general, light spoilers for FETH, nothing to do with Three Hopes tho

Outline

I. Intro

II. Dragons

III. Crest Beast

IV. Hegemon Husk

V. Closing Thoughts

I. Introduction and Framework: Umwelten

For a long time, I’ve wanted to write about one of my special interests[1] as it applies to Fire Emblem Three Houses: umwelten. It’ll take a moment to set up since there’s some specialized vocabulary and some background concepts necessary to understand the whole situation, but, at least to me, the groundwork is beyond fascinating.

An umwelt is a term coined by biologist Jakob von Uexküll.[2] It’s a curious little concept lying underneath much more famous theories from people like semioticians like Heidegger and Bakhtin. Strictly translated, it means “environment,” but what it really refers to is the world that an organism creates by interpreting the stimuli received by sensory organs.

It is important to understand umwelten because physically speaking, before your or my personality/mind/voluntary will can begin to act, physical factors limit what we perceive and alter how we interpret. We can only act on data if we perceive it. A bat can act on all sorts of data we cannot thanks to its sonar; a tick cannot see and cannot build its worldview on sight (but it can build an umwelt using heat signals based on a sensitivity far more delicate than ours). There could be any number of senses that humans are incapable of, with data we’ll never be able to perceive (think about all the things you physically sense, through sight and hearing and taste and touch and smell, that a plant, or a jellyfish, living beings all, have no concept of, and indeed, can never contemplate). And, of course, our senses are imperfect: vision’s fuzzy, finite, imprecise, sometimes we missee things, confuse one thing for something else, etc. And a lot of those errors we never detect (because, most of the time, they don’t matter). Just like we never realize when we are correctly filling in the gaps in our perception, because most of that happens before the data is even presented to our conscious perception.

Not only do our bodies determine what raw data we possess, but they also influence how we interpret that data. Chemical signals can dramatically alter how we interpret things, like how McDonalds never tastes better than when you’re hungry, how adrenaline allows you to perceive some things with incredible accuracy but fail to perceive other things entirely, and how trauma can increase sensitivity or awareness to negative stimuli. The sophistication of our brains allows us to do things like detect lines, perform physical predictions, and distinguish rhythms and colors when many species can’t do any of these things, even when they are perceiving the light or sound or other stimuli that contains the lines, music, and the like. (I am deeply saddened by this truth because my dog will never understand why wrapping his leash around a pole limits his movement.) To say nothing of how memory and past experience also affect your interpretive framework.

So your umwelt is the world as you construct it, based on all your sensory abilities, limitations, filters, biases, etc. Your umwelt changes whenever you interact with anything, as you add new information and forget old data. Parts of your umwelt include your innenwelt, that is, how you construct yourself within your umwelt. Because, while we do have special access to information about ourselves, we are still perceiving most parts of ourselves in some fashion. Whenever we engage in self-reflection as is necessary to create concepts like “Identity” or “Self-Image”, we do so purely by using perception on ourselves. And not just our own perception, but we necessarily rely a lot on our perception of others and how we perceive others perceive us. This brings us to the final bits of vocabulary (which I probably won’t use but it’s good to have :>). When you perceive someone else’s umwelt, that’s an umgebung (it deserves a different name because you aren’t accessing their umwelt, the umgebung is just the parts of their umwelt that you manage to perceive imperfectly). Then, a sociosphere is created by the interaction of two umwelten. A sociosphere requires communication via signs to bridge the umwelten (these signs being everything from raw sensory data to spoken language to tone to body movements, each full of their own impreciseness, imperfection, and ambiguity, for good and ill). The signing process, that is, all communications of meaning, is semiosis.

As a final example, take a moment to consider the soles of your feet, the walls around you, or the palms of your hand. Your feet are touching something, possibly fabric or grass or carpet or wood or tile. There’s a whole lot of sensory data of softness, texture, shape, temperature. When you think about walls, most of the time I just imagine them as flat, but that’s not true at all. When I see a brick wall, I know it’s made of bricks, but I don’t observe the individual bricks at all. And despite the phrase “know it like the back of your hand”, how much do you actually know or perceive of your hands? The little platelike structures that compose your skin, the creases on the joints, the veins under the surface, the pores, the precise contours and shapes of your hands?

If you choose to focus on one of these things, you’re suddenly filled with new data and your world, your umwelt, is enriched and detailed. When you’re not focusing on them, they simply do not exist at all within your umwelt, because you are not perceiving them. They exist within the welt, the physical, unperceived world, but they don’t exist in your umwelt. Attention is important to prevent us from being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data our senses provide, like the typically useless awareness of the taste of the inside of our mouth or the sensation of clothing against skin.

Between differences in sensory organs, chemical compositions, wills, and experiences, our perceptions are fundamentally different, not just from species to species but from individual to individual. You and I can never know what it’s like to be inside someone else’s head, not really, anyway. Empathy is somewhere between reasoned guesswork and outright projection.[3] The gulf between a person and a bat is not so severe as the distance between two people, but we never really know how close or how far we are experientially, linguistically, or physically. (This doesn’t mean empathy isn’t important or valuable, but it’s limited. See [1] for places where I talk about that in detail, but a discussion of the frailty of empathy and a subsequent reconstruction of empathetic action is well beyond the scope of this article.)

With the groundwork out of the way, let’s talk about three umwelten: that of dragons, that of crest beasts, and that of the Hegemon Husk. Note that this is speculative rather than concrete because this stuff is specific enough that you’d need authorial confirmation for it to have any authority. So, more questions and possibilities are raised than conclusions reached, but they’re fun questions and possibilities and you could do a lot exploring them in fanfiction and the like. (See [4] for stories that explicitly address stuff like this; it’s awesome.)

II. The Immaculate One and other Draconic Shapeshifters/Nabateans

A single creature with a composite umwelt, because it has two separate sets of sensory devices, united by a single mind interpreting the senses, but the inability to use both sets simultaneously. We can assume that dragons in human form have a sensory suite similar to humans in most respects.

Biologically, a dragon body takes much more energy than a human one, meaning it just doesn’t make sense to use unless it’s necessary. So what is it necessary for? I doubt dragon forms are dexterous enough for construction work, so that leaves hunting and fighting. This is reflected in Rhea’s nutty combat skills, from Hoarfrost to Miracle to Defiant Strength to Ancient Dragonskin. Draconic bodies are for fighting; human forms are for communication, living, crafting, i.e., all else. Social life.

This narrow purpose means that dragon bodies are likely to focus on certain types of sensory data, like hunger (because of how much energy a dragon body needs to maintain) and aggression (the body needs the mind to be on board with fighting when it is using this form). Dragons are probably more territorial or even conquering because they would need to be so in order to survive. Of course, they’re more than intelligent enough to resist these impulses, but it might be harder for them to resist these impulses in dragon form. A dragon form is probably better able to handle the peculiar cognitive burdens of combat, like intense stench, fear, loathing (both loathing others or the dreadful sensation of being loathed).

Note, though, that the Immaculate One’s mechanics suggest social cooperation might be physically built into the dragon form: the fact that Hoarfrost and Aurora Breath don’t damage allies and Sacred Power buffs allies means that the dragon form’s abilities are modified under the assumption that allies in combat are likely to be present. But these social components specifically may reflect Rhea’s own training, rather than innate physical qualities. While the dragon form likely elevates survival instincts, which are often antisocial, these social aspects repudiate the possibility that the dragon form is purely animal. (Crossing the streams, I note also that Nowi and Tiki can benefit from pair up while transformed too.)

In summary, a dragon’s umwelt may include much more threat information than a human one, with more stimuli being perceived as threatening. Survival information will also be elevated to sustain the body’s higher energy needs. Information irrelevant to the purpose of the dragon form is less likely to be incorporated into a dragon’s worldview as long as they are in dragon form.

How much that carries over to the human form is unclear. The mere existence of a dragon form might affect the human form’s senses as well, e.g., Rhea might get hungrier faster. There are probably ways for the body to communicate to the mind the need to shapeshift, attached to the processes of aggression (it could operate somewhat like adrenaline).

Other plausible differences between human and dragon forms include:

• better sight (the Immaculate One has a range of 5, for instance) (but perhaps they use magic as a sensory organ; the Immaculate One has white, round pupils, which wouldn’t work well at all).
• windsense: greater awareness of wind/wind currents thanks to wings.
• physical insensitivity: scales and scale-the scales may not have the same level of detailed touch information as skin, and the scale of draconic bodies means that they have to filter out more sensory information to not be overwhelmed.

Plausible differences between humans and dragons (regardless of form):

• cognitive capacity: this might differ between human and dragon forms, but also between human forms and genuine humans. Perhaps dragons have better pattern recognition or something.
• lots of instinctual interpretive filters. Dragons probably have different microbiomes, gut systems, and all that changing what they can eat, what they like to eat, etc. And from there, that changes what smells they like, what chemicals or flavors are associated with “good” and “bad”, etc. E.g., maybe fish are really good for dragons and Flayn’s fishxation is more than sentimental.
• Stamina & other physical abilities. Crests are innate to dragons. The fact that their human forms are combat-capable (and they don’t totally rely on dragon form for combat) means that even their human forms probably require more energy than humans and that combat in human form wasn’t uncommon. Otherwise, dragons would probably be quite physically frail.
• Age and perception of time: there’s naturally a lot of debate over how “fast” different people or species might perceive time and it’s a subject quite resistant to empirical study. But I’d say it’s pretty reasonable to say dragons, especially long-lived ones,
• Hibernation. Dragons can hibernate, but don’t have to. That makes you wonder what triggers hibernation, how they choose to do so, etc. Perhaps a dragon can just start overeating and that tells the body they’re about to hibernate.

The last note is dragon madness present throughout Fire Emblem lore. It wasn’t clear that dragon madness applies to the dragons of Fodlan until recently, when FEH had its forging bonds event that framed Fallen Rhea’s experience squarely within the domain of dragon madness. I actually started writing this before the Forging Bonds came out and I probably found the revelation a bit more exciting (in an academic sense) than most. What I’ve written here provides a purely biological explanation for dragon madness (as opposed to an ephemeral “dragons go crazy because old” that dragon madness has often been reduced to).[5]

As stated, it seems reasonable that the dragon form increases aggression, territorialness, decreases distress in combat, etc. The shift between this state and human state requires significant neuroplasticity, that is, the capacity for a brain to modify itself to adapt to different needs and circumstances. Neuroplasticity naturally decreases in humans with age and under high stress, i.e., the exact conditions that aggravate dragon madness. So, what dragon madness may represent is the gradual loss of the ability to revert and regulate the useful and productive cognitive qualities of dragon form. So dragons lose the ability to stop thinking and feeling as if they were constantly in combat and possibly in danger. In other words, the body approaches a state where it can’t exit its emergency mode.

Emergency mode, fight or flight, adrenaline-pumping, however you frame it, is incredibly taxing on mind and body. Focus and attention don’t work normally, there is a constant search for threats which involves a very specific type of detail-oriented perception (at the exclusion of other forms of perception and thinking), the heart, muscles, and the like work overtime, certain hormones and neurological subnetworks go wild, and so on. All very taxing, very tiring, very stressful. Plus, resources are devoted to survival-focused tasks at the expense of other functions, making it harder to perform normal, low-intensity tasks. That’s why it’s only used when necessary.[6] But without relief, the damage builds up from overworking the mind and body. As damage accumulates, the body and mind become less capable, and need to exert even more energy to function normally. And the victim is typically conscious of this decay, watching their capacities decline and losing their sense of control over their lives and actions. And, unless something interrupts the decay, it not only continues but accelerates. This is bad under any circumstances, but what is important about dragon madness is how it develops even in the absence of stress or trauma. Dragons are expected to experience this, no matter what they do, and despite their (assumedly) unlimited lifespans. Now, even in dragon madness, they are still people, but their umwelt is increasingly warped: they’re going to miss information that suggests things may be nonthreatening, they’ll miss details on all kinds of tasks, and they’ll be easier to provoke. The sort of information being missed also happens to be the sort that is often most helpful in mitigating stress and maintaining healthy worldviews and relationships. And, since this process does not seem to be strongly reversible,

III. Crest Beasts

The cognitive and perceptive state of crest beasts is probably quite similar to severe dragon madness, with some aggravating factors. First off, crest beasts are an imitation of dragons, what with how crests are ultimately draconic power. Crest beasts seem to undergo the same mental alterations as dragon shapeshifters, but where the negative effects are amplified. Humans are not meant to become crest beasts (meaningful insight, that one), and the dramatic shift in perception, emotional systems, and the like means that the human system is unprepared to experience the same things dragons experience during shapeshifting. For dragons, it’s built into them; for humans, it’s a radical, forceful, unnatural reconstruction of their being.

Some things to make it worse: First, the transformation itself is painful and intense pain is quite effective at blocking our perception of most stimuli. Recall how failing to perceive neutral or beneficial stimuli is one of the primary harms of dragon madness. Adding additional factors limiting perception means those harms will manifest more severely. Second, the human mind is not going to be ready to process information as it is presented to them by a crest beast’s body. Everything will look, smell, feel, taste, sound different. Some things will be too intense, other things will be conspicuously absent. This probably isn’t as severe or stressful or disorienting as, say, a person blind from birth receiving treatment to restore their sight as an adult, but that’s the sort of distress this is. Third, the process probably just causes straight brain damage. Nothing about it seems healthy. Fourth, crest beasts don’t have any of the moderating influences of natural selection or biology to make sure anything about them works properly.

So, crest beasts experience the worst parts of being a dragon, but all at once, with no biological safeguards or ameliorating factors. Checks out why they’d completely lose their sensibility in most cases or retain very little sense in the case of the most robust, like Maurice.

IV. Hegemon Husk

We know very little about the hegemon[7] husk, but it seems to be a recreation of nabateans using human material. I would put, biologically, the husk as a sort of midway point between crest beasts and nabateans. The blood reconstruction surgery Edelgard underwent with the double crest allowed her to become a shapeshifter and retain herself while transformed, much like a nabatean and quite unlike a crest beast. She is also able to reverse the transformation. I’ll also note that Fallen Edelgard, as depicted in FEH, is still very much in control of her faculties. She’s not mad, as the fallen characters often are.

The term husk does imply something is lost in the transformation.[8] If I had to guess at it, a lot of that applies to the physical level. Like the crest beast, the husk lacks all biological function and constraints. It is a purely artificial form, so questions like natural selection, adaptation, and fitness are off the table. I would assume the entire process is incredibly strenuous, if not ruinous, for Edelgard’s body. We can imagine that, as in the crest beast, the mental shifts are severe: as a human, Edelgard’s brain on the physical level is not naturally prepared for the change and subsequent increases in aggression. But as mentioned, she bears this well.

Indeed, the husk seems to exhibit everything about crest powers/shapeshifting more intensely than even nabateans. Consider the crest of flames weapon, with a whopping 27 range, as well as the ability to act twice. 27 range, even with a low hit-rate, implies a powerful perceptive ability (probably magical rather than purely physical, especially since her black irises and red pupils wouldn’t function very well as eyes).

This extremity of power, perhaps, is the best way to interpret the term hegemon as applied to the husk (even reading it as a husk of a hegemon is inaccurate, since Edelgard did not achieve hegemony in AM. Perhaps husk of a potential hegemon). Because, in the typical, political meaning of the hegemon, Edelgard isn’t a hegemon of anything at this point in AM. She does, however, represent the peak of physical might. The husk is at least on par with a nabatean, but also possesses twin crests. One last, but unevidenced possibility, is that Edelgard is manifesting only as a husk of her real power in that form. This type of highly specific, choice-and-context of language interpretation isn’t normally my speed, but given the lack of information about the husk, it at least gives us a bit more to talk about. Whatever the case, it’s odd that the only time the word hegemon is used in FETH is to describe Edelgard in husk form and in the much more context-appropriate title for Byleth in their Edelgard paired ending.

V. Closing Thoughts

Thanks for making it through. I hope at least part of the discussion was enjoyable. I’ll note that, while I haven’t relied too much on the vocabulary developed in the introduction, I think that discussion is still useful for foundational reasons, because it motivated this entire study, and it was underlying everything I wrote here. I did this for fun and hope it was fun for yall too.

An important limitation on the whole discussion: the study of umwelten and how our bodies and experiences color, limit, and define what we experience and how we construct the world is valuable. Both to better understand ourselves and others. It is not, however, grounds for vilifying or dehumanizing people by culture, experience, personality, or physical qualities. People and cultures have flaws, but in intelligent beings, our choices weigh much more than our physical differences (and I would say this would be just as true when comparing human and nonhuman characters). This is especially true when we intentionally observe, study, and accommodate these flaws in ourselves.[8]

Quickly, I want to discuss the nonphysical implications of the term husk. The other thing lost is that this is the only time that Edelgard genuinely accepts TWSITD’s influence over her body. It’s the culmination of the blood-reconstruction and the destruction of her family. It’s a last-ditch effort, after all her friends have been slain in previous battles and Edelgard is last person who can carry her vision forward. Edelgard’s final struggle in AM is a husk of what it was: even if she were victorious, TWSITD has expanded its control over her and the people she chose to fight alongside are gone. To drive it home, note how the hegemon husk has a skill called a Wilted Flower.[9]

This note is perhaps obvious, but if I were publishing this, there’s some stuff I’d fix up (like making sure to properly couch each statement as a potential interpretation rather than a how it is interpretation, but I’m not doing that much editing for free LOL). Took being unable to sleep as a good sign to finally finish this project/I’ve been sitting on this long enough that it just feels like it’s better to finish than keep holding onto it.

And most importantly, stay safe and take care yall. World’s crazy, but there’s a lot of good people out there and a lot of good you can do.

Footnotes

[1] If umwelten are something that interests you, I’ve written about it several times before but my favorite would be this: A Description of La Vida total. Pretty much anything on my site with the tag La Vida total is concerned with understanding others’ perception (and how, although it’s ultimately impossible, it’s a sacred and essential process).

[2] I think it’s tragic that there’s so much talk of semiotics, often without hitting on this core concept at the foundation of it all. Semiotics is essential for much of the good parts of postmodernism and especially understanding why modernist, enlightenment, and romantic thought were all kinda falling apart, i.e., why postmodernism became necessary. Alongside Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems and non-Euclidean geometry messing with mathematics, an understanding of umwelten makes some amount of postmodernism essential. And knowing this stuff helps navigate a lot of current issues and debates a little better because it inoculates you against some common intellectual traps.

[3] This didn’t fit in anywhere, but for your consideration: Sonder. As much as I love tangents, I don’t want to overdo it.

[4] If you like applying science and biology to fantastic species, I’d recommend Heterogenea Linguistica, Delicious in Dungeon, and, to a lesser extent, Land of the Lustrous. Heterogenea Linguistica focuses on how language would vary based on the physical capacities of fantasy races, while Delicious in Dungeon focuses on all kinds of ecosystems, interactions, sustainability, and all that. I’ve been loving them both. And Land of the Lustrous focuses a lot on the mind-body relationship in the context of gem-body people and how differences in body affect concepts like memory. Oh, and the anime Flip Flappers actually introduced me to the concept. Due to some development issues, like the loss of their head writer halfway through the run, the second half of the show is pretty shaky. But the first half especially is very clearly playing with and trying to understand the issues of umwelten.

[5] The explanation I favored most before (and it applies to any long-lived species) is that a longer life also means more opportunities for life-shattering trauma. This, of course, was an inadequate explanation for dragon madness, because people can and do recover from life-shattering trauma and dragon madness seems inevitable (although, who knows, maybe it’s not; there are so few dragons that humans are basing their understanding of dragon madness off of a handful of individuals, individuals they have a bad tendency of starting wars and genocides with).

[6] Several human mental conditions, like PTSD (and cPTSD even more), anxiety, and paranoia are possibly, a deregulation of the same process, that is, these diseases arise when the body feels like it is in danger constantly. My experience of cPTSD squares with this description of the condition, but as someone who is more an “involuntary expert” than an actual expert on the subject, I think it’s appropriate to emphasize that I don’t know that this is the precise mechanism for these diseases. It’s a plausible explanation and one I believe, but I am unaware of how rigorously the explanation has been assessed at the scientific level.

[7] Clearing up a misconception I’ve seen in the wild about the term hegemon, that it’s pejorative or negative or some such. Hegemony is a descriptive term, not a pejorative. Hegemony is often criticized because it’s dangerous, but hegemony of some form is typical (and possibly necessary) in any given societal arrangement. A functional government is always hegemon within its territory, for instance. Modern governance limits the danger of hegemony by breaking it up between competing groups, but these groups possess the hegemony of the state between them. There may exist other powers that compete or limit a hegemon, but a hegemon is dramatically more powerful than rivals. Rhea was hegemon: the dominant power in Fodlan, a single figure who stands at the top of Fodlan’s hierarchies (albeit a power in decline by all accounts, evidenced by the incomplete loss of influence in Adrestia and the weakened ability to invoke Fodlan’s armies for the Church’s purposes). Byleth inherits that title in most routes. Edelgard can be emphasized as a hegemon in Fodlan only insofar as she represents a new hegemonic structure, i.e., a hegemon besides the head of the Church of Seiros.

[8] I feel the need to mention this because people have used semiotics and observations about biology for several noxious philosophies. Racism, for one, especially since the theory was first developed in the middle of scientific racism’s peak. Or the argument that infants don’t deserve protection because they supposedly can’t express preferences (from Peter Singer, but also an idiotic claim on the facts).

[9] If anyone recalls what I wrote about Edelgard as an empath, part of that was that she seems a lot like what is described as an orchid child, i.e., a child who blooms with support but wilts without it (as opposed to more resilient children who have less extreme outcomes). Wilted flower checks out.