Entry tags:
A response to "Facing and Tracing Spaces of Fate, Failure and Family"
I realized that my previous dismissive reply, while probably self-evident to those who have been involved this discussion since even before the release of Awakening, was probably at best pedantic and at worst meaningless to those who have not. So, because this debate has circulated around in snatches of conversation here and there for quite long enough, I've decided to consolidate this into a writeup once and for all.
"Awakening blends the outcomes of permadeath into the narrative, revealing the horrors of war within an allegorical framework." - David Boyd
This statement is not strictly untrue. Awakening, like every other entry of the series, uses the permadeath mechanic, and this necessarily entails all the permanence and finality that must be attributed to the mechanic itself. However, Boyd's article speaks of Awakening, not permadeath in isolation. In fact, he begins by framing Awakening in terms of its unusual (commercial) success compared to the rest of the series: "In February of 2013, Intelligent Systems released the thirteenth Fire Emblem game on the Nintendo 3DS in North America. Surprisingly for the Japanese developers, Fire Emblem: Awakening sold 180,000 units in February alone. [...] The extraordinary success of this once niche title has grown [...] The success of Awakening is somewhat puzzling since the last game in the series only sold 250,000 units since 2009." As if Awakening is somehow the pinnacle of some misguided narrative of progress and evolution within the series. We've climbed past the prototypes and their failures to ultimately achieve polished artistic and commercial success in Awakening. (Insert vigorous applause from game-series Darwinists.)
This sense is not directly stated in the article, of course. However, other than this introduction, we find no acknowledgement of the rest of the series, nor any motive for their exclusion. I gather the sense that the author simply has not played them nor researched them: a point never openly acknowledged, but rather, shuffled behind an introduction that seems to vaguely suggest that Awakening ought to be taken as the representative of this permadeath-happy series.
This is truly unfortunate, not only for those fans of earlier games1, but for Boyd's very thesis. For if we are to write about death and narrative or the horrors of war, Awakening is the least suitable candidate for the task.
"If mothers or fathers die in battle before marriage, their offspring is forever lost in the torrents of history, making it that much more difficult for Princess Lucina to save her crumbling world from darkness. If mothers or fathers die in battle after marriage, they leave behind their grief-stricken spouses and children. Either way, permadeath weaves itself into the narrative of Awakening[...]" - Boyd
Let us recognize the difference between implications processed within the gamer's mind, and implications depicted within the game.
Lucina does not make mention of any of her comrades outside of those events directly tied to said comrade, allowing the existence or non-existence of any of these children to be a narrative non-factor. On the player's end, they will not even notice the loss of children inadvertently lost through death or celibacy. Nothing indicates that they have missed anything at all, other than a curious skip in the numbering of the Paralogue and a little dark shadow in the Support Log. They certainly do not mourn for a person erased out of existence.
If a character falls in battle--when it is even genuinely possible--not once is this event referenced subsequently within Awakening. Recruit Owain, and kill his father right before his eyes just as he most feared, and the game will give absolutely no reaction.
Of course any art relies on some extent to its beholder to give it significance, and I would not argue that every nuance of your playthrough must be reflected in the script. However, many other entries to the series have held you narratively accountable for the deaths you have allowed. Even in the earliest games, the death of the major character Caeda (FE1) will change an ending scene; the death of many two-bit players in FE2 will ultimately affect those with close ties to them. In later games, the script will occasionally reference a minor character if they are alive (eg. Legault in FE7 Ch. Four-Fanged Offense) and display an alternate one with just the main characters if they are not.
The most confrontational example of accountability doubtlessly comes from FE9 (Path of Radiance). In this game you begin with the quaint little mercenary group that your protagonist, Ike, calls family. You spend the early chapters running around and defending the innocent from bandits. (Sound familiar?) However, while a good half of Chrom's Shepherds are defended by Plot Armor--notice that their "death" is formally a retreat, so that they can appear on screen and deliver scripted lines--everyone but Ike's two plot-important advisers can die a real death. More than that, if this happens early on while the game is still focused on the mercenary band and their connections, it will openly address your failure to protect their lives:
- FE9, Ch 4
This is not an isolated example. Later, when the youngest of three brothers joins your forces, he will use either or both of his siblings' death as leverage to force the others to permit him onto the field. Even one support varies with character death: In Makalov/Astrid C, Makalov's reason for having flowers is to bribe his sister if she is alive, to honor her grave if she is dead.
Compared to games with smaller casts, one might argue that Fire Emblem's narratives are apathetic toward their deaths, as there is never2 any major plot change based around a character's life or death. Still, the other Fire Emblem games display a far greater interest in narratively accounting for the deaths of individuals among its ranks of 30-80 characters. Awakening leaves all to the imagination.
That is not even touching, of course, the fact that the player can opt out of permadeath in Awakening and its immediate predecessor, FE12.
"Guy Debord, drawing from the Romantic post-Napoleonic Prussian war strategist, Carl von Clausewitz, wrote “The world of war at least presents the advantage of leaving no room for the silly chatter of optimism” (176). [...] This experience of war does not retain ideological remnants of romanticism or heroism in Awakening or A Game of War; Clausewitzian strategy is a practical space of working out existential anxieties of the value of life amidst violence." - Boyd
David Boyd originally states this in connection to his experience with the permadeath mechanic. But how quaint that he should claim that permadeath ties into a greater statement about the unromantic, unoptimistic, unheroic practical face of war. If Awakening does wish to make such a statement, one certainly could not tell from the script.
At the end of the game, the player is given the decision to sacrifice their avatar to end a threat forever, or allow Chrom to put it to sleep, allowing for the possibility that it may someday rise again. This threat, as repeatedly stated throughout the game, was responsible for laying waste to Lucina's future and could easily destroy the world. Yet if the player decides not to make the sacrifice and allow it to be put to sleep, the game rewards them with this:
- FE13, Endgame
Ignoring, of course, that this course of action puts millions in harm's way for the sake of one oh-so-precious main character.
This is not atypical for Awakening. Rather, it is a reflection of the core ideology that runs throughout the game. If Boyd's article had quoted a single snatch of game script, the pervasiveness of such "silly chatter of optimism" would have been self-evident. After all, aside from heinous elitist suggestions of individual worth, a great deal of time is spent talking about theatrics, wacky magic gone wrong, and pie.
Even beyond the narrative's feelgood approach to risk management, it maintains a great distance from the realities of war. There is some acknowledgement in Paralogues 2-4 of the effects on the common people, but disregard of war crimes, disregard of post-war devastation and reparation, and the aforementioned shocking disregard of life all combine to show that Awakening is fundamentally not interested in the practicalities of war.
Perhaps the most irritating thing about the choice of Awakening for this topic is that many earlier Fire Emblem games have been deeply concerned with war. It is the norm rather than the exception for the games to showcase the devastation of war and the profound effects it has upon its people. FE5 (Thracia 776) even goes so far as to question the justness that any war could have.
Remarks about human nature and the inevitability of war are also common. It is the norm rather than the exception for the games to emphasize that the devastation therein was triggered by some supernatural evil, but made possible by the inherent corruptibility of man. This is at least touched upon in every single game before FE13 by depicting human antagonists abusing the power allotted to them by the ultimate supernatural power. Despair over this tendency of humanity can be found in the main plot/conclusion of FE2, FE3, FE4, FE5, FE6, and FE10.
- FE2, Epilogue
In Awakening, the source of the tragedy is externalized onto its supernatural evil entity and a few exceptional villains who claim no particular affinity to any group (such as "the nobility") and whose behavior is clearly taken to reflect upon themselves, as epitomes of evil, alone.
But returning to the points raised within Boyd's article: if there are "existential anxieties of the value of life amidst violence," Awakening is perhaps the worst game in the series to select as an example. After all, Awakening clings to the value of a single life while disregarding the lives of thousands.
Above and beyond refusing to explore the relative value of loss of life, Awakening is not even interested in loss. Or, if it is, it is willing to soften that message with the apocryphal option to undo it. You, the player, are given agency to avoid the deaths of any recruitable character. Every sympathetic character who dies within the course of the main game does so of their volition with best wishes to your army. And after the game, in a series of free downloadable post-game missions, the player can play through a series of extra chapters where each and every "dead" character except for the main antagonist can be in some form recruited into the army. Perhaps during the intended narrative, Awakening tells of loss, of brave self-sacrificing actions that saved the world. But after its main story has been delivered and it becomes an entertaining game alone, it takes great pains to assure you that you are God, and they can bring these people back to life if you please.
Compare this to FE3 (Mystery of the Emblem), the sequel to FE1. In one of your first missions3, you meet one of your former allies, Lorentz, from the first game. As is custom, there is the option for your Lord, Marth, to go and talk to him. You might think, thanks to extensive precedent, that this would lead to his recruitment. On the contrary, Lorentz tells you that there is more to this situation than you know, and, seeing no option that would not harm his beloved country, kills himself right before your eyes.
Lorentz's case is exceptional, but unavoidable loss in Fire Emblem is not. In nearly every game, we see a realization of the "Camus" trope: an honorable character on the enemy's side who voluntarily fights for that enemy and cannot be persuaded to join your cause. Awakening imitates the surface of the Camus trope through Yen'fay, but it misses its core: Yen'fay is unwilling, and the idea that the enemies' ranks may be filed with equally noble and driven people as yours is entirely lost.
If we really mean to ask why Awakening found commercial success, it would be a misguided venture to explain its success in terms of the search for "the traumatic experience of loss." If that, or the horrors of war, or high-stakes strategy had been responsible, then the previous entries should have found comparable or greater success.
Reading Boyd's article again, I cannot help but be put in the mind of Benjamin Whorf's most famous paper, in which, amidst a flurry of sophisticated language marking himself as a learned man in the eyes of his audience, he proposes that the Hopi people lack a notion of linear time due to their language's grammatical structure. Hopi bilinguals have since made their presence known and announced that of course they think of time linearly like the rest of us. Only in hindsight was it clear that Whorf's article consisted almost entirely of his own speculation, rooted in appeal to his status of learnedness: there is not a single example of the Hopi language as it is used by the Hopi people in converastion. Whorf's article is an evocative bit of self-contained philosophy grounded in very little reality. So too, it seems, is Boyd's.
Now, if we translate his conclusion alone into the words of Tumblr laypeople:
becomes
which is an observation that I will note is entirely true, meaningful to game design... and observed before by thousands and thousands of fangirls without unsubstantiated pretension.
As a final note, I must mention that the last image used in Boyd's article is not official art, but a piece of fanart. It is the piece "Bargain Sale" by Hanokage (whose alias could be translated "Shadows of Leaves").
1 I understand that there is a great deal of grumbling among long-time fans with any new entry, so allow me to demonstrate proof of my good faith: I have spent a significant amount of my time translating material for Awakening, some on my own initiative and some at request; I have a substantial amount of fanwork for Awakening, to the exclusion of other universes in recent months; and if you ask my grumbly long-time-fan buddies, they will probably tell you that I spend a disproportionate amount of energy in the game and fandom's defense. I believe Awakening has its merits, and it arguably does better than the rest of the series in certain aesthetic areas and in character trope subversion. Unfortunately I do not think that anyone could claim in good faith that Awakening does justice to the subject of war in light of the rest of the series.
2 There are some minor exceptions. For example, in FE6 (Sword of Seals), some deaths will make it impossible to obtain certain items required for accessing the good ending. However, that is not really about the impact of the death of a person so much as the loss of an asset.
3 Those of you in the know understand that FE3 begins by recapping FE1 in Book 1. I'm talking about a part of Book 2, in particular Chapter 1.
It is not typical for people within fan communities to formally cite where their ideas came from, since everyone knows who first said what, but since I have written this for the sake of relative outsiders I'd like to credit the people responsible for pointing ideas central to this article.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
mark_asphodel: For the point about FE5's "bootstraps" conversation, FE2's epilogue's remark on the human condition, and generally promoting awareness of the Kaga era games (FE1-5) and vigorously beginning, promoting, and taking part in debate around ethical issues in the series.
kyusil: For writing on the detachment of characters from the narrative and pointing out factors that may have created this impression, such as the absence of small main script tie-ins that had previously been effective.
While I cannot think of direct contributions they have made to this particular topic,raphiael, lyndis, queenlua, blankspectrum, samuraiter, writerawakened, gascon-en-exil, maverickz3r0, and perlerie have been generally active in the discussion of Fire Emblem related topics since Awakening's release and have each played a role in shaping the environment of discourse surrounding me. They do not necessarily agree with everything stated here--in fact, they may have explicitly expressed a difference in opinion--but they have formed the setting in which these discussions are possible. Past participants who may have also shaped current thought include Shimizu Hitomi and amusetache.
Further reading can potentially be found at the emblemology community, though it should be noted that it contains a mixed bag of writing for extremely varying purposes. The majority of articles are concerned with in-universe matters for the purpose of creating fanworks, though the essay category may contain more entries of relevance. This collection is biased in favor of people who I know personally, but I do not know of any other attempts to organize available writings on Fire Emblem.
This statement is not strictly untrue. Awakening, like every other entry of the series, uses the permadeath mechanic, and this necessarily entails all the permanence and finality that must be attributed to the mechanic itself. However, Boyd's article speaks of Awakening, not permadeath in isolation. In fact, he begins by framing Awakening in terms of its unusual (commercial) success compared to the rest of the series: "In February of 2013, Intelligent Systems released the thirteenth Fire Emblem game on the Nintendo 3DS in North America. Surprisingly for the Japanese developers, Fire Emblem: Awakening sold 180,000 units in February alone. [...] The extraordinary success of this once niche title has grown [...] The success of Awakening is somewhat puzzling since the last game in the series only sold 250,000 units since 2009." As if Awakening is somehow the pinnacle of some misguided narrative of progress and evolution within the series. We've climbed past the prototypes and their failures to ultimately achieve polished artistic and commercial success in Awakening. (Insert vigorous applause from game-series Darwinists.)
This sense is not directly stated in the article, of course. However, other than this introduction, we find no acknowledgement of the rest of the series, nor any motive for their exclusion. I gather the sense that the author simply has not played them nor researched them: a point never openly acknowledged, but rather, shuffled behind an introduction that seems to vaguely suggest that Awakening ought to be taken as the representative of this permadeath-happy series.
This is truly unfortunate, not only for those fans of earlier games1, but for Boyd's very thesis. For if we are to write about death and narrative or the horrors of war, Awakening is the least suitable candidate for the task.
Let us recognize the difference between implications processed within the gamer's mind, and implications depicted within the game.
Lucina does not make mention of any of her comrades outside of those events directly tied to said comrade, allowing the existence or non-existence of any of these children to be a narrative non-factor. On the player's end, they will not even notice the loss of children inadvertently lost through death or celibacy. Nothing indicates that they have missed anything at all, other than a curious skip in the numbering of the Paralogue and a little dark shadow in the Support Log. They certainly do not mourn for a person erased out of existence.
If a character falls in battle--when it is even genuinely possible--not once is this event referenced subsequently within Awakening. Recruit Owain, and kill his father right before his eyes just as he most feared, and the game will give absolutely no reaction.
Of course any art relies on some extent to its beholder to give it significance, and I would not argue that every nuance of your playthrough must be reflected in the script. However, many other entries to the series have held you narratively accountable for the deaths you have allowed. Even in the earliest games, the death of the major character Caeda (FE1) will change an ending scene; the death of many two-bit players in FE2 will ultimately affect those with close ties to them. In later games, the script will occasionally reference a minor character if they are alive (eg. Legault in FE7 Ch. Four-Fanged Offense) and display an alternate one with just the main characters if they are not.
The most confrontational example of accountability doubtlessly comes from FE9 (Path of Radiance). In this game you begin with the quaint little mercenary group that your protagonist, Ike, calls family. You spend the early chapters running around and defending the innocent from bandits. (Sound familiar?) However, while a good half of Chrom's Shepherds are defended by Plot Armor--notice that their "death" is formally a retreat, so that they can appear on screen and deliver scripted lines--everyone but Ike's two plot-important advisers can die a real death. More than that, if this happens early on while the game is still focused on the mercenary band and their connections, it will openly address your failure to protect their lives:
Titania
...Ike...I understand how you must be feeling, but...You mustn't blame yourself for what happened. We faced a well-trained opponent...There was no way we could have fought Daein and escaped without losses.
Ike
But these losses? Gatrie...and Rhys?
Titania
Remember this feeling always. Use the pain to win next time. That is the best way to honor our fallen companions.
Ike
...I understand...
- FE9, Ch 4
This is not an isolated example. Later, when the youngest of three brothers joins your forces, he will use either or both of his siblings' death as leverage to force the others to permit him onto the field. Even one support varies with character death: In Makalov/Astrid C, Makalov's reason for having flowers is to bribe his sister if she is alive, to honor her grave if she is dead.
Compared to games with smaller casts, one might argue that Fire Emblem's narratives are apathetic toward their deaths, as there is never2 any major plot change based around a character's life or death. Still, the other Fire Emblem games display a far greater interest in narratively accounting for the deaths of individuals among its ranks of 30-80 characters. Awakening leaves all to the imagination.
That is not even touching, of course, the fact that the player can opt out of permadeath in Awakening and its immediate predecessor, FE12.
David Boyd originally states this in connection to his experience with the permadeath mechanic. But how quaint that he should claim that permadeath ties into a greater statement about the unromantic, unoptimistic, unheroic practical face of war. If Awakening does wish to make such a statement, one certainly could not tell from the script.
At the end of the game, the player is given the decision to sacrifice their avatar to end a threat forever, or allow Chrom to put it to sleep, allowing for the possibility that it may someday rise again. This threat, as repeatedly stated throughout the game, was responsible for laying waste to Lucina's future and could easily destroy the world. Yet if the player decides not to make the sacrifice and allow it to be put to sleep, the game rewards them with this:
Chrom
He's...he's finished. ...We did it! And without sacrificing the life of another friend! Can you believe it, Robin?
Naga
Grima has returned to slumber.
Robin
......
Chrom
He may rise to threaten the world again, but he'll never destroy it. One such as I, or the first exalt before me... One will rise up to challenge him.
Shepherds... Friends... The war is over! The fell dragon's era of chaos has been averted! The Risen will trouble our world no more! You all know that I'm a simple man, never one for speeches or song... But you need to know this... All that is good and brave in me and what I have done is because of you! We have weathered a sea of horror, but we did it as one. And, finally, we have come to the inviting shores of a bright future. Together.
- FE13, Endgame
Ignoring, of course, that this course of action puts millions in harm's way for the sake of one oh-so-precious main character.
This is not atypical for Awakening. Rather, it is a reflection of the core ideology that runs throughout the game. If Boyd's article had quoted a single snatch of game script, the pervasiveness of such "silly chatter of optimism" would have been self-evident. After all, aside from heinous elitist suggestions of individual worth, a great deal of time is spent talking about theatrics, wacky magic gone wrong, and pie.
Even beyond the narrative's feelgood approach to risk management, it maintains a great distance from the realities of war. There is some acknowledgement in Paralogues 2-4 of the effects on the common people, but disregard of war crimes, disregard of post-war devastation and reparation, and the aforementioned shocking disregard of life all combine to show that Awakening is fundamentally not interested in the practicalities of war.
Perhaps the most irritating thing about the choice of Awakening for this topic is that many earlier Fire Emblem games have been deeply concerned with war. It is the norm rather than the exception for the games to showcase the devastation of war and the profound effects it has upon its people. FE5 (Thracia 776) even goes so far as to question the justness that any war could have.
Remarks about human nature and the inevitability of war are also common. It is the norm rather than the exception for the games to emphasize that the devastation therein was triggered by some supernatural evil, but made possible by the inherent corruptibility of man. This is at least touched upon in every single game before FE13 by depicting human antagonists abusing the power allotted to them by the ultimate supernatural power. Despair over this tendency of humanity can be found in the main plot/conclusion of FE2, FE3, FE4, FE5, FE6, and FE10.
Thus,
The curtain fell upon the great war.
Many victims have been swept away
And now, at last,
Peace is visited upon Valencia.
Why in the world
Did this war come to pass?
No answer to that question exists.
There is but one thing to be said.
That is, if there ever comes a time
When mankind once more grows arrogant in its pride
The flames of conflict shall
Once more scorch the land.
All will be lost,
Or so it is said.
A most terrible and unseemly end.
That, perhaps, is what shall live on
Within the hearts of men.
- FE2, Epilogue
In Awakening, the source of the tragedy is externalized onto its supernatural evil entity and a few exceptional villains who claim no particular affinity to any group (such as "the nobility") and whose behavior is clearly taken to reflect upon themselves, as epitomes of evil, alone.
But returning to the points raised within Boyd's article: if there are "existential anxieties of the value of life amidst violence," Awakening is perhaps the worst game in the series to select as an example. After all, Awakening clings to the value of a single life while disregarding the lives of thousands.
Above and beyond refusing to explore the relative value of loss of life, Awakening is not even interested in loss. Or, if it is, it is willing to soften that message with the apocryphal option to undo it. You, the player, are given agency to avoid the deaths of any recruitable character. Every sympathetic character who dies within the course of the main game does so of their volition with best wishes to your army. And after the game, in a series of free downloadable post-game missions, the player can play through a series of extra chapters where each and every "dead" character except for the main antagonist can be in some form recruited into the army. Perhaps during the intended narrative, Awakening tells of loss, of brave self-sacrificing actions that saved the world. But after its main story has been delivered and it becomes an entertaining game alone, it takes great pains to assure you that you are God, and they can bring these people back to life if you please.
Compare this to FE3 (Mystery of the Emblem), the sequel to FE1. In one of your first missions3, you meet one of your former allies, Lorentz, from the first game. As is custom, there is the option for your Lord, Marth, to go and talk to him. You might think, thanks to extensive precedent, that this would lead to his recruitment. On the contrary, Lorentz tells you that there is more to this situation than you know, and, seeing no option that would not harm his beloved country, kills himself right before your eyes.
Lorentz's case is exceptional, but unavoidable loss in Fire Emblem is not. In nearly every game, we see a realization of the "Camus" trope: an honorable character on the enemy's side who voluntarily fights for that enemy and cannot be persuaded to join your cause. Awakening imitates the surface of the Camus trope through Yen'fay, but it misses its core: Yen'fay is unwilling, and the idea that the enemies' ranks may be filed with equally noble and driven people as yours is entirely lost.
If we really mean to ask why Awakening found commercial success, it would be a misguided venture to explain its success in terms of the search for "the traumatic experience of loss." If that, or the horrors of war, or high-stakes strategy had been responsible, then the previous entries should have found comparable or greater success.
Reading Boyd's article again, I cannot help but be put in the mind of Benjamin Whorf's most famous paper, in which, amidst a flurry of sophisticated language marking himself as a learned man in the eyes of his audience, he proposes that the Hopi people lack a notion of linear time due to their language's grammatical structure. Hopi bilinguals have since made their presence known and announced that of course they think of time linearly like the rest of us. Only in hindsight was it clear that Whorf's article consisted almost entirely of his own speculation, rooted in appeal to his status of learnedness: there is not a single example of the Hopi language as it is used by the Hopi people in converastion. Whorf's article is an evocative bit of self-contained philosophy grounded in very little reality. So too, it seems, is Boyd's.
Now, if we translate his conclusion alone into the words of Tumblr laypeople:
"If the[sic] you haven’t learned from Awakening’s Clausewitzian strategy, not just will you lose a warrior you’ve leveled up and invested time into for hours and hours; you will lose a father or a mother to a child that is fighting in the future to save his or her own ruptured world. When faced with permadeath in this context, I felt more and more complicity to confront the costs of war, and center my efforts on mending the shattered familial space. Awakening’s tragic properties propels the gamer to avoid the cataclysmic mistakes of the past – either gamically or narratively – so to give the children of future generations a world wholly intact and untainted by the ravages of world war." - Boyd
becomes
"If you suck at the game, your units will die. And you're really attached to them, because you've spent hours using them, and they're characters and you've gotten to know their family and you just know it's going to kill their kid to lose them. So I HAVE to reset, I just can't let them die like that. That's what Awakening does to me, because Fire Emblem is a cruel mistress. I just want them to have a happy ending okay." - Boyd (tr. myself)
which is an observation that I will note is entirely true, meaningful to game design... and observed before by thousands and thousands of fangirls without unsubstantiated pretension.
As a final note, I must mention that the last image used in Boyd's article is not official art, but a piece of fanart. It is the piece "Bargain Sale" by Hanokage (whose alias could be translated "Shadows of Leaves").
1 I understand that there is a great deal of grumbling among long-time fans with any new entry, so allow me to demonstrate proof of my good faith: I have spent a significant amount of my time translating material for Awakening, some on my own initiative and some at request; I have a substantial amount of fanwork for Awakening, to the exclusion of other universes in recent months; and if you ask my grumbly long-time-fan buddies, they will probably tell you that I spend a disproportionate amount of energy in the game and fandom's defense. I believe Awakening has its merits, and it arguably does better than the rest of the series in certain aesthetic areas and in character trope subversion. Unfortunately I do not think that anyone could claim in good faith that Awakening does justice to the subject of war in light of the rest of the series.
2 There are some minor exceptions. For example, in FE6 (Sword of Seals), some deaths will make it impossible to obtain certain items required for accessing the good ending. However, that is not really about the impact of the death of a person so much as the loss of an asset.
3 Those of you in the know understand that FE3 begins by recapping FE1 in Book 1. I'm talking about a part of Book 2, in particular Chapter 1.
It is not typical for people within fan communities to formally cite where their ideas came from, since everyone knows who first said what, but since I have written this for the sake of relative outsiders I'd like to credit the people responsible for pointing ideas central to this article.
mark_asphodel: For the point about FE5's "bootstraps" conversation, FE2's epilogue's remark on the human condition, and generally promoting awareness of the Kaga era games (FE1-5) and vigorously beginning, promoting, and taking part in debate around ethical issues in the series.kyusil: For writing on the detachment of characters from the narrative and pointing out factors that may have created this impression, such as the absence of small main script tie-ins that had previously been effective.While I cannot think of direct contributions they have made to this particular topic,
raphiael, lyndis, queenlua, blankspectrum, samuraiter, writerawakened, gascon-en-exil, maverickz3r0, and perlerie have been generally active in the discussion of Fire Emblem related topics since Awakening's release and have each played a role in shaping the environment of discourse surrounding me. They do not necessarily agree with everything stated here--in fact, they may have explicitly expressed a difference in opinion--but they have formed the setting in which these discussions are possible. Past participants who may have also shaped current thought include Shimizu Hitomi and amusetache.Further reading can potentially be found at the emblemology community, though it should be noted that it contains a mixed bag of writing for extremely varying purposes. The majority of articles are concerned with in-universe matters for the purpose of creating fanworks, though the essay category may contain more entries of relevance. This collection is biased in favor of people who I know personally, but I do not know of any other attempts to organize available writings on Fire Emblem.
no subject
Also: "While the permadeath mechanic has been introduced in many other games from 1992 onward [...]"
Mr. Boyd, I think you're forgetting that Fire Emblem introduced this mechanic in 1990. Yeesh, talk about short-sightedness.
no subject
... Hey, April 20th is Lucina's birthday. Cute reference I didn't catch until now.
no subject
no subject
I suppose this is the problem that occurs when the first game to become decently popular outside of Japan is the thirteenth title in the series.
no subject
Awakening is totally tragic like Antigone, dontcha know?
no subject
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The parts of Awakening that most address this I'd say are Lucina's dark future and the unseen genocidal war lead by Chrom's father in the past. Neither of them are on screen for very long or examined too closely by characters (Lucina seems to be the kid completely mindful of it, and definitely the only character in cutscenes to emphasize the possible destruction).
Emmeryn's pacifistic rule could've been well-contrasted by Ylisse's recent bloody past, but instead she just seems like an easy military target. Which really isn't going to help the average citizen any when they're being raided by bandits or war parties.
I was really shocked with the game when the Risen show up spectacularly, start terrorizing pot-helmeted villagers, and then are never mentioned again within the plot. I mean, they don't destroy villages on the maps they randomly spawn upon, but I figured Chrom would be at least somewhat concerned with fixing this threat. But nope, council names 'em "Risen" and they're good.
...I never understood why Grima could summon robot zombies...
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I think there are certainly parts of Awakening that pay attention to the daily shittiness of living in warlike conditions. You bring up the history of Ylisse as well as Lucina's future, and I agree for both of these examples. I also think that the Future Past DLC does a pretty good job of conveying the gloom and hopelessness of their situation, and that the kids in their own ways seem a little bit broken by having grown up the way they did (though some of their traits are unbelievable). I'd also add to that some of the very early paralogues, which directly address how the war affects the common people in some pretty nice ways: ruffians exploiting the situation, people turning on each other...
Unfortunately all these things are very peripheral. Everything above mentioned except Chrom's father happen in purely optional content. So even though FE13 does bring it up... you get the sense that it doesn't care all that much about it. Not when you compare it to what happy friends we all are.
no subject
I really wish they had gone into Chrom's father more. He talks about his worries about becoming like him, but there's very little context of what exactly that entails (and it might've given thee villains a little more motivation)