Edelgard Did Nothing Wrong (Religion, Faith, and Politics in Fire Emblem: Three Houses)
Fire Emblem: Three Houses is too big, and if I try to analyze everything going on in it the game will be over.
More seriously, no prior Fire Emblem game has had the complexity and layers of Three Houses in terms of how it employs themes and how they interact. Because of this, in trying to dig down to what struck me as the core message/insight we’re meant to take from the game, laying out all the foundational evidence for every premise getting to that conclusion would involve a tremendous number of diversions and make the overall point even easier to lose than most of my writing. As such, some points are going to be breezed over quite quickly, although if I were on my game I’d simply make a series of articles and refer back and forth between them. But that would require writing them all beforehand to ensure a reasonable release schedule, and I’m just not that organized.
As always, I will be assuming you’re broadly familiar with all four routes and their cliff notes plot points for purposes of analysis. Each route individually touches on each major theme of the game, but emphasizes different aspects, and only taking all four together can we really get a coherent thesis. Additionally, while I’ve watched the finales of all four paths for context, I’ve only personally played the Crimson Flower and Verdant Winds chapters, meaning that the elements most strongly emphasized in Azure Moon I’m a bit lacking in (although this is touched on repeatedly in supports among all Blue Lions recruits, so that helps a lot). Silver Snow, being the Bad End and half-finished, you can probably get all the relevant context just watching Rhea’s big speech in the final chapter and her S rank support anyways.
At its most basic, surface text level, Three Houses is a story of political and religious reform, and each of the four routes reflects a different philosophical approach and means to achieve this. During the first half of the game, it is clear that Fodlan is only nominally stable, that stability almost entirely localized in the central church. Religious extremists (or at least supposed religious extremists) stir in the Empire, the Kingdom has been wracked by nearly a decade of decreasing harvests and poor governance following a genocidal war against Duscur, and the Alliance is forever locked in skirmishes with nearby Almyra on top of their own natural indecision by virtue of being an oligarchy. Archbishop Rhea, meanwhile, rules the central Church and Garreg Mach with a bloodthirsty certainty, ordering death for any apostates against her rule, whilst casually ignoring how many of the problems in Fodlan are direct result of the Church’s tenants that mandate isolationism and have frozen social progress for the nearly 1000 years since Seiros established it. Change in one form or another has become inevitable, and so each route places Byleth in the position to choose the ‘correct’ way to bring about reform.
Crimson Flower depicts direct Revolution, rallying the masses against the corruption of Rhea and those serving under her and declaring them enemies of the people to be deposed. With the root cause of the corruption and suffering of the world removed, creating a new social order to assure better lives for all becomes a much simpler prospect.
Azure Moon is the path of incrementalism, solving the immediate problems before society and treating the symptoms of the underlying cause, in hopes that as conditions improve and more educated, capable generations come along, rooting out those causes will require less and less violent means.
Verdant Wind takes an entirely different track, the path of globalism. By breaking down the barriers between peoples and incorporating new ways of thinking into the lives of common folk, the bigotry and lack of compassion that cause most problems will fade away naturally, and create a better and less violent world.
Silver Snow asks us to sympathize with the oppressor, and consider that perhaps the way things are is really the Best of All Possible Worlds already.
While Three Houses does explore the ramifications of these ideologies clashing, and how the four factions relate to one another does draw on the areas those core ideologies overlap, ultimately they inform the outline of the story more than the themes it conveys or the motivations of the characters within it. However, they’re also the basis for how each faction relates to the religion whose reform is at the heart of the game. And the ways they differ can be summarized as their position on two distinct aspects of the religion: the Church of Seiros as a political power in Fodlan and the leaders thereof, and the Church of Seiros as the dominant religious faith of Fodlan.
Silver Snow, being the path where Byleth aligns with the Church, naturally approves of the Church as both a political and religious institution, and fights to retain the dominance of both.
Azure Moon questions the current leadership of the Church and acknowledges their shortcomings aiding the different regions of Fodlan, but in the end retains the faith and tenets of the Church with only minor changes while installing Byleth as Archbishop. While the implication is that over time Byleth would probably reform various aspects of the Church, there’s no immediate changes beyond Rhea stepping down.
Verdant Wind allies readily with the leadership of the Church, since in a united Fodlan that leadership would simply be one voice among many in ruling the land. Ultimately Byleth becomes the head of state for the united continent and the other regions, including Garreg Mach, answer to them. Claude however is skeptical of the Church from the very beginning, and as his goal is explicitly to end Fodlan’s isolationism, ultimately the core teachings of the Church are stripped away with his and Byleth’s victory in the war.
Crimson Flower rejects both the teachings of the Church, in particular the emphasis on Crests and the nobility, and the specific leadership of Rhea owing to her many crimes and her immortal nature. Edelgard concludes that so long as the institutions or specific leaders of Fodlan are allowed to remain in power, they will always attempt to hold that power and in so doing revert towards the status quo and the horrible abuses that it perpetuates.
However, those are questions of politics and religious institutions, and simply describe the differences between the routes in the game. The winner of these clashing ideologies is not decided by the strength of their conviction or the righteousness of their cause, but by what route the player pursues… or within the narrative, which side Byleth joins. But why is that? Obviously Byleth as a case of player-insert character will be on the winning side because the player is on the winning side, but how does the game justify this within the narrative? The answer goes beyond the political and institutional reality of Fodlan and digs down to the next layer: Faith.
A recurring element of Fire Emblem as a series is dragons belonging to system of divinity. The top gods, both good and evil, are simply long lived dragons with nominally mortal forms that can be killed, and the limitations of their children and creations once applied to them even as they have grown less and less vulnerable over time. The Goddess worshiped by the Seiros church is much the same, a dragon named Sothis said to be from a distant star… whose spirit dwells in the soul of Byleth. One of the most hidden aspects of the story spells out the mechanics for this: Byleth’s mother was an artificial being created by Rhea using Sothis’ Crest Stone (essentially a dragon’s Heart), and Byleth was stillborn. The Crest Stone was directly implanted into them, and their own unbeating heart was irrelevant with the heart of Sothis in their chest. In the course of the story, Sothis eventually merges with Byleth and bequeaths a substantial portion of her power to them (presumably all of it, just Byleth has no idea how to do God Stuff), meaning that in most ways that matter, Byleth has become a new incarnation of the Goddess.
Seiros formed the Church of Seiros to govern in absence of the Sothis, who had been killed by Nemesis in ancient times. Seiros is said to be the daughter of the Goddess, and as seen in the opening scene, was driven in no small part by a sense of vengeance against Nemesis. However, the current Archbishop, Rhea… is Seiros, and her stated reason for most of her actions was not merely to follow her mother’s edicts to lead the people well, but to outright revive Sothis. The entire 1000 year history of the Church was meant to produce a being like Byleth, but one who never developed a will of their own, an empty vessel for Sothis to dwell in.
It’s difficult to look at this fictional history and not be reminded of Revelation. A millennium of rule by a great Dragon using half-truths and proclaiming themselves a representative of God’s will, only interrupted when a new incarnation of God appears and leads the faithful against them? It’s quite suggestive. And while, like most incarnations of divinity and faith from a Japanese writer, Three Houses also draws some inspiration from Buddhism and it is entirely likely Byleth has elements of Siddartha Guatama that I’m not learned enough to spot, they also have two more elements that, taken together with these references, remind me strongly of Jesus.
Despite being portrayed as starting the game substantially stronger and more experienced than all of the students, Byleth rarely considers themselves as a leader by choice, and devotes themselves fully to the role of teacher. When they revive after the time skip, they return to fulfill a promise to their pupils, and becoming a rallying point for any side of the still-going war happens entirely because their students need them in that role. That element of training up disciples to become the leaders of men rather than aspiring directly to any kingdom themselves is one of the defining attributes of how we think of messianic figures, or at least those directly inspired by Jesus.
The last major theme of Three Houses is trauma, and the ways hurt people can be twisted and hurt one another. A recurring element of most Byleth supports is acting as a sounding board for each character to reveal and confront their traumas, and Byleth encouraging them to be their best selves rather than lashing out or punishing themselves. This is common in this sort of story, but it seems noteworthy that one of the defining elements of Byleth’s character is helping others deal with their demons. Many of Jesus’ miracles were done as part of his role as a healer, which could be broken down into two main areas: curing the blind and driving out demons. While it’s difficult to say why or how a historical Jesus would have been particularly gifted in restoring eyesight, demonic possession is quite likely how people of the first century described things like traumatic triggers and other forms of mental illness. Like their role as Sothis’ inheritor and as a teacher, Byleth’s status as a healer in much the same way Jesus was is not substantial on its own, but taken together are suggestive enough to seem intentional.
So if Byleth is, symbolically within the narrative, a messiah figure, logically their choices in the game are meant to make a moral statement. They are the incarnation of god, and their choices will influence how people live and what they value for generations to come. And as the core of the story in all routes is religious reform, what is moral depends a great deal on the religion in question. So we’re going to look at the best case for the moral standing of the Church of Seiros, and then assess how much water that best case holds and what impact that has on the moral value of the other routes.
Nemesis and the 10 Elites were a group of bandits who were found and granted technology and power by the survivors of Agartha (who ultimately become Those Who Slither in the Dark). They were able to ambush and kill Sothis and many of her Children, creating the heroes relics passed down through noble families in the time period of the game itself from their hearts and bones. To combat them, Seiros and the other Saints (the surviving Children of Sothis) shared their blood with humans, granting them powers in similar fashion to the Elites, and went to war. Seiros ultimately won, killing Nemesis in battle, but what follows is strange and hard to explain except as a pragmatic power grab within the narrative: Seiros rewrote history, claiming Nemesis as a fallen hero of the war against the Agarthans who went mad with power, and his Elites as conflicted warriors who ultimately turned against him in the final battle. The Hero’s Relics seen in the game are passed down their noble families due to this lie, Seiros canonizing the Elites and scattering them across Fodlan in order to administer the land and found those noble houses. The entire basis for the rule of these bandits, and to a lesser extent of the descendants of those who truly did aide Seiros, was their possession of the weapons and the Crests that enabled them to use them, a literalization of the classic “divine right to rule” attributed to real-life nobility. Apart from fealty to this system, the teachings of Seiros emphasized isolationism and a shunning of new technologies, a lingering reaction to the war against Agartha.
Each nation of Fodlan suffers as a direct result of these tenants. The Kingdom has engaged in genocide within the past generation, the Alliance is in a continual state of near-war with the only shared land border on the continent, and the Empire a generation past fought off an alliance of other nations and holds one of the heirs of those nations as political prisoner during the game. The obsession with preserving the bloodlines of Crested nobles and having new heirs with Crests has devastated the stability of the Kingdom, and certain regions of the Alliance are little better. Indeed, while society at large seemingly values ability more than gender (Leonie or a lady Byleth are never remarked as unusual for becoming mercenaries after all), institutional sexism is the norm within the ruling class, precisely because a system which values legitimate heirs is one that will reduce women to little more than walking wombs. We see that the ancient Agarthans had automated weapons, rocket technology, and computers, and in the thousand years since that war the three nations of Fodlan have not invented gunpowder. Stepping outside the fiction for a moment, the social mores of Fodlan range from roughly Elizabethan England in the Kingdom to unification-era Germany in the Empire. It’s no accident, for example, that homoeroticism is common across all factions, but all the openly bisexual characters are originally from the Empire. Even then they are secretive, never discuss these things by name, and seem to think of their same-sex attractions as dalliances rather than having the potential to be serious long-term relationships to build a life around.
This is the legacy of the Church of Seiros, and given that Rhea is merely an alternate identity for Seiros herself, this state of affairs has been allowed to continue under their original architect. This is, if not what Rhea wanted, acceptable to her so long as her true goal of Sothis revival is making progress.
The fairest thing I can say about Rhea’s position is the entire situation is meant to be a tragedy. Nearly all of Rhea’s actions are trauma-brain overreactions to Sothis’ death and an attempt to carry out her will and revive her directly. But she in no way understands what sort of person Sothis is or why she gave her the instructions she did, and ultimately only makes the people of Fodlan more vulnerable to both the ancient dangers Sothis herself fought and new ones born of human failings. After all, thanks to the mistrust and lack of technological progress fostered by Seiros’ teachings, the remnants of the Argathan civilization still walk uncontested among people today and many of the tragedies in the recent part are direct result of their machinations.
From this we can conclude that Silver Snow is not a moral path for our messiah to take. Sure, Rhea herself retires, but essentially only because she at long last succeeded, and a new incarnation of Sothis ascends to the throne of Fodlan. Given that she stays on in an advisory role and no motions towards reforming these corrupt systems takes place, the only material improvement to the world is the incidental destruction of Those Who Slither in the Dark. In a world where every level of society was straining under the weight of Seiros’ teachings, they were never addressed at all.
Azure Moon ultimately removes Rhea from power, and unwittingly deals a crippling blow to the Agarthans, but there’s still significant cause for concern in the world Dimitri will create. One of the incidental statements in the first half of the game mentions an interesting detail of the founding of Faerghus: the Church recognized the first king’s right to rule in exchange for more freedom to proselytize among the people there. This works as foreshadowing in Crimson Flower and the close relationship they retain with the Church after Edelgard begins the war, but as an American there’s no small amount of familiarity to the most religious region of the continent also being the one most closely tied to patriarchal rule, a culture of fatalism and valorizing death, and every other overt signifier of toxic masculinity. Dimitri’s story is one of recognizing and trying to overcome these things within himself, and he is on the path to recovery in the end, but the risk of relapse will always be there so long as the Church maintains so strong a presence in the culture of Fodlan. In that way Azure Moon perhaps most closely resembles our modern politics, where we can see progress but the threat of being dragged back into darker ages by regressive zealots seeking their own power is ever-present.
Verdant Winds makes a more compelling argument, directly and brazenly forging relations with other lands and philosophies in order to bring peace to Fodlan and immediately drawing the Church’s military under their own banner and making them subordinate to the cause of peace and unity. The main failing it’s the route’s complete disinterest in holding Rhea to account for her crimes, which is particularly strange given that far more of the nature of those crimes and her rewriting of history is revealed their than in either Azure Moon or Crimson Flower. Ultimately Claude will create a better world, and one much more likely to be stable than the Fodlan united by Dimitri, but many avenues of justice for those who were wronged by the Church have been closed. This deference is interesting within the narrative as well; Claude espouses a philosophy not dissimilar from Deism, as filtered this through a framework of diversity and allowing all religions and cultures space to practice their own beliefs (because of course he does). He seems profoundly uncomfortable at the notion of the Goddess being a tangible and involved entity in Fodlan’s history, while still immediately recognizing all of Byleth’s (ultimately supernatural) talents. In all Verdant Wind seems not to have fully explored the ramifications of its philosophies and how they interact, which is not the case for the other routes, and as such it’s hard to really consider it as the most moral outcome.
When asserting that Crimson Flower is the most moral outcome of the game, it’s important to note that each part of that statement is important. While the oppression of the Church of Seiros and the crimes of Rhea in particular are what we could easily consider just cause to begin a war/revolution, it is equally important to note that the particular of that war are different in Crimson Flower than they are in all other versions of the story, and those differences have a profound impact on the morality of the war. In all scenarios, the war Edelgard begins exists in a near-stalemate for the entire 5 years of the time skip. However, on non-Crimson Flower routes, Edelgard’s goals in the war have degenerated into conquest; Rhea is missing and presumed dead, the majority of the Kingdom is held by her allies and the remainder lacks a legitimate leader to formally contest her on those holdings, and the Alliance maintains a careful neutrality that could easily have served her original goals if she’d maintained them. And yet the war continues and she maintains her alliance with Those Who Slither in the Dark, even while her intent to betray and remove them from her idealized united Fodlan is true in all versions of the story.
The thing to remember though is this is true of all routes; Byleth’s support is critical in each route to ensuring that faction becomes their best selves and doesn’t fall into the same trap Seiros did 1000 years ago of letting their trauma dictate their actions as ruler. Edelgard is the most pronounced in this regard, but that only makes sense because she’s the most direct foil to Rhea to begin with, torn between the same single-minded devotion to a better world and the sheer depths of her trauma while Dimitri and Claude are far more one or the other. And in a way this perhaps best synthesizes the main themes of Three Houses; only someone like Edelgard, one who possesses privilege but knows its poisons, who empathizes with the pain of others due to her own deep traumas, who is driven to create a better world because she can see with crystal clarity all the evils of this one, can persevere and create such a world… but without others at her side, left to her own devices and swimming in her own trauma, she would just as surely lose her way and become the tyrant she fought. Faith isn’t just a system of beliefs to adhere to, but a companion where no real person could measure up and keep you to the courage of your convictions.
Fittingly Crimson Flower touches on this union of themes in a way no other route does. Byleth parts ways with Sothis at the end of the route, fitting into the Jesus mold of messiahs in a way other versions of Byleth does not. And it also echoes Edelgard’s support with Manuela; Edelgard asks about her career and why she joined the church, and Manuela says basically “well my talents were a gift from the goddess, but I had to use them and work as hard as I could to justify having them”. Edelgard admits, more nicely, she thought of faith as a character flaw, a way to deny responsibility for yourself or others, and Manuela using it as a motivator gives her pause. Faith and religion are not a substitute for your own morals, judgment, and effort, but a place to start. The beginning of wisdom, not the end if you will. Casting it away entirely is possible, but requires a strong replacement, stronger the more you have been hurt and the more you need support in your life, but relying on it to shape your world view rather than taking it as a single element thereof is to cast away a fundamental aspect of your humanity.
Crimson Flower represents a union of Three Houses’ themes that the other three routes do not, and Edelgard’s actions in Crimson Flower are those with the best chances of creating a better world. She holds the one who created the systems oppressing Fodlan directly to account, and challenges the systems of isolation and nobility that maintain that oppressive state. She breaks out of the religious fervor keeping the people under thrall of those systems, while providing space for people to create new beliefs in their wake. With the help of Byleth she retains the courage of her convictions rather than falling down the road of conquest and despotism of so many other revolutionaries, including her counterparts on other routes. She takes steps whenever presented to her to reach out a hand and right the wrongs committed by her ancestors and repair relations with other nations (see her supports with Petra and the scenes where Claude is allowed to return to Almyra in Crimson Flower). Edelgard did nothing wrong in the sense that her actions are those that are necessary, and at any opportunity to do better, she will take it.
What makes Three Houses interesting as an experience though is how all these things can be simultaneously true without sacrificing the integrity of the other routes (well, except Silver Snow, the overt and unfinished villain path). Dimitri’s campaign is not the best possible outcome for Fodlan, but does paint a picture of a better world and how people who have been overcome by their pain can aspire to put themselves back together. Claude’s campaign sweeps some of the ills of Fodlan under the rug, but his ability to unite people and avoid vilifying his enemies is admirable and something aspirational to the real world. And ultimately it’s compelling because you can enjoy the game on any of the layers making up the major themes, because the game is willing to be complex and not limit itself to a single, unmissable message. Those can be fun too, of course, but something so unabashedly ambitious and multifaceted is a rare treat, of a sort only video games can provide, and it’s nice to be able to so openly celebrate one with Three Houses.
