#seiros

my page for the fe3h five-year anniversary zine!

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Promise to cut a path that is your own.

TIS THE DAY!!! HAPPY BIRTHDAY FIRE EMBLEM THREE HOUSES!!! 🎉🥳🥳🥳 This is a redraw of a piece i made when the game came out, 6 years ago. I would have loved to make it in time for the timeskip anniversary, but better late than never!

HQ file and (free to watch) speedpaint on my patreon.

Closeups and original version under the read more!

Saint Seiros, but if she was a goddess from Greek Mythology and she had Mediterranean skin 😇

So I said a while ago I'd make an essay/meta series about each country/faction's national myths. Well I lied because I think this is just going to end up being a general FE3H in-universe political analysis, order for that to make sense, I need to start earlier.

By which I mean, Nemesis.

The real beginning of in-universe Fódlan's written/known history that the human civilization is Nemesis. The standard in-universe in Imperial Year, aka Adrestia(+Church), but the reason why they were founded in the first place and how they became dominant is through their fight against Nemesis.

So let's take a look at what Nemesis is to Fódlan's politics, stripped of the personal relationships and emotions.

Nemesis is a warlord from a pre-state era who got into power via a massacre, then remained in power for centuries by being stronger and better at killing than everyone else. The reason why people couldn't/didn't challenge him probably isn't because of morals or ethics or legitimacy of cause or whatever more sophisticated political concepts we think of, it's that he will literally kill you with his handheld nuke if you try. It's a pure kratocracy, the strong can do whatever the hell they want because they're strong, there are no safety nets like law or other procedures or any kind of institutions. The Ten Elites' allegiance to him is strongly implied to be purely personalist: he's strong, he can give them things that make them strong too, so they obey and follow.

You guys know the concept of the Overton window? Nemesis' rulership is like shattering the Overton window, or rather, stopping it from forming in the first place. He killed a goddess while she was asleep and turned her spine into a sword with the help of racist mole people, and the message to society is that nothing is "off limits" or "unacceptable" if you can do it.

And this was at the beginning of known human history in-universe. This is the guy whose name was synonymous with "hero" and "ruler" in the northern half of the continent for a very long time.

Nemesis is the political precedent of Fódlan.

All that came afterwards, Seiros and War of Heroes and so on, that's been just cleaning up after his mess. The initial project of Adrestian Empire, Church of Seiros, etc should be best understood as desperately trying to (re)construct the Overton window and pull it away from "getting help from racist mole people, committing genocide, killing anyone you don't like, eternal cycles vengeance."

Which would have been extremely difficult, because when you tell people who have been living under WMD-holding warlord rule for centuries, they will hit you with the NPC stare if you tell them "please do not kill that person and take their shit just because you can." How do you explain the concept of like, human dignity, when the only thing on their mind has been survival and the way you survive is by grabbing resources by force, which includes killing other people and taking their shit?

You can't. At least, not on a large scale. That's where religion comes in.

You can't debate every single person who lived in northern Fódlan to convince them of the inherent value of human life, but you can go "actually there's a goddess in the sky who's even stronger than all those warlords, she's the one who gave them the things that makes them super strong. She can also take them away and them face consequences if they don't use it how she intended. Evidence? Look at us, the Saints and the Adrestian Empire, we defeated the warlords, which means we're stronger and more righteous and favored by the goddess. Okay now we'll tell you what the right way to treat each other is on behalf of the goddess who is very very strong, please fucking listen."

It's not perfect. It has caveats. Lots of them, actually. But this was probably the best immediate way to explain morals and ethics to a population that doesn't know wtf those are. You have to speak the language they know, aka strength.

It also explains why the descendants of the Elites aka the Crested bloodlines were allowed to survive. Because before the Church, it's likely that the default in the north when you win conflicts, probably clan level conflicts, was... killing as many of the rival clan members as you can. Which usually leads to the surviving ones swearing vengeance and kill as many of the other one back, so on. Blood feuds.

If Seiros, Adrestia, etc went around killing as many of the Ten Elites' bloodlines as possible out of vengeance because they could, because they were stronger and the victors, then they're showing people that they are not offering an alternative to Nemesis and Elites' rule, just more of the same. They'd be playing the Elites' games, and at that point they've already conceded that the worldview of Nemesis and the Elites' are right.

They can't do that. No matter how much Seiros hates Nemesis and the Elites and no matter how awful it is that there will be living reminders of what they did in the form of their Crested descendants, you can't kill them all if she wants a true political and social and moral victory, not just a military one.

So they're forgiven and accepted into the fold of the new order, the one under the Empire with the Church of Seiros. Official narrative says "the goddess let the Ten Elites' kids keep their Crests because they've repented and promised to use them as she wanted" because it's consistent with the lore from earlier (+can't tell the full truth about what Crests and Relics are without outing herself as another Nabatean to be killed and butchered for Relics). It's a case where you can't put the genie (Crests and Relics) back in the bottle, so you opt for soft leashing it with religion.

Problem being that even if it's understandable how it got there, the whole "Crests are blessings from the goddess" is still a lie/not the full truth.

But once you build institutions (Church, Empire, the general political structure of Fódlan) on the lie, you have to keep lying. Even if a noble house is acting like shit, if they have Crests then they're still under the goddess' favor according to their own doctrine. You can't suddenly switch up and say "actually the OG hero king of the continent was never heroic, his + the Ten Elites' Crests and Relics are fucked up trophies from a genocide whose inheritance through bloodlines have nothing to do with the goddess' favor, we know this because the Five Saints were survivors of said genocide and are secretly dragons whose bones can be used to make more super powerful weapons."

Can't do it early on because it would get the remaining Nabateans hunted down, can't do it later because it collapses the legitimacy that the current order is founded on and the nobles might go "oh ok Crests have nothing to do with whether we're moral so we can all do whatever we want, there's no need to even pretend to care" and/or declare war on Church for making their bloodlines look bad and also possibly get the remaining Nabateans hunted down.

Ideally, that whole Church doctrine should have been nothing more than first aid before truth and reconciliation wrt the Nabatean genocide. But those who got into power from that genocide made a world where truth and reconciliation were mutually exclusive. If you tell the truth, many humans would not have tried to reconcile with the victims, they would've tried to kill them for more power and not even understood why that was wrong.

This is why Fódlan's politics sucks so much, its first ruler committed genocide and was so successful in normalizing it that the survivors gave up justice in favor of (immediate) stability and damage control. No memorials, no trials, no history lessons where it's taught as a horrible thing that must never happen again, just a vague metaphor in the scripture and survivors in disguise saying "so like... be nice to each other. Please?"

Much of 3H Discourse™ is about whether so and so were right or wrong, but in-universe the reason why all of that happened was because the continent's history began with an atrocity that made it nearly impossible to even establish the concepts of right and wrong in society. And translating those into the only language people understood at the time, of might making right, inevitably warped the definitions forever while covering up said atrocity.