so i picked black eagles because red is my favourite colour (lol i'm such a commie), and Edelgard's design was cute, and the characters were interesting to me. I was a lib back when I played this btw.

Yellow would be a distant second for me, and I would never play blue.

THEN THE PLOT HAPPENED, HOLY F. When she betrayed the church, I did not hesitate to immediately side with her. Churches damaged me so fucking much when I was young, gave me all sorts of brainworms and basically arrested my development for decades. They are a poisonous and systemic structure and I loved the power fantasy of destroying them.

The time skip happened, we killed some dragons, and I gay married Edelgard. I loved how the power dynamic shifts in the game before and after the time skip - she starts out as a student, and in that role you relate to them as kids, but after the time skip, she is all grown up and you stay the same - suddenly, Byleth (at least how I saw it) is the one on the other side of the power imbalance.

Anyway I beat it, cried a bit, and then went in to play the game again. This time, I said, I'll play a different route. I proceeded to choose the Black Eagles again.

This time, I said, I'll side with the church. That's the right thing to do in a game like this, right? Play different branches, see how the story plays out?

Nope, I recruited most of the other houses in the second playthrough, sided with Edelgard again, and gay married her again. not really sure how to explain this.

NOT ONLY THAT, I think this game started my journey into accepting that pacifism only serves the status quo - which, eventually, led me here. I thought to myself after that game, "hey maybe we should tear down power structures that are causing harm to people, and painting the people trying to do that as evil is a way for the system to reinforce itself?" yeah i'm an ML now so

cavets: the tea scenes were weird, as was the gift giving lol, but I do think they were well-intetioned. I really likes the slice of life aspects, eating with people, having tea, despite all the gamification of S-ranks and all that. I think the game is good despite that, not because of it. Grinding relationships is the only reason I think I'd call this game "problematic fave" and I'm not sure how I'd feel today about it if I were to play it again. But, at the time, giving coffee to Hubert over and over was very fun to me, and Hubert x Ferdinand is my favourite non-Byleth pairing, I love the depiction of their relationship.

I also loved the unexpected shared history between Lysithia and Edelgard as well. Oh, and Dorothea and Mercedes were just really fun to talk to, I loved Dorothea's confidence and Mercedes' extreme gentleness, I could probably go on for a while as long as I jogged my memory ... I have a lot of feelings about this game.

The Black Eagles appeared to me as the house of misfits (although tbh I think this is very subjective), and that led for so many interesting characters, all who had little cheesy arcs, and they are all precious to me.

All of the characters were interesting in their own way, it's just a shame I couldn't recruit Claude too.