Author’s Note: This post began as a series of comments a while back. Seeing as the Rhea-Edelgard comparison has proven a central issue of discussion for the past weeks, I figured it was worth cleaning up this comment and making a full post out of it.

Rhea is an awful tyrant by the year 1180, but there are some important considerations to make regarding that. When I wrote about empathy and orchid children with regard to Edelgard, there is a very real possibility that the same once applied to Rhea. This post is an application of many of those same principles. I believe Rhea is very much the sort of person that Edelgard would have become had her circumstances been different. They begin in similar circumstances, of course, both being sole survivors of massacres, producing survivor’s guilt, PTSD, and all that. However, there are some significant differences that complicate our comparisons between the two. These differences may well suffice to explain the difference between Rhea and El’s outcomes:

• Rhea struggles with race conflict that is almost nonexistent for El. El’s captors belong to the same ethnicity, political class, nation, race, everything, as her. Even when Edelgard deals with people of other ethnicities and class, she has no special experience to put them at odds (I’d like to think she would handle these issues well even if she did, but that’s a big IF). Despite all this, at her young age, she is already wary of ‘children of the goddess,’ though I don’t believe her wariness could be classified as bigotry. By contrast, race issues are at the fore for Rhea’s suffering. She was the victim of a racial massacre. She has felt it necessary to completely hide her racial identity (and, along with it, her true self) for centuries at least (I assume Wilhelm knew, but his story is too sparse to know why their relationship was special and if such a thing happened again. Jeralt knew Rhea was more than human, but I don’t know how deep that knowledge goes). The differences between a dragon’s umwelt and a human’s are significant (I intend to work on this idea in a later post). And she has little experience that would moderate those racial tensions. To make it even worse, Rhea also faces the threat of racial extinction. Not only is her race attacked, those attacks have been so successful to drive them to the brink of annihilation. This, I anticipate, evokes a special, existential fear. And, as messed up as the attempts to reincarnate Sothis are, they represent possibly the only option for Rhea to prevent her people’s total extinction.
• More speculative, since the timeline is so uncertain for this portion of Fodlan history, but Rhea may have been very immature, even more than Edelgard, when the Red Canyon happened. She is a direct child of Sothis and her experience of grief is from an infantile perspective. Based on the slower maturation of dragons, Sothis’ sleep and subsequent death may have deprived Rhea of motherly affection very early in her development. If this is the case, she is not only left without a mother, which is bad enough in general, she is left without a mother to emotionally and physically nurture her, teach her virtue, and so on. Rhea partially absorbed Sothis’ vision of coexistence with humans, but her understanding is about as sophisticated as it would be if she only had access to that vision as a child. The big question here is when Rhea lost Sothis in substance. For the time after the 1st war with the Agarthans, Sothis was devoting a lot of energy to healing the scars of war, so even in peacetime Rhea wouldn’t have gotten to see as much of her mother as a child needs. If Rhea was born before the war, Sothis’ duties may well have kept them largely separated. Her experience of grief makes it feel like she’s trapped as a child. She doesn’t mourn her mother like an adult would. There’s too much dependency. Even teens have enough independence that their grief is unlikely to manifest this way. But that is something about trauma: it preserves the original emotional world as it was when the trauma occurred. Even though she can be mature, cunning, intelligent, and all that, when it comes to her mother, she still feels like a child (feel as in experience feeling, not feel as in how she appears to us). [Note 1]
• Rhea did not have someone do for her what Byleth did for Edelgard. If she ever did, they died long before she did. Wilhelm is the only human on record who we can reasonably believe had an emotionally intimate relationship with her, and that’s not even certain. [Note 2] And, given the difference of lifespans, Rhea has far less incentive to connect to humans. And, well, there aren’t many dragons running around to fill that role, and those we know already have a relationship with Rhea that preempts such.
• Rhea is socially awkward and relies on decorum to communicate in a normal-seeming manner (to hide her isolation, present a fixed and plausible persona to others, and bridge the racial divide). She has little ability to communicate her emotional needs, because her need for security necessitates cutting herself off from others (Edelgard exhibits this same behavior, but the dangers of exposing herself lack the racial and historical risk that Rhea faces). Very like Edelgard, Rhea does not feel she can show weakness, ever. However, she has no outlet for this. Consider the following advice request she puts in: “I am more than capable of protecting myself from ruffians, but those around me tend to worry, and so I am often denied the pleasure of a private stroll.” She is dissatisfied with any response besides “You’re too important, so I’m afraid it can’t be helped.” She yearns to connect with people, to relax, and the like, as all leaders do, and as El does, but she has a deeply internalized sense of obligation and decorum (decorum also being almost a nonissue for El).
• The most important is longevity: Edelgard is human, Rhea is a dragon. All these issues don’t play out over months, years, or decades: we’re dealing with centuries. Any negative tendency in Rhea’s character, any deficiency in her environment, has had centuries to work themselves on her and cement themselves in her psyche. It is well known that it is easier for things to fall apart than to put them back together. We humans can kinda keep things together sometimes for 100 years, but the probability of making a serious moral lapse across centuries is much greater. And any traumatic failure or unresolved sin, instead of weighing Rhea down for 50, 80, years, does so for 800 years, which is a terrifying thought. Rhea has been without companionship and moral/emotional support for centuries. I cannot fathom how terrible a situation that is. And as if this were not enough, she may well have tried to do things better before (find a sense of belonging, try to find someone she could trust with her (racial + other) secrets, cooperate with humans, be forgiving), and been burned enough in the attempts that she gave up somewhere along the line.

In particular, Rhea, even in 1180 I believe, could set things right, but the conditions that induced her tyranny remain unchanged [Note 3]. Perhaps Seteth and Flayn could have moderated her, given more time, but things were already at a boiling point on the human side and, unfortunately, they both lack the force of character to undo a millennium of dysfunction.

We really do not know what Rhea was like in her youth. She may have been an orchid child, but she may well have not; her circumstances are sufficient to break many a psyche. She does not seem to be an empath now, but she could have been one once. She has had a lot of time to change and, given a millennium, I doubt any part of her personality would be immune to change.

Because we don’t know her starting point, we do not know whether her contemporary tyranny is more a consequence of suffering or an expression of choice. Or rather, how much each factor is responsible, because they both are. We do not know who Edelgard would be if her experience were closer to Rhea’s.

I did not write this to say that Rhea and Edelgard have no comparison. Rather, I want to delimit exactly what the issues with comparison are. Rhea and Edelgard share a lot and I believe that must be appreciated. But these confounding factors also must limit any conclusion we make regarding their relationship. I’ve focused largely on the ethical implications of these factors, but I don’t doubt that other significant implications exist.

Further, I do not write this to justify who Rhea has become, but because she represents a threat we each face: given the right circumstances, the necessary duress, I doubt any of us would not become monsters. I contemplate how gangs take kidnapped youths and subject them to mixes of drugs and torture, then force the victim themselves to torture or murder in order to break the spirit. How child soldiers are often forced to kill their own families. And the El and Rhea comparison reminds me of how perilous the escape from torture and trauma is. I want Rhea to be happy, but without some gratuitous time travel, it’s pretty hard to reach her. And that’s not necessarily her fault. And, given a thousand years, it’s hard to say Edelgard wouldn’t have ended up similarly miserable, similarly cruel. Not that Rhea’s cruelty should be viewed as a sole consequence of her circumstances. Rather, we need someone outside of ourselves to ground us, to support us, to raise us up, to keep us true to ourselves. Because, of ourselves, I doubt any of us have the strength to truly endure the hurricane of time forever.

Notes

[Note 1] I received some light pushback on the claim that the Zanado massacre was race-driven. Before getting into the justification, I would like to note that I am worried by some comments I’ve seen suggesting that the Agarthan’s actions here are reasonable, or that Nemesis was genuinely heroic. For the reasons that follow, it was racial. But even if it was political, the slaughter of children is unforgivable. Beyond that, the very precept is wrong. The Agarthan justification, mirrored in comments, is disturbingly similar to the anti-Semitic conspiracy, which I refuse to describe on account of its odious nature (and, if my memory does not fail me, one commenter even invoked this similarity while justifying Nemesis’ actions). I do not mean to characterize anyone as an anti-Semite, but the nature itself of this argument has left me unsettled. Yes, Nabateans had a great deal of power over human society. Yes, benevolence does not justify a program of racial supremacy. But we do not know that such a program existed, let alone that Nabateans were active participants in human society. Fidel Castro would blame imperialism for literally anything and, while the US truly has a disturbing role in Cuban history, he would use the same scapegoat to cover his own failures and evils. (Without diving too much into the political, I would point to the widespread scapegoating of immigrants and refugees as a modern and historic example, a practice which I am avidly opposed to and disgusted by.) The point is, cultural, political, and racial scapegoating is a common political ploy, regardless of whether there is any factual basis. And even where culpability does exist, it is exaggerated. And even then, it does not ever justify genocide. Nemesis and TWSITD display the tyrannical dispositions of strongmen. I believe we are wiser to assume they used the tactics of strongmen than give them the benefit of the doubt here.

Now, to the facts.

It is a racial dispute because the Nabateans were slaughtered as a race. There was no consideration of innocence, no sparing of children, no ideology that would make Zanado anything but race-based killing. The Agarthans hate dragons regardless of whether the dragon is personally responsible for the conditions they complained of. The process of slaughter was extreme and disgusting, demonstrated by a quote from the Dream Interview:

They granted humans the technology to make powerful weapons from the corpses of the citizens of Nabatea, or so was their plan that they enacted, to which they went forward with this plan using the human, Nemesis. As a result, what would happen to humans who gained power… they would want even more power, and find a dragon much stronger to beat in order to collect materials forcefully, in order to make even more powerful weapons… and so that was the cycle that was born. And that was the birth of Fodlan’s Ten Elites.

The slaughter specifically moved from the weak to the strong, for the sake of technology, not any political reason.

And regardless of whether anti-Nabatean sentiment was fair based on political circumstances of which we know little, and that from deeply biased individuals, that’s not going to mean very much to a firsthand witness of the slaughter of her entire race and civilization, innocent and guilty alike. Whenever genocide occurs, whatever political considerations may exist simultaneously are barely relevant in defining the quality of genocide. And, for all Rhea did, she never attempted to eradicate humans like the Agarthans tried to do to her.

[Note 2] We know that Rhea conferred the Crest of Seiros to Wilhelm for some reason. They had a wide-ranging alliance. While this gift may be nothing but the sort of thing that happened with Jeralt, it is a remarkable and rare event. Alas, we are left with pure speculation as to the true nature of Wilhelm and Rhea’s relationship.

[Note 3] I love stories about people realizing how awful they’ve become and fighting themselves and the world to atone so Rhea facing humans as equals and telling the public the truth because she chose to, not because she needed to, is my dream story. This would, I believe, have been the key to a golden route. I don’t think a golden route has to be a perfect, everyone-is-maximally-happy ending. We could have made meaningful choices about what the world should look like in the end, who we trusted to rule Fodlan more, or how specific issues should be handled. Heck, we coulda just had to sacrifice one of the lords if we wanna do it the easy way. But yeah, it could have been beautiful… q-q

[Final Note] I am posting at 4:10 am my time, so I apologize for any mistakes I make and will attempt to address them after some proper sleep. My hope is that such errors are minimal since around 80% of this is copypasted. I hope this reading has been worthwhile for you and may you have a wonderful, blessed day.

[Originally for r/edelgard]