Also, holy crap, I don’t know how much rhetoric has been devoted to him yet, but there needs to be, like, a thesis on Carson from Deity Device
Basically everything about this character was clearly carefully crafted from top to bottom that by the end of the game, you want a character who started as an anti-hero, if not outright villainous, to live happily with his partner, the Fire Emblem, their adopted magical construct daughter, and to overthrow a generations long regime with the power of the Wind God Sety for a day.
I have to be careful not to spoil (If you can find a way to play Deity Device, please do it; I respect that the author took down the rom for creative and personal reasons, so I won’t go against their wishes and post links or anything, but play it yourself, look up a playthrough, just find a way to experience it if at all possible, its beautiful its insane, and somehow it required to discs to play, basically) but lets breakdown how and why Carson is just so insane and amazing and handcrafted to perfection:
-To start, the story revolves around several major bloodlines that are basically the fonts for magic in the current setting, seemingly vessels for spirits or the will of the gods (to the point every major casting unit you get in the first half just has infinite mana, thanks to echoes style magic progression). Carson, however, does not. He has zero mana, no magical talent whatso ever. He has, for all intents and purposes, a magic growth of 10%, and a wind tome he can use 60 times total he had to figure out how to research and craft himself in spite of a system and top to bottom hierarchy that says he can’t, and he is a second class citizen because of this; You feel this sting even more personally after your lord is one of the most mana-gifted mages of the current era, a woman with such potent bloodlines and blessings from spirits, she can slam multiple meteors per deployment by the end of her story
-Because of this insanely flawed system where blood and magic are the key to everything, Carson did many, many things, including working on artifical humans, artificial mana, selective breeding to create stronger mages, and many other things that would make him, frankly, good material to be the final boss of most fire emblem tales. He’s only the word “Quintessence” away from basically being a small, sassy, Nergal when you, the player, step into his shoes
-So, going from the absolute highs of being a vessel of flame incarnate to an actual street orphan who stole fire from the gods to warm the rest of the world, desperate to keep the closest thing he has to a sister from falling apart at the seams being a flawed mana construct, who is keenly aware she is a draining font of mana like a bucket with holes in it, it doesn’t take more then a chapter to turn from hating our wind-mage prodigy to empathizing and seeing just how bad it is from the outside looking in
-And then, Carson finds not just love, but friendship, purpose, and a young, naive yin to balance his bitter jaded yang, another young man who has every reason to hate Carson, instead grows in confidence and strength from our wise-assed commoner genius. And Carson himself begins to loosen up, some of that good natured charm and wide-eyed belief feeding back into him, to the point he goes through his own character arc and sees the nobles who he considered nothing more then privledged, sneering bigots and tyrants as similair victims to the system
-god, and its just so, so perfect. He gets given a ring, a vow, and steps up to be absolutely buck wild as a unit. Like, Carson will have, I’m going to generously estimate 12 to 14 magic as a 20/20 promoted sage… but he will have 40 speed, the power of forsetti, galeforce, and can snipe comfortably at 4 range… and he will have earned that status with words, and blood, and grief, and tears, and just so much heart renching hardship, and he will still refuse to believe he can be loved, that he is worthy of love, even as the man willing to give him everything, to share mana, pain, love, life, everything, continues to offer his hand and forgive Carson, lift him up, and you will be there too, willing to give Carson a second chance for all the harm he’s done, you will have gotten to that point with him, whether just because how much you need and enjoy using him as the most insanely OP wind sage who can give Llewyn and Ced a run for their money, or just from how amazing his arc and story are, seeing both sides of his story and seeing him at his worst, only to rise to his best