mark_asphodel | Levin, the world's worst... detective (Reply)

FE4 has a lot of plot holes.

And many of them involve characters being hit with the Idiot Stick when the plot requires it.

Yeah, yeah, Ethlin's idea of a family vacation. I'm not complaining about that. I'm complaining about Levin's convenient blind spot.

By his own words, Levin doesn't figure out who Julia is until partway through the final chapter. I realize the dude's not actually omniscient, though according to Leen some of the kids do indeed believe he "knows everything." But... seriously? He can hand out all kinds of info-bits to the kidlets-- the whereabouts of Delmud's sister, the identity of Faval and Patty's mother, etc, etc, etc. Levin can puzzle out the parentage of all the other kids, including the ones like Corple and Leen who don't even know the names of their birth mothers... and some of them have minor blood only, so it's not like he's doing parlor-trick IDs by scrutinizing them for funny birthmarks. And he can't "get" that the weird kid with shaman powers he picked up in Barhara seven years before is Dierdre's daughter? His own powers appear to be genuinely otherworldly (even more so in FE5), but they fail him where Julia is concerned. How bloody convenient.

I'd thought Levin was just withholding information from Celice because Reasons, but it really does sound from his dialogue with Celice that he had no idea about Julia. Couldn't he see her "aura" (not Aura) or whatever? Was that also conveniently cloaked or suppressed? A side-effect of amnesia, perhaps?

Have I mentioned I dislike FE's use of Because Amnesia about as much as I dislike overuse of the "caring for orphans" trope?

Ehhhhh. The guy who knows everything fails to grok a key piece of information until the last possible second, and the supernatural hand-waving on the subject isn't even consistent. It makes you wonder how Levin did put the pieces together... hypnagogic revelation? Prayer and meditation? A couple of rounds of scotch?