Content note: Discussion of suicide ideation and mental illness.
“As the sole survivor that day, do I… do I have the right to live for myself?”
In some of my rants, I have referred to the mythical Faerghus Man, and I want to clarify what I mean by this. Faerghus is a culture dominated by loyalty and chivalry, but in the current version of their culture, this loyalty is often given to the dead rather than the living. The fixation with death and the feelings, thoughts, and hopes of dead people is a central theme in Dimitri’s story. When I say Faerghus Man, I am mostly referring to the culture of fatalism and as Felix states it, “the glorification and worship of death”. Ingrid and Catherine both have some aspects of the Faerghus Man, but Dimitri, Rodrigue, and Gilbert all three share an enduring fixation with the dead, and in CF, we see Dedue embrace his own version of the Faerghus Man. Felix and Sylvain try to escape from the death cult and it leaves its scars on both, but they still vow to 'die together'. They are, to quote Nick Cave, “entwined together in this culture of death”.
What I like about Dimitri: Obviously, I have chosen a quote that is not the most iconic, but it is the quote that I feel best encapsulates the character. While Edelgard is an intellectually satisfying character, with her development centered on ideas of justice, fairness, liberty, and freedom from religious tyranny, Dimitri’s appeal as a character is emotionally charged and fraught with uncomfortable discussions about mental illness and the toll that they have on many people’s lives. But Dimitri’s story is also one of hope and redemption. As my good friend Elly put it, “Dimitri is a man of big feelings more than anything.”
Viewing Dimitri from this lens is important because it is essential for understanding why he gets caught in a cycle of violence and why it is important to have conversations around the character that go deeper than just “oh, he’s a violent man”. It is recognizing that his violence comes from a place of trauma and self-loathing, and more importantly, talking about how to translate that trauma and self-loathing into healing. Much like Edelgard, he builds a wall around himself and wears a mask to hide the real self. Both suffer from trauma, but they respond to it in much different ways. Edelgard’s response to trauma is to bury it deep within her and to focus on building the best future that she can, but despite it being quite a big secret, she is actually willing to divulge after knowing Byleth for around half a year. Dimitri, pre-timeskip, keeps his own trauma even more buried and hidden, although once you know what to look for on a replay, you see the subtle signs that he is suffering. And unlike Edelgard, his goal is not grandiose or ambitious – his goal is to avenge his family, regardless of if he lives or dies.
When you meet Dimitri, he seems like a polite young man who respects and loves the members of his house. During the beginning of the game, when the lords introduce their house members, Dimitri is unfailingly polite and praises each one of them for their talents (even Sylvain), as opposed to both Edelgard and Claude who are more judgmental toward their house members. He is, however, quite flustered when you ask about him, worrying that his sad backstory will color your view of him. Unlike Edelgard, who immediately wants you to prove your mettle, Dimitri seeks your approval and, mostly in hindsight, has some pretty severe social anxiety and is quite socially awkward.
His relationships with the other Lions are fraught with awkwardness. Because many of his closest friends and loved ones died in the Tragedy of Duscur, he has lived a quite lonely existence for the past four years, and he craves friendship from his fellow classmates. However, he is not very comfortable around other people, and to add to it, Faerghus’s culture is quite rigid about proper respect shown to royalty, and this ends in Dimitri struggling to make connections with his classmates. His support with Dedue at first comes off as a bit generic/daft; the prince who wants his servant to not worry about titles and just call him by name! But we find out that he considers Dedue as like a brother to him because he has no other family, and is frustrated with his perception that Dedue is trying to distance himself from him because of formality. Their B support ends with a melancholy “If you wish it so, you may continue to think of yourself as my vassal. I clearly cannot stop you. We need not be anything more, or anything less. If that is what you wish, Dedue, so be it.” His supports with both Ashe and Annette are fraught with awkwardness as well, with his social anxiety clogging up the lines of communication.
His relationship with Ingrid is interesting. They seem to align on many things and generally have similar feelings about the culture of Faerghus, as a contrast to both Felix and Sylvain who defy the cultural norms. One of the themes of the four friends is that they suck at communicating with each other, and it seems that Ingrid does not understand the depth of Dimitri’s trauma. In their B support, she gets very angry with him. She says that she is proud of Glenn (her fiancé who died in Duscur)’s death, and he responds that if she had seen Glenn in his last moments that she wouldn’t have said that. She thinks that Dimitri is spitting on his memory by saying that his death was needless because Glenn died protecting Dimitri. He reveals that he saw agony and regret in Glenn’s face as he died, and that there were no proud, knightly deaths on that day. It’s obvious that both of them are still hurting, and once you realize that Dimitri does not want to be alive, you understand more why he said that Glenn’s death was needless, even if it wasn’t the right thing to say to his mourning former fiancée.
Mercedes is probably the closest Dimitri has to a normal support relationship built on reciprocity. Mercie, unlike the rest of the Lions, calls him by his name rather than his title, and she greatly desires to be friends with him. He trains her in how to fight with a sword, and in exchange, she teaches him to sew. In this support we see that a goofy trait of his (that he breaks things) is something he finds deeply shameful (“My inability to control my own strength is humiliating.”) Mercie, in her way, tries to make him feel better about it, and explains that he just needs to keep practicing. (Thanks, teacher Mercie.)
Also, while I did not see this support pre-timeskip, apparently his B support with Gilbert is technically available. It’s, uh, really dark:
Gilbert: Even so... You have changed since that fateful day, Your Highness. Perhaps too much. I worry that in your pain, you have locked away your true feelings. Your passion is dulled. And your vigor faded.
Dimitri: You want to hear my true feelings, Gustave? Then let me ask you this. Why did you save my life that day? Why did you not allow me to die along with the others? If you truly wish to atone for your sins... Then take my life, here and now.
The game has a variety of warning signs about Dimitri’s desire to no longer be alive, but this is the ironclad evidence. I’m not sure when you can access this support, but it gives you insight into Dimitri’s depressive, fatalistic way of thinking.
We see flashes of anger boil through, as we see at the end of Chapter 1. He is visibly upset at Lonato and how he brings his own people into the fight against the church, and killing civilians particularly perturbs him. He scorns the idea of fighting for “some implacable just cause”, which sets him in contrast to Edelgard, who believes that her just cause is worth involving civilians. At first, he seemed like a pretty generic Fire Emblem main character, but we get some dribbles of something more sinister lurking beneath. Sothis references it at the beginning, and Felix has that very ominous early dialogue mentioned in Felix’s writeup, where he tells that Dimitri will chew you up and spit you out. Dimitri struggles to reconcile the two parts of himself; the peaceful, shy teenager that he wants to be and the angry and violent side that sometimes bubbles to the surface. He talks about a side of himself that he is ‘chilled to the bone’ by, which we learn is his violent side.
The interesting thing about Dimitri pre-timeskip is that he is sweet and almost clingy to Byleth. He has an often-quoted line after the rescue of Flayn, “Professor, your smile is absolutely mesmerizing!” He is over-affectionate at times, almost like a puppy that just really wants someone to love him. He craves a sense of community and togetherness, but he doesn’t really know how to be anything but socially awkward. Which is why his later behavior is so heartbreaking.
We see him express doubt in the goddess’s love in his Goddess Tower support, where he states that he isn’t sure if there is a goddess, but if there is, it seems as if she does not care about the comings and goings of normal humans. His experience seems to have shattered his faith in the goddess of Fodlan, which is fairly common among survivors of trauma.
The first big warning sign about Dimitri’s descent into darkness is in Chapter 8, where we see the events at Remire Village. He starts ranting wildly, talking about how he wants to rip their skulls off for this grave injustice and flies into a rage when you suggest that the Flame Emperor tried to reach out to you (yes, you lose support points with him for this). Soon after, he reveals that the only reason that he came to Garreg Mach is for revenge, and he will do anything to achieve it. He becomes a different man in the late stage of Part 1; his voice is maniac, he becomes sleepless, with headaches and nightmares of the death of his loved ones, and his friendly facade, while not completely gone, is replaced with anger and grief. Felix comments that ‘the boar is becoming unhinged’. We see his softer side return in the scene with Byleth after Jeralt’s, where he reaches out to them to try to help them with their recovery, but it does not last.
We learn that Dimitri and Edelgard met each other as children during Edelgard’s exile, and Dimitri remembers Edelgard teaching him how to dance; she was, unsurprisingly, a strict instructor, and we see young Edelgard scolding young Dimitri on his dancing. (We see brown-haired Edelgard, which is a bit of a mystery in Dimitri’s quest, although obviously explained in hers.) Byleth asks Dimitri if he wants to reconnect with her, but he says no. (CS shows explicitly that Dimitri tries to fish for information and Edelgard doesn’t remember him, for reasons outlined by that PTSD post I linked from Reddit in Edie's writeup.) Dimitri is pretty socially skittish in the best of times, and he seems uneasy around Edelgard, likely because she doesn’t remember him.
In Dimitri / Sylvain’s C support, Sylvain teases Dimitri for giving a girl a dagger as a token of his love. This is negative infinity ‘game’, and peak Faerghus Man, so Sylvain mocks him for it. “If you had only asked me first, the situation with the dagger could have been avoided!” he teased. Since I guess Byleth or player-god creeped on them during this support, when Dimitri embarrassedly asks “Can you guess what I gave her as a parting gift?” one of the options is a dagger (the other two being normal gifts that one might buy a girl). By narrative convenience, Dimitri finds the Flame Emperor scheming with the baddies, and finds the dagger left behind. He is beside himself, and…
All of this comes to a head in Chapter 11 with the reveal of the Flame Emperor. The hint was there, of course, but when it actually happens, he flips his shit, screaming “Is this some kind of twisted joke?” and he cuts through the soldiers in a mad rage. He has more or less unraveled at this point, raving about killing that woman and getting his revenge. In the cutscene before Chapter 12, Dedue says to him “Your Highness, you do not seem well” In which he responds with “Nothing could be farther from the truth. I am so happy I can hardly contain myself. My loved ones, they want her head, her life. They’ve whispered as much to me.”
In both Edelgard and Claude’s routes, the return after five years is a happy reunion, where both of the lords are excited to see Byleth again. There are hugs and friendly words and in Edelgard’s case a friendly loving family of friends waiting, and in Claude’s case, you have Claude’s beautiful visage.
Yeah, sorry mate, you played the wrong route if you wanted happy. You walk up a stairwell lined with corpses and find a haunted Dimitri, asking you if you are “another ghost here to haunt him”. After deciding you are neither ghost nor a spy, he comes up with a plan to “rid the monastery of rodents”, meaning bandits. Despite Byleth’s appeal to the humanity of the bandits, he raves about the strong preying on the weak. We also learn that Dimitri was imprisoned on his return to Fhirdiad for the death of his uncle, and Dedue died breaking him out. His voice sounds gravely and weathered, more depressed and less manic than pre-timeskip.
Most of Dimitri’s plans are mostly just wild ravings about Edelgard and heading to the Imperial capital to decapitate her* (See footnote on this point wrt to violence against women). He stands alone, hunched, and lashes out at you if you try to try to talk to him in the monastery. Felix is very worried about ‘the boar’ despite his deflections, and Ingrid ruminates on Dimitri’s feelings, but other members of the army, like Annette and Ashe, seem largely terrified of him.
In Chapter 14 in all three non-CF routes, you fight against Randolph, an imperial soldier. In this route, you get Randolph and Fleche talking about the “one-eyed demon” who has mercilessly slaughtered many imperial troops. After the battle, in one of the most gut-punch parts of this game, Dimitri mocks Randolph for his deluded idea of justice, which involves conquering other nations, and he says that it is absurd that Randolph would claim to do this “for the people”. The scene has interesting camera work because Dimitri is glowering over the point of view of the camera, where Randolph is laying. As Dimitri goes to torture Randolph, Byleth kills him instead, and Dimitri gets pissed. In probably the most emblematically horrifying moment in this route, Byleth tells Dimitri “I miss the Dimitri I once knew.” He responds with “The Dimitri you once knew is dead, and in his place, a bloodstained monster. If you do not approve of what I’ve become, then kill me. If you insist that you cannot… then I will use you and your friends until the flesh falls from your bones.”
Not only is his behavior deplorable on its own, but also he betrays the expectations of an entire country, as the culture of Faerghus puts a heavy emphasis on the symbolic value of the royal family. He’s really irritable and hateful and wants everyone to leave him alone and let him die. Ultimately, his behavior is rooted in deep self-hatred, and in daring Byleth to kill him, he reveals that the primary thing he wants is death. He wants to be released from the guilt and expectation that he is drowning in. He feels guilty about his violent nature and is unable to process his own pain, so he keeps moving, driven by revenge.** (see footnote on 'fanbase woes wrt to tribalism')
Anyway, Gilbert and Rodrigue try, but are unable to convince him to focus on saving the Kingdom because he thirsts for revenge so deeply. We see a few cracks in Dimitri’s armor. The first is the return of Dedue. Dedue, at the brink of death, was rescued by his people and nursed by to health. Dimitri is surprised and almost… happy? He sounds like himself again for the first time since the timeskip. But still, he decides to march on Gronder, even with the reservations of his retinue. The pre-battle video behavior is ‘normal’ at this point if you’ve been playing this route, although I can see how you might be confused if you played VW first. In VW, Dimitri dies after Gronder in a fit of rage, rushing toward Edelgard.
In Azure Moon, we see that Fleche tries to kill him in a revenge-crazed plan, and she ends up killing Rodrigue instead (poor Rodrigue, always dies). After this, we see what is dubbed “the rain scene” by the AM fanbase. Byleth sees Dimitri, ready to rush off to his death (as seen in VW), and they try to talk sense into him. Finally, after five months of acting like a madman, he asks Byleth, “So tell me, what should I live for?” And they respond with “Live for what you believe in.” And then he finally opens up and talks about the immense guilt that he has born for the last nine years, for living when everyone else around him died. And then he allows himself to live again.
This scene never fails to make me cry. As someone who has suffered from anxiety, depression, and some lesser forms of survivor’s guilt, allowing yourself space to live for yourself is a powerful message. That having a space to heal is important. I know that there are some mixed feelings on Dimitri’s character arc from a mental health perspective, because it supposedly portrays people with mental illness as violent, but I never really took it that way. He is violent because he lives in a culture where violence is applauded and considered noble and honorable; Ingrid, Rodrigue, Gilbert take more exception with the poorly devised plans and disregard for his country than they do with specifically the violence. Both Felix and Sylvian, who are also shades of mentally ill, reject the violence and irrationality in their culture in their own way, but they are considered more atypical for their responses than Dimitri is.
It makes me reflect on how we as a society have used different methods ‘treating’ mental illness, and certainly in the south, men getting treated for their mental illnesses by, you know, counseling, is generally considered to be ‘unmanly’. My father and my older brother both used alcohol, and in my dad’s case drugs and violence, to ‘treat’ their mental illness, which is unhelpful and ends up hurting others. I see this as similar; a man using the tools that he’s given to deal with trauma and mental illness, and it ends up hurting those around him. I wrote extensively about how my own mental illness intersected with my feelings on Dimitri here: When I Looked At a Character and Saw Myself.
After all of this, Dimitri apologizes to his friends for his horrific behavior, and they decide to march to Fhirdiad. And we start getting supports again, hooray.
His support with Dedue is very interesting because the support changes dramatically in tone once the scab is ripped off and Dimitri’s brokenness is bared for all to see. He explains to Dedue that, in him surviving the Tragedy of Duscur, Dimitri was able to justify to himself why he himself survived (which is one of the reasons why Dimitri goes mad after Dedue ‘dies’). Dimitri tells Dedue, in his over-affectionate way, that Dedue is “irreplaceable and cherished” and that he wants Dedue to see him as a friend, not as his vassal/servant. Dedue tells him that if Dimitri will work to help the people of Duscur that Dedue will indeed consider him a friend.
A lot of his A supports show his shame for everything that he’s done; he doesn’t believe he is deserving of friendship after all he has done, but his friends give it to him anyway. Mercie, always the levelheaded one, says that she’s “tired of this self-deprecation!” Felix and Dimitri I talked about in the Felix writeup, but it mostly shows that some things won’t have a happy, clean ending and that the differences between them are irreconcilable. We learn in his Flayn support that he has had no sense of taste since the Tragedy (which the game hints at in a few places but doesn’t hard confirm until Flayn A), and in his Marianne support, they discuss the reasons that the goddess has allowed them to continue to live while others around them have died, concluding that there must be a reason for it and that they should hang onto life together.
He doesn’t completely let go of his rage, though. In the fight with Cornelia to liberate Fhirdiad, he gets angry, promising to destroy her. She taunts him, telling him that his stepmother never loved him, and that he’s a poor prince who is unloved by everyone. After the battle, he faces his people for the first time in five years. He is reluctant; who would want a king whose hands are stained red with blood? But the crowd cheers, and Dimitri weeps. “These are happy tears, my friend.” Big feelings indeed. After a while, he realizes that, even if his stepmother never loved him, he has other people in his life who love him, and that counts for a lot.
He decides to parley with Edelgard to try to understand her point of view, despite believing that she won’t come. But she does come. He asks her why she decided to start this senseless war, and she explains that she believed that this course of action would lead to the least overall death in the end. He scoffs at this, not understand how she can’t see the horrors of war. It’s an interesting scene because the game doesn’t really portray one of them as more ‘right’ than the other, but presents each side as worth considering. As I have already alluded to in this space, I think Edelgard’s argument is quite strong in this scene, but Dimitri is an incrementalist and he finds Edelgard’s radical solution to be unacceptable. Dimitri gives her the dagger back, and she speaks of her long-forgotten friend, the one who gave her the tool to cut herself a new future. They both tried to understand each other, but ultimately their views were not compatible, and so they must fight.
In the last scene, we see Dimitri reach his hand to Edelgard, and she rejects him, throwing the dagger at him, and he kills her. He looks back, but Byleth leads him into the future. He is not completely better, or even close, and he will likely need help with his mental illness for the rest of his life. But hope is there. He decides to dedicate the rest of his days to defending the weak and the innocent.
I think CF Dimitri is a character that makes more sense through the lens of having played Azure Moon. In this route, his country has been co-opted by Rhea. He doesn’t have much love for the church or the goddess, but he has replaced his rage with brutal, unchecked depression, and he doesn’t really care about a cause or ruling, only death. (Hubert comments, “He will do almost anything, these days”. Hubert is of course biased as the emperor’s propaganda minister.) There are two versions of his death scene; one with Edelgard, which doesn’t shine too much light on him (more of an interesting scene for El than him), but the one with Dedue, which you get if you kill Dedue before he transforms, brings a little insight. In this scene, Dedue tells Dimitri that his life has been meaningful after the death of his family in Duscur thanks to Dimitri. The worst part about this is how Dimitri doesn’t see how much Dedue cares for him until it’s too late, which reflects some of the same themes present in AM where Dimitri doesn’t understand why people care about him.
I love how many layers there are to his mental illness; not just the obvious, in-your-face ones, but his anxiety and inability to see the good in himself, a trait that is so ubiquitous among people with anxiety. Whoever wrote this character obviously understood the depth in which anxiety damages your life by warping your relationships with other people. I have played games and read books with mentally ill characters before, but the wide variety of symptoms and social interactions made Dimitri’s resonate to me more. Faerghus has a distinctly rural/southern feel and the social problems that are rooted from its society feel very familiar to me. I also like how they committed to making him do terrible things, not just a fake out, but also really go there. Dimitri is voice acted impeccably by Chris Hackney, who does the wide range of emotional states so well. I think most of the cast is well done, but he and Dorothea stand out on that front.
A few worthwhile supports of his: Mercedes, Felix, Dedue, Ingrid, Marianne. I don’t think his support game is as good as Edelgard, but he has a few decent supports. The Sylvain one is one of the few 3H supports I found legitimately funny, and not just for being dark as fuck.
And this is why I love Dimitri!
*Footnote about Dimitri's obsession with Edelgard with respect to violence against women: I empathize with anyone who feels uncomfortable with his obsession with killing Edelgard because a man being obsessed with killing a woman is a bit creepy. I personally don't read it as gendered in the sense that Edelgard, having started a war, should certainly not be immune to a consequence of her extreme action (and if you've played Tales of Berseria, it feels very similar to Velvet's obsession with killing Artorius, which has the genders involved flipped). Still, I think discomfort with that is legitimate and deserves to be addressed in the context of this character, especially with the ubiquity of violence against women that occurs in our society. Discounting women's very real and very visceral reaction to violence against women is something that is reinforced by patriarchal norms.
**Footnote about ~the discourse~: I think one of my great frustrations with this game’s fanbase is the tribalism that has sprung up from the conceit of the game. This was of course cultivated by advertising and the framing “Choose whose side you are taking”, which probably results in higher sales numbers, but it also amped the tribalism that was already inevitably going to exist. The framing could have been better in a game that the point is that all sides have a point but all sides do things that are morally questionable. Edelgard’s fanbase has their share of people who largely see her actions as justified and will defend her to the death, but I feel like Dimitri’s most ardent supporters excuse him committing war crimes because the other side started the war. Dimitri’s actions have no purpose except to be brutal and horrific, and the game repeatedly hammers home that this is not okay! In Chapter… I believe 15, there is a priest in the monastery that expresses surprise that he finds Dimitri patting a child on the head, saying that didn’t know that the prince had that sort of humanity in him. Nothing from this part of the game should make you feel like you are doing the right thing (I feel like the game could barely have made this more obvious), but because of some tribal tendencies exacerbated by the game’s conceit, people feel the need to defend their ‘side’ anyway. This isn’t to say that you can’t conclude that, as a whole, that Dimitri’s actions end in a fairer and more just world than Edelgard’s, but to excuse his sins misses the point of his route!
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