Yer a girl Corrin (Fire Emblem Fates and Feminism)
Fire Emblem has never managed to be my favorite series, or break any single entry into my top tier of video game favorites. But it occupies its own little space in my brain: once every year or so I just kinda wanna play Fire Emblem, and I’ve played more of them than Nintendo is actually willing to sell me. Not unlike Pokémon, I can be reasonably sure it’ll be a pleasant experience and being able to fit it into my understanding of the series and how it’s grown or shifted through the years is as much a part of playing it as the actual game itself.
So when playing through Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest is something I ended up doing in fits and starts over the course of a year and a half, partly out of just finding more interesting games to play and partly out of just… not wanting to, I was a bit weirded out. In did change some aspects of the core gameplay in ways that I wasn’t entirely confident playing through, and perhaps that had an impact, and later events suggest maybe I just wasn’t okay through most of 2015, but it was still a very strange thing.
Stranger still, I found I didn’t have a very good memory of most of it, but increasingly what I did remember was the parts I didn’t like. I started to feel legitimately upset, even angry, thinking about the bits I remembered well and the overall flow of the story. I ended up enjoying the next game, Shadows of Valentia, quite a bit despite its many problematic aspects and completely falling apart in the endgame but… when news dropped about the upcoming Three Houses, it bearing greater similarity to Fates was proving to be a turnoff. That’s a pretty bad attitude to have about a game I know approximately three paragraphs about, so I figured y’know what, I need to figure out why the heck I didn’t like Fates.
I’m not entirely sure if Fire Emblem Fates is consciously trying to say much of anything. But as time went on and Conquest’s shortcomings bothered me more, it struck me that perhaps it was more than just poor writing, and unintentionally or intentionally it ended up with some meaning that was rubbing me the wrong way. And playing through Birthright, and getting a better sense for what they’re doing with Corrin as a character, I have a much better grasp on it.
Corrin functionally is defined by compassion. Her character arc is actually quite a bit like Wonder Woman in the most recent film: she’s been raised in the art of war while living segregated from the world. Her handlers are loving and well meaning, but the knowledge she’s confined weighs on her. She needs to believe the best in people, and in so doing fixates on a single person as the source of evil in a long-simmering, complicated conflict. But she differs in a key aspect: her naiveté is reliably played up to a degree she often comes across as dumb, or at least as not learning from her mistakes. Corrin’s defined by her compassion for others, but both versions of her story frame this as a character flaw that causes greater suffering than a more measured, calculating heroine would inflict.
Birthright broadly is Corrin’s journey to becoming more hardened and less forgiving. The emphasis during the path split is that Garon’s using her to kill Mikoto is unforgivable, and while Corrin being less tactically minded and more diplomatic than Ryoma does win them allies here and there, it also is the primary source of named characters being killed. In particular her hesitance to fight Xander is the main reason Elise was present to jump between them, meaning she died needless and drove Xander to fight suicidally in their final duel. It’s not terribly strong as a theme, and isn’t necessarily by intent, but it feels present.
Conquest, in addition to highlighting this perception of Corrin’s flaws more sharply via repetition, suffers in two other critical ways. Fates as a whole is written as though the Nohrian siblings are the Noble Enemy Generals, and consequently their path is more about showing the human side of those characters and fleshing them out. So there’s an implicit assumption that the player is already familiar with the Hoshidan cast, because obviously the dark path is played second in a story like this right?
The larger problem is the emotional core of Conquest. The idea is to flesh out the Nohrian siblings, but the dynamic they establish in the early chapters is very specific: siblings coping with an abusive parent. The way each one has a particular “role” they play for Garon, and the way they coordinate to run interference for Corrin after she refuses to execute prisoners is practiced and extremely evocative. A conversation later in Birthright provides another key ingredient to this reading: staying with an abuser does depend on a non-abusive set of expectations for the abused to hope the abuser returns to. Elise quotes Xander as saying Garon used to “love showing his strength. But he had dignity and charm and didn’t care for conquering other kingdoms […] things started getting bad when Queen Arete died.” Elise claims never to have known Arete, which suggests that it is specifically Xander’s continued faith in Garon’s better nature that gave rise to the sibling’s dynamic of deflection and placating him.
When Corrin chooses to side with Nohr, she’s consciously choosing to throw herself back into a toxic, abusive family dynamic, purely on faith that her siblings bonds will make things right. This is a very potent story hook… so when Corrin’s plan becomes using a magical throne to dispel a glamor and show Garon as a literal monster, and waging a war of aggression to get him to sit on it, what’s happened is Corrin has put an entire nation of innocents at risk to help her family. And combined with her naïve sense of compassion, hundreds if not thousands are slaughtered in this quest, including the implied genocide of the kitsune.
Earlier I likened Corrin to Wonder Woman, but the idea of a game split in two with a clear ‘main’ and ‘supporting’ path without indicating which is which is also directly analogous to a previous Fire Emblem, Sacred Stones. The story split in that game also served mainly as a way to add depth to its main villain, but it did so by making the main character of each route very different people. Ephraim is a battle-hardened warrior and exceptionally skilled (apparently) strategist and his role in the plot plays similarly to that of Marth or other typical Fire Emblem heroes. But he only becomes available once the game offers his side of the path split, and prior to that you play as the other main character, his sister Eirika. Eirika is portrayed in a similar, although less extreme, light as Corrin: compassionate, sometimes sheltered and naïve, but always fully capable of holding her own once battle lines are drawn.
And as with Corrin, that compassion is later shown to have dire consequences. But the framing is very different. Sacred Stones’ main villain is Lyon, a young prince who allowed himself to be possessed by a Demon King to gain power, to revive his father so he might lead his people during a rapidly approaching natural disaster he has forseen. The two paths show different sides to his character, because he and the twin leads (in the diegetic as well as gaming sense) were all fast friends growing up, but his relationship to each was very different. He was in love with Eirika, and so her path shows more of his vulnerability, as well as his love of learning and for his people. Ephraim was a high bar he could never clear (and… also Fire Emblem has a history of ~vibes~ between siblings and so there’s some implication he was almost a romantic rival even though SS thankfully never fully goes there), and so his desperation and the ways in which the Demon King prayed on his own jealousy and resentment are highlighted more.
Late in the story, the heroes have acquired a relic (one of the titular Sacred Stones) which could trap the Demon King, and in either path the story requires that it be destroyed to set up a final battle. Ephraim is simply paralyzed with dark magic, Lyon steals the stone in full possessed mode, and shatters it while mocking his weakness. Scene. Eirika instead comes upon Lyon lying prone, seemingly struggling with his possession. He then claims that his soul is being devoured, but the stone would allow him to save it. And of course Eirika hands it over and, now openly possessed, Lyon shatters it while gloating about how little control Lyon has now. Ultimately there is a final stone, and y’know you win and all, and the incident inspires your army to look deeper into things and realize what Lyon was trying to do, or rather why. It was a setback, and perhaps you could argue that people died as a result (you basically fight nothing but monsters at this point in the story, who act autonomously from Lyon’s will), but there’s an equal chance that this incident influence the twins to open their boarders when calamity befell Lyon’s homeland.
But the critical difference, aside from body count, is that Eirika makes one choice out of compassion that put lives at risk. Corrin makes an original choice to accelerate Nohr’s conquest in order to save her family, but subsequently during every battle tries to minimalize casualties. That setup is a difficult needle to thread, but emphasizes Corrin’s trying to balance her loyalty for her siblings with her compassion. The trouble is that also at most battles, the main Nohrian army sweeps in and starts executing prisoners, burning villages, and other traditional Horrors of War signifiers. Corrin never devises a solution to this, and indeed doesn’t… seem to even try to, beyond “win faster”. She repeatedly risks blowing her cover by doing this, but also accomplishes nothing! Once would carry the message that her actions have consequences, twice would emphasize that this is the Dark Path… but every time is just telling you that even trying is foolish.
The overall theme of Fates, at least in its two main paths, becomes “compassion is weakness”, and Conquest additionally implies that victims of abuse will inflict any amount of hurt on others before stand up to their abusers. Even a cynical worldview inclined to accept these as truths has to admit this is an awfully grim message. Even Xander’s description of Garon’s good times speaks to Xander’s character flaws, of considering a very specific form of goodness that aligns with patriarchal ideals and contrasts with Corrin’s character even when the two love and understand one another. Which both suggests the message of the game may not be as accidental as I’d like and reinforces the idea that Birthright is the “main” campaign and Conquest is meant to be played after.
And here’s where we come back to the personal aspect of all this. I refer to Corrin exclusively as a woman, and in part that’s just because if presented a boy/girl option I will choose girl 100% of the time. But more than that, Corrin’s characterization reads as highly feminine. Her primary character trait is compassion, she is motivated by love, and she was taught to fight but finds pride in personal improvement, not in victory and conquest. Mapping these traits onto a character with no fixed gender is good, but part of that is because it challenges gender norms because they are traits coded overwhelmingly as feminine.
For quite a while the best explanation I had was video game mechanical investment stuff. By having Corrin be somewhat customizable, you encourage a player to project more onto them: I decided how they look, so it’s ‘me’. And so when the character fails at something, particularly in story in a way that cannot be averted, the player feels like a failure and becomes frustrated. And maybe that’s true. But the certainty that Corrin being a woman just made more sense stuck around, and playing Birthright it clicked into place: the ways and reasons Corrin’s plans fail are consistently due to her compassion. The story plays out in a way that praises masculine traits, considering strength and sacrifice reliably as noble things, while showing feminine traits as useless and naive. But more specifically, the biggest way I relate to my own femininity is compassion, and the game was specifically deriding that trait. I couldn’t phrase it that way when I played Conquest, but the game sitting worse on me over time, in a way that I couldn’t help thinking about it whenever considering the game at all? That feeling explains it where nothing else has.
I don’t think Fates is some sort of garbage making the world a worse place of course. This has been a very negative piece because it’s all building up to a very specific conclusion. I subscribe to a form of feminism wherein I find negative portrayal of femininity a poor trade-off for more positive portrayal of women: if women are only shown as strong and valuable when they engage in the same activities and value the same traits as men, that’s still a form of misogyny. And despite my somewhat personal issue with how the game approaches the topic, it doesn’t fully fall into that trap. It’s perfectly willing to show men and women with both masculine and feminine shades. It just fails to value a specific trait I hold above others. And while I talk about Fates as one game with two complimentary parts, honestly in playing Birthright to refresh myself on the game (and honestly because I was starting to worry I’d just kinda stopped liking Fire Emblem which would be annoying) I found that, without the repetition of the point Conquest has, I mostly enjoyed it. The way the game values masculine strength is absolutely there still, and Corrin’s naiveté is still a bit much at times, but it’s background noise, a troubling aspect of a mostly-inoffensive experience. And even Conquest has a lot going right when it’s not trying to anger me specifically: the best writing in either route is when the four Nohrian siblings are together.
But being able to put the game in context makes it a lot easier to appreciate those things, at least for me.
