If you haven’t seen it yet, the master of the land has dropped an announcement detailing some possible operational shifts for FEE3 going forward, linked here. I’m not planning to get into the main contentious discussion for this year, but instead direct everyone’s attention towards the much more interesting topic:
Now, I have it on reasonably good information that MournfulRelic does not want to run the event again in 2025. Frankly he was insanely powerful for doing it twice at all. What this does mean is the previously nebulous process of FEE3 ringleading will become at least somewhat more publicly accessible. Presumably, the master of the land will utilize his own discretion in selecting the final representative, but with Metaphor Re:Fantazio having come out this year, I think it’d be some good fun for everyone who was interested in running FEE3 to do a little campaign pitch, drum up some public interest. After all, ‘public support for the host’ is a non-negligible factor when it comes to who should be running the show.
With that in mind, I thought it’d be a good time if anyone who has hidden or public aspirations of running FEE3 2025 to step into the limelight and give everyone a good accounting of themselves in this thread. I’ll make my own post as a reply since it’d be gauche to take up the topic post myself. Although it’s a community thread and thus lawless, I will propose one rule: no future policy suggestions unless you’re announcing candidacy and are declaring policy change ideas as part of your platform. Only the weak idea guy; the strong implement.
With that in mind, let’s see those self-nominations. Everyone who thinks they could do FEE3 better, uh, step up and get clowned on.
i am campaigning. under my presidencydictatorshipdivine right to ruleassistance fee3 will become 2 letters shorter, and turn into e3. what are they gonna do, sue us?
vote for me i’ll siphon the life force out of sigmaraven and use his knowledge as my basis for running the show while his soul is trapped in damnation forever
Self-nominations? Nah. Making this thread was an open invitation, Sigma, and if you didn’t know exactly what you were getting yourself into then I’m frankly disappointed in you.
I hereby nominate SigmaRaven, aka @BigMood, for running FEE3 2025, and call for everyone in the community to rally around his involuntary campaign. This absolute madman, veteran of three wild projects, has managed to put up with all you chucklef*cks and your Dies Emblem nonsense while taking on huge side projects purely for the bit, so he can sure as hell do the same for your FEE3 submissions for the same reason. And while he’s undeniably crazy, I don’t think anyone who’s talked to him can actually say they don’t like this guy. He knows what he’s doing, even if it doesn’t make sense to anyone else. And most of all: it’ll be funny.
I am officially stepping forward as a candidate for the throne of FEE3 host. In this post, I will illustrate what I would considered to be the main considerations of any host candidacy: my qualifications, my platform, and, last but not least, what I hope is an honest assessment of my possible shortcomings as an organizer-elect. We will, of course, lead with the good, as any good pharmaceutical commercial does.
Qualifications
First of all, I imagine many of you know me, even if only in passing. I like to get up to my antics around the site, do my hijinks, make my hacks, etc. What I imagine you don’t necessarily intuit is how few people actually dislike me, or at least strongly enough to act on it. I have cordial to good relations across a decent amount of the fandom sphere as relates to FEUniverse. While I am not known to any truly large streaming figures, a good number of hackers, mods, and even people who visit FEU casually but otherwise do not like the crowd here engage with me in a friendly manner. I believe I can bring this good energy to the annual FEE3 trade show. Those who wish to submit need not find themselves cowed in front of me.
I am, also, a work-from-homer with no life. This means that, as a general rule, I am insanely available to field questions and concerns compared to many of my working adult peers, and my life is stable enough that I can host such an event as a hobby safely, in comparison to some of our younger community members, who might large amounts of free time but external considerations that demand their attention, such as family or schooling. A vote for me is a vote for operational stability and timeliness.
Most importantly, I am a transparent individual. In all dealings, I will not hesitate to be as honest as I can possibly be. If any topics come up that I cannot discuss due to administrative concerns, I will at least endeavor to secure a good reason. I think all previous hosts have been very reasonably forthcoming, but the event itself, as Camdar himself alludes to in his announcement post, has often had a bit of vagueness baked into it by design, if only due to lack of clarity in who’s running the event and what policies they’ll implement, a lack of clarity that you can see I am currently trying to dispel.
FEE3 Policy
Moving on, my FEE3 show policy will be largely to continue the show with few deviations from the current norm. For all intents and purposes, consider me an ‘establishment candidate’; I think FEE3 is fine, sees an appropriate amount of success every year, and generally fulfills its role as a showcase and holiday-adjacent event that gets the community energized. As far as I am aware, the submissions process established in the last two years helps to run a clean show and has resulted in a good variety of trailers and full plays. I do not aim to, as they say, “fix what ain’t broke”.
With that in mind, my platform does consist of two minor changes to current policy.
Vanilla-Adjacent Content ('Reduxes')
The first is centered around the handling of rebalances. Let’s look at the current exclusion criteria as of this year’s FEE3:
Essentially, hacks that are “minor” in nature from a player perspective are excluded, with reskins, rebalances, and PMEs explicitly called out as being strictly prohibited. I believe that what’s strictly prohibited is quite clear, but if elected, I will do my best to clarify edge cases and establish more formal guidelines to explicitly permit the inclusion of high-effort vanilla-adjacent works. While at this time I am still working on refining these proposed new guidelines, they will boil down to the following: either fully new/recontextualized maps and changed/recontextualized dialogue across the entire hack, or an extremely high density of new asset creation/original mechanics that were not included in the base project.
To further elaborate on the above, I would like to examine three high quality vanilla-adjacent hacks from the past few years: [FE8] Sacred Stones Reforged v1.0.2, [FE8] An Unexpected Caller (22 Chapters) [COMPLETE], and Fire Emblem: Dark Stone - FE8, but you play as the bad guys! [Overhaul with a new story]. For reference, of these three, the first two have been featured at FEE3, while the last was not able to be featured due to current regulations. Under my tentative proposed policy, Dark Stone would be admissible due to being a combined map recontextualization and story overhaul. It is my belief that the average player would consider this a significantly distinct deviation from vanilla FE8 so as to be worth playing as a “custom” project. An Unexpected Caller, despite explicitly using vanilla maps and characters, would also qualify, as the gameplay is wildly different from the vanilla experiences of any of the projects it draws from, and the usage of dialogue to form a narrative is sufficiently novel, despite much of the dialogue being “spliced” from vanilla.
Lastly, of these three, Sacred Stones Reforged is both the closest to the ‘vanilla’ experience while being wildly popular. I believe that the creation of massive amounts of custom assets, such as CGs and battle animations, warrants inclusion in FEE3, despite not adhering to the first two criteria I proposed. If you like, consider trailers of this nature to be something adjacent to animation showcases, just with an entire hack attached for good measure. While I will not be implementing anything as dry and argument-inducing as a scoring rubric, I will try to create metrics by which people can judge whether their project makes sense to showcase in FEE3 that I hope most will agree on.
Finally, as a stretch campaign promise (the kind that’s meant to be broken), I would like to propose a funny “everything else” slot, where, using one of the hour slots during FEE3, every “minor” hack that would normally be rejected will instead be slapped together into one timestamped video. The only requirement will be that the hack creator must submit a trailer specifically between 1 and 2 minutes for their hack, and that, if somehow more than 30 people go through the effort of doing this for PMEs and rebalances, only the 30 most interesting trailers (decided entirely subjectively by me) will make it to the final showing. My thought process is that, if someone truly believes their minor edit is somehow worth showing off, they can create at least 1 minute of content about it (and the heavens will not permit more than 2 minutes). Let’s Play content will not be allowed for this hypothetical category.
Outreach
FEE3 generally sees a modest amount of interest from people outside FEU/in adjacent communities. I think generally people are fine with the amount of attention, but I have seen sporadic comments about how it’d be nice if we got wider engagement. For this, I have a two-step process as part of my platform.
Step 1: Pathetically beg. I will go around to every FEtuber anyone can suggest and request that they at least mention the show in a Youtube social post or something. I will metaphorically get on my knees or some shit for real, I’m gonna be one of those door to door salesmen that try to sell solar panels or something. I would ideally try not to annoy people who are already friendly with the FEE3 event; on the other hand, if they’re already friendly with the FEE3 event, I hardly have to do this.
Step 2: Okay, the above one was for jokes, this one’s for real. We’ve seen a good number of non-FE hack/fangame indie games be shown in FEE3 as of late. Most people seems to be positive about this; from the FEE3 side, it brings some fresh content to the show and possibly gets a few more eyes on the show from these creators’ audiences, and from the creators’ side, well, free advertising lmao. As part of my platform, I plan to more proactively reach out to fledgling SRPGS (not, like a ton at once lmao, not tryna get the hacks buried, but maybe like 2 or 3 that haven’t been featured in FEE3 before) and see if they’d like to be included in the show.
It’s possible that the current showrunners already do these sorts of things, but if they do, well, we don’t really know. Vote for me, and at least you’d know I failed.
The Dangers of Voting Sigma
I believe my platform contains two key risks, which people who believe I am a good fit for FEE3 would have to accept and possibly help mitigate.
The first is that increased operational transparency is not necessarily a good thing. People love to sling shit around FEE3 time, and for those who have no moral grounding other than slinging shit, increased transparency into video acceptances/rejections as well as showrunning just gives bad actors more stuff to sling shit at. If I were accepted as host and my policies caused a degradation in community behavior, no one in their right mind would ever communicate anything about FEE3 showrunning ever again and hosts would go back to being dictated by shadow policy (DMing the admin lmao). As such, I would trust you, the people, to, uh, not stir shit, and to also not engage with others trying to stir shit.
The other risk is that my proposed increased outreach comes with the risk that I reach out to someone who, like, turns out to be an extreme shithead. This would have the consequence of, at least temporarily, associating the show with an extreme shithead, which would be bad. If elected, I will, of course, do my due diligence as best I can, but this is an inherent policy risk that can only be mitigated, not negated.
Anyway, I hope you all have enough information now to decide in a well-informed manner whether I am the FEE3 candidate that best represents your interests. I, of course, will be voting for Ru.