Archived Discussion VideoGame / ValkyriaChronicles

• Designated Evil: Every aspect of how Faldio shooting Alicia is handled would have you believe that it was a crime on par with murdering helpless puppies for sport instead of being a desperate but entirely logical act that probably saved countless Gallian lives. It cost Faldio his career, his friendship with Welkin, and his own self-respect, all for giving Alycia a non-fatal wound in the shoulder in order to activate the Valkyria powers that would render her invulnerable and save his country's entire military, and, by extension, Gallia itself. It worked perfectly, forcing an enemy retreat and stopping Selvaria in her tracks—up until then, she'd been zipping around the battlefield blowing up every Gallian force in her path without breaking a sweat, decimating whole flanks of their force. You'd think someone could have considered the extenuating circumstances involved, since literally the entire military was there to see how completely useless mundane force was against her. Sure, Welkin might have been able to come up with something else eventually, but how many more people would have died before then? Apparently, as far as the writers are concerned, all the lives that were saved don't matter because they're not in Squad Seven.
  • Ultimately, the act was deemed so heinous that it warranted Faldio becoming so guilt-stricken that he went out of his way to commit a completely needless Heroic Sacrifice to redeem himself. Of course, since part of that choice was to drag a defeated and basically helpless man to his death, it didn't come off as terribly heroic. Notably, when Welkin and Alicia realized what Faldio was doing, they didn't make any moves to stop him whatsoever, offering only very basic and stock protests until he explained why he was doing it, after which they stopped speaking completely. Apparently they thought it was perfectly okay to let Faldio redeem himself through suicide and murder. This troper found it unconvincing and highly distasteful, to say the least.
    • Danny V_El_Acme here. I'm an officer candidate for the US Army, so I think I have a little bit of knowledge on how military law works, and let me tell you something: voluntary fratricide AKA fragging(shooting and/or attempting to kill a fellow soldier) is the WORST CRIME a soldier can commit, short of treason. After the Vietnam War, not even mercy killing is exempt from this. The punishment in the US Army for fragging is death or life inprisonment, it is that serious a crime. Not only were Faldio's actions wrong, no matter what the intentions, Alicia was RISKING HER LIFE ANYWAY. If the Valkyrur powers manifest when the subject is near death, then it was just a matter of time for Alicia to manifest them anyway, he didn't have to shoot her. Also, the fact that Faldio actually shot a fellow soldier, no matter the reason, completely eliminates any moral superiority he might have had. Hell, Maximillian's people prosecuted THEIR war criminals, was Gallia going to be less accountable for theirs? The fact is, Faldio was probably gonna be executed anyway, so he might as well have died taking a tyrant with him. If anything, I'm surprised Captain Varrot actually gave Welkin a reprimand for hitting Faldio, I would have let him beat the living shit out of him.

• Family-Unfriendly Aesop (While This Troper would call it, "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down", a more specific interpration might be to the effect of, "No one can use power responsibly. It's better to be to be part of a homogenized group than to risk becoming corrupted by standing out." Seriously, almost everyone of noticeably higher rank than Welkin, on both sides of the war, has at least a brush with amorality, and most of the high-ranking Imperials are portrayed as just plain evil individuals. And that's not even getting into Alicia's Stay in the Kitchen ending in regards to her being a Valkyria...
  • Or Cordelia, for that matter. She doesn't take an active role in the game until she's revealed herself as a Darcsen.
    • The Darcsens as a whole fit the Aesop: they share a cultural identity and an ethnic phenotype, and there doesn't seem to be a bad apple in the bunch.

• Feminine Women Can Cook (Alicia. Forget being an unstoppable Bad Ass Action Girl, all she wants is to be Welkin's li'l woman.
  • Now this is friggin' unfair. Alicia always said from the beginning that it was her dream to open a bakery, and Welkin was such a great guy that he let her follow her dream to success. And Welkin himself didn't want to be a soldier, he did it out of duty to his country, so he didn't make Alicia go through anything he himself would not have done himself, the mark of a true officer and good man. All he wanted was to be a teacher and help those in the next generations be the best they can be. Kudos to him. And place yourself in Alicia's shoes: not only did Welkin stop her from sacrificing herself needlessly in an attempt to destroy the enemy(which possibly could have failed), he confessed his love for her as the main reason for doing so and actually PROPOSED to her right then and there. She would have been FUCKING CRAZY not to marry him.

  • Doesn't she own her own business? I thought being an entrepreneur was a good thing.

• Karma Houdini (Utterly subverted by Faldio. Despite the fact that his decision to shoot Alicia did have the desired effect—to prevent the total destruction of the army by Selvaria— without a single casualty, no one, including himself, seems to care about how many lives he saved by doing it.
  • It's not that he didn't care about the lives saved by his actions, rather, he felt that it was the sensible thing to do, but no rationalization could assuage the guilt of doing such a thing to his friends.
    • That doesn't explain everyone else's reaction; it's also Awesome, but Impractical to think that the brass wouldn't hear about this and congratulate Faldio for turning the tide of the war with a single, pointedly nonlethal, shot.
    • He's part of the militia, the brass wouldn't care about him.

• Stay in the Kitchen (Played literally with Alicia's ending, wherein she marries Welkin and becomes a baker)
  • Are you saying owning your own successful bakery mean being depenent on a man? What if it was the other way around? Would that still be the case?

• This Is My Story (Welkin and Alicia share the spotlight, but most of Alicia's internal character development is unavailable to the player because of Welkin's limited perspective. Her struggle with her Valkyria powers is left mostly unexplored, save for one or two lines of dialogue in Welkin's presence. She mentions being worshipped on the field, but the player never sees that, or how Alicia comes to deal with it, at least until she tries to blow herself up.
  • Especially grating is the fact that the player gets lots of scenes that Welkin has no connection to whatsoever, including of the villains' conversations between themselves, but we still don't get any significant Alicia-only development.

• Unfortunate Implications (The Darcsen race is modeled after the Jews of World War II, are consistently portrayed as blameless victims throughout the story, have no antagonists among their number, have Isara's death, draw strength from racial unity (Darcsen Bond potential) and are exonerated of their social stigma when Princess Cordelia reveals herself as one of them and explains the real truth behind the Darcsen Calamity, and almost everyone described as being anti-Darcsen either reform or is somehow punished for it. The Unfortunate Implications lie in the fact that they look Japanese... you know, those guys who sided with the Nazis.)
  • Alicia's Valkyria powers basically disappear after Welkin proposes and kisses her, and her blue flame dissolves into green motes of light that settle on the grass all around them; she never uses them in full again. Why deal with the responsible use of power, which is hard and requires careful thought and self-exploration, when you can just get married and let your husband make the important decisions?

• Character Derailment: In the game Alicia captures Welkin on suspicion of spying. She sorts things out quickly, but the scene solidifies her as gutsy, stubborn Action Girl who's in over her head. In the Anime she's Too Dumb to Live, spending an entire episode ignoring mounting evidence that Welkin is not spy, endangering her own life and those around her, and pointing her rifle at an unarmed civilian while imperial soldiers close in. Welkin goes from a slightly eccentric nerd to a full-blown Cloud Cuckoo Lander. The worst case is Susie, who goes from Technical Pacifist to pathological coward.
  • Then again, if the Anime's gonna repeat the scenes from the game exactly, it'd be hard not to make it too boring. And not to mention it won't be as interesting for those who knows the game's story from head to toe. Besides, this troper feels that the Anime itself, despite the changes, is good enough either as a standalone entry in the franchise or as a TV series. One more thing: Character Derailment is for when a character deviates from its previous usual behaviour in the same story/continuity; the Anime and the Game are, seemingly, taking two somewhat-parallel paths with their own twists on the characters.
    • So its Adaptation Decay then? It is true that the anime had to fill up more time, but instead, they completely butchered the characters for the worse. Turning Alicia from acting like a well adjusted adult, she becomes a Cliché Storm anime high school girl, complete with a Slap-Slap-Kiss relationship for Welkin. Best example would be in chapter 3 of the game, and episode 3 of the anime, where in the game, Alicia is actually happy to be on Welkin squad, while in the anime, she starts yelling really loud about how horrible it is. In front of her commanding officer, all of them. Anyone who actually enjoyed the game, will be in such great pain as to how they managed to completely screw up. How do you kill Vyse?!?!? Arguable, the series becomes less entertaining since everyone acts like a Flanderization version of themselves.

• (Vezirov) Wait, does that mean you've only been pulling negative trope entries? The Unfortunate Implications entry and all entries describing the negative aspects of Faldio's portrayal have been erased, and there wasn't any discussion on most of those. (Surely you could have left ONE on there?) The Chickification one even specifically said averted at the beginning, when it was still up. Bad form. Valkyria Chronicles isn't perfect, and there's nowhere on tvtropes that requires all trope examples to be positive ones. At the very least, you could have moved the examples you don't agree with here, instead of just taking it upon yourself to delete them.

• I didn't pull all the negative ones, but certain ones appeared to be less of an actual entry and more of just personal ranting that wasn't necessarily a proper example - a lot of the ones complaining about the game were spammed by the same anonymous IP. I didn't touch Chickification. I'll bring them all back to this page is this is seriously an issue, but while negative tropes are cool, just Complaining About Shows You Dont Like isn't. I'd also like to add that Unfortunate Implications got pulled because apparently someone is completely unaware of what ethnic Jews are supposed to look like - hence why the "dark hair" is such an important ethnic marker in the Darcsen. To complain that they look Japanese is to ignore the obvious metaphor.

• Um, yes, while it is true that dark hair is typically a Jewish trait.. it is also typically a Japanese trait. Seriously, how many "ethnic Jews" have blue-black, pin-straight hair, and nigh-invisible noses? Even the Jewish members of my family think they look more Japanese! Moreover, if I recall correctly, the entry did specify that they were meant to be an Expy of Jews circa WWII, but the Unfortunate Implication was in their appearance.. I'd love to be able to quote the entry for accuracy, but obviously I can't do that. (Honestly, all the support I'd need for this one is the Darcsen Engineer, assuming I'm recalling her face right)
  • I have Jewish family too. They're clearly meant to be Jewish and I never thought they looked Japanese, at least not more than numerous other non-Darcsen dark-haired characters in the game. If they look Japanese, it's because they're being drawn in a Japanese style - and several other non-Darcsen also have Japanese appearances despite things like red or even blond hair (hell, one of the Darcsen haters has a Japanese face). Someone is seriously over-analyzing this.

Regardless, it doesn't matter who wrote those entries. The ones that weren't breaking any rules didn't deserve to be deleted just because you disagreed with them.

Rebochan: Yea, they do need to go, if they're not actually an example of the trope they're describing. Stay in the Kitchen had gathered a ridiculous amount of natter, then got deleted, then got natter again, and the identical entry for this game on that trope's page was still more natter arguing that it was't valid. If a trope is gathering that much in the way of JustifyingEdits, it's really not an example of this, it's one person's vendetta. The Faldio stuff I pulled because they read along the same way - one person posting their personal rants, then getting more JustifyingEdits about whether they were valid. When something gathers that much natter, and I can actually gather enough context either from having played the game or just reading the natter, it's generally easy to tell if the entry was valid and the complainers were just upset, or whether the entry was bunk and the complainers didn't understand how to edit the Wiki.

• Unfortunate Implications:

First of all, just because you don't see it, it doesn't mean it can't be seen at all. We have the phrase "Your Mileage May Vary" for just this sort of thing; if you disagree, use it. To me, and evidently to several others, the Darcsen are portrayed as and characterized as WWII-era Jews, but they look, whether intentional or otherwise, more Japanese than Jewish. If you think it's an over-analysis, that's fine, but your opinion is not the be-all-and-end-all of tvtropes.org.

• Neither is yours. Who are the several others? If anything, the only unfortunate implication is that because the game uses an anime style, the traditionally Jewish ethnic appearance can appear more Japanese. Which might be worth including but only in the sense that some people feel that way, but doesn't change the numerous non-Darcsen characters that still look Japanese because of the art style.
  • The people I live and played the game with, as well as whoever added that particular detail to the Unfortunate Implications trope page, and/or the Unfortunate Implications entry on the VC page itself, since it wasn't me. And it doesn't matter WHY they look that way, only that they do (And personally, I didn't see any characters who struck me as Asian-looking except the Darcsen.)

• Simple. They look Japanese because the artists are from Japan and they go with the Japanese art style.

As to the Cooldown Hug part. There's no explanation as to why the iconic Blue Flame of the Valkyria turns green and explodes into motes of light, except Welkin's love. With green being closely associated with greenery and nature, that seems obvious enough, and she never uses the Blue Flame form again after that point.

Welkin basically calms an overly-emotional, suicidal Alicia down with a vow, a ring, and a kiss, and all of her problems instantly disappear, along with her power. All Alicia needed was for her power and status to be removed, and to be linked to Welkin, to be happy and stable.

Yes, that is a simplified interpretation, and yes, it is not the one the writers intended, but that is what Unfortunate Implication means — "Just because a work has Unfortunate Implications does not mean the author was thinking of it that way."

• I didn't take out the Cooldown Hug, so I'm not sure why you're arguing over it. As for the Unfortunate Implications, you can't just put up the Unfortunate Implications that you personally think up and just handwave with "Your Mileage May Vary". I also point out that if you think all there was to that scene was "Man stops woman from thinking for self", you completely missed the point, namely that the alternative was Alicia getting killed, plus entire Aesop about the ultimately destructive nature of the Valkyria powers (how'd they work for Selvaria anyway?) It's about trying to make Alicia not throw her life away, and Welkin says that because he loves her. I daresay if the roles had been switched, had Welkin been the one making the Senseless Sacrifice and Alicia talking him down with the same words, nobody would have batted an eye and would have immediately accepted the point of the scene. It's the idea that because Alicia is female and is talked down because someone loves her, that she is not a real woman anymore and thus "all her problems are solved by a man" (and not, say, by DYING NEEDLESSLY). Alicia has been in love with Welkin since she met him, and well before she was a Valkyria, she was baking for him. Had she never had to go to war and become a Valkyria, her life would have turned out the same way. To suggest that because she has special powers means she must love having them and must love fighting, even when that is clearly against her own characterization, has Unfortunate Implications but not from the perspective of the game, but from the perspective of the people arguing that everything Alicia does can be reduced to mere details entirely because she can be talked out of a Senseless Sacrifice by the person she loves openly reciprocating her feelings. Being free of the intensely destructive Valkyria powers (that, you know, require she be in a state of undeath already), is in fact a good thing. The game also shows the tragedy of pointlessly throwing your life away for someone who doesn't reciprocate your emotions via Selvaria using her powers to the point of her own destruction, so it should be obvious that "Having a man makes you a real person!" is not part of the game.
  • I was referring to the part of the entry that talked about the scene OF the Cooldown Hug, not the Cooldown Hug entry itself; sorry if I was unclear. In any case, I would agree, save for one detail: Weklin only uses that as a lead-in to his love confession. All he talks about is protecting her and loving her and wanting to marry her; combine this with her previous statement of "I am Valkyria, not a woman", and the implication is made. If he had said anything else, or if she had any signs of lingering conflict over it, we wouldn't be having this discussion and there wouldn't be any problem. But no, the writers focused specifically on Welkin's love being the solution to Alicia's very real and very valid emotional turmoil— and it's never a problem again. Proposal made, problem solved, end of story.

and later:

(Translation: It's not a real victory if YOU are the one who saves the country, because you're a Valkyria, and all Valkyria powers are evil and there is no responsible use for them. This ties into the Family-Unfriendly Aesop entry, which I'll get to shortly.)

Right up until this point, I thought everything in the scene was mostly okay, if sort of eye-rollingly dull. Alicia's problem is valid, and Welkin's response is reasonable and heartfelt.

THIS is where the whole thing goes south:

This changes the meaning of everything that came before it. It becomes "I am a man and thus strong, and you are a woman and thus weak, and so I must protect you." Neither one of them acknowledges that even WITHOUT her powers, she is definitely the stronger of the two. And even that wouldn't be so bad if it was made to sound less like a standard, cliche, anime love confession and more like "Hey, I'll catch you if you fall" or something to that effect, "I'll support you" or something— but no, it's "I'll protect you". As though Alicia, without her Valkyria powers, is incapable of doing so herself, and moreover, that he, being her squad leader, isn't putting her in harm's way every time she goes into battle. For me, it makes him sound insincere and more clueless about his situation than he actually is, just to staple traditional gender roles onto them both at the last minute. Looking back on it, this may be a case of Values Dissonance more than Unfortunate Implication.

• I'm sorry, but the meaning of that entire scene sailed right over your head. You simply decided that Alicia ceased to be a character because someone else loves her? There's absolutely nothing in Welkin's confession that changes the meaning - if anything, it reinforces it. The alternative is Alicia doing everything by herself - instead, it's Welkin promising to help her. Seriously, I repeat - the Unfortunate Implication is not in the scene, it is with you for implying that another person promising to protect the person they love automatically strips the other person of their humanity and characterization. Furthermore, you're contradicting yourself - you imply that Welkin is stripping her of any power, then implying he is harming her by putting her on the battlefield. Well, which is it? Is Alicia too weak by Welkin's promise of caring about her to defend herself, or is Welkin an asshole for expecting that she can still be a valuable soldier, she just doesn't have to relinquish her humanity and destroy herself? If anything, Welkin commanding her is a sign of his protection.
  • As a soldier and member of the National Guard(which for all purposes IS the Militia as the game defines it: citizens volunteering for military service), I can tell you that affection for fellow soldiers is one of the driving forces behind many a military operation's success. True soldiers care for each other and PROTECT THEMSELVES. Welkin said that he'd protect Alicia, and that was a source of STRENGTH for her. But in no way did Welkin imply that Alicia could NOT RETURN THE FAVOR. Knowing that Welkin cared for her and wanted to protect her gave Alicia the strength to protect him back. And if you watch the game's ending, you can see how well that tuned out :) And as for the whole discussion about the Cooldown Hug, this is Truth in Television. You have no idea how many soldiers I've seen in pits of despair being brought back by a fellow soldier who gives him a hug and tells him things will be alright. A hug is a POWERFUL gesture. It is a very intimate physical contact, with the express purpose of comforting. The fact that personal space is eliminated gives the signal that hey, I'm here with you, you're not alone. It really pisses me off how people imply that Welkin and Alicia's relationship was forced in some way. Both Welkin and Alicia started out as friends, and then became comrades in a long and painful war. They shared joy and tragedy together, but tried to always keep it professional and not let their feelings get in the way of their mission. You're telling me that after sharing so much, going through the friggin' HELL of war, seeing friends die, that their relationship was FORCED? Are you SHITTING me?? I haven't seen such a believable relationship between characters in an RPG since Justin and Feena in the original [[Grandia]], THAT'S how big of a deal it is with me. I have rarely, if EVER, invested so much emotional involvement with video game characters as much as these two. Only Solid Snake comes close, and what do you know, THAT was a war game too!

For me personally, this ruined any semblance of believability for their romance (not that I thought there was much to begin with). The writers completely removed any influence of the setting or events of the game for Welkin to deliver one of the most overused lines in all of anime/JRPG history in a love scene. The only thing worse is how Alicia is instantly cured of all her issues, and never talks about it again. Resolved with a kiss. Done. Alicia's growth as a character stops as soon as she resolves her relationship with Welkin.

• What more growth does she need? Her conflict was over whether she could still be a human and maintain her human soul and feelings. Welkin treating her like a human and loving her for herself is just enough to break her out of malaise. Again, I despise the implication that accepting the love of another man makes Alicia less of a person simply because it is the love of a man she was already in love with.

And I repeat: Unfortunate Implications have nothing to do with the writer's intent of the game. Unfortunate Implications are things that the audience perceives about the work, and the fact that the game obviously did not INTEND to send that message does not change that at least PART of the game's audience did see it that way.

• And if you're the only one that feels that way? Most of the audience does not see it that way.

And, for what it's worth, I am equally disgusted by similar scenes where the genders are reversed. I think the concept of the Cooldown Hug used to avert needless suicide attacks is among the most revolting tropes in existence, no matter whose fault it is.

• That's entirely subjective, though. I think it was done well here because it reinforced a long-running theme. And to be honest, I've seen it happen in real life. Sometimes people really do shut up enough that they need to be reminded that someone is so invested in their welfare because they love them (though not always romance love). I really only get annoyed when the logical appeal is skipped, but in this scene, the appeal to logic came first, before the appeal to emotion.

• Apparently its wrong for a woman to have someone who loves her, protect her. This reminds me of my civil rights class, where some of the women in there where so determined, or angry, that they would consider any help of the male gender as an attack on them of being a lesser person. Much like the similar cases of racism in left 4 dead 2.

• Designated Evil:

Wordy? Yes. Vitriolic? Sure. Incorrect? Absolutely not.

Faldio saves Gallia. He does it by shooting Alicia, but he still does it. Had he not done it, Selvaria would have simply finished off the military and the militia, and that would have been the end of Gallia. They had nothing else that could stop her.

No one, at any point, considers this from Faldio's standpoint, save for one, short, still-in-support-of-Welkin line from Varrot. He spends the rest of the game in prison agonizing over his guilt. No one ever asks, "Well, what ELSE were we going to do?" No one ever brings up the idea that Alicia has always been a fast healer and never suffered long-term damage from the shot. As far as I remember, Alicia never even has anything to say about it for herself; everyone else gets all up in arms over it, but Alicia, wholly intact, is never even asked how she feels about it, or what she thinks should be done. The only thing that matters is that Faldio shot his best friend's girl, and a fellow militiawoman. Worse than that, nobody seems to have a problem with Faldio taking away Alicia's choice in the matter, just the actual attack, and it's been awhile since I played it, but I don't remember anyone asking Faldio, "Why didn't you tell anyone this before you decided to shoot Alicia?"

And then, at the end, when Faldio reappears, he stops Maximillian's Final Flame and— when all previous canon suggests that the proper thing to do with an enemy commander is to capture him, Faldio commits murder/suicide by throwing himself and Maximillian off the Marmotah. No one really tries to stop him, or tell him that there are other ways to atone for what he did. He dies and is never so much as mentioned again. He is not mourned, even by his best friend.

This is his reward for saving Gallia twice.

Specifically, Designated Evil is about someone being forced into a situation where all the possible solutions are bad ones, and being designated evil because of it. Faldio fits the trope down to the last detail.

All the other Faldio-related tropes (apart from the obvious ones, Redemption Equals Death and such) are basically all aiming for this one, and though I could see it being shortened, there was absolutely no reason to remove it.

• I thought Faldio was covered by I Did What I Had to Do. Beyond that, there's still the matter that he shot Alicia and forced her to activate powers against her will...plus if he'd been wrong, he'd have killed her for nothing. Then there's the nature of the rather Machiavellian mentality behind it ("It's okay to shoot her, she'll get magic powers and make it all better!"). The Valkyria powers themselves are also not a good thing, and I don't get why Alicia having them is supposed to be such a good thing just because they're useful when just having them is such a strain on the user. Forcing her to awaken hurt her. His actions may have saved Gallia after all, but that doesn't make them morally right, and even one of the original examples pointed out that there may have been other solutions, though harder, and possibly with more casualties...but that doesn't mean they don't exist. The closing scenes of the game follow this mentality as well. Just because a lot of the solutions are bad ones doesn't mean taking the most morally questionable one is okay.
  • I would classify I Did What I Had to Do as being one of the obvious ones. If you read the Designated Evil trope, everything Faldio does falls in line with the details of the trope itself. Just because it also fits IDWIHTD doesn't change that. The point of the trope is that what Faldio did isn't morally justified— but he didn't see himself as having any other option, and NOT doing it— at least in his own mind— meant condemning Gallia's troops to certain death. He made his choice; that's I Did What I Had to Do. The entire world punished him disproportionately for it, without considering his perspective or the dire situation; that's Designated Evil.

(Also, we're arguing about the legitimacy of TROPES, not the events of the game itself. Can we stay on topic, please?)

• The events of the game can affect the legitimacy of a trope. I Did What I Had to Do isn't affected at all by the mitigating circumstances, so it's obvious. Designated Evil requires context.

• Why was Family-Unfriendly Aesop removed? There's no arguing or conversation here, all three of the items in this one are all IN SUPPORT of it being true in various instances. Did you just remove it because you didn't see it that way, or because it had three tiers?
  • Two of those tiers were completely off-topic of the example and were not attempting to "support" it. The main example doesn't seem to support it's own conclusion with examples, and then of course there's the further complaints that Alicia's baking and marrying stops her from being a real woman.
    • Um... yes, they were, if you read them. Let me explain:

(While This Troper would call it, "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down", a more specific interpration might be to the effect of, "No one can use power responsibly. It's better to be to be part of a homogenized group than to risk becoming corrupted by standing out." Seriously, almost everyone of noticeably higher rank than Welkin, on both sides of the war, has at least a brush with amorality, and most of the high-ranking Imperials are portrayed as just plain evil individuals. And that's not even getting into Alicia's Stay In The Kitchen ending in regards to her being a Valkyria...)

Damon is portrayed as grubbingly ambitious, unsympathetic, and callous to the problems of the militia. Corrupt with power, and abuses it by taking credit for the capture of Selvaria while sending the militia on Suicide Missions all the time. He gets a Karmic Death. Varrot has a brush with corruption/amorality in her side chapter where she tries to order the death of the Imperial general who killed her lover. She is talked out of it, but it still happens; amorality due to her command position over the militia— she attempts to use her rank to kill someone she has a personal vendetta against. Only her unity with Squad 7 saves her from that corruption.

• Actually, that goes against the supposed "moral". The rest of the game Varrot never abuses her power and at that moment, it is not just an abuse of power question, but a question of whether she would let her emotions cause her to do it.

Faldio shoots Alicia. He's supposedly Welkin's equal, rank-wise, but for the first half of the game, he's treated as being more experienced and somewhat aloof, and even though he had his reasons for doing so, he is treated as being instantly and totally corrupted as soon as he pulls that trigger.

• That's a hell of a stretch - he is Welkin's equal and his only "power" is knowing when to shoot someone. If he had command or superpowers, this might work.

Prime Minister Borg is totally corrupt and uses his position as a foothold to rule Gallia, and he dies for it. Jaegar is portrayed as somewhat sympathetic, but is doing something he knows is morally wrong to achieve a specific end; specifically, he becomes amoral specifically to GAIN his position. Gregor... well, if I have to explain how Gregor is corrupt, I probably ought to just give up now; ditto Maximillian, who abuses his power by trying to take over the world. The major Imperials don't even wear the same uniforms. At least Gallia, army and militia both, has that going for them (minor customizations aside).

• You'd still have to really stretch this to come away with the message of "Nobody uses power responsibly and everyone in power is corrupt." And what about the numerous characters in authority that are not corrupt? Cordelia uses her power for good. The moral here is clearly "If you have power, use it responsibly." None of those examples supports the idea of non-individuality. If anything, they go against it - every one of those was about maintaining morals and in the case of Alicia's powers, about maintaining your dreams and personality no matter what.

Meanwhile, the tight-knit major players of Squad 7 (That is, the main four, Welkin, Largo, Alicia, and Rosie, since the others don't get cutscenes or anything) never do anything but the morally right thing (Rosie has her Jerkass early portrayal but gets better, through developing a bond with Isara), maintain their humble beginnings as simple militamen and women with no desire for rank or personal power, and their closeness of unity is the source of their true strength, to the point where they throw away their biggest trump card (Alicia's Valkyria powers) to force themselves to depend on it. And they win every time.

• That doesn't reinforce the Family-Unfriendly Aesop at all. And they do make bad decisions. You can't handwave things like Largo and Rosie refusing to obey orders or Rosie's continual bad treatment of Isara just because they wouldn't fit the conclusion you want to make.

The Stay in the Kitchen ending comment was unnecessary, but Alicia DOES still fit the trope— she abandons her power and status as a Valkyria— someone who is worshipped in Gallia— because being a Valkyria can only corrupt her. She is never faced with the idea that she could be a good Valkyria, or that she could learn to properly control her powers, or help the public understand what Valkyria really are; she has to put them aside completely to avoid being corrupt.

• Stay in the Kitchen is specifically referring to a scene where the male lead tells the female to stay behind because she is a woman. Welkin tells Alicia to not kill herself, but does not chase her off the battlefield or treat her as a weak woman. He simply tells her to not kill herself or use a power that hurts her. He's still perfectly fine with her grabbing a gun and fighting just like everyone else in his unit.

Or Cordelia, for that matter. She doesn't take an active role in the game until she's revealed herself as a Darcsen.

Cordelia isn't corrupt, but she doesn't use her power responsibly. She squanders it by giving it over to her Prime Minister, who is totally corrupt. But then she reveals herself as a Darcsen— a homogenized group— and becomes an active, useful force in the game, and even joins Squad 7 on the battlefield. I don't know how you thought that this doesn't fit the Family-Unfriendly Aesop described.

• She actually starts becoming more assertive before that as soon as someone plants the idea in her head that status quo is not a good thing. The Aesop is "Power is bad and nobody can use it responsibly". Cordelia is the exact opposite - "Power is good when used responsibly". Also, her entire plot is about not suppressing her true personality and supporting status quo, but by being the nail that sticks up and facing her kingdom as her true self.

The Darcsens as a whole fit the Aesop: they share a cultural identity and an ethnic phenotype, and there doesn't seem to be a bad apple in the bunch.

I don't know how to clarify this further. They act the same, they look the same, and they're the only group in the game that has absolutely no negatively portrayed characters in it. At least as far as I know, anyway, I admit I didn't use many of the Darcsen squad members when I played it.

• It still doesn't affect the trope in the slightest. Unless "Racism is bad, m'kay?" is Family-Unfriendly Aesop material? Positive Discrimination would be a good fit for that though - the Darcsens never seem to do any wrong either.

• Feminine Women Can Cook

Alicia can cook. All she wants to be is Welkin's wife and a baker, she's not interested in being a Valkyria or fighting. Derisively worded, but not untrue. Another situation of rewriting being a better idea that deletion.

• The point of that trope is that either Yamato Nadeshiko types must cook, or a tomboy can't. Alicia is neither a Yamato Nadeshiko, nor a tomboy that can't cook - she's an Action Girl, and she cooks. If anything, the game subverts the trope by giving her a traditionally feminine wish and still placing her in the role of a capable soldier, something that trope doesn't cover.
  • Um, that isn't exactly true. The point of that trope is Exactly What It Says on the Tin— cooking as a symbolism for femininity.(Quote from the page: But how do you symbolize an internal trait like femininity? Easy! Use cooking ability as a substitute.) Most of the examples on that page are more about girls who, for whatever reason, can't cook. Alicia, the God-Queen of Headshots, spends most of the game doing traditionally manly things like firing rifles, throwing grenades, and killing people, and doing it all with great skill; she would appear extremely tomboyish and masculine if she weren't specifically designed with extremely feminine visual cues (her twintails, stockings-and-short-skirt, and trimmed scarf in particular) and cooking ability. Cooking is a feminine trait, and used to showcase her womanly inclinations. There's nothing wrong with that.

  • The page itself clearly points out that the trope is applied to Tomboys to prove that doing masculine things makes you unable to cook. Alicia's cooking is an important trait to her, but it's not done to make her more feminine - a lot of feminine looking women don't cook because they're too masculine. And furthermore, if her visual cues are more feminine than her cooking, this isn't an example of the trope. Her first scene in the game is still of her pointing a gun at the main character. By all standards in the trope, she should not be able to cook, let alone open her own bakery and get certification as a business owner.

You keep complaining about how people pigeonhole Alicia into the role of The Chick just because she's the female lead in a JRPG romance story, but with this one you're specifically misdirecting tropes that she does fit because you seem to think they portray her in a stereotypical light. I agree that Stay in the Kitchen doesn't fit, but Feminine Women Can Cook doesn't have the connotation that you seem to think it does.

• You may notice the page lists archetypes for how this trope is applied - feminine traditional women are good cooks, tomboys or independent career women don't cook or fail at it.

• Cooking is Feminine? Chef Ramsay would like a word with you. Also, I think a lot of people are forgetting, the game was about normal people, farmers, factory workers, singers, bartenders, bakers, who are now apart of this war. Some of Alicia's problem came from this. With the exception of the occasional Sky pirate. there isn't really much Alicia could have been without breaking that mold. Welkon wants to be a teacher, but no one says anything about that.

• This Is My Story

This one is also fairly true. She's the title character, but the player gets no window into Alicia's personal struggle except for a handful of things she says in Welkin's presence; we never see her trying to understand her powers, or experiment with them, or anyone coming to her with their concerns or prayers or any number of other things. She goes from quietly internally dealing with it with occasional consults from other characters (asking Selvaria how she deals with it) to suicidal (the Marmotah) within a few chapters. Meanwhile, the camera can't get enough of Welkin, or people talking about Welkin, and so on.

This trope is probably most readily evidenced by the fact that everyone and their mom knows that Welkin is the son of Lieutenant Gunther, army and militia alike, but the army basically has zero reaction to finding out that there's a Valkyria in the militia's ranks.

• This one's also on the cutlist for being a vague, Decoy Protagonist trope that exists entirely because one person didn't like male protagonists existing in games where they preferred the female non-leads. The trope itself has a vague idea of what a "real main character" should be, so listing it here is rather pointless. It's also a bad example of Entry Pimping. And no, Alicia isn't the title character at all, unless you ignore that there's an entire race of Valkyria and there's more than one just in the game. The story isn't about Alicia and her powers, it's about the Gallian war and is centered around how one person and his closest friends handle it. Main characters are not simply determined by who has the best powers, or hell, Orlandu should be the main character of Final Fantasy Tactics.
  • Just because you don't think the trope meets your standards, it doesn't mean the trope doesn't exist,

  • There's tropes cut for being vague duplicates of others all the time. Just because you can make a trope page doesn't make it a trope. You're supposed to run them past YKTTW specifically so you can gather examples and refine the trope so you don't get tropes that go straight to the cutlist. Hell, I didn't even nominate it for cutting, someone else did. Nobody's had any kind of defense or even anything to say about it. It's an obvious case of Entry Pimp in action.

  • and "who has the best powers" doesn't matter. Alicia and her status as a Valkyria is the driving force of most of the second half of the game, and regardless of anything else one might say about the race of the Valkyrur, Alicia is the only one whose story is treated as important— even the truth of the Darcsen Calamity gets rather forgotten in the rather pressing problems of the current war. The player is deprived of seeing Alicia's reaction to most of the major events in her life, and has to hear about it in single lines of dialogue, because the camera is focused on Welkin, even though Alicia is at least as much the heroine of the story as he is the hero. She is more important to the plot than he is, but she gets less attention from the camera, and the player misses out: that's the point of the trope. It fits.

  • No she's not more important to the plot than Welkin. Welkin's the player character, the commander of the squad, and his plot and how he experiences the events around him are how the player is able to experience the world around him. His ideals and what they mean in a war, as well as the deadliness of the war itself, are the only constants in the plot. Is Maximillian the main character of the first half when his conquest is the driving force of the plot? No, of course not. While Alicia might have been able to carry a plot on her own and that's probably a legitimate debate, as is whether she really got adequate screentime considering what the game intended her to do, the trope suggests that because Welkin is male and not a Valkyria, he is hogging spotlight from someone the troper personally feels should be the main character simply because she has more powers or they personally like her story better. That's subjective as hell - it would be like saying Tidus shouldn't be the main character of FFX because people liked Auron better. The one legitimate example is FFXII, which is duplicated by Decoy Protagonist, which explicitly covers that without the added attempt to claim women are marginalized because of a male lead character in "their" game (not to say you couldn't get that in a game with a Decoy Protagonist, but that would be a feminist example of the latter, not a complete separate trope).