mark_asphodel | Meta Month, Day 26 B: Child Mortality (Reply)

An obvious question in analyzing Fire Emblem is, “Where is everyone’s parents?” We’ve discussed this before, so I’ll only touch on it in passing. The next question that comes to mind, from a world-building perspective, is, “Where are all the other kids?”

We have an abundance of one-child and two-child families, and some three-child families, but off the top of my head I can’t think of a sibling group larger than that beyond Castor’s many impoverished brothers and sisters from FE3. This is very odd, and three possible explanations come to mind.

1)FE women, aside from Castor’s super-fecund mother, just aren’t fertile. Given the large number of continents involved, I think we can scrap this.
2)FE women are using some kind of fertility control to keep the family size down to an ideal one or two precious babies. We’ll get back to that.
3)The other kids died.

And you say, “Stop going all grimdark Misery Ages on me, Mark. This is a fantasy world.” Nuh-uh-- as already established, these are fantasy worlds with a metric crapton of orphans and half-orphans running around. Status and wealth are no protection from a premature demise in Fire Emblem. And really, it’s the simplest explanation (we’ll come back to #2, I promise). The other kids died.

I was doing some research on Roman birthing practices, and came across some interesting statistics-- even given that upper-class Romans had it very good compared to their Dark Ages descendants, and that some Roman medical texts offer surprisingly sound obstetrical guidance (and others didn’t), an estimated 5%-8% of Roman infants didn’t reach their first month-- they died at birth or shortly afterward. Another text estimated that 28% of babies didn’t live out the first year. Now, take that number and halve it via healing magic and customs that don’t involve snakes or hyena feet and the number’s still pretty bad.

Canon doesn’t have a lot to tell us in this regard; Cellica in FE2 appears to have had some siblings (rather, half-siblings) who were murdered, and there might have been a reference to some dead children in Rigel’s imperial family as well. But otherwise, all we’re left with are gaps. Singleton sons-- and, potentially more interesting, only daughters. Brother-sister pairings. And the occasional three-sibling unit.

Now, perhaps these tidy little families were planned, and mothers-- common, noble, and royal-- were using something like the legendary Silphium plant to regulate their, ah, cycles. Though it does seem odd that so many land-holding families would be content tying their fortune to the life of one or two children-- especially if that one child is a girl (as stated before, some FE worlds are decidedly more sexist than others). Cultures across our world have it ingrained into society that lots of heirs, especially lots of male heirs, are a very good thing. The kings of Archanea and Talys or the marquess of Deil or even a certain marquess of Ostia might accept and love the one daughter they get, but I doubt they’re overjoyed at the way things turned out. There’s a difference between accepting your lot and desiring it.

So, the family-planning thing doesn’t really work across the board-- I can actually see this as more likely in the case of poorer families who don’t want as many mouths to feed. And that leaves us, again, with limited options-- poor fertility, and kids we don’t see because they didn’t survive.

Some cases seem easy to peg-- given what a mess Lyon is, I don’t think the possibility of siblings who were even less hardy would surprise anyone. And then there are some age gaps to exploit-- the gulf between Minerva and Maria, for instance... or even the gap between Elice and Marth. The time between the apparent marriages of Eliwood and Hector and the births of the kids we do meet also seems a little suspicious, though FE7’s ending sequence with the happy expectant mothers might dull one’s desire to speculate too much on that count. (Gen 2 in FE4 is more easily explained by circumstances-- not a good time to be having large families.)

Now, if authors prefer to duck the issue entirely, I don’t blame them. Introducing dead babies to the mix is about as manipulative as you can get in fiction. But if authors do decide to confront it... well, it’s a fair thing to work with. At least as fair as the assumption that Florina, Ninian, and everyone else’s mom died giving birth to our heroes... and possibly more so.