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
That is fair, Edelgard is in a tough position, and she doesn’t necessarily have any reason to trust Rhea or the church.
Rhea is certainly willing to use violence to accomplish her goals, but I don’t think it is really correct to say she backs the crest system. She is just making use of the existing reality in order to not get her people killed again. I don’t think she would oppose a different social order as long as her people are safe and she can still try to bring back her mommy
The execution of heretics isn’t great, but if you look into what the Western church believes it’s like some insane racist shit. Their differences in belief and doctrine are mostly not stated, except that they advocate for more extreme separation of class, race and culture, and oppose the mingling that Garreg Mach Monastery allows. So I can’t say I have any sympathy for them. And they are also trying to assassinate Rhea and take down the central church so it’s not hard to understand why she would execute them.
I’m fact if Rhea didn’t create the church with her relatively benign beliefs I think the religion in Fodlan would probably have ended up a lot more like the western church heretics: insane racist crest worshippers who believe holy blood is all that matters, and everyone else must be kept in their place or exterminated