(originally posted December 15, 2022)
I've had this thought kicking around since I played the game in... [checks notes, nervous laughter] ahem, 2019, and meant to make something way more produced out of it, but a casual mid length copost is the only way it will escape my brain in the pandemic times.
When you've got a cast of like thirty little anime goons who all want to date you, the cool and sexy player character, you need some fairly economic writing to fit it all in. They don't need to be super complex, but you do need to get the audience to go "heh, yeah, I like this one". I think Three Houses does a pretty solid job of this, since I'm at least capable of calling up most of these characters' names, faces, and basic personality traits purely from memory.
(Charitably, what separates this from "Please-Pull-The-Slot-Machine-For-This-Character Gacha Characterization" is in the way the cast is intertwined with the game's worldbuilding and the Support system. I have not even convinced myself with this argument. More on that later.)
Like, okay (again, working mostly from memory here), the main narrative motifs in Three Houses are probably:
The way the game handles characters is that each one broadly has 1-3 personality quirks that get repeated over and over (the three Lords, being involved in the main story stuff more often, tend to have a little more going on). The writing takes these basic quirks and uses story missions, monastery segments, and Support conversations to create a sense of specificity for each character while threading them into the greater worldbuilding. (Here is where, in my overambitious early plans, I would have made a goofy little stat hex for each character with all their wacky traits. Bad idea. Not happening.)
For example, Lorenz Hellman Gloucester ("of House Gloucester?" "the very same!"): he's a fop obsessed with status and appearances. But his supports make it clear that he takes his title extremely seriously because of the Leicester Alliance's precarious position compared to Adrestia and Faerghus; it's bordered with Almyra, a potentially dangerous foreign entity. He's confrontational with Claude because House Riegan outranks House Gloucester in the Alliance Council, and other dialogue implies that Lorenz's father set up an assassination of the previous Riegan heir. His Support with Mercedes is about how she (and by extension, all those without a title) is beneath his notice until he finds out she has a Crest (incidentally, she's the only commoner in the game who has one, while multiple nobles do not). So he's still a fop obsessed with status and appearances before anything else, but you get a sense of the 5Ws.
So, again, a pretty solid way to work a wide ensemble cast, IMO. Everyone's got their wacky gimmick, and you remember a handful of good bits besides, like Raphael and Flayn's roar-off or Dorothea saying that whenever some guy got too pushy she broke his arm.
During my runs with the game, a particular character stuck out as a bit odd to me: Ingrid Brandl Galatea, from the Blue Lions house. Based on my memories of asking around, people seem to think she's either a stuck-up, racist jerk (which, I mean, fair) or simply kind of boring with nothing going on. I'm here to argue that Ingrid's supposed problem is not that she has nothing going on, but that she has too much going on. She is so not boring that she becomes boring. Comparatively.
Stick with me here.
What is Ingrid's main character gimmick? Some stand out more than others, but I can't exactly settle on a main one. Like, okay:
Why does Ingrid want to be a knight? She idolized her former fiance who was killed in the Duscur uprising, and he was part of the childhood friend group with the rest of the Blue Lions nobles. They all coped with the Duscur stuff in their own ways, and Ingrid's way was becoming the Racist Fun Police. Then, even though she's traumatized by this incident, she has to keep dealing with marriage proposals because House Galatea is notably impoverished (which is why she's Wacky Anime Hungry) and her Crest makes her a desirable bargaining chip. And this still ties into the wider setting geopolitics, since House Galatea is poor from having a territorial schism with House Daphnel, who seceded from Faerghus and helped found the Leicester Alliance.
Any one of these is perfectly acceptable as a major character gimmick. Ashe also wants to be a knight. Seteth also has a stick up his ass. Felix also hates Duscur. Bernadetta also has to deal with magic eugenics. Raphael is also Wacky Anime Hungry. And each of these characters has another gimmick or two, sure, but it stands out to me that Ingrid has like 50-70% more stuff going on than most of the cast. It fleshes her out in a way I didn't expect. I like it.
I think this is why people think she's boring.
In Disco Elysium, the player character's internal skills chime in from time to time during conversations, because your character sheet is effectively your Detective's Inner Monologue. They each have their own voice and little gimmick. Authority wants you to act with Honor, Drama wants everything to be operatic and important, Electrochemistry wants those yummy drugs.
Gamespot posted a video in 2020 where Disco Elysium's lead designer and writer Robert Kurvitz talks about how people don't really understand what they're reading unless they read it multiple times. He goes on to explain how the skills are an effective way to do this: important stakes or information get parroted by multiple different skills within the same sequence. If you use cheats to play the game with a maxed out sheet, they repeat themselves a lot; you end up reading variations on the same statement like ten times.
I think this concept is applicable to a lot of stuff, but we're talking about Fire Emblem character traits here. It's easy to recall that Marianne is depressed because that's like, her whole thing. Alois is always a bumbling dad-joke guy no matter whom he's talking to. Ferdinand von Aegir won't shut up about his noble name. You remember this because you see it over and over.
Then it snowballs, because you keep interacting with the characters with obvious personalities because they're more immediately understandable and likeable, then see their Supports with other characters who are similarly easy to understand. And that's good! It's fine. It's, again, a pretty solid way to do a large cast. It's economic.
But, as part of a wider cast where everyone is like that, what if a character has twice as many personality points coming up half as often? None of it sticks. It's trying to cram a hexagon into a triangle shaped hole. You either get bored or remember the annoying bits.
(Aside: I looked up the Support transcripts of several FE3H characters around this point and there was a lot of "oh right, they were also [TRAIT]" going on in my brain, which either proves my point or shows that I simply have poor memory)
And it's not as if I'm immune to propaganda myself. Like, okay, I just wrote a whole ass post explaining why I think Ingrid is maybe the best written character in Three Houses, because I think she has a bit more depth than most of the cast. I can't begrudge anyone who thinks she's boring, because it makes sense to me why they would. There's like 30 PCs and a couple dozen NPCs besides competing for attention, and she probably isn't even my favorite character out of them. I didn't immediately go out of my way to recruit her first on non-Blue Lions routes, for example. I certainly wouldn't roll the banner for her.
But simultaneously, I have no clue where the conceptual tipping point is in-between Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Fire Emblem Heroes (or any other gacha game with a big cast), right? What makes me consider the writing in one well done, and the other not? Like, cynically, the only difference is that one is presented as a complete work all at once and the other is assembled piecemeal over time. Hell, the entire Fire Emblem franchise at this point is arguably just a vehicle to see which characters are popular enough to be first in line for the gacha game. The line is so damn fuzzy as to be invisible sometimes.
And knowing that, just... it tickles insecurities I have about creativity and writing that have only grown recently. I feel Garth Marenghi - empowered by a Spirit Bomb's worth of well-meaning tweets - sneaking up behind me with a length of fiber wire, whispering "subtext is for cowards". I see the rise of "lesbian necromancers in space" style marketing, of gacha games, VTubers.
Is this the only way now? I can't help but think about the attention economy. Hook 'em fast and hard. If they're hooked, the the audience will generate their own depth and meaning. If they aren't, reload and fire again. How many Marvel movies are coming out next year? How many Disney+ Star Wars shows? How many limited-time Genshin banners? How many Cosmere books? How many extruded isekai stories that do nothing but mash the dopamine button like they're tryin' to do Blanka's electricity move and have straightforwardly shitty titles like "I Became The Strongest Duelist Because My Blade Gets Stronger With Each Sexual Conquest" or some other complete fucking garbage?
S'all old news, I guess. Perhaps I'm too cynical. I don't mean to dunk on people who enjoy all of those things (well, maybe a little); their feelings are legitimate and we need to take what we can when we can during these dark times. Hell, I'll still boot up Cheat Engine and stomp through an RPG from time to time. Sometimes you gotta get out of reality for a while.
Just, god, of course people would think Ingrid's boring, huh?
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