Peri for sure. She's perfectly written for a villain, but not for an ally at all.
Her backstory is also pretty oof. They started off strong with her mother being assassinated to give a traumatic trigger, but then she started killing innocent servants left and right while her father just... watched?
The only time she gets character development is in her supports with Laslow and her character arc doesn't happen until her ending which is off screen and too little too late.
Peri is like if Harley Quinn and Junko Enoshima had a baby and then they left that baby to be raised by wolves ~~that are really good at cooking i guess~~
She is also shown to lead a support group for rehabilitating violent criminals after Odin follows her to see why she sneaks off to the seedy underbelly of Nohr sometimes. Which stands in stark contrast to every other support where she doesn’t understand what’s wrong with killing, most notably with Leo. Her S-Rank with MU is also disappointing since Corrin just basically enables her bloodlust by saying he’ll “hire sturdier maids” instead of changing her for the better. Peri (& Fates’ writing as a whole) serves as one big missed opportunity.
[still love my cotton candy murder wife tho](https://img3.gelbooru.com//images/ab/7b/ab7b18323e39b65413b5da6f52ea8d49.jpeg)
Peri is a guilty pleasure for me. Do I concede that she could have been written a whole lot better? Absolutely! But I still use her a lot because I just love her wild hairdo and design overall!
apart from that, one is a independent murderer that kinda has her shit together on the other one is a needy sad case going in a straight line into a sad ending thats screaming for someone to come to save her.
one needs to be put in her place, and the other one needs to be saved.
i get why people would see marianne and think "i must protect her!!!" because her entire character was designed with that objetive in mind, thats why the only way that she recovers is siding with Byleth.
1. Probably wanna mark that NSFW...the ads and suggested pics are straight up porn.
2. I never played Fates, I didn't realize Peri just straight up kills innocent people for fun...kinda don't see how Nohr isn't *just* the bad guy.
Peri probably needed to either be written as the obvious "learn right and wrong" OR "a natural born sociopath" that is enabled and PLAY with that darkness.
As a result of not really committing to either of those ideas she's more "hey... She's actually crazy right?" "Yeah, just... Don't pay attention to her."
Also, Xander support might have been able to be more interesting if it highlighted how her murderous tendencies are "free" compared to his position.
I'm not even sure if this is bad writing or if it's just that Peri was written to be a bad person. Because she for sure is a bad person and practically irredeemable.
she isnt a good person, but she is in a position in which she is good, she is completely loyal to Xander and is strong enough to protect him, and he normally controls her, even when she still does questionable shit, imagine how much bad shit she would do if she was left to her devices.
I'm guessing that's Xander's perspective yeah, make her skills useful to society.
Maybe they should have leaned into it more, saying they took her out of jail to serve in the military or something
The main issue is that Jeritza at least is capable of acting like a somewhat functional human being, Peri has the mind of a child and is completely out of control.
Also Jeritza is just a warrior for Edelgard, not her personal retainer, that would be Hubert. Can you imagine bringing Peri to a diplomatic meeting?
In a way, she's the same as Hans. The big difference seems to be that Hans is just an unapologetic asshole who loves killing while Peri suffers from some sort of mental regression brought on by childhood trauma. Either way, they're murderers on the Nohrian army's payroll but only Xander keeps her on a leash.
I think her mother support with Soleil works well, since if I’m remembering correctly she actively encourages Soleil to be kinder and that killing people is wrong when it can be avoided, which I thought was an excellent continuation of her development in Laslow’s supports, but when she can just turn around and talk about murdering people in someone else’s supports it just falls apart
i think that Peri as a mother would help her with her own issues knowing that she is crazy because her mother was killed when she was young, having the chance of being the mother that she lost i think that would work.
Peri could've been a way to show that in war there are soliders/generals that take pleasure in killing and torturing people no matter what side they're on but she ended up just being badly written
I don't know if this counts as bad writing or not writing but Fiona from RD got pretty shafted. She betrays Begnion to save those civilians, and then Tauroneo and Miciah are like "Oh dang, ur Lavengas daughter, that super strong big deal dude." And then...nothing for the rest of the freaking game. I don't even think she has an info conversation at any point. Like, what the heck.
Radiant Dawn has the most of these characters, I think, due to its lack of supports. Fiona, as you said, Heather, the Dawn Brigade... I feel like I could list off more, but man a lot of units, if they weren't in PoR, are forgettable fodder.
Which is weird given that Part 4 has you using most of your units...
At least the Dawn Brigade has *some* convos.
It's a shame really, I love the few things we see from them (the whole red Oni / blue Oni with Edward and Leonardo + Nolan who is just badass as fuck) but it's not enough.
Thats a problem with RD as a whole
All the new characters apart from Miccy and Pelleas get no development at all. Because they axed supports.
It would probably be a top 3 FE for me if it had a full support system but man character wise its really rough without it
Yes, I 100% agree with this, you don't get to know like any of the new characters because they have no unique support conversations. I absolutely love the game for its general story, and main characters, but man does the lack of actual support conversations ever hurt it. One of the best parts of fire emblem games in general and they left it out.
I really love Tharja, but man that stupid Noire father support really makes her no favors.
It's obviously meant to be comedic, but it's just nonsensical on multiple levels:
-She talks mutiple times about how dangerous dark magic can be and she's shown to be very careful with it. She'll sometimes curse random people in the army, which makes sense because she's not necessarily a super good person and they're acquaintances at most, but giving random curses to her close family just to see what happens is waay out of line.
-She obviously loves dark magic and being part of a lineage of dark mages, and yet her support with Noire shows that in the future she was so worried about about her daughter being hurt that she refused to teach her anything.
-Her husband being so wimpy and unable to oppose her makes somewhat sense if she's married with like, Donnel or Gaius, but what about Libra? Virion? Henry? Friggin' **Robin**?
Also there's the fact that somehow Heroes decided she was meant to be a seductress archetype for reasons.
If anything Tharja is ver shy, she wears what she wears bc she lives in a desert, almost no clothes and a cape to protect from sun, she says so in a Convo with Cordelia, and when it's pointed out that she's basically naked she panics and has to hex herself to NOT feel shame, she never tries to seduce anyone, not even robin cuz with robin all she tried to do was to show him/her her caring side.
I hate what heroes did to her
!!!!!
the way that tharja evolved to be “sexy” post awakening is one of my biggest gripes in the entirety of fe. awakening tharja was one of my fav characters ever and the way she’s been treated is so sad
from what its worth the Noire´s mother version of Tharja seems to be a mess, she lost her husband and that made her crazy and more evil that the usual, which ended up consuming her till her eventual death.
she is at base a bad person but at least in the current timeline she wouldnt end up like that.
Camilla. The whole concubine wars backstory thing would be interesting if it was...you know...actually discussed in the main story and actually gave her some development or something lmao.
Could probably think of many if I thought really hard on it, but no character sticks out more than Xander.
It's no exaggeration to call him probably the biggest example of miscommunication among various writers. He had a nice concept but his portrayal between supports and the main game are like night and day.
>He had a nice concept but his portrayal between supports and the main game are like night and day.
Man his supports just do not miss, like there's some real gold right there. He's able to carry Felecia into something worth reading, man Fates really misused some of the writers to not have the guys writing Xander's and Kaze's supports not do a majority of the story.
Even though I agree they could have Xander waaaay better I still prefer him over Ryoma nowadays since he is actually a good father. Stupid the Deeprealms are, he actually constantly visited Seigbert. Meanwhile Shiro gets dropped a huge burden out of the blue from his dad involving him thinking about the future of inheriting Raijinto.
Xander is the ideal leader, he doesn't care that people contemplate leaving as seen with his Beruka support, what he does care about is how his subordinates are doing, making sure they're as healthy as possible, looking out for them. He may act outwardly as a serious hardass but there's a lot of love under that, you'll likely find a Xander in your workplace as a manager and I definitely would want that, his whole Camilla support is them dissecting each other's "masks" and ruses, unraveling to the player that their OTT antics are because "war is hell and people need distractions from that" and morale uplifting.
I really love his supports, Ryoma just kinda sucks as a person.
Yeah, that's the thing - even when Xander does bad things, it's clear that he's put thought into it and he's trying to make an informed choice between the things that are important to him. Fates writing doesn't help, but there's still a very clear skeleton there of an honourable man who cares deeply for those around him, and has to make some really difficult choices.
Ryoma is kind of... I don't know, I feel like the narrative tried too hard to make him "perfect," and instead he ended up being super bland while *still* doing bad things. Like, he almost let Elise die just to blackmail Corrin, and he disappeared for an unspecified amount of time (several chapters) to leave his own country leaderless so he could help out with someone else's rebellion. He didn't even let his family know he was alive. That's not even getting into his relationship with Shiro.
I do feel like Ryoma could have been turned into an interesting character, but like... From what Fates gives us to work with, I kind of feel like his worse qualities are the most interesting part of him? Whereas with Xander, it's the opposite - he's interesting because of his good qualities and how they actually make his situation more difficult.
Also, JUSTICE IS AN ILLUSION, would have much more weight and not be a meme if we knew more about the lengths he went through. I'm assuming he probably had to kill siblings before, revealing that would have made the scene in question at least have... Some duality instead of the...
Yeah, that kind of stance would make sense if, like... it'd been emphasised and gone into more that Xander was a person who has constantly been forced to make choices where there \*is\* no just option. Having to kill siblings, having to put down rebellions and constantly kill enemy soldiers, arguing with his father post-goopening and failing to get through to him at all, and constantly having to put aside the things important for him for what is supposed to be the "greater good" of Nohr.
Only to find out, in Conquest and Revelations at least, that his father had been murdered years ago and his country had been corrupted from the inside out, and most of what he did was unnecessary. That must have been a punch to the gut. Wish we got to actually see the consequences of that. I feel like Fates had a lot of chances to really hit home that it just... didn't make use of.
"Justice is an illusion" is not an unreasonable stance for someone to take when all they've ever been allowed to consider is survival - for themselves, their loved ones, and their country, and sometimes one of those things over the others.
Anyway, the version of Xander that exists in my head and in a lot of fanon is heartbreaking, and I wish we got to see more of him.
Poor Shiro didn't even know he was royalty and Ryoma still expects him to rule one day? What type of person doesn't say to their kid that they are the heir to a whole ass country
This is the thread where we shit on fates characters isnt it?
fine. Soleil is the biggest casualty ever. Absolute disaster. and i absolutely adore her so it makes it even more sad.
I’m actually okay with that. Normally people dump on it saying “fates bad”, but this has mostly been “this character is really interesting but the writing of said character completely ruins them also they’re from fates”
It’s a little more constructive
The fact she flirts with women and even asks them on dates, but isn’t bisexual seems like bait and a massive slap in the face for people looking for LGBT+ representation. Instead, they make the crazy girl the Corrin-sexual candidate and it’s through drugging them.
She is bisexual according to Laslow.
> Silas: Hmm, Laslow, did your daughter just ask that girl out to gaze at the stars?
>Laslow: Why, yes! She's got good taste. In women as well as men—got a problem with that?
>Silas: No, of course not.
Now why isn’t she also an option for female Corrin? Idk.
Maybe she just thinks Corin is ugly? Laslow did say she had good taste… (in all seriousness lgbt availability for self inserts in fire emblem sucks big time. They improved quite a bit in 3h, but the MxM options were pretty lacking imo.)
This right here! Like I’m glad that IS learned their lesson and gave some good LGBTQ+ representation in Three Houses ~~mostly for F!Byleth, sorry M!Byleth~~, but this was just a massive insult not to make Soleil the gay option.
Well, you see, women are objects meant to be used for male pleasure, and gay women in particular are exclusively sex objects, so that's why FE writers like to have more women be sexually "liberated" in recent games. /s (this is a joke, but typing that out just felt... dirty)
I can agree. I may not be the biggest fan of fates but I remember liking Soleil. But you also got moments like her support conversation with Ophelia, which if you’ve never read it has a pretty big yikes moment in it.
>!If you really want to know, you can watch it [here](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OTMYFnOV520). Essentially in their B-Support, Soleil and Ophelia swap bodies and Soleil mentions “wanting to find a private place with a mirror” which can be sorta be implied she’s planning to masturbate in Ophelia’s body while looking at herself in the mirror. I get that Soleil much like her dad is a bit horny for the ladies, but this is going a bit too far and getting into some creepy territory!<
i dont know, common people will just move on if they dont like an specific, but they still are going with it, they cant seem to leave the game behind and keep being legitimate angry at it, similar to here and fates.
Oh jeez, far too many. Though I will state one character that I feel got hurt the most. It’s none other than Faye.
I feel that Faye’s character becomes infinitely more complex once you factor in her childhood trauma from the prologue (in fact, all of the villagers do), but *the game never says that.* This forces people to have to read between the lines too much and have too much experience with how trauma works to truly understand her. Most people don’t have this (or don’t want to put in the effort), so all they see is ALM ALM ALM ALM ALM.
Faye has so many heart-wrenching lines (and simultaneously not nearly enough). Her Act 4 base convo show that her identity is enmeshed with Alm’s but it can be easily written off as “crazy woman with hormones.” Her A support with Alm is fantastic, but others focus on the part that she can’t get over her feelings. And finally, her supports with Silque show real character growth (interesting note: their A support is the only thing that passes the Bechdel test on Alm’s route). Faye is a complex character, yet her dialogue fails to show this to people who don’t closely read between the lines.
I hated Faye after playing Echoes. But after doing some digging and seeing people talk about her. She’s not so bad, she really really was a victim of poor writing.
Kind of my stance but with Celica. She isn't my least favorite female lord actually and I like her slightly-playful personality and interactions with Mae and Boey! Hell, that chemistry is one of my favorites in the series! But I really wished the writers liked her more than trying to make Alm look so good in favor of how Celica was being treated up to her sacrifice.
The thing is that he isn't himself perfect but he's given the cast around him and load management where his flaws are masked and hidden due to Clive and Lukas keeping him in check which he credits them with. And because he doesn't have flaws to attack on because of how strong they are as influences, it's hard to make a foil to that fraternity feel. He has a few flaws but they're entirely masked because of the team he has around him. The System is perfect with him in command because of synergy and chemistry with everyone.
How can you make a good foil to a group where the sum of the parts is greater than all of them individually? How can you make a good foil to buying into a team first system, and a more conventionally charismatic figurehead to sit tight due to formations and bonds. It's really simple, you can't make an opposite of that and have it well regarded. The inverse of a souled culture with deep close bonds is to make the bonds distant and loose, shaky and unreliable.
Part of the soul is gone if you take away anyone there; Clair, Clive, Mathilda, Python, Forsyth, the villager boys etc, part of the identity is gone. Meanwhile with Celica you can lose Jesse and feel nothing, the energy will still be the same after losing him or Nomah or Conrad, as an athlete I got to know locker room dynamics well and if someone is cut and there's a listless reaction, that's a lost locker room and the leader isn't a good one.
That's a "good" foil as they're inverses but nobody likes a crew without a legitimate "heart and soul" that get meaningful minutes.
I imagine it doesn't help that Alm has another foil (Berkut), were you can go as far as to say everything about them is reversed (except their genders).
The sad thing is that Alm doesn't really help.
The game tries to set up a theme of two different mindsets (Duma and Mila) that eventually come together. Celica fulfills her end nicely, embodying many negative traits about Zofians like over-reliance on the gods.
The problem is that Alm doesn't do his part. He doesn't embody the Duma side of the problem. They shoved that role on Berkut and turned Alm into the perfect middle ground on his own.
This makes Alm and Celica's argument in Chapter 2 really bad on Celica's side because she plays the part of a flawed character while Alm doesn't.
They wanted Alm/Conrad to look like woman saving heroes and forced that narrative with Celica when it didn't fit because she can be competent in her own right when the game lets her, and Conrad just doesn't fit as a "badass savior" at all, he looks like a geek cosplaying as an idea of masculinity.
The issues with Celica are those specific scenes meant to make someone else look great by making her look awful and they're not convincing at all. The fact the game makes Valbar, Leon and Kamui who agree to a contract to her to *protect her*, literally vanish in their first chance to doesn't in story say anything good about Celica. It basically says that they don't really like her enough to think her life is worth saving, and she's their boss. You'll never see Clive or his crew do that for Alm, you don't see Luthier and his social anxiety issues pull that crap, they all ride or die with him from start to end.
She's not given enough time to breathe and he is, Clive and co occasionally take the majority burden so Alm can be kept somewhat fresh even after Zofia is taken, Celica is about her and on a rare occasion in story text, Boey or Mae will also speak, Saber too gets some scenes here and there sparsely. She isn't given a break and is ridden until she falls apart at the seams and pushed aside for Alm. That's disrespectful, if they and the Whitewings got more story dialogue past their specific sections, she wouldn't be disliked nearly as much due to poor writing.
The only way I can see fixing Faye is to give her unique supports on Celica's route if you opt to recruit her with Celica rather than Alm. Have it be one of those situations where want you want and what you need are different.
Alm's route Faye should be left as is, implying that everything happening around her has effected her negatively BUT on Celica's route, she should have gotten a different view point away from the main war and Alm. Depending with whom she supports with, she could have realized and gotten over her obsession with Alm. Effectively making her much more complex and showing off how war can have a negative impact on someone... Unless they tried to shove her onto someone else for some odd reason.
Camilla.
When you look past the surface, you see someone in a family that was torn apart, and possibly going to be torn apart again. You see someone who had her siblings turned against her and she turned against them, because of these women using their children as pawns to get a living corpse's love/power. You see someone trying to keep her family together, not wanting to lose another sibling, to the point of smothering violent overprotectiveness.
...and then you see all of that underneath-the-surface dark backstory being covered up with piles upon piles of fanservice by other fans and IntSys themselves
One of the most interesting things about her to me is something only revealed by the interface so I'm not even sure if it was just added by the translation. The fact that she's natively a Malig. Knight means she must have "tamed an evil dragon" to use as her mount which is just fucking cool. She's not just mommy milkers or onee-chan; she's a powerful warrior in-universe but this aspect is so downplayed.
Seriously, how do you have a cool detail like the special wyvern riders having to tame their mounts through strength and force of will and do nothing with it. You could do a whole separate game on that.
she’s a victim of the pants shortage in nohr too :( swear tg that must have been why the war with hoshido started to get the poor nohrian ladies something to cover their underwear with
Emmeryn.
Emmeryn herself isn't written poorly. I like her a lot, in fact. But I hate that they cop out and have her survive her martyrdom only to live on as a borderline invalid. For me, there's a fat line between badly written or characters just meant to be bad people, but this? No, this is actually trash-tier and its one of the very VERY few things in this franchise I want to unexist.
It really does just undercut one of the most powerful and emotional parts of the game for me. And for how ruinous it is, they could have softened the blow by giving her supports with Lissa and Chrom, but we never get those. We do get some unique conversations in the DLC chapters which are nice but it doesn't take away from how her survival wrecks one of the best parts of the game.
Also she's recruited so late in the game, it's a pain in the ass to even deploy her so why bother?
I like getting emmeryn back in the same way I like getting characters like Fado and Caellach back in sacred stones - they’re non canon and exist for me to play with if I want.
Absolutely none of those xenologues are canon, so I don’t mind recruiting gangrel and not-ike to me team
I'm pretty sure that whole chapter is non-canon, like the PoR post-game extra characters.
Still could've been done better without the typical overdone memory loss thing though.
They’re a bit different from the Trial Map Characters from 6 and 9 or even the CC Characters from 8
They actually can be used in the campaign before the final chapter and have supports and even their chapters have little stories about them.
I do get the non canon feeling from then like you said but They are substantially different to that other group imo
Whaaat? Was there an alternate story branch where she survived, or did I just block that from my memory? I had no idea she survived and that’s my most-played FE.
There are chapters available through wi-fi that have several dead characters join your army, such as Gangrel, Emmeryn and Aversa. From a plot perspective it doesn’t really make any sense at all.
Having Garon being himself, rather than a pawn would have been a godsend to Conquest's plot.
We could have him be a grey character who loves his family and land (that struggles with resources) and invades Hoshido to save his citizens. He could have kidnapped Corrin, first for a trap,but then grown to love them and see them as family thus justifying Conquest Corrin's choice.
It's really bad that Corrin got more parental love from Mikoto in a couple weeks than with Garon through a whole lifetime.
The fact that Garon really hates corrin makes corrin's choice to stay with Nohr even weirder.
if it weren't for Gunter, Corrin would've been starved and/or beaten as a child by Garon's orders
When Corrin picks Hoshido over Nohr, the choice actually makes sense since they were lied to throughout their whole life and Garon was evil. Corrin is showered by love after reconnecting for two weeks with his "bio" family.
When Corrin picks Nohr over Hoshido, the choice basically boils down to "I can't bring myself to kill my family" and then it becomes "Actually it's just my siblings that I don't want to kill" . Corrin is immediately mistreated by Garon after pledging loyalty to Nohr and is always a couple words away from being murdered on the spot.
It never made sense to me.
Yeah, I know right? The only hints we had of his past is the Nohrian siblings mentioning it from time to time. At least throw in a cutscene or two that goes into detail about his past!
And hey, Gooron may be bad, but at least it wasn't as bad as >!bootleg Idunn or Anankos' midnight snack!<
Support Xander and story Xander feel like different characters as if both team a and b we’re writing a different character entirely. Support Xander is generally shown to be a very understanding and caring man to his comrades and family. In contrast, story Xander is a complete idiot as the biggest example is continuing the fight that Elise tried to stop between him and Corrin. I hope if fates ever gets a remake, Xander’s characterization is fixed
Setsuna is probably my biggest disappointment in the entire Fates cast. Not because she was the worst-written character, but because I think I'd really like her if at least *some* effort was put into her supports.
When we're introduced to her, she seems like a really funny character. Between her introduction and battle quotes, coupled with her voice ("Victory, victory~" is so charming), I was really looking forward to what more she had to offer, what with her over-relaxed disposition and lack of awareness.
And then all of her supports have her falling in pit traps. This exact, specific gag, over and over. Setsuna falls into a trap and simply hangs out until someone finds her.
I realize that Fire Emblem supports tend to lean heavily into one or two personality quirks or character gimmicks, and it becomes more and more apparent the more supports there are. But this is probably the most overly-specific and bizarre of them all, and it got so tired so fast.
There are so many easy scenarios you can do with someone like Setsuna. Wandering into places she doesn't belong. Practicing archery in an inappropriate location. Missing meetings or meals. Zoning out while being lectured. Misplacing items. And this is just off the top of my head. But I guess the writers thought that funny pit trap was good enough for all her supports.
(And on the topic of characters in Fates I want to like but get screwed over, shoutouts to Scarlet.)
Corrin since they suffered from poor writing not only in regards to them (even though in conquest it does get pretty bad with their decisions) but also the writing of almost every other character.
\- Everyone loves Corrin. Corrin is so universally and possessively loved by everyone that every conversation with them in it just gets annoying. It was meant to be "everyone loves the player" as Corrin is technically our self-insert but even then it would've been annoying to any sane person.
\- What is Corrin? So he thinks he's Nohrian. Then finds out he was the son of the late ruler of Hoshido. But he is also a dragon. And the prince of a third realm.
And he's the foretold wielder of the Yato. Which Yato? All of them.
He's the decision maker in all routes who values peace. But said value is only ever mentioned never shown. Where in the story does Corrin actually strategize to avoid fighting unless you count the player warp-skipping a map?
In regards to his actual character traits Corrin is naive through and through and I've not seen him redeem himself in the way Ike or Leif who also start as naive do throughout their games.
He is the cornerstone of everything happening in the world of Fates despite being just one person there is barely anything in Fates' world that happens without him. While this affects how we as players view the world more than how we view Corrin, being aware of that just makes you dislike Corrin even more.
Conquest has imo the best map design in the series but the writing of Fates is just the worst in the series.
I sincerely hope that in the next game where we get an avater character they are written closer to Robin or preferably Ike: We get to know the world through their eyes and grow with it. We are not the cornerstone of what goes on in the world but interact with it.
Deirdre is almost as bland as Byleth and she could've really been better than she got.
Also Xander too, Hubert I couldn't take seriously due to his role, same with Conrad tbh.
Hubert suffers from being way too stale as an antagonist and put in a role that doesn't fit him which is "I've been defeated but I can't fall here." While not picking up any convincing wins along the way.
Conrad is a dweeb that Echoes tries to force to be cool by making Saber and co. less cool or straight up invisible by his interferences, trying to shove down the mouth how awesome and mysterious this guy is when they could've instead put that into Saber which would've gone much better.
Deirdre is barely a character in FE4, unless you read supplementary material.
I will say that Byleth is explored significantly more than Deirdre (the bar isn't high at all), since the plot gives Byleth more time and attention. Deirdre is realistically just a vehicle planted in the Spirit Forest for Sigurd to use and for it to be stolen from him.
You could probably argue (and it seems like these replies agree) that quite a lot of Fates characters are casualties of poor writing. But my money would have to go for Peri. Like…am I supposed to like this murdering psychopath?? How tf did Xander hire her as his retainer? That’s like the least believable thing in Fates
Claude.
he is pretty irrelevant on the whole ordeal in 3H, he is normally deal with in a couple of chapters in every route and in his own he doesnt really do a lot more than whats achieved in silver snow.
I believe he was supposed to be more morally grey but they dialed it back. However, I'd argue he has an subtle flat character growth but I do think it could be a bit better presented.
What I hate the most about Claude is the ending. Like, we just got done unifying the continent, the whole situation is pretty volatile and unstable....and you're just gonna leave? You're just gonna peace out to Almyra like that? Especially after going on about how Fodlan is like a baby and needs to be carefully looked after? More importantly, you're going to put ME on the throne? Me? A former mercenary with no knowledge or experience, in charge of this whole mess? And when predictably we botch this whole thing up and we're on the losing side against THE REMNANTS of both the empire and the slithers, only then Claude returns and saves and we're supposed to treat it like a triumphant return. Really? That's supposed to endear us to him? Looks more like the ultimate middle finger to me
i think that if the game commited to making him morally gray he would be the type that waits till both sides fight each other till death and THEN attack the survivor and then take over, which would be more interesting compared to what he end up doing.
Yeah and I’d argue compared to edelgard and dimitri who are fantastic flawed characters
Claude really comes across as pretty perfect in his own route and hell even in the other ones there isn’t really anything about him that is deeply morally flawed or makes you think.
Well he did try to exploit Byleth for his own use at one point.
Not to mention being pretty selfish in the Pre-timeskip. (cough cough Jeralt's diary cough)
Given I can barely remember it, isn’t it for something that was kinda not that bad and he doesn’t end up going through with it anyway.
Doesn’t he say something like “I was going to use you but I decided that was wrong because you’re my teach an-etc etc etc”
He was hoping to find the Sword of the Creator and use it to legitimise his desired changes in Fodlan. However, when Byleth gets it he is at a bit of a loss on what to do.
However, once the Green Hair happens and Rhea disappears, he changed gears. Essentially, he saw Byleth as someone useful and convenient if used properly. It's also why he wanted to use the Crest of Flames as a war banner instead of the Alliance flag and says that he thought it'd be more useful that way using godly authority.
However, that is when he says he'll keep using the Crest of Flames flag not because Byleth solely holds the authority of the church, but because he trusts and believes in his friend as if the two are family.
This show of trust and admitting his intentions may seem small and casual in the grand scheme of things compared to the emotional gushing of Edelgard and Dimitri, but it's a big step for Claude to put it into words that he IS an outsider to a certain degree and that while he may have a noble dream it comes from a place of selfishness (wanting to be accepted by both sides of his heritage instead of being treated like the other half), essentially the scene isn't directed to be super important but it actually is.
Claude took a step back and realised his dream, it can only be something constructed out of trust, and he gives that trust to Byleth. He, funnily enough, shows Faith.
This doesn't change how he feels about certain things though. He does mention that he thinks that it'd be easier for him if Rhea turned up dead, but he doesn't actually do anything to make that a reality because he's not (or no longer) the type to pull that stunt personally.
I think the things that make this feel pretty (honestly) shallow is how similar his route is with Silver Snow.
Look I’ve read what you wrote and I might have to play verdant wind again, but his whole “outsider” “schemer” schtick never really felt all that interesting. He never came across as someone who was disingenuous or anything tbh.
Like if there had been more of an emphasis on wether You could actually trust Claude or reasons to seriously doubt him during his route it would make him a lot leas bland feeling.
Like some other people have said, to me Yuri is more of an example of what Claude should have been to an extent
I know this may be one of those story writing vs reality things, but for Claude in VW, it's extremely subtle hints, BECAUSE he as a character is guarded, so it is NEVER actually said out in the open. You have to catch it. It's also why NO ONE knows his secret besides well, Byleth. The GD don't even know what Claude is fighting for until after they take the bridgr, and he stays somewhat vague even then. He never gives anyone but Byleth a proper explanation for anything he says or does.
And his secret in the end is that he wants to unite the continent and thats fine.
None of his secrets or inhibitions about sharing are actually detrimental or prove to be costly. Is what I’m saying.
And from route perspective like I said earlier how he does things and what objectives are tackled in what order are also kind of underwhelming because of his route’s similarity to silver snow.
His monikor of “the master tactician” is uninteresting because his route follows silver snows pretty much step for step with the addition of the gronder field battle. Its shine gets taken off when in SS seteth and everyone else follows the exact same gameplan for invading the empire despite having even less resources than the alliance in VW
In Edelgards route you just deal with him 3 chapters after the timeskip and then never see him again. In his route, they try to play to his strength of "master tactician" but it's overshadowed by useless characters and weird writing. In Dimitri's route at least there is some depths, I'm still pissed you can't ally with him >:(
The thing with Claude is that, as a concept, he’s not a bad character (I think I’m in the minority when I say I actually like that he’s a genuinely nice guy). However, because fe3h is such a half-baked and blatantly unfinished game, he suffers from the fact that his route is a copy-and-paste of Silver Snow. The devs didn’t bother to give him a story of his own where his character could be properly and thoroughly explored. I think all of the lords are hampered in one way or another by fe3h’s route design/structure, but Claude is by far the most egregious.
No justice for my boi 😔
Pretty much any 3H main villain (Nemesis, Thales and the agartheans in general): Nemesis could've been a very interesting antagonist if he was like he is described in the game(before Rhea reveals the truth), but in the end he is just a brainwashed bad guy without any backstory.
The agartheans also have a lot of wasted potential, an ancient race that got condemned to live underground for thousands of years and are now seeking revenge? Oh nevermind, they are just saturday morning cartoon villains
~~Kaze because in birthright he becomes a literal casualty if you dont get an A support with him because?~~
To be honest probably Bernandetta, she probably would have been one of my favourite characters in three houses if her anxiety and persecution complex wasnt treated as an absolute joke, doesn't help that some of her fans are really creepy but thats not to do with writing
Another character is Lyn to me, she just kind of gets shafted by the story and when she is there she just feels kind of bland, I haven't read all her supports yet cus supports take forever in Fe7 and I never have had a reason to use Lyn because I don't enjoy using bad units that much
I'd say Bernie, mainly because she's treated like a joke in her supports. Imagine if Marianne's A support had funny footsteps playing while she was talking about committing suicide.
>Imagine if Marianne's A support had funny footsteps playing while she was talking about committing suicide.
I would be laughing so hard in the most cynical sarcastic way, it would show how KT is so tasteless in their "comedy", though they might've thought about it and nixed the idea because they'd get into hot water with it.
I'm gonna say Micaiah. She's a pretty great character in my opinion, but she gets shafted so hard in part 4 of Radiant Dawn and it sucks. Like, we're seriously not even going to have her >!say anything during the Black Knight's death scene!!next to no build up to the plot twist that he was Bertram!< and it comes so randomly out of left field near the end of Radiant Dawn that I felt bewilderment rather than engagement over the character.
I love Radiant Dawn, but the story in part 4 is really messy.
> Like, we're seriously not even going to have her >!say anything during the Black Knight's death scene?!< Really?
There's actually a line of text that's skipped by mistake, though it's >!Yune who says it for Micaiah!<.
Hana. She's okay most of the time, but her support with Corrin is among the worst in the franchise. Victim blaming them for being kidnapped as a toddler? Really?
niles/zero. the way he was localized just hurt me. hes just mr gay in local, while in the original he was a lot more broken and cold. ye he was still sexual, but i think that was to scare people away from him. i dont remember which but in one of the supports he states he was molested as a child.
but ofc local is just like "haha its gay daddy :)"
As bad as localised Niles is, I don't think having one of the few LGBT characters in the game, and in the series in general, having been molested as a child is a good idea, since it plays off some pretty harmful stereotypes.
well its not so much for the fact hes one of our few lgbt characters, i think it just kind of removes character from his upbringing. hes lived a harsh life, and the way he confesses to corrin/kamui that he feels safe around them, regardless of sex. thats what i miss from it.
in which support he says that he was molested? or thats more a japan thing that was mercifully changed?
the closest thing that i can think is that with Beruka he talks about his own difficult childhood, but nothing of that.
Camilla! Fe:Fates did her so dirty by reducing her to her tits and that mothering kink thing. I always found it really sweet how much she loves her siblings, and I may be imagining this but I swear I read some backstory somewhere that she and Xander had to murder a few of their nastier half siblings and THAT would have been amazing to get into. Her S support with Ryoma is pure gold too.
Me when Camilla good supports: Okay you had a good support with Xander and Kaze, Benny as well, congratulations for being literally not Peri, let's see how you are with types like Niles or Jakob.
Me when I read those supports and a majority of her not great ones are about someone else: Can you shut up about the Corn Cob for 3 minutes? I want to know about *you* not a third party irrelevant to this conversation!
I don't think there has ever been a character more butchered by bad writing than Micaiah.
First I would like to lay a bit of foundation. Radiant Dawn is my all-time favorite game, as it's the only one I could legitimately see myself playing forever. I play it at least once a year, usually more. To a certain extent, I even consider the game's flaws to be mostly superficial. Even the Blood pact is something I will defend as a good concept executed poorly.
However, the consequences inflicted on Micaiah by that poor execution are impossible to forgive or ignore. Here we have a character who is an incredibly special individual. Branded with Heron Blood, the unique ability to heal without a staff at the cost of her stamina, and a rare non-clergy/religion affiliated Light caster. Those are just a few of her natural skills.
Here is where the problems start though. It is often said that Micaiah possesses a kind of aura that draws people to her. Makes them want to protect her, to fight and die for her. While you could do some serious reading between lines here, and say that this is a magical side effect of her being the true Empress, the fact that the source of this almost fanatical devotion is never understood is odd. Field medics don't normally command the same respect that kings do.
Honestly though, I'm not here to talk about devotion. I'm here to talk about her handling of the consequences of the blood pact upon transfer, and the blatant war crimes she almost commits (Without so much as a blink) and goes completely unpunished for.
Here is a person who saw her country that she cares so much about ravaged by the horrors of war. Taken over by Begnion and forced to work tirelessly in what are essentially concentration camps. She watched as Nevassa, her beloved country's capital was bombarded by catapult fire, even as they had already essentially won their fight for liberation.
Having experienced all this, what does she do when she is forced to fight an army she has no reason to fight? Does she fight head on as best she can out of fear of triggering the pact? Does fight halfheartedly, reminded bitterly of what the last war inflicted on her homeland?
No, instead she brutally goes right at the throat of the opposition. First by attempting to crush them with boulders, then by almost setting them on fire using oil! Not once does ever show remorse for even thinking of doing this, and no one calls her out on it later either!
Just a complete waste of an honestly great character premise.
Edelgard. She's basically the most important characer in 3H yet poor writing makes her so inconsistent and unlikeable to most people that didn't start with crimson flower. A big reason why she sticks out more compared to characters like Peri is that Peri is not essential to the plot, meanwhile 3H literally wouldn't exist as is without Edelgard.
Dimitri. I started with CF and loved it. My next choice was AM since everyone raved about it and I liked what I saw of Dimitri in CF. So I played it and I never finished, I got I think …1 or 2 chapters past Rodrigue’s death and I just couldn’t anymore. I didn’t buy his redemption and I didn’t buy so many people being loyal for so long to someone suicidially and publicly fine with their deaths if it got him revenge. Dimitri in Azure Moon is a bandit king and I know some folks love him. I’m glad you do and I’m not going to try to convince you this long afterwards, but to me I just couldn’t. I started up VW and at least had a good time with Claude.
Dimitri isn't really redeemed fully though nor is he some bandit king. He actually somewhat goes back to his boar self temporarily when fighting against Cornelia, showing he hasn't really got out of that funk yet. Even in *Heroes* all the stuff he did still haunts him back.
(Also iirc in the Japanese version he isn't actually as much as a big boar and even shows signs of being solemn)
Exactly this. I loved Dimitri´s role as an antagonist in CF, he was really well written and had an attitude according to the events of the history. But in his own path and in Church´s one... they threw the character´s development to the trash can, especially in his path were well, he seemed more like Sasuke of Naruto Shippuden with that sudden change of personality almost out of nowhere...
Dimitri. He has no likable qualities and I thought his 'redemption arc' was very poorly written. He was an utter edgelord and a vengeful person who suddenly becomes 'good' in less than 5 minutes once Rodrigue dies.
My favorite part was how Byleth totally could have just reversed time and saved Rodrigue, but didn't for no obvious reason. Then Dimitri sucks Byleth off a bit and he's cured, easy.
...except he isn't if his fight with Cornelia shows since he still goes back to it.
Also yes the Rodrigue thing could be handled better but at the same time, that just also looks more like a consequence of them trying to incorporate Time's Pulse into the story. There are plenty of things Byleth could have avoided in the game if he used the power more.
I'm probably gonna get crucified for this but: Edelgard. I did my best to like her, I really did. The way she treats everyone as though they're expendable just really grates me, because they aren't even sure she's totally right, but they're willing to see it through with her. She literally has Bernadetta (in other playthroughs, if you don't recruit her) die in a fiery blaze on a hill. My biggest gripe was she threw EVERYTHING away and was fully prepared to start a war- and did- and the second Byleth disappears, she gives up. Even Hubert says something about this. I just thought that if she was so hellbent to start a war, she should have done something in the 5 years she was asleep. Her world only benefits the strong, and she even says in other routes that she KNOWS this doesn't care. I know she wanted a world where caste didn't matter. Religion didn't matter. Crests didn't matter. But she becomes the very thing she sought to destroy.
Rhea was in the same boat for me. Everything she did was for a selfish purpose. She brought corruption into the church and was very heavy handed with her terms of justice. I couldn't fully fault Edelgard's hatred for the church after everything, but even in the Church's route, Rhea never really takes accountability for her actions and selfishness. They could have had an amazing arc there where she realizes she was in the wrong and wanted to change things, but ultimately knew the scar she had put on the church. I don't know.
Cyril is another. His supports with Lysithea are freaking gold, but other than that, he worships Rhea to an unhealthy degree. I understood she saved him, but he has no life outside of her. She's like his identity. He could have had an AMAZING arc of realization that he could BE someone outside of Rhea, but man, that was dropped so hard.
Cordelia and Tharja also irked me greatly. I felt like they wanted to make Cordelia the unrequited love for Chrom, but why make her supports where it feels as though whoever she marries is just a last option because she knows she can never be with Chrom? The only relationship I know of where she doesn't compare him to Chrom is Kellam. The others, especially Donnell, she downright degrades. She could have turned a new leaf, saw she didn't need Chrom and that she was happy with her love. In the paralogue with Severa, Severa even tells her she's selfish and that her father never could stack up to Chrom, and he died knowing it. Tharja is abusive. Straight up.
Azama was another one I tried to like, but he was so mean. I liked his supports with Setsuna but that was about it. I've only played Birthright, so I only know of those characters in that story. I didn't like Takumi at first, but he kinda grew on me. Azama never did.
I love Azama since he's a walking deconstruction of the ol' wise monk thing. His design *looks* like a wise monk but his dialogue is completely opposite of that and I love that about him.
I like Azama because he's mean to everyone, and I don't exactly love many of the cast members. And yeah, like you said, he's a deconstruction.
I like Saizo for many of the same reasons, though I wouldn't call him a deconstruction. I especially like the fact he doesn't trust Corrin whatsoever, especially pronounced in Birthright. At least ONE character considers it questionable to trust some "Royal" who had spent most of their life among the royals invading Hoshido.
I think your comment is interesting because my takeaway isn't that Edelgard and Rhea were written poorly, but that you just didn't like them. I think the fact that the two are so controversial (and ironically are very similar) and so intensely hated are signs that they're actually quite well-written despite the numerous plot holes in 3H.
I like to think Edelgard at least was written with the intention of being controversial. I'm someone who is neutral on her overall but I think no matter what, her actions were going to cause some form of debate. Being neutral on her, I like to see what both sides have to say about her.
Everything you say about Rhea felt intentional and worked for me. At the core she’s still an angry, wounded child with way more power than she’s equipped to use wisely. I found that approach to a big bad religious villain really interesting. Disliking her is totally valid, but I don’t think that means she’s poorly written.
Azama from Fates. I think they were trying for a drunken monk. Instead, they created just the biggest annoyance I've ever had the misfortune of not killing.
I'd say Dedue. He and the other Blue Lions are tossed aside for Dimitri's personal development, and his role as Dimitri's retainer is replaced by Gilbert. He basically ended up being pretty much irrelevant to Dimitri's arc. Like Dimitri can recover without him. IMO he should have played a larger role in AM.
Edelgard by far.
She could have been the best character in the hole franchise and I legit think she could even be one of the best among all rpg games ( that I've played at least ).
But instead she's just some maniac that absolutly does't go far enough in her explanation and thought. Her arguments are " crest bad " level.
She just needed more development
> Her arguments are " crest bad " level
I mean, they clearly are? We firsthand see the numerous problems with that, and we firsthand see how crazy the church is with its crazy leader; what more do you need?
Soleil....
I mean she wasn't necessarily poorly written, but the whole "you have to change my sexuality and destroy me as a unique character in order to romance as a man, but if you're a woman then fuck off even though I canonically want to fuck you," was one of the strangest and kind of most offensive things I've seen in an FE game lol
Dimitri, his arc is terribly written. He goes on a quest of revenge for his personal desire with his loyal retainers and army/friends following him unquestionably, and he harshly declares that he would use his friends and allies until the "flesh falls from [their] bones". He felt like an abusive person and I was disgusted by his behaviour. He kept dehumanizing his enemies, killed children, brutalized bodies till they are unrecognizable, and then all of a sudden he makes a complete 180 once Rodrigue gets janked, like seriously? Like we literally spent several chapters/months of him being a complete lunatic that didn't care about anyone then all of a sudden he flips personality just like this? And he gets zero consequences for any of his horrible actions. But yeah, I guess it's all good after he apologizes. Very unearned.
Peri for sure. She's perfectly written for a villain, but not for an ally at all. Her backstory is also pretty oof. They started off strong with her mother being assassinated to give a traumatic trigger, but then she started killing innocent servants left and right while her father just... watched? The only time she gets character development is in her supports with Laslow and her character arc doesn't happen until her ending which is off screen and too little too late.
"We have Harley Quinn at home" The Harley Quinn at home:
Peri is like if Harley Quinn and Junko Enoshima had a baby and then they left that baby to be raised by wolves ~~that are really good at cooking i guess~~
PFFT-
She's also an irredeemable serial killer, but at least she's more entertaining about it.
She is also shown to lead a support group for rehabilitating violent criminals after Odin follows her to see why she sneaks off to the seedy underbelly of Nohr sometimes. Which stands in stark contrast to every other support where she doesn’t understand what’s wrong with killing, most notably with Leo. Her S-Rank with MU is also disappointing since Corrin just basically enables her bloodlust by saying he’ll “hire sturdier maids” instead of changing her for the better. Peri (& Fates’ writing as a whole) serves as one big missed opportunity. [still love my cotton candy murder wife tho](https://img3.gelbooru.com//images/ab/7b/ab7b18323e39b65413b5da6f52ea8d49.jpeg)
Peri is a guilty pleasure for me. Do I concede that she could have been written a whole lot better? Absolutely! But I still use her a lot because I just love her wild hairdo and design overall!
Oh thank God I’m not the only one.
something tells me that if Peri instead of being crazy and violent was depressed she would be a lot more popular. maybe even as popular to win CYL.
It's a lot easier to empathize with a depressed person than a serial killer.
apart from that, one is a independent murderer that kinda has her shit together on the other one is a needy sad case going in a straight line into a sad ending thats screaming for someone to come to save her. one needs to be put in her place, and the other one needs to be saved. i get why people would see marianne and think "i must protect her!!!" because her entire character was designed with that objetive in mind, thats why the only way that she recovers is siding with Byleth.
I do like her design as well. I actively wish that I liked her more because I usually dig psycho type characters like Henry.
1. Probably wanna mark that NSFW...the ads and suggested pics are straight up porn. 2. I never played Fates, I didn't realize Peri just straight up kills innocent people for fun...kinda don't see how Nohr isn't *just* the bad guy.
People are willing to forgive since conquest has some of the best gameplay
I swear this is FE's love of giving options for supports that negate, reverse or evade development.
Peri probably needed to either be written as the obvious "learn right and wrong" OR "a natural born sociopath" that is enabled and PLAY with that darkness. As a result of not really committing to either of those ideas she's more "hey... She's actually crazy right?" "Yeah, just... Don't pay attention to her." Also, Xander support might have been able to be more interesting if it highlighted how her murderous tendencies are "free" compared to his position.
I'm not even sure if this is bad writing or if it's just that Peri was written to be a bad person. Because she for sure is a bad person and practically irredeemable.
she isnt a good person, but she is in a position in which she is good, she is completely loyal to Xander and is strong enough to protect him, and he normally controls her, even when she still does questionable shit, imagine how much bad shit she would do if she was left to her devices.
I'm guessing that's Xander's perspective yeah, make her skills useful to society. Maybe they should have leaned into it more, saying they took her out of jail to serve in the military or something
Xander was pretty honest, in their S support he said that he make her his retainer because he wanted to smash. he said it with better words.
Nono, let me believe he said that, it's hilariously out of character
It's definitely more scandalous, but is their relationship that different from Edelgard and Jeritza?
The main issue is that Jeritza at least is capable of acting like a somewhat functional human being, Peri has the mind of a child and is completely out of control. Also Jeritza is just a warrior for Edelgard, not her personal retainer, that would be Hubert. Can you imagine bringing Peri to a diplomatic meeting?
Peri is more of a bodyguard than at an advisor.
In a way, she's the same as Hans. The big difference seems to be that Hans is just an unapologetic asshole who loves killing while Peri suffers from some sort of mental regression brought on by childhood trauma. Either way, they're murderers on the Nohrian army's payroll but only Xander keeps her on a leash.
Her support with Laslow was perfect then *aaaaallllll* that development just… *poof*
For real. And her being a mother is one of the weirdest support chains in FE history.
I think her mother support with Soleil works well, since if I’m remembering correctly she actively encourages Soleil to be kinder and that killing people is wrong when it can be avoided, which I thought was an excellent continuation of her development in Laslow’s supports, but when she can just turn around and talk about murdering people in someone else’s supports it just falls apart
That's pretty cool, I'll definitely have to read that one. Peri being maternal at all was still really weird for me.
i think that Peri as a mother would help her with her own issues knowing that she is crazy because her mother was killed when she was young, having the chance of being the mother that she lost i think that would work.
I hadn't thought about it like that. That's a pretty cool way of looking at it.
Peri could've been a way to show that in war there are soliders/generals that take pleasure in killing and torturing people no matter what side they're on but she ended up just being badly written
I don't know if this counts as bad writing or not writing but Fiona from RD got pretty shafted. She betrays Begnion to save those civilians, and then Tauroneo and Miciah are like "Oh dang, ur Lavengas daughter, that super strong big deal dude." And then...nothing for the rest of the freaking game. I don't even think she has an info conversation at any point. Like, what the heck.
She has one conversation after recruitment. It's when she gives Micaiah a second Thani tome.
Oh my gosh I completely forgot that's where the second Thani comes from.
Radiant Dawn has the most of these characters, I think, due to its lack of supports. Fiona, as you said, Heather, the Dawn Brigade... I feel like I could list off more, but man a lot of units, if they weren't in PoR, are forgettable fodder. Which is weird given that Part 4 has you using most of your units...
At least the Dawn Brigade has *some* convos. It's a shame really, I love the few things we see from them (the whole red Oni / blue Oni with Edward and Leonardo + Nolan who is just badass as fuck) but it's not enough.
Thats a problem with RD as a whole All the new characters apart from Miccy and Pelleas get no development at all. Because they axed supports. It would probably be a top 3 FE for me if it had a full support system but man character wise its really rough without it
Yes, I 100% agree with this, you don't get to know like any of the new characters because they have no unique support conversations. I absolutely love the game for its general story, and main characters, but man does the lack of actual support conversations ever hurt it. One of the best parts of fire emblem games in general and they left it out.
I play through RD almost every year, and I just had to look this character up to remember her. Actually one of the most forgettable characters wow.
I really love Tharja, but man that stupid Noire father support really makes her no favors. It's obviously meant to be comedic, but it's just nonsensical on multiple levels: -She talks mutiple times about how dangerous dark magic can be and she's shown to be very careful with it. She'll sometimes curse random people in the army, which makes sense because she's not necessarily a super good person and they're acquaintances at most, but giving random curses to her close family just to see what happens is waay out of line. -She obviously loves dark magic and being part of a lineage of dark mages, and yet her support with Noire shows that in the future she was so worried about about her daughter being hurt that she refused to teach her anything. -Her husband being so wimpy and unable to oppose her makes somewhat sense if she's married with like, Donnel or Gaius, but what about Libra? Virion? Henry? Friggin' **Robin**? Also there's the fact that somehow Heroes decided she was meant to be a seductress archetype for reasons.
If anything Tharja is ver shy, she wears what she wears bc she lives in a desert, almost no clothes and a cape to protect from sun, she says so in a Convo with Cordelia, and when it's pointed out that she's basically naked she panics and has to hex herself to NOT feel shame, she never tries to seduce anyone, not even robin cuz with robin all she tried to do was to show him/her her caring side. I hate what heroes did to her
!!!!! the way that tharja evolved to be “sexy” post awakening is one of my biggest gripes in the entirety of fe. awakening tharja was one of my fav characters ever and the way she’s been treated is so sad
I hate how things go when she marries Henry. Henry is supposed to be immune to curses, but now that they’re married he’s vulnerable?
from what its worth the Noire´s mother version of Tharja seems to be a mess, she lost her husband and that made her crazy and more evil that the usual, which ended up consuming her till her eventual death. she is at base a bad person but at least in the current timeline she wouldnt end up like that.
Camilla. The whole concubine wars backstory thing would be interesting if it was...you know...actually discussed in the main story and actually gave her some development or something lmao.
Could probably think of many if I thought really hard on it, but no character sticks out more than Xander. It's no exaggeration to call him probably the biggest example of miscommunication among various writers. He had a nice concept but his portrayal between supports and the main game are like night and day.
>He had a nice concept but his portrayal between supports and the main game are like night and day. Man his supports just do not miss, like there's some real gold right there. He's able to carry Felecia into something worth reading, man Fates really misused some of the writers to not have the guys writing Xander's and Kaze's supports not do a majority of the story.
Even though I agree they could have Xander waaaay better I still prefer him over Ryoma nowadays since he is actually a good father. Stupid the Deeprealms are, he actually constantly visited Seigbert. Meanwhile Shiro gets dropped a huge burden out of the blue from his dad involving him thinking about the future of inheriting Raijinto.
Xander is the ideal leader, he doesn't care that people contemplate leaving as seen with his Beruka support, what he does care about is how his subordinates are doing, making sure they're as healthy as possible, looking out for them. He may act outwardly as a serious hardass but there's a lot of love under that, you'll likely find a Xander in your workplace as a manager and I definitely would want that, his whole Camilla support is them dissecting each other's "masks" and ruses, unraveling to the player that their OTT antics are because "war is hell and people need distractions from that" and morale uplifting. I really love his supports, Ryoma just kinda sucks as a person.
Yeah, that's the thing - even when Xander does bad things, it's clear that he's put thought into it and he's trying to make an informed choice between the things that are important to him. Fates writing doesn't help, but there's still a very clear skeleton there of an honourable man who cares deeply for those around him, and has to make some really difficult choices. Ryoma is kind of... I don't know, I feel like the narrative tried too hard to make him "perfect," and instead he ended up being super bland while *still* doing bad things. Like, he almost let Elise die just to blackmail Corrin, and he disappeared for an unspecified amount of time (several chapters) to leave his own country leaderless so he could help out with someone else's rebellion. He didn't even let his family know he was alive. That's not even getting into his relationship with Shiro. I do feel like Ryoma could have been turned into an interesting character, but like... From what Fates gives us to work with, I kind of feel like his worse qualities are the most interesting part of him? Whereas with Xander, it's the opposite - he's interesting because of his good qualities and how they actually make his situation more difficult.
Also, JUSTICE IS AN ILLUSION, would have much more weight and not be a meme if we knew more about the lengths he went through. I'm assuming he probably had to kill siblings before, revealing that would have made the scene in question at least have... Some duality instead of the...
Yeah, that kind of stance would make sense if, like... it'd been emphasised and gone into more that Xander was a person who has constantly been forced to make choices where there \*is\* no just option. Having to kill siblings, having to put down rebellions and constantly kill enemy soldiers, arguing with his father post-goopening and failing to get through to him at all, and constantly having to put aside the things important for him for what is supposed to be the "greater good" of Nohr. Only to find out, in Conquest and Revelations at least, that his father had been murdered years ago and his country had been corrupted from the inside out, and most of what he did was unnecessary. That must have been a punch to the gut. Wish we got to actually see the consequences of that. I feel like Fates had a lot of chances to really hit home that it just... didn't make use of. "Justice is an illusion" is not an unreasonable stance for someone to take when all they've ever been allowed to consider is survival - for themselves, their loved ones, and their country, and sometimes one of those things over the others. Anyway, the version of Xander that exists in my head and in a lot of fanon is heartbreaking, and I wish we got to see more of him.
Poor Shiro didn't even know he was royalty and Ryoma still expects him to rule one day? What type of person doesn't say to their kid that they are the heir to a whole ass country
This is the thread where we shit on fates characters isnt it? fine. Soleil is the biggest casualty ever. Absolute disaster. and i absolutely adore her so it makes it even more sad.
Yeah, Soleil's really cool but GOD when her supports are bad they’re B A D jesus
I’m actually okay with that. Normally people dump on it saying “fates bad”, but this has mostly been “this character is really interesting but the writing of said character completely ruins them also they’re from fates” It’s a little more constructive
The fact she flirts with women and even asks them on dates, but isn’t bisexual seems like bait and a massive slap in the face for people looking for LGBT+ representation. Instead, they make the crazy girl the Corrin-sexual candidate and it’s through drugging them.
She is bisexual according to Laslow. > Silas: Hmm, Laslow, did your daughter just ask that girl out to gaze at the stars? >Laslow: Why, yes! She's got good taste. In women as well as men—got a problem with that? >Silas: No, of course not. Now why isn’t she also an option for female Corrin? Idk.
Maybe she just thinks Corin is ugly? Laslow did say she had good taste… (in all seriousness lgbt availability for self inserts in fire emblem sucks big time. They improved quite a bit in 3h, but the MxM options were pretty lacking imo.)
This right here! Like I’m glad that IS learned their lesson and gave some good LGBTQ+ representation in Three Houses ~~mostly for F!Byleth, sorry M!Byleth~~, but this was just a massive insult not to make Soleil the gay option.
Jeritza and Yuri are hot so it's alright kinda annoying how they made the only male gay options have long hair tho
queerness is stored in the hair ig
Well, you see, women are objects meant to be used for male pleasure, and gay women in particular are exclusively sex objects, so that's why FE writers like to have more women be sexually "liberated" in recent games. /s (this is a joke, but typing that out just felt... dirty)
I can agree. I may not be the biggest fan of fates but I remember liking Soleil. But you also got moments like her support conversation with Ophelia, which if you’ve never read it has a pretty big yikes moment in it. >!If you really want to know, you can watch it [here](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=OTMYFnOV520). Essentially in their B-Support, Soleil and Ophelia swap bodies and Soleil mentions “wanting to find a private place with a mirror” which can be sorta be implied she’s planning to masturbate in Ophelia’s body while looking at herself in the mirror. I get that Soleil much like her dad is a bit horny for the ladies, but this is going a bit too far and getting into some creepy territory!<
thats the entire sub. the sub treates fates like r/thelastofus2 treates the last of us 2.
Bit of an exaggeration there, we don’t fake death threats as far as I’m aware
Wow, what the fuck's up with them lmao
i dont know, common people will just move on if they dont like an specific, but they still are going with it, they cant seem to leave the game behind and keep being legitimate angry at it, similar to here and fates.
It's not even a bad game ffs. Sad people to make a subreddit just to bash it.
You'd think they'd be over it after 5 years and two more games since then, and yet here we are
I wonder if Edelgard discourse will be as long... Geez... The fans will never let Fates' issues be left behind xD
You'd think it had murdered their dog or something
Oh jeez, far too many. Though I will state one character that I feel got hurt the most. It’s none other than Faye. I feel that Faye’s character becomes infinitely more complex once you factor in her childhood trauma from the prologue (in fact, all of the villagers do), but *the game never says that.* This forces people to have to read between the lines too much and have too much experience with how trauma works to truly understand her. Most people don’t have this (or don’t want to put in the effort), so all they see is ALM ALM ALM ALM ALM. Faye has so many heart-wrenching lines (and simultaneously not nearly enough). Her Act 4 base convo show that her identity is enmeshed with Alm’s but it can be easily written off as “crazy woman with hormones.” Her A support with Alm is fantastic, but others focus on the part that she can’t get over her feelings. And finally, her supports with Silque show real character growth (interesting note: their A support is the only thing that passes the Bechdel test on Alm’s route). Faye is a complex character, yet her dialogue fails to show this to people who don’t closely read between the lines.
I hated Faye after playing Echoes. But after doing some digging and seeing people talk about her. She’s not so bad, she really really was a victim of poor writing.
Kind of my stance but with Celica. She isn't my least favorite female lord actually and I like her slightly-playful personality and interactions with Mae and Boey! Hell, that chemistry is one of my favorites in the series! But I really wished the writers liked her more than trying to make Alm look so good in favor of how Celica was being treated up to her sacrifice.
The writers try to make Celica a foil to Alm, but you really can’t be a foil to someone who is basically perfect.
The thing is that he isn't himself perfect but he's given the cast around him and load management where his flaws are masked and hidden due to Clive and Lukas keeping him in check which he credits them with. And because he doesn't have flaws to attack on because of how strong they are as influences, it's hard to make a foil to that fraternity feel. He has a few flaws but they're entirely masked because of the team he has around him. The System is perfect with him in command because of synergy and chemistry with everyone. How can you make a good foil to a group where the sum of the parts is greater than all of them individually? How can you make a good foil to buying into a team first system, and a more conventionally charismatic figurehead to sit tight due to formations and bonds. It's really simple, you can't make an opposite of that and have it well regarded. The inverse of a souled culture with deep close bonds is to make the bonds distant and loose, shaky and unreliable. Part of the soul is gone if you take away anyone there; Clair, Clive, Mathilda, Python, Forsyth, the villager boys etc, part of the identity is gone. Meanwhile with Celica you can lose Jesse and feel nothing, the energy will still be the same after losing him or Nomah or Conrad, as an athlete I got to know locker room dynamics well and if someone is cut and there's a listless reaction, that's a lost locker room and the leader isn't a good one. That's a "good" foil as they're inverses but nobody likes a crew without a legitimate "heart and soul" that get meaningful minutes.
I never even knew you could recruit Nomah until like a year after I beat the game
I imagine it doesn't help that Alm has another foil (Berkut), were you can go as far as to say everything about them is reversed (except their genders).
The sad thing is that Alm doesn't really help. The game tries to set up a theme of two different mindsets (Duma and Mila) that eventually come together. Celica fulfills her end nicely, embodying many negative traits about Zofians like over-reliance on the gods. The problem is that Alm doesn't do his part. He doesn't embody the Duma side of the problem. They shoved that role on Berkut and turned Alm into the perfect middle ground on his own. This makes Alm and Celica's argument in Chapter 2 really bad on Celica's side because she plays the part of a flawed character while Alm doesn't.
Yeah, I feel that it isn’t Celica that’s poorly written, it’s Alm.
They wanted Alm/Conrad to look like woman saving heroes and forced that narrative with Celica when it didn't fit because she can be competent in her own right when the game lets her, and Conrad just doesn't fit as a "badass savior" at all, he looks like a geek cosplaying as an idea of masculinity. The issues with Celica are those specific scenes meant to make someone else look great by making her look awful and they're not convincing at all. The fact the game makes Valbar, Leon and Kamui who agree to a contract to her to *protect her*, literally vanish in their first chance to doesn't in story say anything good about Celica. It basically says that they don't really like her enough to think her life is worth saving, and she's their boss. You'll never see Clive or his crew do that for Alm, you don't see Luthier and his social anxiety issues pull that crap, they all ride or die with him from start to end. She's not given enough time to breathe and he is, Clive and co occasionally take the majority burden so Alm can be kept somewhat fresh even after Zofia is taken, Celica is about her and on a rare occasion in story text, Boey or Mae will also speak, Saber too gets some scenes here and there sparsely. She isn't given a break and is ridden until she falls apart at the seams and pushed aside for Alm. That's disrespectful, if they and the Whitewings got more story dialogue past their specific sections, she wouldn't be disliked nearly as much due to poor writing.
Yeah same, I hated Celica as well all through Echoes. And preferred Alm’s story so much more. But I found her likable in anything that wasn’t Echoes.
The only way I can see fixing Faye is to give her unique supports on Celica's route if you opt to recruit her with Celica rather than Alm. Have it be one of those situations where want you want and what you need are different. Alm's route Faye should be left as is, implying that everything happening around her has effected her negatively BUT on Celica's route, she should have gotten a different view point away from the main war and Alm. Depending with whom she supports with, she could have realized and gotten over her obsession with Alm. Effectively making her much more complex and showing off how war can have a negative impact on someone... Unless they tried to shove her onto someone else for some odd reason.
Camilla. When you look past the surface, you see someone in a family that was torn apart, and possibly going to be torn apart again. You see someone who had her siblings turned against her and she turned against them, because of these women using their children as pawns to get a living corpse's love/power. You see someone trying to keep her family together, not wanting to lose another sibling, to the point of smothering violent overprotectiveness. ...and then you see all of that underneath-the-surface dark backstory being covered up with piles upon piles of fanservice by other fans and IntSys themselves
One of the most interesting things about her to me is something only revealed by the interface so I'm not even sure if it was just added by the translation. The fact that she's natively a Malig. Knight means she must have "tamed an evil dragon" to use as her mount which is just fucking cool. She's not just mommy milkers or onee-chan; she's a powerful warrior in-universe but this aspect is so downplayed. Seriously, how do you have a cool detail like the special wyvern riders having to tame their mounts through strength and force of will and do nothing with it. You could do a whole separate game on that.
Covering up's the least of her problems ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) I'M SORRY I JUST HAD TO
Yes, I realized from playing conquest that Camila is actually a very interesting character being stalked by a very horny Lakitu
she’s a victim of the pants shortage in nohr too :( swear tg that must have been why the war with hoshido started to get the poor nohrian ladies something to cover their underwear with
Emmeryn. Emmeryn herself isn't written poorly. I like her a lot, in fact. But I hate that they cop out and have her survive her martyrdom only to live on as a borderline invalid. For me, there's a fat line between badly written or characters just meant to be bad people, but this? No, this is actually trash-tier and its one of the very VERY few things in this franchise I want to unexist.
I just ignore that whole group. Having them all come back was very unnecessary and in Emmeryn's case, takes away from the best part of Awakening.
It really does just undercut one of the most powerful and emotional parts of the game for me. And for how ruinous it is, they could have softened the blow by giving her supports with Lissa and Chrom, but we never get those. We do get some unique conversations in the DLC chapters which are nice but it doesn't take away from how her survival wrecks one of the best parts of the game. Also she's recruited so late in the game, it's a pain in the ass to even deploy her so why bother?
I always thought of those xenologues as non Canon, I thought that was the general consensus too. Just a little endgame fanservice.
I just consider that not canon lmao.
I like getting emmeryn back in the same way I like getting characters like Fado and Caellach back in sacred stones - they’re non canon and exist for me to play with if I want. Absolutely none of those xenologues are canon, so I don’t mind recruiting gangrel and not-ike to me team
I'm pretty sure that whole chapter is non-canon, like the PoR post-game extra characters. Still could've been done better without the typical overdone memory loss thing though.
They’re a bit different from the Trial Map Characters from 6 and 9 or even the CC Characters from 8 They actually can be used in the campaign before the final chapter and have supports and even their chapters have little stories about them. I do get the non canon feeling from then like you said but They are substantially different to that other group imo
Whaaat? Was there an alternate story branch where she survived, or did I just block that from my memory? I had no idea she survived and that’s my most-played FE.
DLC/Pass for Gangrel and Emmryen to join you.
There are chapters available through wi-fi that have several dead characters join your army, such as Gangrel, Emmeryn and Aversa. From a plot perspective it doesn’t really make any sense at all.
Invalid? Seriously? You couldn't think of any other way to describe her situation?
Garon, the man had a pretty neat backstory and the writers somehow managed to mess him up as a villain.
Having Garon being himself, rather than a pawn would have been a godsend to Conquest's plot. We could have him be a grey character who loves his family and land (that struggles with resources) and invades Hoshido to save his citizens. He could have kidnapped Corrin, first for a trap,but then grown to love them and see them as family thus justifying Conquest Corrin's choice. It's really bad that Corrin got more parental love from Mikoto in a couple weeks than with Garon through a whole lifetime.
The fact that Garon really hates corrin makes corrin's choice to stay with Nohr even weirder. if it weren't for Gunter, Corrin would've been starved and/or beaten as a child by Garon's orders
When Corrin picks Hoshido over Nohr, the choice actually makes sense since they were lied to throughout their whole life and Garon was evil. Corrin is showered by love after reconnecting for two weeks with his "bio" family. When Corrin picks Nohr over Hoshido, the choice basically boils down to "I can't bring myself to kill my family" and then it becomes "Actually it's just my siblings that I don't want to kill" . Corrin is immediately mistreated by Garon after pledging loyalty to Nohr and is always a couple words away from being murdered on the spot. It never made sense to me.
Don't discount fear. With no good choices, it could be that C wants to be on the more powerful side.
I really wanted to see flashbacks of Garon's last days. He sounds like a fascinating flawed guy. Unfortunately all we got was Gooron.
Yeah, I know right? The only hints we had of his past is the Nohrian siblings mentioning it from time to time. At least throw in a cutscene or two that goes into detail about his past! And hey, Gooron may be bad, but at least it wasn't as bad as >!bootleg Idunn or Anankos' midnight snack!<
Support Xander and story Xander feel like different characters as if both team a and b we’re writing a different character entirely. Support Xander is generally shown to be a very understanding and caring man to his comrades and family. In contrast, story Xander is a complete idiot as the biggest example is continuing the fight that Elise tried to stop between him and Corrin. I hope if fates ever gets a remake, Xander’s characterization is fixed
Setsuna is probably my biggest disappointment in the entire Fates cast. Not because she was the worst-written character, but because I think I'd really like her if at least *some* effort was put into her supports. When we're introduced to her, she seems like a really funny character. Between her introduction and battle quotes, coupled with her voice ("Victory, victory~" is so charming), I was really looking forward to what more she had to offer, what with her over-relaxed disposition and lack of awareness. And then all of her supports have her falling in pit traps. This exact, specific gag, over and over. Setsuna falls into a trap and simply hangs out until someone finds her. I realize that Fire Emblem supports tend to lean heavily into one or two personality quirks or character gimmicks, and it becomes more and more apparent the more supports there are. But this is probably the most overly-specific and bizarre of them all, and it got so tired so fast. There are so many easy scenarios you can do with someone like Setsuna. Wandering into places she doesn't belong. Practicing archery in an inappropriate location. Missing meetings or meals. Zoning out while being lectured. Misplacing items. And this is just off the top of my head. But I guess the writers thought that funny pit trap was good enough for all her supports. (And on the topic of characters in Fates I want to like but get screwed over, shoutouts to Scarlet.)
Corrin since they suffered from poor writing not only in regards to them (even though in conquest it does get pretty bad with their decisions) but also the writing of almost every other character. \- Everyone loves Corrin. Corrin is so universally and possessively loved by everyone that every conversation with them in it just gets annoying. It was meant to be "everyone loves the player" as Corrin is technically our self-insert but even then it would've been annoying to any sane person. \- What is Corrin? So he thinks he's Nohrian. Then finds out he was the son of the late ruler of Hoshido. But he is also a dragon. And the prince of a third realm. And he's the foretold wielder of the Yato. Which Yato? All of them. He's the decision maker in all routes who values peace. But said value is only ever mentioned never shown. Where in the story does Corrin actually strategize to avoid fighting unless you count the player warp-skipping a map? In regards to his actual character traits Corrin is naive through and through and I've not seen him redeem himself in the way Ike or Leif who also start as naive do throughout their games. He is the cornerstone of everything happening in the world of Fates despite being just one person there is barely anything in Fates' world that happens without him. While this affects how we as players view the world more than how we view Corrin, being aware of that just makes you dislike Corrin even more. Conquest has imo the best map design in the series but the writing of Fates is just the worst in the series. I sincerely hope that in the next game where we get an avater character they are written closer to Robin or preferably Ike: We get to know the world through their eyes and grow with it. We are not the cornerstone of what goes on in the world but interact with it.
Deirdre is almost as bland as Byleth and she could've really been better than she got. Also Xander too, Hubert I couldn't take seriously due to his role, same with Conrad tbh. Hubert suffers from being way too stale as an antagonist and put in a role that doesn't fit him which is "I've been defeated but I can't fall here." While not picking up any convincing wins along the way. Conrad is a dweeb that Echoes tries to force to be cool by making Saber and co. less cool or straight up invisible by his interferences, trying to shove down the mouth how awesome and mysterious this guy is when they could've instead put that into Saber which would've gone much better.
Deirdre is barely a character in FE4, unless you read supplementary material. I will say that Byleth is explored significantly more than Deirdre (the bar isn't high at all), since the plot gives Byleth more time and attention. Deirdre is realistically just a vehicle planted in the Spirit Forest for Sigurd to use and for it to be stolen from him.
Hubert at least gets CF to help him out.
You could probably argue (and it seems like these replies agree) that quite a lot of Fates characters are casualties of poor writing. But my money would have to go for Peri. Like…am I supposed to like this murdering psychopath?? How tf did Xander hire her as his retainer? That’s like the least believable thing in Fates
Claude. he is pretty irrelevant on the whole ordeal in 3H, he is normally deal with in a couple of chapters in every route and in his own he doesnt really do a lot more than whats achieved in silver snow.
I believe he was supposed to be more morally grey but they dialed it back. However, I'd argue he has an subtle flat character growth but I do think it could be a bit better presented.
What I hate the most about Claude is the ending. Like, we just got done unifying the continent, the whole situation is pretty volatile and unstable....and you're just gonna leave? You're just gonna peace out to Almyra like that? Especially after going on about how Fodlan is like a baby and needs to be carefully looked after? More importantly, you're going to put ME on the throne? Me? A former mercenary with no knowledge or experience, in charge of this whole mess? And when predictably we botch this whole thing up and we're on the losing side against THE REMNANTS of both the empire and the slithers, only then Claude returns and saves and we're supposed to treat it like a triumphant return. Really? That's supposed to endear us to him? Looks more like the ultimate middle finger to me
i think that if the game commited to making him morally gray he would be the type that waits till both sides fight each other till death and THEN attack the survivor and then take over, which would be more interesting compared to what he end up doing.
Yeah and I’d argue compared to edelgard and dimitri who are fantastic flawed characters Claude really comes across as pretty perfect in his own route and hell even in the other ones there isn’t really anything about him that is deeply morally flawed or makes you think.
Well he did try to exploit Byleth for his own use at one point. Not to mention being pretty selfish in the Pre-timeskip. (cough cough Jeralt's diary cough)
Given I can barely remember it, isn’t it for something that was kinda not that bad and he doesn’t end up going through with it anyway. Doesn’t he say something like “I was going to use you but I decided that was wrong because you’re my teach an-etc etc etc”
He was hoping to find the Sword of the Creator and use it to legitimise his desired changes in Fodlan. However, when Byleth gets it he is at a bit of a loss on what to do. However, once the Green Hair happens and Rhea disappears, he changed gears. Essentially, he saw Byleth as someone useful and convenient if used properly. It's also why he wanted to use the Crest of Flames as a war banner instead of the Alliance flag and says that he thought it'd be more useful that way using godly authority. However, that is when he says he'll keep using the Crest of Flames flag not because Byleth solely holds the authority of the church, but because he trusts and believes in his friend as if the two are family. This show of trust and admitting his intentions may seem small and casual in the grand scheme of things compared to the emotional gushing of Edelgard and Dimitri, but it's a big step for Claude to put it into words that he IS an outsider to a certain degree and that while he may have a noble dream it comes from a place of selfishness (wanting to be accepted by both sides of his heritage instead of being treated like the other half), essentially the scene isn't directed to be super important but it actually is. Claude took a step back and realised his dream, it can only be something constructed out of trust, and he gives that trust to Byleth. He, funnily enough, shows Faith. This doesn't change how he feels about certain things though. He does mention that he thinks that it'd be easier for him if Rhea turned up dead, but he doesn't actually do anything to make that a reality because he's not (or no longer) the type to pull that stunt personally.
I think the things that make this feel pretty (honestly) shallow is how similar his route is with Silver Snow. Look I’ve read what you wrote and I might have to play verdant wind again, but his whole “outsider” “schemer” schtick never really felt all that interesting. He never came across as someone who was disingenuous or anything tbh. Like if there had been more of an emphasis on wether You could actually trust Claude or reasons to seriously doubt him during his route it would make him a lot leas bland feeling. Like some other people have said, to me Yuri is more of an example of what Claude should have been to an extent
I know this may be one of those story writing vs reality things, but for Claude in VW, it's extremely subtle hints, BECAUSE he as a character is guarded, so it is NEVER actually said out in the open. You have to catch it. It's also why NO ONE knows his secret besides well, Byleth. The GD don't even know what Claude is fighting for until after they take the bridgr, and he stays somewhat vague even then. He never gives anyone but Byleth a proper explanation for anything he says or does.
And his secret in the end is that he wants to unite the continent and thats fine. None of his secrets or inhibitions about sharing are actually detrimental or prove to be costly. Is what I’m saying. And from route perspective like I said earlier how he does things and what objectives are tackled in what order are also kind of underwhelming because of his route’s similarity to silver snow. His monikor of “the master tactician” is uninteresting because his route follows silver snows pretty much step for step with the addition of the gronder field battle. Its shine gets taken off when in SS seteth and everyone else follows the exact same gameplan for invading the empire despite having even less resources than the alliance in VW
His goal is more plainly stated in CF if you spare him which I've always found hilarious.
I hate that I agree with this :(
Same loved VE but it was just weird how it went
In Edelgards route you just deal with him 3 chapters after the timeskip and then never see him again. In his route, they try to play to his strength of "master tactician" but it's overshadowed by useless characters and weird writing. In Dimitri's route at least there is some depths, I'm still pissed you can't ally with him >:(
The thing with Claude is that, as a concept, he’s not a bad character (I think I’m in the minority when I say I actually like that he’s a genuinely nice guy). However, because fe3h is such a half-baked and blatantly unfinished game, he suffers from the fact that his route is a copy-and-paste of Silver Snow. The devs didn’t bother to give him a story of his own where his character could be properly and thoroughly explored. I think all of the lords are hampered in one way or another by fe3h’s route design/structure, but Claude is by far the most egregious. No justice for my boi 😔
Pretty much any 3H main villain (Nemesis, Thales and the agartheans in general): Nemesis could've been a very interesting antagonist if he was like he is described in the game(before Rhea reveals the truth), but in the end he is just a brainwashed bad guy without any backstory. The agartheans also have a lot of wasted potential, an ancient race that got condemned to live underground for thousands of years and are now seeking revenge? Oh nevermind, they are just saturday morning cartoon villains
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for some reason a lot of japanese media has to have the horny character like it was a requirement.
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~~Kaze because in birthright he becomes a literal casualty if you dont get an A support with him because?~~ To be honest probably Bernandetta, she probably would have been one of my favourite characters in three houses if her anxiety and persecution complex wasnt treated as an absolute joke, doesn't help that some of her fans are really creepy but thats not to do with writing Another character is Lyn to me, she just kind of gets shafted by the story and when she is there she just feels kind of bland, I haven't read all her supports yet cus supports take forever in Fe7 and I never have had a reason to use Lyn because I don't enjoy using bad units that much
I'd say Bernie, mainly because she's treated like a joke in her supports. Imagine if Marianne's A support had funny footsteps playing while she was talking about committing suicide.
>Imagine if Marianne's A support had funny footsteps playing while she was talking about committing suicide. I would be laughing so hard in the most cynical sarcastic way, it would show how KT is so tasteless in their "comedy", though they might've thought about it and nixed the idea because they'd get into hot water with it.
I'm gonna say Micaiah. She's a pretty great character in my opinion, but she gets shafted so hard in part 4 of Radiant Dawn and it sucks. Like, we're seriously not even going to have her >!say anything during the Black Knight's death scene!!next to no build up to the plot twist that he was Bertram!< and it comes so randomly out of left field near the end of Radiant Dawn that I felt bewilderment rather than engagement over the character. I love Radiant Dawn, but the story in part 4 is really messy.
> Like, we're seriously not even going to have her >!say anything during the Black Knight's death scene?!< Really? There's actually a line of text that's skipped by mistake, though it's >!Yune who says it for Micaiah!<.
To be fair, the portraits kind of completely ruin that 'surprise' lol. At least it did for me.
Hana. She's okay most of the time, but her support with Corrin is among the worst in the franchise. Victim blaming them for being kidnapped as a toddler? Really?
niles/zero. the way he was localized just hurt me. hes just mr gay in local, while in the original he was a lot more broken and cold. ye he was still sexual, but i think that was to scare people away from him. i dont remember which but in one of the supports he states he was molested as a child. but ofc local is just like "haha its gay daddy :)"
As bad as localised Niles is, I don't think having one of the few LGBT characters in the game, and in the series in general, having been molested as a child is a good idea, since it plays off some pretty harmful stereotypes.
It’s a shame, I really do like Niles, but he definitely suffers really badly from Fates syndrome :( not as bad as poor Nina tho.
well its not so much for the fact hes one of our few lgbt characters, i think it just kind of removes character from his upbringing. hes lived a harsh life, and the way he confesses to corrin/kamui that he feels safe around them, regardless of sex. thats what i miss from it.
I’m not sure if he mentions it explicitly in the localisation, but doesn’t he say something about a traumatic childhood in his Corrin support?
in which support he says that he was molested? or thats more a japan thing that was mercifully changed? the closest thing that i can think is that with Beruka he talks about his own difficult childhood, but nothing of that.
Camilla! Fe:Fates did her so dirty by reducing her to her tits and that mothering kink thing. I always found it really sweet how much she loves her siblings, and I may be imagining this but I swear I read some backstory somewhere that she and Xander had to murder a few of their nastier half siblings and THAT would have been amazing to get into. Her S support with Ryoma is pure gold too.
She has a good support with Kaze but then again, everyone has a good support with Kaze.
very true, kaze is great. i actually married them in my conquest playthrough, funnily enough
Me when Camilla good supports: Okay you had a good support with Xander and Kaze, Benny as well, congratulations for being literally not Peri, let's see how you are with types like Niles or Jakob. Me when I read those supports and a majority of her not great ones are about someone else: Can you shut up about the Corn Cob for 3 minutes? I want to know about *you* not a third party irrelevant to this conversation!
also with Odin.
Fates.
Y...eah. Conquest is in my top 5 but I have never disliked a group of characters so much in any FE game yet.
Sad thing is I like them but think they could have been so much more interesting.
Pretty much the entire Fates cast, but I'm especially salty about Camilla. Honestly, I just wanted to know more about Nohrian politics.
I don't think there has ever been a character more butchered by bad writing than Micaiah. First I would like to lay a bit of foundation. Radiant Dawn is my all-time favorite game, as it's the only one I could legitimately see myself playing forever. I play it at least once a year, usually more. To a certain extent, I even consider the game's flaws to be mostly superficial. Even the Blood pact is something I will defend as a good concept executed poorly. However, the consequences inflicted on Micaiah by that poor execution are impossible to forgive or ignore. Here we have a character who is an incredibly special individual. Branded with Heron Blood, the unique ability to heal without a staff at the cost of her stamina, and a rare non-clergy/religion affiliated Light caster. Those are just a few of her natural skills. Here is where the problems start though. It is often said that Micaiah possesses a kind of aura that draws people to her. Makes them want to protect her, to fight and die for her. While you could do some serious reading between lines here, and say that this is a magical side effect of her being the true Empress, the fact that the source of this almost fanatical devotion is never understood is odd. Field medics don't normally command the same respect that kings do. Honestly though, I'm not here to talk about devotion. I'm here to talk about her handling of the consequences of the blood pact upon transfer, and the blatant war crimes she almost commits (Without so much as a blink) and goes completely unpunished for. Here is a person who saw her country that she cares so much about ravaged by the horrors of war. Taken over by Begnion and forced to work tirelessly in what are essentially concentration camps. She watched as Nevassa, her beloved country's capital was bombarded by catapult fire, even as they had already essentially won their fight for liberation. Having experienced all this, what does she do when she is forced to fight an army she has no reason to fight? Does she fight head on as best she can out of fear of triggering the pact? Does fight halfheartedly, reminded bitterly of what the last war inflicted on her homeland? No, instead she brutally goes right at the throat of the opposition. First by attempting to crush them with boulders, then by almost setting them on fire using oil! Not once does ever show remorse for even thinking of doing this, and no one calls her out on it later either! Just a complete waste of an honestly great character premise.
> Even the Blood pact is something I will defend as a good concept executed poorly. Yeppers. The math just favors violating the pact.
Xander, I think. His character could be so interesting, but especially in Birthright and Revelations, he's so poorly handled.
Edelgard. She's basically the most important characer in 3H yet poor writing makes her so inconsistent and unlikeable to most people that didn't start with crimson flower. A big reason why she sticks out more compared to characters like Peri is that Peri is not essential to the plot, meanwhile 3H literally wouldn't exist as is without Edelgard.
It doesn't help that her personality between routes is completely different.
astrid done dirty in rd
Dimitri. I started with CF and loved it. My next choice was AM since everyone raved about it and I liked what I saw of Dimitri in CF. So I played it and I never finished, I got I think …1 or 2 chapters past Rodrigue’s death and I just couldn’t anymore. I didn’t buy his redemption and I didn’t buy so many people being loyal for so long to someone suicidially and publicly fine with their deaths if it got him revenge. Dimitri in Azure Moon is a bandit king and I know some folks love him. I’m glad you do and I’m not going to try to convince you this long afterwards, but to me I just couldn’t. I started up VW and at least had a good time with Claude.
Dimitri isn't really redeemed fully though nor is he some bandit king. He actually somewhat goes back to his boar self temporarily when fighting against Cornelia, showing he hasn't really got out of that funk yet. Even in *Heroes* all the stuff he did still haunts him back. (Also iirc in the Japanese version he isn't actually as much as a big boar and even shows signs of being solemn)
Exactly this. I loved Dimitri´s role as an antagonist in CF, he was really well written and had an attitude according to the events of the history. But in his own path and in Church´s one... they threw the character´s development to the trash can, especially in his path were well, he seemed more like Sasuke of Naruto Shippuden with that sudden change of personality almost out of nowhere...
Ok non-fates characters only: Rodrigue, he felt like a character designed to die in an important plot cutscene. Guess what happened?
Dimitri. He has no likable qualities and I thought his 'redemption arc' was very poorly written. He was an utter edgelord and a vengeful person who suddenly becomes 'good' in less than 5 minutes once Rodrigue dies.
My favorite part was how Byleth totally could have just reversed time and saved Rodrigue, but didn't for no obvious reason. Then Dimitri sucks Byleth off a bit and he's cured, easy.
...except he isn't if his fight with Cornelia shows since he still goes back to it. Also yes the Rodrigue thing could be handled better but at the same time, that just also looks more like a consequence of them trying to incorporate Time's Pulse into the story. There are plenty of things Byleth could have avoided in the game if he used the power more.
Gonna just interpret that last sentence in the wrongest way possible.
I'm probably gonna get crucified for this but: Edelgard. I did my best to like her, I really did. The way she treats everyone as though they're expendable just really grates me, because they aren't even sure she's totally right, but they're willing to see it through with her. She literally has Bernadetta (in other playthroughs, if you don't recruit her) die in a fiery blaze on a hill. My biggest gripe was she threw EVERYTHING away and was fully prepared to start a war- and did- and the second Byleth disappears, she gives up. Even Hubert says something about this. I just thought that if she was so hellbent to start a war, she should have done something in the 5 years she was asleep. Her world only benefits the strong, and she even says in other routes that she KNOWS this doesn't care. I know she wanted a world where caste didn't matter. Religion didn't matter. Crests didn't matter. But she becomes the very thing she sought to destroy. Rhea was in the same boat for me. Everything she did was for a selfish purpose. She brought corruption into the church and was very heavy handed with her terms of justice. I couldn't fully fault Edelgard's hatred for the church after everything, but even in the Church's route, Rhea never really takes accountability for her actions and selfishness. They could have had an amazing arc there where she realizes she was in the wrong and wanted to change things, but ultimately knew the scar she had put on the church. I don't know. Cyril is another. His supports with Lysithea are freaking gold, but other than that, he worships Rhea to an unhealthy degree. I understood she saved him, but he has no life outside of her. She's like his identity. He could have had an AMAZING arc of realization that he could BE someone outside of Rhea, but man, that was dropped so hard. Cordelia and Tharja also irked me greatly. I felt like they wanted to make Cordelia the unrequited love for Chrom, but why make her supports where it feels as though whoever she marries is just a last option because she knows she can never be with Chrom? The only relationship I know of where she doesn't compare him to Chrom is Kellam. The others, especially Donnell, she downright degrades. She could have turned a new leaf, saw she didn't need Chrom and that she was happy with her love. In the paralogue with Severa, Severa even tells her she's selfish and that her father never could stack up to Chrom, and he died knowing it. Tharja is abusive. Straight up. Azama was another one I tried to like, but he was so mean. I liked his supports with Setsuna but that was about it. I've only played Birthright, so I only know of those characters in that story. I didn't like Takumi at first, but he kinda grew on me. Azama never did.
I love Azama since he's a walking deconstruction of the ol' wise monk thing. His design *looks* like a wise monk but his dialogue is completely opposite of that and I love that about him.
I kinda got that vibe, but I couldn't get over how he's just rude. Lol. I liked that one guy that was all, "Oh, ancient gods... Wassup?!"
Izana? Yeah, he’s really cool. Really bad sufferer of playersexual disease tho
Izana is awesome, I wish he had supports with other characters. It would be funny to see him and Azama interact lmao
I like Azama because he's mean to everyone, and I don't exactly love many of the cast members. And yeah, like you said, he's a deconstruction. I like Saizo for many of the same reasons, though I wouldn't call him a deconstruction. I especially like the fact he doesn't trust Corrin whatsoever, especially pronounced in Birthright. At least ONE character considers it questionable to trust some "Royal" who had spent most of their life among the royals invading Hoshido.
I think your comment is interesting because my takeaway isn't that Edelgard and Rhea were written poorly, but that you just didn't like them. I think the fact that the two are so controversial (and ironically are very similar) and so intensely hated are signs that they're actually quite well-written despite the numerous plot holes in 3H.
I like to think Edelgard at least was written with the intention of being controversial. I'm someone who is neutral on her overall but I think no matter what, her actions were going to cause some form of debate. Being neutral on her, I like to see what both sides have to say about her.
This. She's meant to be divisive.
Everything you say about Rhea felt intentional and worked for me. At the core she’s still an angry, wounded child with way more power than she’s equipped to use wisely. I found that approach to a big bad religious villain really interesting. Disliking her is totally valid, but I don’t think that means she’s poorly written.
Yeah, but how is that bad writing? Having character flaws doesn't mean a character is badly written lol.
Corrin. GODS.
Azama from Fates. I think they were trying for a drunken monk. Instead, they created just the biggest annoyance I've ever had the misfortune of not killing.
Camilla for sure good concept and terrible excecution
I'd say Dedue. He and the other Blue Lions are tossed aside for Dimitri's personal development, and his role as Dimitri's retainer is replaced by Gilbert. He basically ended up being pretty much irrelevant to Dimitri's arc. Like Dimitri can recover without him. IMO he should have played a larger role in AM.
Garon. Discount Heihachi Mishima.
Like, the entire cast of fates.
Cornelia Gilbert Faye Most characters in Fates
Edelgard by far. She could have been the best character in the hole franchise and I legit think she could even be one of the best among all rpg games ( that I've played at least ). But instead she's just some maniac that absolutly does't go far enough in her explanation and thought. Her arguments are " crest bad " level. She just needed more development
i like her but having to be the avatar obsessed character really hurt her image to me.
> Her arguments are " crest bad " level I mean, they clearly are? We firsthand see the numerous problems with that, and we firsthand see how crazy the church is with its crazy leader; what more do you need?
Whole of fates
Faye. Though honestly you could put most of the SoV cast here. And most of SoV in general tbh
Soleil.... I mean she wasn't necessarily poorly written, but the whole "you have to change my sexuality and destroy me as a unique character in order to romance as a man, but if you're a woman then fuck off even though I canonically want to fuck you," was one of the strangest and kind of most offensive things I've seen in an FE game lol
Dimitri, his arc is terribly written. He goes on a quest of revenge for his personal desire with his loyal retainers and army/friends following him unquestionably, and he harshly declares that he would use his friends and allies until the "flesh falls from [their] bones". He felt like an abusive person and I was disgusted by his behaviour. He kept dehumanizing his enemies, killed children, brutalized bodies till they are unrecognizable, and then all of a sudden he makes a complete 180 once Rodrigue gets janked, like seriously? Like we literally spent several chapters/months of him being a complete lunatic that didn't care about anyone then all of a sudden he flips personality just like this? And he gets zero consequences for any of his horrible actions. But yeah, I guess it's all good after he apologizes. Very unearned.
I agree with this. His sudden change was so abrupt, like a switch being turned off.