Some random speculation. Take it as a general question to other people in the fandom for speculation of their own, thoughts on plausibility, or any canonical information I might have missed. Some of this speculation might seem very obvious to people who have thought about the series longer than I have. If you know more or better than I, please, tell me more!

This is spoilered not because its particularly long, but because I link to pictures of various Brands and discuss the Branded characters. People who have not finished Radiant Dawn and wish to avoid spoilers should stay away.

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Why have I not seen this one before? This one is perfect.

Not all fan art has much in the way of personality, sadly. Some pictures are so caught up in trying to show the person that they don’t try to show an emotion as well. Not all pictures are trying to do the same thing, but I reserve the right to be happy when I see a picture that communicates an emotion as clearly as this one does.

I like this one because it fits Elincia’s character arc in Radiant Dawn so well, and it does it in a pleasantly understated way. (Did the game really need to have Elincia break down into tears while hugging Leanne?) It shows the doubts she feels at being queen and how strange it feels for her to wear a crown at last, but neither does it make her look weak. Just… sorrowful, as she takes a moment to prepare herself for the burdens laid upon her.

I think I would like to see more with these two, both in art and fiction.

Not shipping, mind you. No, no, I already have Lucia shipped and there isn’t enough background on Janaff. I mean for the culture shock angle. Most of the laguz-beorc conflict we see in the games is between beorc and the beast tribe, no doubt because Gallia gets the most screen time, and Phoenicis does not take prisoners. Watching Janaff fumble around awkward in his FE9 support with Lucia trying to make sense of her is cute, though, and her straitlaced responses and overeagerness to make a good impression are amusing. (Here’s a hint, Lucia! The laguz aren’t very big on formal titles and shows of respect.) You can see that Lucia is trying to represent the kingdom of Crimea and forge ties with the hawks, but both people just confuse the other.

A shame that Phoenicis never got that much screen time. Or Kilvas, for that matter. Poor, under-loved bird tribes…

You know what I’d like to see more of in fan art? Alternate costumes.

Or even forgetting that, pictures of characters in their promoted costumes. It feels like every single picture I see is based on the official art. We can be more creative than that!

And by ‘we’, I of course mean ‘you’, since I can’t draw. :P

Just going to spam some pictures, since I haven’t done so in a while… there is no rhyme or reason to this, I’m just throwing out pictures that I like.

Every time I think I’ve seen all the fan art for these games, I see more and I’m impressed.

krad-the-tactician:

Back to Jill!  It’s all up in the air how well she still relates with her childhood friends, as a break of a traitorand learning lies that big is … a little too much to suddenly be best friends again.  So her loyalties are mixed.  Country versus beliefs.  Are they raising up an idealized version of Daein that’ll somehow magically ~forget~ generations of abuses, or are they unwittingly bloodying their hands with innocents?

In a way, she sees it a lot better, and a lot more clearly than Zihark.  He’s … got issues of his own (that’ll be addressed later) that blinds him to the stone-cold nature of Jill’s that can see right through the half-truths. 

And this was one of the major problems with the handling of the Daein revolt in Radiant Dawn.

As a fan, I feel like Daein is perhaps the best-realise nation of Tellius, simply from my emotional response to it. I can wave the black-and-crimson flag and cheer Daein on, because I have a connection with them, particularly through characters like Jill, Tauroneo, Bryce, and Pelleas. The cause of Daein nationalism is a just one. At the same time, though, Daein is deeply flawed, both politically and culturally. Its absolute monarchy and authoritarian government have caused serious problems even as at the same time they were what enabled Daein to crush Crimea and face down Begnion. Culturally, Daein’s paranoia about non-Daeins and hatred of the laguz make it hard to support everything about the country. Compared to squeaky-clean Crimea, Daein really is the more interesting nation.

I really like the use of highly sympathetic characters who are also genuine patriots. The internal struggles they face could have been more closely developed, of course. They know Daein is flawed, but they fight for it anyway. Why? Jill is the perfect example. Daein raised her and indoctrinated her in lies. She saw the suffering caused by Daein’s invasion of Crimea. Daein chewed up and spat out her father, forcing him to live a lie and then to die for it, fighting for a cause he didn’t believe in on a battlefield he didn’t choose for the glory of people who didn’t even remember his name. Jill has every reason to hate Daein.

Why doesn’t she?

Incidentally, I love the composition of the last panel here. The move from physical reality to a representation of Jill’s psyche works well, especially with the first two panels overlaid on the background of the third. It’s intentional that it looks like Jill is standing in the centre of a wave of ripples in a pond? It’s just really well put together.

Not so eager about FE13 at the moment myself, but we need more art of Ephraim in his dark blue armour.

krad-the-tactician: That’s what I used to think, before the FE 20th anniversary artbook came out, and somebody translated a really interesting bit in his description here.  Needless to say, it was quite explicit in that she was really dead, and not just missing.  

Okay. All I have to say to that is: :(

And possibly speculation about different continuities, but that’d all be crazy fanon stuff anyway.

Er, that doesn’t make sense.  How would there be widely known and widely participated laguz hunts in Daein if there’s no laguz?   It’s a duh that there’s not many, but Daein’s a big chunk of land, and it’d be more than possible for a few resilient people to hide their tracks and live out in tightly-knit tribes.

Ah.

So I was forgetting something obvious. Mea culpa.

My thought was that since the Daein hatred of laguz is based on falsehoods, it would be difficult to sustain in the face of an active laguz population. If you claim that laguz are all bloodthirsty monsters, the apparent fact that laguz can be civil and well-spoken gives you problems. The Begnion position on laguz - that they are strong but intellectually inferior, but can be trained to be useful slaves - is much more sustainable. In a way, I was always struck by the irony that the ferals Izuka creates are simply what the Daeins already believe the laguz to be.

I still find it a bit implausible that Zihark’s girlfriend would get lost in Daein, though. You’d only go there if you had no other choice, and it seems like she would have had more options. Perhaps he met her in Daein? Do we know how they met, or how Zihark, born and raised a Daein, broke out of Daein views on laguz? And then something something Ira-goes-off-on-a-flight-of-imagination…

krad-the-tactician:

This is a little bit of a stretch, but I just had a shocking realization -

What if Jill had been the one that killed Zihark’s laguz lover on a hunt?

Wait.

Zihark’s ex-girlfriend isn’t dead.

Correct me if I’m being thick or missing something incredibly obvious, but I can think of nothing in either game that indicates that she’s dead. I confess I have a preference for her being alive, because that’s just a bit less clichéd, but I have no evidence for that other than the simple lack of evidence that she’s dead. You’d think that if Zihark knew she was dead, he would have mentioned it at some point. All he tells Muarim is that she left.

I should also say that I had the impression that Jill had never seen a laguz before she encountered the ravens attacking the Greil Mercenaries. Her dialogue when she sees the ravens - “That are those things? Giant birds? Disgusting! Could they be… Are they…bird half-breeds?” - suggests to me that at the very least, she had never seen a bird laguz before. She believes they’re all evil beasts so unhesitatingly because she has never encountered them to find any contradictory evidence. It’s possible to encounter and fight laguz and still hate them, but doing that requires you to rationalise away what you’re seeing, and Jill’s openness to having her mind changed later suggests that she didn’t have any strong mental blocks like that. In short, Jill’s hatred of the laguz is too naive for me to think that she had any real experience with them.

Really, how would she have encountered any beast laguz before anyway? She was born and raised in Daein, and there’s nothing to suggest that she travelled widely, especially since she was both a child and a soldier. The thing about Daein’s prejudice against the laguz is that it can only be sustained because the Daein people have no contact with laguz. All the laguz in Daein were driven out or exterminated centuries ago. For Jill to have had any prior experience with laguz she’d have to have travelled abroad: to Gallia, to parts of Crimea, or even to a place in Begnion that still holds slaves. I don’t think any of those suggestions are plausible.

In episode six of The Legend of Korra, there’s a short eight-second or so segment with some very interesting implications. In this post I’m going to analyse it and present some theories I have.

Needless to say, there will be spoilers in this post for all of The Legend of Aang and the first six episodes of The Legend of Korra. I am also going to make predictions about future episodes of A:tLK. If you don’t want to see any of that, do not read this post. That said, I hope people do read it and comment!

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