markoftheasphodel:

gascon-en-exil:

I’ve already made it clear that I’d like to see this pairing elevated to canon status in the Jugdral remakes, and unless IS decides not to pull from Heroes at all and go in a completely unexpected direction with Finn I think it’s safe to say we’re going to get some heavily implied subtext at the very least on his end. It’d be both good storytelling to play around with popular fandom impressions of the character (most of them involving het ships) and good representation insofar as Finn is a wholly different sort of character from the likes of Leon and Heather. It would also be relatively easy to work his love for Quan into his actions in FE5 and Gen 2 and so not restrict his sexuality to his backstory. Good deal all around…provided it’s reciprocal, of course.

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Well seeing this was an unexpected treat.

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Apparently spewing out several paragraphs every few months with no warning is just how I do Jugdral meta/headcanons.

Mmm, but there are quite a few things in FE canon that are also more “epic” than believable. FE’s latter-day concept of “devotion” also seems a bit… inherently bad, given the exemplars of the butler guy in FE14 and the village girl in FE15 (you know which ones). IDK, I’m the person who has a stumbling block in taking Sephiran seriously because of the centuries-spanning breadth of his grief, so…

Minor point about Lehran/Sephiran, but he only snapped and turned omnicidal chessmaster villain after the Serenes Massacre, twenty years before the events of FE9. Before that he was grieving over the loss of his powers and his enforced isolation and observing critically the constant tension between beorcs and laguz, but he wasn’t out to kill everyone yet. Twenty years is about the same length of time Finn devoted everything to Cuan, but it must have been much less to someone who’d lived for over a millennium. I can buy that. How he got himself a noble title in Begnion and became a senator despite seemingly coming from nowhere on the other hand….

As for the various overly devoted/obsessive 3DS characters, the difference between them and a hypothetical remake Finn is that their behavior often gets played for laughs. I have a hard time imagining the writers taking everything Finn goes through in both games and using it for comedy. Yes, it’s obvious that he’s got some unresolved issues he’s not working through in a healthy way even in the original games, but what he is doing is helping secure a throne for Leif and contributing to Seliph’s war effort in a major way. Regardless of how tragic his circumstances are (because some of the 3DS characters may also be potentially sympathetic in their OTT devotion) I think his plot importance would keep him out of the comic relief camp.

Insert salt that “Titania loved Greil” is automatically accepted as character motivation ‘cause it’s het. No close readings or manifesto required.

The irony is that I’ve barely ever given the Titania -> Greil dynamic a second thought specifically because it’s het in the very queer Tellius, but that’s a great parallel. I wonder if Radiant Dawn had had more time to spend on character work if we’d have gotten any more on that point. Surely she’d have something to say about Ike receiving his father’s axe at least (especially since she can wield said axe).

Back to Finn though, it occurred to me later that excessive grief over Quan would actually give him and Lachesis some common ground, though not of a kind that would likely lead to the creation of Nanna. I question how comfortable he’d be with talking about his feelings for Quan – and I doubt the remakes will clarify much on that score, since the localizations if not the Japanese originals of contemporary FE like to skirt around the subject of homophobia – but regardless of how he frames his grief it might create a situation that looks from the outside to be that of an emotionally fraught but cold couple. I still think something else had to have been happening with Glade for Selphina to take so much issue with Finn and Lachesis’s relationship, but that a whole other story.

I’ve already made it clear that I’d like to see this pairing elevated to canon status in the Jugdral remakes, and unless IS decides not to pull from Heroes at all and go in a completely unexpected direction with Finn I think it’s safe to say we’re going to get some heavily implied subtext at the very least on his end. It’d be both good storytelling to play around with popular fandom impressions of the character (most of them involving het ships) and good representation insofar as Finn is a wholly different sort of character from the likes of Leon and Heather. It would also be relatively easy to work his love for Quan into his actions in FE5 and Gen 2 and so not restrict his sexuality to his backstory. Good deal all around…provided it’s reciprocal, of course.

While there may be a small amount of narrative appeal in keeping the relationship between Quan and Finn intimate but not sexual – making it both an idealized platonic erastes/eromenos dynamic and a gay take on courtly love – I imagine I’m not the only person who would be side-eyeing that reading. Per canon in the original games and as reinforced by Heroes, Finn dedicates almost two full decades of constant hardship and turmoil to fulfilling the dream of his deceased lord while also raising his lord’s son to become a suitable king for a unified Thracia. That’s an absurd amount of self-sacrifice in any scenario, and values of knighthood or not – and remember that one of the themes of FE5 is that knighthood is not all it’s cracked up to be – it’s nearly unbelievable if we’re to assume that he was only able to love an oblivious Quan from a distance. Far better would be the reading that when Finn is polishing the brave lance he’s wistfully recalling long nights of passion in Verdane and Agustria – that, unlike Lukas with Clive or Levail with Zelgius, his lord was willing to give him exactly what he wanted.

But what did Quan want?

I think it’s generally accepted in a tongue-in-cheek way by Tumblr’s FE community that the Gen 1 lord trio engaged in some youthful dalliances when they were at school together. Quan being the only one of the three with a young male retainer not related to him with whom he shares several conversations already encourages the observation that he was the one most invested in the physical particulars of those dalliances if nothing else. And then you look at that retainer and note that he has a certain physical resemblance to one of Quan’s friends (exacerbated by recent artwork that gives Finn more elaborate and…lordly outfits) as well as possibly a resemblance to that same friend’s naïveté on account of his age. And then you remember that Quan is married to that friend’s sister and the pieces fall into place a bit.

This is not to downplay the role of either Quan’s friendships or his grandiose political ambitions that rival (sometimes literally) some of Jugdral’s biggest antagonists in his connections with Sigurd and Eldigan, nor does it preclude the likelihood that he harbors genuine romantic and sexual attraction for Ethlyn and possibly also Finn. There are a number of ways to explain away these particular choices – Grannvale is closer and therefore more politically advantageous than Agustria, Ethlyn was clearly more mature and ready for the marriage market than Lachesis was prior to the events of the game, Quan and Eldigan may have not actually been as close (do they even talk in-game?) without the big dumb heart of the group to unite them, etc. – but it’s hard to look at Quan’s situation up until just before Yied and conclude that all of his desires conveniently lined up in such a way that he had basically everything. If he was working out an unrequited attraction to Sigurd through a loving wife and an adoring protégé while also furthering his plans for putting Leonster on the continental map it just makes him extremely fortunate – up until when his luck ran out in a very big way.

I think Ethlyn would have picked up on something between Quan and her brother, just as surely as she couldn’t have been blind to what he was doing with Finn. Finn on the other hand may not have figured it out, which is probably for the best. It’s enough that Finn would have known that he was sharing Quan’s affections with Ethlyn; adding a crush on Sigurd into the mix with the conclusion that their relationship may have begun as a kind of projection might have been too much. Quan seems to have been very much the love of Finn’s life, but even if they were intimately involved the reverse was definitely not true. Maybe the writers will lean into the messier side of desire between men already implied in FE5 with Selphina, and we’ll see a Gen 2 Finn who doesn’t hate Ethlyn but who also doesn’t have a problem with quietly omitting her legacy. Little things, like his first tears in over a decade during his reunion with Altena or Leif identifying himself as the son of one holy blood house in Heroes, add up to in my opinion and at only a bit of a stretch a Finn who sees Quan’s children as somehow theirs, that they are the legacy of his doomed love just as much as they are the future of Quan’s dreams for Thracia. Jugdral just rolls that way sometimes, so I can see it happening.

(Incidentally, this means that I’m now torn between the image of Finn as a responsible gay mentor for Diarmuid+any other non-straight Gen 2 characters and Finn as a subtly unhinged cautionary tale that fills them with dread for their own long term prospects.)