Just a grumbling female player...

[Baldrick]

The Hinoka/Subaki support establishes that pegasi in Fatesland react to people's emotions rather than their gender. It wouldn't be the first time things have changed on a new continent; Tellius had a different origin story, Elibean dragon mounts aren't related to manaketes like Akaneian dragon mounts, Elibean manaketes degenerate differently, Valentian magic works differently, etc.

[Cornguy]

I will agree that male pegasus knights are kind of strange after 20 years of them being female exclusive, but before it was a thing, I always found it strange that the pegasi just hate the feeling of balls on their saddle, but it's perfectly fine with them if the guy is riding in the bitch seat, ala rescue?

I just wonder how an entire species of domesticated animals could unanimously reject male riders. 

[eclipse]

29 minutes ago, a bear said:

Despite that, I think it's interesting to note that Leon shares a similarity to Niles as a sassy gay archer, much in the way that Takumi follows after Innes and Shinon in being a talented asshole archer. Those are examples of character archetypes being done well, I'd say: they share a similar foundation, but are developed uniquely in appearance, relationships, development, foibles, etc. Being female or black or gay or Laguz or whatever only adds to variety. Spice o' life.

Niles had a bit more room to grow, so we can see him being an ass to just about everyone.  Leon only has Valbar and Kamui.  The subject for the latter?  "Don't hit on me, 'cause my heart belongs to Valbar".  His shrine convo also revolves around. . .well, him being gay.

Heroes tried to flesh him out a bit, but he now fits the girly-gay guy stereotype, complete with shopping.

15 minutes ago, Johann said:

Ah, I can see why you took my previous post the way you did then. Allow me to clarify: I am thinking more like the "you can't make the main character [insert minority group]!" sort of outright hateful complaint. Have you not seen that kind of reception to movies, shows, games, etc? For instance, when the new Star Wars movies were coming out, there were people who had a lot of vitriol for Finn, one of the main characters, simply because he was black. Creators need to ignore those kinds of people.

An opinion like yours is reasonable, though I'd amend that to say creators should always be exploring tasteful and meaningful ways to implement characters of different backgrounds & identities. Even adding a minor character who is LGBTQ, even if they have little or no plot significance can still be a positive thing, provided their identity is depicted in a positive way. Gaming in general could use better writing, which would improve the representation of all people, really.

I agree in the sense that his obsession with Valbar is what defines him, not his homosexuality per se. He should have been written better.

Regarding Gray and Boey; while they have families (which we never see), they are still the only people of color other than, uh who else, Greith? The game's world could be more fleshed out by showing more variety of people, though at least individually Gray and Boey are great characters.

Oh, I have my gripes with Star Wars!  However, none of them have to do with Finn.  His skin color is a non-issue in the story, and I think that's the way it should be!

I'd be happy with good characters in a game, other things nonwithstanding.  A mediocre story with amazing characters is a lot more enjoyable than an amazing story with mediocre characters, IMO!

Responded to the Leon things above.  I really liked Leon as a unit, but alas, his character leaves much to be desired!  It still isn't enough for me to abandon him as my Heroes representative!

More skin color options for in-game characters would be nice.  Elibe had Sacae, who looked different than the rest of the world, and managed to address some racism issues.  Why not have a region with a darker-skinned race, race issues dependent on how the world itself works?

[Humanoid]

16 minutes ago, Cornguy said:

I will agree that male pegasus knights are kind of strange after 20 years of them being female exclusive, but before it was a thing, I always found it strange that the pegasi just hate the feeling of balls on their saddle, but it's perfectly fine with them if the guy is riding in the bitch seat, ala rescue?

I just wonder how an entire species of domesticated animals could unanimously reject male riders. 

Well there's that whole thing about the unicorns and female virgins, so it probably draws on that mythology or something similar notwithstanding the fact that a Pegasus is not a Unicorn and that the rider Pegasus is traditionally associated with was Bellerophon, a man. But we know that Fire Emblem tends to do mashups of various western/Abrahamic mythologies, and that can be potentially more interesting than sticking too closely to the source (FEH is just a little too exclusively Norse for my tastes).

That said, I'm glad Subaki exists to shatter that glass ceiling. I'm not asking them to go back and put male pegasus rides in a theoretical (second) FE1 remake, but let's leave it open in future games.

 

On the subject of racial representation, on the other hand, there have been plenty of missed opportunities and perhaps it's a bit unfortunate that the world of Gaiden with its two homogenous countries was the one where they attempted to retrofit the issue some degree. Regna Ferox in Awakening was a bit of a halfhearted attempt at representing different peoples - on the one hand you had Basilio and Flavia, but it pretty much began and ended with that.

I'm playing through Sacred Stones right now and it's notable how you tour so many countries and regions, but you couldn't tell who was from where unless the game outright told you in text - and it didn't matter anyway because the entire continent was a monoculture. We make fun of Fates' worldbuilding, but SS feels like it's had just as little effort into it, if not less. Huge missed opportunity.

Edited January 31, 2018 by Humanoid

[Johann]

1 minute ago, eclipse said:

Oh, I have my gripes with Star Wars!  However, none of them have to do with Finn.  His skin color is a non-issue in the story, and I think that's the way it should be!

I'd be happy with good characters in a game, other things nonwithstanding.  A mediocre story with amazing characters is a lot more enjoyable than an amazing story with mediocre characters, IMO!

Responded to the Leon things above.  I really liked Leon as a unit, but alas, his character leaves much to be desired!  It still isn't enough for me to abandon him as my Heroes representative!

More skin color options for in-game characters would be nice.  Elibe had Sacae, who looked different than the rest of the world, and managed to address some racism issues.  Why not have a region with a darker-skinned race, race issues dependent on how the world itself works?

Yeah, unless a character's gender/race/sexual orientation/etc is directly tied to the plot (ie: getting pregnant being a plot point), then there's no reason why a creator can't do practically anything with who they are (and even then, well, it's fiction, rules can be made and unmade).

Sacae in general was fascinating.

[Cute Chao]

Yeah, to me, the only females can ride pegasi seemed completed arbitrary to me, especially since, as others have mentioned, they allow men to be rescued, so it's not like a unicorn 'only a virgin female' thing (which I always hated as well because it implies women have to be more pure than men). 

It doesn't weird me out to see guys on pegasi. It makes me think... finally! 

I really hope they keep this up in the new game since it feels better to me. I do agree, we don't need male pegasi in the previous games or their remakes, since it has already been established but... stop establishing it in the future... 

[NegativeExponents-]

15 minutes ago, eclipse said:

More skin color options for in-game characters would be nice.  Elibe had Sacae, who looked different than the rest of the world, and managed to address some racism issues.  Why not have a region with a darker-skinned race, race issues dependent on how the world itself works?

While I do agree that Sacae as a whole was pretty well done, it’s not exactly a good example for characters of various skin tones. All of the sacaean people, for example Lyn, Rath, Sue, Guy, and so on, didn’t really have a different skin tone compared to non Sacae people, just a different culture. If we have to look at Elibe, the guardians of the desert, Hawkeye and Igrene, are better examples of darker skin toned people but sadly they are the only guardians we know of and can’t know if all of them were also darker or if there even was other guardians to begin with.

[eclipse]

1 minute ago, NegativeExponents- said:

While I do agree that Sacae as a whole was pretty well done, it’s not exactly a good example for characters of various skin tones. All of the sacaean people, for example Lyn, Rath, Sue, Guy, and so on, didn’t really have a different skin tone compared to non Sacae people, just a different culture. If we have to look at Elibe, the guardians of the desert, Hawkeye and Igrene, are better examples of darker skin toned people but sadly they are the only guardians we know of and can’t know if all of them were also darker or if there even was other guardians to begin with.

Sacaeans had more than just skin color.  Their hair was greenish-black, eye shape is a little narrower, fashion was drastically different, contrasting values system, different fighting style, etc.  It was a completely different type of people and culture, and I liked that fact that some of the other people in Elibe had a problem with them.

[Ice Dragon]

24 minutes ago, a bear said:

I'm all for devil's advocate or making sense of the why, but I can't help reading your posts as if you're personally invested in defending IS. Am I wrong? I don't mean for this to be a personal attack or anything either, so I apologize if it comes off that way.

If I'm going to be blunt, it's because I don't like it when people whine about things, which is what most unfairly critical opinions tend to be. It's annoying when people don't try to think about both sides of the argument before deciding to write a wall of text about it.

As for this argument in particular, I'm not entirely sure how it got to where it is because my original point was that the tier list is not skewed towards females as much as people are saying it is, and that ended up devolving into what's wrong with this world.

 

15 minutes ago, Johann said:

It's not a valid argument because the whole thing is fiction. Pegasi don't exist. The rule that they don't let men ride them doesn't exist. Someone just made it up. The only thing enforcing that rule are the whims of the creators. To quote the video, "Criticism of the creative work is ultimately criticism of the decisions that people made when they were putting it together." Changing the rules is bad writing, but then so was establishing that bad rule in the first place.

Okay, I see what we're getting at here. That makes sense.

You're saying that there is no difference between "there are too many female fliers in Fire Emblem" and "it's dumb that pegasi don't let males ride them" because both of them are a direct consequence of the design decision that pegasi do not allow males to ride them despite the first needing to go through another layer to get there.

In other words,

• (1) There are too many female fliers in Fire Emblem.

results in the response

• (2) That's because about half of the fliers are pegasus knights and pegasi don't let males ride them.

which results in the counter-criticism

• (3) Well, then, that's dumb.

which results in

• (4) Okay. You do you.

I feel like the fact that there is a layer between (1) and (4) is, in fact, meaningful. (1) is specifically a criticism of an observable result of the world's rules. You can observe that result without knowing the rules of the world, and the rules of the world are a sufficient justification for that result to have occurred. That's not too different from "Why can't I pass through walls?" in the real world. It's not a criticism of the rules of the world; it's criticism of an observation of the world. The laws of physics are, therefore, a valid justification.

(3) is something that I would agree is a criticism of the decisions that went into the world's creation. Justification is therefore a high school essay rather than a college mathematical proof (i.e. given these assumptions, these are the results) (which suffices for the justification of (1)).

 

45 minutes ago, Cornguy said:

I just wonder how an entire species of domesticated animals could unanimously reject male riders. 

The same way dragons with that much body mass and that small of wings relative to body mass can take to the skies: magic.

[fe6_fan]

54 minutes ago, Glaceon Mage said:

Wendy and Sophia, the two worst units in FE6 and possibly the entire franchise, are in the game.  I don't think viability in their original game has anything to do with who's added.

He has relevance to Roy's character, and he's a bit of a meme for being bad in Japan apparently.  Those are the main reasons for me to hold onto the hope that he'll get in.   But like, if they're going to pass over new men in favor of girls, I can't help but worry that won't be enough.

The game does reference him, Allen, and Lance at one point (Book 1 Chapter 3-1 where Roy is accompanied by an archer and two cavs), so there's that too I guess.  

Wolt isn't actually that awful if he's buddy-buddy with Roy. I've seen a lot of artwork floating around on PIXIV of people using them as their "A-TEAM" combo (and I don't think it was meant to  be a joke). I've used them together on a couple runs (though I usually use Roy/Lilina because they are absolutely monstrous), and Roy with Wolt actually isn't all that bad. Yeah, it requires a bit of support to make Wolt hardcore, but a lot of the FE6 cast aren't particularly monsters on their own in the first place. I do hope he will get in there! Then Roy can have his bestie~

[Magical Glace]

Just now, bbqbert said:

Wolt isn't actually that awful if he's buddy-buddy with Roy. I've seen a lot of artwork floating around on PIXIV of people using them as their "A-TEAM" combo (and I don't think it was meant to  be a joke). I've used them together on a couple runs (though I usually use Roy/Lilina because they are absolutely monstrous), and Roy with Wolt actually isn't all that bad. Yeah, it requires a bit of support to make Wolt hardcore, but a lot of the FE6 cast aren't particularly monsters on their own in the first place. I do hope he will get in there! Then Roy can have his bestie~

Oh, I know.  Wolt's my favorite FE character, so I make a point of using him every time I play FE6, even on hard.  It helps that Roy/Wolt is my favorite support chain in FE6.

Gotta make best boy great, and all that.  If he ends up a 4-5* in Heroes, all my feathers from his release until he's +10 are for copies of him and giving him SI stuffs.  No exceptions, haha.  

[fe6_fan]

Booted for reasons.

Edited January 31, 2018 by bbqbert

[Baldrick]

11 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

As for this argument in particular, I'm not entirely sure how it got to where it is because my original point was that the tier list is not skewed towards females as much as people are saying it is, and that ended up devolving into what's wrong with this world.

Maybe you could address my point about how male dragons and dracoknights are overlooked, and so it's wrong to say the best classes just happen to be female-dominated?

 

11 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

The same way dragons with that much body mass and that small of wings relative to body mass can take to the skies: magic.

So much for "minimally believable within the setting".

[Johann]

4 minutes ago, Ice Dragon said:

You're saying that there is no difference between "there are too many female fliers in Fire Emblem" and "it's dumb that pegasi don't let males ride them" because both of them are a direct consequence of the design decision that pegasi do not allow males to ride them despite the first needing to go through another layer to get there.

Not sure what the significance of (4) is here, but overall I think you understand what I'm saying, that yes, the observable results of a design choice isn't justified by in-game rationale. "Too many female fliers", of course, is subjective and open to interpretation as to what that means and implies for the FE world and its creators' intent, while "there are more female fliers than male fliers" is an undeniable result of that choice.

I figure that in development, it's probable they were like "let's make the pegasus knights fliers because I like that (for whatever reason)", and then in later games backed with "it's how we've always done it". I mean, if there were dude pegasus knights from day one, Subaki would never have seemed strange to you, and none of the plots suddenly implode.

I would also say that people defending things like Nowi as a spouse or sexualized characters (across any medium, not just FE or other games) is a much more serious example of people using the Thermian argument to ignore/justify the impacts of design choices.

[eclipse]

16 minutes ago, bbqbert said:

I find it quite interesting that you describe my original post as whining about things and being "unfairly critical." From what I can tell, many many female players (and men) feel the same way. That does not necessarily mean that we are being unfairly critical. Perhaps as a man, as a member of their target audience, you aren't able to see quite as clearly from our perspective and why we might feel this way. And I also think it's annoying when people assume I haven't thought about something before posting a wall of text. I've spent one year playing Fire Emblem Heroes, reading forums, reading commentaries, watching YouTube videos, hearing both sides of the argument, before I came to this point.

But thanks for making grand assumptions about me and belittling my post.

That's. . .not exactly how to rebut a point.  Respond to Ice Dragon's argument, but don't put him down for being a man.

Edited January 31, 2018 by eclipse
I suck at grammar

[Interdimensional Observer]

1 hour ago, Ice Dragon said:

I still have difficulty wrapping my head around the fact that Subaki is a male pegasus knight. It simply doesn't make sense to me because it contradicts everything I know about pegasi in the Fire Emblem universe. That's the sort of thing that happens when you start messing with already established rules.

 

Given you know the Japanese, you can shoot me down in 3 2 1 if I'm wrong. But I once heard the "Pegasus" in Hoshido are called Tenma, an almost unheard of East Asian mythological flying horse thing, in Fates. If true, this would offer a small, thin excuse for the difference. But I'm guessing this really isn't the case?

 

For myself, FE should not attempt serious modern political commentary through its characters. I'm not expecting IS to hire specialists in race and sexuality to write deeply nuanced characters of those kinds, but nonetheless including them and not falling face first on the execution is appreciated. You don't need to shove the aspect in the forefront of everything they say, and I'd actually like it if they intentionally made it very low key with a character (something like a gay knight who brings up in one support conversation they a fisher spouse you don't ever actually see, and which the other person in the support doesn't go "oh you're gay?!" treating it as if the knight said they breathe air, and then the gay knight talks a little about the relationship in details unrelated to being gay, like the knight being an only child and the fisher having a big family). But at the same time, people do value these things enough to struggle for them, so the traits shouldn't be just tacked on and covered up.

 

18 minutes ago, NegativeExponents- said:

While I do agree that Sacae as a whole was pretty well done, it’s not exactly a good example for characters of various skin tones. All of the sacaean people, for example Lyn, Rath, Sue, Guy, and so on, didn’t really have a different skin tone compared to non Sacae people, just a different culture. If we have to look at Elibe, the guardians of the desert, Hawkeye and Igrene, are better examples of darker skin toned people but sadly they are the only guardians we know of and can’t know if all of them were also darker or if there even was other guardians to begin with.

Let us not forget the Dragon Laguz of Tellius! Living in a desert (explicable as "we're few in number and no one would ever war for a remote litterbox so this is the most isolated place and thus appropriate for our kind"), they too are well tanned.

Also, you mention Arcadia, but Sophia and Fae are very pale despite living there their entire lives. While a Norwegian shipped as freshly born to Congo won't look like a native Congolese, they should if they normally go outside look significantly darker than a Norwegian back in Norway. Are Dragon genetics that lacking in melanin production? 

 

49 minutes ago, Humanoid said:

I'm playing through Sacred Stones right now and it's notable how you tour so many countries and regions, but you couldn't tell who was from where unless the game outright told you in text - and it didn't matter anyway because the entire continent was a monoculture. We make fun of Fates' worldbuilding, but SS feels like it's had just as little effort into it, if not less. Huge missed opportunity.

That is the general consensus. We get some sense of difference with Jehanna the desert kingdom (I like the step pyramid Jehanna Hall), but the rest is terribly bland. Grado and Renais we fight in enough to get an idea of what the countries look like at least, but Frelia and Rausten get nothing- only castles. We don't even get the names of all 5 legendary heroes! Why didn't they take the moment to do even this? They gave us the Tower of Valni even! They could have in three lines said Valni was the name of the Frelian hero.

Traversable World Maps =/ world building. Magvel and Awakening make this clear.

 

54 minutes ago, Johann said:

Yeah, unless a character's gender/race/sexual orientation/etc is directly tied to the plot (ie: getting pregnant being a plot point), then there's no reason why a creator can't do practically anything with who they are (and even then, well, it's fiction, rules can be made and unmade).

While it is nice to most superficially show an idealized multicultural society by including multiple races, at the same time a hodgepodge approach can be a little lacking. It can be useful to have distinct racial, ethnic, and national communities- as in Elibe as others have pointed out. 

[fe6_fan]

Booted for reasons.

Edited January 31, 2018 by bbqbert

[Baldrick]

15 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Given you know the Japanese, you can shoot me down in 3 2 1 if I'm wrong. But I once heard the "Pegasus" in Hoshido are called Tenma, an almost unheard of East Asian mythological flying horse thing, in Fates. If true, this would offer a small, thin excuse for the difference. But I'm guessing this really isn't the case?

Found it. It's in Subaki and Selena's support, though the English version doesn't explicitly name them that.

15 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

Also, you mention Arcadia, but Sophia and Fae are very pale despite living there their entire lives. While a Norwegian shipped as freshly born to Congo won't look like a native Congolese, they should if they normally go outside look significantly darker than a Norwegian back in Norway. Are Dragon genetics that lacking in melanin production? 

Sophia is physically weak and Fae is likely kept inside to protect her, so it's reasonable that they don't get as much sun as Hawkeye or Igrene.

[eclipse]

13 minutes ago, bbqbert said:

My point wasn't to put him down. However, privilege does work in this way: someone who is experiencing the privilege (in this case, a man who is in the target audience) does not always understand why someone outside the privilege (in this case, a woman outside the target audience) feels so bothered/offended by something that they themselves are not experiencing. Maybe he does understand--but his choice of words were quite belittling and not particularly inclusive or understanding.

If it came off as offensive, I can delete it. That's fine.

See that bolded bit?  That's fine (well, I'm eh on the inclusive part, but it's better than the previous post).

I'm the supposed target audience of K-dramas, if you look solely at my demographic.  However, if someone assumed that I would like/dislike something because I'm the target audience for K-dramas, I'd be equally mad, because I don't like/watch K-dramas.  I'm a person, with likes/dislikes.  My gender is merely one aspect of me.

[Johann]

27 minutes ago, Interdimensional Observer said:

While it is nice to most superficially show an idealized multicultural society by including multiple races, at the same time a hodgepodge approach can be a little lacking. It can be useful to have distinct racial, ethnic, and national communities- as in Elibe as others have pointed out. 

Oh I agree, I'm saying that when you break down a character and look at who they are and what they do, things like skin color, etc might not play into their actions in the plot, therefore giving the creator the freedom to make them anybody. If you could make Luke Skywalker black, or Harry Potter gay, or Frodo Baggins a girl, it wouldn't change the overall plot of those stories nor the other major elements of their characters. Just as well, any male FE lord could simply be changed to black or gay (unless the plot has them consensually conceive children) or female (possibly requiring changing their spouse too) without breaking the story.

edit: @eclipse what are K-dramas?

Edited January 31, 2018 by Johann

[eclipse]

1 minute ago, Johann said:

edit: @eclipse what are K-dramas?

I know them informally as "Korean soap operas".  The target audience is. . .well, women.  Plenty of drama/emotion/romance.  In other words, not my thing!

[Johann]

Just now, eclipse said:

I know them informally as "Korean soap operas".  The target audience is. . .well, women.  Plenty of drama/emotion/romance.  In other words, not my thing!

Ah, yeah, I totally feel ya on that. I get frustrated when someone assumes that cuz I'm a straight male that I want boobs and butts all up in my everythings, including my Nintenders.

[Humanoid]

4 minutes ago, Johann said:

Oh I agree, I'm saying that when you break down a character and look at who they are and what they do, things like skin color, etc might not play into their actions in the plot, therefore giving the creator the freedom to make them anybody. If you could make Luke Skywalker black, or Harry Potter gay, or Frodo Baggins a girl, it wouldn't change the overall plot of those stories nor the other major elements of their characters. Just as well, any male FE lord could simply be changed to black or gay (unless the plot has them consensually conceive children) or female (possibly requiring changing their spouse too) without breaking the story.

edit: @eclipse what are K-dramas?

If you shuffle those examples around though, it can tell a different message. Frodo Baggins being black would certainly take some explaining given the setting. While gender and sexual orientation are more or less independent of geographical factors, race most certainly isn't, especially in these old timey-time societies and good world-building would explain how they got there. So one of these things is not like the others.

It'd have been great if Joshua and the people of Jehanna in general were black though. As it stands, my Joshua is completely mediocre and a big disappointment given how much hype he seems to carry. Just another generic FE swordsman.

[Johann]

Just now, Humanoid said:

If you shuffle those examples around though, it can tell a different message. Frodo Baggins being black would certainly take some explaining given the setting. While gender and sexual orientation are more or less independent of geographical factors, race most certainly isn't, especially in these old timey-time societies and good world-building would explain how they got there. So one of these things is not like the others.

It'd have been great if Joshua and the people of Jehanna in general were black though. As it stands, my Joshua is completely mediocre and a big disappointment given how much hype he seems to carry. Just another generic FE swordsman.

Yeah, I could've emphasized the "if it doesn't interfere with the plot" part, since race in LotR does affect the plot. If all hobbits were black though, then I don't see it interfering with the plot.

I haven't played SS but yeah that seems like a real missed opportunity on many levels.

[Cornguy]

1 hour ago, Humanoid said:

On the subject of racial representation, on the other hand, there have been plenty of missed opportunities and perhaps it's a bit unfortunate that the world of Gaiden with its two homogenous countries was the one where they attempted to retrofit the issue some degree. Regna Ferox in Awakening was a bit of a halfhearted attempt at representing different peoples - on the one hand you had Basilio and Flavia, but it pretty much began and ended with that.

I'm still disappointed they didn't make Lon'qu black. He's from Regna Ferox, two black people was the limit or something? 

I'm not an advocate of forcing diversity into games, but right here, everything was lined up for them to make the coolest black FE character(sorry Devdan), and they just decided to make Samuel Jackson and a waifu, and say "that's enough of that". You wouldn't even have to change his portrait aside from his skin-tone.

Sorry for going a little off-topic.