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mark_asphodelI am seriously bummed out today. See, my most excellent spouse and I have some mutual friends we've known for about fifteen years. We all met on the same Usenet group in the late 90s and they, like us, became an item after a few years and have been together now for more than a decade. We've stopped by their apartment in the next state over, petted their cats, gone out to dinner, and maintained an online relationship through the years. They mean more to us than 99% of our friends from the brick-and-mortar universities we attended in those halcyon Usenet days.
Now they've broken up, for good, with the root cause being mental illness that's basically crippled one of the pair. It's terrible and sad and, given the length of time things have been crumbling, inevitable. Some people can't be fixed, or the fix is something that costs them the life they used to have. But it's just depressing as hell.
So, I will resurrect a post I started on last year, after feeling another overdose of fannish sentiment that Fire Emblem is aaaaaall about making happy love relationships. Whatever you think of FE13, that sure wasn't always the case. Here's some relationships that weren't built to last, and I don't mean relationships that were doomed from the start because of trickery or some other coercion (Hardin/Nyna, Arvis/Deirdre), or something like Lewyn/Fury wherein the supernatural is clearly at play. I mean relationships that people fuck up themselves on their own time, because of who and what they are. Fifty percent of this is old news to y'all because the germ of this post is so old, but two of these topics are things I've never harped on before that are at least worth a look.
Exhibit A: Abel and Est.
Honestly, this is the big one. It's not ambiguous. It's not relegated to an optional support wherein you might never know about it. It's smack in the plot of the big touchstone Fire Emblem game that the other games keep ripping off. Abel, your original Green Cavalier, hooks up with Est, the adorable youngest sister of the original Peg Knight Trio. How classic is that? She comes to Altea, he retires from the whole knight thing to open a little shop, and they settle down. Mind you, Est's big sister Palla is also in love with Abel and seems to have thought she had a chance with him, but she looks the other way so that Est can be happy.
And then everything comes crashing down. Hardin's goons overrun Altea and take Est captive, using her as a hostage to keep Abel-- formidable warrior that he is-- under control. If Abel doesn't take up arms against Marth, Est dies. Actually, it's a bad-faith offer and they plan to kill her anyway... but Abel doesn't know or accept that, and he caves in and rides against his lord and all his former allies. Since Prince Marth is all-merciful, Est is saved and Abel is forgiven and they have the chance to contribute to the overall victory, but there are consequences to their actions. Est, likely overcome by guilt or shame, runs away. Abel chases after her. Neither one is ever seen again by their family, friends, or anyone else in Archanea. It's the last we heard of the adorable little peg knight who wasn't competent enough to not get captured (again) or the fundamentally decent cavalier who wasn't hardass enough to sacrifice his love on the altar of Duty. As far as I know FE12 didn't retcon this bleak, bleak ending, which stands out to me as one of the deeply compelling things about FE3. Sometimes really bad things happen to good people in the course of saving the world, and no amount of hand-waving can fix it.
Exhibit B: Finn and Raquesis
Mind you, what happened to Abel might not be a clear-cut indictment of the particular choice he made when confronted by the Love vs Duty conundrum. In its original form circa FE4, the relationship between Finn and Raquesis almost serves as a rebuttal to the idea that Abel could've/should've done differently. In this decidedly oddball knight/princess relationship, Finn and Raquie are living together for a few years, raising two small kids-- his toddler prince, her infant daughter. But Raquesis misses her son, who's been stashed with friends in another country, and decides to collect the boy and bring him back. Given this plan involves crossing a desert infested with dark mages, Finn thinks it a terrible idea and advises against it. Raquesis goes, Finn doesn't follow, and Raquesis is never heard from again. Finn raises the kids on his own, and a decade or so later Raquie's daughter Nanna does meet up with her elder brother to compare notes and confirm that, yeah, Raquesis never turned up where she was supposed to be. The kids assume she's dead, and Nanna (if Finn's daughter via the FE4 pairing system) will have some pretty strong words for Finn over the way he let Raquesis go off to her doom. But there never was any real question that either of them would do otherwise-- Raquesis had a duty to her son that involved crossing a mage-infested desert. Finn had a duty to Prince Leif that involved not getting disappeared in said desert. End of story.
FE5 does some weird things to this fairly straightforward scenario-- including the allegation from a third party (Selphina) that the relationship ended when Finn walked out on Raquesis (and yet he still ended up with both kids). The locus of blame seems to shift from the Retrive Son/Stay Home irreconcilable differences described above to the sense that maybe it wasn't that great of a relationship to start with, which possibly bounces off Nanna's complaint of "If you really loved her..." from FE4. You get the sense that there's more of a personal failing on Finn's part. Maybe he's too wrapped up in being a Perfect Knight to carry his end of a romantic relationship. Maybe he's a Perfect Knight because he doesn't have it in him to keep Raquesis happy. It's very, very hard to ignore that the titanic figure at the center of Finn's psyche isn't Raquesis, alive or dead-- it's his long-dead mentor Prince Cuan. Only once the war is ended and Finn finally has the geopolitical thing he's wanted for two decades... which happens to be exactly what Prince Cuan wanted... does he make like Abel and go after Raquesis, who by this point has been MIA for about fifteen years. Unlike Abel, he eventually comes back. We never learn what happened to Raquesis.
Exhibit C: Igraine and her husband
This was flagged to me byraphiael and my god is it heart-breaking. The supports between Igraine and Asthor that cover this are found here, and if you don't know them, please read them because quote-mining won't do them justice. On the one hand, it starts from FE's oh-so-familiar amnesia trope; Igraine found a wounded man, took him in and grew to love him. Then his memories came back, and he disappeared in a convenient bandit attack, leaving her only a piece of paper inscribed with arcane symbols...
This might be the best use of the amnesia trope since Camus and Teeta started the whole mess. Reading these supports, I feel they evoke not only the obvious Zeke/Teeta situation but also things from other games (not least the Eyvel/Briggid business from FE5), but they stand on their own-- melancholy, filled with hope and loss and understanding. I don't know what's more of a gut-punch, Asthor's attempts to make amends without giving anything away, or the way that Igraine lets him go. There's not any sense that it could go any other way, at least not with these characters being who and what they are, and yet it's so. Damn. Sad.
Exhibit D: Tauroneo and his wife
Raphi brought this one up as well while we were talking last year, and it's pretty straightforward as related by Tauroneo's supports with Rolf. Tauroneo, as he now sees it, picked military duty and family honor over the physical safety of his sons, which resulted in a divorce from his nameless wife and separation from his two sons... one of whom was already physically maimed in the attempt to meet his father's high standards. There's not a lot of ambiguity here, other than the apparent red herring that young Rolf might be Tauroneo's grandchild by one of those long-lost sons, but it's a stark little story filled with an aging warrior's misplaced pride and deep regret. (Also it's a nice twist on the long-standing Lorenz Archetype/Little Kid bond.)
I can't think of anything in Magvel that flows along these lines, not unless you read a lot into Saleh/Gerik (We had a good thing going until you killed my friend) or read exponentially more into Joshua/Caellach (We had a good thing going until you killed my mom). The tragic relationships in FE8 tend to involve zombies, and we're not here to talk about zombies.
Now they've broken up, for good, with the root cause being mental illness that's basically crippled one of the pair. It's terrible and sad and, given the length of time things have been crumbling, inevitable. Some people can't be fixed, or the fix is something that costs them the life they used to have. But it's just depressing as hell.
So, I will resurrect a post I started on last year, after feeling another overdose of fannish sentiment that Fire Emblem is aaaaaall about making happy love relationships. Whatever you think of FE13, that sure wasn't always the case. Here's some relationships that weren't built to last, and I don't mean relationships that were doomed from the start because of trickery or some other coercion (Hardin/Nyna, Arvis/Deirdre), or something like Lewyn/Fury wherein the supernatural is clearly at play. I mean relationships that people fuck up themselves on their own time, because of who and what they are. Fifty percent of this is old news to y'all because the germ of this post is so old, but two of these topics are things I've never harped on before that are at least worth a look.
Exhibit A: Abel and Est.
Honestly, this is the big one. It's not ambiguous. It's not relegated to an optional support wherein you might never know about it. It's smack in the plot of the big touchstone Fire Emblem game that the other games keep ripping off. Abel, your original Green Cavalier, hooks up with Est, the adorable youngest sister of the original Peg Knight Trio. How classic is that? She comes to Altea, he retires from the whole knight thing to open a little shop, and they settle down. Mind you, Est's big sister Palla is also in love with Abel and seems to have thought she had a chance with him, but she looks the other way so that Est can be happy.
And then everything comes crashing down. Hardin's goons overrun Altea and take Est captive, using her as a hostage to keep Abel-- formidable warrior that he is-- under control. If Abel doesn't take up arms against Marth, Est dies. Actually, it's a bad-faith offer and they plan to kill her anyway... but Abel doesn't know or accept that, and he caves in and rides against his lord and all his former allies. Since Prince Marth is all-merciful, Est is saved and Abel is forgiven and they have the chance to contribute to the overall victory, but there are consequences to their actions. Est, likely overcome by guilt or shame, runs away. Abel chases after her. Neither one is ever seen again by their family, friends, or anyone else in Archanea. It's the last we heard of the adorable little peg knight who wasn't competent enough to not get captured (again) or the fundamentally decent cavalier who wasn't hardass enough to sacrifice his love on the altar of Duty. As far as I know FE12 didn't retcon this bleak, bleak ending, which stands out to me as one of the deeply compelling things about FE3. Sometimes really bad things happen to good people in the course of saving the world, and no amount of hand-waving can fix it.
Exhibit B: Finn and Raquesis
Mind you, what happened to Abel might not be a clear-cut indictment of the particular choice he made when confronted by the Love vs Duty conundrum. In its original form circa FE4, the relationship between Finn and Raquesis almost serves as a rebuttal to the idea that Abel could've/should've done differently. In this decidedly oddball knight/princess relationship, Finn and Raquie are living together for a few years, raising two small kids-- his toddler prince, her infant daughter. But Raquesis misses her son, who's been stashed with friends in another country, and decides to collect the boy and bring him back. Given this plan involves crossing a desert infested with dark mages, Finn thinks it a terrible idea and advises against it. Raquesis goes, Finn doesn't follow, and Raquesis is never heard from again. Finn raises the kids on his own, and a decade or so later Raquie's daughter Nanna does meet up with her elder brother to compare notes and confirm that, yeah, Raquesis never turned up where she was supposed to be. The kids assume she's dead, and Nanna (if Finn's daughter via the FE4 pairing system) will have some pretty strong words for Finn over the way he let Raquesis go off to her doom. But there never was any real question that either of them would do otherwise-- Raquesis had a duty to her son that involved crossing a mage-infested desert. Finn had a duty to Prince Leif that involved not getting disappeared in said desert. End of story.
FE5 does some weird things to this fairly straightforward scenario-- including the allegation from a third party (Selphina) that the relationship ended when Finn walked out on Raquesis (and yet he still ended up with both kids). The locus of blame seems to shift from the Retrive Son/Stay Home irreconcilable differences described above to the sense that maybe it wasn't that great of a relationship to start with, which possibly bounces off Nanna's complaint of "If you really loved her..." from FE4. You get the sense that there's more of a personal failing on Finn's part. Maybe he's too wrapped up in being a Perfect Knight to carry his end of a romantic relationship. Maybe he's a Perfect Knight because he doesn't have it in him to keep Raquesis happy. It's very, very hard to ignore that the titanic figure at the center of Finn's psyche isn't Raquesis, alive or dead-- it's his long-dead mentor Prince Cuan. Only once the war is ended and Finn finally has the geopolitical thing he's wanted for two decades... which happens to be exactly what Prince Cuan wanted... does he make like Abel and go after Raquesis, who by this point has been MIA for about fifteen years. Unlike Abel, he eventually comes back. We never learn what happened to Raquesis.
Exhibit C: Igraine and her husband
This was flagged to me by
raphiael and my god is it heart-breaking. The supports between Igraine and Asthor that cover this are found here, and if you don't know them, please read them because quote-mining won't do them justice. On the one hand, it starts from FE's oh-so-familiar amnesia trope; Igraine found a wounded man, took him in and grew to love him. Then his memories came back, and he disappeared in a convenient bandit attack, leaving her only a piece of paper inscribed with arcane symbols...This might be the best use of the amnesia trope since Camus and Teeta started the whole mess. Reading these supports, I feel they evoke not only the obvious Zeke/Teeta situation but also things from other games (not least the Eyvel/Briggid business from FE5), but they stand on their own-- melancholy, filled with hope and loss and understanding. I don't know what's more of a gut-punch, Asthor's attempts to make amends without giving anything away, or the way that Igraine lets him go. There's not any sense that it could go any other way, at least not with these characters being who and what they are, and yet it's so. Damn. Sad.
Exhibit D: Tauroneo and his wife
Raphi brought this one up as well while we were talking last year, and it's pretty straightforward as related by Tauroneo's supports with Rolf. Tauroneo, as he now sees it, picked military duty and family honor over the physical safety of his sons, which resulted in a divorce from his nameless wife and separation from his two sons... one of whom was already physically maimed in the attempt to meet his father's high standards. There's not a lot of ambiguity here, other than the apparent red herring that young Rolf might be Tauroneo's grandchild by one of those long-lost sons, but it's a stark little story filled with an aging warrior's misplaced pride and deep regret. (Also it's a nice twist on the long-standing Lorenz Archetype/Little Kid bond.)
I can't think of anything in Magvel that flows along these lines, not unless you read a lot into Saleh/Gerik (We had a good thing going until you killed my friend) or read exponentially more into Joshua/Caellach (We had a good thing going until you killed my mom). The tragic relationships in FE8 tend to involve zombies, and we're not here to talk about zombies.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 12:00 am (UTC)Worth noting that the fallout between Lehran and Altina is central to FE10's plot. That one's pretty complex too, mostly for what made Lehran take things upon himself the way he did.
There's also Ashnard/Almedha, albeit that was a relationship that never reached maturity, so to speak.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 12:59 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 12:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 01:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 01:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 02:43 am (UTC)Especially since FE13 makes it pretty clear, if we didn't connect the dots before, that the major blood carriers are essentially Branded. And I don't think that was FE13 retconning FE9/10 so much as it was FE9/10 retconning FE4/5 from the get-go.
I just don't see any of this as being of a kind with Tauroneo screwing up his family.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 12:12 am (UTC)Yeah, FE8 deals with a lot of broken friendships/alliances, rather than romantic interactions, I think. The romance is tragic because it's unrequited or because somebody's dead. Sometimes both :P I like reading into Saleh/Gerik, but I don't think it's canon.
Igraine and Astohl (now there's a name that could use a localization) has to be one of the saddest things in FE, just because there is almost that expectation that they'll be able to reconnect or something, and... they don't. I just find that a lot sadder than stuff fandom tends to grab onto like Matthew/Leila.
I wonder if Almedha/Ashnard counts? I mean, what they had was never really love, exactly, as much as crazy + passion + powerlust all coming together, but I always got the suggestion that Almedha mourned that as much as she mourned her lost power and son.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 08:52 pm (UTC)Agreed. Both on the original read and on re-reading it now, I find it unbearably poignant... and Matthew/Leila has never much grabbed me.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 12:27 am (UTC)Tauroneo is really awesome. I liked him as a character a lot and wished he played a bigger role in the game.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 08:51 pm (UTC)The worst part was that when Salome bolted for the final time, she took both their cats. Her former partner is taking that very, very hard. He'd gotten used to the idea of losing her, but to have the cats just not there one day? Horrible.
Tauroneo's cool. I like all the "Lorenz" types, but none of them feel like a total retread of the previous old dude.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 06:07 am (UTC)The idea of relationships failing just because...I mean, it's just true. Sometimes it's not even one person's fault over the other, it just kind of happens before people realize it. It's nice (if a little depressing) to see realistic depictions of relationships as opposed to the "always happy everything is perfect" relationships.
Abel/Est
Just truly messed up. Honestly, if Abel had hooked up with Palla in the original war I think things would've changed massively- and for the better. For one, I think Palla is less likely to be captured than Level 1 Est. Meanwhile, Est would probably have gotten over her crush and instead managed to fall in love with someones else. (Though I think Palla and Abel would have their own issues, for one Palla's ridiculous work ethic could cause some friction, but I think they could probably work it out much better.) I'm very curious to see someone's fix-it fic on this.
Finn/Raquesis
I like...love this pairing, even though I can't decide whether I think they were in love or not. On one hand, I think there was definitely something there, and I think they could totally work...if they'd get over their unrequited love for Cuan and Elto respectively. There's a lot of complexity to them, and the way the relationship ends is tough.
Igrene/Astohol
Tragic and awesome. I've always thought they had one of the (few) best written supports in FE6.
Tauroneo/Wife
I really like this one, because it makes a lot of sense. So many people get completely absorbed with their profession (and being a Rider of Daein isn't exactly a 9-5, 5 days a week kind of thing) that they neglect the other things that matter.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 09:04 pm (UTC)Thanks. It will be very hard to not even think of our friends as a couple/unit-- it's been so long!
I'm very curious to see someone's fix-it fic on this.
Yeah, me too, as I've never been able to pull it off myself.
On one hand, I think there was definitely something there, and I think they could totally work...if they'd get over their unrequited love for Cuan and Elto respectively.
They remain my absolute favorite FE pairing ever-- both because of that complexity, and because of the sheer length and development of their relationship. You have something going on for years, with a fall-out that stretches through the decades, and little kids involved, clearly things weren't 100% private because Selphina knows (or thinks she knows) the inside scoop, and ARGH so much to work with. Instead of one little snapshot of a relationship in time, we have an entire scrapbook of odds and ends to poke through, with enough ambiguity to shade things more happy or more tragic as the fan wishes.
But you can't do outright ANYTHING with them, which is another strength of it IMO. The characters have limits-- Finn's are especially well-defined-- and you can tweak things here and there but can't just completely toss out what's in the canon and the supplementary stuff. It's not like some of the SNES characters where there's so little to go on that you can do a lot of hand-waving and it feels pretty plausible, as some things just don't work.
Yeah. My OTP forever. Squee.
and being a Rider of Daein isn't exactly a 9-5, 5 days a week kind of thing
Hahah.
Yeah.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 04:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-12 08:42 pm (UTC)Yeah, it's a hard thing. There were some other "pairings" out of our group that didn't last, but this one seemed solid until things started going to hell three years ago.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-15 09:27 am (UTC)Anyway, on the FE side of things...
The Igraine and Asthor thing is one of my favorite bits of supplemental FE6 development. I've toyed with writing something about them for a long time (since there are so few fics about them) but I don't think I could pull it off the way I'd like to.
Also in Tellius, obviously it's less notable since it involves two characters in backstory who aren't even given names, but Rolf's mother walked out on his father once he fell ill - she explains that she couldn't handle being a young mother along with his father's illness, though Boyd implies that she was having an affair.
And since I'm playing Thracia 776 right now... Arion and Linoan come to mind, since they never do end up getting married, but the game is so lacking in detail about their relationship and its eventual dissolution that I'm not sure how I'd analyze it in this context myself. Other than Linoan's ending and the hints that they both had feelings for other people, there's not much to go on. (Plus, how exactly does Arion wind up engaged to a rebel leader/the daughter of an executed traitor in the first place? Especially since, unlike quite a few other choice Judgral relationships, Linoan seems to know exactly what she's involved in, at least during the time we get to see her.)