A Poll Was Done for the Most Hated 3 Houses Characters in Korea.

>! You’re kind of missing a lot here, although I do see where you’re coming from. I think Rhea, is one of the best written and most grey characters in the game. Imo, I think the fact that the Black Eagles (both Church and Edelgard routes) are by far the most popular routes taken colour people’s opinions of her.

To preface, you’re totally right that Rhea is secretive, lies a lot and has ulterior motives. However, I think calling her crazy, evil or anything of the sort is missing a lot of the finer points of her character, and taking a lot of Edelgard’s information as gospel. Which is fine, the game doesn’t actually present many alternatives to it until you do other routes, especially the Golden Deer routes. The lack of objective truth and things being lost in history and people acting based on their own perspective is a really major theme in this game, that’s mostly handled in the Golden Deer route.

So, let’s begin to unpack this. First, let’s look at Rhea changing the history of the War of Heroes and essentially establishing the nobility system. While Edelgard views this as evil, lies and an attempt for Rhea to manipulate the world through a caste system with Crests, a division of the country into three ruling bodies to make the Church all-powerful. I can’t really say that it’s very accurate. As we know, Crests were not a gift from the goddess, but rather blood drawn from the children of Sothis. The first instance, was her own crest being passed through saving the life of Wilhelm I, one of Nemesis’s defectors, who founded the Adrestian Empire (more on that later) and then the rest of the crests being taken from the 10 Elites (one of the only plot holes I’ve seen in this game is how Cichol and Cethleann’s crests got passed down, I assume their blood must’ve been stolen in some way) and the Saints. Quite frankly, Rhea had no choice but to let Crests happen. If she were to reveal that Crests came from the blood of her siblings and the goddess, that would not only be actively dangerous to Seteth and Flayn, but also promote more horrible transfusion experiments like the ones we see TWSITD do on Lysithea and Edelgard. The hero’s relics are pretty dang similar. They are already literally the remains of her family and friends made into weapons to kill the remnants. Best to honour them rather than destroy them, but this point is a bit ambiguous.

Second, nobility and the three ruling bodies. As we know, the Adrestian Empire came to be through Seiros saving Wilhelm’s life, which endowed him with Seiros’s crest. The rest was not really her doing. Faerghus and the Alliance are both offshoots off the Adrestian Empire. Neither are actually directly affiliated with the Church, either. The nobility system also kinda began as a result of this, although I’m not too sure how much of it was Rhea’s doing and how much was just human machinations. As we know, there is also more than one Church of Seiros, which supports the idea that Rhea isn’t a power hungry megalomaniac who wants to rule and be worshipped.

Third, and probably the most contentious post, is Rhea’s zealotry and perceived sociopathy and hatred of humans. First of all, it’s kind of hard for me to personally see Rhea as a straight up human hater. She saves Jeralt’s life, Byleth’s life, Cyril’s life and gives Catherine and Shamir a purpose and a home. She also saves you from Edelgard’s attack on Garreg Mach and then later from TWSITD in the GD route. I’ll be honest with you, I was expecting Rhea to ultimately have ulterior motives besides just being a nice person and actually be manipulating or using these people for whatever reason. But she wasn’t. It’s also a little difficult to really see her as a zealot, as not only is her religion, well... actually real, but she herself is actually Seiros and the goddess is literally her mother. She’s seen enough shit and by her own admission, it’s difficult already for her to see the murderers and mutilators of her kin revered as heroes, even if it was the safest option for everyone. When someone defiles the church (and at no point do we see anyone being persecuted for being a non-believer or anything of the like) it’s essentially her re-experiencing the defiling of her family and mother all over again. For example, Edelgard

Let’s look a little bit deeper into her experiments at reviving Sothis. Which admittedly, are relatively unclear and somewhat left up to conjecture. However, we know two things for sure. One, Byleth’s imbuement with Sothis and the Crest of Flames was incidental and a favour to Jeralt and Byleth’s mother. Byleth was essentially stillborn. She had all but given up on her plan to reincarnate Sothis at this point. The game makes that exceedingly clear. Hell, just the fact that Byleth can be male proves that. The other thing is, that Rhea made roughly 10 or so Homunculi over the millennium or so in between the War and the game’s events. This is conjecture, but based off Rhea’s personality and the information we’re given, it’s fair to assume that these women actually lived full uninterrupted lives before Rhea retrieved the Crest Stone from them.

Finally, her behaviour in the Black Eagles routes is easy to explain when you understand all of this. Admittedly, I haven’t done the Church route, but we’re more talking about the Edelgard route here. In here, she has essentially snapped because Byleth, not only the boy that she selflessly saved using her mother’s heart but actually the accidental success of her attempt to resurrect her mother, decides to betray her for Edelgard. Edelgard, who wants her and the church dead and gone and sees them as the ones to blame for everything. It’s even worse for her considering she definitely knows who TWSITD really are and knows that Edelgard has decided to work with them. On top of that, Byleth is not just her mother’s reincarnation but has absorbed her power and killed any chance Rhea has of ever seeing her mother again for real. In other routes (and before you betray her) she obviously doesn’t mind this, but your betrayal here causes her to, IMO very understandably, snap. !<

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