slotumn:

slotumn:

now that i’m apparently going to use tumblr for longposts™ here’s the pinned post (lapslock so you know it’s real shit)

• primary fandom is 3h but i also like other FEs
• lysiclaude monoship OTP except for m!shez and shahid + other family members (i like incest)
• also like sothileth and shezleth, f!sothileth and m!shezleth by default
• gd and leicester + almyra centric, i’ve spent a normal amount of time considering the worldbuilding for those countries
• basically assume lysiclaude paired ending and vw/gw route or something based on that by default for everything i write
• i’m a believer in no cross-faction scouting and i also don’t like cross-faction shipping. i don’t like “honorary” eagle/lion/deer!
• everyone needs to do more wrong and commit more atrocities then get guillotined for it
• i have f/m, m/m, f/f ships, i am not a “het/slah/femslash shipper” and i think dedicated het/slash/femslash shipping fandoms fucking suck and have shit taste

i also have a twitter (majority of the brainrot is here), another twitter (fic promos), bluesky (also fic promos ig) and dreamwidth (was supposed to be for longposts like on here but i have not touched it in a while)

time for some additional rent lowering shots

Keep reading

also if we’re not mutuals and you’re

• american or from any of the anglobrit colony offshoots
• and a monolingual english speaker

then specify your nationality when you reply/reblog with commentary on my posts so i can actively disregard everything you have to say. this is even if we agree

Actually given that you can see Enbarr peaking out of the top in the Dagda map I do feel like Dagda should probably have invaded a few more times than they did

Like maybe not quite northwest Africa-Iberia levels of constant interactions but it should def be closer to Libya/Egypt-Italy/Balkans levels. You’re telling me an imperial power saw another imperial power chronically decline after the first invasion and didn’t go “we gotta do that again we gotta go hit them, as a treat” soon afterward (unless Dagda also tired itself out hard during First Mach War)

I appreciate that Almyrans are clearly more committed on the “what if we just hit other weaker-looking countries for fun” front even if they do have advantages of sharing a land border #NomadicEmpireGrindset

The thing about trying to evaluate or analyze characters like 3H lords is that the narrative primarily frames them morally and personally/emotionally, but if you treat the in-universe logic seriously then you have to look at them institutionally, and the institutional incentives generally run orthogonal to the moral concerns and are often not particularly relatable to normal people who do not hold the kind of power politicians do.

Like these characters are heads of states, and states are generally amoral and self-interested. Sometimes the morally correct thing happens to intersect with those interests, but that’s generally not the main driving principle, and politicians often have incentives to greatly exaggerate the moral dimensions.

Edelgard wants to end hereditary Crest-based nobility -> because the Empire is a bureaucratic state that doesn’t have Relics = aren’t reliant on Relics for military purposes anyway so they can feasibly do that. Is a war on Central Church 100% necessary if your main goal is soley internal meritocratic reforms? Probably not. Is it easier to gain executive control if you can invoke wartime emergency powers and easier to rally domestic support if you invoke imperial primacy and reunification of lost territories and accuse Church of laundering imperial decline? Hell yes. Does allying with Agarthans and giving them a chance to entrench themselves in the wartime apparatus a good idea? Probably not. Is it less embarrassing and project the impression of a strong empire better than explaining to other factions that the Empire is so compromised that wartime emergency powers are basically the only way the emperor can have any real authority? Yes.

Dimitri wants to find the conspirators behind Tragedy and restore Duscur -> because fundamentally all of that was a state capacity issue and that would eventually have to be addressed regardless of the moral dimension. Was genocide on Duscur morally wrong? Yes. Was it also an embarrassing demonstration of how little control the crown exercised over its own nobles/how much they lacked a monopoly on violence? Also yes. Would restoration of Duscur be morally correct? Yes. Would that be the exact kind of project that both demonstrates and lets him consolidate the power to ensure his own elites can’t just kill him over disagreements? Yes. Was it morally/ethically wrong for him to torture and kill suspects out of vengeance? Probably. Could he have gotten away with being vengeful if he just tortured and killed the suspects in dungeons where nobody else could see and get alienated? Also yes.

Claude wants to open borders and allow freer movement of people and ideas -> Leicester is highly mercantile and the only country sharing land borders with a non-Fódlani country that’s confirmed to be massive, powerful, and probably wealthy (Sreng is notably resource poor). Would this result in less prejudices and problems for people like him? Yes. Would Leicester and Almyra be the ones primarily making a fortune off of all the trade back and forth? Also yes. Would Claude sympathize with Brigid/Duscur/Sreng issues on principle? Probably. Would he have a good reason to prioritize those above a myriad of other stuff unless Leicester or Almyra gain something by helping them? Probably not. Does Leicester and Claude have reasons to ally with any of the other factions depending on the situation? Absolutely. Does that mean they’d actually give a flying fuck about whatever political/ideological conflict over legitimacy the whole Empire-Church-Kingdom issue revolves around or that allying one of them means eternal loyalty and commitment to anyone else’s cause? Fuck no.

In other words, from an institutional perspective the the correct rational answer characters like lords would give to most moral criticisms of them would be “you might be right but that’s your problem, not my institution’s.”

Would the moral criticisms still be valid? Yeah. Would objectively correct moral criticism without any other accompanying pressures/consequences deter a political leader from pursuing institutional interests because they suddenly had an epiphany about how morally wrong their ways were? No.

Because the thing about epiphanies is that they usually occur after the person has gotten into deep shit and faced undeniable/overhwhelmingly negative consequences (and somehow survived). People who are doing something morally bad and getting what they want out of it, or at least do not feel the negative consequences as directly, tend to not have those epiphanies. And power tends to insulate you from consequences, or at least you only pay the consequences after everyone else has.

So personally I think debates that are like “what this powerful character does is wrong and harming people and they are a morally bad person vs no it’s not they’re actually making things better and they’re a morally good person” don’t actually do much to help understand/explain these types of characters.

“How does this character’s power work (source/extent/what’s required to maintain it) and what does that let them get away with,” in my opinion, tends to explain more.

slotumn:

The crackhead vs alcoholic theory of Fódlan politics

The Empire is a spiralling alcoholic but drinks in their own house, the Kingdom does crack and gets into violent public altercations the second the Church looks away, so given limited resources the Church almost always ends up sending aid to Kingdom first, and by the time that’s over the Empire’s chronic decline and structural rot has worsened

Personally I think this is the main reason why Church and Kingdom remain “close” even after Kingdom independence/legitimization, it’s hard to not be when the Kingdom apparently requires constant babysitting to not fall apart, even if the Empire was Seiros’ original project and probably closer to her ideal vision of what a state should be

(Leicester is a vaper, they don’t seem as dysfunctional as the other two but they’re extremely annoying so the smart thing is to leave them alone)

When Rhea said the Kingdom was like a child to the Church she meant that they’re expensive and emotionally draining to maintain

The crackhead vs alcoholic theory of Fódlan politics

The Empire is a spiralling alcoholic but drinks in their own house, the Kingdom does crack and gets into violent public altercations the second the Church looks away, so given limited resources the Church almost always ends up sending aid to Kingdom first, and by the time that’s over the Empire’s chronic decline and structural rot has worsened

Personally I think this is the main reason why Church and Kingdom remain “close” even after Kingdom independence/legitimization, it’s hard to not be when the Kingdom apparently requires constant babysitting to not fall apart, even if the Empire was Seiros’ original project and probably closer to her ideal vision of what a state should be

(Leicester is a vaper, they don’t seem as dysfunctional as the other two but they’re extremely annoying so the smart thing is to leave them alone)

The funny thing is that Edelgard and Rhea fight each other while they’re both allied with 1. Agarthans or 2. Agarthan proxies

With Edelgard she has Agarthans in the coalition directly, but if you consider the background of how the Kingdom separated and who Loog is heavily implied to have gotten assistance from, the entire Kingdom project probably started off as an Agarthan proxy to sabotage the Church’s preferred political order

Personally I think it’s entirely possible that the Church and Kingdom being close is less happy voluntary cooperation on the Church’s part and more “this stupid chud country keeps threatening to implode every time we look away so we are forced to babysit them constantly”

And if the above extends to Empire literally getting infiltrated by Agarthans and the Church still being too busy trying to stop Kingdom from imploding to do shit about about it (because at least Adrestian bureaucracy ensures relative stability even if they look away) then arguably Kingdom did continue to act as structural sabotage on the Church for about 400 years

This doesn’t even require people to be evil or malicious, it just requires them to decide that stopping the immediate disaster/pursuing immediate advantages takes precedent over building long-term capacity, which is basically how you get most of canon era 3H problems. However western half of Kingdom nobility and probably half of Empire nobility were evil too

Tl;dr Rhea torching Fhirdiad at the end of CF understandable because if a country forces another institution to fill in for their lack of administrative capacity and then the leader dies in a location that basically hands the enemy a huge propaganda win (Tailtean is the worst possible place for Dimitri to die at considering the history behind the location) they probably deserve it

slotumn:

The greatest argument against gender abolition is that it would benefit men and women, and as a nonbinary who hates both I simply cannot stand for that

Like have men and women considered that their gender identities are skill issue and if you get good you can just not be that

This is not a shitpost, my blog is a hazardous space for men and women because men and women make the rest of the world a hazardous space for my patience and mental health. If you are a man or a woman or hold any kind of relationship to masculinity or feminity fuck you. Gender neutrality or death

The greatest argument against gender abolition is that it would benefit men and women, and as a nonbinary who hates both I simply cannot stand for that

Like have men and women considered that their gender identities are skill issue and if you get good you can just not be that

So there’s actually a detail about Catherine’s backstory that looks a bit weird if you take it at face value: in her A support with Byleth, Catherine says she was falsely accused of participating in the regicide so she had to leave the Kingdom, but the really important question here is who accused her and why, and how did it stick to the point she had to run away

Because Catherine clearly isn’t on bad terms with Dimitri or other eastern nobles, they don’t act like they believe she was involved in killing Lambert so it probably wasn’t an eastern house that accused her, and even if she was accused it might seem odd she had to outright leave considering Charon is geographically and probably politically surrounded by royalist houses

But the thing is that she did not lay low post-Tragedy, she turned Christophe aka a western lord’s son in for execution, right after a successful conspiracy + decapitation strike on the king the general western Kingdom elite cohort was involved in; and we know it wasn’t an anonymous tip-off type of thing bc Lonato knows she did that and has an axe to grind against her

So I think in the aftermath of the Tragedy the Kingdom was implicitly or explicitly having an east vs west struggle, and while Western Church was trying to take advantage of the chaos to off Rhea in implicit or explicit coordination with the western lords, Cassandra interferes

Western faction probably got pissed about having their kill steak interrupted and accused Cassandra of participating in the regicide to get back at her, everyone including western faction probably knows this is bullshit but this is a shitslinging power struggle where they’ve already decided on the conclusion and are working backwards

And most crucially Rufus the regent and Cornelia (Cleobulus) as court mage were both allied with western lords and involved in the Tragedy, so if they supported the western lords’ claim that Cassandra was involved and pushed that as the official narrative, others probably couldn’t do shit about it

So Cassandra now has a target on her back, and if other eastern houses including her birth family attempt to protect her the western lords have a pretense to accuse them of sheltering a treasonous criminal and attack them (literally or politically), if she seeks asylum in Empire or Alliance it has political implications due to being Crested Relic-wielding member of an important Kingdom family

Hence she ran off to Garreg Mach and took on a new identity as Catherine because it’s Fódlan’s neutral ground and they already owe her kinda for reporting the potential assassination plan

Tl;dr Catherine’s extended political context edition backstory might be something like “local noblewoman tries to stop situation from getting worse, gets branded traitor because people doing it are powerful enough to do so, learns that truth does not matter during power struggles the extremely difficult way”

Even more tl;dr would be that Catherine might have turned in Christophe feeling conflicted only for Christophe’s regional peers to be like

slotumn:

Shit you’d expect Church of Seiros to have schisms over

• whether Five Saints’ covenant with Empire is exclusive to them or whether Church grants something equivalent to other states they’ve recognized and legitimized
• theological implications of Saints’ Crests vs Elites’ Crests
• whether regional churches can independently canonize saints
• to what level they can accomodate local traditions before it becomes heretic

Shit Church of Seiros actually has schisms over on screen in FE3H

• Central Church not sufficiently supportive of doing terrorism, assassinations, and genocide over policy disagreements

The game sets it up to look like there is some further context in regards to the Lonato mission and the further context in question is “western Kingdom elites fucking suck politically, morally, and operationally”

Shit you’d expect Church of Seiros to have schisms over

• whether Five Saints’ covenant with Empire is exclusive to them or whether Church grants something equivalent to other states they’ve recognized and legitimized
• theological implications of Saints’ Crests vs Elites’ Crests
• whether regional churches can independently canonize saints
• to what level they can accomodate local traditions before it becomes heretic

Shit Church of Seiros actually has schisms over on screen in FE3H

• Central Church not sufficiently supportive of doing terrorism, assassinations, and genocide over policy disagreements