#duscur

I also headcanon that Duscur was formerly closer to Albinea, and the Sacred Gwenhwyfar mountain range was formed when the geologic plate slid into Fódlan's continental plate. (This would be related to my ideas on trade with Albinea, local ecology of northern Fódlan, and extant relict populations of elk descended from Albinean domestic reindeer. The berries are like salmonberries or gooseberries.) (Alternatively, Albinea broke away from Fódlan and is moving north on a tectonic scale.)

There's probably also long tradition of smoked, pickled, and salted fish, considering the peninsular marine access and nearby salt mines in the mountains bordering Pryderi territory (latter info from Hopes). It's said that Duscur has rich forests, implying that wood (likely larch and bristlecone pine) is not a popular building material for typical domiciles or water vehicles. The flowers of Duscur in Garreg Mach's greenhouse are drought resistant, but easily overwatered by the freshwater available for that purpose, possibly indicating a brackish origin with halitic soils and saline water table. Seals are abundant along the coasts of rocky cliffs, similar to in the real-world northern United Kingdom. Perhaps selkie folklore can also be found in Duscur. Sealskin is probably the boatbuilding material of choice.

We know that Duscur culture also has a bear totem; this could be like real-world Korea's, or Siberian and Inuit, origin myth cosmologies. Bear meat is sacred to the Ainu of Hokkaido and Kamchatka, consumed ritually as part of ceremonies honoring the relationship local people have with the land as participants of a cycle both spiritual and ecological. It is likely that Duscur bears are closest to the Eurasian brown bear. (I have a special place in my heart thinking of it as the Ussuri subspecies!) Due to the presence of bears, wolves have less prey and territory for hunting and a lower population in the region.

With mountains, coasts, and bears, we can assume Duscur to have an annual salmon run and plenty of rocky postglacial waterfalls. Add that to the tourism bureau's pamphlet right up there with the wildflowers— I prefer to picture something like bluebell woods, personally.

The Duscur people have probably domesticated some sort of gourds, like calabash or pumpkin or acorn squash. Root vegetables may be more common than leafy greens, depending again on soil salinity.

Something many may not have considered before is the presence of beavers in Duscur. Beavers are an excellent way to decenter European ecology and culture from wider historically inspired fantasy works, since they went nearly extinct in that region just before the Colonial Age. The second largest kind of rodent, and the largest endemic to our planet's northern hemisphere, beavers are what are referred to as 'keystone species' and 'ecosystem engineers'. A really effective way of representing the negative effects of imperialistic colonization is through the degradation of local ecology as beaver populations decline from fur hunting. Using the beaver as a symbol, we can represent a shorthand for the reintroduction, reconstruction, reparation, and respect for indigeneity promised by King Dimitri Blaiddyd I of United Fódlan to the native Duscur people.

Now, because I'm a fan of nuance, I'd first like to say that just because the political culture of the region is cavemen level and incompatible with civilization doesn't mean all their grievances have to be fake and illegitimate. As a matter of fact, they probably started out with multiple real and understandable complaints. Some of this is headcanon/extrapolation while others are supported by canon, but I think it's all pretty plausible.

To start off: the First Mach War from 721, when Brigid and Dagda. This was before Kingdom independence, so everyone's still a part of the Empire. The name seems to imply that Mach was one of the main theaters for the war. Geographically plausible imo, Fódlan's Fangs region (Nuvelle/Ochs) is closest to Brigid but it wouldn't be too difficult to just sail up from there and land on Mach too.

And of course, a war being fought at a place means that it takes a lot of damage and requires a lot of funding and support to recover. But the timeline casts a lot of doubt on whether the Empire tried to do that imo. They go subjugate Brigid in 728, and then they try to do a counter-invasion on Dagda in 731, then they lose. Then the War of Eagle and Lion breaks out in 747. You see where I'm going with this? Mach gets their shit wrecked during the invasion and bleeds the hardest for the Empire -> Empire doesn't do shit to help them recover, continues to extract taxes so they can go beat up Brigid -> tries to beat up Dagda and loses, taxes provinces including Mach even harder to make up for it.

If this sounds humiliating and agonizing, that's because it is. You can't really blame them for breaking from the Empire and joining the Kingdom at this particular point in history, even if Loog's side probably wasn't completely chivalric and heroic either, given the whole Agarthan support thing. If the Empire did not want their provinces to go join a rebellion with shady backers they should have ruled better, skill issue, etc.

Okay, so Mach broke away from the Empire and is now nominally a part of the Kingdom. It's actually more like a warlord confederacy but it says kingdom on the paper the Church signed so let's call it a kingdom. Great. What do the lords of Mach, the western lords, get?

Canon more or less confirms that they often got sidelined in national politics due to their lack of Crests/Relics, and by national politics I mean warlord meetups. It's probably not a recent trend either, because 1. Mach supported a Crestless prince, Krouffer, during the three way Faerghan succession war a few centuries back, likely using the Crestlessness as a common rallying point, and 2. of course the political culture in the Holy Kingdom of "literally descendants of Ten Elites and located in their home turf" Faerghus would valorize having superpowers that lets you do Big Violence. Then the disparity gets even worse once you bring Relics into it. It's probably not even the primary driver of the conflict/resentment but the whole religious "favor of the goddess" stuff also rubs salt into the wound.

And on the one hand: well yeah it's kind of inevitable that guys with handheld nukes tend to hold more prominence, especially on military affairs, than guys without them.

On the other hand: if the brute strength of handheld nukes + military affairs are the only ways to have a say in anything, it will breed resentment and persecution complex among a group of people who are supposed to be peers with the nuke havers but effectively are inferiors because no nukes.

And on yet another hand: this sidelined resentful group decided to respond to this injustice by destroying the very political project that could have fixed it and then committing genocide on unrelated minorities.

Like that is basically what Code of Hammurabi was made to fix back in 1755 BC. "Genocide for lack of political influence" is the type of shit that makes "an eye for an eye" an improvement. The concepts of "civilization" vs "barbarity" might often come with chauvinist and supremacist attitudes, but yeah this is in fact objectively barbaric and uncivilized. What the fuck are institutional solutions? Just kill everyone who pisses you off. That'll show 'em.

Another thing of note is that it's not like Mach is disadvantaged compared to the east (Faerghus) in every single way; they might not have Crests and Relics, but they do have lands that are more temperate and better for agriculture. The western lords probably instinctively know that this is a good thing, too, since they seem to be opposed to centralization partially on grounds that they don't want to give the grain away to other territories.

A halfway sane or smart political actor would have turned this this into a leverage point, and tried this very basic thing called bargaining, by going "we have this thing you guys need (food), we will consider giving it to you if you consider giving us what we want/need (political influence, prestige and recognition, whatever)" towards eastern royalists. It could have worked, there's at least one prominent royalist house (Galatea) suffering from chronic food insecurity, after all. But we see no indication that they ever tried this, and the things they do pull in canon makes me inclined to think it never even crossed their minds.

No seriously, Leicester exists, that's a territory was once a part of the Kingdom but isn't honor culture-bound and now thrives mainly on trade. Maybe Mach can't become fully sovereign like Leicester, because Leicester does have the Relics/Crests necessary to enact the Big Violence required for independence from other Relic/Crest havers (Faerghus); doesn't mean they can't take some notes on "how to succeed in this bitch of a world without relying soley on brute force." I have a feeling they didn't take notes.

And "they have a right to not give away their grains because autonomy, they also have a right to be treated as equals by their Crested peers without offering anything back," is not a good argument. Maybe that should be how it is, in a perfectly ideal world where the Kingdom holds agricultural production in as high of regard as military might. That's not the world the western lords live in. Political success requires operating on what is rather than what should be. It's also not very nice to let people in other parts of the country starve, but pretending humanitarian concerns have the possibility of driving these warlords' political actions is absurd so let's just stay in the self-interest realm.

What I'm trying to say is, there's no reason for the western lords to keep clinging to the "Big Crest/Relics = Big Violence = big influence and big honor" framework. That's not a game they can win and it's against their self-interest to keep playing it. They have the material needed to make a different game they could win, and even an example (Leicester) to take notes from. If you keep playing the losing game at this point then idk what else you expected but to, you know, lose.

Okay, so we've established that "Big Crest Big Relic Big Violence = Big Legitimacy" is rigged against the western lords. So let's get into the question of, is this actually a good game to play/a good way to hold a country together, and do the guys winning at it think it is?

On the former, objectively, no. This is the Nemesis/Ten Elites personalist kratocratic warlord model, it looks and is fearsome while the big strong warlord with a handheld nuke is alive, but it's also fragile; the War of Heroes was this model getting mogged by durable organized institution(s) that can outlast deaths of leaders. The Empire went through three emperors across this war and won, meanwhike Ten Elites rapidly declined and lost once Seiros killed Nemesis. Personalist warlordism is prone to becoming morally heinous and structurally unsustainable. Humans in both fiction and real life keep having to re-learn this lesson.

On the latter, it's very possible that many generations of eastern Kingdom lords including the Blaiddyds thought so and felt no need to change it. Nobody dislikes a game they're winning.

But for whatever reason, Lambert Egitte Blaiddyd looked at this and thought, "wait a fucking minute, I might be winning this game but this is still a bad way to run a country, we can't keep doing this, we need to reform." Canon doesn't give the details on how he came to this conclusion beyond "he's a benevolent guy" but he did. And that's a good thing. If you've read my previous essays or my blog in general, you probably know that I'm not the one to bat for the noble characters in 3H at all— but going from Relic warlord confederacy to an impersonal state with institutions and rule of law that doesn't fall apart the moment there isn't an heir/the heir doesn't have a Crest is historically progressive.

I'm pretty sure that Lambert tried to signal this towards the western lords too, because Gilbert aka Gustave Eddie Dominic, a non-Crested member of the one Crested/Relic-holding noble house in the west, became a royal knight working in close proximity to the crown prince. This is the equivalent of waving a big sign that says "I CARE MORE ABOUT YOUR CULTIVATED ABILITIES/MERIT AND LOYALTY TO THE STATE THAN HEREDITARY SUPERPOWERS. MY REFORMS ARE A GOOD THING FOR THE CRESTLESS WHO ARE WILLING TO PUT IN THE EFFORT TO BE USEFUL TO THE STATE"

Lambert essentially tried to implement what the Empire already had 1000 years ago in the Kingdom, called a central government. He even brought a woman nicknamed a saint (real Cornelia) to do infrastructure and medicine at Fhirdiad, like Seiros did for Enbarr. Had this project succeeded, it would eventually have made Relics and Crests less of a game breaker in Kingdom politics. The advantage of having a Crest probably wouldn't have gone away entirely, and the inequality would probably still have been more prominent than in the Empire because of Relics. But it wouldn't have been everything. Administration and bureaucracy, academics, medicine, so on and so forth would have become more prestigious and influential venues. Even in military matters, somebody without a Crest who's good at strategy/tactics, leadership, training other soldiers, etc would have become far more important.

And the western lords, upon seeing a guy offering to change the game to benefit them, fucking hated it.

The excuse they give on this is something like, "but the centralization was infringing on our autonomy" "he'd only listen to the other Crested eastern nobles, we'd get drowned out." And these sound rational, until you remember what the Kingdom is.

The Kingdom is not a nice constitutional monarchy where the disagreements and conflicts still operate on the basis of the state existing regardless of who is (or isn't) in charge. It is a warlord confederacy where they swear loyalty the basis of a specific person (or bloodline) being able to crush skulls in one hand.

The king doesn't exist because the Kingdom exists, the Kingdom exists because the king exists.

Lambert tried to jiujitsu the latter into the former using his position as king. It's called state-building. It's kind of structurally inevitable that noble autonomy gets reduced (=they cannot do whatever the fuck they want within their own territory and get away with it, they have to answer to a higher country-wide law) in the process, and that that the leader prefers people who buy into the concept of a state for the state-building over those who refuse to.

Again, this is a project that comparatively benefits the western lords far more than the eastern lords in the long run, because it reduces Crest/Relic reliance. The "loss of autonomy" is a tiny drawback compared to the gains. And if that's still unacceptable, there are three big ways to deal with this:

join the state-building project and make your voice heard within it (reform from inside model)

do parallel state-building project in the west that preserves your autonomy while being structurally resilient, demonstrating to the king and eastern royalists that noble territorial autonomy and progress/prosperity/resilience can co-exist (Leicester model)

throw a genocidal tantrum and crash the whole project while causing massive collateral damage (what happened)

At this point, I think it's pretty clear that the western lords' problem is not about justice or fairness. They're not mad about the current system being unequal and unfair, they're mad that they're on the wrong side of the inequality. "Might shouldn't make right?" No, "might makes right and we're mad we're not the mightiest."

This is dictionary definition of violently reactionary politics. People throw that descriptor around willy nilly in places it doesn't fit, but rejecting offers of progress, not offering an alternative, and using violence trying to reverse what already began is what reactionarism looks like. That's right, Dimitri is unironically a beacon of progress in the Kingdom because he's trying to continue his father's state-building project while killing these guys. Again I'm not trying to glaze him, I don't even particularly like him as a character, but politically that's what this situation is.

Speaking of the Blaiddyds, look at which Blaiddyd is siding with the western lords. Rufus. Hopes shows him going "I'm literally the Duke of Itha for no reason other than being born lucky and I live more comfortably than 99% of the population but I'm still mad because I'm not kingggggg ugh it's because I don't have a Crestttttt I gota kill my brother and try to assassinate my literal child nephew multiple timessssss." This shit also applies to the western lords, too. Look sorry about the guys in the east having more power than you, but you do realize that you also have power and privileges most of the population can't even conceive of, right. A noble holding less prestige compared to another noble is not the worst injustice there ever was.

So now that we understand that these people suck in ways that do nothing to resolve their grievances, let's untangle the most insane and morally heinous part of this whole affair: scapegoating Duscur for regicide and then committing genocide on them.

A part of why western lords did that is obviously land grab, resource grab, etc. But I think there's also political + psychological pathology here stemming from the Kingdom's strength-based honor culture and logic.

Here's what we know about Duscur pre-genocide:

they're culturally distinct and militarily weaker but still autonomous

the Central Church didn't have religious beef with them

there were prejudices between Duscurians and Fódlanis, but it wasn't at armed conflict levels like Brigid/Dagda, Almyra, Sreng

Lambert did diplomacy with them in a normal cordial manner

Now imagine that you are a bitch ass reactionary noble from Mach:

King reduces your autonomy and listens mainly to Crested eastern nobles. Humiliation! Making us lose face! Treating us as second class!

King does diplomacy with Duscur, respecting their autonomy despite the military weakness and being polite to them like a normal person Humiliation by proxy! He respects their autonomy but not ours! That implies we're lesser than those weak foreigners!

You feel humiliated and weak and Kingdom honor culture demands that you rectify this by taking revenge and proving your strength/honor

Well the king obviously dishonored you with his policies

But so did Duscur, by daring to exist autonomously without overwhelming force and still being treated respectfully by the crown rather than being violently subjugated

To prove our strength, it must be shown that both the king and Duscur are weaker than us

Hey, I know, if the king and the diplomatic mission gets killed by Duscurians, it humiliates him by showing that he's weaker than these backwater savages, and also that his method of civilized polite diplomacy doesn't work because it makes others see you as a sucker they can kill!

Then when we kill and humiliate Duscurians, we're being honorable because we're avenging the king (you're welcome eastern royalists), and also it proves that we are stronger than the Duscur, which by proxy proves we are stronger than that sucker reformist king who got murdered!

Oh awesome the king's brother (Rufus) who also has the same Crestlessness complex as us sympathizes and wants to help. So does Cornelia. So does the Western Church. So do some Adrestian nobles. Wow this is all very convenient

If all of this sounds like deranged mental gymnastics, that's because it is. It's a closed loop of grievance and resentment where anything and everything the crown does is an insult to western lords' honor. Why was Duscur scapegoated? Because they dared to exist and interact peacefully in vicinity of the violence-based Kingdom politics. In this circular logic, being peaceful is not seen as a virtue, it's seen as an existential insult that requires mass murder and destruction to rectify.

Everything from Lambert's death onwards is designed to be a no-win scenario for everyone but the western lords:

If Duscur is guilty and the eastern royalists don't stop the genocide, the western lords are righteous avengers and honorable vassals who stayed loyal to the king even though he mistreated them, so western lords win. (officially peddled narrative at start of 1180)

If Duscur is guilty and the eastern royalists try to stop the genocide because two wrongs don't make a right, it proves the eastern loyalists, even with their Crests and Relics, are weak cucks unwilling avenge their king while the Crest/Relicless west is willing, so the western lords win.

If Duscur is innocent and the eastern royalists don't stop the genocide, that means the eastern royalists can't protect the king's allies/diplomatic partners, so the western lords prove they are stronger and win.

And even if the official narrative is that Duscur is innocent and even if the eastern royalists had managed to stop the genocide, they've still done a successful decapitation strike on the state-building project.

They killed the king before he finished jiujitsuing things into "king exists because kingdom exists," which means that the king does not exist, the old Kingdom Lambert inherited (that the western lords hated because it treated them as second class nobles) does not exist, and the new Kingdom he was trying to build (that the western lords hated because it didn't let them do whatever the fuck they wanted) also does not exist. What does exist is an awkward half-formed failed state that needs Central Church's soup kitchens to keep the lights on.

And yeah, there are people, including the crown prince, who strongly suspect that this was a conspiracy and that Duscur is being scapegoated. If you're a Kingdom noble you'd have to be politically iliterate to not suspect.

But Tragedy of Duscur being a Mach op, the injustice of Duscurians taking the blame and being massacred, doesn't even matter at the start of canon. Because this was always about power, and specifically, about western lords asserting that power is all that matters.

And the only definition of power they know is the Nemesis/Ten Elites/Agarthan definition: brute force to kill anybody you want and get away with it.

These are the guys that come up in the paradox of tolerance; how in order to have a tolerant or even just a halfway functioning society, you cannot tolerate people whose primary form of political expression is violence and murder. You can't build a state that runs on rule of law by letting people who violently reject those concepts hold power.

The game shows Dimitri being vengeful towards perpetrators of the Tragedy as a bad thing because it's detrimental to his personal mental health, and while using up your mental energy to be viscerally angry about it all the time is unhealthy, his instinct on what he has to do with the western lords politically is basically correct. You need to totally subjugate them or remove them from power and possibly the mortal coil. By coercive force. You cannot talk this one out.

Now, I know what people might be inclined to say at this point: there are good western nobles who aren't terrible genocidal freaks. And my answer is: there are, and that changed nothing politically.

The Dominics, who have a Crest and a Relic, are still pressured by other western nobles into being quiet or complicit. Baron Dominic (Annette's uncle) pretends to go along with them for his family's safety. The best these "good western nobles" can do is not joining in on the cavemen behavior, but they can't meaningfully stop their peers from doing it. And speaking of the Dominics: on that earlier point about Gilbert/Gustave, the fandom likes to characterize him as a deadbeat who cares more about professional failure than his family who needs him, and the game also tries to make it seem like his guilt is soley over failing to protect the king. But I think it's possible that another reason is because royal knight + going back to Dominic post-Tragedy = other western lords come kill him and his family knowing that the crown can't protect them anymore.

Gustave would have been viewed as twice an eyesore and sellout by other western nobles: first he goes to serve the Crested king who humiliates the west even though he's Crestless, then he comes back to his Crested family who loves him regardless. You can think that he handled the process badly, but when your boss just got murdered and the nobles nextdoors who orchestrated it are demonstrating how psychopathic they are by creating more victims in real time, concluding "I am a walking target due to my connections to the late king, I need to stay away from my loved ones and get a new identity, preferably in a neutral zone willing to offer unconditional asylum (Garreg Mach)" is... pretty sound.

What other nice western nobles do we see? Lonato? Lonato was personally kind to Ashe, but that doesn't guarantee that he wasn't aligned with some questionable actors politically. I think I'm going to have to write another essay on the Western Church and their connection to the western lords/Tragedy/etc, but Lonato's son (Christophe) was involved with a Western Church plot to assassinate Rhea, and the Central-West Church schism is very obviously related to the Kingdom's east-west feud. Lonato's grief and anger about Christophe's death can be real and personally understandable, but the fact both of them casually follow a regional church infiltrated by Agarthans + almost certainly encourage/validate the reactionary politics of the region is a red flag, in my opinion.

This doesn't mean Lonato or Christophe had to be directly involved in committing genocide at Duscur, but it does imply that the baseline elite culture (I say elites because western Kingdom commoners like Ashe and Yuri are normal) is ideologically captured by, and has normalized, toxic reactionary politics.

(I do think there's a reason why we never get further details about Christophe or see him on-screen; what we know about him implies that he either got radicalized or manipulated by the Western Church into being a part of a reactionary political project that included/was supposed to work in tandem with the Tragedy. Neither of those things would be pleasant to see on screen, especially if it was radicalization.)

One last point for this already long-ass essay, which is: are the western lords good for literally anything. Like yeah they are disgusting as moral and political actors, but what about as tools.

Well, they are useful for the Empire once the war starts, because it lets Edelgard flip half of the Kingdom extremely fast. So I can't say they have zero tactical uses. But even this comes with a few catches.

First catch: the reason why western lords flip so easily isn't because they were deeply moved by Edelgard's project for a meritocratic state. They flip fast precisely because they don't believe in a state. The state, whether Kingdom or Empire, does not exist to them; there's only vengeance and settling scores and a cartel for preventing literally any restraint on their powers. To them Edelgard and the Empire are just the latest bigger stronger warlords who will help them settle scores in their blood feud with the east.

And it sorta works while the war is ongoing. They attacked a location/army that the Empire needed attacked? Yeah sure, a goal accomplished is goal accomplished, we don't need their reasons for attacking to line up perfectly with ours. They want us to show support for their weird petty generational blood feud bullshit? Fine, whatever, we'll let them think we have their back unconditionally and that we see them as peers. We don't but let's just say we do so we can keep using them.

Then once the fighting is over and the governing starts, it will become painfully clear that they're structurally incompatible with Edelgard's Empire. Edelgard is a statist and an institutionalist to her core. She's such a massive institutionalist that she wants to conquer the whole continent so it can be ruled by her institutions. So yeah the western cavemen gotta go. She probably won't be sorry about this because the western lords are an anathema to everything the Empire represents and takes pride in. And she'd be objectively correct for that.

The second catch: even during the fighting, certain western lords seem prone to doing some stupid annoying shit because they don't know what "coordination" and "chain of command" and "following a plan" is. Maybe not enough to completely abandon them, but still annoying.

This isn't a hypothetical, it happens in Scarlet Blaze when Lonato fires off a rebellion on his own without coordinating with the Empire. Edelgard is visibly exasperated with this and the only reason she goes to help Lonato is because the Empire has a reputation/brand to maintain wrt helping their vassals, not because he did a good job. It's like giving candy to a tantrum throwing child, "yes yes we know you hate the Central Church for personal reasons and want to kill Rhea, PLEASE coordinate with us next time." The token sympathetic western lord, everyone.

So, to sum everything up, see the title. The western lords run on Nemesis style "might makes right" logic, the thing fucked everything up at the start of known Fódlani history, 1000+ years after Nemesis' death. But they also play victim when that's convenient. You know which other faction in the game does that? Agarthans.