I attempt to explain the moral pitfalls of Nuzlocke to an author.
“And, news flash, people kill people all the time. It’s a part of life.”
It is like water off a duck’s back.
GammaTronA response to your review at https://www.fanfiction.net/r/12619171/
Thanks for the review. Honestly, this is a nice change from other reviews on this site. As for your concerns, this is how I write my stories and I have seen other writers do these same things on the site. The morning actions are meant to show you small pieces of her being.
The three dots mean a silent moment like the three dot option in Telltale games.
The battle was flat since they’re brand new Trainers. Battles will become better as experience is gained. So expect some flat battles in the beginning.
As for Rowlett, the only Pokémon that will die are Cyber’s. Other Pokémon will live, just not any that faint in Cyber’s party.
Speaking of the last part of your review, deaths will only be on purpose if the lives are lost against criminal people like Guzma and his damn Golisopod. Later chapters will be going more into the details on death and those that can understand Pokémon.
Again, you have no idea how much that your review has made my day. Thank you so much for it.
[I have seen other writers do these same things on the site.]
Just because other people do something doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. The fact that other people do these things is a big part of why I advise against them — they’re cliche and overused by this point.
[The three dots mean a silent moment like the three dot option in Telltale games.]
Yes, I know. It’s a technique that works in visual media, which is why I specified that it does not work in non-visual media. It looks very awkward. The reason “…” is used in games is because games don’t have any better means of conveying a pause in dialogue. In prose, you do, and your story will be richer if you take those more nuanced options.
[deaths will only be on purpose if the lives are lost against criminal people like Guzma and his damn Golisopod]
That makes Guzma a lot more evil than I ever imagined him to be in canon… I always got the impression he just wanted to vent his frustrations, not actually kill people. If he is that evil, that rather derails the plot — the main characters now look like sociopaths if they don’t immediately drop everything to apprehend this mass murderer.
Also, “on purpose”? So, what, even a sweetie like Hau could accidentally go too far and eviscerate one of Cyber’s pokemon? That’s horrifying. How is anyone okay with that kind of normalized blood sport? Or is this some sort of special curse that only affects Cyber?
It’s a writing method I have always used. If it bothers you, that is fine. It is your own opinion and I will respect your choices just as I hope you can understand my own.
Deaths are a confirmed thing in the games such as Team Rocket killing Marowak for their skulls or Cyrus and his gial of destroying the current world to make one without emotions, willpower, or anything. Lysander tried to kill the main character in Y ysing the ultimate weapon. Who knows what was made prior to Type Null being made in Sun and Moon. I am not the first writer to deal with this kind of matter when it comes to fanfiction involving Pokemon.
And, no, Hau never killed any of my Pokemon. Spoiler, I lost only five and each time was to either a Kahuna, Elite Four, or a Trial. That and Hau is one of my favorites in the current Generation of the games. I would never do that to him.
[It is your own opinion and I will respect your choices just as I hope you can understand my own. ]
But that’s the problem, I do not understand your choices.
[Deaths are a confirmed thing in the games such as Team Rocket killing Marowak for their skulls or Cyrus and his gial of destroying the current world to make one without emotions, willpower, or anything. Lysander tried to kill the main character in Y ysing the ultimate weapon. Who knows what was made prior to Type Null being made in Sun and Moon. I am not the first writer to deal with this kind of matter when it comes to fanfiction involving Pokemon.]
None of those deaths happened from normal battles, though. In the games, battles are always nonlethal, even against people with no qualms about murder like Cyrus and Giovanni. Making battles lethal, even if only sometimes, is a departure from canon, and a major one. It throws the whole trainer setup into question. I can understand why people might be okay with pokemon battles if no one ever gets really hurt, but I just cannot conceive of how it can be so widely accepted if there is even a chance of death. It’s even more disturbing when you consider the fact that the pokemon have no say in it. This is akin to gladiator fighting. To even passively enable that is monstrous.
[And, no, Hau never killed any of my Pokemon.]
But *could* he have? What would you have done if you did lose a pokemon to him?
You do not understand my actions and choices? I see… my apologies. I have autism so my brain is ‘wired’ differently than others.
The best I can say is that it is gameplay segregation. Like how when you lose in a really important battle in the games, you can always retry until you win. But that wouldn’t be truly possible in reality. In reality, the big bad wouldn’t give you the chance to try to best them if you lose. They would win and you and everyone else would lose. I believe that is another reason people do Nuzlocke challenges: we WANT to get rid of that belief you can do things again if you lose to them. And I know that sounds and IS terrible, but can you tell me that EVERYONE is innocent of thinking along those lines of thought?
If he had, I would keep him in character and give comfort and not blame him for what happened. It was an accident and just to live on for thise who fall. It’s a way people grow. I have lost pets that I have deeply loved like fanily and it hurts when I remember remember them and the fact they’re dead, but I still remember them and keep those memories in my heart. You may not like that I am doing a story such as this, but I am. Please accept that this is happening. You don’t have to read the story if you do not. I’m writing this because it means something to me.
[I have lost pets that I have deeply loved like fanily and it hurts when I remember remember them and the fact they’re dead, but I still remember them and keep those memories in my heart.]
That’s not an apt comparison. You weren’t responsible for their deaths; or if you were, I certainly hope you wouldn’t repeat the same mistake that led to their death. If you order someone to fight in a blood sport and they die, that’s not an accident. You absolutely bear the responsibility for that.
[And I know that sounds and IS terrible, but can you tell me that EVERYONE is innocent of thinking along those lines of thought? ]
Uh, well, I am. If Pokemon worked like that I don’t think I’d be comfortable playing it. I feel uncomfortable even in regular RPGs when you have to kill people, and in games with permadeath like Fire Emblem I can never bring myself to let any party members die.
I don’t think you’re understanding what my objection is. If you restricted deaths to only battles against evil people, that would be one thing. It would mean trainers are sacrificing people to save others. That is a goal worth dying for (though I still point out that the pokemon have no say in it, so it’s still a little questionable). But if pokemon are dying in the main quest? The main quest is only for the humans’ personal pride. It is wholly selfish. The pokemon gain nothing from it. To kill people in the pursuit of such a petty goal is utterly despicable. What would you think of a general who knowingly sends their soldiers to their deaths just for personal gain? Who knowingly sends CONSCRIPTS, at that, while they hide behind an untouchable fortress?
Just… obviously it means something to you, otherwise you wouldn’t be writing it. But what does it mean to you, exactly? Why? Why do you want to make a story where children kill people for sport and no one sees anything wrong with it?
…Your favorite Pokemon games are Black and White, aren’t they?
I can share the feeling with permadeath. I don’t like that mechanic being put directly in the game. And my response to those questions on who sends people out to knowingly die…Everyone in higher levels of political power. It’s how life is. It sucks, but I don’t care much for that. I just care about my friends and family.
As for my reasons on playing a Nuzlocke, I wanted to try a Nuzlocke for once. Call it curiosity, call it something else, but I wanted to try it just once. And each death was accidental on my end such as not expecting an attack being known by a Pokemon or forgetting Castform changes type in different weather conditions. And don’t go blaming me for anything, I beat myself up more than enough for each death.
And for the other question, it’s just. a. story. You don’t have to read it if you don’t want to, but I will continue this story as is. This story means a lot to me because of this being the very first time I have ever done a Nuzlocke and made me appreciate my Pokemon more than ever.
[And don’t go blaming me for anything, I beat myself up more than enough for each death.]
Then why did you keep going? If you felt bad about it, why are you portraying it as a heroic thing to do? Why does the character never question whether they’re doing the right thing?
[And my response to those questions on who sends people out to knowingly die…Everyone in higher levels of political power. It’s how life is. It sucks, but I don’t care much for that. I just care about my friends and family.]
Well, everyone else thinks those people are horrible and should be held accountable for their actions. If you want to make a story where your character can be seen as heroic, you should consider that.
She will start questioning herself. For goodness sake, we are only two chapters in.
As I said, only two chapters in. Give it time for development like with the battles.
But she’s going to keep going, isn’t she? She’s going to ask herself if killing people for her own personal glory is the right thing to do, and she’s going to have to answer “yes”, because otherwise the story would go too far off the rails.
SHE IS NOT GOING TO KILL PEOPLE! *berserk button pressed*Pokemon can talk in your fic. They are people.…Your favorite character is Hermoine Granger from Harry Potter, isn’t it? Because you sound just like her.
I’m quite tired of this and I am not the first to have a Nuzlocke with talking pokémon and will certainly not be the last. If you don’t like it, don’t read it. And, news flash, people kill people all the time. It’s a part of life.
[And, news flash, people kill people all the time. It’s a part of life.]
Yes, and it’s wrong. We put those people in prison so they can’t hurt more people.
Obviously, you can write what you want. But I want you to understand why I have such a problem with it, because it’s genuinely disturbing to me that you don’t seem to understand my objection. Do you understand why I find your character villainous, not heroic as you intended?
You have received a message from:
GammaTron
https://www.fanfiction.net/u/961900/
Reply link: https://www.fanfiction.net/pm2/post.php?rid=219612562#new
——————–
And I told you, IT’S JUST THE FIRST! TWO! CHAPTERS!
Honestly, there is need for Character Development. You can’t understand because I refuse to give anymore spoilers and I will NEVER give you spoilers with how you are no acting.
——————–
Well, that was disturbing.
I find it interesting that someone writing such a low-empathy narrative is so bad at reading comprehension.
The three dots mean a silent moment like the three dot option in Telltale games.
… Huh, well. That’s a new one. Thankfully.
deaths will only be on purpose if the lives are lost against criminal people like Guzma and his damn Golisopod
Golisopod’s ability would actually make for a pretty interesting thing to focus a nuzlocke fic on, if you absolutely must turn that arbitrary setting of gameplay challenges into a narrative conceit. Emergency Exit seems like it’d be kind of annoying, but in a setting where pokemon battles are to the death, the ability to leave the battle when you drop below half health would be really useful. It’d mean that your opponent would have to deliver over 50% damage in a single blow to kill it.
Or is this some sort of special curse that only affects Cyber?
Goddamn, man, you just put more effort into justifying how nuzlocke rules could be narrative instead of gameplay (and did a better job of it) than just about any nuzlocke fic you’ve reviewed on this site. How does that make you feel?
None of those deaths happened from normal battles, though.
They’re also all either accidental or merely attempted, as well. Stealing a cubone’s skull doesn’t kill it, and that marowak just got killed in the middle of protecting its young, and threatening to destroy the world and everyone in it (only to fail at the last moment thanks to the actions of the heroes) is pretty much Cliche Supervillain 101.
This is akin to gladiator fighting.
Worse, actually. Canon pokemon combat is similar to gladiatorial fighting. Because a gladiator was fucking expensive to train and an absolutely massive investment, trainers did everything in their power to keep their gladiators alive. Battles were not supposed to be to the death. Accidental deaths certainly occurred (I can’t imagine they didn’t), but the most successful gladiators were the ones best at putting on a show. Not the ones best at killing people.
It’s actually sorta like modern professional wrestling (except I don’t think, but would not be surprised if, gladiatorial fights were totally staged). People have died doing pro wrestling, and others have suffered horrible injuries and effects that followed them for the rest of their lives, but no one is calling for professional wrestling to be banned as a brutal and evil bloodsport.
The best I can say is that it is gameplay segregation.
The core problem with nuzlocke fanfiction is that nuzlocke rules are, in their entirety, a gameplay construction- and a self-imposed one at that. There is nothing in the storyline or even the game mechanics that forces you to play like that. If your favourite pokemon gets KOed, you could just decide it doesn’t count, heal them up at a pokemon center, and continue on. What would stop you?
Now, the problem arises when you force these arbitrary self-imposed gameplay restrictions on the narrative of a fanfiction. Fanfiction has no gameplay to segregate from the narrative, so anything based on narrative/gameplay segregation has no place there. Nuzlocke rules were developed to increase the difficulty of a series of video games that started very easy and got increasingly easier with every passing iteration. They weren’t designed to- and do not- create an interesting story.
The only way they would make the slightest bit of sense to include in a story is if the protagonist decided to place arbitrary rules on himself to make his pokemon journey harder. And, besides, if you want to get technical, pokemon in nuzlocke challenges don’t die when they’re defeated in battle. You release them.
If this author wanted to record a memory of how his first nuzlocke run of a Pokemon game went, he should have just done that. That’s what the first nuzlocke comic was. A record of someone doing a self-imposed challenge run of Pokemon Ruby.
Please accept that this is happening.
For some reason, this line really skeeves me out. Something about the phrasing just… does anyone else get a weird feeling from this line?
in games with permadeath like Fire Emblem I can never bring myself to let any party members die
Same here (in the rare event I play a Fire Emblem game). I had a friend who didn’t do this, and by the end of the game, he ended up with a save file that had no one but the green-haired girl who can’t die and the knight who starts off over-leveled but has terrible growth rates so you shouldn’t over-rely on him. I was horrified. How?
But, in narrative terms, don’t the characters just, like, take a major wound and can’t participate in battles or something? They don’t actually die? The story would’ve been pretty hard to write if anyone could die at any moment in it. I don’t really know shit about Fire Emblem. Honestly, my knowledge is limited mostly to “Jade artifacts issued to Dragonblooded by the Scarlet Empire should look like armour from Fire Emblem games”, and “Pegasus Knights apparently can’t fight without miniskirts”.
forgetting Castform changes type in different weather conditions
But that’s like the only thing castform does. How do you even forget that, and even if you did, why would it matter? It’s fucking castform.
Pokemon can talk in your fic. They are people.
Okay now you’re just messing around here. In the outlines of that pokemon fic I wrote, I had my characters treating pokemon more like people even though I wasn’t going to write most species of pokemon as being merely highly intelligent animals. My protagonist would’ve been hesitant about sending her cyndaquil into battle because of how quickly it could lose its will to battle if things started going bad. The cyndaquil wasn’t even exceptionally weak and didn’t even dislike battling! It just got scared easily when forced on the defensive. She’d probably have quit training in a week if pokemon could talk.
And if you were just going to novelize your nuzlocke playthrough of a Pokemon game… pokemon can’t talk in the games.
I find it interesting that someone writing such a low-empathy narrative is so bad at reading comprehension.
Why’s that?
The curse justification actually came up before in some other nuzlocke fic.
Without love it cannot be seen.
Yeah, Illhousen’s right, that’s just something that I saw in another Nuzlocke comic. Even still, it wouldn’t address the fundamental problem of the stakes — if you know you’re cursed to make pokemon die in battle, you should stop fighting pokemon battles.
Well, it wouldn’t work for your standard badge quest plot, but if the stakes were something even worse, it’d still be acceptable. If you were cursed to have pokemon die when they lost battles, but you had to fight battles to stop Team Villain from unmaking reality, you’re still a good guy. It’s not like any of the pokemon that would die fighting would survive if Team Villain unmade reality.
With the curse idea, it’s at least theoretically possible for the protagonist to not be a terrible person.
“Wouldn’t work for your standard badge quest” is kind of the core issue here. A lot of problems in Pokemon fandom as well as the source material itself can be traced to applying standard shonen/general storytelling tropes to its highly specific premise.
So you have a tale about the Power of Friendship… except your “friends” are basically slaves who have no say in whether they stay with you or not and were kidnapped by you to begin with.
And you have your standard romance, except your waifu is also your property.
And so on.
It’s like that thing from the fic Farla reviewed where that pokemon who couldn’t stand battles came to her trainer’s rescue when he was about to be defeated. In another context, “a character overcoming their fears and joining the battle when all seemed lost” would be a bit of a cliche, but could work fine, but there it was done for such a low-stakes situation that it turned into a farce.
Though, speaking of cliches,
Well, do you have to? The issue here is that the PCs of Pokemon games are generally supposed to be regular (if talented) trainers who just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. They generally don’t have any super powers or special destiny or anything like that. So then, that begs the question: if you’re cursed to lose your pokemon in battles, wouldn’t it be better to let someone else, someone without that curse, to fight in your place? The current champion or your rival or whoever else? Why do you think you are the one who must stop the evil team?
That, again, comes down to applying general tropes to a more specific premise where they don’t work that well. Normally, it’s noble to fight evil even knowing you could die, and it’s fine to rely on your friends to follow you into battle, but that trope works in situation where it’s your life on the line and your friends have freedom to turn back if they so wish. In Pokemon, on the other hand, it’s more questionable.
A while ago I read this story, it wasn’t based in a Nuzlocke as I know it (not based in any main game, alas, no badgequest), but it featured pokemon death that became more frequent as the plot went further. The plot was that some kind of evil entity terrorized the trainer and all his pokemon summoning them in some kind of nightmare realm each and every night when the trainer went to sleep, even if he did everything to keep himself awake, he always ended in that realm in which he was in a survival 6 vs 6 battle against nightmareish pokemon.
It was a decent set up.
But, in narrative terms, don’t the characters just, like, take a major wound and can’t participate in battles or something? They don’t actually die? The story would’ve been pretty hard to write if anyone could die at any moment in it. I don’t really know shit about Fire Emblem.
If the characters are major enough that they need to be in cutscenes (or if they’re related to 2nd Gen units in Awakening/Fates), then they get the incapacitating wounds – unless they’re the Lords, in which case it’s game over. Otherwise they can die, and the narrative will ignore them as soon as they join your army, outside of some optional lines.
I remember in the Fire Emblem-inspired Telepath Tactics every character except the main two could indeed die in battles, which can result in some amusing cutscenes of the protagonist talking to thin air; the developer clearly did not expect people to make it through the game with only the Striders.
I think it definitely lent weight to your tactical decisions, though of course I could never abide letting anyone die. :p
I haven’t commented in a while, but I’m pretty familiar with Fire Emblem and at least some of those games have done interesting things here. I haven’t played all of them (especially not the recent ones) so I can’t comment on every one, but some of them definitely put in a lot of effort to make sure the dialogue functioned properly in every available character configuration.
What they did doesn’t always make perfect sense – e.g. sometimes if a character is dead, they’ll give that character’s line to someone else (maybe one of the people who gets “too wounded to fight but not dead”) without changing it at all even though it was clearly meant to have been said by the first character. And then in other cases they’ve actually added lines where characters will talk about and acknowledge the deaths. Some of those games put a lot of effort into this, and almost nobody who plays the game will actually see any of it.
There’s a Let’s Play by Fedule on the Something Awful archives (he’s done FE9 and FE10, I’m linking to 9 because it’s the best example of this) which is really diligent about documenting all of the possibilities, which I found quite interesting.
As for the actual subject of Nuzlocke… I really don’t get it, and I especially don’t get why people are so wedded to the idea of writing fic about it. I can sort of see the appeal of the gameplay challenge, though I’ve only done it a handful of times and didn’t enjoy it much myself. It’s hard enough to translate regular Pokemon game content into a coherent setting, so adding this additional grimdark element is just a recipe for further failure…
One other thing comes to mind. Pokemon Uranium (a fangame I’ve talked about here before) has a dedicated Nuzlocke mode which actually labels pokemon as “dead” when you lose them and prevents revival, etc. On one hand it’s nice to have the game enforce the challenge for you if you want that, on the other it’s still abusable by save-scumming and such… but that’s not what I want to talk about, really. Even just having that makes playing through a largely-traditional Pokemon narrative incredibly jarring: you have pokemon explicitly die and the game just goes on talking about ‘oh that was a great fight’ and ‘you’re such a great trainer’ and so on. None of the text is changed, outside of the menu screen. I found it almost disturbing, honestly. It makes me think that Nuzlocke ought best be left to the realm of ‘self-imposed game challenge’ and that trying to do anything else with it, take it any more seriously than that, is a recipe for incoherence and dissonant implications.
What they did doesn’t always make perfect sense – e.g. sometimes if a character is dead, they’ll give that character’s line to someone else (maybe one of the people who gets “too wounded to fight but not dead”) without changing it at all even though it was clearly meant to have been said by the first character.
I think this is part of the reason why I could never get into the narratives of Fire Emblem. I was reading the wiki yesterday, trying to find the name of those two characters I mentioned in my first post (Lyn and, I think, Wallace) and I got distracted and found a character who could have like seven other characters in different combinations depending on what combination of characters were her parents (including one who, on their own, could be the character’s brother or sister depending on their own circumstances).
It just makes it seem so… artificial. Like, good fiction is supposed to trick people into thinking that fictional characters are more than just a conglomeration of narrative elements, and when there’s that kind of thing in a game… I just can’t. The characters should be more than just paper dolls that take whatever role the narrative needs them to play in a particular scene, and narrative roles should be tailored to the characters who are meant to take them.
I got distracted and found a character who could have like seven other characters in different combinations depending on what combination of characters were her parents (including one who, on their own, could be the character’s brother or sister depending on their own circumstances).
The 2nd Gen Units (which are the characters I assume you mean there) are kind of a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” thing that way. They’re built off of the support conversations which were originally made to make players care more about the supporting characters in your army, adding the possibility of including Children of the Future with their parents’ skillsets. So for simplicity’s sake, they had to be hardwired to one parent, making the other interchangeable. Not too bad if each character only has a few marriable prospects, but both modern games that have this system decided that the majority of your army should be able to marry anyone of the opposite gender within that group unless they’re siblings.
So, let’s say in Awakening, Gerome is always Cherche’s son. Their support conversation is specifically tailored around both their characters, with Gerome bonding with his mother when she was younger, and Cherche meeting the son who prrrobably hasn’t been born yet (it’s a similar scenario with most 2nd Gen units and their mothers, but the different personalities allow for variety). Gerome’s father? Can be any of the 13 men Cherche can potentially marry. Their support conversation has Gerome do most of the talking, with his father’s lines only being different depending on his speech quirks.
Clearly a solution would have been to only make Cherche marriable to a smaller number of male units, so at least then her son would have more unique supports with his father and not just a template. But then the people who like the dating sim elements of the support system would complain that Cherche would have had better chemistry with this other guy. And the people who like to minmax would have complained that her marriable options grant suboptimal builds to Gerome.
So… it’s still a mess. At least the only 2nd Gen character who matters in Awakening’s plot is Lucina (though her supports with her mother and siblings are also templates), so they can be seen as kind of a bonus there to the narrative.
The one I was thinking of was (I thought) Cynthia, but I checked, and it was totally Lucina.
See, I don’t really see that as much of a reward. Like, I absolutely love Second Generation type deals. I never read, like… the last half of Naruto, but I still read fucking Boruto. I love seeing what characters get up to 20 years after their actual plot happens.
But it really doesn’t make sense in a game that doesn’t take place over 20 years to have that. How are all these kids showing up anyway? It says Lucina’s from the future on her wiki page and… are they all? Or what’s going on with that?
They’re built off of the support conversations which were originally made to make players care more about the supporting characters in your army
And I really like this! I’m the kind of guy who’d agonize over which supports to pick because I want to see all the character building side-conversations. All of them.
But… it’s only really a bonus if it shows me what the children of the two characters are like. Not “the child of Cherche and Someone Else”. I don’t like Sasuke and Sakura as a ship (seriously there’s like nothing even there), but I still want to see what their daughter is like (and she’s fucking awesome, easily the best character in the next generation, please Kishimoto give me more of her adventures) if that’s what ended up as canon.
Sure, if I like a Cherche as a character, I could want to see what her children are like… but I also want to see what her husband is like.
Welp, I searched Cherche on the wiki, and…
Welp. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeelp.
I never cared for the second-generation mechanics, honestly (and we can talk about the ways in which it makes no sense and leads to bad writing/storytelling decisions), but I have at least a sense of where it came from and what fans are getting out of it. This might get long, sorry. (Also, while I’m trying to explain this, please also keep in mind that the games I actually like are the ones that don’t include this mechanic.)
We have to start by going back to FE4 (Seisen no Keifu, fans generally translate it as “Genealogy of the Holy War”). It’s really difficult to talk about the game’s mechanics without plot spoilers, as it’s actually one of the better examples of gameplay and story integration I’ve seen – which, interestingly, I think weakens it as a game (I personally have never liked it much despite it being beloved by the fandom). Anyway, the game is split into two parts (generations), and at the end of the first your characters are betrayed and there’s a mass slaughter in which almost everyone dies. Then there’s a ~15 year timeskip and the second part of the game starts up, playing as their children to avenge them and set right what went wrong (the timing as to when the children are meant to have been born is a little weird, but a lot of the female characters are implied to have survived, and the first-generation story does span several years).
Where this becomes relevant is that this was the first game to include shipping as a game mechanic, and the children’s stats, abilities and equipment were all determined by inheritance from their parents (and the pairings were something you could manipulate during gameplay). It also meant the game would fuck you over if you didn’t know the twist was coming and failed to pair every woman (in this game, the child characters were associated with the mothers); the game would give you inferior “substitute characters” so it would not be unwinnable but it’s a very different experience with them. But anyway, the game would favour certain pairings by making them easier to achieve (usually if the characters had some kind of backstory connection, or sometimes if they were related because incest is good? I dunno), but you could do whatever you wanted and there was a lot of gameplay-related min-maxing potential. Players loved this. There ended up being something of a divide in the fandom between optimising ships for gameplay potential, versus characterisation, versus going with what was closest to ‘canon’, etc. Shipping wars, the game.
So there was a decently large segment of the fandom that had been clamoring for this to return ever since that game, but it didn’t for years. The support system was introduced in FE6, which allowed you to have characters talk to each other and establish relationships that also provided gameplay benefits (stat boosts when they were near each other), and the conversations would help flesh out minor characters, etc. I actually liked this a lot; they’re a bit of a mixed bag but there was a fair amount of decent writing in them, and who could actually support with whom was usually limited to relationships that made sense. Although honestly, it was so tough to see most of them ingame that most players either never saw them or looked up scripts.
Then along came 2012 and Fire Emblem: Awakening (FE13). From what I understand, the games hadn’t been doing well (in part because 11 and 12 had been flawed remakes of early games, and 11 did so badly that 12 never got a Western release) and it was meant to be the swan song of the series; they didn’t expect to ever make another so they pulled out all the stops (it later sold so well the series was revived). I guess that’s how they hit upon the idea of trying to do an updated take on an old and beloved mechanic: the game revolved around a time-travel plot, in which the characters’ children go back in time and team up with their parents to avert a Bad Future. (I guess they didn’t want to do “everyone dies and now you start over” again, and needed some other kind of justification. It honestly works better than I’d have expected?)
Honestly, the game has its points. It’s not horrendously written for what it is, though I found the story less engaging compared to previous entries. And the shipping/children mechanics are even more intricate to the point it’s a min-maxer’s dream (I’ve personally not played it so I can’t comment 100%, but honestly the sheer diversity of options looks mind-melting to me). It also provides a sort of customisable player-insert character (ugh; several FE games have done that though) who can be paired off with any character, which led to all sorts of other issues (let’s just say the word ‘waifu’ comes up far too much and ugh I’m already creeped out). The game has also been criticised for being deeply heteronormative, which I think is accurate but I also have a hard time imagining how to do a mechanic like this without falling into that trap.
The problem with this customisability is that it meant every relationship in the game had to be modular, which is what you both were getting at earlier. The character’s general appearance and personality traits were fixed by one parent (I think usually the mother in Awakening, then switched to father in Fates… we’ll get to Fates), while the other only provides hair colour and their impact on the gameplay properties. It’s not great from a writing perspective and it destroys characterisation once you know how it works and what the options are (and I guess the alternative would be needing to do so much writing to cover all the possibilities that they’d never get a game finished). But a lot of people seem to love the dating sim elements and the child character customisation in spite of that.
It worked a lot better in Seisen, I think, because that was a SNES game and everything was a lot more barebones as a result. The amount of writing you could fit in a game was much different then, so a lot of it was more minimalistic, left more up to the imagination, etc (also, just as a consequence of the narrative structure, most of the children were separated from their parents very young, so having their personalities more or less fixed could be justified). The meticulous detail in Awakening made the issues a lot more apparent, or at least it did to me.
Then came Fates and Fates was even worse, from what I can tell (I know less about that one). The children mechanics were popular so they had to include them, right? So it got shoehorned in in the most ridiculous, nonsensical way – the characters literally just get married and instantly have a child when you establish the support relationship, then the child gets shoved into a pocket dimension to age faster so they’ll be able to join the party. I’m not joking. The actual story of the game (such as it is) has no connection to any of this and will completely ignore its existence. To call it a nonsensical mess would be kind.
To make a long story short, I think the story of this particular mechanic in Fire Emblem and the associated weirdness is the story of something that originally had narrative justification becoming beloved by fans for different reasons, and writers/developers bending over backward to try to find ways to force it into other narratives to make new games with it. For my part, I think the games that lacked this mechanic ended up being much better written and having much better characterisation.
And all of this is a distraction from the point I had been originally trying to make, which was about the games’ effort to ensure the narrative could function alongside permanent character death (which was definitely done better at some times than others). Though now I’ve completely forgotten what I was actually trying to say about that, anyway.
I never cared for the second-generation mechanics, honestly (and we can talk about the ways in which it makes no sense and leads to bad writing/storytelling decisions), but I have at least a sense of where it came from and what fans are getting out of it.
It definitely seems like, if I was bigger into FE, I’d agree with this totally. I definitely understand what the fans would get out of it. I’d be the kind of fan who’d they be including it for. But I also don’t think I’d like the implementation.
Like, I just found that the character Severa can be the sister or mother of Morgan. Those should not both be options. Pick one. She could be Morgan’s mother or she could be Morgan’s sister. Not only is it kinda creepy that I know she can metanarratively be either of these things, it just makes me think there’s no possible way I’d be satisfied with her in either role.
Oh, and she can be a romantic support with the Male Morgan. Perfect. Thanks, game, I wanted that.
This might get long, sorry.
Dude, the length of this post is like… the average length of the comments I make here. Believe me, you don’t need to apolgoize (at least as far as I’m concerned).
Anyway, the game is split into two parts (generations)
Yeah, this is kind of what I was suggesting with my original post, and what it didn’t seem like Awakening didn’t do, which is what confused me.
at the end of the first your characters are betrayed and there’s a mass slaughter in which almost everyone dies
Wow I instantly already dislike this implementation of it. When I want to see the families of my beloved characters twenty years after the story ends, those families need to actually include the beloved characters. HMPHING SO HARD AT THS RIGHT NOW.
It also meant the game would fuck you over if you didn’t know the twist was coming
So basically everyone who wasn’t late to the party. Hmphs: 2
the game would give you inferior “substitute characters” so it would not be unwinnable but it’s a very different experience with them
See, if I was designing this game, I would probably just have the game throw the remaining characters together and spit out their premade kids, or since I am way more charitable than an old school jRPG designer, allow the player to pair them off in a menu between parts.
Or, at the very least, make the substitutes not vastly inferior to the kids. Hmphs: 4
Shipping wars, the game.
And I know that I’d be one of the ones who couldn’t finish the game because my characterization-optimised ships were the worst mechanically. Personally, I think… hm. I wouldn’t really tie the stats to kids, but the kids to stats. Like… Mother 1 will always give bith to a tank character, but the tank character will be Offspring A with Father 1 and Offspring B with Father 2. The stats are the same but the character given them is different.
But, again, I’m not as coldhearted as an oldschool jRPG designer.
Saving my hmph until I learn how much characterization based ships will fuck you over.
I actually liked this a lot
This is, like, one of the only things I remember from my youthful playing of Fire Emblem 6 on the GBA, besides being pretty sure the pegasus knight in the game gave me my love of characters with wavy lilac hair. It was, by far, my favourite part of the game and, if I played through it today, seeing the support conversations would probably be my primary goal throughout the course of the game.
most players […] looked up scripts
Is this where those quotes I found for Cherche in my previous post came from? Because I’d totally be this sort of player. Fire Emblem games seem like they’d be just way too unforgiving for me to actually play, and I totally got into arguments with my hardcore FE fangirl friend over the introduction of a “casual mode”, because I’m hyper-casual.
they didn’t expect to ever make another so they pulled out all the stops
Aaah, nothing revives a series like “what are they gonna do, cancel us?”
It honestly works better than I’d have expected?
“Kids come from the future to help parents who haven’t paired off yet save the world from an apocalypse” is one of the better ways to do this kinda thing, honestly. Especially the “parents haven’t paired off” part. There’s nothing like having a scene where the tsundere meets the kid she’s going to have with the dude she’s tsundere for.
And the shipping/children mechanics are even more intricate to the point it’s a min-maxer’s dream
Bleeeeeeeeeeh. Hmphs: 5
(let’s just say the word ‘waifu’ comes up far too much and ugh I’m already creeped out)
Well, that explains the bodystocking-witch…
The game has also been criticised for being deeply heteronormative
Yeah, as someone who does a lot of Second Generation type stuff, I’ve heard this one a lot and it’s like… what do you want me to do about it? In my current writing project, I had this come up, and the only two options that would make sense are heteronormativity or a lot of bisexual characters engaged in a lot of polygamy.
Though I have seen people say that FE seems more okay with incestuous relationships than homosexual ones. Is there any merit to that?
The problem with this customisability is that it meant every relationship in the game had to be modular
Usually, you only see this level of modularity hurting the story in western games, my thoughts on which are pretty accurately summed up here.
it destroys characterisation once you know how it works
Exactly my point. It just feels like paper dolls when you know how systematic and rote it is.
The children mechanics were popular so they had to include them, right?
So it was written by fanfiction authors? “I did this and it was popular, so if I do super-this it’ll be super-popular”?
And that explains why Fate has… okay, some random bishie-ninja is the future-father of… the bodystocking witch from the last game? Now that’s just silly!
Oh, but hey: Apparently, that character canonically falls in love with the PC regardless of their gender? I wonder how that turns out. Wish I knew that when my FE fangirl friend was gushing about her.
Though now I’ve completely forgotten what I was actually trying to say about that, anyway.
Yeah, me too. Honestly I’m way more knowledgeable about the politics of Waifu Wars than that other thing anyway. I’ve got a lot of thoughts on the nature of permanent character death, but they don’t really mesh when applied to video games (I’m an RPG nerd by background), and the theory behind waifu wars is a lot more fun to discuss anyway.
All right. Let’s talk about Robin and Morgan, lol. A lot of the things you’re objecting to seem to be created by the intersection of “customisable player insert avatar” and the generation mechanics; I don’t think you’re wrong to object, really, because it’s a tangled mess, but I can explain how that mess got started (here we go again).
Robin is the default name for Awakening’s customisable character, and how I’ll refer to them. It seems to have been deliberately chosen as a unisex name (which I honestly like a lot), and the player chooses everything – gender, appearance (lots of options here), name, and stats to some degree (basically you choose a strength and a weakness that modify the character’s base growths). Robin actually has some degree of characterisation in the writing, so they’re not a pure self-insert character; it works better than I’d have expected, really, though I personally would have preferred them to just be a character like everyone else. Robin’s a bit Mary Sue but not egregiously so compared to most video game protagonists.
Unlike the other characters (whose marriage options are generally limited to the first generation party) or Chrom (who has I think four possible non-Robin spouses, and F!Robin), Robin can marry anyone of the opposite sex. This includes the child characters and even some DLC characters, which is where the weirdness starts to come in. (Honestly a lot of it seems creepy to me because I can’t explain this choice outside of the developers not wanting to limit the player’s ability to personally marry their ‘waifu’ types.)
Morgan (note also a unisex name) is Robin’s child and will always be the opposite sex from Robin. The vast majority of the weird permutations you’re noticing occur because the game allows Robin to marry outside their generation (so, e.g., Morgan can be Chrom’s son if he married F!Robin, or Chrom’s granddaughter if M!Robin married Lucina). The only characters who can have siblings are Lucina and Morgan, because except for Chrom and M!Robin, the children are determined by the mother (each female character is assigned a specific child).
So that’s why you’re seeing such weirdness in potential character relationships for Awakening, anyway. Most of it has to do with the developers not wanting to limit who Robin could be paired up with, and deciding that Robin also had to have a designated child. I think they tried to justify it with a handwave that, while the other child characters all came back from the same ‘bad future’ timeline, Morgan is actually from yet another timeline somehow. I found that to be utterly forced and nonsensical, but I guess it’s the best they had.
(Also, unfortunately for your imagined tsundere scenario, none of the children come back before the parents are paired off. In fact, it’s specifically pairing off the parents that makes the child become recruitable, so they’ve ruled out all sorts of shenanigans there… actually, come to think, couldn’t it have been interesting to have someone come back and find out their parents married other people in the changed reality? But they ruled that one out too.)
Back to other topics.
I think I may have been a bit unfair to Seisen in saying that everyone dies – it’s definitely a majority, but it’s not all of them. A few first generation characters (e.g. Finn, Levin) stick around to interact with the children, and some characters who were around but not playable in the first generation (Shanan, Oifaye) have grown up and become the mentor figures for generation two. There may have been others, but if so I don’t remember them… There’s also a fair amount of figuring out what happened to everyone, etc, and a lot of the villains are still around and/or more relatives and descendants of the villains from part one. But if you’re a person who enjoys the familial interactions, there isn’t as much of that as there could have been, and based on what you’ve said here I expect it would disappoint you.
Actually, from what I’ve been given to understand, most of the characterisation-optimised and/or plot-optimised pairings are at least decent, and some are really good. But I haven’t played the game, so I can’t tell you anything from firsthand experience. (And in Awakening some pairings are definitely better than others but it’s more an issue of ‘good’ versus ‘gamebreaking’, and you get a lot of mileage out of just levelling the parents up regardless of who they are.)
On the other hand, Seisen is by far the most incest-heavy game in the series: the plot of the game actually relies on it (the villain’s plan is literally to trick a half-sibling pair into hooking up and producing the reincarnation of an evil god), and then a lot of the possible pairings end up being incestuous (I know there’s a long-lost brother/sister couple, a cousin pairing, and I think a few others). That ends up being worse because, given the way the game’s “holy blood” mechanic functions, incestuous pairings end up being advantageous from a gameplay perspetive. Fire Emblem games generally have less incest than the series is perhaps known for, especially the ones given international releases, but it’s earned that reputation honestly.
I never really thought about it, but I think you’re right that there’s a lot more incest (and certainly more openly) than there is homosexuality. There are a fair number of homosexual relationships, though a lot of them are of the subtextual blink-and-you’ll-miss-it variety. FE7 had Lucius/Raven, Legault and pretty much every man he interacted with, and (arguably) Lyn/Florina. FE9/10 had Ike and Soren, who are just great in every way, and also Heather (though I don’t think she’s that well-written and mostly just stereotype – almost all of her dialogue boils down to “I like women! Ooh, I heard she’s pretty, I can’t wait to meet her! Did I mention I like women yet?” without actually using the words gay or lesbian anywhere). That said, even those examples are a lot more nuanced and interesting to me than what Fates did, where there’s one specific character who will still be attracted to the player-insert character regardless of gender, so if anything I think the games have regressed somewhat.
I think if I were going to design a character pairing system with children, and if I had unlimited resources, I’d want to establish which pairings were allowed and then have a unique child character for each pairing (so e.g. A is compatible with B, C, and D, and depending on which pairing you choose you get child X, Y, or Z, who are all completely different people), but while more realistic, that’s a lot of character design work and writing to do only for the vast majority of it to go completely unseen by almost all players. So I can understand why they took shortcuts: it would honestly be unrealistic to expect them to take this approach, or at least without substantially curtailing the diversity of gameplay options. (I’d also like to see some homosexual pairings be possible, maybe with adopted children making an appearance in some cases, or just let homosexual characters exist and not produce children to help reduce the number of child characters you’d need to plan for. Honestly, I don’t think it’s hard to be more inclusive than Fates and Awakening turned out to be; I’ll give Seisen something of a break for coming out in 1996.)
And yes, I completely agree with you that a lot of the flaws seem to stem from the same kind of mindset as bad fanfic. I wouldn’t even be surprised if it were literal fanfic, in the sense that the people working on the games now grew up playing them and experiencing them as fans.
Well, that was a lot of text. I’m still not convinced I have a coherent point in all this. Hooray for sidetracking?
Like, I just found that the character Severa can be the sister or mother of Morgan. Those should not both be options. Pick one. She could be Morgan’s mother or she could be Morgan’s sister. Not only is it kinda creepy that I know she can metanarratively be either of these things, it just makes me think there’s no possible way I’d be satisfied with her in either role.
Oh, and she can be a romantic support with the Male Morgan. Perfect. Thanks, game, I wanted that.
Yyyeah. The thing there is that Morgan is considered as a 2nd Gen unit, so they get supports with their fellow 2nd Gens (including potentially romantic ones), but Morgan is Robin/the Avatar’s child… who can also court 2nd Gen units (and doing so gives Morgan better stats). Because of that sort of thing, the 2nd Gen squad doesn’t seem to have prior memories of Morgan – who is, of course, an amnesiac – unless they happen to be siblings.
Wow I instantly already dislike this implementation of it. When I want to see the families of my beloved characters twenty years after the story ends, those families need to actually include the beloved characters. HMPHING SO HARD AT THS RIGHT NOW.
At least the first half is set up as a tragedy. Even though the ambush is presented as a shock, previous events were building up to things ending in tears.
Though I have seen people say that FE seems more okay with incestuous relationships than homosexual ones. Is there any merit to that?
Well, part of the plot of FE4 is that between all the politicking and betrayals, a cult leader arranges for the courting of two characters who are (unknowingly) half-siblings so that their children got dominant “evil dragon god” genes. (Many of the nobles in that game are descended from ancient heroes and those blood bonds give them the right to wield legendary weapons – which is why the substitute children are generally weaker) Which, fine, creators shouldn’t be judged by the evil plots they write… except that the series director at the time had mentioned that he had originally intended some other characters to be more openly incestuous.
After that, the only sign of incest was the occassional healer girl overly attached to her big brother (see: Clarine, Priscilla) and some… odd lines in the supports between Ephraim and Eirika in FE8.
Then Fates happened. You know how that game’s about having to choose between two warring kingdoms, each with a quartet of royal siblings who claim Corrin/the Avatar as their own? You can have Corrin marry any of them – and the game tries to throw a fig leaf of “it’s okay, none of them are technically related to Corrin”, but that doesn’t help. Oh, and the songstress who’s portrayed as the Official Love Interest is later revealed as Corrin’s cousin.
So, yeah. It was just some weird subtextual thing, and then Fates made that much more overt.
Oh, but hey: Apparently, that character canonically falls in love with the PC regardless of their gender? I wonder how that turns out. Wish I knew that when my FE fangirl friend was gushing about her.
Tharja in Awakening has this weird crush on the Avatar regardless of the gender, but can only marry him if male. Rhajat in Fates (who claims she and that game’s Avatar are some sort of reincarnations) is one of the two characters who can marry the Avatar regardless of their gender. Of course, the other character, Niles, is a 1st Gen, so he’s a less squicky proposition than “daughter of one of your allies, who was raised in the Hyperbolic Time Chamber, so now she’s older than her dad”.
Okay guys I know I contributed to this but, c’mon, seriously.
A major problem with these stories is that the authors insist on the pokemon being able to talk. There are some situations in which sending animals unwillingly to their deaths could still be a morale sacrifice; there are none if youre dealing with people.
Randomized race is a far superior form of challenge, and a lot more entertaining. Of course, people would rather be grindy loners.
I’m so confused by this brand of Nuzlocke. Back in my day it meant “I’m going to dramatize my playthrough as it happened, which includes dramatizing the deaths of any of my fainted pokemon”, not… whatever this is.
Someone on reddit linked this Nuzlocke ‘fic where the character is in a kind of purgatory, explaining the poke-death but also why he has to keep going even though it’s unethical. Haven’t read it yet but I have to give it points for a mildly interesting premise.