CONTENT WARNING: suicide ideation, family abuse
Also spoilers for the Blue Lions route in Fire Emblem: Three Houses.
First things first: if you feel like there is no hope, here are some resources!
I have been thinking about how exactly I wanted to approach this subject because it is deeply personal to me.
I played Fire Emblem: Three Houses when it came out in July. My husband chose to play as Edelgard, so I decided to start my quest as Dimitri. As I played through the entire Blue Lions route, I realized that it was having a huge emotional impact on me, especially during the lategame as the game really began to deliver on its themes. There are a few themes of the route, but it is primarily about redemption and finding a reason to go on living, even through extreme trauma and loss.
In the first half of the story, Dimitri puts on a mask of politeness and composure to hide his emotional turmoil, but as the game goes on, we delve into his psyche and learn how he is really feeling. Dimitri does not want to be alive. He does not actively seek to end his own life, but it is clear that he does not consider his life worth living. We figure out a lot more of the pieces as the game goes on, but, beginning around the 40% mark, we start to see him unraveling.
“I’ve blurted out irresponsible things like that to my classmates. Promises that we'll see each other again and the like. I have no business making such promises for the future. There are certain things that I must accomplish, even if it means risking my life. I may not even have a future to promise to someone.” As we dig, we realize that he bears a great deal of guilt from the death of his loved ones, being the only survivor of a massacre. We learn that his goal in life is to exact revenge on the people who killed his family. Even though he is the crown prince of his country, he doesn’t really seem to care about becoming king, nor does he care about forming lasting relationships because he doesn’t think he will be alive to experience those things to their fullest. He lives only to find his parents’ killers.
I remember the first time I thought about taking my own life. I was around 13 years old. I did not have any one highly traumatic event happen to me, but most of my childhood was some degree of low-scale trauma. My father was an alcoholic who constantly verbally abused me, my mother, and my older brother. When my father’s behavior became too unbearable, I was sent to stay with my grandparents. Unfortunately, my grandmother (my father’s mother) was passive-aggressive, controlling, and manipulative. While my dad’s rage was visceral and easy to point at as a definitive cause of trauma, my grandmother’s constant, unending infliction of guilt was probably a bigger factor in my spiralling self-hatred and my desire to die.
My father began to use meth when I was around 10 years old. His behavior became even more wild, more erratic, and I was terrified of him. A little later, probably when I was around 12-13, our house began to smell of ammonia (as a result of him using it to cook meth). It was too scary for me to comprehend. I was afraid that if I stayed in my family’s house that I would be arrested (this probably isn’t true, but I might have been thrown in foster care), so I made the decision to live with my grandparents. Every time I heard a police siren for the next decade, I was afraid that they were coming for my family.
Guilt is something that radically changed my life for the worse. During my time living with my grandmother, I constantly overanalyzed everything that I said to her and all of the things that I did, even when she was not around. I hid things from my grandmother: not big things, but things like eating in secret or going to the movies when I said I was going to church. But I felt so awful about those little white lies. As time went on, I found myself lying to her more and more as I tried to live the life that I wanted to live, while pretending to her that I was living the way she wanted me to live. Because I knew if I had told her the truth, she would endlessly complain about my decisions and make me feel like a horrible person simply for having experiences that most people my age would have.
It destroyed me. I used to fantasize about jumping in front of cars, jumping off of bridges, stabbing myself with a knife. I could go on and on, honestly. My memories from high school are barely existent, and where they exist at all, they are patchy and uneven. I eventually resolved to escape from my family, to get away from the grasp of my addict father and abusive grandmother. She demanded that I call her 4 times a week when I moved to university, and of course I complied. If I did not call her for whatever reason one of those times, she would cry and tell me how horrible I was for not calling my “sweet grandmother” often enough. She would put down my looks, my weight, my hobbies, and later my taste in men. She wanted me to be her vision of a proper young lady, something I had neither the ability nor the desire to be. And her expectations were an unbearable weight in my pursuit of happiness.
For me, watching Dimitri following the game’s five year timeskip was really painful. After experiencing more betrayal and death of people close to him, he goes into this mode of self-hatred and thirst for revenge… a thirst that gives him a small reason to live in his life that has spiralled out of his control. He spends his days enacting vigilante justice on those who he considers abhorrent; the soldiers of his enemy, the emperor who he believes has taken his family’s life, and bandits, who live their lives preying on innocent people. Nothing else in the world matters to him, and if he dies in this pursuit of… revenge? that is fine. that is a feature, not a bug. Obviously as a fictional character who lives in a world filled with violence, this response is… a response that someone could have. It’s not a healthy or moral response, but it is a response.
I reflect on how I would have responded to someone murdering the people I loved the most during the time I did not value my own life. When your life is of no value to you, the calculus of your actions is different than when you have self-preservation in mind. I consider myself to be ethical and moral, but would I have taken up arms against someone who hurt my family in that emotional state? That question makes me deeply uncomfortable, but I think the answer is yes.
I found my own control by a) lying to my grandmother about everything, b) staying up until 4 am playing video games or reading and skipping class, and c) binge eating. (Pro-tip: Eating ice cream and candy every day, in addition to its lack of health benefits, is also really bad for your teeth. But good thing you didn’t care about your teeth when you didn’t want to be alive!) I had some semblance of a plan to escape my family by being reasonably successful in school but I didn’t really have a coherent plan for the future because I didn’t know if I would be around for it.
Dimitri ends up taking himself, and those who care for him, on his journey of maniacal revenge and bloodlust. He objectively has things to live for and people in his life who care about him, but he doesn’t see them. He chooses to go on his path of self-destruction instead, and he cares little if others are dragged into hell with him. This reminds me not so much of myself, since most of my self-destructive behavior was more personal, but when I was older and had more perspective, I realized that I was not the only person in my family who desired to no longer be alive.
My father. My father had been broken by that woman too. Thankfully, I had chosen to go down a path that I could (and did) recover from, but my father used drugs and alcohol to deal with his pain. He never wanted to quit because he didn’t care about being alive. It hurt me so deeply when I was younger, but I now understand that we were the same. That we both shared that lack of value for our own life. He used to tell me that the only thing he enjoyed about life is taking a shit. It’s not that my father wanted to hurt us, much like Dimitri did not want to hurt his friends, but both of their self-destructive thoughts left them little time to consider the feelings of others.
My elder brother was, and still is, the same way. One particularly scary evening, when my brother was drunk (my brother is an addict as well), he expressed the desire to murder my grandmother and then to take his own life. He was her caretaker for eight years after my grandfather’s death, and she treated my brother the same way she had treated me when I lived with her: as a detestable wretch who was unworthy of love. I talked him down from that plan that evening, but I can’t help but wonder if my brother still wants to be dead, even now.
So….
What brings you back from the brink?
Dimitri’s recovery starts with the return of his best friend Dedue, who he had believed dead for five years. This scene is the first time since his descent into darkness where we hear something resembling joy in Dimitri’s voice. (Incidentally, Dimitri’s voice work is excellent and really lends credibility to the character. This is a great example of how, not just the line, but the way it is delivered, matters. The line is simply “Dedue….” but he has this boyish joy in his voice as he says it, so unlike anything we have heard from him in a long time.) This event alone doesn’t fully dissuade him from his path of self-destruction, but it is the first crack in the armor.
After sending his army into what is essentially a death trap, a young woman tries to murder him in retaliation for his wretched behavior and his mentor ends up getting killed to protect him. This event is the turning point in Dimitri’s story. Another character reasons with him, convincing him that a death spiral of self-destruction is no way to live, and that, ultimately, it will hurt those he loves. At this point, he is not yet convinced that he is worthy of life, but he is at least convinced that he needs to re-evaluate his life decisions and try to find a reason to live. He decides to fight to save his country instead of fighting purely to satisfy his lust for revenge. He makes the decision to live again rather than walking around like a living corpse.
As for me, after I finished university, I ended up going to graduate school, moving to a new and big city because of a man I met online. I hated graduate school, and as per previous discussion, I did not plan anything very well; I just showed up and hoped for the best, because that was the only way I really knew how to live. I was stressed out by moving to a big city (expensive and loud) and had some issues with living with another human being, period. The intensity of the fantasies about jumping off buildings increased during that time, and… in one particularly dark moment while I was doing field work in the Pacific Ocean, I considered drowning myself by jumping off the ship. That was probably the closest I came to actually following through. I slept very little and worried constantly. I felt guilty about moving away from home (you can probably guess what person stoked those feelings) and, again, binge eating was always a big part of my solution to fill the void. At the beginning of our relationship, I hid a lot of things from my boyfriend, mostly related to mental health / binge eating. I was terrified that I would be dumped if he knew that I was such a broken person.
There was one day when I sat in the lab working and I started sobbing. One of my coworkers, this man in his early 30’s, asked me how I was doing. We ended up talking for a long time, and during that conversation, I admitted to him that I had thought of jumping off the building that day, although I didn’t say that the thoughts were almost daily. He walked me over to the university’s counselling suite and set up everything for me. It was the turning point in my life.
It honestly didn’t take much for me to no longer want to die, although I was still suffering from depression for a while afterwards. I know some people criticize Dimitri for ‘turning from his madness too quickly’, but I found that, once you are convinced that your death is not preferable to your life, your behavior changes quite quickly. For me, it was simple things. The counsellor helped me sign up for medical insurance (which I was supposed to have had for the last two years). She convinced me to go to a dentist with my school’s dental plan (two root canals and ~30 odd fillings later, my teeth are probably finally in decent condition). I began to appreciate how good of a man my boyfriend was and that I had a lot of good things in my life. It is important to realize that your life does have meaning and that you deserve to move on from your trauma. As a result of the treatment, I began to feel human again.
After he saves his kingdom from ruin, Dimitri cries as he realizes that people are happy to see him. He wonders why anyone would be happy to see him because, in his mind, he is so unredeemable and terrible. Dimitri continues to suffer from depression and self-hatred for the rest of the game, and the implication is that it will take him a long time to fully heal. His friends continually gather around him and convince him that he is worthy of friendship, worthy of love, and worthy of life. Even if he has committed great sins and caused great suffering, he can still be redeemed. I cried during several of the scenes in the later stages of the game, particularly the ones where he struggles to understand why anyone would love him or care about him. I remember feeling the same way. I sometimes still feel that way. I liked that the game didn’t portray him as ‘magically cured’. Sure, he is no longer driven to plunge headfirst into death, but nor was he able to snap his fingers and make all of his mental anguish go away. I think recovery and redemption and re-building self-worth is a long road, and I think the game does a tasteful job of making him seem credibly anguished, but giving the player hope for his future at the same time.
Conversations about mental health are so important to have. After finishing this game, I, for the first time in my life, opened up to my husband about that fact that I used to fantasize about death during the first four years that we were together. It was a hard conversation to have, but it made me feel at peace, because it was my last big secret. And I think this is the beauty of powerful stories; they can bring people together and help us express the things that we have hidden deep inside of ourselves. It was uncomfortable for me to relate so strongly with a character who participated in such morally questionable actions, but the way he turns around his life and his desire to help others, despite all of his trauma, was something that really resonated with me. We both came back from the brink. It felt satisfying to see a story of someone who reminded me of myself far too much, a person who ultimately survived his trauma, even if it left him with scars.
And who among us, those of us who survived trauma, do not have scars? I am still angry sometimes. I am still sad sometimes. But dammit, I’m alive, and I want to be alive.
EDIT June 2020: This was written September 2019. Because of writing this, I opened up to a coworker (who teaches psychology) about some of my mental health issues, and she recommended a book on trauma. After reading it, I realized two things. 1. I was suffering from something pretty serious in the trauma department and 2. whoever wrote Dimitri's character arc in 3H had obviously done their research on obvious and non-obvious symptoms of trauma, because holy shit were many of the things mentioned spot on.
For the last four years, I had been having mysterious dizzy spells and numbness in my body. In February 2020, I went into an attack on the stairwell on my way to work, and I was convinced by one of my bosses to take a month of leave. I was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder, panic attack disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Since then, I have been working with a therapist to help me sort through my mental health problems, which has been greatly beneficial to me. I am now back at work and have had only one panic attack in the last three months. The journey isn't over, but it has started. I hope that other people can find their peace on their journeys as well.