#slotalks

1. Nabateans

Detail with biggest lore implications, even though it was shown in just the beginning and the end. The guy making the declaration as "Divine Sovereign" has his ears out, unlike the Nabateans of 3H who hide them post-Nabatean genocide. And the reason they hide them is almost certainly because they don't want to get clocked and experimented on (see: Flayn kidnapping)/killed to make more Relics.

In other words, whatever happened in the game's backstory, it's apparently safe for at least this one Divine Sovereign guy to walk around as openly Nabatean with his pointy ears. Massive lore implications there.

Sothis is also in her adult form; and if you remember, the reason why she appeared in child form in 3H is because she lost her memories after being killed by Nemesis. The fact she appears in her adult form here implies 1. either she didn't get killed or 2. her ghost self somehow regained her memories. Either way, also lots of lore implications.

Plus character design detail: the Divine Sovereign guy has blue eyes, unlike most Nabateans in 3H who all have curtains matching the window. And the only other Nabatean who has blue eyes is Sothis.

2. there are still Crests, Relics, and Demonic Beasts

As you can see in the gameplay. Cai and Dietrich have Crests of Elites, even. And if we assume they were made like in 3H (=kill Nabateans, drink their blood, make weapons out of their bones), it implies that at least some Nabateans still got killed like that here too.

And while there are regular giant monsters in the 3H works, Leda is shown controlling Demonic Beasts, which are specifically associated with Crests/Relics, and more specifically, human interactions with them. Interesting...

3. the factions and cultural/religious inspirations

We see that there are factions in the gameplay bits, but they're not the ones we know. Some color schemes are remniscient of 3H factions however, ex: Cai's faction being blue and both the logo and his clothes having Celtic knot motifs, invoking Faerghus.

Theodora's faction logo is yellow and appears to be Persian inspired? That winged lion + fire. And if we assume that the irl cultural motif counterpart factions from 3H carry over, she might have something to do with Almyra or the Almyra equivalent.

Dietrich has a black faction logo and he seems to be able to use dark magic. He even teleports, which is a very Agarthan thing in 3H (Agarthans or Agarthan associated characters are the only ones shown doing space shenanigans in the cutscene and/or having exclusive space abilities mechanics wise, like Shez). He's also very pale, palest one in the main four, wears armor that looks vaguely like Thales' armor. Might not be Agarthan but probably at least has Agarthan related backstory.

Leda is the hardest to tell; her faction logo is red but it doesn't look Adrestian as we know it, nor does her design invoke mainstream Adrestian designs we see in 3H. She might still be from the Empire/Empire equivalent, though; see number 6 for why.

As for the Divine Sovereign and presumably the Red Empire™ archetype of this game that's holding the competition: probably Adrestia or Adrestia equivalent, I think? Remember that before things went sour between Adrestia and Church in the recent few hundred years of 3H, Seiros and the Saints (Nabateans) helped found the Empire and whatnot, so Adrestia there already has the strongest claim to being the arbiters of the faith and successors of Saints/Nabateans (if they knew what Nabateans were); a similar country being ruled by an actual Nabatean isn't too much of a stretch.

Also one interesting thing to note is that from what we've seen in the trailer, the aesthetics are far less... west/north European. It's giving Byzantine including the Near Eastern/North African territories. Which, again, interesting given that Fódlan was "what if Stereotypical Fantasy Europe™ (so the north/western parts mostly) went isolationist for 1000 years." And idk what Cai's name is short for but Dietrich is the only one in the main four with a super Germanic sounding name, while Theodora and Leda are very Greek/Byzantine, matching the aesthetics shown.

For religion: the Divine Sovereign's name and his declaration at the start invoke faith. Meanwhile Theodora mentions having to protect her faith, implying that she might follow a different one. Also her design is obviously a Seiros homage, which has interesting implications regardless of whether Seiros as we knew her exists in this world.

Plus, considering the relationship between irl Christianity, Rome, and other regions/people that were under their rule (ex: Celts), interesting stuff about the spread of religions coming?

4. Adrestia and gladiators

I am brainrotten and lorepilled enough that as soon as I heard the whole arena gladiator thing, my mind immediately went to this doc in the Shadow Library. The one about the Adrestian emperor's wedding being celebrated with lavish feasts... and featuring northern gladiators being torn up by beasts as entertainment(!)

So, if the country holding the competition is Adrestia or the Adrestia equivalent of this verse: this might take place at a point where the Empire does nominally rule over the northern (3H world's Kingdom) and eastern (3H's Alliance) parts but they aren't fully culturally/religiously integrated yet. Cai talks about fighting to save his father too; maybe his dad got dragged off by the Imperial rulers for something idk

5. other interesting details

In 1:52, the woman Dietrich is fighting holds something that looks... like a gun???

In 1:54; Egyptian inspired cat mask?

6. the Japanese title

萬紫千紅, banshisenkou, is another Chinese expression like fuukasetsugetsu.

The kanji breaks down to: ten thousand (ban) purple and thousand (sen) red (kou). It's commonly used to refer to the sight of flowers in full bloom— and kou 紅 is the kanji used for crimson in Crimson Flower.

So, I'm willing to bet that this is almost certainly about Adrestian Empire at its peak (those 500? 600 years between end of War of Heroes and the First Mach War~Faerghan independence where they held hegemony over Fódlan) or another timeline/world/whatever with similar conditions.

Like these characters are heads of states, and states are generally amoral and self-interested. Sometimes the morally correct thing happens to intersect with those interests, but that's generally not the main driving principle, and politicians often have incentives to greatly exaggerate the moral dimensions.

Edelgard wants to end hereditary Crest-based nobility -> because the Empire is a bureaucratic state that doesn't have Relics = aren't reliant on Relics for military purposes anyway so they can feasibly do that. Is a war on Central Church 100% necessary if your main goal is soley internal meritocratic reforms? Probably not. Is it easier to gain executive control if you can invoke wartime emergency powers and easier to rally domestic support if you invoke imperial primacy and reunification of lost territories and accuse Church of laundering imperial decline? Hell yes. Does allying with Agarthans and giving them a chance to entrench themselves in the wartime apparatus a good idea? Probably not. Is it less embarrassing and project the impression of a strong empire better than explaining to other factions that the Empire is so compromised that wartime emergency powers are basically the only way the emperor can have any real authority? Yes.

Dimitri wants to find the conspirators behind Tragedy and restore Duscur -> because fundamentally all of that was a state capacity issue and that would eventually have to be addressed regardless of the moral dimension. Was genocide on Duscur morally wrong? Yes. Was it also an embarrassing demonstration of how little control the crown exercised over its own nobles/how much they lacked a monopoly on violence? Also yes. Would restoration of Duscur be morally correct? Yes. Would that be the exact kind of project that both demonstrates and lets him consolidate the power to ensure his own elites can't just kill him over disagreements? Yes. Was it morally/ethically wrong for him to torture and kill suspects out of vengeance? Probably. Could he have gotten away with being vengeful if he just tortured and killed the suspects in dungeons where nobody else could see and get alienated? Also yes.

Claude wants to open borders and allow freer movement of people and ideas -> Leicester is highly mercantile and the only country sharing land borders with a non-Fódlani country that's confirmed to be massive, powerful, and probably wealthy (Sreng is notably resource poor). Would this result in less prejudices and problems for people like him? Yes. Would Leicester and Almyra be the ones primarily making a fortune off of all the trade back and forth? Also yes. Would Claude sympathize with Brigid/Duscur/Sreng issues on principle? Probably. Would he have a good reason to prioritize those above a myriad of other stuff unless Leicester or Almyra gain something by helping them? Probably not. Does Leicester and Claude have reasons to ally with any of the other factions depending on the situation? Absolutely. Does that mean they'd actually give a flying fuck about whatever political/ideological conflict over legitimacy the whole Empire-Church-Kingdom issue revolves around or that allying one of them means eternal loyalty and commitment to anyone else's cause? Fuck no.

In other words, from an institutional perspective the the correct rational answer characters like lords would give to most moral criticisms of them would be "you might be right but that's your problem, not my institution's."

Would the moral criticisms still be valid? Yeah. Would objectively correct moral criticism without any other accompanying pressures/consequences deter a political leader from pursuing institutional interests because they suddenly had an epiphany about how morally wrong their ways were? No.

Because the thing about epiphanies is that they usually occur after the person has gotten into deep shit and faced undeniable/overhwhelmingly negative consequences (and somehow survived). People who are doing something morally bad and getting what they want out of it, or at least do not feel the negative consequences as directly, tend to not have those epiphanies. And power tends to insulate you from consequences, or at least you only pay the consequences after everyone else has.

So personally I think debates that are like "what this powerful character does is wrong and harming people and they are a morally bad person vs no it's not they're actually making things better and they're a morally good person" don't actually do much to help understand/explain these types of characters.

Follow up from the previous essay on Fódlan's (lack of) Overton window, let's examine why the lords of 3H talk past each other. And no I don't mean that in terms of their individual personalities, frankly that stuff barely matters. I'm talking about their political positions, and more specifically, the political structures and logic of their countries.

What are the Adrestian Empire, the Holy Kingdom of Faerghus, and the Leicester Alliance? And why can't they "just talk it out?"

And apparently I didn't make it clear enough in my previous essay, but the reason why I don't bring up the whole Agarthan/Nabatean war all that much is because this essay series is about how most everything post-Nemesis (aka known human history to the in-universe humans of IY 1180) can be explained with human level incentives and politics.

The cosmic drama explains specific and unusual (both in-universe to places outside of Fódlan and out of universe because 3H is a fantasy media) material conditions and circumstances like Crests and Relics, sure, but it does not warp humans into acting in ways that would otherwise be utterly unimaginable. It enables and accelerates existing tendencies and incentives but this is not a "ohhhh those poor Fódlanis are just victims caught up in the big dragon people/mole people war." We are assuming that humans (and human-like dragons) have human(-like) psychology and incentives. Humans are not just collaterals here they are actors. That's what we are assuming because otherwise it's boring.

We are also not going to debate the personalities and traumas of the lords and Rhea. That is not what this is about either. Because any imperial/royal/ducal/papal shaped being in their place would have similar political and structural incentives. Maybe the specifics would defer maybe they would be less (or more) competent but they are still dealing with the same institutions in the same situations. This isn't mutually exclusive with the above of "humans as actors," it's a part of it. We are not treating the lords and Rhea as people who exist in a vacuum we are treating them as (one of the many) in-universe historical and political actors existing in a specific in-universe historical and political context.

Anyway you can probably guess from the title, but it's because their political structures and incentives and social contracts are very different. Maybe on the surface it seems like they're all "Crests = blessings of goddess and believes in Church of Seiros that tells them that," and that's certainly the idea the Church wanted to push so that they'd get along, but that clearly didn't work, and they are indeed pretty damn different.

Or at least, that's my conclusion from extrapolation based on canon + comparisons with real history. Maybe that's not what the writers intended, but I think it makes a lot more sense politically if you see it this way, so here's my take on what the three countries are.

Empire: there are powerful people (Agarthans) within command structure who either don't answer to the leader and/or aren't controllable by her and also seem to hate her guts

Kingdom: leader is losing his shit while becoming tunnel visioned on one(1) objective to the detriment of everything else, including operational safety and survival

Alliance: leader is opaque and doesn't fully communicate what he's actually doing or what role subordinates are playing in it or what other parties are involved until it's over, if at all

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.

If this game takes place in Fódlan in the timeline we know, and if it's before the Zanado massacre entirely with Dietrich being the odd one out (Agarthan connections?) for having a Relic, then it would explain a lot of things.

Namely why there's a Nabatean with his ears out, why Sothis is an adult, and why it seems to have more influences from places outside of fantasy Europe. It literally takes place before The Shit™ that led to Fódlan becoming an isolationist dark ages Europe caricature. Byzantine/Near East aesthetics check out too considering the real Nabat(a)eans.

Additionally I think Divine Sovereign might be one of the many Nabateans ruling (a part of) Fódlan during what's supposed to be an interregnum period, aka while Sothis is asleep

Personal predictions

The tournament and the Divine Sovereign granting a wish is not the end of the game, that's the midpoint where everything changes like the timeskip in 3H

Whichever wish he grants is somehow linked to the massacre occuring, like the victor got an answer/clue to breaching security

The massacre occurs on-screen

We will get to see younger Rhea

Theodora is somehow linked to Rhea, and her design being similar to Seiros has something to do with this; ie Theodora influences the Seiros outfit not vice versa