Last night, I got into a debate with my brother and Mom over not choosing one of the other routes in Fire Emblem; Three Houses for my second playthrough. The simple answer was this playthrough was to see how Annette fits into the Black Eagle house and I finally decided to do it after a KickStarter project featuring Tara Platt (Edelgard) and Abby Trott (Annette) went live (it was the final push I needed, the project didn't succeed, though), but after getting some anger control through a helpful therapy website, I decided to elaborate on it. Also, don't worry, if I do it a third time, I doubt I'll play the same route, I can't think of more units to recruit unless you can recruit Catherine in the Black Eagles route, which I doubt you can.
I understand my family’s desire to broaden my horizons, but I don’t want to play those routes yet, because this route helped me with my emotions and loneliness when facing right-wing radicals. I felt like we were defeating the systems of racism, homophobia and misogyny that I’m seeing too often in the news and that I could spend time away from the battlefield and just enjoy the company of soft-hearted individuals like Edelgard, Petra, Dorothea, Leonie, Lysithea and Annette. In the end, the route becomes less about conquering the continent and more about healing Edelgard from her trauma, she becomes fonder and fonder of you throughout the game and even cries when she thinks you’re dead, something she earlier in the game claimed to no longer be able to do. Maybe it’s just that I saw a Let’s Play of Persona 3 years before this, and Tara Platt as Mitsuru and Edelgard in the first half of the first act presents the “cool, unshakeable, willing to do anything to make things right” leader. Then you hit the first C rank with Edelgard and hear that voice vulnerable, scared. It’s so shaking and unsettling you want to draw a sword to protect her with your life. You then hear all her trauma, the last time I heard things like this was when Naomi Ban visited my Middle School and detailed her time in Auschwitz. Something snapped inside me in that conversation, it said, “I don’t care what you do, I’m going to make it so you never have nightmares like this again. I will make you happy.” I honestly wish I had met someone in real-life who made me feel that way and we’d date and get married.
The last time I felt this way with a JRPG character was ten years ago in Persona 4. At the time, I was obsessed with Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato. This game had its own J-Pop idol, Rise Kujikawa. Here I finally started to understand the crap Miley and Demi go through. The Pop music industry places someone on a pedestal for as long as they can be useful and as soon as they display something the industry doesn’t like, they shove them in the trash bin and move on to the next in line. Rise Kujikawa becomes a victim of that by saying she wants to retire, watching someone else brought into her spotlight, given her sponsorships, her music and a movie she was in talks for. This is ultimately too much for the young teenager, who starts breaking down in tears before the protagonist. He can choose to hug her here. Doing so causes Rise to let out an emotive, wailing sob. It was between this and her pole-dancing shadow (a representation of her fear of losing herself in the Pop Business) that her voice actress truly impressed me. I looked up the game on Wikipedia and found out it was Laura Bailey. Almost ten years later, I routinely watch her every Thursday night playing Dungeons and Dragons with fellow voice actors in the show Critical Role.
No comments:
Post a Comment