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FE Gaiden Leon


coldhand25
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Since Leon is my favourite character in Echoes I looked up his wiki page, and found very few info about his Gaiden self. So, I know in Echoes he is gay,  but I wasn't able to find anything about him being it or not in Gaiden. Somewhere I read that he was close to Valbar in Gaiden as well, but they were more like brothers there (not blood related of course). Do anyone know anything about it? I'm just simply curious.

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I was under the impression that characters were so undeveloped in Gaiden that most just had no personality.

Maybe Leon was nothing other than just that archer with Valbar.

Look at his ridiculously generic ending in Gaiden:
"As one of the knights in the kingdom, he works towards the restoration of Valentia"

Praise Echoes for giving these characters a much needed shakeover. :)

(I though Python was the coolest archer :o)




 

Edited by Vince777
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@Vince777 Oh, so that's why there is so little information about him. In that case Echoes really did a great job. (while Python is definitely cool, Leon just had that kinda narcissistc feeling - at least I felt like it. That, and long hair, which I find great on both male and female characters)

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Leon's feelings for Valbar was something that was barely alluded to in Gaiden and it was done vaguely through his recruitment quote, to my knowledge any kind of romantic implications were added by Echoes and didn't exist in the original.

The most interesting part of Gaiden Leon is his death quote;

Quote

"I have long desired to fall in battle..."

It's incredible nihilistic and rather unlike Leon's personality in the remake. The closest we get to that in Echoes is if Leon is recruited but Valbar is killed in the map he appears on or if Valbar dies during a battle.

Quote

“*sob* Valbar... How could you go and leave me all alone like this? How do I go on without you? This is on your heads! All of you! And I'm coming with you to make sure he didn't die in vain.”

"Don't leave me, old friend! What will I fight for?!"

Otherwise, Leon doesn't show anything similar to his Gaiden death quote; his new death quote doesn't even allude to a nihilistic side.

Quote

“This is so embarrassing... What a...clumsy way to go... I always pictured something more... impressive.”

 

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I frankly wish they just went all the way with gay characters. What about actual romance?

I still feel like they're a little held back and sometimes cling to clichés a little too much.

(I do still love Leon)

 

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32 minutes ago, Vince777 said:

I frankly wish they just went all the way with gay characters. What about actual romance?

I still feel like they're a little held back and sometimes cling to clichés a little too much.

(I do still love Leon)

 

We didn't get too much in the way of options when it comes to romances either. Well, we got no choices I guess. You don't need to give him the ability to turn any man in Valentia gay, but you could've at least picked one/one more who reciprocated his feelings/had feelings for him. Doesn't have to turn another character gay necessarily either, people can be bi.

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Leo's lines in Gaiden consist of that aforementioned death quote and:

* (Recruiting Leo)
Leo:
If my bro Valbo’s going, then I’m going too.
I’ve got a bit of confidence in my skill with a bow, y’see.

~ Archer Leo joins the party ~

This being a fan translation, I am led to believe the line is more casually written in English than the Japanese is or an official English translation would be.

But yes, that is it. Just his recruitment quip, a death quote, and a character ending. Not unusual for NES Gaiden, nor NES FE1, nor pretty much any FE until FE6 adds Supports for the first time. Although the situation did get gradually better in the SNES era, you still had characters like Dalsin and Ralph who had introduction and recruitment text and that is it.

Even Asbel, Leif's Merric/Soren, a minor character you'd think would get some good dialogue being not totally irrelevant, doesn't really have any outside of his recruitment chapter and character ending. And Hardin, despite being the man who is set up as being Marth's friend who tragically he must fight in the War of the Heroes, never got much in FE3 Book 1, and all Shadow Dragon did was add one conversation between Blue and Turban- something for their relationship, but not really enough.

 

As for gay characters in FE, well Heather and Kyza were also thrown into a game without any fellow same-sex LGBTQ around. Well, Danved/Devdan is in the Japanese... gay? Not sure what he is stereotypically exactly, other than being described as speaking like a coy woman.

They could also write characters with loved ones who weren't onscreen, gay or straight. Not everyone in an army is going to date a fellow warrior. They've already done a bunch with Dalsin, Canas, Dorcas, Caesar seems to have a mystery beloved, Zihark once loved a Laguz girl and we get a good bit on her. The key with this method is to not make the character too much just expose of their love for their beloved and what the beloved was like, and I think Zihark and Dorcas did this well enough, perhaps Canas too.

I do have this hypothetical gay character with a background lover- it's a messy wall of text though:

Spoiler

Fleshing out your hypothetical gay male FE character from when you said you’d like one whose sexuality was in the background. The details from before were the unseen husband is a fisherman from a small rural fishing village who comes from a large family and has at least one sister. You left out other details, but you made this character a mercenary, and implied they had no real family of their own or came from a small one, an only child, and that they like their husband’s large family. Change the character from a mercenary to a standard conscript, a villager who actively and willingly joined their nation’s military for their own benefit. Whether to make them come from the same village as their husband, or have them come from some place else, I did not decide. To make them childhood friends would be romantic and you find this plentifully in straight couples in JRPGs and other popular entertainment media. But the idea that the character was passing through or temporarily staying in the fishing hamlet as per their military duties and then met their husband there, is also an interesting prospect. The character, taking an interest in fishing and finding the village not that bad, visits the place on what little time off they get, not being able to get much better as a lowly grunt. He meets his future husband, befriends them among others, and it later turns into love. It started with the character wanting to fish and, with a bit of skepticism given he was a soldier, the villagers let him catch a few with rod and lure. The villagers themselves rely on net fishing and also know how to spear fish if need be. Interested in joining in on this, the character is denied the opportunity, not being from the village. Nonetheless with his insistence and growing familiarity in the village, he, if not allowed to fish himself, does get the chance to help out on the boat and learn some steps of the process like preserving the catch and maintaining the boats. During this, he became close with the fishers around his age, and through this and his military experiences, came to realize his deep appreciation for male-male bonding. At a certain point, he came to recognize from all his interactions this ran deeper, into his sexuality. Once he came to terms with this, he saw his friends differently, and began exploring each of them as a mate. One young man caught his attention enough that he secretly told him of his attraction. The man was awed, but said he felt nothing of the sort. Denied, the character was heartbroken, but not for too long. In his broken state, another young man noticed he was being depressed and asked what was wrong, but the character did not bother to answer. Persistent, the young man to whom he had professed his sexuality before told this young man, who was moved by the news. Telling the character what he knew, he then admitted to being of the same sexuality. The character was surprised not to have noticed it before, and questioned if it was true. But the young man insisted it was and the two began to spend more time together to see if they were being true about their feelings. The answer came to be yes, and the character liked being with his future husband. The two admitted their love for each other, and later informed the husband’s family of the matter. They agreed to their romance, the family was already quite big, but they had not officiated a marriage yet, not until he could be finished with his current duty in the military. I think this was part of your old idea, that the husband’s sister is planned to be used as a surrogate to bear the couple’s child.

The key would be to take these details, reduce them to one sentence blurbs apiece, and still leave the character room to be themselves beyond the romance in their supports. This is likely too much for that, so some less important stuff would have to be left more vague for player to imagine and fill in by themselves.

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I have not played Gaiden myself though I have watched a Let's Play on it, and from my understanding it didn't seem that Leon was gay in the original. The only thing about him that could possibly be interpeted that way was his statement of "You'll have to speak to my bro Valbar." but you're digging at straws at that point if that's the basis. His character was more one who romanticized battle and war. For instance his death quote is, "I have long desired to fall in war." So I would say this was something that Echoes added, which was not in Gaiden.

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My apologies in advance for sounding either insensitive or hateful because chances are I'll sound like one of those things plus a couple others. In case you were wondering, no, I don't care if I sound that way or if I offend any gay people.

To put it simply, they made Leon gay so they could be PC because it's somehow hip to have gay characters in your games now. Admittedly, Heather happened before the LGBT craze, and thus I personally don't view her with the same distrust as I view Niles, Soleil, Rhajat, and Leon, which you may call hypocrisy, and I won't fight you on that point. Either way, they made the first real try at being 'LGBT-accepting' with Fates(if Awakening had LGBT characters outside the weird little implied stuff with Kjelle and Severa that was thankfully either subtle or DLC and thus can be swept under the rug, I missed them), and received enough positive remarks to completely forget that they pretty much disgustingly stereotyped all three characters involved and kept going.

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4 minutes ago, SoulWeaver said:

My apologies in advance for sounding either insensitive or hateful because chances are I'll sound like one of those things plus a couple others. In case you were wondering, no, I don't care if I sound that way or if I offend any gay people.

To put it simply, they made Leon gay so they could be PC because it's somehow hip to have gay characters in your games now. Admittedly, Heather happened before the LGBT craze, and thus I personally don't view her with the same distrust as I view Niles, Soleil, Rhajat, and Leon, which you may call hypocrisy, and I won't fight you on that point. Either way, they made the first real try at being 'LGBT-accepting' with Fates(if Awakening had LGBT characters outside the weird little implied stuff with Kjelle and Severa that was thankfully either subtle or DLC and thus can be swept under the rug, I missed them), and received enough positive remarks to completely forget that they pretty much disgustingly stereotyped all three characters involved and kept going.

I would have to disagree with you on them making Leon gay for PC reasons. Japan, as far as I'm aware, they don't care as much about being PC as people do in the west (This may be me just generalising but still). Japan just doesn't seem to care that much about it (I mean look at Atlus with Persona, a lot of people requested they include a gay love interest for the MC but they didn't because they really don't care too much about it).

As for the Fates characters, I would disagree with Niles and Rhajat being stereotypes. Being bi (Which they essentially are) isn't a big part of their characters and they interact the exact same way with their same sex Corrin like they do opposite sex Corrin. Them being the characters they are is just because of how they were written. They were just there to provide options (Not the best, realistically it should have been Azura/Silas/Kaze/the servant if they wanted to include a same sex option but alas). As for Soleil, she is just a bundle of controversy which shouldn't of been controversy since the whole thing was based on a taken-out-of-context translated support by someone on Tumblr. TLDR; Original Soleil before localization was kinda based on the Class S Genre, but upon localisation, it kinda got fucked. I'm not gonna defend her character in either version cause I actually really dislike her, especially when Ophelia is involved but yeah.

As a sidenote, I agree that gay characters shouldn't be added for the sake of it and I actively dislike when a gay character is added and that is all their character is. This coming from a gay person BTW.

As for the topic at hand, Leon had basically no character in the original except is rather unique death quote. I also don't mind him being gay in SoV, despite being a bit of a stereotype, it's rather tasteful but also he is just a fun character in general. I also like how he doesn't get with Valbar since I think it would be a push considering Valbar's character and how he lost his family an all.

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12 hours ago, coldhand25 said:

Since Leon is my favourite character in Echoes I looked up his wiki page, and found very few info about his Gaiden self. So, I know in Echoes he is gay,  but I wasn't able to find anything about him being it or not in Gaiden. Somewhere I read that he was close to Valbar in Gaiden as well, but they were more like brothers there (not blood related of course). Do anyone know anything about it? I'm just simply curious.

Due to how little development and actual lines of text many characters got back in those times, it was more hinted at than anything else. It's not like it matters too much in the end either, since he is still the same person but it's just something to think about.

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2 hours ago, SoulWeaver said:

My apologies in advance for sounding either insensitive or hateful because chances are I'll sound like one of those things plus a couple others. In case you were wondering, no, I don't care if I sound that way or if I offend any gay people.

To put it simply, they made Leon gay so they could be PC because it's somehow hip to have gay characters in your games now. Admittedly, Heather happened before the LGBT craze, and thus I personally don't view her with the same distrust as I view Niles, Soleil, Rhajat, and Leon, which you may call hypocrisy, and I won't fight you on that point. Either way, they made the first real try at being 'LGBT-accepting' with Fates(if Awakening had LGBT characters outside the weird little implied stuff with Kjelle and Severa that was thankfully either subtle or DLC and thus can be swept under the rug, I missed them), and received enough positive remarks to completely forget that they pretty much disgustingly stereotyped all three characters involved and kept going.

You seem like a swell individual. 

Including gay people isn't "PC". That's not even remotely what that term means. What Leon being gay is, however, is including a not huge, but still sizeable fraction of the entire earth's population. If there were an army of 30ish soldiers like this, statically, at least one would probably be gay. 

And if I'm remembering correctly, it'd be true pretty much everywhere on the planet. Now, what might be more PC is Leon being openly gay, since that's a much smaller percentage of people around the world, due to social norms and stuff. And since Japan itself considers itself part of the first world, even if they aren't really the... "best" with handling gay characters, they still realize plenty of gay people buy their products. And especially after Awakening, IS will likely keep including them, and they'll likely be open about it from now on(Fates being them dipping their toes in the water), since an entire army shunning or mocking a character for their sexuality isn't a good way to make the cast likeable. 

Edited by Slumber
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2 hours ago, SoulWeaver said:

My apologies in advance for sounding either insensitive or hateful because chances are I'll sound like one of those things plus a couple others. In case you were wondering, no, I don't care if I sound that way or if I offend any gay people.

To put it simply, they made Leon gay so they could be PC because it's somehow hip to have gay characters in your games now. Admittedly, Heather happened before the LGBT craze, and thus I personally don't view her with the same distrust as I view Niles, Soleil, Rhajat, and Leon, which you may call hypocrisy, and I won't fight you on that point. Either way, they made the first real try at being 'LGBT-accepting' with Fates(if Awakening had LGBT characters outside the weird little implied stuff with Kjelle and Severa that was thankfully either subtle or DLC and thus can be swept under the rug, I missed them), and received enough positive remarks to completely forget that they pretty much disgustingly stereotyped all three characters involved and kept going.

Japanese developers do not care about being PC, and unfortunately someone already got around to saying why including gay characters isn't PC before me, but Heather, Rhajat and Niles - and Soleil if you would even count her - are not exactly favourable portrayals in most peoples eyes to begin with.

Heather in particular was just a stereotype and nothing else - and Leon is a considerable improvement over all of them. Ironically, a bad or stereotypical portrayal of a LGBT character is far more likely to be "politically incorrect" if anything.

Edited by Tryhard
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13 hours ago, coldhand25 said:

Since Leon is my favourite character in Echoes I looked up his wiki page, and found very few info about his Gaiden self. So, I know in Echoes he is gay,  but I wasn't able to find anything about him being it or not in Gaiden. Somewhere I read that he was close to Valbar in Gaiden as well, but they were more like brothers there (not blood related of course). Do anyone know anything about it? I'm just simply curious.

He doesn't really have a personality in Gaiden, mainly due to having very few lines. His death quote is interesting. As one person has already said, it kind of shows a nihilistic side to him. Ooor he just thinks he will be honoured or remembered more if he died in battle. Maybe he wishes to be something similar to a martyr? I dunno.

The misery of being an unit from a NES or SNES FE is that most units from these two eras barely have any dialogue or character to make them unique or likeable. And the units from Marth's game got it even more hard by again not having a lot of characterization in the remakes. FE4 probably had the least problem due to occassional convos and less amount of units, although many of the convos are not accessible depending on what units are paired together.

 

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This section of an interview might or might not be relevant.

Quote

Developing the other characters

Kusakihara: We tried to reasonably arrange the characters, trying to break it up as not to put all types of character on one side or the other. For instance, Forsyth is very diligent [in personality] simply due to his role as an adjutant. Since the original amount of text in Gaiden was rather minimal, characters had to be expressed through the official art and face graphics. At the same time, their dialogue had to be exaggerated.

Q: Like Leon?

Nakanishi: Leon only had about two words of dialogue in the entire original game.

Kusakihara: As such, we had to expand upon what little amount of material we had to work with. From his somewhat androgynous face graphic, we could imagine him saying “Valbar old friend!”* And so went from there.

*TN: “aniki” in Japanese, a term used for older brothers that is now more commonly used by gangs like the yakuza.

Q: That’s quite the method of expanding upon someone!

Kusakihara: Be that as it may, it would be troublesome having just one main face portrait to work with through the entire game. (Laughs)

-Kantopia translation of a Nintendo Dream interview

The impression I get his that his personality -- which in this case is also his sexuality, for better or for worse -- may likely have been inspired by his rather beautiful portrait for a male Famicom character, rather than any dialogue in the original game. And things snowballed from there.

No intended agenda. No intended offense. No intended pandering. Just a flat-out "he looks gay lol, let's work with that".

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5 hours ago, Azz said:

As for the Fates characters, I would disagree with Niles and Rhajat being stereotypes. Being bi (Which they essentially are) isn't a big part of their characters and they interact the exact same way with their same sex Corrin like they do opposite sex Corrin. Them being the characters they are is just because of how they were written. They were just there to provide options (Not the best, realistically it should have been Azura/Silas/Kaze/the servant if they wanted to include a same sex option but alas).

Oh, I didn't mean stereotypes like that, I mean that Niles is a disturbing creep from the streets who drops innuendos every second or third sentence while Rhajat is an open stalker. I had a friend who thought all gay men were like Niles and all lesbians were like Rhajat, and it took me a while to explain that first off, those aren't technically the proper terms for them, and second off obviously they're exceptions, not rules. That being said, it's quite possible said friend was hardly alone in the world in taking Niles and Rhajat as their examples and generalizing it to all LGBT persons.
Regarding Soleil, if anything I find her triply bothersome compared to the other two, but for different reasons - she's an old gimmick that was just used(constant flirting with girls, used with Inigo), what feels like a very-poorly-done representation of a specific type of person(in this instance lesbians), a gimmick that another Unit also uses in the same game(Lazlow), and said other Unit is the same Unit whose gimmick she originally is copying off of(Lazlow of course being Inigo). The only time she seriously gets together with a Male Unit for their S-Support in the English version that I can remember is Forrest, and I personally do not find that a compelling case for her not being lesbian. It's possible I'm wrong as it's been a bit since I reviewed her Supports, but I doubt it.

4 hours ago, Slumber said:

You seem like a swell individual.

I mean that if a gay person wants to be offended by something I said, that's their own problem. If they'd like to discuss things politely and use actual facts to convince me I misspoke, then I am happy to retract misinformation I may share. If they choose to get offended, my opinion is tough luck, being offended is both a choice and part of life. I will admit that I have a small bitter streak where the LGBT community is involved due to personal reasons, but for the most part I try to keep that out of my conversations on the internet as I feel I have no business letting my personal matters get in the way of actual discussion with intelligent people like those here on these forums.

3 hours ago, Tryhard said:

Heather in particular was just a stereotype and nothing else - and Leon is a considerable improvement over all of them. Ironically, a bad or stereotypical portrayal of a LGBT character is far more likely to be "politically incorrect" if anything.

I did mention I don't find Heather as problematic, in particular since the Tellius Games were released before all the LGBT activity began happening, meaning I'm less suspicious of potential politicization with her than with the others. I also only found Leon an improvement at all because he wasn't as outright weird as Niles, Rhajat, or Soleil, and even then he still rubbed me wrong, though that may be due in part to the aforementioned small bitter streak I bear towards the LGBT community.

This all being said, I do admit I made the mistake of stating my subjective opinion as though it were objective fact, and for that I do apologize.

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Pretty most gay characters in FE were made just as a way to draw attention of LGBT to buy their game.

The JP developers really did not care about them that much.

It's just a fan service so they can get more money.

Don't forget that some were not gay in JP scripts, they just become gay after the localization.

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3 minutes ago, hanhnn said:

Pretty most gay characters in FE were made just as a way to draw attention of LGBT to buy their game.

The JP developers really did not care about them that much.

It's just a fan service so they can get more money.

Don't forget that some were not gay in JP scripts, they just become gay after the localization.

If anything it's the other way around. Take for example Kyza and Heather from RD. Kyza is trans, but that was completely removed from the localised version of RD and with Heather, while there were still some hints, they were very vague in comparison to the original Japanese version.

The only character that can be remotely said to have been 'made gay' after localisation is Soleil and even that's a stretch.

I also don't see how this could make them money, since all the characters are so minor and also so few in number it would be stupid for anyone just to by the game because of the existence of a minor character, that doesn't even need to be recruited, that is gay. If anything the original Japanese scripts of FE games have had more LGBT characters, like teh aforementioned Kyza and Heather, so I really don't understand where you are getting this from. 

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On 4/4/2018 at 8:24 AM, Chconroy said:

Leon's feelings for Valbar was something that was barely alluded to in Gaiden and it was done vaguely through his recruitment quote, to my knowledge any kind of romantic implications were added by Echoes and didn't exist in the original.

The most interesting part of Gaiden Leon is his death quote;

It's incredible nihilistic and rather unlike Leon's personality in the remake. The closest we get to that in Echoes is if Leon is recruited but Valbar is killed in the map he appears on or if Valbar dies during a battle.

Otherwise, Leon doesn't show anything similar to his Gaiden death quote; his new death quote doesn't even allude to a nihilistic side.

 

Best thing about his post Validar recruitment quote is that if you turn him down, he uses the exact same dialogue as when you refuse him normally, making for an extremely swift change in mood.

That death quote is pretty cool. Kind of wish they made Kamui the gay one and made Leon some kind of nihilist (although it wouldn't be impossible to have both on Leon, then  again Kamui's Echoes persona didn't make much of an impression on me.

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On 4/3/2018 at 11:55 PM, coldhand25 said:

Since Leon is my favourite character in Echoes I looked up his wiki page, and found very few info about his Gaiden self. So, I know in Echoes he is gay,  but I wasn't able to find anything about him being it or not in Gaiden. Somewhere I read that he was close to Valbar in Gaiden as well, but they were more like brothers there (not blood related of course). Do anyone know anything about it? I'm just simply curious.

All we know about FE2 Leon is he views Valbar as his sworn brother.

His death quote is different saying "I have desired to die in battle" or something similar.

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