merric

10/4/25: Minor edit.

Personally, there's a background 'focusing so hard on the inhumanity of a (canonically) white woman' niggling at me, but it's not enough to dissuade me. So, in no particular order, we can consider:

• The role that sapphic love potentially plays in her story; could she be saved by the love of a woman (Leonie)?
• Her varying degrees of human faculty; is she a werebeast? Is she completely animal? Is her human form trapped inside? How happy is she about her inhuman body? Actually is it fine to be a freak of nature? How can I make this as philosophically satisfying as possible??!
• Her varying degrees of beastly appearance; is it a complete transformation? Does she possess less prominent features e.g. fangs, skin, tail? Are her head and body in opposite states (joke answer)?
• Leonie's potential monsterfucking awakening;
• The amount of braincells I am burning in my passion.

Love how CF and AM are fucked up in opposite ways.

CF paints its antagonist as a crazed tyrant stuck in the past as a metaphor for her desperation to remain in power. Meanwhile in other routes you learn that she is a genocide survivor whose people weren't able to go through any reconciliation process (who has also assimilated into the ruling class, but I have other posts about that).

The psychological arc in AM is about not letting your past sins get in the way of having a positive impact on the world. But reconciliation with the Indigenous nation to the north is only ever referred to in a hand-wavy epilogue, never addressed beyond the white saviour trope.

AM is a universe where adhering to FE conventions is bad while CF is a universe where deviating from FE conventions is bad. lol

You can't make this shit up, can you?

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

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.

I fucking hate playing Ailell but I'm fascinated by how the story of its formation encapsulates a lot of the themes (and indecision) in the game's worldbuilding. The initial story draws upon the wrath of the angry paternal monotheistic God while the true story is of a defence against a nuclear-armed omnicidal cult.

I don't expect the church-stomping (positive) route to have a fully-formed political philosophy, I expect it to not rely on stereotypes of religious and mentally ill people which exposes its disturbingly limited view on those deemed non-human.

Dimitri [holding the AM script]: I am going to work through and or accept the ugly, inhuman parts of me as well as the human parts.
Byleth: :)
Claude: And we're gonna imply that humanity has no inherent superiority over nature?
Edelgard:
Edelgard: Fair enough
Dimitri:
Claude: And not unintentionally parallel the crimes your country committed under your predecessors, right?
Dimitri:
Claude: Ri—
Dimitri: I'm so sorry Claude

Reading comprehension is knowing that CF is the villain route. Critical thinking is pipe-bombing Intsys HQ for that fact. Transcendence is wanting to talk about anarchism and ecological cosmology with Claude and the other outsiders

If the convo is about real-life politics in 3H then may I offer the anthropocentrism in Edelgard's (lord) vision (destruction of the non-human world in her methods and disregard for non-human sentient beings in her ideals).

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(Mid-SS; that route can share maps)

Intra-house conflict suits the Black Eagles, I think.

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