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This. This is why Kiran Fire Emblem has taken over my brain.

So some setup: as mentioned previously some time or another, I enjoy creatively tinkering with Fire Emblem Heroes’ writing. It’s a fun exercise getting to work with characters and plot beats I wouldn’t personally make. I think I’ve gotten significantly better at it too, in much the same way my art around this game has. I understand it more, I suppose.

As a result, this wonderful happy accident happened. I finally found the running theme of FEH’s characters (and thus its wider narrative as a whole).

They are all lonely.

The bad type of lonely. The dangerous kind. The one that can kill if you are not careful. And they are all infected with it, in one way or another. Alfonse and Veronica are our most blatant examples; their self isolating behaviors being obvious. Veronica spits on extended olive branches on principle based on who offers them and Alfonse was so traumatized by the last time he opened up that he now champions self isolation as being the most logical option. They are then confronted by Lif and Thasir, the natural conclusion to where that behavior will lead them. The personification of the loneliness that kills. Defeat them, or everything that matters will die.

It doesn’t quite get so blatant spelled out past that moment, but the idea never quite goes away. It’s the vice grip Hel has Eir under, what lifetimes of neglect threatens to do to Seiðr, what was passed down so many times in their family that it become truly genetic in Bruno and Letizia, and what our protagonists fight so hard to save Reginn from in the face of losing everything. And, oh, just the entirety of book 4. Super the thesis of book 4.

The only two characters not quite part of this dynamic is Kiran, who isn’t allowed to be a character in-game (pain), and Anna, who intelligence systems glosses over in the same way they did Sharena for a long time (more pain). Both of them have the capacity to expand this theme even further. It’s some of my favorite parts to explore when both drawing and writing for this game.

This overall discussion is what I believe to be the crux of Kiran’s loneliness that kills. The natural consequence of being isekaied is an extremely bad bout of culture shock. Not in a cutesy way either, like Kiran not understanding the phrasing of something or comedically missing the tone of a conversation without having the inherent context as everyone else. While that may be true, Kiran can take actions to fix that. No, it’s the reverse that’s the problem. Since Kiran is the foreigner here, there’s not always an effort to try to understand them in that way. And even if there is, no one has any real metric to fully understand. They are from a world so inconceivably alien to the people of Askr that their explanations can only go so far.

This leaves them isolated in a way they don’t have the words for and is not easy to fix. They just have to deal with this empty feeling. To get up and move on because there’s more important things to be worried about. Eventually, it all gets rather tiring to keep dealing with. They no longer bother to clarify what they mean when someone gets confused. Decide to remove it from their speech to avoid the issue all together. And while they’re there, some other stuff can go too. Fears, doubts, crippling homesickness, the empty feeling— no one needs to know that. Swallow it. All of it. Let the bile roll in their gut. It’s nauseating at first but over time— no. In the face of death? It barely requires forethought. And no one notices. Not until some goddess of nightmares finally rips the mask off and reveals just how good they got at pretending to be someone, anyone, else.

And man, that’s sad. It’s all sad, really! I try hard to not change any major plot beat in FEH, but Book 4’s climax would be the only major exception. This needs to have payoff. Everyone, even Freya, misjudges just how large Kiran’s loneliness has grown. How close it is to killing them. They are trapped in a downward spiral and rapidly approaching an absolute rock bottom. Not even Freya’s little fantasies can do anything at this point. But what does is Sharena and how she deals with her loneliness. She is the whole antithesis of the narrative full of loners. Unlike every other character, her loneliness drives her to inadvertently save people. To reach out and grab on with everything she has, in the most genuine unabashedly caring way. It is loud, it is unfiltered, it’s touchy, it’s annoying, it’s wonderful, and it doesn’t even work half the time but it doesn’t need to because when it does IT SAVES PEOPLE. Sharena saves people because she doesn’t want anyone to be alone.

AUGHHH THIS GAME. Kiran and Sharena Fire Emblem your friendship means so much to me. All of these characters need therapy so badly. Some trauma bonded found family vibes is just going to have to cut it for now.

What do u think Kiran is

How do u think the order sees kiran

*slowly sits up in my chair*

I think Kiran is a very normal person. This is someone you and I have met before. Be that from the other side of grocery store cashier, waiting in the same elevator, or walking by on a crosswalk. Kiran is a civilian from our world trying to roll with the punches of being warped somewhere completely alien. And you can see it in how they conduct themselves.

I always have a lot of fun writing Kiran’s dialogue because their casual modern speech almost feels like a dialect in comparison to the more formal fantasy tone everyone else speaks with. An “ain’t” will never exit Alfonse’s mouth, you know? And there’s a difference in “Do you have gold?” vs “You got gold?” To me, this gives Kiran an air of unfamiliarity to anyone they interact with. Let’s use Grima as an example, because it doesn’t sound like this grammatical change would make much of difference until Kiran has the audacity to hit Grima with a bro mid sentence. But that’s just how they talk. And as sweet and friendly as they are, there’s always moments like that to remind that no one has the cultural context to fully understand Kiran. Except for the audience, who can realize that Kiran let the customer service voice drop to talk to Grima like he’s an actual person.

And that’s just about how they talk! This view is only emphasized by every other thing about them! They’re a lovable goof, which is normal chill person behavior in the audience’s eyes but feels REALLY ODD to the characters of FE’s medieval fantasy war setting. There is this air of unknown about them that the more socially perceptive will pick up on and will try to come to a conclusion about. Example, I imagine Soren would interpret a lot of this as a dangerous and deeply annoying lack of intelligence from someone he has the displeasure of sharing a tactics table with. Or looping back to the Grima example, he would totally think Kiran has greedy ulterior motives behind that pleasant facade. It takes a lot of work for those types to realize that the discrepancy present isn’t really any of those things. But I also wouldn’t be too surprised if Kiran doesn’t try to directly prove any of those assumptions wrong unless they have to.

Why? Well now it’s time for the implications! Oh how we love the implications.

Because the Summoner is a different story. No one has any fucking clue what that is.

I can tell you what Kiran has pieced together so far. Summoning people from across time and space is apparently not easy. It’s not some school of magical study that some mage could pull off with enough time and research. Trust, Eitri tried. It’s a lot of complex moving parts. For example, the contracts. The contracts Kiran automatically binds their summoned to don’t even compare to the ones Veronica used in book 1. They are far more intense and infinitely harder to break. The only way out of them is if Kiran wills it so. Not even death is an option, because Kiran can come in for the revive. If they had to guess, it’s an older, more completed version of the art. Something lost to time. But no matter the case, Kiran has the ability to take full control of whoever they manage to summon. From a lowly farmer to the divine. And their power only grows.

In a similar vein, if there was any character to canonically see the hud, I think it would be Kiran. It’s genuinely part of their power set. I have previously described Kiran as the party mage until Veronica shows up to be the actual mage, but it would be way more accurate to call them a mystic/seer. They see the map, everyone’s stats, and is doing a fast amount of math to give the combat forecast. Then, upon processing all this information their enemies couldn’t dream of having at their disposal, Kiran can telepathically communicate any change in plans to anyone under contract. Kiran is not inherently some great tactician the moment they touch ground in Askr; they simply can do things no one else can. They’re learning the actual tactics part on the fly. This makes them simultaneously the largest ace up the Order’s sleeve and potentially its biggest liability. If they fall, it could cause a whole system cascade. By that same token, some of the biggest threats the Order has faced are the ones who do their research and rightfully target Kiran.

Now. Thinking critically about all that. That’s downright terrifying. A ridiculous amount of power has been dropped callously into Kiran’s lap and they have to work extremely hard to be moral with it. It’s terrifyingly easy not to be. It would actively take less effort to ‘take the reins’ as it were. But in order to be able to sleep at night ever again, they go the extra mile to not invalidate the will of their summoned. To take over like that. To make a colony of worker bees out of people. Because oh dear god they just summoned a child and the fact that they could easily force them to fight and die for them, only to be revived and do it all over again, is HAUNTING. No. No the Order has an in house orphanage now. This kid is getting adopted and cared for god damnit or Kiran might just pop a blood vessel. And sure that child is going to be a child and there will never be a world where they get along with everyone else, but that’s just going to need be a problem they address when they get there and not an excuse to use Hubris; the power set. Now replace the word child with everyone they ever summoned and you have the wider philosophy they apply to the entire Order.

They’re hyper aware of the power imbalance. They hate it with every bone in their body. They work really hard to correct it in whatever way they can.

So Kiran might not jump on the opportunity to correct those who think lesser of them. It’s… oddly comforting to know someone is keeping a critical eye on them. Holding them accountable. Especially since so much of the order just thinks of them as this quirky yet well meaning host. And, really, what can they even do about that? They have gone over the contract with every hero they summon and despite that they still choose to stay. So, what, do they try to inspire more mistrust? The problem with that they would have to actually do acts that intentionally inspire mistrust. And even if that was successful they can’t just waste the extra man power because every other month there’s some new divine asshole who wants them all dead. And if they fail that means they have to start their life from square one and god they can’t do that again so—

Just breathe Kiran.

It’s fine. You’re fine. Just breathe.

You have work to do.