On the prejudices of our (game) heroes
Jan. 27th, 2012 06:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodelOne thing I see Ike criticized for, a lot, is his distinct lack of prejudice. To have Ike emerge from a world as screwed-up as Tellius with such an egalitarian attitude (especially when he grew up around people like, uh, Shinon) strikes a good many fans as unrealistic. Fair enough, though really it kind of goes with the role of being the Game Hero, at least as far as Fire Emblem is concerned. (Eliwood's own egalitarian bent could be deemed equally unrealistic, but I guess the "common touch" thing goes over better than "the not-racist in a totally racist world" angle.)
I mean, come on. Eirika has never even heard of a Manakete before the war breaks out, and I doubt Ephraim knows any more about it, but Myrrh pops up with her indigo hair and wings and she and Ephraim are BFFs and everything's peachy. Though I do notice Eirika at least does a double-take over the whole thing, so maybe Eph is off in his little head-fantasy land about the fact that his new sidekick is a 1,200-year-old being of an alien race. This isn't someone like Canas we're dealing with-- there's a lack of knowledge and a distinct lack of fascination. Myrrh has wings and a magic stone-thingy. Ephraim doesn't much care.
Granted, the Magvel twins and the Elibe heroes don't really have a frame of reference to process the whole "alien creature" thing outside of myth, legend, and Things That Happened Long Ago. It's the opposite to Tellius, where the beorc/laguz divide is as in-your-face as it gets. Roy may be very misinformed about the dragons (per Jahn) but he hasn't lived all his life dealing with human/dragon tensions as some kind of present social ill. If he's Ninian's son, Roy might have some kind of internal tension going on, but we don't really see it. If he's not Ninian's son, well...
But then there's Archanea, where the manakete issue is every bit as glaring as the beorc/laguz problems in Tellius. I'd expect Marth to have a bit of a problem with, say, Bantu. Fire dragon shows up and wants to join the army? Seriously? (Mind you, Marth has Bantu's dragonstone and doesn't have to give it back.) With FE3!Marth, you can at least argue that his willingness to accept everybody as Good Peoples even if they have a tail is just part of his essential specialness. Again, he's the game hero, he's different from everyone else. Deal. If someone else were that virtuous, the game would be about them.
Then again, Archanea also turns out to be a really great place for demonstrating man's inhumanity to man, from the actions of the kings of Archanea and the nobles of Aurelis on down to the slave-traders and kidnappers. In the case of FE11!Marth, it's the human enemies he singles out for hate-- two entire kingdoms' worth of enemies, right down to the "commoners" (he's pretty much the anti-Eliwood when it comes to social issues). Apparently anyone willing to join the liberation party is welcome, even if they're a) criminals, b) incredibly shady, or c) Bantu. Tiki, Xane, and Gotoh are a different case-- and Marth doesn't know what the latter two are until midway through the second war. Bantu just up and introduces himself to Marth even before Marth realizes that the subjects of Grust and Gra are, like, people with feelings and stuff, which is as close to a moral epiphany as he gets. I really wouldn't expect someone whose entire place in society stems from the hereditary ability to kill dragons to be especially receptive toward any sort of entreaty from a dragon, even an old pathetic one.
But we never do hear Marth say anything close to "the only good dragon is a dead one," even though his army must have done something horrible to the overall population of the dragon tribes. The real animus is directed at the various human antagonists who are allegedly carrying out the will of Medeus. I guess from a meta standpoint someone could concoct various explanations for this, but looking at the text as the consumer product that it is...
Our Heroes: Not Racist. They can be classist (in either direction). They can flirt with war crimes (or commit them, in Micaiah's case). But they are Not Racist, no matter how race-poisoned their cultural background might be. And even if genocide comes about in a collateral-damage kind of way. :/
TL;DR, cut Ike some slack, I guess. At least in a big-picture sense, as you can still argue that the characterization doesn't entirely work. But he's hardly an isolated case.
I mean, come on. Eirika has never even heard of a Manakete before the war breaks out, and I doubt Ephraim knows any more about it, but Myrrh pops up with her indigo hair and wings and she and Ephraim are BFFs and everything's peachy. Though I do notice Eirika at least does a double-take over the whole thing, so maybe Eph is off in his little head-fantasy land about the fact that his new sidekick is a 1,200-year-old being of an alien race. This isn't someone like Canas we're dealing with-- there's a lack of knowledge and a distinct lack of fascination. Myrrh has wings and a magic stone-thingy. Ephraim doesn't much care.
Granted, the Magvel twins and the Elibe heroes don't really have a frame of reference to process the whole "alien creature" thing outside of myth, legend, and Things That Happened Long Ago. It's the opposite to Tellius, where the beorc/laguz divide is as in-your-face as it gets. Roy may be very misinformed about the dragons (per Jahn) but he hasn't lived all his life dealing with human/dragon tensions as some kind of present social ill. If he's Ninian's son, Roy might have some kind of internal tension going on, but we don't really see it. If he's not Ninian's son, well...
But then there's Archanea, where the manakete issue is every bit as glaring as the beorc/laguz problems in Tellius. I'd expect Marth to have a bit of a problem with, say, Bantu. Fire dragon shows up and wants to join the army? Seriously? (Mind you, Marth has Bantu's dragonstone and doesn't have to give it back.) With FE3!Marth, you can at least argue that his willingness to accept everybody as Good Peoples even if they have a tail is just part of his essential specialness. Again, he's the game hero, he's different from everyone else. Deal. If someone else were that virtuous, the game would be about them.
Then again, Archanea also turns out to be a really great place for demonstrating man's inhumanity to man, from the actions of the kings of Archanea and the nobles of Aurelis on down to the slave-traders and kidnappers. In the case of FE11!Marth, it's the human enemies he singles out for hate-- two entire kingdoms' worth of enemies, right down to the "commoners" (he's pretty much the anti-Eliwood when it comes to social issues). Apparently anyone willing to join the liberation party is welcome, even if they're a) criminals, b) incredibly shady, or c) Bantu. Tiki, Xane, and Gotoh are a different case-- and Marth doesn't know what the latter two are until midway through the second war. Bantu just up and introduces himself to Marth even before Marth realizes that the subjects of Grust and Gra are, like, people with feelings and stuff, which is as close to a moral epiphany as he gets. I really wouldn't expect someone whose entire place in society stems from the hereditary ability to kill dragons to be especially receptive toward any sort of entreaty from a dragon, even an old pathetic one.
But we never do hear Marth say anything close to "the only good dragon is a dead one," even though his army must have done something horrible to the overall population of the dragon tribes. The real animus is directed at the various human antagonists who are allegedly carrying out the will of Medeus. I guess from a meta standpoint someone could concoct various explanations for this, but looking at the text as the consumer product that it is...
Our Heroes: Not Racist. They can be classist (in either direction). They can flirt with war crimes (or commit them, in Micaiah's case). But they are Not Racist, no matter how race-poisoned their cultural background might be. And even if genocide comes about in a collateral-damage kind of way. :/
TL;DR, cut Ike some slack, I guess. At least in a big-picture sense, as you can still argue that the characterization doesn't entirely work. But he's hardly an isolated case.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-28 03:09 am (UTC)Ike
Are you one of Gallia's sub-humans?
- PoR Ch 7 post-chapter
(Of course he manages to get over this in one line with zero defensiveness, but that's why he and Ranulf are good enough bros to sail off together after the war is done.)
That said, although it's something I haven't thought about intensively, I think you could probably make a case for Micaiah being racist. Or, perhaps better put, she's not actively progressive. It's a lot of little things. Like the fact that she'd raised Sothe, but apparently never corrected his racist habits. (She lets Ike do that, and :3 :3 :3's at him afterward.) Her acceptance of Izuka in the war party after Pelleas pleads with them, despite his relatively grievous transgression and lack of penance. The fact that she reluctantly accepts the soldiers' enthusiasm for butchering laguz as a positive aspect.
Sothe: Who cares about Pelleas smiling or laughing? We have no quarrels with
the Laguz Alliance! Why are we targeting them?
Micaiah: Well, with a few exceptions, the soldiers are excited about hunting
down the laguz... They've been promised a large bounty for each one they
kill. It's certainly raised morale.
I love Micaiah. She has, despite being forced to feel differently due to her life circumstances, internalized that Daein mindset.
That said I don't feel like Ike's raised in the middle of beorc-laguz strife or anything. He grew up not only with Shinon, but also very progressively minded Greil and Titania. He grew up not seeing any laguz between the ages of 7 and 17, and from the sound of it he hadn't heard much in the way of good or bad either. It sounds rather like the "polite" thing in Crimea is to not talk about the laguz. Ignore both previous oppression of laguz, and also don't try to actively exterminate them. They have an alliance, but they're not all that eager to join forces with them, mostly they're just okay with the mutual peace.
I mean, I'd argue that Ike's complete naivete about laguz up until that point is a little odd and it's a cheap plot device to get the gamer to learn alongside with him, but if we take what we're given, Ike's not too different from Ephraim in this regard.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-28 02:48 pm (UTC)I really did like that, yes. But, as you said, once corrected, he immediately stops.
She has, despite being forced to feel differently due to her life circumstances, internalized that Daein mindset.
I find it intriguing that IS was willing to push the envelope in so many ways with Micaiah, and it gives me hope that Krom/Chrome will at least have an interesting personality and attitude. But then I tell myself that Micaiah was the counterpoint to traditionally shiny progressive Ike, and we're likely to get no such deal in Krom.
I'd argue that Ike's complete naivete about laguz up until that point is a little odd and it's a cheap plot device to get the gamer to learn alongside with him
I'd definitely argue that, but it's not substantially different from Ephraim's behavior, and I'd argue Ike's plot-mandated quirks are less bizarre than retcon!Marth's implied attitude toward dragons.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-28 08:12 am (UTC)I think the main sticking point with Ike is that the prejudice against laguz is so normalized and constant just about everywhere else, so it's a little hard to swallow. It was one of my main hangups on him at first, but when I looked at it again, it makes sense given the rest of him - not really apt to judge individuals based on factors like bloodline or race or social status.
I actually like that Tellius doesn't universally equate racism with "bad guys", though. I mean, Shinon's overblown about it, but it's still there, even though he's also got sympathetic points to him. (Though his main character trait is uh being a jerk, so, there's that.) And as Ammie said, there's Micaiah's passive attitude, and Soren's rather virulent stance (even if there's reasoning behind it that isn't just fear or "otherness"). And on the flip side, you have the laguz kind of talking down to a lot of beorc characters, or being outright condescending and snarky at them like Lethe. It's still cartoony racism, sure, but that's one element I found effective about it.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-28 02:41 pm (UTC)I find the disparate reactions of Ephraim and Eirika to be... interesting. That and the fact that Ephraim has the potential to bond closely with Myrrh via supports and Eirika doesn't. You could argue that points to a deficiency in Eirika's character (though Saleh sure doesn't see it, and you'd think he'd be sensitive about that sort of thing), but I think the most charitable way to interpret the difference is that Ephraim's, uh, Ephraim-ness allows him to take the whole "winged critter BFF" in stride. If there's any cognitive dissonance going on, he's ignoring it. Whereas the more contemplative Eirika does have a moment or three of WTF about it all.
I think the main sticking point with Ike is that the prejudice against laguz is so normalized and constant just about everywhere else, so it's a little hard to swallow.
I felt that way about him too initially, but... eh. Like I said, that's why he's the hero. And, after thinking it over, I think FE11!Marth's behavior re: dragons is a little more strange-- seriously, given the backstory, you'd expect Altea to be the regional equivalent of Daein in its attitude toward dragons. Though the designers' notes go out of their way to dump the blame for race-poison on Archanea kingdom, indicating that Grust was a nicely integrated place before King Cartas interfered, that kind of thing. Altea really could've been the "Crimea" of the continent-- less progressive than Grust, but not outright enforcing racist policies like the mainland kingdoms.
I actually like that Tellius doesn't universally equate racism with "bad guys"
As much as I dislike outright species conflicts being used as ham-handed racial metaphors, I did appreciate this.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-28 06:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-28 06:58 pm (UTC)With good reason.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-28 10:21 am (UTC)This is a hero problem, isn't it? Even in a world rife with racial hatreds like Agarest, one of the basic virtues of each hero is that he (there aren't any she-mains in that game) is completely race-blind.
....
Then again, that might be because almost every representative he meets of a non-human race is a staggeringly attractive female who also happens to kick ass as a party member.
no subject
Date: 2012-01-28 02:29 pm (UTC)Yeah. Video games, gotta love 'em.