you know, it's an interesting coincidence, it really is. when I originally started making those villain grading posts, we were just a few months away from a long-anticipated new Fire Emblem release, and that moment gave me the idea to take on that little exercise for a number of reasons.
and then, here we are, about three months shy of three years later. for a number of different reasons, I started to think about finally making a follow-up post, seeing how I'd compare the antagonists from Three Houses to their predecessors. freshly boosted on new meds, I whip out a very long draft for a post in just a few days. and then, the day after I was done, a long-anticipated new Fire Emblem release is announced. and so, just on a whim of fate, I'm technically returning to this text post series under the same conditions as I started it! isn't it poetic?
maybe it is, but perhaps the poetry of the situation isn't all that important when it's being blasted into dust beneath the bad guy's iron boots. so let's go to war; let's see how Three Houses measures up on this front.
... at least, that's what I would be throwing us straight into, but, there's a little snag. when I started this analysis, I noticed that Three Houses has a relatively unique relationship to the archetypes of Fire Emblem, and it didn't sit right with me to just leave the classificatory endeavors at "this character is a Gharnef", "this character is a Camus", etc. so I'm going to be leading here with a foreword on that topic, a much longer foreword than the other ones I've written in this series -- one that's going to be less for getting technicalities out of the way and more an analysis in its own right.
(and of course, just like the other times, I have to note: there will be spoilers. spoilers for every route and every moment of Three Houses itself, naturally, but there's more than that; discussing where the one title fits in with the rest of the whole franchise naturally comes with spoilers for the rest of the whole franchise as well. SO, besides, that you are now adequately warned that this post spoils 100% every last inch of Three Houses, each section of the post will also have its own specific spoiler warnings for other titles (Shadow Dragon in particular will be spoiled frequently just on account of how the language that we use to talk about archetypes is brimming with Shadow Dragon spoilers). and to be adequately precise, when I say that a section "kinda" has spoilers for a given title, I'm considering them spoilers on the level of something that wouldn't be out of place in trailer -- so, information that will technically result in you not having a total clean-slate experience of the title, but also not all that spoilery.)
(plus there's the other thing I always warn about: I will criticize and/or blam some characters, possibly including the ones that you like, in this post. there will not be a small amount of that, frankly. I will have a lot of spicy opinions to share here and you'd best not be caught off guard if we disagree strongly on some point or another. but if you're now fully well aware of what you're about to trip into, well... amazon espionage device, play Paths That Will Never Cross.)
(the following section contains spoilers for: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light/Shadow Dragon) to understand how Three Houses's relationship to Fire Emblem archetypes is different from the norm, we'd have to start by understanding what the norm is, precisely. which begs these questions: why are there archetypes? what purpose have they served in the series up to this point?
in the early stages of the franchise, this is not exactly a great mystery. from Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light up to Thracia 775, our ever-controversial former director Shouzou Kaga was pretty much the reason why archetypes existed; he was, and is, a man of habit, one who's often innovating but is also resolved not to fix what ain't broke. he just really thought that having a red cavalier guy and a green cavalier guy was a neat enough concept that it should be done three times. eventually, he would part ways with Intelligent Systems in an equally controversial move, but at first brush, not much seemed to have changed -- Binding Blade also had a red cavalier guy and a green cavalier guy. and it also had an assload of tropes that it got clean off earlier titles, especially Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light. perhaps something about a freshly decapitated series returning to its roots in order to figure out where it could even go from then onwards... or perhaps they just needed to keep it quick and simple as they moved from the SNES to the GBA.
just looking at this inertia doesn't quite answer our question, however; we've had roughly another entire half of a franchise since those times. not every Kaga-ism survived after Binding Blade. but archetypes persisted, and arguably became even more entrenched than before. not a single main series title since Blazing Blade has failed to include a red cavalier guy and a green cavalier guy, even if some titles tinkered with the idea more than others (and yeah, the ninja guys from Fates: Birthright count).
when I try thinking about why archetypes have stuck around for so long, I strike upon a few reasons that I feel that I can point to. archetypes are usually at least one of these three things: a good game design element; a language that communicates with veteran Fire Emblem players; and/or a story element that resonates with the themes that are common to the whole franchise.
as for good game design elements... I couldn't in good conscience praise the Fire Emblem series on that front for very long; the games are often chock-full of information and tricks that would be useful to know and that you're really not likely to attain just by playing through. it can be tough to get new crowds into the game, and although certain significantly lower-difficulty modes in recent titles have somewhat alleviated this, the player still has to be dedicated in their own right if they want to improve enough to really be able to play on a tactically engaging level, or if they want to improve enough that they could take on older and more challenging titles as well. all of that said, though! some of the archetypes are actually pretty handy for developing a new player's skills, and this would have pretty much been the best they could do on this front way back in the NES. when you meet those perpetual red and green cavalier guys from the first time, you get a visually vivid hint to the fact that two characters can have the same class and still have wildly different statlines. the powerful veteran paladin without much room for further improvement forces players to start pondering early on when to send in the most powerful unit to solve a situation quickly, and when to leave an opportunity for the weaker units to grow. and if you want to introduce these players to the idea that enemy units can sometimes be recruited to your side, it's not a bad idea to deliver it in the form of a visually striking character, unusually dangerous to fight head-on, but who can easily be overcome by a player who has been attentive enough to the writing that they figured out what sort of person could bloodlessly bring that scary sword down.
but of course, if this were just about the new players, there would be no need for the archetypes to be so internally consistent; if you're meeting your very first pair of red and green cavalier guys, then things wouldn't be all that different if they were, I dunno, yellow and purple instead. here's where that "language" thing come in -- veterans of the series often know what to expect from a unit at a glance, absent a better mechanism for setting those expectations. that surly fellow with the Killing Edge that you just recruited off the enemy? their Skill and Speed are likely to grow at a frenzy pace, but you'd best cross your fingers that they'll also manage to get enough Strength to make the cut. however, if you meet another swordfighter who is musclebound, scarred, and giant-weapon-wielding enough that they could substitute for Guts from Berserk, that's one who won't have any problems with Strength! in fact, they're probably great at ever stat and will just break the game silly--
so far, all of this conversation has been about game mechanics, and the way they integrate with the writing and aesthetics. some of the archetypes have everything to do with the story and nothing to do with the gameplay, though. in fact, all of the archetypes I covered in this post series are exactly that way. the enduring presence of such character types is, I believe, a way that each title can discuss, connect to, and/or reinforce certain themes that the broader franchise holds close to heart. for one thing, if you think about it, a lot of the villainous archetypes are ultimately about Fire Emblem's strongly anti-war messages. the Camus and the Michalis are talented people who would have thrived and done good deeds in a peaceful world, but war culls the innocent and the brave without a second thought. the Conqueror always believes that they have good reasons to go to war, but their platitudes blind them to the disaster and injustice that they create. the Gharnef desires war for their own individual benefit, and their willingness to manipulate others in service of that goal is what makes them a grave danger to the world. now, not every individual instance of the archetypes fit cleanly into these descriptions -- and indeed, even the more mechanically-focused archetypes have also been known to lob the occasional curveball at people -- but broadly speaking, bringing those types of character back constantly is a way to continue meditating on themes that span the whole series, bringing them in contact with each individual title's specific themes in order to say something new each time.
boy, that took us seven entire paragraphs just to kinda get started, huh? we're just now going to talk about Three Houses. starting with how it throws everything we've just discussed off the window.
in most other Fire Emblem games, you have a large cast of playable characters, of which you're only able to ever field a handful at a time; it's sensible, then, that newcomers and veterans alike should have a wealth of clues to help them quickly determine who's who. however, the cast of Three Houses is smaller and more concentrated -- and most importantly, they're not meant to be figured out quickly. they have hidden talents, they have certain skills and combat arts that they can learn along the way without you knowing upfront what it'll all turn out to be, they sometimes come out at you at the beginning of the month with an unexpected idea as to what their lesson plan should be moving forward. characters in Three Houses were meant to be explored; it's part of the game's very core loop. designing these characters in a way that would make them obvious at a glance would run directly anathema to that.
on the story side of things, it also gets a little more complicated than usual. see, as you might just very well know, Three Houses is Intelligent Systems's latest take on attempting to run multiple possible storylines within the same setting. there's a lot of debate that can be had on whether it was a success this time (tip: I do not think so-), but I think it's definitely fair to say that the concept has been deepened quite a bit here since Fates. it's no longer an arrangement where every character is basically either with you or against you. instead, each route has the potential to give characters entirely different roles and arcs. you've got characters like Felix, who has an entirely different development track in Azure Moon than if you recruit him in other routes -- therefore, him being playable or not at a given run isn't the sole determinant of how his story plays out. and you've also got characters like Dedue, who plays dramatically different roles in Crimson Flower and Verdant Wind despite being an unplayable character in both. Claude has a different role in each of all four routes (even if his role in Silver Snow is... offscreen casualty,). all put together, most characters in Three Houses are polyvalent, so trying to lock them down as singular storyline archetypes is an exercise in futility.
and yet, despite all of this, when you take a look at the cast of Three Houses... it wouldn't be right to say that it's absolutely done away with the traditional archetypes. on the contrary, veterans were quick to notice how the Blue Lions in particular field a cast full of characters who allude to the archetypes in some way or another. Felix may not be a recruitable enemy -- he's not even one of the characters you might have to re-recruit after the timeskip -- but he is a surly raven-haired twunk who favours the sword, so he has the Navarre aesthetic down pat. Sylvain and Ingrid have the color schemes and clashing personalities of your usual red and green cavalier duo, even though they don't have the same class "canonically". even outside of the Lions, Edelgard's post-timeskip design alone was enough for a lot of veterans to accurately suss out some of the story roles that she plays.
all put together, I'd conclude that characters in Three Houses don't truly belong to archetypes, but they do sometimes evoke archetypes. having thusly distilled the dynamic, I'd say that there are two ways I'll be making this list different from others prior. the first is that I will not be evaluating entire characters, for the most part; I will, instead, evaluate them specifically under the circumstances where they evoke a villainous archetype. for example, Claude is going to be on the list somewhere, but I'm going to be looking exclusively to the route where he dons the antagonist's mantle -- everything else will be considered to be out of this post's scope. and then, the other necessary provision is that I won't be concerning myself too strictly with whether the characters I'm evaluating do at any point fit exactly into a certain archetype -- it will have to be more about the extent to which they embody the trappings of a given archetype really.
and now, at long last...!
(the following section contains spoilers for: Genealogy of the Holy War, Thracia 776 (kind of), Blazing Blade, Sacred Stones, Awakening (kind of))
nuclear gharnef
Gharnef in Azure Moon, Verdant Wind, Silver Snow
(0/10)
we're starting off pretty straightforward, really; the surface trappings are all obviously here. there's a dark magic user, with an unique class and a spell that playable characters can't learn, and who also shares in the barely-human looks. although, reversing the trend, his skin is unnaturally pale -- diversity win? in any case, he is also certainly the shadowy figure secretly instigating the conflict on all routes... although Crimson Flower relegates actually facing him to the distant offscreen epilogue future, so, I don't know that we can quite name him as an antagonist at all on that route. plus, there's someone else who actually plays the Gharnef in Crimson Flower, and you'd best be looking forward to finding out who, it's going to be a hot take and a doozy-
now see, though, there is one little sad thing about starting out simple, and it's that, as you may have gathered from the score, we're also starting off on a negative note.
this guy is pretty much Validar all over again. his schemes are confusing, inconsistent, and don't all pay off. he does a number of things that impact the story, but it always feels like just an awful thing that happened and that he was technically involved with, and not anything that really feels like it has his fingerprints on it. when you look at the scene where he takes Byleth out of commission for 5 years to come, does it feel like he trumped the hero, or does it feel like the writers just needed an excuse to skip forward?
Thales is a walking, gloating plot device who barely even makes anything interesting happen in the plot. he's Behind It All, but he never feels like a real threat. especially not on Azure Moon where he just dies in the stupidest possible way short of dying offscreen.
(but hey, at least his design isn't super racially charged; doesn't that entitle him to that one mercy point? and the answer is... not this time. the guy may be white as a bleached sheet, but what the character design lacks in Problematique, the storytelling delivers. see, riddle me this: does any character ever entertain the idea of peaceful coexistance with the Agarthans for more than a brief passing moment? not that I recall; most everyone just quickly concludes that killing every last Agarthan is good and necessary. this may not even be necessarily incorrect on the facts of the story -- the Agarthans themselves are openly genocidal, after all -- but I just don't think it's right to tell a story where wiping out an entire civilization is unambiguously good. plus, I can't help but think of the Loptyrians that the Agarthans were clearly inspired by, and well... the idea of genociding Loptyrians was so thorougly opposed by the text of Genealogy of the Holy War, it was literally one of the things that incited the entire plot. so, in what's unfortunately not the first time, we're seeing a new title manage to be less progressive than a SNES game from the 90s. good show! by which I mean, really bad show.)
milf gharnef
Gharnef in Crimson Flower
(3.5/10)
hot take and a doozy, I said! ... okay, yeah, you may be staring at me like I just transformed into The Immaculate One in front of you. unlike Thales above, Rhea sure doesn't look like any Gharnef we know; she does have a decidedly inhuman form that she can take on, but it's not inhuman in the way that a Gharnef is normally inhuman. and factually speaking, it'd be a pretty controversial statement to claim that Rhea is the secret instigator of the conflict in Crimson Flower.
you might remember, first of all, that I told you to put the strict facts back inside the box before we ever got started here. I would state very confidently that Rhea is portrayed as a Gharnef-like figure in Crimson Flower. she's involved in all sorts of secret schemes that the protagonists in this route are tasked with unraveling -- both as far as the shadier side of Church of Seiros's history goes, and inasmuch as she subtly-unsubtly takes over the Kingdom after losing Garreg Mach. and hell, she wouldn't even really be the first take on a Gharnef who looks beautiful, but also looks increasingly unhinged as time goes, up until their most monstruous possible form appears as the final boss. Lyon did that stuff first.
... but also, actually, let's take those facts back out from the box, because they may not be so useful as far as classifying this particular segment of Rhea's character goes, but we will need them in order to evaluate the quality of that segment. because there's the most fundamental problem with having Rhea evoke the Gharnef here: it is baffling.
see, Rhea is pinned to the center of the conflict in Crimson Flower by this sillogism: Rhea is responsible for the culture surrounding crests, and that culture is responsible for Edelgard's suffering. A -> B is correct. B->C is blatantly false. as a matter of fact, you spend the entirety of Crimson Flower doing the bidding of the people who actually ARE responsible for Edelgard's suffering!! and see, I do think that one could possibly tell a story that contains those contradictions but still makes sense; I bet you could even do it without changing the facts given here at all. but that's just not what happened in this case. the story was not told logically, plain and simple.
Crimson Flower's Rhea screams, burns cities, kicks puppies, and wants you dead -- but never ever are we given an actual meaningful reason to think of her as a villain. and I think that holds true no matter if you only played Crimson Flower or if you've played other routes and are made less inclined to see all of her roaring and insanity as anything truly character-defining. in fact, if the writing were working here, you could easily be exposed to a more sympathetic side of Rhea in other routes and still go through this one seeing yourself face-to-face with a character who is a villain still, just one who also has depth.
with all this blamming, it might seem like Rhea was supposed to be getting a 0/10 for no effort, but there's the thing: I do not think that she's a nothingburger villain on the level of like, Veld or Validar (or iunno, Thales). I think that she would actually have made for a phenomenal villain if the writing were not so goddamn wonky. she could have been a compelling, complex antagonist. and see, Gharnefs often play at instigating conflict actively -- here, we could have had someone who is villainous for passively creating an unjust environment that breeds conflict on its own. that's a type of villainy that I'm far more interested in seeing in stories, so I would have loved to see something like that actually materialize here. alas, it has not, and little more than the disappointment remains. still, though, an interesting idea that failed to execute lands more score at the end of the day than a total non-idea.
(however, this whole interesting idea is still getting docked by one point, because, well. I hardly have to explain how the narrative around Rhea also contains unquestioningly genocidal elements. you know things are going very not good when your plot is reminiscent of antisemitic conspiracy theories.)
gharnef who is technically in smash
Gharnef in White Clouds
(0/10)
surprise, surprise! I'm covering White Clouds as its own individual narrative unit as well. I'm mostly doing it that way because it'll give us more stuff to talk about, really. if you were to sweat the specifics, Solon wouldn't quite be a Gharnef, at least no more than, say, Ephidel is. but surely you remember why we're not, in fact, sweating the specifics here. we can just take this wrinkly barely-human dark-magic-using scheming figure here for the ostensible Gharnefness that it portrays. hell, I remember thinking "oh, that's our Gharnef" when he was first briefly shown on a trailer! (Thales was shown too, but his slice of a cutscene is so visually noisy, I don't think I even discerned that there was a person in the middle of the lightshow.)
see though, there is one problem with covering White Clouds in-depth, and it's that White Clouds is... easily the worst written part of the game plotwise. it's all this bunch of weird little mysteries, "the blood of that girl" this and "the darkness of Zaharas" that, nothing that gets raised has an important conclusion, nothing that happens is built up properly. you can play this part of the game four times over and still have no fucking idea what was actually supposed to be going on the entire time.
Solon is the "mastermind" of all this nonsense, and just as flat of a character as his superior. if the ~twist~ that Tomas is actually this dude was supposed to be a player punch, in Golden Deer it's more like a light fingerpoke, and in the other versions of White Clouds, it's more like standing 6ft apart and avoiding physical contact.
so, woe, 0/10, that was about as surprising as any of the twists that this dude went for.
(the following section contains spoilers for: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light/Shadow Dragon, Genealogy of the Holy War)
upside-down camus
Camus in Crimson Flower
(7/10)
boy, this whole thing has been pretty negative so far. how about I start talking about my favorite character now? ... well, bias or no bias, I still find that I have a lot of criticisms to lobby about how well the game has done this fave of mine. but let's not stray off the scope here. for now, I'll only be talking about Claude's appearance as an antagonist in Crimson Flower. so, how did he fare in that capacity?
well, Crimson Flower has this persistent problem where they continuously fail to establish the motivations and stakes for the protagonists' faction. so far we've already gone over how this makes conflicts muddy and illogial with one villain, and things aren't all that different here. it's rather difficult to sustain the pathos from a tragically inevitable battle if you fail to establish that it is inevitable; the narrative never really reveals its hand on why exactly the invasion of the Alliance is happenning at all. it just lobs that at you fresh off your 5-year nap as if it's a natural step forward. now, one could argue that the reason for it is to break the deadlock at the Roundtable and secure Leicester support of the Empire, lest the anti-Imperial faction should turn the tables at a troublesome time; you could also argue that there's no good reason, and it's nothing more than naked Adrestian imperialism. the problem, ultimately, is that there's a need to argue at all. there would be no real argument if the narrative had just managed to establish this properly, and this failure in turn makes it harder to sell the tragedy of the conflict with Claude.
fortunately, though, everything else works out brillantly actually. this might be my bias showing, but I think the pathos throughout the Alliance invasion segment is one of the strongest emotional beats in the entire game. everytime a known face falls before your blades, someone else openly grieves; it's usually very touching. and when we get as far as Claude, well, he may not have any associates left to mourn him, but what he does have is... chatter from your units at the monastery.
if that sounds dismissive, then allow me to clarify. I loved playing Three Houses, it's up there with the other titles I adore, and this is despite the fact that the game's central plotlines are, largely, a hot mess barely held together by duct tape. the best writing in the game often comes from other places, and dialogue from roaming the monastery often does more for the story's current events than their actual presentation does. it's something like the natural evolution of Path of Radiance and Radiant Dawn's base conversations and Shadows of Valentia's town conversations, which are two other favorites of mine. it's through this elegant, phenomenal, probably-handled-by-Koei-not-IS instrument that Claude's departure is given its poignancy. you see a lot of mixed feelings, admiration and regret and the sense that it was unfortunate but inevitable, and it's so compelling it manages to distract you from the sentiment that this wasn't really all that inevitable actually.
(in fact, while I'm singing the praises for monastery chatter, permit me a quick tangent that has absolutely nothing to do with any part of this post. you know what my favorite chapter is for monastery chatter? the one right after Jeralt dies. like, Jeralt's death itself is nothing, just so excessively telegraphed that the residents of the city have taken to stealing copper wire from the lines; that sequence afterwards, though... it's bittersweet, intimate, in a way that I feel few scenes in the entire franchise have come close to matching. I legitimately cried in real life seeing Bernadetta out of her room (a significant feat as you may well know) to place flowers on Jeralt's grave. and I don't cry all that easily at media! I only cry easily at arguments and other situations where crying would inconvenience me severely.)
as nice as this all is, though, you all know how much I hate it when this series does that thing where you only get the depths of an antagonist after they're already out of the picture, and this does run the risk of landing in that zone. fortunately, though, I believe that Claude was spared from that treatment. I still feel they could have done a little more with him, but Crimson Flower does well enough at making his character nice and established even to people who only played that route. his wits and the good intentions in his heart of hearts manage to come across and make some difference.
I don't think it's for no reason that many of the folks who are exclusively into Crimson Flower like to imagine scenarios where Claude joins the team; it's common even beyond the simple fact that many of us saw "these three protagonists can never walk the same path!" and went "but... what if they did" (and now it seems like they will, even!). this ardent wish that you wouldn't have to fight the Camus is a feeling that usually comes from the best of 'em, and while Claude's tenure as an antagonist is marred by some errors of execution, it could have been on par with the Eldigan standard.
dilf camus
Camus in Crimson Flower
(2.5/10)
we're not done talking about camus characteres (I did it again!!! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!!) in Crimson Flower just yet! although... it might be surprising to hear that we're almost done talking about this archetype overall. the other routes seem to aim for more of a longitudinal way of camus, so to say; there are many tragic deaths but seldom do we linger very long on any single one. anyways, with the schematics out of the way, let's talk about murdering our priest daddy.
if Crimson Flower's problems with unclear motivations and stakes were forgivable when it came to Claude, here they just about reach their nadir. see, by all rights, Seteth is such an easy character to write as a Camus that it's astonishing to me that they managed to screw it up. you're fighting Rhea, Seteth is strongly loyal to Rhea, therefore there's no way around fighting Seteth, right? if they'd put in the writing to establish that angle, it would have worked effortlessly. so, how come they didn't go with that?
fighting Seteth feels pointless despite the fact that it does have a point if you think about it. fighting Seteth feels like it's not happenning for the reasons you'd more readily assume, but rather kinda just because Edelgard doesn't like lizards. and see, I've complained a lot up to this about unquestioningly genocidal writing angles in this game, but this here was the absolute worst of it, I'd say. writing that justifies a genocide is one thing; writing where engaging in genocide is just something that's done, not even a big deal? that's even worse.
much of the pathos of a Camus comes from having to take an innocent life, ostensibly in the name of a greater good. here, an innocent life is taken in the name of nothing in particular that's named, besides that it sounds like it might be for evil purposes. just casually coming from characters who are not otherwise written as evil exactly, on this route or others.
I still won't bring it down all the way to 0/10, though, on account of how ridiculously easy it would have been to write this in a way that actually works; unlike what goes for a truly nothingburger antagonist, the materials were all there, it was just the execution that was an unspeakable catastrophe.
(the following section contains spoilers for: Shadow Dragon and the Blade of Light/Shadow Dragon, Path of Radiance, Radiant Dawn, Awakening (kind of))
michalis on ghostface's phone
Michalis in White Clouds and Azure Moon
(0/10)
he's called the Death Knight, he's bristling with scary dark armor covering his physique from head to toe, his true identity is a mystery (if a hilariously brief one), he was clearly angled to have a rivalry with a protagonist where part of the thrust is a competition between two skilled and passionate warriors... yeah, there's something a little more than archetypal resonance going on there, obviously. this is a rehash, and we can't really talk about the Death Knight without bringing up the Black Knight. so, how do the old and the new compare against each other?
the Black Knight was a 4/10 in my book. the Death Knight... is worse.
you might be wondering, first of all, why I've pitched the Death Knight in with the Michalis archetype despite that he's rehashing a character that I considered a Camus. I might as well get into the weeds of that spot of organizational trivia because at least it's an entry point; there are so many writing failures to belabor here that I wasn't sure where to start. see, the Black Knight had a great deal of his individual personal motivations on the table, but when it comes down to it, he was taking orders from his master and that was always the #1 reason for him to be up to the shit that he got up to. this is, ostensibly, not quite how the Death Knight operates. the idea was that the tragedy would be lurking in how he was once a caring young man, but trauma and extreme circumstances turned him into a maniac. he rushes into warzones intent on pure murder, no matter what his orders are.
... this is not at all how he comes across. instead, what we see in practice is this dude who keeps going "i DoN't TaKe OrDeRs" and then does exactly what he was being told to do anyway. that's not an unhinged motherfucker, that's a teenager. and the whole tragic angle falls flat on its ass when it's basically told just like some sort of supervillain backstory; he found himself forced to kill one guy, and then he snapped and became an incoherent plot device. how touching. but at least Azure Moon even bothers to go there; in Verdant Wind and Silver Snow, the Death Knight is really just a plot device that behaves incoherently, nothing that even attempts at being interesting happens with him, and the only emotion he ever inspires is a resounding "this guy again??".
so far, though, the Death Knight's not running all that unfavorably compared to the Black Knight, who also struggled with execution problems on the part of the story that was supposed to humanize him, who also struggled with being relegated to a plot device a lot of the time instead of taking actions that suit his established motivations better. what's putting that 4-point gulf between them, then? well, for one thing, it's that the Black Knight is an actually intimidating colossus of iron while the Death Knight is strutting around in this goofy ass armor that only really makes him look like he belongs in a Halloween shitpost, but besides that, there is one thing that the Black Knight actually did right most of the time, and which also fell through here: the rivalry angle.
at least half of the Black Knight's enduring success with fans -- to the tune of being the antagonist to get the most votes in nearly all installments of the Choose Your Legends poll -- comes from how epic his rivalry with Ike can be at times, further amplified by Ike's status as having been the de facto most popular character in the entire franchise until the release of Three Houses (and hell, technically we can't possibly know how Ike would perform in a new popularity contest vs Edelgard, even if she did get more votes than him by a good margin). I do feel that there was a lot about that whole rivalry that could have been written better -- including NOT THROWING ON AN EPIC FINAL CONFRONTATION AND THEN JUST WALKING IT BACK IN THE SEQUEL -- but I still can't deny that the pull is there. what I can deny, trivially, is that the Death Knight's antagonization of Byleth lands anywhere near that standard.
he just kinda goes "YOU HAVE A COOL SWORD. MEET ME AT THE DENNYS PARKING LOT SO THAT WE MAY KILL EACH OTHER" and that's the end of it. Byleth doesn't much respond to it -- and yeah, I know, mute audience-surrogate character, but the writers sure do give Byleth opinions when they actually want to. plus, I'm not sure that even a fully-realized character would necessarily have had an actual reaction to all that nonsense beyond "okay, cool, this certainly is happenning to me right now". there isn't any sort of personal dynamic happenning between Byleth and the Death Knight at all, whereas the Black Knight's rivalry to Ike is very deeply personal. the only connection that fans see between Byleth and the Death Knight is that it'd be kind of kinky if they had a hot gay fuck, and even this seems to come almost exclusively from Crimson Flower where the Death Knight is not an antagonist. (and this is where I'd poke fun at how abruptly Crimson Flower drops the Death Knight as an antagonist, but that'd be out of scope. and you've seen a million jokes to this tune by now anyway, probably)
after such a thorough lambasting, the only saving grace that the Death Knight might have is that at least he's not also written offensively, right...? oh, nevermind, the DLC introduced a shitty ass stereotype-DID angle here. this technically doesn't come up in White Clouds or Azure Moon, so ordinarily it'd be out of scope for this post, but there's not much of a point isolating the shitty-to-real-people writing where it can still retroactively color our view of the stuff that does fall within the scope. and so! forget about the 1 mercy point, have a flat 0 for the perfectly complete disaster.
muahahahahahahachalis
Michalis in Verdant Wind, Silver Snow
(6/10)
perhaps you remember how I unleashed this whole tirade on the relationship between Three Houses and classic Fire Emblem archetypes before I would deign to launch off into this whole post about using those archetypes as a framing device to evaluate characters. I've got to tell the truth by now: one thing that made me really feel the need for that is that I've seen people try to classify the Three Houses cast as archetypes before, without sparing much thought for the methodology of it. that seems to work fine if you're just claiming that Felix is a Navarre because he obviously has the aesthetic, even though he's not a recruitable enemy myrmidon who wields a Killing Edge. this exercise has a tendency to unravel spectacularly as you get deeper into it, though. eventually, you might find yourself boldly stating that Hubert is a Camus, and if that thought made you burst out laughing when you read it, then yeah, we had the same reaction.
it's not that I can't even imagine how someone would argue for that stance. Hubert may not be an innocent exactly, but Verdant Wind and Silver Snow do give him the kind of mournful "why must we fight" sentiment that we often see with the Camus; and the reason why we must fight is because Hubert is utterly devoted to his master, like many Camus characters (WOOP WOOP DAB DAB) are. still, taking the more loose approach I've generally taken to classification around here, I find that Hubert has very little in common with the Camus crop despite these resemblances on the definitional level. for one thing, he's got that style of self-aware villainy that I don't think the Camus goes for, but that is reasonably common with the Michalis (and also, you might have seen it in my Michalis post but I'll reiterate anyway, that I fucken adore that style actually). stiil, I think the most crucial part of it is that your average Camus is typically found going "well, I don't agree with my master's plan here, but who cares what I think, I'm just a Camus, following orders". Hubert is not quite so obliged, and not quite so obedient either. Edelgard tells him constantly that he's free to, and probably should, leave her to walk her bloody path on her own. he's willing to go behind her back, he's willing to contradict her openly, he's not on any level just following orders. but there's one aspect of him that has him prisoner for good and all: he simply does not want to live any life other than one where he is at Edelgard's side, changing the world. any other possibility can never be more than a contingency plan to him.
this is all really interesting, but there's a snag: the buildup to it leaves one wanting. Silver Snow at least shows you Hubert's dedication to Edelgard through all of his playable character dialogue; there's an advantage to the whole traitorous party member setup after all. that alone doesn't suffice to fully illustrate the tragedy at hand when you fight him, and even this much is absent from Verdant Wind altogether.
no, the part that really comes out to smack you with the whole scope of the sad yet fascinating turn of events is the reveal of Hubert's letter, instructing your party to go after the Agarthans if they should claim victory over him and Edelgard. the presence of that thing makes it plain to see, Hubert definitely believed that the protagonists would be inclined to help him go after the real threat if he just told them what the situation is, and still he never deigned to seek common cause, because it just wasn't in his DNA to do that. Claude even makes a rather unsubtle, rather meta-feeling comment on it in Verdant Wind, just directly lamenting that Hubert should have sent in the letter from the start.
there's a problem with unveiling the tragedy that way, though. perhaps you'll see it coming if you've read enough of my posts in this series, because this is a problem that we just keep on having lately with this hell franchise. let me then throw my hands up to the sky, scream out this plea, and hope against hope that it's the last time I ever have to. please, Intelligent Systems. please, Koei, if you have a say on this one. for the love of all that is right, just, benevolent, or generally Eliwood in this world. STOP PUTTING UP THIS STUFF AFTER THE SHOWDOWN!! YOU ARE WASTING YOUR TIME IF YOU WANT ME TO FEEL WORSE ABOUT THE DEAD GUY AFTER I JUST KILLED HIM!! THE CONFRONTATION ITSELF IS MEANT TO BE THE APEX OF THE PATHOS!! THE TRAGEDY SHOULD BE ALL CLEAR TO ME BEFORE THE WEAPONS ARE DRAWING!! I SHOULD BE CHEWING ON IT AS THE FIGHT TAKES PLACE!! STOP DOING THIS THING WHERE YOU WANT TO HAVE AN EVIL VILLAIN BUT YOU ALSO WANT TO EULOGIZE HIM AFTER THE FUN EVIL VILLAIN SHIT IS DONE!! EVEN IF YOU WERE READY TO TACKLE THE CHALLENGE OF WRITING IT BOTH WAYS, YOU'D HAVE TO WRITE IT BOTH WAYS AT ALL TIMES, NOT ONE WAY AND THEN THE OTHER!! PLEASE JUST DECIDE HOW YOU'RE GOING TO WRITE A GIVEN ANTAGONIST AND THEN DO IT, WRITE IT, CONSISTENTLY, WITHOUT CHANGING YOUR TUNE AT THE SINGLE MOST INOPPORTUNE TIME POSSIBLE FOR IT!!!
whew, okay, sorry you had to see that, but it's out of my system now. if we're lucky, I won't have to go there again for the rest of this post.
anyway, there are glaring execution flaws, but in the end, I don't think you can possibly not enjoy duking it out with Hubert. if the conflict against him doesn't always succeed at being deep, at least it never fails at being entertaining. here's something you should do, as a gift for yourself, if you have not before: have Claude battle Hubert in Verdant Wind and bear ye witness to the most fucking hilariously dorky exchange in the entire game (not something I'd say lightly). Hubert is one of the most fun characters in all of Three Houses, and while his role in Azure Moon is much too small, he's a star whether you're with him or against him. if Hubert had a little more narrative space to himself, I feel that he'd have been an evolution on Gangrel!
and Gangrel was a 6/10, so, I'd say that's as well as Hubert fared.
michalis with two eyes actually
Michalis in Crimson Flower
(7.5/10)
but airlock, how could you claim that Dimitri is a Michalis, against whom conflict is inevitable because of his personal flaws, when it's hardly a personal flaw of his that we went and invaded his country? trick question, I've made no such a claim, I'm only stating that Dimitri evokes the Michalis as antagonist in Crimson Flower! you've understood the process by now, right? so even if the facts of it aren't exactly lining up, it's more about the nature of the portrayal.
Crimson Flower's Dimitri is quite a bit different from the versions of him that we meet in other war phase routes; he is kinder, stabler, and has twice as many eyes. and yet, there is no mistaking it: he still 100% wants to hang Edelgard's head from the gates of Enbarr. that vengeful violence is the truly established reason why conflict with him is inevitable. if it's either him or Edelgard, then Edelgard chooses Edelgard, even if the choice can't be made quite so lightly.
and see, here's the breath of fresh air that I've been waiting for this whole post: Dimitri's death IS tragic. there are no gaping flaws of execution to be seen around here. the conflict that I described above is intended and delivered by the narrative. for once in all of Crimson Flower, you know exactly why you're doing the tragic thing that must be done.
I don't think it's for no reason that there's a number of Azure Moon fans out there, who otherwise hate every micron of Crimson Flower, but who still deeply appreciate Dimitri's scenes on that route and are willing to take them uncut into interpretations of the character. the sorrow of Dimitri and Dedue on that route is very solidly written, and its mark is plain to see on the fans.
... still, I feel that I must beg to differ a little from that popular opinion, becuase personally I don't find it that compelling. maybe it's just such a short and dilluted affair, that also has to split screentime with Rhea all along the way, and also, when it's over, you're thrust straight into the final confrontation. some of the monastery dialogue that I praised to high heaven might have come in clutch here. now, even if it hasn't viscerally made me feel all that much, I appreciate solid writing for what it is, and especially for how much less easy to accomplish it is than it might seem -- and even moreso because boy, you know if you've been reading these posts, solid writing is not something we get everyday with Fire Emblem- so yeah, flawlessness alone counts for a lot in my scale, even if you'd also need some qualities on top of it to reach the highest echelons of Fire Emblem antagonists.
(the following section contains spoilers for: Blazing Blade, Path of Radiance(kind of))
fuck bodysnatching
Punchable in White Clouds
(0/10)
another White Clouds antagonist, another 0/10; there's a pattern here, no four ways around it. surely by now you can see what I meant when I opined that White Clouds is the worst part of the game plotwise.
let's recap for a little bit, from my previous post on this Punchable archetype. it speaks to characters who aren't designed for appeal, but instead, to draw negative attention. and I made the further stipulation that they must be recurring antagonists who impact the plot beyond just the map that they're fought on, because otherwise I'd be tearing through every unlikeable miniboss around. most importantly, I noted that I couldn't quite evaluate these characters based on how well I liked them -- they weren't meant to be liked in the first place -- so instead, I set down two standards, of which at least one must be fulfilled: the Punchable character should be entertaining, and/or the Punchable character should feel good to finally take down. a character who can do both of those is great, but just doing one of those particularly well is enough to score a 10/10. (still the highest score any of the Punchables have gotten from me so far was 9/10, but I digress)
now, the question is, are we doing this all the same way as usual, or are we tinkering with this formula in any way to go along with the whole different methodology that I've been using so far? well... the thing with the Punchable archetype is that, to be frank, it may have been a bit of a stretch for me to consider it an archetype at all. there's one of those people in just about every game, but there's not a common library of character traits and design cues that they draw from. it's not even something that I could claim to be a Fire Emblem thing when it's very much common for stories of any sort to have characters like these. so... just for this section, there's nothing really to change about how I classify and evaluate.
it feels like a waste to explain all this before going on to examine Kronya. she's not entertaining, she's not particularly fun to take down, and she's not much of anything at all. she's a major villain alright -- major enough that they revealed her in Three Houses's pre-release season and added her to Heroes pretty early on. but she also just stands there, taking up narrative space and not doing anything at all with it. first, she spends a bunch of her time in the storyline just going "heeeeeheeehee they don't know that Monica is actually really me", and at no point does this infiltration of hers seem to trigger any effect on the plot. then she kills Jeralt! that should've been very significant, but she pulled it off as just another arm of her villainous group -- another one of them could have easily done it instead. hell, maybe if the Death Knight had done, he'd have succeeded just a touch more in being a Black Knight pastiche. we then go to take revenge on her for the murder, but that affair feels just as impersonal, least of all with the emotional weight being carried by the mute audience-surrogate protagonist. and finally, Solon sacrifices her to unleash Zaharas, and not a single part of that is established previously or makes sense despite how much the whole sequence wants to be Byleth's big moment; therefore, Kronya dies a death just as nonsensical and pointless as everything else about her character. (also, the scene of the death wants to be grotesque and terrifying, but it also wants to do a bunch of weird boob shots, badly enough to utterly sacrifice visual clarity. so that's just great)
along this post series, I've put a lot of characters on blast for being nothing more than plot devices with a face, but Kronya is probably the epitome of it. she's just as much of a nothingburger character as her fellow Agarthans, with the further issue that it's hard to affirm that she even technically does anything important at all. it doesn't seem as if she was brought in for anything besides putting an additional booba villain design in the game.
if she really was meant to be The One Who Kills Jeralt, that alone could have served to provide a little direction on how to write anything at all into her. something like, say, if Kronya and Jeralt were to build some rapport between each other, providing a real reason as to why he'd let his guard down around her. then, when the knife plunges in, Kronya could have eschewed the generic villain dialogue (really, all the Agarthans could have eschewed the generic villain dialogue in general--) to say something about that connection, perhaps to spit on their friendship and state clearly that ever second of it was false and annoying to her, something like when Sonia let down her mask and let Nino have it. that's just one idea, but also, it's one idea that I came up with effortless off the top of my head; how hard could it possibly be to actually write one thing, anything?
(... you take those eyes of yours off my WIPs this instant--)
I don't really go into negative scores around here, but boy, Kronya would have needed more character just to accomplish as little as being 0/10 on the same level as her fellow Agarthans.
(also, yadda yadda, unquestioningly genocidal story element, I'm not getting into it for the third time.)
fucking backpain
Punchable in Azure Moon
(7.5/10)
there's a curious contrast, though, isn't it? our next character is also an Agarthan villain with a booba design, but so much has been done differently that she's hitting one of the highest marks in this entire post.
I'm not here to try to convince you that Cornelia is any sort of exceptionally deep or compelling character. she does have a surprisingly detailed backstory, but it's just details, without much of anything that enhances her sense of character. still, the Punchable folk need not be deep characters. there's just one of two things they need to do well, and Cornelia nails the part about being great to take down.
she's a smooth operator -- the only Agarthan whose machinations make sense actually. she makes Dimitri's life a living hell and loves every second of it. she's the very face of Faerghus's fall before the Empire, and her defeat is crucial for the country to ever begin healing. when the protagonists overcome this imposing challenge, Cornelia comes down with a mighty crash, taunting Dimitri one last time. and then, this defeat heralds in one of the true highest points of all of Azure Moon -- a moment that may not have been quite as momentuous if Cornelia were a lower quality of villain.
(there's still one thing she has in common with all the other Agarthans, though, and it's that -1 point for being a vector for an unquestioningly genocidal narrative. thankfully, this is the last time I have to do this for this post.)
(the following section contains spoilers for: Gaiden/Echoes: Shadows of Valentia, Mystery of the Emblem/New Mystery of the Emblem, Genealogy of the Holy War, Binding Blade, Path of Radiance(kinda), Awakening(kinda))
the scourge of garreg mach
Conqueror in White Clouds
(3/10)
right, so, I'm not here about to try to convince you that the Flame Emperor is not the same character as her true identity. I realize what a "you can vote for the Flame Emperor in CYL5"-ass choice this is. I would argue, though, that the Flame Emperor plays a different role in the story than her unmasked self does -- I'd even say that the moment of the unmasking is the real point where White Clouds ends and the war phase begins. but, most importantly, splitting this up gives me more to talk about, and the more post, the better, right?
woefully for the Flame Emperor, though, having her role in White Clouds isolated means that she's not getting graded for a better-written part of the game. pretty lucky for her, then, to be the only antagonist in White Clouds to earn more than a 0/10. (of course, 1 point of this is just the mercy point that the others were denied. that still leaves us 2 whole points to discuss!)
there's not that vast of a difference for the most part. the Flame Emperor is another anonumous entity among masked or practically-faceless villains, appearing in a bunch of curscenes that consist of nothing more than Vague Villain Chatter that doesn't make any sense in the first playthrough and doesn't matter on subsequent playthroughs. plus, the Flame Emperor in particular has all these lines that feel like they're trying to be cool and mysterious but are just stilted and bizarre ("halt. you're having too much fun", anyone?). still, there are a couple of scenes where an actual character almost starts to shine through the robes and helmet. ... and it's not good, but it's better than the absolute non-characterization that we otherwise get from White Clouds's villains.
it starts in the aftermath of the disaster in Remire, with the Flame Emperor appearing before Byleth and Jeralt, dropping this limp-wristed disclaimer of responsibility followed by a limp-wristed proposal to join forces. then, in the aftermath of Jeralt's death, we see a villain chatter cutscene where this picks up more steam: Thales launches on a non-sequitur about his people's salvation, at which point the Flame Emperor openly contradicts him, putting him on blast for his group's gruesome deeds and saying that no, they will not be saved. in those moments, we see the Flame Emperor right on the edge of actually doing something interesting and self-motivated instead of acting exclusively as another one of the live plot devices. this cuts through the spoooooky vagueness otherwise permeating these pointless cutscenes, telling us something discrete and clear about the characters involved: that they're not in agreement. that there's even an outright conflict between them.
... and then that angle goes nowhere. you'd think that the Flame Emperor's words right there would be fighting words, but Thales just ignores the open defiance, spouting one line in response to the accusation that he's responsible for some atrocities, after which the scene just ends. he doesn't seem pressed to address the fact that his subordinate just said directly to his face that she opposes his ultimate goal. and neither does said subordinate follow up on those words from there; the net time we see her, it's back to working with the group as usual, without any indication that something happened to pull her back in line like this.
(there's a tangent to get into that I feel might be clarifying as to what that whole thing was all about. the Flame Emperor, as well as her true identity, draws a lot from our here Conqueror archetype, and especially from a certain fiery justice-bringer in particular. so, a scene like that one, featuring the Flame Emperor talking back to the shadowy cabal, strikes me as having been inspired by the scene where Arvis does the very same thing. it's a very iconic scene! it's a brillant double feint -- it first misleads us into thinking that Arvis may be ditching the villains to throw his lot in with the protagonists, only for it to surface that nope, he is betraying everyone. it then misleads us into thinking that Arvis has beaten back his shady associates and is taking charge, when truthfully, the lurkers are playing the long game, knowing that Arvis's ascension will make him more vulnerable, not less. of course, that would not have been such a fantastic scene without having both everything that built up to it and every way in which it paid off later, and that's where the Flame Emperor's take on it becomes a pale imitation.)
now, before we're done here, there's just one more particular moment of the Flame Emperor's that we can dig our claws into: the reveal of her true identity. the thing is, I played the Golden Deer version of White Clouds first, and so, I can only speak with absolute confidence as to how effective the twist was on that version. and I'd say that, under that specific circumstance, it was... actually very effective. it caught me off guard without coming out of absolutely nowhere, as any good plot twist should do, and it even fired off with more than enough time left in the clock for the story to follow through on the reveal. ... but see, as best as I can tell, I was pretty lucky to have experienced the twist that way first in Golden Deer, because boy, it seems like Black Eagles and Blue Lions both telegraph this one directly to death, what with the respective unsubtle hints of Edelgard's wink-wink-wink dialogue and the business with Dimitri's gift dagger. and see, I can't totally discount that the twist still works in one version of the story, least of all when twists well done seem to be such a dying breed these days, but on the other hand... if the storyline for which this twist is the least important, the one that does less to build up to it, is the one where it works best, that sure is an indictment, isn't it?
so I think we can conclude on this: the Flame Emperor has a little more substance than the other White Clouds antagonists, but she doesn't quite make a more compelling character than the rest of them. more fixable, but not less broken, so to say.
and with that done... what say you folks we finally let that mask fall?
the scourge of fódlan
Conqueror in Azure Moon, Verdant Wind, Silver Snow
(5.5/10)
I can't very well stall it any longer, now can I? I imagine that there might be people out there who would check this post out just for the sake of this particular section here. it's not remotely an analysis that I'd be the first or last internet rando to partake in, but the hunger for meta is neverending, especially among the people who really love or really hate this character. I suppose all I can do in this scenario is step into the arena, and hopefully contribute something worthwhile to the greater debate.
at least, if the analysis might be challenging, the classification is perhaps the easiest in this entire post. Edgelord here isn't any sort of rehash, but she has plunged deeply and thorougly into the pool that Conquerors past have drawn from. even further than just happily adopting the Big Red aesthetic, she has some things in common with just about all of her predecessors. like Hardin, she is (in Silver Snow) a character who journeys by your side at first, but eventually becomes an enemy. like Arvis, she manipulates the powerful to secure herself as a mighty emperor, with continental ambitions -- and yet, she's also chafing under the dominion of a creepy secret cabal. like Rudolf and Walhart, she believes that the people of her world are overreliant on religion and challenges them to take destiny into their own hands instead. like Ashnard, she hopes also to upend her society's rigid structures of birthright, giving rise to a more meritocratic system (or, well, Ashnard would call it power instead of merit, but the principle is similar enough). and like with Zephiel, all of this rationally held philosophy ultimately belies a broken, suffering, and vengeful heart, lashing out against the world with a military aplomb.
this bevy of send-ups doesn't only make it very easy for me to connect Edelgard to the archetype, though; it also carries a metatextual message. if Edelgard is so much like all of these villains past, then the intent was likely for us to see her the same way we did them: as a complex villain. ... instead, though, we find ourselves endlessly hurtling our digital saliva at each other, arguing over whether Edelgard is even a villain at all. there may be an impulse there to assume that this disconnect exists because not everyone in the audience would know enough about Fire Emblem to see the metatext clearly; Three Houses did draw many newcomers into the series, after all. still, I don't think this can be summarized as something like "woe, people have opinions on Edelgard and yet they don't know about Red Blorbo from my old ass untranslated games"; my personal, anedoctal experience is that many new players do see Edelgard as a villain, and many veterans of the fandom do see Edelgard as an antihero. and I wouldn't say that the latter isn't a sensible reading of the character, either.
the thing there is, that abundant metatext is definitely not the only message that Three Houses puts forth about Edelgard. in fact, how about we go over a somewhat infamous example of another such message? in the intro to Chapter 12, Seteth says that Edelgard has a wicked heart, at which point you're prompted to respond -- and your choices are to either contradict him, or change the subject. to agree with him, and acknowledge Edelgard as a villain, simply isn't an option. and I know, it may not be as if the dialogue choices you're given in this game normally mean very much, but this is also exactly what I meant when I said this earlier: the mute audience-surrogate protagonist sure does have opinions when the writers want them to.
all throughout the game, you'll keep finding a similar assortment of mixed messages. the story wants to say that Edelgard is a villain, but the story also wants to say that Edelgard is just a parallel hero that we shouldn't really have been fighting against. the story wants to say that Edelgard personally made the decision to go war, being propelled along the path by one of her central character flaws -- but the text also doesn't want to ascribe agency and responsibility to her for it. she's just so so so sorry that it had to be this way, you see. perhaps it's really no wonder that the fandom can't reach any sort of agreement on how to judge Edelgard's moral character -- even the game disagrees with itself there.
now, don't take that as me claiming that a character can only be good if everyone walks out of the story feeling the exact same way about them. I've praised other villains in this post series highly for containing multitudes. but there's a line somewhere between ambiguity and plain self-contradictory nonsense.
now, hopefully, within those six paragraphs, I'll have managed to sufficiently address that hot-button issue of Edelgard's morality -- because it's not the only thing I want to talk about here. moral complexity is great and all, but it's the last thing in your mind when you see Ashnard's wicked grin spread open. when you hear Zephiel's theme song, you forget all about who's right and who's wrong; you just run for the hills. Conquerors are very often the ones most directly in charge of the enemy's armies, the ones who are out in the front making the plot happen with their fists. and so, I believe we also have to talk about whether Edelgard fits in with this legacy of badass motherfuckers.
and I'd say, she certainly manages a strong start on that one. that last stretch of non-CF White Clouds is an absolutely phenomenal show of force. she belts out a bombastic speech and galvanizes the people, drives them to energetic war cries. she outplays Garreg Mach's defenders completely, to the extent that it's even hard to grasp just how thorougly outplayed you are at first, and it has to sink in gradually. she proves herself a formidable enemy. she has a keen mind for strategy, and she applies it through the continent's most powerful military force. once Garreg Mach falls and Byleth gets taken out of commission, it seems for a moment that all hope is nearly gone; that you'll be awakening five years later to a world that's being completely ground under Edelgard's iron boots. I still remember being on my first playthrough, and feeling incredibly pumped to start that hopeless battle from the brink. especially if that battle was going to be set to Chasing Daybreak.
oh, but how unfortunate! it was my great disappointment to then discover that the Edelgard who pulled off all this awesome shit was left five years behind.
after the timeskip, it feels like any clash between you an Edelgard is at most a show of token resistance. Azure Moon lets Dimitri dither back and forth about which front of the war he wants to push, and somehow, the ground that he abandons each time isn't being swiftly retaken by Imperial forces. five years of war and denounciation against the church, including the conquest of their central temple, seems to do precious little against your prospects for rallying people to a religious cause in Silver Snow and Verdant Wind -- the latter route even puts this forth as a pragmatic motion. and in all three of those routes, your nabbing of Garreg Mach as a base goes barely opposed. Edelgard does notice it and throws some soldiers at it one little time, but then, for the rest of the game, you're somehow not in danger of being attacked on your base, that your enemy knows the exact location of, that your enemy once successfully conquered, and that your enemy is still sitting on all of the priceless intel that she used to pull that off the first time. (and I mean, I'm not saying I wanted every second chapter to be Defending Garreg Mach all over again, but god, at least let us have done something clever to earn such security, y'know?)
perhaps it's a reflection of the game keeping the brisk and relaxed pace from the Academy Phase in the War Phase, instead of playing it a little more like the near-breathless succession of chapters that's normally seen in Fire Emblem -- but the long and narrow of it is that Edelgard seems to just spend that whole stretch of the story waiting for you to come take the fight to her, like she's some sort of Pokémon Champion.
(which brings me to my second tangent on how Arvis Did This Too And It Was Better! Arvis isn't a very active villain anymore by the second generation of Genealogy of the Holy War, either -- but there are two reasons why that works much better for him. the one reason is that he's not in the middle of a war; he WON the war, he conquered the world! Seliph has to start a new war to take him down! the other is that this angle is played intentionally by the story -- Arvis has, indeed, become little ore than a pale shadow of the glorious conqueror that he was 20-odd years in the past, and there's a striking tragedy there regardless of whether it was ever a good thing that he took over in the first place.)
over the course of all the discourse, I've seen many fans settle on this moderate-seeming stance: Edelgard is a good villain, but not a good character, they say. let me then be dangerously bold... and claim the exact opposite stance, actually. I think Edelgard, removed from the context of Three Houses's plotlines, is a fantastic character. she has an amazing personality, one that makes her both compelling and just fun to watch. she's deep, interesting, and richly connected to the world that she lives in. but the stories where she plays the antagonist fail to draw out these good qualities; they just trip all over themselves instead of making use of the amazing thing they have at hand. Edelgard is something like what I'm told many of the better Fates characters are -- pretty cool and interesting in any other context. that may frankly be something that goes for a lot of Fire Emblem characters out there with small roles, but it's naturally not a sufficiently high mark to be hitting with your de facto main antagonist.
so, y'know, don't get it twisted. on the one hand, I'm evaluating each character's performance in antagonistic roles, and on that front, I don't have much good to say of Edelgard. on the other hand -- she's awesome, okay. and hopefully, these last two sentences, if not the entire tenor of this analysis, are just right to piss off extremists on both sides of The Edeldiscourse. thanks for making it this far without throwing bottles at me -- and for giving me enough time to find cover. you'll never get me alive!
with the high score sitting at 7.5 -- no 10/10s, and certainly no hope of unseating the one 11/10 -- it would seem that I didn't have much good -- and plenty of bad -- to say about Three Houses in this post. despite that, Three Houses is a title that I greatly enjoyed, one that I could easily place up there with my favorites (but not above the favorite -- Blazing Blade is still bae!).
it's pretty much the exact same thing that I said about blamming almost every Awakening villain and a majority of the Thracia 776 ones too: sometimes, antagonist writing is just not the strong suit of a given title, and it may still be very solid on other fronts. it's certainly sensible to me that Three Houses falls short on writing the villains, when it falls so short on writing the core plot.
I'd probably have much greater praises to sing for the game if I were to talk some more about that monastery chatter that I adore, or about the worldbuilding... maybe that'd be a pretty fun idea for another post series. but I'd probably have to blam Blazing Blade's very own Elibe on that front, so, I am hesitant--
but, I picked the post series that I picked and I'll probably go on to keep on adding to it as we proceed with this series, so... what are we looking forward to seeing in the upcoming Three Hopes's antagonists? if everything else I've gone into here hasn't given you a reason to comment, then at least, that's a question to bite into!
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