Fire emblem gay fates

I’ve been trying to write this rant for a while now, and I always get stuck with it, because I keep trying to be a verbose grandstanding idiot about it, going on about the noble creative endeavors that RPG mods can be as works of love, creativity, and a desire to correct costly mistakes, and blah blah blah.  And all that is absolutely true and some of it’s even true for this particular mod, but in the end, it’s not what’s goddamn relevant.  What is, is the fact that Fire Emblem 14’s Unofficial Gay Fates mod is simple, delightful fun built on fans’ love for the game’s characters and the self-indulgence of shipping the hell out of all of them.  And damn it all, I like it for that, and so will you.

An expanded continuation of an abandoned mod that caught my eye some years ago,* the Unofficial Gay Fates Add-On mod is pretty simple and straightforward in concept: it adds social links Supports, both whole new ones altogether and also new S-Rank conversations for existing ones, written by a myriad number of fans who have collaborated on this project.  A lot of new Supports, for that matter.  And this takes many forms.

Now of course, this is most obviously represented by pairs of characters who didn’t have any kind of support connection in the original FE14 now, with this mod, able to form meaningful friendships, and even** become romantically involved.  This, of course, is going to most often be true for same-sex couples, since the characters already had a ton of heterosexual options available in the vanilla game.  Also, character pairs who had supports that had no romantic S rank before may now have this cherished Let’s Bone rank (which again is most often true for same-sex pairs), and characters who could romance Corrin heterosexually may now also get their gay on should Corrin be of their own sex, with the final romance interaction appropriately altered to represent Corrin’s gender (which in at leat 1 case involved actual re-writing beyond just pronoun switching (more on this case below)).  There’s, like, dozens of entirely new support conversation chains that the mod adds which end with romance.  FE14 was already packed full of potential love stories, but with the Unnoficial Gay Fates Add-On, you can just go absolutely hog wild with it.

Fanservicy?  Oh it’s fanservicy.  It’s fanservicy as fuck.  This is self-indulgence to an extreme within a franchise that is already unhealthily indulgent about such things.

But hang it all, it’s still fun.  This isn’t some game company gracelessly pandering in the hopes of making a cheap, sleazy buck off of its audience.  We, the audience ourselves, are the ones creating these indulgent scenarios.  Not out of some crass hope of hitting the lowest common denominator selling point, but because we actually like the work’s characters, and want to have more content of them to enjoy.  I think fanservice is a hell of a lot less deplorable when it’s massaging characters’ potential out of love than when it’s twisting characters’ essence out of greed.

And that love and gentle treatment shows in this work, because honestly, the overall level of writing to be found in this mod is solid.  Now I haven’t read all of them, and there’s some variation from 1 fan writer to the next...but overall, the characters are represented well, the scenarios in which they engage with one another and become friends and lovers are decent and at times even inventive, and the emotional progression generally checks out well (within reason; we’re still talking about going from 0 - 69 in just 4 conversations).  And most of them even still feel authentic to the general method and ambiance of the game’s original material.  Not ALL of them, admittedly, because some of us just can’t help being overly verbose garrulous windbags no matter what we do, resulting in conversations that are like 3x longer than anything you’d normally have found in the game, but eh.

Yes, I contributed some of the Supports in this mod, so yes, a lot of the last 2 paragraphs was me shamelessly patting myself on the back.  I don’t care.  I like what I wrote, and I like the characters I wrote for.  The world forgives show- and game-ruining narcissism from the likes of Dan Harmon and Randy Pitchford; I think I can be forgiven a little pride here and there.  I’ve still got a ways to go before I see David Cage in the mirror.

Beyond being genuinely enjoyable and giving the player a chance to do more shipping in an afternoon than their local FedEx hub, it should be noted that this mod DOES have its higher purposes.  Yes, its draw is primarily for the simple fun of it, but I wouldn’t be making a rant about it here if that truly were all there was to it.  The Unofficial Gay Fates Add-On also fixes some mistakes that the original FE14 made.  Remember my list of Fire Emblem 14’s romances?  After I celebrated the best the game had to offer and lamented its worst, I also listed out certain love story options that really should have been available to the player, such as the popularly desired Ryoma x Scarlet (given that they have an actual personal connection in the main story, which you sure as hell can’t say about most of the various shipping possibilities in the game), or the option for characters who very clearly, canonically already have romantic and/or sexual interests in their own gender to romance Corrin regardless of gender (how insane is it that Soleil’s only able to romance Male Corrin, yet her interest in him is based on closing her eyes and pretending that he’s a girl?).  Quite obviously, this mod corrects these mistakes of negligence, allowing for several romantic relationships whose absence in FE14 was a notable error.***

Additionally, I’m just pleased overall that FE14 now (unofficially) has a good number of homosexual relationships available to its characters.  I was really annoyed over how incredibly tiny a first step FE14 was for the series (and the publisher, for that matter) into realistically representative romance options, and I sincerely think this is what Fire Emblem 14 needed.

We have included the links we were provided, but if you have additional details please let us know.

In Fire Emblem Fates, players can make a male or female avatar. I thought it was safer for everyone ― including you.

Setsuna: Oh, well… You know Lady Hinoka always finds me, no matter where I’m trapped!

Setsuna: It just took a little longer than usual because no one thought I’d be trapped in my own room!

Setsuna: She checked the beach, and the forest, and the nearby caves, and the hot springs, and, oh, that bandit camp, and th―

Rhajat: I’m aware.