, I just don’t see how Bernadetta’s character could possibly be considered a good thing when she’s so grating in almost all of her supports and most of her story and exploration presence outside of CF. All the screaming and high-pitched pronouncements of impending death get very old very quickly, and the part where she’s meant to be romantically appealing in her neediness and isolation is as lost on me as it would have been had it stemmed instead from a massive rack. Her supposedly sympathetic backstory doesn’t help much either, as it leaves me mostly with the thought that her father is an idiot because his methods obviously did not make her suitable to be a good wife. I also don’t care for how she’s one of several characters used to soften Jeritza (and that the way she does so is I think rather insulting to people with social anxiety, to liken it to a compulsion to commit murder), or even worse that people point to her Hubert support to try and say that he’s not such a bad guy and they’d be total besties just like Ferdinand and Dorothea (another pairing that doesn’t exactly scream BFFs). I mean, really....