I’m asking for the continents we hardly talk about. How about Aversa?

Sexuality Headcanon:

Bi/pan, she’s pretty flexible all around.

Gender Headcanon:

Cis female per the needs of making Morgan (see what I said about Azelle), though like Camilla she dresses like a drag queen so there’s some entertaining headcanons there if one is so inclined.

A ship I have with said character:

No one really. Shadowgift!Morgan isn’t even that good.

A BROTP I have with said character:

I have no idea. She’s very much a loner even though she weaponizes sex – something I can wholly relate to.

A NOTP I have with said character:

Validar, I suppose, though I’m not very strongly against it.

A random headcanon:

I don’t really buy into the reveal that she was an entirely innocent villager until she was kidnapped and brainwashed by the Grimleal. Aversa’s in a weird spot characterization wise because we’re meant to believe she was invented more or less from the ground up à la Sonia even though she’s still human and there’s an air of deliberate construction similar to Camilla’s in her behavior.

General opinion over said character:

Meh. FE has several more interesting temptress figures, and FE13 has several units who can fulfill a role comparable to hers better.

9, 27, and bonus: have you made a post ranking the lords yet, and if you haven’t is it something you will someday do?

9. Most disliked character(s)? Why?

For FE, Priam. Good God, even if he is just a reference to similar joke characters from FE3 and FE5, his existence reigniting the controversy over Ike’s sexuality made me loathe him. He’s not even that funny compared to Shannam.

27.

Least shippable character?

Excluding stuff like kids in every fandom (not really into aging up characters, though I don’t think it’s heinous and amoral or anything), I have to go with pretty much every one of Tolkien’s characters. I have no idea what sort of next level Anglo-ness the man was writing on, but despite the huge following of various LoTR and Hobbit M/M pairings I just…can’t get into any of them when the source material is so devoid of any sexual feeling. To contrast him with another Anglo author with famously sex-deprived writing, I feel the same way about shipping Jane Austen characters…but she at least can write engaging romances, and in her settings it’s completely understandable that everyone would be an absolute prude.

I have not, though it’s something I could manage without much trouble. I don’t think I could neatly order them into a list, but I can approximate the levels at which I like engaging with each of them.

Gotta know, who are you pairing up this Awakening run?

With the support log full and no emotional attachment whatsoever to any of the pairings I go strictly for gameplay optimization. The ones I’ve plotted out are fairly standard:

Chrom/Sumia – all-around best pick for both Lucina and Cynthia, with the two of them operating very similarly except that Lucina has Dual Strike+ instead of a Faire

Lissa/Ricken – Owain gets a great MAG mod and Luna because his twitching sword hand is ironically inferior most of the time

Sully/Donnel and Tharja/Gaius – generally agreed-upon best way to fix Kjelle and Noire, with Kjelle able to take Donnel’s bad mods and lack of anything worthwhile other than pegasus knight and Noire getting both Galeforce and a proc stack

Miriel/Gregor – though I’ve never tried it comes highly recommended for Laurent, presumably because of flexible mods and the potential for a Vantage+Vengeance+Wrath crit build

Maribelle/Libra – better mod dads are needed more elsewhere but since that’s all Brady cares about he can get by with Libra’s mediocrity

Panne/Virion – amazing mods everywhere that matters and Hit+20 to fix the one issue with berserker

Cordelia/Lon’qu – good mods again as well as Lancefaire wyvern lord, which just barely outweighs Frederick (or Kellam) giving her Luna so I don’t have to worry about setting up Vengeance

Vaike/Nowi – Axefaire general hard support Nah, which is one of the best things you can do with her without Robin

Olivia/Stahl – Luna and better mods than the two remaining options

Cherche/Henry – the only non-Robin father who gives Gerome both things he needs to be a standard male physical support (berserker and Hit-boosting skills), which matters because…

F!Robin/Gerome – alright, I am playing favorites here. 3rd gen Morgan also alleviates the awkward problem of having one child too many and needing to drop one (usually Gerome or Nah depending on Morgan’s gender)

Feel free to imagine Frederick and Kellam consoling each other in their loneliness with a double-ended dildo, because we all know neither of them could top worth a damn.

I’ve reached the halfway point of Awakening and have stopped to grind for babies ~~because they were just asking for that double entendre~~. Everyone loves to harp on the Valm arc for being pointless and the time travel for being unexplored and the ending and Spotpass recruitments for ripping the teeth out of the narrative, but I’ve remembered an entirely different story-based grievance, one that I don’t see talked about nearly as much: the pacing between the end of Chapter 11 through Chapter 13 is ridiculously off-kilter.

After “killing” Gangrel the staging shifts to that of a standard FE epilogue with the downfall of the evil nation and a wedding and swelling triumphant music…and then there’s a two-year time skip for Lucina to happen and suddenly you’re back on the world map as if no time has passed at all. Two chapters later adult Lucina makes her big reveal and you can start getting paralogues for the other children just in time for the voyage to Valm and Robin’s infamous war crime. This period is effectively the halfway point of FE13 at least in a gameplay sense, though the narrative feels absurdly stretched between two major events with the climax of the first of three big story arcs and Lucina’s reveal as disconnected as they are. I really cannot understate how awkward that time skip in particular is; the closest comparison I can make in another game is FE4′s Gen 1 and its several leaps forward during and immediately after the Agustria campaign. In both games part of the explanation is to give time for the birth of the lord’s child – along with a sizable period during which we might assume the other eugenics babies get born, with only a few exceptions like Coirpre, Gerome, and anyone Henry fathers – but in Genealogy the time skips occur during an ongoing campaign wherein the playable cast is kept together by immediate circumstances. From the way FE13′s Chapter 11 ends one might imagine that everyone just goes home afterward and then…all come back together again without being contacted because Valm is just that threatening. Actually, what was Virion even doing in Ylisse for the first eleven chapters other than perving on Sully et al?

Gah. Even with FE15 for context this game is just riddled with plot holes.

Next up on my list of FEs I’ve overlooked but am now revisiting is FE13. I’ve barely touched either Awakening or Fates since I completed the arduous and mostly unrewarding task of filling out their gigantic support logs, so this has been good for a refresher. Even though I prefer Fates’s narrative and overall presentation and appreciate some of its mechanics like the lack of weapon durability, daggers, varied objectives, ~~and feet~~ Awakening does have more min-maxing appeal. I’ve not yet gotten to the point where the story flies completely off the rails, but maybe with Echoes’s postgame in mind the effect will be somewhat lessened?

munchinmanaketes said

From my experience, Virion is considered the worst father. Kellam gives Luna at least.

He does, but Virion has two advantages over Kellam: a better mod spread (2 SKL and SPD vs. 1 STR and SKL and -2 SPD, since the remaining stats are basically irrelevant in Apotheosis) and more diverse class offerings with sniper (longbow access, high SKL for dual strikes and procs), sage (best all-around magic class), and wyvern lord (high mobility physical class) all as good final classes for the map. Kellam’s really only got sage since assassins’ SPD is usually overkill for their low damage output and general is only really useful as a support as discussed elsewhere which means Luna will be wasted on a unit who can’t proc it in the back.

That’s not to say Virion is always the better of the two since different kids have different needs. Owain and Inigo for example really just want a more reliable proc than Astra, and while Kellam’s certainly not winning any awards for great mods to go with Luna they could take him if necessary (more so Inigo since Owain needs more help in the mod department). Virion meanwhile has three cases where his paternity is particularly valued:

Brady, who gets everything he needs from his mother and only wants good mods,
Severa, who appreciates any of Virion’s classes I mentioned depending on what you’re doing with her (though I’m not too fond of this one since this means she’ll have to set up Vengeance for her proc),
or any of the non-Galeboys (Laurent, Yarne, Gerome), as the first two will like sniper’s Hit +20 if they go berserker support to patch up that class’s SKL and Gerome can make do with Bowfaire warrior in that case since the only non-Avatar father who gives both berserker and good Hit-boosting skills, Henry, is in higher demand elsewhere.

The more direct comparison to explain why Kellam is at the bottom of the Awakening breeding pool is Frederick, who also comes with Luna and a -2 SPD mod but compensates with a better physical focus, with 2 STR and SKL and paladin and wyvern lord as class options.

Going to have to disagree on Awakening General’s Ever being useful. Their resistance is back to being terrible, they have terrible stats, & their armor+animations even looks bad. Manaketes or WyvenrLords are better tanks in Apothesis. As for Xavier, I find he’s not great for his combat due to the odd hammers fetish of the enemies in the game. I can name other good generals, though as you mentioned, they are usually good Inspite of being Generals rather then because of being Generals.

They’re bad in the main game and I assume also bad for Lunatic(+) and Spotpass which are apparently built around Nosferatu tanking and crit/proc builds respectively, but Apotheosis is something completely different. You can’t really tank there because enemy stats are so high and there are so many offensive skills (and Dragonskin to cut the effectiveness of Nosferatu/Aversa’s Night), so the optimal strategies are pure offense. Wyvern lords are good for their mobility, good weapon types and ability to hit important STR/SKL/SPD thresholds with help from a pair up and other boosts, manaketes (and taguel) are bad because they can’t use brave weapons which are optimal because of how they work with dual strikes – a pair up where both units have brave weapons can potentially attack twelve times, six of them before the enemy can even move – and generals are useful for having the same maximal STR cap that berserkers get and therefore being almost as good a support class for non-Galeforce girls to settle for. I usually see general recommended for Vaike!Nah since he gives her Axefaire and the class itself, and it also works for Kjelle with an Axefaire dad if you can’t spare a Galeforce dad for her for whatever reason. The player phase-dominated, no tanking approach strongly colors the meta around Apotheosis; it’s largely why Kellam is considered the worst father, Frederick the second worst, and Gerome and Nah the children with the least potential since all of them are inherently lacking access to key offensive classes and/or skills despite their defensive merits. People do deviate from the norm in challenge runs, foregoing Limit Breaker, rally or rescue bots, tonics, brave weapons, etc. but I’ve yet to hear of anyone successfully turtling their way through the map.

The Top Ten Women of Fire Emblem (as Written by a Gay Man)

#10 – Maribelle

Frankly, it’s impossible to get good help these days! Our head steward is so old, and he’s off with the gout nearly every other day. Now, we don’t want to work the poor man to death—just think of the scandal! But a house can’t maintain itself, and what will we do when he kicks the bucket?

Clair and Maribelle were neck-and-neck for a spot on this list, and since they’re similar characters in many respects my choice eventually came down to the minor contrasts mostly born of gameplay differences between Awakening and Shadows of Valentia. Sure, Clair may have a role in the plot beyond her introduction, and she gets the honor of exposing Fernand’s obvious crush on her brother, but as I see it Maribelle has three major advantages that pushed her over her Valentian counterpart:

she’s not locked into marrying a Nice Guy, and in fact has her choice of one of over a dozen men (or none at all),
her dialogue with her son brings out the softer sides of both her and Brady…after much lighthearted comedy,
and lesbian subtext with Lissa, which even if it doesn’t go anywhere because this is Awakening is still worth noting.

Almost all of that can be chalked up to Awakening’s bloated support system and breeding mechanic, which is proof that even if grinding all those supports is an utter pain in the ass they can still be occasionally useful for solid character development. And though she doesn’t serve a purpose in the story beyond her introductory chapter, that she rode out to parley with the Plegian army alone and unarmed out of concern for Lissa (and Chrom! See, no homo!) is pretty impressive.

There might be a tiny additional bit of bias in her favor here since she’s the first purely magical troubadour/valkyrie to appear in the series since the GBA games, a class I was rather missing. It also goes without saying that I find her highly relatable as a snob and society maven – albeit one provincial enough to be intimidated by the women of the Ylissean court, apparently – and I find her tiny parasol amusing. She even complains of its useless size in the Summer Scramble DLC. Clearly Maribelle knows how to accessorize…but not how to accessorize practically.

Unusual FE observation: despite my obvious bias in favor of slash wherever possible, I really enjoy following along with breeding meta, even more so than I do other types of FE meta (tier lists, rate the unit, etc.). It’s a bit of shame that Fates’s breeding isn’t centralized around certain objectives in the way that Genealogy’s and Awakening’s are, because it’s cut down on the discussion rather significantly.

After playing through settings where Samuel and Shannam exist, I started considering another theory to explain Priam that’s reconcilable with Ike’s aversion to women. What if he’s just a guy who’s idolizes Ike and is trying to imitate him? The similarities in appearance and personality seem kind of…scripted to be natural inheritances from someone who was alive however many millennia previous, and Ragnell means nothing when legendary weapons from all eras are just lying all over the place in the world of Awakening (and anyone can use them, for the most part). Given FE13′s generally light tone and the fact that the game stars a Marth cosplayer, should we even be taking the Priam’s much-debated claim of being Ike’s descendant at face value?