this page will pay host to various medium and longform writings, such as comparisons between japanese and english text, trivia, analyses, and so on.
currently, i'm writing an impressions/analysis of the askr's kin story series as it releases. since this is the only article at present, i'm just throwing it in its entirety below; this page will see a restructuring once i have anything more.
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
it was my incredible mistake not to review and anticipate when ancillary characters like melíai get released, and so i was caught unawares and with my mythic elm rerun savings at threat of being reallocated. fortunately, i was able to get her to +1 before spark, as well as some nice luck on the other focus heroes along the way (two machyua despite sniping green...). while i love ash dearly, melíai is technically a different person, and so i don't feel particularly obliged or motivated to pursue a +10. not that i'm fond of building save armors anyway.
i thought it kind of silly that the "melíai is ash" thing was revealed in her meet the heroes page the day before it was properly revealed in the ending itself, and such anticlimactic thunder-stealing also dampened the blow of what i specifically asked not to happen: melíai's pursuit of lord askr is simply a Feeling and a name from what little remained of her memory. tch. i'm becoming more nervous that elm may go completely uninvolved after all...
i feel it has been mentioned somewhere prior, but i was surprised and jokingly embittered to learn that all of the other askran worlds that melíai traveled through were peaceful. why just us!? or rather, i believe the tally of heavily assaulted askrs extends to our askr, líf and thrasir's askr, and melíai's askr. only ours remains intact...
it's really cute how melíai seems to have a soft spot for the idea of family. she wants to see her father...! one of her castle quotes in japanese has her trying out different forms of address; "tou-san... otou-san... otou-sama... papa... w-what are you looking at!?" so cute....
i find it interesting that in the pt. 1 ending, melíai's meet the heroes page, and one of her status screen quotes, it's pointed out that she chose her name herself. seems significant. where could she have known such language from, being that it isn't norse.... mysterious indeed.
written 2025-08-13
an askr so destroyed even the castle does not remain...!? ash is has twice now decided that whatever happened here is directly connected to melíai's ejection from her original world and memory loss. which is a fine assumption, but it feels like she's doing a lot of Trust Me I Can Sense It With My Power. perhaps she is more capable than we thought...
vanitas has surprised me again on the matter of name language. now we're in latin. what is up with this alternate world...?? i'm also slightly annoyed because vanitas is like.... futility and the inevitability of death. which are things we kinda went over in previous tt+ stories. i'm not sure what i'd put as the evil third to opening and closing either.
there are a few signs possibly pointing at vanitas being embla or related to embla, though. ash directly hints at it by comparing the feeling of vanitas's power to lord askr, on the level of a god. in english, ash refers to vanitas as "she", which is actually not specified in the japanese text but is a reasonable assumption (and i assume the translator gets this info ahead of time). vanitas uses "watashi", the same as embla, although in hiragana rather than kanji. characters in feh are to my knowledge typically quite strict about first person pronoun as a Rule, but i've seen embla drift between hiragana and kanji for other words (such as 殺す / ころす, to kill. vanitas used the former). so if vanitas is an otherworld embla, her shortspoken and drifting speech makes me think she is in a degraded or more base form.
my concern is that vanitas is now taking up the second and final new character slot in the tt+ story. delusion of desperation: vanitas remains an unseen force. she puppets otherworld elm to be our enemy. that way we get "threat that unites askr/embla parties" while also sticking within the character/alt quota of the tt+ story. and i get my elm . please. otherworld elm like melíai would be so cool.
it's neat to see sharena getting to be present without her brother or commander soaking up importance, although she's mostly spent her time being the first responder to shocking events by going "huh!?" and "aaaaaah!!!!". it lets ash take the lead after her extreme sidelining in the book vi main story, so that's nice i guess.
so it seems lord askr is actually alive in this world if vanitas seeks to kill him. that's honestly a bit surprising.... i wonder if he'll look just as he did in our world. but surely he'll be in some poorly state, seeing as the kingdom of askr is in ruins, and he wouldn't just allow that to come to pass, would he....!? mysteries.
i get the feeling we'll meet this world's lord askr briefly before he kicks the bucket again. melíai doesn't seem like she's going to get a perfect happy end, but rather find partial resolution during that brief reunion and then be forced to find the rest of her own way afterward. a melíai who must protect her land of askr in lord askr's stead.... where have i heard this before.... though melíai will have a ton of restoration work to do with probably not a lot of hands to help out.
i'm not sure where the ash alt is going to happen. it feels like the potential for growth is all on melíai. but perhaps there's something the "ash" of this world Must Do, but because of melíai's lost memory, she doesn't know how, and the task falls to our ash instead? so dying lord askr 2 grants her a power-up or something. that's my guess for the moment.
i hope vanitas is cool if we get to see her. i may have seen a spoilered post about vanitas on the subreddit titled "hooters Þjazi". Þjazi has her hair up roughly similar to letizia, so that's brought on a whole other set of theories as to vanitas's identity.... or maybe that image really was just hooters Þjazi. i'd love letizia to be involved somehow, but my hopes aren't high with regards to her very busy jp va, likely the same reason we never got an alt for her (still waiting...). i'll just hope whatever the design ends up being that i like it.
much to be uncertain of.... i previously threw spaghetti around and one of them stuck. may prescience have struck me once more. let's throw out the worst case for the sake of it: there is no elm at all, ours or otherworld. ash and melíai both get powered-up alts. and feh hates me forever more.
written 2025-08-16
VANITAS SOUNDS LIKE VERONICA. i can't believe i named just about everyone but her. i even said "related to embla".... the only mismatch is in that first person pronoun; veronica uses atashi (hiragana) and thrasir uses watashi (kanji). so vanitas is still unique in using watashi (hiragana). but we're in an otherworld where "ash" can be tough and brutish, so surely an otherworld veronica can use わたし as a treat. i'd vaguely thought of veronica in the sense of being puppeted by embla (i even checked when it happened in book vi...) but i totally forgot she was kinda genuinely all "kill askr grrr" back in the old days of book i. when i went to review, the manner of speech was nearly one to one, particularly the use of ellipses in japanese. in my defense it's been literally 8 real time years.
i'm squinting a bit at the japanese where vanitas is saying "i will kill askr...". the jp says アスクは殺す... i think it'd be more normal to say アスクを殺す ? i'm not sure what the は is doing, if it's just a way to express the same thing with a particular nuance, or if it's actually meaning something different. i think it's weird that vanitas said "askr is no more" yet also "i must kill askr". though it's true we don't know which askr she's talking about in any of these instances. i'm thinking..... the は must be to imply "askr" as in the land and people with a blood/power connection to askr (aka sharena/ash/melíai). english tl might have fucked up here by explicitly saying "i shall destroy him", implying lord askr specifically instead. woof. my trust in the en tl lately has been eroded, so i'm sticking with the possibilities provided by the japanese vagueries. i think it might be significant that we had the same mixup occur when we first met melíai— we should keep our mind open when "askr" hasn't been explicitly identified as The Land or The Guy.
it was somewhat relieving that we made it to lord askr's realm to look for him so quickly. alas, otou-sama is not there.... i feel like if he were dead, we would have found evidence of this already and the shape of the problem would be a little different. ash seems to have a picture of things in her mind, that something happened to this askr (place) as a whole that resulted in melíai being sent to another world.... the sense i am getting is that the lord askr of this world could see something big and insurmountable was happening, so he ejected his ash himself in order to seek help from other worlds, but circumstances resulted in her losing her memory. this lord askr may be trapped or hidden in some way, having placed his faith in his ash to find the solution.... that's my working theory. i guess i have a few fanfic ideas if i'm wrong.
vanitas is the big mystery to me. i suppose she very well could be this world's veronica, but that puts me at a deadend for predictions, because i have no idea what they'll do at the emblian empire if princess veronica just isn't there. i unfortunately was spoiled while consulting the fe wiki for something entirely unrelated; i saw a closeup of the new ash alt's face in the "recent pages" thumbnail, so i know she gets her powerup in pt.3, though i don't know the nature of it. do they find lord askr in the emblian empire...?? i might be making too many assumptions about the nature of the powerup; in the past i think it was usually granted by a higher power (thus why i keep going to lord askr) but i suppose it could be reached by other means, given that it'll likely be a new unit type with a different basis of narrative acquisition. maybe it has to do with utilizing melíai. that'd make the most sense for highlighting what's "signature" about the askrans (crossing into and fostering bonds with other worlds). plus i think it would be a little lame for ash to inherit a power from a lord askr that isn't her lord askr....
many ways for this to go.... i'm still holding out for elm. they're going to embla. elm is in embla. presumably. i'm starting to think embla might be in a state similar to askr.... in which case otherworld elm may have been ejected— or not, if we take my theory above— lady embla would close elm in with her, if anything! so he could be there trying to manage the situation against whatever vanitas is, assuming she's a key force behind whatever's happening. and then we team up with him. and he also gets a powerup. Right. because askr and embla uniting against a tertiary foe is just the destiny of feh and book vi, is it not!?!? please. please. i don't want to have to design it myself. but i fucking will if they don't give me this. i cannot be denied my dream twice in one year (jeralt outfit cyl byleth drawn by nishiki areku will live on in my imagination....). writing this all a bit last second so i will find my fate tomorrow, along with a cute new ash. man i hope she's not armored.
written 2025-09-04