Gallophilic Cultural Posturing: A Case Study

For me it's Dietrich, still not too fan of the guy, but I do very much like that he has a team of characters with who he has absolutely no prior relationship.

He was dead last before, but now I hesitate to choose him for my second playthrough.

As of now it's Megaira's Beacon. Theodora's got the beefiest men and, more importantly, men who might actually talk to one another in subtextually horny ways. As of right now she's also the only one whose story seems like it even has a chance to be a standard FE plot with a war and so forth which might turn out to be a novelty in this game.

House Lamine looks like it's going to center around Three Houses's reheated leftovers, even more so with the latest clip with Dietrich's weird obsessive face confirming he actually is just a Jeritza clone.

I won't be able to play Rose Tempest without mentally making comparisons to Octopath Traveler, and those games just have better storytelling in general. (Also... *waves in the direction of my 400K+ words of OT2 fanfic*.) There might be something if Buccar's thing with Leda's dad was a Thing and he's the Finn to her Leif, but that's all that's moving me with these guys at the moment.

Ribeira Winds meanwhile seems like it's pulling mostly from earlygame Valentia and the Ram Village gang...who I've always found to be some of the least interesting characters in those games. Cai might not be secret royalty, but there's definitely something strange about him even beyond the JRPG protagonist status. And obviously I'm not much into the heterosexual teen romance drama that's inevitably going to come up with this group.

There's a Fortune's Weave Direct coming tomorrow.

The House Lamine lineup here is very interesting contrasted against what's been previously established about their group. No Esmeralda, Mikaela, or weird eyebrows guy. Instead:

The man on the far right dressed like a dancer has previously been seen in combat for Megaira's Beacon. The person in the cat mask might also be tied to them. We've also seen Ursula using a different, unidentified faction flag so she's probably an optional recruit.

But now I'm very curious about what will happen next. The Twitter account seems to take the weekends off, but now the app is fully caught up on character intros after having steadily done one a day for two and a half weeks.

I see the comments, so I'm aware that I'm not the only one who's picked up on the potential here. But here's the burning question -

Cai - Ribeira Winds

Dietrich - House Lamine

Theodora - Megaira's Beacon

Leda - Rose Tempest

Characters who've gotten introductions on Twitter: 18

Other known playable characters, usually because they've appeared as blue units in combat clips:

Alexandra

Ninae (not seen in combat, but Leda is shown recruiting her)

Nuzzo (localized name still unknown)

teal-haired brawler

man with weird eyebrows

mercenary with partially orange hair

burly archer

blonde gladiator

blond who looks similar to Seteth (not seen in combat, but sharing a meal which is a playable character thing)

mercenary with pink hair buns

mage with long purple hair

mage with light green hair

ornius rider with ponytail

guy with facial markings (not Nuzzo)

another character with facial markings

It also looks like Olympia activates an in-combat skill called "emotional/affected Nosferatu", which seems like it could be unique to her, judging by the name. We're told her actual personal skill is "sore loser/competitive", but we've seen characters that appeared to have multiple personal skills (Mikaela), so maybe Olympia has more than one, too. If so, maybe magic is personalised further, beyond just spell lists?

I left a pinned comment on my short Ultand video to that effect. Olympia's Nosferatu does have an unusually high number of uses at 16 as opposed to 12 from Three Houses. It would be very weird for it to go from a universal spell to a fully unique one, but kind of funny if hers was buffed.

But IS is seriously copying Square Enix/Team Asano's homework over here. The Leda-Primrose parallel has been pointed out since the launch trailer, but Olympia greatly resembles in looks and personality Dolcinaea, the antagonist of the dancer story of Octopath Traveler II.

Blonde diva in a blue dress who has a semi-friendly rivalry with the performer protagonist, check and check.

And given the criticism of the conspicuous heterosexuality of some of these characters intros, I can't help but point out that Dolcinaea is implied to be a lesbian. She has a female bodyguard who wears a man's suit, the two are always together, and the bodyguard's postgame sidequest is to help her get Dolcinaea a present. It's one of those situations where the game never says anything about it and leaves it up to the player to read the subtext - not unlike Partitio's two dads.

I don't think so? Blush Blush has a character who's written as an over-the-top comedic take on that, but that's it. It also means absolutely nothing in that game since the entire premise is that you're "dating" 20+ men at the same time. To Trust an Incubus has all the love interests getting possessive, but alien sex pheromones are involved and that game also has threesomes all over the place so that angle is never pushed very hard.

While I'm aware that possessive characters in gay dating sims exist, generally speaking the social pressures that encourage that kind of behavior, and make it potentially attractive in a weird subversive way, just don't exist with gay relationships the same way they do with straight ones. That's both the female yandere concept as well as stuff like domineering, possessive male leads in harlequin romances and their ilk. It's difficult for me to see either of those character types functioning the same in queer male spaces where non-monogamy is so common and so easy to practice and the status of being publicly "with" someone rarely matters - much less the "I have to keep you on lockdown to ensure that the children you're carrying are mine" nonsense that straight men do with women.

Double up on Team Leda with the blonde mage - possible shaman intro, maybe a new spell or two

Cycle back to Team Cai and give everyone another round - teal-haired brawler w/ pugilist for him, then weird eyebrows axe/magic guy as some kind of hybrid for Dietrich?

Start in on the general recruits - a dozen or more options here, could sustain for weeks

Fates's gameplay never really clicked for me, mostly because the unit building feels pretty all over the place and...insubstantial, I suppose would be the word for it? Freeform class systems without Three Houses's class mastery incentive will do that. Also all the content that's just random drops or reliance on online connectivity isn't great. However, playing it on emulator where I can use cheat codes made Fates more palatable, which has been nice in putting together my upcoming video since I had to get a good amount of footage on the game's shuriken and daggers.

More interestingly, Muu (whose name is almost certainly going to be different in localization) is the first character to show off gauntlets. I'm a bit proud for having pegged gladiator exactly right: it's the beginner swords/axes/gauntlets class, which also settles for me that myrmidon must be intermediate this time. Curiously, gladiator doesn't gain infantry rank even though brigand does, which makes me wonder about pugilist.