#edelgard My Beloved

#edelgard my beloved

As requested by @cobra-diamond. I hope this makes you happy.

If you know me, then you probably know that I have a habit of talking about problematic characters like Azula. You know, the ones who have to have an inordinate amount of hatred attached to them that boggles the mind. It's just Azula is one of the most notorious of this...I guess you can say club.

The thing is...she's not the only one out there.

Spoilers for Fire Emblem: Three Houses below.

As Requested By @cobra-diamond. I Hope This Makes You Happy.

This is Edelgard von Hresvelg. Crown Princess to the Adrestrian Empire. Leader of the Black Eagles House in Garreg Mach. And quite possibly the most controversial character in the entire Fire Emblem franchise. She's been called a lot of things over the years. A fascist. A tyrant. The old "worse than Hitler" comparison. Needless to say, she's had it rough.

And to be fair, there is a reason for that. Traditionally, she's the "villain" of the story. She's the face of the enemy faction, the one you encounter the most if you don't side with her, and she ends up the final boss on the most traditional of the Fire Emblem routes. Her design is crimson red with devil horns, and she turns into a literal monster at the end of one of her routes. So by all accounts, she's the bad guy.

Except...she isn't. Not really. Let's back up a bit.

Three Houses takes place on the continent of Fodlan, which is broken up into three distinctive factions. We have the Adrestrian Empire that Edelgard is from who used to rule all of Fodlan. We have the Leicester Alliance which is ruled by a class of nobles who are only loosely united. And then we have Faerghus, a proud people with armies of knights and ruled by a king. Above them all are the Knights of Seiros who basically run things in Fodlan, keeping stability and maintaining the balance of power between all three factions from their monastery of Garreg Mach. Here, noble children from all across the continent are enrolled to learn combat and how to be a faithful servant of the Church and its Archbishop, Rhea.

Fodlan also has a strict caste system dictated by Crests. Think of them as bloodlines that grant users special abilities and the power to wield divine weapons. Those who inherit Crests are practically seen as chosen by the Goddess and enforce her will on the earth and are on top. Everyone else essentially gets trampled on, with families doing pretty underhanded things and constantly squabbling in order to make sure their family has Crests.

Enter a mysterious faction lead by their enigmatic leader, the Flame Emperor. For most of the game's first half, they serve as the ultimate bad guy. They're the face of Those Who Slither In The Dark, (TWSITD), they're the ones who hired the mercenaries who attempted to kill the student heads at the beginning of the game, and their identity is one of the driving questions at the start.

Turns out...the Flame Emperor is actually Edelgard.

Before now, Edelgard had been one of the class leaders and one of your students should you choose to teach the Black Eagles. She's...not exactly the most open person, but she's also dutiful and dedicated to succeeding her elderly father, the Emperor of Adrestria. So it comes off as a shock to many that she's revealed to effectively be the bad guy for the first half of the game. An indeed, there are people in-universe who genuinely want her head and blame her for absolutely everything that TWSITD pulled.

The thing is though...Edelgard's position within TWSITD is less of leadership and more of a weapon. You remember those Crests I mentioned earlier? Well it turns out, Edelgard actually possesses TWO which is unnatural in Fodlan. The reason for that is...well, it was the result of torturous experiments that left her in a disgusting prison and was forced to watch the rest of her siblings die. Leaving her the sole survivor. And going back to my Azula comparison, she too was conditioned to effectively serve TWSITD to bring down the Church and tear Fodlan apart.

AKA: she was set up in-universe to be the villain.

The thing is though at the end of the day...she ultimately isn't.

Her trauma isn't brushed away. It's treated with as much respect as it deserves. And she's not treated as some monster either since all of her traits established before the reveal are still present after the timeskip where the war starts if you decide to defend her from being executed by Archbishop Rhea. Mainly, she cares a lot about her allies and forces. Even giving them an out of what is certain to be a bloody path she embarks on.

And it IS a bloody path. Edelgard's ultimate goal is to dismantle the Church which seems villainous...until you realize that the Church was responsible for the oppressive Crest system that resulted in her experimentation and a ton of backstabbing and suffering in Fodlan. As bad as TWSITD are, they wouldn't have gotten as far if the Knights of Seiros practically didn't create every opportunity for them to cause chaos and destruction. She doesn't even like TWSITD too much, and only allies with them cause they're the lesser evil in the grand scheme of things, and she needs their support to stand a chance against the dominant Church. And she already HAS plans to bring them down the moment the war is over. That seen of her in the of the routes where she turns into a monster? That's her choosing to become a monster when her back is to the wall and her last ditch effort to secure a better future for Fodlan.

What's more, she actually shows more clemency and mercy to her enemies than her rivals. Imperial troops are said to be more accommodating to citizens and captured soldiers than Faerghus who have been known to torture their captives. Edelgard is willing to show mercy and is perfectly willing to let Rhea stand down, showing the same mercy that her enemies don't since Rhea was willing to execute heretics over their rebellious attitudes (practically justifying the war). And the less said about Dimitri, the King of Faerghus, the better...

So while Edelgard is coded as a villain...she doesn't really act too villainous. She shows regret over her actions. She isn't as brutal as a lot of people make her out to be. Hell, her ending where she wins the war is arguably the best for Fodlan since the oppressive Crest system is dismantled with the only resistance coming from nobles who their claims to power are challenged. Not to mention she IS willing to let territories like Brigid peacefully secede and is going to step down from her position as Emperor once things are stabilized and she finds a successor.

Sadly like Azula, because she's seen as the villain in-universe a LOT of people think she's some power-hungry monster. Even when a closer examination of her actions and character show that it is NOT the case. Which...honestly makes her special to me and a lot of people. She's the kind of character who would be demonized elsewhere, but is given a chance to tell her side of the story and NOT be the monster everyone makes her out to be. And ultimately if you play your cards right, she does get that happy ending denied to so many characters like her.

It makes it all the sweeter that after so many years of being conditioned to be the villain, presenting herself as the villain, Edelgard gets recognized as the hero and person she actually is.

How Astronomers Time Travel

Let’s add another item to your travel bucket list: the early universe! You don’t need the type of time machine you see in sci-fi movies, and you don’t have to worry about getting trapped in the past. You don’t even need to leave the comfort of your home! All you need is a powerful space-based telescope.

But let’s start small and work our way up to the farthest reaches of space. We’ll explain how it all works along the way.

This animation shows a small, blue planet Earth at the left of the frame and an even smaller white dot representing the Moon at the right. The background is black. A beam of light travels back and forth between them. The graphic is labeled “Earth and Moon to scale, Speed of light in real-time, surface-to-surface in 1.255 seconds, average distance 384,400 km.” Credit: James O'Donoghue, used with permission

This animation illustrates how fast light travels between Earth and the Moon. The farther light has to travel, the more noticeable its speed limit becomes.

The speed of light is superfast, but it isn’t infinite. It travels at about 186,000 miles (300 million meters) per second. That means that it takes time for the light from any object to reach our eyes. The farther it is, the more time it takes.

You can see nearby things basically in real time because the light travel time isn’t long enough to make a difference. Even if an object is 100 miles (161 kilometers) away, it takes just 0.0005 seconds for light to travel that far. But on astronomical scales, the effects become noticeable.

The Sun and planets are lined up along the center of the frame with distances shown to scale. The title is “The Solar System: with real-time speed of light.” Earth is labeled 1 AU, 8 minutes 17 seconds; Jupiter is 5.2 AU, 43 minutes 17 seconds; Saturn is 9.6 AU, 1 hour 20 minutes; Uranus is 19.2 AU, 2 hours 40 minutes; and Neptune is 30 AU, 4 hours 10 minutes. The bottom of the graphic says, “1 AU (astronomical unit) = 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers.” Credit: James O'Donoghue, used with permission

This infographic shows how long it takes light to travel to different planets in our solar system.

Within our solar system, light’s speed limit means it can take a while to communicate back and forth between spacecraft and ground stations on Earth. We see the Moon, Sun, and planets as they were slightly in the past, but it's not usually far enough back to be scientifically interesting.

As we peer farther out into our galaxy, we use light-years to talk about distances. Smaller units like miles or kilometers would be too overwhelming and we’d lose a sense of their meaning. One light-year – the distance light travels in a year – is nearly 6 trillion miles (9.5 trillion kilometers). And that’s just a tiny baby step into the cosmos.

The Sun’s closest neighboring star, Proxima Centauri, is 4.2 light-years away. That means we see it as it was about four years ago. Betelgeuse, a more distant (and more volatile) stellar neighbor, is around 700 light-years away. Because of light’s lag time, astronomers don’t know for sure whether this supergiant star is still there! It may have already blasted itself apart in a supernova explosion – but it probably has another 10,000 years or more to go.

$An undulating, translucent star-forming region in the Carina Nebula, hued in ambers and blues. Foreground stars with diffraction spikes can be seen, as can a speckling of background points of light through the cloudy nebula. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and STScI$

What looks much like craggy mountains on a moonlit evening is actually the edge of a nearby, young, star-forming region NGC 3324 in the Carina Nebula. Captured in infrared light by the Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) on NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, this image reveals previously obscured areas of star birth.

The Carina Nebula clocks in at 7,500 light-years away, which means the light we receive from it today began its journey about 3,000 years before the pyramids of Giza in Egypt were built! Many new stars there have undoubtedly been born by now, but their light may not reach Earth for thousands of years.

Glowing spiral arms are twisted around like a cosmic cinnamon roll. A bright yellow oval is diagonal in the center of the frame, and sprays of stars extend outward from it like tentacles. Pink, white, and blue stars speckle the spiral arms and dusty lanes lie in between. The glowing arms are streaked with smaller clumps of dust. Credit: NASA and Nick Risinger

An artist’s concept of our Milky Way galaxy, with rough locations for the Sun and Carina nebula marked.

If we zoom way out, you can see that 7,500 light-years away is still pretty much within our neighborhood. Let’s look further back in time…

$Spiral galaxy NGC 5643 with a bright, barred center surrounded by an orange-y glow. Vaguely purplish swirling arms extend outward from the center and appear somewhat mottled as streams of dust block white and blue stars in the arms here and there. A few stars are each surrounded by many sharp diffraction spikes. Credit: ESA/Hubble and NASA, A. Riess et al.; acknowledgement: Mahdi Zamani$

This stunning image by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy NGC 5643. Looking this good isn’t easy; 30 different exposures, for a total of nine hours of observation time, together with Hubble’s high resolution and clarity, were needed to produce an image of such exquisite detail and beauty.

Peering outside our Milky Way galaxy transports us much further into the past. The Andromeda galaxy, our nearest large galactic neighbor, is about 2.5 million light-years away. And that’s still pretty close, as far as the universe goes. The image above shows the spiral galaxy NGC 5643, which is about 60 million light-years away! That means we see it as it was about 60 million years ago.

As telescopes look deeper into the universe, they capture snapshots in time from different cosmic eras. Astronomers can stitch those snapshots together to unravel things like galaxy evolution. The closest ones are more mature; we see them nearly as they truly are in the present day because their light doesn’t have to travel as far to reach us. We can’t rewind those galaxies (or our own), but we can get clues about how they likely developed. Looking at galaxies that are farther and farther away means seeing these star cities in ever earlier stages of development.

The farthest galaxies we can see are both old and young. They’re billions of years old now, and the light we receive from them is ancient since it took so long to traverse the cosmos. But since their light was emitted when the galaxies were young, it gives us a view of their infancy.

The animation begins with a tiny dot of purplish light which quickly explodes, with a flash of light blossoming out to cover the whole frame. The light subsides and the screen shows galaxies of smudgy or spiral shapes racing outward from the center of the frame. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

This animation is an artist’s concept of the big bang, with representations of the early universe and its expansion.

Comparing how fast objects at different distances are moving away opened up the biggest mystery in modern astronomy: cosmic acceleration. The universe was already expanding as a result of the big bang, but astronomers expected it to slow down over time. Instead, it’s speeding up!

The universe’s expansion makes it tricky to talk about the distances of the farthest objects. We often use lookback time, which is the amount of time it took for an object’s light to reach us. That’s simpler than using a literal distance, because an object that was 10 billion light-years away when it emitted the light we received from it would actually be more than 16 billion light-years away right now, due to the expansion of space. We can even see objects that are presently over 30 billion light-years from Earth, even though the universe is only about 14 billion years old.

$Hundreds of red, yellow, white, and blue galaxies are sprinkled across a black background, appearing as small, brightly colored smudges. The tiniest galaxies appear as mere dots, while larger ones are disk-shaped. One blue star with six diffraction spikes shines in the lower-left corner. Credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, and M. Zamani (ESA/Webb). Science: B. Robertson (UCSC), S. Tacchella (Cambridge), E. Curtis-Lake (Hertfordshire), S. Carniani (Scuola Normale Superiore), and the JADES Collaboration$

This James Webb Space Telescope image shines with the light from galaxies that are more than 13.4 billion years old, dating back to less than 400 million years after the big bang.

Our James Webb Space Telescope has helped us time travel back more than 13.4 billion years, to when the universe was less than 400 million years old. When our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches in a few years, astronomers will pair its vast view of space with Webb’s zooming capabilities to study the early universe in better ways than ever before. And don’t worry – these telescopes will make plenty of pit stops along the way at other exciting cosmic destinations across space and time.

Learn more about the exciting science Roman will investigate on X and Facebook.

Make sure to follow us on Tumblr for your regular dose of space!

MCSM Season 2, but

Fred kills Xara and imprisons Romeo.

Fred wanted to make a perfect nation, one without troubles and sadness, only happiness and innocence. People should be obeying, clueless and feel joy.

Instead of Sunshine Institute it's a Moonlight Plains. Everyone is free to move around as much as they want as long as it's inside of plains.

No one is allowed to carry weapons, no fights, no sad faces. Smiling, smiling, smiling.

Everything he says — is true and they should obey.

Remember how Lukas called Soren's woolworld a "Happy land"? Well, it is a happy land.

Instead of trying to make Jesse his champion, Fred will try to make another "happy land", maybe even more perfect than the first one. He'll try to reason, saying how letting people decide everything for themselves is too dangerous for them, so they need a Leader, someone who'll tell them what to do and how to live.

And who will be a better leader, than The Hero himself?

But as soon as Jesse refuses, Fred laughs, saying it wasn't a question. He'll send Jesse under the bedrock, to Moonlight Plains in a special zone, where they "fix" those, who is lost. Meanwhile Fred will turn into Jesse, slowly turning people from Beacontown into brainless zombies who can't even decide what food they should have.

Beacontown becoms a closed place and the gang is worried, trying to reach out for "Jesse". As soon as Petra becomes too annoying, Fred sends her to the Plains as well.

There she meets Jesse and.. Vos, who is alive. They were planning the escape together. Vos, Sammy, Jack and Nurm were sent to the Plains a long time ago, but Jack and Sammy are both on a lower floors since they were "too aggresive, meanwhile Nurm was sent to work as a villager should.

Adventurer says their group got here even before the Admins Fight, so he knows for sure Romeo is their only chance to take Fred down. It's useless to try and ask for help people in Moonlight Plaids, since thye're too brainwashed, but there are small groups in whatever was left from Xara's and Romeo's towns, who Fred still didn't captured.

Plan is simple: get on lower floors, find Jack and Sammy, get out of this place, find Romeo with the help of other groups. Easy and smooth, considering no one is uses weapons here.

But unlike Romeo's physical challenges, this place is a psychological horror.

Will they escape without loosing their sanity? And just how longer Beacontown and others will be able to hold back from turning into brainless happy zombies?

83 notes View Post

echo-aria

1 year ago

#just like me frfr

Not me watching the eclipse and thinking “Wow so this is what it’s like to be bedrocked over-”

52 notes View Post

echo-aria

10 months ago

Kanarui content please🙏🙏

shoves my sorta-rarepairs onto you guys.

emusaki. i just think theyre neat. emu always gives saki free tickets to wxs shows and both tsukasa and emu are like “WOOOOOO SAKIIIII!!!!!!” when she always shows up

mizuankana. girlboss x girlboss x wet cat. an is like “omg we should do (physical activity)” and mizuki is like “omg yess!!” and kanade is just “😨” /silly

lot of rui pairs coming up sowwy they call me mod rui for a reason

harurui. i dont really have a reason i just think theyd be cute. haruka slowly develops the :3 face as a default and everyone is like “what the hell”

ruian. “she asked for no pickles” <- an speaking for rui. an is so girlboss and rui is so meow meow. an thinks he’s chaos but loves them for it

i have my reasons for kanarui, mafurui, ruiena, and mizurui. polyniigo + the :3 tbh

46 notes View Post

echo-aria

1 year ago

hi everyone, this is a gofundme my friend's dad made for an orphanage in Gaza. Please donate or just share if you can't

gofundme.com

Help the Gaza City Orphanage., organized by Talat Ali

Assalamulaikum & Hello. I'm Talat & have worked as a charity NGO for over 25 years in pov… Talat Ali needs your support for Help the Ga

254 notes View Post

echo-aria

1 year ago

I want Kanade and Rui to meet! i feel like Kanade would be the first and only person who could reasonably hold a conversation with Rui when he goes technobabble.