The Wired Revolution Act III: How Fire Emblem Three Houses Shows The Aspects of A Leader

By Nathan Moloney

courtesy of koei tecmo/intelligent systems/nintendo

How does the fight for a better world impact us and those we love? Fire Emblem: Three Houses answers with a resounding, “Pretty poorly!” This essay will focus on The Black Eagles route, so expect spoilers for that portion of the game.  We will also be going deep into the character Edelgard Von Hresvelg, Emperor of Adrestia and a young revolutionary. If you’ve already beaten a route of Three Houses, feel free to read! If not, then do that before coming back!

Edelgard is unusual in her status as nobility in the continent of Fodlan, as she hates it more than anything. In comparison to Will and B.J from my prior essays, she starts the story at the height of power. The heir to a empire stronger than any other, with a house full of nobles who listen and support her as the emperor.

Yet there is one thing that she shares with those other heroes; she knows that this world is unfair.

Edelgard would be the last person to start a revolution in any normal world. Her crown is normally a supporter of Archbishop Rhea and The Church of Serios, attending he military academy the church runs. As a noble, she would benefit from this world. Yet there is one word she hates more than anything.

Crests.

Edelgard hates crests and the system made from them. Crests ensure a noble’s standing in their house, the weapons they can wield and the power they hold in society. It is also the source of her trauma, the vicious experiments that killed her siblings and shortened her lifespan.  A victim of this repugnant system, she picks up an axe and declares the one word that would shape Fodlan for 5 years.

War.

courtesy of koei tecmo/intelligent systems/nintendo

Edelgard’s morals can certainly be questioned; she is not as noble a hero as Will and B.J are, but that is what makes her so interesting. She aligns with those who made her a victim and killed her family. She manipulates her professor (and player character) Byleth, as well as masquerades as the villainous Flame Emperor. Yet she does not allow this to break her or allow it to close her off from her allies. She makes friends, she laughs, she connects with those around her. They are not pieces on a chess board for her; they are people she deeply cares for.

The path her life takes is decided by the player choosing whether they want to join her or side with the church. In both outcomes, the player takes their whole party with them. Either uniting Edelgard with her allies or isolating her to her worse impulses. No matter what, the war she plunges Fodlan into rips apart everything.

Three Houses plays with a lot of perspective due to its multi route structure. To some, she is a great liberator racing to end the oppression of the masses. To others, she is a grand despot razing peace and life. Edelgard is all these things; she knows she can never be the perfect emperor, so she takes an axe to the rules and fights for her dreams.

courtesy of koei tecmo/intelligent systems/nintendo

Edelgard sums up everything I love about Three Houses. A complex character who is not always in the right, but who you can understand. She is not a noble hero like Will or a hardened man of war like B.J; she is a victim made into a flawed avenger. Despot, hero, revolutionary or fascist, the means don’t matter to her as much as creating her better world is. Her axe might need to break the bodies of otherwise good people, but she can take it. Better her than those she loves; that’s what makes her so good as a character. She is shaped by those around her; her fight is shaped even by the choice to play her route.  Her fight could not exist without the bodies of her family, but Edelgard, the girl who would be emperor, likewise would not exist without The Black Eagles. Her axe is bloodied for them, and her revolution cannot succeed without them. That’s what makes her so special to me.

“If an opera is made about my life someday, I wonder how I'll be portrayed. The revolutionary who guided the Empire to a new dawn...or the foolish ruler who took her revolution too far." Edelgard Von Hresvelg to Dorothea Arnault, Imperial Year 1180

courtesy of koei tecmo/intelligent systems/nintendo

---

Nathan Moloney is one of our featured writers, and will be heading up the review section for IGN. Born in Oakville Ontario and raised between there and Toronto, Nathan aims to bring a wide range of experience to the team. Being a lifelong gamer, he has played everything from Lego Batman to XCOM 2 and Hades. With a particular interest in role-playing games, Nathan will bring his love of narrative into everything he does. Expect reviews telling you about what he loves and dislikes about the storylines in the games he loves, as well as powerful discussions about the revolutionary narratives in many video games.

The Wired Revolution Act II: How The 2010’s Wolfenstein Games Show That Fascism Deserves a Kick in The Teeth

By Nathan Moloney

IMAGE courtesy of machinegames/bethesda

For years many have argued about what a ‘good’ Nazi even is, but MachineGames posits in their Wolfenstein games that the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi, and it is quite a persuasive argument. As the fans of the series will know, in 2014’s Wolfenstein: The New Order and 2017’s Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus thrusts the player into the fascist stomping boots of B.J Blazkowicz as he fights through an alternate 1960s after the victory of the Nazis in WW2. The message of the following writing is that sometimes it is needed to fight back against the oppressors of the world. Sometimes violence is the answer against those who would inflict violence on targeted groups of people. These games do not shy away from depicting the subject matter so neither will we, so a content warning for well, The Nazi Party in general.  Now it should be noted that from this point onward you should have played the games to the end, as there will be spoilers from this point onward. However, for the smaller spin offs such as The Old Blood and Youngblood there will be no spoilers for those games (as I have yet to play them, and they are less important to the overall narrative of B.J across the games). With all that understood, let's get into the overall essay.  

IMAGE courtesy of machinegames/bethesda

 B.J starts his journey after having been knocked into a coma in the final battle of the war and coming out of it in a mental hospital some 20 years later, coming to the defense of the family that cared for him and the patients that come under Nazi abuse. This opening shows two things regarding both B.J and the world that I want to highlight. First is that nobody is safe under their regime, not the polish family running the hospital nor the patients inside, suffering comes for us all. Second is that BJ is Captain America, he’s a strong American hero out of time come back to help people.

However, there is one thing that makes him function stronger than Steve Rogers in this case of a fight against the Nazi party, and that is the fact that B.J is Jewish. Whereas Steve is everything the Nazi’s love fighting against them, B.J is tainted in their eyes by his Jewish heritage, there can never been an equal exchange of ideals between them, because they will always hate him for the one thing he can never change, his blood.  

IMAGE courtesy of machinegames/bethesda

 In my prior writing on Metaphor ReFantazio I discussed how that game shows the power of collective action against a greater evil, and we see that laid clear in this series with the Kreisau Circle. A fictional extension of a real anti-Nazi group in Germany, this verison of the circle is a multi-racial rebel group consisting of people fighting against the fascist government. This might be an even stronger version of what Metaphor ReFantazio was doing due to these games existing in a more real world with real races and real people. These are games that are not afraid of showing Nazi’s in a bad light and letting the player fight back against with brutal attacks against the violence being perpetrated against the world. MachineGames never shys away from the violence needed to make a meaningful change, and they never try to sugarcoat the fight to make the world better.  

 In 2025 I find this to be a strong message, where we as Canadians look over to our neighbors and see a madman breaking down the rules, putting people in cages, wanting 51st states and waging war against his own citizens. It’s hard not to fear the worst when we see a weak man trying to seem strong by hurting people and swinging his dick around.

Is the United States on the road to fascism? Who really knows, but it will be if people are not willing to stand up and fight for what is right. Look to how open MachineGames was to placing their boot in the mouth of oppressors and tyrants and think about that if they were willing to do that in a video game, what are you willing to do in real life?

 As pointed out by Youtuber peterspittech they couldn't make this game today, not because we the people have changed but rather due to the cowards at the top of the boardrooms. Are you willing to let them win? Or like B.J, are you going to get off your knees and fight?

IMAGE courtesy of machinegames/bethesda

Nathan Moloney is one of our featured writers, and will be heading up the review section for IGN. Born in Oakville Ontario and raised between there and Toronto Nathan aims to bring a wide range of experience to the team. Being a lifelong gamer, he has played everything from Lego Batman to XCOM 2 and Hades. With a particular interest in role-playing games, Nathan will bring his love of narrative into everything he does. Expect reviews telling you about what he loves and dislikes about the storylines in the games he loves, as well as powerful discussions about the revolutionary narratives in many video games.

The Wired Revolution Act I: How Metaphor ReFantazio Shows the Power of Collective Action

By Nathan Moloney

(Image COURTESY of sega/Atlus)

Metaphor ReFantazio opens with one question, can fantasy affect reality? The truth is messy and not without nuance, but I would argue that it comes to the conclusion that fantasy can inspire us to make a change in the world. Before we get into that however, I want to give a big, massive spoiler warning. This essay is for people who have beaten Metaphor: ReFantazio and want to further engage with the themes of the story and what it has to say, I highly recommend experiencing the game before reading further.  

Let’s recap the narrative. You play as The Traveling Boy (Canon name Will, which will be how we refer to him from here), you are on a mission with the fairy Galica to kill Louis. Louis was blamed for trapping the prince of the United Kingdom of Euchronia in a deadly curse and killed its king, and you are part of the group that is harboring the prince and working against Louis. By the time you get a chance to make the attack, the King’s Magic kicks in and calls an election. From there you set out on your quest to get high enough in the race to get close to Louis.  You discover the truth behind the curse (it was ordered by this worlds corrupt church), that Will is actually the prince, and then you kill Louis to bring peace to the kingdom before being crowned King.  

Image COURTESY of sega/Atlus)

However I want to discuss one key plot point, the book that Will takes around with him at all times. It is a utopian fantasy novel that is clearly being written about our real world, it tells of a world without bigotry and without strife in a way that is  appealing to a young man facing racial discrimination at every turn as an Eldan boy (the lowest tribe in the United Kingdom). By the end of the game Will is faced with a choice, leave the world he knows for the world he reads about or stay to face certain death against Louis.  

He chooses to stay and fight for the world he knows instead of escaping into the fiction of his book. I think that is Metaphors answer to the question it asked you some 60-100 hours prior. Fantasy impacts reality through inspiring you to make the change that you want to see in the world, and through sharing the fantasy with others you can make them see the world differently. Throughout the entire game Will shares this novel with those around him, and they change as a result. The book is utopian not because it shows our deeply un-utopian world as that, but because it makes others dream big and want to make their world similar.  The fantasy brings people together in a world so divided by their differences and prejudices. We also see this through the character of More, who spends most of the game as your mentor who is locked away in his own realm. At the end it is revealed he is both your father, the now dead king, and the author of the book that Will carries around, and he is the one who offers the choice to leave the world to come to our real world. More does this because he lost hope in the world and its ability to change after his son was cursed, in his eyes his fantasy could not affect reality, and he simply wants to give up on making that difference. However, Will’s views are different because he shared this fantasy with others, and he has those bonds built with different people.  

This is the core ideal of Metaphor ReFantazio, that fantasy can inspire you to make the change in the world, that fantasy when shared with others is among the most powerful forces in the world. It is not that the mere act of reading a book makes that change, it is acting on the ideas of that work which makes the change, and that is why I love Metaphor Refantazio. It is a smart story about changing the world and I love all its many facets. 

Fantasy can inspire us to change the world, together. 

Image COURTESY of sega/Atlus)