Rewrite for GD and VW: If Claude’s Route was More Focused on his Character
Now, I’ve made it very clear that Claude is one of my favorite characters in 3H (if some fan tests are anything to go by he’s apparently tied with Marianne and Dimitri lmao). I find his concept, ideals, character, upbringing, and the way he interacts with most of the characters to be extremely appealing and interesting. He had so much potential to be one of the best written characters in the game, and despite his various writing pitfalls I still find him to be one of the most intriguing.
But... yeah. His writing, when it comes to actually laying out his ideals in actions, his intelligence, and just overall actually being ya know, a character, he has many flaws. Like, holy shit there’s a lot wrong. We’ve heard most of it before, how 99% of his achievements are off-screen, how his character arc doesn’t succinctly delve into him acknowledging the problems Fodlan faces (the game does, showing he’s not incapable of changing his viewpoints on matters, but not nearly enough to be satisfying), that sort of thing. That lack of showing his conflicts makes his arc seem more bland than the others, despite the small nuggets the game gives of the contrary; those nuggets just aren’t enough to properly fill out a character arc. And given that the developers admitted themselves that Claude was reconceptualized (he was supposed to be a far more dubious character initially), the pitfalls start to make sense as to why they’re there.
So, was there a way for them to re-write Claude with a satisfying character arc, with how 3H is structured? ...Probably not, given the best lord we see is Dimitri and even he has his issues (such as solving his biggest character drive on accident and then later properly doing so off-screen but only with DLC, that sort of thing) with many of both of their flaws being in large part due to the fundamental setup of 3H (”hey, take down Edelgard and also take down TWS and also go through your own characters arcs even if they’re unrelated to either of these things all in 22 chapters, good luck”). But was there a way to make Claude better? I’m going to try and find out.
Now, I’m not the best writer in the world or anything so don’t expect anything worthy of a trophy, but I’ll still give it my best shot.
This will be on a Google Doc (if the display is the same as my personal default then it’ll be black page white text, as a heads up) as it’s. Long. Like I made a good few posts going ha ha funny funny but it’s actually 25k words. This turned into quite the investment lmao sorry about that, so just a warning that this is a lot to read through
GD and VW Rewrite
@lochnessies you said you wanted to be tagged so that you don’t miss it, hope it’s not too bad!
