People are telling me claude and edelgard are fundamentally different people with fundamentally different ideas of what is or isn't acceptable and I hear you! Do I think in-canon they could have actually come to see eye-to-eye or agree to an alliance? Only if very specific events happen. But please put into consideration that I am the curator of my own content... and I can make these events happen
Listen. Two frustrated 23 year old world leaders with similar enough ideas about the need for major societal and political change but entirely different ideas about how to get there and the employment of force locked in an audience chamber full of people they hate just a little more than they hate each other? No choice but to work together? That's hilarious. I wanna see the two of the most refined, well-dressed people in game wrestle in the fucking dirt either over like the morality of house arrest without trial OR over claude making one too many short jokes. I want hubert to get repeatedly elbowed in the gut trying to yank them apart only for hilda and byleth to easily plant themselves between them once they're done enjoying the show.
If you think the appeal of two independently intellegent individuals going stupid with petty rage every time they make casual eye contact is lost on me, that's where you're wrong. Like they cannot agree on method, philosophy, the roles of leaders, nothing... but they are stuck together. What is there to not understand?
((And I guess the angst potential of two people falling in love as people but being unable to reconcile the pieces of themselves too. To have someone know you, reject parts of you, and yet love you anyways? Hello? Ouch? Honestly, claude's goodbye to us in CF was already bittersweet af—he can't agree with you but he also can't stop you, he can only wish you luck and go. Imagine that but if he and edelgard were closer? Also the potential for growth and development yada yada))