Happy Pride Month

happy pride month

Lif trusts Sharena more than he trusts Alfonse cause he knows what he's about. He's been there done that.

happy gay people month

All of this is very true and correct. On the lore keeping side of things, it’s heavily implied to have only been a year by the time book 5/6 rolled around. Between Veronica’s new alt not looking too much older and that line from the tempest trials basically confirms it.

Now, in my personal opinion, this feels incredibly wrong.

Unlike any other fire emblem game, FEH has the unique structure of being serialized. We have spent a LONG time with these characters. Seven years, if you’ve been here since the beginning. That gives Heroes a fascinating and unique emotional base to play off of for its narrative.

Normally, when a FE game says these characters have been fighting side by side for a long time, the audience has to extrapolate what that means for themselves. For example, how long is the first half of FE: Awakening? How much time has passed since Robin woke up in a field to defeating Gangrel? To my knowledge, we have no clue. The most solid timeframe that FE: Awakening provides is the two year time skip and Lucina being from over ten years in the future. And this is not a criticism of Awakening; it doesn’t really need to convey that information. It might be nice for the characterization of Robin, but at the same time, knowing the exact number doesn’t rob the effect of his arc defying the ancient immortal Grima with infinitely more memories than him. Then, on top of this, the undefined amount of time that has canonically passed and the time the player spends experiencing the game never coincide with one another. Intelligence systems could say defeating Gangrel took the length of a summer, and that wouldn’t affect the player who took a year to finish it or the player who beat it in a week. Because we know how the audience temporally experiences it isn’t as baked into its structure. If we were given a solid timeline, we wouldn’t really be primed to care.

FEH does not operate in this way. Again, it's serialized. The time taken to engage with it's narrative is controlled. And this is a boon for it’s narrative more often than not. For example, what makes Alfonse’s, “...when you’re not near, I feel… not quite myself,” line effective? Especially as time goes on? There’s many reasons, especially since this is a character growth moment. But I’d argue one of them is how we intrinsically understand what he means, because we have witnessed these characters going on adventures with each other for YEARS. By now, we can imagine everyone in our core four cast feels something akin to that about each other. Alfonse, Sharena, Anna, and Kiran have all literally and metaphorically walked through hell and back together multiple times over. How can he not feel that way about them at this point? It’s been seven years.

That has the potential to be a deeply compelling, no? All it needs is to be purposely applied. So whenever I take it upon myself to fill in the gaps of its narrative, I enjoy using the passage of time to further communicate the bonds between these characters. Because we are in a rare scenario where the audience has already been primed to feel something when a specific time frame is mentioned. I can make Bruno’s tragedy of a life hurt more by emphasizing just how young he was when his life started falling apart and have it parallel how vulnerable Veronica is now. We can now understand why he’s trying to stand by her despite the curse making his life a living hell. Anna also makes a lot more sense as a character if she’s been fighting on a battlefield for more than a decade and it colors what constant wars have done to the nation of Askr. The fighting is so constant, that the cutthroat money motivated merchant had to rise through the ranks of being a solider instead and it crafted her into someone who cares for things outside of gold. And so on and so forth with all the other characters.

It really works. To me, at least. At the end of the day FEH is far from a high quality game and I am perfectly aware that I’m probably putting more love and thought into it than some of the people making it. But that’s part of what I love about it. It’s REALLY creatively stimulating. If it was totally bad, then I wouldn’t care for it, but it’s such a 50/50 shot of quality that I can’t help but use it as a creative writing prompt. How would I improve this, if I was given the opportunity to? How do I preserve and elevate what’s already there? These are questions I’ve never had as much fun answering than I have with FEH. So much so, that it got me posting fan art on the internet, which is something I’ve never EVER felt compelled to do before this. And it’s been unbelievably enjoyable. I love this game.

So I guess the moral of this is to have fun lmao. Ignore the source material if you want. Forget what is headcannon and cannon. Pretend you do not see the height chart claiming Alfonse is close to 6ft tall. Or maybe do the opposite and remember all the lore details. Keep that stuff on tap for the rest of us with less than stellar memory. Both are good.

LMFAOOOO

It's very unclear! But Alfonse's "It's been at least 10 years since Sharena was a child" line is a rough estimate itself. I feel like it could place Sharena anywhere to 18 to 20 when she joined the Order of Heroes (this is just my headcanon though, based on what's typical irl -- there's also a possibility that in Askr, the age you're considered "an adult" is different, but that's also speculation)

But if Sharena was anywhere from 18 to 20 when she joined the Heroes, and granting that a few years have passed to get to Book 4. Maybe 22? 24? At oldest? If every book is a year. Which in that case!

Yeah she could be at this point actually 🤔 Or maybe 26.

And really you can throw any random number at Alfonse like. I kinda hc he's 3 years older than her, if not 4. They do seem close in age, but far enough that Alfonse has always felt more "grown up" to her (possibly by the way he was treated/raised, many possibilities). But going off those numbers, he could be 29 or 30ish current Book, if we're going w Sharena being 26 (makes me wonder if his Brave alt is gonna make him look "more mature"... like his portrait always read as young adult to me, but I wonder if he'll be a little less baby faced.)

SHARENA WEEK DAY 2!!!!

Bit too tired and short on time to design an alt for her, but I made up for it by drawing her cute face a whole lot :)

Guys… I may have low balled this number.

We have safely entered the 90s

Since I wasn’t able to get the day six prompt done today, here’s a fun fact for you! I’ve been doing all of the Sharena week illustrations in one file.

One singular clip studio file.

It’s ghoulish.

Sure, it’s all organized to my understanding— It has a plethora of folders and features color coding! But. I have reached layer 58 there’s only so much that can do. Spamming the layer visibility to see which layer this is has suddenly become a whole god damn process. A process I could fix by just cleaning up a little but that would be too easy. Now I’m committed to these nearly 60 layers. We’re in this together. They are my ride or die. Enough color coding is surely going to make it make sense (it won’t and I’m being delusional)