screenshot Ike's FE Megathread {15.5}

[Integrity]

On 5/18/2017 at 11:52 PM, Gruntagen said:

Pardon me for asking and/or if this sounds utterly retarded, but what are you referring to with "pacing"? You've recently made mention to it regarding Olwen's character progression, and before you referenced it in regard to Celice's fight with Yurius and the Loptyr Cult, saying that Generation 2 was a story of "a boxer getting wailed on for eight rounds and losing conclusively and hanging on by a thread of his life and then in the last seconds of the eighth round he swings his first punch that connects solidly and it happens to knock his opponent right out." Would it be a problem to explain this, maybe give examples from FE14 like you did with support convo progression?

 

SO, pulling out punctuation and shit for this. I think the best way to explain is to first outline Genealogy (the specific boxer analogy, which I barely remember writing), explaining Olwen/Salem, then tackling some bits of Fates to wrap it up.

 

Pacing, in brief, just refers to the tempo of events. Imagine a 1,200 page book where the first 1,100 pages are the protagonists talking and angsting about the emperor of the evil empire place, flying around and getting nothing done, and having sex. Then, in the final 100 pages, the protagonist discovers a hidden power within himself and clowns the evil emperor and it's game over. That's (unless it's specifically an art piece) generally awful pacing. This is a typical Terry Goodkind book. To reach for a weird explanation, imagine a graph (ah, Christ, using my art to explain something always fails):

R, the black line, is how much of the book you've read. A, the red line, is sort of abstract; think of it as how much of the plot has been fulfilled. In a perfect world, you want the two lines to be parallel - every chapter something happens to intrigue you and move everything along, big or small, so you keep flipping pages. In this case, you go through the first 80% of the book to get to the part where the protagonists start doing things.

 

I hope any of that made sense.

 

My boxer analogy in Genealogy attacked this specifically: think of Manfroy. In chapters P through F, how much does he accomplish? I'm just going to topdeck this from my head and not go through my notes or anything, so some things may be missing or wrongish. I'm just counting things we actually see him do or hear of him doing.

* turns Verdane against you (P and 1)

* turns Agustria against itself (2 and 3 via chogall)

* kidnaps Deirdre out from under your nose (3)

* arranges Elvis' ascension to the throne (gen 1)

* arranges Quan and Ethlyn's deaths (no joke, this isn't revealed til later in Thracia though) (5)

* gets the entire empire and emperor under his thumb (the interim)

* some shit in 8/9 I can't remember (8/9)

* kidnaps Julia out from under your nose (10)

* denies both Elvis and Julius to do what he wants without consequence (10)

* brainwashes Julia and sends her to kill you (10)

* completes Julius' ascension as Loptyr (F), after starting Julius' creation and ascension as Loptyr (the rest of the game)

 

Things you do to impact Manfroy:

* in the final turns of the final chapter, you kill him as an afterthought (F)

 

There's zero conflict between you and Manfroy. If the narrative replaced Manfroy with a series of coincidences, or with the characters themselves (Elvis, Julius, etc.) doing the things, the narrative would not have suffered at all. There is no struggle between us and Manfroy; Manfroy simply does whatever he wants until a certain point in the plot where you're allowed to fight and kill him without him warping away. Manfroy is, in essence, a god character, and god characters are really boring unless the point of the story is about their weaknesses (see: good Superman stories versus bad Subparman stories).

 

Julius is just as bad, but not as visibly and not for as long. He's shown to have the power to teleport wherever he pleases, and has no qualms about killing, and he's actually (narratively speaking) immune to conventional weaponry. He's even teleported into our midst to bail Ishtar out, among other things. He's seen us. He knows we're a threat. He does nothing about us. What would happen, narratively and not even playing with dumb video game numbers (yeah julius is level 30 but we're only level 10 obviously etc.etc.), if he had taken ten minutes to warp into our camp and attack us literally himself? For 99% of Genealogy, he would have wiped us out and we could have done literally nothing to him. Remember: we didn't know about the Book of Naga until we get Julia back. We didn't know about Tyrfing until chapter 10. Generously speaking (let's say Tyrfing is enough to kill him, narratively), every single second of Genealogy's second generation is driving us toward a foe we will never be capable of defeating until Palmark gives us Tyrfing, which we don't know that he has, right before we get to that chapter. Being ungenerous and assuming that only the Book of Naga can truly defeat him, we spend everything up until the final about ten turns of the game charging towards an enemy who cannot be defeated until we randomly acquire a powerup that nobody, including the player, had any reason to expect existed, and then we kill him with it.

 

To put it more colloquially, imagine a story about a guy being chased through the woods by a maniac with a chainsaw. It lasts for ten chapters, ten awful, grueling, tense chapters; in the tenth chapter the chasee happens across an abandoned army base he didn't know about and there's a fully functional and loaded FN FAL assault rifle and he guns the maniac down, book ends. That's the Book of Naga, from a pacing standpoint. It has nothing to do with our planning, either as a player or as Seliph in the world as our avatar; it has nothing to do with our brains or determination or anything of the sort. We were just handed the keys to kill the final boss minutes before we had to fight the final boss.

 

Note that this is different than, say, the final tower in Radiant Dawn. In Radiant Dawn, we're just forging ahead fully confident that we're going to be able to handle whatever comes before us, and we find out that we're about to walk into enemies that we can't hurt (4-E-3) in the same breath that someone offers to solve the problem. We know we need the Book of Naga to kill Julius the entire way to actually killing Julius, and that Julius could obliterate us at any point we don't have it. Ashera's blessed that we can't hurt don't go outside the tower, and we don't even know they exist really until there's a contrived thing that pops up and we get blessed weapons.

 

So we come to Olwen. Olwen's character development, speaking honestly, is really well handled by the standards of early Fire Emblem. She doesn't immediately leap from the enemy team to yours, and she doesn't sit on the enemy team being all noble general supporting a cause she doesn't believe in. She believes in the cause, until she's confronted with the evidence, and that sends her into a very human doubt. She doesn't just hop immediately from this doubt to "well these guys must have been wrong THEREFORE the other guys are right!!" and leap into your army, though. Fred gets some organic experiences of his own with you and tells her quite firmly that the best thing is to fall in with us. Conversation for conversation, Olwen and Fred do really well.

 

The problem with Olwen is, again, pacing. Think of the tempo of those conversations: at the beginning of 11, she's tossed unceremoniously into the dungeon. You have some talks with Fred, setting up his part. Everything else happens over the course of 11x. Her development is well handled in that light, but in actuality happens over the course of like two hours. After that, despite all her potential (oh MAN Olwen had great potential as a third advisor) she's totally shelved until Kempf optionally in 16A and Reinhardt otherwise in the 20s somewhere. Olwen has a ton of content, and it's completely concentrated into two chapters in the middle of a filler arc and then the rest of it is discarded/is one conversation with her brother later.

 

Salem is the worst offender, though. His problem isn't really a problem of pacing for his own arc, it's that it doesn't exist; I blame that on the fact that Thracia itself has a problem with pacing. Except for its main characters, Thracia tries to distill everything related to a side character down to the smallest amount of time possible. Karin: focused for 4, 4x, and 5, then gone basically forever. Olwen: focused for 11 and 11x, then gone basically forever. Pan: the star of 12 and 12x, then gone literally forever. Spoiler alert: Safy's entirely done talking now that we've found her sister. The original crew? None of them have any more lines until we get Evayle back later in the game. We'll move on from here, too: Amalda and Conomore will have their entire appearances dedicated to 15 and 19. Miranda/Sleuf show up for 16B/A and then 19 and are done (actually I think Miranda has a line in 18 too).

 

Think about Thracia's pacing as a whole, though. Let's ignore the fact that Salem deeply deserved to be a supporting character, being the only sympathetic cultist in the universe. Chapters 10-13 absolutely have room to develop some side characters. 14 is an awesome chapter to have a little side character chatter. Everything after Seliph shows up is .... well, we'll get to that when we do. Point is, Thracia has tons of dead space where mostly nothing (12) or entirely nothing (12x) is going on where some screen time could have been dedicated to the dudes you probably still have in your party. Fire Emblem itself recognized it with the advent of supports in the next game, to some degree, but that has all its own issues we'll tackle when we get there.

 

Since you specifically requested that I tie it into Fates supports, I'll give it a quick whirl with no promises for quality. Take a support that I think is pretty well done overall, Silas-Oboro:

C. <oboro> fuckin nohr. <silas> whats her deal

B. <silas> sorry nohr sucks <oboro> ok whatever

A. <oboro> nohr sucks but you don't i guess <silas> i'm a man before a nohrian <oboro> ok

Distilling it pretty hard, but you get the gist. It sounds pretty good so far!

S. <oboro> dude, i <silas> marry me. <oboro> what ok

 

And gone. This is largely a problem with the support system (which we'll talk about in depth, I promise!) in that there cannot be any pacing. If there's any romantic progression from C-A, you end up with people having added romantic tension with other people when they're already married and have kids, or just end up having them have tons of unresolved and unaddressed romantic tension. If there isn't any romantic progression from C-A, you end up with this, where a mutual understanding does a 360 and turns around and becomes marriage all of a sudden. It's capable of being done reasonably well (see Subaki/Hana) but that's a very specific thing. The Subaki/Hana support built something like tension that could be construed as romantic or couldn't be, at the reader's discretion. Silas/Oboro, on the other hand, is very explicitly just understanding, that blossoms into sudden love in a single conversation. We joke in the fandom about the three conversations to marriage meme, but it's a very real thing and that is the best thing I can bring up to exemplify bad pacing.

 

I think I could write more about it but I've spent the last hour before I go to bed on a Tuesday night typing this instead of the update (hey, guys, bully this guy, he's why I didn't get the update done on time) so I'm gonna cut it off and hope you understand.

[Jotari]

Just wasted like four days of my holiday abroad getting up to date with this. Probably regret the decision about as much as you regret starting this in the first place. Look forward to being around for future coversations (if it ever gets updated again that is, I want this to be strike through text but that seems to be impossible on mobile) as I Have Opinions.

Also maybe you can explain to me why I find deadbeat dad Galzus to be so unreasonably cool. Ive legitately considered making a topic on this in the past because I honestly have no idea why I like him. Best guess is that its the fur coat.

[Vaximillian]

1 minute ago, Jotari said:

I want this to be strike through text but that seems to be impossible on mobile

{s}text{/s} with brackets instead of braces produces text. Standard BBCode magic.

[Jotari]

25 minutes ago, Vaximillian said:

{s}text{/s} with brackets instead of braces produces text. Standard BBCode magic.

Im a twenty first century man. If its not made remarkably easy for me then Im not going to do it. Even if the explanation requires more effort.