I love Celica. Of all FE lords she feels the most 'human' to me, in a way. I really like characters who have clear flaws and make questionable decisions that aren't just waved away later by the writers. You'd think it should be the standard for protagonists in fiction, but for some reason it's rather rare with FE lords. It's also the reason why Micaiah with her ultranationalist attitude is my second favourite lord. Also I'd like to point out the inconsistency of the FE fanbase. They criticise lords for being 'boring', but the moment you get more complex characters who actually make consequential mistakes, they get dogpiled for being "dumb" etc.
I'm just gonna go ahead and say it All the fanbase wants is just burly men who aren't concerned about killing people Anything that's not that gets slammed way too often as "boring", "dumb" and "poorly written"
I've always been of the opinion that Celica wouldn't get nearly as much crap if Jedah didn't have a clearly evil design and voice. I'm not saying it's a bad design, but imagine if he actually looked and spoke like a normal person who might be at all trustworthy, his arguments would seem to make a lot more sense then. As it stands, people think Celica is dumb because yeah maybe you shouldn't trust the cackling purple man but if you're looking strictly at the script it's not so bad
This. Imagine if Jedah had a refined design such as Nomah, which wouldn't be all that strange seeing as he's also a religious figure. Ultimately it's just we as the audience who "see" Jedah as clearly evil because we associate his design with it by convention.
9:23 I laughed hard at that one. This is just an observation I've had, but it seems like making a poor decision is the worst thing a character can do according to fandoms across the internet. Even if the poor decision is justified/understandable from the character's point of view. As an extension of that observation, why is it people call a character's competence into question whenever they make a mistake/need help? The way many people talk about it makes it seem like a zero-sum game.
It's probably because poor decisions tend to be annoying to the player instead of to the characters in the story. Evil or monstrous things a character does to other character aren't "real" to the player but frustrations and annoyances are. Most people won't feel a visceral reaction to a villain burning down a village of innocent people because those are just ones and zeros but if a character makes a bad choice that causes me the player to have to spend hours on a story detour cleaning it up then my IRL wasted time and frustrations will stick in my memory. So even is one character is irredeemably evil as long as they are interesting or fun they can be 'forgiven' or liked. Whereas another character that is objectively a better person but does something that upsets the player outside of the story they will be judged more harshly for the out of story 'sins' of annoyance.
I think there's a lot at play here (also I'm not an expert in anything relevant to this, so take my ramblings with a grain of salt): People hold different standards for fiction and reality. For most stories to work even a character who is supposedly just a normal average person actually needs to be significantly more capable and competent than the average real person. A lot of mistakes look worse when a fictional character makes them than if a real person makes them. This also tends to make it difficult to write realistic characters as they can easily come across differently in the context of fiction to how they'd come across in reality. It's easy to forget or fail to take into account that you as the player/audience may have knowledge that the characters don't. Particularly if there's something 'obvious' about another character or something should be 'obvious' based on the genre or medium (or other aspects beyond the 4th wall). On top of that the decisions are being judged with the power of hindsight. Once you already know something it can be overly easy to convince yourself that it should've been obvious beforehand. Any character flaws or mistakes aren't just someone being flawed or making mistakes. Either a deliberate choice was made (so this is deliberately being inflicted upon the player/audience), or a mistake was made in the writing (so is a flaw of the work itself). Either way someone wrote these flaws and mistakes into the story, and presumably had reasoning behind why they did so. There's also what Andrew said: poor decisions can have an impact across the 4th wall. As for why people call a character's competence into question, partly I think it comes back to the idea that things in fiction don't happen by accident. Someone deliberately chose to include that happening. Also again that people have higher standards for fiction than reality. While not necessarily a zero-sum game, characters are often judged relative to other characters. Characters can often be capable of things far beyond the scope of what the player/audience will experience in day-to-day life, so it's often easier to make relative judgements than absolute ones.
@@blueeyesmew ah, that's a very good analysis. It reminds me of Overly Sarcastic Production's video about Deus Ex Machinas. In reality, it is possible a horrible tyrant just dies in a simple accident, and the land is saved. In media, this feels like cheap writing, plot convenience. A tyrant has to die by the hand of the hero in a spectacular battle! Like you said, it's the same with bad decisions: real people make bad choices because they (we) are flawed. If fictional characters make bad choices, it's as if the author had no better tool to keep the plot flowing.
I never really considered Conrad from that angle, it's been a while since I've replayed Echoes, so my thoughts on him aren't very concise/well thought out lol but I kinda saw him as another foil for Celica almost? Like they had they same situation as kids, being presumed dead and being raised in secret, but he clings to their personal past rather than embracing his new life (calling Celica 'Anthiese' while Celica only calls herself Celica), while Celica is Not Too Fond of their past life as royalty (like how considers herself a priestess before a princess) Like I said, not very deep analysis here, but the point is he's not Faye so really he's a great character. Also the scenes of Celica being weirdly helpless for him to save her are balanced out by the fact that he has to wear a mask to hide the fact that he has a softboy personality that screams "I was born in a wet cardboard box all alone"
I want to also add Valentia book detailing the timeline and the like does point out Valentia was inhospitable to humans, and only via Duma and Mila did it become a place they could live in as well. Their final act before their hearts were removed and buried under what would become the Mila Tree was to use their power to make it so Valentia could continue without needing them to sustain it. So yeah even the evil deranged madman Jedah and Celica was meant to have a point! And the Gods realizing they have to move on because the people were too reliant on them and they can no longer provide for them due to things outside even Duma and Milas control.
Her “biggest mistake” isn’t even a mistake though. The real person who screwed up was Jeddah. Apparently he thought that not attempting to destroy the Falchion was a really good idea and wouldn’t backfire against him. But instead of trying to rectify that error, he follows it up with something even dumber: by having Alm and Celica fight each other on front of Mila’s corpse, giving her ample time to unseal the Falchion and ruin any advantage he once had. Also, I never really understood the comparison between her and Eirika. Besides the “trusting the bad guy” moment, they share seldom if any similarities. And even then, she didn’t even do it because she trusted Jeddah, she did it because Mila essentially screwed them over and now she realizes that her entire journey had been rendered pointless. Her breakdown is 100% justified here and her admitting that she has no choice but to sacrifice her soul is her realizing that any other alternative would funnel into the same outcome. In short, Celica isn’t stupid, it’s just that she got screwed over by the circumstances.
Except Feh made it a point that Celica believes in all her beliefs and actions leading up to that point was a good idea and that Alm would be a buttface without her. Except Alm didn't do anything wrong and pretty much saved her and all of Valentia.
I swear FEH is such a crap shoot because they either NAIL a character dead on and its a perfect 1:1 transition or they fuck them up so bad the result is unrecognizable
@@femspaint2911 Yeah, Ascended Celica's forging bond legit made me so mad. Like, oh without my peaceful outlook and efforts to avoid conflicts at every point, things could have been so much worse? Like, come on Celica you're really gonna do our boy Alm dirty like that? Meanwhile Camilla is like one of my favorite characters to see in the game because it lets her shine as a character and not an object. And Duo Duma/Mila was a really nice thing to see.
Nice video! Celica is my favorite female character in Fire Emblem and i feel that the hate she gets from trusting Jedah is uncalled for. Celica has proven to have more humanity that Jedah during the course of SoV's story and the fact she marries to Alm after the war makes me love the two of them even more. Also of note, during the Mortal struggle cutscene, Celica tells Alm to kill her before she kills him implying that her soul is not completly corrupt. Hae Jedah told Celica to forget about Alm and that he doesn't love her among other obvious thinks he should have done then his scheme would have worked but ultimately he underestimated not only Celica and Alm but humanity as a whole. And here is my conclusion to all of this: Jedah and Celica both look into the abyss but when it look back at them only Jedah blinked.
2:50 "You're really telling me no sister from anywhere else could of gone to check up on Mila." Some could. Some did. All before Celica ended up dead at the hands of the Rigelian with the shadow sword and that haircut.
I will defend 1 thing about Faye I gained more respect for her after her Alm & Silque supports where she realizes that she's thrown potential friends under the bus over a guy she likes. And Alm handled delivering the rejection really well too. I'm still not exactly a fan of Faye (I mostly like Gray as far as villagers go) but I like having healthy friendzoning/unrequited love stories. Breath of fresh air, I feel. Hell, I like Leon too. I wish Valbar had said more in their A support, since he clearly knew Leon was into him, but I suppose he felt that if Leon was feeling more confident about their friendship still, maybe not much needed said.
all those thongs that happened to celica could just as easily have happened to alm, it doesn't mean anything to her character just cause she was unlucky and saw herself caught in impossible odds, shit happens
Also something that makes Celica's story worse is the fact that you can save the daughter of antagonist. Sonya would never let her do what she does because her personality. I think they kinda forgot about that.
Jfc i wish they added a scene with Sonya in if you had her in your party at that time talking Celica down and maybe even convincing her to not give her soul over to duma. I love echoes to death but sometimes it makes me 💀💀💀
My issue remains that I don't understand why she for some reason defends her father against Alm during their reunion. I thought we had established that basically nobody liked Lima IV, including Celica... so why does she get pissed when Alm blames him for the things that were very much his fault?
While it's not entirely the same (small conflict versus full-on war), Celica telling Alm off for the war especially feels weird when, as you mentioned earlier in the video, Celica went out of her way to fight and kill the leader of the pirates and his crew in the area. This isn't to say that she was wrong to do so, but it feels weird for her call for peace after that.
Halcyon to Celica: "Why were you born with the Brand? And why are there two of you?" (Her and Alm). What do you reckon? And where did her nightmare at the beginning of Act 2 come from? Alm is shown a vision when given his copy of Mila's turnwheel. Celica keeps hers with her always: does she believe her dream to be sent from Mila? How much does that inform her decision making? Or was it Jeddah tapping Duma's power to cast on Celica a version of the same spell Nuibaba used to lure Alm? Just because Jeddah kicked Halcyon out of the Duma faithful, doesn't mean Halycon isn't still loyal to Duma - what is his agenda? And what is Mycen's (towards Celica). He saved her life as a child, bringing her and Alm together, but now when she says she is going to seek out and appeal to Mila, "You have chosen your path." When he knows Mila won't be there because Rudolf's plan was to start by attacking Mila. OK his whole approach with Alm is "mushroom management" as the joke goes - keep your employees in the dark, feed them sh*t and watch them grow - but even so, does Mycen now just want Celica out of the way? My own take on the Brands, to make sense of the overall story - it isn't their marks that make Alm and Celica special, but their being born special that made their marks (Duma's and Mila's symbols respectively). Special because generations ago, Duma bestowed a touch of his own godly power on a Rigelian royal - maybe Rigel himself, the eponymous founder - and Mila did the same for Zofia. A touch that is heritable, carried and transmitted by all descendants but which manifests in few, maybe only one per generation. Which makes both Alm and Celica charismatic, "larger than life" with hidden potentials; which makes them made for each other; and is why Jeddah thinks their souls in particular are what the gods need.
Great analysis, I loved your Jedah one from way back then and this one’s just as perfect. While I do prefer Alm by just a smidge, Celica is an equally as compelling lord, and should be treated as such. You explained The Scene stop Duma Tower very well, and honestly, everyone who dislikes Celica for that scene should see this video. As for the Conrad part, I only agree on the avalanche section… I mean, Celica has magic. She could’ve blown up the rocks. Conrad didn’t need to save her there, the writers just wanted an excuse to have him there.
watching the memes on screen as you talked about the plot beats did some cocomelon shit to me. i agree with a lot of the points you made and greatly enjoy celica’s own story and her flaws impacting her story-she’s a traumatized teenager! a woman of the cloth! she can’t just cast away her sense of obligation willy nilly because she has a cute reunion with her brother! (and i like conrad i think he’s endearing but GOD HIS INCLUSION IN THE STORY SUCKS PISS). i actually used to not like her as much (even though i understood her intentions from the start) but the internet being so awful to her for being a teenage girl + how the story itself makes her look more like an idiot than her similarly naïve and sheltered and even moreso impulsive boyfriend (and i loooove alm he’s my favorite fe15 character but celica is easily the better lord). i kinda hate how she has to die to get the message through to her head but the scene itself is pretty cool?
I think a lot of people's complaints come from the differences between Gaiden and the Remake. Where the original kinda forces her organically into her decisions, the remake keeps it pretty loose and doesn't really give that much in terms of stakes. For as much of a mechanical improvement it was keeping Alm out of a permalock in the volcano in SoV, it was heavily more crucial for him to be stuck for Celica to be coerced into a decision. It's one of the few things Gaiden aced, where SoV flopped.
Celica may have grown a great deal through the course of her story but her growth was basically going from being worse than Alm in everyway and also wrong in every decision based off of her sheltered immaturity to just becoming red haired Alm. The principles she espoused at the very end of her arc are the things All believed at the start of his. And even then it's just generic hero principles. "Be kind, be brave, stand on your own two feet, have friends, etc". You can slot those in to every almost FE MC and they would fit perfectly. The way Celica stands out from all of them is only that she starts out much worse than the average MC and then admits she was wrong and becomes average. Shadows of Valentina feels bogged down by the need to contrast the two MCs and as a result neither get enough development. Alm just ends up being always right and generic and Celica is always wrong and sheltered until at the very end. It hurts both of their characters a lot for me.
I completely agree, I don't understand why people still say she was in the right when really wasn't, like when Alm and Celica first see each other when they're grown up, she's the one completely in the wrong, Alm did nothing wrong there plus he was spot on about the secret princess. So I really don't know why people get so defensive whenever I say I don't like Celica's decisions at all in the story
Honestly both the echoes only new characters were pretty wtf. Like Faye just exists for yandere fetishes story wise and Conrad literally adds nothing to the story besides a little mystery and maybe insight into their family but overall net loss. Thing is at least Faye is interesting gameplay wise because more villagers are cool and she is the only female one giving her different class options. Conrad does nothing on Celica's route and arguably only has use if you are going to do Celica's post game and like maybe the dungeons if you are lacking people to wield the blessed spear. Edit: Also in vacuum Conrad is all right personality wise but hurts the plot.
I mean, I can understand that it’s frustrating for some people to see characters make mistakes they don’t think they should’ve, but it’s annoying when people see a character flaw and act like it’s bad writing just because they are making a bad decision. SoV doesn’t exactly let you get into it’s character’s heads, you definitely could argue that the game didn’t do enough to establish that Celica would decide to sacrifice her soul to Jedah if it meant saving Mila, or that it didn’t do enough to establish that Celica is too trusting for her own good. But it’s annoying when people say “why does Celica trust Jedah, he looks super obviously evil.” When obviously she knows he probably cares about Duma and doesn’t have a reason to not make good on his end of the deal. I think the only reason he didn’t make good on his end was because he was literally incapable of freeing Mila, Jedah believes Valentia needs its gods, and Mila is one of them. He’s even surprised when Mila gives her blessing to alm and crew to kill duma, to him, that’s a betrayal.
My gripe with Celica's route is that basically nothing she does is all that helpful for the plot the way Alm's actions are. I mean sure she beat some bandits but that was just doing good deeds. Alm is actively fighting against the evil empire while Celica is searching for a god that is already fucking dead and then she gets herself captured in a silly way, you can justify it but she hasn't done much good up until now. The game ends saying that people don't need gods and that just makes her whole quest so much worse and basically proves alm's to be superior as he actually forges his own path unlike the lady who is just searching for someone else who doesn't exist to solve their problems. Her route is also filled with crap terrain but that's beside the point. She's a pretty good written character and I do not like her because I am pee brain and to me she doesn't actually help.
I mean. No? They’re both fighting against one half of Rigel’s forces; Alm, the army (+ Nuibaba), Celica, the Duma Faithful. If Celica wasn’t bashing cultist heads on the other side of the continent, Alm would’ve been as good as dead.
Spoilers for Fire Emblem 7 16:54 Please do, they did not need to bring her back when Nils is also a dragon and can help out. Like bro Ninians death could have been Nintendos Aerith im just saying
I think the didn't want to make Eliwood definitely kill someone by accident, (also for the Ninian x Eliwood shippers). I think that Nintendo alredy has it's version of Aerith dead :FE4 chapter 5 (even if it was made before so we probably should call it Nintendo's version of Nei death)
If you read between the lines, I guess. We do know Valm is Valentia 1000 years in the future, so unless there was a revolution or anything in those 1000 years, it's save to assume that yes, Walhart is Alm's descendant.
they should've made it so Conrad comes in to try and help Celica but ends up getting himself into trouble and she has to save him instead. that would fit way better
In all honesty, Echoes could’ve been a fantastic story-or at least honestly better-had it literally just been Celica’s route and designed around that, rather than Alm’s route with Celica doing her own thing until the man in her life tells her she’s wrong and she just kinda agrees to it. Also of note: Echoes imprisons or otherwise takes the will away from 7/12 women in the game, which only gets to 7/15-barely above 50%-once you include the DLC. By this, I believe it is best that we confiscate all of Echoes’ jail cells until it shows it knows how to use them.
It has been a long problem of fire emblem. Even post-Kaga game do this. FE6 is the worst, with Guinevere, Elen, Clarine, Sue, Lilina, Cecilia, Sophia, Fae, Niime and Juno all being at a point of the story imprisonned by the ennemy forces !
i think an important difference between them is that there are no scenes where alm becomes helpless and incompetent so faye can look cool and save him. if anything, it’s the opposite. alm “saves” faye in the prologue (even though it was really mycen who saved all of the kids but she was like ten so i’ll forgive her for not realising that) and faye immediately falls in love with him forever after that. honestly faye seems to only exist as a character because the story needed a third woman that crushes on alm, for some reason. faye can be annoying as a character but conrad (to me) is annoying as an element of the story because he literally just exists to save celica and look cool.
I think Faye was written to be a deconstruction of some tropes common in Fire Emblem: -First she still traumatized by what happened to her when she was a child while many characters in Fire Emblem seem unaffected by traumatic events (for exemple Lilina is imprissoned, almost killed by her captors and she learn that her beloved father was killed but she don't seem very affected). -Second it's a deconstruction of the rescue romance, before meeting Slayde she seem to had an innocent crush on Alm, but after he rescued her it became an unhealthy obsession increased by the war. The rescue romance is common in Fire Emblem, when Ninian fall for Eliwood because he rescued her and because he is an human nice to her (related to her traumas of the dragon-human war) and it's presented as cute and romantic. Faye show the dark aspect of falling for someone related to a traumatic event. -And finally it's a deconstruction of the character entirely devoted to an other, it's probebly a heritage of Courtly Love were the man is entirely submited and devoted to his lady and in Fire Emblem many characters have relationship like that (for exemple Julian is entirely devoted to Lena) but Faye show that dedicating all your existance to an other person is more creepy and sad than chilvalric and romantic.
Seriously: Even if she leaves much to be desired as an actual character, the fact that Faye is (slightly) better b/c she doesn't actively shit up all over Alm's side of the story is a fucking indictment as to how awful Conrad is when he was implemented into Celica's plot. Unrelated to that, great video! Alm and Celica are my favorite FE lords, so seeing one of them getting some love is always great! I am legitimately considering giving you money now, funny FE meme man! (The fact you also like Gregor also probably has something to do with it).
Unrelated, but I really love Echos art style. I wish it stuck around for more than one game
I love Celica. Of all FE lords she feels the most 'human' to me, in a way. I really like characters who have clear flaws and make questionable decisions that aren't just waved away later by the writers. You'd think it should be the standard for protagonists in fiction, but for some reason it's rather rare with FE lords. It's also the reason why Micaiah with her ultranationalist attitude is my second favourite lord.
Also I'd like to point out the inconsistency of the FE fanbase. They criticise lords for being 'boring', but the moment you get more complex characters who actually make consequential mistakes, they get dogpiled for being "dumb" etc.
I'm just gonna go ahead and say it
All the fanbase wants is just burly men who aren't concerned about killing people
Anything that's not that gets slammed way too often as "boring", "dumb" and "poorly written"
I've always been of the opinion that Celica wouldn't get nearly as much crap if Jedah didn't have a clearly evil design and voice. I'm not saying it's a bad design, but imagine if he actually looked and spoke like a normal person who might be at all trustworthy, his arguments would seem to make a lot more sense then. As it stands, people think Celica is dumb because yeah maybe you shouldn't trust the cackling purple man but if you're looking strictly at the script it's not so bad
This. Imagine if Jedah had a refined design such as Nomah, which wouldn't be all that strange seeing as he's also a religious figure.
Ultimately it's just we as the audience who "see" Jedah as clearly evil because we associate his design with it by convention.
same with corrin and nohr
9:23 I laughed hard at that one.
This is just an observation I've had, but it seems like making a poor decision is the worst thing a character can do according to fandoms across the internet. Even if the poor decision is justified/understandable from the character's point of view.
As an extension of that observation, why is it people call a character's competence into question whenever they make a mistake/need help? The way many people talk about it makes it seem like a zero-sum game.
It's probably because poor decisions tend to be annoying to the player instead of to the characters in the story. Evil or monstrous things a character does to other character aren't "real" to the player but frustrations and annoyances are.
Most people won't feel a visceral reaction to a villain burning down a village of innocent people because those are just ones and zeros but if a character makes a bad choice that causes me the player to have to spend hours on a story detour cleaning it up then my IRL wasted time and frustrations will stick in my memory.
So even is one character is irredeemably evil as long as they are interesting or fun they can be 'forgiven' or liked. Whereas another character that is objectively a better person but does something that upsets the player outside of the story they will be judged more harshly for the out of story 'sins' of annoyance.
I think there's a lot at play here (also I'm not an expert in anything relevant to this, so take my ramblings with a grain of salt):
People hold different standards for fiction and reality. For most stories to work even a character who is supposedly just a normal average person actually needs to be significantly more capable and competent than the average real person. A lot of mistakes look worse when a fictional character makes them than if a real person makes them. This also tends to make it difficult to write realistic characters as they can easily come across differently in the context of fiction to how they'd come across in reality.
It's easy to forget or fail to take into account that you as the player/audience may have knowledge that the characters don't. Particularly if there's something 'obvious' about another character or something should be 'obvious' based on the genre or medium (or other aspects beyond the 4th wall). On top of that the decisions are being judged with the power of hindsight. Once you already know something it can be overly easy to convince yourself that it should've been obvious beforehand.
Any character flaws or mistakes aren't just someone being flawed or making mistakes. Either a deliberate choice was made (so this is deliberately being inflicted upon the player/audience), or a mistake was made in the writing (so is a flaw of the work itself). Either way someone wrote these flaws and mistakes into the story, and presumably had reasoning behind why they did so.
There's also what Andrew said: poor decisions can have an impact across the 4th wall.
As for why people call a character's competence into question, partly I think it comes back to the idea that things in fiction don't happen by accident. Someone deliberately chose to include that happening. Also again that people have higher standards for fiction than reality. While not necessarily a zero-sum game, characters are often judged relative to other characters. Characters can often be capable of things far beyond the scope of what the player/audience will experience in day-to-day life, so it's often easier to make relative judgements than absolute ones.
@@blueeyesmew ah, that's a very good analysis. It reminds me of Overly Sarcastic Production's video about Deus Ex Machinas. In reality, it is possible a horrible tyrant just dies in a simple accident, and the land is saved. In media, this feels like cheap writing, plot convenience. A tyrant has to die by the hand of the hero in a spectacular battle!
Like you said, it's the same with bad decisions: real people make bad choices because they (we) are flawed. If fictional characters make bad choices, it's as if the author had no better tool to keep the plot flowing.
@@elli_senfsaat Thank you. I haven't seen that video but that description makes sense.
I never really considered Conrad from that angle, it's been a while since I've replayed Echoes, so my thoughts on him aren't very concise/well thought out lol but I kinda saw him as another foil for Celica almost? Like they had they same situation as kids, being presumed dead and being raised in secret, but he clings to their personal past rather than embracing his new life (calling Celica 'Anthiese' while Celica only calls herself Celica), while Celica is Not Too Fond of their past life as royalty (like how considers herself a priestess before a princess)
Like I said, not very deep analysis here, but the point is he's not Faye so really he's a great character. Also the scenes of Celica being weirdly helpless for him to save her are balanced out by the fact that he has to wear a mask to hide the fact that he has a softboy personality that screams "I was born in a wet cardboard box all alone"
Conrad gets WAY too much shit. I strongly disagree with the complaints in this video especially... but eh, I know that's an unpopular opinion LOL
I want to also add Valentia book detailing the timeline and the like does point out Valentia was inhospitable to humans, and only via Duma and Mila did it become a place they could live in as well. Their final act before their hearts were removed and buried under what would become the Mila Tree was to use their power to make it so Valentia could continue without needing them to sustain it.
So yeah even the evil deranged madman Jedah and Celica was meant to have a point! And the Gods realizing they have to move on because the people were too reliant on them and they can no longer provide for them due to things outside even Duma and Milas control.
Her “biggest mistake” isn’t even a mistake though. The real person who screwed up was Jeddah. Apparently he thought that not attempting to destroy the Falchion was a really good idea and wouldn’t backfire against him. But instead of trying to rectify that error, he follows it up with something even dumber: by having Alm and Celica fight each other on front of Mila’s corpse, giving her ample time to unseal the Falchion and ruin any advantage he once had.
Also, I never really understood the comparison between her and Eirika. Besides the “trusting the bad guy” moment, they share seldom if any similarities. And even then, she didn’t even do it because she trusted Jeddah, she did it because Mila essentially screwed them over and now she realizes that her entire journey had been rendered pointless. Her breakdown is 100% justified here and her admitting that she has no choice but to sacrifice her soul is her realizing that any other alternative would funnel into the same outcome. In short, Celica isn’t stupid, it’s just that she got screwed over by the circumstances.
6:35
The long lost princess of... Rigel???
Fuck, how did I not catch that in the script, there ar eliterally only 2 countries on the damn continent
Except Feh made it a point that Celica believes in all her beliefs and actions leading up to that point was a good idea and that Alm would be a buttface without her. Except Alm didn't do anything wrong and pretty much saved her and all of Valentia.
I swear FEH is such a crap shoot because they either NAIL a character dead on and its a perfect 1:1 transition or they fuck them up so bad the result is unrecognizable
@@femspaint2911 Yeah, Ascended Celica's forging bond legit made me so mad. Like, oh without my peaceful outlook and efforts to avoid conflicts at every point, things could have been so much worse? Like, come on Celica you're really gonna do our boy Alm dirty like that? Meanwhile Camilla is like one of my favorite characters to see in the game because it lets her shine as a character and not an object. And Duo Duma/Mila was a really nice thing to see.
"Cars go places"... and I had to immediatly give a like after such a phrase.
Nice video! Celica is my favorite female character in Fire Emblem and i feel that the hate she gets from trusting Jedah is uncalled for. Celica has proven to have more humanity that Jedah during the course of SoV's story and the fact she marries to Alm after the war makes me love the two of them even more. Also of note, during the Mortal struggle cutscene, Celica tells Alm to kill her before she kills him implying that her soul is not completly corrupt. Hae Jedah told Celica to forget about Alm and that he doesn't love her among other obvious thinks he should have done then his scheme would have worked but ultimately he underestimated not only Celica and Alm but humanity as a whole. And here is my conclusion to all of this: Jedah and Celica both look into the abyss but when it look back at them only Jedah blinked.
Thank you for reminding me why I love this character.
2:50 "You're really telling me no sister from anywhere else could of gone to check up on Mila." Some could. Some did. All before Celica ended up dead at the hands of the Rigelian with the shadow sword and that haircut.
I will defend 1 thing about Faye
I gained more respect for her after her Alm & Silque supports where she realizes that she's thrown potential friends under the bus over a guy she likes. And Alm handled delivering the rejection really well too.
I'm still not exactly a fan of Faye (I mostly like Gray as far as villagers go) but I like having healthy friendzoning/unrequited love stories. Breath of fresh air, I feel.
Hell, I like Leon too. I wish Valbar had said more in their A support, since he clearly knew Leon was into him, but I suppose he felt that if Leon was feeling more confident about their friendship still, maybe not much needed said.
all those thongs that happened to celica could just as easily have happened to alm, it doesn't mean anything to her character just cause she was unlucky and saw herself caught in impossible odds, shit happens
Also something that makes Celica's story worse is the fact that you can save the daughter of antagonist. Sonya would never let her do what she does because her personality.
I think they kinda forgot about that.
Jfc i wish they added a scene with Sonya in if you had her in your party at that time talking Celica down and maybe even convincing her to not give her soul over to duma. I love echoes to death but sometimes it makes me 💀💀💀
Celicar 😭
Tobe-ota
Royota.
I love both Faye and Conrad and I will defend them both
17:11 It's okay, you can say revolverwing
Bro you got me with that comment 😂
My issue remains that I don't understand why she for some reason defends her father against Alm during their reunion. I thought we had established that basically nobody liked Lima IV, including Celica... so why does she get pissed when Alm blames him for the things that were very much his fault?
Hey man Conrad is cool
Yem
I agree 👍
Conrad is a good boy and I will not tolerate this slander against him
Conrad is a loveable and handsome dork and I’m gonna ignore all that bashing, despite the fact that it is the truth.
While it's not entirely the same (small conflict versus full-on war), Celica telling Alm off for the war especially feels weird when, as you mentioned earlier in the video, Celica went out of her way to fight and kill the leader of the pirates and his crew in the area. This isn't to say that she was wrong to do so, but it feels weird for her call for peace after that.
Halcyon to Celica: "Why were you born with the Brand? And why are there two of you?" (Her and Alm). What do you reckon? And where did her nightmare at the beginning of Act 2 come from? Alm is shown a vision when given his copy of Mila's turnwheel. Celica keeps hers with her always: does she believe her dream to be sent from Mila? How much does that inform her decision making? Or was it Jeddah tapping Duma's power to cast on Celica a version of the same spell Nuibaba used to lure Alm?
Just because Jeddah kicked Halcyon out of the Duma faithful, doesn't mean Halycon isn't still loyal to Duma - what is his agenda? And what is Mycen's (towards Celica). He saved her life as a child, bringing her and Alm together, but now when she says she is going to seek out and appeal to Mila, "You have chosen your path." When he knows Mila won't be there because Rudolf's plan was to start by attacking Mila. OK his whole approach with Alm is "mushroom management" as the joke goes - keep your employees in the dark, feed them sh*t and watch them grow - but even so, does Mycen now just want Celica out of the way?
My own take on the Brands, to make sense of the overall story - it isn't their marks that make Alm and Celica special, but their being born special that made their marks (Duma's and Mila's symbols respectively). Special because generations ago, Duma bestowed a touch of his own godly power on a Rigelian royal - maybe Rigel himself, the eponymous founder - and Mila did the same for Zofia. A touch that is heritable, carried and transmitted by all descendants but which manifests in few, maybe only one per generation. Which makes both Alm and Celica charismatic, "larger than life" with hidden potentials; which makes them made for each other; and is why Jeddah thinks their souls in particular are what the gods need.
Great analysis, I loved your Jedah one from way back then and this one’s just as perfect. While I do prefer Alm by just a smidge, Celica is an equally as compelling lord, and should be treated as such. You explained The Scene stop Duma Tower very well, and honestly, everyone who dislikes Celica for that scene should see this video. As for the Conrad part, I only agree on the avalanche section… I mean, Celica has magic. She could’ve blown up the rocks. Conrad didn’t need to save her there, the writers just wanted an excuse to have him there.
I sorta felt that he was far too harsh to Conrad here...
Faye is bae I will NOT allow this slander.
watching the memes on screen as you talked about the plot beats did some cocomelon shit to me.
i agree with a lot of the points you made and greatly enjoy celica’s own story and her flaws impacting her story-she’s a traumatized teenager! a woman of the cloth! she can’t just cast away her sense of obligation willy nilly because she has a cute reunion with her brother! (and i like conrad i think he’s endearing but GOD HIS INCLUSION IN THE STORY SUCKS PISS). i actually used to not like her as much (even though i understood her intentions from the start) but the internet being so awful to her for being a teenage girl + how the story itself makes her look more like an idiot than her similarly naïve and sheltered and even moreso impulsive boyfriend (and i loooove alm he’s my favorite fe15 character but celica is easily the better lord). i kinda hate how she has to die to get the message through to her head but the scene itself is pretty cool?
17:04 killed me. These FEH players really make me question things.
jesse has a perfect pose to be a "stuff" alternative
I think a lot of people's complaints come from the differences between Gaiden and the Remake. Where the original kinda forces her organically into her decisions, the remake keeps it pretty loose and doesn't really give that much in terms of stakes. For as much of a mechanical improvement it was keeping Alm out of a permalock in the volcano in SoV, it was heavily more crucial for him to be stuck for Celica to be coerced into a decision.
It's one of the few things Gaiden aced, where SoV flopped.
Little does she know, across the ocean was the domain of the one her ‘god’ calls king. 😂
@0:00 that could've been a joke for Mercedes
1:10 You didn't have to call me out like this LOL. I agree, we don't exist
Celica may have grown a great deal through the course of her story but her growth was basically going from being worse than Alm in everyway and also wrong in every decision based off of her sheltered immaturity to just becoming red haired Alm.
The principles she espoused at the very end of her arc are the things All believed at the start of his. And even then it's just generic hero principles. "Be kind, be brave, stand on your own two feet, have friends, etc". You can slot those in to every almost FE MC and they would fit perfectly. The way Celica stands out from all of them is only that she starts out much worse than the average MC and then admits she was wrong and becomes average.
Shadows of Valentina feels bogged down by the need to contrast the two MCs and as a result neither get enough development. Alm just ends up being always right and generic and Celica is always wrong and sheltered until at the very end. It hurts both of their characters a lot for me.
I completely agree, I don't understand why people still say she was in the right when really wasn't, like when Alm and Celica first see each other when they're grown up, she's the one completely in the wrong, Alm did nothing wrong there plus he was spot on about the secret princess.
So I really don't know why people get so defensive whenever I say I don't like Celica's decisions at all in the story
With all the talk of carving I am now thinking of Let me Carve your way
Honestly both the echoes only new characters were pretty wtf. Like Faye just exists for yandere fetishes story wise and Conrad literally adds nothing to the story besides a little mystery and maybe insight into their family but overall net loss.
Thing is at least Faye is interesting gameplay wise because more villagers are cool and she is the only female one giving her different class options. Conrad does nothing on Celica's route and arguably only has use if you are going to do Celica's post game and like maybe the dungeons if you are lacking people to wield the blessed spear.
Edit: Also in vacuum Conrad is all right personality wise but hurts the plot.
Celica: my aren’t you a fat one!
12:07 it was worked for ca- i mean sirius, why wouldn't it work again
I mean, I can understand that it’s frustrating for some people to see characters make mistakes they don’t think they should’ve, but it’s annoying when people see a character flaw and act like it’s bad writing just because they are making a bad decision. SoV doesn’t exactly let you get into it’s character’s heads, you definitely could argue that the game didn’t do enough to establish that Celica would decide to sacrifice her soul to Jedah if it meant saving Mila, or that it didn’t do enough to establish that Celica is too trusting for her own good. But it’s annoying when people say “why does Celica trust Jedah, he looks super obviously evil.” When obviously she knows he probably cares about Duma and doesn’t have a reason to not make good on his end of the deal. I think the only reason he didn’t make good on his end was because he was literally incapable of freeing Mila, Jedah believes Valentia needs its gods, and Mila is one of them. He’s even surprised when Mila gives her blessing to alm and crew to kill duma, to him, that’s a betrayal.
With ghast's celica analysis and this video, I'm so glad people are now being educated as to the greatness that Celica's character is.
My gripe with Celica's route is that basically nothing she does is all that helpful for the plot the way Alm's actions are.
I mean sure she beat some bandits but that was just doing good deeds. Alm is actively fighting against the evil empire while Celica is searching for a god that is already fucking dead and then she gets herself captured in a silly way, you can justify it but she hasn't done much good up until now. The game ends saying that people don't need gods and that just makes her whole quest so much worse and basically proves alm's to be superior as he actually forges his own path unlike the lady who is just searching for someone else who doesn't exist to solve their problems. Her route is also filled with crap terrain but that's beside the point. She's a pretty good written character and I do not like her because I am pee brain and to me she doesn't actually help.
Alm mostly fight the army, Celica slaughter the cultists
Yeah and the cultists are really only after her, not her country. Almost selfish.
@@ooomith I'm pretty sure the cult of Duma is a pretty fucking big deal and one main reason of everything going to shit in Valentia
I mean. No? They’re both fighting against one half of Rigel’s forces; Alm, the army (+ Nuibaba), Celica, the Duma Faithful. If Celica wasn’t bashing cultist heads on the other side of the continent, Alm would’ve been as good as dead.
My guy she literally took down the cartel
I’m sorry I have to ruin the 776s viewer count.
But hey… Lucky 7s
Spoilers for Fire Emblem 7
16:54 Please do, they did not need to bring her back when Nils is also a dragon and can help out. Like bro Ninians death could have been Nintendos Aerith im just saying
I think the didn't want to make Eliwood definitely kill someone by accident, (also for the Ninian x Eliwood shippers). I think that Nintendo alredy has it's version of Aerith dead :FE4 chapter 5 (even if it was made before so we probably should call it Nintendo's version of Nei death)
Was the whole Walhart ancestry thing ever actually confirmed?
If you read between the lines, I guess. We do know Valm is Valentia 1000 years in the future, so unless there was a revolution or anything in those 1000 years, it's save to assume that yes, Walhart is Alm's descendant.
You, yes you, guy who hasn't finished the video and won't see it till the end card,join the discord server i swear it is a good place.
ill consider it for a few seconds
I reach that one swamp map at celicas route and i now know why you hate conrad
they should've made it so Conrad comes in to try and help Celica but ends up getting himself into trouble and she has to save him instead. that would fit way better
In all honesty, Echoes could’ve been a fantastic story-or at least honestly better-had it literally just been Celica’s route and designed around that, rather than Alm’s route with Celica doing her own thing until the man in her life tells her she’s wrong and she just kinda agrees to it.
Also of note: Echoes imprisons or otherwise takes the will away from 7/12 women in the game, which only gets to 7/15-barely above 50%-once you include the DLC. By this, I believe it is best that we confiscate all of Echoes’ jail cells until it shows it knows how to use them.
It has been a long problem of fire emblem. Even post-Kaga game do this. FE6 is the worst, with Guinevere, Elen, Clarine, Sue, Lilina, Cecilia, Sophia, Fae, Niime and Juno all being at a point of the story imprisonned by the ennemy forces !
Were Karel Vid Please Man, Also Galzus
Do one on Micaiah.
15:50 OHH WHY DO HER NAILS LOOK LIKE THAT THEY DONT LOOK RIGHT
I feel like you're being way too hard on Conrad Faye I could understand
i think an important difference between them is that there are no scenes where alm becomes helpless and incompetent so faye can look cool and save him. if anything, it’s the opposite. alm “saves” faye in the prologue (even though it was really mycen who saved all of the kids but she was like ten so i’ll forgive her for not realising that) and faye immediately falls in love with him forever after that. honestly faye seems to only exist as a character because the story needed a third woman that crushes on alm, for some reason. faye can be annoying as a character but conrad (to me) is annoying as an element of the story because he literally just exists to save celica and look cool.
oof, sorry for writing a whole paragraph. i like talking about stuff like this.
I think Faye was written to be a deconstruction of some tropes common in Fire Emblem:
-First she still traumatized by what happened to her when she was a child while many characters in Fire Emblem seem unaffected by traumatic events (for exemple Lilina is imprissoned, almost killed by her captors and she learn that her beloved father was killed but she don't seem very affected).
-Second it's a deconstruction of the rescue romance, before meeting Slayde she seem to had an innocent crush on Alm, but after he rescued her it became an unhealthy obsession increased by the war. The rescue romance is common in Fire Emblem, when Ninian fall for Eliwood because he rescued her and because he is an human nice to her (related to her traumas of the dragon-human war) and it's presented as cute and romantic. Faye show the dark aspect of falling for someone related to a traumatic event.
-And finally it's a deconstruction of the character entirely devoted to an other, it's probebly a heritage of Courtly Love were the man is entirely submited and devoted to his lady and in Fire Emblem many characters have relationship like that (for exemple Julian is entirely devoted to Lena) but Faye show that dedicating all your existance to an other person is more creepy and sad than chilvalric and romantic.
I still think FE2 Celica is better written
And Celica in the manga?
@@eleonorepb4565 haven't read it
Ok
Seriously: Even if she leaves much to be desired as an actual character, the fact that Faye is (slightly) better b/c she doesn't actively shit up all over Alm's side of the story is a fucking indictment as to how awful Conrad is when he was implemented into Celica's plot.
Unrelated to that, great video! Alm and Celica are my favorite FE lords, so seeing one of them getting some love is always great! I am legitimately considering giving you money now, funny FE meme man! (The fact you also like Gregor also probably has something to do with it).
All hail our Russian overlord Gregor
Hell yes!
+Faye is an optional recruit and can be cleric
Faye doesn't suck 🙄
Celica is a character ruined by the color purple
First