lenticular

Framme is somewhat similar to Vander in that her main appeal is in her unique early-game contribution. She is your only healer/staff user for chapters 2 through 5, which means she's going to see some use in most games. Yes, there are certain ways to approach the game that don't require a healer, but I think that most people are going to want to be fielding one at all times. I know I sure do. After chapter 5, you start to get other options: Jean's paralogue is between chapters 5 and 6, Micaiah is in chapter 6, then having other characters (eg Céline, Chloé) gain staff use on promotion with the first master seal being avialable in Anna's paralogue before chapter 7. Even when you do start getting other options, you might want to stick with Framme. Jean is a weak unit if you aren't planning to invest in him longterm. You may want to prioritise promoting different units. And so on. It's really not until the midgame that you start getting options that are clearly outclassing a low-investment Framme. If you're not planning to use her for the long haul, you might drop her when you do start getting the promoted staff users, or maybe when you pick up units like Ivy, Pandreo or Hortensia. This is a pretty good run though. Four chapters where she offers unique utility, and then another five or so where she's still likely to be somewhat useful. And unlike Vander, she has better potential for endgame. I've never actually tried using her beyond the midgame so usual disclaimers about theorycraft apply, but I can't imagine that she wouldn't turn out somewhat competently. Her growths are pretty decent across the board and her speed growth is great. Still, she is lumbered with being a growth unit in a game that is not kind to growth units, so she's unlikely to be remarkable. She also has a weak personal skill and probably the worst weapon proficiency in the game. There's very little about her that will really stand out past the early game. Even still, being very useful for a portion of the game and then kinda competent for the rest is enough for me to give her a 6/10.

My experience of Clanne is that I'm always looking forward to dropping him. In truth, though, a lot of that has nothing to do with his performance as a unit. My enthusiasm to get rid of him is more to do with his character; the avatar worship from him and his sister (can I get away with calling them the Fawn Brigade? probably not) instantly rubbed me the wrong way. So it's possible that I've never given him a fair shake. But with that said, due to his early recruitment, I have used him a little in both my playthroughs, and he never really gave me any reason to want to stick with him or delay benching him. His early game performance isn't particularly distinguished, and other units quickly come along that can do everything that he can and then some. My initial instinct is to give him a 3/10 but I think that part of that is down to my personal bias against him. I don't doubt the people who say he's turned out decently for them, so that's enough for me to nudge my rating up to a 4/10.

I think that the two things are inextricably linked, honestly. Why does Edelgard tend to provoke so many arguments? It's because people genuinely, and in good faith, interpret her character and story differently. When the arguments get out of hand, people tend to assume that the person they're arguing with is obstinately refusing to accept what's obviously true, but that is (generally) not what happens. Some people play the game and are left feeling that Edelgard is a hero, some that she's a villain, some that she's a victim. So the more interesting question is not which of these interpretations is the "correct" one, but "why is it that this game is open to so many interpretations?" And part of that is inevitable for any story. People will always interpret things differently based on their own personalities, opinions and life experiences. And then, beyond that Three Houses is playing with more themes that invite different interpretations. It's supposed to be morally grey. It's supposed to be about the non-reliability of the historical record, how the winners get to be the ones to write the history, about propaganda. With this in mind, I'd say that disagreement over how the story should be interpreted is a sign that it did something right. But then, as you say, there are also world building cheats, there are little inconsistencies, there are things that don't really make sense when you think about them too much. And for the most part, I think that players who are presented with these things will try to fill in the holes, rationalise and head-canon them to try to make sense of the story being told. But they will fill them in differently. And in so doing they will drive their interpretations even further apart. So, in short, yes, I would agree with you that there are shortcuts taken in the way that the story of Crimson Flower (and the game as a whole) is told, and I believe that these shortcuts are a part of the reason why Edelgard discussion so inevitably descends into the same arguments.

The whole "let's just walk into this really obvious trap" thing managed to at least make me roll my eyes. No, but see, you only thought you killed him. Just because he got cut to pieces by a magic sword and then had a building collapse on top of him didn't mean he was dead. Everyone knows that.

Mark is my least favourite. Mainly because I always find it incredibly creepy when Lyn turns to look directly out of the screen as if she's addressing me. It gives me a literal shudder every time it happens. Also, my habit for avatar characters is to always pick female and always use the default name. And while I can technically do that in BlaBla, having a woman called Mark is just kinda weird. My favourite: eh, Robin, I guess? Robin's fine. I'm not really a big fan of avatars as a concept, so the one who is closest to just being a predefined character is going to be my favourite.

Vander is another tricky one to rate. We're probably all going to agree on the basics: he's absolutely your best unit at the moment you get him, but if you stick with him, he'll end up as your worst unit in the endgame (excepting massive favouritism). That seems like a wholly uncontroversial thing to say. Any disagreement is going to be over how we translate that into a score. I think that there's a credible argument to be made that "win the game but you're not allowed to ever use Vander" is a harder challenge run than almost any other "win the game but you're not allowed to ever use $character" would be (except for Alear who is similarly weird to rate, and Seadall who is an easy dancer/10). In a game where a lot of characters feel pretty interchangable, Vander actually offers something that can't be replicated by anyone else. If you want an early-game tank and panic button, you use Vander. I'll also add that being good for a handful of chapters and then terrible for all other chapters is not actually worse being good for a handful of chapters and then unavailable in other chapters. The worst case for a bad unit is that you don't use them. The best case is that you deploy them as a warm body and they manage to take a hit or be involved in a trade chain or something like that. We should be grading him based on his best possible use case of getting swiftly dropped, and not on a hypothetical case of actually trying to stick with him until end-game. Snowfire's point is also a good one, about it not being detrimental for him to steal xp if you're planning to drop all the the Elyos and Firene units anyway. And I'll go a step further and say that he's still great if you're just trying to train up a couple of early units and drop the rest. You can use him to easily weaken enemies to set up kills for the units that you're funneling xp onto, leaving them better off than if you use a more balanced playstyle trying to use all units equally. I have no idea how best to translate all of this into a score out of 10. I'm not sure it's even meaningful to try, since he really isn't competing with other units. Nobody else can do what he does, but he can't do what everyone else does. I'm going to come down on the ultimate fence-sitter's rating of 5/10, though I won't criticise anyone else for rating either way higher or way lower than that.

Malledus is the player character in the same way that Judith is the main protagonist of Three Houses because she has the Lord class. Which is to say: not at all. Not all games in the series use the same conventions. Some games use the idea that the player is the tactician, but others don't. Soren is another one who is pretty clearly not supposed to represent the player.

You made me curious enough to look up my own stats for this, for my considerably less impressive (but still pretty impressive) 38 perfect games. Technically my fastest completions were three games by Freebird Games (A Bird Story, Finding Paradise, Impostor Factory) since they all have exactly one achievement, awarded for completing the game, so they all clock in at exactly 0 minutes between my first and last achievement. If you don't include them, my fastest game is A Kiss For The Petals - Remembering How We Met, an extremely meh visual novel, which took me 1 hour and 9 minutes between the first and last achievement. My longest duration game was Stardew Valley, which lasted 2473 days between first and last achievements. Which is over 50,000 times as long as A Kiss For The Petals - Remembering How We Met. My game with most potential to break my record, though, is Braid, which I played in 2010 and got all but one achievement. If I ever decide to pick up that last one, then it'll be close to 5,000 days. Anyway, good job on breaking three digits. It's not exactly the most meaningful achievement in the history of the world, but it's still a cool one. Congrats!

First off, I'm going to be refering to Alear as "she" here, just because that's the version that I played, but all comments apply just as well to male Alear too. Of all the FE games with selectable protgaonist gender, this is probably the one where it makes the least gameplay difference. Unless you count Mark. Secondly, my comments are based on having played through the game once on Hard/Classic, and then playing through about half the game on Maddening/Classic before getting distracted and wandering off. So my comments are based on a combination of Hard and Maddening experience, but somewhat more weighted to Hard. Protagonist units are always weird to rank because of the forced deployment. Do you interpret it as a positive, saying that there's no opportunity cost to fielding them? Or as a negative, saying they take up a deployment slot that could potentially be used by someone else? Or do you pretend that they don't have forced deployment and try to judge whether you'd use them if you didn't have to? I think the last approach is probably the most useful, and I'll answer the question with a big fat "maybe". Alear's biggest problem is that she is a growth unit in a game that isn't kind to growth units. Early game recruits get you through the early game but are then largely outclassed by the prepromotes that you pick up in the mid game. You can absolutely bring some of your early-game units with you to the end of the game, but it requires a little bit of favouritism. If you try to spread all your experience and resources equally among a full team of early-game units then they will all end up pretty underwhelming. So does Alear offer enough to be one of the few units that you choose to invest in? (Or would she do so if you had the choice to drop her?) Kind of. In terms of stats, she's nothing particularly special. Her bases are low, as befits a level 1 unit, and while her bases are decent, they certainly aren't spectacular. So she's not really standing out on that front. However, as protagonist, she gets a bunch of unique special tools that help her stand above the hoi polloi: Access to the Dragon Child/Divine Dragon class line. Battle access to the convoy. Use of the swords Libération and Wille Glanz. Supports with every other unit, and eventual access to a 💍 support. A really good personal skill in a game with lots of terrible personal skills. The whole thirteenth Emblem thing. All of these things at least have the potential to be useful. I didn't get much value out of the end-game tools (Wille Glanz, the 💍 support, and the 13th Emblem) because, on Hard at least, clearing all the paralogues overlevels your army so much that the end game is trivial and extra power at that point is meaningless. I'm also not a big fan of the "use your Emblems more often" flavour of Libération and the Divine Dragon class skill, since they don't tend to mesh well with how I use Emblems. I tend to save them for either the times when I really need them, or when I know I'm going to have a recharge spot coming up soo. So these abilities just didn't feel useful to me. I can easily see them being better for people who use their Emblems differently, though. Divine Dragon is a fairly underwhelming combat class, but the dragon typing does offer some interesting options for using Emblems. Byleth and Corrin are obvious choices here, but they're also both strong Emblems that other units are going to want to have as well. Convoy access is always handy, and is particularly strong if you turn Alear into a staff user. In my Maddening run, I had her as a Martial Master, which was a bit of a meme, but quite fun and effective. A less memey version would be to go for Griffin Knight or Royal Knight, or just to pair her with Micaiah. Her personal skill is also really strong, and can surprisingly often make the difference between being able to get a kill and not. Given that most of the personal skills on offer in this game struggle to even achieve mediocrity, having one that is actually legitimately good makes it really stand out. I don't think that Alear is going to be making use of all of these different tools in very many games, but the vast majority of games are going to be able to get at least something out of some of them. Which ones will vary from player to player and from game to game, but there'll probably be something there. All of this means that, even if she weren't force-deployed, Alear would still be a decent choice for favouritism among the early game scrub squad, though not an overwhelming one. I really don't feel like I know the game well enough to provide meaningful ratings out of ten, but that's what we're here for so let's somewhat arbitrarily say 7/10.

I've no opinions on them, since I've not seen any of them. I suppose that it's somewhat telling that I've never felt any particular desire or compulsion to seek them out, which is at least partly because they didn't really catch my interest at all. But mostly it's just because I hate going to the cinema and have no interest in paying for Disney+. Agreed. I think it's a good example of a plot twist for the sake of a plot twist turning out badly. It's unpredictable, certainly, but in the worst sort of way, adding nothing of value to either the story or the gameplay. Meanwhile, I'd characterise the Edelgard twist as being good in story but bad in gameplay, and the Emblems twist as being meh in story and mixed in gameplay (with both advantages and disadvantages). The Kaze twist is pretty clearly the worst of the three. I don't think I've ever seen or heard anyone saying that they enjoyed it.

I'm not really a fan of the gameplay implications of that particular twist. I don't mind it too much, since it didn't hit me personally, but I've been very turned off by somewhat similar situations in Fates and Engage. Now, obviously, not everyone is going to have the same experiences as me here. It's going to vary a lot from player to player. How much an individual's game is personally impacted will effect how they feel about it, for sure. And probably also the temperament of the player and whether they're more of a planner (which I definitely am) or whether they're the sort of person who likes to feel that they're constantly having to adapt to new circumstances (which I typically am not). I guess that my point is that when you introduce any sort of twist into a video game, the stakes are even higher than doing so in other media. You have a chance to get it wrong in the story and to get it wrong in the gameplay. Or not even "get it wrong", necessarily. People have different tastes. No matter how well you execute a twist, it's still going to alienate, disappoint, or turn off some people. And when you're operating on two different axes, that means you're probably going to be losing more of your audience than when you only have to worry about how it's playing out in the story.

It was Toshiyuki Kusakihara talking about Three Houses, and specifically about It's from this interview as discussed in this thread. Personally, I think that I would generally lean further into predictability for video game stories than stories in other media, because the story typically has to serve the gameplay as well as standing on its own merit. It's always frustrating in games to land in a situation where you screw yourself over because you weren't able to see something coming, so having plot twists with gameplay ramifications seems like something that has potential to alienate players.

I'd say it's a difference of degree, not a difference of kind. There's a whole continuum of familiarity, with "rewatching exactly the same thing" falling at one end of it. Consider: Rewatching a movie I've seen before. Rewatching a movie, except I've only seen it on VHS and now I'm watching it on blu-ray. Rewatching a movie, except I've only seen it in black and white on VHS, and now I'm watching it in a cinema. Listening to the audiobook of a book that I've only ever read in print before. Watching a different production of a play that I've seen before. Watching a movie adaptation of a play I've seen before. Watching a TV show adaptation of a book that I've seen before. Reading a book that is a retelling or reimagining of a story I've read before. Watching a TV show that is a spiritual successor to one I've seen before. Playing a video game series that reuses many of the same tropes in all its entries. Reading a book that is heavily inspired by three other books, all of which I've read. Watching a science fiction TV show that leans heavily on the tropes of the genre. Watching a movie that uses storytelling techniques honed over thousands of years of literary tradition. There's no single obvious breakpoint between the two extremes.

I'm going to say that yes, a story can still be interesting even if it's entirely predictable. Or possibly "interesting" isn't the right word here. A story can still have merit? Still be worth engaging with? Or let's frame it the other way: being entirely predictable at every stage does not make a story worthless. My logic here is based on rereading/rewatching/replaying favourite stories. Let's say I decide to rewatch The Princess Bride. It's a personal favourite of mine and I have lost count of the number of times that I have seen it. Absolutely nothing that happens in it would be even a little bit surprising. But I would still enjoy it. (Aside: The Princess Bride is also a good example of a story that literally tells you what's going to happen before it happens, by way of its framing story with the boy and his grandfather.) If I'm still able to enjoy a story when I know it inside-out, then it's obviously not just the surprise and unpredictability that I'm enjoying. It's fun to get swept up into another world, to watch delightfully over-choreographed sword fights, to hear the way the actors deliver their lines, to cheer for the heroes and boo the villains (and to boo the hero that one time too), to listen to the score, and so on and so forth. And yes, sometimes there's even value in predictability and familiarity. Sometimes, we're just in the mood for something tropey and cliched and cheesy. Sometimes I want a story that's full of twists and turns that will keep me on my toes and make me think, but sometimes I want something where I can just turn my brain off and go along for a ride. I think that the vast majority of people like to have a mixture of new and familiar experiences. The exact balance between the two varies a lot from person to person, but I don't think I've ever met anyone who falls completely at either end of the spectrum. And it's the same for stories too. Some people are going to value unpredictability more than others, and are going to favour certain stories as a result, but everyone is going to get some value out of both unpredictability and familiarity. Not going to go in depth here since I don't want to go off-topic, but it makes me happy that at least one person was familiar with each of these, and I agree with both of these takes.

I've never heard of Byzantium being the inspiration for Adrestia before, nor have I ever thought about it that way myself. I'd be interested to see what it is that draws you in that direction. But again, my core point isn't that no standing armies should exist; it's that no large standing armies should exist. Small forces like the Knights of Seiros, yes. Big armies that can conduct continent-spanning wars, no. Edit: In thinking about this more, I'm actually going to say that this scene is illustrative of the problems with poorly thought through scenes. I would guess that, in making the game, the writers and developers didn't give too much thought to where the troops that Edelgard was addressing came from. They likely just thought that it was a powerful scene that looked cool. But, ultimately, when you really examine it, it doesn't make that much sense. There are good reasons to suppose that it isn't a standing army (my point), but also good reasons to suppose that it isn't a conscript army (your point) so... what gives? Different people are going to see that scene and interpret it differently, based on what they personally find least jarring. And then that interpretation is going to have consequences on how they interpret the rest of the story. And while it isn't a bad thing for a story to be open to multiple interpretations, it probably isn't desirable if that is born from people struggling to make sense of a scene that doesn't really make sense on its own.

Well, let that be a lesson to me, then, not to use examples from works I'm not too familiar with. I read LotR decades ago, and kept falling asleep in The Two Towers when I tried watching the movies. It is difficult to come up with good examples though, because there are so few works that are universally known. And even when people think they know them, a portion of them are actually misremembering. I'd be able to talk more usefully about the books that I read last month, but then probably nobody else would know what I was talking about. (To Say Nothing of the Dog had a great ending. But I didn't like Sourcery's ending at all. And while Imogen Obviously's ending was entirely predictable, it was the right sort of predictable. All of which is probably meaningless to most if not all the people reading this.) But yeah, I really should be more careful with the examples I choose. I'm not a big fan of nor an expert on Sherlock Holmes, but from memory, both Five Orange Pips and Scandal In Bohemia both ended with exposition on what actually happened though, right? Yes, the expectations are subverted slightly by having the great detective fail to solve the crime, but they're also met by having an ending that fully explains the mystery. Which I think is the more important part. Mystery readers typically want to understand the mystery, and having the detective solve the crime is a convenient way to reach that point, but not the only one. You can only subvert expectations so much before a story just stops working.

I see them more as a small elite force than a large standing army. I'm not saying that no professional soldiers would exist, just that they would be a small minority of an overall fighting force. Consider that, even pre-war, the Knights of Seiros were sufficiently spread thin that they needed to use Academy students to help defend Derdriu in the Shamir/Alois paralogue. (Which also implies that the Alliance doesn't have much/anything in the way of a standing army.)

I think that, as a general rule, stories need a balance of the predictable and the unexpected. Too much predictable and the story is dull. Too much unexpected and it's jarring or nonsensical. Predictable endings, by and large, are a good thing. If I read a romance novel, it is very predictable that the protagonist and the love interest are going to get together at the end, but I still want that to happen. It would be very unpredictable for a wizard to appear out of nowhere, turn the protagonist into a mouse and the love interest into an owl and then the owl eats the mouse. But that would be a horrible ending. It's predictable that Luke blows up the Death Star. It's predictable that Frodo destroys the One Ring. And so on and so forth. Endings need to make sense and be consistent with the rest of the story being told. And they also need to conform to the standards of the genre, or they're just going to disappoint people. If something starts off looking like a regency romance but it ends up as a science fiction thriller, then most people are going to hate it. The people who like regency romance don't get the endings they hoped for, and the science fiction fans got bored at the start and stopped reading/watching/playing before the subversion happened. Which isn't to say that it's impossible to have good stories with twist endings or good stories that subvert expectations. But they're tricky and much easier to do badly than to do well. Even if some sort of twist is desirable or expected, then it still has to operate within the confines of genre expectation and internal story logic. Mystery stories are known for their twist endings, but nobody wants to read a book that ends with Sherlock Holmes deciding that there just isn't enough evidence and the crime will have to remain unsolved. It would be an unexpected surprise ending, but it would also suck. So, generally speaking, I think it is good to know in advance more or less where a story is going to end up. The unexpected should come in how we get there. What are the difficulties that the protagonists face along the way to the final goal, and how do they overcome these difficulties? That's where a lot of the interest comes from, and that's what makes the predictable ending feel satisfying and earned.

I prefer a "come as you are" approach to rules for this sort of thing, because having more stringent rules applies a false veneer of objectivity that isn't really warranted. We're mostly going to be going off our own experiences combined with a bit of theorycrafting. I would feel disingenuous about contributing to a thread that was supposed to be more objective than that. I also like letting people talk about their own play-style and own experience because it gives a better impression of how people are actually playing the game, and it can also be enlightening sometimes to see how these different play-styles can result in different experiences of different units. If everyone who savescums/rng-manips to get certain bond rings rates a given unit highly and everyone who doesn't gives them a low rating, then that tells us something useful and interesting that we'd miss if we were enforcing a standardised set of rating criteria.

Her soldiers are her citizens. Having a large standing army of professional soldiers wasn't really a thing in pre-modern times. If we assume that Adrestian society is similar to the medieval European society it's based on, most of those soldiers are probably farmers who have been drafted for this war. She's also not just saying that the current batch of Church leadership is corrupt and needs to be replaced. She's saying that the leaders of the Church have always been corrupt, that the Church is an inherently corrupt institution that needs to be torn down. I'm not sure that there is a meaningful difference here between the Church and the faith. If you want to imagine that there is, and that Fódlan has a great reformer, Marcia Luthier, who wants to protest against the Church while retaining the faith, then I have no problem with Edelgard going along with that instead. My assumption -- and I haven't examined this one, so if you want to argue that it's unjustified then please go ahead -- is that Edelgard is doing all the stuff with dissolving the Church alongside the war. So I don't view it as an either/or thing so much as a one/both thing. I find it hard to imagine that Edelgard is just letting all the existing priests and churches carry on as before, stirring up support and sympathy for the nation's war enemies. At best, I can see some sort of Protestant Reformed Church of Sothis taking the place of the previous Church of Seiros and anyone who refused to convert being put into internment camps. She might do. But then again, she might not. There really isn't aa precedent for a territory the size of Adrestia declaring independence from the Church, so we can't really appeal to past events. We can each say what we think is most likely, but none of us really know. And if she does put out a call to arms, maybe it's accepted and maybe it isn't. We don't know. There's reasonable arguments to be made on either side. I certainly think that it is less likely that the Alliance would join the war on the Church's side if Claude viewed Rhea as the aggressor, but how much less likely? Enough to make a difference? I don't know. You don't know either. And importantly, neither does Edelgard.

She'd give exactly the same reasoning that she did in the prime timeline except without adding "so we're going to war" at the end. She absolutely did just disassemble one of the core foundations, etc. and her people were entirely on board with it. OK, sure, I can get behind that as a reasonable interpretation. But this then goes back to the idea that Edelgard is actually being manipulated. If her primary reason for choosing war over other options is that it's what the Agarthans would allow, then she's little more than a puppet ruler. What on earth are you talking about?

The way I tend to look at it, the big question is, what would have happened if Edelgard had attempted to achieve her goals peacefully? We'll never know the answer to this, of course, but it seems like something we could reasonably speculate on. I'm imagining that instead of declaring war, she just announced the complete dissolution of the Church of Seiros in Adrestia. All church buildings and land would be seized, all church officials would be given the choice between exile and conversion. Meanwhile, she'd build a new secular school in Enbarr as an alternative to Garreg Mach, she'd implement a meritocratic system of government, and so on. And for good measure, let's also imagine that she has a system of free immigration so that anyone from Faerghus or Leicester who wants out of the church-run system could do so. Would this work? Well, maybe. Maybe not. She has the political authority to make these sweeping changes and she has the will of the people behind her. That's a really good start. In terms of internal Adrestian issues, she has as good a chance of making things stick as she ever could, I'd say. The stickier issue would be predicting how Rhea would react. Would she allow it, or would she be willing to declare war to reestablish Church control? Who knows? Both in- and out-of-universe, that's impossible to predict for sure. But let's say it did go to war, would Adrestia be better or worse off? On the one hand, they'd lose the advantages of being able to launch a surprise war and pick the initial engagements (not that this turned out to be particularly important in the prime timeline, where the war quickly descended to quagmire and deadlock). On the other hand, there's a much lower chance that they'd have to fight the Kingdom and (especially) the Alliance this way. It would be harder for Rhea to bring allies on board for an offensive war than a defensive one. So, overall, purely in terms of success chance, there are arguments to be made either way. I don't think it's clear and obvious that either approach has vastly more chance of succeeding than the other. Because, let's remember, the military approach that she chooses only succeeds in one route out of four, and then only because of something (Byleth's allegiance) that she had deemed highly unlikely and not planned for. And even with the military success, it's still up in the air whether that can translate into the longterm societal reforms that she's hoping for. So, overall, what I see is a character who, when faced with two possible approaches to achieve her goals, one of which involves starting a continent-spanning war and one of which doesn't, chooses the former.

One of her notes in the advice box says: This absolutely does not make a lick of sense. Stars that are that far away are not bright enough to be visible to the naked eye, let alone to become the stuff of legend. For comparison, the real-life inspiration for the Blue Sea Star is Sirius, which is less than 9 light years away. You could maybe conceivably get something of the right sort of brightness and distance if you had a quasar as a neighbouring galaxy, but this a pretty big stretch to begin with, and for it to make sense, you've got to assume that there are astronomers out there who are capable of correctly calculating the distance, but not capable of realising it wasn't a star at all, which I don't buy for a second. Furthermore, we know (from the Abyss library) that telescopes were banned by the church, and the best telescopes anyone in Fódlan had managed to come up with used two lenses from glasses. The only people who could possibly be making astronomical readings that sophisticated are the Agarthans. In short, they are feeding her lies about Sothis mythology, and she is eating it up entirely uncritically because it reinforces her existing beliefs. Is this what I'm supposed to take away from that single throwaway line of text? Almost certainly not. Was it probably just written by a writer with a poor grasp of astronomy who thought that saying millions of years sounded cool? I suspect so. And yet, did it instantly jump out at me, science nerd that I am, as something that didn't make sense at face value but needed to be interpreted? Why yes, yes it did.

I've long thought that Edelgard is basically just a naive dupe who has been gaslit to hell and back by the Agarthans. There are just too many aspects of what she says and does that don't make sense to me otherwise. For instance: The general populace of Adrestia has sufficient loyalty to her to follow her to war against the church, but she never considers just declaring independence from the church as an alternative to war. She says that she is super into the idea of meritocracy, but then she appoints all her school friends to high offices of state. She, as the Flame Emperor, somehow commands Kostas to kill Edelgard without realising that this is a bad idea? She credulously accepts anything she is told that backs up her position, from bad information about Rhea's character to bad science about the Blue Sea Star. I don't think that this is what the writers intended for me to think, but it's how it's pretty much always come across to me. And happily, unlike certain other characters in Fire Emblem history who have had their own idiot ball moments, she does actually feel justified. It's almost impossible to believe that anyone could stand the amount of abuse that she did at the age that she did without being messed up in the head in at least some way. And if her particular psychosis has made her believe everything that the Agarthans are feeding her, then I find that believable. (My understanding is that this is not a popular opinion, and that is fine. There are always multiple ways to interpret any work; I don't claim that mine is the only valid interpretation.)

I'll also note that, since FE started putting MU/avatar characters in their games, the only game that hasn't had one is SoV, which also has a split route with different armies. If they decided that it wouldn't work for that game, I can only imagine they'd reach the same conclusion for RD and its even larger number of separate armies. (I am also a little sad that the success of MU as a concept probably means that we're less likely to get games with interesting and experimental structures in the future.)