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
Sure most of the powerful nobles are “controlled” but that’s because Edelgard isn’t doing anything to threaten their position. Only the true religious believers would really care about destroying the church. But once that is done how is she supposed to end the nobility when they are the entire basis for her power? She has no class basis for changing society so I just don’t understand how it’s supposed to work even hypothetically. I guess the answer is probably just “it’s a videogame story lol”