Mewn pob daioni y mae gwobr

There's actually only one true case, the accusative; e.g. māpa "person (nom.)" > māpē "sic. (acc.)". Only animate nouns are marked for it, as inanimate nouns follow ergative/absolutive alignment instead.

Most other cases are indicated by postpositions. These are inflected for a pronominal patient; e.g. nana "for me", mana "for you", cina "for him/her/it (prox.)", nā "for him/her/it (obv.)", etc. A nominal patient instead usually takes them as suffixes; e.g. māpana "for the person". The nominal may instead remain independent, in which case the postposition is inflected to agree with it; e.g. māpā xina "for the person". This method foregrounds the nominal.

Some cases are indicated by possessed nouns; e.g. mīli "middle", māpā mīlitzōnēn "among the people" (mīli-ch-sō-nē-n MIDDLE-possessed-3rd.reflexive.possessor-locative-plural "at their own middles"). The really fun part is that possession is actually double-marked. The possessed noun is marked for the person and number of its possessor, but the possessor itself is also marked as such by lengthening its final vowel; e.g. māpa > māpā, as shown.

Finally, some cases are indicated by adverbs used in conjunction with the genitive postposition -tlo; e.g. mīnē māpatl "with the person", chilinē māpatl "on the other side of the person", āchilī māpatl "beyond the person". These adverbs function identically to prepositions in European languages, even governing a form of what might be called case agreement in the form of genitive -tlo.

There are some patterns that can be discerned which determine which kind of case marking will be used for a certain meaning. Grammatical cases like benefactive, dative, and genitive are almost always postpositions. Possessed nouns always indicate locational meanings like "beside" or "in front of", and are always derived from nouns indicating body parts. Adverbs, though, are a catch-all category, with both grammatical cases (e.g. mīnē "together with; by means of") and locational ones (e.g. nīnē "below").

The accusative case is the oldest, being an ancient locative adverb that was reinterpreted as an accusative – the proto-language didn't have case marking at all, just a few adverbial forms that sometimes got co-opted into cases much later.

Postpositions are the next-oldest. Their pronominal inflection developed from preclitic pronouns, just like the personal inflection on verbs did. Possessed locational nouns and adverbial "prepositions" developed third, and alongside each other.

We can actually see evidence that the postpositions are much more ancient than the locational nouns or the adverbs, because of the way the nominal object is marked. When the postpositions were "new", there was actually a second true case besides the accusative: the genitive, which was marked by lengthening of the noun's final vowel, e.g. māpa > māpā. This is still found in the modern language as the possessor form (e.g. māpā huixtitzō "the person's house"), but with postpositions it retains its original genitive sense (e.g. māpā xina "for the person", lit. "of the person for themself"), in which usage it simply marked the object of a postposition.

Annie Lennox

Grace Jones

Sinead O‘Connor

Dolores O‘Riordan

Patti Smith

Tracy Chapman

Joan Jett (photo credited to Brad Elterman)

Pauline Black (photo credited to Ebet Roberts)

Meshell Ndegeocello (photo credited to Raymond Boyd)

Tanita Tikaram (photo credited to Bernard Weil)

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