#fe freya

I got spring Camilla from mine! Completing my Camilla collection finally !!! Felt so good!!!

LETS FREAKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

Ahem.

So if you are a tag reader and have existed on my blog for an extended period of time, then you may recall me mentioning that I really should go on a rant about Loki. Multiple times even. And there is a good reason for that— she is one of the most interesting characters to analyze and write for in feh.

That might seem like an odd claim, but you must remember that your reliable narrator finds immense joy in writing for Kiran fire emblem. Kiran is fun for a few reasons, but the work loop is what really sells it. There is a character beyond the self insert, but it must be found and then extrapolated back. Detective work goes into their analysis and then more free form creativity is employed to inflict that personality back onto the narrative. Loki provides a similar experience. She’s an almost equally blank slate. Harsh comparison considering Kiran is a non entity of a self insert, but true nonetheless. Currently, as of the very start of book 9, Loki is not much of a character. I hope to be proven wrong in the near future, but right now that is the case.

The issue can most easily be broken down into one core question: what does Loki want? No, seriously, what does she want? She’s the only reoccurring character in which we have no idea about anything that drives her. You might argue that this is supposed to be part of her mystique, but then I’d argue that you don’t understand what builds mystique. You know who also had mystique? Líf and Thrasir, Læraðor and the Healing Hands, Gullvieg, and about every other antagonistic force whose full motives were not initially clear. Just because we did not know the full extent of what drove them, did not mean that we didn’t get a sense of something they wanted. The most common thing these antagonists want is to kill our heroes, which is why conflict arises in the first place.

What does Loki want in comparison? To cause Chaos™️? That is a cop-out in the same way writing Harley Quinn as just a crazy random lady is. It is an excuse to not write a consistent character and just hoping that surface level aesthetics will carry everything on its emancipated shoulders. To what end does Loki want to cause chaos? For what reasons? What could possibly stand in her way? What conflict could arise from that? Every other character has straight forward answers to these basic questions, but even after 8 seasons of this narrative, we still don’t have anything for this lady. And that’s a blatant flaw of FEH. Which is a shame, because as I was digging to find ways to fill the gaps, some genuinely interesting ideas came up.

This starts with the FEH’s pantheon. It is a vital part of the narrative’s themes of loneliness, isolation, and connection. Being the villains 80% of the time, they are often a pure distillation of the long term effects of isolation. Hel is a fascinating introduction to this idea that gains more intrigue in retrospect. Unlike every divine encounter after her, she is the sole god we meet in book 3. It’s an unspoken rule, but they typically arise in contrasting pairs. Askr and Embla, Nifl and Múspell, Freyr and Freya, etc. It is revealed that Hel was not an exception to this rule, but had successfully killed her equal and opposite of Ymir long before she ever set foot in Askr. With no one left to naturally counter her, she’s been fueling her endless need for more power free of natural consequence. Without life, death has gone utterly power mad. Upon her throne of corpses, she is entirely isolated and free to view every breathing being as lesser. To really drive this home, they reveal that her only connection to a living thing, Eir, to be a lie. She is a need for power, left by itself to rot.

Then we have the siblings Freyr and Freya, who were implied to be the weird black sheep of the pantheon and thus only had each other. Freyr is notedly one of the few non antagonistic gods and this correlates with his apparent social life. He talks to people! Regularly! According to Peony, anytime anyone has any issue in the realm of dreams, they go to him. He has taken the time to build a community and make himself the beating heart of it. He’s getting some god damn therapy. Good for him! Freya has unfortunately done no such thing and hasn’t moved on from the harm inflicted upon them in the past. She has power, beauty, and fame, but Freyr is still the only person she has. But now, the reverse is no longer true and he’s pulling further away. This nags at the long standing wound of never being accepted and Freya sees this as rejection from the one person in this horrible cruel world who wasn’t supposed to do that to her. Everything goes to hell from there. This need for acceptance is left by itself to rot.

Now, this was supposed to be a discussion of Loki, no? Why bring this up? Well, it’s because she’s an oddity. Hel, Freya, and Freyr generally define the types of gods we see from this point onwards. We either got isolated and rocking it (Hel, Múspell), isolated and crying in the club (Freya, Gullveig, Nifl), or finally getting some god damn therapy for the isolation but ultimately not being able to fully escape it in time (Freyr, Askr). Loki is not quite any of these things. And as I was trying to rationalize why there was an exception to this theme I found, it dawned on me— it’s not that she isn’t any of these things, it’s that she’s on the verge of becoming one of them. What makes Loki unique among the pantheon is that she’s the only god we see meeting and connecting with people throughout the narrative. That’s the point. Nothing has begun to rot yet. Her powers are shapeshifting and pretending to be a person, because she’s actually on the verge of potentially becoming one.

Let’s use her dynamic with Veronica as an example. Loki genuinely likes Veronica. She finds the girl silly and cute. However, she had alterer motives from the moment they met, as she was still working for Surtr at the time and befriended the young princess so that she could be ultimately sacrificed to the rite of flames. And even outside of that, she needed her help to begin the Tempest. It was a lie from the start, and yet, Loki gives our protagonists an opening to save her. That’s fascinating. She does not value Veronica’s life or wellbeing above her schemes, but she likes her enough to actively go out of her way to give her a chance. If I didn’t know any better, that’s a fascinating set up for a long term character conflict. Loki, the chaotic trickster god plotting to bring change and ruin, vs Loki, a quirky shapeshifter lady teaching Princess Veronica funny little tricks like how to heal paper cuts and not lose her breakfast when quickly dimension hoping to the realm of the dead.

We finally have the siblings, hope we get a better quality video of Freya's appearance.