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mark_asphodelThere is a way around it without simply declaring FE5 a weirdo "what if?" scenario to FE4's canon.
It's especially plausible given the role played by bards in Jugdral society.
Just don't assume that either of the games conveys What Actually Happened. They're myths. Legends. Representations of the actual, obscured-by-time, events.
Think of FE4 as the Celice Narrative (C-Narrative). Its goal, of course, is to proclaim Celice as the savior of the continent. The wafer-thin archetypical supporting cast, simplistic eeeeevil minor villains, and overall depiction of events isn't the truth, it's propaganda for the new Grandbell Empire and its founder. Meanwhile, we have an extant competing narrative starring Leaf (L-narrative) and the treatment of the Holy War in the L-narrative throws up a whole slew of flags as to what the C-narrative is doing to actual history.
Familiar characters are presented in a different light. Sometimes the changes are subtle, sometimes the changes are pretty sharp. The way the characters are deployed matters even more than the characterization, though. The C-narrative simplifies and collapses the events on the Thracian peninsula; Trabant loses his tragic grandeur and is caricatured as a snarling villain in his final scene in the C-narrative. The "good" Thracians are represented by more easily digestible archetypes in the form of Hannibal and his innocent little son, while the "bad" Thracians just get killed. Arion's existence appears to be kind of a loose narrative thread-- too important to yank out of the C-narrative entirely, too problematic to resolve. Linoan, representing a rival strain of Narga blood, just gets excised from the C-narrative, as does the existence of Manfroy's granddaughter Sara. The C-narrative doesn't want these things cluttering its legend. At the same time, the many characters from Northern Thracia who do the heavy lifting for Prince Leaf, like Dorias and Glade (who plays a MAJOR role in reconstruction), just all get telescoped into the more "legendary" figure of Finn. Oh, and of course Leaf's limited successes in Northern Thracia become a catastrophic failure in the C-narrative. And the Freege angle gets all mucked up in the telling, too.
None of which makes the L-narrative absolute truth, either. We have a pretty good idea who wrote that one (Homeros) and he would have had his own agenda (pleasing Queen Nanna, perhaps?). The L-narrative has its own blind spots. One could go out on a limb and assume that, perhaps, the character of Janne was deemed too troublesome for the telling and was promptly erased. Maybe there's even a second L-narrative out there with Janne in a supporting role. ;)
[And none of this helps one decide on which version of events is "right" for the purpose of fanfic or meta. It just casts the problem in a different light.]
It makes one wonder what the alternate myth cycles of Agustria and Silesia would be. An A-narrative (for Aless) or S-narrative (for Sety) would be absolutely fascinating. To say nothing of Isaacian legends, or an I-narrative centering on Ishtar...
It's especially plausible given the role played by bards in Jugdral society.
Just don't assume that either of the games conveys What Actually Happened. They're myths. Legends. Representations of the actual, obscured-by-time, events.
Think of FE4 as the Celice Narrative (C-Narrative). Its goal, of course, is to proclaim Celice as the savior of the continent. The wafer-thin archetypical supporting cast, simplistic eeeeevil minor villains, and overall depiction of events isn't the truth, it's propaganda for the new Grandbell Empire and its founder. Meanwhile, we have an extant competing narrative starring Leaf (L-narrative) and the treatment of the Holy War in the L-narrative throws up a whole slew of flags as to what the C-narrative is doing to actual history.
Familiar characters are presented in a different light. Sometimes the changes are subtle, sometimes the changes are pretty sharp. The way the characters are deployed matters even more than the characterization, though. The C-narrative simplifies and collapses the events on the Thracian peninsula; Trabant loses his tragic grandeur and is caricatured as a snarling villain in his final scene in the C-narrative. The "good" Thracians are represented by more easily digestible archetypes in the form of Hannibal and his innocent little son, while the "bad" Thracians just get killed. Arion's existence appears to be kind of a loose narrative thread-- too important to yank out of the C-narrative entirely, too problematic to resolve. Linoan, representing a rival strain of Narga blood, just gets excised from the C-narrative, as does the existence of Manfroy's granddaughter Sara. The C-narrative doesn't want these things cluttering its legend. At the same time, the many characters from Northern Thracia who do the heavy lifting for Prince Leaf, like Dorias and Glade (who plays a MAJOR role in reconstruction), just all get telescoped into the more "legendary" figure of Finn. Oh, and of course Leaf's limited successes in Northern Thracia become a catastrophic failure in the C-narrative. And the Freege angle gets all mucked up in the telling, too.
None of which makes the L-narrative absolute truth, either. We have a pretty good idea who wrote that one (Homeros) and he would have had his own agenda (pleasing Queen Nanna, perhaps?). The L-narrative has its own blind spots. One could go out on a limb and assume that, perhaps, the character of Janne was deemed too troublesome for the telling and was promptly erased. Maybe there's even a second L-narrative out there with Janne in a supporting role. ;)
[And none of this helps one decide on which version of events is "right" for the purpose of fanfic or meta. It just casts the problem in a different light.]
It makes one wonder what the alternate myth cycles of Agustria and Silesia would be. An A-narrative (for Aless) or S-narrative (for Sety) would be absolutely fascinating. To say nothing of Isaacian legends, or an I-narrative centering on Ishtar...
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Date: 2012-03-28 04:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-28 07:40 pm (UTC)Interesting! But, yes, that's not the norm for FE heroes, dead parents or no.
Obviously, the "real" answer to the absence of Linoan, etc, from FE4 is that they hadn't been invented yet, but FE is a weird enough series that the revisionism is interesting to contemplate. I mean, in a sense, that's kind of the premise of Thracia-- that you get to see the "little people" that didn't make it into the epics and the history books. And if the entire mess of the Thracian plotline was condensed into the struggles of half a dozen characters in the Celice Narrative, what else got elided along the way?
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Date: 2012-03-28 09:37 pm (UTC)Alternatively, Celice Potter.Yeah, I think it's an interesting way to reconcile the differences you see. An approach like that might not work for a case like the discrepancies between 6 and 7, or even the "OOC" (heavy emphasis on the air quotes there) things people poke at in Radiant Dawn from PoR, but it works really well here, considering the subject matter and timeline at all.
. . .Actually, it might be an interesting approach to Marth, too. Especially with FE13 proving without a doubt that his "legend" lives on.
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Date: 2012-03-29 12:28 am (UTC)Yeah, the possibility of this makes me feel better about the discrepancies between FE1/3 and FE11/12.
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Date: 2012-03-28 08:47 pm (UTC)Or maybe it was originally told as propaganda and we got to play through the modern retelling of said propoganda! :P When you start calling things narratives only, the possibilities are endless.
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Date: 2012-03-28 08:53 pm (UTC)When you start calling things narratives only, the possibilities are endless.
I had an old piece about Feena and Navarre, written before Feena's sekrit royal heritage was retconned out of FE12. In it, Navarre was from future!Isaac (he obviously is!) and there was a running joke about how every nation in Jugdral claimed that Emperor Celice had been married to their native princess. So the people in Isaac claimed he'd married Mana, the people in Verdane said he'd married Lana, and the great dirty secret of history was that he'd gotten together with Julia. That was fun, but I lost interest because of the Feena thing.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-28 09:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-29 08:11 am (UTC)Insert joke about Tear Ring and Berwick somehow being the other two hypothetical narratives.no subject
Date: 2012-03-29 10:46 pm (UTC)I sure wish I knew which FE characters Kaga planned to put in the TRS games, because interviews make it clear he was planning just that. I think you can kind of tell from some of the portraits, but I'd love to know for real.
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Date: 2014-02-05 09:51 am (UTC)How would that would out I wonder? After all, Ishtar did die fighting Celice's army....right?
no subject
Date: 2014-02-05 01:56 pm (UTC)