Meta Month, Day 15: Anri
Sep. 15th, 2011 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodelSo. I was eating marshmallow candy today, and it got me thinking about the history of Altea (long story).
Anri. Dragon-slayer, founding hero. One corner of a love triangle with lasting and disastrous consequences.
Other than that, he's pretty much a question mark. There's not a sense of him as a real person, IMO-- he's noble and brave and apparently a "suffer in silence" kind of guy, but he doesn't come across as especially sympathetic or human. Which is funny, given he's humanity's lone champion and all that. What do we know?
A century before the events of the Marth Games, Medeus and the Dolhr Empire have pretty much conquered humanity... on Archanea, anyway. Medeus and his peeps take action against human scum in the year 490. By 493, the dragons capture the human capital of Pales and kill the royal family, except for the Princess Artemis. Five years later, a peasant lad by the name of Anri, hailing from the "developing" town of Altea in a remote region of the archipelago, shows up brandishing the divine Falchion sword and makes Medeus go take a dirt nap. Literally, in this case. Two years after that (year 500), Anri declares himself the king of a couple of islands, and names his new domain "Altea" after his hometown. After reigning thirty-seven years, Anri kicks the bucket and his squabbling younger brothers carve up the kingdom-- Marcellus takes the western island, which retains the name Altea, and the brother who grabs the eastern island founds Gra. This status quo holds until family relations get even worse come 602, leading to murder and revenge and all that fun stuff.
Somewhere between 493 and 499, Anri worked in a doomed love affair with Princess Artemis, before she got married off to blue-blooded Duke Cartas.
The beginning of Chapter 11 of FE3, Book II tells the most complete version we have of the story. It almost sounds as though Artemis was hiding in Altea before Pales was taken; once her hiding spot was revealed, the citizens of Altea rallied to protect her. The revelation that Artemis survived spurred Cartas and his liberation army to fight the dragons on the mainland-- that Cartas had the royal family's shield, aka the Fire Emblem, at this stage suggests Artemis designated him her champion before she went into hiding. Whoops. Anyway, the mainland resistance and the Altean resistance are both on borrowed time until a mysterious sage (!) pops in and let the Alteans know that hey, up in the Ice Temple in the frozen north there's this magical sword, see? And Anri, who by this point has fallen hard for Artemis, decides he's going to get that sword.
Apparently he went alone; Gotoh states in Ch 10 of FE3 Book II that Anri was the only human to ever reach the Ice Temple. So either Anri flies solo... or his companions didn't survive. I'm guessing Anri was an adult of at least 17-18 years old here; while a 15-16 year old might be impulsive enough to set off alone to find a magic sword hidden at the other end of the continent, I can't quite see things playing out the way they do if he's exceptionally young. Anri was definitely alone by the time he reached the Marmotord desert by Thabes; his exploits are chronicled in the Anri Saga, which seems to be an epic poem written in the first person, presumably penned by Anri himself after the fact. Jagen quotes from it in Ch 11.
Anyway, he gets the sword, kills the dragon, and doesn't get to marry the girl. Anri never marries, which sets things up for the succession battle that rips his kingdom in half once he's gone. Apparently he consoles himself by writing epic poetry, which seems a good enough thing to do with his remaining four decades.
Here's what we don't know:
1) Age gap between Anri and his brothers. Name of the youngest brother. What, if anything, he did to mediate between them (nothing?), assuming tensions were apparent prior to the succession battle.
2) How long Artemis was hiding in the town of Altea. This might not have been a whirlwind romance-- they might have known one another for two or three years.
3) If anyone knew her identity before her cover was blown and the citizens swore to protect her. Maybe Artemis was just posing as another mainland asylum-seeker.
4) If he set out with any companions.
5) How long his quest took-- six months? A year? I'm betting that, once he had the sword, Gotoh warped him right in to deal with Medeus... why waste a perfectly good hero with a lengthy return journey?
6) That mysterious sage. Gotoh, perhaps? Or... something else?
7) How many people knew about the Artemis thing while the participants were alive. I'm guessing not many. Duke-then-King Cartas was a baaaaad guy to cross.
8) Where Anri got mad fighting skillz to handle Medeus. Maybe the element of surprise was all it took, or maybe he was very active in the Altean resistance before going solo.
9) If Falchion ever affected his will the way the designers' notes indicate that dragon-derived weapons can.
Anyway, that's it. I don't have a lot of headcanon on this guy, because I just don't have the warm fuzzies about him. Anri just strikes me as a pretty closed-off individual; he walks alone, fights alone, and (in the romantic sense) dies alone. All in all, a very different sort from his great-great-nephew, who is all about team-building and unity and "we're all in this together."
And that, perhaps, is the core of the problem with Anri. Long-haired lone heroes might be romantic figures, but in the end, there's something... lacking.
PS: From the Akaneia Chronicle pic of Artemis, she was a dark-haired lass who didn't look much like Nyna. FYI.
Anri. Dragon-slayer, founding hero. One corner of a love triangle with lasting and disastrous consequences.
Other than that, he's pretty much a question mark. There's not a sense of him as a real person, IMO-- he's noble and brave and apparently a "suffer in silence" kind of guy, but he doesn't come across as especially sympathetic or human. Which is funny, given he's humanity's lone champion and all that. What do we know?
A century before the events of the Marth Games, Medeus and the Dolhr Empire have pretty much conquered humanity... on Archanea, anyway. Medeus and his peeps take action against human scum in the year 490. By 493, the dragons capture the human capital of Pales and kill the royal family, except for the Princess Artemis. Five years later, a peasant lad by the name of Anri, hailing from the "developing" town of Altea in a remote region of the archipelago, shows up brandishing the divine Falchion sword and makes Medeus go take a dirt nap. Literally, in this case. Two years after that (year 500), Anri declares himself the king of a couple of islands, and names his new domain "Altea" after his hometown. After reigning thirty-seven years, Anri kicks the bucket and his squabbling younger brothers carve up the kingdom-- Marcellus takes the western island, which retains the name Altea, and the brother who grabs the eastern island founds Gra. This status quo holds until family relations get even worse come 602, leading to murder and revenge and all that fun stuff.
Somewhere between 493 and 499, Anri worked in a doomed love affair with Princess Artemis, before she got married off to blue-blooded Duke Cartas.
The beginning of Chapter 11 of FE3, Book II tells the most complete version we have of the story. It almost sounds as though Artemis was hiding in Altea before Pales was taken; once her hiding spot was revealed, the citizens of Altea rallied to protect her. The revelation that Artemis survived spurred Cartas and his liberation army to fight the dragons on the mainland-- that Cartas had the royal family's shield, aka the Fire Emblem, at this stage suggests Artemis designated him her champion before she went into hiding. Whoops. Anyway, the mainland resistance and the Altean resistance are both on borrowed time until a mysterious sage (!) pops in and let the Alteans know that hey, up in the Ice Temple in the frozen north there's this magical sword, see? And Anri, who by this point has fallen hard for Artemis, decides he's going to get that sword.
Apparently he went alone; Gotoh states in Ch 10 of FE3 Book II that Anri was the only human to ever reach the Ice Temple. So either Anri flies solo... or his companions didn't survive. I'm guessing Anri was an adult of at least 17-18 years old here; while a 15-16 year old might be impulsive enough to set off alone to find a magic sword hidden at the other end of the continent, I can't quite see things playing out the way they do if he's exceptionally young. Anri was definitely alone by the time he reached the Marmotord desert by Thabes; his exploits are chronicled in the Anri Saga, which seems to be an epic poem written in the first person, presumably penned by Anri himself after the fact. Jagen quotes from it in Ch 11.
Anyway, he gets the sword, kills the dragon, and doesn't get to marry the girl. Anri never marries, which sets things up for the succession battle that rips his kingdom in half once he's gone. Apparently he consoles himself by writing epic poetry, which seems a good enough thing to do with his remaining four decades.
Here's what we don't know:
1) Age gap between Anri and his brothers. Name of the youngest brother. What, if anything, he did to mediate between them (nothing?), assuming tensions were apparent prior to the succession battle.
2) How long Artemis was hiding in the town of Altea. This might not have been a whirlwind romance-- they might have known one another for two or three years.
3) If anyone knew her identity before her cover was blown and the citizens swore to protect her. Maybe Artemis was just posing as another mainland asylum-seeker.
4) If he set out with any companions.
5) How long his quest took-- six months? A year? I'm betting that, once he had the sword, Gotoh warped him right in to deal with Medeus... why waste a perfectly good hero with a lengthy return journey?
6) That mysterious sage. Gotoh, perhaps? Or... something else?
7) How many people knew about the Artemis thing while the participants were alive. I'm guessing not many. Duke-then-King Cartas was a baaaaad guy to cross.
8) Where Anri got mad fighting skillz to handle Medeus. Maybe the element of surprise was all it took, or maybe he was very active in the Altean resistance before going solo.
9) If Falchion ever affected his will the way the designers' notes indicate that dragon-derived weapons can.
Anyway, that's it. I don't have a lot of headcanon on this guy, because I just don't have the warm fuzzies about him. Anri just strikes me as a pretty closed-off individual; he walks alone, fights alone, and (in the romantic sense) dies alone. All in all, a very different sort from his great-great-nephew, who is all about team-building and unity and "we're all in this together."
And that, perhaps, is the core of the problem with Anri. Long-haired lone heroes might be romantic figures, but in the end, there's something... lacking.
PS: From the Akaneia Chronicle pic of Artemis, she was a dark-haired lass who didn't look much like Nyna. FYI.
