Permafrost's Writing Advice

Creative
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I have issues with “big, bad dragon/demon” that have plagued many games in this series, but I agree with most points stated. I find the biggest issue being the trivialization of all other villains/cults leading up to the end. They are simply devices that get used by the final big baddie.

I’ll get blasted on this site for this, but Zephiel is the biggest culprit. He’s a twerp with daddy issues who goes for the old “this world is imperfect” pitch, and when Idunn is awakened, her lore completely overshadows him. He is a tool.

Ashnard is similar, however to his credit, despite Radiant Dawn’s character assassination of him, he had an end goal in mind and ideals that could be understood to some extent in PoR.

Lyon was a literal tool, though I give him props for staying dead in the end. It was impossible to ever take him seriously, as you knew the Demon King was the driving force.

However, I will die on the Nergal hill. He a puppet to no one but himself and has lore that is foreshadowed, but not outright given unless certain restrictions are met. His goal isn’t to take over the world like every other cliche villain. He wants/needs power, to fuel both his dark magic obsession and to open the dragon’s gate to get back to his wife - a goal he has forgotten due to his dark magic descent and age.
He is dealing with “technology” that is explicitly explained to be ancient/powerful/bad news, etc. The only issue is the way he goes about getting power. Nergal has ties to current characters (Black Fang, Elbert, Laus, etc) and ancient characters (Athos, his wife, Arcadia), and is the overarching villain for the entirety of Fe7’s wonky main storyline.
I will argue the Ninian revival point due to the several other boundary breaking elements in 7, which are all fine imo. Athos & Nergal are centuries old with no explanation (doesn’t need one - akin to Gandalf in Tolkein, it provides these characters strength and mystery w/o outright saying “I am strong”.) Nergal is able to suck energy out of people and mold animated humanoids with said energy through dark magic. Bramimond is also a dark magic user, even more experienced than Nergal, so much so that his physical being is completely screwy. So by the time Ninian is revived, we know that the ancient heroes are FU powerful, life/death is able to be manipulated through dark magic, and that there are many things existing that purposely defy the normal logic set up. Ninian/Nils being dragons the entire time acts as an additional point.

I also agree that “magical miracles” are lousy unless they are set up correctly or foreshadowed as being somewhat possible.

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One another thing i want to add, that maybe could explain why i have such a big problem with fantasy hijacking the story in FE so much:

Fantasy in FE is incredibly shallow. Aside from maybe Tellius, what exactly is Fantasy in FE aside from spells, sometimes chosen one/blood, and Dragons?

FE puts Fantasy at the bare minimum, so throwing the interesting dynamics aside for it is…quite bad imo.

And even FE games who go a bit deeper with their fantasy use it completely wrong, but i already pointed that out above and my big problem with it.

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Nergal is also one of my favorite FE villains. He arguably has the problem of being evil for the sake of evil. But he he’s also been driven somewhat mad by the process of becoming a Dark Druid leaving only vague notions of his original goal of saving/reuniting with his wife, so it works. It really is a shame that his story is hidden behind a lot of obscure unlock conditions and the RNG of defeating Kishuna during his first appearance. FE7 is probably my favorite FE story and one of my favorite video game stories overall, and Ninian’s resurrection definitely doesn’t ruin it. I just think it could have been done better.

I honestly think that other than maybe Radiant Dawn, FE7 is the game where telling a story and developing characters was most clearly a big priority for the devs. It’s the first game where the protagonists have real agency and aren’t told what to do by some sort of advisor. On a similar note, it’s the first game with a group of protagonists that can bounce their thoughts and concerns off each other. There are two perspectives for the main story and a lot of optional content to further flesh the story out. There’s also no full scale war in FE7, so the story is more than just claiming enemy territory. It’s also the first game to use CG images for important moments and have different facial expressions for the main cast. FE8 regressed on a lot of these fronts as Eirika/Ephraim and Seth have a typical dynamic to past lord-advisor pairs. FE9 went back to one lord with a rotating cast of advisors-Greil, Ranulf, Sanaki, Nasir, and Elinica (more of a Nyna). Though Ike does exert more independence from his advisors (aside from Greil) than past lords.

Zephiel is very boring as a main villain. He’s just a nihilist who hates all humans because of his dad.

I think the problem with Lyon is the story never does the work of making the player care about him as much as Eirika and Ephraim do, so it’s hard to identify with them wanting to save him as badly as they do. That’s why Eirika is so often labeled as stupid for handing him Renais’s stone. That scene would read a lot differently if the player also wanted to save Lyon. I think if he was a temporary ally or had his own section of the game (not being evil but as himself), he would work better in the story.

That’s fair. I don’t really think fantasy worlds need to put a lot of effort into things like magic systems unless magic is heavily plot relevant. If it’s just an ability that exists, it’s fine to not dwell on it. But every FE game features clergy in some capacity, but it’s often not clear what they worship. Does anyone know what gods people in Magvel worship? The Great Dragon doesn’t seem all that well known outside of Caer Pelyn, so it’s probably not that. Jugdral and Elibe have religions focused on Braggi and Elimine, but it’s not clear if people believe those two achieved some sort of divinity or if they’re revered as chosen messengers of the gods. I think the only time gods come up in Elibe is when Kenneth says there are no gods save Nergal.

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Nergal is an example of the good character who lost himself by going down the rabbit hole. He went so deep into the dark arts trying to save his family that he lost himself and went insane. Everything happening in FE7 is cause and effect as a result. My wonder is that if under the right circumstances he could have been saved. Redemption is a theme I like to implement in my writing, and whether or not you deserve to be saved once you go past certain boundaries.

As for writing style(as brought up in this topic’s old first post), I think that a story is best told by characters who are imperfect and layered. Even a good guy or one who seems like a Mary Sue has to be masking something and/or be forced by events to change and become more layered. If there is innocence it must be lost. And conversely darker characters should be brought more into the light if not going deeper into depravity. But that’s just me.

The Demon King in FE8 has no redeemable qualities and is a one dimensional ultimate evil. But using Lyon as the main antagonist makes his archetype work because they use Formortiis as more of a macguffin than a character to drive Lyon.

As for plot, I’m not sure if it would apply to FE because I’m not one of their writers, but I think starting with an outline is the best so you know where you want to end up, but be able to go back and alter it as your characters evolve. Because they might make a different choice than you originally imagine, and you have to consider the second order effects of those choices(how it affects them, others, and everything.) Writing is rewriting, after all.

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If I’m being honest, I’m not sure if I fully agree with the assertion that being consistent with the physics of your world matters all that much.

It matters a lot, yes, in that it’s a lot easier to follow what’s happening if it makes sense, but bringing up Ninian’s revival kind of hurt the point.
You can do any asspull you want as long as you meet certain criteria:
-Does it feel deserved?
-Does it tie into a theme of the story?
-Is it just cool and kinda plausible given the powerscaling at hand?
And so on.

My views on this weren’t always like this. They actually kinda were influenced by the Korean webnovel titled Omniscient Reader, whose latter half is honestly a really cool look into the nature of fiction and how we engage with it.
The gist of its power system is that building up feats or putting in effort creates an energy source of sorts called “plausibility” which lets you get away with wacky things that would otherwise have you smited by causality.
The purpose of this power system doesn’t make sense until further into the story where it starts examining fandom and plagiarism.

There’s also the part where factors completely and absolutely divorced from a narrative, like real life events or franchise setup methods, can justify in-story events. Obviously this means the story’s staying power is a little off and can date the story, but we need that kind of media too, if only to show future generations what kind of impact our era had on us creatively.

I kinda went on a tangent there. It’s 1 am and I slept 3 hours the past night. so cool

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I think the point that you’re making doesn’t really excuse a poorly written “asspull.” It’s more that the reader is more willing to tolerate a bad bit of story if what’s around it is good. I spent a fair bit of space explaining why I don’t like the Witch Celica scene in Echoes, but I still like Echoes overall because the story otherwise does a mostly good job with characterization, and tying that characterization to the story beats, especially with Celica.

The Witch Celica scene doesn’t ruin the story for me, but it still isn’t good. Like you mentioned, it arguably does tie into the themes. Shrimperor mentioned the power imbalance between Alm and Celica where Alm is the one who’s ultimately correct because Celica puts too much faith in the gods. But to save Celica, Alm had to think a bit like her and put his faith in Milla. So it’s possible it was meant to tie in with the themes of how the best outcome is to moderate the virtues represented by Mila and Duma rather than only accepting the extreme of either. The scene is still mostly noise to the audience because it’s a literal unearned deus ex machina.

Ninian’s resurrection is the same. It would be better if the heroes had to do something to earn it, but the story does a good enough job in other areas that the overall experience isn’t made bad by it.

Compare that to the final chapter of Engage where Sombron says the emblems aren’t going to be able to help against him and they all disappear, but Alear summons them back a moment later after getting some generic encouragement. It’s just pointless “drama” in a story that’s already mostly silly and lacking in depth (yes, I know Engage gets in the occasional good line or character moment, but monkeys with typewriters will eventually produce a literary masterpiece through random chance if given infinite time). It’s a pretty pointless moment in a bland story, so it doesn’t stand out as particularly bad, just more of the same.

When writing you shouldn’t aim to do good enough most of the time that the reader will tolerate when you BS your way through a moment that the characters aren’t really equipped to deal with.

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Honestly the problem with the FE examples isn’t that they violated previously established laws of the universe, it’s that they essentially retconned prior consequences for no relevant reason. There wasn’t actually a need for Ninian to be revived, especially because Eliwood isn’t required or assumed to have reached an A rank support with her. Idk what’s going on with Echoes because I heard about Faye and decided to stay clear of it lol.

My point that I think I had is that a story isn’t a reality but a representation or facsimile of a reality. It’s like in visual arts, where even if the image is technically poor, if it looks right, then it is right. Same goes for story. If it hits good then it don’t matter. “Keeping your physics consistent” is generally a good guideline to achieve this, but giving the reader an emotional attachment and putting them in the moment can serve just fine as well, unless somehow your audience is comprised solely of people who think they’re above caring viscerally for a fictional scenario.

If something is too thoroughly consistent, it can feel clinical and cold. Even Deity Device, which I love, by the way, came close to suffering from that at some points, mainly at the spots major players weren’t having big character moments, which really was not often. It just kinda stood out when development was painstakingly built up to the point it felt like it was just repeating itself, although it wasn’t.

Edit: Now that I think about it I’m not sure what point I had or why I was posting anyway aside from maybe being pedantic because this is writing advice and not “DO NOT DO THIS OR I WILL CHOKE AN INFANT”

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The thing is that to get the audience to care about the scenario, there generally have to be stakes. Just like how a character can be overpowered to the point it feels like there are no stakes in the story, the setting can be overpowered to the point that it removes all of the stakes from the story. That’s when it becomes easy for the writer to “and then this happens” his way way through the story. I agree it can be grating when someone is trying to “outsmart” a story, but the audience shouldn’t have to do the heavy lifting of figuring out why things are happening and doing mental gymnastics to accept those happenings. It’s the task of the author to create a comprehensible experience.

The notion that if the story says something happens, that’s what happened is true in a literal sense, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that what happened is good or interesting.

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