Tag: FE7

Just throwing this out there since I don’t have a lot of time for blogging at the moment. What does everyone think about the possibility that Three Houses is a soft reboot of FE7, in the same sense that FE6 is considered a soft reboot of FE1? Kind of jumping off from what @agoddamn was saying about Mark’s merits (or lack thereof) as a self-insert and the obvious similarity with the three lord setup, plus the trailer voiceover not giving any indication of a standard political antagonist which Blazing Sword also memorably lacked.

Lyn’s all over the place in Heroes and Warriors, FE4-7 is the period of the series people are talking about for remakes, and FE is now a major international Nintendo IP that could be looking back toward the game for which many pre-Awakening fans hold a lot of nostalgia. So…maybe?

swordsoprano said

i’ve met, like, one eliwood/lyn shipper and maybe three hector/lyn shippers in my entire life

I think FE7 shipping debates in general were fairly lukewarm compared to the big ones preceding (who’s Lachesis banging?) and following (how not-straight is Ike?) them, but any emotional investment is more than I can muster there. I have trouble formulating an opinion on any of Eliwood or Hector’s canon marriages, other than that Hector/Florina makes no sense* and that Hector/Lyn is actually well-written and presented up until their ending CG which seems uncomfortably rape-y for no apparent reason:

Am I the only one seeing that?

*I have two explanations/headcanons to make sense of Florina. The depressing but more realistic one is that she’s supposed to be a kind of proto-Soleil where her fear of men and preference for the company of women are meant to read as signs of emotional immaturity that she needs to grow out. Which is already bad on principle, but…Hector is her gateway into heterosexuality? The other, less likely one is that she’d only agree to marry Hector if Lyn marries Eliwood and they all agree to swap partners when they get together, and Roy and Lilina just sort of happen at some point. 

Oswin/Uther

What I like: It’s surprisingly plausible bara if you’re willing to look for it, and it adds another full layer to Oswin’s interactions with Hector that’s mostly hilarious until it isn’t.

What I don’t like: I always felt like Hector wasn’t given much space to really process his brother’s death in-game (largely because the entire plot point gets glossed over in Eliwood mode), so that goes double for anyone else who would have been close to Uther. 

How I ship it: Standard lord/retainer fare with the hitch that, although neither of them would ever say it, they both feel a little like they’re raising Hector together. Given Ostia’s reputation for its knights it’s probably a manly military affair that only occasionally dips into emotionally intimate territory (though more often as they aged). Ends badly, but it’s not like there are many happy endings in Ostia anyway.

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

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#2 – Almedha (and Hellene)

Where is he? Where is my Pelleas? He’s the only thing that matters… I can’t lose him…ever! Please, I beg of you. Bring me my Pelleas! Tell him his mother needs him… Hurry… Bring me my Pelleas!

If I’ve personally learned anything from doing this ranking it’s that I clearly have some unresolved mother issues. These two along with Lachesis, Sonia, and Camilla together represent motherhood frustrated, inadequate, and/or utterly twisted – and yet here they all stand. I ended up bumping Hellene from a ranking of her own in part because she feels fairly repetitive in the same list as Almedha. Both are morally grey NPCs defined by their complicated relationships with their children, but Hellene has far less screentime and, though she was integral in laying the psychological groundwork for what would grow into the plot of FE6, is treated as the least significant member of the Bern royal family. I will say that she works well as a subtle foil to Sonia, as another mother who uses her child but who tries to improve herself when she’s called out for her callousness. She also makes a great point about Desmond, that he can flout a ton of social conventions (among them preferring a bastard to his legitimate heir, one of the few times FE even acknowledges legitimacy as an important consideration) and get away with multiple accounts of attempted murder…until the one time that he doesn’t, and Hellene’s resolve to make amends and live together as a family with her husband ends up all for naught. Oops.

Part of Hellene’s tragedy though is that her situation is not entirely her fault, as she’s trapped in an arranged marriage to a man who can exert limitless legal influence on her and her son. Almedha on the other hand benefits greatly from the near-total gender parity of Tellius and from the death of her tyrannical lover before she’s introduced into the story, and she’s both more tragic and more culpable because her own choices led to her fate. She ran away from her family because Goldoa will not move was too pacifistic for her liking and took up with Ashnard of all people, and that one rash decision cost her the ability to transform, separated her from her son, and led to the creation of the dragon Feral Ones and to her brother’s torture and eventual death. She’s got Hellene beat there.

And yet for all that Almedha is set up to have been a deeply sympathetic figure the story does not shine a very flattering light on her. She spends most of her time clinging suffocatingly to Pelleas and standing alongside the obviously evil Izuka, and her frailty and smothering attitude are remarked upon by the other characters at multiple points. Nasir is absolutely merciless when it comes to laying all the blame for Dheginsea siding with Ashera at her feet. And even though Almedha is one of the two characters visibly affected by the divine prohibition against beorc-laguz relations she doesn’t play into the themes of Daein’s ongoing racism or prejudice against the Branded at all; in fact, that she identifies Pelleas as her son by his brand and uses that evidence to elevate him to the throne is more reminiscent of how brand-bearers are treated in the franchise’s other settings. She’s not an easy character to like, perhaps doubly so as she’s an NPC with a lot of screentime in a game infamous for giving little development to the majority of even its playable cast. Like Hellene too, her ending is wrapped in tragic ambiguity; even if Pelleas survives and she learns that Soren is her son, she gets to meet him only in passing. Soren potentially never learns the truth, and he doesn’t seem inclined to care.

Still, at the end of all of that I still like Almedha, in part because I enjoy complicated and barely-sympathetic women like her and in part because you have to appreciate just how bold she can be. She willingly left her notoriously isolationist home to become the mistress of one of the most mentally unhinged men in FE history, and she’s still trading on his name and title years after his death to call herself the queen mother of Daein even though they were never married. Though it’s probably coincidental (all the other Goldoan royals wear black) it’s hard to look at her design and not think that she looks like she’s dressed in mourning – and then to contemplate exactly for whom or for what she could be mourning. Her lost son? Daein? Somehow in spite of everything, Ashnard? I find the history between Almedha and Ashnard to be very Faulknerian in execution, from the image of her as a ruined and outraged woman of high standing sticking around and being a burden to everyone around her to Ashnard’s cruelly utilitarian plan to breed with a dragon princess in the hopes of producing a superhuman child. Of course it helps that it’s easy to draw parallels between Daein and the (Anglo-)American South at certain points in its history, but even on their own it’s the sort of demented back story that only shows up once or twice per setting in this series (except Jugdral, where dysfunctional families are the norm rather than the exception). 

But – spoiler alert – more on the moral complexity of Daein next time.

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

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#6 – Sonia

You’re a fool, Brendan Reed! Your own sons suspected me right from the beginning. Every minute I spent with you, every caress… It was loathsome!! It was all for Lord Nergal. All to control the Four Fangs. Now it’s over. Die for me now, will you? Die for your beloved wife!

In essentials I’ve already written this ranking here, but so I won’t be accused of phoning this one in to account for two recent developments I believe a follow-up is warranted. But really, go read that post first.

The first of those developments is that Heroes has given Nino, FE7′s biggest woobie and Sonia’s most victimized target, a resurgence in popularity. While I’m still fairly indifferent to Nino on her own merits possibly because I can’t get over the fact that she looks like a clone of Saria from Ocarina of Time because yes that’s weird, it feels reductive to always see Sonia discussed solely as a tyrannical mother figure. She’s also the series’s most nuanced temptress villain, in large part because she’s a morph and as such a curiously meta sex object – created in-universe by a man specifically to cater to the male gaze (though not the player’s, as her most fanservice-y bits are absent from her in-game portrait). Kishuna may be the focal point of most of Nergal’s backstory as supposedly the only morph created with the ability to feel, but if we’re comparing the hooded and silent figure more associated with an annoying map mechanic than anything else to the most roundly hated antagonist in FE7 I’m left wondering what the big deal with Kishuna is supposed to be (leaving aside the implied dark history with Renault, anyway). Sonia nails both performative gender – particularly in contrast to the deliberately androgynous Limstella – and performative emotion in a way that encourages actual emotional response to her character. That response may be pleasure at her death and schadenfreude when Nergal/Limstella bluntly reveals that she isn’t human, but for a villain as detestable as her I’d say that counts as good character work.

The second recent insight into Sonia came from my first playthrough of FE4, which allowed me to experience firsthand Hilda, Sonia’s predecessor in theme and design. I mentioned this back during my Genealogy liveblog, but I found Hilda to be an underwhelming character. Part of that is that she awkwardly mashes together pure over-the-top villainy like Sonia’s (gleefully endorsing child hunts, for example) with the grounded political ambition of a social-climbing mother pushing her daughter into an advantageous marriage, two traits that are hard to reconcile as taking place in the same plot. Another problem with Hilda is that her most personal acts of evil, her abuse of Tailtiu/Ethnia and her daughter, occur offscreen and mostly between generations. Sonia by contrast has no such issues, as the player gets to watch her manipulate and abuse Nino, Brendan, and the rest of the Black Fang during the main story. Hilda may make more sense when considered as one particularly dark element of the dysfunctional Freege family, but Sonia commands the role of central antagonist throughout the Bern arc, the one irredeemably evil figure (excluding single-chapter antagonists, at least) in a guild of morally grey assassins. The only real flaw in Sonia’s characterization is that the chapter in which she gets her comeuppance at the hands of Nino and her rescuers is optional.

Oh, and Ursula might have the hots for her, which makes this scenario the only case of an Ishtar archetype with a sexual interest in her female superior. That’s pretty noteworthy – extremely screwed up, but noteworthy.

A little spontaneous FE7 meta

To anyone who was excited about an upcoming sex post, I’m sorry to disappoint you.  My writing can be so fickle.

I just finished replaying FE7 for the first time in years because I’ve finished the Wind Waker remake but don’t want to spend money just yet on a second Wii U game, and I have to say that I found myself sympathizing somewhat with a character who almost never gets that sort of reaction: Sonia.  Yes, really.

I understand that Sonia is one of those “love to hate” FE antagonists like Valter and Valtome, and I’m certainly not going to try advancing the position that she’s anything less than completely evil.  One thing I’ve noticed in the fanbase is that almost everything said about her relates to her abominable treatment of Nino.  I can see the reasoning behind that, firstly because the other aspects of her character have little emotional impact on anyone in the playable cast and secondly because she’s not the first female villain in the series to be a nightmarish mother figure (Hilda).  However, Sonia has two other notable traits:

1) She’s a morph who believes that she’s human.

2) Her primary goal was to seduce and marry Brendan, so that Nergal could take control of the Black Fang.

Given my profession it’s unsurprising that my moment of sympathy with her involves the second point, especially her “Every minute I spent with you, every caress… It was loathsome!!” – there have definitely been times where I’ve wanted to say that to a number of a my lovers.  Ditto her treatment of Brendan and his sons that we get to see in-game.  It’s at best superficially affectionate but could better be described as openly contemptuous and domineering, which makes sense given her present situation.  By the time that the player actually gets to see the heads of the Black Fang, Brendan and Sonia have been married since “last year,” and she’s obviously calling the shots within the organization in spite of the reservations of her stepsons and her husband’s seeming indifference.  There’s no longer any need for her to make a convincing pretense of caring about Brendan (especially since they’re married, and divorce seems pretty uncommon in this series).  

Of course, this bit – and everything involving Nino, for that matter – raises another question.  If all morphs other than Kishuna (who was rejected by Nergal as a failure) are emotionless, then logically this would also include Sonia even though she clearly doesn’t give the impression of being emotionally blank like Ephidel, Limstella, etc.  Does this then indicate that she’s good enough at understanding and faking emotions (including sexual and possibly romantic attraction) to not arouse suspicion as to her real identity?  Put that way I’m inclined to think that her belief in her own humanity was intentional rather than a design flaw, such that she could deceive even herself.  I’m also fairly sure that there’s a word for that kind of behavior – sociopathy? psychopathy? – but I’m not well-versed enough in those sorts of things to try putting a definite label on her.    

One last thing: I find that it’s a bit of unexpected shrewdness on Nergal’s part that he’d understand to send Sonia after Brendan and not directly after King Desmond himself; Desmond may have consigned his wife and legitimate child to a manse while he lives in the palace with his mistress and their bastard, but the romantic side of Desmond/Guinevere’s mother must be plainly evident for Nergal to have avoided introducing a third woman into the equation.  Who knew a guy like him would be so knowledgeable in the art of using sex to target and control powerful men?

So…yeah.  I don’t think I had a specific point to make here, but all summed up I just wanted to show that Sonia has more going on with her than just being the source of all of Nino’s woobie-ness.

Mercilessly Judging the Men of Elibe

Mercilessly Judging the Men of FE13

Mercilessly Judging the Men of Tellius

Mercilessly Judging the Men of Magvel

This is going to be the last entry in this fun little series; I encourage you to check out the earlier ones if you haven’t already for some more description about this project.

There is, however, a unique disclaimer for this post.  FE6, possibly because of its status as a throwback/semi-remake of FE1, suffers from the same problem as the Archanea games – that is, some of its characters are so flat as to be barely distinguishable from one another.  This isn’t helped by the fact that I haven’t read too many of the game’s supports, so I’d struggle to say anything noteworthy (or, more importantly, funny) about units like Bors, Wade, Lot, etc.  Therefore, the following list will include all male playable characters from FE7 as well as a selection of those from FE6.  Even I can’t judge a guy whose profile has a face pic or more realistically for a hookup app, a headless torso pic and nothing else.

  • Sain – more interesting than your typical green knight, but I suspect that he’s either a virgin or terrible in bed
  • Kent – clearly does not how to conduct himself after a one-night stand and has a stick rammed so far up his ass he may as well be an Anglo; not worth my attention
  • Wil – his quirkiness gets on my nerves, but at least he’s not awful to look at
  • Dorcas – Elibe has a surplus of already-married men on the roster, but unfortunately adultery kink is pretty much all Dorcas has going for him
  • Rath (and also Shin from FE6) – they’re basically interchangeable, but I can’t say I find their stoic silence or their nomadic lifestyles charming
  • Matthew – no one likes dead girlfriend angst, but you have to credit the man for putting thieving skills to use in a more practical (and legal) career field
  • Nils – I don’t care how good he is at playing flutes, I don’t do shota
  • Lucius – no fems; his boyfriend, on the other hand…
  • Wallace – there’s something pleasingly alien about rubbing a bald head while making out, though conversely I can’t really expect him to find my prostate in anything resembling a timely fashion
  • Eliwood – has that textbook bland lordly charm going for him, I guess?
  • Marcus – the younger version has more lasting potential in-game and therefore I assume in the sack as well, but silverdaddy!Marcus has his uses too along with most of his previous social advantages
  • Lowen – gee, another earlygame cavalier who loves to cook…Stahl > Oscar > Lowen, and note that Stahl wasn’t at a very high point to start
  • Bartre – his pornstache later in life doesn’t work for him at all, but if I were really drunk I think him and Dorcas double-teaming me in a sling or something would be kind of hot
  • Hector – but they can’t compare to this guy, who’s both better looking and much wealthier; it’s unfortunate that maturity comes with more scruff than he can really pull off
  • Oswin – unlike in Tellius, the bara men of Eilbe aren’t overwhelmingly bara, so I can have hot fantasies about a large orgy with all the moderately attractive ones
  • Guy – kind of skittish, though I guess it’s good that he doesn’t have a no homo moment like some other myrmidons *glares at Lon’qu*; Sacae’s not doing too well here overall, I have to say
  • Merlinus – nothing better than glorious money from an obvious sugar daddy type, though I also get some bottom vibes from him so I’d probably have to call in a favor from one of my top acquaintances
  • Raven – I can live without the angsty emo streak, but we can bond over being vengeful fallen aristocrats; naturally, I’m open to threesomes with Lucius (though one top/two bottoms is harder to manage than the inverse), but not with Priscilla
  • Canas – married, but what happens in Lycia stays in Lycia, right?  I can see him being secretly really kinky for some reason
  • Dart – regarding that pointless internet war of a few years ago, I slightly favor pirates over ninjas because Eurocentrism, but that doesn’t mean I could put up with the brutishness and financial instability for more than a night or two
  • Legault – will obviously sleep with anything that moves, so fun for a wild night provided he wears protection
  • Heath – Legault can keep trying with him for all I care, because he’s got far too many emotional issues and not even any money to soften them (and also he may have two-colored pubes)
  • Hawkeye – the only valid reason to ever be in a desert is if there’s a chiseled half-naked guy waiting there to screw your brains out, as far as I’m concerned
  • Geitz – I can do better than being another notch on the bedpost of a prodigal son stupid enough to run away from money
  • Pent – a little bishonen for my tastes, but he’s a count and I get to break the Sixth Commandment (the Seventh for Protestants, before someone points that out) – fun!
  • Karel – and capping off the parade of Sacae fail, we have a homicidal maniac; too bad his midlife crisis didn’t improve him in any way other than in morals 
  • Harken – why are emo heroes a thing in this game?  Eh, he’s still fuckable (even though he just reminds me how I’d rather be in a Reed brothers sandwich, but they’re not playable *sniff*)
  • Jaffar – almost definitely has never had sex in his life, and severely damaged men don’t appeal to me in the slightest
  • Renault – you can hear my confession anytime you want, Père; if the confessional’s a’rockin’, don’t come a’knockin’
  • Athos – if I wanted to get fucked by a Dumbledore clone, I’d take one who looks like the younger version, thanks
  • Roy – like his dad, but even younger and a really big hit with the ladies for some inexplicable reason…I’ll pass
  • Dieck – another scarred mercenary leader, but this one has connections in high places and so is good for more than just a quickie; his possible interest in daddy kink per Klein is an intriguing perk
  • Lugh and Ray – identical twins would undoubtedly be fun in the right circumstances, but these circumstances are nothing but pedobait…ick
  • Saul – it’s unlikely that it would be hard to talk into some religious-themed fun, so yay
  • Gonzales – specifically mentioned on this list so that I can emphasize the extent of “HELL NO” involved
  • Geese – he’s better looking than Dart or his brother at least, but my problems with pirates persist
  • Klein – a small step up in looks from his father, though I prefer to fraternize with slightly more sturdy-looking nobles
  • Percival (with Elphin) – for Elphin alone I’d say the same as I did for Klein, but he gives Percival some nice homoerotic moments to complement the usual paladin allure so I’ll gladly concede to a (very upper-class) threesome
  • Douglas – I pine for the bears of Magvel, but Douglas is a functional substitute and might even be able to get in on the rest of the Etrurian fun with Elphin and Percival 
  • Yodel – even I’m not depraved enough to want to tap that, sorry
  • Zephiel – like Ashnard if he had a sympathetic backstory and a natural hair color; not bad from a distance, but that’s it

siraranispleased:

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FE7 Top 10 // 03 // Wallace
“Something’s wrong… Is it a sneak attack? You cowards, waiting there in the fog! My name is Wallace, the boldest knight in Caelin (wherever it is)! If you’re not afraid to die, show yourselves! Bwah ha ha ha ha ha ha!”
Introduction in Chapter 23

If you ever wondered why I’m so damn forgiving to the generally unpopular Knight/General class, well, here’s your answer.

Read More

Great write-up on an often neglected character.  It never really occured to me to think of Wallace as a paragon of FE knighthood, since there are so many other obvious (and for the most part bland) examples that jump out.  He’s a pretty unorthodox Lawful Good character because of it, which is always welcome.

I can’t say I’m much for knights/generals either, and if I didn’t already have other projects going on I’d consider doing some sort of defense of the equally underrated priests/bishops/saints/war monks, though explaining why I like them would involve a lengthy analysis of religion and light magic in FE and probably an in-depth discussion of the series’s pseudo-Catholicism.  

*looks at own list of meta prompts* Nah, I’ll save it for later.  

My problem with FE13’s handling of queerness

Ever since I started playing the game about two months ago I’ve had trouble putting my finger on exactly what I found wrong with the homoeroticism in FE13.  I’m not talking about the lack of same-sex S supports, because that’s built into the mechanics of a second generation so it’s grudgingly understandable.  Rather, so many of the support conversations (and I’ve not even gotten them all yet) have these uncomfortably handled queer moments – Avatar gets them the most since his/her C-A supports seem to be largely the same regardless of gender, but there are other instances – Sully’s gender nonconformity showing up in almost all of her supports, the infamous Virion/Libra, etc.  They all have one thing in common, something that is practically nonexistent in every FE before: they acknowledge the prospect of homoeroticism only to immediately shut it down, usually by playing it off as a joke.  I distinctly remember multiple instances of things like “That’s not what I mean” or “I’m not that kind of guy/girl” or just general freaking out over the possibility of a homoerotic situation.

FE homoeroticism is out of the closet, and the results are not pretty.

Like I said, this sort of explicit acknowledgement is something almost completely new to the series – sure, there’s Heather and there’s Legault/Heath and various suggestive paired endings in 7, 8, and 10, but even those are nothing compared to this game.  The Hubba Tester, even (somewhat) toned down as it is in translation, is the clearest example of the mindset that gay people exist to either be fetishized or joked about, and the supports suggest pretty thoroughly that Ylisse is aware of the existence of homosexuality to a degree unseen in any other FE setting and, furthermore, that some sort of stigma exists that justifies characters having momentary gay panics.

Compare Virion/Libra to its spiritual predecessor, Serra/Lucius.  Both supports involve a character mistaking a very feminine-looking man for a  woman, but only the former mentions the likelihood that that man’s femininity turns him into an object of desire for other men.  I think that fact even comes up in Libra’s recruitment conversation with Chrom, of all places, so it’s part of the player’s first impression of the character.  Instead, Serra/Lucius involves Serra briefly fetishizing Lucius’s beauty and leaves the subtextual homoeroticism where it belongs (in his Raven supports and paired ending, of course).  The true thematic equivalent to Virion/Libra, a Sain/Lucius support, does not exist (though I know people have joked about in the fandom).  While there’s a definite ambiguity to the likes of Raven/Lucius, Lyn/Florina, Joshua/Gerik, Ike/Soren, etc.  homoeroticism in these games at least has the advantage of not being so violently shut down at almost every turn.

As for the comedic element, FE has had laughs at the expense of gender nonconformity before; the bandit duos of 6 and 7, Valtome, and Excellus all partake in the same uncomfortable exaggerated femininity, either as a random gimmick for a single chapter or as part of an extended characterization designed to make the player dislike them more and look forward to killing them (on a side note, masculine-looking women are even rarer, but when they do show up – Echidna, Vaida, Tanith to a lesser extent – they’re recruitable characters and their appearance is rarely if ever referenced).  However, gender nonconformity – even with the double standard of the last parentheses – is a convenient out in media that allows for the suggestion of homosexuality without having to actually mention it.  Aside from perpetuating the false association between sexuality and gender conformity, note that all the examples above are villains.  It’s a pervasive (and highly annoying) trope to pit an effeminate villain against a conventionally masculine hero, and who are these guys’ opponents?  Roy (has a veritable harem of potential brides), Eliwood or Hector (required by the plot to get married and have children), Tibarn (sure, he has gay subtext with Reyson, but he’s hypermasculine in the extreme, and right around the time his army kills Valtome he engages in light flirting with Elincia), and Chrom (already married with a child at the time he goes after Excellus).  So…yeah, this is something of a time-honored tradition of the series, and based on Excellus it’s probably not stopping anytime soon.

The playable cast, though, is supposed to be likable, and yet all the comedic pseudo-homoeroticism and everyone’s impulsive reactions against that sort of thing doesn’t endear them to me in the least.  The only instances of homoeroticism that I’ve found so far to be relatively inoffensive (maybe even positively represented *gasp*) are the subtextual cases like Lissa/Maribelle and Inigo/Gerome.  I realize that, in a way, the series (and video gaming in general) is following the same cultural progression that dictated representations of homosexuality in other types of fiction, going from the darkness of ignored and encoded subtext into the harsh light of stereotypes, vilification, and fetishization, with the hope of eventual cultural acclimation and the minimization of those problems.  The problem with that is the moment of general uncloseting in the Western world started in the late 19th century and was accomplished in total by World War II.

*stage whisper* You’re a little behind the times, video game industry.