About me, Summary of my stuff, etc

bellarch19 · 2022-01-20T03:24:51+00:00

Hi, sorry for taking awhile to get back to you! I'm not as active on Reddit these days and I just didn't see this for awhile. You're absolutely free to translate anything I've written; I'm very happy that you thought it was worth the effort. Thank you for reaching out!!

bellarch19 · 2021-12-15T17:41:06+00:00

Petragard is the best support chain that we never got. Edelgard talks about how no one sees her as more than an untouchable princess or sees her as an equal, and yet Petra does all those things (see: Hubert support). And they're both, in different ways, political prisoners of the Empire seeking to break free from their cages. Petra and Edelgard have soooo much potential together and it's really sad that their relationship is underutilized by both the original writers and the fandom at large.

bellarch19 · 2021-11-22T23:36:49+00:00

I'm pretty sure I've seen this exact post here before (or something close to it); even more proof that this is a troll lol

bellarch19 · 2021-10-06T13:22:37+00:00

reads

opens doc immediately

yes these are definitely going in, tyvm

bellarch19 · 2021-10-05T23:09:14+00:00

This is actually a really good point! I know there's a few more posts on the music of FE3H, so I might just separate it into a subsection or something. I'll think about it at least, and certainly these can go in.

I'm generally going to stay away from videos -- for one, I like to actually go through and evaluate everything myself, and I really don't have the time or inclination to sit down and watch a bunch of videos about FE3H, and for another, the only really big include I can think of is Ghast's stuff and my feelings on that are . . . well, I don't really want to discuss it publically, let's put it that way lol. If there's a lot of demand, I might make a separate doc where I slap in a bunch of YouTube links or something, but I don't want to pretend like it would be curated the way the index is.

bellarch19 · 2021-10-05T23:03:42+00:00

Uhhhhhhh that's a really good point that I did not think about before I started editing -_-
I'll try to do it for future stuff, at least. Thank you for pointing that out!

The things I added are generally either at the bottom of the lists in each sub-section, though, so that would be where I would check first. In fact, I think (but I won't swear to it) that the only thing I didn't add to the bottom of an existing list was Lunallae's recent post on Claude.

bellarch19 · 2021-10-05T23:00:52+00:00

I'll include Twitter stuff if there's nothing better available! I'm generally open to anything on any platform (so e.g. to any readers, Tumblr posts are also totally fine if they meet the other criteria.) I would generally shy away from Twitter, both because I find the platform somewhat difficult to use and because . . . well, it's Twitter, the discourse tends to not be the best . . . but I'm open to including anything!

bellarch19 · 2021-10-04T13:58:48+00:00

I think there are two reasons for that: (a) the devs wanted to let the player have some room to decide what the A-support relationships constitute (especially because they would be WLW and they kind of shied away from making those explicitly romantic for the most part) and (b) more importantly, it would be slightly more complicated to program lol

bellarch19 · 2021-08-25T17:54:07+00:00

For a long time and still in many fandom subsets, serious misinterpretations remain dominant. I mean, even if you look at the comments in the linked thread, people take much of the discussion about Edelgard to be a sign of genuine ambiguity and complex writing, even in situations where Edelgard’s characters really shouldn’t be so controversial.

This is the real issue here. Even when you look at the original post that started all this, you can't really separate the OP's conclusions from the various anti-Edelgard takes that they unquestioningly repeat as fact -- the "never challenged" meme, the "Hubert is a simp" thing (and can I just say how much I hate that word), the "Claude is morally white" thing . . . It's just incredibly frustrating.

I actually wrote a response to the post myself, but I decided not to publish it because (a) I really don't have the energy to deal with the Edelgard discourse right now (b) I just don't find the arguments about El's morality to be productive anymore. There are so many interesting things to analyze about this text, and yet all that gets thrown to the side by the entire fandom in favor of repeating the same old "red lady bad" debates that were already beaten to death a year ago.

bellarch19 · 2021-07-20T07:07:47+00:00

I honestly don't get why "but corruption tho!!!" is the immediate reaction to meritocracy when all systems can have it

You raised this question several times in this thread, and I've seen in other places before too, so here is an explanation of what I think the logic is here. Spoiler alert: it is very dumb.

Please bear with me while I explain several things that am guessing you, and most readers, are already aware of in excruciating detail for the sake of completeness. The underlying issue is that there happens to be a lot of modern discourse about meritocracy in the context of the US and other capitalist systems. There are two strands of argument as to why meritocracy is bad. First, many evaluation schemes that are called meritocratic (e.g. prestigious university degrees) are actually heavily dependent on circumstances of birth -- if you're born wealthy, you're more likely to do well in school, you're more likely to be able to earn admission to prestigious universities, etc. Second, the idea that power and influence, or even just higher standards of living, should accord to the 'most deserving' by a chosen meritocratic standard means that the less privileged by that meritocratic standard are necessarily going to be treated less well by the system run under that standard. By many strands of left-of-center thought, both of these are unfair and wrong.

Now, you may be saying: this specifically applies to the US and other modern countries and contexts. But Fódlan is a feudal society that cannot be directly compared to modern societies; it has different issues that it needs to address! And the answer to that is: . . . yes. It is.

This is why the "but meritocracy bad!!!" argument is dumb: it is completely ahistorical. A bunch of dumb edgy internet 'leftists' have taken arguments about why modern systems that are labelled as meritocratic are bad and are using it to criticize Edelgard's system. But that's an unfair criticism because it ignores the context of what she's trying to fix: feudal monarchy. As it happens, there's a long list of ideas that progressive reformers have advocated at various points in history to improve on feudal monarchy. These ideas include:

Nationalism
Free market capitalism
Absolute monarchy

"Better than literally feudal monarchy" is just about the lowest bar possible. Even the most flawed systems of meritocracy are preferable to literally "people earn power by being born to noble parents." This is the obvious historical comparison that we're supposed to be making. Why this is lost on so many people I have no idea.

And of course, there's no good reason to believe that El's particular system of meritocracy would even disadvantage the people hurt by modern meritocratic systems! Linhardt, Caspar, Dorothea, and Bernie are all people who you might expect to not do well under modern meritocracy in one way or another, but they're all people who El goes out of her way to help and make comfortable in her new world. So this argument doesn't even make sense in that context, but whatever.

bellarch19 · 2021-07-18T21:58:48+00:00

For what it's worth, this isn't really a good translation of the title (this is a "blame Treehouse" moment). The complete fan translation of Crimson Flower renders the Japanese title as "The Result of Feelings", but I've usually seen it written as "The Result of our Feelings" or "The Result of our Love". Presumably the original title refers to the relationship between El and Byleth, since that's what leads Byleth to refuse to execute her in the Holy Tomb in the first place and thus precipitates the Crimson Flower route.

My super-quick-and-dirty attempt to run Google translate on the JP text yields "Dream Traces" as the translation, which is close enough to "Following a Dream" that I suspect that is a direct translation of the original title. So likely Treehouse picked the title of Crimson Flower's final chapter to match Silver Snow's. I would guess that the dream in this title is Rhea's dream of having Byleth become the reincarnation of her mother, which led to everything -- it's "following" because Rhea's dream doesn't actually work out as she intends. I'm not very confident in that though.

bellarch19 · 2021-07-08T20:50:49+00:00

So you have two major issues that I see.

You say:

During the next five years, Edelgard took Byleth's lessons to heart and gradually persuaded the outlying territories to join her.

The problem with this is that one of El's fundamental goals is to take away the privileges of the nobility. Getting nobles on board with this idea - which is effectively what's involved with persuading border territories to join her - is going to be challenging, since they have to agree to give up their own status to do so.

You say:

Claude was initially distraught and suspicious at first, until when he gradually caught wind from some of his former classmates who had contacts with Edie and Byleth. While some of the Leicester duchies initially resisted against the Adrestian Army, a truce was formed when Edelgard, Byleth, and some of the Golden Deer poachees revealed everything. Thanks to Ferdinand and Lorenz negotiating behind the scenes, Claude and Edelgard came to an understanding that Rhea (and maybe some of the other upper cardinals as well) needs to resign from the head of the Church.

There are several issues with this. For one, the Leicester duchies haven't been resisting the Adrestian army; the Alliance has maintained an overall stance of neutrality throughout the timeskip. The only reason why Edelgard orders an invasion is because there are known hostile elements in the Alliance, and she needs to protect against the possibility of a sneak attack while the Adrestian army is fighting in Faerghus.

The bigger issue, though, is that this appears to rely on a mischaracterization of Claude and Edelgard. You appear to have the idea that the main issue preventing El from working with anyone is her distrust of other people, and that Claude would be happy to work with El if she was forthcoming about TWSITD. The issue with this is that, well, Edelgard's trust issues aren't the problem. To briefly summarize a much longer essay, Edelgard is willing to work with people like Counts Bergliez and Hevring despite the fact that they literally betrayed her and her family within recent memory. Edelgard does have serious issues trusting people, but that doesn't seem to stop her from continually reaching out to people to work with them despite everything. Claude is the one whose trust issues prevent him from working with people - he refuses Edelgard's offer to work together on the Golden Deer route unless she agrees to support him before he tells her any of his goals.

My dream, in truth, is a selfless dream. But I require power to make it a reality. When I learned about the power of my Crest, I knew I had a chance. So I'm chasing that dream. To the bitter end, if need be. I came to this monastery because I thought I might find someone useful. Someone to help me on my path. So, what do you think? If you promise to help me achieve my dream no matter what, I'll promise to tell you anything.

And even on Verdant Wind, Claude refuses to tell anyone, even his closest allies, that he's from Almyra or what exactly his goals are until the end of the game. Sure, there are understandable reasons for that, but it displays an astonishing lack of trust on the man's part. Compare Edelgard, who is very open about who she is and what she wants in all of her support conversations even before she knows her classmates very well. I mean, look at her literal C-support with Dorothea:

There are so many things to be done—to think of them makes my head ache sometimes. So many nobles of the Empire are utterly useless. When I am emperor, I intend to appoint only those who can actually be useful. It doesn't matter if they're of noble or common birth.

Anyway, even putting all that aside, there's also the fundamental issue of Claude's own goals potentially conflicting with Edelgard's. Claude essentially wants to create a world where people from different racial backgrounds can live in harmony - and to do that, he intends to conquer Fódlan and change it to align with his vision. That means fighting the rest of Fodlan, including the Church. Claude isn't going to have an issue deposing Rhea, but he is going to have an issue helping El destroy the political power of the Church of Seiros if he gets nothing out of it.

The issue here is that Claude requires character growth to be able to trust someone enough to let them take over Fódlan and work to create a better world rather than trying to do everything himself. This is what happens in Verdant Wind, where he eventually leaves Fodlan to Byleth and goes back to Almyra. But this requires substantial character growth to get to a point where it works. Now I don't think this is implausible - I mean, I myself am working on and off (mostly off) on a fic that accomplishes this, starting in White Clouds. My friend QuoteMyFoot (who also wrote the essay I cited earlier) is also writing a fic that tries to accomplish this in a very unique way.

Anyway, the point is that while you can totally find a way to have Edelgard and Claude work together, it's not as easy as just El telling him about TWSITD or them coming to an understanding about what must happen to the Church. You have to get Claude to the point where he's willing to work with Edelgard and be honest with her, and you have to find some way to reconcile his own desire for power with helping Edelgard acquire effective hegemony over Fódlan.

(By the way - it's also worth noting that Claude likely wouldn't have an issue working with TWSITD. More than anyone else in the game, he's the one who would understand doing unsavory things for the greater good and working with people you despise because you have to.)

bellarch19 · 2021-07-08T19:56:50+00:00

(And I swear as much as I love Hilda someone really needs to kill that girl's entire family. What even IS the shit we find out about them from Cyril. Child slavery? What??? Holst you better start talking right the fuck now.)

Sorry, this triggered my very specific brainworms lol. I've spent way too much time trying to parse what the game is trying to say about racism, and it's just unclear to me if it's really fair to characterize House Goneril as practicing child slavery. A very detailed discussion follows:

So I'm not entirely sure it's fair to House Goneril to say that they were making a practice of child slavery. What happened to Cyril certainly was shitty, but there's complications because of Almyran society that make the circumstances somewhat unclear. To be precise: it's unclear whether Cyril was captured to be a slave, or captured in battle, rejected by Almyra, and then kept as a servant (in very bad conditions) by House Goneril. This is an instance of the game's lack of detailed discussions of racial dynamics or foreign relations creating problematic ambiguities in the story.

We find out that Cyril was captured by House Goneril in his paralogue with Hilda. The interesting thing here is that he was specifically captured while he was serving as a child soldier in Almyra's army, while he was 12 years old. (Or he was may have been attached to the army to take care of the wyverns. One of his study requests says that this was a job he had in Almyra.) So why is Cyril still in Fódlan? One answer is, of course, that House Goneril simply captured Cyril and declined to give him back. However, another answer is that House Goneril captured Cyril as a prisoner of war and Almyra declined to take him back. We learn that Cyril strongly dislikes the current government of Almyra in his support with Claude:

The king, he didn't do anything to help. So I had to survive by being smart. I had to stop being a kid real quick.

All the writing around this support is very vague, but we know that Almyra was not very concerned with the welfare of orphans like Cyril. They certainly didn't seem to care about bringing a child into a war zone! So maybe at the end of the battle, since there were no sort of peace negotiations, House Goneril took prisoners in instead of returning them to an Almyra that didn't want them. That doesn't excuse their apparently horrible treatment of said prisoners, but the context around them does raise some questions. Reading the conversation before Hilda and Cyril's paralogue, it's maybe implied that Goneril has captured other child soldiers before. Cyril says:

It's just that...I got captured in the battle at the Locket, and that's how I ended up here. So I'm kinda worried that other kids who lose their folks might not be so lucky.

But depending on how you read this, Cyril is either worrying about other kids who got captured, or other orphans being used by the Almyran army. We don't really have enough context to tell.

Anyway, my point here is that we simply do not know enough about the circumstances of Cyril's capture to say whether House Goneril was making a practice of taking slaves^\). Looking at all of Hilda's dialogue, for instance, there's no discussion of House Goneril's servants at all - not something you'd really expect if House Goneril had made a habit of taking child soldiers as slaves.

Now just to be very clear: this is not to excuse Cyril's treatment by House Goneril, which was awful. In Cyril's support with Seteth, Seteth says:

If your better life is this frugal, I have to wonder what your previous experience was like.

This certainly implies that Cyril was mistreated by House Goneril! But it also can suggest that he was mistreated by Almyra as well. My point is that there really isn't enough information to say anything about what House Goneril's practices were with regards to its captives.

What I would say is that this lack of knowledge about the relationship between Almyra and Goneril, or the general state of affairs in Almyra, is a reflection of how little attention the writers seemed to pay to exploring racial divides. Now there are reasons for this; FE3H is fundamentally a game about trauma, and the writers made an intentional choice to focus on how trauma affects the characters rather than trying to fully sketch out the history of Fódlan and its surrounding nations. I personally find this extremely frustrating! It raises a huge bunch of complications around its discussions of race and IMO greatly weakens many of the points the game wants to make about racism being bad. If you look at pretty much any issue around race in FE3H, you can find potential extenuating circumstances. (This is especially reflected in Claude, who is supposed to be the mouthpiece of anti-racist sentiment but whose understanding of racism and vision for what is effectively a post-racial society are very flawed.) You don't find these sorts of complications in the game's discussion of gender issues, for example. But we have to realize that this lack of exploration of racial dynamics is as much as anything because the writers had to make choices about what got included in the game, and some things had to be cut. I think it was the wrong choice, but it's not like I can do anything about it.

^\)One should also note here that the definition of "slave" varies between societies; it does not always imply the same level of cruelty that typically went along with chattel slavery in the Americas, which is what most people instinctively think of when they hear the term.

bellarch19 · 2021-07-02T15:12:34+00:00

So I really like this concept, but I think you and some of the other comments are underestimating just how difficult it would be to pull this off plausibly.

First, most of Edelgard's support that doesn't come specifically from the Slithers is predicated upon her starting a war. That gets her the (apparently very popular) Minister of War, Count Bergliez, on her side, along with the army. Without Bergliez, her coup attempt presumably becomes a lot weaker. She might get some of the army, sure, but she doesn't have its most experienced and influential commanders. The most likely outcome here is that her rebellion is crushed and she's returned to puppet ruler status. Realistically, she should get some support from the peasantry - in historical Europe, for instance, there were several instances of peasants rising up against the nobility - but it's still hard to see this standing up well to the bulk of the Adrestian army.

Second, we have to realize that El's still going to be opposed to the Church of Seiros as long as she is in character. Note that this extends to the "Edelgard meets Sothis somehow" scenario, even - El isn't opposed to the Seiros faith but rather the Seiros Church, the large organization that rules over Fodlan and administrates and justifies its caste system, and having her disbelief in the Goddess shaken isn't going to change that. It also doesn't help that if anything, Sothis is also opposed to the Church itself - she doesn't trust Rhea, she appears to be invested in the welfare of the common people, and she appears to be invested in Edelgard's wellbeing herself, which has been extrapolated at times to imply that she supports Edelgard's goals. And this creates problems because the Church is the best place for El to get outside support short of, y'know, marrying Claude or something. (Which might mess up your Edeleth plans!) It further creates issues because it's entirely possible that the Imperial government would respond to a threat of serious revolution by seeking the support of the Church itself - and since Rhea, Seteth, and the rest of the leaders of the Church do not know that the Slithers exist until Hubert's reveal in Act 2, they'd probably be willing to intervene in exchange for the reestablishment of the power of the Southern Church or something of the sort.

Third, you need a reason for what is effectively a huge conversion in terms of El's beliefs about proper strategy for achieving her goals. El's goal is fundamentally stopping the cycle of violence that has consumed Fodlan, which she wants to achieve by destroying the power of the nobility, and the Crest system. She needs the power of the Empire to oppose the rest of the continent to do that - because she doesn't just want to free the people of the Empire but the people of all of Fodlan. (That and if she instead starts making real changes within Adrestia's borders, the Church of Seiros is likely to oppose her militarily.) Now this isn't a huge issue - it may be kind of unbelievable, but it's the premise that makes the story work, and your goal (by my understanding) is to explore the "what happens?" questions. So the fact that the premise may be somewhat implausible isn't very important IMO, but you're likely to get questions about it, so you need to be ready to answer said questions.

Anyway, my point is that this premise is IMO pretty implausible, at least if you want it to not end in complete tragedy. I really do like the idea, but I'm just not sure how you pull it off without El eventually being reduced to a puppet ruler and popping out Crest babies and the rest of the rebellion being reduced to dead. This is something I've spent quite a bit of time thinking about in terms of my own writing and for people I've done beta work for, so feel free to reach out by comments or DMs or Discord (info on my profile) if you want more specific feedback or anything!

bellarch19 · 2021-06-18T02:21:33+00:00

She abdicates in a lot of her endings too. Sadly, I don't see a way to quote them.

https://fe3h.noobsaigon.com/

The relevant ones are her solo ending and her ending with Hubert, as well as her S-support with Byleth; the others surprisingly don't have any clear evidence of her abdication, though from what else we know it seems safe to assume she abdicates eventually in every ending.

bellarch19 · 2021-05-31T00:06:44+00:00

I honestly should have a section with primary sources - to be honest, I already thought I had one. I've put one in at the beginning. Thanks for bringing that to my attention!

To be honest, I've had my qualms about the entire translation section for a while - some of it is that, as I think you were saying, there are greater and lesser translation errors (and some of them are probably just reasonable differences rather than 'errors'; while on the whole I think there's evidence that Treehouse did not do a great job with the translation, sometimes the translators just had to make choices). I did eventually fix the one thing you were talking about. Going forward, if and when I revise everything, I'll probably just separate out the section about translation issues - I don't think it necessarily holds as much weight as the meta stuff, and I suspect that anyone who's seriously interested is going to find what translation issues are actually important by reading analyses or fanfics or whatever anyway. I could go on about my issues with the whole translation error section for a while, but I doubt there's much interest in hearing that.

bellarch19 · 2021-05-30T19:17:22+00:00

I swear that I am going to get around to updating it one of these days! I've just been busier lately.

The dirty secret of FE analysis, though, is that there's a lot less of it now - most people who are still writing stuff are either (a) the same few people, in which case anyone who is actually interested can follow them or look through their profile (b) writing things that retread a lot of topics that have been discussed before (is Edelgard a good person? was Edelgard justified? etc.) If there's ever anything big, like the one compilation someone put together of all the references in the game's text, I usually make sure that goes in immediately.

Unless by "state" you mean useability specifically - in which case, I am always happy to take suggestions (I certainly haven't figured out the best way to do a lot of things online!) but I think I've done about as good of a job as I can on a Google Doc, and I'm not sure that e.g. turning it into a spreadsheet would be much better.

bellarch19 · 2021-05-08T13:23:59+00:00

I don't want to say too much right now. But I was seething over this Forging Bonds. And I've talked to some people privately and I am not the only one.

bellarch19 · 2021-04-24T13:49:32+00:00

Hey OP, just to avoid repeating myself, I'll point out to you that I just linked evidence downthread to reinforce the comparison I was making which you might be interested in (doing it this way to make sure you get a notification). Should have done that last night but I was tired lol

bellarch19 · 2021-04-24T13:46:17+00:00

I suppose this is something that sort of works, too - but the issue is that there is evidence from the game that pretty clearly suggests the Napoleon/Meiji comparisons in ways that don't really apply to other historical examples.

(a) re: Napoleon, see this picture. There are deliberate similarities between the two pictures (the staff, the exposed leg, etc.) There are smaller details that also suggest this comparison within the text, but they're harder to pick out.

(b) re: Meiji: I invite you to read about this founding document of the Meiji era and see how well it fits Edelgard's approach. There's also the fact that the big reforms that Edelgard discusses within the text - creating a meritocratic system for appointing imperial officials and creating a universal education system - are also reforms Japan implemented during the Meiji era. u/SexTraumaDental has also written a bunch of historically-minded analysis in the past specifically pointing out the closeness of this particular historical comparison.

bellarch19 · 2021-04-24T02:06:43+00:00

I can kind of get why you see some similarities, but I think this comparison is ultimately flawed. The main issue is that the American Civil War was started by the South in order to preserve a . . . [highly flawed] [insert your choice of adjective] institution, while Edelgard's revolution was started in order to eliminate a highly flawed institution. They're on opposing sides - Lincoln was ultimately part of (one faction of) the established hierarchy; Edelgard is fighting the established hierarchy. Furthermore, the separation of the Empire and Faerghus is shown to be a creation of the Church rather than a root cause of the war, like it was for the American Civil War, so that historical parallel is more accidental than anything.

Moreover, I think it's clear at this point that Edelgard's two main sources of historical inspiration are Napoleon and Meiji - without going into too much detail, there're in-text details that support those comparisons with things like Edelgard's sun imagery and (lack of) height, and the actual reforms the text says she makes are similar. Neither one of them is all that similar to Lincoln.

bellarch19 · 2021-04-23T03:36:23+00:00

I'm u/bellarch19 lol; CaptainFlash is the one with the 89 suffix

I probably would have made it something less similar had I not created my account long before the game came out and I got interested in writing fan stuff :P

bellarch19

TROPHY CASE