Fire emblem gay

Fire Emblem is a series that has a complicated history indeed with queerness. The design is a structure to hold up the experiences. A Alear (Fire Emblem) Alfred (Fire Emblem) Arval (Fire Emblem) B Bernadetta von Varley Boucheron (Fire Emblem). The options for a gay relationship were extremely limited at.

To me, this opened the field of romantic supports to be more varied, including providing a lot more space for queer relationships. The result is… well. Fire Emblem games have always presented heteronormative worlds, and this is just another example of that.

Players who choose female Byleth can reach S-support with five characters: other than Edelgard, players can S-support Dorothea, Mercedes, Rhea, and Sothis. For pride month this year I thought I would do my best to celebrate this long history by trying, to the best of my ability, to catalog it for reference's sake.

What a design team builds is, largely, a scaffold: an edifice that the player engages and has an experience with. Fire Emblem: Fates is hardly alone in this, either. In the fire emblem gay of building a relationship with them, you find out both of them are married to women and have children!

The Fire Emblem series specifically, however, has a long history of gay fan pairing, queer theory readings, and now of explicit queer representation of varying quality. FE heroes from Marth on down to Byleth are often defined by their blood relationship to some ancient hero, god, or royal line.

To care about them and be invested in them. More to the point, their S-rank support conversations do not involve expressions of romantic love or anything of the sort. Heteronormativity here means emphasizing the unspoken normality of heterosexuality, setting it as a baseline from which everything else is judged by its distance.

Because that queer reading that hit me right in the gut emotionally has absolutely, positively no impact whatsoever on the actual story of Three Houses. Edelgard talks about being scared that her feelings for Byleth would be unrequited, despite her desire to be with them.

Fates is where the other big reaches for explicit queerness happen in Fire Emblem but boy, did they fumble the ball on that one. In looking at romance options in games, we need to consider them from this angle: What experiences do they scaffold?

What meaningful experiences for the player does the game allow or, more importantly, which ones does it foreclose? If both Byleth and Edelgard are women, the tone of this scene, its emotional valence, is completely different.

Mathematically, that did happen; compared to two in FatesThree Houses provides eight potential same-gender romances, five for a lady Byleth and three for a dude Byleth. Fire Emblem: Three Houses, the most recent core game in the series, introduces several characters with same-sex romance options, including House Leader and protagonist Edelgard.

Comparatively, for men, Alois and Gilbert two-thirds of the options! Controversial as it may be, the series uses permanent unit death to try and give emotional weight to your combat choices: Will you potentially sacrifice someone you care about for victory?

In preparing to write this article, I watched video of some of the S-rank romantic supports main character Byleth can have in Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

Who are the gay : While Byleth can romance characters of the opposite gender, there are also options for same-sex romances within the game

But the series has never tried to support a reading that is critical of heteronormativity. If you see a former friend in the enemy ranks, do you bite down your feeling of betrayal and recruit them, or kill them off for their transgression? These characters represent young and old, noble and commoner, the grimly serious and the cheerfully friendly.

It is deeply resonant with a certain type of queer experience that I suspect is relatively common. Think about all the various story beats and ideological issues the various Fire Emblem games tackle. And well… hoo boy.