Gallophilic Cultural Posturing: A Case Study

In the first two Octopath games your party consists of

two characters who just want to follow their dreams or make the world a better place

two characters whose plans involve murder and/or grand larceny

and four other characters at varying points in between

There's a lot of easy comedy to be pulled from contrasting the characters in those first two groups. My own fic writing gets to do something similar, exploring and eventually resolving the tension between a sunshine cinnamon roll twunk who believes he can single-handedly eliminate poverty and a grieving vengeful daddy bear.

I've been thinking about this for a little while, but now I've got some time to sit down and write it down.

Fortune's Weave has around half a dozen characters whose designs were obviously lifted from Three Houses, with varying degrees of alteration. (And then Seteth is just here as-is.) However, it's also not hard to spot a variety of older series archetypes popping up here and there, from the Christmas knights to the underpowered villager to a pegasus knight classic. (And also Anna, as ever.) This is not a bad thing, nor is it at all unique to Fortune's Weave since FE reuses character concepts all over the place. But I'd like to propose another of these.

Theodora's retainers are bara bandits.

He sounds like a Balthus expy. That doesn't totally rule out anything gay, mind you, and his likes also include "interesting people" so make of that what you will. He should get drunk with Tobias so he can score an invite to the Saramis gay orgy.

We have a bit more information now, so I feel like I can put together a more complete sketch than the last time I did this. Now in color! I never use different color fonts.

Classes colored and in bold are confirmed to belong to that "set." Classes in bold but left black definitely exist but are just my own speculation for their placement.

Red - infantry fighters (not necessarily related to the infantry skill)

Gladiator

Myrmidon

Brigand

Pugilist

Shido

Warrior

unidentified axe class (confirmed)

advanced gauntlet class (unconfirmed)

Orange - archers

Hunter

Archer

Rogue

Charioteer

Sniper

Forest Knight

unidentified bow class (confirmed)

advanced charioteer (unconfirmed)

Green - knights, i.e. in the GBA games they'd use a Knight Crest

Soldier

Armored Knight

Light Cavalry

Guardian

Dreadnought

Cataphract

Bardinger

Blue - "exotic" mounted units

Ornius Rider

Armored Ornius Rider

Wing Soldier

Dragoon

Elephant Rider

advanced ornius rider (unconfirmed)

advanced wing soldier (unconfirmed)

Purple - mages

Diviner

Shaman

Priest

Ovate

Bishop

War Monk

mounted mage (confirmed)

I'm fine with that. It cuts down on support bloat and doesn't force every line to be written in a three-act structure.

Sure.

It's Seteth.

They're the only other female/AFAB characters definitively on Leda's team at this point, so I'm not sure if that says much.

Leda/Eshmel is just one conversation at A rank. It seems reasonable that this would be the case for all Eshmel supports except possibly with the characters from their own story who will spend more time with them. Whatever this may signify about the presence of Avatar S ranks, it does at least mean that Fortune's Weave will have considerably fewer "character monologues at a plank of wood until they have a growth moment" supports.

Further, not all of Leda's supports have A ranks. Dante, Esmeralda, and Orchel all terminate at B. This variance may inspire some hope for paired endings, since one would logically expect only the support lines that go up to A to get an ending.

I didn't, though I've been bombarded with so much info today that inevitably some of it missed me.

It's not terribly surprising that a trait like that would have been left off Leda's prerelease profiles, which emphasized much more the obsessive revenge angle. It's probably a safe bet that Leda/Olympia is going to be the breakout F/F pairing of this game - sidelong Octopath parallels and all.

Screengrab of beginner certification.

A few things stand out:

The class icons have different colored backgrounds. I didn't notice it in the advanced list from the Direct, but it's present there as well for the ones that aren't greyed out: shido and warrior are red like gladiator, while dreadnought and bardinger are green which I presume is the same color as soldier. Has the game already subdivided the classes into groups? I'd complain about taking some of the fun away from me if all signs weren't pointing to Fortune's Weave being the type of game where you do everything in one giant save file.

Less complicated but equally important - Guzran's slutty outfit may just be the standard look for male gladiators. That's some decent fanservice; now let's hope they take off even more in later tiers.

I wouldn't know (asexual), but maybe the appeal is that he kind of looks like a woman? A JPN preview shows an earlygame bandit calling Dietrich a とんでもねえ別嬪さん, "incredibly fetching lassie". If one isn't into fems, that part of the appeal is obviously lost.🤔 (Well, the appeal for specifically Fabio is in the "blatant sadist" part.😅)

That doesn't surprise me much. Yet another reason for me not to hop on the Dietrich/Fabio train, because from everything I've seen about them these two are just a mess of unfortunate implications.

I'll run through them here, because if I tried to make a video about this I'd get a bunch of comments to the effect of "do you want gay content or not, just be happy with your scraps".

Most directly we're right back to assigning possibly-explicit male queerness to shady, violent men. It's the issue people had with Niles in Fates, then tried to raise again with Jeritza (and to a lesser extent Yuri) only to have it go largely ignored for that game.

It suggests that fem men are considered universally more attractive than non-fem men, which obviously isn't true.

AND it only works if you believe that Dietrich reads as fem, which...he really doesn't. The only thing that's even slightly fem about him is that he has long hair, and you could say the same for a ton of men in this game. Well, there is one other thing...

Dietrich is being held up as beautiful and "fem" in comparison to numerous burly dark-skinned men in Fortune's Weave: Bonaventure, Tobias, Buccar, Guzran, Goliath, Yang Jie, Kiroc, etc. The racist, colonialist implications of a pale pseudo-European foreigner held up as an exotic ideal of beauty speak for themselves, and there's additionally the stereotype that dark-skinned men are perceived as more masculine (whether as a positive or a negative).

Oh, and since this also bears mentioning - remember how one of the reasons people expect more queer content out of Fortune's Weave is because of how Shamir describes Dagda? Funny how the closest thing thus far to anything explicitly queer involves two characters who are not from Dagda.