Problematic Fire Emblem Hot Takes

Introduction

a lot don’t wanna hear this, but forde is actually eirika’s best potential spouse. if i weren’t a lesbian eirika truther then it would be curtains for those frauds seth innes and saleh. forde’s chemistry with her is through the roof they’re so slept on

lyn's route from blazing sword is better than the other routes. blazing sword is not a good story overall. and lyn's route, while much simpler than the rest of the game, is just straight up more fun. i literally just play lyn's route then stop sometimes. lundgren is a better final boss than dragon. i don't care about the rest of elibe i only care about caelin and sacae

neimi mathematically is the best gba archer and also has the most viability in actual play due to having ranger class access, 3x effectiveness rather than 2x, and instant colm C support. every other gba archer is so far behind her. also i'm gay and in love with her but she rejected me

I hate when Alear being a god is treated as a justification for avatar/player shilling because it's putting the cart before the horse: Alear is a god to justify the shilling.

eirika/l'arachel is popular but I much prefer eirika/tana, if they're in competition. I like tana a lot for f/f pairings in general, especially as she is the girl with the most supports with other girls in sacred stones (with the added bonus of none of them shifting to talk about heterosexual crushes in the A support)

i absolutely hate using dancers. i would literally rather deploy anyone else than a unit that has a very niche purpose and dies in one hit

this is about FE in the broad sense rather than pointing out at a specific FE game, its discourses, or the fans. while i agree FE writing (or character designing sometimes) in general has sexism problem, some criticism reads as madonna complex, if not also sexist.

i love tanya but i hate how sexist the writing around her is... she has basically nothing and all her dialogue revolves around osian or her father. even her death quote mentions osian, like come on man. it's just so annoying cuz she's very deliberately designed to be more masc, but it's like the writers were too scared to fully commit to her being masc, so they made her an accessory for osian instead. women can only be masc if they make sure to center men ig.

jaffar is my favorite fire emblem character ever and it really annoys me that people only ever ignore him or call him a pedophile, when he's realistically like 16

I hate Seliph/Ares. It's one of the most boring ships in the game and outclassed in every aspect by a more interesting pairing, but it's somehow one of the most popular FE4 ships.

I kind of agree about Camilla/Hinoka. Their supports are a bit bland- they’re a case of both having interesting potential and having more intriguing interactions outside of their supports.

I like camilla / hinoka as a pairing but pretty much all of that comes from the conquest route. their support chain in revelations is honestly pretty sauceless.

Gatekeeping and fandom hostility over perceived media literacy isn't an excuse to disregard any criticisms towards modern FE, but some of y'all aren't ready for this conversation.

i'm surprised when people talk about jugdral's child hunts as if they're some super dark thing that's stopping the game from being localised, as if children being in mortal peril from the villains is somehow out of place in a children's series. a spider will kill a little girl in sacred stones if you let it!

its been ten years since the "they removed her vagina bones" tweet which means everyone has once again decided to have an opinion about a game they didnt and never were going to play and the most disingenuous one that ive had the displeasure of seeing was something along the lines of "the changes made to the second chapter were problematic because the jp version set it up as a scathing critique of the gravure industry and replacing the swimsuits with (ugly) clothes removed that message". like. no part of tms was ever critical of the entertainment/idol industry. the most charitable readings of it are either "the issues in the industry are the result of the actions of individual bad actors; if they stopped being bad, everything would be okay!" (bad because the problems are structural and focusing on individual cases allows you to ignore the broad reforms needed for lasting change to actually occur) or "tms is tells an extremely optimistic tale about what the industry could look like if it didnt have those systemic issues" (kiiiinda problematic because its not choosing to engage with the Issues but there's already a million dogshit edgy idol series about the Dark Side of the industry so who the fuck cares if its mindless), but really the most realistic reading is more along the lines of "all the characters who get possessed have their possession broken directly through tsubasa's (or that side story's character's) growth as an entertainer, framing their prior victims as unskilled and deserving of their (metaphorical) exploitation ('if they were able to meet expectations, this wouldn't've happened!')" which is so far away from the slam dunk #empowerment moment that people act like it is that i have to assume they are doing this on purpose

erk and nino's paired ending is actually the worst thing in fe7 idc. it literally ruins both of their characters immediately. not explaining myself