lenticular

Evolving the Golden Dagger and having it turn into something that its previous wielder would never be able to use was a particular highlight of the system for me.

"My favourite forging system is the one from Sacred Stones." But no. Seriously, it's not so much that I don't like customisation as that I don't like min-maxing. Stacking flaws or maluses into dump stats in order to get the one stat that I actually care about through the roof has always been deeply unsatisfying to me. Like, if I'm making a lance for a general with awful speed, then I don't care about weight because everything is doubling me anyway. So I put as many points into added weight as I'm allowed and get a weapon with great might and hit at no cost. That's the sort of thing that I don't enjoy.

If I had to pick one system, I think I'd go with the Tellius system. Being limited to one forge per chapter gave it some amount of strategical thinking. Do I want to make a forge for a unit who's lagging behind and needs to catch up, or do I make one for my best unit to make them even better? The randomness of the coin system in Radiant Dawn also added to that since maybe if you got a particularly lucky forge you might want to try to preserve the weapon instead of carrying on with your initial plan for it (acquiring coins in the first place was a pain, though). I also liked that you could only forge weapons you were buying from new, partly because it prevented imbalance like forged wing spears and partly because it just made more sense from a storytelling and verisimilitude perspective. Finally, I liked being able to pick the colour of my new weapon. Yeah, it was daft as hell, but I want my pink battleaxes back. Shadow Dragon and Awakening (and presumably New Mystery too though I've never played that) had a system that was comparable to the Tellius sytem but not as good. Fates is my personal least favourite system because I have no interest in touching any of the online/social features of My Castle which means that any systems that interacted with them were no fun for me. The Shadows of Valentia incarnation really suffered from not giving the player enough information, especially when "evolving" into a different weapon type; it was difficult to know whether this was worth it without looking everything up outside of the game. The system in Three Houses is largely inconsequential, with most upgrades being small enough that you won't really notice them but also cheap enough that you don't notice the cost either so there are very few actual interesting decisions to make around it. My prefered solution would just be to disallow worsening any attribute entirely. I don't think you really lose anything of value by doing so and it lowers the chance of fat-finger errors and of "add weight to earn wexp faster" style misinformation. The balancing of bonuses and maluses like you describe could potentially work, btu that sort of system usually leads to min-maxing in a way that I just don't find very fun.

Yeah, but they were all taking transfusions directly from Rhea, no? My assumption is that you can get the crest of Seiros via transfusion directly from Seiros but not from some random human who happens to carry it.

If that were possible, then there probably wouldn't have been any need for the experiments that were done on Edelgard, her sinblings, Lysithea, etc. I assume that it only owrked on Jeralt (and the first Hresvelg emperor, etc.) because it was coming directly from Rhea/Seiros and hadn't been "diluted" by intervening human blood. Pretty much everything in the game that covers the timeline of the distant past comes from extremely unreliable sources, mind. And it would be very much in character for Rhea to exaggerate the timescales involved to try to portray a heroic age with larger than life characters who lived for centuries.

Not in between paralogues/auxiliary battles, though.

I think it's a bit of a stretch to read too much into the writing on the magic symbol. We just don't know enough (read: anything) about the symbol and its origin to be able to use it as evidence for grand sweeping statements about character morality. My take on Sothis is that she is definitely numinous. I can easily imagine her as a kami, for instance, or a member of a polytheistic pantheon. And we do know from some of Petra's comments that Brigid's religion is still much more along those lines, so it's not much of a stretch to imagine that Fódlan's religion prior to the Church of Seiros might have looked similar as well. To refer to Sothis as a goddess is entirely reasonable; to refer to her as the goddess is considerably less so; to credit her as a creator figure is outright propaganda. But I find this fascinating because of real-world parallels in how monotheism can arise by the elevation of a single deity to be the supreme deity and then to start denying the existence of all other divinity.

Some of these just seem as if you're setting yourself up for annoyance. It's certainly possible to have characters work through weapon skill weaknesses and to have them pick up mastery skills from master classes, but doing so requires altogether more grinding/busywork/engaging with the monastery than I'd have thought you'd be looking for. This is especially the case for (put behind a spoiler since I don't know if you know the various Azure Moon specific things nor if you care about potential spoilers): Seminars in this game annoy me. Partly the fact that they're completely rubbish, but mostly that the game won't let you choose who attends without doing some aggressively annoying micromanagement of goals.

Hypothetically speaking, if I wanted to use Defiant Defense, I wouldn't have it as something I kept active at all times, but as a fallback for when I fell to low health. I can imagine circumstances where that might allow the tank to survive an extra hit or two compared to what they would without it. It's still pretty terrible and not at all worth the effort of getting it, but maybe that's enough to make it a 1/10 rather than a 0/10? Defiant Res, on the other hand, is even harder to justify. Maybe against all the mages in the final chapter of AM? But that's a real stretch. Seal skills also have the downside that if for some reason you do decide that you need them, they can mostly be replicated with either a bow combat art or a dark magic spell. Which, admitedly, you have to think ahead and be sure to recruit the right person for that but if I knew in advance that I was going to want to debuff an enemy's res for some reason (I have no idea why) and my options were "master Dark Knight" or "recruit Hanneman" then I know which I'm going to do.

Yes. Lorenz's paralogue ("Land of the Golden Deer") is a good example. To quote Lorenz himself, "while the Alliance may appear to be at peace, the reality is that internal conflict is a routine matter". I don't believe there's any actual full-blown wars (prior to the big one), but there are definitely a lot of smaller scale conflicts, skirmishes and feuds. Best of luck with that! Trying it on Maddening is one step further than I was willing to go. I'm interested to hear how you get on.

So, I may be wrong here, and please correct me if I'm grossly misrepresenting your opinion, but I think that part of the issue here is the question: why do we optimise? Is optimisation a means to an end or is it an end in itself? I think that in discussion, we tend to phrase things as if optimisation is a means to end. "If I perform exactly these tutoring sessions then that will get this character to this skill level by this chapter which will let them learn this skill which will let them more easily kill this boss" and so on. But I also think that this can often be a bit of a convenient fiction. A lot of the time we don't really care about how easily we can kill the boss. We're actually just optimising because it can be fun to optimise things. Even things that are completely pointless. Especially things that are completely pointless. I actually think that this is one of the biggest tensions within Fire Emblem as a whole. It is fun to build people up to be superhuman demigods who can solo endgame maps without breaking a sweat; it isn't all that much fun to actually have those superhuman demigods. At least, not for very long. It can be fun to break out the maniacal laugh and declare "cower before me, you puny fools!" at your console when you finally bring your unstoppable build online, but that fun only really lasts for about one full map, after which it just becomes a monotous slog of "oh look, Robin killed everyone again, must be thursday". If we optimise the strategic and logistical parts of the game then we often end up optimising the fun out of the tactical parts of the game. Still, we persist in optimising these games to within an inch of their lives, even when we don't actually care about the end result, even when the end result can actually make the game less fun. Why do we do that? Well, I think there's two main reasons. One is that, sometimes we just can't help ourselves. We get into the mindset where we focus on beating the game rather than on playing the game. We make it all about the destination and forget about the journey. This is, frankly, daft, but it's an easy trap to fall into. I know that I fall into it sometimes, no matter how much I try not to. But the other reason -- which I touched on before -- is, I think, a better one: oftentimes we will try to optimise the game because optimising is fun. It's fun to look through all of the different skills/abilities that you can put onto a character and dream of all the different synergies that they might have with each other. I suspect many of us had a moment at some point in the past when we realised "wait, what if I put Vantage and Wrath onto the same person?" (and possibly then got destroyed by an enemy archer, and had another eureka moment of "but what if I give them a hand axe?"). It's fun to figure out what works and what doesn't. It can fun to micro-optimise every single turn to squeeze out as much xp as possible even when it would be far easier to just kill the boss straight away instead. So, when we look at Three Houses and compare manual tutoring with auto-tutoring and we note that manual tutoring is the optimal choice, I have to ask, what are we optimising for and why are we doing it? If the idea is that we are optimising as a means to an end, because we desire the results of the optimisation, then I would dispute that. The actual results of the optimisation are largely (though I admit not entirely) inconsequential. To anyone who doesn't enjoy tutoring but is worried that avoiding it would unduly weaken their characters, I would reassure them that just isn't the case. But that's not the only reason why people optimise. I do have a lot more sympathy with the position of "I want to optimise because I enjoy doing so, but I don't like this particular form of optimisation". Because I know that in games if I try to ignore one feature but then optimise everything else, then I often have that nagging feeling in the back of my head of "yes, but I could be doing more". And sometimes I manage to look past that, but sometimes I find it hard to. In Three Houses, for instance, I dislike tea time so I've managed to basically pretend that it doesn't exist. I play the game as if it weren't there at all, and I don't have a problem with that. However, in Fates, I hated the social aspects to My Castle and didn't use them at all, but that also left me feeling less willing to engage with the rest of the game. I was always left with the feeling that I was losing out by not having a chef's hat or an arena shield, or enough of whatever ore I needed, or whatever else was bugging me at the time. Did I actually need these things? No. Was the game perfectly playable without them? Yes. Did the lack of them still detract from my enjoyment of the game out of proportion with how much I would have gained if I had them? Yes. So, yeah, I guess I do sort of get it. Even as I also sort of don't get it? This has got long and rambling and is basically just me thinking aloud, but I hope that at least someone will find it a little useful or interesting.

If you're talking about design intent, then I can also easily say that if they weren't intending for tutoring to be skippable then they wouldn't have included the auto-tutor option. The option exists so that people can use it. Would they prefer that people engage with all the systems that they built? Absolutely. Did they also recognise that not everyone would want to do so and therefore added an option to skip it? Again, yes. Let me put it this way: let's get back to basics. What do you think you will be missing out on if you just auto-tutor every week? How do you expect that you will have a worse experience in the rest of the game if you do so? I feel that we're talking past each other a little bit here, and hopefully pulling back to the fundamental issues will help prevent that.

That makes sense. I know that I've put people as adjutants to fortress knights when I want them to gain some quick class xp. However, for my personal play style, if I'm using a dedicated dodge tank (or any other build that can effectively solo the game), then as soon as I've reached that point then I'll rush through the rest of the game. I generally find the "I've already won but the game doesn't realise it yet" phase of games to be pretty boring, so I don't usually do my due diligence on the last few maps if I know I can easily solo them without thinking. That's a playstyle thing, though, and I know that other people prefer to get a chance to see their overpowered builds in action as much as possible, or to really squeeze out as much as possible to make them even stronger. Not my thing, but I wouldn't want to deprive anyone else of their epic victory laps. I don't know that I'd consider it excessive grinding, but it's certainly more than I do. On the subject of tea time, I want to add that I would personally never use a build that required dozens of tea times simply because I don't enjoy tea time. At all. I once made Ignatz my dancer and had tea with him two or three times to make sure he met the charm requirement, and even that much was miserable for me. Now, obviously, not everyone is going to have the same disdain for tea parties that I do and people who enjoy them should absolutely feel free to turn Ignatz into his suave and debonair best self, but I do think that any build that requires extensive engagement with otherwise completely optional parts of the game should come with a fairly big asterisk.

Not sure if you're aware, but you can just hold A through the entire thing to repeat the same instruction four times, which is slightly quicker and slightly less likely to give you RSI than button mashing through it each time. The only time you actually need to release and repress is when you get "praise" or "console/critique" choices. Not a huge improvement, I'll grant, but good to be aware of. Being able to split the tuition between multiple categories can occasionally be useful in the early game, if you're trying to chase multiple break points in time for a specific map. Like if you need to unlock a specific spell or combat art but also need to get to a certain rank in a different weapon for the class you want to go into. It's not something that comes up often, and I don't think the flexibility that it offers is really worth the added busywork, but it's not completely useless. I don't think it's fair to call it only technically optional. It is genuinely optional. Getting everyone to their needed weapon ranks wasn't even remotely an issue in my no-monastery run. There are other parts of the monastery that I'll concede are only technically optional but tutoring isn't one of them. Auto-tutoring is absolutely fine. Yes, you lose out a little by not doing it, but you also lose out a little by not doing skirmish battles in games where they're available, and I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone suggest that they're only technically optional. Yeah, I've never seen the appeal of in-universe tutorials. It can work, very occasionally, but most of the time I just find that the breaking of the fourth wall brings me out of the epxerience, while at the same time, putting the words of the tutorial into a character's voice makes them less clear and concise than they could otherwise have been. Huh. I've never noticed that. I'll have to look for it next time I play. Can confirm that it is a mock battle. I think it mentions in passing that it's "to hone your skills" or "further your training" or something like that, though it doesn't really dwell on it. But you can have people "die" in it and still be fine afterwards. Though, I think it's actually bugged and plays the "I'm dying" voice line rather than the "I'm retreating" one. (All of this paragraph is from memory, so take with a grain of salt.) One of my big issues with gambits is that I almost never even notice when the enemy actually has them up until I'm being hit with them. Which is the same problem I have with Fates. Too much stuff going on that's too easy to miss. At least (for my tastes) I can just rewind time in three Houses when I die due to stuff I didn't see. Yeah, I agree with this. Higher avoid rates makes the terrain actually be meaningful. Too low and it turns into something that I don't really actually care about as anything other than a micro-optimisation that won't actually make any real difference.

It depends. One big factor for me is how often I'm expected/allowed to switch out my party composition. If all of my characters level up even when I'm not using them, then I'll probably rotate people in and out a lot to keep things fresh. Or there are games where that doesn't apply but that give you new units regularly, meaning there's going to be a lot of turnover. In either of these situations, I much prefer to have generalists. It's far easier to switch people in and out if I'm not having to match up the incoming and outgoing roles perfectly. On the other hand, if I'm going to have a single party that stays the same over the course of the entire game, then it becomes much more tempting to train people up as specialists. It's usually going to be better to train one person as a dedicated healer and one as a dedicated damage dealer than to have two people who can do a little bit of both. Because it's a nice balance between giving the player enough options to be interesting but not enough to be overwhelming or tedious, I'd assume. Why would you even want that, though? Is there some sort of weird build that I don't know that relies on having both Apothecary and Oni Savage skills? Or is it just one of those things that you theoretically can't do even though you'd never actually want or need to?

I would definitely consider that to be grinding, yes. If that’s how you have fun playing then that’s great and fair play to you, but that wouldn’t be fun at all for me. And no, it also isn’t quick or convenient to master Warrior (or any other Advanced class) but even without any grinding, I find that I will actually get there. Even without any auxiliary battles or grinding or any other special consideration, I’ll pick up the mastery in time just by playing the game. Not fast, but I get there. With Master classes, I find that I don’t ever get there naturally. That’s the big difference for me.

The big difference is the timing. You certify into Warrior at level 20, but into Wyvern Lord at level 30. Even at a baseline, that means that you're getting the skill a full ten levels earlier. Given the choice between having my build work now or having my build work ten levels from now, I'll take now please. But it's actually worse than that. The time between levels 20 and 30 typically corresponds with the end of Part 1 and the start of Part 2, which is also the part of the game that has the densest concentration of battles because that's when most paralogues unlock. You have a lot more battles after hitting level 20 than after hitting level 30. I'm guessing that maybe you do a lot more auxiliary battles than I do? Personally, I find that if I don't use a knowledge gem, then I'll typically finish the game before my master classes have picked up their masteries, and if I do use one then I can finish up but only with maybe 3 or 4 levels left before the end of the game. If I want to get the mastery ability for master classes then I have to go out of my way to do so. If you're playing the game differently how I do then maybe you're picking them up sooner? If you do pick it up, then sure, why not use it? Well, provided that you have a build that is suited to it, which not all builds are. But again, I won't typically master a master tier class at all unless I go out of my way to do so. I'm genuinely curious: for people who are routinely picking up mastery skills for master classes, about what chapter are you tending to hit level 30, about what chapter do you finish mastering the class, and how many auxiliary battles are you doing along the way?

Those screenshots are all well and good, but all of that could just as well be achieved with Wrath instead of Defiant Crit. Sure, you don't get your guaranteed crit on player phase if you're using Wrath, but you also don't need it. Just go and stand near the enemy and let them attack you instead. If you're running an enemy-phase build (either with vantage or a dodge tank) then there's little difference between the two. Player phase builds are possible with Defiant Crit, of course, but there are other glass cannon builds that are a lot easier and quicker to set up (Vengeance builds, for instance, or Magic Bow Hunter's Volley). Ultimately, it comes down to this: are you playing NG+ or are you willing to do a lot of grinding? If yes to either, then Defiant Crit might be worth looking into. If not then it really isn't. At least, I don't think it is. The benefits it offers aren't enough to justify how awkward it is to pick it up.

I'm not opposed to new weapon types, but I'd prefer that they focus on making the existing weapon types feel more distinct. There just isn't that much to differentiate between swords, lances and axes in most Fire Emblem games other than a sliding scale of trading off might for weight and accuracy. In comparison, gauntlets in Three Houses or Shuriken in Fates both feel far more distinct with their own unique niche, and I'd rather something like that for the main weapon types too.

You can use it with Vantage/Wrath, but there are other reliable ways to get to above 100% crit chance. There are killer weapons, crit rings, crit boosting battalions, weapon crit +10 skills, and so on. If you're runnign a Vantage/Wrath build, you should probably have set all of these up already so you can bring the build online much sooner. And sure, if you get Defiant Crit then it might let you swap some of those out for something else, but that's realistically only going to be a marginal improvement over what you already had. Marginal improvements that you only get in the very late game (if at all) aren't something that I'm ever going to get excited about.

Interestingly, I've heard that exact same criticism used against Pokémon and the features that are removed there. Stuff like pokémon following you in the overworld, mega evolutions, ride pokémon, the national pokédex, etc. have all been removed. And how any individual feels about their removal is going to depend on how much they liked those features. Personally, I liked ride pokémon so I see removing that as a retrograde step, but I didn't like mega evolutions or the national pokédex so I see removing them as removing clutter. Ask someone else and you'll get a different opinion. It's the same with Fire Emblem. I didn't care for Dragon Veins or the Maid and Butler classes, so I'm personally glad they didn't show up in Three Houses. I did quite like the Malig Knight, though, and think that would have been nice to have. But that's just me. I'm also generally cautious around any claims that something or other is popular with fans in general. I know what I like, I've a pretty good idea of what my friends like and what people on this forum like, and a moderate idea of what the wider English-language online Fire Emblem fandom likes, but even that is only scratching the surface of the games' player base. I've no idea what's popular in Japan or Brazil or Korea or Germany. I've no idea what's popular with the millions of people who buy and play the game but then never once talk about it online. But the game companies often do. They have community managers and market research and data analytics and all that sort of stuff. That's not to say that they know everything about what's popular and what's not, but they have a better idea than we do.

I don't think that going full branching paths could ever really work well in a Fire Emblem game. And not just because of things like voice acting and animated cut scenes and the costs of producing them, etc. I also think that one of the joys of text adventures and interactive fiction is the ease with which you can replay them and explore the other options. The good ones at least always leave a sense of the road not taken and make me want to play again and try taking different decisions to see where they lead. This is great in a text adventure which lets me quickly and easily skip over stuff that I've already read, but I can't imagine it working for something like Fire Emblem. I can see three possible ways that could work. You could replay the whole game every time you want to try a single different decision, which would be the same problem that White Clouds has except magnified. Alternatively, the game could keep track of every node and branch that you've visited and let you restart from that point, but then you lose out on raising and customising your units up to that point, which is fairly core to Fire Emblem's identity. Finally, you could keep a whole lot of save files and use them to skip around navigate between different decisions, but that sounds incredibly fiddly and un-fun to me. Regardless, I just don't see it working. If not branching paths, though, then what would extra choices actually do? They could be meaningless non-choices that very quickly converge back into the same scene and don't matter at all, but after Three Houses, I'm not sure there's anyone clamouring for more of that. They could also be tied to something more along the lines of a morality scale or a faction alignment system. For instance, I can easily imagine a system whereby you don't pick a house at the start of the game, but instead have shifting alignment and loyalties based on your decisions in part one, which then reflects which house you are permanently alligned with for part 2. I'd personally enjoy something like that, but I can see problems with it as well: How would it work for people who weren't interested in engaging with the system at all? How does it deal with the potential for your best units leaving your group? And so on. Regardless, outside of a branching paths style of narative, I don't think that most other ways of handling narative choice would increase the requirement for voice acting by all that much. Probably by a little bit, for sure, but not to the extent that it would stop it from being practically viable. So I don't really think that the trade-off between voice acting and player choice really exists. I will say, though, that full voice acting is pretty important to me. It's not the be all and end all, but the voice acting in Shadows of Valentia and Three Houses made me enjoy both of them considerably more than I would have done otherwise, and I would be sad if it went away for future titles.

There's also Locktouch. Regardless, I would guess that Shove and its cousins are combat arts because a combat art slot is less valuable than a skill slot. I don't know about anyone else, but I find that I often have more than five skills that I'd like to bring if I could, but rarely feel the desire for more than three combat arts.

The game is weird. It doesn't force an explore on you for chapter 3, so it's still possible to skip the quest at that point. But then in chapter 4, it does give you a mandatory explore. Seemingly, this would be so that you can do the quest to investigate the Holy Tomb, except that the game doesn't care if you end you completely ignore that quest and end your exploration session early. What it does care about is the battalion guild quest. It won't let you end your exploration until you've finished that. Even though it was perfectly content to let you ignore it in chapter 3 by just resting every week. No, this doesn't make any sense to me either, but that's how it works. Or at least, that's how it seems to work as far as I can tell.

You absolutely can bench any character you aren't using, though. In fact, generally, it's more efficient to do so. There's an upper limit on how many characters can ever be deployed at once (12 on the field plus 3 adjutants) and unless you're grinding, there's also an upper limit on how much experience you can get, so it generally makes sense to divide that experience only between the characters you're actually going to be deploying. In this sense, Three Houses isn't any different from other Fire Emblem games. Yes, there is flexibility in how you train and class your units, meaning you never fall into situations of "welp, I like both Gatrie and Tauroneo but I only want one general so I guess one of them is getting benched" but that hasn't really been an issue in Fire Emblem since reclassing was introduced. I also think that you're overselling thigns a bit by referring to characters as blank slates. They all have distinct bases, growths, skill strengths and weaknesses, budding talents, learned spells, learned combat arts, personal ability, etc. which shapes who they are and makes everyone suited to some classes and not to others. Personally, I like this mainly because it keeps characters distinct but also because I am a masochist who enjoys making deliberately bad choices and running with them. In theory, I see where you're coming from here, but in practice, I don't think they really work out like that. A lot of answers make sense, but there are also a good number that just seem entirely too arbitrary. Yes, of course Catherine is going to want to talk about "Someone you look up to" or "Mighty weapons", but why is she interested in "Gardening mishaps" or "Classes you might enjoy"? I have no idea. And if, at the end of the tea time, she says "We should train together" then the correct responses are either to laugh or sip tea? But if you nod or chat instead, then that's wrong? I have no earthly clue how that even begins to make sense. This theme is definitely present, but I have to say it's not one that particularly worked for me. I think that this is because the main characters are also the main actors who are driving the war. If anyone has the ability to end the war peacefully, then it is our people. Edelgard especially is the single primary instigator of the war, so it is particularly jarring to have a song from her point of view about how terrible war is when it is literally all her fault. I think that the real question here is to what extent monastery activities should be mechanically tied to battle performance. Personally, I enjoy (most of) the monastery as an end in itself. I like walking around, interacting with the characters and learning more about the world. For me, that is an end unto itself. I find it fun, so I don't need the extra little carrot of making my people fight a little bit better. What I want, ideally, is to be able to engage in as much monastery content as I want without having to worry that I'm going to trivialise the battle content, or as little monastery content as I want without having to worry that I'm setting myself up to fail. With that said, though, I'm sure that for some people, the integration of the two systems is entirely the point. For some people, the monastery is all about the rewards that it grants and being able to see the fruits of one's labour, so to speak. And I'm not going to tell those people that they are wrong. And then there are still others who have no interest in the monastery at all and who would rather just skip the whole thing if they could, and I won't tell them that they're wrong either. And the challenge in the game's development was how to keep all these different types of people happy? How can you make it rewarding for people who want to be rewarded, skippable for those who want to skip, and a goal in and of itself for people who just want to take a break from their tactical combat game to play a walking sim for a while? It's a difficult challenge, but I think that IS mostly did a decent job of it, though with a few exceptions. (As an aside: Can you please try to use more paragraph breaks? It's difficult to read single unbroken paragraphs like the one I'm quoting from. Thank you.) That is a definition of "species", but not the only one. (For other definitions, see, for instance, the Wikipedia article for "species".) Even in the real world, the definition can break down in several cases, such as ring species or asexually reproducing species. As ever, nature remains more complicated than our ability to fit it to neat boxes and definitions, and we live in a world which isn't further complicated by Weird Magic Stuff. I don't think it's particularly meaningful to ask whether laguz and beorc are the same species and whether they suffer from racism or speciesism, when we can just say that they face bigotry and discrimination and leave it at that.