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Noire's Father
This post is not about designer intent. This post is not about designer intent. This post is not about designer intent. From a designer intent standpoint, the issue can probably be summarized as, "they thought it was lulz and no big deal."
This post is like my post about Ike and the epilogue, an attempt at sensibly reconciling these things in some way that enriches rather than cheapens the universe, for pretentious fic writing purposes or general peace of mind or whatever.
All right. So. Noire's daddy.
The issue at hand is this: Tharja, both in the other universe and this one, has used Noire for experimenting with new hexes for what appears to be a pretty long time. And Tharja's spouse has dealt with this by going up and confronting Tharja and getting the hex transferred to him instead for his efforts. Beyond this, in the present world, he also steals Tharja's hexing implements in an attempt to stop it for good -- but Noire explicitly says that he'd never tried anything like that in the alpha timeline.
So what's up with that, dad? Why didn't you deal with the matter in some way to stop it once and for all?
1. Physical limitations
Let's say he tries to physically leave Tharja. Grab Noire and run or whatever.
First of all, it's not really clear how far they'd have to run to be out of the danger zone, if ever. Henry/Olivia, Henry/Tharja, and Henry/Sully supports all indirectly suggest that hexes can affect a target fairly distant from the caster. Can you get far away enough from Tharja? She's probably got a lifetime supply of hair hidden away, and she might just make you projectile vomit slugs until you come crawling back. With the possible exception of Henry (who apparently finds the runny nose curse too "delicate" to counterhex, but should probably be able to keep them safe from any seriously coercive hexes meant to bring them back, which are probably more mainstream) I don't think the dads could assert themselves against that unless they either outright killed Tharja or attempted to enlist the support of other army members, both of which are questionable options thanks to the following reason.
The second reason is that there are more dangerous things in the world than Tharja in this doomed timeline. A lot of them. Noire seems to suggest in her father A support that it's ~free will~ that's allowed her father to steal mommy's curse kit whereas he'd never tried before, but personally I think it's the difference in circumstances. In the doomed timeline you need every fighter you can get, and alienating a powerful mage who would protect your own child and everyone else's over the matter of runny nose hexes probably doesn't work out to be a gamble in your favor. Because while Tharja is a threat to her child, she's a threat on the level of "persistently causing discomfort," not "eaten alive" -- and insofar as larger threats are concerned, Tharja's presence helps1 rather than hurts.
(I would actually be interested to know if there's scholarship on divorce in times of major, immediate, and external survival-related uncertainty, like if they go way down when a country's currently fighting a defensive war or recovering from a tsunami or something. I do know that there's research done [a lot of it] on the matter of economic dependence, but I think the "Child Getting Hurt vs Where Next Meal Come From?" question is a very different one from "Child Getting Hurt vs Will Zombie Eat Child?" question. In the latter, both sides of the scale are about the child's well-being.)
Considering that Tharja outlived Dad, his staying with her may have even saved Noire's life.
In the present timeline, dad's already pulling stunts within months that alpha-timeline-dad never tried to pull. Perhaps their relationship is charted for a significantly different course in this timeline, now that no one has to play nice because of the zombies.
1 Per Tharja/Noire A and the Future of Despair DLC, Tharja acted to protect Noire from serious threats, going so far as to sacrifice herself.
2. Social pressures
There are two people outside of daddy's own potential neuroses that might keep him attached to Tharja.
One of them is Tharja. By all accounts, he loves her and has probably seen her sweeter side, which might cause him to believe too much in her ability to ~change~ (or generally not do harmful things to their daughter). All right, that's daddy's weakness. But.
The other one is Noire -- because despite being afraid of her mother, Noire is also very clingy and feels warmly toward her. Judging by their interactions I'd certainly guess that Noire would object to the idea of being permanently (or near-permanently) separated from her mother.
And I suspect that when your daughter is squalling for you not to do something, it's harder to convince yourself that you're doing it for her sake, especially when your wife is using the same "it's good for her" excuse to do said questionable things.
3. Because he was dead
No, really.
Noire/Tharja C: "You were consumed with avenging Father, so you never had time to waste on me."
Dad died before Tharja. How much earlier? It sounds like it was a matter of years to me ("you never had the time to waste on me"?). I don't think the game clarifies. Perhaps it says in one of the Future of Despair Dad&Noire chats, but as far as I know there's no general statement about Noire's dads in general.
But it's certainly possible that the worst of it, the part that drove Noire to having a split personality and whatnot, came after dad was already gone. Yes, practicing hexes on your kid is certainly bad enough in principle, but when it's runny noses I think I can understand dad having a "Well, let me talk to her" mentality about it. I'm not sure I want to know what Tharja was practicing in her latter days.
This post is like my post about Ike and the epilogue, an attempt at sensibly reconciling these things in some way that enriches rather than cheapens the universe, for pretentious fic writing purposes or general peace of mind or whatever.
All right. So. Noire's daddy.
The issue at hand is this: Tharja, both in the other universe and this one, has used Noire for experimenting with new hexes for what appears to be a pretty long time. And Tharja's spouse has dealt with this by going up and confronting Tharja and getting the hex transferred to him instead for his efforts. Beyond this, in the present world, he also steals Tharja's hexing implements in an attempt to stop it for good -- but Noire explicitly says that he'd never tried anything like that in the alpha timeline.
So what's up with that, dad? Why didn't you deal with the matter in some way to stop it once and for all?
1. Physical limitations
Let's say he tries to physically leave Tharja. Grab Noire and run or whatever.
First of all, it's not really clear how far they'd have to run to be out of the danger zone, if ever. Henry/Olivia, Henry/Tharja, and Henry/Sully supports all indirectly suggest that hexes can affect a target fairly distant from the caster. Can you get far away enough from Tharja? She's probably got a lifetime supply of hair hidden away, and she might just make you projectile vomit slugs until you come crawling back. With the possible exception of Henry (who apparently finds the runny nose curse too "delicate" to counterhex, but should probably be able to keep them safe from any seriously coercive hexes meant to bring them back, which are probably more mainstream) I don't think the dads could assert themselves against that unless they either outright killed Tharja or attempted to enlist the support of other army members, both of which are questionable options thanks to the following reason.
The second reason is that there are more dangerous things in the world than Tharja in this doomed timeline. A lot of them. Noire seems to suggest in her father A support that it's ~free will~ that's allowed her father to steal mommy's curse kit whereas he'd never tried before, but personally I think it's the difference in circumstances. In the doomed timeline you need every fighter you can get, and alienating a powerful mage who would protect your own child and everyone else's over the matter of runny nose hexes probably doesn't work out to be a gamble in your favor. Because while Tharja is a threat to her child, she's a threat on the level of "persistently causing discomfort," not "eaten alive" -- and insofar as larger threats are concerned, Tharja's presence helps1 rather than hurts.
(I would actually be interested to know if there's scholarship on divorce in times of major, immediate, and external survival-related uncertainty, like if they go way down when a country's currently fighting a defensive war or recovering from a tsunami or something. I do know that there's research done [a lot of it] on the matter of economic dependence, but I think the "Child Getting Hurt vs Where Next Meal Come From?" question is a very different one from "Child Getting Hurt vs Will Zombie Eat Child?" question. In the latter, both sides of the scale are about the child's well-being.)
Considering that Tharja outlived Dad, his staying with her may have even saved Noire's life.
In the present timeline, dad's already pulling stunts within months that alpha-timeline-dad never tried to pull. Perhaps their relationship is charted for a significantly different course in this timeline, now that no one has to play nice because of the zombies.
1 Per Tharja/Noire A and the Future of Despair DLC, Tharja acted to protect Noire from serious threats, going so far as to sacrifice herself.
2. Social pressures
There are two people outside of daddy's own potential neuroses that might keep him attached to Tharja.
One of them is Tharja. By all accounts, he loves her and has probably seen her sweeter side, which might cause him to believe too much in her ability to ~change~ (or generally not do harmful things to their daughter). All right, that's daddy's weakness. But.
The other one is Noire -- because despite being afraid of her mother, Noire is also very clingy and feels warmly toward her. Judging by their interactions I'd certainly guess that Noire would object to the idea of being permanently (or near-permanently) separated from her mother.
And I suspect that when your daughter is squalling for you not to do something, it's harder to convince yourself that you're doing it for her sake, especially when your wife is using the same "it's good for her" excuse to do said questionable things.
3. Because he was dead
No, really.
Noire/Tharja C: "You were consumed with avenging Father, so you never had time to waste on me."
Dad died before Tharja. How much earlier? It sounds like it was a matter of years to me ("you never had the time to waste on me"?). I don't think the game clarifies. Perhaps it says in one of the Future of Despair Dad&Noire chats, but as far as I know there's no general statement about Noire's dads in general.
But it's certainly possible that the worst of it, the part that drove Noire to having a split personality and whatnot, came after dad was already gone. Yes, practicing hexes on your kid is certainly bad enough in principle, but when it's runny noses I think I can understand dad having a "Well, let me talk to her" mentality about it. I'm not sure I want to know what Tharja was practicing in her latter days.
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I guess in the game timeline, the cursing implements are taken, at least, so then there's the question of how much the despair timeline should count toward assessing the game timeline's characters. (But the despair timeline characters marry the same people, have the same skills, so I think there can't be a drastic difference, unless you want to chuck out a whole bunch of other things, too.) It's something, though there's still the issue that the fathers, without seeing firsthand the end result Noire, don't do that.
So I guess IMO, Best Case Scenario for despair timeline versions of the fathers was that they talked to her a couple of times, got cursed, and died before they could do anything more effective. That is, if you're like me and you'd rather a character you like die than abuse their own daughter. There's a lot of moral gray in there, of course, but if the goal is reconciling and being okay with the characters rather than being realistic, that's the one that works for me.
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I mention Noire's squish because whether or not it should be heeded by daddy, a decision that the beneficiary opposes is a much harder one to make. And none of these daddies have had training teaching them what maladaptive attachment looks like.
I'm not sure how I feel about the "stab Tharja with a kitchen knife" option being 100% ethical... Inigo and Owain talk about the high value of life in their crazy future -- I'm inclined to think that when the survival of the human race is in question, justification of lethal force has very different morality tied to it.
Teal deer, I agree that listening to Noire's squish would be a failing of some sort, but I think the zombies are kind of a big deal. (Fwiw, Re: how much the AU counts, I had the theft of the cursing implements down as a product of different circumstances producing different decisions.)
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Not to mention, Tharja's endangering both her husband and her child. (And the Noire/Tharja supports, IMO, suggest that it wasn't just a matter of experimenting on her -- Noire is absolutely terrified of even annoying her mother for risk of getting something cast on her.) Even minor things would hamper their ability to fight and thus to survive. That should be considered as well if one gets into advantages and disadvantages of leaving her. Noire of course survives, but that doesn't mean Tharja necessarily helped.
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Tharja/Henry is difficult in ways the other pairings aren't. I don't think there's much that (for example) Donnel could do that's short of lethal force, but yes I grant you that Henry should have had more options than the others.
But when dealing with Tharja/Henry, we're also dealing with a different Noire. It's worth noting two things.
One, Noire doesn't actually have DID. She's aware of what goes on during her shifts (Lucina/Noire supports, among others) and feels that she "owned" those actions (Laurent/Noire). DID does have different manifestations depending on the culture, but I checked Japanese wikipedia and the gist is still the same as it is over here. Noire's fundamentally lacking the dissociation part of dissociative identity disorder. She has something-not-good, but not necessarily one known to stem exclusively from situations of dramatic abuse. If anything it reminds me of the way some otherkin talk about totem shifting, where fixation on an object of significance brings on the sensation of a mental shift. Sadly I'm not sure what that's called in legit psychology, but it's not DID, and therefore not necessarily the product of horrible abuse.
Second, when Henry is Noire's father, the game muses in the epilogue that perhaps their daughter is unstable thanks to being the product of two dark mages. While this sounds silly, it makes a certain amount of sense. In Tharja/Noire A, Tharja explicitly says that too much curse power potential can be dangerous to a person, and cites Noire's reaction to the talisman. If we don't want to go with ~genetic curse power potential~, there's also the possibility that Mr. Talks-with-Flowers passed on some sort of predisposition that, mixed in with Tharja's issues and a not-extremely-horribleterrible-environment-but-still-a-bad-one, showed itself as what we see in Noire.
In other words, I think Tharja/Henry in particular opens up the possibility that there was less bad shit going on, but to a similar net effect thanks to genetic predisposition. And that level of bad shit may have been one that never shocked Henry into feeling the need to lose a wife over it.
(Though for the record, if there were awful things going down in his presence, I vote Henry as Spouse Most Likely To Kill Tharja For Noire's Sake -- I mean, in their very marriage proposal Henry agrees to Tharja's request to let her die and save Robin instead if it came to that. Henry's visibly bereaved when it comes to losing Olivia, but Tharja for whatever reason is a different matter.)
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Whether or not Noire has DID, there's still no doubt that she's absolutely terrified of Tharja on a level that goes way beyond "you made my nose run, wah". Specifically of annoying her or getting in her way, pretty obviously implying that this what triggered Tharja's abusive actions. And abused children frequently develop behaviors and disorders that make them feel as if they have control over their lives. Reliance on a persona seen as strong? Yeah, that fits right in. I think saying "but it doesn't necessarily mean that" is ignoring every other sign that's given. If one actually takes what's being said seriously, which is the goal here, Tharja is definitely abusive beyond what's stated explicitly, unless Noire is just absolutely terrified of runny noses.
As for whether Henry produces a different Noire or not, I guess it's possible, but the script is almost identical literally everywhere else. It's a failing of the game, sure - but it's there nonetheless. The one constant factor across every possible dad is Tharja. Maybe Henry tried harder to stop her and somehow Noire ended up exactly the same save for the narrative changing a bit, but that's one character slightly less likely to be complicit in abuse out of how many potential dads? Including Robin, Ricken, and Libra, all of whom have some possibility of magical non-lethal force. I don't think there's an option outside dead that in any way excuses them. I mean, you can go "good people do bad things in bad situations", but for me it's absolutely repellent to think that almost every man in this game is at the very least a potential accessory to child abuse, especially when their future selves are supposed to be these tragic dead heroes.
The options appear to be either to do what the game wants and go "oh Tharja!! u so wacky!!!", to assume the father died very early, or to try to reconcile the idea that the vast majority of the first generation men are potentially neglectful cowardly fathers. The first one is counter to the goal of this and the third one paints the whole cast pretty hideously (and not in a nice nuanced moral gray kind of way), so that leaves me with the second as the only one that makes it at all possible to keep liking the characters there I like.
The less said about "and they can all also sleep with a girl who looks and often acts prepubescent", the better.
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it's 2 AM okay leave me alone, but the points still stand
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That's a pretty big break with any previous strain of FE morality, isn't it? I mean, even taking it as valid that GrimaWorld is degrees of magnitude worse than Archanea under Medeus or Jugdral under Julius'n'Friends, our heroes have always operated in a zone in which lethal force is justified.
Yeah, I'm just gonna say the guy's dead and move on. Positing some kind of rational moral justification for why our heroes need to keep a deranged child abuser alive for the good of humanity in the lulzy "don't think about it" gameverse of Ylisse is like building a staircase out of cotton candy. If the world weren't constructed out of Pixy Stix I think I'd find that intriguing, but instead it just makes me uncomfortable in a way I don't think I've felt about any other entry in the franchise.
The Fridge Logic burns, all the more so because of the sense that we're actually not supposed to think about any of it.
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Except when we killed a shit-ton of people in Valm.
And when you have the player-tactician engaging in conversations with DLC characters that support the necessity of killing for the greater good.
The game wants it both ways. If they wanted to get across to us "killing is something we're not into 'cause Ylisse ain't like that," they should've reintroduced Capture and not given us the meaningless option of torching an entire fleet of enemy ships.
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Actually, that conversation essentially has it both ways. Robin refuses to support it phrased like that.
Yes, I totally agree with you that Ylisse is not consistently pacifistic, but if you want to talk about thematic precedent, there is your thematic precedent. Tharja is an allied character, so she falls under the Real People section of the Ylissean moral code.
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Robin sees beyond himself/herself, to the larger reality. One person's life means nothing in the shadow of millions.
Chrom doesn't have it in him himself, but he thinks it's a virtue that Robin does. I mean, Tharja's husband + Tharja's kid + whoever else Tharja decides to hex Because Reasons is not millions, but it's in line, textually, with Ylissian morality to take action against one if they're endangering many.
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You often see victims overlooked IRL because their persecutors were more highly regarded by the community, and I think this is a sad little mirror of the very same effect, except driven by survival rather than status.
Incidentally, it is essentially possible to demonstrate any moral stance in Ylisse thanks to its hodgepodge inconsistency. I was only interested in demonstrating that a high evaluation of single lives doesn't come out of nowhere. (Incidentally, a high evaluation of life is a separate issue from that of the individual vs collectivism.)
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Regardless of how valuable she is to the army, this isn't something like "she's annoying" or "she's weird" or "she's creepy". She is actively willing to endanger anybody and impossible to convince otherwise. So keeping her around would benefit few (her + her wet tissue husband's feelings if those are an issue) at the expense of many.
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There are even examples in canon to support this. For one, no one else in the army ever seems to find her behavior worrisome enough to kick her out, either in the course of the game or in the future. I think that alone says a lot: Tharja's bad behavior is never perceived as severe enough to threaten her position. And even more specifically, Henry offers (more than once) to demonstrate to her a death curse on someone in the army, and Tharja refuses.
Tl;dr there are a number of instances that indicate a limit to Tharja's bad behavior.
And again, I'm not saying that her behavior, especially where Noire is concerned, is either desirable or defensible. I'm just saying that doing one type of bad thing doesn't make someone thoroughly evil, or even thoroughly dangerous.
I'm also inclined to agree with Ammie that this mirrors countless irl situations where people in positions of power get away with bad things, even though people might be aware of said bad things, simply because of their status and/or their perceived value to the community. I think it's very arguable that Tharja's value to the community, especially given the situation in the future and the indications that no one perceived her as a threat, outweighed whatever bad things others might have noticed her doing to her daughter. (And this isn't even factoring in other irl issues like bystander effect.)
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I'm not saying she's going to kill anyone. But she is endangering them by making it more likely that they will be killed. The failure to perceive her behavior as bad or dangerous does not mean it is not bad or dangerous. She could easily compromise enough characters to outweigh her benefit, and any assessment harsh enough to excuse child abuse for benefit would more likely excuse ditching a huge liability for greater benefit. This is a case where Tharja's not-just-one-thing does make her thoroughly dangerous to everyone. Keeping her around is more risk than benefit, unless she can outperform everyone she compromises, combined, all the time.
If the characters don't find her behavior bad enough to do something, then they're either stupid or favoring her above everyone else, including the child she is abusing. Either way, they're casually complicit in child abuse, and I'm allowed to find that unforgivable.
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Objectively they should both be thrown out if we're talking about actual risk justification, so it still holds that Tharja helping more than she hurts is not a valid reason to keep her around when she is abusing her child.
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Morally speaking it's quite sick, very "Those who walked away from Omelas", but in the face of the apocalypse I think it's a very different matter from a setting without such dangers.
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The eye thing is from Noire's dad support.
Every time you talked back, Mother cursed you up to your eyeballs.
...Or sometimes she just cursed your eyeballs, and you cried yourself to sleep.
If you take that in the least seriously, rather than lol-FE13-gag, which is the goal... yeah. The only reason Tharja is not regarded as dangerous is because the game treats this as a gag. She is definitely dangerous, and continues to be. And if that's treated as "it's okay, she's hurting Noire, not us", then every single character becomes morally repugnant in a way that's totally unacknowledged by text, thus not adding interest but horror to the lot of them.
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Also, Noire was "pretty young" when Tharja died so I doubt she was fighting. I think her fear stems from not knowing if Tharja would, and fearing the worst.
I tossed out #1 and #2 because they would conspire to make the vast majority of people make the same or similar decision. It's not for the sale of excusing his actions in that universe where it happens, but pointing out that the potential for falling into such a role is something many, many people have, and so I don't think the Kakusei guys necessarily deserve to be judged as unusually terrible people because of how we know they'd react to it
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But that sounds like a horribly time-consuming project and I'm not so invested in Tharja that I really need to find out with any degree of speed. NoA will get to it eventually. :u I'd rather find out about other characters.
Though that note about added 'joke' is interesting. Thanks for looking that up.
[Also, Noire was "pretty young" when Tharja died so I doubt she was fighting. I think her fear stems from not knowing if Tharja would, and fearing the worst.]
This is a definite possibility. I mean, we know Tharja is a dangerous mage, and if she died relatively early and Noire was supplemented with horror stories about how Tharja wrecked entire armies, fear can be intensified especially in such a generally meek and complacent person as Noire. Fear can intensify or twist a LOT of reactions really. On a far more tame example, I know that I like having extended periods to focus on projects, and if I'm 'afraid' I'll be interrupted with inane or annoying bits, oftentimes I'll default to extreme laziness on the basis of 'well I won't be able to get anything done ANYWAY,' and while this by no means is anything like 'ogod if I screw up she'll curse me,' fear of the unknown can definitely affect people in strange ways.
On the Dad front, I also wonder if there was perhaps something that debilitated or detained them, thus preventing them from being able to engage in a more active involvement in Noire's raising. I mean, it sucks, but it's not unusual to consider that Dad may have had his hands full earning food/money/protecting the home from Risen and in his exhaustion coming back he just didn't have the capacity to intervene in Tharja's questionable child-rearing methods. In a timeline where this isn't an issue, he could definitely play a stronger role, as indicated by how quickly and negatively Dad reacts to finding cursed Noire and the statement that he couldn't do much more than take the blows for her in the future.
but anyway, just musing here.
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But Tharja still does try every new magic she cooks up on Noire. Not just the cute ones. All of them. Unless you discount what Noire says as just not counting, which seems counter to this.
There are totally legitimate reasons why Renault could have killed Lucius' parents, and totally legitimate reasons for Niime to encourage her sons and grandsons into playing with soul-eating magic, but no one takes exception to me hating their guts or offers excuses about how understandably human their actions are. Canon calls all the fathers "pathetic". Claiming "well Tharja could be more help than hurt" is all conjecture and counter to text, and really just seems like a way to make them look less bad than they actually are. They had a child and a wife who, while helpful, was also willing to curse them and said child (at least) whenever the fancy struck her. They decide to stay with her instead of doing the sane thing and getting away from her. It's a shitty decision.
Either the fathers die extremely early, or they are all abusers with no reason that stands to scrutiny (without discounting Noire's words or adding a thick layer of "what if" to it) outside cowardice. They are people who end up like that unless they're made to feel bad about how pathetic they are by their abused future daughter. Why shouldn't they be judged harshly? Because people do these things all the time? It's still abuse, and abuse should be judged harshly. Every man who can marry Tharja is a potentially abusive father, and I have every right to feel deeply uncomfortable with this fact. It's great that you guys don't, and I'm not saying you have to. What I was saying was that even with conjectural excuses, they are still abusers unless they die very early on and continue to do everything possible to protect future Noire (which they explicitly do not - nice job abandoning her with furious Tharja on the way, guys!), and I do not like abusers.
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An interesting attribute from Tharja/Noire conversations is that Tharja tells her she's been steeped in dark magic quite literally since birth, and per her supports with Kellam she says she comes from a big family of dark mages. Knowing what we know about her and what Henry says about dark magic (cue Modern!Druggie Henry), using it has an effect on people, and based on other details those who use it tend to have.... odd ways of raising children (Nimue and Hugh, Canas/Nino supports talking about Hugh). I wonder if the inclusion was in part harkening back to references like that.
Now, it certainly doesn't /excuse/ Tharja from testing hexes on Noire, but it gives a bit of background because, that element aside, she DOES try to be a good mommy. (Doomed DLC and /Noire A where she decides no, she's not going to teach Noire dark magic because it's some messed up stuff). She tries to protect her from things that would really harm her and cares in her on twisty way.
And it does make a degree of sense that she'd have to resort to something like that to 'teach' Noire how to handle things in a future timeline. I mean, it's not a nice thing, but oftentimes parents will take a harsher angle in order for their kids to learn how to adapt to horrible situations, and Tharja seems like that kind of parent (and without a husband in the future timeline, she doesn't have the ability to rely on him for protective learning). She's not gonna 'sanitize' her kid's exposure to the elements. It comes across as abusive, but then again theirs is a world in which mages are something of a commonality and magic can be used for even inane things. She might be something of the mage version of the tough dad that puts the kid through a hell workout to build their stamina or something. Though all we've really seen is runny noses, and that's not terribly taxing, all things considered. (unlike Henry's fatality hex on Sully)
So, I don't know. I know I'm rambling and I probably make little sense but those are some of the thoughts I've been thinking about. I don't endorse her actions (and I don't like what it reduces a lot of her husbands to--especially ones where it ought not to work, like Henry for obv. reasons and Virion whom she openly admits she can't curse), but I can find ways to see where it might come from. I do wonder if Tharja would have started it up in current timeline had Noire said nothing. After all, when she finds out about the Talisman, she basically says SCREW IT, YOU DON'T NEED THIS which means that using magic to cork problems isn't her usual go-to. And, as you mentioned, 'threat of imminent zombie death' is not so much an issue as in the Doomed Line.
Incidentally, so far I think they make the most sense with Gregor as dad--I mean, in his S he offers to let her test things on him and he totally rolls with everything with a good mood-- even in his A with Noire.
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That said, I think Tharja's driving motivation was indeed experimental. After all, she largely ignored her daughter in favor of research. That doesn't say "overbearing training regimen" to me. Maybe Tharja did also want Noire to "toughen up", but only insofar as she was very 1800s German dad about how Noire should STOP SNIVELING AND TAKE IT LIKE A MAN, and honestly, that's almost always terrible egocentric parenting.
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I can't find text on it, but doesn't Noire's unmarried ending say she sticks around for Tharja to experiment on? So the only reason Tharja wouldn't do it on her child is because she's doing it... on her other child?
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Noire stayed with her mother after the war as her assistant. Was she simply trying to protect her infant self from Tharja's curses? Or did Noire find solace with the woman who brought her into the world?]
It's unclear. Seems to imply that she might. But with a father who already objects to the idea and his willingness to intervene in the timeline, who can say for certain. P:
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this should be like, a slogan or a blog subtitle or something of yours :P
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I don't think Noire's interactions with her mother suggest that this kind of "tough love" is at all the limits of what Tharja does. As for teaching, she apparently does it in reaction to annoyances, and expressly does not care to teach Noire anything. So... I don't think that holds up. (Even if it was just runny noses, what does that teach a kid anyway? The importance of carrying tissues into battle? If anything, like I said above, things like that and eyeball hexes make survival harder.)
Even if the game tries to go "hahaha children cowering in terror at their parents! lulz!", that doesn't mean we should try to normalize it as readers as something a "tough" or magic-inclined parent would do in this world. Neither Sully nor Miriel appears to go out of their way to cause their child or husband suffering, after all. It's just Tharja, and all the signs point to abuse.
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[Yes, I did say Gaius. Honestly at this point he strikes me as having more backbone and fewer neuroses than most of the Gen1 dudes.]
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I can't say I like options #1 and 2, because they are certainly harder to swallow than option #3, but I do find all of them more or less equally plausible. For one, I do buy, from all that I've read thus far, that there were very different considerations in the version of the future that Noire and the other kids knew. I strongly get the impression that everyone's survival was absolutely paramount over all else, and if the implications that the 13 kids who returned were the only human survivors of their time are accurate (though please correct me if I'm wrong on that :-P), I can understand why it might have been that way.
But even besides that, while I don't necessarily want to think about a bunch of characters who seem like their hearts are usually in the right place (not to mention characters who I genuinely like, for the most part) being complicit in Tharja's abuse, at the same time I don't find it impossible - and I don't want to find it impossible. I guess I look at it as a "people in bad situations can become capable of bad things" sort of deal. I know this is getting a little serious for video game meta
when aren't we overly serious about video game metabut I don't like the mindset that only a "bad" person/character would be ever be capable of doing something as amoral as being complicit in child abuse. Sticking people into "good" and "bad" categories like that (and specifically implying that some people are "too good" to ever do things of that nature) strikes me as ultimately dangerous and dehumanizing, for a ton of different reasons, and I feel like considering people (or even characters) in that light isn't a helpful outlook to have. So I'm open to options #1 and 2 for that reason alone.(I was going to add to the last part with a personal anecdote, but I'm kind of hesitant since this is a public post. :D;)
Actually, other than making me feel better about the role of Noire's father in all of this, the only other reason I see to favor option #3 is that it might have an extra bit of canonical basis. In Tharja and Noire's supports, Noire suggests that in addition to her father dying some time before Tharja, she was fairly young when Tharja herself died as well. (During their B support, when Tharja wonders out loud why her future self wouldn't have taught Noire how to use hexes*, Noire replies, "I'm not sure. I was pretty young.") Since it seems like there was some time in between Tharja's death and the father's death, it's plausible to me that Noire's dad wasn't around all of that long.
*As a very tangential aside, it's kind of interesting to me that at least one of future!Henry's potential kids (Inigo) somehow ends up knowing how to use hexes (the transcript doesn't say exactly how though I guess Henry presumably taught him), but future!Tharja apparently doesn't teach Noire anything about them.
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Yes yes yes. That's my reason for including #2. Because while it's morally incorrect, people are fallible, and that kind of situation is one in which it's very easy to be fallible.
but future!Tharja apparently doesn't teach Noire anything about them.
She mentions in Tharja/Noire A that this was a conscious choice to protect her.
Also I checked the "pretty young" quote against the Japanese and it's there too. Huh. All right, but Noire's dad *was* around until she was at least fourish, probably more than that, considering that she distinctly remembers him helping her out.
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(And I think I explained my aside poorly before - I found it interesting in terms of How Dark Magic Works, or might work, rather than for implications regarding parenting skills. It's interesting to me that learning to use hexes is considered dangerous for one character and - assuming Henry was using good judgement, which I get the impression that he was - relatively okay for another. In that sense it reminds me of the talk you translated with Henry and Ricken, because there seemed to be "this really isn't for everyone" vibes there too... but I'll stop now because dark magic thoughts are kind of off-topic, I guess. :D;)
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(minor discussion of show characters follows, no major spoilers)
first season it's only a minor subplot, but one of the characters has an abusive shit of a husband, everyone knows it's happening, but they can't figure out what to do about it—do you call the authorities? oops there are no authorities this is zombie apocalypse zone—and they're like "look we'll say something once we get settled in a more safe/secure place"—which doesn't ever happen because lolzombies—and you can't really just kick sack-of-shit husband from the group because the wife's defensive of him / clingy / seems like she might leave with him, which is pretty much dooming them to death by zombies—bla bla bla
then second season you have leader!rick and second-in-command!shane, and shane keeps doing objectively terrible things, is kind of an asshole, bla bla—but rick keeps trying to ignore the problem for reasons like (1) we were BFFs pre-zombie apocalypse, (2) he's really fucking good with a gun and we objectively need his skills to survive, (3) some people are extremely fond of shane and the resulting infighting/potential group split involved in dealing with shane will just leave everyone more dispirted/weaker/whatever as a whole
all this makes sense since doomed!timeline is basically zombie apocalypse, but yeah, i thought the parallels were interesting. law and order and such are really hard in a world sans anything resembling civilization.
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