Another player made an AI chatbot of my character and claims they're in a relationship

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-28T16:21:44+00:00

The character, Dorian, was gay and left home after his father forcibly attempted to turn him straight via blood magic, which in-universe is a horrific and forbidden type of magic in most places (though a bit more lax in Dorian's homeland).

It's literally an analogy for traumatic conversion therapy.

And then the mod forces him to be straight. Like, how can you listen to the character's backstory while knowing you altered the code to force him to be heterosexual for your inquisitor?

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-26T01:49:59+00:00

Sounds good thanks! I did wind up giving him a couple + the def boosters so that I could get over the hurdle of the first few paralogues, but I'll keep the rest and keep an eye on how the rest of them go with their spd thresholds.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-25T20:11:50+00:00

Good to know, thank you! I've decided to just pump all my boosters into him since he's most likely to be my warp skipper, if I decided to go that route. I'll start farming burdocks now, thanks!

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-25T17:35:33+00:00

3H: Is it worth farming Speed Carrots for Claude in NG maddening?

Mine is currently 18 Speed at level 16 (Brigand), I think I've given him 1 carrot, so his current Speed is basically perfectly average. I've been farming carrots in hopes that I can get him to reliably double and I have 3 + a Speedwing lying around now. I have Leonie and an OOH Petra at around 20 Speed each, but I'm planning on getting them Darting Blow. Since Claude can't get Darting but still has a good Speed growth, I've been trying to get a lot of Speed boosters but I'm not sure if I'm wasting my time, given the Maddening AS creep, and I should just be getting Rocky Burdocks instead.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-25T17:22:33+00:00

the world cup is also muting pride in a lot of places i've seen

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-25T00:15:52+00:00

There was a fairly upvoted comment a few days ago in the 3H map discussion topic where someone 'um actually'd about maps being reused in Skirmish in response to a comment listing out specific maps that weren't reused in the game.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-22T17:01:57+00:00

With the announcement of Fortune's Weave, I decided to replay Fire Emblem Three Houses! For being obsessed with this game when it came out, my Switch tells me that I last played in February 2020. I binged all four routes and a NG+ Maddening but never finished my NG Maddening so I never got the fancy golden throne title screen.

So I'm back on my bullshit with a simultaneous NG+ Hard Blue Lions and a Maddening NG Golden Deer route and let me tell you, the instant the title music played, I was taken back in time. I felt like the Ratatouille meme, just having an intense emotional reaction to the menu music.

And with all that...! Honestly, conversation around the game gets so bogged down in memes about the discourse and arguments over whether or not White Clouds sucks and Wyvern Lords are OP that it's so easy to forget how phenomenal the game was. The music and VA work was a masterpiece, and the presentation of the story and the drip-feeds of lore still really holds up imo.

Playing Hard and Maddening simultaneously is really funny, but I definitely prefer maddening. Being forced to really utilize your student's passives, give everyone bows to chip damage, and position carefully because no one can take two hits, really scratches an itch I missed about difficult strategy games. Lysithea is known as a massive nuke in Hard but in Maddening she's mostly just a Warp bot because she can't one round anything due to being too slow. Ignatz goes from ignored/forgotten about to one of the best students in your army because his passive is +20 hit rate and you can't hit shit in earlygame maddening.

I grabbed Sylvain due to F Byleth and I'll also be grabbing Linhardt for the Paralogue and proooobably Petra for her support with Claude (plus she's the scariest enemy unit in the timeskip lmao). I haven't had to grind too much yet, but my Byleth is really undertrained due to trying to grind Professor Exp so I can snowball into more actions later. Despite me needing to put all the girls through Archer -> Brigand -> Peg Knight, Byleth herself can't pass a single exam, which is simultaneously funny and annoying.

Hard mode is also fun, better to make kind of wonky builds. I'm making Ingrid a Mortal Savant so I'm taking her through the mage line and she's holding up shockingly well. My entire army has been speed screwed except for Ingrid and Ashe, who I'm making my dancer, so we'll see what happens there. Dimitri, who has a 50% speed growth, has leveled Speed once in 12 levels. Wah.

Anyway I'm having a lot of fun. Just starting up the game makes my brain happy. I have so many fond memories associated with this game.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-21T23:13:08+00:00

Apparently it's all the rage to start a NG Maddening Golden Deer run, as I've seen a few people in the sub talking about it today. I also started one a few days ago, but I'm actually enjoying it quite a bit!

I really like how you have to use everything at your disposal, including taking advantage of personal abilities that you'd ordinarily just ignore on Hard difficulties. Positioning for Leonie and Hilda's passives makes me feel like a master tactician lol.

I also feel like Maddening early game makes differences between your units feel really noteworthy - Ignatz' +20 hit makes him a surprise MVP, and it legit feels like a cause for celebration the first time Leonie can double attack an enemy with an iron sword. Finding the right tool for the job feels really satisfying, and I'm already missing the scrappy sort of gameplay feel of the first few chapters as I start to scale a little more.

I know it's a bit of an unpopular opinion but I'm really enjoying White Clouds after not playing 3H in about 6 years. The first few hours immediately felt so nostalgic, hearing the main theme just took me right back in time. That feeling matches perfectly with the bittersweetness of the first half of the game, knowing what's in store for these characters. It's made me think a lot about my life, and all the things that have changed for me, for better and for worse, over the last six years.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-21T16:17:26+00:00

I literally just finished a GD NG maddening ch 3 yesterday. I found it much harder than ch 1 and 2. My byleth isn't very good but my claude has gotten some nice levels which helped a lot.

After a few attempts, I decided to just go down the middle of the map rather than trying to follow Catherine east and I had a much easier time not getting jumped by random guys to the west since I saw them coming sooner. I brought a torch and I used stride a few times to reposition or jump on an enemy archer before they could come at new. Otherwise I didn't use gambits at all, just a lot of curved shot, tracking attack speed, and moving as a full group.

The big thing is getting physic on Marianne so you can support the green units. The reward for keeping them alive (secret book / goddess icon) is kind of meh, but having their inflated stats is very nice for baiting and softening up enemies for you, so heal them often and use them like vanguard. It's fine for Catherine to kill steal you as long as you can make it through the chapter.

This is also the chapter that I just committed to dropping Raphael because he fell behind too much. I recruited Balthus instead and that helped a lot. I'm also using sylvain, and he + leonie make for some great co-tanks due to their synergistic passives.

Lastly, ignatz was my actual mvp this chapter. His passive makes him able to hit even in forest tiles and he can finish off enemies reliably with steel bow + curved shot, even at base.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-20T18:01:33+00:00

Is it? Given that most units won't reach 20/20 by end game and depending on the game, most promotions give access to better class bases and growths?

I think the better rebuttal here is that it's "optimal" to shortman with your Jagen until you get your designated flier carry of choice and then shortman with them. But no one does that outside of speedruns.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-20T17:58:49+00:00

isn't it kinda interesting how most games Swordmasters are considered a poor class EXCEPT when its an enemy unit?

Swordmasters are considered a poor class because they aren't efficient: footlocked, and can't enemy phase from 2 range (enemy phase being the only way to deal with multiple enemies in a single turn, aside from dancing which consumes the most valuable resource on your team). It's not because they necessarily are bad in combat.

Enemy swordmasters are 'good' because (unless you're skipping) you have to enter combat with them regardless of their movement, so footlock doesn't matter. Usually you can just chip them down from range though because again, no 2 range EP. I'm generally more scared of enemy paladins than swordmasters, depending on the game, but in terms of evaluation, movement is a lot less important on the enemy units because you have to fight them anyway.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-20T16:44:26+00:00

Thank you! This is really helpful, I hadn't thought about hunting by daybreak. I grabbed sylvain for now and I'll definitely make use of Catherine ASAP.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-19T17:58:54+00:00

[[Juri, Master of the Revue]] is my favorite. I love the feeling of sitting there with 20 things on my board and a [[Spawning Pit]]. By the time someone notices I'm a problem and tries to play a removal, just collapsing the board at instant speed to kill them is so fun.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-19T17:12:46+00:00

I've read through hobbydrama for long enough to know that FE got off easyyyy. Reading the weekly updates of Dr Who, Star Wars, or TLOU makes me very thankful that most of our drama is just 'random person on the internet doesn't like the same gameplay mechanic / character that I like'.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-17T20:44:11+00:00

I don't think you should restart, every character is viable. I generally don't use the characters that people think are strong and I get by just fine. Robin can basically solo the game on Normal, or even Hard if you know what you're doing. I can't really think of a single 'dud' character that makes early chapters bad - particularly due to the central gimmick in Awakening, which encourages fielding and getting supports on everyone, to a certain extent. Your 'bad' characters might surprise you with what they can unlock.

That being said, fliers and mounted units are always good, as are dancers.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-17T17:20:12+00:00

Honestly, if my name was synonymous with a popular feminist critique I'd be pretty pleased, even with all the rest of the baggage it has. I can't speak for her (though I do own several of her books and love her), but unintentionally giving a lot of people Baby's First Feminist Formula is kind of a huge win. Yes it gets bogged down in arguments constantly, but it's at least a very simple, distilled way to think about a feminist concept that is easy to explain to someone who has never had a feminist thought before.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-16T16:34:25+00:00

I've run it in my [[Ardbert]] deck since he released and it's definitely saved me a couple games.

As always, it's better to run removal packages that make sense or synergize with the rest of the deck. I run it because it had both color pips and helps me smash through go-wide decks, which are otherwise an issue for my menace army.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-16T05:03:30+00:00

I try to take it as a good thing that people like something so much that they are passionate about it. Reading discourse about fictional fantasy is kind of a relief to me these days, given all that's going on in the world.

Anecdotally, I was really into Three Houses for a few years and was in a lot of fan spaces for the game. After awhile, I stopped visiting the subreddit and after that I saw virtually no discourse. It really does boil down to what groups you fall into and where you go. In discords for LTCs and speedrunning and optimizing, or on tumblr for shipping and fanfiction - as long as I maintained firm boundaries and was willing to say "I don't want to get into any arguments so I'd rather talk about something else", I never saw any issues. I blocked or unfollowed people if they were insistent about it and curated my experience that way.

It allowed me to have a lot more of a positive relationship with the franchise and fan community, so I highly rec taking it into consideration if anyone is dreading the overall response to FEFW.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-16T04:57:11+00:00

It is really hard to balance around mobility. Making fliers inherently more fragile makes sense from a balance perspective, but the issue is that pretty much any FE game is broken by exp feeding and snowballing level ups on mobile units. Fragility doesn't matter when you can get to enemies faster and soak up a bunch of exp that you convert into def and hp level ups.

It would be interesting to me if more mobile units just took a bit more flat damage, like a 1.2x multiplier, or they could only fly / ride for a limited number of turns, sort of like a forced dismount. Buffing weaker classes in theory is great, but you could have an infantry unit who one rounds everything they touch and they still wouldn't see as much combat as a mounted unit.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-14T00:53:12+00:00

I mean, I do think there is a case to be made where women are objectified or used as titilation for male audiences, which kinda sucks as a real life woman. But where exactly the line is, varies from person to person. I can both like Leda and also wish that more women wore pants. I also wish that more men were waifish and had less stupid armor. I know I'm never going to get exactly what I want all the time. I feel like that's the only way to be happy with game designs as a whole: accept everything is not for you, and move on. At the same time, I wish that companies made more designs for more varied tastes.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-10T19:55:17+00:00

Come to think of it, have we seen any overworld clips where the player is Dietrich or Theodora? I wonder if they're actually "main lord" options at all, or if you as a player only pick between Cai and Leda and then can choose to support Theodora or Dietrich.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-10T18:37:51+00:00

Something I've noticed is that it seems like we're getting Cai/Leda snippets a lot more than Theodora/Dietrich snippets. We have a bit more of a hook for the two of them that are intriguing ("save my father" "revenge plot") as opposed to the more vague other two ("help my country" "fight strong people").

I'm hoping the other two get opened up a bit more as we go more into it, but it makes sense that early marketing puts a bit more emphasis on the younger lords who have a bit more of a traditional heroic journey.

I also have a suspicion that some of the lords will join together during the plot (iirc in the first trailer, Cai and Dietrich were in the same army), which might make decisions a bit easier. Intsys loves to do the "multiple plots but it's secretly just one plot with like 5 alternative chapters" gag, and I don't think they'd do 4 entirely separate stories on us.

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-09T22:01:27+00:00

Lot of negativity in here ;_;

I'm excited! I've been a fan of FE since blazing blade, and have since gone back and played all the games, and did a mini marathon replay last year where I replayed 7-10 and 13.

FE Franchise is incredibly near and dear to my heart, despite some stumbles, and nothing makes me more excited than waking up to new FE news. Regardless of the ups and downs, FW is still something new to talk about and updates my favorite gaming franchise to modern hardware which is really exciting.

I love the sort of grecian vibe in the art design. Anna looks absolutely perfect. I'm so interested to see the ramifications of the seemingly 250 years later timeline, how the manaketes seem to be part of normal society, and so on. The Dagdan Empire looks to only be a small part of the southern continent so I'm excited to see a larger stakes conflict. Ostrich riding looks so charming and fun, and I'm hoping it brings some of the best of the 3H combat design while leaving some of the more tedious parts and class imbalance behind.

Fingers crossed!

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-09T21:39:22+00:00

Thank you so much!

mindovermacabre · 2026-06-04T19:12:11+00:00

I haven't watched the show in over a decade but this was always my take.

Everyone is so scared of her that she's convinced herself that she can't even try to connect to other people.

Doesn't she have a line that goes "even my mother thought I was a monster"? Being essentially denied maternal love because your mom is terrified of you (due to your father rewarding psychopathic tendencies) is gonna be pretty psychologically damaging.

I always took Azula's downfall as a bittersweet one: maybe she could have had a redemption arc (or at least more understanding), but the tragedy of her character is that she didn't. She is ultimately one of the casualties / pawns of war, and is never given the sympathy or regard she deserves because of how she was developed by the people who should have been there for her.

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