Fire Emblem's classic games have a bit of a problem when it comes to representing women. The oldest games leaned hard into this, with many of the women you met either starting in distress, spending the story waiting for men to help them with their problems, or end the story giving up their dreams or powers to men. Starting around the GBA, they slowly began getting better at this- Lyndis was a landmark in that regard- but it is still clearly present in the game's DNA, and it wouldn't be until worlds like Tellius and Fodlan that women were allowed their own narrative arcs, thrones and general agency. I feel it may be a disservice to leave it there, so let's unravel it a bit, shall we?
Eirika: Restoration Princess
Eirika is the Lord as initially presented, and while Ephraim comes in later to serve as a secondary Lord for the route split idea, Eirika's position is never challenged. This is a bit of a landmark in FE history- the next female character to be unquestionably a female Lord is Edelgard, and even then you'll get plenty of people ready to question her credentials anyway. Eirika is positioned as the weaker yet wiser sister to the foolish Ephraim, and this is the angle that they always pursue when writing the two together. The issue to be found here is that they never use that "wiser" part.
Act 1 focuses on her emotional decision to pursue Ephraim into Grado. This is a fairly sensible decision- Ephraim is a key leader worth having in a war, and he also possesses a valuable item in the context of the war with Grado. Eirika, however, explicitly doesn't know the latter detail, and a lot of the intrigue of the first arc suffers somewhat because she has to bear the burden of being the exposition target for details that she perhaps should have been told ahead of time. Combine that with her inability to notice Orson's suspicious behaviour, and you have a Lord whose first impression is anything but the keen-eyed diplomat Eirika is painted as.
This issue only gets bigger through Acts 2 and 3. With a little help from the standby of "protagonists aren't actually pushing the narrative" issue that is FE's biggest weakness, Eirika's accomplishments are brought down to "helps Innes out of his ambush in Chapter 10" and "talking down Glen". Ephraim, in contrast, gets some stronger emphasis in the narrative with his interrogation of the prisoner (the equivalent scene being handled by Seth in Eirika's route!) and his connections with Duessel and Selena. When reuniting, Ephraim has to bail Eirika out of a jam twice- at least it made sense that they'd target Eirika the second time, but Ephraim's foolish decision to charge Grado when Grado's commanders had little need of it goes unquestioned. And then the first chapter afterwards is a very Ephraim-focused matter, with little regard paid for Renais's other ruler.
Eirika suffers, heavily, from a lack of agency in her world. She remains a popular Lord because of her dynamic with Lyon- as trite as "the villain has a crush on the heroine" can be, Lyon's approach is unique enough to set him apart- her gayness with L'Arachel and Tana, and her being an easy fit for one of the most important people in a postgame Magvel, but the game utterly fails to seize on either of the latter two for itself. While an important element of art is the ability of the reader to expand on it with their own views, it is also important to remember that those additions were brought in from elsewhere, and in some regards, the game itself is only made more disappointing in light of what Eirika could have been. Restoration Queen was an excellent start, removing the directly sexist language, but there is still further to go.
Tana, L'Arachel and Ismaire's Crowns
So we've talked about the game's problems with giving Eirika the spotlight, how about the rulers who don't have the main character spotlight?
Ismaire is by the far the most galling of the trio- she makes no appearances in the story before her spotlight other than to assert that she's "just" a babysitter monarch while Jehanna is suffering from a crippling shortage of male rulers, and Carlyle's major role as her chief assistant becomes the leverage he uses against her to extort an emotional connection. Again, Carlyle is still a functional villain with this motivation (entitled men who believe in the friendzone are a penny a dozen), but Ismaire doesn't even get to challenge him on this point. Restoration Queen may not have entirely salvaged her, but at least they got that right. Ismaire at least manages to have a plan to save the Sacred Stone from Grado (that is, if Carlyle didn't ruin it by being him), which helps her be more impressive than a literal sexy lamp, but not by much. As counter-intuitive as it is to say, though, I still think expanding on Joshua's role is the way to go to help her out. All we have to go on about Ismaire and Carlyle's contributions to Jehanna's functionality is Carlyle's word. Joshua is supposed to be running around a Jehannan mercenary to learn these systems- why doesn't he get to comment on how well they're helping the commoners? Why doesn't he get a Support where he talks about the way Carlyle acted around him and his mother before he ran away- and a reflection on whether or not Carlyle contributed to that reckless decision? Hell, why does he not get a Support where he complains about, or even so much as identifies, his mother's weaknesses that his hare-brained scheme is meant to address? Without the ability for Joshua to fill in the blanks, we have no clues to judge Ismaire on other than the least flattering ones.
Tana's issue isn't really her fault. Innes is not only the older and male-r of the two choices here, he's also categorically better at the job of being Frelia's King than she is. Even the most ardent Tana fans can't exactly deny him this one. The main thing going against Tana is that they just really... don't use her. We have a princess from the nation who's helping us out, a best friend to one of our Lords, and the love interest of the other one, and she's relegated to the permadeath crew. Her badass moment of sneaking out to support us is only on Eirika route- Ephraim route dumps her as a damsel for Ephraim to save and barely notice- while her key role as Ephraim's emotional support is underbaked and able to be usurped because she can be killed off. Tana was a bit of a late addition, considering she was still being finalised by the prototype and her portrait was off being used as L'Arachel's, and it shows.
L'Arachel, meanwhile, gets her title of "best girl" pretty easily- she's the only one who's not being pushed down by a nearby man. The weirdness with her, where it exists, is largely in the matter of what, exactly, her position is. She's referred to as Rausten's princess, but there seems to be no acknowledgement of her as a potential suitor, friend or even so much as "someone you should know exists" to Eirika and Ephraim before the story. As it progresses, L'Arachel's job as Rausten's princess is maintained by her access to the Sacred Stone, but how exactly her boisterous journey across the continent fits into it goes unstated- it probably doesn't, but the people who know what she should be doing don't seem to try too hard to stop her. Her endings, as well, imply that she can play fast and loose with her presence in her country, as well as the JP endings implying her position isn't necessarily that of a Queen, but a "representative/delegate". L'Arachel's issues may just be Rausten not getting any focus until the eleventh hour- she's certainly not got any problems outside of that. Outside waves vaguely.
The Heterosexual Nightmare Supports
The most popular ship partners for Eirika are L'Arachel and Lyon. Funny how they're the two without actual paired endings by the writers, huh? It's not just Eirika- a lot of the game's overt romantic pairings, and especially the pairings they added for variety, have a huge problem of being about "bickering", needless fighting that only serves to obfuscate the positive connection the pairing has, if any. Bickering couples were far more popular in the 90s and 00s, but thanks to the discussion about the impacts of relationship dynamics where couples do not enjoy each others' company, such relationships have begun to die off in favour of strong emotional connections once more. This may be in part why L'Arachel's bond with Eirika has risen in popularity since the game's release: Her exposing her weaknesses for Eirika before shyly asking for her continued companionship is a very popular romantic arc today.
In contrast, Ephraim's chief relationship, Tana, is one absolutely handicapped by their pointless fight. Tana asks Ephraim about details of their first meeting, details which Ephraim would likely be hard pressed to recall even if he hadn't been roped into duelling Innes all day long. While this highlights how Ephraim's rivalry with Innes intrudes on the relationship with Tana, it also makes it much harder to imagine what the two do when they're getting along. For Ephraim, whose asexuality and desire to fight makes him hard to imagine sitting down, any obstacle here goes a long way to making a long-term relationship unimaginable.
While Seth/Natasha (where Seth talks over Natasha and puts his own desires over her goals) and Neimi/Amelia (where the two girls gossip over guys) are blatant examples of "do not do"s among the supporting cast, I think the best example of the harm the writing imposes on their own relationships is the Gerik/Tethys/Marisa love triangle. The dynamic the three have is charming, but the fact Gerik/Marisa chooses to focus on Gerik being insensitive about Marisa's social hangups and Tethys spending a lot of her other chains crossing lines means the idea remains good only as an idea. I compare these three to Edelgard/Dorothea/Byleth, and the fact those three pull off the dynamic far better shows off how badly Sacred Stones misplayed. Fire Emblem has adopted a tradition of "all (heterosexual) couples need to be an option", which makes the problem worse, but they weren't exactly masters of choosing pairings purely by chemistry beforehand. Perhaps the mechanical benefits of Supports are intruding here- modern games downplay the benefits, which allows Supports to chosen on the basis of character more frequently. That is, when they do consider their options selectively.
Ephraim: Restoration King
Poor, poor Ephraim, forced to shoulder the burden of being the story's favourite character. It hurts everyone who isn't him (except maybe Innes), and it also hurts him, too. Ephraim's skillset, desires and capabilities are well-defined- as early as before the game, in flashbacks, he was well aware that he was a man who was excellent at helping individuals in combat capacities, and pretty lousy at "everything else" that is the job description of King. Eirika and Lyon, two otherwise excellent diplomats and thinkers, tell him he's wrong, and the story tries its best to force Ephraim into that crown, despite the fact that Ephraim proves himself to be getting no better at shoring up his weaknesses. He always goes on the offense, he always takes over the wrong castle, and all he learns is how badly he's screwing up. That is, if he wasn't already well aware. Ephraim may be an idiot, but he never seems to be unaware of that fact.
The argument that Ephraim is too competent and thus a "Gary Stu" is two-fold. Ephraim's skills are perfectly reasonable for someone of his interests- his understanding of tactics is fed by his ability to work on a battlefield, and his understanding of strategy is "how do I stay in good fighting condition when it counts". As a battlefield general, Ephraim earns a position in any army- probably not "commander-in-chief", but a smaller group that can be ordered to do only things that match his skillset while other groups cover for his weaknesses. What people are complaining about is the story's weird ability to praise Ephraim for succeeding at doing Eirika's job by using only his own skills. As far as the narrative is concerned, Ephraim has completed a character arc that sees him grow into a position where his ending is earned, but the only character arcs that he completes on screen are the aforementioned "this is what you suck at and your failures have cost people their lives, homes and sanities" lessons Seth and Lyon drop on his head with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, alongside the lesson that he should not keep his emotions to himself- a parallel to Lyon, but of no use to the position he is being required to take. He learns just how bad it is that he is to be the next King, but he doesn't learn anything that could make him more like Eirika and less like himself.
So what's the lesson to take from this? Sacred Stones, as a text, is half-finished at best- something that was fairly obvious from the fact it was a developer's side project to Path of Radiance that released before it. Many of these complaints pertain to elements of the narrative that can be elaborated on or ignored by fanfiction, and many of Sacred Stones's fans have done exactly that. These flaws are prominent, but they are so easy to fix that people, consciously or otherwise, come up with fixes to create a world they are satisfied by on their own. No one will question you if your version of Magvel has Eirika's position as Renais's Queen be greater than Ephraim's own, if he even has one- that's so obviously what the text was building towards that the fact this wasn't the ending provided is just that shocking. But it's important to keep in mind, at least when discussing the game, that the text itself didn't do these things. The characters may have grown up without IS's guiding hand, but when it comes to recommending the actual game to newcomers and seeing how they are used in future Magvel material, what matters is how the writers have grown. And how willing they are to argue with what they first released back in 2004.
No comments:
Post a Comment