Not to be the- actually, yes, to be the spoil-sport in the room; I do not think Edelgard should be at the club nor does she yearn for it, as they say. I am going to be the most pretentious dickhead in the room and say everyone has misread what the vulnerability Edelgard shows towards Byleth is supposed to be. I am often pretty critical and cynical towards it, but also I think fandom brought their own tendency to flanderize into the conversation here. Edelgard is literally so high-strung and proud of her capabilities that she literally took "good luck on your next mission" from Dimitri as an insult. Edelgard elaborates to Byleth in her A support that it is nice to have someone she can be vulnerable around. Byleth is a release valve for stress, if we get reductive with it. That does not mean Edelgard would desire a different kind of life, Byleth just makes it easier to go through. Yes, Edelgard dreams of eventually retiring from her duties, but it is clearly meant to be the capstone to a job well done (she literally frames it as declaring a successor to her government, not by birth, finalizing her project of government reforms with an heir chosen by merit). A lot of people pick up that Edelgard chose this path (a thing Edelgard says multiple times in her monologues), but then paradoxically try to frame it as a duty forced upon her (a thing Edelgard does not often say or frames her life around). No, uh-uh, nope, nada, zilch, no chance, no way, no how, I am running out of negatives to express here. Claude says Edelgard looks like a dog that got the stick (a way to say happy and content) when the war breaks out in the Golden Deer route. As much as Edelgard has introspections and regrets, this is where she wants to be! Dimitri is Edelgard's most often cited narrative foil and he frames his life as a series of duties and obligations, it makes sense that Edelgard ought to contrast that and not parallel it. Edelgard wants to throw the world into tumult, she does not need to, she says as much after we crush Lonato that people will die by her will and her will alone. Edelgard certainly feels responsibility and perhaps even culpability for her actions, but that stems from her self-aware fact that everything she does is as she desires it to be. Certainly Edelgard operates within constraints and limitations (working with TWSITD), but that is just life, and again it is a willing trade-off to get what she wants. Edelgard is defined by her willfullness and pride, by her cultivation of strength and willingness to throw her weight around; it does not make thematic sense to say that her life as we see it in the story is something she does not want to live. Yes, the part where her mother was exiled, siblings were slaughtered, and her own bodily autonomy was violated were all definitely things she did not want to happen, but enduring tragedy is not the only thing a character does and it is not the only thing to life.
