Arachnofiend

No clue how unpopular of an opinion this is but Byleth/Petra is a terrible support chain and Petra's worst pairing by a significant margin Petra's indecision on whether or not she wants to lead Brigid is an invention of that specific support chain that runs completely counter to every other ending. They could have done something similar to her endings with Hubert and Claude, and that would have been just fine, but what they did is one of the worst Avatar-isms in the entire game. The writers just scrap her entire character motivation to make it make sense that she'd stay with Byleth in Fodlan.

I'm into the timeskip on my Verdant Wind run and using anything other than Iron+ for your standard weapon still feels shaky; the better weapons are just heavy enough to cut a unit's damage in half so I usually only use Silver when I wouldn't have doubled anyways. The exception being Cyril, who's been using Silver Bows since I recruited him and has been one of my most reliable units for killing the toughest enemies. Point Blank Volley is really good you guys

If the Most Deployed list is a summation of deployments in every chapter then that's even more of an argument that most people are picking Crimson Flower - if it was remotely close to even then Edelgard would have zero chance at showing up on that list, given that an even distribution of choices would mean that a third of players pick Black Eagles and then only half of those players pick Crimson Flower. Certainly if Dimitri was the uncontested most popular character in the game as these polls indicate he'd have an easier time showing up than Edelgard, given that you can't decide halfway through the game that you never want to field Dimitri again.

Funny that you mention Radiant Dawn, given how much I personally detested the way that game shuffled your roster around, taking away and forcing specific characters on you on a whim.

They should replace it with illusion magic. Imagine if every time Nergal was going to teleport away, instead you get the chance to attack him and it turns out it was just an image. ...Wait that's even more infuriating

To be fair, it's doubtful that anyone in this setting is qualified to properly treat severe paranoia. They're not even at Freud, let alone real psychology.

In basically every instance it's better to recruit sooner than later for characters you intend to use. The only arguable exception I'm aware of is Ingrid, and that only if you were planning on making her a Falcon Knight already.

I seem to recall some of the ones who "survived" were noted as later being victims of suicide anyways. Which is understandable.

I have to be impressed with your luck (for better or worse) if Gilbert is staying alive long enough to aggro the archers. Dude gets trucked by the reinforcements on Hard mode, I can't imagine what sort of RNG must have occurred for him not to get murdered on Maddening. The Miklan chapter has a number of issues, mostly that gap between dealing with the thief reinforcements in the north east and getting into the throne room where you have to slog through empty hallways to get to the next enemy. But I think the real crown for most irritating chapter in Three Houses goes to the Hubert paralogue: it's almost insulting how they gave the must-keep-alive green units healing tiles to stand on only for them to immediately walk away to throw themselves at the nearest demonic beast. Suffice to say I did not get Hubert's lance on my Crimson Flower run.

Most of the people who like Dimitri prefer to think of him as a cute character anyways

In-game month, not route specific as far as I can tell. If it was route specific then I wouldn't be seeing Edelgard on non BE runs.

Her struggle in polls is very strange to me, given that she's the only lord that shows up on Most Deployed lists even post-timeskip (indicating an overwhelming number of players play Crimson Flower). I can only assume she's most popular with casual players? Shrug.

Worth mentioning that Jeralt misreports Byleth's age to everyone including Byleth. While Byleth is in their early 20's as determined by the year of their mother's death, when the game begins everyone believes Byleth is in their late teens at the latest because Jeralt claims they were born "many years" after he left the monastery. Seteth isn't exaggerating when he gets mad at Rhea for hiring a "child" as a professor. I think this is actually an example of one of the things Three Houses is pretty clever about: namely, using Mary Sue-isms to obfuscate the truth. Much like how we assume we get handed a free teaching gig because we're the protagonist and that's what happens to protagonists when in reality it's just a factor in Rhea's plot, "knowing" that we share a birthday with the mysterious green haired entity in our mind reinforces the customized birthday as the truth since that's the trope we're used to.

So I've been using Cyril in my GD Maddening run and... yeah, Ghast is completely right about him being a good unit. He's the greatest testament to how the extra mechanics in 3H make it so that bases and growths don't tell the whole story. Cyril was bad for exactly one chapter. I did not give him any special favoritism, many chapters later his level is still about equal with the rest of my squad (the only one who's truly overleveled is Lysithea and that's because I've had multiple situations where giving her the boss kill is the best way to win the chapter). All I did was raise his bows to C+ and run him through Brigand like I did almost every other martial character and he immediately became one of my best units. His early entry to Point-Blank Volley really is just that good. Enemies that are difficult to kill, I rely on either Lysithea or Cyril to do it. When Claude doesn't double he's completely out-classed by Cyril and that's after giving Claude the +STR item from the DLC. I'm sure things will even out once weapon ranks get higher and other characters get their best combat arts, but Cyril has pulled ahead as an MVP unit during the part of the game he's supposed to suck, so I imagine his growth rates will keep him going once everyone else catches up. Basically my point here is that we need to factor in the power of exclusive combat arts when evaluating units more

And my reaction to this would have been "thank GOD they're not forcing me to use one of my least favorite PoR characters anymore".

Bernadetta is treated as a gag, complete with goofy music, in every C support. YMMV on if the more serious B and A supports help with that, but in my case having to sit through basically the same cringey C support a dozen times makes it difficult to respect IS's attempt to treat her more seriously in later conversations.

To be fair, there is one particular Fates song that has been reduced to meme status people hate it so much... maybe Malen is just sneaking in the fact he likes that song?

I had pretty good success with Marianne as a Mortal Savant; it was a Hard mode run so eh but being able to one shot monsters with Beast Fang was fun. Marianne has a weird issue where she seems to get all of the most inaccurate Reason spells... well into the game I was still seeing her put up some unpleasant 60-70% accuracy numbers. Being able to just use a sword instead helps with that quite a bit.

Mortal Savants, as with all magic classes in this game, can use any magic; they only get black tomefaire though so your options for who works as a Mortal Savant are very limited. Ignoring that MS is kind of just a bad class, Byleth, Manuela, and Marianne all do a good job of it. Lysithea and Edelgard would be fine choices in theory but their spell lists are full of dark magic which MS doesn't give any bonuses to. I think if you really want to run a Mortal Savant the best choice is Marianne. Of the characters who can do it at all, she's the only one who has legitimate arguments for it given her relic and crest.

I don't think it really counts as spoilers given it's something the game doesn't expect you to notice. Certainly, the truth about the Crest of Flames isn't something you're going to entirely puzzle out if this is your only hint.

This is one of those things that works better in a novel than a video game. How many people use Flayn in their Crimson Flower runs? Killing off a party member, especially if there's no way to avoid it, is just a good way to make sure players don't invest in that character. And on the blind run when you don't know that character is going to die... well, you're just gonna get pissed you lost all of that experience.

I blame the voice actor for Seteth, in both directions. His English VA is so much better than the Japanese it's really no surprise he's a more popular character over here.

The closest thing to a proper defend map is the Ashe/Catherine paralogue... which is a fog of war map in a wide open area, meaning that there are zero choke points a Fortress Knight could potentially cover. Trying to tank with an armor on that map just means you're gonna get OHK'd by a mage from the fog.

Dimitri is referred to as the "True King of Fodlan" multiple times, by Gilbert in his S support for an easy to find example. This is a lie for the exact reason you said - Faerghus only exists because they won a civil war, which is an action that presumably Dimitri would consider to be Morally Wrong. The Alliance joined the Kingdom because their military had been crippled by Dimitri and were forced to capitulate to him by those circumstances, it was either let Faerghus take over or get overrun by the Empire. Dedue's endings do not give any indication Duscur gets its independence back. All that's referenced is "reconciliation" - as in, they now receive rights as citizens of Faerghus but they're still a minority within the kingdom. I don't claim that Dimitri isn't genuine in his desire to reconcile, but I also think it's clear that he doesn't intend to do anything beyond that.

If there's an argument for Fortress Knight, it's how ludicrously high that class's defense base is. Lowering that to be a bad Paladin is... well, it's not a key for success.