I Love Flayn

I am a massive Flayn fan and I love seeing romantic art or fanfics of her and Byleth together, but this is sadly a pairing that either goes ignored or is openly vilified by much of the FE fanbase*. Mind you, this same fanbase has no issues with romantic Flayn pairings in general (Flayn x Dimitri seems to be wildly popular for some reason) but only is it when Byleth is involved that people seem to get up in arms. Yes, there are people who hate characters like Edelgard and Rhea, but nonetheless there are tons of art and stories of Byleth with them. Flayn by herself doesn't attract nearly as much vitriol (that I'm aware of), yet she's one of the characters least represented in Byleth ships (and yes, I know there are others, no need to bring it up). Flayn fans are also routinely mocked and insulted, and whenever Flayn x Byleth content IS created, it's always met with the same derision and backlash, often couched as "memeing". This is grossly unfair to Flayn and her fans, and both deserve better treatment. I know what many peoples' first objection is going to be to these points: "Flayn is a young child! Loving her or wanting her to be with Byleth is wrong and you are sick for it!" While this amounts to nothing but an empty and unwarranted personal attack, there are three reasons why it's completely invalid: Flayn is not a child or "loli" as people often label her. She has a teenage physique and is literally coded as being of 17 years of age (I'm not going to bother going deeper on this point because detractors will accuse me of "fixating on her body") Even disregarding the first point, no one is ever given hate for pairing Flayn with other characters as I've mentioned multiple times now. If Flayn is "too young" to be romantically involved at all, why is it still acceptable to pair her with Dimitri, Ferdinand, Linhardt, etc? Why is it ONLY with Byleth that it's a problem? People say they don't like pairing her because she "looks too young", but that doesn't stop the plethora of Bernadetta or Lysithea x Byleth content being produced, as well as the majority positive reception it gets in contrast (and yes, I do mean pre-timeskip). In summation, I am one among many passionate Flayn fans and we will continue to be her fans no matter how many insults and memes people bombard us with. Flayn is a kind, sweet and wonderful girl, and she deserves way more love and respect than this fanbase gives her, and so do we. *To be clear, I'm not referring to NSFW content of any kind, so don't even try to throw that argument out. If you have to make this about sex, that's on you.

Since votes have been declining I figure now is a good time to review the results. The ratio of killing vs sparing Flayn has stayed steadily around 50:50, with killing having a slight advantage of around %0.8 as of the time of this post. The majority of those who participated wanted Flayn to survive or at the very least were indifferent to her death, at 87.69% as of this post, while the remaining 12.31% killed her with (what I assume is) malicious intent. Interestingly, there have also been replies from those who've expressed intent to spare her on subsequent playthroughs, so the amount of total times spared on average is likely to be higher than just on initial playthrough. I may make a second poll in a few months collecting those results. This information has been very helpful to me. Thank you to those who participated and also who shared their thoughts on the subject. And this is just a personal aside, but to those who killed Flayn intentionally out of dislike/hatred of her: could I ask why? Flayn comes off to me as pleasant and inoffensive, so what is it about her that makes some believe she deserves death? Are there aspects of her character that cause that strongly of a negative response in some that I may not be aware of? This has got me curious enough that I might make another thread on it, but I wanted to ask here first.

Asking without judgement, I'm genuinely curious to what the majority of people did regarding the fight against Flayn. Since statistically most people chose Black Eagles as their first house, it's very likely they were unaware of the mechanics regarding her survival (though if Crimson Flower wasn't your first path I would still like to hear from you). I want to see what action most players ended up taking, and whether or not their knowledge of her survival and/or their opinion toward her personally played a role in their decision. For me, Crimson Flower was my first playthrough and I didn't want to kill Flayn from the start. I didn't know about killing vs sparing, and by pure luck ended up sparing her to give Byleth the boss EXP.