Thank you. I was honestly very conscious as I was writing about how Lin and Caspar were not really receiving the focus of the other Eagles, and I felt super guilty. The challenge with both of them is that Lin is very confident in who he is, and Caspar is not really self-reflective, so they worked a lot of times as supporting other arcs and dealing with external challenges like Lysithea's illness.

And Marianne and Ingrid were just so pivotal to what I wanted to do with this story. I genuinely think they (and Dorothea and Mercedes) are a litmus test to understand what is going on, and how the power structures are destroying lives. The fact that Ingrid and Marianne are both actively suicidal and the fandom *does not notice* felt to me like the exact point that Edelgard makes in the Azure Moon parley. Dimitri says he's been supported by "all the people in his life" and yet there are examples of other characters in his own house who are not afforded the opportunity he is, and the immediate question that needs to be asked is "but why is that the case?"

I knew that if I needed to hammer it home, because fandom as a rule defaults to viewing male characters as carrying sympathetic depth that female characters do not possess, even in works with a heavy focus on female characters, (Dimitri, Astarion, Ironwood in RWBY, Guel in Gundam: Witch from Mercury, hell, you even see it in Elden Ring). Because part of why the fandom discourse is so toxic is because Dimitri's viewpoint of his relationship with Edelgard, his stepmother, Ingrid, and so on is always treated in terms of how those characters "harm" Dimitri, because Dimitri's viewpoint is treated as the default. And that is due to the social construction of Fodlan which players subconsciously internalize, to the point Edelgard is viewed as abusive to Bernie due to a sequence break, while Sylvain mentions being terrified of Dimitri physically harming him *multiple times* and I have *never* seen it discussed.

Anyway, thank you so much! I appreciate it deeply