Sunwoo

I feel like the last Blazing Blade banner would've been a more appropriate companion for the start of this book than Awakening. The Healing Hands are basically a discount Black Fang.

I already got two copies of Laurent on my first circle. This is amazing.

Yeah, Rath's weapon refine is acceptable. Guaranteed follow-up attack is good, and easy +8 to all stats under the right conditions is also fine. The 30% helps him survive if he has to eat a hit, so like. It's fine. It could've been worse for sure.

If I had to choose between the game sucking Alfonse's dick or the summoner's dick, I'd rather go with Alfonse. Especially since the last book was basically just a bunch of female OCs sucking the summoner's dick anyway. Alfonse is the best OC in Heroes anyway. And yes, that's partly because they won't let anyone else (except Veronica) have character development in the first place, but it's still IS's own damn fault for saturating the story with so many OCs in the first place instead of putting in only the ones that are necessary and developing them better.

Yeah, that was also a very questionable move by IS. Even if Engage is new, wasn't Lapis decently popular? They would've been better off putting Amber in that spot since Lapis could carry a banner and Amber is Amber. If the demote had to be female, Jade would've been a good option too. Since she's inexplicably less popular than the other Brodian ladies and it'd be nice to get more easily accessible armors who aren't GHBs.

>Inigo got kicked out of the banner to make room for the new OC Uhhhhhhhhh I'm trying not to complain about the OCs because I have nothing positive to say about them, but this is just horrendously offensive. They kicked off Inigo. INIGO. Y'know, the guy who's actually popular. Robbed him of a prf and skills given to 5-star units, which he would've certainly gotten if it wasn't for the OC stealing his spot. Ugh. This is legit confusing. I can understand kicking off someone like Tanya or Ross and giving them demote kits because they probably had lower demand and were less likely to get the good stuff even if they were on a banner. But seriously, man. I'm actually annoyed about this because if it weren't for the OC, Inigo had a good chance for preferential treatment. I expected a future children's Awakening banner would add Lucina alt, Noire, Severa, and Inigo while leaving Laurent off completely, so I'm actually okay with this I guess. Having him in with bad tome choices is still better than him not being in it at all.

Lol, I just got home. I wasn't expecting a FEH Channel today, I thought it'd be tomorrow. ALSO I HEAR THAT LAURENT EXISTS NOW?

Dude, enough. You have zero knowledge or context of my experience with romance as a genre and in fiction, and you're kind of being an ass at this point. I don't care if other people like romance or disagree with me. Doesn't affect my life in any way whatsoever. But what you're doing is telling me that my experiences are invalid because you, with your nonexistent knowledge of anything related to me personally, have deemed that I don't have "enough experience" with romance as a genre to have an educated opinion on it. You're free to disagree with me, but you're not so much disagreeing as you are implying that I am stupid and wrong to have my own thoughts on something because you don't think I know anything about it when you don't know me enough to make that call. Making personal attacks over something this trivial because you want to win an argument on the Internet is a surefire way for me to lose any respect for you that I ever had.

Dude, just because I don't read romance doesn't mean I have absolutely no experience with it. I watch people doing book reviews of various romance books and authors. I've also watched reviews of romance movies and have likely watched some personally. I think the vast majority of the genre is Not Good and I have heard of some people getting bad ideas of romance because of novels and movies, and it's not like this is coming out of nothing out of my own biases. I've solid, if limited, reasons to believe this. And didn't I ask you to PM me if you wanted to continue this topic because it's not FE-related? ;/

No, like, I legitimately think it's crap. Not because I dislike the genre but because I think it's full of bad messages and examples, especially for impressionable young people who may be voyaging into their first romance. There are way too many stories romanticizing abusive men, portraying awful female leads as the "everygirl" we're supposed to project ourselves onto, discarding friends and family because they're not your lover, or some combination of a bunch of awful things. And even the ones that aren't outright awful still tend to demonstrate dubious behavior as romantic when it's really not. For example, the only romance book I ever read seriously still had some hints of the male lead manipulating the female lead with his innate magical powers at a point when they weren't actually in a relationship. And there are just some very icky elements about it that are portrayed as romantic when some of this is problematic IRL. The issue comes when people don't recognize these red flag behaviors as something you should run away from IRL, because they think that because it was in this book where it was portrayed as romantic, it's fine. And there are more people like that than we'd think.

Lol, I gotta hard disagree with you there Jotari. Romance in general is a pretty crap genre. But it's also not really FE related so I probably won't elaborate here (although if you want to PM me about it, feel free). But yeah, Julius/Ishtar is by no means a healthy pairing. It's also kind of the point of their relationship. I only wish that the timeline of certain events wasn't so weird, because it feels like the characters' intended ages sometimes are in contradiction to the timeskip.

Hilariously enough, a lot of the people who ship Ishtar/Reinhardt because Julius is abusive tend to make the Ishtar/Reinhardt relationship bad and unhealthy for wholly different reasons. There's one particular series of Ishtar/Reinhardt stories written by a single person that completely turned me off to the pairing entirely, which isn't always an easy thing to do! (Usually, it takes several bad fics by several people to do that.) Nobody fucking knows how to write romance. And yes, while getting a dancing Reinhardt was pretty damn awesome the shippy aspects of him being on the banner with Ishtar were not. Soiree Reinhardt is part of the reason for my not being able to take Heroes characterization seriously. Just for that banner, Reinhardt's characterization suddenly veers into "love" territory when there is really nothing in canon to back that up.

I never considered Reinhardt to have a crush on Ishtar. Excluding Heroes (since it doesn't represent its non-OCs very well), the only thing that Reinhardt ever says about Ishtar canonically is that she dismissed him from her service because she has no need for him anymore. Since Thracia doesn't have voiced dialogue, his tone of voice could be whatever you imagine it to be. (Personally, I interpreted it as flat and matter-of-fact.) Julius is also not a very objective judge of, well, anything. He's possessed, and also possessive. It don't think it'd be OOC for him to misinterpret Reinhardt's knightly devotion and respect towards his lady as a crush. And, personally, I really like Reinhardt as a character and would be super disappointed if all of his motivations boiled down simply to "he loves Ishtar and that's all there is to him". For his lack of screen time, there's a lot you can reasonably assume about him just using basic human psychology. Maybe a remake will prove it all wrong one day, but until then I like to imagine Reinhardt as a dude who grew up believing that as a knight, you had to follow your liege no matter what. And because he's in so deep with Friege's misdeeds and because Ishtar herself is not necessarily a horrible person, he feels he doesn't have the option to just leave. Maybe he doesn't even really have any of his own thoughts on what Friege is doing, because he believes that as a knight all that matters is what his lord orders. Besides, he's one of the few Camus archetypes who actually gets called out for being ... well, complicit. I never really liked the Camus archetype because it felt like in general the story's trying to cover their ass and portray them as, "Isn't it so sad that this noble person died fighting against you when they could've been your ally? Ignore their misdeeds and/or stupidity and just be sad for them!" Reinhardt feels like what the Camus archetype should be, a respectable warrior who should still be held accountable for their actions (or lack thereof).

I expect nothing from Book 8. Like, I'm not trying to be snarky or anything. I legitimately don't expect anything out of it. I don't even expect it to be better than the last one, if I'm honest, and I hated book 7. That said, I know that Heroes is following the Norse mythology pretty closely, but unless they have plans for something completely different for how they do the story (or plan to scrap it completely) I don't think they'd write out a potential Ragnarok-type endgame situation. At least, not until the last year of the game.

OP is a bit of a wall of text and I should be in bed, so I might not be super coherent here. Apologies for that. There will always be a lot of nuance in history. A lot of the reasons as to why things happened, and what was considered acceptable for the times, and how we should view those things now ... there's really no satisfactory answer to any of it. The straightforward answer is that no nation, no culture no people is free from wrongdoing in their past (or present) and the sooner we acknowledge that the sooner we can actually work together rather than bitching about who had it worse or why certain groups are more acceptable targets. Indeed, it's kind of mind-boggling to me how many people don't seem to realize that humanity is opportunistic in general. Especially back in the old days when as a civilization people's moral compasses were ... uh, worse off than today. Honestly, my take on the situation falls into one of two thoughts: 1) The further back in the past something is from us, the more distanced we feel from it, and the more we forget or disregard the horrors that were felt back then. We are biased by the present and some people tend to believe that if they don't experience it and can't empathize with it, then it doesn't matter; 2) People want to take sides and don't like to admit they're wrong. Rather than realizing that things in life and things as complicated as history and geopolitics are not simple good vs. bad takes, they want to pick a side they identify with and ignore everything to the contrary. A not-insignificant number of people can't see past themselves and their own biases. I think I'm gonna cut it off short here. Apologies if it didn't answer your concerns @Jotari but I'm getting sleepy.