#unlike this. so it's just kinda weird that they'd go SO FAR to proof that such a blatantly Not Good Person character

[dont-post-after-midnight]

So far, we've got two contenders on who we think Stripe will be: Claw and Riley Greene

I thought it would be fun to make a really long post with all the reasons I think either one of the two could be Stripe.

Of course, this is all my speculation, and a lot of this is just me going "hey that sounds like something Stripe would do/say. Also, if there's something I missed or forgot, feel free to reblog with any of your ideas!

All the reasons I think Claw is Stripe:

Greene does refer to her as the leader, and the gremlins do follow her without question. Unlike Greene who doesn't seem to want that role (just wanted to use them temporarily to achieve his goal) Claw was very clearly the leader from the start just like Stripe. And if the show follows the movies and how the leader is predetermined from the start, then Claw simply being the leader might automatically make her the same as Stripe/Mohawk if that makes any sense.

The other gremlins have way more respect for Claw than for Greene. There's multiple scenes of them laughing or mocking him but I don't think any of them would dare disrespect Claw, even by accident. Like in the night club scene when the one gremlin accidentally hits her and everyone goes silent, I feel like if the same thing happened to Greene they'd all just laugh at him.

Her personality and the way she acts is very similar to Stripe. She's very cunning and, aside from Noggin, appears to be the most intelligent out of the bunch. While the other gremlins were off wreaking havoc, Stripe was the one who started and orchestrated all of it. Similarly, Claw was the one who escaped and kick started all the mayhem on the ship. Claw and Stripe both enjoy chaos as much as the next gremlin, but they're both a little more reserved and tend to think things through and plan ahead better than the rest.

While Claw doesn't have a mohawk or tuft of hair like Stripe does, she does share one likeness to him:

Both Claw and Stripe are seen squinting one of their eyes in some scenes. That's about it for similarities they share but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Stripe shooting the gremlin cheating in the bar scene sounds a lot like something Claw would do if she got mad (though to be fair, Greene would do the same I feel 😅). She basically the same thing when she got mad and turned that one gremlin really tiny.

I can see Claw disliking Gizmo as much as Stripe/Mohawk do. Gizmo clearly doesn't like her and share the same feelings, so I can imagine she'd harbor some resentment for him if she ever found out. Maybe this is why Stripe/Mohawk in the movies hated Gizmo so much (Mohawk even more so), if Claw is the same gremlin as them then their hatred of him makes a lot of sense. I feel like this is more proof that Claw is Stripe rather than Greene since he doesn't seem to dislike Gizmo at all. Sure he wanted his immortality, but he ended up finding another mogwai to eat so I find it less likely for Greene to view Gizmo as his enemy than Claw.

All the reasons I think Riley Greene is Stripe:

He's literally got "green" in his name. I think it would be funny if his last name was Greene and he ended up turning into a green monster. 🤣

Has been called a "monster" multiple times. This might be a sign that he's more monster than human deep down, like he'd fit in among monsters better than humans.

Greene seems to have a fascination with weird/mystical things and the macabre, which feels like something Stripe would also be interested in. There's his room on the ship with all his weird little oddities and things in jars, his knowledge of black magic and courts of hell, and the line "if you do amputate I want the arm."

His blatant disrespect towards his henchmen and other people. He only refers to his henchmen as numbers and doesn't care if they get hurt. He also doesn't seem to care about things like entering the Wing family's shop when it's closed, or making Elle scared and uncomfortable around him.

Call me crazy, but I feel he kinda has features that resemble a gremlin, plus the tuft of hair on his head like Stripe:

Aside from that, his beard and the way it curves forward is similar to how most gremlins chins look. His eyebrows are curved upward like gremlin "eyebrows", and his nose is pointy and curves downward like a gremlin. Also his outfit and ship are all colored green with red highlights similar to gremlin colors, though this could just be referencing him working alongside them.

The mogwai he ate not only gave him immortality, but it also had a tuft of fur on its head. Of course, that mogwai could have just been a reference to Stripe, and not that Greene is going to turn into Stripe. But I feel like this is the biggest piece of evidence going for him becoming Stripe than all the others.

[butwhatifidothis]

I know i'ts Reddit but the Three Houses sub is so annoying. You can call Rhea a villain - you can call DIMITRI a villain, and I've seen one of the mods saying Dimitri is a villain on every route including his own - but call You Know Who a villain and everyone loses their minds and will give you a lecture on how she is a "heroic antagonist" in 3 routes and the true hero of the game in the 4th. They all erally think they're being insightful is the thing. And this isnt even r/Edelgard

Well, seeing that I do believe the "Edelgard has C-PTSD" take was originally on the general Three Houses sub (if I remember right - either way I don't think it's on r/Edelgard. Edit: it was the main Fire Emblem subreddit, thanks nilsh lol), that's not the most surprising thing to hear. The prevalence to which people vehemently deny that Edelgard could possibly be a villain is very widespread, and since it's such a blatantly wrong take you get similarly blatantly wrong takes about the other (actually heroic) characters to go along with it.

Rhea's the easiest target, since she's the only actually, genuinely morally gray person of the four characters talked about (the other of course being Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude). She makes decisions that have no right or wrong answers and that end up having large, long-lasting effects on Fodlan. Even with that, however, there are just some things that she couldn't do anything about. Crests were always going to be considered a sign of superiority by humans, for example - they'd already genocided a race for them and had them around for what, a century before Rhea had any power to speak of? Correct me if I'm wrong on the numbers, but in any case it was long enough for multiple generations to come about who also had Crests. Nothing Rhea could have done would have stopped that. However, people look at her actions, hear Edelgard's words shitting on Rhea, ignore the red herring surrounding Rhea, and believe her to be the villain of 3H. Some even make the Agarthans her victims, because "there must have been a reason for the Agarthans to hate Nabateans."

Dimitri also makes incredibly questionable decisions. In post timeskip (in non-CF routes) the choices he makes are oftentimes something that can easily garner a side-eye, to put it nicely. But the thing people ignore about him (and also about Rhea, let's be honest) is that he is making these choices under very mentally unstable conditions. It isn't him not caring about others, it's him prioritizing the voices that he hears - voices that he genuinely believes to be his father, his best friend, his step-mother, and countless innocents - that tell him to behave a certain way, do certain actions, achieve certain goals. Ignoring these voices - especially when, off of CF, they are likely the only "people" he's consistently heard "talk to him" for four to five years - just isn't immediately possible for Dimitri. And then he makes an effort to better himself and shows that while the bad is still a part of who he is, that doesn’t make him bad, just human - he’s in fact one of the most caring people of the cast. But people either completely ignore that and say that he's an evil uncaring villain who just wants to do what he wants, or, erm... the other option. Which is arguably far worse and is inarguably very ableist.

All bias aside, Claude is the morally cleanest of the four characters. He just deadass doesn't do questionable actions that are nearly on the level as the others. Not to say that he doesn't make questionable decisions, but to butcher up a post I made a while ago: Rhea, Dimitri, and Edelgard have killed someone (for a variety of reasons) while Claude is stealing a Pepsi from a mom-n-pop. But he's initially set up as the untrustworthy one - even I thought that he was gonna be the big bad at first (it's why I chose him lmao). His motivations are shrouded in a lot of mystery and obfuscation, he has an air of confidence about him that is noticeably different from the other characters, he intentionally makes himself look untrustworthy - it's easy to see him as someone who is revealed to be the villain. So when he isn't - when his big bad secret is that he's a mixed kid who wants everyone to hold hands - people don't believe it, the same as when they ignore Rhea's red herrings. Claude is set up in one way, and it is impossible for him to deviate from that way, so he must actually be the villain - along with Dimitri and the darkness in him, along with Rhea and her lies, his fakeness is all that's there to his character.

These three are archetypes of characters that generally are villains. Rhea's kind of character is usually Church Bad, Dragon Bad, Human Good - it's a shock that she's actually a pretty damn good person, especially all things considered (my sis says that she would have just eradicated humans were she in Rhea's position, and I doubt that's an uncommon opinion to have). Dimitri's kind of character is Once Good Now Bad Because Mental Illness Bad - it's a shock that he's able to have the less appealing symptoms of an already stigmatized mental illness and still be shown to be an incredibly good person (this can also apply to Rhea some). Claude's kind of character is usually Evil Halfer Infiltrating The "Good" Side For Evil - it's a shock that he proves again and again to be a really good person (bruh, you would not believe how often this is not the case, especially in fantasy - half-raced NPC's are revealed to eeevil spies that used their half-race appearance to infiltrate the "good" side more often than you might think). Them being good people are subversions of the types of characters they are - and in turn, Edelgard being a villain is a subversion of the type of character her character normally is.

Take down the corrupt church! Fight for people's freedom! Destroy oppression! Get rid of nobility! Cute anime waifu! These are all things that are extremely typical of the hero of a story, especially one like FE. Edelgard is saying all of the right things - when it comes to end goals, in any case. She's confident, she looks like she knows what she's doing, but she also has the special soft side for just the player character where she's cute but oh so lonely. The game subtly pushes you to favor Edelgard - Adrestia is always the first option to chose between it, Faerghus, and Leicester, the loading screens are of BE, she has the most immediately striking design of the three lords.

She has most all of the set up for being the hero of the story... and then she isn't. She's actually the villain. She wants to get rid of the church, in extremely large part, because it's run by a race she hates. She fights for strong people, not for "weak" people who will fall behind in her society of independence (and only humans fall under the umbrella of "people" to her). She "destroys" "oppression" by replacing it with her own. She gets rid of nobility that she doesn't like, and just replaces the people in charge with people she knows - the system's still there, just with new faces. She's the cute anime waifu until Byleth is done being useful to her, then she breaks off the connection and leaves them to fend for themselves (unless they specifically marry her).

For all of 3H's faults, it is a subversive game in these regards, and in ways that can be arguably legitimately commendable. The Church is actually good, the mentally ill aren't "too far gone," the mixed race outsider isn't secretly evil, and the cute girly is the big bad - none of these are really things you see that often, especially all at once. So, the people who liked what Edelgard was saying, grew to like her, wanted to side with her, they see that they've been bamboozled into following a villainous cause of conquest, violence, racism, and imperialism, a cause that doesn't care for the weak, or for the religious, or for the noncompliant, and they plum don't like it. So they fall back on the tired old tropes of fantasy (to be clear these are found elsewhere but they're pretty damn prevalent in this particular genre) - the Church is bad, the mentally ill are "too far gone," the mixed race outsider is an infiltrator for the "bad" side, and the one saying all the right hero stuff is the right hero of the story. All the context for 3H is ignored because they don't like the conclusions it comes to - that Rhea, Dimitri, and Claude are all good people, and Edelgard just isn't. It just so happens that Edelgard is very popular, so this isn't going to stay in just one corner of 3H's fandom