So what's Micaiah's deal, then? We have the Lord (...well, Lady/Priestess) of Radiant Dawn, the girl on the cover, and... yeah, she kinda just dropped off in the end, huh? Sure, she turned out to be the person who was supposed to take Sanaki's crown and ultimately turned it down to become Daein's Queen, but, uh... Where did she go in the ending?
Let's start with her introduction, because that's what the game did. It's terrible, no two ways about it. If you want your Lady to be compelling, you don't introduce her being captured. That's a bad foot to step forward.
As if that weren't bad enough, Micaiah's first encounter made things worse. Daein's situation is absolute garbage and the fact the player is invited to feel partially responsible for it helps carry Part 1, which helps when the protagonists are as disorganised as this. Being freedom fighters means of course they can't be picky with what they have, but the sum total of their best resources being "a war veteran thief" and "a girl with the ability to see the future" (plus whatever Nolan's giving them, which is probably significant compared to Micaiah and Sothe)... well, they're proactive, but you're not giving me much faith in their abilities.
Indeed, the Dawn Brigade seem to mostly be working to establish themselves as caring for their fellow Daeins as opposed to having a concrete means and end to victory. By which I mean... it helps make sure the audience sympathises with Daein and it's not the worst character arc to carry around, but it definitely doesn't help her case when she's being compared to Elincia, Sanaki and Ike, who have her thoroughly outstripped on this matter and are tackling more complicated ones.
(Don't forget the second capture here. Lucia and Sanaki get captured too, but at least this is to actively further the objectives of their opponents and isn't quite as... "capture the pretty girl".)
And ultimately, Micaiah's story ultimately gets tied together with Pelleas's. Because Pelleas is serving as a deconstruction of the "long-lost prince" archetype, Micaiah is kinda getting doomed to be unsuccessful herself.
If there's one point where I'd say the intention of Micaiah's plot and the expectations set begin to drift apart, it's with this exchange. This is setting up a battle between Ike and Micaiah that the plot is willing to accomodate, but this isn't about differences in philosophy. Micaiah's arc following this is to understand Ike's position and adopt it into her worldview, which fits the overall narrative, but doesn't help Micaiah establish herself as Radiant Dawn's main protagonist.
And as a protagonist, she doesn't really... do much. Sure, a lot of Fire Emblem protagonists don't really have much of an impact on the overall situation, deferring to tacticians or the needs of the situation, but here, this becomes a lot more explicit.
Micaiah does influence the story of Part 1, though, when she actively subvert's Izuka's plans to take her own initiative to do the right thing. You know, like a protagonist is supposed to do.
Unfortunately, Izuka is able to concoct a reasonable-sounding argument to get Micaiah into a more co-operative position in the Daein Army. And this is the point where Micaiah stops being a protagonist. Micaiah doesn't understand the political powers and motivations that govern this complicated situation, and in her quest to do The Right Thing, defers to another's judgment. To be fair, I wouldn't exactly say Micaiah has the savvy to avoid signing Begnion's Blood Pact if she pushed the initiative here and consciously stole Pelleas's crown right now, but if she also sacked Izuka as advisor and looked to someone else for advice, perhaps she might've been able to do more good for Daein.
I wouldn't say it's much of a coincidence that the narrative of Micaiah passing rulership of Daein to a weak King is followed up with a deconstruction of Ike doing the same thing in PoR- and the tumultuous circumstances which got Elincia prepared to retroactively justify that decision. PoR Elincia was a character much like Pelleas, and the game has quite clearly said that such people make bad rulers. So if we're meant to accept the idea that Pelleas should be King of Daein, we should see him do something similar, right?
Yeah, if you got this far and still think Pelleas being King is a sensible decision, you haven't been paying attention.
Which leaves Micaiah in a bit of a tricky spot. She's still doing The Right Thing in supporting her King, but that Right Thing isn't right at all. As she doesn't yet know right now, Pelleas has already fucked up worse than just deploying to fight a war he has no business in by now, and Micaiah is stuck trying to reconcile the fact that Pelleas is the most trustworthy person in power in Daein and also... not the greatest.
In a more optimistic narrative, these qualities would actually count for something in Pelleas. Previous Fire Emblem games, in fact, included protagonists in their ranks like Alm, Seliph and Ephraim, who demonstrate considerably less political acumen than their epilogue success claims of them.
Tellius knows which side of the idealism/cynicism scale it wants to be on.
A somewhat notable observation here is what, exactly, her opponents are saying about her through Part 3. Soren starts off fully respecting Micaiah, if not necessarily because he thinks she's good, but because he knows she's successful. As the fights progress, Micaiah's success from Part 1 escapes her, and her opponents lose that initial impression and start thinking of her as a victim- either an unfortunate but necessary target of the Apostle's Army or someone to be pulled out of its path if necessary, depending on the person and battle.
And now we get to the Blood Pact, and this is where things get... weird. As an English-speaking fan, my understanding of Micaiah is based around the English version and analyses on Micaiah's actions from other English-speaking fans also using the English version.
And someone on the translation team really liked Micaiah. As a reminder, none of these conversations (except the third one) even exist in JP- I'm not saying "Micaiah said something else that might be more down to my lack of ability to read Japanese", I'm saying the whole conversation segment is missing. Without these bouts of proactiveness and actual competence, Micaiah is a much less interesting character, and her role in the story... stopping with the Blood Pact kinda fits. Much like Elincia, who has grown into an excellent Queen and whose talents aren't really helpful in the Part 4 environment, Micaiah's own talents (...or lack thereof) are set to one side for Part 4, and the Silver Army plot is a lot more focused on Sanaki's sense of identity and having Yune spend half the thing using Micaiah's screentime.
Oh yeah, that whole "not being herself" thing. Protagonists that cannot assert themselves as interesting people in their own right often wind up being a sockpuppet for the most sensible character they listen to (or the author, in really bad stories that can't even manage one heroic character worth cheering on), and while Ike keeps this on a metaphorical level (and even gets a chance to make a deduction using his own observations once- the Tower of Guidance is filled with miracles indeed!), Micaiah takes it very, very literally. Many people call this a waste of a protagonist. I say Micaiah wasn't really intended to replace Ike at all, just keep his seat warm while the plot was tackling the broader themes that kind of require Ike not to be present.
And that's not even getting in to the fact that I have gotten this far into a discussion of Micaiah's identity and role in the story without mentioning her hand tattoo. Its plot relevance up until now has been kickstarting a clue that Pelleas does not have his ducks in a row and maybe being tied to her character motivation (and if you do tie it thus, the motivation falls apart). And that ties into another point I've made. Or rather, two points I've made.
"What's the deal with Mist being an avatar of Order?" and "How does the timeline work that Micaiah and Sanaki are sisters?"
We have some idea of the original ideas for Path of Radiance. Among them is the idea of Mist being a magic Lord of equal importance to Ike, and being the daughter of someone adopted by Duke Persis, and who is a Missing Person in the plot snippet the draft highlights. Which wouldn't be that significant, but, uh... Elena clearly has Sephiran's hairdo in the final designs. I think the idea was that Elena was Misaha's daughter, eventually leading to Mist turning out to be the True Apostle of Begnion.
It's fairly easy to see the reasons behind changing this plot point in the final story- Mist canonically sings the galdr of release before the medallion often, in a way it would be difficult to prevent her doing, and if she were truly the key to unleashing Judgment over Tellius, well, Lehran's job just became a whole lot easier. From here, the process to attaching this missing piece of the puzzle to Micaiah has nothing which clues us into the developer's decision-making process, but it does kinda feel discrete from her pre-existing protagonist situation and with some level of suspension-of-disbelief issues- or maybe that's just Lekain describing the two as sisters when he should have the much more devastating "you're just some random nobody" to throw at Sanaki to demotivate her.
So yeah, remember what I said about "Tellius knows which side of the idealism/cynicism scale it wants to be on"? Here it kinda... fails. Here, we're meant to take Micaiah as being a good queen candidate... and while the English version gave her actual proactiveness in the story, I wouldn't even describe their efforts as enough to fully connect the passive position she takes at the end of Part 1 to this. We know Elincia will be a good Queen because Part 2 showed us her growing into the role. We know Sanaki will be a good Empress because she consistently plays smart when she's not being beaten to an emotional pulp. Micaiah has... a good heart.
- Sothe:
- 復興作業のやり直しだ。
これで最後になるといいけど。
- Ike:
- 『なるといい』じゃない。
そうするんだ。
おまえたちならやれる。
The former
- Micaiah:
- わたしが還るべき祖国はデイン。
ベグニオンじゃない。
- Sanaki:
- じゃ、じゃが……
- Micaiah:
- ここには、あなたがいる。
あなたはあなたの国を守って。
and the latter.
先王ペレアスと臣民の強い要請の元、
デイン第１５代国王として即位。
その後、デインは空前の発展を遂げる。
And also her ending. This is definitely not a question I want to answer with machines, but it does kinda look like Micaiah is being treated less as a good queen and more of a promising pick.
If there's one smart Queen thing Micaiah does in the story, it's this- if Sanaki does this not just for Daein, but for Crimea and the laguz nations too (and eventually Stefan's place), situations like the Blood Pact and 3-9 become much less great threats. Suzerainty isn't a legal thing these days, and there's a reason for it.
A brief stop in her Support ratings:
- Fastest: Sothe, Rafiel
- Fast: Edward, Leonardo, Nolan, Laura, Ilyana, Meg, Volug, Jill, Tauroneo, Fiona, Vika, Nailah, Pelleas, Sanaki, Stefan, Kurthnaga
Overall, I feel that Micaiah's tumultuous reaction has not been helped by her actual role in the story- complaints about what she brings to the story and what she doesn't range from "Mary Sue" to "wasted protagonist" and everywhere in between, and it's hard to put a pin on where exactly on that spectrum Micaiah should be sitting. I think the idea they had, of actively deconstructing the Ike-type Lord, had some merit- even if perhaps you're asking for people to miss the point if you have the actual Ike continuing to do his Ike things in the same story- but as the first protagonist players met, the girl on the coverart of the box, and with the interesting lore nugget of being a Branded on her side, a lot of players (reasonably) had certain expectations that she would proceed to reconstruct her character, or alternatively take it in some other direction where she would claim equal or greater protagonist powers to Ike. This did not happen. Since she's standing next to Elincia, who has a similar story except with more success at self-improvement and more of a dropoff in relevance, this shouldn't be much of a surprise, but still...
As for me? Honestly, I think Micaiah is competently written. I quite like the directions her character goes in (...when they're not "being Sanaki's sister"), Micaiah just doesn't click with me the way Elincia, Sanaki and some of the less plot-relevant girls do. And I suspect some of this is part of the reason why. The plot knows what it wants Micaiah to do. This isn't something that a protagonist should be doing- but it is still a compelling character arc for a side character.
Since it's just interesting enough to not go unmentioned, I'm going to slip in a 3H segment: As a Lord, it is no surprise Micaiah passed on some of her qualities to Byleth (many of them appear in the Big Book of Being A Fire Emblem Lord), but it's interesting to see how some of the stuff that comes up in Micaiah's story also appears in Byleth's. The main thing here is having a goddess in her head- and the Yune/Sothis parallels are so explicit that this one's probably intentional. Some additional qualities that Byleth has are not keeping the narrative spotlight on themselves in the end of their stories (Byleth passes it on to the Lord of each route), focusing on a weak King for being a good Person even in the face of active conpsiracy (on the Azure Moon route) and becoming a ruler in the endcards despite a lack of narrative buildup (on non-Crimson Flower routes). I don't think these latter parallels are intentionally supposed to make you think of Micaiah, but I do find it interesting that they have the intentional parallel about the goddess and some of the same shortcomings incidentally. Whatever the reason may be, it seems that challenging the idea of being a Fire Emblem Lord does tend to follow with people projecting their dashed expectations somewhere they don't belong. Then again, most attempted subversions tend to end like this, especially if they are not sufficiently signposted.
No comments:
Post a Comment