dovecote

hey ny'all, long time no see 😳 lotta people are migrating back here so i thought i should try being active again...!

“Very well. You have me beaten. I will tell you as much as I am able.”

❤️ EDELBERT TRICK-OR-TREAT 🖤 

Let’s have a fun & spooky Halloween with a gift exchange all about Fódlan’s greatest goth power couple! 🗡⚰️🕯

Parliament of Rooks by Abigail J Harding

but I’m just really offput by fanart / fanfic that places Dimitri and Edelgard as “happy siblings!” in an alternate setting like. I *understand* the desire for happy harmless AUs, for everything just works fics. I don’t agree with them, but I get why it exists. But this particular framing is just… so reductive and dismissive. such a dimitri-centric framing of that relationship that completely ignores any of edelgard’s feelings about that time of her life in exchange for dimitri’s projection of family onto her

Like, the sibling relationship thing wasn’t ever something Edelgard thought of …. literally ever. It’s certainly something Dimitri believed in for what its worth, but from Edelgard’s perspective they weren’t tragically separated siblings. She met him when she had been forcibly abducted to another country and he ended up being a friend and a support to her; but it was never a sibling relationship. Not to her, and not to her mother. Only to Dimitri. 

Patricia was at best a trophy wife in an unfortunate political position and at worst a forcibly restrained prisoner forced into political marriage who was desperate to get out of her situation to see her family; her true love the emperor and her daughter El. Even Dimitri himself realizes in his own story that his perception of his mother had been whitewashed by his optimism and she had actually been quite cold to him.

And for El, Dimitri was a boy she met that gave her an undeniably great gift; friendship during a tough time, a dagger to defend herself, and a mindset that she’d carry through her difficult life. But he was never a brother to her, not in any real way. Frankly it’s almost less annoying when people ship them instead.

She doesn’t remember him specifically because what the situation was for her was traumatic, her and her family used as pawns in a game, followed by torture and pain and death and revolution that all came from one source; one culture that Faerghus was a great contributor too. All she was able to keep from her time with the boy in Faerghus was the dagger and that drive to cut her own path, but in a way that he never imagined, and would never approve of, reforging it and making it her own. 

So why would Edelgard long for that life? Why would Edelgard pine for a half-sibling that she never had, never knew, and a family that was never real? Why, when she huddled side by side her 10 other siblings and watched them die 1 by 1, leaving all their hopes on her? Who staked her entire live on making that mean something, who built the foundations of her soul on a way to right those wrongs? To undue the abuse done to her father, to her mother, to her brothers and sisters. Her heart is already so tied to her true family already.

Why would she want to go back to where it started, in the midst of chaos and uncertainty, and live a pretty lie that never was, and never could be? No, Dimitri wasn’t a sibling to her in that sense, and he couldn’t be. Not when the only thing he was ever able to really give her was the strength to leave him and survive on her own. Without him, without anyone else. When even when they meet again years later, the only way that they can ever meaningfully come to terms is to fulfill their ideals and move on without the other still breathing.

That’s not tragedy or a dream life taken away from them, that’s consistency. That’s the course of their lives and the interaction of who they are as people. The alternative- that there was ever any family to long for, that there were any good memories to have; It’s just cleanly polished make-believe projected from a naive, foolish boy who doesn’t understand a thing about others. Who wants them to go along with the way he sees things, who wants everything to be perfect- but never really questions why they aren’t, why they can’t be. Never sees the bigger picture through the immediate moment. Of course he’d believe in them as siblings. He never doubted, never looked past the curtain, because he never wanted to. But she was backstage the whole time.

edelbert week day 5 (the future) - ichor, chapter 1