0 Def Cleric

She definitely comes off that way to me.

I would imagine that they saved her route for last to make sure it fit with all the events they set up on all the other routes... and then they ran out of time making the second half of fitting with other events (slitherers.) They probably wanted it to come off pretty strong, but oops.

I can confirm it, considering the JPN name of the song is "Lady of Hresvelg". It's Edelgard's song. (It also has her VA, I believe?)

Never played Xenoblade, but you can only give the whetstone to (and receive the rewards from) one of the two askers.

Yeah, I definitely prefer Genealogy gen 2, just personally. Although Sacred Stones is pretty nice too, and it's got some great character conflicts, I just love to bite into the meat of the lore, and the whole Archanea/Jugdral world has so much there! ...But I bet you can guess what my favorite duo of games besides the Jugdral pair are. After all, Tellius is the second-best developed continent in the series!

Indeed! My particular priorities are worldbuilding, characters, and plot (in that order), but I'm well aware that other people prioritize them in different orders or not at all. Personally, I think it's fascinating seeing different perspectives on story due to disagreements on those priorities.

It's very simple! Nothing makes a story objectively good, because the consumption of a story, from its basic wording down to its themes, is entirely from the reader's own view. There is no truly "good" or "bad" story in this world, because what is important to everyone who consumes stories is different. Some people prioritize characterization, some prioritize themes, and some simply prioritize enjoying the experience! Literary critique is based entirely around the idea of subjectivity in the analysis of stories. It's a wonderful thing, really. Since it's something created from human minds, human minds have to interpret it to understand it and enjoy it or despise it or be thoroughly ambivalent towards it. Is including tropes a good thing? A bad thing? It's up to the reader! Just as everything is. And of course, your view of the story and its themes will always depend on you, as a person!

Fantastic villain ranking list! I'd probably rank Grima and Julius higher myself, but I'm completely unashamed to say that that's my absolutely GIGANTIC Evil Dragon That Isn't Actually Insane bias shining through. Which of course means that I entirely agree with you about Medeus's lack of screen time : ( He's not even a king, he's just a prince! And he ended up with the weight of the entirety of the Earth Tribe's sealing on his shoulders. Poor guy.

Well, I'm not a licensed social worker yet thanks to being mired in the middle of my master's, but yeah. Edelgard is a genuinely good portrayal of PTSD though, with those trust issues. You just probably shouldn't be attempting to reform the entirety of the continent when you're not entirely rational and being manipulated by the people that caused your mental illness, lmao.

To an extent. I'd probably say that it definitely shouldn't disappear so swiftly, especially without people who are aware of dedicated coping mechanisms for it. When it is active, it's pretty realistic (as far as a video game goes); but since no one's really aware of the (somewhat counter-intuitive) ways to treat trauma in Fodlan, there's not really an excuse for it disappearing so fast. It would have been a good deal more realistic if he displayed proper symptoms of PTSD (aka had periods of clarity) and was jarred out of it by Rodrigue; though he would definitely have an eventual relapse (probably when encountering one of his main triggers, such as Edelgard), he'd probably be able to work decently well for a time, although I think he should definitely have displayed more survivor's guilt post-Rodrigue. As it is, psychosis doesn't really tend to go away. It's just made to be less harmful (through cognitive behavioral therapy changing the associations with the hallucinations, and differentiating them from reality, or with the decidedly more modern solution of antipsychotic medication.) It's really not easy to separate what's in your head from reality, especially directly after another recent highly traumatic event! As it is, PTSD has a tendency to cause erratic behavior, which could easily justify his rampages without the excuse of blaming it on others. (It especially is likely to lead to violent behavior in men, but obviously women can experience it too (thanks for the example, Edelgard.)) (Although the majority of people with PTSD, and even more so with psychosis, are nonviolent.) Overall, it would have been better writing to give him PTSD, because it both better justifies his rampages and better justifies him snapping out of it. Psychosis tends to cause fear rather than rage in the majority of cases. But hey, it's vidya gaem.

Yup! Fodlan definitely needs better mental health research because half of everyone in this game has issues. And that's only the nobility! (If it is psychosis related, though, I do feel a bit disappointed that it's not maintained throughout the route.)

Again, that's not how PTSD works. PTSD activates on triggers, and does not cause constantly disordered thinking. Whether he's been imprisoned or not, the fact remains that if he had PTSD, he would have considerably more logical thought patterns than he currently exhibits. PTSD may be a dissociative disorder to an extent, but it does not cause consistently warped thought processes, like many personality disorders as well as psychosis and schizophrenia. In addition, the majority of disorders that cause consistently warped thought processes are lifelong, and do not disappear when your good old pal Rodrigue dies on the spot. The closest thing to what Dimitri exhibits is trauma-induced psychosis, which is a very different animal to proper PTSD. Source: I have a psychology degree with a focus on trauma.

That's really not how PTSD works. People with it are still capable of differentiating reality from falsehood, unless they're being triggered, and episodes following triggers do not last long at all. Unless you're possibly presuming that every single conversation with Dimitri post-skip is constantly triggering him, PTSD is no excuse for that.

Me personally disliking something doesn't make it terrible, no. I don't mind Revelations' story at all, as a stand-alone, but that doesn't make it necessarily good, either! But it's not really subjective that one of a story's main purposes is to entertain, and if the majority do not find it interesting, or at least entertaining, it is not achieving the primary goal of a video game story. There's a difference between a Fire Emblem story and the Inferno by Dante, you know. Fire Emblem stories exist to entertain. Mass-produced video games are not philosophical treatises, and if the majority does not find them entertaining, they have failed in their purpose, regardless of how subjective or objective their distaste is. ...But considering Fates' story does not consistently portray its theme, nor does it develop its setting, nor does it develop its characters, it's rather objective to say "this does not follow what a story should follow, and thus it is bad." Anyway, I'm not arguing with you on this any more, considering you have absolutely no standards for a story besides "it has a theme that I think it is consistent with", which would be 99% of works of media, ever. Death of the author, man.

Portraying a theme competently is, essentially, in my mind, portraying a theme within the context of the world you have created. A story can explore its themes however it wants, yes, but not necessarily be successful as a story. Just portraying a message consistently makes it nothing but a PSA, not a story; and no one listens to PSAs for (unironic) entertainment. Entertainment is, as I've said, the secondary but arguably more important purpose of a story. A story must hit both points (interesting/consistent with themes) to be a decent story; hitting one makes it poor, and ideally a story hits the third point of "portrays a well-developed world" as well to make it an excellent one. Shadows of Valentia is a passable story, if not an excellent one; it hits two of those points (interest and development of a world) well, while flopping on theme. Whereas Fates only arguably hits the theme point and that's it.

Stories do, yes, exist to tell an author's view on the world, generally. However, the other (and far more important) purpose of stories is to entertain, especially in a video game context. And a story conveying its theme poorly when it has great opportunity to portray it well is... not entertaining in the slightest. Organically portraying events (whether it can be truly organic or not) makes a story more believable, and thus entertaining. Fates fails on that point in every way, but especially with Garon's portrayal. Cut him from the story, and you'd immediately improve it by a factor of 10, simply because his actions are so difficult to believe. If a story wants to portray its theme in a certain way, then it must portray it competently, or it will be subject to criticism from people like me. A proper theme makes as much logical sense (of course, taking humans' penchant for irrationality into account) as possible within the confines of the setting. For example, though Awakening's story isn't terrible by any means, the idea of inescapable fate could be portrayed by other means than inconsistent internal logic, so I rank it a good deal lower then Genealogy's first generation, with a similar theme. ...No FE game's story is a literary work of the century, though.

Themes don't mean anything when the story's garbage on its own. A story is meant first to convey a series of events, and then portray a theme through those events. If it can't portray the series of events believably, it fails as a story, and is simply an unfulfilled theme statement. Garon's actions do not need to be nonsensical to drive the plot. Cruel actions can make perfect sense in the context of a story, and yet they can still be easily questioned. Corrin doesn't need to be childishly inept at noticing oddities in people's behavior to drive the plot; even if Fates had a coherent theme in finding the truth at all costs, Corrin is an active detriment to it. Garon could easily have simply changed from being a firm but kind ruler to a cruel and overbearing one with no seeming reason, and that would drive the plot enough to get Corrin to question "is this man truly who he says he is" without having to make Garon's actions spew out of a random number generator each chapter. Grima is a decent villain because they both drive forward the themes of the story and are a consistently written being. They always work to further their goals, while Garon's actions are inconsistent enough to make you question whether he even has a goal- which is in complete opposition to what he is, as a puppet of Anankos. He should be performing the tasks that Anankos sets out for him, yet his actions are so inconsistent and even contradictory that Anankos would do well to eat him as soon as we get to Conquest Ch.10. Fates' story is a garbage fire for other reasons, but its inconsistent writing of Garon is a major one. (I've read the Fates story "analysis" in your signature, and it's far too focused on theme to count as one. Despite what high school English literature classes will teach you, a good theme does not a good story make.)

Dude, you need to put spacing in your paragraphs. Badly. And you're arguing with something that wasn't said, in the first place. Yes, every villain exists to be wrong, but depending on how they're wrong, they'll engender more sympathy and interest from an audience. A literal ooze puppet that makes completely irrational decisions is generally less interesting to a wider audience than a villain who could have, in another world, been a hero. Or one that's actually terrifying, just based on their actions alone, rather than cartoonish. Of course villains can be wrong, that's how they're supposed to be! But it's much better if they're wrong in an interesting way. For example, with your first post on this thread, Grima just oozes charm, and that lets them be interesting to the player even though they're an absolute abomination. Garon doesn't really have anything going for him besides "is a puppet of the greater mastermind" and we've seen that six hundred times before. Evil doesn't mean you have to be a flat character.

I would be glad to not see another post arguing about Edelgard on this site for the next twenty years.

I'd stop entirely. If you set yourself a limit and don't get whoever it is within the limit, you'll just feel awful about "wasting" those orbs. Although, the legendary banner is an 8% 5* rate, so it's pretty likely that you'd get [spoilers] even within around 150 orbs left. Really, it's up to you though.

"Only thorns left on this rose..."

That's fair. I didn't remember too well with Indech, so thanks. But yeah, if is is connected, I'd probably theorize that Sothis is the only "true" dragon, and that she simply died before degeneration started affecting "true" dragons. If it's not (which is really more probable) then it's definitely more LIKE Archanea in regards to dragons than the last several non-remake games, which is refreshing.

I mean, Sothis's ears are pointed elf ears, and we do see those. And every other dragon having hair that just so happens to hide their ears makes me think it's intentional. Draconic degeneration is definitely present in Seiros, Macuil, and Indech; Cethleann and Cichol explicitly threw away their dragon forms, so I would suspect they're similar to Xane and Gotoh in the fact that they can't do so because they're not really dragons any more.. ...However, I have this odd theory that Sothis is the only proper Archanean dragon there, and her children are sort of artificial dragon-like beings. Since she's the one that displays most of the traits of the main world dragons, it wouldn't surprise me if she was a (other, thanks to Echoes retcons) rogue divine dragon that went and found someplace nice to set up shop, long before draconic degeneration started happening in Archanea.

Lysithea does not leave over the skip in Crimson Flower.