Can i be gay in fire emblem three hosues

Fire Emblem: Three Houses has had its fair share of controversy, but none quite like the gay romances in the latest game. In looking at romance options in games, we need to consider them from this angle: What experiences do they scaffold? These characters represent young and old, noble and commoner, the grimly serious and the cheerfully friendly.

But the series has never tried to support a reading that is critical of heteronormativity. Edelgard talks about being scared that her feelings for Byleth would be unrequited, despite her desire to be with them. Heteronormativity here means emphasizing the unspoken normality of heterosexuality, setting it as a baseline from which everything else is judged by its distance.

More to the point, their S-rank support conversations do not involve expressions of romantic love or anything of the sort. Fates is where the other big reaches for explicit queerness happen in Fire Emblem but boy, did they fumble the ball on that one.

Who are the gay

Fire Emblem: Three Houses is the first game of the series where there is LGBT representation. Controversial as it may be, the series uses permanent unit death to try and give emotional weight to your combat choices: Will you potentially sacrifice someone you care about for victory?

The design is a structure to hold up the experiences. If both Byleth and Edelgard are women, the tone of this scene, its emotional valence, is completely different. To care about them and be invested in them. In preparing to write this article, I watched video of some of the S-rank romantic supports main character Byleth can have in Fire Emblem: Three Houses.

To me, this opened the field of romantic supports to be more varied, including providing a lot more space for queer relationships. What meaningful experiences for the player does the game allow or, more importantly, which ones does it foreclose? I only included paired endings in this category if they are % impossible to read as possibly gay, due to the presence of another spouse.

Fire Emblem games have always presented heteronormative worlds, and this is just another example of that.

Fire Emblem Three Houses

These include Gilbert (w/ Byleth, has a wife), Alois (w/ Byleth, has a wife), Ignatz (w/Raphael, marries his sister), Raphael (w/Ignatz). Think about all the various story beats and ideological issues the various Fire Emblem games tackle. Fire Emblem: Fates is hardly alone in this, either.

Mathematically, that did happen; compared to two in FatesThree Houses provides eight potential same-gender romances, five for a lady Byleth and three for a dude Byleth. Because that queer reading that hit me right in the gut emotionally has absolutely, positively no impact whatsoever on the actual story of Three Houses.

Fire Emblem is a series that has a complicated history indeed with queerness. Comparatively, for men, Alois and Gilbert two-thirds of the options! What a design team builds is, largely, a scaffold: an edifice that the player engages and has an experience with.

The queer romance options in Fire Emblem: Three Houses are severely lacking, but we've created a guide for you anyway. It is deeply resonant with a certain type of queer experience that I suspect is relatively common. These are the characters that are bi, or likely are.

While Byleth can romance characters of the opposite gender, there are also options for same-sex romances within the game. The result is… well. In this post, we will explore the gay characters in Fire Emblem Three Houses and their romantic options.

And well… hoo boy. If you see a former friend in the enemy ranks, do you bite down your feeling of betrayal and recruit them, or kill them off for their transgression? In the process of building a relationship with them, you find out both of them are married to women and have children!