A Brighter Dark (Fire Emblem Fates) - Halfway point observations

[waltzoid]

Yesterday, I made it halfway through A Brighter Dark while waiting on the next installment of leliel_12 's criticism of the same.

Long story short: I don't think it's very good.

There's a lot that I feel needs to be picked apart, but in the interest of saving time and space, I'll limit my list to include a few things that stuck out to me for the first 22 chapters:

1. Yes, this story's version of Corrin is the protagonist, but she barely qualifies as a hero...not even an anti-hero. She's rude, violent, spiteful, and openly hostile to the idea of HAVING a soft spot unless her siblings are involved. Her empathy for the Nohrians living in the Hoshidan slums feels less like her wanting to do better by her people and more like giving her another excuse to want to burn everything down. Whatever complaints players may have about Corrin from Fates being too "soft", A Brighter Dark leans WAY too hard (pun intended) in the other direction.
2. Even with the attempt at "balancing" the two factions by showing that Hoshido has its own flaws and issues, they still come out of it looking like the more honorable party (Takumi's anger at Corrin aside). The Hoshidans may treat the shapeshifting clans (kitsune and wolfskin - the latter of which are supposed to be native to Nohr, not Hoshido) as second-class citizens, but at least they let them live and don't grind them into dust and erase them from the history books just for the audacity of wanting a little autonomy. There's only so many times "destroy the village to save the kingdom" will work, no matter how many times Garon or the narration tries to justify it.
3. With the point of view bouncing around to so many different characters - sometimes with four or five shifts per chapter - the narration has a very inconsistent and confused tone. On that note, some of the more tolerable parts of the story are the ones that don't focus on or even mention Corrin at all (such as Ryoma and Xander's duel in Chapter 15).
4. I know it sounds disgusting to cheer for a fictional character's death, but my favorite part of the story so far is the ending to Chapter 19 where Flora (one of Corrin's maids), after watching her sister Felicia murder their father to try to put an end to the Ice Tribe's rebellion, refuses to be healed by Elise and uses her dying words to figuratively and literally spit in Corrin's face and tell her what a horrible person she's been all her life. This makes Flora my favorite character in the story by default. The two chapters of Corrin angsting over it is somewhat over the top, but at least that's two fewer chapters of her acting like a knothead and not expecting to be called out on it.
5. While I still can't get behind the changes made to Corrin and Garon's characters, I will say that I like the more assertive Sakura, and wish that SHE was the main character of the story instead of Corrin...at least Sakura ACTS like a hero and tries to help people.

The story ground to a halt several months ago, so we won't get to see how it actually ended, but I wonder if I should incorporate the notes from "The End" if I ever get around to doing a full review. All I can do is keep reading and hope that there'll be something I can genuinely root for, but considering how frustrated I was with the first quarter of it, I don't have high hopes.

Comments

[sarajayechan]

I read about Flora's "fuck you Corrin" death and the more assertive Sakura on the TVTropes article. While the article itself is either a misguided attempt to make the fic sound good or written by the author spewing their ego all over the place, given what I've read in the sporking Corrin deserved it and I don't object to Sakura being the hero this bullshit version of the Fates world deserves.

BD!Corrin needs to be called out, bitch slapped, kicked in the knees, and locked back up in the fortress for the good of the world. The whole thing (so far) reads like the author read a bunch of 90s antihero comics and tried to warp Fates's story to be like them instead of, y'know, subtly tweaking Corrin to suit a darker retelling of Conquest.

[waltzoid]

I'll say. The narrative tries to sell this version of Corrin as a hardened warrior when all she's done up until the Ice Tribe massacre is kill a small handful of prisoners (poor Rinkah didn't even get a chance to do or say anything cool), lose the Bottomless Canyon fort battle and get knocked out by Hans, and have her sword come to life and kill Mikoto.

The explanation for how Mikoto dies in BD makes even less sense than what was presented in Fates.

(spoiler warning)

Instead of Sumeragi's ghost stealing and shattering Ganglari with magic and Mikoto jumping in front of Corrin to protect her from the blow, Garon says he placed an enchantment on it to specifically seek out Mikoto when it got close enough to her. How was Garon even able to do that without ever seeing Mikoto?!

(end spoilers)

[leliel_12]

Oof, yeah, that is one of the things I'm planning on exorcating when I get there - because it has every hint of Corrin's "rock bottom" moment, the point where she realizes she's gone too far and spend the rest of her life trying to clean up her mess...and she KEEPS. GOING!

[waltzoid]

The lack of self-awareness over the whole situation became more and more obvious to me at the halfway point. Just when I expected some character development to happen, either Corrin (no funny nicknames here; I'm saving them for the spork) shrugs it off and goes back to whatever she was doing, or one of her friends/retainers/enablers? will say something along the lines of "it's not your fault" and she goes back to whatever she was doing. Nobody seems to care that Corrin's allegedly becoming a monster (apparently they must be reading a different unprinted version of the fanfic that some of us were reading); as long as it helps the war effort, anything goes, I suppose.