YMMV / The Savior King, the Master Tactician and the Queen of Liberation

• Anti-Climax Boss: Solon, despite being a powerful sorcerer and the mastermind of the Remire bloodbath, is defeated in mere seconds after Byleth kills Kronya, one of his underlings.
• Ass Pull: The Rite of Rising to save Byleth's life succeeding in part due to Bernadetta's blood. The Chalice of Beginnings was created for use by Saint Seiros and the Four Apostles (of which the Ashen Wolves are descendants) to attempt to revive Sothis. Bernadetta is a descendant of Indech, one of the Four Saints, who weren't mentioned in Aelfric's account of the original Rite of Rising, and Bernie herself had no reason to believe that adding her blood to the mix would work when the original ritual failed despite Seiros being present to guide the Apostles.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Some of SK's plot points take on darker implications in light of the release of Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes:
  • When the war is nearing its end, Thales has Edelgard forcibly turned into the Hegemon Husk. In the Azure Gleam route of Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, that’s precisely what Thales does to Edelgard, but instead of doing so as punishment for her failures, he does it out of revenge for thwarting his coup. Worse, instead of dying like she does in this fic, when she turns back to normal, she’s emotionally regressed to her 12 year old self.
  • Count Gloucester is the one who is responsible for the incident that killed Godfrey Von Riegan and Raphael's parents (which, at the time, all evidence pointed to). In Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, however, Count Gloucester wasn't even the one behind the incident, and was in fact in charge of the security of the route by hiring some mercenaries, but someone else among the Gloucester family — implied to be an Agarthan mole — set up the incident by bribing the mercenaries to threaten the merchants.
  • Dimitri’s uncle Rufus is portrayed as a flawed but well-meaning individual. However, Dimitri reveals to Byleth in a support conversation in Three Houses that he and his uncle didn't get along. Three Hopes would reveal that Rufus was complicit in the Tragedy of Duscur, and had tried to get Dimitri killed on more than one occasion, forcing Dimitri to execute his uncle for high treason when he attempts to stage another rebellion in Fhirdiad.
  • This fic's Edelgard views Claude as a ruthless and manipulative schemer who only cares about his ambitions. While in Three Houses canon she isn't as hostile toward him as she is to Dimitri despite being enemies, he actually lives down to SK!Edelgard's expectations in Warriors: Three Hopes more in Golden Wildfire, which brings his Chronic Backstabbing Disorder and I Did What I Had to Do tendencies to the fore.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • While Felix gives Count Varley a brutal verbal smackdown in SK Chapter 69, he is also among the Kingdom generals in Three Hopes who can give him a brutal physical smackdown as well at the end of the Azure Gleam route.
  • The core premise of SK is the team-up between Dimitri and Claude to defeat the Empire. This comes to pass during the Azure Gleam route of Three Hopes during the final battle, with Thales and "those who slither in the dark" having taken over the Empire and hollowed it out from the inside to spite Edelgard. The main difference is that Dimitri and Claude's relationship goes deeper than a simple alliance in SK, while they're only conveniently aligned against a common enemy in Three Hopes since Claude is less-than-eager to fully assist Dimitri due to the Kingdom's explicit support of the Church. On the other two routes (Scarlet Blaze and Golden Wildfire), Claude instead forms an alliance with Edelgard, and should Shez keep Jeralt alive, that partnership sticks to the very end of the game.
  • Among the couples dancing at the Garreg Mach Ball, one pairing that gets mentioned is Edelgard and (the fake) Monica. As Three Hopes would later show, the real Monica really does become that devoted to Edelgard after Edelgard saves her life from "those who slither in the dark".
  • While it's only implied in dialogue from Rhea in Three Houses, the idea of Sothis "taking over" Byleth's body becomes a major plot point early on. Three Hopes confirms that it is possible for Sothis to control Byleth (but not do a full-on Body Swap), showcased during a battle with Shez and Arval, and it takes a great deal of resistance from Byleth to shake off Sothis' influence. Byleth only fully gives up control of their body and soul to Sothis if Shez kills Jeralt in Part II.
• Informed Wrongness: Lonato's assertion that Rhea threatened the Golden Deer by showing them what happens to those who "[defy] her obscene whims" is treated as the ravings of a grief-stricken man looking for death. Rhea, in both Three Houses and SK, confirms to the students before and after the mission that this is exactly what she wanted to happen.
• Karmic Overkill: Edelgard's general treatment by the Agarthans in Chapter 80, even among other fans of the story who hated Edelgard, came off as excessive. The author admitted in replies that even they were uncomfortable while writing the scene in question.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Thales has multiple candidates for line crossing, to the point where he's practically using it as a jumprope. Whether it be his indoctrination of the children who enter his army and using them as assassins and disposable soldiers, orchestrating the Tragedy of Duscur and by extension causing the near genocide of the Duscur people, regularly experimenting with demonic beasts, performing the Dual Crest experiments first on Lysithea's family, then on Edelgard's, killing their siblings and shortening their lifespans, empowering Edelgard to kickstart a continent-wide war with the aim of killing as many 'surfacers' as possible, or taking Edelgard's dead siblings and transforming them into twisted dragons, Thales regularly expresses a callous disregard for human life in his quest for power.
  • Count Hevring, Linhardt's father, lured countless villagers from his territory to Enbarr under the guise of requesting test subjects to assist with a cure for the late Emperor Ionius IX's chronic illness. No such cure ever took place, and many of the unfortunate subjects became Human Sacrifices for the Agarthans and added to the Imperial army's legion of Demonic Beasts, with Hevring attempting to violently silence one of the whistleblowers (a young girl who lost her brothers to Hevring's experiments).
  • Count Varley, Bernadetta's father, who had already gained his fair share of hate from Bernadetta for being an all-around Abusive Parent to her (and forcing her to watch him beat her commoner friend Yuri to near-death) goes well beyond his usual standard of cruelty when he leads an assault on the Imperial city of Hrym to murder groups of anti-war protestors.
  • And there's Edelgard herself, who, aside from keeping both of the aforementioned counts under her employ and enabling their corruption in spite of their betrayal of her father, is heavily implied to have used the "javelins of light" to destroy Fort Merceus after it is captured by the heroes, killing numerous Imperial citizens living there and prompting the survivors to denounce her as a madwoman.
• Narm:
  • The decision to use real-world languages to depict Almyran and Agarthan speech is jarring because the languages chosen (Gratuitous Japanese for the former and Gratuitous German for the latter) don't fit either faction's culture or aesthetics.
  • Following her Face–Heel Turn, Edelgard's turn to villainy is meant to set up a massive downfall, but both of these aspects fall flat due to how extreme they are (going from being an all-around Smug Snake with a Hair-Trigger Temper to being imprisoned, beaten to a pulp, and relentlessly mocked by the other villains).
• Strawman Has a Point: Even if Edelgard isn't much better in the truthfulness department, she is correct in arguing that the Church of Seiros altered history for their own benefit. She's later proven even more right when Byleth takes measures to conceal Rhea's knowing and deliberate distortion of history by describing them as simple mistranslations of the goddess's will.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • A major point of contention is how little Edelgard is used despite being an integral part of Dimitri's backstory and the larger plot of the war between the Adrestian Empire and the Church of Seiros. Rather than spearheading the war effort as she does in Three Houses, she is reduced to a Big Bad Wannabe and lackey of "those who slither in the dark" whose constant failures result in a steady string of defeats for the Empire and an Undignified Death for Edelgard.
  • Kronya, despite being revealed as the sister of Original Character Atra, has very little presence as an antagonist. Almost all aspects of her characterization and backstory are told from Atra's perspective, with Kronya's only direct contributions to the plot being her offscreen murder of Jeralt and death at Byleth's hands just two chapters later.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Despite having information on the Agarthans that nobody else does, Atra keeps everything she knows to herself and instead wages an ineffective one-woman guerilla war against them (which gets called-out by Glenn). Though the story implies a case of paranoia that anyone she met could be an Agarthan in disguise is the reason she avoids sharing her knowledge, the fact that she knew where Shambhala was would have been a huge boon for the heroes to end the war faster, as opposed to letting it continue until the Adrestian Empire's fall. Additionally, she knows the truth behind the Tragedy of Duscur and becomes aware of the Remire Calamity over a month before the situation in the village spirals out of control, but she keeps both to herself to solve them on her own. Given the enormity of what's at stake (she knows Thales and his ilk are out for genocide), she instead comes off as a paranoiac at best and cowardly at worst, which gets particularly jarring when Atra claims that she chose to turn on Thales and had learned to question what she was taught to Edelgard, who is just as stuck with Thales's lies as Atra once was.