this page serves to record my impressions and analysis of the askr's kin story series as it releases. i wanted to get this up as soon as possible, so expect the formatting to be nicened up later...!
table of contents
part 1: opening
firstly, the title: "askr's kin" sounded suspiciously not singular to me, so i checked out the japanese. 開神の娘たち, "opening god's daughters".... no ambiguity to be found. i was incensed over the idea that ash suddenly had a sister retconned in-- what she shared with lord askr in his final moments, his request to acknowledge themselves as "father" and "daughter".... that was just for them!! there just couldn't be anyone else before that, nor, of course, after....
i gave in to temptation and viewed the datamine of the new character while i was visiting my feh-playing brother. "ohh, she's cool...!!!" i was pleased despite my preemptive haterism against Sudden Sister, and despite the lack of kozaki yusuke art that i had so looked forward to (i had a feeling he wouldn't be on for this story...). i struggle to 100% love ekao's artwork, though i think the form factor of their figures is really nice. the look of this cool warrior who's seen some damage intrigued me and i felt better about what was to come. i got the impression from her cloak that she's traveled, and i noticed her staff is the very same as ash's, but didn't have the time to ruminate on that fact.
i wonder if sharena bringing up ash's state at the end of book vi will mean anything for the future. i don't know if making miss self-sacrifice promise not to self-sacrifice is gonna go the way you think it will, sharena.... or perhaps this will be a moment of Growth or something where ash leans on her friends instead of pushing herself over her limits. some arcs are so dirt simple even i cannot divine them.
sharena mentions having heard about a warrior busting up other askrs from alfonse and anna; will they be joining us later? and how do we know about that....!? do we have regular contact with parallel askrs? this has Implications. it is certain that the annas are taking advantage of it in some way.
skipping ahead for a moment, as i hadn't much impression of our new foe until i got to look at her unit profile on the final map-- she's lost her memory. she's voiced by the same voice actress as ash. she has ash's staff. it came to me in a flash, and with some amount of relief, that this is ash. there is no other daughter...!! right away i start looking at her with a book iii lens, of an older ash from a messed up alternate world.
now let's backtrack with that theory in mind: melíai asks where askr is. not "lord" askr, just askr, and this is what causes sharena and ash a little confusion about what she's referring to.... ash herself would never drop such an honorific, and sharena naturally uses it as well. we can guess that melíai might have picked up lord askr's name from someone who owes him no such respect. there's a small table of potential sources of this information-- people who know of lord askr as more than a legend but wouldn't deign him with the honorific-- but i think it depends on who's alive in melíai's original world. no.1 elm coper is not going to Not make this reach; i think it's decent sense that if they're going to show us an older, battered ash, there might be a matching elm soon to follow. of course they could also just make it such that the name "askr" is all melíai remembers and prune the idea of another party's involvement entirely. which i'd not be very happy about. on account of lost elm stonks. but i digress
two very characterizing bits for melíai are:
1. melíai's reaction when sharena introduces herself as princess. she jumped on this instantly-- "if you're a princess, that means you know everything, right!?" kind of a cute leap of logic, like her understanding of the world is from a fairytale book. it seemed like her energy spiked as soon as her objective was in sight; she's desperate to get to lord askr and to have her questions answered since she doesn't know shit rn.
2. melíai's voiceline on defeat. "who... am i?" she doesn't even know that much!!! how she got to hear of lord askr and not her own identity is a mystery indeed. the circumstance of her memory loss is probably going to be a central component of the plot until someone else can come beat some clarity into us. that the question of her identity are her fading words tells me this is what's most important to her.
as for why melíai is looking for lord askr, one can assume the lord askr of her own world has perished, otherwise i don't know why she couldn't find him there. it's also curious why this seems to be the first time she's meeting a princess sharena. had she been so unlucky in all the previous askrs that she never managed to run into anyone who knows of "askr" as lord askr...? i suppose with no memory she wouldn't even know where to look for royalty.... at any rate, i assume all she knows at the moment is that lord askr has the answer to who she is.
the english translation gives her a bit of an attitude that doesn't exist in japanese. jp melíai sounds more desperate or even fearful, and is expressing it through aggression, like a wounded feral cat. i want to take her in and put her on some blankets until she calms down a bit 😔🫶
melíai's japanese name is メリアエ (meriae). i assume the romanization changing "ae" to "ai" was to make it more likely to be pronounced as "eye" rather than "ay". i think that's as good as it gets for emulating the japanese アエ here. i pettily wish they didn't do the accented í because now i have to be Correct about it all the time and it's a pain to type that alt code.
i only researched briefly, but i think her namesake comes from meliae, nymphs of the ash tree in greek mythology. but that'd be pretty weird since feh uses norse mythology (if there are exceptions, i am unaware of them). more to learn on this front; maybe an elm with a different name could help point me in the right direction.
i really wonder where things are going.... will melíai ever regain her memories....!? what would happen to her personality then....!? much to consider.... and i want my elm. you can't leave him one of two survivors of book vi, go out of your way to write a forging bonds story to confirm he lived, and then NOT involve him in the follow-up series. i'm scared what if i don't like what they do to him. i already have mixed feelings about ekao's design for ash. who are they giving elm to. こわいよ
written 2025-07-08