Now that I’m in the middle of a break between FE14 routes I wanted to think about what Switch game I’m going to be getting myself for my birthday in a few weeks, since other than these new or recent releases are looking pretty thin in number before Three Houses comes out next spring (hopefully…shouldn’t we be getting some more promotional content on that soon?). These are my options:
1) Diablo III, which is being released for the console on the Feast of All Souls. Of Blizzard’s non-Warcraft properties Diablo is the one I’ve been most interested in, and it seems that the latest entry shares various design and mechanical features with WoW which ought to make it easier to get into. Not much into hack-and-slash RPGs, but then maybe that’s because it really seems like one of those genres that’s pretty boring to watch even if it is fun to play.
2) Skyrim, because Breath of the Wild eased me into the open-world concept and this one is supposedly incredible (if a bit dated now). A former lover was really into ES and talked about the games a fair amount so I something of the lore and mechanics and such. Then again, I haven’t touched BotW since I completed all the DLC content 100% so if anything that should tell me that open world games can’t hold my attention once I’ve been everywhere and done everything, even for repeat playthroughs.
or 3) Super Mario Odyssey, unquestionably the safest choice as I know my way around 3D Mario platformers – even more so in this case since everything I’ve heard about it suggests that it follows more in the footsteps of 64 and Sunshine than the Galaxy games which I’ve never played.
imoooo its so stupit that the same ppl who complain abt the incest in genealogy which is, yknow, treated as taboo and terrible. are like “uwu my azurrin babies” and try to justify it by saying it doesnt count as incest bc it was a plot twist. like no. you’re just a hypocrite and don’t like games with good writing. genealogy has flaws, its a 20some year old game, but fates was poorly written and fanservicey and catered to incest fetishists lol and suckers like you still try to defend the plot as anything other than a cash grab off awakening’s success. lolz.
While I agree that there’s a lot of unnecessary hostilities between the different subsections of fandom and that criticisms of the games can be made in bad faith from preexisting biases against those groups (i.e. that Awakening and Fates represent newbies/casuals or that Genealogy, Blazing Sword, and/or the Tellius games are the ones most often exalted by older fans/elitists), the idea that Genealogy has a morally stronger position against incest than Fates or any other game for that matter is fundamentally flawed.
right, so this is crucial to address, because both “jugdral has all the incest and fates has none of it” and “fates has all the incest and jugdral has none of it” are sincerely up there amongst the worst takes anyone in this fandom has ever produced
there are some finer sticking points there that I’d like to unravel, though; primarily, the matter that incest in Jugdral and incest in Fates have a fundamental presentation difference that warrants individual analysis/criticism of each case, instead of comparison (but that doesn’t lend itself quite as well to pissfights and favoritism, eh?)
@demoiselledefortune on why Jugdral (and later characters in the mold of Lachesis) does incest, one theory I have is that this most popular model of incestuous feeling – that of a teenage girl crushing on her older brother – is meant to represent emotional immaturity, like a variant Electra complex that gets “fixed” when these girls find and fall in love/lust with another guy. Granted this doesn’t quite work in all cases and especially not for Lachesis, who dies(?) likely an unwed teenage mother of two with her love for her brother idealized and immortalized both in-universe and in the minds of the fandom, but if this is the case we have an explanation for why this archetype keeps getting repeated. Of course it’s a similar explanation for Japanese!Soleil the schoolgirl “lesbian” and Nina the yaoi fangirl, so….
And even though Gaiden has no incest subtext unless you read into Alm and Celica being raised together, remake Valentia added some to the mix. It axed the two leads’ shared upbringing but recast Clair as another Lachesis/Clarine figure and threw in Conrad apparently just for a few incest gags. Neither are fetishistic in the ways Fates is with the royal siblings, but they do seem to be winking at the series’s reputation in the same manner as Heroes bringing up the Magvel twincest joke or playing up Lachesis’s brother love. I can’t interpret these as anything other than attempts at humor, that everyone from his sister to his estranged BFF to all of his male subordinates wants to jump on Clive’s mediocre dick and that Conrad was such a poorly-conceived addition (he doesn’t figure at all into Zofia’s succession because…?) that he’s good for nothing but a few giggles over subtext and yet more evidence that Valentia hates women. I do however bring these up along with the examples from Heroes and the Fates fetishism to indicate where I think the current group of people involved with the franchise stand re: incest. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if we got more in the same vein come Three Houses.
Side note: I know there are readings of Boyd/Mist that paint that pairing as Tellius’s knowing nod to the Lachesis archetype as well, but that one’s purely on a meta level – Boyd in this case being a (not related, heterosexual) stand-in for Ike.
imoooo its so stupit that the same ppl who complain abt the incest in genealogy which is, yknow, treated as taboo and terrible. are like “uwu my azurrin babies” and try to justify it by saying it doesnt count as incest bc it was a plot twist. like no. you’re just a hypocrite and don’t like games with good writing. genealogy has flaws, its a 20some year old game, but fates was poorly written and fanservicey and catered to incest fetishists lol and suckers like you still try to defend the plot as anything other than a cash grab off awakening’s success. lolz.
While I agree that there’s a lot of unnecessary hostilities between the different subsections of fandom and that criticisms of the games can be made in bad faith from preexisting biases against those groups (i.e. that Awakening and Fates represent newbies/casuals or that Genealogy, Blazing Sword, and/or the Tellius games are the ones most often exalted by older fans/elitists), the idea that Genealogy has a morally stronger position against incest than Fates or any other game for that matter is fundamentally flawed.
Sure, Arvis/Deirdre is explicitly a plot of the main antagonist…but of the numerous instances of unambiguous incestuous feeling in the Jugdral games this the only one condemned by the text, and arguably it’s more because Manfroy kidnapped and brainwashed Deirdre to make it happen than because he set her up to marry and sleep with her half-brother. The children of this pairing are practically demigods, and for Julius at least it is acknowledged in-game to be so because he is the product of incest. Then there’s Lachesis, whose powerful attachment to her brother is presented as a star-crossed love that can potentially get “fulfilled” if the player chooses to pair up Lachesis’s daughter and Eldigan’s son, who are fully aware of their parents’ unconventional attraction and lean into the implication in one of their conversations. That’s not even touching upon the other instances of potential incest the game allows for, among them an uncle and niece (Shannan/Larcei), two pairs of first cousins who could also be considered genetic half-siblings as their mothers are identical twins (Lester/Patty and Febail/Lana), two Gen 1 pairs ambiguously related through common holy blood (Ayra/Chulainn and Claud/Silvia), and possibly others depending in Gen 2 depending on who gets paired up in Gen 1 (ex. Lex!Larcei with Iuchar or Iucharba is another set of first cousins). The game does nothing to discourage any of these and could even be said to support these potential pairings as all of them have lover conversations, something that quite a few pairings in this game lack.
Overall I would say that FE4 takes a morally neutral stance against consensual incest, something that could be said for Fire Emblem as a whole and that crops up in smaller concentrations in most games. Fates may have a host of writing problems – I’m going over them again myself in a series I’m working through at the moment – but its stance on incest is entirely consistent with the rest of the series, from Lachesis’s tragic love to Priscilla’s clingy attachment to Raven to the twincest rumors of FE8 (freshly rekindled by Heroes, incidentally) to the bara bandit brothers in Awakening especially to, yes, Corrin’s ability to bone a whole host of people who are their siblings after a fashion. On that note though I do have to remark that Azurrin is not where you’ll find FE14′s incest fetishism. They’re only cousins – not considered incestuous in many cultures, including in Japan apparently since both Awakening and Fates include cousin pairings that are romantic in Japanese but clumsily censored to be platonic in localization – and are only revealed as such near the very end of what will probably be the last route the player experiences. It’s not something the story or their support dwell on either. No, the real incest fetishism comes from pairing Corrin with any of the Hoshidan or Nohrian royals, each of which plays up that angle for the benefit of those who are into that sort of thing.
And, for my part, I don’t consider that a problem. I’ve engaged in incest roleplay in my own sex life, and I don’t see anything morally objectionable about exploring the subject in fiction either. For better or worse incest is a recurring motif (or running gag, if you will) of Fire Emblem, and while we can speculate endlessly as to just why the series repeatedly feels the urge to go there it is something that fans either have to square with and accept or attempt to ignore. The individual games can be freely picked apart for their ethical and representational missteps – and old and new alike they all misstep in their own ways – but I would be very much surprised if there were ever an FE that took an all-around definitive stance against incest. Would it even really be FE then?
…No? I can’t imagine where you could have ever gotten that impression, anon. I’ve always had brown hair, though I have some natural dark blond highlights that are more noticeable if I’m out in the sun enough.
It’s remarkably difficult to find among my photos pictures of myself that neither include someone else nor involve at least partial nudity, but I was able to dig up a selection of entirely SFW examples from the past year or so.
The picture I use as a profile on hookup apps, simple and unassuming with little that can be remarked on other than myself. I’ve been told that in my more quasi-aristocratic moments I can come off as cold and unapproachable, so here I’m surrounded by warm colors (that neither complement my disposition nor flatter my complexion, but still) with my characteristic wry half-smile I prefer whenever anyone insists that I smile for a picture. Also, I neglected to shave that morning, allowing for the faintest suggestion of what my facial hair might be for those into that sort of thing. It’s always a good idea to cover as many bases as possible, you know.
On the gallery of a small plantation house in St. Francisville, near the river in the Florida Parishes north of Lake Pontchartrain. This region is so named because it was not part of the Louisiana Purchase but instead the westernmost extent of the Florida panhandle at the time it was acquired by the US, giving it a slightly different history from the rest of the state. The Anglos (of which there are many) are especially a strange breed, not quite the standard Bible Belt rednecks who live in the northern part of the state but also not the insidiously adaptable Episcopalians and their ilk who shoved their way into New Orleans culture a century and a half ago. In any case, I don’t stand out much in a photo taken from this distance, but sometimes the environs are worth a look themselves.
Case in point – in the gardens of Houmas House, a plantation along the river between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The elegantly-arranged – and anachronistic, but it’s not as though I own the place, and in any case vast fields of sugarcane do not exactly draw the eye – parterres and paved walks are ironically contrasted with this bench sculpture of a homeless man, an artful reminder of poverty ever-present on the fringe of beauty.
…Oh, right. This is supposed to be about me. Moving on.
For a less flattering staged photo here is one from that same outing, in a carriage house converted into a large open dining room. This photo mostly shows off the size of the barbecued shrimp, here lifted from the dark roux that gives the dish most of its flavor. I assume I’m brandishing my knife like so because I was stopped in the middle of bringing it to my dish to cut off the head. Despite the name perhaps the only thing barbecued shrimp has in common with American barbecue is that it’s rather messy to eat, even more so than boiled crawfish although the mechanics – pinch the tail and suck – are similar.
On the subject of food, a scene from lunch at Commander’s Palace in the Garden District. We sat in the naturally-lit upstairs dining room, which overlooks the Lafayette Cemetery (I imagine some people might find that morbid). Founded in 1893 by the eponymous Anglo-Frenchman – yes, those exist, especially after the Civil War when the money started to dry up and we found ourselves for the first time on the outside looking in at what is deemed Society here – but since purchased by the prolific Brennan family of restaurateurs, Commander’s is one of the relatively uncommon locales outside the Vieux Carré where both Creoles and Anglos like to see and be seen.
From last winter, at the rooftop bar of the Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles Avenue, named the Tin Roof after the Tennessee Williams play. The balcony overlooks the skyscrapers of the American Section – so you might imagine why I chose to sit inside that and it looked like it was rather cold that evening. The drinks in front of me are grasshoppers, my favorite New Orleans original cocktail.
And finally for novelty purposes, a picture of me walking through some nondescript neighborhood in the middle of last winter, probably the most bundled up against the cold I’ll ever be here. It was likely around 5 degrees C/40 degrees F or some similar temperature that would get me immediately and justifiably mocked in Québec, but life in the subtropics does not adequately prepare you even for that so I believe I deserve to be excused.
I have just found out from Facebook of all sources that the Anglo ex recently celebrated his wedding. He and his homely bride of undoubtedly unremarkable parentage will be making their permanent home in one of those forgettable states between here and Québec. That’s for the best; I’m sure he’ll feel more at home surrounded by those of his own kind. Meanwhile in the years since he vanished from my life I have dined at the tables of some of this city’s most illustrious and affluent old men with a taste for boys. I have turned down more than one genuine marriage proposal out of pragmatism, fully used to by now the reality that the only men who will love me in full sincerity are those too poor to sustain that love. And meanwhile I conduct my affairs on the side with admirable discretion and clever intrigue – just last night I was spit roasted by a married couple in the upper apartment of a townhouse-turned bar in the Avenue St. Claude, a contact that I hope may prove a useful entry into their social circle should I need to look in that direction one day. I am everything that a Créole of my disposition ought to be, a credit to the very ancestors that he always scoffed at because it clearly must be so easy to “be your own person” when one has such comparatively rootless forebears.
The popular consensus among FE elitists – a group to which I theoretically belong as my experience with the series predates Awakening – is that Conquest is the only truly salvageable part of Fates solely on account of its difficulty. As I also happen to be a filthy casual who will shamelessly abuse Phoenix Mode and the grinding DLCs if I’m really in the mood I naturally do not agree with this assessment, or at least I don’t put anywhere near that much stock in the challenge that Conquest provides. I am then left with an important question – appeal to older games’ less forgiving difficulty aside, does Conquest live up (down?) to its reputation as hot garbage?
For starters I don’t care for the base assumption that Birthright has all the good story moments and Conquest has all the good gameplay moments. There are several maps on both routes that I find more engaging in Birthright than in Conquest, such as Izumo and the opera house. Conversely, there are moments when Conquest’s story covers similar territory to Birthright’s but does so in a more satisfying way, from Takumi’s arc to each route’s fight against shapeshifters to their endgames.
It would perhaps be most accurate to say that Conquest’s failure as a story stems less from individual moments like those and more from the disconnect between the story it’s trying to tell and the story fans were expecting based on promotional material and Nohr’s overall aesthetic. This is not a villain campaign, and Corrin’s inability to genuinely commit to Garon’s goals of scorched earth imperialism throw that fact repeatedly in the player’s face. Rather, this is the unsettling tale of a family of abuse victims learning to push back against their upbringing – while being to a point complicit in their abuser’s horrible actions. It’s not an easy story to experience in those terms; you’re practically required to like and sympathize with the Nohrian royals in order to make it work, not to mention accept a narrative starring a (potential) self-insert who receives remarkably little agency in directing the course of the plot. I can’t really say that there’s anything else quite like it in Fire Emblem, which may be another reason fans are quick to dismiss the story outright. It’s neither the series standard plot enacted in Birthright nor is it the hybrid of Awakening’s basic ethos and Radiant Dawn’s grandiose plotting that comprises Revelation. At best I can maybe draw a comparison between Conquest and Thracia, which also casts a degree of moral greyness on its main characters and takes several of the major plot motions out of the hands of its protagonist. That’s still a stretch however, and at the end of the day Conquest alone among the routes of Fates is best understood on its own – a flop, albeit an ambitious flop.
I don’t mean to excuse the genuine instances of lazy plotting, questionable worldbuilding, and bias in favor of this route’s enemy nation. Those are all present in Conquest and do indeed bring down the experience, but it’s far from the only story in the series to suffer from those same problems. It’s not great or even good writing, but thanks to Fates’s split story structure it can lean on the other two routes to help fill in the gaps and come out to be – in my opinion at least – just about serviceable for the purposes of this unconventional tale of pacifistic conquest, learned helplessness, and miscast antagonism. As I’ve expressed before when talking about story in FE, ambition counts a lot for me regardless of execution, and Conquest may be the single best example of that in the series thus far.
Next time: a week or so off, then Revelation Chapter 6-12
dornishsphinx said
Hmmm, I’ve lost my progress since switching phones, but I’ve been thinking of restarting for something to do whenever I have a few spare minutes. What year has it got to now?
On a side note, I find it hilarious that people only started caring about JKR’s writing choices after she started dabbling in American stuff, considering the rest of the series is hardly the pinnacle of PC-dom (with the dark East European and also somehow German school being the one that stuck out to me.) It feels so very transparent.
It’s up to early Year 5. With how infrequently story chapters get added though the game feels more driven by temporary events that last for a few days to a week and award everything from cosmetic features to brief side story content. Right now for example there’s a Halloween event that gives you various in-game currency and a hideous orange costume for completing. I’m actually curious as to how those events are handled for people just starting out. It would suck if you just miss out on a bunch of content because it’s already over.
Re: JKR and cultural insensitivity, I do remember a few people complaining about Cho Chang back when the books and movies were being released, but it really has blown up since then. I just don’t think that kind of racism was really on fandom radars in the 2000s the way it is today, although Rowling’s tendency to retroactively champion diversity that she didn’t actually write in the books (ex. gay Dumbledore, black Hermione) probably also has a lot to do with her work being more closely scrutinized. For my part I’m fairly indifferent to the whole affair; my lone horse in this race is the treatment of the Beauxbâtons characters, and while it is indeed silly it falls squarely in line with how Anglos like to depict the French. (Also, the movie’s decision to make Beauxbâtons
an all-female school encourages the hilarious headcanon of a magical couvent.)
Chapters 21-Endgame, in which this turns into the end of a Pokémon game.
Chapter 21
This may just be the worst filler chapter in Fates, dull and forgettable in pretty much every way. This isn’t even the first time in Conquest that Iago has pulled his Faceless stunt against Corrin, and it’s still a dumb and poorly-developed source for a conflict. Why does Iago hate Corrin so much on this route anyway? Lilith also dies here, her death even more random and pointless than the one in Birthright. I actually had an idea for how they could have killed her off in Conquest and have it carry some actual emotional weight: have her take a killing blow from Takumi in Chapter 23. It would emphasize just how far gone Takumi is and tie Lilith’s sacrificial love for Corrin back into their Nohrian siblings’ love, particularly as Elise does take an arrow for Corrin back in Cheve. But nope, death by random Faceless it is.
Even the experience of playing this chapter is less challenging and more highly annoying, between the beefy Stoneborn stunning units and the Faceless hordes clogging the road to the end. I also hate how the rubble blocking certain paths up the stairs can be hard to see; at least once several of my units got stuck in a dead end because I couldn’t tell at first that the way I was sending them was impassable.
Before moving on, I should probably explain the Pokémon thing. Conquest’s lategame has always felt conspicuously methodical to me when compared with the other routes and with FE lategames generally. It reminds me very much of the typical (and infamously formulaic) experience of a Pokémon game, which end with a long and tedious trip through a cave that forms a physical bottleneck to the final area of the main story (this chapter) followed by sequential challenges against the Elite Four (22-25, with the four Hoshidan royals even faced in ascending order of age), a “surprise” fight against a regional Champion (26, with “surprise” in quotes because, just like with Hans and Iago, it’s rarely surprising that you have to fight them at some point), and then often a challenge against one or more otherworldly legendary Pokémon in the postgame (27 and Endgame, in which Corrin faces off against two incarnations of an insane dragon from another dimension). To contrast, Birthright’s final confrontations are more spread out and don’t even feature half of the Nohrian siblings, and the true climaxes are those that have been built up throughout the route. Revelation does throw multiple antagonists against Corrin in sequence, but in its tradition of imitating the endgame of Radiant Dawn each of them represents a different story thread getting hastily wrapped up to make way for the fight against Fates’s overall antagonist. This is not to suggest that Conquest’s lategame has no effective moments, but the deliberate scripting doesn’t help this route’s reputation for lazy plotting.
Chapter 22
I have two problems with this chapter, although one will take just a few sentences to resolve. The Dragon Veins on this map have their action described as “flatten a levee,” when what they actually do are destroy walls separating the different sections of the field. A levee is not a wall on land but an artificial embankment against a river or other body of water built to prevent flooding. They’re kind of a big deal in New Orleans, and their appearance and function do not remote resemble the walls in this chapter. Weird word choice, localizers.
The other, more substantial problem I have here concerns Sakura and her supposed innocence. In a sense I appreciate that Sakura does here what Elise refuses to do in Birthright and takes up arms against Corrin; it highlights her resolve in spite of her characteristic timidity and helps differentiate the two little sisters in a more substantial way than the fetishistic anime tropes that they each apparently embody. I also appreciate that Sakura’s reluctance to fight comes through in the way this chapter is structured, in that she’s enclosed behind…”levees” healing her forces from afar and that you’re not required to fight her to end the chapter. What I take issue with is how easily the game casts her in the role of innocent victim after the battle, simply because Garon and his minions show up (from where?) and kill all the surrendered Hoshidans. Yes, this is a war crime and yet another demonstration of how terrible these people are and how we’re obviously going to be killing them later, but Sakura and even more so her retainers and Yukimura were earlier attacking the Nohrian army. This would have been a good point to demonstrate some genuine moral greyness in someone who gets nothing of the sort of otherwise (and that’s not even getting into her standing alongside Yukimura, a man revealed earlier in the route to be a bit sketchy himself), but thanks to Garon the scene is skewed in favor of flat villainy and justified outrage again.
Chapter 23
…Alright, I’ll be the one to ask it. Why does Hoshido have a Great Wall? It’s my understanding that, in contrast to Nohr pulling from over a half dozen Western European cultures, Hoshido is meant to be representative of solely Japanese culture – and yet when I think of East Asian countries with oversized walls I’m obviously not thinking of Japan. Perhaps some projecting on the part of the writers of the kind of defenses they think Japan would have had if it had been a large continental territory like Hoshido?
Regardless, I don’t have much to say about the specific content of this chapter. I’ve already remarked that Takumi’s arc in Conquest is well-executed, and his last stand atop a great wall overlooking a gorge in the setting sun makes for a fittingly dramatic end even before it goes all possession-assisted suicide. The deaths of his retainers have a bit of punch to them too, particularly since it’s become so customary on this route for Corrin to spare defeated opponents.
This policy along with the scope of this battle do however bring up a larger point I wanted to make when comparing routes. Both Birthright and Conquest end with Corrin’s army invading the enemy nation, conquering their capital, and deposing their sovereign along with various others who get in the way. There is though a strong contrast between the presentation of these two invasions, and they happen to involve this series’s varying representation of the scale of its wars and the forces under the player’s control. In some cases it’s understood that the characters that make up the playable cast, plus a few major NPCs like merchants, literally represent the entirety of their side of the conflict. In other cases the playable cast are implied to be merely the vanguard of a much larger army. This can sometimes get awkward, but most of the time it’s fairly clear-cut that, say, all of Blazing Sword follows the first model whereas Gaiden and its remake are evenly split between an army of the first type (Celica) and an army of the second (Alm post-Deliverance Hideout).
For basically all of Birthright and Revelation and even parts of Conquest Fates uses the literal one-to-one scale model, and that manifests clearly in Birthright’s endgame. Corrin’s army sneaks into Nohr, passing through a supposedly abandoned fortress and a river of lava to reach a succession of two secrets passages that allow them to infiltrate Castle Krakenburg. They could not be feasibly marching with a whole army at their backs, and as such the conflicts they face in Windmire play out either as ambushes, Corrin’s personal family drama, or quick surgical strikes against enemy commanders who are unambiguously killed off. Not so in Conquest, where even before Garon’s army joins up with Corrin’s there’s enough of a rearguard to secure the major military installations that they seize on the way to Shirasagi and also keep prisoners of war. Azura also alludes to rebellion among the army’s ranks, a concern that would be completely baseless were the player not meant to assume that their visible army was being followed by legions of unnamed soldiers. The effect of this is that Conquest feels much more like a, well, conquest, and there’s a greater consideration for the standard rules of engagement in wartime (and Garon’s callous disregard for them) to match the larger scope and less personal conflict. Sure, the Hoshidan royals are still crying that Corrin has betrayed them and they can’t be a family, but since Corrin doesn’t really know the Hoshidans in the same way as they do the Nohrians I don’t find that to be at the emotional core of these chapters.
Chapter 24
As natural as it is to feel sorry for Takumi for what he goes through in Conquest – exacerbated even further here after this chapter when Hinoka apparently forgets about him entirely when contemplating whether Corrin can keep their family together – Hinoka might be even sadder on a meta level. Here she is, a woman whose life has been defined since early childhood by the kidnapping of her beloved sibling forced to fight that sibling now siding with their own captors as they invade and conquer her home…and yet for the small amount of time the main story spends building up her character and motivations this confrontation carries all the emotional weight of a single-chapter boss and little else. The biggest character moments on this map are less about her and more about other royals: Azura steels herself to march on her adoptive home, Xander doubles down on the pragmatic rationalization of an abuse victim, and Camilla gets to do her performative violent flirtation routine with a side of Corrin smothering that actually manages to be kind of funny. Even the retainer banter that Hinoka excels in elsewhere feels bland in this chapter.
As such I don’t really have much more to add. This map’s gimmick is a clever expansion of one used in an early Birthright chapter at least. And, uh, the Hinokacopter I guess? I suppose the question of the day is whether that’s more or less silly than Camilla’s catwalk strut.
Chapter 25
Now that’s a less fine hunk of obnoxiously self-righteous man right there.
Intriguing foil and bara porn potential aside it’s not that I hate Ryoma, even in Conquest, but it frustrates me how unsubtle the writers were in their love for him. I recall reading meta once that Ryoma fails as a proper Camus because there’s never any acknowledgement that he’s fighting for the wrong cause, and I have to agree. Corrin tells him that they’re working to save Hoshido too in spite of appearances, but Ryoma’s suicide is still presented as an honorable tragedy that spares Corrin a painful choice that’s ultimately pointless since Iago and Garon try to kill them in the next two chapters anyway. Also, while Ryoma finally abandons his desire to drag Corrin back into the Hoshidan fold after being told that Hinoka is dead (but no reaction to Takumi’s apparent suicide – sensing a pattern there?) the rage that replaces it lacks the well-intentioned antivillainy of the traditional Camus. He’s just pissed off enough to kill Corrin in revenge for killing his sister…or rather stand there for ages waiting for you to finish the rest of the chapter. At least Xander’s passivity and nerfed stats in his final Birthright confrontation make sense in context.
The strange thing is that I have no moral problem whatsoever with the concept of honorable suicide, but this particular scenario makes me kind of hate that Ryoma does it anyway. He dies a hero for Corrin and Azura to cry over, nothing like the flawed but honorable (in his own way) individual Xander is acknowledged to be in Birthright. Ryoma’s final stand and death flatten his motivations from earlier in the route to the point where the player is not encouraged to examine them. His controlling and manipulative behavior from Chapter 12 go completely forgotten, and it’s not until this very chapter that he accepts that Corrin truly cares about and wants to be with his Nohrian family – because Corrin claims to have murdered Hinoka.
(Side note: this is arguably the most Hinoka ever matters to the plot of any of the routes, yet another sign of the serial neglect of her character.)
Ryoma is every bit as flawed and complex an antagonist or even an ally as Xander, but you have to dig at the story to understand that. This leaves me with a deeply unsatisfying impression of imbalance, not only because these two are the most clearly established foils among the royal siblings but also because it perfectly encapsulates the prevailing creator bias of Fates, a bias that the players were seemingly meant to accept at face value.
Chapter 26
*yawns*
This chapter and the last two may throw almost everything Conquest has to offer at you to really amp up the difficulty, but in terms of story Chapter 26 is just a speed bump to get to the big reveal at the end. Iago and Hans are still not remotely interesting villains, and nothing interesting comes of them here. Leo even gets the honors of killing Iago just as he does in Birthright. Actually, there is one good bit – the moment when all the siblings stand up to Iago and Hans and announce their intentions to kill them and how they’re going to get away with it, turning one of Iago’s usual tactics against him. It’s the most satisfying showdown with these two in any of the routes, in my opinion.
I think this would be a good time to bring up a theory I heard recently from a YouTube critic explaining how Iago and Hans’s obvious two-dimensional villainy could plausibly exist in-universe: as Anankos is using Garon to destroy both Hoshido and Nohr, it benefits his long-term goal to give high-ranking positions to destructive individuals who will not only gleefully kill off the opposition but will cause dissent and disruption among their own ranks through their blatantly awful behavior. This is likely a case of giving the writers credit for more than they deserve, but the Fates fandom is no stranger to having to do most of the worldbuilding work itself.
Chapter 27 + Endgame
I’m going to step back a bit on my criticism of Conquest’s formulaic lategame, because despite the rigid structure leading up to this finale and some shared story elements with Birthright’s endgame – the Yato power-up, the shattering of the Yato reversed by a conversation with the dead and the power of friendship, Azura’s death and continuing mystery, an all too quick smoothing over of the political situation following the battle – these chapters and Conquest’s ending are substantially better than I remember them from earlier playthroughs.
Let’s start with Xander. He goes from threatening to kill Corrin if their claims about Garon turn out to be a ruse to the first of the Nohrians to defy the newly-revealed slime monster masquerading as his father – for precisely the reason that he’s lambasted as an idiot with daddy issues on the other routes. Alone among his siblings he knew the real Garon long enough to understand what he was truly like, so it’s fitting that he’s the one to understand that they’re facing a monstrous imitation of the real man and then rally the others to join him. That’s a profound turnaround, and as such Siegfriend powering up the Yato really lands as a strong moment.
Then there’s the resolution of Takumi’s arc, which unlike with Ryoma’s two chapters ago doesn’t tidily push the reality of his feelings of loss and resentment under the rug because of the current circumstances. Corrin and Takumi get to reconcile in the setting’s equivalent of limbo, each acknowledging that their mistakes led them to this point. This does not, however, then resolve itself with the conclusion that Corrin chose the wrong path in the end; instead, they validate their decision in the face of a bright future for Nohr and peace with Hoshido (which will presumably involve a hell of a lot of diplomacy and trade agreements, but details…). I believe this was an important writing choice to make for the player, to allow for Conquest’s ending to feel like a proper resolution instead of a monstrous lie as Xander describes the war in the final cutscene.
And that cutscene, and the scenes in the Nohrian throne room preceding it – actual acknowledgement in the story of Nohr’s culture and class system at last! There’s even an oblique hint at the resource scarcity that Birthright spells out, that the Nohrians feel they must make war to support their country. As much as I would have preferred all this worldbuilding to be sprinkled throughout Conquest rather than crammed into the ending I’ll take what I can get. We have to live with friendship superpowers and easy diplomacy and, er, Camilla’s bouncy breasts to get there, but all the same the finale is a strong one.
Oh, and Azura…it’s easy to forget about Azura, considering she never explains in this route what her song will do in the endgame and she dies offscreen immediately thereafter. It’s frustrating that she has so much less presence on this route compared to Birthright when here she’s the one who directs Corrin on the path to invading Hoshido instead of coming up with any other kind of solution. Way to completely dodge any kind of responsibility for that decision, Azura.
Gascon-en-exil: Gallophilic Cultural Posturing 