The next FE Lord: What would you want him or her to be like?

[Rehab]

I brought up the young/for kids distinction not to intentionally try to strawman you into a hole, but because I thought you seemed to be tying the "boring protagonists" thing to "these games have a young target demographic" thing, and my intention was to say that Fire Emblem's target is one that gets excited by the prospect of seeing some movement in the plot and characters, not turned-off. Shouldn't have put "for kids" in scare quotes, though, gave the wrong sort of meaning, sorry about that.

We are certainly not in disagreement that the stats quo has a lot of white and male to go around, and that there's often internal pressure in companies to not make things without them. I'm wondering if there's a fundamental disconnect, however, in our interpretations of "what does this mean for games (entries in Fire Emblem, particularly) that actually do have a go at using not-white, not-male protagonists?"

There's a lot of data to go around that suggests the majority of games with, for example, female leads, have tended to get proportionally smaller advertising budgets compared to those with male leads, regardless of the "size" of the release, and that while those games have indeed tended to make less money proportionally than games with male leads, they also tend to face tons of discouragement of all kinds by higher-ups internally. Thus, pending way more evidence than we have, it remains a distinct possibility that part of the reason companies are reluctant to make games with, say, female leads, is not because they're correct and shrewd businesspeople, but because they actually fulfill their own head-up-pants prophecies focusing on that lack of profitability, by way of not bothering to do some of the things that help make a game profitable.

And then there's Tomb Raider. What's the word on that, that it still wasn't profitable enough (sharing a similar distinction with Hitman: Absolution) to make the profit Square Enix projected, despite selling 3.5 million copies? I forget at this point

Speaking just for myself, you're bloody right I'll complain about that sort of thing in particular until it's for sure not a thing under any circumstances anymore, because it's just obviously ludicrous.

As for the share of people complaining about the changes being set in motion by companies who actually are trying to make entertainment that represents more widely, yeah, we know they exist, but the question is do they actually make or break titles the way I assume they think they do? Wherever we are right now, I don't really think that that we can say we're at a point where something will not be successful without the approval of whatever number of fans will actually not support anything with a black Heimdall, or a female Thor, or any not-bog-standard protagonist.

Deciding that issue of profitability, however, yet remains over the heads of a thread which literally asks people only what they "would like" to see in the next entry in the series. All of that'd be more in line with a thread that asked, "what do you expect?" This isn't a thread explicitly about complaining or demanding at all, it's about wants and day-dreaming- even if the entries are sometimes phrased a little forcefully, that's still all they are.

(If the issue is that companies are yellow, though, I can't imagine it'd hurt for fans to throw those wants out there with some added feeling)

And I brought up the "Fire Emblem on Mars" thing to illustrate that the designers can't possibly have a 100% calcified idea of what to consider making a part of the game when developing a Fire Emblem, if that's actually a thing that honestly entered their minds even briefly. Didn't want to make the argument that literally anything could happen, just that imagining new places for the series to go has its place. Yes, I know why they didn't go with it.

One could already argue that Awakening shifted the aesthetic/setting more towards Renaissance feudalism than Medieval feudalism. I don't mean to say "expecting guns in the next game is fully reasonable," just that people ought to be able to say, "hey, that might be cool," and not get a "that will never happen and it's folly to think of it" sort of response.

And and I don't mean to ban you from posting tvtropes links :p Just, using them as evidence of why things are how the are isn't really what they're for.

[Rapier]

A lord that's 25+ years old. Getting pretty tired of teenagers leading whole armies.

This.

Or, at least, a lord as old as Sigurd. And if they need to be young, like Leaf, then have a strategist on his side so it doesn't seem so silly.