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
the western church isn't a religion without rhea's influence, she's been influencing them for 1000 years. they're a splinter group that's just more extreme than the main church. the way i see crests as they exist at the start of the game is that they're like the monarchy with the divine right of kings. it isn't that the systems wouldn't exist in a similar form without the church, but to act like the church isn't supporting them and giving them legitimacy is absurd. and also in this analogy the pope is actually jesus who's been running the church for 1000 years and who could have maybe tried to make things better at some point in that timespan.
edit: i mean i get why rhea did what she did, but it's still shitty and i think that makes edelgard focusing on her understandable
While I agree in a sort of moral sense that Rhea ‘ought’ to have done more to improve the condition of society, that concept would make no sense to someone born in her time period.
The idea of human ‘progress’ is an entirely modern conception, ancient peoples would never have and did not think that way, so I think judging her in that way is kind of pointless, even if it is true in a way.
She did make things better in the only way that would make sense to someone in that society: promote a general peace and harmony in society, and work to prevent the types of destructive wars she had experienced.
Given Rhea’s life experience her conception of history is probably a lot more like the ancient Greeks: she is living in a sort of fallen society that is inferior to the great heroic days of old. Not an exact fit, but probably closer to how she understands the course of history.
sure, but i still feel totally comfortable judging her for it. if "that plan would not at all make sense to someone who was actually in her position" isn't a valid excuse for edelgard not thinking through every possibility for improving the world as a teenager with a shortened lifespan it's even less valid for an immortal dragon who's been maintaining the awful status quo for 1000 years
edit: i'm on my phone rn, and i accidentally deleted my response to the other response, so I'll just sum it up here. the game developers put less thought into this stuff than we did. they didn't care about how exactly edelgard took out the nobility, just that she did. i'm of the opinion that setting up all these problems in fodlan and letting us solve them (even if they don't make total sense given our modern understandings of politics) is more narratively satisfying than not doing that, so i prefer edelgard's route.
I just found it too nonsensical to me to be enjoyable. I’d rather they just ignore that shit and focus more on the characters themselves (which I think were well done overall in three houses) than do a political/social story that is poorly thought out. I can’t get much satisfaction from it because it feels so unrealistic and not like a natural consequence of how the world and story are set up. I mean you have to have some suspension of disbelief for this stuff, but for me the idea that a medieval imperial princess would think the way Edelgard does at all is already stretching it. So I enjoyed the other routes more.
that doesn't bug me for 2 reasons. 1) i don't think it's a stretch for someone to get locked in a torture dungeon for a while and come out with a view of the world kind of askew from the societal standards. 2) fire emblem is the kind of medieval fantasy where the characters mostly have modern sensibilities.
not that you're wrong to have that be a barrier for your enjoyment or anything, i think this is the kind of thing where we just need to agree to disagree.
The western church is in direct opposition to the central church and their ideas are much more based on power of the crests themselves, which exist regardless of anything Rhea and the central church do. And yes some religion and ideology to back the crest power structure would exist regardless of anything Rhea does, that is my entire point! Any realistic alternative would be orders of magnitude worse than what exists at the start of the game, even if the central church isn’t really “good” itself.
I guess removing the church isn’t necessarily a bad thing but to act like the church is the reason why Fodlan is ruled by crest bearing nobles is to have a completely immaterial understanding of the world.
Edit 1: Attacking the church seems much more likely to alienate the pious common folk then to lead to them supporting Edelgard’s “revolution” I mean there’s a reason why there was no sort of anti-religious anti-feudal movement in medieval Europe, it simply makes no sense
Edit 2: To be fair I probably do judge Edelgard more harshly since she has an explicitly political goal and actions. Judging Rhea in that way seems kind of pointless since she doesn’t really have any goals outside of not getting genocided and bringing mommy back lol As characters I like both Edelgard and Rhea a lot. I just find there’s a lot of Edelgard fans online who basically take what the slithers say about Rhea/the church/the Nabataeans at face value. And I feel like Crimson Flower is pretty half baked, mostly as a result of how Three houses was developed
edelgard is definitely leading a bourgeois revolution, and the church might not have been the best place to start. but i don't think the crest system can be dealt with without changing people's mind about the whole handed down by the goddess thing, and rhea wasn't about to do anything there. so turning people against the church makes sense from that perspective.
i just don't know that that's true. even if she couldn't have done anything at the start, you're telling me that over 1000 years she couldn't figure out how to use the church to maybe improve things somehow? again, i get why rhea didn't, she was scared and had a good thing going. and she had reason to be scared. but without that knowledge, looking at it from an in universe perspective and knowing all the other stuff i just mentioned, i'd be pretty pissed as well.
basically i think that, though not the worst offender in fodlan, the church was the easiest first target, and one that makes sense. it's the most central authority in fodlan, and it's led by someone who has all the stuff i just covered going on. those who slither are secretive enough that they probably aren't a good start to your revolution, since if you don't get all of them they'll just bomb you from orbit and you won't get all of them without a long prep time. and it's not hard to rationalize the nobility as relying on the church for their authority. it's not the whole story, but if you're an angry 15 year old starting to plan this all out i think it makes a lot of sense to start with rhea and the church.
I don’t know, maybe that’s true. I guess I just think that there is no universe where anything she could do would fundamentally change the structure of society so targeting the church just seems kind of pointless to me, and the result is just really the completing the genocide of Nabataeans. She’d be better off trying to make her empire more like the alliance and encourage the growth of a bourgeois class that could actually change things. Though that plan would not at all make sense to someone who was actually in her position so :vivian-shrug:
doesn't she only kill rhea in crimson flower? she has her captured for 5 years, but when she's the villain rhea lives. and you can let flayn and seteth live as well. she's not particularly genoocidal, at least in practice.
yeah, that's my main point. i mostly just think she's a good character who has more sympathetic politics than i'm used to, and her plan doesn't seem too dumb or unbelievable given her circumstances. but it's far from a perfect plan, and she's certainly not perfect herself. i don't know how much of of that is just crimson flower being kind of half-assed as a route, and how much of it is intended as her not having the full context of things and having started this plan as a teenager. i'm pretty sure it's at least a little of both.
I can understand why she might think that way, but I still fail to see how in reality that it would change much of anything. You get rid of the church and some other ideology develops to justify the class power of the nobility. Considering the existence of crests being passed down by bloodline it’s hard for me to believe that any replacement ideology is going to lead to a more just society. I guess I just don’t see removing the church as a step towards anything unless the plan is just to throw society into chaos and hope that the end result is better.
She still has absolutely no plan of she is disempowering the nobility
if she just stopped at the church you'd be right, but she doesn't. her plan for the nobility seems like she's just incarcerating some of them and seizing their stuff (which is what she's doing in game) and she'll take on the remnants after the church. is it the most fleshed out plan? no, but it seems to work.
It works because it’s sloppily written to get a happily ever after ending. It’s completely illogical that she just removes the nobility with no consequence. If that was her plan all along then the war with the church was entirely pointless and does nothing to make her reforms work
It’s not like the church was the thing preventing her from expropriating the nobility. It’s the nobility that is stopping her from doing that! Except in crimson flower I guess the nobles just give up their power for no other reason then because waifu empress says so
Personally I think the letting Flayn and Seteth live is just something the devs did so you don’t have to feel like the bad guy. It felt totally incongruous to me in the story but I suppose others disagree
And the reason she doesn’t kill Rhea in the other routes is because she fails.
Maybe if they had more time they could make it make sense but as is crimson flower seems pretty nonsensical
she has rhea as a prisoner for 5 years. it seems pretty clear her goal isn't just to kill the nabateans.
True I don’t think that genocide is her goal or motive. But she still parrots racist conspiracy rhetoric about how “they” control society. And eternal prison or execution I think makes little difference, but yes I agree that killing the Nabataeans isn’t her motivation.