Minor character unappreciation thread

[Jotari]

20 minutes ago, Magenta Fantasies said:

Choose Your Legends isn’t a good metric for popularity. There are all sorts of reasons why some characters can place higher than others. Maybe people thought Gaius was a shoo-in for being added to Heroes, but Lon’qu and Donnell’s futures were less certain, so they voted more for the latter two. Henry is almost certainly more popular than Lon’qu or Donnell, but he’s also much more polarizing than them or Gaius. Lots of people like Henry, but I’ve met plenty of people who dislike him, myself included. As far as fan art, fan fiction, general observations in the fandom/just generally being talked about, etc. Gaius is definitely more popular than Lon’qu or Donnell, although those aren’t perfect metrics, either.

In fact, there are several characters who have placed weirdly high in CYL, such as Dorcas. Outside of the occasional poisoned mutton meme mention, does anyone talk about him? Even in 2017, that meme was fairly obscure and I don’t think the ad it originated from ever aired in Japan. I never saw this meme until a year or two ago, and I’ve been a Fire Emblem fan since 2009.

CYL is not a perfect assessment of popularity, but it is far more objective than any personal observations and the first CYL in particular is going to be a lot more indicative of popularity as that was before the release of Heroes itself which will obviously be influenced by Heroes as a game. Nonetheless, while a character who isn't popular might do well in CYL for memes or heroes related quirks, there's no reason to assume the contrary, that a genuinely popular character wouldn't do well in CYL. 

[Etrurian emperor]

On 4/26/2024 at 3:36 AM, Fire Emblem Fan said:

Another character I'm not fond of is Hapi. The only thing I think I like is her support, chemistry, and ending with Dimitri. Other than that, she's a character that doesn't really work. Her "sigh to summon monsters" gimmick is incredibly stupid and does not work in any way, shape, or form, in my opinion, and most of her supports are just plain not great. I'm more annoyed by her than anything.

I mentioned Hapi in the minor character appreciation thread and as such I must say....yeah your right. Her ''sigh to summon monsters'' gimmick IS stupid. It took me quite a while to look past that. 

[Samz707]

1 hour ago, Etrurian emperor said:

I mentioned Hapi in the minor character appreciation thread and as such I must say....yeah your right. Her ''sigh to summon monsters'' gimmick IS stupid. It took me quite a while to look past that. 

NGL I still wish they had it be a feature.

Being able to summon a neutral monster that attacks everyone on command would have been fun. 

[lenticular]

5 hours ago, Magenta Fantasies said:

As far as fan art, fan fiction, general observations in the fandom/just generally being talked about, etc. Gaius is definitely more popular than Lon’qu or Donnell, although those aren’t perfect metrics, either.

For fan fiction in particular, it's pretty simple to gauge popularity just by looking at tags on AO3. This is an imperfect metric for multiple reasons, of course, but it does give us some actual numbers to compare rather than just general hand-wavey personal experience. Looking at the counts for the different character tags, I see:

• Gaius: 630
• Henry: 637
• Donnel: 168
• Lon'qu: 629

And to add a few extra data points just for comparison:

• Basilio: 158
• Frederick: 1238
• Chrom: 4214

(Full disclosure: I see slightly different numbers when logged in compared to logged out, presumably due to some configuration setting that I have while logged in. The numbers I've shown are the logged out ones, though the logged in ones are not substantially different enough to change any overall conclusions.)

Pretty clearly, we see Gaius, Henry and Lon'qu at very comparable levels of popularity, with all of them being quite clearly ahead of the likes of Donnel and Basilio, but quite clearly behind Frederick. Again, this is a single metric and an imperfect one at that, and it's unwise to try to extrapolate it too far, but my limited conclusion here would be that there is no evidence from this dataset that Gaius is notably more popular among fan fiction writers than other male Awakening characters.

[Etrurian emperor]

2 hours ago, Samz707 said:

NGL I still wish they had it be a feature.

Being able to summon a neutral monster that attacks everyone on command would have been fun. 

I think hexes are another example of that. In supports Awakening and Fates claim hexes can do just about anything but in gameplay its just a minor debuff to the enemy. 

[Fire Emblem Fan]

On the topic of Choose Your Legends, I think the first two are genuinely good gauges to character popularity, for the most part. After that, though, is when it really became "vote for alts/get into the game" instead of "vote your favorite."