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
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.
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.
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