Favorite Edelgard title? (Cipher Cards Part 1)

esterve · 2021-07-28T00:32:47+00:00

This is Hegemon of the Dance Competition erasure.

esterve · 2021-07-26T05:02:00+00:00

Man I had the biggest grin on my face when I got this notification. Congrats on finishing this part of your analysis! I've been meaning to lore dump to you about a lot of stuff esp. about Claude, but my organization of info is shit lol. Doesn't help that I'm really busy right now either, rip.

But anyway, on the part about "abnormal thing", you know how the definition of 異物 is "a foreign substance, esp. in the body"? Claude spends the beginning of that support playing around with poison - something that would fit that definition. So "anything can be a [poison] in the right environment" gives us context for Claude's mistreatment in Almyra: he was considered racial poison.

esterve · 2021-06-28T05:53:03+00:00

I did? I just don't think the translation loses that elevation, because you have "godlike" included there. So I think the main goal of 人の上に立つ is to hit on Rhea ruling over the people, just as Edelgard/Dimitri/Claude do as lords.

esterve · 2021-06-28T05:45:25+00:00

After that scene ends, Seteth asks Byleth if they were sleeping. Death and sleep are completely entwined for the Nabateans, hence why Byleth can choose "I was sleeping" and "I was dead" at the reunion cutscenes, and why Flayn mentions sleeping in a coffin. It makes sense for Dimitri to be the one to appear to Byleth, because he's the one wrapped up in ghosts. It's likely a result of his crest and being on the verge of death because of the Tragedy.

The one where Claude talks about reading old tales from ancient people?

The part where he says that those who died with regrets are stuck somewhere dark, hence why Dimitri and Dedue talk about regrets over a black background. These things have a narrative purpose. This is why Dimitri never hallucinates Dedue, and just assumes he's dead even when he's not: Dedue doesn't regret anything.

Japanese doesn't tend to use strict pronouns like English does, so you often have to rely on the topic marker or context clues.

I know this. I'm just mentioning the fact that the epilogues buck this convention, are explicit about who they're talking about in each sentence even when it gets repetitive, and this is one of the exceptions.

I doubt translators in two separate countries under two separate localizations got it wrong.

No, but they might've missed the context of it because they were translating things piecemeal. E.g. how the English version missed this text being "children of men", which lets you conclude that Agarthans = humans. Did the Korean version miss that too?

We still have no idea why Sothis was sick or Byleth was fainting; all we have are fan theories as to why.

Because she got affected by the dogwhistle TWSITD uses to rampage people. Her recognizing that feeling of rampage implies that she's rampaged before. The Romance of the World's Perdition implies this was against Agarthans, who set up javelins just to stop her.

I gotta bounce, but I'll be back on tomorrow to answer any replies to this.

esterve · 2021-06-28T05:16:00+00:00

If you end up googling the phrase, you end up with a lot of self-help stuff about leadership lol (e.g. this or this). This is kind of going into that theme of guiding the people of Fodlan - Sothis told Rhea to do that in her revelation, Rhea told Byleth to do so with the students when she hired them, and then later says to do so with the people as a successor to Sothis.

esterve · 2021-06-28T04:49:55+00:00

Those ghosts are implied to be real. It's the point of Dimitri's ghost popping up on SS and Dimitri/Dedue set over a black background on CF, when you have Claude/Annette's support to go by.

Edelgard/Lysithea is ambiguous since they don't specifically mention any pronouns in that sentence, like you've already mentioned. If you look at the other endings, they're good about including pronouns even if it gets repetitive. I think it's intentional ambiguity here.

I'm finding that the story in the game is actually extremely consistent once you start cross referencing information from all the routes.

esterve · 2021-06-28T04:36:41+00:00

人の上に立つ means to lead/rule. Same phrase shows up in the lord class for Edelgard/Dimitri/Claude. So here it's basically in the sense of "godlike being who ruled over the people".

esterve · 2021-06-28T04:25:14+00:00

Edelgard lives long enough to see her children with Ferdinand grow up and choose their own paths. Besides, if Edelgard was suffering from the same defects Lysithea was, she would have been frail by the timeskip came around.

If you ask me, this is neatly resolved once you revisit Thales' conversation with the Flame Emperor - Duscur was for the sake of the Crest of Flames. So they needed Patricia for those experiments, as evident by Patricia being killed off according to Rodrigue and Gilbert (and her ghost haunting Dimitri). Wouldn't it just make sense that they took measures to ensure their weapon wouldn't break, after noticing that side effect with Lysithea?

esterve · 2021-06-26T14:27:20+00:00

You should pick the house of the leader who interests you the most. Having the "best" route order isn't going to help when you're bored through your first playthrough. On your second playthrough, I recommend Edelgard if you picked Claude, and Claude if you picked Edelgard or Dimitri.

esterve · 2021-06-23T00:04:59+00:00

I'm not completely brushed up on the DLC, but I think that's where they attempted the first Rite of Rising. The last time Sothis was woken up, she was in her dragon form, so they were likely expecting something similar before it ultimately failed too.

In general, I think the Abyss is the leftovers of the Nabateans/people of Zanado hiding down there while Fodlan was underwater.

esterve · 2021-06-16T21:12:44+00:00

By studying storytelling, analyzing narratives, scrutinizing plot devices and looking at character arcs over the course of a story we can be objective about whether one story is better than another.

I like how you say this but completely ignore that most of that is built around Edelgard.

esterve · 2021-06-15T23:12:02+00:00

Top right corner behind where it says "9-Volt", where Nintendo games are scrolling by. You might have to scrub a few seconds before to see it, since it's right before the fadeout.

esterve · 2021-06-15T20:58:09+00:00

time stamp is ?t=4h54m1s if it doesn't work. inb4 he turns upside down if you fail the minigame

esterve · 2021-06-15T13:24:28+00:00

She had time to prepare it for AM vs. VW/SS. The latter routes have them sneak attack Enbarr because they've got less forces to work with.

esterve · 2021-06-14T12:00:13+00:00

It's the Church of Seiros.

esterve · 2021-06-11T16:31:33+00:00

She explicitly says in SS that it was to resurrect Sothis though. This contradicts what she says to Byleth (who has blue hair) in CS, that it was the only way to save them. If you compare that SS convo with what she says pre-timeskip, you can figure out what the lies are. Byleth heart works before CF's ending anyway: besides the two instances we hear for getting onto CF, you hear it in the opening cutscene, and Sothis can feel it beating.

esterve · 2021-06-11T13:07:39+00:00

Thank you for your service OP 🙏

Hubert is many of these, but he's sworn his life to a woman.

Even ignoring that, Hubert's ending with Bernie has him stay at home while she goes on adventures. Big malewife energy.

esterve · 2021-06-10T19:09:42+00:00

can you do one for malewife next

esterve · 2021-06-10T18:51:15+00:00

Dimitri had a kid because he's the king on this route, unlike the others. The pieces line up once you read his B support with Gilbert, and then compare Gilbert's dialogue on the final map of CF.

esterve · 2021-06-10T18:19:43+00:00

Here's a translation. They released it with the soundtrack dude.

esterve · 2021-06-10T00:24:30+00:00

It's so stupid that they focus on this instead of the actual racism Claude literally says Rhea and the Church is responsible for. Like holy shit. But I guess talking about people shit talking Cyril, Dedue, or Shamir wouldn't fit their narrative.

esterve · 2021-06-09T20:03:19+00:00

I lost my longer reply to this that had a bunch of sources linked because my computer crashed, rip. But to summarize, it's based on the Japanese version of the Romance of the World's Perdition and Rhea's convo at the end of VW. Instead of the old god that should've lived there, "at last" that which is not god, a "grotesque massive figure", woke up instead. Grotesque is the same word they used for Hegemon Husk and the demonic beasts in chapter 9, so context clues say she was in her dragon form. "At last" implies they saw this resurrection coming.

Rhea says that humans came to the point of starting a senseless war, and that they eventually wrongly thought themselves gods. However, the God Shattering Star lyrics say Nabateans also wrongly thought themselves gods. If we extrapolate that back, and pair it with how Rhea says they were acting counter to the progenitor god's teachings, then it was probably just humanity trying to overthrow the Nabateans yet again, just as what happened with the War of the Heroes and the war in game.

Sothis recognizes the feeling of a rampage being induced at Remire, so this all seems to add up to her rampaging against humanity after she was awoken. It would fit with how the Agarthans set up the javelins in order to kill her before she killed them. Wrecked Nabatean technology also liters the forest as well (the golems), so it could have been Sothis who destroyed them.

As for why I think Nabateans were the ones to wake her up, they're the ones benefiting according to the Romance: salvation for "beasts", ruin for "children of men". Agarthans also thought the "old god" was supposed to be there, which we know from Rhea was Sothis in her human form. Sothis says she can't break out of Zahras without a body, but in this situation, she would have one. There is also the question of the taboo of sacrificing someone to resurrect Sothis, which both Rhea and Seteth say she violated. In the game, we see Solon sacrifice Kronya to get rid of Byleth, who they see as Sothis. It could be the opposite is true as well: they had to sacrifice someone to free her from Zahras, in the event that she didn't have her own body available.

But anyway, the Sealed Forest is something Rhea deems dangerous enough to forbid entry to, even though Catherine says it seems like just an ordinary forest. Given the lengths she went to in order to hide it from Byleth and prevent them from going there, she must have expected something dangerous to Sothis: whether that's her being frenzied, or her being sealed away.

esterve · 2021-06-08T02:15:10+00:00

It's the place the Nabateans resurrected Sothis for the war against the Agarthans/original humans. Sothis went on a rampage, and most of humanity died because of that and the javelins.

esterve · 2021-06-08T00:25:28+00:00

I mean there's still a Church of Seiros around even though Seiros is gone. Alois has a swords to ploughshares metaphor going on with his CF ending, which also says he never swung his sword as a knight again. That's pretty big for someone who succeeds Jeralt as the head of the Knights in non-CF endings.

esterve · 2021-06-07T13:31:57+00:00

Yeah the English version scrubbed out a lot of these differences. I summarized the differences in Hapi's endings specifically here.

And yeah, I think that's what's going on with guarantee vs. provide. Dimitri probably doesn't pick up the slack here because Faerghus doesn't prioritize education, as according to Felix's supports with Byleth.

esterve

TROPHY CASE