The sadness of CSWNPPSS (C-Support With New Person Personality Snapback Syndrome)

[Corrobin]

Coined by Let's Player BigKlingy ( https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxvXtj-uENUUIgHdzg4R7hw ), this term is for when a unit with a major flaw or gimmick who works on it in a support with another unit, usually ending by fixing in their A, starts a new C-Support with another person and immediately reverts back to having their flaw.

BigKlingy refers to it in an incident in his latest upload, referring to the Hilda-Seteth C support (which involves Seteth clearly seeing through Hilda's lies of minor injuries and sicknesses to get out of doing chores and using his church position to guilt-trip her into confessing by invoking the "The Goddess sees everything you do" card), after some previous supports (Notably with Byleth and Cyril) having made her less bad about pushing work onto others.

Don't you hate it when this kind of thing happens? And how would you fix this in future FE games?

[X-Naut]

Have supports more heavily tied to story progression. Time lock supports to prevent them from being obtained too early, and let support points build automatically as the chapters progress (with active building merely accelerating them). Support ranks increase automatically too; if you missed the conversations then go to the support library. That'll solve a lot of the issues, but volatile recruitment makes things problematic in 3H without heavily restricting support access until after the time skip.

[Interdimensional Observer]

This would be difficult to fix.

The easy way would be to set a programming "flag" when a character has reached an A Support with someone else. Since whilst a gimmick might not be "remedied" at the B, it should be by the end of the A. When the flag is set, the game will instead reach for an alternate support for the same rank between the same two characters.

So lets pretend Yarne hit his first A support with Lucina and he got over his extinction fears there (I have zero idea if the support does involve them). Then, YarnexNah will select a different version of its C support than the one which would have played had he not A supported Lucina already, or anyone else.

The major problem, is how much of the supports would have to be changed? If it's basically the entire thing, then that is a lot more writing the character writers have to include. It'd be bearable only if the support required minor tweaks and adjustments in tone.

Another issue is not all supports tread in the same waters. Not all supports revolve around a character getting over their gimmick. Therefore, it'd make little sense for the flag to be raised if a support didn't involve the gimmick. And as such, the programmers would if they were being extra attentive have the flag raised only on certain supports hitting A. But this means more work, and how worth it is it really?

[Zapp Branniglenn]

This issue persists beyond two support conversations even. For instance, Leonie. Her B support is locked until after a certain person she cares about dies in the story. And in that B support with Byleth she's 100% over it, at least until a point where she can talk about that person without getting choked up. BUT if you go exploring in the monastery in that following chapter she can't keep herself together. The problem here is that the player has the ability to look at supports before they can choose the Explore option. So even with the aid of time-locked supports, these gaffes can slip by the writers. I even think the timing of that support contributes heavily to people upset at her Byleth support because it makes her seem obnoxious toward the avatar who is clearly still grieving at that point of the game.

One idea I've thought of to avoid these issues is removing Support conversations entirely in favor of base conversations that need not be unlocked by the player. That way, all conversations between units canonically happen and character growth is always acknowledged. This option wasn't really on the table for the Awakening/Fates era since all support chains had to end in romance, but they have foregone this design for the most recent game.

[Ertrick36]

I always just imagined the supports happening at certain points in the story, and not just whenever I unlock them.

Sure, that kills the immersion a bit, but I'd prefer not to think too much about this kind of stuff.

[Eltosian Kadath]

The older games basically avoided this by being extremely restrictive with the supports, both the number available, and the number you can get each playthrough. Having less supports makes it easier to have characters discuss differing topics with different characters, and even when they did cover similar topics, the old 5 support system was restrictive enough to make it difficult to get into a situation with this tonal whiplash. They will either need to return to these restrictions, or get more creative with the number of topics and issues characters face in supports, instead of having a handful of issues/traits that dominate certain character's supports.

[eclipse]

Hey, it's that person you got to know, person A!  They understand your weaknesses and accept you anyway!  Hey, here's person B, someone you know in passing!  Why aren't you as comfortable around this new person as you are around person A?

If you want an extreme example, take Bernadetta.  She takes her time to open up to people.  Throw an entirely new person at her, and she's liable to retreat back in her shell.  It's a little jarring from the player's PoV, but understandable from hers.

[Fire Flower]

It's certainly weird, and there are only very few examples of where completing a support will slightly affect other supports in the game, but I feel like accounting for every single difference will be so much work that it isn't worth it. I'm happy with what we have right now.

[Marcus Cooper]

I always imagine that, especially in an enclosed setting like the Academy, that supports of the same tier occur at roughly the same time (with some differences) since these people are all each other's classmates. Just because they have a different homeroom teacher directly over them doesn't mean they never attend classes together. Do you expect me to believe that the big school that all the nobles and rich merchants send their kids to only has 3-4 actual teachers with the knights and such serving as potential mentors? They probably attend GenEd sort of classes offscreen where the houses blend. A character with CSSS probably has all their C-Supports at roughly the same interval (a month or so, for argument), then as they work on it, they get B-Supports (with some C+ thrown in, since some people care more than others.), and once they've taken care of it, they're ready for A-Supports. They may relapse a bit because of Support Grinding and plot, but it makes sense to me. Thoughts?

[AnonymousSpeed]

inb4 locked

Serious Answer Edited In: Look guys, you're just going to have to accept practical limitations of the medium. I would rather we didn't futz about locking supports past a point in the story trying to "fix" an issue which really only matters to pedants like us.

Edited February 7, 2023 by AnonymousSpeed