godspeed and god bless you jason, i can’t read posts longer than a paragraph but i just know this is fire as fuck
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You make a good point. However it is also true that, as far as we know; Jugdral, Elibe and Archanea are different worlds. The only two continents we have the certainty that are in the same planet are Valentia/Valm and Archanea. So we can’t be sure that they are a comodity in every world.
He transformed a totally unimportant question into a whole debate/theory/investigation and I love him for this 
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They’re rare in FE despite existing in the time period because they’d be expensive.
That’s it. That’s the answer.
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Sounds like a pain to sprite a character with glasses, maybe they just wouldn’t bother
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Many people in this thread have already made comments on how Fire Emblem is anything but realistic/historically accurate, and I largely agree with them. So instead of just repeating what others have already said I’ll instead offer my perspective on how FE would handle glasses if it was accurate to medieval europe, because after all the middle ages are the obvious main inspiration for FEs settings, at least in aesthetic.
Frankly, it wouldn’t be much different. Glasses first appeared in Europe during the late middle ages, specifically in the 14th century, which matches the average FE setting with plate armour and all. These glasses however where a far throw from the glasses we have nowadays.
First of all, they only worked for far-sighted people, so if you were near-sighted you were screwed anyways. They were also mostly for reading, you couldn’t comfortably wear them all day even if you wanted to as temples were not invented until the early modern period.
So, in conclusion, even if FE were to get more realistic on the topic, glasses would still be a very rare sight. They certainly wouldn’t be seen on playable and boss characters who have to actually fight in battles.
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Glasses for nearsightedness almost certainly existed, it’s just much harder to dial in and hence would be expensive. I assume this is why it’s mostly monocles - it’s much more distracting to have one eye frick itself than both, and it’s also much less expensive to just have one lens.
Also like… having to squint your brow to keep it on is less annoying if it’s just one eye.
If eyeglasses for nearsightedness existed that early then I’m not aware of them. Glasses in late medieval art are almost always shown in the context of reading or other activities that would require good short distance vision. It’s not just that eyeglasses for short-sighted people would be more difficult to make, the idea of using glasses to permanently correct eye-sight deficiencies simply hadn’t developed yet.
Magnifying glasses already existed, but they’re also much larger and more forgiving wrt focus etc; I’m almost 100% certain the reason myopia glasses didn’t exist in the mainstream is because manufacturing is much more difficult.
Reading glasses are convex and much less likely to break. Given glasses were held between one’s cheek and brow, you didn’t have a lot of space to make the lens curvature and so any small mistake when machining a concave lens for myopia would ruin the whole thing.
We currently mostly use acrylic or polycarbonate for glasses in modern day precisely because they don’t shatter into a billion pieces if you mess up, are much more forgiving, and due to being thermoplastics, require little to no machining.
I already had one character with glasses in my hack, now I have incentive to make more. I got you, OP
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Let me first start by saying making glass at that time would be expensive and we can assume not many knew how to shape glass so glass it self let alone 
would surely cost a fortune so only noble or rich merchants could have them. Therefore it is rare to see characters with
I have not played games before 6 so i cant say about other characters but Canas is a strong dark mage and is a researcher so he can earn a lot by selling his findings to make some money for his lense do note most mages in FE are very enthusiastic about magic study so them paying a big sum dont seem unlikely
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That’s an interesting reflection on Canas’ potential back-story.
Fire emblem: Glasses edition. WHat’s the name of your hack, if it’s already public?
If the legendary, god-defier Glass isn’t there, I’ll riot.
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I am not a big fan of glasses characters, but there is an anime in the world called G-On Riders that only features Bishojo(beautiful girls) wearing glasses, so it would be nice to have an FE that only features characters wearing glasses.
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Well, perhaps because of artistic styles and the fantasy/medieval setting, according to ChatGPT (which is not exactly correct but ain’t incorrect either). The artistic style generally shows that not really a lot of people either in real-life or in fiction wear glasses, and this is arguably even more so dubious in a medieval age.
The earliest record of an optical lens usage is surprisingly earlier than one would think, in 1286 (according to Wikipedia and internet resources), and the earliest modern glasses are invented before 1727.
However, there are arguable precursors for visual aid devices in Greek and Roman times - it is uncertain who exactly created the first pair of spectacles here, but we know that the Romans did make magnifying glasses at that time.
At 9th century, reading stones were invented - they’re not exactly eyewear glasses, more like magnifying glass.
There are also claims about single-lens magnifying glasses being used in China during the Northen Song dynasty (960-1127).
It might be just coincidental that we have several factors counted into once:
- As this is supposed to be medieval period that would mean we shouldn’t have modern glasses.
- The game’s artistic style, as the developers considered that glass-wearing characters are uncommon.
- The type of glass-wearing characters is not often that considered, again accounting to the rarity of people actually wearing glasses.
Hope that explains well. I might be considering factoring this as well for character design.
You can buy magic tomes in shops. I highly doubt they are all hand-made. In most games, basic fire and thunder tomes are very cheap.
Athos was old, but was still 1000+ years old. And Nyx in Fates is stated to be way older than she looks. So she reversed her aging with magic. Perhaps Athos just liked his beard.
But I also agree with your point. In a world where magic exists, it wouldn’t be far-fetched for it to be used to cure someone’s eyesight.
Is researching really so hard to do
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Nope, I still usually just go book read through the internet and research stuff. Allow me to fix that- nvm, actually that shouldn’t hopefully matter too much, but it is a most likely a true fact regardless.
I think a contributing factor to why it isn’t common for characters to have glasses (at least pre-FE9) is that adding glasses would clutter the character’s in game portrait when working with a low pixel count. Notice how Canas’s monocle doesn’t really have a frame and is made by using some of the lighter colors in his skin pallet on the far side of the viewing angle where most characters would have the darker shading colors. There’s a limit to how much detail you can realistically put into a portrait for the GBA, SNES, and NES games, and even a one pixel wide glasses frame is taking away real-estate on a character’s face. Also, at lease in FE7 and FE8, the eyes are the most expressive part of the character portraits because they can be set in three different positions, and this would be lost if the portrait’s eyes were cluttered by glasses.
Izuka wears a monocle with a nose bridge.
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