Characters / Fire Emblem: Three Houses – Dimitri

Fire Emblem: Three Houses characters index
Main Characters: Byleth | Edelgard | Dimitri | Claude | Rhea | Other Main Characters
Houses: The Black Eagles (Part One, Part Two) | The Blue Lions (Part One, Part Two) | The Golden Deer (Part One, Part Two)
Garreg Mach Factions: The Ashen Wolves | The Church of Seiros | Officers Academy Instructors and Staff
The Three Nations of Fódlan: The Adrestian Empire | The Holy Kingdom of Faerghus | The Leicester Alliance
Other: Historical Figures | The Flame Emperor Army | Those who slither in the dark | Other Characters

Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd

Nationality: Holy Kingdom of Faerghus

House: Blue Lions

Class: Noble → Lord → Paladin/Hero → High Lord → Great Lord (Three Houses), Soldier → High Lord → Great Lord (Three Hopes)

Crest: Blaiddyd (Minor)

Age: 17 (12/20)

Height: 180 cm (pre-timeskip) -> 188 cm (post-timeskip)

Voiced by: Kaito Ishikawa (Japanese), Mai Nishikawa (Japanese, young), Chris Hackney (English)

^{Post-Timeskip}

^{Click here to see Dimitri in Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes}

^{Click here to see Dimitri in Fire Emblem Heroes}

^{Click here to see Post-Timeskip Dimitri in Fire Emblem Heroes}

Savior King/The Protector

"Someone must put a stop to this cycle of the strong trampling the weak."

The crown prince of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus and the house leader of the Blue Lions. Dimitri is a courteous and refreshing young man who embodies chivalry, but he hides a darkness beneath his pleasant façade. His favored weapon is the lance.

His personal ability, Royal Lineage, grants him twenty percent more Experience. Post-timeskip it is upgraded to Royal Lineage+, boosting his Avoid while he is at full health. He bears the Minor Crest of Blaiddyd, which has a chance to double his Attack and weapon uses for Combat Arts.

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# — D

• Achievements in Ignorance: In Azure Moon, by killing Cornelia, Lord Arundel, and potentially Myson, Dimitri and his friends in their missions to free Faerghus from Imperial regime and take down some of the Empire's generals also take down some of Those Who Slither in the Dark's highest ranking generals as well as the instigators of the Tragedy of Duscur without even knowing about their existence.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: Warriors: Three Hopes portrays his conflict with Edelgard as being far, far less personal than it was in Three Houses. Since he never comes to the conclusion that Edelgard was complicit in the Tragedy of Duscur, he opposes her not out of a desire for revenge but out of support for the Central Church of Seiros (and not wanting to be put under the authority of the Empire's Southern Church), with his dialogue indicating that he was keeping the Kingdom out of the fight until Rhea directly came to him for aid. He also openly admits to admiring many of the reforms Edelgard has made, with the caveat that the Kingdom should adopt such reforms slowly to allow more societal stability and less chance of the reforms not lasting.
• Adaptational Angst Downgrade: Because the Flame Emperor does not make an appearance in Three Hopes, Dimitri is still very much sane after the Time Skip and his conflict with Edelgard is more a matter of defending his Kingdom and its allies than a desire to slay her. While the Tragedy of Duscur still weighs on him, he devotes himself to his responsibilities as king and tries to keep his troubles from showing. Not to mention he gains some closure for it with the death of his uncle who was complicit in it early on, though being the one that killed him in turn weighs on him.
• Alas, Poor Villain:
  • On the Crimson Flower route, just as Edelgard is about to behead him, she mourns the fact that he could've flourished as a good king had they been born in times of peace. After doing the deed, she mourns him even further knowing that he was used by Thales and the Agarthans without being aware of it.
  • On the Verdant Wind route, after the battle at Gronder Fields, he tries to chase after Edelgard, but collapses out of exhaustion, which gives the Imperial Army the chance to pierce him with lances. Hilda witnessed it, and says afterwards that he deserved a better way to go out.
• All-Loving Hero: Dimitri serves as a rather twisted example of this. As Dedue will note, Dimitri's problem is that he loves his people too much. Everything he does is driven by a love for those who died for his sake at Duscur and that combined with the trauma of seeing them all die at such a young age pushes him to seek vengeance for their deaths. And the mental dissonance between his love and his desire for violent revenge wears away at his mind until he snaps at the end of part one from Edelgard's betrayal as the Flame Emperor. Dimitri descends into total madness with vengeance becoming the sole thing on his mind. But as he even states later upon returning to a better state of mind, it was never hate for his enemies that truly drove him, it was love for those he sought vengeance for.
• Ambiguous Situation: On the Silver Snow route, he is reported dead at Gronder Field, but he appears to Byleth afterwards briefly. Byleth passes out after the conversation and Seteth says they were "dreaming", and since Dedue never comments later on Dimitri's current state unlike in the Verdant Wind route, it's left ambiguous whether this was a Dead Person Conversation or if Dimitri is Not Quite Dead.
• Amazon Chaser: Putting aside that pretty much any romantic ending will be with one of the playable cast members who are all skilled fighters, he hits on and confesses his love to Catherine in their A+ support and succeeds at getting her to seriously consider a relationship with him after the war. If it works out or he ends up with someone else is up to the player.
• Ancestral Weapon: He gains use of House Blaiddyd's Hero Relic, the lance Areadbhar, after the timeskip, and his Crest allows him to wield it safely.
• Animal Motifs:
  • Aside from his house's lion motif, Dimitri is called a boar by Felix for his savage and brutal side of his personality. However, it also fits his moniker as Savior King, as boars are a symbol of Christ, and represent strength, courage, and ferocity.
  • Wolves. Dimitri's last name, Blaiddyd, is Welsh for "Wolf Lord". Out of the three Lords, Dimitri has the strongest sense of camaraderie with his fellow students and tends to share strong bonds with them (Despite everyone in his group feeling overwhelmed by his presence besides Felix and Sylvain because he is the Crown Prince). This reflects wolves in real life having strong family bonds of their own. This could also emphasize his lone wolf tendencies and ferocity in battle after the timeskip. The fur he also wears on his cloak match the colors of wolves' fur coats.
• Anti-Hero: In Azure Moon, he still holds firm to his belief that the innocent should be protected, but he is willing to kill his foes that stand in his way and he's mentally broken to the point that he's driven by anger, hatred, and revenge. He gets better by the end of the story, though.
• Any Last Words?: Asks his uncle Rufus, "Final words?" before executing him in Three Hopes.
• Apologizes a Lot: His very first line of dialogue in Three Houses is him apologizing to Jeralt for asking him and his mercenaries for help, and it only goes up from there. Dimitri will apologize for something he says even if the one he's talking to shows just the tiniest bit of offense at what he said. Another thing he will always apologize for is whenever a conversation shifts into him talking about himself, as it is a way for him to avoid opening up to others because of his low self-esteem.
• Armor-Piercing Question:
  • Delivers one to Edelgard in Azure Moon during their negotation and can ask her one in Crimson Flower as well during battle. In both cases, he's unable to shackle her resolve, though she cannot come up with a compelling answer, either.
    Enough of this madness! This future of yours is built on a foundation of corpses and tears!
  • On the Azure Moon route, he asks one of Byleth, suggesting that they are not so different. The player can agree or disagree with this sentiment.
    Five years ago... did you not deem the woman who killed Jeralt to be unforgivable?
• At Least I Admit It: As far as he's concerned, this is the difference between himself and the likes of Randolph. He gets a pretty brutal awakening that this still doesn't excuse what he's done when Rodrigue dies protecting him from a vengeful Fleche.
  After all is said and done, we are both murderers. Both stained. Both monsters.
• The Atoner: Upon being dragged back from the edge on the Azure Moon route, Dimitri is downright horrified and remorseful at what a monster he became, and vows to spend the rest of his life atoning for his sins.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The Crest of Blaiddyd allows Dimitri to double the amount of damage his Combat Arts do, which, combined with his incredible strength, means he can kill just about anything that gets in his way with it. However, it not only has a very low activation chance, but it uses more of the weapon's durability, meaning that it is possible for Dimitri to just chew up each weapon he's given if the player gets (un)lucky. Combine this with Areadbhar and its unique Combat Art Atrocity, and it's possible for Dimitri to kill everything in one hit that lacks HP break bars, at the cost of it losing virtually all of its durability. As a result, it's a fun idea to use, but chances are you'll almost never see it, or want to use it. It's also perfectly in-line with his self-destructive personality post-timeskip.
• Ax-Crazy:
  • Pre-timeskip in Three Houses, Felix mentions in their support chain that during a battle to quell a rebellion, Dimitri fought so savagely that Felix did not recognize him as the friend he had known, labeling him afterward as a monster. A morose Dimitri does not deny Felix’s account of the event. In Three Hopes post-timeskip, Felix adds that Dimitri was smiling as he killed the enemy commander. Sure enough, his battle model has an unnerving smile.
  • Post-timeskip, mainly pertaining to the Azure Moon route, Dimitri is a broken man, openly showing no hesitation to kill. He believes that he is haunted by those he failed to avenge, and is hostile when anyone else tries to help or calm him down, up to threatening to kill Byleth when they try to talk to him. However, he gets better, and actually improves from before.
    Dimitri: Kill every last one of them!
  • Interestingly, it's averted on the Crimson Flower route. Due to having the support of Rhea and the Church of Seiros from the start, Dimitri doesn't have to go into hiding and is able to be crowned king of Faerghus right away, which does wonders for his sanity (and his eye). He still despises Edelgard for what she's done and blames her for the Tragedy of Duscur, but he is much more levelheaded.
• Babies Ever After: His ending with Gilbert, as well as Gilbert's Solo Ending, mention that Dimitri goes on to have a son, regardless of who he ends up marrying.
• Back for the Dead: His sole appearance on the Verdant Wind route has him unexpectedly show up on the rematch at Gronder, where he's in his Ax-Crazy state and indiscriminately attacks Alliance and Imperial troops alike. After being defeated he withdraws and then decides to pursue a retreating Edelgard alone, resulting in him getting speared by Imperial soldiers.
• Badass Adorable: Though to a lesser extent than Edelgard, Dimitri is a handsome young man who boasts superhuman strength, and has his fair share of endearingly adorable moments. Less so after the timeskip, however.
• Badass Boast: He has many, many examples of this but his battle dialogue with non-recruited Manuela during his paralogue manages to stand out in terms of sheer wit and style.
  Manuela: You've grown into a fine, handsome man, Dimitri. Bit of a shame you've also become a violent beast. Men like you make the Silver Maiden cry.
  Dimitri: Oh? I suppose it is a shame, Professor Manuela. Perhaps I should have appeared before you holding a bouquet of flowers, rather than the weapon that will end your life.
• Bait-and-Switch Sentiment: Dimitri ends up saying a variant of this to Flayn in their A+ Support where after Flayn reveals her fears of never waking up from a deep sleep Dimitri reassures her that he cares about her and could never forget her.....and neither could all of their friends.
  Flayn: You really do not pick up on subtle cues, do you?
• Barbarian Hero: Gives off this vibe post-timeskip, with the grizzled look, longer hair, fur cape, and wilder state of mind. Even before then, he's noted as having unusual strength. Even Raphael is impressed when he hears a story of Dimitri lifting a caravan single-handedly. Reflected in his statline, as Dimitri has the highest maximum STR at a whopping 87. He goes so far as to Neck Snap people with his bare hands and barely a flick of his wrist once he starts going off the deep end.
• Baritone of Strength: He speaks in a noticeably deeper and more growling voice post time-skip, which goes alongside nicely with his new look, which is a body with bigger muscles, even if he already had Super-Strength before the time-skip via his crest.
• Beneath the Mask:
  • He's genuinely heroic, but Byleth notes near the beginning of the game that they sense a "darkness" behind his friendliness. Later on, it's evident that Dimitri understands and is horrified by the depths of his emotional trauma and bloodthirst, though he tries his best to present the picture of the noble and kind knight.
  • In Chapter 8, if Byleth chose the Blue Lions, Dimitri's rage over the attack on Remire Village has him letting the mask slip, calling for the bloody, violent death of Solon's attacking forces. After the battle, Dimitri apologizes to Byleth, regretful of letting them and others see that side of himself, only to end the conversation on this:
    Dimitri: There's a reason I came to the Officers Academy. Just one reason. I came here for revenge. And one day, I will have it.
  • Beneath his more cutthroat and vengeful side as "The Boar" is a man who is deeply traumatized by his past, genuinely cares about protecting others, and has a deep-seated desire to die due to believing that he doesn't deserve, nor is worthy, of living, unlike the people who have died to protect him.
• Berserk Button:
  • Bloodshed and killing being justified. In Dimitri's eyes, killing can never be justified, no matter the circumstances. This most likely stems from his trauma from the Tragedy of Duscur after watching many of his friends and family be brutally killed. On Azure Moon, Dimitri retains this to an extent, which is shown in his interaction with the servant of Viscount Kleiman. It's justified considering that Viscount Kleiman helped cause a massacre and called it justice.
  • Edelgard or the mention of her after learning she was the Flame Emperor. Because he believes she's involved in the Tragedy of Duscur, all his thoughts revolve around killing her post-timeskip. On Crimson Flower, this is played with since he hasn't lost his sanity, though he still obsesses over killing Edelgard for starting the war.
• Betrayal by Inaction: In the Golden Wildfire route of Warriors: Three Hopes, he is trapped in an apparent no-win situation. If he continues to shelter the Central Church, he traps himself in a losing war with the Empire and Federation and risks the Kingdom being wiped out and its territories carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey. If he throws the Central Church out, he spits on the very institution giving his reign legitimacy (and betrays the national and personal debts he owes them), guaranteeing a civil war. Dimitri's third option is to passively abandon the Church to be destroyed by the Federation, getting rid of them without provoking his constituents and trusting Claude to pull out once he's accomplished his goal. All the same, the decision grieves him as he would have if possible saved the church and the Kingdom.
• The Big Guy: He can potentially become this among the Blue Lions during the war phase if Dedue dies because his paralogue wasn't completed. Dimitri is already freakishly strong, even stronger than Dedue before the time-skip thanks to his Crest, and his growth spurt makes him the tallest of the remaining Blue Lions, surpassing Sylvain by 2 centimeters, the only one besides Dedue who was taller than Dimitri during the Academy phase.
• Big "WHAT?!": If you choose him as the dancing representative for the White Heron Cup, after his earnest request not to be chosen, he'll let out a pained "What?!" before cursing your name.
• Black-and-White Insanity: A significant contributor to his eventual Sanity Slippage. While his moral compass can accurately distinguish what is right and just, his standards for irredeemable evil are far too strict. To him, war, self-defense, or ideology are just flimsy excuses that villains use to justify murder, so there's no point in understanding or empathizing with their position. Unfortunately, this outrage extends to even himself, so he sees himself as an unforgivable monster for fulfilling his princely duties and for taking joy in killing others. Only on the Azure Moon path does he come to terms with the complexity of killing and learn how to forgive both others and himself.
• Blood Knight: "Combat" is listed among his likes in his bio, and in his S-rank Forging Bond convo in Heroes, he mentions he enjoys the battlefield because he doesn't have to be troubled by his thoughts there. Even Felix is disturbed by how much Dimitri enjoys battle, considering him something inhuman after seeing the nightmarish glee Dimitri derived from slaughtering his foes while suppressing a rebellion. Dimitri's model in Three Hopes smiles during battle.
• Blue Is Heroic: As the leader of the Blue Lions, Dimitri's outfit are decorated with blue colors (most of all his academy and Three Hopes ones), and in the story, he is the closest to the traditional Fire Emblem lord of wanting to protect people and being a kind figure. Averted after the time-skip, where he has become an insane murderer hell-bent on revenge.
• Bond One-Liner: He gets plenty of stylish ones after defeating enemies during the first half of Part II on his route.
  "Too weak for this world."
  "I disposed of doubt long ago."
  "See you in the eternal flames."
  "All talk and no action."
• Break the Cutie: He was already broken pretty badly when he watched his family and knights get slaughtered in the Tragedy of Duscur, traumatizing him and leaving him obsessed with revenge. Then Edelgard is unmasked as the Flame Emperor, causing him to completely snap and go on a five year crusade of vengeance that only ends with either his beloved vassal Rodrigue's death on Azure Moon or his own death on all other routes.
• Broken Ace: Pre-timeskip, he’s hailed by others as a model of moral and chivalrous behavior, a highly skilled lancer and swordsman, and a kind and thoughtful prince, but he’s got some deep-set psychological trauma affecting him as a result of the Tragedy of Duscur, as well as his own over-fondness for battle.
• Broken Bird: He hides it well (at first), but Dimitri is a deeply depressed man. The deaths of everyone at Duscur constantly weigh upon his mind. He is noted to be unable to taste anything (a sign of depression) and during his A rank support with Shez in Azure Gleam, when they ask him what would make him happy, the first thing he thinks of would be the knowledge that his country is happy and peaceful at the time of his death, something he doesn't immediately realize is rather bleak until Shez points it out. And ultimately Shez is unable to get him to think about his own happiness, they just settle for him being happy at others' happiness on the day they ultimately win the war.
• Broken Pedestal: On the Azure Moon route, after being fatally wounded, Cornelia spends her last moments taunting Dimitri by stating that his stepmother Patricia, who appeared to care for him dearly, never actually loved him, and instead conspired with those who slither in the dark to orchestrate the Tragedy of Duscur, supposedly to return to her "true" famiy in the Empire.
• Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl: With female Byleth post-timeskip on the Azure Moon route, as Dimitri is left brooding and unstable, while she is more in touch with her emotions by then. There's even a lot of symbolism of her pulling him from the darkness back to the light.
• Cain and Abel: Plays both Cain and Abel with his stepsister, Edelgard. Upon discovering her identity as the Flame Emperor, he turns murderous and remains as such for the rest of the game... except on the Azure Moon route. There, he overcomes his hate and tries to reconcile with her, only to get a dagger in the shoulder.
• The Caligula: While he hasn't become king yet, Dimitri becomes a Caligula-in-the-making on the non-Crimson Flower routes post-Time Skip, as his obsessive desire for revenge on those behind the Tragedy of Duscur makes him violently unhinged and causes him to neglect the needs of the Kingdom's people in favor of appeasing the dead, leading his allies to question if he's even mentally competent enough to be leading the resistance against the Empire, let alone be the next king of Faerghus, and only following him either because of their loyalty to Byleth or Faerghus's knight code. He is also a deconstruction of a Caligula, as his insanity stems from his Survivor Guilt related to Duscur (which resulted in him seeing ghosts), and realizing that his step-sister Edelgard was the Flame Emperor (whom Dimitri erroneously believes was complicit in the Tragedy) made him snap. It's also implied that his apathy towards Faerghus's future stems from being a Death Seeker. On Azure Moon, he turns away from this path when he realizes that his lust for revenge only ends up creating an endless cycle of death, allowing him to eventually become The Good King. On Silver Snow and Verdant Wind, and without Byleth and Rodrigue around to rein in his worst impulses, his obsession with revenge and bloodthirsty nature gets himself and his allies killed.
• The Cameo:
  • Watches fights with Dedue and Ingrid in the Marketplace portion of the DLC stage Garreg Mach Monastery in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
  • He appears in the background in the Tetris 99 theme of this game.
  • He is one of the characters that appears in the teatime mini-game of WarioWare: Get It Together!.
• Cannot Tell a Joke: Because of Dimitri's serious demeanor, things that he says in jest are taken at face value. If he meets Byleth at the Goddess Tower on the night of the ball, he proposes that they pray to the goddess that they remain together forever. After a pause, he adds he was joking, which she doesn't find funny. In his and Sylvain's B-support, he uses a pickup line he learned from Sylvain and has to hide in Sylvain's room when the girl he said it to won't leave him alone. Sylvain admonishes him for it, saying that people know Sylvain's not being serious when he uses those lines, but the same can't be said for Dimitri.
• Cassandra Truth: In the aftermath of the Tragedy of Duscur, he tried to testify that the assassins weren't from Duscur, but nobody believed him. It probably didn't help that high-ranking nobles of the Kingdom going all the way up to the court mage and the queen-consort herself were in on the conspiracy.
• Celibate Hero: He doesn't seem too interested in romance, despite his position as the future king. In fact, in other routes, his kingdom falls apart because he dies childless. However, this can be subverted if he is romanced by female Byleth or he gets a paired ending with Annette, Catherine, Flayn, Mercedes, Hapi, Ingrid, or Marianne.
• Chaotic Stupid: On the Verdant Wind route, he picks a completely pointless fight with the Alliance out of sheer psychotic rage, and gets himself and potentially every member of his retinue save Dedue killed.
  Claude: Calm down, Dimitri! What does it achieve, us killing each other here?
  Dimitri: Move, Claude. I have no time to exchange words with you.
  Claude: It doesn't matter what I'm saying, does it? You aren't even listening. But I'm not gonna budge.
• Character Death: He will always die in non-Azure Moon paths, either as a result of his desire for vengeance consuming him and leading him to an avoidable death, or for being one of Edelgard's key obstacles in her conquest of Fódlan and the defeat of the Church of Seiros (unless his final appearance on Silver Snow was the real deal).
• Character Development: He has perhaps the most robust arc out of every character in the entire series, and it serves as the focal point of his route. Dimitri starts out as an idealistic Nice Guy with a tragic past, someone who infrequently gives into blind rage during stressful situations. After discovering the Flame Emperor's true identity, he snaps, falling into insanity and monstrosity after the time skip (which is not helped by his captivity and having to live on the run/in hiding). He then goes on to brutally murder Empire soldiers, killing anyone he deems as a "monster" for preying on the weak and being obsessive in his desire to brutally murder Edelgard for her transgressions. He spends the bulk of his route angry and closed off, refusing to interact with former friends, due to his extreme self-loathing and inability to deal with the hallucinations of the dead (likely a result of his intense Survivor Guilt). It takes the combined death of Rodrigue, his father figure, and Byleth's coaxing for him to finally able to just let go, and live for himself instead of being bound by the dead. After becoming a Knight in Sour Armor, his perspective completely shifts, as he's able to oppose Edelgard in a rational manner (and tries to parley with her). After defeating her, he offers her his hand so that they might work together. Sadly, she responds to this gesture with a knife, forcing him to kill her. He does not relish her death. It's notable that even after his character development, Dimitri is still plagued by the voices of the dead, according to his S-support with Byleth, and will likely hear them for the rest of his life. This is true to how mental illness works in real life, but it also speaks to the strength he's gained that he can live on without succumbing to despair under his current conditions. His development is so robust that it stands out how Dimitri-focused the story is compared with the other routes having more politics and in-universe mythos in the mix.
• Chick Magnet: In his supports with Sylvain, Dimitri promises to be more open to social interaction if Sylvain promises to be more diligent. By the second part of the support, Dimitri has to lock himself in Sylvain's room to hide from a girl who wants to go out with him.
• Childhood Friends: With Felix, Ingrid, and Sylvain. He is also revealed to have been one with Edelgard when they were little, but grew distant after she moved away. It doesn't appear as though most of the students are aware of this relationship, but several characters (including Byleth, optionally) can comment on the fact that he seems to still have a crush on her. While the Childhood Friend Romance is implied through dialogue on Dimitri's end, it's not explored much from the other side, and even if it were, Edelgard and Dimitri are mutually exclusive characters and it's therefore impossible to ever follow up on it.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Dimitri grew up with and can marry Ingrid should you achieve an A-support and ending with them.
• Clark Kent Outfit: In the Drama CD An Officer's Academy Sleuthing Story, during a reprieve where Claude and Dimitri visit the sauna, Claude realizes that Dimitri's strength isn't wholly derived from his Crest — he's genuinely very well-built underneath his uniform, and his appearance in the 2022 "Summer Vacation" banner of Fire Emblem Heroes backs that up.
• Climax Boss:
  • On the Verdant Wind route, he is fought in Chapter 17 during the second battle at Gronder Field.
  • On the Crimson Flower route, he is fought on the Tailtean Plains alongside the church forces right before the Final Boss.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Threatens the defeated Randolph with having to watch each of his soldiers die, one by one, and then the removal of his eyes, after his defeat in Chapter 14 of the Azure Moon route. Luckily for Randolph, Byleth steps in to Mercy Kill him before Dimitri can act.
• The Comically Serious: Dimitri conducts himself incredibly seriously and lacks much of a sense of humor, making it all the funnier when the embarrassed and stressed prince is forced to deal with Sylvain's antics or similarly undignified situations.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: On the surface, he's a fairly standard noble lord like Marth and all the rest. However, beneath his Mask of Sanity lies a festering mess of rage, hatred, and vengeance, and without Byleth's or Rhea's influence to rein him in, the trauma he goes through before and during the story causes him to snap and become completely Ax-Crazy.
• Cosmic Motifs: Dimitri is closely associated with the moon. Besides his tendencies towards madness and cycling through strikingly different personalities based on his mental state, almost all of Dimitri's major scenes of character development happen at night, and most of them prominently feature a full or crescent moon. Dimitri's outfits furthermore tend to strikingly mix or alternate between black and silver. In Three Houses, his story route is titled Azure Moon. Three Hopes also confirms that thanks to his workaholic tendencies, Dimitri is known to the other Lions as a night owl active at all hours.
• Creepy Shadowed Undereyes: Possesses these after the time skip. If you're on the Azure Moon route, they disappear after Rodrigue sacrifices his life for Dimitri and he realizes what kind of person he's become. Averted on the Crimson Flower route, as he's considerably more well-adjusted.
• Crime of Self-Defense: Self-inflicted. On Azure Gleam, he describes his killing of his uncle Rufus by beheading in a Public Execution as a cold-blooded murder. The fact that the "victim" led an armed insurrection against him, tried to kill one of his closest retainers, and used his subjects as meat shields is immaterial.
• Cynicism Catalyst: The revelation of Edelgard being the Flame Emperor solidifies Dimitri’s resolve to murder those he deems wicked, and though he retains good intentions of protecting the innocent even as an Anti-Hero post-timeskip, he stops trying to hide the depths of his desire for vengeance and bloodthirsty brutality.
• Dark and Troubled Past: The Tragedy of Duscur, in which a young Dimitri witnessed his father and several knights of Faerghus (including his close friend Glenn Fraldarius) killed in bloody conflict. The prince recounts witnessing their final moments, and from the beginning of the story onward, is haunted and tormented by the memory.
• Deadly Distant Finale: Several of his paired endings for Azure Moon (Felix, Marianne, Dedue, and Flayn, for those curious) involve his death at an unspecified point after the end of the war, and usually before the person he's paired with.
• Dead Person Conversation: After the Battle of Gronder Field in Silver Snow, it's implied that Dimitri's final conversation with Byleth is this. He's reported to have died in the battle, and Byleth meets him randomly outside of the monastery. Byleth is incredulous that he's alive, and something doesn't seem right. During the course of the conversation, Byleth tells Dimitri to attempt to atone for his sins. Dimitri bitterly replies that Rodrigue said the same thing, but states that he will try to do so. The screen goes black, and Seteth wonders who Byleth was talking to, since they were standing there all alone. Byleth replies that they were talking to someone, and Seteth states that it was probably someone desiring guidance from Byleth.
• Death by Irony: In White Clouds, he’s incredibly critical of Lonato for suicidally leading his people into battle against a much more powerful opponent motivated by personal revenge. In Verdant Wind and Silver Snow, that’s exactly how he dies, leading the last remnants of Faerghus loyalists and most of his friends into a rout at Gronder Field, trying to kill Edelgard without bothering to unite Faerghus and get help from the church first.
• Death Seeker:
  • Implied post-timeskip, as he's very uncaring about his own life. If you're on the Azure Moon route and he dies, he just dryly remarks that this is a fitting end for him. If you heal him(or use Dance, Rally or a Gambit with a status buff), he tells your healer they're wasting effort. And finally, when Fleche tries to kill him, he doesn't even appear to try to defend himself in the CG. After Chapter 17, however, he starts to value his own life again.
  • Stated near outright in his support chain with Gilbert, where Dimitri can even pull a Please Kill Me if It Satisfies You pre-timeskip. It almost happens in their A-rank, but Gilbert deliberately misses to make Dimitri come to his senses.
    Gilbert: Your Highness, I repeat myself — consider the value of your own life.
  • It's brought up again during the "A New Future" Forging Bond event in Heroes, in which the younger Dimitri seems surprised he's still alive five years later.
  • In Three Hopes, this trait also returns in Azure Gleam and unlike in Three Houses he is this time bound to his duties as the new King of Faerghus added onto his own trauma over the tragedy of Duscur. Chapter 7 of Azure Gleam explicitly has Dimitri tell Felix and Shez that he is willing to die by Cornelia's hands when she threatens him into a Hostage Situation where the people under him will die if he steps into battle. Dedue manages to snap him out of it by telling Dimitri that he isn't alone and that the rest of the Blue Lions will help him. His support conversations with Shez also cuts to the matter directly, with Shez honestly calling him out on this and his Workaholic tendencies. He also takes a frankly disturbing amount of glee in being able to kill a phantom clone of himself in Chapter 16 (Which is only available if you recruited Byleth).
• Deconstructed Character Archetype: Of the three lords, Dimitri is the closest to the classic Marth archetype the series uses for most of its main lords: kind, extremely idealistic, noble, chivalrous, and horrified by war. However, unlike Marth and similar lords, who cling to optimism and The Power of Friendship in order to get through their hardships relatively unscathed, the mental and emotional trauma that Dimitri experiences before the game begins and during its events ends up breaking him and tormenting him in several ways, turning him into a violent, cynical anti-hero who needs to be pulled out of his self-destructive behavior by Byleth, basically a darker version of the 'battle gung-ho' Lords popularized by Hector and Ike. Dimitri can also be described as a more insane version of Leif in regards to his vendetta with the Flame Emperor, similar to Leif's It's Personal vendetta with Raydrik. That is also deconstructed as his obsessive vendetta with Edelgard is what gets him killed on the Silver Snow and Verdant Wind routes, notably the latter, where he meets an Undignified Death at the hands of Adrestian soldiers when he tries to pursue Edelgard.
• Defiant to the End: On the Crimson Flower route, if he is killed after watching Dedue sacrifice himself by turning into a beast, he dies cursing Edelgard's name and telling her to burn in the eternal flames for the atrocities she committed in the name of her ideals, as well as the ones he erroneously believes she committed. Without that one last trauma, his death is much more peaceful.
• Demoted to Extra: On Silver Snow and Verdant Wind, he loses all plot relevance after the timeskip. On Verdant Wind, he shows up out of nowhere for one boss fight and is unceremoniously Killed Offscreen afterwards, accomplishing nothing of importance; the central conflict for most of the game is firmly Claude vs. Edelgard. It's even worse on Silver Snow, where you don't even get to fight him and the only screentime he gets is after his untimely demise, where he's strongly implied to be some sort of ghost.
• Denying the Dead Parent's Sins: Sort of. On the Azure Moon route, when Cornelia reveals that his stepmother was one of the people responsible for the Tragedy of Duscur, Dimitri at first is understandably skeptical about her claims and fervently denies her involvement.
• Developers' Desired Date: To Byleth on the Azure Moon route. They have a few scenes with romantic undertones outside of supports and Holding Hands is a reoccurring theme between them. Also, while only a female Byleth can S-rank Dimitri, the heavy romantic undertones are still very much present if Byleth is male, making Dimitri a more usual example of this trope to him.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength:
  • Dimitri has remarkable physical strength, but has trouble keeping it from interfering with more dexterous tasks; he asks Mercedes to teach him needlework in their support chain, and somehow manages to accidentally bend a pair of scissors with his physical strength alone.
  • It's been a problem for him for years: Felix won't let him live down the fact that he used to accidentally snap swords in half as a child.
• Dissonant Serenity: Felix noticing Dimitri as this trope in battle is what led to the nickname "the boar." Sure enough, in Three Hopes, Dimitri smiles in his battle model.
• Don't Call Me "Sir": He insists he's more comfortable with just being called 'Dimitri' by those close to him instead of 'Your Highness,' and prefers to be treated as an equal to those he outranks. His supports with Dedue and Ashe involve this conflict, as both insist on using the honorific. Even Sylvain and Ingrid, his childhood friends, usually call him "Your Highness," rather than by name.
• Draw Aggro: In the final boss fight of his route, Hegemon Edelgard will always spend the first of their two moves per turn attacking him if he's in range.
• The Dragon: Only on the Crimson Flower route, he serves as this to Seiros, and even dies to protect her and his country.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: On the Verdant Wind route, Dimitri is driven from the field at the Battle of Gronder Field, and so is Edelgard, leaving them both alive to be confronted later... only for Dimitri to immediately be killed offscreen by Imperial mooks while trying to chase Edelgard down. Hilda says that he deserved a better death. It becomes worse in the Silver Snow route, where you don't meet him onscreen post-timeskip (aside from a conversation with what may be his ghost) and aren't even present for the Battle.
• Dude, Not Funny!:
  • In Chapter 7, this is his response when Edelgard jokes that they can fight all they want if Adrestia and Faerghus go to war. Considering what does end up happening...
  • After revealing to his classmates that Edelgard is his stepsister there's the following exchange with Sylvain.
    Sylvain: Wait! I remember now! She was that girl, wasn't she? The one you gave a dagger to? Heh, so your little girlfriend was Edelgard.
    Dimitri: Sylvain, if you have any more foolish things to say, please save them for later.
• Dude Looks Like a Lady: Not during the present, but there was a bit of this when he was younger as shown in Azure Moon. During his C-support with Catherine, Dimitri mentions he never forgot her first words to him: "Look at that young maiden wielding a giant lance. How adorable!", and how furious he'd been at the time (but not anymore). Catherine says she didn't know he was the prince — which later earned her a reprimand from her father — and that his hairstyle at the time threw her off. As seen with a Blue Lions route flashback of Edelgard teaching him how to dance when they were kids, his hair was a bit long and dainty for a boy.

E — H

• Early-Bird Boss: As one of the three potential bosses of Chapter 1 on Maddening, you fight him before any character customization is unlocked when he is perfectly capable of one-rounding anyone except Raphael, making him a very daunting challenge.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: His life has sucked a lot, but if you're on the Azure Moon route, then does Dimitri ever earn his happy ending. He's finally able to stop being consumed by Survivor Guilt, becomes hailed as the Savior King of the united Fódlan, puts in place key reforms that usher in a golden era, and potentially finds love and a happy marriage.
• Enemy Mine: In Three Hopes if the requirement for the secret chapters is fulfilled, Dimitri will get trapped in Zahras alongside Edelgard, Claude and Shez. This makes the three leaders put aside their rivalry so they all can find a way out. This is prudent for Dimitri in both routes that aren't his own, as there, he will be against both Edelgard and Claude, as opposed to Azure Gleam where only Edelgard is any sort of enemy to him. When they do escape by defeating Epimenides, all three return to their armies without going into arms against each other.
• Entertainingly Wrong: In Three Houses, Dimitri has plenty of reason to believe the Flame Emperor was behind the Tragedy of Duscur and continues to even after his identity is revealed, and the Flame Emperor himself makes no attempt to provide evidence against it beyond their word, which drives Dimitri's entire story. He unfortunately never touches on the fact that Edelgard being the Flame Emperor makes any involvement in the Tragedy highly improbable; for Edelgard to have been at Duscur would mean she'd organized a cross-kingdom regicide and slaughter at 13 years old, and that's if she was even released from her crest experimentation by that time.
• Et Tu, Brute?:
  • He was very close to his stepsister and childhood friend Edelgard. Predictably, when he finds out that she's been orchestrating attacks on the Church of Seiros and seems to be responsible for the Tragedy of Duscur, he handles it very, very badly.
  • On the Crimson Flower route, he has a special battle quote if you pit him against any former members of the Blue Lions, in particular with Felix, for whom he has a personal "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
    Dimitri: Not only have you become the emperor's lap dog, but you have turned against your own people. From the depths of hell, you will regret tainting the land of Faerghus!
• Everyone Can See It:
  • Played With. Several characters, such as Claude, Sylvain, and potentially even Byleth, can teasingly accuse him of having romantic interest in Edelgard. He tends to laugh it off when they do. He does react very deeply to her betrayal, but firmly refers to her as his step-sister.
  • If she's recruited on Azure Moon, Dorothea will mention that when an opera is made about the war, female Byleth will almost certainly be made Dimitri's Love Interest^note male will be "played by the most handsome actor" in it, suggesting that all of Faerghus can see it.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • On the Crimson Flower route, Hubert notes that as pragmatic and ruthless as Dimitri has become, he refuses to make victims of his friends. This can be seen by how Dimitri shows more sorrow over his allies' deaths than on Verdant Wind or Silver Snow.
  • Also on Crimson Flower, Dimitri vocally disapproves of Dedue giving Kingdom soldiers Crest Stones to turn them into Demonic Beasts without his knowledge. He then resignedly says they must press on and achieve victory so as not to waste their sacrifices.
• Evil Nephew:
  • On the Azure Moon route, he is framed as one by Cornelia for the assassination of his uncle, Rufus, for rumors that he may have been involved in the Tragedy of Duscur. Dimitri is in fact upset by his uncle's death, even if he was a skirt-chaser who ignored his duties as regent.
  • Also on the Azure Moon route, Lord Arundel tries to guilt-trip Dimitri for fighting him, Dimitri's own uncle. Dimitri, however, refuses to listen to Arundel.
• Evil Sounds Deep: After the time-skip, his voice gets notably deeper, and he's clearly more unhinged than he was in the past. Downplayed, however, in that he's just an Anti-Hero.
• Exhausted Eye Bags: Dimitri possesses shadows under his eyes after the timeskip, after the last five years spent in exile, still haunted by the deaths of his loved ones and desiring revenge more than ever. On the Azure Moon route, with Rodrigue's sacrifice to save his life and Byleth's continued guidance, Dimitri makes a turn for the better and loses the eye bags.
• Experience Booster: His personal skill, Royal Lineage, grants him an additional 20% experience gained after combat.
• Expy: Dimitri's overall story has obvious parallels to William Shakespeare's Prince Hamlet. Like Hamlet, Dimitri started out as a refined and idealistic young prince, but his life is changed when his father, the king of his nation, is killed under mysterious circumstances. Dimitri becomes haunted by the image of his father demanding revenge of his death, with Dimitri characterizing the image as a "ghost" in his mind similar to how Hamlet's father appeared as a ghost to his son. Finally, Dimitri's thirst for revenge takes a major toll on his sanity, eroding his idealism until he becomes single-minded and bloodthirsty.
• Extreme Omnivore: He doesn't care what he eats as long as it's nutritious, insisting that every meal is delicious. Dedue has to remind him not to eat the weeds should they be sent out to weed the fields. It's later revealed that he's completely lost his sense of taste, which means that everything is tasteless to him. He mainly puts on the façade of enjoying his meals to assure others. Notably, he's the only one who likes Flayn's cooking, because the flavors are so overpoweringly strong that he can actually taste it somewhat.
• Eye Scream: Loses his right eye to an unspecified injury during the timeskip (in a tea conversation, he implies he still has the eye, but it may not work well), except on the Crimson Flower route. One advice box letter from him mildly deconstructs this, where he says desk work is a lot harder for him, due to reading putting a strain on his remaining eye.
• Eyepatch After Time Skip: Sports an eyepatch after the timeskip following an unspecified injury to his right eye, except on the Crimson Flower route and in Three Hopes due to Point of Divergence effects in play. Dimitri's developed more Blood Knight tendencies and self-loathing over those years and takes glee in slaughtering his foes. It stands to reason he lost an eye due to his recklessness.
• Fallen Hero:
  • Post-timeskip on the Silver Snow and Verdant Wind routes. His misplaced desire for revenge on Edelgard and guilt over being a survivor of the Tragedy of Duscur completely overwrite Dimitri's original noble heroic intentions. He just ends up wandering around Fódlan killing random Imperial soldiers, being willing to attack anyone in his way.
  • Played with on the Crimson Flower route. Due to having the support of his kingdom and the Church behind him, Dimitri never falls into a violent vendetta like he does in the other routes (and by extension never loses his eye). Though he clearly still despises Edelgard, he sticks to his duty of defending his home from Edelgard's forces and works with the Church as his kingdom has done for generations. In their final confrontation, Dimitri still calls out Edelgard, but more for what her current actions have wrought rather than for his personal grievances with her, showing that he has managed to retain his sense of nobility and honor. However, for the whole route, he fights on Rhea's side despite the fact that she is clearly no longer well mentally.
  • Even on the Azure Moon route, the shock of him turning into a crazed killer is part of the tension of the route. One of the first things you see him do is gleefully describe how's going to torture Randolph, to the point Byleth Mercy Kills the poor guy. However, unlike other routes, he has Byleth and the rest of the Blue Lions to support him emotionally, and he eventually has a Heel Realization after the younger sister of Randolph attempts to kill him in revenge and Rodrigue sacrifices himself to stop the attempt. From there, Dimitri gets better and focuses on saving his people over getting revenge on Edelgard.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Wrath and his desire for Revenge. Being haunted by Survivor Guilt and trauma, Dimitri swears revenge against the Flame Emperor over believing that they caused the Tragedy of Duscur, and it's clear that it's starting to consume him. This not only leads him to start losing his sanity once Edelgard is revealed to be the Flame Emperor, but become an Ax-Crazy Blood Knight post-timeskip. Even more tragically, he's completely wrong about Edelgard's involvement in the Tragedy (she was the same age as him when it happened, after all) and despite working with the perpetrators, it's Teeth-Clenched Teamwork at best. His deaths in Verdant Wind and Silver Snow are the direct result of him recklessly trying to get revenge on Edelgard. In particular, on the Silver Snow route, he chooses to not wait for the Resistance Army to prepare and immediately leads an ill-advised march through the capital, wanting to kill Edelgard as soon as possible. This leads to a disastrous Battle of Gronder Field, leading to many casualties, including himself, Rodrigue, and Gilbert, and Claude going missing.
  • Love and selflessness. Several characters note that Dimitri cares too much about people, to the point he takes their burdens as his own and can never justify taking another person's life. He seeks revenge not for his sake, but because he believes it's what his deceased friends and family are owed. He despises all killing, which leaves him unable to do anything but demonize anyone who willingly kills another, up to and especially including himself. Thus, his love feeds his wrath and Survivor Guilt, which sends him spiraling on a path of self-destruction as he tries to carry the regrets of the dead. Since the dead compel him to kill the monsters who murdered them, he has to kill them, but, by killing, he's become no better than the monsters, so he is caught in a vicious cycle. It's only on the Azure Moon route that he moves past this, by learning to live for himself. As an indirect consequence of feeling like he has to do everything himself, particularly showcased in Three Hopes, Dimitri frequently does deeds himself but doesn't tell the others about them, which the others criticize as an insulting lack of trust in them - even if that wasn't his intention - when they only found out because of someone else and/or well after the fact.
  • His lack of tactical prowess. Dimitri is the strongest fighter out of the three house leaders, both physically and skillfully, and serves as a Frontline General. It makes sense considering the Kingdom prioritizes personal combat, and children learn to wield a sword before they learn to write their name. However, while he is a strong and charismatic warrior, he's noted to be a rather poor tactician when compared to Edelgard or Claude. Unlike the Black Eagles and the Golden Deer, the Blue Lions don't have a member that acts as a strategist unless Byleth joins their house. In Crimson Flower, Dimitri makes the fatal mistake of separating his army when Edelgard invades Faerghus. Because it's against his usual Frontline General strategy, Edelgard is able to see clearly through Dimitri's plan and attacks him, leading to his death. On non-Crimson Flower routes, Dimitri's blind hatred of Edelgard and violent insanity makes him prone to rash and shortsighted decisions with no thought for strategic value. On Silver Snow and Verdant Wind, without Byleth or Rhea to rein him in, this leads to the destruction of the Kingdom army and Dimitri's death.
  • His self-loathing. In Three Hopes, as he says to his own Phantom during the secret chapters, there is no one he wishes to end more than himself. It puts a lot of his personal flaws into perspective. His desire for revenge and his selflessness reveals a self-sacrificing nature that puts his own wants and desires on the back burner unless it benefits those around him. While noble, it takes a massive toll on his mental health leading him to absolutely shatter mentally (Azure Moon), or refuse to change in fear of any massive consequence because of his actions (Azure Gleam). It takes his major supporters to break him out of this mindset and live for himself for once.
• First Love: Implied. Dimitri reminisces fondly on the happy year of his youth he spent with Edelgard, and was devastated when they were separated. Byleth can tease him with potential romantic feelings for her, though he laughs it off; she no longer remembers him (likely due to the experiments forced on her shortly after returning to Enbarr), but she does recall at least her first love was "a nobleman from Faerghus." He acknowledges that anything that might have been there before is long gone now, as they have both changed since their childhood. It doesn't help that he later learned they are step-siblings (his stepmother is her actual mother).
• Foil:
  • He and Sylvain are pretty much direct opposites; Sylvain is easygoing, fun-loving, and lighthearted, while Dimitri is serious, responsible, and in Sylvain's words, "uptight." Highlighted by their support chain, where Sylvain promises to act more responsibly if Dimitri will lighten up.
  • Dimitri and Raphael are both strong blonde-haired students who both lost their family years before the story began. However, Dimitri is a Bishounen pre-time skip while Raphael is physically The Big Guy before and after the time skip. Another contrast is that while Dimitri suffers from Survivor Guilt in the aftermath of the Tragedy of Duscur and said guilt eats him up in all routes until his Character Development on the Azure Moon route, Raphael was able to move past the death of his parents and does not hold Ignatz or Lorenz' parents accountable for their deaths. This is also because as Raphael notes, he has to take care of his sister, and getting revenge would not help.
  • Dimitri and Edelgard have three things in common. Both are heirs to their respective kingdoms, the Adrestian Empire and the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, suffered from a Dark and Troubled Past of which they were a lone survivor, and have a desire to change Fódlan's oppressive Crest system. While Dimitri seeks to reform the Crest System to stop oppressing the weak, Edelgard wants to outright destroy it because she believes it cannot be fixed. Dimitri is generally The Idealist who sees the good in the world and in others while Edelgard is more The Cynic who is quick to see the bad. With Byleth's influence in their respective routes, Dimitri becomes The Atoner for his previous violent behavior while Edelgard learns to tone down on her extreme actions, though she never becomes The Atoner like Dimitri. Dimitri embodies more of the Messianic Archetype while Edelgard more or less embodies the Satanic Archetype.
  • To Jeritza von Hrym a.k.a. the Death Knight, whose true name is Emile von Bartels. Both of them suffer from mental issues that involve a bloodthirsty and violent side to their personalities that they often try to keep under control. A difference is that the Death Knight is treated as an alternate persona to Jeritza while Dimitri's bloodlust is stemmed from his extreme self-loathing and desire for vengeance. Both of their bloodthirsty sides were born out of love for others (Dimitri wanting to avenge his friends and family and Emile wanting to protect Mercedes from his abusive father). Both of them specialize in sword and lance and are heavy hitters on the battlefield. Some differences between the two is that while Dimitri is sociable, polite, and caring, Jeritza is often cold, brusque and dislikes socializing. Dimitri's father, Lambert, was viewed as a kind and just king and father, so Dimitri remembers him fondly while Emile was abused by his cruel father and was willing to murder him to protect Mercedes. Dimitri has a strong sense of camaraderie with his classmates while Jeritza states he has no desire for it at all, though this may stem from his fear of the Death Knight.
• Flirty Stepsiblings: Dimitri's stepsister Edelgard was his First Love, although he prefers to think of her as a Childhood Friend rather than a stepsister.
• Four-Temperament Ensemble: Melancholic. Dimitri is easily the most empathetic of the three lords, and is the most bogged down by his emotional baggage. He is earnest and serious pre-timeskip, but incredibly vengeful and cynical post-timeskip.
• Freak Out: In Three Houses, he completely snaps at the end of Chapter 11 when he finds out Edelgard is the Flame Emperor, who he has come to believe orchestrated the Tragedy of Duscur. His worst qualities start coming to the fore at this point, and he's completely unrecognizable by the start of Part II.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Yes, Dimitri's Dark and Troubled Past would leave anyone with psychological issues, and events in the present only exacerbate them further. But the characters and narrative make it clear none of that justifies the depths he ends up sinking to in his misguided attempts to address them, and that he needs to get his shit together before he gets himself and everyone he's responsible for killed pointlessly. On the Azure Moon route, several of his friends, especially Felix, make it clear they understand his goals but he needs to realize he's the future king and get himself together for the regular people. On the Azure Moon route, he acknowledges this, does so, and becomes a great king who brings an age of peace to the continent. On the Silver Snow and Verdant Wind routes, he doesn't, and gets himself and everyone on his side either killed or rendered a non-factor.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: At the start of his route post-timeskip in Three Houses, none of the other Blue Lions approve of his actions and many students from other houses admit they're here for Byleth, not Dimitri, if recruited. After Chapter 17 Dimitri becomes The Atoner, and the others warm up to him again. In a bit of Gameplay and Story Integration, Dimitri cannot initiate any support conversations nor be a part of regular monastery activities (Tutoring, Advanced Drills, etc) on his route until after that point.
• The Friends Who Never Hang: He's noticeably less close with Sylvain than he is with Felix or Ingrid, and Dimitri and Sylvain are the only two members of the quartet of childhood friends who cannot get an A support or a paired ending in Three Houses.
• Friend to All Children: His C-support with Byleth shows that Dimitri takes time out of his day to teach young orphans swordplay, as he empathizes with the pain of losing one's parents. Even at his absolute worst, on the Azure Moon route post-timeskip, a monk at Garreg Mach will note he saw Dimitri patting the head of an orphan child. At the end of his route, the ending mural depicts Dimitri surrounded by smiling children, and the narration states that as king, one of his focuses was improving lives for orphans. Ironically, one of the things he can say on expeditions in Three Hopes is that he feels very uncomfortable around children because he doesn't know how to act around them.
• Frontline General: He tends to fight on the front lines, alongside his troops. In his B-support with Gilbert, Gilbert politely suggests that Dimitri stay off the front lines for his safety's sake, but Dimitri refuses, saying that fighting is the only way he knows to advance his cause. Gilbert observes that Dimitri is like his father in that regard.
• Full Health Bonus: His personal skill Royal Lineage, after being upgraded during the timeskip, increases his avoid by 20 when he has full HP.
• General Failure: While Dimitri excels as a fighter, his tactical sense is often critiqued as lacking compared to Edelgard and Claude. This comes back in a big way in non-Azure Moon routes.
  • On Silver Snow he makes an attempt to avert this, as the Kingdom Army through Gilbert offers the opportunity to form a united force with Byleth and their army, which Seteth turns down because their own forces need time to regroup. Dimitri, being laser focused on facing Edelgard at Gronder Field, carries on regardless. The Kingdom Forces end up getting completely decimated, and next time we see Dimitri it's strongly implied to be his ghost.
  • On Verdant Wind Dimitri shares that same fate as he did in Silver Snow, but then you learn that he survived the carnage of the Battle of Gronder Field, only to try and pursue the Empire by himself before finally keeling over from exhaustion and getting executed by random mooks from the Empire.
  • On Crimson Flower Dimitri is at his most stable, having not undergone the torturing and hardship that he did in the other three routes. Despite that, he makes the tactical blunder of dividing his army, hoping he could bait the Empire into attacking the Church at the capital so that the rest of his forces would ambush them. The problem here is that is so against his usual style that Hubert and Edelgard immediately figure out what he was planning and ambush his army instead. This ends up leaving Rhea the de facto leader of the Kingdom, who promptly chooses to torch the capital of Fhirdiad rather than retreat.
• Gentle Giant: On the Azure Moon route after his Character Development. He's one of the tallest and most physically intimidating of the playable characters, yet he's also regained his kind and heroic nature. The ending mural even shows him being flocked by children.
• The Gods Must Be Lazy: In his Goddess Tower scene, Dimitri reveals that he believes the Church of Seiros's titular goddess no longer has any actual input in Fódlan, and begging her for salvation is a fool's errand. His mindset isn't that surprising considering what he has been through.
  Dimitri: I doubt there are many who really believe that wishes can be granted. The goddess just watches over us from above... That is all. No matter how hard someone begs to be saved, she would never so much as offer her hand. And even if she did, we lack the means to reach out and grasp it. That's how I feel about her.
• Go Mad from the Isolation:
  • On all the default routes of Three Houses, Edelgard declares war on the Church of Seiros, Dimitri is framed, slated for execution, rescued by Dedue (possibly at the cost of Dedue's life), and forced into exile by Cornelia. For the next five years, he is entirely alone and knows only combat from fleeing for his life or murdering for revenge. The experience is just one of the many factors in his ensuing Sanity Slippage.
  • Completely averted on the Crimson Flower route, as Rhea retreating to the Kingdom capital prevents him from being imprisoned, allowing him to be crowned as king. His desire for revenge has not waned in the slightest, but he's significantly more composed and still wants to protect his people.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: In Three Houses, discovering that Edelgard is the Flame Emperor in the Blue Lions version of chapter 11 sends Dimitri into a murderous rage, charging the Flame Emperor, screaming that he’ll have their head, and post-timeskip becoming obsessed with meting out vengeance on the wicked.
• Go Out with a Smile: If Dedue is defeated before turning into a Demonic Beast, he goes over to a dying Dimitri, convincing Dimitri that he wasn't a failure. Reminded of how he saved Dedue, Dimitri's character portrait changes to a contented expression as he says his last words, "Is that so? I see... I am glad..."
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: His primary associated color is blue, which is seen in his uniform, alternate class outfits and timeskip outfit, making him the blue lord character of the game. Traditionally, the blue lord characters are hailed as the main heroes of a standard Fire Emblem game. The color blue is also associated with player character units, and directly contrasts Edelgard’s predominantly red attire, signifying her status as the traditional opposing Red Emperor in his story.
• Good Is Not Soft: In Three Hopes, even without his descent to madness, Dimitri fully understands the possible necessity of an eventual violent confrontation against Rufus and breaking the peace in the short term for long term stability. He does not relish it, but when forced, Dimitri does capture and execute his own uncle without hesitation. And he makes no bones about the fact that he plans to kill everyone else who was complicit in the Tragedy at Duscur. Felix comments on this after noticing that Shez seems uncomfortable about the execution.
  Felix: All traitors get put to the sword. It's his duty as king.
• The Good King: At the end of the Azure Moon route, the mural commemorating his ascension says that he sought to create a world free from oppression. The mural also shows children happily flock to him while knights under his supervision in the background are feeding the poor, and he eventually becomes known as the Savior King.
• Good Old Fisticuffs: In the Blue Lions version of chapter 11, after discovering that the Flame Emperor is Edelgard and throwing his lance in her direction, Dimitri wastes no time in taking out some of her soldiers with his bare hands.
• Guest-Star Party Member:
  • He is controllable during the tutorial, but if you choose the Black Eagles or Golden Deer, he permanently leaves your party. Outside of that, you can control him through the Cindered Shadows side story.
  • In Warriors: Three Hopes, he is controllable in Chapter 1, but departs if you don't pick the Blue Lions. He rejoins you for Chapter 16 as a temporary companion for the battle against Epimenides, but leaves again for good at the end of the chapter.
• Hair of Gold, Heart of Gold: He is blond and one of the most chivalrous, idealistic, and kind members of the cast. However, he becomes more openly violent after the timeskip. He regains his kindness should you side with the Blue Lions.
• Hallucinations: Post-timeskip, he experiences auditory and visual hallucinations of his deceased friends and family, asking why he hasn't avenged them yet.
• Handicapped Badass: On all default routes post-timeskip, he loses an eye. But even with a blind side, Dimitri still leads from the front lines with just as much fervor and skill as before.
• Hazy-Feel Turn: A downplayed instance occurs in Crimson Flower, where Rhea is undergoing Sanity Slippage and is clearly unfit to be leading Fódlan. While he does have legitimate grievances against Edelgard's war of aggression and his vengefulness is understandable, unlike Claude, he never attempts to bargain for peace, even when cornered, forcing you to kill him.
• Hearing Voices:
  • Both before and after the timeskip, he often hallucinates hearing the voices of his deceased loved ones. Notably in Chapter 14 of the Azure Moon route, Byleth walks in on Dimitri in the cathedral, fervently muttering to himself; he addresses his father and stepmother, promising them that he'll kill the Flame Emperor and allow them to rest.
  • His supports with Felix in Three Hopes reveal that he began hearing the voices of the dead two years after the Tragedy of Duscur, after recognizing an enemy general as someone who participated in it. Felix, for his part, suggests that the voices are a product of Dimitri's own mind, but promises to keep the whole thing a secret.
• Hero Antagonist:
  • In the Crimson Flower route; a heroic person who fights for his friends and homeland, but is still ultimately allying with an increasingly radical church and defending a flawed system of nobility and crests that has led to the suffering of much of the cast. Notably, he doesn't suffer the same breakdown he has in other routes, and so retains his polite and noble behavior.
  • In Warriors: Three Hopes, he is a heroic indivudual who opposes the protagonists on the Scarlet Blaze route and the back half of the Golden Wildfire route because they want to destroy the Central Church and he needs to protect the source of his legitimacy as ruler and is worried about his kingdom falling under the political sway of the Empire.
• Heroes Prefer Swords: Swords are his second-strongest proficiency, and even Master Swordsman Catherine declares him her equal in swordsmanship. He also can use the series' signature Lord class if he has a decent sword rank, and he's the only one of the three lords whose personal class has skill proficiencies with swords.
• Heroic Self-Deprecation: On the Azure Moon route post-timeskip, once his sanity is restored, he isn't exactly happy about becoming a violent Shell-Shocked Veteran.
• Heroic Build: Dimitri has very wide shoulders and a narrow waist even before the timeskip, and has story-based Super-Strength. Post-timeskip, he's had a late growth spurt and the effect is even more pronounced.
• He's Back!: After spending the third quarter of his route as an Ax-Crazy Revenge Before Reason maniac, Rodrigue's death causes him to decide to atone and returns him to the chivalrous man he once was. He kicks off his atonement by retaking Fhirdiad from the Faerghus Dukedom. It's ultimately Subverted, as Dedue points out that while everyone else thinks this trope took place, he knows that rather than being back to his old self, Dimitri has become an improved version of that. He is no longer bound by hatred and vengeance at all and has overcome his fatal flaw of being too empathetic, something that is shown in his dialogue and supports.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Dimitri has this dynamic with Dedue as he considers him to be a dear friend and trusts him completely. He can also become this with Felix if he gets a paired ending with him.
• He Who Fights Monsters: After the Tragedy of Duscur, Dimitri gained a strong sense of justice and hatred towards those who use their power and positions to bring harm to the ones weaker than them, and killing in general. After he starts going more and more insane during the time-skip, though he's not the king of his nation nor has any other high status, he has spent all those years killing Imperial soldiers so he can get closer and closer to Edelgard, even if the deaths of these soldier won't help him in his goal at all. Even on Crimson Flower, him going against Edelgard and defending Faerghus is more done out of vengeance rather than wanting his kingdom to flourish, which results in even more deaths. And he's painfully aware of it as well, as he admits himself to be a monster to both Randolph and Byleth and if he falls, he says that he deserves an end like the one he gets.
• Hidden Depths:
  • While he doesn't know her true identity, Dimitri is able to ascertain just from watching the way she moves that Rhea is an extremely experienced warrior, and is not bluffing at all when she says she is quite capable of defending herself.
  • On Azure Moon, others claim that he is devout to the Church of Seiros and goes to pray during the night where few are around to see. In actuality, Dimitri will reveal during his Goddess tower conversation with Byleth that he outright doesn't believe in the Goddess's ability to intervene in the affairs of humans, merely describing her as someone who silently watches over humanity, and that even if she tried to intervene, mankind would refuse to reach out to her.
• History Repeats: Jeralt was formerly a soldier from the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus who fell for Byleth's mother, Sitri, in Garreg Mach monastery. Dimitri, who is the prince of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, can potentially fall in love with female Byleth by meeting and forming a bond with her in Garreg Mach monastery, provided that he is the one chosen for S-rank support in the Azure Moon route. For bonus points, both men specifically comment on their love's beautiful smile.
• Holding Hands: A theme between Dimitri and Byleth post-timeskip on the Azure Moon route. When they find him at the monastery, they offer their hand to him, only for Dimitri to reject it. They do the same thing during his Redemption in the Rain, but he takes it this time, commenting on how warm their hand is. After he kills Edelgard, as they leave, he almost looks back, but is stopped when Byleth takes his hand. And should he S-Support with a female Byleth, their CG artwork shows them holding hands.
• Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: If paired with female Byleth. She's 164cm, while post-timeskip, he gains more muscles and several centimetres to reach 188cm. He even comments on how tiny her hands are in their S-support.
• Humble Hero: During the Academy phase, Dimitri is a very pleasant and humble person. He dislikes formality and prefers to speak with people as equals, not as if they're beneath him. On the Azure Moon route, after he starts to redeem himself for his heinous crimes, he regains his humility. This is especially proven when he arrives back in Fhirdiad, questioning if he deserves to sit on the throne of Faerghus after everything he had done.
• Hunk: Post-timeskip, he trades some of his prettiness for muscle and a more rugged look.
• Hypocrisy Nod:
  • Dimitri hates killing and believes it is an inherently wrong act. That's why when he becomes more ruthless or tries to avenge the dead, he's filled with self-loathing, as he knows that he‘s engaging in an act that he hates.
  • Dimitri spends half of the Azure Moon route ranting that Edelgard must answer for her crimes. When he is confronted on his own actions, he outright acknowledges that he has done much to deserve scorn, and after Rodrigue's death, questions how he can attempt to change himself after all of the horrible things he's done in pursuit of revenge. Several of his battle quotes before this have him openly stating that he will suffer the same fate as those he's killed.
• Hypocrite: Most apparent in the parley scene, where he leads by telling Edelgard that the people of Fódlan are not strong enough for Edelgard's reforms. When Edelgard later challenges him as to who will be able to make these reforms, if not her, he asserts that the common folk will be able to do so.

I — O

• I Am a Monster: In his support conversation with Byleth, Dimitri shakily reveals a deep-seated sense of self-disparity due to his frequent killing:
  Dimitri: Killing is part of the job, but even so... There are times when I'm chilled to the bone by the depravity of my own actions.
• I Can't Dance: Begs not to be chosen to represent the Blue Lions in the White Heron Cup, and if you choose him, he insists he's not going to be able to win, and is surprised if he does, with the judges commenting on his unconventional style.
• I Got Bigger: Dimitri grows eight centimeters during the timeskip and puts on a good deal of muscle.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: On the Verdant Wind route, after the forces of all three countries clash at Gronder Field, he attempts to pursue Edelgard as she is retreating, only to collapse from exhaustion and then be run through with spears by her soldiers. Yes, we do mean multiple spears.
• Ineffectual Death Threats: Post-timeskip, he repeatedly makes direct and/or veiled threats to his own allies who he believes are "getting in his way," none of which he actually follows up on, though his allies do back off when he does so.
• Informed Flaw: Downplayed example on the Crimson Flower route, where Ferdinand derides Dimitri for his barely-checked hatred. While this is indeed true on every path (and even then, he can grow out of it late into Azure Moon), he's at his most level-headed on this particular route. Unlike most routes, where he's nearly executed and forced into exile, Dimitri is crowned King of Faerghus fairly quickly, has the support of the Knights of Seiros due to the Kingdom's positive relationship with the church, and he puts his need for answers regarding the Tragedy of Duscur on the back burner. It is only through normal circumstances (that is, if Dedue dies as a Stone Demonic Beast) where Dimitri's deep hatred will be shown in full force, as in his final words, he lashes out at Edelgard and blames her specifically for the death of his family and Edelgard's mother (The Tragedy of Duscur), and uses Edelgard's old nickname at the moment where he pretty much tells her to go to hell.
• Innocently Insensitive:
  • In his support with Ingrid, Dimitri tries apologizing to Ingrid about the tragic death of Ingrid’s beloved Glenn Fraldarius, refuting her claims that Glenn’s death was admirable and he died heroically. Ingrid storms off in anger, leaving Dimitri to self-deprecatingly ask himself what is wrong with him. When Ingrid comes to apologize in their B support, Dimitri apologizes as well.
  • If the Blue Lions were chosen, if female Byleth chooses him to visit the Goddess Tower with, on the night of the ball, Dimitri wishes for them to be together forever. A moment later, he laughs it off as a joke. She calls the joke cruel, to which Dimitri apologizes.
  • On the night of the ball in Part I, Dimitri muses that it was irresponsible of him to promise the Blue Lions that even after his ascension as king, he'll stay close to his friends.
• Insane Equals Violent: His periods of incredible violence directly correlate with his periods when his psychosis is at its worst.
• In-Series Nickname: Felix disparagingly calls him "boar" for his bloodlust and recklessness. After Dimitri realizes the error of his thinking and develops into a better person, Felix mostly calls him by name, but occasionally continues to refer to him as such.
• Internal Reformist: Although he dislikes the Crest and nobility system as an excuse to oppress the weak, unlike Edelgard, he believes that breaking the social order would be far more damaging than anything, and instead seeks to reform them once he is king. He does just this on the Azure Moon route, leading to a golden age.
• Irony:
  • Dimitri is at his most violent on the Azure Moon and Verdant Wind paths, the former being his own route, while on Crimson Flower, the route where Byleth allies with his mortal enemy Edelgard and directly opposes him, he acts more like a classical hero, rallying his troops and showing great concern for his friends.
  • His hatred of Edelgard is fueled by her alliance with those who slither in the dark, who masterminded the Tragedy of Duscur and continue to wreak havoc with their numerous depraved schemes, sometimes without her knowledge or consent (such as the tragedy in Remire village and Jeralt's murder). On the Crimson Flower route, he finds himself in the uncomfortable position of watching his own allies resort to ugly extremes without his knowledge or consent (most notably Dedue's usage of the Crest Stones), and after his death, his remaining allies seem to knowingly go along with Rhea's cruel plan to set Fhirdiad ablaze, causing the deaths of the very innocents he was trying to save.
  • Dimitri always suspected that Arundel was behind the Tragedy of Duscur. Due to having zero knowledge about those who slither in the dark, he never realizes that the man who says the Tragedy was committed for Edelgard is implied to be Arundel (Thales) himself, leading him off the right track.
  • He has spent all of his adolescent years haunted by the ghosts of his deceased loved ones. On the Silver Snow route, he himself is heavily implied to become a ghost.
  • The only time that Dimitri accomplishes his goal to kill Edelgard himself is when he does it out of self-defense in the Azure Moon route, and it is also the time where he was focused on reconciling and letting her live instead of taking her life.
  • Very late into Part I, Dimitri desires to brutally tear Edelgard's head off from her shoulders. When Dimitri himself meets his end on the Crimson Flower route if Dedue died as a Stone Demonic Beast, he is implied to have been beheaded by Edelgard herself.
  • Dimitri considers killing one's kin to be the worst thing one can do, but in Three Hopes he's forced to personally execute his own uncle for treason.
• It's All My Fault:
  • He blames himself for the Tragedy of Duscur, as he failed to convince his father's advisers that the Duscurans were not to blame for his father's death, resulting in massacres on both sides.
  • On the Azure Moon route, an anguished Dimitri declares that Rodrigue being mortally wounded shielding him from Fleche's assassination attempt is all his fault, just as if he had been the assailant himself. The wounded and dying Rodrigue tells him that he's dying for what he believes in, just like Glenn and those who died protecting Dimitri during the Tragedy of Duscur. Rodrigue implores Dimitri to continue fighting for what he believes in.
• It's Personal: He wants the Flame Emperor's head on a stick for (allegedly) orchestrating the Tragedy of Duscur.
• It's Personal with the Dragon: Played With. While Dimitri eventually gets to see both Thales and the Flame Emperor in the story, Dimitri's biggest grudge ultimately forms against the latter due to believing Thales acted on the Flame Emperor's orders. In his own route, this leads to him unknowingly rolling right over Thales in his efforts to get to Edelgard, making her the Big Bad and securing Thales as the Big Bad Wannabe Greater-Scope Villain of Azure Moon.
• I've Come Too Far: Subverted. After Rodrigue's Heroic Sacrifice saves Dimitri's life at the end of chapter 17 of the Azure Moon route, Dimitri talks with Byleth, begging for advice as to what he should do. He claims that he's been driven solely by vengeance for his dead loved ones for too long to change. Byleth tells him instead to find motivation in what he believes in, just as Rodrigue did, and Dimitri muses on their words. It works, and the next day, Dimitri apologizes to his friends for his behavior, promising to atone for his actions.
• Jack of All Trades: While he primarily specializes in lances and authority, he knows a little something about everything as an antagonist.
• Jerkass: After the timeskip on the Azure Moon route, he's an antisocial jerk who spends most of his free time brooding and cares only about ripping the Flame Emperor's head off. He even threatens to Byleth that he will continue to use them and their friends "until the flesh falls from [their] bones."
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • As far as he's fallen in his pursuit of revenge, Dimitri raises a good point when he suggests that he and Byleth are not so different in regards to his own actions against the Flame Emperor and Byleth's actions against Kronya. Similarly, he rebuts Randolph's accusations of his depravity and bloodlust with a note that as a general for the Empire, his hands are no less bloodstained than his own.
  • In the Crimson Flower route, while he is mostly opposing Edelgard because he wrongly assumes that she's behind the Tragedy, and cooperating with a psychopathic Rhea who has had several abuses of power exposed, he's still rightfully angry at her for cooperating with those who slither in the dark and starting a five-year-long war.
  • In his B-support with Ingrid, which can happen before the Time Skip, he bitterly says that Glenn died a "needless death". By saying this, he's criticizing the ideal of knightly honor, but it also seems as though Dimitri doesn't appreciate Glenn's sacrifice, which upsets Ingrid, causing her to leave and Dimitri to regret his words. Despite that, Dimitri has a point, if insensitively said; Ingrid apologizes for not considering Dimitri's feelings in their B+ support, and admits that she suspected Glenn died with regrets in his heart, and resolves not to do the same, leading her to swear her life, rather than her death, to Dimitri.
• The Juggernaut: Towards the end of the Chapter 14 battle of Scarlet Blaze, Dimitri will start heading towards the Imperial army’s base. And on the way, he will break right through every Imperial soldier who stands in his way and can take down player-occupied strongholds with ease. He will only stop if any of the player units intercept him.
  Ferdinand: That man is a force of nature – we cannot hope for ordinary officers to stop him.
• Killed Offscreen: On the Silver Snow and Verdant Wind routes, he dies shortly after the battle for Gronder Field.
• King Incognito: This is the focus of his and Yuri's support in Three Hopes, where Dimitri wants to get a better view on how commoners live so he can better adjust his changes to fit them as well. To do this, he uses his time-off to visit a town nearby and assist the residents with their chores, and they think he is just some normal knight. Yuri calls him out on this, however, as Dimitri puts himself in more danger this way and could risk being killed, which Dimitri admits is logical.
• Kinslaying Is a Special Kind of Evil: Dimitri despises those who kill their own kin:
  • On Crimson Flower, if he fights Felix, he resolves to kill the latter, who'd killed his own father.
  • One of the reasons he despises Edelgard is the belief that she killed her own mother. He turns out to be mistaken.
• Kirk Summation: In Azure Moon, Dimitri delivers one to Edelgard during their negotiation prior to the Kingdom's invasion of Enbarr, as he tries to convince her she will be unable to change Fódlan through all the death and carnage her war has brought. Unfortunately for him, Edelgard disagrees and proceeds to counterattack with her own arguments before both parties reach the conclusion they'll be unable to reach a common ground.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Post-timeskip, he still retains his belief in the duty of a knight and desire to protect the weak, but has completely lost faith in honor or chivalry. And most of this is dwarfed by his desire for revenge anyway, unless you're on the Azure Moon path, in which case his goals shift to truly prioritizing the defense of innocents.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: On Golden Wildfire, he displays an ability to recognize and accept that there's nothing to be gained by pursuing a lost cause, no matter how righteous. Facing the prospect of the Kingdom being torn apart by the combined Imperial and Federation forces if he continues to shelter Rhea and the Central Church, he abandons them to die at Claude's hands, correctly reading Claude's motives and trusting him to withdraw once he's completed his stated objective. Claude does indeed do exactly as Dimitri wishes, although how Edelgard responds is left ambiguous.
• Last of His Kind: On all default routes due to his uncle being killed by Cornelia. On the Crimson Flower route, he comments that he isn't the end of his bloodline, suggesting that his uncle survives there due to Cornelia not usurping him.
• Laughing Mad: When he discovers that the Flame Emperor is Edelgard in Chapter 11 if Byleth chose the Blue Lions, he's reduced to cackling with an unhinged expression on his face. He charges Edelgard, screaming that he'll have her head, and ends up snapping the neck of an Imperial mook immediately afterward.
• The Leader: The prince destined to rule over Faerghus, he has command over members of the Blue Lions, who are themselves subjects of his kingdom. Despite his royal background and authority, he still takes orders from Byleth, who instructs him and the other students.
• Leave No Survivors:
  • In Chapter 8 on the Blue Lions route, when he is informed about mysterious individuals watching the madness at Remire Village, he orders them all to be killed. Considering that he usually condemns killing, it also serves as Foreshadowing for his decent into his violent persona later on.
    Dimitri: Kill them all. Don't let a single one of them escape. Sever their limbs and crush their wicked skulls!
  • In Chapter 17 on the Azure Moon and Verdant Wind routes, he orders the deaths of every opponent at Gronder Field.
    Dimitri: Know that I will tear your heads from your shoulders. The dead must have their tribute. Kill every last one of them!
• Leitmotif: "The King of Lions", which plays in a number of his post-timeskip appearances.
• Light 'em Up: For all his ineptness in the way of magical spellcasting, Dimitri, of all people, can learn freaking Aura, once he reaches a high enough Faith rank.
• Lightning Bruiser: He starts with an excellent 12 base strength, and even has the highest maximum Strength in the game out of the playable characters at 87, along with strong growths in Strength, Defense, Speed, and Dexterity, making him a monster in close combat. He also has relatively easy access to the Soldier-Cavalier-Paladin class line, which only further bolsters his ability to come in hard and fast. His only shortcomings are his terrible Magic and Resistance stats and growths, which leaves him vulnerable to magical bombardment by spellcasters and performs poorly as one himself. His final class, Great Lord, also gives him a whopping +4 modifier to his Speed, the same as Swordmasters.
• Locked Out of the Loop:
  • Of the main protagonists, he is the only one who never makes certain discoveries about the backstory, such as the Children of the Goddess, the true origins of the Heroes' Relics, and the truth about those who slither in the dark. He only learns a small amount in his supports with Hapi, but even then, Dimitri is only told a small portion of the greater history. Meanwhile and outside of his own route, Dimitri never gets to uncover the truth behind the Tragedy of Duscur, meaning he ultimately perishes fully believing Edelgard had a hand in said slaughter rather than his stepmother (and by proxy, Cornelia).
  • Discussed in his A-Support with Hapi regarding his past friendship with Edelgard. Due to Lord Arundel hiding Edelgard's identity for her safety's sake during her time in Fhirdiad, Dimitri and Edelgard only ended up knowing each other by the nicknames they used, and Dimitri himself realized "El" was in truth Edelgard only after she had long since left Faerghus some time later.
    Dimitri: As she (Patricia/Anselma) was seeking asylum from the Empire in the Kingdom, Lord Arundel was obligated to hide the Imperial princess's whereabouts. [...] I did not realize until much later that the girl I'd met under such strange circumstances was my stepsister.
• Lone Wolf Boss: On the Verdant Wind route, post-timeskip. He's got nothing to do with the true villains of the game, is only concerned with his own personal agenda of revenge, and attacks you mostly because he's gone completely homicidally insane by that point.
• Madness Makeover: Post-timeskip outside of Crimson Flower he has rattier hair and sunken eyelids to match his deterating mental state.
• Magically Inept Fighter: Dimitri does not perform well as a spellcaster, as his is Magic and Resistance growths are an abysmal 20%, but conversely, his physical-oriented growths are great to excellent, making him a Lightning Bruiser.
• Magic Knight: Downplayed in Three Houses; while the player can build him as one, his stat spread and proficiencies are not well suited for it. Played straight in Three Hopes however, as his personal skill, Azure Lightning, innately imbues all of his attacks with lightning, making him a Magic Knight by default.
• Major Injury Underreaction: After the final battle on the Azure Moon route, Dimitri is unfazed by Edelgard's final attempt on his life, swiftly killing her with his lance before casually pulling out her dagger from his shoulder.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy: The Feminine Boy to Edelgard's Masculine Girl. While he's not traditionally girly in the slightest, he's still sensitive and emotional, has an interest in sewing, and views his Super-Strength as a curse as it keeps interfering with delicate work.
• Mask of Sanity: He does his best to uphold the image of an idealistic and chivalrous knight, but underneath, he's a festering mess of rage, hatred, and vengeance. After the timeskip (or even before that, should The Reveal occur on the Blue Lions route), the mask has cracked and he's become openly psychotic.
• Master Swordsman: In his supports with Catherine, Dimitri states that swordsmanship has become one of his specialities. One of his weapon proficiencies is the sword and, during the Academy phase, Dimitri is always seen wearing a sword on his belt.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: His appearance in Silver Snow as a ghost. Is it Dimitri's real spirit, now joining the choir that tormented him in life, or is Byleth seeing things?
• Meaningful Echo:
  • If you chose the Blue Lions, right after Jeralt's death, Dimitri tells Byleth to take their time to grieve and then find something to believe in to continue on with their life. At the end of chapter 17, Byleth tells him to live for what he believes in.
  • If the Blue Lions are chosen, and Dimitri is chosen for the Goddess Tower he explains that if the Goddess does exist she would never she would never offer her hand out to those begging to be saved, and even if she did, the people lack the means to grasp it. Come the time-skip, twice, Byleth, who has by this point joined souls with the Goddess and effectively become said Goddess, offers their hand to Dimitri. The first time he rejects it, but grasps it the second time.
• Meaningful Name:
  • His first name is the Slavic form of Demetrius, meaning faithful to Demeter, the Greek Goddess in charge of Harvest, and the cycle of life and death, as well as the shifting seasons as a result of the separation from her daughter. Fitting for the Prince of a Grim Up North Nation, who goes through a bout of madness and depression due to the death of his loved ones.
  • His middle name, Alexandre, is the French version of Alexander, meaning "defender of the people." It's fitting for a heroic protagonist. His last name, Blaiddyd, is a multi-layered version meaning Wolf Lord, which denotes his status as a prince and lone wolf tendencies post-timeskip, and just so happens to be the name of a legendary Brittonic King who promoted the use of Necromancy, indicating his obsession with avenging the dead.
  • The name of his signature weapon, Areadbhar, translates to slaughterer, and it's shown by the Combat Art it provides Dimitri: Atrocity, which deals triple damage to all enemy types while granting a massive boost to might.
• The Mentally Disturbed:
  • He generally hides it well at first, but Dimitri is not mentally well. Byleth even notices something is off about Dimitri despite his outwardly kind behavior. As part one progresses, events cause him to slip deeper and deeper into more violent impulses until the final reveal of Edelgard being the Flame Emperor breaks him completely. Post timeskip, on all routes except for Crimson Flowers, he has become completely deranged. And unless Byleth is there to help reign in his worst excesses, it leads to his eventual pointless death.
  • Even though in Three Hopes, the events that trigger Dimitri's descent into madness don't occur, it's still clear that he is still not particularly well. In his A rank support with Felix, he reveals that the ghosts of those who died at Duscur have been haunting him and begging him to avenge them all these years.
• Mental Health Recovery Arc: Dimitri's character arc could be summarized as such. Due to the events of the Tragedy of Duscur, Dimitri is haunted by those who have died. Their ghosts demanding vengeance pushes him to kill, an act that he considers unjustifiable for any reason. This leaves his mind in a vicious psychological cycle where his heart says killing is wrong, but his obligations to the dead demand vengeance. After most time skips, Dimitri's psyche has completely shattered and he has become nothing more than a feral and sadistic killer bent on revenge. On the Azure Moon route, after Rodrigue performs a Heroic Sacrifice to protect Dimitri, he finally learns to let go of the past and learn to live for himself rather than those who died. While he still hears the voices of those who died, Dimitri has regained most of his sanity and later becomes a king that brings a golden age to his kingdom.
• Messianic Archetype: Out of the three house leaders, Dimitri is the most moralistic and most focused on protecting the innocent. Like Edelgard and Claude, Dimitri wants to change Fódlan for the better. However, unlike Edelgard, he'd rather accomplish his goals through acceptance and not annihilation and unlike Claude, he is more than willing to confront conflict while Claude would rather avoid it. His Animal Motif, the Lion, is also a symbol of Christ. Dimitri suffers the worst treatment of the three lords during the timeskip; not only does his trauma haunt him and turn him into an unhinged killer, but he is framed for his uncle's murder and forced to flee his own kingdom. His themes in his character arc include forgiveness, redemption, and overcoming his bloodlust, obsession with revenge and self-loathing. At the end of Azure Moon, Dimitri would usher in a new age where he reforms the Crest System rather than outright destroy it like Edelgard wanted to.
• Morton's Fork: In Three Hopes, he's faced with such a dilemma regarding the succession. If he ascends to the throne, civil war will break out between those loyal to him and those loyal to Rufus, but if he supports Rufus, Rufus' opponents will rebel. Dimitri is finally forced to act when the kingdom descends into civil war, but laments that he can only preserve the kingdom's peace by going to war with his own uncle.
• Mr. Fanservice: Dimitri is a stunningly handsome man who later gains a more rugged charm in the timeskip, and as his Summer variant in Heroes shows, he is ripped.
• Muscles Are Meaningless: Downplayed. Dimitri is obviously a trained and fit warrior, but his frame pales before Raphael's pre-timeskip. Despite this, Raphael struggles to keep up with Dimitri's Training from Hell and Dimitri beats Raphael in almost every stat. According to him, this is because the royal bloodline of Faerghus has always possessed immense innate strength, which may or may not be due to their Crest.
• Multi-Melee Master: He has strong proficiencies in both lances and swords, but suffers when trying to use axes.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members:
  • In Three Houses, he obviously cannot be poached from the Blue Lions, and will never fight directly alongside Hubert and Jeritza (under any circumstances), or Edelgard and Claude (outside of the tutorial battle or "Cindered Shadows").
  • In Three Hopes, he only fights alongside Edelgard and Claude in Chapter 1 and the optional chapter; he can never fight alongside Hubert, Monica, Ferdinand, Caspar, Manuela, Hilda, Leonie, Lysithea, or Holst.
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast: His signature weapon's name, Areadbhar, translates to "slaughterer", and the combat art it gives him is called "Atrocity".
• The Needs of the Many: In his supports with Catherine, he admits that he sometimes wonders what it'd be like to be free of his princely obligations, but sticks to his role as many people would suffer if he abandoned his position and caused a political power struggle. This is a major part of why his friends and allies are upset with him on the Azure Moon route; he's so focused on revenge against Edelgard that he ignores how many people are needing a ruler to help them, and once he snaps out of his rage, his first goal is to save the people.
• Nice Guy: He is friendly, thoughtful, and polite as a youth, although Byleth muses early on that he has a darkness beneath. Subverted post-timeskip, where he goes full Sour Outside, Sad Inside and Took a Level in Jerkass. In the Azure Moon route, with Byleth's help after Rodrigue's death, tones down to a Jerk with a Heart of Gold that leans back toward Nice Guy.
• No Doubt the Years Have Changed Me: The last time Byleth sees him before the timeskip, he's a Knight in Shining Armor, albeit one whose dark side is starting to show. When they reunite with him five years later at Garreg Mach on the Azure Moon route or at Gronder Field on the Verdant Wind route, he's degenerated into a raging madman whose only goal in life is to kill the Flame Emperor as painfully as possible.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished:
  • During his support chain with Byleth, pre-timeskip, the two of them teach a group of orphans to use a sword. Post-timeskip, those same orphans attack Dimitri off-screen.
  • In an example that takes over a decade to come back around, when Edelgard and Dimitri were children, Dimitri gave Edelgard a dagger so that she, in his words, could cut a path to her future. Cut to the end of the Azure Moon campaign, where Dimitri offers a defeated Edelgard the chance to work together to build the future; she in turn attempts to kill him (or at least provoke him to kill her) with the very dagger he gave her years before.
• Nominal Hero: Post-timeskip on the Azure Moon route, Dimitri goes on a single-minded personal quest for revenge, whereas the rest of the Blue Lions and recruitables have their own personal stakes in ending the battle against the Flame Emperor. Anyone who gets in his way is an enemy or an obstacle, to the point where he comes close to lashing out at his friends. He finally loosens up when he realizes that his Revenge Before Reason tendencies not only affects his allies, but his enemies' loved ones, and learns to put saving his people before revenge.
• No-Sell: In Azure Gleam's ending in Three Hopes, a defeated and cornered Thales unleashes his full magical might against Dimitri while Shez holds off the mind controlled Edelgard. Dimitri, who by this point is absolutely done with Thales' bullshit, simply takes the blows, even physically batting one blast away, before getting close enough to finish off the dark mage.
• No Sympathy:
  • In Azure Moon's Chapter 13, should Byleth tell Dimitri that the thieves he wishes to hunt are likely simply trying to survive, he'll reply that they must be killed anyway, and that their actions are simply unjustified, regardless of motive. Given how visibly shaken he ends up after having killed the Adrestian and Alliance soldiers stationed on the bridge of Myrddin while desperately clinging to the same argument, it's all but stated Dimitri had been deliberately invoking this as means to cope with his own actions by that point.
  • In the final chapter of his route, his reaction towards Edelgard having transformed herself into a Hegemon Husk basically amount to this, stating he won't pity her nor share any sympathy given her current state is a result of the path she had chosen.
• Not Blood Siblings: It's implied that he had a crush on Edelgard when they were children, and he mentions that he didn't learn until he was older that his stepmother was also Edelgard's mother.
• "Not So Different" Remark:
  • Post-timeskip and on the Azure Moon route, he claims this is true of him and Byleth, pointing out that just like him, they couldn't let the death of their family member go unavenged. Byleth can choose whether to agree with him.
  • After Randolph's defeat in Chapter 14 of the Azure Moon route, Dimitri claims that he and Randolph are alike in their depravity, having killed many in pursuit of their goals, however noble they may be. Randolph fervently denies it.
    Dimitri: After all is said and done, we are both murderers. Both stained. Both monsters.
    Randolph: You're wrong!
    Dimitri: Am I?
• Not So Stoic: On non-Azure Moon paths, Dimitri first reacts to the death of one of the Blue Lions members with a simple "Hmmm...". Once you start killing more, he starts crying out in horror. It's one of the few moments to crack his Ax-Crazy state.
• No, You: In Azure Moon, after Randolph's attack on Garreg Mach has been stopped, he calls Dimitri a monster because of all the killing he has done. Dimitri replies back that Randolph is a monster as well for the same reasons, he just has yet to realize it.
• Odd Couple: Most of Dimitri's prospective partners have just as much steely determination as Dimitri himself, but if he weds Flayn the marriage is assumed by the rest of Fódlan to be a diplomatic marriage of state due to how wildly different they are to outsiders. Three Hopes does not have paired endings for characters, but if Dimitri can reach an A-support with shy, panicky Bernadetta should she be persuaded to defect to the Kingdom, it's implied that they're both thinking about making an official relationship.
• Offstage Villainy: Some of his more heinous actions during the timeskip on Azure Moon are only hinted at, rather than shown outright. While he was reintroduced having killed several Imperial soldiers, and planned on torturing Randolph to death, many of the murders he comes to regret are brought up by Dimitri or other characters, rather than being shown.
• Omnicidal Neutral: On the Verdant Wind route, in his deranged bloodlust, he is just as willing to attack Alliance forces as he is Imperial ones.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: When Dimitri was a young boy, he gave a girl he had a crush on a dagger as a going away present. Sylvain frequently makes fun of Dimitri for giving such an un-romantic gift. Edelgard was initially surprised by the gift too, but it meant enough to her that she held onto it to the present day, even though she eventually was unable to remember who it was exactly that gave it to her. Dimitri reminds her that it was him in Azure Moon.
• One-Man Army: After the timeskip, he ventures into Imperial territory to slaughter entire battalions on his lonesome in his delirious rage. Each of his victims died such gruesome and painful deaths that people could scarcely believe it was done with human hands. It gets deconstructed in Verdant Wind during the Battle at Grondor Field where he tries to chase down Edelgard by himself after the battle concludes; he dies facing down a larger number of foes and gradually worn down from all the fighting.
• The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: In Chapter 12 on his route, he makes it very clear that he intends to kill the Big Bad personally.
  Dimitri: Edelgard will die by my hand, and mine alone.
• Only Known By His Nickname: Three Hopes all but states this is one of the reasons Edelgard is unable in the present to figure out that Dimitri is the same boy she met back in Fhirdiad, as she only knew Dimitri as a child under the name of "Dee".
• Out-Gambitted: On the Crimson Flower route Dimitri's downfall comes about because he incorrectly believes that he can use the Church as a decoy to bait the Empire while the Kingdom Army waits in the Tailtean Plains to ambush them. Edelgard and Hubert predict Dimitri will pull something like this and launch their attack on the Kingdom Army at the Tailtean Plains instead. By the time the Church's forces finally manage to arrive, the battle is already in progress and they are too late to turn the tide.

P — Z

• Parental Abandonment: Dimitri’s mother died of illness soon after he was born, while his father was assassinated while Dimitri was still in his mid-teens. Luckily for him, Dimitri had Felix’s father Rodrigue to act as a close Parental Substitute.
• Pet the Dog: Post-timeskip on the Azure Moon route, one of the Knights of Seiros sees the Ax-Crazy Dimitri pat the head of an orphan in the monastery. While the knight in question is disgusted with Dimitri's lust for revenge, he wonders if Dimitri still has some good in him.
• Pimped-Out Cape: Sports one after the timeskip, a flowing mantle that spills across the floor and is lined with thick white and black fur that forms a tall collar around his neck.
• Platonic Life-Partners: His ending with Hapi is his only paired ending with a female character that doesn't mention anything romantic between the two parties. It is more about them taking down Those Who Slither in the Dark together, finding a cure for Hapi's beast summoning problem, and having tea parties in Faerghus.
• Please, Don't Leave Me: On the Azure Moon route, he begs this of Rodrigue, after the latter takes a fatal stab from Fleche, who tried to assassinate him.
  "NO! Don't die... Please, don't die! Father, Stepmother, Glenn... They all died and left me behind. Rodrigue... Are you to join the ghosts who shadow my every move?"
• The Power of Hate: On the Crimson Flower route, after being mortally wounded at the Tailtean Plains, if Dedue was killed as a Demonic Beast, he manages to stubbornly cling to life and spit out a few last insults and threats powered by nothing but sheer hatred for Edelgard for causing his friends and people to take such actions to halt her invasion.
  Edelgard: Your obsession with me is appalling. If you were a normal human, you would most certainly have died already.
• Pre-Final Boss:
  • In Crimson Flower, he's the boss of the route's penultimate chapter and the game transitions directly into the final level rather than taking the player back to Garreg Mach like it usually does.
  • In Three Hopes, he is the main boss in the penultimate chapters of both Scarlet Blaze and Golden Wildfire. In the former, he, as the King of Faerghus, is the last major force of the Kingdom army at Ailell^note If Byleth and Jeralt aren't recruited, he will instead share this role with Claude, and in the latter, he and the Church army tries to retake Garreg Mach when the chance presented itself. After both battles, he will escape in a different direction than the Church, leaving Rhea without any backup.
• Precision F-Strike: Like most characters in Fire Emblem, Dimitri uses 'dastard' rather than 'bastard' when talking about those he finds despicable, but when enraged, he uses 'bastard' even pre-Time Skip, further foreshadowing the darker side that he keeps hidden.
• Pre-Asskicking One-Liner:
  "I'll cut through!" (Pre-timeskip)
  "I'll comply." (Post-timeskip - Chapters 13-17)
  "Leave it to me." (Post-timeskip - Chapter 18 and beyond)
• Pre-Mortem One-Liner:
  • Academy Phase:
    "Let's see you dodge this!" (Also used in the War Phase 2 section)
    "This battle is over!" (Also used in the War Phase 2 section)
    "Right where I want you!"
    "Stand down!"
  • War Phase 1 (Azure Moon Chapters 13-17 and Verdant Wind):
    "Out of my way!"
    "I'll destroy you!"
    "Don't struggle."
    "Begone!"
  • War Phase 2 (Azure Moon Chapter 18 onwards & Crimson Flower):
    "On my honor!"
    "I won't be deterred!"
• Protagonist Powerup Privileges: Only Dimitri can access the High Lord and Great Lord classes.
• Psycho Electro:
  • Downplayed. In a typical playthough Dimitri probably won't learn any magic, not helped by his low growths and suboptimal performance in magic-based classes. However, should the player push him towards Reason magic, he will only learn Lightning spells. This compliments his violent breakdown partway through the story, particularly in Azure Moon.
  • As an enemy in Part II, he can summon a bolt of lightning (due to being equipped with the Counterattack skill) should he be attacked from afar, which makes this trope in line with his appearance as a boss in Verdant Wind.
  • Three Hopes downplays it in a different way. Dimitri's Azure Lightning infuses lightning into his attacks. While Dimitri never has his Freak Out in this timeline, he's still a bundle of pent up, often bloodthirsty, rage beneath his kingly demeanor, and certain characters refer to him as savage and animalistic. However, he rarely lets that side of himself slip through and generally presents himself very calmly and straight-laced.
• Rank Scales with Asskicking: He's the prince of Faerghus and unsurprisingly its strongest fighter. He's a master of both the sword and lance and freakishly strong to the point that even the nearly invincible Catherine declares him her equal.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • During the Azure Moon route, Dimitri learns that Viscount Kleiman, a Kingdom noble who betrayed Faerghus, was involved in the Tragedy of Duscur. When Dimitri meets with the servant who revealed this information, the servant tells Dimitri that he believed the Viscount to be the embodiment of justice and claimed that they did what they believed to be right. Dimitri is clearly disgusted by this claim and chews the servant out for the Viscount's self-righteous hypocrisy.
    Dimitri: And so, in the name of justice, he caused massacre upon massacre out of love for his homeland. You murdered your own king, killed our soldiers and involved innocent citizens. And yet you have the gall to speak of justice!?
  • After the timeskip, Dimitri encounters Lord Gwendal, who's following Lord Rowe despite him having betrayed the Kingdom. Dimitri chews him out for this, though Gwendal isn't fazed.
    Dimitri: The man praised as a lion is degraded to a mere traitor's underling.
    Lord Gwendal: A traitor's underling? That's upsetting, Your Highness. I am and always have been a Knight of House Rowe.
    Dimitri: How dare you? You are nothing but a lowly beast scavenging for scraps. You have forgotten the dignity of knighthood.
• Recurring Boss:
  • In Three Houses, outside his own route he’s fought in Chapters 1 and 7; he’s also a boss in Chapter 17 of both Crimson Flower and Verdant Wind, making for up to three battles against him.
  • In Three Hopes, he is fought twice on both of the routes that aren't his own. In Scarlet Blaze he's encountered in chapters 8 and 14, and in Golden Wildfire it's in chapters 12 and 14. He also appears as an enemy in Chapter 15 of both routes, but is sequestered off in an area of the battlefield that the player can't reach and has no actual effect on the battle itself.
• Recurring Element:
  • Dimitri starts off as the classic heroic Marth-like Lord, but psychological trauma eventually turns into an embittered, bloodthirsty shell of his former self, becoming one of the darkest takes of the militaristic Alm-like Lord. On the Azure Moon route, Byleth pulls him out of that state, bringing him back in line with Marth and his ilk.
  • On the Crimson Flower route, Dimitri takes the place of the recurring Camus Archetype, being the Anti-Villain in service to the antagonist, though he is a lot more antagonistic due to his understandable but single-minded hatred for Edelgard.
• Red Baron:
  • On the Azure Moon route, he earns the epitaph "Savior King". Even his enemies know him by that title, as Hubert refers to him that way once.
  • On the Crimson Flower route, he has earned the title of "Tempest King" because he moves through the battlefield like a tempest slaughtering his foes.
• Redemption in the Rain: On the Azure Moon route, his realization at what a monster he's become comes amidst a pouring torrent of rain where, once again, Byleth holds out their hand — except this time he takes it. That marks the moment Dimitri goes from Sociopathic Hero to Knight in Sour Armor.
• Red Herring: There are a few warning signs he might be the Flame Emperor on his route; he is conspicuously nowhere to be found the first two times the Flame Emperor confronts you in person, he makes it quite clear that he’s out for revenge against certain people who may be affiliated with the Church, and he is seen having a friendly conversation with a man previously established to be working with said Flame Emperor. Then you and he eavesdrop on a conversation between said Flame Emperor and their allies, and that quickly puts the kibosh on that idea.
• Reluctant Psycho: He knows he's Ax-Crazy post-timeskip, and he's really not at all happy about it.
• Remembered Too Late: A variation in that he remembers but doesn't vocalize it. On the Verdant Wind route, as his allies die in front of him, he slowly seems to take in how much he cares for his friends. By the time he really has it settle in, he's alone and inevitably going to die. On Crimson Flower, however, his care for his friends seems to be intact, and he responds to their deaths with sorrow (Mercedes) thanking or praising them (Sylvain and Dedue as a human), or bitterly lamenting their passing (Demonic Beast Dedue).
• Revenge Before Reason: Hoo boy. Post-timeskip, Dimitri's sole goal in life is to exact revenge on all of his enemies, especially the Flame Emperor, no matter what it might cost him. On the Silver Snow and Verdant Wind paths, this explicitly gets him killed; on Crimson Flower, you have to kill him directly, though the manner of his death can range from a somber end to a vicious one depending on how the battle goes; on the Azure Moon path, however, he's able to develop out of this, putting aside his quest for vengeance to liberate his people and help the Alliance. When he does go after Edelgard at the end, it's because he believes that she must be stopped, not because he still wants revenge.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: After the Blue Lions version of chapter 11 in Three Houses, he finds out that Edelgard is the Flame Emperor and goes completely batshit, slaughtering several of their soldiers with his bare hands. After the timeskip, his only goal is to kill them swiftly and brutally, and he's willing to slaughter anyone who gets in his way to do so. On the Azure Moon route, he calms down and reflects on his self-destructive behavior at the end of chapter 17.
• Route Boss: In Three Houses, he’s fought in White Clouds (outside his own path), Crimson Flower, and Verdant Wind. In Three Hopes, he’s fought twice in both Scarlet Blaze and Golden Wildfire.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: He's a prince, but he's nonetheless on the front lines.
• Royalty Super Power: As the prince of Faerghus, he bears the Minor Crest of Blaiddyd, which occasionally doubles his weapon's damage bonus while using combat arts at the cost of consuming double the durability, and grants him the right to wield Areadbhar. According to his support with Raphael, Dimitri's Super-Strength is also one of these, which may or may not be related to his Crest.
• Rule of Symbolism: His Hopes outfit has a lion head on his chest. A strap he's also wearing covers the right eye of the lion, in the same way Dimitri wears an eyepatch after the time-skip in Houses.
• Same Character, But Different: Discussed during Part II of non-Crimson Flower routes. After his return, many characters are shocked and taken aback by Dimitri's bloodthirst and hostility, to the point even Felix is convinced he had become a completely new person. According to Dedue in Azure Moon however, Dimitri actually defies this trope: if talked in the monastery after Dimitri begins his Redemption Quest, Dedue will comment his liege never actually changed as a person up until recently, as the Dimitri he always knew had always been a tortured soul driven mad by his kindness and compassion towards the weak and the dead.
• Sanity Has Advantages: His competence as a leader drops drastically after his Freak Out, especially on Silver Snow and Verdant Wind. He becomes psychotic enough to pick fights with the Alliance for no reason, and without Byleth, Rodrigue, and Gilbert to rein him in, he pointlessly gets himself and all of his followers save for Dedue killed. This is further exemplified in Hopes, where he never goes off the deep end and competently leads his Kingdom in the war, and actually survives all three routes.
• Sanity Slippage: Dimitri tries to portray himself as a honorable knight from his kingdom while fighting with his own darkness and inner demons at the same time due to his Survivor Guilt. When he finds out that the Flame Emperor is Edelgard, it proves to be the last straw in his fracturing mental state. By the time he's reintroduced post-timeskip, except on Crimson Flower, most of his sanity is gone and he's nothing but an Ax-Crazy Blood Knight wreck. He comes back from it if you're on the Azure Moon route. Otherwise...
• Scars Are Forever: He still has the scars on his back that he got from protecting Dedue after the Duscur tragedy. He says that he doesn't mind, though, as it's a reminder that he was able to save one life.
• Secret A.I. Moves: He has the General/Commander and Counterattack skills when fought as an enemy, which he cannot obtain under your command.
• Secret Art:
  • Atrocity is Areadbhar's combat art, which can only be used by Dimitri. It deals 15 extra damage and increases hit by 20, with the effect of being effective against anything, doubling his damage output.
  • He learns Paraselene upon mastering Great Lord. It deals 10 extra damage and increases avoid by 10, with the effect of moving him back by 1 space after combat. It is exclusive to the Great Lord class.
• Secret Secret-Keeper: Played for Drama and Deconstructed. The Blue Lions route reveals Dimitri secretly eavesdropped on the meeting between the Flame Emperor, Thales, and Kronya that takes place in Chapter 10. Not only is he led to believe the Tragedy of Duscur was ordered by the Flame Emperor due to Thales claiming it was done for their sake, once the three of them are gone and, after inspecting the blade the Flame Emperor threw to drive him (and Byleth in Blue Lions) away after sensing someone was nearby, he discovers the weapon in question is the same dagger he gifted Edelgard many years ago. Dimitri remains in denial about the clear implications all this information suggests for the Flame Emperor, and refuses to fully process his discovery up until the Flame Emperor is finally unmasked in Chapter 11, after which he just...breaks.
• See You in Hell: Post-timeskip on the Azure Moon route, but before chapter 18, he sometimes says a variation of this after defeating an enemy unit.
  Dimitri: See you in the eternal flames.
• Sleep Deprivation: He doesn't sleep nearly as much as his comrades would like him to, partially due to his Workaholic nature (At least in Three Hopes), and partially because he has constant nightmares about the Tragedy of Duscur.
• Shared Family Quirks: According to Hapi, he shares a lot of his habits and behavior with his stepmother.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Post-timeskip, he's haunted by the events of the past five years, going from the most idealistic of the lords to the most cynical and sour. Compared to Edelgard's and Claude's joy at seeing Byleth again on their respective routes, on Azure Moon, Dimitri sullenly asks if they're merely one of the many ghosts he's seen blaming him for their deaths.
• Shock and Awe:
  • Both of the Reason spells he learns are electricity-based.
  • In Three Hopes, his personal Action Ability, Azure Lightning, has the ability to shock enemies with electricity after attacks, letting him knock them back and cause discharges around to futher shock more mooks.
• Slasher Smile: In Three Hopes, Felix recounts to Shez an incident where they were teenagers quelling a rebellion, and Dimitri smiled as he killed the enemy commander, as when he first noticed "the boar" inside him. Sure enough, Dimitri's in-game model is smiling during battle.
• Sociopathic Hero: Played with. Post-timeskip, he has few qualms about slaughtering all of his enemies to reach his goal of revenge, but he is completely self-aware about the monster he's become and it's clear that his constant bloodshed is taking an extreme toll on his mental health. If you're on the Azure Moon route, he eventually recovers and starts down a path of genuinely protecting the weak from being trampled on by the strong.
• Sole Survivor:
  • The sole survivor of the royal assassination cited in the Tragedy of Duscur. It inflicts quite a few psychological problems on him.
  • When it comes to his actual route, this is notably averted in several ways, as the only faction leader on the Azure Moon route who dies is Edelgard, who is the Final Boss on that route. Claude always survives (unlike on Crimson Flower where dies unless specific conditions are met), and Rhea peacefully steps down upon her rescue and survives by default, whereas she's the Final Boss of the Crimson Flower route, peacefully passes away on the Verdant Wind route, and can die on the Silver Snow route if she doesn't reach A-support level with Byleth. Dimitri's route also has the most recruitable units in the game — the sole exceptions being Edelgard, Hubert, Jeritza, and Claude — and it's also the only path in the game in which Gilbert is recruitable. Finally, as long as you did Dedue's Paralogue during Part I, he will rejoin your ranks and possibly survive to the end in Part II.
• Sorry That I'm Dying: If he falls in Classic mode after his turn for the better in Chapter 17 of the Azure Moon route, Dimitri considers his death a punishment and asks his allies to forgive him.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: Post-timeskip, he is hostile, cynical, curt, and can't even be invited to social activities. He's also very broken, seeing and hearing the ghosts of those he lost and desperate to gain peace the only way he can think of: avenging them.
• Spared by the Adaptation: In Three Houses Dimitri is guaranteed to die in all routes but his own. In Three Hopes, Dimitri gets to live all the way to the end of the story in all routes, including Scarlet Blaze and Golden Wildfire. Notably, he is also the only lord who is guaranteed to make it to the end without ending up either dead or mentally incapacitated.
• Start X to Stop X: In Three Hopes, he laments that the only way to prevent the Kingdom from descending into civil war is to kill his uncle Rufus, the incompetent and power-hungry regent.
  Dimitri: In other words, I cannot restore my grandfather's peace without first breaking it.
• Stepford Smiler: His profile says that he's a courtly young man, but has a shadow hiding underneath. One of his level-up quotes in Heroes is a vow to never lose anyone again, suggesting that even pre-timeskip, he's seen and tries to hide his share of pain. Post-timeskip, he's dropped the mask completely, his Survivor Guilt having eaten away his ability to hide how much everything weighs on him.
• Straight for the Commander: He says that attacking the commander first is his most preferred tactic on expeditions in Three Hopes, because it will end the fighting a whole lot faster.
• Straight Man and Wise Guy: Dimitri is the straightforward, always serious straight man to Sylvain's joke-cracking, mischievous wise guy in their support chain.
• Superboss: He is one of the three bosses of the second New Game Plus-exclusive paralogue "Eagles, Lions, and Deer" in Warriors: Three Hopes, fighting you alongside fellow house leaders Edelgard and Claude. He is one and a half times the player's level cap on Maddening, gets more and more fired up as the fight progresses, and boasts weapon triangle advantage against Shez's unique class, meaning he's almost certainly going to be the most daunting opponent in the game.
• Super-Strength: He accidentally snapped swords when he first started training (at nine), can lift a caravan on his own, and when pushed to the brink, he can crush an enemy's skull with one hand. Fittingly, he has the highest Strength growth in the game and caps it at 87. This is also to his detriment, as Felix gives him grief over breaking training swords in their supports.
• Survivor Guilt: On the Azure Moon route, he doesn't even initially believe that Byleth has returned post-timeskip at first, believing that they're just a hallucination. He also has this feeling in regards to the Tragedy of Duscur, where he was the Sole Survivor of a series of assassinations on the kingdom's nobles, which resulted in him hearing voices as well as having hallucinations. It does seem like he's getting better on the Azure Moon route, but he tells Byleth in their S-support that he still has nightmares of everyone who died and accepts that he probably always will (though he's not allowing it to consume him like before).
• Sweet and Sour Grapes: On Azure Moon, he eventually learns to let go of his obsession with revenge. In the process, he rescues Claude from Imperial forces led by Thales (in disguise as Lord Arundel), kills Thales, and unwittingly accomplishes his lifelong goal of avenging the Tragedy of Duscur.
• Tarot Motifs: Justice, represented by the crest of Blaiddyd. Upright, it represents justice, fairness, and truth; as is standard for Marth-like characters, Dimitri is a morally upstanding young man who believes in teamwork and defeating evil to keep his kingdom safe. Inverted, it represents moral instability, bias, and harsh self-criticism; after the time-skip, Dimitri has let his survivor's guilt and hatred for Edelgard override any sense of justice he once had, prioritizing revenge against the Adrestian Empire and its soldiers over his health, his allies reservations, and even the the decline of Faerghus.
• That Man Is Dead: He declares this to Byleth after the timeskip on the Azure Moon route, when the latter says they miss the old Dimitri after giving Randolph a Mercy Kill.
  Dimitri: The Dimitri you knew is dead! All that remains is the repulsive, blood-stained monster you see before you.
• These Hands Have Killed:
  • On the Azure Moon route post-redemption into The Atoner, Dimitri reveals that he finds it incredibly hard to forgive himself for how many lives he has taken, a list that includes nobles, commoners, soldiers, and children (albeit the last group was in self-defense).
    Dimitri: I am a murderous monster. My hands are stained red. Could one such as I truly hope for such a life? As the sole survivor of that day, do I... Do I have the right to live for myself?
  • In Three Hopes, while he doesn’t have nearly the same degree of baggage as he did in Three Houses, he’s still haunted by having killed (and having to kill) many people — now including his uncle, shouldering the burden of being a kinslayer.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Notably, he holds this belief despite having killed people himself, and continues to maintain it post-timeskip after he's killed a lot more people, which contributes mightily to his self-loathing. In an early scene, he's horrified that he had to kill civilian militia in self-defense, and no matter what Byleth's response, Dimitri states that they should have found a way to deal with them peacefully. Part of his opposition to the Flame Emperor's war is that no matter what reforms or gains it may achieve, the fact that it is built on corpses and blood is why he will oppose it.
• Time-Shifted Actor: In Japanese, he is voiced by Mai Nishikawa instead of his normal voice actor Kaito Ishikawa for flashbacks to his youth on Azure Moon.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: After the timeskip on the Azure Moon and Verdant Wind routes, he's become an antisocial jerk who spends most of his free time brooding and cares only about ripping the Flame Emperor's head off. On the Azure Moon route, he gets better after Rodrigue's death; on the Verdant Wind route, he attacks the Alliance out of sheer psychotic rage and pointlessly gets himself killed chasing Edelgard beyond his body's limits.
• Took a Level in Kindness: After Rodrigue's death, and after Byleth comforts him and convinces him to keep living, and decides to atone for his sins, while still continuing to go after Edelgard to stop her conquest after freeing Faerghus from the Adrestian Empire.
• Tragic Hero: On Crimson Flower. He genuinely means well and wants to protect his kingdom, but his hatred and desire for revenge on Edelgard leads to his ruin.
• Training from Hell: Faerghus is a country that places a high importance on combat training, and as the future king, Dimitri had to do a lot of tough practises even as a child, and he gives examples of some of the things he had to do to Raphael in their Supports. This included running around mountains in full armor (and in Three Hopes, he says on expeditions that he also had to swim with it on) and lifting large boulders or barrels filled with rocks as weight training.
• Tranquil Fury:
  • After finding out that Edelgard is the Flame Emperor and having a brief fit of Unstoppable Rage in the Blue Lions version of chapter 11, he demands to know why they caused the Tragedy of Duscur in a tone of voice that barely conceals his desire to break their neck under a very thin veneer of calm.
  • On Crimson Flower, if Felix fights him, Dimitri will confront Felix over killing Rodrigue. When Felix responds by saying that he'll cut down anyone who stands in his way, Dimitri calmly says, "I see. That was all I needed to hear to finally work up the resolve to kill you."
  • In his supports with Dedue, he finds some soldiers gossiping about Dedue, and terrifies them so much that they end up running away, even though he barely raises his voice.
• Trauma Conga Line: He has the worst time of the three Lords during the timeskip. Finding out his step-sister is the Flame Emperor, forced to flee his country, spending five years alone and fighting, and that's after the Tragedy of Duscur. He has considerably less trauma during the Crimson Flower route, due to not getting exiled and becoming King, but he's still very much driven by hatred.
• Tritagonist: In Part I, if Byleth chose to instruct the Blue Lions, he's the ostensible leader of the students you're teaching, but Byleth has more screentime and both Byleth and Sothis have more character development. He takes over as the main protagonist in Part II as his trauma and character development take center stage.
• Tsurime Eyes: His eyes point upward, contrasting Sylvain and Ingrid's Tareme Eyes and matching Felix's.
• Turns Red: In the first Gronder Battle as well as during his confrontation on the Crimson Flower route, Dimitri will always have the Defiant Strength ability, which boosts his sky high physical attack to ludicrous degrees once he's low on health.
• Unaffected by Spice: Played for Laughs. In Three Hopes, Dimitri losing his sense of taste makes him capable of eating an overly spicy cheese dish that Bernadetta accidentally makes while flustered in their Supports. While Bernadetta comments on the horrible taste it might have, Dimitri is able to eat it just fine.
• Uncertain Doom: On the Silver Snow route, he's reported dead after the Battle of Gronder Field, yet appears to Byleth afterwards to have a conversation that Seteth heavily suggests is a Dead Person Conversation. However, Dedue does not comment on his state afterwards, leaving Dimitri's fate unknown.
• Undignified Death: On the Verdant Wind route, after the forces of the three countries clash at Gronder Field, he attempts to pursue Edelgard as she is retreating, only to collapse from exhaustion and then get impaled with spears by her soldiers. Hilda, who witnessed the whole thing, views his death as this.
• Undying Loyalty: Zig-Zagged with the Church. Just like his predecessors, he has a sense of loyalty towards it and especially Rhea, to the point that on the Crimson Flower route, he grants her asylum after the Empire attacks and sacks the monastery, and fights Edelgard to his death to protect her. But in Three Hopes, he says that while he is thankful for the help Rhea has given him, his loyalty to them comes less from a desire to protect them, and more from his feelings that as King, he owes them because the Church assisted in founding Faerghus and that many living in the country are religious. That said, he also states that if it is possible he wishes to save both. Even there are some moments in both games where it shows that he's not above throwing them away if it is the only way for Faerghus to survive, not because it is the moral thing to do but because as king his priority must be his own people.
  • Despite fighting with them in Crimson Flower, his ultimate strategy when the Imperial Army was closing in on the Tailtean Plains was to try and use the Church army as bait for them, doing all the heavy lifting so the Kingdom army could then pick off what would be left.
  • In Three Hopes, he states that his priorities will be to protect the lives of Faerghus first and the Church second. As such, if saving his nation means he must cut ties with the Church, then he will reluctantly do it, he will just not do it in a direct way and accept whatever retribution may come of it.
• Ungrateful Bastard: If you heal him in the first half of the post-timeskip missions, due to his Death Seeker tendencies at the time, he'll deride it as a waste of effort.
• Unknown Rival: His relationship with Edelgard can be summed up as this once their relationship turns from cordial to sour. Dimitri views Edelgard as his Arch-Enemy who, even in Three Hopes where he's not wrongly convinced she's involved in the Tragedy of Duscur that shaped his life, he must defeat to stop her war from plunging the land into chaos and destruction. Edelgard meanwhile sees Rhea and Thales as her true enemies while Dimitri at best (such as in Crimson Flower and most of the routes in Three Hopes) is just a misguided pawn of the archbishop, who is using him and by extension the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus as her major beatstick in the war against the Empire, and at worst (as in Verdant Wind, Silver Snow, and most of Azure Moon before he gets his act together) a vengeance-crazed Fallen Hero also unknowingly manipulated by those who slither in the dark into hating her for crimes she didn't commit but would fall under "guilt by association".
• Unstoppable Rage: When he finds out that Edelgard is the Flame Emperor in the Blue Lions version of chapter 11, he goes completely ballistic and rips apart a squad of their soldiers with his bare hands.
• Unskilled, but Strong: The effect of his Crest, Blaiddyd. When it activates, it greatly boosts his damage with Combat Arts, but also doubles the amount of durability the art consumes.
• Unwitting Pawn: The Azure Moon and Crimson Flower routes suggest Lord Arundel was capitalizing on Dimitri's desire for revenge and the suspicions Faerghus' Crown Prince harbored about his involvement with the Tragedy of Duscur to essentially secure a failsafe that guaranteed a big-scale conflict between the Empire and the Kingdom^ExplanationNear the end of Crimson Flower, Edelgard comments Dimitri's all-consuming vendetta was caused by one of his uncle's schemes, which ultimately spiraled into believing she had been the one who kickstarted the Tragedy of Duscur. Meanwhile, on Dimitri's own route, he's shown researching the Church's donations and fixating on Arundel's as they stopped 2 years before the Tragedy, questions him about said donations when they meet briefly, mentions to Byleth after the timeskip he suspected Arundel had a hand in the Tragedy due to this plus his sudden return to the Empire prior to the event, and comments during Chapter 8 he had assisted to Garreg Mach to get revenge on someone. Interestingly, Blue Lions also reveals that while Dimitri's suspicions ended up sidelined upon hearing Thales tell the Flame Emperor (later revealed as Edelgard) the Tragedy had been caused for her sake, the Agarthans still took advantage of the situation —which in Azure Moon is both discussed and invoked by Cornelia and Lord Arundel respectively— as it ultimately led to the same end result anyway.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: In his supports with Ingrid, Dimitri recalls that he had this kind of relationship with Glenn, since they often argued and while Glenn had a high opinion of Dimitri, he never praised him to his face.
• War Is Hell: In his supports with Byleth, he reveals that he feels that violence and killing in war is regrettable despite the necessity of stopping those who would harm others, and that he mistrusts any who can kill without emotional attachment.
• Warrior Prince: The crown prince of the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, and fairly skilled with a lance and sword while he’s at it.
• We Used to Be Friends:
  • In his childhood, he had a brief but close friendship with Edelgard of all people. She was actually his first crush. At present day, Edelgard is rather cold with him and he accepts whatever they had seems to have disappeared in the intervening years (also he learned later that she was his step-sister so that would have put the kibosh on any potential romance likely). However, even despite their distance at present time, he is still completely destroyed by the revelation that she is the Flame Emperor and goes completely off the deep end.
  • While he's still on good terms with Sylvain and Ingrid, his friendship with Felix is severely strained as a result of Dimitri's bloodthirsty behavior when suppressing a rebellion. After Rodrigue's death and Dimitri's change of heart, his friendship with Felix begins to heal, with Felix once again calling him by name, even if Felix still is brutally honest with Dimitri.
  • It's possible to permanently destroy his friendships with Sylvain, Ingrid, and/or Felix by recruiting them to the Black Eagles and siding with Edelgard, putting them on opposite sides of a war.
• Weapon Specialization: He wields lances in battle. His House even specializes in them.
• What the Hell, Hero?: With his high beliefs in doing the right thing, Dimitri gives these out from time to time.
  • After quelling Lonato's rebellion, Dimitri voices his concern about having just killed civilians, the people he's sworn to protect, should the player make Byleth answer with "That is the reality of war", Dimitri in a harsh tone reminds them that they and their friends didn't kill soldiers following orders, but people who has lives outside of fighting. He catches himself before going on further, saying that if they hadn't done done, more civilians would've died.
  • During his and Byleth's discussion about the disaster that happened in Remire Village, if Byleth says that the Flame Emperor said he wasn't involved in it, they lose support points with Dimitri as he finds it unbelivable that Byleth would believe him.
  • On the Crimson Flower route, if Byleth battles Dimitri in chapter 17, he asks Byleth why they chose to walk down the violent path of siding with Edelgard. Despite this, while he feels like he must put them down, he also has a feeling of regret over it.
  • If Felix is the one to confront him in the same chapter, Dimitri points out to him that he assissted in killing Rodrigue, his own father. Felix answers by saying that he would cut down anyone who stood in his way, including his father, which makes Dimitri come to terms about killing Felix.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Discussed. In his support conversation with Byleth, Dimitri laments the fact that each enemy that he cuts down is a person, with their own loved ones. He sadly recounts a story of a locket containing a young woman's lock of hair he once found on a dead soldier.
• When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Dimitri's growths lean towards the Myrmidon, Soldier, and Lord family trees, being a pure physical fighter unlike the archer and Dragon Rider Claude. With his Lightning Bruiser build, he doesn't need magic or ranged weapons.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist:
  • He's a firm believer in chivalry and honor, and believes it's a knight's duty to protect the weak from evil. Post-timeskip, most of his idealism is broken into pieces.
  • On the Azure Moon route, his idealism returns after Byleth finally manages to reach through to him. It's tempered by the understanding that no single person can achieve the kind of peace he's looking for, but he firmly believes that it's possible if people work together.
• The Wise Prince: Pre-timeskip, he’s a kind, responsible, and thoughtful young prince who in his own words abhors fighting and killing despite showing a talent for it, though he has some hidden Blood Knight tendencies and a fondness for combat underneath.
• Workaholic: In Three Hopes, by the start of Chapter 4, Dimitri has buried himself to his work and responsibilities as king to a point of overworking, much to the worry of his allies. His support conversation with Shez reveals that this is partially fueled from his Survivor's Guilt and his own responsibilities as king of Faerghus. If you killed Jeralt in Chapter 12 of Azure Gleam and Rodrigue dies, Dimitri confesses to Shez that burying himself with work is easier and helps get him through the grieving process.
• You Are Not Alone: A large part of his character development in Three Hopes is accepting that he doesn't have to bear the weight of the world on his shoulders alone, that he should trust his companions to ease his burden however he can.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: His reaction to finding out that Edelgard is the Flame Emperor is to ask if it's some kind of twisted joke.
• You Killed My Father: He hides it pretty well, but his only goal in life is to kill the ones responsible for his parents' murder and the ensuing genocide of the Duscur people. It's deconstructed when circumstantial evidence leads him to believe Edelgard was responsible and his ensuing quest for revenge makes him a danger to himself and everyone around him.
• You Monster!: In Chapter 11 if you chose Blue Lions, an enraged Dimitri calls the Flame Emperor a monster if he initiates battle with them, as well as the "lowliest beast that [he has] ever known." After the mask falls off, he growls the same phrase at Edelgard, thinking her responsible for orchestrating the Tragedy of Duscur.

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