i feel like you've put rosetta headstone under a box propped up by a stick with signs reading like "names as mask and identity, insecurity, local boy is introduced to Emotions and also white people (derogatory) and is not having fun, Hedgehog dilema, and more!" like a goddamn roadrunner cartoon. Anyway it is very dark in this box but damn am i having fun A+++
THANK YOU!!!!
Gonna be real, this story is fucking weird and messy and niche but I did drive myself a bit insane over it. It has so much going on. It's very emotional and raw. It's so fucking stupid.
In the game, Claude frequently mentions how he's an 'outsider', and how his very cutthroat home environment gave him an 'every man for himself so do anything to survive' mentality. The game itself I think only even alludes to the fact that he's a foreign prince and I actually don't know to what degree his real name is even mentioned (I heard that it was a Word of God thing but the Wiki's pretty upfront about it so ???), so there is honestly a shitton left unexplored about Claude's heritage and how he must have felt early in the game.
I decided to focus a lot of Claude's story about being biracial, especially in a story where that seems very uncommon. I interpreted him as someone somebody who was constantly teased and ostracized for being European in Fantasy Saudi Arabia, and who probably idealized running away to his mother's country and both a) wowing everybody through being from a far superior country (this xenophobia/nationalism is entirely from me and entirely because I think it's funny) and b) finally being able to successfully pass as somebody of everybody else's race. It's very much an exotification, it's definitely ridiculous, and it is a picture of somebody who is pretty desperate to belong and who has already resigned himself to the fact that he can't belong anywhere unless he pulls a lying gambit. It's the picture of a teenage boy on his study abroad and who just plans to squeeze this continent dry for what it can give him, but it's also the picture of somebody who is desperately searching for somebody he can understand and who can understand him. Of course, nobody ever truly can. That's where the strong themes of communication are born: how do you make somebody understand you when you are speaking in an imperfect second tongue?
Obviously, you use flowers. And that's how Byleth becomes the most important person in Khalid's life - not only somebody who is capable of understanding him, somebody who wants to understand him just as desperately as he wants to be understood. Thanks for reading!!!
