Where the Goddess Dwells
Faith and Interpretation in Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Considering how ubiquitous religion is in human society, it’s not surprising that religions frequently appear in video games. Fictional religions contribute to world-building, often offering a creative way to approach sensitive themes. An artistic representation of a world religion can ground a story or provide personal and cultural insight in a narrative. While many games use these elements to great effect, most don’t require players engage with religion the way practitioners would. A religion can look real without feeling real. By involving the player in the ambiguity of a faith practice, Fire Emblem: Three Houses explores the complexities of belief through the game’s central authority—The Church of Seiros.
Garreg Mach Monastery
It’s easy to see where Three Houses is taking much of its inspiration from. Monasteries and monks evoke medieval Christianity in Western Europe, in much the way that the factional conflicts of the game evoke the political conflicts of European monarchies. On the continent of Fódlan there are three branches of the Church of Seiros—the Central Church, the Western Church, and the Eastern Church—that operate with some measure of autonomy. The most influential of the three is the Central Church at the Garreg Mach monastery where the player spends most of the game. There Lady Rhea acts as the head of the church in a role comparable to that of the Pope in Rome. Instead of a Christian reference, though, her name is a Greek allusion to Rhea, sister-queen of the Titan Cronus, mother of Zeus. When Cronus attempts to stave off rebellion by eating their own children, it is Rhea who tricks him into eating a stone, allowing Zeus to live and later defeat the Titans. These references grant a verisimilitude to the Church of Seiros, but a mythic usage of religious material for world-building doesn’t necessarily reflect how it feels to practice a religion.
Though light on any robust theology—relying instead on its visual correspondence to the Catholic Church—the church in Fire Emblem: Three Houses is a system that needs interpretation by its characters, with a multi-faceted particularity in its world reminiscent of religion in our own. The characters of the game express different levels of belief in their religious institutions, and many question the relationship between belief and action as the conflicts of their world subsume their lives. By forcing these ideas into conflict with each other, the various endings of the game present distinct ways to restructure what was at first a medieval faith for our modern world.
The One True Faith(s)
Some of the students at the monastery are devout believers. Mercedes is usually found in the cathedral praying. Many of her support conversations explore how faith helped comfort her during her difficult upbringing. She still shows an openness to develop ideas of faith in her conversations with Dedue, a fellow student from the country of Duscur. Religion in Duscur, Dedue explains, includes a pantheon of gods in a polytheistic system. Initially Mercedes is not off put by this idea, though later she is surprised to hear Dedue praying to the goddess of Fódlan. She remarks, perhaps skeptically, “So, the goddess is part of a pantheon... I guess that’s one way to interpret it.”
Others around Garreg Mach openly share their unbelief. Cyril, another foreigner in Fódlan, is basically the custodian of the monastery. Hailing from Almyra to the east, he was taken in by Rhea during conflicts between his birth nation and the Leicester Alliance. Because of this, he has devoted his life to serve Rhea and protect her. In a support conversation with the player, the game prompts you to ask Cyril if he is a believer. His answer? No. Rhea told him not to worry about it if he doesn’t show an interest. He cares for Rhea because she helped him, and he sees her helping other people. His concern is for the material impact the church has, rather than its theology, making him a member of the church without professing its beliefs. Religions and their adherents have argued about this very distinction over the years; which matters more, what we believe or what we do? Such views also differ from stronger anti-theist claims that religion itself is an evil, actively causing harm to society, a view expressed by one significant house leader.
“Have you ever wondered if the only way to create a truly free world is to dispense with the goddess and the Crests?”
Throughout the game, these subtleties are heightened by a narrative revealing the church’s intra-denominational conflicts, or conflicts between members of the same faith denomination. By exploring conflicts within a tradition Three Houses isn’t just asking whether the faith is true, but which version of this faith is the best for the world. Religion in media is often presented as an object defined by explicit truth claims; this inherently flattens the diversity of religious expression and belief within any faith system into one entity or symbol to engage. While that makes it easier for that object to be part of a conflict (ie. those who believe versus those who do not), what if the conflict is within the object itself? An intra-denominational conflict shifts the emphasis from an objective presentation of the faith to the subjective experience of it, from what one believes towards how one believes it.
When studying religious texts, a word used for this is “exegesis,” or the critical interpretation of a sacred text. While religious institutions try to define the faith, giving rules and requirements to be a member, followers in new contexts and cultures inevitably reinterpret religious ideas. Exegesis, at its best, is an attempt to understand the guiding principles of an interpretation of the text. Which parts matter most? How do we reconcile conflicts within the text?
“Granted, it is not stated explicitly in the texts, but it is easy enough to read between the lines and get to the underlying truth.”
Two students, Claude and Annette, humorously demonstrate this in their support conversations. At first, Claude overhears Annette singing a silly song that she made up while gardening: “Living in a land that’s dark and blinded by the frigid cold, Creeping through the loneliness for ages untold, In your heart you’re desperate for the sweet embrace of light, Pushing through and crawling with all of your might, Creepy creepy creepity creep…” The song reminds him of rituals from Almyra, and he returns once he has deciphered the “deep meaning” the lyrics contain:
Those words represent the cry of a poor soul who died in anguish [...] A land that's dark and frigidly cold. That could only mean the underworld. In my search for truth, I read up on the old rituals of the eastern regions of Faerghus. Those who died with regret are thought to end up in an underworld of sorts. Somewhere cold. Somewhere dark. Somewhere creepy. To escape from their bitter limbo, they dig their way up through the earth, trying to find the surface, or the light in other words. And so they creep about endlessly in the cold dirt of the underworld, clinging to their hopeless desire. Creepity creep, Annette. Creepity creep.
Annette says his interpretation is all wrong. She meant the song to be happy, telling the story of the seeds she was watering, slowly creeping up from the ground to bloom. The text of the song can support both wildly divergent readings. In this case, Annette acted as the institution, the source of authority on the text, while Claude was the individual that brought a new set of assumptions to the text. Thankfully the stakes here were low, and no blood need be shed.
“Pointing a sword at the Holy Church of Seiros is akin to pointing a sword at the goddess herself.”
When an interpretation threatens the power of a religious institution, things quickly turn ugly. One of the game’s early missions sends your students to help put down a religiously motivated rebellion in the Kingdom of Faerghus. Lord Lonato has harbored resentment against the authority of the Central Church ever since Rhea executed his son Christophe for participating in the Duscur Rebellion. In actuality, Christophe was sentenced for plotting to assassinate Rhea, and the rebellion was used as a pretense to hide his true motivations from the public. While this may seem more overtly political than religious in nature (the two are often intertwined) one of the students at the monastery is Lord Lonato’s adopted son. Ashe thought his adoptive father was a devout man, and never knew about his seditious plans. Lonato’s relationship to the faith was perhaps authentic, but likely changed once he was confronted with the brutal application of its power to kill his son. Unfortunately for Lonato, the Church’s teachings allow for just this sort of situation; one of the precepts in the monastery library reads: “Dare not kill, harm, lie, or steal, unless such acts are committed by the will of the goddess.”
“As far as we can tell, both sides worship the same goddess and practice the same faith, but their differing relationship to authority is enough to sow the seeds of holy war.”
Later battles again bring you into conflict with the Western Church. During one mission, you arrive at a sacred shrine to find Western Church priests and soldiers opposing your approach. “You heretics, who defile our goddess!” they shout. Seteth, Rhea’s advisor, responds simply, “You are the heretics!” Battle ensues. As far as we can tell, both sides worship the same goddess and practice the same faith, but their differing relationship to authority is enough to sow the seeds of holy war. Importantly, the game does not make this comical as if to demonstrate the absurdities of religious disagreements, but rather shows empathy for those paying the price of these disagreements. These encounters seed doubts brought to fruition at the end of the game when the house leaders attempt to reimagine their world, and the church in the process.
Mechanics and Mystery
Acts of interpretation, varying levels of belief, and intra-denominational conflict all portray religion as a web of factors—belief, practice, community, identity. A religious tradition is never one singular entity, as different people respond to each element in different ways. Rachel Wagner directly compares this possibility space in religion to the concept of play in games:
Play, then, is how much freedom we have within a given rule-based system. Play shapes how much wiggle room we have—how much we can change a received text or tradition and not find ourselves isolated from our religious peers. We could think of theology as the most basic level of “play” with a sacred text as system; it is the “road” upon which we are “steering” our hermeneutical inquiry… To approach a religious text from the perspective of rules rather than from that of received authoritative tradition (and fixed literal text) allows interpretation to become more like gameplay than story-reading.
—Rachel Wagner, Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality, 32, 50.
“I wonder which is best, Professor… To cut away that which is unacceptable, or to find a way to accept it anyway…”
Lutheran theologian George Lindbeck outlined the possibilities of such a rules-based, or regulative, approach to religious doctrine (what he terms the “cultural-linguistic model”) from the perspective of religious practitioners. Note the plural use of “ways” as opposed to a singular way to be religious:
Religion cannot be pictured in the cognitivist… manner as primarily a matter of deliberately choosing to believe or follow explicitly known propositions or directives. Rather, to become religious—no less than to become culturally or linguistically competent—is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training. One learns how to feel, act, and think in conformity with a religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly articulated. The primary knowledge is not about the religion, nor that the religion teaches such and such, but rather how to be religious in such and such ways.
—George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine, 21.
“If that’s what you believe, it’s only because that’s what you’ve been led to believe.”
While Wagner’s argument could make it seem games are pre-disposed to complex religious portrayals, unfortunately the opposite is usually the case. Perhaps this is partly because of what Kevin Schut describes as a bias in video games “toward a mechanical, demystified representation of religion” (256). Digital games, Schut argues, are fixed structures of rules in code, which often translate into rigid presentations of religion at the expense of mystery:
[T]he connection between a battle of two units and a civilization’s faith points may be a bit convoluted, but it can, in the end, be precisely mapped. The connection between the rosary and the mass, on the other hand, is far less neat: it’s not that there’s no connection, but rather that there is a potentially limitless number of connections, and they don’t interact in a simple cause-and-effect manner. The rules of religion are more organic and less mechanical than the rules of a video game. In other words, religious guidelines and instructions are fully social: they allow for reinterpretation, they can be negotiated, and they allow for mystery and the unknowable.
—Kevin Schut, “They Kill Mystery: The Mechanistic Bias of Video Game Representations of Religion and Spirituality,” 260.
This results in game systems that instrumentalize religions, turning them into tools to be used for in-game benefits, such as magic systems with predictable inputs and outputs. To be clear, this describes much of Fire Emblem. Characters literally add points to level up their “Faith” skill, granting them access to more powerful magic that acts in discrete, quantifiable ways. That is what it means to practice religion in the gameplay.
“In a place alike to this place, you can imagine the goddess of Fódlan truly existing.”
Furthermore, one could extend elements of Schut’s argument to the justification of belief. Believers of any kind confront the question of why believe what they believe. We naturally prefer feeling certain about our beliefs over questioning them. This is why the pursuit of apologetics (systematically defending religious doctrines) has become a money-making, personality driven Christian industry that promises to equip believers with perfect arguments to fend off attacks on the ultimate truth. But if the goal is “to understand better belief and unbelief as lived conditions, not just as theories or sets of beliefs subscribed to” (Taylor 8), such attempts are misguided at best. If questions about spiritual truths are immaterial, they can’t be empirically answered by the material world. This doesn’t stop us from trying, and the result is increasingly frustrating debates between Ken Ham and Bill Nye or large-scale wooden boats that “prove” Noah’s flood is literal history.
“When game mechanics further intrumentalize these systems, the connection becomes clear: believe in this god and get epic powers to unleash upon your enemies.”
Video game religions don’t have this exact problem. In a digital world where magic exists and mythical creatures roam the land, a god exists just as clearly as anything else. There is hardly any contestation about that truth; the game merely presents it to you as another object in the digital world. When game mechanics further instrumentalize these systems, the connection becomes clear: believe in this god and get epic powers to unleash upon your enemies.
“If he's not careful, the goddess will send her saints to smite him. Not that I believe that…”
The goddess in Three Houses literally lives inside the mind of Byleth—the player character. Byleth meets her, Sothis, at the beginning of the game, though the player isn’t immediately aware of her true nature. Throughout the game, Sothis grants you the power to rewind time, her presence activates holy relics without their magic stones, and finally she fuses her consciousness with yours, turning you into her earthly avatar, which allows you to rip a hole in the very fabric of reality. Rhea, it turns out, is an ancient progenitor being in human form, the last child of the goddess, shepherding the church for centuries as she waited for the goddess to return. Using the Crest of Flames—a stone planted inside your body like with the Titans—Rhea turned you into a vessel for the goddess so that Sothis could again assume human form. The final battle of Part One ends with Rhea transforming into the Immaculate One, an ancient dragon, in response to the threat the Empire now poses to the church.
If any contemporary world religion could summon a literal dragon to prove the power of their god(s), the apologists would be out of a job. There is little question that the goddess and her power is in some virtual sense very, very real. Yet still, characters question, doubt, and challenge the church. If the story of Three Houses was most concerned with an instrumentalized religion, dragons and powers would be enough to convince the masses. But it isn’t, and they aren’t. In this story, the question isn’t about evidence, but interpretation.
Ultimately this results in somewhat competing factors in its exploration of religion. Fantasy elements like magic and dragons make for a fairly literalized religious system; mythic allusions and a visual correspondence to medieval traditions grant that system a believability and gravitas; incorporating the act of interpretation into the narrative allows the characters, and by extension the player, to challenge the legitimacy of that literalized system, narratively if less ludologically. This supports Schut’s broader argument that, while the mechanical nature of digital games manifests as a bias towards instrumentalized representations of faith, elements like narrative and emergent play can “de-mechanize” religion in games, allowing for “a greater variety of play and meaning-making than might be immediately apparent” (Schut 269). In that way, the Church of Seiros feels real, emulating a complexity that is at the core of every religious practice in our world.
A New Faith for a New World
After years of war, conflict has ravaged the continent, radically altering the institutions that had guided Fódlan’s development for hundreds of years. Each house leader—Claude, Edlegard, and Dimitri—confront both structural and personal reinterpretations of the faith as it relates to their driving ideologies.
When Rhea’s Immaculate form is revealed, Edelgard hardly accepts this as a sign of the goddess’ righteousness. To Edelgard, it is proof of her own righteous path—to kill the goddess. Rhea’s lies about herself and historical revisions as the head of the church demonstrate the church’s corruption. All of Edelgard’s trauma is a result of the power of the church. The pursuit of crests (magical bloodlines that may manifest in descendants) led to the experiments that killed all her siblings. She would use the power granted to her to destroy the church, the institution protecting this supposedly divine gift that has stratified the realm into noble and commoner.
“Those corrupt hypocrites cannot lead Fódlan to true peace. Their foul belief system must be torn asunder so that true wisdom may finally prevail!”
While she doesn’t yield in this pursuit, a conversation with professor Manuela reveals perspectives on faith that Edelgard had yet to fully consider. She always viewed reliance on the goddess as a weakness, yet Manuela used faith as a strength, a way to overcome hardships. This causes Edelgard to question what she’s truly fighting for:
I don’t want you to misunderstand and think I'm against everything the church represents. There's good there, buried in the corruption. Still I find it extremely difficult to step back and accept the good, overlooking all the rest. For the world to start anew, it's necessary for the nobility system and the Church of Seiros to both be completely crushed... [B]ut then I think about people like you who are devoted to the goddess. People who are unlike the others, who are willing to fight for themselves rather than leaving everything in the hands of a higher power. When I achieve my aim, I'll be crushing their emotional and spiritual support. Yet despite all that, you're still here. Still supporting me.
Is belief a passive quality, or an active one? Does faith require us to accept things as they are, or encourage us to fight for change? At the end of the game, if you side with Edelgard, you succeed in killing Rhea, allowing humanity to take the future of Fódlan into their own hands for perhaps the very first time.
That future is not inevitable, though. When Edelgard’s deception is revealed, the player has the choice to instead protect Rhea, support the church, and lead the fight against the Empire. Absent any direct connection to the Empire, Kingdom, or Alliance, success results in the establishment of the United Kingdom of Fódlan, a theocratic government operating out of Garrag Mach with the player character its first divine ruler. What would such a dramatic increase in religious authority mean for the faithful, or for those within its borders who resist its creeds? Rhea herself recognizes the need for change if you reach her highest support conversation (otherwise she dies after losing control of her Immaculate form, perhaps representing the shortcomings of institutional authority and rigid belief systems), but it isn’t clear what those changes would be and whether they would leave room for Fódlan’s diversity of religious expression.
“As all of you have committed a breach of faith, the archbishop will now pass judgment.”
Unlike the Empire, the Kingdom of Faerghus and the Church have always been close. When the Kingdom broke away from the Empire, it was the church that legitimated their claim, and in return, the first king Loog made the Church of Seiros the official state religion. On Dimitri’s path, the player and the Blue Lions must rescue Rhea from the Empire, but their story is more personal, dealing with loss, grief, revenge, and ultimately forgiveness. Everyone generally accepts the restoration of the church as a good end in itself, a net positive for society. Characters describe their individual journeys with religious language, such as disgraced knight Gilbert serving the church as penance for his failure to prevent the death of his king.
As Dimitri learns more about Edelgard and her ambitions, he realizes that his long-lost stepsister and her political allies were responsible for the Tragedy of Duscur and the loss of his family. Anger and a desire for revenge consume him; after war breaks out Dimitri is no longer the polished proper knight from the beginning of the game, but rather disheveled and scarred both without and within. While in this state, he is only found in the cathedral and refuses to converse or train during the weeks between missions. Killing is all he has to offer, his single act of devotion to the dead. When he finally accepts his responsibility for the welfare of those around him, he wonders if forgiveness is possible after all the atrocities he’s committed. To do this, he shifts his focus from the dead to the living in the rubble of the cathedral: “The only atonement I can offer [the dead] now is to take responsibility for this broken Kingdom that has been entrusted to me.”
“There are those who cannot live without their faith… and those who cannot go on once they have lost their reason for living.”
When Edelgard refuses to surrender, Dimitri kills her not for himself but for the realm. Recognizing the value of the church, he wants to make a world that allows for the meaning faith offers and use it to shape society in a way that helps others. But will this potential good outweigh the damages that the church has perpetrated in the world? What’s to prevent the church from again becoming a tool for the powerful at the expense of the weak?
Claude and the Golden Deer ostensibly support the church as they oppose Edelgard’s advance. After defeating her and rescuing Rhea, their attention turns towards Those Who Slither in the Dark, a powerful organization that has opposed the goddess since early in Fódlan’s history. Much of the political strife in the land has been caused by their secret manipulations, with their ultimate goal the resurrection of Nemesis, Seiros’ ancient foe. In order to secure peace, you and Claude face a resurrected Nemesis together, and prevail.
“Can we really draw a definitive line in the sand and say one group of people is all good, and another all bad?”
However, Claude’s vision of the future requires a transformed church, as he reveals to you well before that future is certain:
[M]aybe some god empathized with me and my dreams […] I don't mean the goddess of Fódlan. Though, I suppose it may be hard for you to grasp what I'm talking about. People all over the world have different ideas about who or what the gods are, right? Even in distant lands across the ocean or over the mountains. They have gods who see the world as a whole, who don't care about Fódlan's borders. Who don't meddle in our affairs. Who don't grant life or take it away [...] A god like that, that's the sort of god I think I could believe in [...] I think people should be free to believe in whatever gods they want. If a person believes in a god and that god becomes a support system to them, that's a good thing. That's what a god should be.
To the citizens of Fódlan, this is likely a startlingly new view of god in keeping with Claude’s goal of an interconnected, diverse world where differences don’t lead to fear. Is this perspective possible to sustain, or does belief by its very nature separate and exclude? In Rhea’s absence after the war, Seteth is the one who attempts to enact it. According to his epilogue card, “His encouragement of believers to respect those of other faiths helped the people of Fódlan to find common ground with others.”
“Religion as an ideology adapts itself easily to many ends. How else could it persist through all of our collective history and cultures?”
These questions about the relationship between faith and society are increasingly relevant in a world where the sitting American president stokes comparisons between himself and the Messiah, the vice president claims persecution by the “secular left” for his faith, and Democratic primary contenders for the presidential nomination openly refer to how their faith led them to progressive policy positions. Matters of faith permeate our society whether we profess to believe or not. Three Houses explores these ideas through the conflicting ideologies of its main characters and game paths, countering what Alister MacQuarrie describes as the “non-ideological hero”:
[T]he heroic rebel on screen is often very evasive about the principles behind their actions. In many cases, the rebel hero does not take up arms for any specific idea of a better world. Rather, the rebel hero most often turns to force because of personal injury. Even while engaging in political violence, they are non-ideological heroes.
“I weighed the victims of war against the victims of the world as it is now, and I chose the former.”
Edelgard, Dimitri, and Claude are open about the kind of world they hope to create, repeatedly acknowledging the violence necessary to create it. Any righteous fervor is constantly tempered by the costs of war, and no one character serves as the ultimate villain when the adversary in one path becomes the hero in the next. For some of the church’s faithful, religion is another tempering agent, prompting them to ask what is necessary in the pursuit of their goals and whether a worthy end justifies immoral actions. Others see the transgressions of the church as inherently disqualifying, necessitating a response of force. Still others, like those practitioners of the Western Church, are driven by their religious motivations to take up arms. The game does not present this as a villainous act when it has already sown doubt in the central authority those practitioners oppose. Religion as an ideology adapts itself easily to many ends. How else could it persist through all of our collective history and cultures?
If Children Cannot Forgive
Fire Emblem: Three Houses is hardly the first video game to use elements of historical religion in the development of its fiction, and more are certain to follow. What have games to gain by exploring religious themes in a world of rising “nones”? According to Rabia Gregory, we use historical religions not to explore the past, but our present: “Neomedieval religious systems and cosmologies invented for video games are not just replicas of historical religions; they reflect contemporary values, resonate with modern audiences, and guide players into and through gaming worlds” (Gregory 136).
“If children cannot forgive, it will not ever have an ending. Is that what you are wanting?”
The people of Fódlan are attempting to reckon with the long-simmering tensions within their borders. Inspired though they may have been by medieval history, these tensions—classism, racism, religious fundamentalism, multi-culturalism, trust in authority, the fallibility of social institutions—are all struggles in our world today. There is something immanently human about them and the religious impulse to understand them. If Three Houses accomplishes anything unique in this respect, it is to push the emphasis in its view of religion from the individual to the social, from what we think to what we do. By challenging literal, authoritative representations of faith through its divergent paths, the game encourages the player to confront a multiplicity of beliefs and experience their consequences in the world. As dark as those consequences can be, each potential ending ultimately underscores a current of earnest optimism pervading the game—that no matter the struggle, together we have the power to make the world better for everyone in it.
May we use it well.
Sources:
Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Intelligent Systems and Koei Tecmo. Nintendo, Switch, 2019. All screenshots by author.
Gregory, Rabia. “Citing the Medieval: Using Religion as World-Building Infrastructure in Fantasy MMORPGs.” Playing with Religion in Digital Games, edited by Heidi A. Campbell and Gregory Price Grieve. Indiana University Press, 2014, pp. 134-153.
Lindbeck, George. The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age. 25th Anniversary Edition. Westminster Press, 2009.
Schut, Kevin. “They Kill Mystery: The Mechanistic Bias of Video Game Representations of Religion and Spirituality.” Playing with Religion in Digital Games, edited by Heidi A. Campbell and Gregory Price Grieve. Indiana University Press, 2014, pp. 255-275.
Taylor, Charles. A Secular Age. Belknap Press, 2007.
Wagner, Rachel. Godwired: Religion, Ritual and Virtual Reality. Routledge, 2012.