lenticular

Oh, hey, that's me. But on the other hand, I also actively want a remake of Binding Blade. And a remake of Path of Radiance. And a brand new Fire Emblem game in a new setting. And a sequel to Three Houses. And a sequel to Tokyo Mirage Sessions. And... you get the picture. Of all the people who actively want a Genealogy remake, how many of them would place it as their single top most-wanted next Fire Emblem game? At the end of the day, it's pretty much guaranteed that IS is working on something Fire Emblem related, and I'll happily accept pretty much anything on that front. And it will come out when it comes out. I don't want a bad, rushed game. And I also don't want for a game to be announced early and then go through multiple delays. I'd much rather wait.

For me, what made it feel distinct from playing as Link wasn't really what Zelda could do but rather what she couldn't do. Link has a sword, almost always. If we aren't using a sword then it wouldn't feel like Link. If we aren't using a sword or any of Link's other usual weapons (boomerang, bow, boms, etc.) then it really wouldn't feel like Link. So, yeah, Link could be doing all the things we see, but he couldn't be doing just those things. If we were Link we'd always have the option of saying "to hell with all this summoning nonsense, I'm just going to solve this problem with my sword instead". That we seemingly don't get that option is what will make the game feel distinct, I think.

Genealogy remake on the Switch: May 2026. The next console, the Switch U: June 2026. Thracia 776 remake on the Switch: September 2029.

Wait. You can have people wake up faster by shoving them in Tellius? I've wasted whole minutes of my life to not knowing that when sitting around waiting for Ike to wake up when I forgot to bring a Restore staff to a relevant level. I could get behind the idea of venin weapons being minorly magical rather than just "regular iron weapon dipped in poison"; the Three Houses version is forged from Venomstone, which definitely feels magical. But then we have things like daggers in Engage, which don't feel at all magical. And weird outliers like the Tellius incarnation of Deadeye causing sleep, which doesn't make a slightest lick of sense either as magical or as mundane. We are probably overthinking things dramatically by trying to find any sort of unifying pattern here. (So what's new?) That would be an amazing setting. I love it thematically, aesthetically, and mechanically. There is so much that could be done with that. I'm also imagining it as the enemy has attacked the library and set it on fire to try to stop your side from having your supply of tomes, so you have to try to fight the fire as you kill the enemy, because the burning books will have some funky magical enviornmental hazards. Regardless, I'm making this my answer to the original question of this thread. I want to work in the scriptorium or library that creates all the magic tomes. Which is from Hypothetical Fire Emblem Game That Doesn't Exist Yet, which is my favourite game in the series.

I'll take the sniper rifle. It does depend on stuff like durability and weapon ranks, of course, but if you make favourable assumptions then I think the sniper rifle is better. I'm going to assume it's a magic sniper rifle that never breaks, never needs to be reloaded, and can be used by anyone. One good thing about the sniper rifle is that you can use it to feed kills to anyone you want. Even your weakest unit is getting an almost guaranteed kill every player phase, or two kills per player phase after you recruit Tethys. They will very quickly gain levels to catch up and even to get ahead of the curve. Making sure Eirika got enough experience without putting her in danger would be effortless. Levelling up any of the trainee classes would be a breeze. Seth is great, but there's only one of him. All the experience he gets is for him alone. The experience from the sniper rifle can be split as you need it, ensuring you get a full army of strong high-level characters. Sniper rifle is also disgusting when paired with Pegasus Knight. From the moment you recruit Vanessa, you can give her the sniper rifle, have her fly somewhere inaccessible, and then have her take out the entire map with impunity. Since we also have infinite accuracy and damage, we also don't need to worry about stat penalties from rescuing, so if we want to we can just have Vanessa rescue Eirika before she does this. No need to even bother to deploy anyone else if we don't want to.

Well, the Restore staff can cure poison, so I don't see it as much of a stretch to go from there to curing infections. Maybe it just purges the bacteria from the body? Or maybe it stimulated the immune system enough to let it fight off the infection itself? Or maybe it just temporarily removes the symptoms and you're still going to have to spend a week in bed afterwards recovering, but you can at least manage to get through the rest of the battle. It's never really clear. And then there's also all of the stuff with the Galdr of Rebirth and the Feral One drug, which is a specific example, but does at least show some of the potential for healing magic. Yeah, that sort of thing is always complicated. When there's only a single individual of a given class, it's impossible to really say which of the abilities are from the class and which are from the individual. Does Pegasus Knight learn healing skills, or does Tsubasa? There's no real answer. So I guess that for a question like this, it's fine to just handwave it and go for whichever answer best fits what you want to do. That is possible, but it also raises a whole lot of new questions. Mainly: how are tomes even made? If we're assuming that they are loaded with magical potential energy, then that energy has to have come from somewhere. And in the case of something like a Meteor tome that drops a giant flaming rock on people, that is a staggeringly enormous amount of energy. Who is even making these tomes to begin with? How? What is the energy source that they're using? And why are they not way, way more expensive than they are?

Three Houses healing does come with the downside of being confirmed in-lore (in a conversation with Manuela) to only really be good for trauma, battlefield medicine, emergency medicine and other similar situations, with regular medicine required for more long-term healing. So while it would still be miraculously useful in a real world situation, it would also be relatively limited. Possibly better to go with Shadows of Valentia magic, that also doesn't require staves, but doesn't (that I know of) have that lore restriction that Three Houses does. Yeah, it drains your health, but so long as you have a good supply of food on hand, you'll be fine. Eating two sausages is enough to cast Fortify 5 times. Sacrifice would also be a fun option, but the original rules disallowed Lord classes, alas. Or maybe the best healing option would be a Heron. If we're allowed Manaketes and Taguel, then Herons should be fine too, right? Blessing and Galdrar should be phenomenally useful, especially the Recovery Galdr which is completely useless in game. And you could fly. Sadly, the rules limit us to classes from the game that we're choosing, so if we want to be in Tokyo, then we're limited to TMS classes, which doesn't give us a whole lot of choices for healing. I don't remember TMS all that well, but I don't recall it having any dedicated healing classes unfortunately. Though honestly, I think I'd be more inclined to go for black magic rather than white. Even pretty basic magic effects tend to violate fundamental laws of physics like conservation of energy, so there's a good chance you'd be able to set up perpetual motion machines, provide clean energy sources, etc. Although this does risk running into the Superman power plant problem, so might not be the best idea after all. But then, if you were the only person with magical healing powers, you'd have a similar situation, where you either become an amoral greedy bastard and get to charge everyone through the nose, or else you'd find yourself stretched far too thin trying to help everyone.

I would assume that they're in a similar position to Rings of Power where they only have the rights to LotR and The Hobbit but not to Lost Tales or The Silmarilion, so they have to extrapolate from the stuff in LotR's appendices instead.

I'll largely just echo everything that SnowFire said, but I do want to add one more thing. Wikipedia can be, and often is, inconsistent, but that inconsistency isn't usually the result of hypocrisy. Rather, it's just the consequence of a very decentralised administrative structure without a single decision-maker. Instead, there are or have been hundreds of thousands of different editors over a period of over two decades. And while there definitely have been hypocrites (and all manner of other bad actors) among that number, the vast majority of Wikipedia editors are well-intentioned and doing the best that they can. There absolutely are articles on Wikipedia that are worse than Marth's article in pretty much every way: worse writing, worse sourcing, less notable subject, everything. And yeah, it's definitely easy to look at those and see unfairness or hypocrisy, but I really don't think it's actually there. Instead, there are a few different possibilities: It might just be that nobody who has seen the article has thought to nominate it for deletion, and if it ever was nominated then it would be deleted too. There's a pretty low bar for creating new articles, and some articles that get created probably shouldn't be. If it has been nominated for deletion but kept, it might be that a different group of people were the ones discussing. Different people are going to have different opinions, different standards, and different ways of interpreting Wikipedia's rules. If you think of it less as "Wikipedia decided that..." and more as "these specific individual editors decided that..." then it can still be frustrating when there is inconsistency, but it doesn't seem malicious or hypocritical in the same way. Sometimes standards change over time. What was a reasonable article in 2001 might not be a reasonable article in 2024. And given how large and lumbering a beast Wikipedia is, change can happen slowly, and somewhat inconsistently. So, overall, I don't think it's particularly productive to look to other articles and say "but if [bad article] gets to exist, why doesn't Marth?" Instead, it's like SnowFire says. If you're passionate about this, then you can try to hunt down the sources and commentary that would justify the article.

Looking into it, Marth's article was discussed in Wikipedia's "articles for deletion" section back in February, with the consensus in that discussion being that there isn't really enough coverage of the character to warrant an independent article, and that any relevant content should be covered on the article for SDatBoL. Which, honestly, I think is probably fair. If you look at the latest version of Marth's article before it was redirected it seems to have a lot of padding and trivia. Stuff like "Marth's character designer is currently unknown" or "in 2013, Complex ranked him 36th among the 50 greatest soldiers in video games" is pure padding, and then there's a bunch of stuff about all the games that he's appeared in, which is fine for a dedicated gaming wiki, but kinda trivial for a general encyclopedia. It has been a couple of years since I edited Wikipedia at anything above an "occasional typo fix" level, but going from memory, if people would like to see the article restored, your best bet is to hunt down a bunch of good sources for information about him. If you can find significant articles from prominent/reliable sources that discuss Marth in detail, talking about, eg, his character arc and characterisation in the story, the motivations about his creation, etc. then that would probably be enough to warrant revisiting the discusion and potentially restoring the article. But short of that, I don't think it's likely.

It depends on what population you're selecting from. If I walk into a bookshop, most of the books there are probably at least decent. Maybe not to my tastes and interests, but not bad. But then consider that the books in the shop have all been chosen by the bookseller as the best ones that they think will sell. And then there are even more filters behind that. The booksellers can't choose to sell books that are long out of print because nobody liked them. And the selection of books that are published in the first place is higher quality than all the manuscripts that get sent to publishers by aspiring authors. And the manuscripts that people send to publishers are, on average, going to be better than the ones that people finish writing but then never do anything with them because they don't think they're any good. Which are better than books that people start but then abandon before they finish. So if the question is "are most novels crap?" then the answer is a resounding "yes!" if you're looking at the level of "unfinished NaNoWriMo projects" and a resounding "no!" if you're looking at the level of "the bookseller's choice shelf at your favourite indie bookshop", and somewhat vaguer and more equivocal answers as you move through various filters between these two extremes.

For the record, some of your arguments that unit x is better than unit y have also had a positive influence on me, both in the sense of "that was a fun discussion" and "that has changed how I think about things". Thank you. That's very kind of you to say. I see this argument floated sometimes, and honestly, I think that it's dumb as a box of rocks. It is perfectly common for writers to use the characters and settings created by other writers, and many such works have been commercially successful and critically acclaimed. Just think for a moment baout how many different writers have written Bruce Wayne, Luke Skywalker, Jean Luc Picard, Lara Croft, Nancy Drew, Bart Simpson... and many, many others. As an example, consider the film, The Dark Knight. When that came out, did anyone talk about how much of a lazy hack Christopher Nolan was for using characters that others had created, and how he was a disgrace to cinema, and how nobody but Bob Kane and Bill Finger should ever have written Batman stories? Obviously not. Instead, it was the highest grossing film of its year and won so many awards that they have their own Wikipedia page. There is no inherent artistic difference between Nolan and a random fanfic writer. There is a definite legal difference, of course. Nolan has explicit permission from rights holders whereas fanfic authors are generally relying on fair use provisions and the likes. But I for one have no interest in letting a Warner Bros executive have the final say on what is and is not a valid display of artistic expression within our culture. And there is, on average, a significant difference in quality. But again, we're getting deep into dystopian territory if we're starting to demand that only "good" (whose definition of good?) art is allowed to be created or shared. Omegaverse is... weird. And I always struggle figuring out exactly what I think about it. Because on the one hand, there is definitely that visceral "ewww, gross! I did not need to know that!" reaction to it. But on the other hand, if that's how other people get their jollies, then who am I to tell them not to? So long as they aren't actually hurting anyone, then they can have whatever weird interests and hobbies they want. Just so long as they keep it well away from me. This sort of thing is pretty interesting, honestly. Because even highly derivative works are typically legal. If I wanted to write a story about a bunch of people in a medieval fantasy world fighting against a dark cult and their dragon god and then being helped out by their children who traveled back in time from a world where the dragon apocalypse had happened, then I totally could do that. I couldn't lift chunks of text directly from Awakening (copyright infringement) or call the main characters Chrom and Lucina (probably trademark infringement), and I definitely couldn't market it using the words "Fire Emblem" (or anything Emblem, as Kaga found out). But just the general story outline is fine. Highly derivative, of course, but on a firm legal standing. And even being derivative isn't necessarily a bad thing. There are, after all, no completely new stories. Every story is inspired by other stories that went before. I am curious what you have against NSFW fanfic? It isn't typically my thing, but I have no problem with it existing. So long as it's suitably labeled so that people who aren't interested can avoid it, of course. And I think there's a decent argument for avoiding adult content in fanfic based on works that are explicitly aimed at children (no BDSM Frozen or drug addiction Pokémon, for instance). I think there is fun to be had both ways. Creating original characters and an original world is definitely a lot of fun, for sure. But I think there are also advantages to using pre-existing characters and setting. For one, I think that they're nice for especially short fiction. If I only have the time and energy to write a 2000 word short story, then it's nice to be able to dive straight into whatever I want the story to be about and not have to spend those limited words on establishing the characters. The other big one for me, frankly, is readership. Part of the fun of writing is having other people read what you wrote, and that's a whole lot easier with fanfic than original fiction. And yeah, to some extent there is feedback loop/self-fulfiling prophecy/network effect going on here. Maybe if fanfic was less prominent then there would be more people willing to read my amateur-hour original fic, but that's not the world that we live in. What on Earth does courage have to do with anything? I write as a hobby because I enjoy it, not because it's a test of my bravery.

Well, I both write and read fanfiction from time to time, so unsurprisingly, my thoughts on it are generally positive. Is it plagiarism? No, definitely not. A key component of plagiarism is that you are trying to pass off someone else's work as your own and not giving credit. Fanfic is pretty much the opposite of that. Fanfic wears its inspiration on its sleeves and says "hey! look! this is the source I'm drawing my inspiration from!" It is, as a whole, a very intellectually honest medium. But is it copyright (or trademark) infringement, though? I don't know. Probably not? I'm not an intellectual property lawyer. But based on my understanding of copyright law and what I've heard from people who actually are intellectual property lawyers, my belief is that it is probably legally fine in most cases. But is it ethical? What if the author/copyright holder doesn't want fanfic of their work? Personally speaking, if the copyright holder is a corporation, then I don't care what they want. It's not my concern if fanfic marginally hurts the bottom line of Disney or Nintendo or the likes. However, if the original creator of the work is also the copyright holder (eg, most books or indie games) and they have stated that they don't like fanfic of their work, then I won't write or read anything in that fandom. No disrespect to anyone who chooses otherwise, but that's where I'm most comfortable. But also, most creative types are fine with fanfic being written of their work. At least, from what I've seen. When creators do actually have an explicit policy or statement about fanfic, I see a lot more that give explicit permission than that ask (or demand) that nobody writes fanfic of their work. It's quite common to see creators request some sort of limitation on fanfic writers ("please show me!" "please don't show me!" "please explicitly credit me!" "please don't include anything that wouldn't be age-appropriate for the original work's target audience!") but relatively rare to see creators who have a blanket opposition to the whole concept. Beyond that, a lot of professional authors either are or have been involved in fan fiction. The two obvious examples for me are Naomi Novik and EL James. Novik was heavily involved in setting up the Organisation for Transformative Works (which is the group behind the AO3 website, among other things). James wrote Twilight fanfic which she used as the basis for her Fifty Shades novels. But there are countless others out there as well. But isn't most fanfic absolutely dreadful? Why yes. Yes it is. But that's Sturgeon's Law for you. 90% of everything is crap. And crap fanfic at least has the benefit that nobody is trying to charge you money for it, which you can't say about a lot of media. Furthermore, most people are going to be crap at pretty much anything when they first try it. Fanfic is just a more public space to be crap at something than when you first stumble your way through Wonderwall on your new guitar, for instance. But what about all the sex!? Please won't someone think of the children!? And assorted other pearl clutching. I mean, this is daft, right? We all know it's daft. But just for completeness' sake: a. There is plenty of fanfic that doesn't include sex at all. b. Sex also features prominently in moveis, literature, games, and pretty much any other artistic or entertainment medium you care to name. c. Fanfic is more likely to explore female sexuality and queer sexuality than most other media, and I don't think it's a coincidence that it gets targeted for this reason. My ultimate parting thought though, is this: adapting, changing and reworking stories has been an integral part of our culture for as long as our culture has existed. Have you ever tried to study Greek mythology, for instance, and discovered that it's all a big confusing mess where different myths seem to directly contradict each other? That's often because they do, because the stories were retold many times and they changed in the retelling. Or consider just how many modern works are essentially adaptations of Shakespeare. And that a lot of Shakespeare's work was adaptations of classical stories. If it's OK for Shakespeare to take Pyramus and Thisbe and turn it into Romeo and Juliet, then for Sondheim et al to take Romeo and Juliet and turn it into West Side Story, why is it not then OK for a random fanfic writer to take West Side Story and turn it into something new? Obviously, an average fanfic writer is not going to be nearly as talented as Ovid, Shakespeare or Sondheim, but restricting the right to make art to people who make "good art" is an obviously horrendous idea.

Look. You have 166 perfect games on Steam and I only have 54. You have to give me something, man.

I have also now 100%ed this. My experiences were pretty similar, though a little less positive overall. I took 7.3 hours, and I ended up still having a few unlocks left when I unlocked the last achievement. I also felt as if the game was starting to wear out its welcome just a little bit at around about the time I was finishing it, but that's no bad thing. I was glad it finished when it did, but I didn't spend a long time before I was done wishing that I was finished. Which is pretty good pacing. Definitely worth the 5 quid price tag.

We do have that. Sort of. In Three Houses. We only get to field one dancer, but we have a couple dozen choices for which dancer we want. And yeah, the general consensus is that some units do make better dancers than others (due to spell lists, personal abilities, support lists, stats, crest, etc.) but that these differences are marginal and almost totally irrelevant when it comes to choosing your dancer. Instead, the best choice is usually going to be "who aren't you using for anything else?" At the same time, though, let's do a thought experiment. Someone makes a fan game, and they implement every dancer (singer, heron, etc.) in the series into this game. Right at the very start of the game, before you know anything else about it, you get a dialogue box asking you to pick your dancer. Who do you choose? Almost certainly not Tethys. Or the related thought experiment: you have to pick one game to play without using a dancer at all, which one do you choose if you want to see the smallest difficulty increase? Possibly Sacred Stones. (Forum consensus last year was that Sacred Stones and Awakening were the series low points for dancers.) I guess the point I'm trying to make is that for utility units, the differences within a game tend to be relatively small whereas the differences between games are considerably larger. If we're ranking staffbots, the most important consideration is how good that game's staves are. If we're ranking thieves (for their utility), the most important consideration is whether the game has a lot of stealable items, unlockable chests, etc. Other factors aren't nothing, but they're secondary. Dancers would be similar. In the hypothetical six-dancer game, the important consideration is what the core dance mechanics of the game are. Do they get to refresh multiple units in a turn? Do they get special dance? Canter? What's the class's move stat? If we're assuming that all our dancers are in the same class, rather than having Radiant Dawn style design where their abilities are all different, then there probably wouldn't be that much to choose between them. (There is also the weird hide and seek minigame in the monastery in Three Houses. This counts even less than the sparkly item pick ups.)

I believe that I was that someone. And I would still broadly stand by those criteria for what makes a unit good. I'm not sure that no-staff vs no-Seth is particularly a good comparison, though. Maybe no-Seth vs no-Moulder would be a better comparison? In which case, no-Moulder would probably be easier, since you could just stomp the game with Seth up until you get Natasha. Or the alternative comparison might be no-staff vs no-cav/paladin, where I'd go the other way and say that it'd be easier to play without cavs/paladins than without staves, though that one's probably closer? Continuing your analogy to sport ratings, I wonder if there's any way that we could extend the idea of "Wins Above Replacement" to Fire Emblem. I intuitively feel that Tethys isn't really doing that much to make the game easier -- I can't imagine anyone thinking of no-Tethys as a notable challenge run, for instance -- but I'm not sure how we'd even try to quantify that. It isn't clear to me what would count as a "win" nor what would count as a "replacement level unit". Of course, compared to sports statisticians, we don't have nearly as much raw data. It would be really interesting if we somehow had stats for every game of Sacred Stones that had ever been played and could actaully see whether teams with Tethys in them had a better success rate than teams without Tethys in them, but we're obviously never going to get anything even close to that so we're just left with vague personal feelings and intuitions instead.

How much do you trust your memory for how good things were as a kid? I know I was completely non-critical as a kid, and a lot of things that I loved back then are absolutely not as good as I once thought they were.

The licensing is certainly contributing a whole lot to that price. Just from a very quick look at Lego's website, I found this Himeji Castle set, which is $160 for a 2125 piece set. Compared to the Deku Tree, which is $300 for a 2500 piece set. And honestly, I think the Himeji Castle is a better looking set as well. Obviously, $160 is still expensive, but it's not nearly as exorbitant as the price you have to pay for something with the word "Zelda" on the box. I would be very curious to know how much of the price hike is Nintendo's cut of the pie and how much of it is just because Lego think they can get away with charging more for the licensed product. We'll likely never know, but I suspect that both factors are quite substantial. There's Lego Animal Crossing now too.

Yeah, that's exactly where I'm at with it. It's a fantastic game, but oh man, it's completionist achievements are absolutely brutal. I'm at 156 hours and counting, and still have a fair way to go for them yet.

Looking at the Steam page, I see that the same developer has also made a Wikipedia trivia roguelike. Mashing unlikely keywords together is clearly their jam. I might pick this up, though. It looks neat, and I need something to distract me from the pain of banging my head against the brick wall of high-stakes black-deck Balatro.

I think this is an insightful observation. I know that I rarely have a lot of wyverns on my team, probably averaging somewhere between one and two on a typical run. This isn't because I think that this is optimal, but just because I have more fun using a lot of different classes, but it certainly makes sense that my play-style has then evolved around this choice. Because I use more classes, I'm more likely to have a unit that is well suited to each job, so I'm going to need generalist builds less, so I'm going to get less value from things like dual-faire classes. Whereas I can definitely see that for people who tend more towards the "oops, all wyverns" style of play would definitely want to have more flexibility of builds.

Yes. My intention was to try to construe "crossover" as broadly as I could. Something along the lines of "here is a list of things; you choose which of them you think are significant". I'm certainly not trying to claim that all items on the list are equivalent. Yeah, I probably should have included them. I could vaguely claim that they are just shared worldbuilding, but the truth is that I've never played the Jugdral games, so I missed them. That's a fair point, and I partially agree with it, but only partially. Some things are easy enough to ignore, others less so. If I don't like Heroes (I don't) then I can easily just not play it. Simple. But if I don't like seeing a bunch of Awakening characters show up in Fates (I don't) then they're much more difficult to ignore. Sure, I can just not use the characters, but they're still prominent enough that I'm going to be at least a bit exposed to them (and I wouldn't want to do Conquest ch. 10 down a unit anyway). Similarly, while I can ignore all the spotpass and DLC stuff in Awakening, I'm still probably going to stumble across Micaiah's Pyre or Ephraim's Lance or something whether I want to or not. Similarly in Three Houses if I stumble across Gradivus or Mercurius (oops, forgot that one in my original list). It's not as if this sort of thing is a huge issue, but it is just a little bit of unavoidable friction that slightly lessens my overall enjoyment. Or consider the post-game stuff from Shadows of Valentia (which is another one I forgot about on my original list). I can and did completely ignore that and doing so didn't harm my enjoyment of the rest of the game... but it is still a part of the game that I had paid for and didn't get any value from. If it hadn't existed then we might have got a postgame that meaningful continued the story of the game itself, or the deelopment time might have gone to expanding and improving some of the main game. For me, this mainly depends on the settings of the games, whether they're in the same world, etc. I'd have no problem with -- for instance -- Leonie and Shamir showing up in a hypothetical Morfis game or Naesala and Leanne showing up in a hypothetical Hatary game. But if the next game was in a brand new setting on a new world with new creation myths but Panette and Pandreo show up there, then I wouldn't like that. I agree with this. I dislike Engage Anna less than I dislike any of the other playable Annas. Yeah, I've seen that sort of attitude too, and I also completely disagree with it. I find canonicity to be a largely meaningless concept because it's always subject to change. One day, a bunch of Star Wars expanded universe works are considered canon; the next day, Disney decides that they're now all getting shunted over to be "Star Wars Legends" and aren't canon any more. So what? This isn't going to change how I feel about Knights of the Old Republic or the Thrawn trilogy, or anything else. They aren't better or worse as artistic works just because they are or aren't canon. And the same is true for Fire Emblem. Let's imagine that someone at IS comes up with a cool idea for a Three Houses sequel, but that it completely contradicts Three Hopes. Do we really believe that they'd let that stop them from making this new game that they were excited about and thought would sell well? Or do we think they'd go ahead and make it anyway and explain that Three Hopes was just a hypothetical what-if side story? Or likewise, if their idea does absolutely rely on some plot element from Three Hopes, do we believe that they wouldn't be quick to declare that Hopes is completely canonical? Canon mostly means "the version of the story that we're continuing to sell you going forward". And that can have some value to it. it's useful to know which version of The Hobbit has the best continuity with Lord of the Rings, for instance. But I generally think that it's a concept that fandoms as a whole tend to give far more importance than it actually deserves.

I did have Smash in the first section as well. My point wasn't "this is a new thing that they've started doing", but "this is an old thing that they've continued to do but ramped up". Same as I have both sections including Anna and the Gaiden/Echoes cameos.

Well, in addition to having children who are dargons, we also know that her humanoid form has the same features (pointed ears, green hair, extremely youthful appearance) as other Fire Emblem dragons do while in human form. We also know for sure that her bones look indistinguishable from dragon bones, and that a weapon made from said bones can be repaired with the same material that is used to repair other dragonbone weapons. Rhea also says at one point that she (Sothis) "changed her form to resemble that of a human", so (with caveats about Rhea being an unreliable witness), we also know that her humanoid form isn't her true/original form. None of this is entirely conclusive or definitive, but I think that on the balance of probabilities, I would say it's considerably more likely that she is a dragon than she isn't.