#which somehow managed to convince a LARGE portion of the 3H fandom that he is peak progressive thought

[butwhatifidothis]

I think this post I found on an unrelated topic explains why debunking and criticizing the Cap's fic is important. His works, meta or fanfic aren't canon, it's just his interpretation of the game.

Different anon: >claude accused of sexual assault

>dedue beheaded

(Different anon) okay lmao fuck capn. As you said this goes beyond a bad fic. This is just fucking offensive but its praised because "uwu eddy" like holy shit. This isn't "op doesn't like my comfort character burn him" like no its actually upsetting me because of all the bigotry disguised as being woke. No offense to edelgard or her fans. I actually quite like edelgard. But some edelstans need to chill. The lengths they will go to portray their war mongering wife as a saint is disgusting.

Different anon: You know what, I'm gonna dunk on this fic even harder. Okay but in all honesty if this was just some dumb fic I would read it and make fun of it on my own or with a few friends, I wouldn't try to shit on the author or their work publicly or something like that. But when the fic and author in question have played a major role in the fandom, particularly in shaping the discourse and meta surrounding some characters, and promotes several questionable beliefs in the process, that's another story.

*Accused Claude of either being a variety of horrible shit or otherwise willingly working with said horrible shit, to be clear (literally every TWS person we canonically see is guilty of all of what I listed sans sexual assault, so accusing Claude of being one of them very heavily implies that he's also guilty of the same crimes)

Exactly! Like, if this was just some Joe Schmoe bargain bin shit I'd just adjust my tags to blacklist it like I do every other time I come across garbage and go about my day. Going over every single fanfic that makes Edelgard into a hero and demonizes the other characters is stupid and useless - villains are always gonna have their fans who try to erase all of their flaws and make them into uwu darlings. This is such a staple in fanfiction as to have a well-known term for it that it directly related to a character that's has this exact thing happen to them an incalculable amount of times (Draco in Leather Pants), so I literally wouldn't care if this was just that.

But it goes well beyond just making Edelgard into just a poor wittle babby cinnamon roll; as I've already listed, there's misogyny, misandry, racism, ableism, etc. etc. oozing out of the pores, but this is the fic people are saying they are basing their actual view of the actual game off of.

Consistently giving minority race characters worse treatment than that of their majority race peers? Fine! Constantly infantilizing women and taking away any agency they have? Good! Repeatedly painting men as this negative force that taint everything they touch if they don't bow down to the propped up lesbian? Dandy! Portraying the "wrong" mental health issues as making people crazed beasts and/or manipulative villains while portraying the "right" mental health issues as making people weak, helpless, broken victims? So ~brave~ of the author to give such a ~real~ representation of how mental health ~actually~ affects people, not like the stupid game that would dare let people with stigmatized MI be good people with actual agency :)

The 3H fandom looks upon this fic and this author promoting such blatantly rancid shit and said to themselves, "Yes, this is what I should look to for my critical analysis of the game. Not the game itself, but this." This fic and author are, in large part, the reason so many worrying takes have taken off. Like, when someone as big and looked to as Cap'n portrays Dimitri and Rhea are nearly solely mindless animals, it's no shock that the "Dimitri and Rhea needed to be put down" take is what comes of it. Fandom takes this fic as canon + This fic portrays Dimitri and Rhea as animals = Fandom treats Dimitri and Rhea as animals, because hey, "canon" does! So why shouldn't they!

And when people who haven't read this fic and have just the game's knowledge with them - you know, the actual canon with them, not one person's incorrect perception of the game - and they disagree with all the inaccurate (and horrible) shit that the fic posits as true, they get told they're stupid, that they don't know what they're talking about, and that they are the ones who don't understand the game because they aren't taking someone else's headcanon as canonical fact. Dimitri fans get told that they only like him cuz they're horny women who wanna fix the bad boy and that they're fetishizing mental illness. Rhea fans get told that they're supporting eugenics and slavery and feudalism and oppression. Edelgard fans who like her as a villain, like she is are told that actually they hate her and also maybe hate women and/or lesbians (since they don't like Edelgard, which of course they don't, because they call her a villain).

TEatG, I’m sure, is far from the only big-name fanfiction of a fandom to have immensely troubling aspects to it and still be propped as the “pinnacle of analysis;” this isn’t something unheard of, and it also isn’t something that in the past also hasn’t similarly been ripped to shreds by people who looked at it and went “Wow, this is actually terrible.” I’m not about to feel bad for criticizing a fic that has had such lasting and wide-spread negative impact on the game and fandom, just like I wouldn’t feel bad about criticizing someone’s meta post (since this is basically what this fic is).