shipping meme for the tellius games, pretty please~

lowkey otp

Eh, most of my OTPs in general are probably lowkey by fandom standards, at least in terms of how much love I express for them. I’m going to go with Tibarn/Reyson, because they’re basically canon (I’d argue they have a claim to the power couple archetype slot for Tellius, in the vein of Pent/Louise or Quan/Ethlin) and have a comfortable dynamic that’s actually not very seme/uke-ish despite appearances.

highkey notp

Ike/women, with Ike/Elincia specifically because it has some really loud and obnoxious fans based almost entirely on some short-sighted localization choices for FE9. Of course people are free to have their bi/pan/other headcanons for him, doubly so if they believe that Priam actually is his direct descendant, but I’m not going to ship it.

[softly] don’t notp

Muarim/Tormod, because if these games were released today (and if Radiant Dawn had actual support content) contemporary Tumblr culture would rip this pairing apart. It’s about one step removed from classical pederasty, and in this setting and context I’m completely fine with that.

highkey otp but i’m scared of saying it because it’s not a very popular choice

I read a really good Shinon/Gatrie fic once and found their sexual dynamic rather compelling? That one would be more unpopular because Shinon is an unrepentant asshole, granted.

highkey otp and anyone on my tumblr knows it

Ike/Ranulf, for whatever definition of “highkey” would apply to me – see above.

quintessentialgaymutant:

connnorkenway:

honestly the fact that ike fire emblem has been a character many nerd boys have projected on since even before he appeared in ssb because he’s big and muscular is such a shame because he’s become synonymous with ‘strong nintendo male power fantasy character’ even though he’s so compassionate and kind and despises meaningless violence to the point where he deeply respects people innately capable of diplomacy like elincia who he helped not to be famous or anything but because he cares so much and believes he genuinely owes everyone his time.

like this is a character who embodies everything good and while the chicken nugget memes can be funny we’ve reached a point where people genuinely think he’s a meathead devoid of empathy who likes to kill shit for no reason and this mischaracterization has even reached the official writers of the later games like in fates who made him ‘challenge’ people to test his skills when he said in rd he doesn’t enjoy war at all and it’s implied he kind of resents that fighting is the only thing he’s good at, and also the whole priam thing in awakening where they gave him a great- great-granchild for no reason who almost seems like a parody of how ssb fans think the real ike would act

this isn’t even mentioning the whole debacle about his sexuality, because radiant dawn implied and left up to interpretation whether or not his endings with ranulf and soren were romantic, having those ideals of masculinity projected on him has made people become hostile to the idea of him being gay even though the narrative sets it up nicely and basically his whole treatment is a huge example of how toxic masculinity affects everything up to our dumb ass video games and our perception of t

Drag them

markoftheasphodel:

@dyaus-pita said: I’m surprised people get so invested into Ike’s sexuality considering he has all the personality of a lamppost.

I can’t throw bricks at Ike on that point given I’ve seen the “no personality” complaint lodged against just about every character I have been invested in with the exception of Lachesis (say what you will about her taste in men, the girl has personality to spare) and uh, ciascuno il suo, really.

But what do I know, I’ll take Eliwood any day over Lyn or Hector.

Weirdly enough it seems to have little to do with personality or lack thereof. The Ike discourse hasn’t stopped because 1) he’s a protagonist 2) who’s considered very attractive by certain fans and 3) whose game legitimizes gay readings via character endings.

…Actually, as I typed that I realized all that also holds true for the non-straight lord* who predates him – Lyn – and yet her ending with Florina hasn’t generated anywhere near as much controversy. Is it because the fans who like to argue about characters’ sexualities online prefer to talk about the guys, or because Lyn has multiple marriage endings with men such that Lyn/Florina slips under the radar? No idea.

*Eirika and Tana also have a paired ending, but as far as I know very few people interpret that one as shippy.

(Also an Eliwood fan over the other two, though in a hypothetical FE7 remake I’d love to see them develop his relationship with Hector in a more romantic direction. Those two never read as entirely straight guy BFFs to me, even when I first playing FE7 in my teens. Not a modern same-sex romance, mind you, because they still need to make their socially and narratively obligatory offspring and because it wouldn’t really fit them anyway, but something more like early modern romantic friendship. Legault or gender-nonconforming/nonbinary Lucius can be the Leon-esque spokesman for contemporary queerness.)

telliuscollections said

If there is one thing I think is interesting about Tellius is that the game doesn’t seem to miss a chance to tell us that somebody is a noble. It either throws titles around like in Begnion, or we get in passing that Lanvega is a noble (and his peerage remains untouched when he left, so leaving the riders doesn’t seem have much consequence).

Tauroneo is from a “famed warrior family” and we only know that Bryce is loyal to a fault. I’m not sure that we know enough about pre-Ashnard Daein to know that Rider=Nobility. If Greil had territory as a noble like Lanvega did, then I think it would have effected him that much more to leave everybody he had in his care, just knowing how Greil is about the Crimean villagers he helps. I’m just not that sure.

I don’t think the games ever specify if Gawain was of an already noble family or if he earned the Four Rider position entirely on his own – I’m inclined to believe the latter, based on his character and Ike’s – but either way my point was that Ike’s parents are both special in some way. Plus, Gawain would still presumably have been considered nobility or of comparative rank in Daein; to use a real world parallel he’d be similar to the French noblesses de robe, nobles by administrative position (what my own ancestors were originally angling to get in coming to Louisiana, at least before 1789 rendered the whole business of pursuing noble titles in France a questionable endeavor, anyway) and/or recent military service, the latter of which a Four Rider would definitely qualify under.

It’s also another retroactive parallel with Alm, now that I think about it. In FE15 Alm’s (grand)father figure Mycen earned his noble title by military service, and landed nobles like Desaix and Fernand have a low opinion of him as a result. In spite of this both Ike and Alm attain positions of leadership early in their respective games in large part because of their heritages, so although Greil and Mycen may not be noble in the usual sense there’s still an undercurrent of nepotism at work.

There’s an interesting little forum topic on SF about Ike at the moment, and shockingly it has nothing to do with his sexuality. To use the OP’s tl;dr:

Ike’s framing leads to him fulfilling both lesser symptoms or terrible cliches of ‘chosen one’ arcs, yet he supposedly is supposed to be a common merc who accomplishes greatness upon his own merit.

This isn’t a completely new thesis; maybe it’s just that FE15′s portrayal of Alm is giving some of us reason to re-examine the lord to whom he owes a portion of his new characterization. However, this line of discussion when coupled with my recent exposure to Jugdral canon left me wondering about FE’s series-wide political themes and how Tellius fits into them.

Whenever anyone praises Ike’s simplistic political stance (that he borrows from certain laguz cultures*, as someone later in that topic points out), my immediate rebuttal is to recall that Tellius is also the setting that gives us Ashnard, the self-made king who murdered his way to the throne and then proceeded to set off on a tour of worldwide conquest with no apparent plan of governance for his new (or even old) territory. That’s quite a powerful counterargument for the stance that Tellius advocates egalitarianism, much less democracy.

Ike, Ashnard, and the laguz royals remind me in many ways of Judral’s holy blood mechanic, how the cast of those games is divided into (mostly) noble or royal characters with holy blood and a bunch of nobodies without. You could probably even draw a parallel between the growth and weapon rank bonuses awarded by holy blood and FE4 and the laguz royals getting Formshift and unique classes and weapons that make them unquestionably superior to non-royal laguz on a gameplay level. Ike himself may still be the poster boy** for that sort of mentality whereby you can be and do anything purely by strength and hard work because he’s not nobility or even Branded (which is what holy blood in Jugdral effectively is) and rejects positions of leadership in the end to go roaming the world with his boyfriend, but the setting as a whole doesn’t actually support that kind of thing on any kind of large scale.

Basically I’m coming to see more and more that Ike is substantially more complicated on a narrative and thematic level than his characterization would suggest, and that he’s all too easy to reduce to one idea, whether that’s

the OP badass of his games and supplementary material, beloved of SSB players with insecurities who enjoy bashing the other FE reps for being comparatively effete,
the non-straight protagonist who still pisses off a not-insignificant portion of the fanbase because he’s not interested in sleeping with Elincia or some other woman,
(I’m guilty of this one) or the disrespectful upstart who embodies the worst of Anglo-American ideology and who gets largely sheltered from the consequences of his lack of his tact by the narrative.

There’s just something about the guy that always seems to generate debate. I don’t know if I’ll ever write full-on Ike meta (what’s even left to talk about that someone hasn’t brought up?), but I’ve certainly come close enough a few times ~~including this post~~ to where it might be a consideration at some point.

*And for all that Ike is in love with laguz societies, it’s worth remembering too that they engage in their share of nepotism/hereditary rule as well. Skrimir, the nephew to the king of Gallia, is being groomed to be the next king, and both the heron and dragon laguz seem to have traditional hereditary monarchies. FE10′s Part 3 also takes some time to deconstruct the more primal aspects of Gallia’s political and military structure, as they’re placed at a disadvantage in their war against Begnion on account of their excessive aggression.

**Somewhat muted by the fact that Ike isn’t really a nobody. He’s the son of one of Daein’s Four Riders and the woman who was hand-picked by a heron princess to carry Tellius’s Fire Emblem because of her supernatural balance powers. That may not be a noble pedigree, but it’s undeniably special.

markoftheasphodel said

That is for some reason the one human/furry pairing I actually like.

Strangely I ought to be more invested in laguz pairings than I actually am, given how they (or at least the beasts and to a much lesser extent the birds) indirectly relate to some of my kinks, but while that’s enough to make me fine with Tellius’s worldbuilding for the most part it hasn’t done as much for my willingness to check out fanwork of the characters or write meta aside from Tibarn/Reyson being obvious and Ike being not straight. However, my feelings on Ike/Soren are extensively colored by my past romantic experiences such that I have trouble viewing the pairing entirely on its own merits, so Ike/Ranulf is a more palatable if less complicated alternative.

chiakihayasaka said

i was expecting s*renesforest to be full of weird anti leon stuff considering how against they all were with Rhajat and Niles and how against gay ike they still are to this day

Rhajat and Niles I can understand because 1) they’re not exactly the most savory individuals, 2) they’re the only same-sex pairing options (which is really what makes #1 bad), 3) they’re bad pairings from a gameplay perspective because you lose out on kids, even though the writers were clearly aware that adoption was a possibility per their endings, and 4) their localized supports are just copied and pasted from the M/F versions, which makes them feel like lazy add-ons. Leon is a little campy, but otherwise he’s an improvement in every sense and FE15 does not make him out to be the sole queer person in a sea of straight people.

And Ike is just…ugh. I feel a little dirty every time I have to defend him, but it’s been almost ten years since the international release of FE10 and people still won’t shut up and let the guy be not straight. Blame the writers of Path of Radiance for setting up a bunch of conventional pairings only to not follow up on them in the sequel (I’m glad they didn’t, but that sort of thing is bound to piss off shippers), blame the localizers of FE9 for playing up Ike/Elincia, blame whoever thought Priam was a good idea – I just want to link Amielleon’s exhaustive dissertation on the subject and call it a day, because this particular dead horse has been pounded into a pulp.

While we’re having fun side-eyeing SF’s powerful het blinders, the translator working on the Tellius Recollection book got to Ike’s profile. They were explicitly vague about the line on Soren being “dear” to Ike because it’s a controversial opinion.

The real highlight though may be a certain infamous party saying in the corresponding forum topic that Ike/Soren could still be platonic by comparing it to Elincia and Lucia’s relationship. That’s good for a laugh or two.

demoiselledefortune said

that’s my theory n°3 for Priam. n°1 is Mist’s descendant, and n°2 is adoption

Yeah, and even with the parallel with Marth’s indirect descent from Anri the cosplay alternative is looking really plausible for me. Ike just doesn’t have the standard FE lord ending of settling down to rule over something and usually establish or continue a line. Even as the token non-noble lord he still passed over the opportunity to continue being the leader of the Greil Mercs, an organization he inherited like most lords inherited kingdoms or other territory. There’s only two other lords that have similarly unusual endings:

1) Sigurd, who must die so that Seliph can live poignantly. He both inherits and continues a line, in any case.

2) Lyn, who doesn’t exist in FE6 so by necessity she had to be reduced to a non-entity in the ending of 7, either as the wife (and probably mother) of somebody or returning to obscurity in Sacae either alone or with Florina.

Lyn and especially the Lyn/Florina paired ending set a precedent for Ike, but for the main lord of a setting it’s really notable. It’s Micaiah who gets the standard lord legacy in Tellius, with a crown and a (quasi-incestuous) spouse. You could possibly extrapolate a message in here about queer people leaving legacies in ways separate from the usual biological and socio-political channels, but I highly doubt the developers were ever thinking of these characters on that level. If m!Corrin marries Niles in Revelation there’s nothing made of the new king of Valla having a male consort…though really that problem has roots in several of FE14′s plotting issues….

markoftheasphodel:

jrdyuu:

markoftheasphodel:

siraranispleased:

So I’ll be up front, remember when I talked about how ambivalent I am towards Hector, how he has a bunch of qualities I dislike, and the slavish worship he gets from the fandom makes me unable to square that with the qualities of him I do, indeed, like?

Well, Sigurd’s an extreme version of that: as a character, he utterly bores me, and the fandom trumpeting how “awesome” and “badass” he is, holding him up as the best lord (I know, I know, it’s ENTIRELY based on stats and him being a prepromote unit with regular growths) pushes him over the edge from “bored” and “ambivalent” to straight up “most hated lord in the franchise.” I’ll even go a step further in just how petty I am, sometimes, in my darkest, most petty moments, I project my ambivalence and dislike of the entire First Gen/Part 1 of FE4 onto Sigurd, furthering my dislike of him.

This is the guy who only won points with me in the Nuts Fujiwara parody because it made him a lovable idiot (granted, it made MOST characters lovable idiots, but highlighting Sigurd’s gullibility like that made me chuckle)

Sigurd’s fan-bots are a plague, not least because I pretty much came out of Smash fandom where people were constantly jacking off to Sigurd’s bad-assery and endlessly repeating the myth that he was Most Popular Lord in Japan and as such deserved inclusion in Smash so much more than those pansies Marth and Roy. Hell, I got into diving through old Japanese polls purely to prove them wrong.

That said, the Fujimori manga aside Sigurd has two saving graces in canon– the script does call him out on his flaws (hi Lewyn) at least some of the time and he pays dearly for his errors. In a time of player-stroking wish-fulfillment bs, I value that all the more.

This is surprising (in one way) to read as a person who once hailed Sigurd as… one of the Best Lords in terms of writing and potential. (That was roughly three years ago, not sure about now.)

Of course, the outside canon material most likely added some shades pointing to Best Lord (the mangas) in terms of being entertaining to read at some parts.

I do want to ask. though, do the fanbases mostly pick out Best Lords on gameplay/’g00d shit’ memes over plot/character writing or is it both? I’m genuinely wondering how this stuff goes.

Well, for male Lords, I think the answer is yes. If writing won you fans FE11!Marth would have more, even though I do see more positive attention coming his way lately. Leif, too. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Lords that attract a great deal of that kind of fan-attention are considered OP/beasts. Like, the whole “Sigurd can solo Gen1″ thing ~~even though Sigurd soloing the maps is against the literal conceptual point of the game~~. But Sigurd, Ike, and Hector all get that kind of attention and Alm probably will also. Whereas Eliwood and his “balanced” statline, Roy’s super-late promotion, Marth’s lack of any promotion, and Leif’s underwhelming FE5 promotion, are all held against them. But Sigurd-Hector-Ike are coded as Manly Men!!! and have the stats to back it up. Meanwhile Chrom looks like a Manly Man but he is overshadowed by other characters from his game and Ephraim has Seth-Who-Can-Solo-FE8 to contend with. Small wonder those two were neck and neck in voting this week.

Female Lords appear to be judged by completely different standards, and all I have to say about that is, if FE10 had some kind of self-insert that Micaiah could make goo-goo eyes at, she’d have the love and understanding of significant portion of the base that cries “Mary Sue!!!” at her.

Ike and Micaiah both get called Sues in fandom, though whether criticisms of Ike becoming more noticeable are a result of hype backlash or actual reevaluation of his character I don’t know. As it is I never thought Micaiah was very Sue-ish. She’s underpowered and underleveled from a gameplay perspective, and as a character she makes some highly questionable choices, especially in Part 3, that are only praised or forgiven in-universe because at that point she has an entire nation rallying around her in an explicitly unhealthy messianic cult (ex. how the boss of 3-11 sounds just as crazy about her as the 4-P and 4-1 bosses do over Ashera). I’m not sure a self-insert would make any of that look more pleasant – plus then there’d be the problem of Sothe and how their relationship ties into her character, pseudo-incest and all.

Ike’s popularity on the other hand just annoys me, with his only saving grace being that he might be queer, that he’s a Manly Man in a setting that lowkey subverts gender and sexuality conventions all over the place. I can tolerate Hector or Ephraim behaving crassly or snubbing their noses at convention because they grow into their roles, but Ike is rude and condescending to the people of Begnion just because he doesn’t like their customs, ungrateful when temporarily given a noble title, and weirdly biased in favor of laguz almost entirely because he spent the first few years of his life in Gallia. I forget whether it was Ammie or you (Mark) or someone else who made this connection, but I can definitely see Ike as a lord tailored to American tastes: of low birth and proud of it, self-reliant, strongly capitalistic (as a mercenary) but with an obvious Good Guy morality to temper that sentiment, contemptuous of pseudo-medieval/early modern European traditions, ~~unnaturally quick to evolve on racism~~, and content at the end to wander off into legend rather than settle down like the mythic figures of the early US.

Concluding at the end of FE10 that “we don’t have much use for gods” is of course something that would make Anglo Protestants cry, but since it comes after he’s slaughtered his way through an army of hypocritical pseudo-Catholics and their deity I can see that being spun as another point in his favor.

Even if he weren’t stupidly overpowered in-game he’d probably have a strong fanbase.

Thank God or Yune or whatever for those paired endings with Soren and Ranulf….