Story Structure III: Themes
Wherein I discuss the methods by which I identify a story’s themes and integrate them into the storytelling process naturally and elegantly.
lol
Themes are a pretty major element of the writing process, and one that I think in an amateur context are often hard to approach. It’s easy to go into a storytelling process with an understanding of who your characters are or what you want the plot to look like, but it’s much harder to immediately understand what that story actually means – yes, your rapier wielding lord has defeated the dragon worshipping emperor, but so what? How has this story succeeded beyond merely justifying why chapter 22 is a castle map or why I get a pre-promote general at chapter 18?
A theme, in a storytelling context, is broadly speaking a concept that the author is attempting to explore, in the hopes that it may broaden the audience’s understanding of that concept or prompt them to explore it in their own ways. In my last post, I mentioned God of War as being uniquely laser focused in exploring the theme of Family – overbearing mothers, distant fathers, quarrelling brothers, confused sons, the game presents the player with a myriad of examples of the ways our complicated relationships with our families can affect us. I can’t very well use the same example twice, so let’s try one this forum is likely more familiar with; Fire Emblem Three Houses, for all its script’s flaws, has a pretty consistent thematic throughline linking its various characters and plotlines together. It’s there from the very first trailer; the Crests are to blame. 3H is very interested in exploring class dynamics (EDIT: More accurately, they’re an allegory for the circumstances of one’s birth, which is a more broadly applicable theme. Class dynamics are still wrapped up in this, but SirSpensir pointed this out and I felt obligated to include it), primarily through a simplified lens via the Crest system, and it’s a near constant element in almost every character’s backstory. Sylvain’s misogyny and casual disregard of others, Edelgard and Lysithea’s past traumas, the conflicts in Almyra and Duscur, Even in gameplay, your characters at the start of the game are divided into Noble and Commoner, prompting you to take note of this divide between the lower and upper classes of this world. While the script struggles to tie this theme into the main narrative in satisfying ways as it enters the back half, this still works well as a jumping off point; you can trace many of the issues facing the characters in this world back to one overarching concept.
This particularly tightly knit version of theme isn’t necessarily the only way to handle it, of course. In the hack Vision Quest, most of the characters in the game are mostly just their own people doing their own thing, and the theme of the story is a relatively lightly touched upon exploration of power; for a lot of hacks, this is likely to be the approach taken, where the themes of the story are mostly just a common recurring element moreso than something the author is keenly focused on interrogating via the script. But how do you even identify these concepts enough to develop one into a “theme” without going out of your way to write one into the plot?
I’ve said before that the process of writing is more like an archaeological dig. You know where you’re digging, and roughly what’s supposed to be under the surface, but the specifics of what you find will often surprise you and recontextualize the entire whole. Themes are often found through this kind of process. As you write, take note of what topics you keep revisiting time and again with your characters. What are you most often leaning towards writing? What kinds of characters do you often find yourself envisioning? Where are the places where your various plotlines and character arcs lining up in ways you find intriguing?
For an example, in my own hack, Lady of Masks, there are a few themes I’ve been playing with, some of them planned and some of them not. The project has always been heavily focused on matters of faith, how it can be wielded as a cudgel or used to enrich one’s life, the complicated relationship one can have with their own faith or the institutions behind their beliefs, etc., but after starting the project, I often found myself returning to the same topics as I was writing supports for my cast. Many of the characters have somewhat storied pasts due to a history of conflict and unrest within the region. The younger characters are eager to make their mark on history, and the older characters are often filled with regret over their own roles in what history has already been written. Many characters have lost people dear to them and wish to do right by their memory. In this way, I began to realize that another major theme of my project, completely unknown to me at the start, was that of legacy – the legacies we leave behind, the legacies left to us, the legacies we wish to live up to, the legacies of nations and of conquests, all of these things came up so consistently that I made the decision to lean into it more heavily, addressing the topic with more clarity and retooling existing characters who brush up against the concept to fit it more snugly.
However, let’s say you identify a theme through the process I described, but find you don’t really have a big lesson to impart about the topic. What do you do? Do you need to have something definitive to say about it? The answer is… not really, no. A theme isn’t necessarily a “moral of the story,” despite popular belief. I wouldn’t be a real fan if I discussed this topic without discussing this next game; Yakuza 5 is a game focused extremely heavily on exploring one theme to the absolute best of its capabilities, and that theme is Dreams. There are videos out there chronicling the number of times the word alone is said in-game, and the total number is nearly 500. Nearly every character has some kind of dream that’s integral to their character arc, be it a dream they wish to achieve, a dream they’re helping to achieve, a dream they’ve already achieved, so on and so forth. Across the game’s staggering runtime, it hardly deviates from this topic, even in its sidequests. However, the game doesn’t have any kind of definitive statement on what dreams mean to people. Some dreams are bad, some dreams aren’t worth achieving, some dreams are less important than what you already have, but also some dreams are freaking sweet and awesome. What’s the takeaway? 
who knows. That’s for you to decide; the game explores the topic in its own way, and leaves you to draw your own conclusion about what this means. The vast majority of stories, no matter how tight or loose the themes are, will do this. So don’t worry if you don’t think you can adequately make a definitive statement on a theme. The important part is that you explore a topic in a way that’s interesting to you, and is meaningful to you. The audience will derive meaning from your work so long as you can accomplish this.
In a romhack context, there are unique benefits and drawbacks to the formula that can affect how you explore your themes in significant ways. FE being a game about large casts gives you a uniquely powerful tool with which to approach the thematic elements of your story from a wide variety of angles. With several dozen characters, minor and major, allied or antagonistic, you have a lot of options, especially with the use of the support system or any similar approximation. However, you also have a far more limited script with which to do this exploration within; FE scripts are far more limited in runtime and provide far less opportunities for “smaller scale” optional scenes – by which I mean, relative to a more traditional RPG, you don’t get the benefit of things like side quests and the like with which to flesh out your world, and have to rely primarily on what limited time you have in the main script and otherwise on recruitment dialogue, talk conversations, supports, and maybe the odd village scene. This means you typically have to be pretty efficient about how you go about tackling these topics if you want them to land without the help of optional dialogue that many players may not get the chance to see.
The best way to do this is to make sure that, in furthering the main plot, you’re also furthering this thematic exploration at the same time. I’m going to discuss this in far more detail in the next tutorial, which will be entirely about this process, but in miniature; let’s assume a hypothetical wherein the theme you’re most interested exploring is that family theme from earlier. If your protagonist and antagonist have a Luke / Vader thing going on, where the former is related to the latter, it would be very difficult for the plot to advance along the lines of your Luke becoming ready to face your Vader without grappling directly with the theme of how the family dynamic comes into play in that process. Maybe this not-Vader character has a pair of underlings, siblings who are constantly competing in violent and vicious ways; maybe your Luke has a sibling of his own, and his relationship with them is complicated. Maybe your Luke is old enough that he has his own son, and he sometimes worries he has more not-Vader in him than he’d like. Maybe not-Vader himself is caught up in a complicated father/son relationship of his own with some power even greater than him, and you can draw parallels between the two relationships while also exploring how they differ. By tying in the thematics of the story with the major characters and major plot beats, you can find more chances to explore these themes without bloating your script to an unwieldy size.
In your own hack, I encourage you to be flexible and open to a pivot if you find yourself having stumbled into a topic that interests you. Give your characters quiet moments where they can reflect with one another, and see what feels most natural for them to reflect on; find what’s important to your characters, to your world, to you as the author. Once you have an idea of where your head is at, capitalize; look for other places that you can work this topic in, or plot elements that previously felt underdeveloped that could fit into this new framework. Make it a significant part of your next recruitable unit’s character; write some support chains that can really get at some of the specifics that the broader plot might not have the real estate to explore. A strong theme applied properly and charismatically can be transformative in how much investment a player can have in your world and its primary concerns, and can elevate your plot beyond just another fantasy romp where the blue haired man kills the dark cultist man and saves the world.
Jeez uh… I’ve been busy, huh? 
I sort of intended to do all of these as a batch of tutorials, but the character arcs one was so long that it burnt me out something fierce, so it was pretty hard to motivate myself to come back. The next part of the series will hopefully not be super long once I do get to it – we’ll be discussing how you work your themes into your world building, your world building into your character arcs, your character arcs into your themes, etc etc; I’ll probably use a lot of examples from my own project, again because it’s the only one whose creative goals and process I can actually discuss with authority, and because that tutorial far more than the others is going to be about application rather than trying to create an understanding of an element of storytelling that an amateur writer may have struggled to grasp up to this point. Discussion of application, of course, benefits best from examples of application, and this process is something that primarily happens behind the scenes.
There’s also a few other topics I want to discuss – this one was a bit less FE centric than I would have liked, but I want to touch on things a lot of people ask about in the FEU discord, like how to write support chains or discussions about “Camus” characters, and I’d like to throw my hat in the ring to provide an easier to point to resource for such discussions in the future. For now, though, I’m going to focus on finishing this particular set of tutorials – as always, any feedback would be greatly appreciated. I’m trying to cut down on length, but I want to provide a wealth of examples for those who struggle with more abstracted learning, which can lead to a lot of bloat. Are these examples helpful to you at all, or would you rather I stick entirely to practical discussion? Are the anecdotes from my own personal projects helpful, or do they just read as shilling with extra steps? I’d like to improve these as much as possible, so please let me know how you feel – any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks for reading!