#zyphposts

he only hides parts of himself out of necessity in the first place. he's not doing it out of malicious intent or anything crazy like that. and the slip ups that he does make throughout the game? i'd bet those are just little indications of him wanting to stop hiding.

there's his supports with hilda, primarily their A support with the story about the camel. while it doesn't necessarily have to been an obviously almyran story, he still chooses to specify it's from a "foreign land". i've also talked about how he makes that comment about "claude" being a common name to use as a fake name and how dumb that was to say. and yeah it was a dumb comment to make in front of the people he did, but clearly it turned out fine. my point there though is that he says things that he probably shouldn't be saying. i think that's clear. but claude also isn't the type of person to accidentally say stuff like that.

mainly i've always got the impression that claude just really wants to be himself, and rightly so. if you're attacked for your very identity your whole life, i think it's reasonable enough to be desperate enough to want to express it any way you can. even if the people around you don't realize. that's what i think claude is doing.

right off the bat claude introduces his class as less difficult as the others. and while they’re certainly chaotic, he has good reason for saying that. their relationships with claude feel much more like regular friendships than with edelgard and dimitri. even sylvain and ingrid, who’ve been friends with dimitri for years, still use his title when talking to him. so do most of the other blions. felix still calls him a prince, even if it's the boar prince. they all treat dimitri very respectfully as well, obviously keeping in mind his position. obviously felix is the exception. here but that's not super important. in the beagles, none of them use edelgards title (except hubert) but she very clearly has authority over the rest of them. this is especially prominent in cf post-timeskip where the only person who actively questions what she’s doing to her face is ferdinand (that i can remember). and that’s ferdinand so of course he’s going to.

compare that to the deer. if memory serves, i don’t think there’s a single time in the game where claude is referred to with his title by someone. you would never know he was leading the alliance if the game didn’t explicitly tell you. unlike edelgard and dimitri, people are also willing to question him. of course lorenz does it throughout the entire game, but so do hilda and judith. judith is especially notable considering she’s a noble very much under claude.

through cf and am, almost everything is done by edelgard and hubert and dimitri respectively. dedue, gilbert, and rodrigue all have some plot importance but not an extreme amount. everyone else is just kinda there. vw on the other hand gives some of them actually important roles. hilda comes up with the idea for getting into fort merceus. ignatz is the one who tells the guards reinforcements are coming, which is what gets them in. and while less important, shamir is apparently the one who made all the disguises for fort merceus. nader casually brings in the almyran army because claude decided to be safe and ask for help. lysithea later on tells claude and byleth stuff about twsitd. the other houses do not get this kind of involvement from people other than the leaders. now you could say thats just bad writing but i think it makes sense.

even the names of each house leaders' theme goes into this. edelgard's is the leader's path. the only person mentioned is her. she's their leader. dimitri's is the king of lions. of course he's the king, and while the blions are there too, it's more to establish his power over them. claude's on the other hand, is golden deer and crescent moon. crescent moon is a pretty indirect way of referring to claude, and it's not even put first. just another way how the unity of the golden deer is proven to be more important than just claude on his own. the music itself is very different as well. golden deer and crescent moon is significantly more relaxed than the other two.

everyone would have three lines: one for if you picked at least one of their strengths, if they're both neutral skills, and one for if you picked their weaknesses. ik there'd be some complications there but that's not important shh.

what made me think about this, you ask? well i've come up with a dumb idea for a playthrough where i make all my regular magic users use weapons and vice versa. for funsies. i got to hubert and went, oh i cant put him on a pegasus but i can still make him miserable by putting him on a wyvern.

imagine. you're a professor and you tell your student who's afraid of heights to starting fighting on a wyvern. without telling him you go and changes his goals in your planner. when he finds out, he says, "assassination is never out of the question".

in claudes paralogue he talks to and fights the windcaller. afterwards he at least draws the connection from the wind caller to the immaculate one. he knows there should’ve been something related to macuil there but dismisses the idea that byleth proposes of the wind caller being saint macuil and decides it’s a later problem. so he’s on the right track.

similarly linhardt talks to and fight the immovable in his paralogue. unlike claude though, linhardt pretty quickly catches on and realizes it’s saint indech, to the point where indech tells him to stop talking so it’s not revealed to everyone else. after the paralogue linhardt outright mentions how they fought a saint.

neither of them have supports with seteth, but they do both have supports with flayn. claude eventually figures out that seteth is actually flayn’s father and linhardt seems to suspect right from his C support with flayn that she’s actually cethleann. i’m guessing he then also figures out seteth is cichol.

so collectively these guys have figured out all four saints, and then rhea actually tells claude (and byleth) that she’s seiros. and they never speak one word to each other. ever. tell me how this makes sense. nobody else in the game figures all this out. they were literally made for each other.

Thanks for helping me out. Here’s your reward. It’s a stuffed Nader bear! Cute, right?! This toy is incredibly popular with Almyran children these days. Feel free to show it off, but don’t tell anyone where you got it from.