Tag: FE13

While playing through FE13 again last night I had a thought regarding the widely criticized Valm arc.  It wouldn’t surprise me if someone has suggested this before, but could this game’s disjointed three-part structure be a deliberate attempt to mirror the first three games in the series?  Both FE2 and the Valm arc are side stories only tangentially related to what comes both before and after, and furthermore they’re set on the same continent.  If only I knew more about Archanea verse so that I could make more in-depth comparisons….

It would still be a bad narrative decision, but at least there would be a meta-narrative reason for it.

amielleon said

I’m pretty sure dark magic is consistently not-good outside of Awakening. In Jugdral it’s the magic of the DARK DRAGON WHO ENSLAVED THE WORLD. In Magvel it ultimately draws from the Demon King. In Elibe and Tellius it eats your soul.

It’s curious that you single out Awakening as the one time where dark magic isn’t inherently evil.  My memory on the game isn’t the best, but I do recall that it has the dark cult thing going for it like Jugdral, and both playable dark mages (excluding reclassing) are extremely…unusual, to put it charitably.  Eh, you’re the resident Henry expert so you’ve probably talked about this before, actually…

amielleon | A response to “Facing and Tracing Spaces of Fate, Failure and Family”

amielleon:

I realized that my previous dismissive reply, while probably self-evident to those who have been involved this discussion since even before the release of Awakening, was probably at best pedantic and at worst meaningless to those who have not. So, because this debate has circulated around in snatches of conversation here and there for quite long enough, I’ve decided to consolidate this into a writeup once and for all.

In which I argue that:

1) The original article wrongly conflates potential implications of permadeath with the ideology of Fire Emblem: Awakening;

2) Awakening, unlike earlier entries, is largely unconcerned with loss and war; and therefore

3) Tragic implications of permadeath and cruelty of war cannot be responsible for Awakening’s unusual sales figures.

Thanks for the mention in the endnotes, by the way, though I feel I’ve barely contributed enough to FE meta to be all that helpful.

If it’s not too tacky for me to add on a thought of my own, your response got me wondering about player perspective in FE and how inconsistent Awakening is in that regard.  Like you said, the player is effectively God, able to control who lives and dies and even resurrect major NPCs/enemies post-game and have them join your army, but that’s been done before (6 and 9’s trial maps and 8’s post-game) and is generally the player’s role most tactical or simulation games.  Post-game resurrection prior to Awakening never had any attempt at explanation, so it doesn’t have to be reconciled with the plot if Zephiel or Lyon or whoever is joining your army out of the blue.  7 and 12 have a tactician/MU whom the player is encouraged to treat as a personal avatar, but they don’t have a substantial role in the plot (or at least from what I’ve heard of 12, haven’t played it myself), and neither game has post-game content.

Awakening combines these two features, and so the player is simultaneously identified with a God figure who can undo every meaningful death in the plot and a ridiculously overpowered and completely heterosexual playable character who gets treated as by far the most important individual in the setting by everyone and everything in the game.  That requires some major cognitive dissonance, or alternatively the position that the Avatar is a literal god (in addition to being possessed by one).

amielleon | A response to “Facing and Tracing Spaces of Fate, Failure and Family”

After trudging through a bit of the murky world of FE13 character hatedoms I think I understand a little better why so many of them apparently deserve them – fangirls treating the Avatar as a self-insert and raging at the assorted women who are somehow in the way of them getting their dream husbands.  I felt this was unjust because 1) it obscures legitimate criticisms of these characters and 2) it neglects slinging hate at all the male characters.  With the latter in mind, and taking some inspiration from the Evil Twink sketches put on by gay hookup app Mister, I’ve decided to do a quick run-through of the guys of FE13 in the hypothetical situation that I would ever treat the Avatar as a self-insert (and, you know, that the game didn’t prohibit same-sex relationships).  While this is the closest anyone’s going to get to finding out what I think of these characters in a shallow sexual sense, this post is still above all intended for humorous purposes and should not be taken all that seriously.  Trigger warnings for all sorts of sexual naughtiness and general vapidity and flippancy about nearly everything.

  • Chrom – dull, but has money and who wouldn’t want a future king Exalt as a sugar daddy?
  • Frederick – kind of hot, well-connected, and slavishly devoted – can I say “yes” fast enough?
  • Virion – love the money and title, but he out-fops me and seems like he’d be into a bi threesome at some point *cringes*
  • Vaike – gym bunny and dumb as a post – perfect Mr. Right Now.  Pics?
  • Stahl – boring but dependable, passable if I’m really horny and/or desperate
  • Kellam – see Stahl, but even more of a last resort
  • Donnel – impoverished redneck child who wears kitchenware on his head…no
  • Lon’qu – has issues, and not the fun kinky kind either – or the type to incline him to experimenting with guys, apparently
  • Ricken – the twinky fallen aristocrat thing is my schtick, kid, back off
  • Gaius – might be fun for a quickie, but dubious about the expected food kink
  • Gregor – I normally love older guys, but this one has no stable source of income and isn’t even that well preserved
  • Libra – “no fems” was practically invented for guys like this, and furthermore sincere religious devotion doesn’t mix well with hypocritical religious devotion
  • Henry – the irreverent and emotionally damaged twink thing is my schtick, kid, back off
  • Basilio – Um…how can I put this delicately? *consults Grindr dictionary* Oh, right – no blacks
  • Owain – kind of childish, and the sex is bound to really weird.  Alcohol necessary
  • Laurent – nice stable academic, with just enough emotional issues to keep him from being completely dull – put down as a “maybe”
  • Brady – ugly, wimpy, and ill-mannered, and he probably lost all his family’s money or something too…next
  • Yarne – probably fun if he were a bit less obsessed with breeding, but as far as laguz/taguel quasi-bestiality goes getting screwed by a giant rabbit ranks pretty low on the list
  • Inigo – not bad to look at, but obviously insecure and closeted – textbook discreet hookup material
  • Gerome – hunky, surly, and domineering – yum.  Has to ditch the wyvern though, guys with cats/dogs are bad enough…
  • Morgan(M) – I’m not inherently opposed to incest, but I prefer to be the younger half of any relationship/sexual encounter and this kid doesn’t do much for me anyway
  • Gangrel – almost never see facial hair in these games, but still only good for a quickie – he lost all his long-term potential when he lost his kingdom
  • Walhart – I’m not inherently opposed to necrophilia, but this guy isn’t hot enough to justify it
  • Yen’fay – Um…how can I put this delicately? *consults Grindr dictionary* Oh, right – no Asians
  • Priam – hot, but probably likes really rough survival-of-the-fittest sex and I’d like to not die of internal hemorrhaging, thanks

Are there even enough passable candidates on here for a top 5?  What can I say, hookup culture is a harsh place.

kagenoko:

kalevala-sage:

*squeals*  You twat, you knew I was at work and then sleeping and then at work again and you started the party and I missed it and now my reblog is all late and stuff.  Hmph.

For the record, I wasn’t referring to paladins on the whole, or even knighthood on the whole, but the Jagen archetype specifically—this is totally a subjective judgment, but each of these characters’ loyalties to their lord/country seems to offered in place of, not in augmentation of, a formative backstory or legitimate personality, the greatest variation on which would be Frederick’s comically extreme subservience.  There’s certainly a variance in the motives of each knight, but each lord’s highest-ranking, primary doters-upon are fairly similar.

Fire Emblem doesn’t hide its self-awareness about the trope, either: Orson at first glance appears to be Ephraim’s own Jagen, perhaps classed as he is to evoke the trust the player has no doubt sowed in Seth by Ch. 5x.  Without the early-game paladin trope to back him, we’d only have a handful of minutes of playtime to come to know him as reliable, efficient, or loyal, and while he acts and performs the part, I can’t imagine if he’d been a warrior or hero or some other post-promote that he’d still evince the same player expectations of blandly, if not blindly, backing Renais.

It’s neither knights nor lieges who exhibit this flatness of character, but rather the intersection of the two.  Sully is a great example of a knight whose character is enhanced, rather than substituted, by a childhood of comfort.  Are nobles expected to remain loyal to their monarchs as they recline in their castles?  Certainly, but Sully goes above and beyond that expectation to prove that allegiance and make a difference (with her fists!), even as the more traditionally dutiful of the red/green knights.  Meanwhile, Duessel and Ephraim’s less Jagen-ish drama is a touch more complex as it entails royal chivalrous allegiances, but Dozla serves L’Arachel and Rausten with a personal flair decidedly foreign to paladins, unorthodox in his uncourtly manners (gwah hah hah!) and even, arguably, complementing L’Arachel’s daddy issues in manners one wouldn’t expect of Seth and Eirika or Jagen and Marth.  It might, then, not be a question of LG, but that’s the most appropriate way I can sum up the personalities of these paladin-generals.

I hate the Jagen characters so much that I won’t even make my red/green knights into paladins, in games with branchy paths. Ever. (Okay, I did Kent once. But I hated it.)

It’s not just that they’re so flat, but that what little personality they do have is just monotonous, I love Renais, I love whatever silly town Eliwood was from, and they’re boring as well as EXP-stealers. I never let them get one hit in. I never let the enemy get close enough to attack them.

tl;dr I hate paladins.

It’s not as though Kent has any other options for promotions, but going along with what KS is saying it seems as though the full LG paladin characterization is reserved for Jagens.  Kent is a fairly standout exception though.

This is a little off-topic, but I just realized that the series has recently (as in 11-13) picked up at least one conventional aspect of paladins from other fantasy – high Resistance, which I suppose could be considered the tanky equivalent of being magically proficient.  While looking at stat caps isn’t very practical except in rare instances, I find it’s a good measure of how the designers intended different classes to perform relative to one another.  In 11-12, paladins tie RES with sages/sorcerers and only lose to falcon knights and bishops overall, while in 13 it’s even more pronounced because paladins actually beat both falcon knights and dark fliers and only lose to dread fighters and assorted casters.  Even 13’s in-game class description mentions a paladin’s high RES as a notable feature.  I’m a bit stumped as to why this is a necessary characteristic considering pegasi already have the mobile magical tank angle covered quite well, but so it goes.

amielleon:

In practice, though, I think the existence of the internet has dramatically changed game design in some aspects. For example, there used to be a practice where there’d be an impossible part of the game just so players would have a reason to buy the guidebook—gamefaqs changed that. And I think the older games would not have dared to put down recruitment requirements as misleading as Katarina’s and Gangrel’s triple-talk recruitment. There is so much stuff packed into FE13 that it’s totally unreasonable to expect that players will see all of it (or even 30% of it) on their own, and once upon a time that excess would not have even been produced (even in the GBA era when they started to have the space) because it would not have been appreciated anyway. I wonder if the internet changed that.

To be fair FE has never seemed interested in giving away important gameplay information.  There are some really unintuitive recruitments in older games (I’ve heard Xavier in 5 is a nightmare, and Shinon’s re-recruitment in 9 and Oliver’s in 10 are not obvious at all), and 7 in particular has a bunch of mechanics that are never explained in-game – tactician star requirements, the requirements for each of the Four-Fanged Offense/Pale Flower of Darkness maps (and how to get Harken vs. Karel to show up in the latter), and some of the extra chapter requirements (especially 19Hxx – who in their right mind would level grind Nils in Lyn Mode for any reason but to get this chapter?) go completely unmentioned. Even stats as basic as growth rates still have to be datamined.  I’d say that if the internet has influenced 13’s design at all it’s more probably to do with the popularity of shipping encouraging a ton of romantic supports (to the point where non-romantic supports are both inferior from a gameplay perspective and not as numerous).  Not to mention Avatar’s characterization and role in the plot feels like one of the designers was reading through a list of common Mary Sue traits and decided that’d be a perfect fit for the ultimate fanservice self-insert…

fire emblem and some other things too I guess: angelicaurion: amielleon replied to your post: Read More FWIW, I don’t…

amielleon:

angelicaurion:

amielleon replied to your post:

Read More

  • FWIW, I don’t think the series has ever fully taken the implications of the existence of magic healing fully into account. Plus healing magic’s a headache to figure out in the first place, especially how people…

Yay for headache-inducing time/dimension-traveling shenanigans!  I just wanted to make a minor point that Hot Springs Scramble has conversations for the Spotpass characters, most of them obvious connections like those you mentioned, a few not so much (like Priam/Yen’fay and Tiki/Aversa).  It does help them integrate into the main cast a bit better in my opinion, though all the coming back from the dead stuff is still pretty annoying.

Also, has there ever been a video game that’s fully accounted for healing magic in every possible situation, instead of conveniently ignoring it or diminishing its effectiveness whenever the plot demands that someone die or be permanently injured?

fire emblem and some other things too I guess: angelicaurion: amielleon replied to your post: Read More FWIW, I don’t…

The Conclusion of the Cross-cultural Homoeroticism

The more time I’ve had to think about it, the more I realize that I would be struggling to say something here about FE13 that I’ve not already brought up elsewhere.  The primary “elsewhere” in this instance is this post, which along with all the great discussion it has since generated is recommended reading for anyone interested in how the homoeroticism of 13 distinguishes itself (and not really for the better) from that of earlier games in the series.  I was planning a full-length post on the Scramble DLC maps – particularly Harvest Scramble, that font of same-sex conversations presided over by the latest incarnation of bara bandit brothers – but I realized that there wouldn’t be enough new to say to be worth a full post.  Below are some very brief comments on notable conversations, which at this point are probably only useful pointing out as additional evidence for judging the general character of 13’s queerness:

  • Chrom/Frederick – parody of slashy master/servant dynamic
  • Vaike/Lon’qu – gynophobia confused for homosexuality with a side of gay panic and muted homophobia
  • Inigo/Gerome – shockingly traditionalist as far as slashy FE supports go
  • Gregor/Ricken – crossdressing, Ricken is insecure about being shota
  • Stahl/Donnel – Donnel offers to dress in drag and dance with Stahl to recreate a memory, fairly inoffensive really
  • Nowi/Tharja – Nowi is obsessed with Tharja’s “boingy bits,” was censored in the European version likely for its obvious fanservice
  • Kjelle/Severa – like Gerome/Inigo, contains genuine intimacy played seriously more or less, though the situation is comic
  • Sumia/Sully – Sully being gender non-normative as per usual, with Sumia admiring her androgyny
  • Lissa/Maribelle and Virion/Libra – unusually, no real homoerotic substance despite potential displayed elsewhere

I don’t claim that this list is comprehensive (it doesn’t include anything from the other Scramble maps, though from what I’ve seen of both of them they tend to shy away from this sort of material), but it should give a good impression of what to expect from this DLC.  Note also that Harvest Scramble’s bara bandits are campier than they’ve ever been before – they even drop the word “gay” in their dialogue, and discussion of fruit abounds (both in the non-sexual sense of course, but these seem like pretty conspicuous double entendres to me).  

I realize this isn’t much of a conclusion for what is now my second-longest post series on Tumblr.  I don’t think video games as a medium have reached a point where they could be considered very LGBT-friendly (or friendly to any social minority for that matter), and even genuinely positive representations of gay people in games are still haunted by easy fetishization.  Japanese games, though created in a cultural context unfamiliar to many Western gamers, nevertheless display the same general problem even if it’s expressed via different stereotypes or differently fetishized attributes.

Rather makes it hard to end on a positive note at all, but perhaps I’ve just had this too much on my mind for the past few weeks. 

Nintendo’s Cross-cultural Homoeroticism: “I WANT TO BE MANHANDLED!”, Part 4, Pt. 2

markoftheasphodel:

amielleon:

gascon-en-exil:

Just a few notes:

… the games miss several glaring opportunities for straight relationships that would be par for the course as far as FE conventions go.  The most infamous is Ike/Elincia …

Ike/Elincia is “obvious” by JRPG standards, but represents a dynamic that has never ended up together in all of Fire Emblem. (Specifically, Elincia is the Nyna — Marth/Nyna and Roy/Guinevere can never happen, and arguably Micaiah/Pelleas represents the genderswapped version of this trope.)

That said, something I’m really interested to hear about is something you touched on in a post before you began this series, in which you said that the phases of gay acceptance usually pass from silence to open mockery to acceptance. So then, is Tellius, as a “don’t ask, don’t tell” continent that leaves the room to excuse itself with a “they’re just friends”, actually less progressive than Awakening? Or did you not mean to imply that?

That’s a really interesting question.  IMO there’s something definitely different about Tellius and its take on gay relationships in society, something not present in the earlier gameverses, and I hadn’t quite been able to define it for myself.  

RE: Ike/Elincia, the problem with comparisons to earlier relationships in the series, logical though they are, is that the Western fandom hasn’t technically been exposed to Roy and Guinevere at all and was only exposed to Marth and Nyna afterward, in FE11.  Based on some of the decisions regarding localization (releasing FE7 internationally sans subtitle, deleting the last epilogue scenes of 7 from the European versions to avoid confusion over a perceived sequel, etc.) it seems as though the localizers would like to pretend that Westerners are simply unaware that the Japanese-only games even exist.  I think they’ve gotten  less ridiculous about this with 13 (imagine them cutting out all the Spotpass/DLC content for the Japanese-only games!), but for someone approaching 9 with no knowledge of 1-6 Ike/Elincia seems like a perfectly plausible (if a bit generally clichéd for fantasy fiction) relationship set-up.

Your question is intriguing but exceptionally difficult to answer.  It would be easy to represent video games as collectively recreating in miniature the progress of gay representation of the last two centuries, but a far larger sample of the medium than I would be capable of producing would illustrate that it’s rather more all over the place.  One or two developers have made serious efforts toward creating fleshed-out gay characters and/or allowing for player-created same-sex relationships (often with much controversy), but as for the rest homosexuality is either present only in subtext or else as a caricatured source of cheap humor.  

Queer theorists have a hard time making a value judgment on the cultural shift of the mid-late 19th century that gave homosexuality a name and recast it as a mental illness instead of (or rather in many places, in addition to) a crime.  While the work of early psychologists lent a scientific legitimacy to homosexuality, gave gay people widely-used neutral terms for identification and socialization purposes, and encouraged  society at large to pity – and possibly even sympathize with – them, it’s hard to consider all of that an all-around victory when it was accompanied with early and generally extreme attempts at “corrective” therapy, international scandals like Oscar Wilde’s, and the coalescence of millennia of insults and misconceptions into recognizable stereotypes of gay people that still persist today.  That’s why I’m hesitant to say that Tellius is more or less progressive than Ylisse, because even if they roughly follow this pattern of historical progress, this is one of many cases in which “progress” isn’t particularly linear.  I imagine that, for myself as well as for the majority of LGBT people today, the “open mockery” phase hits much closer to home and is therefore less palatable than is a setting where little is explicit but there’s plenty of room for interpretation.  

On second thought, where could such a project possibly begin?  Around 200 conversations and not all of them attainable on the same playthrough (because of Avatar and Morgan’s varying gender) is an awful lot to sift through, and I’d feel out of my element analyzing some of the female interactions (ex. is Cordelia’s swimsuit conversation, in which she shares with one of the Annas her insecurities regarding her bust size, potentially homoerotic?)  Bleh…maybe I’ll just highlight one or two that I think are particularly noteworthy (for better or worse) in the upcoming series.