I’ve yet to come across a comprehensive essay or anything like that. It’s more a sentiment one gleans from interacting with various fans here and on SF and probably other places I don’t know as well (Reddit?). In summary:

• Even though race relations are a defining element of the setting there’s not all that much new or interesting done with it. There are Very Special Moments with characters like Ike and Jill, and all of the avowed racists twirl their mustaches and cackle. Shinon gets to be a playable racist who never learns, but he’s also an all-around asshole and implied alcoholic without a tragic backstory excuse like Soren’s got. RD gets a little better with this – Micaiah’s relationship to racism is more complicated than that, certainly – but that game also drops the ball with other characters like the newly-a-joke Oliver (who still wants to molest herons, except it’s funny now and we’re not talking about slavery) and, well…
• Lategame RD includes the message that racism is bad but also that interracial sex, or at least procreative interracial sex, is so bad that it merits divine retribution. Not only does this utterly screw over one of the central motifs of the duology it also makes no logical sense; Yune isn’t even aware that the Branded exist before Stefan tells her, so who’s doing the punishing and why?
• I didn’t pick up on it until I’d played other games that deal with this theme directly, but the Branded are just characters with holy blood like in Jugdral and all of the 3DS games, characters that in all of those settings are almost always nobility or royalty venerated in-universe for their superhuman abilities and skill with certain weapons.It’s an awkward subversion, to say the least, even for the Japanese audience who’d have probably picked up that association from the start. (I will say however that I personally enjoy one element of this, er, twist: instead of Brand bearers receiving their special powers and status from some kind of magical pact with dragons, some of them apparently just got it by kinky interracial sex. Isn’t that just the FE way?)
• Also, some real world racism in the form of Devdan/Danved, who’s a straight-up caricature of a black man. He’s evidently worse in the Japanese version – ask Amielleon for details. Eesh.

I think that about covers it. Let me know if I’m leaving anything out.

amielleon:

capriciouscorvid:

amielleon:

gascon-en-exil:

amielleon:

amielleon:

Random thought of the day: Micaiah’s narrative is actually a great deal like the narratives told about General Lee–the champion of the homeland who doesn’t support the cultural causes around which the homeland has rallied for the war. I wonder if fandomers hailing from the American South tend to view Micaiah in Part 3 more favorably?

Honestly it’s funny how American Tellius ends up feeling, even though I doubt it was ever intended that way. You’ve got Ike–the embodiment of American working-class masculinity–for a protagonist, you’ve got a continent grapping with racism in the aftermath of slavery, you’ve got General Lee in the sequel…

And meanwhile you’ve still got firmly Japanese beliefs about blood ties and monarchies, Japanese coding in the divinity of India-esque Goldoa, Japanese yaoi tropes, and even Japanese units of timekeeping lel

It wouldn’t be in my case, as I have nothing but contempt for the Anglo idiot who allowed the Confederacy’s only real city and only hope of receiving assistance from France or Spain to be captured barely a year into the war. Even during the lengthy debate over Confederate monuments in New Orleans that ultimately resulted in their removal this past spring Lee’s statue – the largest of the four in question, placed atop a massive column at the center of a circle in the American Section that had been renamed in his honor – was not the biggest focus of arguments against their removal; rather, it was the one of Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard at the north end of the Avenue Esplanade, as he was a Frenchman and native New Orleanian with a statue on the Creole and more tourist-heavy side of the city. Even among the numerous non-French protesting the monuments’ removal Beauregard plays right into the states’ rights and individual state identity rhetoric at the heart of attempts to label the Civil War as about anything other than slavery, whereas Lee is barely relevant at all.

I digress however, as Daein has nothing like Louisiana (especially antebellum Louisiana) to muddle its own nationalism. Even if it didn’t though the American history parallels work better in a time before Micaiah takes up the villain role, with FE9 as the better comparison to the Civil War itself and Part 1 of FE10 as Reconstruction…if racism were completely irrelevant in the latter somehow which obviously wasn’t the case historically. By Part 3 the analogy is rather flimsy, because now there’s a Blood Pact and Crimea and Begnion – who acted in combination as the Union analogue back in Path of Radiance – fighting each other and the Daeins either are being forced to fight or are fighting for reasons they don’t understand. Maybe the Micaiah-as-Lee parallel works if you restructure the analogy with the Begnion Senate as the Confederate slave-owning elite (minus the Creoles for the aforementioned reasons), Daein as the poor whites and loyal blacks (free or otherwise) manipulated into upholding a system from which they could never hope to benefit, and Micaiah and the other main characters trapped between them. That still feels like a stretch to me though.

And anyway, another pillar of Lost Cause rhetoric is that the Confederacy had more skilled and experienced leaders, and from both a gameplay and story perspective that absolutely does not describe Micaiah or the Dawn Brigade.

Oh, I don’t mean that Tellius is a wholesale allegory. Just that the choices Micaiah is known for making (choosing her homeland over any number of principles, even though racism affects her personally) struck me as most similar to Lee out of all the famous historical figures I know.

I didn’t send this post to you because I figured you’d say something to the effect of “pah who cares about the Anglos” :p but the specifics into New Orleans’s role is quite interesting. (In Lee’s defense, he was busy defending the Confederate capital, and the Confederacy apparently didn’t have a few more of him to defend the West.)

Daein is in an odd position with its racism. It was historically part of a slave-owning state but has no slaves itself, probably out of poverty what with being in the frozen wastelands, and in the present day decides to execute fugitive slaves rather than put them to work. I actually wonder if the latter is done under pressure from Begnion… after all, recognizing the existence of fugitive slaves means recognizing ongoing slavery in Begnion. Perhaps Daein was cleaning up after Begnion long before Pelleas and the Blood Pact.

From someone who’s family is of the poor southern white variety, I can say that Daein’s position with racism makes perfect sense. (This also happens to be a significant focus of my university studies.)

To put it simply, it benefits the rich to keep the poor separated into groups. The rich cannot afford the significantly more numerous poor to rise up, so they give them a reason to stay separate, and introduce hierarchies with tangible differences. The lowest is the slave, and just above that are the poor with hardly a thing to their names. This is where Daein’s execution of slaves, and it’s wealth relative to Begnion comes in. In this system it becomes crucial to enforce the idea, that at least we don’t have it as bad as that guy. The poor become the most vicious racists to ensure their position is not the lowest, even though they have no hope of benefitting from the system. It’s socialized and enforced over generations, and becomes deeply entrenched in the culture.

Perhaps Daein doesn’t put them to work because, as we see with Sanaki and the senate, it is becoming politically unsound to have slaves. Because racism is deeply ingrained into the culture of Daien they’d rather execute the slaves than admit any level of equality.

I recommend the books Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race by Patrick Wolfe and How Race is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, & the Historical Power of Racial Scripts by Natalia Molina (in that order) for a much more in-depth explanation if the subject is of interest to you.

In light of this, I have to wonder what the two of you (Capricious and @gascon-en-exil) think about the fact that Ashnard treats laguz like literal animals yet keeps two mixed-blooded individuals among his highest ranked generals, one of which makes no secret of the fact and wears it openly along with the rest of her cleavage.

We’re told (albeit not well shown) that the marked ones/Branded/Parentless are shat upon by both sides because miscegenation is the worst thing evar, but Ashnard seems to take a gens de couleur view of “well there’s enough beorc in there, sure why not.”

Ashnard doesn’t really seem to genuinely hold racist views so much as he has a single-minded obsession with strength and obtaining more power for himself. He doesn’t take an ideological stance on drugging and enslaving Rajaion any more than he has any qualms trying to make a superhuman Branded baby with a dragon princess. His extreme social darwinism reads like populism to the people of Daein (and invites parallels to Ike’s disdain for hereditary social and military structures as well as to how the laguz choose their leaders) but it’s obvious that he doesn’t care about his country at all from how quick he is to leave Nevassa behind and set up his court in Crimea. I don’t think you can apply real-world parallels to Ashnard unless we’re talking about power-obsessed demagogues riding a wave of populist support, like Louisiana’s most infamous governor Huey Long or certain…more recent developments in American national politics. Ashnard seems equally contemptuous of beorc, laguz, and Branded. unless they can empower him in some way.

Incidentally, is it ever established that Ashnard knows that Petrine and Zelgius are Branded, or even that he knows who the Black Knight is? I just remember one scene where he chides the BK for being so enigmatic, so I can easily believe that he never gets the whole story about what’s going on with Sephiran and the guy with the goddess-blessed armor. As for Petrine, her Brand may be visible in her official art, but I get the impression that it’s not actually supposed to be that apparent or else everyone would know and react to it. Even in the conversation with Soren that reveals that she’s a Branded it’s Petrine who acknowledges the similarity between them by Soren’s much more obvious Brand.

amielleon:

amielleon:

Random thought of the day: Micaiah’s narrative is actually a great deal like the narratives told about General Lee–the champion of the homeland who doesn’t support the cultural causes around which the homeland has rallied for the war. I wonder if fandomers hailing from the American South tend to view Micaiah in Part 3 more favorably?

Honestly it’s funny how American Tellius ends up feeling, even though I doubt it was ever intended that way. You’ve got Ike–the embodiment of American working-class masculinity–for a protagonist, you’ve got a continent grapping with racism in the aftermath of slavery, you’ve got General Lee in the sequel…

And meanwhile you’ve still got firmly Japanese beliefs about blood ties and monarchies, Japanese coding in the divinity of India-esque Goldoa, Japanese yaoi tropes, and even Japanese units of timekeeping lel

It wouldn’t be in my case, as I have nothing but contempt for the Anglo idiot who allowed the Confederacy’s only real city and only hope of receiving assistance from France or Spain to be captured barely a year into the war. Even during the lengthy debate over Confederate monuments in New Orleans that ultimately resulted in their removal this past spring Lee’s statue – the largest of the four in question, placed atop a massive column at the center of a circle in the American Section that had been renamed in his honor – was not the biggest focus of arguments against their removal; rather, it was the one of Pierre Gustave Toutant-Beauregard at the north end of the Avenue Esplanade, as he was a Frenchman and native New Orleanian with a statue on the Creole and more tourist-heavy side of the city. Even among the numerous non-French protesting the monuments’ removal Beauregard plays right into the states’ rights and individual state identity rhetoric at the heart of attempts to label the Civil War as about anything other than slavery, whereas Lee is barely relevant at all.

I digress however, as Daein has nothing like Louisiana (especially antebellum Louisiana) to muddle its own nationalism. Even if it didn’t though the American history parallels work better in a time before Micaiah takes up the villain role, with FE9 as the better comparison to the Civil War itself and Part 1 of FE10 as Reconstruction…if racism were completely irrelevant in the latter somehow which obviously wasn’t the case historically. By Part 3 the analogy is rather flimsy, because now there’s a Blood Pact and Crimea and Begnion – who acted in combination as the Union analogue back in Path of Radiance – fighting each other and the Daeins either are being forced to fight or are fighting for reasons they don’t understand. Maybe the Micaiah-as-Lee parallel works if you restructure the analogy with the Begnion Senate as the Confederate slave-owning elite (minus the Creoles for the aforementioned reasons), Daein as the poor whites and loyal blacks (free or otherwise) manipulated into upholding a system from which they could never hope to benefit, and Micaiah and the other main characters trapped between them. That still feels like a stretch to me though.

And anyway, another pillar of Lost Cause rhetoric is that the Confederacy had more skilled and experienced leaders, and from both a gameplay and story perspective that absolutely does not describe Micaiah or the Dawn Brigade.

demesejha:

amielleon:

gascon-en-exil:

A bit unexpectedly, the latest Heroes banner has gotten me thinking about Soren. Whenever we try to contextualize him within the series as a whole it’s usually by looking backwards: he and Ike are the (almost) explicitly gay culmination of the Marth/Merric dynamic along with added elements of Sigurd/Deirdre, and he plays the August to Titania’s Dorias for portions of FE9. What I’m thinking of instead are the later characters he may have influenced, the characters I’ve tentatively started calling the Tharja archetype. Like both her and Rhajat, Soren is a mage in black strongly defined by a single-minded obsession with one person that transcends heteronormative expectations. Hell, Camilla has the personality and color scheme down too as well as dark mage as a secondary class set.

Did Soren inspire Tharja and her ilk? …That thought is entirely too disturbing to contemplate.

“thanks for ruining everything, gascon”

That said, I think Tharja and Camilla differ substantially in that the target of their affections is clearly the self-insert character. Also, despite their resultant quasi-bisexuality, they’re clearly meant for the male version of that self-insert character. They have much clearer roots in female yandere waifus than Soren, who finds deeper roots in the BL codependent uke trope instead.

Basically, with Tharja you’re fapping because you want her to hex you up. With Camilla you’re fapping because you want her to step on you. With Soren you’re fapping because he’s crying in his buff mercenary boyfriend’s arms.

It’s a pretty different dynamic, both in-text and with the audience.

Consider: Flanderization

Tharjas are trope decay of the soren archetype.

Its not that Soren created Rhajat/Camilla/Tharja.

These three are all Flanderizations and bastardizations of his archetype. While they may stem from Soren’s archetype. Ultimately they are a case of trope decay because they didnt come from Soren (or I guess by extension Merric) organically.

So its less accurate to say They came from Soren. And more that IS wanted to create another Soren. Whether they failed or succeeded is up to you.

(Also Isnt Katarina also by proxy a Soren as well?)

Katarina is like some strange hybrid of Soren and Nino, with the whole assassins subplot tacked onto FE12 as a rehash of the Black Fang arc. And despite her appearing in the latest banner the romantic element of her character feels very downplayed compared to Soren and certainly to any of the women who follow her. 

One theory I have re: the objects of these characters’ obsessions is that Ike in his own way was the closest thing to a self-insert FE had seen at the time barring Mark the tactician from FE7 (and even that’s arguable, since Mark has no dialogue, s/he can’t affect the game except by the player simply playing like any other FE, and s/he’s not even mandatory for the main story campaigns). I think Ike was intended to be more personally relatable than previous lords at least for Western audiences; his hostility toward nobility and his naïve approach to racism and tense race relations feel very Anglo-American in particular, far more so than any other lord other than FE15 Alm who sometimes gets compared to Ike. Sure, I find his behavior irritating and not very sympathetic, but I believe that thinking of Ike as an audience surrogate type of self-insert is helpful in explaining a whole bunch of things about fandom reception of his character, from the size of his fanbase in spite of his commercially underperforming games to fans’ willingness to vilify Micaiah as a Mary SUe for nearly identical characterization issues to the popularity of crack ships like Ike/Mia and Ike/Marcia that feel like nothing more than wish fulfillment for straight guys. And, of course, the backlash against Ike’s same-sex paired endings that’s somehow still in force more than a decade after Radiant Dawn’s release.

Ike/Soren does play into a certain fantasy like you said, but it’s ironically one that alienates him from the fans most likely to personally identify with him. Radiant Dawn’s ending has a lot of curve balls like that, though: interracial sex is bad, organized religion is pointless and even spirituality is of limited use, surrogate sons-turned-brothers make great husband material, and sometimes beefy alpha male heroes leave everything behind to travel the world and screw their boyfriends.