Does allowing the player to choose pairings ruin the plausibility of the gen 2 units' personalities?

[Florina's #1 Fan]

So, supports have been a staple of the FE franchise for a long time, but Genealogy was the first to use that concept to produce child units that participated in the second half of the game. Now, Awakening and Fates did things a bit differently, in that there were romantic supports and child units that were able to join the first generation campaign by some plot stuff (or in Fates' case, the childhood killing dimension the writing team made up to recruit the children).

My core question is: Does allowing the player to choose pairings ruin the plausibility of the gen 2 units' personalities? What I mean is, let's say that a player hooks up Chrom with Sully. Why would Lucina care about dresses? And if Vaike is so dumb and focused on physical strength, which we know he is, why is it that if you put Miriel with Vaike, Laurent comes out a carbon copy of Miriel? That doesn't make much sense to me.

If the games' creators chose all the pairings, could we have more interesting gen 2 characters? For example, let's say in Lucina's original future, Sumia, her mother as determined by the developers, contracts a disease and dies very early in Lucina's life. Lucina would have more of an issue talking to her mother when she travels back in time, because she didn't know her very well, but knows that Sumia is her mother and that she wishes she could have known her better. A pairing between Cordelia and Gaius might result in a Severa that almost ran away (or did run away) from her parents, parents who may have fought often due to Chrom playing a part in their marriage despite not being in it, and a father who was often absent because of his criminal lifestyle. A pairing of Libra and Tharja could cause Libra to take Noire and leave Tharja, who was spiraling into insanity and was cursing them for no reason. Then, the kids would grow up different and would have more material in their supports with both of their parents in the past.

This is just a question I've had, because I don't like the idea of forcing characters together, but conversations between the player's chosen parent and the child unit always bore me or make me confused and annoyed that they seem so out of character, like Beruka and Kana's supports (I love your smile, mama? Wait... Beruka smiles? At flowers?), Lucina and Sully's (Sully wearing a dress... hmmm), or Vaike and Laurent's (The words "coochy coochy coo" came out of Vaike's mouth). I understand that it would take way too much time to make the children's supports with the chosen parent unique in comparison to the others that would have their own unique supports, but that's why I'm asking not only what you think of the question, but what alternative ideas you have, what else the next FE could do to make pairing feel more natural, or if pairing just shouldn't exist anymore and supports should be just that, supports, like in the GBA titles.

I don't currently have an opinion on this, by the way. The reason I'm asking is because on my FE concept project (the blog is in my signature, it isn't a fangame, though), there would be a gen 2 campaign, but there are a few kids that I feel would have interesting backgrounds if they had certain parents, but I don't know if forcing pairings is the right way to go. I just want to see how people answer the question, so don't nitpick what I wrote. I don't really care if my examples are wrong or you particularly like a chosen parent/child support, because that isn't the point of the question, not to sound rude. I don't want to argue, I want to debate.

Edited September 13, 2017 by Florina's #1 Fan

[Raptok]

I don't think having a certain parent would force a child to act in a certain way. It would certainly have an influence on the child, but there's no way to tell what influence a parent has had without comparing the same child but raised by different parents (which isn't really possible). So the child unit could have a personality completely at odds with their parent's, but that wouldn't mean they weren't their child.

That said I would prefer if children were forced to come from a specific pairing as it would allow for a much deeper interaction between the parents and the child, and the child could have interactions with some of the other parents making them feel more like a part of the army rather than a secondary army with a few links to the main one.

[Magical Glace]

Personalities aren't entirely genetic.  Most of your parents influence on your personality comes from how they raise you, and most of the second gen in all three games that have it grew up seeing very little to nothing of their parents.  

There's also no guarantee that a kid will act like both parents all the time.  My mom and I are pretty much night and day, for instance.

So no, I don't think it makes the set personalities implausible.

 

That said they need to take a break from kids for a while.  We don't want to retread FE4 or FE13 too much, and we all know what everyone thinks of the Babyrealms.  So yeah.

[FRZNHeir]

Honestly, it depends on how well written the supports of the parents are. If IS took their time to actually write some of the modern supports, I would enjoy the child unit thing a lot more than I did in Fates (although I still love some of the children in that game). IS does need to calm down with the baby-making in games though. Awakening and Genealogy did it well. Fates....
Well, Babyrealms.

Enough said 

[Punished Dayni]

I do think it's a bit tricky to say that the concept of choosing the parent ruins the concept, much as nurture matter for the way a child turns out more than nature (usually).

From the perspective of where these children came from, Fates and Geneology are not particularly affected by who the parents are, as the children were for the most part raised away from them (either because they were carted off to a deeprealm or their parents were dead/posessed/fighting for years without letting you know/a statue). It's also pretty clear that the child is most influenced by their predefined parent when writing them up, so it seems to imply that the other parent might have been the less involved of the two overall. Awakening's the one that's the hardest to square, as they would have had at least one of their parents raising them for a significant portion of their life. And for some, they would have had both too. Though they also would have lost said parents in a stage of their life where they're still growing up and for some that's how they turned out the way they did (see: Noire). Does that mean that the concept is ruined? I don't think so, but the niggling thought still remains.

[Dandy Druid]

Oh darn. I should've reread the poll question. It's asking about children, but my first thought was Virion!Inigo where Virion scolds Inigo for skirt chasing IIRC, even though the former used to do it all the time. But that's more of the parent, not the child. IMO, it usually hurts the noncanon parent more than the child, because the parent is given more generic lines so it could be pretty much anyone.

[Paiphu]

I do wish that different parents would add something more to the children characters than just hair color, and skills. But honestly that is just too much work

[Freezerburn]

It's always been my thought that if they're going to be using second generation characters, then they need to modify each child-parent support to make the match more believable. They did this with Kana's supports in Fates, which was a really appreciated change. Instead of using the same, generic script for each match, changing certain support lines and details depending on who is whose parent really just boosts the game's quality for me. I was really intrigued by second generation units in Awakening because of what classes each child inherited/what traits each child would inherit from their parents in terms of personality/appearance. A lot of that went unexplored.

[Renkindle]

I wouldn't say they ruin it, per se, but thinking about it, I do agree that some of those scenarios in the original post don't make sense - sure, personalities aren't genetic, but I'd expect being parented by Sully and Chrom (and really looking up to Chrom) would cause Lucina to not really value dresses and such too much... unless she spent a lot of time around her aunt Lissa.

On 11/3/2017 at 1:38 PM, Freezerburn said:

It's always been my thought that if they're going to be using second generation characters, then they need to modify each child-parent support to make the match more believable. They did this with Kana's supports in Fates, which was a really appreciated change. Instead of using the same, generic script for each match, changing certain support lines and details depending on who is whose parent really just boosts the game's quality for me.

Oh man. I forgot they did that with Kana, it was pretty nice, especially since both Kana and the other parent's dialogue was changed, not just one of them.