WARNING: long and serious post about an old and tired debate over a videogame story
I like Edelgard to a degree but her whole plan makes absolutely no sense. She wants to overthrow the crest-based feudal system but allies with the nobility and a group of genocidal shapeshifters to attack the church and conquer the continent. Her entire power base is exactly the people she needs to eliminate in order to change things, so it makes zero sense how she could accomplish her goals. The game itself can’t even show or explain it, it just states in the epilogue to Crimson Flower that somehow everything worked out how Edelgard wanted. There is no material basis for Edelgard accomplishing those goals, besides the conquest of the continent.
It’s kind of funny because I feel like if Edelgard showed Rhea proof about the slithers they could actually work together quite well. Rhea would want to get rid of them too, and I don’t think she has much of an attachment to a feudal system based on the descendants of nobles who committed genocide against her people and consumed their blood to gain more power. Rhea and the church are certainly influential, but in the way that the pope was in medieval Europe, they have no direct control over anything outside the monastery and the church.
Edelgard’s rhetoric about “them” controlling the continent is just the Fódlan version of antisemitism
Yeah true, I don’t exactly expect a videogame story to get politics right, so the whole discussion is pretty silly overall. It’s really more certain Edelgard fans online that I find annoying so I wrote this rant lol. The translation question is interesting though. I don’t know how it goes for Three Houses, but I know the English translations for some of the Dark Souls games can mix things up in spots so that could be true here. Translation is hard
I think a non-significant portion of the FE base actually thinks Rhea likes the Crest system. That it wasn't just a stopgap way to explain away all the genocide powers, that didn't end with the humans finishing the job.
Also the completely non-material way that fans look at the Crest system. They go from the Church saying that those with Crests are blessed, and think that's why society gives so much importance to them, instead of that Crests actually make you physically superior to those without them. Shitty nobles were going to be shitty about Crests, with or without the Church. It's like they didn't grasp that humans committed genocide because they felt the powers and relics were so valuable.
Yeah I think a lot of discussion over three houses comes down to people playing one route and then more or less believing that side is correct, which probably is true of me to some extent too (played Golden Deer first so Edelgard is the villain)
But ya I think most people also just have a completely non material analysis of the history in it too. The whole thing about crests being holy or whatever is just stuff made up by the church so Rhea could have some influence over the continent to prevent wars and further genocide of her people. The crest nobles don’t exist or rule because of Rhea, that system would still exist without the church, just minus the specific religious ideology of the goddess Sothis, and in its place would probably be something even worse, or at least the same with the addition of the increased likelihood that humans completing the dragon genocide