Fire Emblem Three Houses, A Year Later
Fire Emblem Three Houses was one of the very first games that we covered on Gayming Magazine. Writer Dom Peppiatt was very lucky to preview the game, and as you can see in his write-up, it looked pretty positive at first. In fact, things were looking more than hopeful for Fire Emblem Three Houses in terms of LGBT+ representation.
And then the rug was pulled out from out of us.
Days before and after the official release, the game quickly started to catch heat due to the lack of substantial male/male romances and in two cases, queerbaiting. I won’t go into it, but you’ll find Kenneth Shepard’s piece on his perspective about Three Houses handling of queer romances to be an enlightening read.
I didn’t write this to talk too much about the game’s shortcomings, there is many of them yes, but appreciate how in spite of this, Fire Emblem Three Houses continues to be a game that brings fans together to express their love and devotion for characters and their world – even a whole year later.
Playing as Byleth, an inexplicably sexy mercenary, you rescue three attractive house leaders who just happen to be incredibly important to the three out of four powers of the land. You have Edelgard, the Imperial princess of the Andrestian Empire, Dimitri, the royal prince of Faerghus, and Claude, the upcoming heir to take over the democratic Leicester Alliance. Due to some shenanigans, you give up your life as a sword-for-hire and end up teaching at Garreg Mach Monastery, a place that functions both as a school and as a military base.
I assure you it is more fun than my meager description of the game. It must be, because the SRPG from Intelligent Systems and Koei Tecmo, hit just over 2.87 million sales back in May and it still continues to grow. It’s inexplicably popular, and with it now hitting its first anniversary yesterday, a quick glance at Twitter, Tumblr and other social media sites will show you just how active the Three Houses fandom still is.
More importantly, the creative spaces of fandom, such as Archive of Our Own, are as queer as they’ve always been. The most popular pairing for Three Houses on AO3 is Sylvix – Sylvain and Felix, two characters from the Blue Lions house – with over 2000 pieces of work dedicated to them. While it isn’t uncommon to have the most popular pairing be a gay one, fandom hasn’t just ignored the female/female relationships of the game either. Edelgard and Female Byleth are nearly sitting at over 1.5k pieces of fanfiction, and other pairings such as Dorothea and Petra, as well as Hilda and Marianne, are going strong.
Fan-written works, much like fan-art, are the life and blood of many fandoms and with the tag being updated daily, it’s obvious that the game still means a lot to many people. As for the game, while it didn’t do much to stoke gay men into getting and playing the game with its lack of inclusion of male romances until later in free and paid DLC, that hasn’t stopped fandom for reclaiming the game and making it into one of their own. Claude doesn’t kiss boys? Says who? My 80k fanfiction says differently.
Speaking to a user named Ferris in a gay and trans Discord dedicated to role-playing Fire Emblem Three Houses characters, they told me that, for them and the rest of the users in the community, this Discord was a way for them to recreate the SRPG in their own image.
“I see arguments that we should just leave [Fire Emblem Three Houses] alone, that we deserve better because obviously Intelligent Systems doesn’t want people like us in their games. Yeah we deserve better.” He continued, “yeah, we do deserve better. But you can’t help what you like, and this game has led me to meet so many people like me, and we’ve worked so hard to role-play these characters and have fun. I wouldn’t give this up. Not when it makes us so happy.”
Fandom has been such a driving force throughout many mediums, and is far more powerful than what we give it credit for. Sometimes it can be overbearing, but it has weight to how the medium is perceived – and Fire Emblem Three Houses is no exception to this. Much like how Spock and Kirk have been solidified as a ‘canonical’ couple throughout the years, Three Houses has earned itself a reputation of having a creative and diverse, queer fandom.
And I do mean creative. It isn’t just fanfiction and fanart that has propelled Fire Emblem Three Houses into the limelight. The famed Three Houses demake, which reimagines the game in the style of a Game Boys Advanced game, has become a project that we’re more than excited to see the fruition of. You’ve also got fan-games, mostly dedicated to furthering the romance between main character Byleth and their love interests like Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude – often including both female and male Byleth, conveying the queer target audience very clearly. Some are just a simple, but fun versions of Guess Who.
Outside of games, there have been podcasts, speedrunners and YouTube series dedicated to explaining and understanding the background lore of what’s happening in Three Houses. Some are still being updated to this day. Some are just completely batshit in the best of ways.
Communities dedicated to Fire Emblem Three Houses have continued to grow as time has gone on, and while it may not be the exact same fervor that was around when the game first released, the fandom around this game is still very much active. It’s a popular game, with characters like Byleth appearing Super Smash Bros, and the three lords still getting their own promo material from time to time.
All this has happened in just a single year. Personally? I can’t wait to see what will happen in the next.
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