Characters / Fire Emblem: Three Houses – Blue Lions

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

The Blue Lions are the house for students from the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus; their house leader is Prince Dimitri Alexandre Blaiddyd. The Kingdom is known for its martial values, which is reflected by a greater prominence of melée-oriented characters among the Lions.

In both Three Houses and Three Hopes, all members of the house join Byleth/Shez's party should they choose the Blue Lions at the start of the game. Do note this is the only way in which Dimitri and Dedue (or in Three Hopes, every member sans Ashe and Mercedes) can be recruited.

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In General

Blue Lions' Banner

"The Blue Lions walk the true path of justice."

— Dimitri introducing the Blue Lions

Tropes Associated with the Blue Lions

• Attack! Attack! Attack!: The Fatal Flaw of the Blue Lions as a whole is that, though they have some very strong individual fighters, they have no dedicated strategist. As such, they always prefer to just charge right in. This is best demonstrated at the beginning of Azure Moon, where despite the whole class knowing that Fort Merceus is the only way to enter Enbarr and even with Rodrigue's troops it would be suicide to attack in their current state, only Ingrid raises objections to their charge. This comes to bite them on the Verdant Wind/Silver Snow routes; without Rhea or Byleth to act as their strategist they stick to their plan to charge for Enbarr, which predictably results in all of Dimitri's forces being decimated.
• Badass Crew: The Blue Lions boast some very potent characters right from the start of the game. They are also a very tight-knit group, with many of them sharing a past (only Ashe lacks some kind of history with the others, and even then he gets along with them great).
• Beauty, Brains, and Brawn: The kindhearted and fashionable Mercedes is the Beauty, the studious Annette is the Brains, and the knightly Ingrid is the Brawn.
• Blue Blood: Sylvain, Ingrid, Felix and Annette hail from noble houses in the Kingdom. Mercedes was a noble in the Adestrian Empire, though once she left it, she came to live in the Kingdom as a commoner. Ashe is the adopted son of Lord Lonato, but he doesn't hold the full privileges of being nobility.
• Boring, but Practical: Most of their units are geared to do one simple thing well, such as Felix being a strong fighter, or Mercedes's focus in healing, but they tend to lack diversity in build options or interesting Combat Art and skill combinations, though exceptions (such as Dedue, Sylvain or Annette) exist.
• Broken Pedestal: On the Azure Moon route after the Time Skip, the students develop a case of this towards Dimitri. While they sympathize him with all the trauma he went through, morale is still extremely low and they have a hard time sticking by his side. It's even implied that it's Byleth, not Dimitri, who is keeping the group together. In non-Azure Moon playthroughs if recruited, with Dimitri presumably dead, some of the former students will mention their lack of faith in the Kingdom actually being able to win the war as motivation for them switching sides.
• Character Death: If they aren't recruited on the Crimson Flower path, then Felix, Ingrid, Sylvain, and Mercedes must be killed in Crimson Flower. Ingrid and Felix are commanders fought during the siege of Arianhrod, while Sylvain and Mercedes are two of the commanders fought on the Tailtean Plains. On the Verdant Wind path, all four of them can be fought and slain at the Battle of Gronder Field, though here, their deaths aren't mandatory.
• Childhood Friends: Dimitri, Sylvain, Ingrid, and Felix grew up together.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Ingrid, Dimitri, Sylvain, and Felix spent their childhood together, and Ingrid can marry any of the lads.
• Color-Coded Characters: Each character wears a specific color in different classes. Unlike the other houses, however, five characters wear the same color:
  • Ingrid/Felix/Annette/Ashe: Dark Blue
  • Dedue: Brown
  • Sylvain: Black/Dark Red
  • Mercedes: Light Grey
• Defector from Decadence: A number of the nobles from this house renounce their lineage if they are recruited into the Black Eagles and side with the Empire to become generals.
• Dysfunction Junction: Half of the class had their own issues that affected them personally. To note:
  • Dedue is mostly well-adjusted for the survivor of a massacre, but Dimitri is essentially his only reason to live, and he can walk a dark path if Dimitri is not brought emotional stability.
  • Sylvain, while friendly, has serious trust issues stemming from being seen as a Crest-bearer rather than a person.
  • Felix has issues with his father and an obsession with becoming stronger due to the loss of his brother.
  • Annette struggles with clumsiness, and issues stemming from her father abandoning her and her mother after the Tragedy of Duscur. She also feels less useful at times because of her lack of raw power compared to her classmates.
  • Averted by Ingrid, Mercedes, and Ashe, as while they have had less-than-pleasant pasts, they are overall well-adjusted.
• Early Game Hell: Inverted. The Blue Lions boast a roster of units with very obvious and easily-exploited strengths, leading to an easy early game, but the preponderance of seige weaponry and mages in their later maps and the simple development paths of their in-house units leads to the hardest late-game. The game gives them the most diverse selection of battalions to choose from to compensate.
• Fallen Hero:
  • On the Crimson Flower route, Dedue will hand out Crest Stones to random Holy Kingdom soldiers with the intent to have them transform into Demonic Beasts in an attempt to beat back the Imperial army, even doing so himself. If not recruited, Sylvain and possibly Mercedes (who arrives with reinforcements later) are complicit in their knowledge of the plan, with Sylvain even stating his approval of it for the sake of revenge when the first soldier turns.
  • When Fhirdiad burns on the Crimson Flower route and they're not recruited, Ashe and Annette, instead of saving the civilians, command the remnants of the knights, focused on killing the Black Eagle Strike Force.
  • Averted with Felix and Ingrid if they're not recruited on the Crimson Flower route, as they're killed off during Chapter 16, before these atrocities can occur.
  • To a lesser extent, this also applies to Dedue, plus an unrecruited Felix, Sylvain, Ingrid, and Mercedes on the Verdant Wind route, as they follow a crazed Dimitri into battle at Gronder Field, and will attack both Imperial and Alliance forces alike.
• Fatal Flaw: Their lack of strategy. The Blue Lions have some of the best teamwork and fighters in the game as many of them are already friends and descend from a nation that prioritizes combat. However, despite many of them being rather intelligent, none of them take up the role of a dedicated strategist or tactician, leaving the role to be taken by Byleth (Azure Moon) or Rhea (Crimson Flower). On the Verdant Wind/Silver Snow routes, their lack of strategy and following the violently insane Dimitri leads to their destruction.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: The Fighter. Their knights are well known for their skill in spears and they tend to favor offensive roles. In game, they have only two spellcasters at the start, and while Felix and Sylvain can learn magic, it's not their strong suit, with the rest being among the best offensive units in the game. All of them except Mercedes have proficiency in a melee weapon as well, and even then she has a Budding Talent in Bows.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • A minor one in this case, but in the Sauna DLC content the students from Blue Lions class heat up far quicker than students from the other houses. This is due to them being from Faerghus, the coldest region in Fódlan.
  • Being the Fighter of the Three Houses means that they have the worst selection for the Dancer Class. None of the students here can take full advantage of having a Charm-based class with sword proficiency and magic availability. Felix and Ingrid, the characters who best fit as one, can't truly capitalize on the class, fitting for two characters who have goals and dreams different from their stations.
• Gender-Equal Ensemble: Averted; the Blue Lions is the only house with an uneven gender ratio — five boys and three girls. The recruitable ones, however, play this straight — three boys and three girls.
• Hazy-Feel Turn: If they are poached to the Black Eagles and the player chooses the Crimson Flower route, this trope happens due to them turning against their homeland for the sake of Edelgard's war on the Church their kingdom stands behind, despite Rhea's now-questionable sanity along with their own personal reasons.
• A House Divided: Downplayed, but after the timeskip on Azure Moon, the students are divided between those who want to liberate Fhirdiad first and those who want to conquer Enbarr(whether out of a desire to destroy the Empire or to rescue Rhea). If Dorothea is recruited, she'll express dissatisfaction with how the Kingdom students are divided. In cut content (implicitly if certain conditions weren’t met, similar to Dedue’s potential demise), Felix and Annette could have defected to Cornelia's side midway through Azure Moon.
• I've Come Too Far:
  • If recruited on the Crimson Flower route, Ingrid and Annette end up having regrets about switching sides after the timeskip due to having to betray their families, but feel they have killed too many of their own countrymen to ever go back and their loyalty to Byleth is still stronger. In Sylvain’s case, his first piece of dialogue on the Crimson Flower route post timeskip imply he is second-guessing his decision to side with the Empire, but choosing to stay due to the promise to fight alongside Byleth and their cause of dismantling the Crest system.
  • Averted by Ashe and Mercedes, who both have personal reasons to help the Empire's cause when recruited on the Crimson Flower route, and in Mercedes's case, is the only way to reunite her with her long lost younger brother, Emile/Jeritza.
  • Felix doesn't regret his decision to side with the Empire on Crimson Flower at first, but after killing his father, he starts to regret it. However, he has no choice but to continue, leading to his many bittersweet endings on that route (though those endings are just as bittersweet on Silver Snow and Verdant Wind).
• Irony: Despite being the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, most of the Blue Lions aren't very religious, with Sylvain in particular admitting that he doesn't pray much. Dedue even has a bane in Faith due to worshiping other gods (justified, as he is not from Faerghus). The only Blue Lion with a Faith boon is Mercedes, who is from Adrestia, which later declares war on the church.
• Jousting Lance: Due to Faerghus' strong knightly traditions, many of its nationals are skilled with the spear.
• Locked Out of the Loop:
  • Downplayed, but none of the Blue Lions aside from Byleth are aware that Edelgard is Dimitri's step-sister, which he simply didn't think to tell them about until Arundel dies cursing him and her. In an optional conversation around the monastery, Dimitri asks Byleth not to tell any of the other students about the secret in question.
  • Many deeper plot elements are never learned by the characters in this route. The identity of Rhea as Seiros (post-timeskip, she pretty much disappears until the epilogue, where she is only briefly mentioned stepping down as the archbishop in favor of Byleth), Byleth and Sothis' origins, the true story of Nemesis, and those who slither in the dark, or the existence of Shambhala. Dimitri and Dedue are the only Blue Lions who will never learn these, as the other students can learn about these revelations if recruited onto other routes.
• Magically Inept Fighter:
  • While Faerghus has a school of sorcery in its capital Fhirdiad, most of the Blue Lions sans Annete and Mercedes (the latter whom was from the Adrestian Empire, whose people are known to be well versed in magic) have poor magical growths and low aptitude for learning it. Even then, the main offensive spellcaster of the Blue Lions, Annette, notably learns only four Reason spells as opposed to five, unlike the other two houses offensive spellcasters.
  • The only physically-oriented Blue Lions who may perform serviceably as magic users are Sylvain, Felix, and Ingrid, all of whom have magic growths above 25% but lower than 40%; two of them (Sylvain and Felix) have a Budding Talent in Reason magic, though both Sylvain and Felix have below average magical growths (30%), making them not particularly ideal as your main spellcasters. While Sylvain and Ingrid do come with a decent spell list that may justify them as somewhat viable magic users, Felix, on the other hand, learns only two Reason spells, negating the potential of his Budding Talent.
• Mutually Exclusive Party Members: In Three Hopes, all of the Blue Lions sans Ashe and Mercedes are locked to Azure Gleam; thus they cannot fight alongside Edelgard, Hubert, Caspar, Ferdinand, Monica, Manuela, Claude, Hilda, Lysithea, Leonie or Holst. Mercedes is only recruitable in Scarlet Blaze and cannot join the party in Golden Wildfire, meaning she cannot fight directly alongside Claude, Hilda, or Holst, although she can become an NPC ally in the final chapter.
• Pelts of the Barbarian: Downplayed during Part II — in lieu of strict color coordination, most of the Blue Lions' Part II gear all have furs either lines on capes or within the shirts and tunics themselves. As Faerghus is cited to be perpetually cold in canon, the furs that most of them wear are far more practical and modest in appearance than refined, but Dimitri's capes as both a High Lord and Great Lord play the trope straighter, especially early on. Dedue, Mercedes, and Ashe avert this; the former two are not originally from Faerghus (instead being from Duscur and Adrestia, respectively), and Ashe lives in a more southern part of Faerghus.
• Put on a Bus: With the exception of Dedue and Ashe, none of the Blue Lions make an appearance in the Silver Snow Route if left unrecruited. Since the Battle of Gronder Field takes place off-screen, it's implied that they likely died along with Dimitri, with Dedue being the Sole Survivor.
• Recurring Element: All of the students in the Blue Lions are throwbacks to staple early-game archetypes throughout the Fire Emblem series. Although they don't follow the recruitment patterns of their archetypes due to how the game works, their personalities, stats, and weapon preferences still line up with the archetypes as presented in previous games. This was confirmed in an interview to have been intentional, with Blue Lions designed in mind to fit previous archetypes.
  • Dimitri himself is the most conventional of the three Lords, being optimistic and noble as well as associated with the color blue just like Marth. After the time skip, he becomes the closest to the secondary "martial" Lord archetype like Alm and Hector.
  • Dedue is The Draug.
  • Felix is The Navarre.
  • Ingrid is both The Caeda and The Palla.
  • Ashe is both The Gordin and The Julian.
  • Annette is The Merric.
  • Mercedes is The Lena.
  • Sylvain is a deconstructed version of the Casanova Wannabe.
  • While due to some deviations from tradition they don’t fit this trope to an exact T, Ingrid and Sylvain are the closest Three Houses has to the archetypal Cain and Abel pair personality-wise.
• Route Boss: Because their homeland is a major target of invasion, both games feature them as antagonists when siding with the Empire — albeit in different degrees. In Three Houses, most of them can be recruited pre-Time Skip, which in most cases is the only way to not kill them them in Crimson Flower and Verdant Wind; in Three Hopes they all appear as enemies on Scarlet Blaze, with Ashe and Mercedes being the only ones you can potentially recruit.
• Supreme Chef: Has the most characters (Ashe, Mercedes and Dedue) that can provide boosts when cooking together with Byleth.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Outside of NG+ they're the only house with access to the Sacred Shield gambit, which has five uses and negates all damage from ranged attacks, including siege weapons and long-range magic. Given how packed with long-range weaponry their last three maps are, they're going to need it.
• Theme Naming: Some of the characters' last names come from the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology, Welsh mythology and Arthurian Legend.
• Undying Loyalty: In Three Hopes they have the fewest number of recruitable characters of the three classes. Ashe is the only one available on both Scarlet Blaze and Golden Wildfire and Mercedes is only recruitable on Scarlet Blaze. Everyone else cannot be convinced to defect from Dimitri's side.
• Unskilled, but Strong: The Blue Lions tend to lack the utility of the other houses' members, notably being the only house to lack a native user of Warp. The attacking spells learned by their members also tend to be raw damage. That being said, in terms of raw stats, they are the strongest house. The Blue Lions are also notably the one house/faction without a true Strategist if Byleth does not become their professor. They do however have a lot of utility battalions at their disposal, likely to compensate for the above (they notably pack the Impregnable Wall, Stride and Retribution gambits at a mere D Authority and the only dancing battalion that can be hired at the guild).
• War Refugees: If recruited on the Silver Snow/Verdant Wind routes, they’re effectively on the run, and those of noble heritage lose their status once the Empire steamrolls the Kingdom and Dimitri is believed dead.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • On the Silver Snow route, if not recruited, most of them make no appearances post-timeskip and their final fates are left ambiguous. The only exceptions are Dedue (takes part in the final battle against Edelgard before vanishing for parts unknown), and Ashe (joins House Rowe and either dies or is re-recruited at Ailell).
  • If left unrecruited but they survive the Battle of Gronder Field on the Verdant Wind route, what happens to Felix, Sylvain, Ingrid, and Mercedes is left unknown.
  • If not recruited on the Crimson Flower route, there's no word about Ashe and Annette's fates should they survive the Empire's siege of Fhirdiad.
• What the Hell, Hero?: If not recruited, the students of the Blue Lions house are the most vocal and angry in their denouncement of Byleth should they engage in battle with the professor on the Crimson Flower route, which also goes for any friends who might have joined them. Since Edelgard declared an unprovoked war to violently conquer their homeland as well as the Church and Alliance under imperialistic rule, it's an understatement response.

Pages:

• Part One
• Part Two

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