Author Archives: Monochromata

Un-Crestables, A Fire Emblem Tale

I’ve gotten into tarot cards lately. I like collecting decks of cards with beautiful, miniature works of art on them, mainly. And I’ve always been interested in how various people groups ascribed meaning to their symbols and words. Even if I don’t believe they can truly forsee the future, my decks are fun to look at and present a new way of categorizing the world.

I’ve also been replaying through Fire Emblem: Three Houses. I’m going to admit, I still haven’t brought myself to doing the Crimson Flower route, as my love for Claude and Dimitri is as endless as it is pathetic, but going back through Verdant Winds as the professor of the Golden Deer has gotten me thinking.

About Crests. Obviously.

So I looked up an image of all the crests at once in order to study their shapes and ponder any conclusions, and I came across something very interesting:

Serenes Forest on Twitter: "Three Houses Trivia: The 22 crests in the game are seemingly based on major arcana. This is apparent from checking the plates that hold a crest stone, from
From Serenes Forest on Twitter

That’s right. Every Crest in the game fits neatly into the main Arcana of the standard tarot. This may not be news to many hardcore fans, but it sure did surprise me.

So here I am, a handful of goofy esoteric cards on one side, and a pile of Crests in the other.

I’m sure you can see where this is going.

For now, I will only choose the Crest I feel like talking about, but I may revisit this later.

The Crest of Flames: The World

I mean, obviously this is the one I picked. This is the big one. Bourne by Byleth, the player character and reincarnated avatar of the progenitor god Sothis, the Crest of Flames is symbolized by the card The World. If there’s one thing every booklet and pseudo-goth college student will tell you, it’s that The World represents the renewal of a cycle. It’s the eye of the hurricaine, or the sharp intake of breath before the first note of an opera, the tingling drop of barometric pressure before a violent rainstorm.

“But I am also known as… The Beginning.”

Where The World occupies the space after an end, so too does it herald a beginning. No matter the route, Byleth is the driving force behind the violent, drastic change that affects the entire continent of Fodlan. Even in the game’s Academy Phase, it is obvious that the world (forgive my pun) revolves around this allegedly-young-but-obviously-something-else-is-going-on professor. And in the War Phase those changes are even more prominent.

However, the strongest point to Byleth and their Crest embodying The World is in their countenance.

Byleth is frequently described as blank, unmoving, and even reflective, as many characters (particularly Dorothea) note uncomfortably that the Professor’s gaze “sees right through” them. The Professor is both a mirror and a window. Through them, one is able to see not only what exists behind them, but also gaze through into a way forward. In this way, Byleth is not easily identified as one of the other bombastic cards of the tarot, such as The Tower or Judgement (although they do carry aspects of each card), but rather perfectly embodies the only card that remains placid even as the change of the universe swirls around them — The World.

Byleth is molded by the world around them, but at the same time changes the world to their will. They keep an emotionless expression, but is fully and completely devoted to their friends and family. They stumble into circumstances without clear goals, but through their own inner strength and determination, rise to the greatest heights.

The Crest of Flames created the world, governs the world, loves the world, and is The World.

Even the shape of the Crest itself is reminiscent of the original World card.

(If you really look…)

While simultaneously invoking the image of flames, Byleth’s Crest also has similar markings to that of a person suspended in the air, hair and robes flowing freely around them, grasping in both hands twin batons or staves. A stretch? Maybe. But with this sort of attention to detail in the other aspects of the Crest of Flames, I like to think the central humanoid appearance was intentional.

Every card in the tarot is equally important in their representations. Just as every unit in the game has their own preferences, abilities, and tactical niche, so too do the Cards, and so too do the Crests.

-Mono

Goron Nipples, or why I started doing this in the first place

Like many horrible things on the internet, it started with a shitpost. I hastily copied this picture to a facebook messenger group of my closest friends, fully realizing I would probably need to explain myself. And then I admitted that I recognized on sight that the nipples depicted were, in fact, those of the Goron Patriarch, Darbus, from the game The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

How did I manage to pull out that name so quickly? Simple: Spend enough time with something, and eventually it becomes second nature. In this case, “something” happened to be my Wii around the year 2007, and “time” is approximately 20-some-odd playthroughs worth of this 50 hour game.

You could say I was obsessed.

Because that is most definitely the case.

But besides only etching the weirdly polyganal forms of Darbus’ magnificent Goro-nips, I also extensively translated the signs of the world from Hylian to English, figured out just the right spots stand to cause the mailman to launch into space or shoot into Hyrule Field’s many crevasses, and painstakingly completed every single of the 99 levels of the game’s dreaded Rollgoal mini game. 12-year-old Mono knew no bounds in the games she chose to devote her (frankly excess) gaming time to. From every console Zelda starting with Ocarina to Bioware’s Mass Effect trilogy, to Left 4 Dead and both Portals, to Fallout, Elder Scrolls, and countless otome games, I found myself being able to focus best when it came to sussing out the finer details and hints developers drop into their games. I’ve always loved reading every lorebook extensively, scrolling endlessly through codices, and painstakingly examining pixelated artwork and signage.

And there’s the word, the crux around this brain dump I call a blog: Lore.

After sending that (basically hideous) meme to my friends, they encouraged me yet again to find a space to catalogue these tidbits of information as I find them. Thus, my randomly assorted, chaotic, passionate slice of the web I’m calling Learn the Lore!

This space won’t have a coherent theme. I will simply write the discoveries I’ve made or the opinions swirling around in my head recently. My goal is to update this once or twice a month, but life may take its toll sometimes. I also would like to note that, in most of my posts, I will not be doing any deep dives or research into specific topics unless something happens to pique my interest. This is a primarily opinion based blog, and while I do have my own research specialities that may come into play, my opinions will be mostly completely unfounded and utterly useless for the sake of Scholarly Gamer Debate.

It also may not be just games. Maybe I get emotional after watching movies and may want to write. Perhaps I have one too many drinks and suddenly find new realizations in my favorite songs. Or something just pisses me off and I want to scream it into the void. Although I will say, this blog will (mostly) veer away from current events, religious, or political topics. I won’t say it won’t slip in sometimes. What I’m saying is that this is intended to be a space to relax and over-obsess over minutae that couldn’t even possibly begin to matter in the grand scheme of the world. That said, if something I say oversteps a boundary, let me know and I will work to understand what I’ve done wrong and get that fixed.

As an aside, my posts may/will contain salty language.

And finally, these posts exist as a praise to all the hard work game developers put into their product. Without these details, game worlds feel hollow, and without the love and attention lavished in even seemingly simple things like textures, flora and fauna, and the scattered codices and lorebooks, games wouldn’t be nearly the all-encompassing, enrapturing form of media that’s taken the world by storm.

But anyway, I’m starting to sound a little up myself. Enjoy, and I’ll be back later with my cache of random facts I’ve been hoarding over the years.

-Monochromata