in between Sol Badguy's boobs

Her dance in one of the trailers from 10 months ago had her dancing Flamenco apparently

https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/1u29bhn/leda_is_clearly_a_15th16th_century_spanish_romani/?show=original

I do play Fire Emblem! I haven't played any of the older games outside of the Tellius saga, but I've been actively following the series since Awakening. I love Three Houses and I'm really excited for Fortune's Weave, although I don't know if or when I'm going to be able to afford a Switch 2.

I noticed Leda right away, and I definitely think she may have been inspired by Spanish Romani culture to some degree. So far, the setting of Fortune's Weave seems to be based on various parts of Mediterranean Europe and North Africa. The map contains references to Aragon and Castile, implying that those regions may be pulling from Medieval Spain. Leda plays a vihuela, which is a Spanish string instrument from the 15th century. Obviously, early Romani arrivals in Europe are not very well-documented, but the diaspora most likely entered the Iberian Peninsula sometime in the 15h century as well. So, Leda is a traveling musician with Spanish cultural influence from around the right time period, and she's clearly designed as a person of color with brown skin. I think it's very reasonable to assume that she's gitana. As a person of gitano heritage myself, I'm obviously excited, but also nervous.

Fire Emblem is no stranger to Orientalism. These tropes and archetypes show up most often in exotic desert settings, as well as character classes such as the Dancer, Songstress, or Bard, which can easily overlap with gypsy tropes as well. Leda's design doesn't really read as flamenco to me, and I do think it's leaning into the usual Dancer/Songstress tropes. If I had to guess, I'd say a lot of the people who are assuming this character is Roma are responding to that imagery and conflating it with gypsy archetypes more than anything else. That doesn't mean they're wrong, but I think the conversations that are happening online are kind of irresponsible-- I keep seeing her being compared to la Esmeralda from the Disney Hunchback.

People have already talked about how every dark-skinned character is grey (which is already weird enough) but I've also noticed that the characters have a lot of colours

I noticed this most on Sirocco, but it's also Leda and some of the others

On this bust portrait of Sirocco, I counted 13 distinct colours, and from the model he has even more on the rest of his outfit.

A lot of colours is not strictly bad character design, but they're not necessarily grouped together either. He's got cool purples, yellows and turquoise, a dusty warm skin tone, then highly saturated warm reds, greens, and silvers. There's no pattern to which hues are dark or saturated

Even comparing his design against two other characters with a lot of contrasting colours, Petra still only has 10 (which can be grouped into about 7 due to similar shades) and Daichi has 7. This is despite seeing more of their bodies

The colours themselves have more design to them. Peta is mid-toned purples/red + contrasting saturated green and yellow. Then Daichi is dark cool green/blue with a bright pink and orange.

I'd assumed it was just what the Three Houses designer was always like, but they'd previously stuck to analogous palettes (to the point of the Golden Deer each having a single colour)

To be fair to the designer, this isn't uniform. Ursula, Dietrich, and Ninae have pretty elegant designs, with one of two main colours with black and silver as a neutral

But even when the number of colours is an elegant choice, the contrast between them is quite strange, like Alexandra wearing a pink and turquoise that are almost exactly the same value against each other

It's interesting when something feels a bit incohesive, because the best colour design in Fire Emblem has a real gift for it

Fates is desaturated, with a focus on dark colours with pops of highly saturated reds

Shadows of Valentia keeps a low contrast and a focus on papery golds

Even something highly saturated like the Arcana keeps a heavy focus on saturated reds, golds, and blues with contrasting black and white

TL;DW: panel of TME's saying that "trans women closet during college and so are more socially mobile", and insulting us, calling us crossies and transsexuals [derogatory] within ten minutes. by a PhD. a doctorate-holding trans man is lecturing us about class mobility by calling us fucking crossies

Within 24 hours of posting a callout of a trans woman who's in pain (traditional TWERF pasttime) on a whole different website, her Twitter account gets nuked.

Over and over again, we inform these people that pointing out the slights trans women make will always hurt these women way worse than anyvody else, and they just keep doing it anyways.