The Politics of Hate in Fire Emblem: Three Houses

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a tactical strategy roleplaying game where the player controls a military academy professor tasked with grooming her young students into battlefield commanders. The premise is problematic (though it makes for riveting gameplay), but developer Intelligent Systems gets away with it for one simple reason: it knows this is all terrible. It understands the forces it is playing with - politics and hatred, spun into a bloody continental war - and it does not shirk from that awfulness.

(Spoilers for the game’s endings ahead.)

It starts with a trick. Early in the game, the player is introduced to the titular three houses of the academy and their constituent students. She chooses one of the houses to teach and sponsor, but between missions she can roam the academy grounds and hob-knob with students from all houses. She can dine, sing, woo, and have tea time with just about every named character on the grounds. She bonds with them.

Then halfway through the game, time moves forward several years, and any student not recruited to the player’s roster becomes the enemy in a three-way war. Friends and boon companions literally become mortal enemies, and the player and her students are forced to put their one-time tea dates to the sword.

Rhea, Archbishop and Supreme Leader of the Church of Seiros

Fire Emblem: Three Houses doesn’t stop with that simple tragedy, as tightly punched as it is. No matter which house she follows, the player is motivated to fight. Her students - particularly the house leaders - contextualize the war in terms of vengeance, revolution, religion, or peace. They are just wars.

So she is told.

The player never gets all of the information at once here. Rather, the game is divided into four paths, each themed and named after their house leader: Azure Moon for Dmitri and the Blue Lions, Verdant Wind for Claude and the Golden Deer, and two for Edelgard and her Black Eagles: Crimson Flower and Silver Snow.

In Crimson Flower, Edelgard starts a revolution against the Church of Seiros, seeking to dismantle a system of injustice propped up by theocracy. And she is easy to empathize with, once you see her perspective. And the enemy is easy to hate. Rhea, the church figurehead, is portrayed as a benevolent spiritual mother figure throughout Part 1 and most of the other paths. But Crimson Flower players will see a unique side of her when the city of Fhirdiad is attacked by the Black Eagles. Rather than surrender or even fight on honorable terms, Rhea orders the town (and its citizens) burned to the ground to force the attacking army at a disadvantage.

And yet this isn’t inconsistent with Rhea’s character, looking back. All players see shades of this rage in Part 1, when Rhea executes bandits without compunction, and in all paths there is ample evidence that Rhea and her ilk see humanity as beneath them, less than human.

So is Rhea the villain, or just protecting her family? Well, yes.

But then Edelgard is no better herself.

For the Crimson Flower player, she has every reason to go to war against the Church of Seiros. They are responsible for her childhood abuse and enabled the torture of many more underprivileged citizens. Edelgard goes to war on their behalf as much as her own.

But her end goal is to replace the Church of Seiros’ theocracy with a dictatorship. Indeed, Edelgard shows such hatred for the Church and its perceived co-conspirators that it is not hard to imagine Edelgard executing bandits or traitors herself, even if the player never sees it on-screen. For that matter, she also takes on unsavory allies in an alliance of convenience. For Edelgard, the ends very much justify the means.

Each of the four paths plays out much like this. The player is motivated to fight her enemies but also learns enough to suspect the perspective she is given is incomplete. YouTuber Alexzandxr noticed this, commenting that every authority figure in Three Houses is an unreliable narrator. And while the students express regret over killing their friends, every one of them insists they will stand by the player regardless of her decisions. So the writers never show their hand. Is Rhea the villain? Edelgard? Dmitri? Claude? Yes.

And maybe no.

For there are villains in the game: the Agarthans, Those Who Slither in the Dark.

If any one forces is behind the tragedies motivating our key characters, it is the Agarthans. Yet while the player comes into opposition against them in every path, they only face defeat after you have conquered, burned and destroyed a half dozen bystanders. Even in the Verdant Wind path, where they are directly confronted and seemingly defeated, they are not extinguished.

In other words, of all the factions actively working in the game, Those Who Slither in the Dark seem to suffer the least.

In Fire Emblem: Three Houses, war is the tool of the snake, not the hero. War is convenient, exciting, easy - but it’s never clean. It’s not surgery. It destabilizes nations, drains entire generations of their youth, and only creates the snake’s preferred ecosystem - never the opposite.

When examined critically, these competing narratives and sympathetic but problematic perspectives deconstruct any hold the player might have on an authoritative truth. And without that truth, she is also robbed of justification for her war. She isn’t righteous. She is merely one side of a four-sided coin.