Don’t worry.
I worry about how I come across while writing texts or even posts like this all the time. I just end up winging it most of the time, and how I come across will be a concern later. The important stuff is that I’ll have gotten this out of my head. XD (like you did with your post).
Even though this might not have started in the best of ways on both ends, I’m still happy to have partaken in this exchange.
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I really often hear these discussions about gender, especially in fantasy spaces, where the whole anti-feminist crowd generally comes out to bat for the writers in ways that miss the point by, essentially, skipping over the root cause and pointing at the result instead. That is to say; instead of examining why the story puts the male character in positions of power and prestige that the female characters are generally not seen in, they point to the deeds that the male character has accomplished after having been placed in positions to do them by the author. “Of course Male Protagonist has more screen time, he’s the legendary wielder of the Super Sword and the son of Cool King the Third! Female Protagonist is cool and all, but she could never do the things Male Protagonist did if you actually think about the lore!”
It’s a perspective that posits that these story decisions were somehow borne of the world’s internal rules, and not that the world’s internal rules were tailored to accommodate this story and this protagonist. If you’ve ever seriously written something, you know that this is generally not how this plays out – the two halves of the equation here are codependent, but they always exist to serve the story first and foremost. The world exists to make the story possible, to give it texture and meaning, not to dictate its flow. There isn’t anything stopping a Fire Emblem story from making a protagonist that does all the same things that a character like Ike accomplishes, and indeed in newer games we’ve seen a glacial but visible push towards female characters with greater agency in the plot.
There’s also a tendency to view these kinds of observations as an attack, like the point of contention is that Male Protagonist doesn’t deserve to be the big hero. I think this is because everyone slept through their high school English class, or else maybe they only teach critical theory here in Canada. Thinkpieces like this are usually about recognizing a pattern in the way stories are told and examining why this pattern exists, positing the ways we could do better. I would describe it as extremely uncontroversial to say that Sacred Stones’s script is mostly of the opinion that Ephraim is a badass who does cool badass shit, unless he’s like your comfort character or something, and it isn’t a huge leap to then point out the fact that his sister, a protagonist of ostensibly equal importance to the story, isn’t afforded that same level of reverence in the plot, and then not a huge leap from there to wonder why Ephraim has stereotypically manly man character traits like Stubborn and Epic, while Eirika is the gentle, kind, naive one, who picks fights she can’t even win. It’s not a condemnation of Ephraim, or even of the script (although, to be clear, Ephraim sucks and is boring for reasons entirely unrelated to this, bc he’s never challenged in a meaningful way and what growth he has is basically just a pretend gesture to make it seem like something happened in the plot wasteland that is FE8) to say that Eirika’s role in the story is shafted in favour of Ephraim, and that this fits into a wider pattern of female protagonists in the franchise and in media as a whole.
This is a franchise with entire games focused on racism as a central theme, a franchise where churches manipulate the populace into supporting wars on foreign soil for the church’s benefit. Why is “I wish there was better female representation” making the franchise political? Fire Emblem has already made itself political, several times in the past, and female rep isn’t even a political issue unless you’re deeply mired in a pit of geek-culture-war channels.
It isn’t, really, at all. Having gone through a character arc and having character flaws are not mutually exclusive – hell, a lot of character arcs are about a character developing greater flaws. The writers could have found an angle to make Ike more than just an ultimate badass, but they didn’t really care to; that wasn’t the story they were telling, and it, again, has the unfortunate side effect of making it stand out when the other protagonist is deeply, deeply flawed. I will say, though, that though I’ve never beaten FE10, I didn’t find Micaiah particularly eyebrow raising at any point in the game that I’d gotten up to, and I generally liked her character. I think this is more an instance of “FE lords can often be kinda boring good boys that do good and are good,” but I’ve also never gotten to the endgame when I’ve heard Ike starts to really take over the plot and maybe that would change my opinion.
Can being an operative word here. Rather infamously, during development of one of the recent Assassin’s Creed games, developers really wanted to have a female protagonist, but the concept was shot down by higher ups and they were made to implement a choice between male and female protagonist at the start of the game instead, as the suits felt that a female only protagonist would hurt sales in a franchise with traditionally male protagonists.
In the case of Sacred Stones, Eirika route is kind of a mess; it’s a mostly tangential trip to Jehenna where you do very little, while Ephraim completely steamrolls Grado with basically 0 resistance along the way (it takes, what, two maps? three?) with generally more haphazard map design. In the case of the new games, I would argue that just because Robin is important to the third act of the game doesn’t mean that the plot mostly centres around Chrom for the first two acts. Even when Robin does start to take centre stage, Chrom still maintains a ton of importance, as does his daughter. That said, Robin is by far the most bearable and least boring of the MUs, going through something vaguely akin to an arc and having a defined and recognizable personality throughout. Corrin is genuinely awful as both a protagonist and a player avatar, regularly making really shitty decisions and generally feeling like a hindrance to the plot, and Byleth might as well be mute. Even if they were female by default and couldn’t be made male, they probably wouldn’t be viewed as being good representation by many people; in the case of 3H besides, the focus is firmly on the house leaders, not on Byleth. Importance in the world does not equal importance in the script; the emotional core of each route is the house leader, and Byleth is simply an avatar with which to experience and interact with their stories. Just because they’re part goddess doesn’t actually make them the most important figure, it just makes them powerful.
It really wasn’t that condescending, especially since clearly you managed to stir up the exact kind of people that you were seemingly trying to pacify with the “I’m not trying to make you feel guilty” comment. This might be vaguely rude to say, buuuut I wouldn’t advise losing any sleep over the opinions of somebody who calls you a “feminazi” in the first paragraph; for that language to even be in one’s vocabulary in the first place betrays a pretty significant bias coming into the conversation, and even if your point was substantially more well articulated, you weren’t going to ever please that crowd with this take. If you plan to do more of these write-ups, my advice would be instead go into the write-up with a more defined plan about what point you’re going to try to build to – in this piece, you identify a pattern in the franchise and for the most part correctly identify the problems that arise from this pattern, but in the end it’s kind of just left in the air, which invites a lot of this kind of discussion in the first place. If you were more purposeful with where and how you dissected these problems, you could land on a punchier and more conclusive final note than “I wish FE games didn’t do this and also romhackers should probably also not do this.” As is, you set up the pieces of the puzzle, and then leave it unassembled, letting other people assemble it for you into a configuration that suits them – in this case, the “stop making fire emblem political!” configuration, which was discontinued in 2015 and is no longer sold on store shelves 
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Thank you for the critique, I do appreciate it. Hammering down a point beyond “thing good” or “thing bad” is something I’ll look out for in the future.
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I’m not going to comment on the content of anything here, but opening with “femnazi” is not a good look, and I don’t want to see it or anything like it said again. It undermines your point and your argument by provoking a defensive reaction to a personal attack and adds nothing of substance (unless your entire point is to make a personal attack in the first place, which is, surprise, also ban-worthy).
Dancer already said something to the specific parties involved, but in case it wasn’t clear, it is not acceptable, regardless of whether the following conversation was “productive”.
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Yeah, “productive” might not have been the best word there. 
I apologize, it’s the first time I’ve ever been involved in a debate like this. I know where I stand in my mind, but it seems I can’t figure out how to accurately express it.
I am curious, though. I know that “femnazi” is a personal attack, and that defending it wasn’t my best move, but how can “anti-feminist” not also be considered a personal attack, since it implies that the other person is bad just because they don’t adhere to the ideology of feminism?
For example this is my own bias speaking again, but while I callously dismissed the usage of “femnazi”, I really got the impression that the opposing point was dismissed as simply being “anti-feminist” could also be interpreted as a personal attack, though not as direct/explicit.
Yeah no, this thread has been derailed too damn much.
@SirNicee, if you want your thread to be unlocked, please let the mods know. Thank you.
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Right, I’ve deleted a large amount of the irrelevant conversation and tentatively re-opened the thread. For my own role in this, I let my hot head get the better of me, which I apologize for. One user who was involved has been banned, and would likely have been banned even without my provocation, from conversations I’ve had with the rest of the staff who agree I went a bit overboard.
If you have any questions, please reach out to me by DM, or to another member of the staff if you aren’t comfortable coming to me personally.
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At its simplest, feminism is just the belief that women should have equal rights to men.
If you believe in equal rights, you are a feminist. 
Sure, there’s a lot more introspective unpacking to do beyond just that, and you may not always agree with feminist advocates on a specific issue, but at its core it is pretty simple. No one’s telling you to join advocacy groups or anything 
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My take on FE8 is that the perception that Ephraim is made out to be better than Eirika is more an issue with how weak the overall narrative is than it is an issue of gender portrayals. The entire third act of the story is meant to hinge on the Twins’ conflicted feelings over Lyon. But the plot never actually does the work of making the player/audience care about Lyon enough to be able to identify with what the Twins are going through. If the player actually cared about Lyon, then Eirika being willing to try anything that might save him wouldn’t read so much like her being naive and stupid because if that moment was properly built up to, the player would also be carrying the smallest of hopes that the stone might save Lyon. But for most, the scene will read like Eirika being an idiot because the player never cared one way or another whether Lyon is saved.
A bit unrelated, but what I consider the most egregious thing about the scene in the lava caves is it trivializes a good chunk of what led up to it. So much of the plot is centered on protecting the Twins’ bracelets, but when they’re finally used to retrieve the stone, it gets broken a short time later. And it ultimately doesn’t matter because Rausten’s stone is enough.
As for the difference in the routes with Ephraim’s journey arguably being more important, because of all of the Gaiden references in FE8, I think the devs were just emulating Gaiden’s story where boy’s story is about war and conquest and girl’s story is about lore and spirituality. The problem is, again, FE8’s weak writing. Eirika is never shown to be a spiritual person, so it doesn’t feel particularly meaningful to her. Her journey would have better fit an arc where L’arachel (or Natasha) is the main character. And while Valentia’s religion is nothing mind blowing, the lore of Magvel doesn’t feel fully developed and doesn’t amount to anything. There’s an entity called the Great Dragon and…it really has nothing to do with the plot. Fire Emblem is often kind of vague about what the priests actually worship, but Magvel is especially weak in that regard.
As for Ike and Micaiah, sequels that are set shortly after a completed story tend to fall into two pitfalls. One is that the sequel can seemingly trivialize the plot of the original, both by trying to up the stakes from the original and by destroying the peace that was fought for in the original story so quickly that it feels meaningless. The Tellius games don’t fall into this one (at least when it comes to Micaiah). The Dawn Brigade’s struggle feels like a natural consequence of the plot of FE9 (though the beginning of the Laguz alliance arc feels a bit contrived). Also, through Sephiran’s speech, FE9 ends on the note that Ashnard was just a mook and there are bigger trials ahead.
The second pitfall is that it can be hard to get an audience excited about new characters when a lot of them will just want to see their old favorites come back. It’s easier to lean on the popularity of a returning hero than it is to get the audience to see the new hero as being just as good. And depending on how powerful the old hero was, it can be hard to set the power level of the new hero without the audience feeling like their old favorite is being arbitrarily overshadowed.
This is the pitfall that most who are familiar with Radiant Dawn will agree it falls into. Micaiah is barely present in the final act, and she doesn’t even get an endgame PRF weapon. But I honestly believe the outcome would have been much the same if she had been a man. Once Ike was back in the picture, no one was going to get to stand on equal footing with him because the story treats him like a perfect human being. Ike’s low points come from others not believing in him as much as they “should.” And the root of any mistakes he makes are framed as coming from others not acting in accord with how he sees the world. So Ike is always morally correct, he just didn’t (yet) have the power and influence to be allowed to tell certain others that he’s correct.
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What’s your favorite female character from anything. I’m curious.
And to add to the discussion: Dishonored did a gender equal in its DLCs and Sequel. Specifically in Dishonored 2 there a bunch of female guards to hack to pieces. Problem is that whenever the game wants to show that the guards are bad folk they use a male. I find this is somewhat counterintuitive given the claim of equality but what do you think. Why is over correcting on this “issue” so common.
I don’t have a favourite female character for the same reason I don’t have a favourite character in general – I don’t usually find it a valuable metric to use to think about writing. I’ll maybe have a favourite character within an individual work, but I’m rarely interested in comparing one character agaimst all the media I’ve ever consumed, each of which I enjoyed for very different reasons and each of which was created with very different goals.
A small update for now, but I went ahead and fixed the frames on one of my original mugs and also edited the palette a bit. No more missing strands of hair when she blinks. My project’s Lord should finally have a proper mug.
As for whenever that next write-up’s going to be, I do have an interesting idea for it, and I do have the time since I won’t be going back to university until January, it’s just a matter of motivation. Hopefully it’s not going to get the thread locked again.
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You might want to make a separate thread for graphics and keep this one for essays.
Up to you, of course
It’s something I’ve thought about. I just figured that for now I’d keep them together because I really don’t have much done or created in either category. If it gets to the point where things get too cluttered I’ll probably spin off one or the other.
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Might as well show a few splices I’ve worked on since this started, plus an updated one. I have a few others in some other projects, but since one’s a Telephone hack, I figure I should wait until that has a public release before showing that off.
So spoiler alert, no, I didn’t leave the community. It turns out finding things to write about is about as difficult and draining as actually finding the motivation to hack. I was considering doing a write-up on the Camus archetype and typical fan reactions to those in said archetype, but I was lost beyond that. Hopefully I’ll be able to find something to rant about in the coming months, but if not, I have other projects.
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I find this Female Lord Syndrome very interesting. And coincidentally, my current hack project has a female main lord, and I want to avoid this syndrome her.
Hopefully I can write her in an interesting way
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The above are all F2U/F2E, as usual. Credit to Goldblitzx for some advice on the second-to-right and also making sure I didn’t accidentally just clone Marius from DOOT on the second-to-left.
Sadly, I don’t have much to show beyond my progress in making my splices actually look decent. My project is still at 4-5 playable chapters out of 28, so I’m not feeling confident showing much from it at this time. Once I do, I’ll be more than happy to post it to its own thread.
We do have food dialogue though, so you know it’s going to be good.
(Mugs shown are by CanDy and AmBrosiac (left and right, respectively).)
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Not sure if it counts as a necro if it’s my own thread, but I’m digging this back up to confirm that my actual project is finally ready to be shown off to an extent.
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