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
Ya know if they made her a more direct copy of a Napoleon figure I think her story would make a lot more sense. Like she’s either from the lower nobility or a well off commoner going to garreg Mach for officer training. She has the same ideas/goals and is able to convince the others in her house of her ideas. Perhaps the imperial heir is also there but is a real asshole further solidifying the black eagles allegiance to Edelgard and opposition to the imperial system. Then she leads some sort of French Revolution type thing in the empire, executing the emperor and establishing a sort of democratic system with Edelgard as leader. Then tensions and contradictions within that system lead to the democratic system collapsing into a dictatorship under Edelgard and she after she solidifies power in the empire launches an invasion of the rest of fodlan to spread her ideas. Would make more sense to me at least. I think Edelgard works well as the villain (and as a character in terms of her personality and supports) but the plot/scenario writing in the Black eagles route seems poorly thought out
mentions in the end slides that she actually does step down from being emperor of fodlan and makes it a democracy and goes full cottage core with whoever she romanced
I always thought that was a pretty dumb conclusion. She consolidated a ton of power into the emperor position, changing traditional structures of power, and then just resigned. Surely someone else would take the reins of the Empire, reforms or not. She kind of just handed to them.