Parrhesia

If you're here to pick a fight, the time has moved on.

Juicy. Given this was literally my degree, it would be almost irresponsible of me not to weigh in. Sure, objective good exists. It may not always be clear and obvious, or easy to pin down, but you can do something well or badly. And there's plenty of solid criteria you can nail down. Part of this relates to genre. You can write as technically adept a piece of fiction as you like, but if it's sold as a romance and the love interests don't get together, you have failed. You set out an expectation to your reader, and if you don't fulfil it, you sold it to them on a lie. Every genre carries expectations with it. If it's crime, there's gotta be a crime, and the crime's gotta be solved, and the reader's got to be able to follow the logic as the protagonist unpacks it. If the reader never gets what happened or how the villain did it, regardless of any other factors, it's a bad crime. Et cetera. Part of it, especially characterwise, relates to consistency. Do their actions reflect their personalities and abilities? Or are their actions out of place with who they are established to be? Are we told one thing ("Jenny is such a great person!") and shown another ('Jenny gunned down thirty civilians')? Also, protagonists have to be charismatic enough to follow, and generally it helps if they're not utter shitbags. They can still be bad people, but there's a reason Black Company follows the essentially decent physic Croaker rather than any of the war criminals he rubs shoulders with. The death knell of any piece of fiction is the reader deciding, "I don't care what happens to these people." And then there's technique. Is it crisp? Concise? Does it flow well? Does the tempo shift according to the mood? Anyone can tell that a simple block of text in a single sentence without a break when someone just keeps talking and talking and talking more and more repetitively about things that nobody cares about is going to get readers to disengage because when will the sentence get to the point or offer room to breathe or ... You take my point. Some things are good to read. Some things are not. Enjoyment is more difficult to pin down. Apparently there are people who find their lives improved by having read Oryx and Crake, which was the most miserable waste of a couple of afternoons I've had the misfortune to sit through. The bitch of a set text, and all. But I think this ties into genre again; you aren't picking up a fantasy to have Deep Thoughts, first and foremost. Any Deep Thoughts will need a spoonful of honey to go down. But when I read, say, The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Asne Seierstad... which is a really good book, by the way, but it was never going to be a fun time! If it flows well, it makes internal sense, it's interesting, and it fits the key genre expectations of the audience; it's good. If nothing makes you want to turn to the next page, and you can't see a reason why anyone else would want to turn to the next page, it's probably bad.

Sure, but the availability's still weird considering neither Ploys nor especially Smokes are really a marquee skill. Attack Smoke being available off a 3-4* nobody while the generally inferior Res Smoke is available off... uhm... a legendary, and that's it? Is strange. It's not so much that there's a high demand for either skill, which would make it more realistic for it to only be on marquee units, but that they're the only ones of the skill family that aren't widely available.

The next map is going to be rounding up more ogres; apparently you skip it if you save the leader and just get ogres added to your recruit or recall list anyway. I guess they're hypothetically good in caves, but the fact that they're really bad at fighting is kind of a damper.

The classic FEH mechanic of tea invitations. Moved.

Sturdy Impact has a garish yellow border and you should hand it to whatever PP unit who still cares vaguely about durability that you like most, so that everyone will know you love them.

Lowkey, part of me kind of regrets using the PM1 guides at all. I used them as kind of a 'break in case of emergency' button, before I'd built Marisa / Mathilda / Jamke tall enough to take on anything, if I needed orbs. And now there's... well, just not that much PvE content left for me to go through, pretty much just the Legendary Abyssals when they show up. But then I think about the fact that the 33-turn unarmed Taurcas clear on Eirika a) broke a 12.5% pity and b) was hilarious, and I reconsider. I still don't think consciously building around them is the best idea. These are orbs you'll get anyway, eventually. Still, wish there was a refreshment of more high-end HB content. Another cycle, another series of 'clear with X blessing' challenges, and I'd be happy as a clam. But that's probably not likely in the short-term now that they've just revived a shitload of them. This is the correct way to make decisions.

INVASION 7+8: Mammals of the order Chiroptera

Honestly, orb saving is venerated to an almost cultist degree. My personal thoughts are that if you're saving for something specific that you know is coming - for instance, people saving for the Revival banners to try and +10 first-gen 5*-exclusives - that's good and cool, but besides that? If you have 15 / 20 orbs, and there's things you want and don't have, go for it. If the 'discipline' is making you unhappy or frustrated, then the problem doesn't rest with you; splurge and be happy. It's why we're all playing the game, after all.

No way should you +10 Aversa if you dislike her. +10ing is a favouritism move, not one for the meta. Go for your favourite, with half an eye on avoiding overlapping roles with other star units.

Hell, I've still never had Thea. And I keep pulling lancebirds - and now have Sigrun on top of that - that push her glorious arrival further and further down the depth chart...

I'm similar. I'll swap seals in and out for my stars, for anyone in Arena / AR, or looking for solutions to HBs, and a few useful-but-not-amazing seals have stuck to certain people throughout. Still, for any serious content (outside of AA, which is all counterpicks anyway), everyone will have a hand-picked seal. But I could do more to hand out tertiary seals that probably won't get shuffled much to my squad players. A lot of guys have just never had a seal equipped their whole careers.

INVASION 6: It's been over a week since I have opened the Battle for Wesnoth application

Guess what the Revival means?

Why are you classing into 'sword' 'master', master of swords, if you don't want to get better at using swords, sweetheart?

It's arguably the best B-skill in the game, pretty much twice as good at the Sabotage skills that were already incredible on the right chassis. I'd sooner save a squad slot on bridal Gunnthra.

I like how Guildus gets 20 more strength and Mildain gets 20 more... intelligence. For a character that can never use magic.

If he's merged then it doesn't matter, he'll be +speed either way. Merging destroys the bane - or, in the case of neutral units, gives a +1 boost to three different stats.

Weird question, perhaps: when you have the Tactics Room up, what tile do you like to put it on? I tend to go second-from-left in the hopes that it can cut an enemy team in half, but it does feel like it backfires occasionally.

It's kind of impressive how insanely toxic this thread has become, so fast.

Diversity isn't by the numbers, matching up 1:1 with a census (let alone a specifically American census). It's about adequate representation in media. Is there adequate straight representation in media? Obviously. Adequate female representation? Not for the most part, but it's been distinctly improving over time. Has there been adequate queer representation in FE? Not until FE15 / 16. People of marginalised groups should be able to look at a large cast and see at least someone who they can identify with. In a game with an avatar and romance options, someone to have them fuck. Sure, you can wave around all the census data you want to decry this 'forced diversity' which... doesn't negatively affect you or your experience in any way. But, sweetheart? Something to think about: the genre's called fantasy.

I let Marisa sponge him, since something like 65 effective defence does the trick pretty well. Granted, a lot of that durability stems from SS4, which... obviously means she can't hit back. An adult Tiki or Nowi might do a job, given some love.

I tried to do something fancy by throwing Marisa down the right. This left too many people running free. So... I hurled Marisa, Legzura-boosted, down the middle on a defence tile to frag the wind mage. DK couldn't damage her, neither could the bow knight, the fire mage chipped her. So, cleaning up from there was pretty straightforward.

Ishtor is a nobody who dies a long time before his sister. I'm not even sure he appears in FE5, and dies offstage to Seliph's army during the events of the lategame. Meanwhile, Ishtar's a relatively major player. So, no, it doesn't really work. Pick 95% of characters, though, and it doesn't really make a difference. Hell, Olwen works. Sure, she can potentially marry Fred (apparently?), but if her romantic interest was Selphina instead, would that affect the plot? No. (Which isn't even particularly relevant to the discussion, which is writing gay characters, not retconning them as such.)

From memory, confirmed by a glance on the wiki, he wants to fuck Ishtar. So it's a pretty terrible example given that Ishtar's story role can't really be replaced by another man in FE5.