The Demise of Lady Edelgard

I finished my second play-through of Fire Emblem: Three Houses this weekend, the Verdant Wind route. My first play-through was through the Crimson Flower route (e.g. the Black Eagles) and it was a beautiful story, but seeing Edelgard from another perspective, and especially her demise, really hit me hard.

Seeing the many sides of Lady Edelgard truly made me appreciate her the way I might appreciate a figure from a Greek tragedy.

Warning: further spoilers ahead.

Of the three lords in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, Edelgard was the most ambitious, but also incredibly charming. Even her most trusted retainer, Hubert, had a love/hate relationship with her: deeply devoted but also afraid of her power, and her willingness to make morally questionable choices. Most routes through the game don’t really delve into why she is like this until you get to the Crimson Flower route.

There, over time, you learn of her manipulation by powerful relatives (and their dark allies), or her suffering by their experiments,¹ and also the loss of her siblings. In the end, she decides to take control of her fate, and the fate of all of Fódlan, in her hands.

The game designers wisely avoided making her a Mary Sue type character. Instead, she makes some very tough and cruel decisions when necessary.

But at the same time, despite her tough exterior, she also never completely loses her humanity.

She is devoted to her fellow students, and to Byleth, and devoted to a future where the old aristocracy and the Church are overthrown. In spite of her cold exterior, when Byleth falls in the Crimson Flower route, she sheds many tears. She even grieves for Dmitri, even if she tries to hide it.

Edelgard was the ardent revolutionary of the game,² and whether you liked her or not, she drove the story, and she commanded genuine admiration and respect from her peers, and from players like myself. It is sad that in most game routes she suffers a tragic ending one way or another, when all she wanted to do was prevent others from suffering the same fate that she did. Her choice in methods of course is where people might disagree (and do), but in the end she was still a human being, not a two-dimensional villain, and her humanity, flaws and all, is what makes her such a compelling character.

If that doesn’t feel like a Greek tragedy, I don’t know what is.

P.S. Amazing voice acting by Tara Platt, by the way. She really brought Edelgard to life.

P.P.S. I still have two more routes to go.

¹ In the Verdant Wind route, Lysithea implies that Edelgard suffered much as she did through those experiments. That explains their similar hair color, and it makes me wonder if Edelgard similarly suffers from a shorter lifespan, though this is never explored.

² Arguably, Claude is also a revolutionary, but he also had the luxury of being able to wash his hands of the messier aspects whenever he wanted to. That said, Claude is the “bro” that everyone needs in their life, and I really liked his story route ending too, especially since in my play-through he ended up marrying Leonie which was a pleasant surprise.