Of Thracia and Bootstraps
Apr. 13th, 2013 10:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mark_asphodelI think every Fire Emblem saga has a moment that acts as a reckoning for the main character, a pivot point where they realize the world just doesn't work the way they think it's supposed to. Sometimes it's a sort of cosmic reckoning, an up-ending of the rules by which their entire world functions, and sometimes it's personal. In Thracia 776, it's quite a political moment, something that can map to our own world in ways that stories about magical artifacts and supernatural bloodlines can't... and therein lies its perverse fascination for me. I quote-mined a good portion of this for my "disturbing stuff in FE5 post," but it's best to see the entire thing in context.
[From Chapter 8, after Dagdar's men rise up against him because they're sick to death of working the land the way Eyvel wants them to and not getting ANYTHING out of it. Mistakes in the text are NOT mine, but the underlined parts are things I've high-lighted.]
Leaf:
"I feel sorry for Dagda. Why can't the people get proper jobs?"
August:
"This barren land can't be worked. Probably most of those people are the descendents of Thracian peasants. They were abandoned as children and had no choice but to grow up to be bandits. They wouldn't have been able to survive otherwise."
Leaf:
"What? Nonsense! What parents would abandon their own children?"
August:
"Oh? You were traveling, yet you don't know the pain of starvation? Where did your food come from when you running from the Empire?"
Leaf:
"Food? I...don't know. But my hunger was always satisfied..."
August:
"Hm, I see you were blessed with fine servants. But you don't understand the suffering of the people. Southern Thracia is covered with steep mountains. The soil is dry, and the climate is harsh. The farmers work day and night, but still they aren't able to feed themselves. Either they all starve, or they sacrifice a few to let the others survive. This is the truth, Lord Leaf."
Leaf:
"Can't they import food from other countries? Northern Thracia didn't have a shortage in food at all."
August:
"Northern Thracia has placed tarrifs on the south. They are especially strict about agricultural trade."
Leaf:
"What did they do that for?"
August:
"The immediate reason lies in the war that happened one hundred years ago, but the situation continues to this day because the north and south don't try to understand each other. Also, Northern Thracian nobles are known to be especially greedy."
Leaf:
"I've always been told that Thracia was a cruel, militant empire. But...they have their own troubles. Why? Why do they keep on hating each other? They used to be one unified kingdom..."
August:
"That is the tragedy that lies behind the two sacred spears, the Gae Bolg and the Gungnir. People can become both wise and foolish depending on their leader. Lord Leaf, you have much to learn to be able to lead your country to a bright future. You must not make the same mistake as your father..."
You remember that post I wrote a while back about how FE "blue team" characters often come off real bad when transplanted into our world? Yeeeah.
Our Heroes tend to be a fundamentally conservative lot, people concerned with restoring the original, established social order, not with overturning tables or shaking things up. They want a return to a golden past, a revival of a heroic age that flowered and faded just outside living memory. Or, at bare minimum, they want to run their noble house, maintain sovereignty over their fiefdom, and beget heirs who in turn will maintain their powers and privileges. There are exceptions, but that’s the general pattern. Marth is the rebirth of Anri. Seliph and his friends are the Crusaders reborn. Later heroes don’t carry quite the same baggage, but they’re doing the same set of tricks, which usually revolves around placing their noble/royal allies back on their rightful thrones. The just and ordered world that our heroes create is stratified, with royals on top and “good” nobles and priests in their appropriate place, and a grateful people beneath them. The very idea of a kingless republic is openly mocked in FE8, with its unflattering presentation of Carcino.
Now, our heroes are consistently good, moral, just leaders who will rule the people benevolently-- as opposed to the bad, crooked, corrupt, or just plain illegitimate rulers they’ve supplanted. Even in the Tellius games, with its “nobles suck balls” lip service, the action revolves around securing or restoring HOW many rightful rulers to their thrones? As for the Jugdral games, as much as the characters spend time agonizing over the best way to demonstrate concern FOR the people, there’s never the idea that it’s in the best interest of these masses to govern themselves.
And it’s worth noting that one of the key enemies in the Jugdral saga, Arvis, is a dedicated reformer. The conflict between a tainted progressive and the reactionaries who oppose him is made palatable by the existence of a plot twist involving the Antichrist. Strip the supernatural out of the equation, and there’s a lot about Jugdral politics to trouble a fan, especially a fan sitting and banging away on the computer in a first-world democracy in the age of tumblr social justice. And Thracia 776, for all that it shows a world permeated by magic, does strip the supernatural out of the equation in the sense that Leif is not a divinely sanctioned savior in the mold of Marth or Seliph.
So the things that come out of Leif’s mouth in this scene have a more naked political sense to them than we usually get from Fire Emblem. Those lazy Thracians, turning to lives of crime when they ought to get proper jobs and lift themselves out of poverty by their bootstraps! What’s wrong with them? Something’s obviously wrong with these crummy poor people who don’t even love their own children. Broken families, no work ethic, no morals... Thracians are scum.
Well, at least Leif isn’t advocating building a wall at the border to keep these inferior southerners off his land. He’s advocating reform-by-conquest, though; I’m not sure that’s any better. You can translate this stuff into the language of Our World far more easily than you can the usual humans vs dragons dilemma and it hurts a lot more to contemplate than does the fantasy racism of Tellius. We’re never going to meet a catgirl outside of a cosplay party or the Renaissance Faire. We’ve probably all had the argument about poverty, broken families, unemployment, and what can and should be done about it... and if your family/workplace debates are anything like mine, I bet it got a bit heated.
And-- just going out on a limb here based on the overall climate of internet fandom-- I bet most of us weren’t on Leif’s side here. It’s actually pretty amazing what this one scene does to deconstruct Leif’s entire position and that of his core supporters. In this one passage, Leif’s sainted father Quan, his grandfather the king, and the entire upper class of Northern Thracia take a hit. That’s not out of the norm for Fire Emblem (we can even debate the extent to which Hector and Elbert were up to shady business), but August’s conversation goes well beyond indicting people who are conveniently dead. Neither of Leaf’s surrogate parents escape criticism here; Eyvel is a goddess on a pedestal everywhere else in the game, but since we already know she uses her regional authority to advocate that the Thracian peasants work this barren land that can’t be worked, she’s complicit in the whole unpleasant system. Whether you want to view her bad farming policy on progressive idealism or reactionary denial of, uh, agricultural science, Eyvel appears to be just flat-out wrong on this issue. As for Finn, he would appear to be the primary source of the overly sheltered Leif’s skewed view on the world and the target of August’s swipe at “fine servants.” It’s possible Eyvel was also promoting the idea of Trabant’s Thracia as a monolithic bloc of terrible people, but if that line of propaganda was coming from anyone close to Leif, it was coming from Finn.
[Dorias tends to be the strawman for the moral shortcomings of Northern Thracia’s upper classes, but Leif hasn’t seen Dorias in a decade. I doubt Leif’s political views crystallized at the age of five.]
This is part of why the world and atmosphere of Thracia 776 really, really grab me. I love the scene in FE3 wherein Marth finds out the truth about the Fire Emblem and the holy regalia of Archanea Kingdom. I love the conversation between Roy and Jahn at the end of FE6. I love the way the whole concept of Lehran’s Medallion is turned on its head in the Tellius Saga. But that’s all... magic. Magic trinkets and warring gods and clashes between humans and the divine, or at least the alien. The question of why the Thracians can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps (because there are no boots to start with), even rendered in simple video-game terms, hits up against the basic everyday conflict of my life in 2010s Michigan with the endless vitriolic debates over “entitlements” and “individual responsibility,” makers and takers and freedom and freeloaders, free trade and protectionism and the chatter of hate-talk radio.
It’s not very nice, but I’ll take this line of FE debate over The Power of Friendship any day, thanks.
[From Chapter 8, after Dagdar's men rise up against him because they're sick to death of working the land the way Eyvel wants them to and not getting ANYTHING out of it. Mistakes in the text are NOT mine, but the underlined parts are things I've high-lighted.]
Leaf:
"I feel sorry for Dagda. Why can't the people get proper jobs?"
August:
"This barren land can't be worked. Probably most of those people are the descendents of Thracian peasants. They were abandoned as children and had no choice but to grow up to be bandits. They wouldn't have been able to survive otherwise."
Leaf:
"What? Nonsense! What parents would abandon their own children?"
August:
"Oh? You were traveling, yet you don't know the pain of starvation? Where did your food come from when you running from the Empire?"
Leaf:
"Food? I...don't know. But my hunger was always satisfied..."
August:
"Hm, I see you were blessed with fine servants. But you don't understand the suffering of the people. Southern Thracia is covered with steep mountains. The soil is dry, and the climate is harsh. The farmers work day and night, but still they aren't able to feed themselves. Either they all starve, or they sacrifice a few to let the others survive. This is the truth, Lord Leaf."
Leaf:
"Can't they import food from other countries? Northern Thracia didn't have a shortage in food at all."
August:
"Northern Thracia has placed tarrifs on the south. They are especially strict about agricultural trade."
Leaf:
"What did they do that for?"
August:
"The immediate reason lies in the war that happened one hundred years ago, but the situation continues to this day because the north and south don't try to understand each other. Also, Northern Thracian nobles are known to be especially greedy."
Leaf:
"I've always been told that Thracia was a cruel, militant empire. But...they have their own troubles. Why? Why do they keep on hating each other? They used to be one unified kingdom..."
August:
"That is the tragedy that lies behind the two sacred spears, the Gae Bolg and the Gungnir. People can become both wise and foolish depending on their leader. Lord Leaf, you have much to learn to be able to lead your country to a bright future. You must not make the same mistake as your father..."
You remember that post I wrote a while back about how FE "blue team" characters often come off real bad when transplanted into our world? Yeeeah.
Our Heroes tend to be a fundamentally conservative lot, people concerned with restoring the original, established social order, not with overturning tables or shaking things up. They want a return to a golden past, a revival of a heroic age that flowered and faded just outside living memory. Or, at bare minimum, they want to run their noble house, maintain sovereignty over their fiefdom, and beget heirs who in turn will maintain their powers and privileges. There are exceptions, but that’s the general pattern. Marth is the rebirth of Anri. Seliph and his friends are the Crusaders reborn. Later heroes don’t carry quite the same baggage, but they’re doing the same set of tricks, which usually revolves around placing their noble/royal allies back on their rightful thrones. The just and ordered world that our heroes create is stratified, with royals on top and “good” nobles and priests in their appropriate place, and a grateful people beneath them. The very idea of a kingless republic is openly mocked in FE8, with its unflattering presentation of Carcino.
Now, our heroes are consistently good, moral, just leaders who will rule the people benevolently-- as opposed to the bad, crooked, corrupt, or just plain illegitimate rulers they’ve supplanted. Even in the Tellius games, with its “nobles suck balls” lip service, the action revolves around securing or restoring HOW many rightful rulers to their thrones? As for the Jugdral games, as much as the characters spend time agonizing over the best way to demonstrate concern FOR the people, there’s never the idea that it’s in the best interest of these masses to govern themselves.
And it’s worth noting that one of the key enemies in the Jugdral saga, Arvis, is a dedicated reformer. The conflict between a tainted progressive and the reactionaries who oppose him is made palatable by the existence of a plot twist involving the Antichrist. Strip the supernatural out of the equation, and there’s a lot about Jugdral politics to trouble a fan, especially a fan sitting and banging away on the computer in a first-world democracy in the age of tumblr social justice. And Thracia 776, for all that it shows a world permeated by magic, does strip the supernatural out of the equation in the sense that Leif is not a divinely sanctioned savior in the mold of Marth or Seliph.
So the things that come out of Leif’s mouth in this scene have a more naked political sense to them than we usually get from Fire Emblem. Those lazy Thracians, turning to lives of crime when they ought to get proper jobs and lift themselves out of poverty by their bootstraps! What’s wrong with them? Something’s obviously wrong with these crummy poor people who don’t even love their own children. Broken families, no work ethic, no morals... Thracians are scum.
Well, at least Leif isn’t advocating building a wall at the border to keep these inferior southerners off his land. He’s advocating reform-by-conquest, though; I’m not sure that’s any better. You can translate this stuff into the language of Our World far more easily than you can the usual humans vs dragons dilemma and it hurts a lot more to contemplate than does the fantasy racism of Tellius. We’re never going to meet a catgirl outside of a cosplay party or the Renaissance Faire. We’ve probably all had the argument about poverty, broken families, unemployment, and what can and should be done about it... and if your family/workplace debates are anything like mine, I bet it got a bit heated.
And-- just going out on a limb here based on the overall climate of internet fandom-- I bet most of us weren’t on Leif’s side here. It’s actually pretty amazing what this one scene does to deconstruct Leif’s entire position and that of his core supporters. In this one passage, Leif’s sainted father Quan, his grandfather the king, and the entire upper class of Northern Thracia take a hit. That’s not out of the norm for Fire Emblem (we can even debate the extent to which Hector and Elbert were up to shady business), but August’s conversation goes well beyond indicting people who are conveniently dead. Neither of Leaf’s surrogate parents escape criticism here; Eyvel is a goddess on a pedestal everywhere else in the game, but since we already know she uses her regional authority to advocate that the Thracian peasants work this barren land that can’t be worked, she’s complicit in the whole unpleasant system. Whether you want to view her bad farming policy on progressive idealism or reactionary denial of, uh, agricultural science, Eyvel appears to be just flat-out wrong on this issue. As for Finn, he would appear to be the primary source of the overly sheltered Leif’s skewed view on the world and the target of August’s swipe at “fine servants.” It’s possible Eyvel was also promoting the idea of Trabant’s Thracia as a monolithic bloc of terrible people, but if that line of propaganda was coming from anyone close to Leif, it was coming from Finn.
[Dorias tends to be the strawman for the moral shortcomings of Northern Thracia’s upper classes, but Leif hasn’t seen Dorias in a decade. I doubt Leif’s political views crystallized at the age of five.]
This is part of why the world and atmosphere of Thracia 776 really, really grab me. I love the scene in FE3 wherein Marth finds out the truth about the Fire Emblem and the holy regalia of Archanea Kingdom. I love the conversation between Roy and Jahn at the end of FE6. I love the way the whole concept of Lehran’s Medallion is turned on its head in the Tellius Saga. But that’s all... magic. Magic trinkets and warring gods and clashes between humans and the divine, or at least the alien. The question of why the Thracians can’t pull themselves up by their bootstraps (because there are no boots to start with), even rendered in simple video-game terms, hits up against the basic everyday conflict of my life in 2010s Michigan with the endless vitriolic debates over “entitlements” and “individual responsibility,” makers and takers and freedom and freeloaders, free trade and protectionism and the chatter of hate-talk radio.
It’s not very nice, but I’ll take this line of FE debate over The Power of Friendship any day, thanks.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 03:35 am (UTC)I'd like to see more looks into how The Power of Friendship sometimes isn't enough. I really hope FE14 goes into a more reasonable moral debate than "I want to save everyone. I know I burned down an entire fleet, invaded a continent and slaughtered millions, but it's okay because The Power of Friendship says so."
no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 01:46 pm (UTC)If FE14 proves to be a remake of FE4, I expect slick dumb fun that essentially poops on the content of the original game.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-15 02:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 03:50 am (UTC)Leif: He Puts Realpolitik In Your Fire Emblem!
no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 01:47 pm (UTC)I want another game with the atmosphere (and some of the mechanics, like Capture) of Thracia 776 like burning. I do not believe the people who gave us FE12 and FE13 can provide it.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 03:53 am (UTC)Thracia forgoes that, and it instead concerns itself with a struggle on a little peninsula which -- if you've played its predecessor -- makes you end up wondering at the end how much the whole thing really meant. As far as the norm for JRPGs go, it's pretty... strange.
But I think you've hit on what makes Thracia compelling, and it's because it forgoes the fate-of-the-world stuff that it can focus on important everyday issues that get lost in the noise when dark gods enter the picture. Take out the high drama and what you've got left to focus on is the stuff of literary fiction.
(Damn though, stuff like this makes me miss Kaga, because having read his interviews I think it's 900% clear that Thracia's attention to these sorts of issues came entirely from him.)
That said, you know how I feel about my favorite FE characters and their values. :P
no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 02:01 pm (UTC)Yep!
Damn though, stuff like this makes me miss Kaga, because having read his interviews I think it's 900% clear that Thracia's attention to these sorts of issues came entirely from him.
It's like Gene Roddenberry, man. Yes, Mr. Designer had some awful ideas in his own right, and somethings times in the final work function in spite of his intentions, but overall I prefer what he was banging on about to the glossy check-yer-morals-at-the-door entertainment we're getting now.
That said, you know how I feel about my favorite FE characters and their values. :P
Your tumblr post about Henry spurred me to finish this; it'd been rotting on the HD for some time. Hey, at least you suspect Soren would place in the moderate wing of the GOP and not the "Take Our Country Back" reactionary hell wing. :P
no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 07:53 am (UTC)"Why? Why do they keep on hating each other? They used to be one unified kingdom..."
Which is quite an interesting view on Leif's morality at the time, which is more in line with FE's ussual "people concerned with restoring the original, established social order, not with overturning tables or shaking things up"
Its kinda hard to pinpoint Leif entire character development when the FE4 did not have any of this kind of conversation. As far as I remembered, the concern of recreating "the prosperous age of Dainn and Nova" is brought up much more often than the Thracian itself, which mind you is supposed to be Trabant's main goal.
And speaking of Thracian unworkable land, there's Dagda's ending. I don't know but the fact that Dagda manage to rebuild the land feels more like a way to put Eyvel in a better light
no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 01:51 pm (UTC)Where the welfare of the people comes up is Finn's talk with Leif in Ch8- the one where Leif is raring to kill Blume, even at the expense of his own life, and Finn tells him to simmer down because it's the duty of the king to live for his people, not get killed on some revenge mission. It's the one thing in the two games that reads like actual (if indirect) criticism of Quan coming from Finn, and it's very much in line with the kind of stuff that Lewyn keeps saying to Seliph.
Other than that, yeah, even the "narrator" in the Chapter Nine Prologue is questioning what the hell Seliph and Friends are doing down in Thracia.
Oh yes, Dagdar's ending. I didn't mention that because (in light of FE2 and the magical famine) I think it's open to interpretation that putting Leif on the throne actually made the land better and more suited to farm, in a "justice returns to the land" kind of way. It's enough in-keeping with other FE games in which the richness or poverty of the land is tied to the legitimacy of rule that I'm not willing to discount it. So in that case it really doesn't matter how hard Dadgar and his people would work-- without Leif ruling a unified land, they'd never get results.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 08:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 01:21 pm (UTC)And the enemies, except for the Satan-worshipers, aren't entirely bad and some places are morally impressive-- and even dark mages become recruitable this time around and we learn the rank-and-file Satan worshipers aren't horrible people either.
There is no way in hell the current people running IS could ever present something as nuanced as Thracia 776 and there's no indication they'd even want to.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 11:46 pm (UTC)There is no way in hell the current people running IS could ever present something as nuanced as Thracia 776 and there's no indication they'd even want to.
I'm curious as to their intentions for pandering so much with FE13. I can't speak for Japan, but it seems like an FE title with the atmosphere of the Jugdral games would go over quite well in the West, considering the popularity of stuff like Game of Thrones. I'd say it boils down to the capability of the developers, but was there really that much turnover between FE11 and now?
no subject
Date: 2013-04-15 12:46 am (UTC)Yeah. I mean, I feel the FE games are trying to say something regarding divine right/mandate of heaven, and to say what they're trying to say they use noble protagonists. I can roll with that. I'd rather have material like that played straight than deal with the pandering BS of "commoner" Ike (who is anything BUT ordinary), though that plays so well in the west that people still cite him as a favorite Lord on those grounds alone. Those people are not usually worth speaking to.
You've said FE5 isn't very high-stakes, but that's in comparison with the rest of the series, isn't it?
FE5 is not a FATE OF THE WORLD conflict with Our Savior pitted against some great world-shattering evil. It's high stakes in the sense that the fate of an entire kingdom of very unhappy people is up for debate, but not the fate of the continent/planet/humanity.
But FE13 was high-stakes and the plot sucked, so the scope is hardly a mark against FE5.
I'd say it boils down to the capability of the developers, but was there really that much turnover between FE11 and now?
I don't know about turnover, but what the current dev team did to the FE12 material was not pretty. Given the Jugdral material is arguably more challenging on the front end... yeah. I don't think they effin' understand their own source material, or they wouldn't have cut out/changed the specific things they did in FE12.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-15 01:53 am (UTC)Having the hand of fate alluded to as a powerful presence makes sense in a (mostly-)linear video game. :) Though I would love to see a heavily multi-linear FE game along the lines of Mass Effect. Leaving things up to the player might be the best way to ultimately reconcile a lot of the divergent themes and morals, as well as actually make a player character work the way it's supposed to.
I wasn't bashing FE5 for not being high-stakes... if anything, that sounds more interesting and lends itself to going a lot deeper with things, rather than wider. I generally like the political machinations more than I do the fate-of-the-world stuff, though part of the reason I like FE6 so much was that I think it weaved the two together in an interesting way by the end. My point about the scope of the story was more about how it might be difficult to start with a true commoner as a main character and then be able to get to even the dramatic scale of a "smaller" story like in FE5. But then, that's hardly an excuse for shoving secret bloodlines into people's backstories... idk, maybe at this point you just have to say it is what it is.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-15 10:20 am (UTC)On the other hand, all the kings and queens in Tellius carry the divine right business over their heads (with the dubious exception of Sanaki) so it's not like Tellius as a whole upends the original purpose of having an aristocratic protagonist.
If anyone in Tellius represented the will of the common people in some way, it'd be Micaiah. And she does have divine right BS going on. A lot of it.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-16 01:25 am (UTC)Also, the fact that so many people are toting FE13 as the best game on the 3DS is probably going to send the signal that they want more of the same.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-16 01:28 am (UTC)C'mon, NES Fire Emblem had more moral nuance than Awakening.
Also, the fact that so many people are toting FE13 as the best game on the 3DS is probably going to send the signal that they want more of the same.
They have definitely received the message that they don't need a coherent script or believable story to make megabucks. That's not a comforting message.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-15 10:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-15 10:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-14 07:55 pm (UTC)I think it's worth bringing up again from an older post that usually it's the enemy countries that are okay with people earning their cred through deeds, rather than through blood.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-15 10:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-15 02:25 am (UTC)For me more that the political drama(tactics ogre made that regard and still is unpaired) is the characther aproach, you fell the life of the characther and their intentions.