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
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.