Just remembered the Veyle feet drama and I think I've figured out where it fits into infuriating cycles of discussion on the internet. Warning for poor recall of canon two paragraphs down.

Scenario: person comments that her design may (or may not) double as fetish bait. Nothing wrong with this. The problem is when their opponents start attacking the person for even suggesting the possibility, ignoring the fact that the creators have lost the audiences' faith to a degree that gave rise to this critique in the first place. It recalls those lolishota enthusiasts and proshippers that are all like "maybe YOU'RE the predator" as if they're bastions of free thought and their opposition are mindless puritanicals, which is facetious at best.

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The Catholic Church receives a Buddhist intervention

So Fodlan has chauvinistic imperialists cosplaying as proto-communists, a reactionary Christian cult and neoliberal accelerationists running rampant all because they forgot their Buddhist roots LOL

Being right is lonely but at least it is funny

Thinkin about my feelings towards ace interpretations of Koito Yuu versus Ike Greil Fire Emblem in fandom, particularly through repression and disinterest. At least based off things I remember.

Yuu experienced a degree of repression but I'm happy to see her as asexual (and personally demisexual) because of the broader exploration of her questioning.

Ike on the other hand—I get why fellow (aro)aces can relate to his general romantic disinterest because it is rather queer, but to interpret it as asexuality primarily or exclusively is clueless at best and revisionist at worst. Gay ace is fine, but we have to be honest: it's 2000s video game gay-coding.

The bright side is that it indirectly opens up conversations on the potential of asexual representation. I hope there's a nascent scene centred around ace-coding or something like that out there.

A practice in optimism: the nature of the 'rule' of the Nabateans in ancient Fodlan is so vague that it could just have been a few too many of them were democratically elected to shared territories and the Agarthans didn't like that. For all we know it could be an Agarthan exaggeration to justify their hatred.

Likewise, the arrival of the Nabateans to Fodlan in the first place is vague enough that it could have been a case of immigrants arriving and becoming part of a multicultural society, and the Agarthans didn't like that either, didn't like them becoming influential in the public sphere.

To be clear this isn't a fable about slaying a dragon sitting atop a pile of gold this is implying that taking a certain form, especially one that is inexplicable to certain others, is itself colonial violence.

When the original text can't even decide if the dragons taking on human form was an expression of admiration and desire for coexistence or an act of settler nativism is really telling...

The human-dragon conflict in Elibe having an environmentalist spin to it (i.e. escalation of the war resulting in a nuclear winter) is a delightful additional layer to the (admittedly elementary) anti-war themes that inform much of the series' identity. Even FE8 had a nice aside, having a go at anthropocentric thinking in the supports...

Wait... Are we doing ridiculously oblique fantasy assimilation now??

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Did people actually think the writers were gonna respect Edelgard in Hopes when they dressed her up like that (especially considering setting and the rest of the cast)?? This is the spiritual successor to the bad trajectory I sensed from Fates' promo material that ultimately swayed me from buying it