Least Favorite Supports?

[𝐍𝐲𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐥]

I've been reading up on supports recently (mainly 3DS and GBA supports), and I've never really noticed how bad some of them are, like Frederick and Cordelia, Sumia and Chrom, a lot of Fates supports, etc etc. but I've never really seen what the general FE community thinks about this topic, usually people praise supports due to most of them being decent or pretty great. So I want to know what you guys think.

[Fire Emblem Fan]

Any support with Peri and/or Keaton is awful, in my opinion. Peri and Keaton are bad characters, they add nothing and their supports are just awkward and aggravating to read.

[Morgan--Grandmaster]

I dislike supports center around relationships where the characters antagonize each other (looking at you, Azama and Felix)/lead into toxic relationships, especially if it goes past the C Support. It was also hard to pair most of the Awakening children since a lot of them had the characters bickering at one another. One of the more recent ones I found is the chain between Boucheron and Etie where Etie endlessly probes Boucheron for questions, stalks him, accuses him of using unscrupulous means to appear more muscular despite him naturally being that way, and even steals his sandwich. I mean, who does that? Luckily, most of the characters in question, even Etie, do have better supports.

Edited March 23, 2023 by Morgan--Grandmaster

[Armchair General]

20 minutes ago, Morgan--Grandmaster said:

and even steals his sandwichand even steals his sandwich. I mean, who does that?

Goldmary, in her C support with Etie, fittingly enough. Although that incident was quickly forgotten about in their next conversation.

But seriously, I kind of found that chain to be kind of entertaining and disturbing. Hopefully the ones in the Fell Xenologue are written better.

[Metal Flash]

Azama/Sakura: he annoys her a bunch, she yells at him, he gulit trips her into apologizing, while not being sorry for what he did, and this somehow leads to them marrying

Alfred and Etie/Boucheron: they both pester Bouche for the "secret" to his muscles, ignoring how he just wants to be left alone after giving his answer

Most Severa supports: just her being bratty/bitchy with others for no reason

[Fabulously Olivier]

Corrin/Soleil is notorious.

[Alastor15243]

Inigo/Nah I just find profoundly disturbing, and I'm frankly surprised I'm the first to mention it. For those of you who don't know, it involves Nah getting annoyed that Inigo isn't attracted to her underage body, so she terrorizes him in dragon form and then forces him into marriage under threat of cannibalism.

Edited March 23, 2023 by Alastor15243

[𝐍𝐲𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐥]

That's definitely one of the most disturbing supports I've ever heard, what was IS thinking 😕

[Acacia Sgt]

Localized SaizoxBeruka C Support.

...

...

...

Exactly.

[Fire Emblem Fan]

I'll also generalize anything with Soleil and Azama. Seriously, they both suck. Soleil may be one of the most inappropriately gross characters in FE. And Azama is an ass in the most un-entertaining way.

Severa/Cynthia is another I really dislike, entirely because of Severa. Severa herself is poo but that support in particular really makes me dislike her.

Nina is terrible and her supports almost entirely revolve around stalking people and writing really gross and disturbing fiction about them that I'm sure most would be incredibly uncomfortable with. Hate it.

32 minutes ago, Alastor15243 said:

Inigo/Nah I just find profoundly disturbing, and I'm frankly surprised I'm the first to mention it. For those of you who don't know, it involves Nah getting annoyed that Inigo isn't attracted to her underage body, so she terrorizes him in dragon form and then forces him into marriage under threat of cannibalism.

I fully agree with this one, too. This might be the single worst support in all of Awakening. Nah's support with Inigo is the one singular reason I put her as one of my least favorite characters in the entire series.

I'll also agree with the Alfred/Boucheron support. That one was just...very uncomfortable, because of Alfred.

I'll add Lysithea's support with Ignatz, as well. Lysithea has a pretty good backstory and other supports that are good, but the one with Ignatz? Not a very good showing for Lysithea.

Edited March 23, 2023 by Fire Emblem Fan

[Etrurian emperor]

I think Corrin/Hana stands out because if reflects so poorly on both characters. Hana's just intensely vile in that support, being completely hostile throughout and blaming Corrin because he got kidnapped and forced to have Garon be part of his life. And Corrin meanwhile is just a complete doormat throughout the entire support.

On a similar note there's Siebbert/Ophelia where Ophelia decides to be a bully for the most pathetic reason out there. Though in this case I think its poorly written. Hana might be a scumbag but her ''I don't mince words'' mentality is an established trait so we know she's a rude and prickly brat. Same with Lysithea and Ignatz. Lysithea bullying Ignatz to feel better about herself reflects badly on her, but we know she's got a short fuse. 

But Ophelia is generally depicted as a sweet, bubbly and friendly girl. That she decides to bully Siegbert and weaponize his greatest insecurity against him just because him being a prince intrudes on her fantasies is genuinely not how she's supposed to behave judging from her other supports. So in that support Ophelia is both unpleasant and acting out of character.

[Metal Flash]

18 hours ago, Alastor15243 said:

Inigo/Nah I just find profoundly disturbing, and I'm frankly surprised I'm the first to mention it. For those of you who don't know, it involves Nah getting annoyed that Inigo isn't attracted to her underage body, so she terrorizes him in dragon form and then forces him into marriage under threat of cannibalism.

I forgot about this one, but yes, it is supremely disturbing.

[lenticular]

Caspar and Bernadetta. In which Bernadetta has PTSD and anxiety, Caspar physically abducts her, and the whole thing is treated as a joke.

Clanne and Framme. I probably wouldn't dislike this one as much if it weren't practically guaranteed to be one of the first ones that you see. But having the game open up by essentially saying "actually we don't think there was enough avatar worship in previous games" was quite a choice.

Tharja and Robin. I mean, Tharja in general, but especially with Robin. "I'm going to stalk you, gaslight you, and curse you until you fall in love with me".

[SnowFire]

Two philosophy comments first.  One, I think there's a lower limit on how bad supports intended as comedic can get.  At some point, you just say it's a joke that didn't work and was poorly written, and move on.  The awkward flirting of Nah above I'd say qualifies as this - yeah, it's not good, but sometimes jokes don't land, and ridiculous situations in fiction isn't exactly uncommon (see: Love, Actually).  And I actually like Azama's supports, so his brand of humor worked for me at least, but I get it's not for everyone.  Two, some supports exile themselves from continuity so completely that I just kinda shrug and assume it's living in its own quiet world, limiting the damage a bad support can do.  It's kind of like how if you wrote a story where Spider-Man was actually an evil Turkish gangster (... this is real, check out Three Mighty Men), you don't say "Wow, this opens up surprising new angles on the character," you shrug and assume it's off in its own separate world.  I'd call most of Peri's supports like this - she is so over-the-top that you have to assume it's either some sort of Loony Toons comedy or else some alternate universe where bragging about mass murder is okay.  As far as the "main" plot is concerned, the crazier parts of Peri's supports are in Things That Didn't Happen.

Basically, this means that the absolute worst support is on-topic enough to be plausibly part of the storyline and something we're meant to take seriously, yet some combination of awful / contradictory / nonsensical / against the game's own themes.  (For another comics example, this might be something like when Marvel briefly decided that Captain America was actually a Nazi Hydra agent.  Yeah that didn't over well, but it was just plausible enough to cause people to angry rather than to shrug and assume it was a wacky anecdote with no implications on the larger universe.)  My current nomination for least favorite support, although spoilers for FE Engage past Chapter 21:

Spoiler

Alear / Veyle B SUCKS.  It is one of those plot points that retroactively makes other plot points worse if you think about it.   Unfortunately, this support hinges on a fairly major plot point.  Worse than your average nonsensical plot hole support, it's thematically contradictory.  We're told that Alear and Veyle met each other Just Once in the past timeline.  It doesn't sound like a particularly intense meeting, either; it sounds like the sole thing Alear did was give Veyle the dragonstone and say some sweet nothings.  However, this meeting was just so moving and inspiring that Veyle knew her big sibling would always be there for her.  Aww, isn't that sweet!  And now they're together again and will always help each other.

Except…  except this is awful!  It changed a slightly cliche but powerful (it's a cliche for a reason) plot point about friends reuniting after a long gap into a plot point about how blood ties are absolutely unshakeable even between essentially strangers.  Now.  There may be a game to do that in (Awakening?), but I'd argue that it is not this game, because we precisely DO have a plot point about a terrible, distant father for Veyle!  And for that matter, a plotline about a "found family" connection between Alear and adopted mom Lumera.  It's also nonsensical - we are told little about how Sombron raised his kids, but having them never ever talk to each other seems deeply weird and unattested to.  Now, I'm not faulting Veyle for looking for kindness & support wherever she could find it, which was apparently just past!Alear, but picking blood relatives is clearly not necessarily the play.  (Also, let's be real, I suspect there's some siscon fanservice here for the JP audience in to that.)  Why couldn't they just stick to Alear & Veyle being close friends & supporters in the past, except rather than being separated by going to different colleges or whatever, it's melodramatic near-death amnesia?  It makes Veyle come across as far, far more pathetic than narratively intended to be clinging to "that person who I talked to literally once" rather than "my old best friend & sibling."  (But of course, the writer didn't think it was pathetic, they thought it was inspiring.)  I hate it.

 

Edited March 24, 2023 by SnowFire

[Magenta Fantasies]

 I find Shinon, Dwyer, Yuri, Henry, Maribelle, Severa, Soleil, Nina and Yarne’s supports insufferable. There are a couple exceptions, but they’re VERY few and far between.

As for individual supports, I agree with some other ones mentioned, like Inigo and Nah (I really like both characters, but this is such a bizarre support, and not even the funny type of bizarre.)

Kaze and Saizo’s support is awful. It says something that Saizo is worse to his brother when they’re allies than when they’re enemies. I really dislike Saizo, but I don’t think his supports overall are as unpleasant as the ones of the characters I listed above. They’re mostly dull, but inoffensive.

I’m surprised no one has mentioned Makalov and Astrid. I’m not sure if I find this support slightly funny or thoroughly aggravating.

On 3/24/2023 at 2:39 PM, SnowFire said:

I'd call most of Peri's supports like this - she is so over-the-top that you have to assume it's either some sort of Loony Toons comedy or else some alternate universe where bragging about mass murder is okay.  As far as the "main" plot is concerned, the crazier parts of Peri's supports are in Things That Didn't Happen.

I chalk that up to the way Nohr is as a country. There is so much crime that the citizens are desensitized to it. They just ignore what they can’t keep up with being concerned about or enforcing laws. Peri’s family is also very prominent, so they probably tried to cover up Peri’s repeated killings. In her support with Niles, Niles says that Peri’s family’s mansion had trouble hiring staff, even though they paid well (implying he didn’t know the reason why they had trouble hiring.)

While Peri is one of my favorite Fates characters, her supports are a mixed bag, including some of the best and worst supports in the game. Her supports with Benny, Arthur, Hinata and Keaton had such wasted potential. Benny and Peri’s support could contrast how Benny is scary on the outside, but sweet inside, and Peri is sort of the inverse. Arthur and Peri could have a comical yet a little philosophical discourse about justice (a little like Peri and Leo’s support, but goofier,) and Hinata could talk about how Peri would be perceived by Hoshidans versus how Nohrians perceive her. I’m unsure about how to fix Keaton’s conversation; maybe they could talk about how Peri’s behavior reminds him of a wolfskin he used to know.

 

[SnowFire]

On 4/11/2023 at 5:34 PM, Magenta Fantasies said:

I chalk that up to the way Nohr is as a country. There is so much crime that the citizens are desensitized to it. They just ignore what they can’t keep up with being concerned about or enforcing laws. Peri’s family is also very prominent, so they probably tried to cover up Peri’s repeated killings. In her support with Niles, Niles says that Peri’s family’s mansion had trouble hiring staff, even though they paid well (implying he didn’t know the reason why they had trouble hiring.)

I'm not sure I'd call this "crime" exactly.  Like...  there's a lot of moral gradations on killing people.  Killing foreigners in a war might make you a hero, killing people through negligence makes you an idiot or an asshole, killing someone in passion or in rage is bad, killing someone out of greed is very bad.  But at least people understand rational reasons in these cases - you weren't yourself from an altered psychological state, or you wanted some stuff.  People understand that, even if they disapprove of the killing part; people do get angry / covetous and that part is fine.

Peri's murders are basically just about the least sympathetic killings possible, even if the script seems to treat them as a joke.  One, it's not for any good reason.  It's closer to killing for sport, or due to pique.  It's not like she's enraged at being betrayed somehow; she threatens to kill Felicia over trivialities.  The classic example here is "person catches spouse in affair with another" and this stuff doesn't come CLOSE to that level of anger in older societies that considered this a Big Deal.  Two, from a strictly rational perspective, rich families would consider this insane.  She's not killing rivals, she's killing her OWN servants.  That makes your family weaker, not stronger!  Three, society generally places a special burden on "protectors" to act honorably, and considers it extremely shocking / awful when this is betrayed.  Think parents killing their own children or hosts killing guests.  In older societies, servants & slaves became part of the household to some degree.  The butler at the Victorian mansion actually had the status of the Bigwizzle family and could throw that status around in town.  Peri is betraying that duty to her servants, which is yikes EVEN IF she had had a better reason for this.  Basically, overall, it's a case of the writer not realizing that what they wrote wasn't really joke-suitable - it'd be like if you wrote a story about some fun-loving rapscallion kids who do things like make prank calls, go truant from school, and beat old people in the park to within an inch of their lives.  Whoa, that last part is a little too intense for what the writer was going for.  Obviously, if you like Peri, that's totally fine (in the same way that our hypothetical roguish kids might be hilarious & cool too), just we have to kind of assume that the super-evil parts are blurred out some.

Incidentally, for a somewhat famous case of this in the US, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delphine_LaLaurie .  She was infamous by the standards of the Antebellum South for torturing and murdering slaves for no good reason...  definitely a scary villain, not quirky comic relief.

(I was reminded of this because of a recent blog post at which mentions that yes, even in ancient pagan Greece, where people were absolute ethical monsters by modern standards, killing your own slave was still a crime.  Maybe a difficult to prosecute one, but not something okay.  See https://acoup.blog/2023/04/14/collections-how-to-polis-part-iii-people-and-gods-beyond-the-politai/ )

[twilightrowan]

On 3/22/2023 at 10:28 PM, Fire Emblem Fan said:

Any support with Peri and/or Keaton is awful, in my opinion. Peri and Keaton are bad characters, they add nothing and their supports are just awkward and aggravating to read.

Keaton is not a bad character. You just don't like him. two very different things. I thought his supports are pretty funny and he's one of my favorite Nohrians.

[Fire Emblem Fan]

25 minutes ago, twilightrowan said:

Keaton is not a bad character. You just don't like him. two very different things. I thought his supports are pretty funny and he's one of my favorite Nohrians.

Keaton is a bad character. You just like him. Two very different things. I thought his supports were outlandish and aggravating and he's one of my least favorite Fire Emblem characters.

[Etrurian emperor]

On 4/11/2023 at 11:34 PM, Magenta Fantasies said:

I chalk that up to the way Nohr is as a country.

I think that be a perfect way to look at it if Peri was a member of team Garon. But she's not. Nohr might work that way as a country but Xander and certainly Corrin very clearly don't. Those two absolutely aren't the sort of people who'd endorse their vassal randomly murdering people for fun and giggles, but because the plot decides that Peri killing people at the drop of a hat is funny they strangely decide to condone it.

With Peri as part of the team Fates has the unworkable situation of Corrin and co being appalled at team Garon slaughtering people for no reason, while being fine with Peri slaughtering people for no reason. And sure, they at times express discomfort about Peri's ways but always in a tone that falls under ''Oh you silly Peri!'' rather than the outrage they reserve for team Garon.

[Magenta Fantasies]

@SnowFire

That’s some interesting history, but 99.99% of players wouldn’t have that context and still 99.99% of players would agree that killing one’s own servants (or innocent people in general) is a terrible deed. While Peri was clearly in the wrong, she didn’t kill her servants for the sake of villainy. She was a little girl who wasn’t able to properly express and control her emotions, so when she was angry or experiencing other negative emotions she would lash out. To me, that isn’t villainous, it’s tragic. I feel pity for her because she never had any real guidance, discipline or support from when her mother was brutally murdered until she met Xander.

On the subject of liking characters who do immoral deeds, for comparison, Oliver and Michalis are two of my favorite characters in their respective set of games. I don’t justify their actions either, yet I really enjoy them as characters. There’s something fun about characters who aren’t “good guy” material joining the good guys. At least Peri TRIES to be good, but she just isn’t good at it, and that’s part of what I find endearing about her.

What also separates Peri from villains like Oliver and Michalis is that she never does anything particularly awful in the present day, even as an enemy in Birthright. She’s very vocal in her enjoyment of gore and killing, and she threatens a few characters, but no actual harm comes of it. Peri’s behavior isn’t malicious. She doesn’t understand she is doing anything wrong and becomes confused, then frustrated when others try to explain her wrongdoings to her. On the other hand, Oliver and Michalis are reasonably well-adjusted people. They’re both self-aware in a way that Peri is not. Oliver has a bizarre sense of morality, but at least understands that others see his actions as wrong.

Peri isn’t evil. She’s just a confused, broken, mentally ill, traumatized girl who never had any real guidance or discipline until she met Xander, who probably was the first good influence on Peri since her mother. It’s implied in Peri’s supports (I really enjoy that most of her backstory is filtered through her foggy lens) that her father was also traumatized by grief after her mother died, and took a step back in her upbringing. He might have also been scared of her violent tendencies.

This combination of innocent and twisted, her obliviousness, which can be both comic and endearing, and the fact that she’s genuinely sweet in several of her supports are why Peri is one of my favorite Fates characters.

On 4/16/2023 at 4:48 PM, Etrurian emperor said:

I think that be a perfect way to look at it if Peri was a member of team Garon. But she's not. Nohr might work that way as a country but Xander and certainly Corrin very clearly don't. Those two absolutely aren't the sort of people who'd endorse their vassal randomly murdering people for fun and giggles, but because the plot decides that Peri killing people at the drop of a hat is funny they strangely decide to condone it.

With Peri as part of the team Fates has the unworkable situation of Corrin and co being appalled at team Garon slaughtering people for no reason, while being fine with Peri slaughtering people for no reason. And sure, they at times express discomfort about Peri's ways but always in a tone that falls under ''Oh you silly Peri!'' rather than the outrage they reserve for team Garon.

In all fairness, a long time has passed since Peri killed her servants—she was a little girl at the time—and while she threatens to kill in the present, she doesn’t actually end up doing it aside from in combat. Her past also doesn’t seem to be common knowledge for most characters. With a few strange exceptions like Arthur (of all people, though he’s also clueless/oblivious at times,) the other characters are clearly disturbed by her behavior, and several criticize her for it. It’s mentioned in some of Peri’s supports that the others avoid her and give her odd looks.

[Jotari]

All supports suck and base conversations reign supreme.

[Alastor15243]

On 4/17/2023 at 11:10 PM, Magenta Fantasies said:

In all fairness, a long time has passed since Peri killed her servants—she was a little girl at the time—and while she threatens to kill in the present, she doesn’t actually end up doing it aside from in combat.

You say that like it's for a lack of trying. If Felicia weren't canonically a combat savant, Peri would have literally skewered her in their support chain.

[genesis]

I find Noire with her father frustrating. Not bad per se but he is an enabler and its all glossed over.