Board 8 > A year later, is the Flame Emperor evil? (Fire Emblem Three Houses spoilers)

(+) Yeah! (+)

Is the woman who teams up with the group that killed countless members of her family to invade peaceful nations to dethrone a leader because she doesn't like the leader's race evil or is she a cute anime innocent flower who draws byleth yaoi and is afraid of mice.

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I never thought about it like that before. When you put it that way, I can't see her as anything but a cute anime innocent flower who draws byleth yaoi and is afraid of mice.
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I haven't played CF but she's pretty clearly evil on the other routes?

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UltimaterializerX posted...

The game does a good job of using perspectives. If you're against Edelgard, she certainly seems "evil". If you're against Rhea, she seems evil.

What actually matters is Claude is the true hero of every story.

He's not the hero of the Blue Lions route!

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Yes and she is also a poorly written character

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Kenri posted...

I haven't played CF but she's pretty clearly evil on the other routes?

Only BL.

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I only did Eagles church route and she seemed pretty not good there, too.

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TheRock1525 posted...

Only BL.

I mean, maybe she's particularly bad there, but she's definitely still evil on VW.

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Edelgard's goals aren't necessarily evil, but her methods certainly are. I think the best argument to be made for her is that her path, however ruthless, led to the most thorough eradication of the Slithers; however, personally I feel that "let's ally with and empower the cabal of evil wizards, then eventually stab them in the back, which we will achieve even though their leader is a skilled chessmaster who is not only smart enough to distrust us but who also has contingency plans in place to dispose of us when we stop being an asset" is a bad plan. Now, according to the CF epilogue, it works, somehow, off-camera. Still can't respect it.
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I only played through Crimson Flower. It's been a while so maybe I've forgotten something but...

The one spoiler I knew going into the game was that Edelgard was the Flame Emperor and was going to betray and fight against the church at some point, and I was completely down with that. Then it happens and apparently the reason we're fighting the church is because Rhea was secretly an awesome dragon?

Like, I'm waiting to find out that the jerks in cloaks are actually with the church, let's go stomp the shit out of both of them. But hey no we're temporarily allies with the death cult because the church is doing something even more awful than mass murder which was ???.

Not that I'm a fan of Rhea or anything, I couldn't stand her personally. But pre-timeskip it seemed like she hadn't done anything all that bad. She was definitely extremely overzealous, and I would have completely bought that she was doing worse things than we saw behind the scenes. But the "she's a dragon!" reveal just felt like a so what. Did I miss something, or is it explained more in the other routes what Rhea was doing that was so terrible? I think there was something about how she's secretly controlling the course of history, but how does that justify total war when you could just, you know, tell people?

SantaRPidgey posted...

Is the woman who teams up with the group that killed countless members of her family to invade peaceful nations to dethrone a leader because she doesn't like the leader's race evil

I get that this was a joke but even as someone who was ready and willing to be an Edelgard fan this seems like a literal description of the plot.

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Yeah, Edelgard didn't seem to have much reason for the war besides "dragon lady bad". The worst thing she did in the whole game was burn Fhirdiad, and that was after Edelgard sent her well past her breaking point. Even the whole sticking her mother's heart into a newborn thing was something Sitri requested rather than Rhea doing it on her own. I think the developers realized this and that's why they added that book in Abyss that says Rhea is stifling technological progress, because at least then Edelgard has some reason to rebel.

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Played CF and Silver Snow (will get to Blue Lions whenever I go for my next playthrough and cap it off with VW) and I'd say "it's complicated."

Edelgard goes super hard into "ends justify the means" and is clearly motivated by deep-seated trauma thanks to the whole experimented on as a child while watching her entire family die from the same experiments and her end goal is among the more positive outcomes for Fodlan - and almost identical with Claude's, a fact that is brought up between the two of them in Part 2. Her rationale is - correctly - that the Church of Seiros under Rhea is intentionally propping up the Crest system which is the cornerstone of much of the darker corruption in the nobility where people are valued based on their crest or lack thereof and seeks to replace it with a meritocracy.

Her closeness with TWSITD is, from her perspective, a particularly odious necessity to overthrow Rhea and on Crimson Flower where she's the most mentally well-off, relatively speaking, she intentionally distances herself from them as much as she can despite being nominally allied with them to the point where her starting Part II position in CF is actually weaker. She also jumps at the opportunity to knife them in the back in the middle of the war by "accidentally" assassinating Cornelia in their assault on Arianrhod though the provocation in doing so causes Thales to launch a fantasy nuke at Arianrhod in response.

If she were a less traumatized person and didn't have such severe trust issues she could have reached out to Claude at the least and found common cause with him. But she's not so she doesn't tell anyone except Hubert and CF Byleth her motivations and objectives so she understandably comes off as a tyrant. She correctly diagnoses a great deal of Fodlan's structural problems and her actions allow for positive change regardless of the chosen route by breaking the stagnation on the continent and allowing for reform. But off of CF she's a lot more accepting of TWSITD's aid and use of war crimes to achieve victory.

tl;dr: On Crimson Flower... not... really, she's something more of an Anti-Hero. Off Crimson Flower, even if her goal is the same she crosses enough lines in trying to achieve it that her cure is worse than the disease.

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Again, it's been a while since I've played so I may have just forgotten this, but I don't remember Rhea caring all that much about Crests. Since I only played Crimson Flower I never got to hear things from Rhea's perspective, was that established more in the other routes?

That does help me see where Edelgard is coming from a bit more though. I can almost buy the trauma motivation, but it doesn't stop her from working with the people who directly caused it and are continuing to cause it to others. She can overcome her trauma to work with her abusers, but not with Claude or Dmitri? (Or maybe not Dmitri? I have no idea what his deal is.)

I think the thing that really bothers me about it personally is that I already disliked Rhea so much that when Edelgard offered to let me join up against her I couldn't do it fast enough. Then when it's time to find out the inevitable awful things she's done it's so underwhelming that I was just out of it for the rest of the route.

It probably doesn't make sense when thinking about the other routes, but I wonder if you could have had Edelgard making an uneasy alliance with Rhea against the TWSITD instead of the other way around.

My perspective of the game is probably warped since I ended up only playing the bad guy route though.

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Yea Edelgard is still very much the game's main villain. Not sure I would call her Evil? But she is a bad person and is the person most responsible for sending the continent into war and every major death. Even on CF she is still hired assassins to kill her classmates in the prologue (Even if she was dumb enough to be with them at the time.), pretty much every event in White Clouds she was part of or helped set up. Her actions look terrible before you even get to the split. That being said she isn't really a mustache twirling baddie. She has reasons even if they are not very good.

Rhea also wasn't for crests. She hates them because they remind her of the genocide of her race. She puts up with them for peace IIRC.

That being said. Rhea was likely not stable enough to be in the position she was in. CF kinda did show that when pushed to an absolute she lost complete control.

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Santa exposed for playing male Byleth and thus not having a viable opinion.

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UshiromiyaEva posted...

Santa exposed for playing male Byleth and thus not having a viable opinion.

People having strong opinions about whether you play as male or female in a game is baffling to me

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dexter28 posted...

Again, it's been a while since I've played so I may have just forgotten this, but I don't remember Rhea caring all that much about Crests. Since I only played Crimson Flower I never got to hear things from Rhea's perspective, was that established more in the other routes?

The Church's doctrine teaches that Crests are gifts from the Goddess. Her personal opinion on Crests isn't really relevant here. In establishing the Chruch of Seiros and its doctrines as she did, rewriting history egregiously along the way, she ended up promoting the heavy societal value of Crests just as despite the fact that Rhea personally doesn't seem to have a problem with foreigners (Shamir, Cyril, etc.) the Church also lends itself to promoting isolationism.

Now, Rhea's objective in all this is primarily to assist in her long term project of resurrecting Sothis (which, while irrelevant to Edelgard's motives in all this, is made quite clear - and depending on route, explicit, that she was aiming/hoping for Byleth's "awakening" to result in Sothis overwriting their personality.) as well as preventing another situation where a Nemesis-like figure could finish the job of eradicating the Nabateans even if at this point they can be counted on one hand. These aren't nefarious goals in and of themselves but the means by which she sought to achieve them is what caused the status quo that Edelgard (and to a lesser extent, Claude) sought to overturn.

like every major leader except claude maybe is too traumatized to deal with things like a normal person and unfortunately for fodlan they command entire nations/armies and have no issue in using them at the first possible opportunity. put seteth in charge of the church and maybe things go better idk.

dexter28 posted...

It probably doesn't make sense when thinking about the other routes, but I wonder if you could have had Edelgard making an uneasy alliance with Rhea against the TWSITD instead of the other way around.

Strategically this wouldn't work from Edelgard's point of view. I have little doubt that if Edelgard went to Rhea and Seteth and explained who TWSITD were and what they were doing that Rhea would mobilize everything she had to wipe them out. ...But at the end of that kind of campaign most of Fodlan would be backing Rhea and the Church still which would make things a lot harder for Edelgard when she would try to move to the "defeat Rhea" phase since now she'd be trying to mount that same campaign as in canon Part II but all alone.

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Let's all agree that the real heroes of FE:3H was the Ashen Wolves.

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I mean Edelgard doesn't go to Rhea for an alliance for clearly outlined reasons.

1. She doesn't respect dragons as a race. She view humans as superior, and dragons as nothing more than beasts.
2. Her ultimate goal is to rule, pure and simple. She sees Fodlan as a whole as hers, and fanatically won't accept any situation that doesn't end with her being the one in control (end of blue lions makes this clear)

The ending to CF is really the weirdest part of her story. The entirety of the game is outlined to show her as a villain, and then CF ends with "and everything was good after" this means either

1. The ending was hobbled together to give Edelgard fans something to hold on to, to avoid outrage from the community (I don't really see this but it does seem like Edelgard PR was something done late in game development)
2. The ending is supposed to communicate a more interesting and nuanced existential truth, that dictators and tyrants provide a control that results in national stability and progress. I don't really believe this is the case strictly because of the way it deals with how Edelgard dismantled the crest system. Like it's a problem that's instantly solved off screen. Edelgard is a fanatic, and in her discussions with people about crests, she speaks about the lengths she's willing to go to dismantle the system. Genocide isn't out and out said, but it's not a far leap to say Edelgard would have gone that far if needed. When there's a world where crest people inherently have privilege, it's hard to imagine someone like Edelgard coming to a peaceful solution.
3. The post game wrap-ups are intended to read like history books. Glossing over atrocities and written by the people in power to show themselves in the best light. I don't really believe this one either but it's the one I like the most at least.

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Evil is a very strong term for any of the major characters in this game. The game generally shows Edelgard as less "evil" than Rhea (they're actually a lot a like, but only one of these people burns their own city down, and only one of them consistently opts for execution of their political enemies over arrest), but I would classify both as morally ambiguous. It's a tough case of the end justifying the means though; her ending leaves Fodlan in better shape than it started, and while Dimitri's and Claude's do too, I don't think it's unfair to say that they wouldn't have been able to do so without Edelgard's actions removing the old regime from power.

MalcolmMasher posted...

I think the best argument to be made for her is that her path, however ruthless, led to the most thorough eradication of the Slithers; however, personally I feel that "let's ally with and empower the cabal of evil wizards, then eventually stab them in the back, which we will achieve even though their leader is a skilled chessmaster who is not only smart enough to distrust us but who also has contingency plans in place to dispose of us when we stop being an asset" is a bad plan. Now, according to the CF epilogue, it works, somehow, off-camera.

I definitely don't think Thales is much of a chessmaster; in fact, to me he comes across as an arrogant buffoon. He hatches a plan to create a super soldier with no idea how to control her (to the point where she basically tells him to his face that she plans to kill him and he doesn't do anything about it). In one route, he gets himself killed in a meaningless fight over Derdriu. In the others, he has access to the fantasy equivalent of nuclear weapons and manages to accomplish virtually nothing with them (in fact only in CF do they accomplish anything); instead they just lead to his own base being discovered.

Speaking of which: SS and VW explain how the slitherers are defeated, I see little reason to believe similar events would not play out on CF.

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I only did Eagles church route so far. Do Lions/Deer have Edelgard being less "Oppose me and I'll fucking kill you" or something

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I definitely don't think Thales is much of a chessmaster; in fact, to me he comes across as an arrogant buffoon.

When Jeralt is killed, Byleth uses divine time travel powers to save him and Thales (who cannot time travel) thwarts this. At the end of White Clouds, Thales is ready and able to remove Byleth from the field, even though Byleth has already broken out of magical imprisonment. I don't think it's fair to say that he makes no response to Edelgard announcing she plots to kill him, either, because when she actually takes a step in that direction (at Arianhod) he promptly drops a nuke on her new fortress in order to remind her who wears the pants in their relationship.

Speaking of which: SS and VW explain how the slitherers are defeated, I see little reason to believe similar events would not play out on CF.

On SS and VW, Thales nukes his own position, and your party survives because Rhea can tank nukes. On CF, the party would need another way.
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MalcolmMasher posted...

When Jeralt is killed, Byleth uses divine time travel powers to save him and Thales (who cannot time travel) thwarts this. At the end of White Clouds, Thales is ready and able to remove Byleth from the field, even though Byleth has already broken out of magical imprisonment. I don't think it's fair to say that he makes no response to Edelgard announcing she plots to kill him, either, because when she actually takes a step in that direction (at Arianhod) he promptly drops a nuke on her new fortress in order to remind her who wears the pants in their relationship.

And... none of this actually matters. Yes, he drops a nuke to show off as a form of arrogant posturing... and tips his hand as to what's up his sleeve. If Thales were actually smart, he would wait for Edelgard or Rhea to kill one another, and then nuke the other. He is not smart. His stunts in the other routes are similarly ill-informed, and in fact this is why he always loses; classic villain bluster. I'm very surprised you seem to respect him, because the game certainly doesn't, which is why he never ends up as the final boss of any route.

MalcolmMasher posted...

On SS and VW, Thales nukes his own position, and your party survives because Rhea can tank nukes. On CF, the party would need another way.

I don't think it's a great stretch that another way might exist, especially since the CF-exclusive characters (Edelgard, Hubert, and Jeritza) have reason to be considerably better-informed of the slitherers' actions and capabilities than the VW- and SS-exclusive characters. I mean, even on those routes, may I remind you that the base is only located because of work Hubert (and/or his allies) put in. Though if you'd really like you could headcanon that Thales gets to take down a bunch of his enemies with him in CF, this is still a losing play for him.

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I don't think you need to choose between Edelgard or Rhea as the one in the right. They're both basically villains. Edelgard moreso, but yeah. Dmitri is a lunatic as well so if you want a sane dude to go with you have to go with Claude.

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Thales's introduction is literally "you have divine time-travel powers, but this man still outplayed you." Yes, I am inclined to respect that.

No, he is not the final boss. (The Evil Wizard archetype generally isn't.) If you ally with him, you never actually fight him, and the final boss is his most powerful enemy. If you don't ally with him, the final boss is either his superweapon, his other superweapon, or his most powerful enemy again.

The issue with nuking the winner of the Rhea/Edelgard fight is this: Rhea might be the winner. I mean, you're complaining about him "tipping his hand", it seems like dumping a volley of nukes on someone who can survive a volley of nukes is strictly a desperation move. So on routes where Rhea wins, Thales goes back into hiding. Then you catch him by surprise. He still has nukes ready to go, but Rhea saves your party. Thwarted!

On CF, Thales' plan to manipulate someone into killing Rhea for him succeeds. Agreed that it would have been wise for him to nuke Edelgard immediately afterward; apparently he still saw some use for her. Now, Thales did threaten to devastate the Empire if she crossed him again, so presumably Edelgard stays in line until she's ready to launch her own attack on Shambhala. And I'm sure that Hubert having located his HQ remains an unpleasant surprise to Thales. But even if he's not prepared for specifically a surprise attack on Shambhala, we can be confident that Thales is prepared for Edelgard to move against him, because she already tried it once and he was ready then, too. And yet, apparently, he isn't ready now. Why not? Why doesn't he devastate the Empire? Or if, perhaps, he decided instead to throw all his nukes at Edelgard and her attack force, then how does she survive without a dragon on her side?

Evidently, the writers did not consider answering those questions to be an important part of Edelgard's story. The game tells us that Edelgard plans to betray Thales, that Thales is prepared for Edelgard's betrayal, and also, in the epilogue, that she did it anyway and it worked. Seemingly the only in-game justification provided is "We're smart, and they don't realize how smart we are." Okay, Hubert, I might be more willing to accept that if the one time you tried to pull one over on the Slithers in-game didn't result in them demonstrating that you were behaving within expected parameters.

Footnote: I believe FE5 is the only Fire Emblem where the token evil wizard is also the final boss. They usually play the "have a dragon, lol" card.
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MawiIe posted...

Her ultimate goal is to rule, pure and simple. She sees Fodlan as a whole as hers, and fanatically won't accept any situation that doesn't end with her being the one in control (end of blue lions makes this clear)

I wouldn't say this is entirely accurate. Her ultimate goal is to reform society. However she sees rule over all of Fodlan as a necessary means to accomplish that. She is quite clear on CF (and again, that she's the most emotionally well-off on this route may help) that she intends to step down once she's done overturning the status quo and also explicitly states that she intends to choose said successor by merit - she has no interest in hereditary rule.

Part of her urgency undoubtedly comes from the fact that she is, in her own mind, working off a short timer. Her lifespan is greatly reduced as a result of the crest experimentation she was put through just as is the case with Lysithea. While some support-related endcards show this is a problem that can be mitigated or even completely overcome Edelgard can't possibly bank on stumbling upon such a solution and so she has to tailor her overall strategy towards unifying Fodlan under her control as soon as possible so she can use what limited time she has to dismantle the entrenched nobility and transition Fodlan into her meritocracy.

If anything, the big unspoken problem with all this is that there's a looming problem of "is there really enough time for her to pull this off even if everything goes as she intends?" I mean the epilogue basically goes "Yep! Sure is!" but depending on support alignments it feels like it strains credibility a bit to think there wouldn't be some succession crisis and resurgence of the disgruntled nobility looking to retake power after her death.

Edelgard is definitely racist against Nabateans though, no doubt about it. She's not entirely wrong about her accusations towards Rhea but her extension of that towards Seteth and Flayn is just straight-up racism on her part because those two are among the most reasonable people in the entire continent.

As for "So how does Edelgard beat TWSITD after CF?" that's honestly the most insulting part about CF and what makes it feel like an unfinished route. I guess we're just suppose to assume Hubert's black ops (which in all fairness appear to be the most competent in the setting) manage to disable the fantasy nukes because those are really the only things that really make it seem like Thales could, at worst, just take everyone else down with him.

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This is incidental, but I looked a bit through the wiki and couldn't find it. How was Rhea controlling the Church for twelve hundred years without anyone getting suspicious that the supposedly human Archbishop has been around for a long time? Was it common knowledge that she was that long lived, and she played it off as a blessing of Seiros? Or did she just recently become the public face of the Church, and I'm wrong about her being the Archbishop for the entire time?

Man it's kind of a shame that Edelgard is personally shitty to Seteth and Flayn too. I liked them both and not getting to find out what their deal was had to have been one of the biggest drawbacks of Crimson Flower.

...it really is kind of a shame I only played Crimson Flower. There's so much of the game lore I just wasn't exposed to at all.

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xp1337 posted...

I wouldn't say this is entirely accurate. Her ultimate goal is to reform society.

this is her PR campaign, absolutely. But if this was her actual goal she wouldn't have chosen murder and death at the end of blue lions.

KamikazePotato posted...

I don't think you need to choose between Edelgard or Rhea as the one in the right.

This is correct. The status of Rhea as an incompetent ruler is completely irrelevant to Edelgard's actions. The fact this discussion mirrors two party system arguments ("yeah but X is bad too!")really does show how the game plays off our own human nature. Which is really cool. But also super goddamn annoying

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MalcolmMasher posted...

Thales's introduction is literally "you have divine time-travel powers, but this man still outplayed you." Yes, I am inclined to respect that.

I read that scene as Byleth using up his/her final Divine Pulse to try to save their father, and not realizing that Thales was actually hiding waiting to jump in and protect Kronya if need be (and thus no longer having a Divine Pulse to deal with that complication). I didn't see it as any sort of "chessmaster" behaviour on his part, he was just being sensible and watching out for an important underling.

MalcolmMasher posted...

No, he is not the final boss. (The Evil Wizard archetype generally isn't.) If you ally with him, you never actually fight him, and the final boss is his most powerful enemy. If you don't ally with him, the final boss is either his superweapon, his other superweapon, or his most powerful enemy again.

So in three out of four routes the final boss is either his enemy, or a superweapon who is also at best his enemy-in-waiting? Doesn't speak too well of his status within the game. Nemesis is the only one that comes close to making him look good, but Zombie Nemesis is kinda nonsensical from a story standpoint so I'd rather not talk about him unless you insist.

MalcolmMasher posted...

But even if he's not prepared for specifically a surprise attack on Shambhala, we can be confident that Thales is prepared for Edelgard to move against him, because she already tried it once and he was ready then, too. And yet, apparently, he isn't ready now. Why not?

I mean, you're the one who thinks he's a cunning genius, not me, so my answer here is easy: he's arrogant. He wasn't prepared for the surprise attack on other routes either, and no, "nuke my own base after I've been fatally wounded" is not an impressive backup plan. (It's entirely possible that Jeritza, whom the game considers to be an extremely effective killer, just takes him out more cleanly so he can't execute this plan. Jeritza's endings do paint him as a key slitherer-killer.)

MalcolmMasher posted...

Evidently, the writers did not consider answering those questions to be an important part of Edelgard's story.

I mean, yeah, and I agree with them, which is probably why in a year of discussing this game non-stop I've never had this conversation before. :) That's not what Edelgard's story is about. In fact as far as I'm concerned the less the game deals with the Objectively Evil Molemen, the better. It's also worth noting that it's a conscious choice on the part of the writers; if they'd wanted they could easily have copypasted the Shambhala map into Crimson Flower.

MalcolmMasher posted...

Footnote: I believe FE5 is the only Fire Emblem where the token evil wizard is also the final boss. They usually play the "have a dragon, lol" card.

This is true, although FE7 comes very close, and in most of the others (Gharnef, Validar, Manfroy) the Token Evil Wizard's life goal is to revive the final boss, so he gets more competence points than Thales for actually suceeding at his main goal. I will also say that Thales isn't the first Token Evil Wizard who behaves like an arrogant James Bond villain and gets burned for it, see also (FE4) Manfroy's "let's leave the woman who can defeat my god-figure alive because it's FUNNY".

xp1337 posted...

Edelgard is definitely racist against Nabateans though, no doubt about it. She's not entirely wrong about her accusations towards Rhea but her extension of that towards Seteth and Flayn is just straight-up racism on her part because those two are among the most reasonable people in the entire continent.

Can you cite evidence for this? I just went back and looked at her boss conversations with them and the worst I saw is that she doesn't want them to become the next rulers of Fodlan. It's a bit silly to call that "racist"; usually revolutionaries don't want the family of the deposed ruler (Czar Nicholas II, Louis XVI, George III) to become their next ruler either! I don't consider the thesis of "a nation of 99% humans should not be ruled over by dragons" to be a racist one. Additionally, in CF she's quite content to let them go if they survive Chapter 15.

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NeoElfboy posted...

Can you cite evidence for this? I just went back and looked at her boss conversations with them and the worst I saw is that she doesn't want them to become the next rulers of Fodlan. It's a bit silly to call that "racist"; usually revolutionaries don't want the family of the deposed ruler (Czar Nicholas II, Louis XVI, George III) to become their next ruler either! I don't consider the thesis of "a nation of 99% humans should not be ruled over by dragons" to be a racist one. Additionally, in CF she's quite content to let them go if they survive Chapter 15.

Again, my thesis is that Edelgard is more mentally stable in CF with Byleth as a pillar of support and is much more open to listening to reason there. Hence why on CF 15 she'll let them go... but only if Byleth defeats and spares them. IIRC, if Edelgard herself defeats them they die.

My take on Edelgard's boss convo with Seteth/Flayn off CF at Enbarr is that she refuses to see Seteth and Flayn as the individuals they are just "children of the goddess." To the point where it's a shared boss convo (i.e. it's the same line regardless of whoever engages her.)

I'm also not sure it's really clear on the family tree wrt to Rhea and Seteth/Flayn. I'm not sure they're literally family. I ultimately came away with the impression that they aren't directly related; they just consider each other akin to family since they're quite possibly the last three Nabateans left. Seteth is a relatively new arrival to Garreg Mach at the time of the story (like 10 years prior or something) and the fact that he is willing to just peace out on Rhea, even if there's the obvious undercurrent of just getting the heck out of there for Flayn's sake, makes me think that at least.

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NeoElfboy posted...

I will also say that Thales isn't the first Token Evil Wizard who behaves like an arrogant James Bond villain and gets burned for it, see also (FE4) Manfroy's "let's leave the woman who can defeat my god-figure alive because it's FUNNY".

Oh, don't get me started on that one. That's quite possibly the dumbest thing any character in the series has ever done.


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xp1337 posted...

Again, my thesis is that Edelgard is more mentally stable in CF with Byleth as a pillar of support and is much more open to listening to reason there. Hence why on CF 15 she'll let them go... but only if Byleth defeats and spares them. IIRC, if Edelgard herself defeats them they die.

Not quite. All you need to do is have Byleth engage with Flayn then anyone who defeats them will spare them, including Edelgard (having done just that myself). The implied difference isn't in the behaviour of the Eagles, but in Flayn seeing Byleth and deciding not to fight to the death (and Seteth, similarly, choosing to retreat to ensure his daughter's safety rather than die in an attempt to avenge her). At no point does Edelgard express a desire to wipe out the Children of the Goddess (up to and including even Rhea, whom she explicitly wants to remove from power rather than kill!), she merely does not want them to have power over humans, which strikes me as very reasonable.

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...Okay, I'll withdraw Edelgard being racist against Nabateans. I didn't know that about the CF 15 mechanics!

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As someone who has tvtropes'd the game rather than actually playing it, from what I understand, Edelgard to me isn't quite evil. Does some hella bad things, but not evil. To me, evil would be someone who does bad things for the lolz, because said bad things makes them feel good, or because they want power because ruling things makes them feel good. The things she does are abominable, undoubtedly spurred on by her feeling of being against the clock on her lifespan, but ultimately she wants a better world where people are not locked in to their social status based on arbitrary symbols, and doesn't have innocent people experimented on for personal gain as she was. Heck, I'd wager even edelgard might consider herself evil because she's fully aware that what she's doing is going to be really bad for a lot of people, but she's willing to assume that responsibility because she feels she is the only one who can. But even though the weight of her actions cannot be ignored, she ultimately means well for the whole of fodlan's future, so I can't quite say she's evil.
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I didn't see it as any sort of "chessmaster" behaviour on his part, he was just being sensible and watching out for an important underling.

Being ready to teleport in and save a key minion at the drop of a hat isn't chessmaster-type?

So in three out of four routes the final boss is either his enemy, or a superweapon who is also at best his enemy-in-waiting?

On CF, by killing a powerful enemy of Thales who he would prefer to eliminate through his minions, you are carrying out his plan. On SS, you're killing his enemy again, driven mad by (among other things) injury from his weapons. On AM, you're killing his superweapon, who in this route never turns against him and his.

I mean, you're the one who thinks he's a cunning genius, not me, so my answer here is easy: he's arrogant. He wasn't prepared for the surprise attack on other routes either, and no, "nuke my own base after I've been fatally wounded" is not an impressive backup plan.

Thing is, on other routes, we may reasonably assume that Thales isn't prepared to nuke the Alliance, etc, because he doesn't consider them to be a threat and (with Rhea victorious and Edelgard slain) is going back into hiding. But on CF, it's a safe bet that Thales is prepared to drop some nukes on the Empire; he was quick to employ one against Arianrhod the last time Edelgard stepped out of line, and implied that he'd lay waste to the Empire if it happened again. ...And yet, he doesn't, and we are not told why.

In fact as far as I'm concerned the less the game deals with the Objectively Evil Molemen, the better

While I can certainly agree that Thales is Objectively Evil rather than a nuanced and complex character, the fact remains that Edelgard has decided that cooperating with Team Objectively Evil is an acceptable method of achieving her goals, which she justifies by resolving to deal with them later, once she rules the continent. So it is important that CF show that Edelgard is both willing and able to do that; that her reign will not be marred by countless Remire-style calamities, where Edelgard offers naught but assurances that she would have done something if she knew in time, which she didn't, but it's already done and she's not going to cut ties with useful allies just because they massacred a bunch of innocent people.

I do not believe that CF does an adequate job of demonstrating that Edelgard is ready to usurp control of that relationship. Apparently you disagree. *shrug*

Can you cite evidence for this? I just went back and looked at her boss conversations with them and the worst I saw is that she doesn't want them to become the next rulers of Fodlan.

On CF, you're not able to bring Edelgard or Hubert to the Leonie/Lindhart paralogue (in which you spar with a non-hostile dragon, and leave him alive). However, Lindhardt decides to leave them out of things on the grounds that it involves a saint, not that it involves a dragon; I don't think even Lindhart has yet connected those dots. So I do not believe that anti-Nabatean is the correct read.
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MalcolmMasher posted...

Being ready to teleport in and save a key minion at the drop of a hat isn't chessmaster-type?

Subjective of course, but to me, "chessmaster" seems very high praise for it. If this is Thales' most impressive tactical action during the game (and I tend to agree that it is), then it still ranks behind the clever actions of quite a few other characters in my mind. And as I've mentioned before, he also has other actions which make him look much less clever.

MalcolmMasher posted...

Thing is, on other routes, we may reasonably assume that Thales isn't prepared to nuke the Alliance, etc, because he doesn't consider them to be a threat and (with Rhea victorious and Edelgard slain) is going back into hiding. But on CF, it's a safe bet that Thales is prepared to drop some nukes on the Empire; he was quick to employ one against Arianrhod the last time Edelgard stepped out of line, and implied that he'd lay waste to the Empire if it happened again. ...And yet, he doesn't, and we are not told why.

I fail to see how going into hiding is a plausible option for Thales at this point. He's appeared multiple times before the "Fell Star", and has failed to kill him/her. Furthermore he has given this Fell Star and his/her allies extremely good reason to want to kill him, and his organization has acted too openly to not leave a mountain of possible threads his enemies can use to find him. In other words: the jig is up! He should know very well that Byleth and friends would want very dearly to hunt him down, and he should be prepared that they might have the means to do so.

If he's not ready for an attack on his base in VW/SS, that's really no wiser than not being ready for one in CF. If he's fool enough to think he can just go back into hiding in the end of VW/SS, he's fool enough to think Edelgard is cowed by his words being backed by nuclear weapons. Either way, he is wrong.

And again, boisterous threats of force are not effective if your opponent's counterplan is essentially to assassinate you. By thinking that they are, Thales misjudges his opponent and this is why he loses.

MalcolmMasher posted...

I do not believe that CF does an adequate job of demonstrating that Edelgard is ready to usurp control of that relationship. Apparently you disagree. *shrug*

I disagree not only with your statement but with its very premise that Thales is in control to start with. How exactly is Thales controlling Edelgard? Aside form his ill-advised threat (and I've already beaten to death that it is an ineffective means of controlling her) he has no hold on her. He holds no direct leverage on her (e.g. hostages), and he needs her if anything even more than she needs him (since both the resources of the empire and her own personal strength are implied to be things he needs to defeat Rhea). She does nothing that he wants during CF besides going after their common enemy. It's an extremely uneasy partnership, not a relationship he controls. At worst, I could see saying CF was setting us up for a coinflip of who would win when the war ended, but when you fill in the blanks from VW/SS (which is something the game does a lot of, so I don't hold it against any one route) it becomes clear based on Hubert's role in those routes that Edelgard actually holds a critical edge.

Beyond that it's just not what the route is about. We know that the earliest drafts of the game had Edelgard as the villain, but the writers decided they really liked the character and wanted to explore a route in which the player takes her side and we get to see her vision for the world brought to reality. Rhea, as the symbol of the old, broken system, is thus the sensible narrative and thematic choice for the final boss of that route, and a confrontation with Thales afterwards would feel anticlimactic. Out of interest, did you want that confrontation on-screen, or did you just want more assurance that Edelgard would win it?

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