Fire Emblem Three Houses (Spoiler Thread)

Plus really good at hosting tea parties (and they don't even use their divine time travel for it).

Silver Snow Byleth is just a figurehead anyway. Seteth is the one actually running Fodlan by the end.

I feel like very recently, I had an epiphany about how silly all the dithering debates and disputing ideologies of 3H are… but for the life of me I can’t put it into words. Only thing I can say for sure is: a) It’s objectively more pointless implementation of Story Branching than the objectively-messier Fates; and b) There is no real compelling conflict because the House Leaders + Rhea are all blithering idiots who can’t talk like civilised people… and I hate that about the story.

BB whenever I have another moment to spare; cheerio!

It's kind of a deconstruction of the Young and in Charge trope, IMO. The House leaders are only 18 when the war starts, and there are some implications that Rhea is also relatively young for a dragon. So it's literally just four traumatized kids doing stupid things under the pressure of their situation.

Granted, said kids do a great job after taking over Fodlan.

So not really a deconstruction is it?

Would that be a reconstruction?

Decon-Recon Switch?

I think it's more just playing the trope straight. It's similar to the second game/echoes. The game has two young kids/teenagers who get swept up in independent adventures they were not fully prepared for and have a falling out in the middle of the game because they can't communicate their ideas properly. Then, they end up defeating a dragon, uniting the nations, and leading it into an age of prosperity.

I've said before the fact that the Black Eagles act exactly like well-meaning college twentysomethings given way too much power is one of the reasons I love them, down to Edelgard giving in to her inner chuuni when naming the team.

I can't help but call bullcrap on this. I love the story, and the fact that it happens because of reasonable failings of the people in charge is what makes it compelling and tragic.

(Which is why I think TWSITD are so lame and unnecessary.)

And like, everyone seems to think the plot could be solved by one conversation. But what would it look like?

"Dragons shouldn't be calling themselves divine and lording over humans. Go away." -Edelgard

"No." -Rhea

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I wouldn’t call Three Houses a deconstruction of anything, in all honesty. I don’t think it actually delves too deeply into any topics to really examine their inner workings, and it doesn’t exactly ask any really hard-hitting questions.

Edited by dragonfire5000 on Mar 21st 2024 at 9:11:28 AM

At the very least, Three Houses deconstructs common character archetypes from the series, with a few lucky ones even getting the reconstruction treatment depending on some factors exclusive to some routes.

Ya'll are missing it. The deconstruction, I feel, is aimed squarely at Fire Emblem itself and not storytelling as a whole.

"Heroic Blood" being a thing is just seen as a net positive throughout the series, to the point the fans have made ceaseless jokes about Awakening being an eugenics simulator. Fodlan is a world that deeply believes in how important the concept is, and it's a shithole.

The "Divine Dragon" as a great guiding hand throughout the series who is a font of wisdom. The Naga stand-ins for Fodlan are Seiros and Sothis, both of whom are actually immature and dangerous despite draping themselves in finery.

And the Protagonist-Centered Morality that the series has mostly indulged in, where the player teams are full of Incorruptible Pure Pureness to levels of borderline parody, falls apart when you have four different competing routes.

I would say that it’s true that this issue can’t be solved by one discussion…

As long as Sothis never talks to Rhea.

The former is the reason why the latter would never give up power. Because she’s convinced mommy can solve everything. We know they apparently talk offscreen somehow in later arcs and that pushed Rhea to change.

If that had happened sooner, Rhea might have been more willing to step down.

Now that’s things on Rhea’s side. Edelgard does need to see the Naebateans as the victims they are rather than the evil non-humans secretly controlling humanity. Her learning the truth of what happened in the past won’t stop her war, but it might make her more willing to see that she doesn’t need to treat Rhea as an enemy to be crushed.

Then add in beating up some moles Nazis, and maybe things go a bit better.

But this requires Sothis actually communicating with Rhea, which doesn’t happen in game due to lack of memories.

Without that, there’s no chance of anything but violence.

x5

I'm think more along the lines of:

Edelgard: I don't want you in charge of the church

Rhea: I don't want to be the head of the church

Edelgard: You've been...wait really?

Rhea: I hate this position! I never wanted this! I have been wearing this stupid and isolating mask for way to long. I just wanted to stop people from killing my family and snorting their remains for power. Ever since I killed Nemesis I've basically been winging it for like a couple of centuries.

Edelgard: Yeah, I know the feeling. I'll I've wanted is to basically be normal but after what happened with the Slithers I've sort of developed this weird savior complex. Don't get me wrong, I do want to make it a better place it's just tied up in a lot of messed up stuff. I've got issues.

Rhea: I hear yeah. Seeing my mother basically go into a coma, then get killed, then get her body turned into a sword really did a number on my head.

Edelgard: Yeah, all the stuff with my siblings kind of left me an emotional wreck too. I think we both might have some serious survivors guilt. I think we got off on the wrong foot hear. Listen, why don't I find a way to guarantee that you people won't be killed in the empire.

Rhea: If you do that, then I can step down and not have to deal with this bull anymore.

Edelgard: So just leave Byleth in charge?

Rhea: Yeah, that works for me.

Byleth: ...

Edited by Freshwater on Mar 21st 2024 at 9:19:39 AM

I mean Crimson Flower is pretty notable in being the one route where Byleth isn't in a position of power y'now.

x4 The only way Rhea can talk to Sothis is through:

1. Experiencing AND surviving a near death experience.

2. Having Sothis either take over Byleth's body, or use them as her mouthpiece.

And the latter is super complicated given Rhea's shenanigans and selective silence gives Sothis multiple reasons to keep herself hidden.

When it comes to Edelgard though, I honestly think that's a lost cause mainly because both women are too broken as people to risk placing trust in who is pretty much their arch-enemy.

x3 It's why I chime in on the idea the game deconstructs common archetypes than the franchise in itself (it needed to do it a bit more to get there IMO).

Edited by Blackress on Mar 21st 2024 at 9:25:51 AM

3x

The thing is most of those things are either unbuilt tropes or already played with in FE.

In awakening, the eugenics aspect in story is played for horror. Validar explaining that the Grimleal spent generations creating the perfect vessel is treated as a sign of their depravity and lack of empathy. And Robin going against their eugenics program is considered a good thing. We also have cases where the main characters have no noble bloodline like Ike. At best he's the son of an ex-minor noble with nothing else but the shirt on his back and a good sword. In fact, the character with an actual heroic heritage Sanaki ends up giving her ancestors weapons to him.

Several "divine" creatures end up being a problem or villain. Mila for example made Sofia too weak to defend themselves while also giving in to her own hedonism. Her defeat while problematic, because it signals Rudolph's conquest, was considered a net positive for Valencia. Meanwhile, the divine goddess Ashera ends up trying to end the world and needs to be put down. Bonus points because it's the goddess of "evil" and chaos who helps save it.

And regarding Protagonist centered morality. That was already heavily deconstructed in FE 4 with Sigurd's conquests. It also comes back again in 10 by showing that each side has it's own reason for fighting and everyone is willing to use whatever tricks they need in order to win.

I would also add that even Edelgard isn't really that unique for FE. Walhart was already a playable well intentioned extremist red emperor who wanted to create a world of men, works with the main villains, and carries an axe.

Edited by Freshwater on Mar 21st 2024 at 9:35:14 AM

It feels like the game is just trying to tell us that there is no correct path and that to achieve your goals you kinda have to delude yourself into thinking you're right. I think that's why there isn't a canon path or whatever. From a meta perspective, the canon route is whichever one the player thinks is correct.

Let's all remember that Deconstruction ≠ Darker and Edgier.

Edited by VampireBuddha on Mar 21st 2024 at 6:20:02 PM

What? Was that brought up or are you just saying random things?

Another thing to go through for a hypothetical Golden Ending is to make sure Dimitri doesn't end up getting himself killed in battle before he starts moving past his issues.

At this point, the one general belief I have with bringing a Golden Ending is to mess with the past, but we'd need a mean of long-distance time travel & a mean to get BACK to the present without taking The Slow Path.

Byleth mental time travels to his start as the Ashen Demon and cuts an early swathe through the mole people to rescue Edelgard, who sees their intervention as proof of Sothis's mercy. She goes to ground in Abyss and the war never starts because Rhea goes on a mole hunt with dragon breath.

The end.

Edited by Watashiwa on Mar 21st 2024 at 10:20:54 AM

The narrative doesn't support the idea that you have to delude yourself into thinking that your way is the best/only way. It aims for "Good people with positive intentions can end up on opposite sides due to irreconcilable differences" but ends up saying "Always do what you personally think is right, regardless of consequences, and everything will work out for the best in the end". Which is a horrible, toxic idea that is unfortunately common in so much media. We imagine that only good people holding good but unpopular ideas need to stand firm in the face of opposition, but it's true of every unpopular idea. This is the same idea that motivated Ted Kaczynski.

The Fódlan games also gesture towards a lot of big ideas, but don't actually delve into them or explore their consequences.

Take religion. We are told the Church of Seiros is incredibly widespread and influential, and we see that there are big, impressive buildings that exist for the purpose of religious services... yet we never see any religious service. We get to explore Garreg Mach Cathedral every week, yet the most religious observance we get is one character praying by themselves. We never actually see how religion is observed by communities or large groups.

This matches up with how religion is viewed today. Outside of Muslim theocracies (and India to an extent), religion tends to be seen as a personal matter, almost as a hobby - it's what some people do for an hour or two on weekends, and comes with a selection of annual holidays and observances ¹ But the Church of Seiros doesn't even really have holidays. There are Saints' Days, but all we get of those is choir services, with no unique celebrations or fun things to do, all to the point that non-Christians think nothing of celebrating Christmas and Easter. Fódlan appears to be much the same way - the narrative shows people getting along with their lives, praying privately, and as seen in Edelgard and Manuela's support, deriving personal inner strength from it. And one of Edelgard's big reforms is to... change society... so that religion... is a personal matter.

You know, actually grappling with how people relate to religion could have made for a more interesting, or at least more coherent, story. Consider the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK, for ارتی کرێکارانی کوردستان). Unusually for a nationalist terrorist group, the PKK's central tenets include secularism and feminism. Indeed, they were historically more aggressively secular than Atatürk in Türkiye, or what is going on in France right now (if the French controversies are indeed about secularism and not just Islamophobia). In the 1980s, the PKK attempted to establish an independent Kurdish nation in southeast Türkiye. To their surprise, they found that very few Kurds were willing to join them. This is partly because most Kurds don't like terrorists at all, but a big part of it is because the majority of Kurds are observant Muslims who aren't willing to abandon their faith or subordinate it to the state.

This tension between religious values and secular ideals could make for an alternative versions of Silver Snow and Crimson Flower. The game would appear to be building up to Edelgard's campaign of conquest... but then at the coronation, Ludwig von Aegir actually puts up a fight. Unlike in Three Hopes, Aegir's opposition to Edelgard is actually somewhat successful; he gains the support of Varley and Vestra, denounces Edelgard, and whips up religious opposition to Edelgard's policy of secularism. This gains him the support of the Church of Seiros and Adrestia is plunged into civil war between Edelgard and Aegir's forces. Ironically, while Edelgard wants to end hereditary privilege, the greatest part of her support comes from the elites who would quite like the fetters of religious obligation to be removes, while Aegir has more support from the commoners, who actually believe in their religion and don't want Edelgard to take it away. If the player chose the Black Eagles, they get to choose which side to align with.

Meanwhile, outside Adrestia, Dimitri ultimately intervenes on Aegir's side. While he would personally prefer to assist Edelgard given their history, he sees that the majority of Adrestia's population opposes her, and most of his own subjects are sympathetic to Aegir's side and are observant Seirosites; a monarch, in Dimitri's view, has a duty to their people. But Dimitri also faces trouble at home, as Edelgard makes a deal with the Duscurans to restore Duscuran sovereignty if they oppose the Faerghusan war machine (hat tip to Red Hunter for suggesting that idea at some point in the past). Conversely, Edelgard could agree to relinquish dominion over Brigid in exchange for assistance in the war and for Brigid to abolish hereditary monarchy afterwards (because this Edelgard is consistent); Dimitri might try to gain Brigidan aid by offering to free them from their oppressors and not attempt to impose his own ideas on Brigid. As such, Petra would be recruitable in Part II Azure Moon.

At the same time, Claude manages to persuade the Alliance lords to intervene on Edelgard's side, hoping to nab the Duchies of Hrym and Aegir for Leicester. He would demonstrate his mastery of tactics by luring Aegir's forces into crossing the Great Bridge of Myrddin, thus giving Leicester a pretext to enter the war while winning his first battle on favourable territory with the sudden assistance of the Almyran navy. And thus we get Claude and Edelgard on the same side, without any massive contrivances.

And, of course, somebody will point out how ironic it is that Adrestia has become the field of a proxy war between its own breakway regions.

OK, I got a bit sidetracked there, but I also want to talk about nobility and arranged marriage. The writers do not understand nobility. And I don't mean that as as an insult, I mean it as a simple statement of fact. House Vestra is stated to be a house without any lands, which is not how nobility works. Ownership of land ² Or at least a historical claim to land ownership; Greece and Romania are republics, but there are men alive today who claim to totally be those countries' rightful kings because they are descended from the last actual kings is necessary to claim nobility (but not sufficient; even in ancient times, there were peasant freeholders not beholden to any nobles).

But let's set that aside and look at marriage. We are told that arranged marriage is standard practice among the nobility, and everybody acts like it's so unfair you guys. But the only characters who actually considers the political impact of their marriages are Petra and Lorenz, and Petra is one of the gaijin.

Sylvain simply doesn't give a fuck (in any sense of the word). Bernadetta freaks out about it the way she freaks out about everything, but again, there is no mention of the political impact of who she marries.

Ingrid talks about marriage, but for her, it's just about money, not necessarily noble status; she can even marry Raphael, and on Azure Moon, and abandon her obligations to be a knight with him. Indeed, Ingrid mostly thinks of an arranged marriage as an obstacle to her becoming a knight. She was engaged to Glenn Fraldarius before the Tragedy of Duscur, but let's consider that. If that was primarily a political marriage, one would expect that she would have been betrothed to Felix at some point in the two years since. But she hasn't and there is nary a mention of either Rodrigue or Matthias trying to arrange it. As such, it looks like her betrothal to Glenn was primarily for love, with Matthias approving because it would also bring Fraldarius wealth to Galatea. Most likely, Matthias and Glenn noticed that their children got along well, and one or the other suggested a marriage, which everyone else present thought was a good idea. So not a truly political marriage, then.

Indeed, throughout both games, there's no mention anywhere of anybody choosing a side because of who they're related to. The noble houses come across as entirely self-contained, with no marriage or ancestral links presented; the most we get is that Claude and Ingrid might share an ancestor, but that has no impact at all on the narrative.

But the biggest issue here, which really shows how the writers didn't actually think through how their world's social systems actually work, comes from House Hresvelg. This is something I've brought up before, so to recap: a plot point lost in the translation is that the emperor of Adrestia routinely takes a bunch of concubines, and the children of the concubines had the same inheritance rights as the children of the emperor's spouse. Ionius IX tried to change that, and this was so incredibly unpopular that the six Great Houses of the empire united to wage a civil war against him. While we don't know how long that system was in place, such a reaction indicates that this had been the status quo for a long time. Despite this, the story still goes with Single Line of Descent, which simply doesn't make sense in this situation.

When Edelgard is defeated, Ferdinand states that when she took power, there were no other legal heirs. The Registry of Imperial Nobles states that bad stuff has been happening to House Hresvelg recently, putting the future of the lineage in doubt.

Except this is only possible if the Hresvelgs are even more inbred than the Targaryens. And they are clearly not, because if they were, then Ionius' reforms would not have been anywhere near as unpopular as they were. The emperors' extra children have to go somewhere, and the implication is that they are married off to other Adrestian nobles in order to maintain familial alliances. After a few centuries of this, every noble in Adrestia should have at least one Hresvelg ancestor, and one would expect at least a few in Faerghus and Leicester; thus, if bad stuff was affecting the entire Hresvelg bloodline, it should be hitting all of Adrestia's nobles. But that doesn't happen because the writers wanted to include intermarriages but also have Edelgard be the last of her line, even though those two plot points simply do not work together

Edited by VampireBuddha on Mar 21st 2024 at 6:21:29 PM

So in short, the English script removing mentions of Edelgard's dad wanting to remove the consort kin is a blessing in disguise?

The write up is fascinating, but a part of me doubts it could've happened simply because the Slitherers' influence feels like something that was more or less mandated into the setting (which might as well be the case, given KT more or less took over what IS originally wrote for the game). Which isn't a bad thing at face value, but would potentially make an ever bigger confusing political mess if they're thrown into the mix.