“But let's table this fascinating discussion for just a moment. Now that we've gotten in some small talk, I'd like to know what you're hiding. You are hiding something, right? Your lineage, perhaps?”
What I like about Claude: Pre-timeskip, I think Claude is pleasantly enjoyable as a main character, with his voracious appetite for knowledge, humorous quips, and his ambiguously questionably behavior and motives. There are definitely such shades of Sylvain here in their selfishiness and disregard for other people’s feelings; he is relentless in his pursuit of knowledge and pursuit of his goals, and often does not consider the feelings of others while in that pursuit. A couple of really good examples of this are his support with Ignatz (where he pushes his own (we’ll say unorthodox) views onto the hapless Ignatz, who sputters in response) and his support with Marianne, where he shows little care for her emotional state or her feelings in pursuit of knowledge about her family and Crests. Unlike Sylvain, who exudes this general apathy about all things, Claude has goals, ambitions, and ideas, and he seems to consider people as tools to achieve the things that he holds dear.
He is casually manipulative in that teenager way; he knows that he is brighter than the people around him and doesn’t mind being known as a schemer, and in fact takes pride in that fact. In some ways his overtness about scheming hinders his goals in the sense that people are suspicious of his intentions, but it’s very realistic in the sense that he is only seventeen and is adjusting to a culture that he doesn’t quite understand. One interesting thing about Claude is that he reminds me of people who have privilege, in his case as the future leader of the Alliance, but want to sit around with other people and argue about theoretical issues (sometimes theoretical only to the privileged person) with people who don’t feel comfortable arguing with someone above their station. I remember commenting to my husband that Claude was a “mansplainer”. My husband responded that he treats everyone that way, not just women, and I completely agree. He doesn’t fully comprehend power dynamics, particularly because he sees himself as an ‘outsider’ as he phrases it, but I feel like his perspective is warped by his desire to not see how he is in a position of power.
I really liked how, early along, he praises his mother for being awesome. My boy has some feminist cred! He seems to really love and respect his mom who to be fair sounds awesome as hell. I liked his supports that delve into his parentage about more, which both Byleth and Hilda does. Despite my previous comment, I think he respects both Hilda and Lysithea a lot, and his behavior that I felt was 'mansplaining' was honestly just him being him.
Post-timeskip is where we really see the character come into fruition. The ‘outsider’ chip on the shoulder and the frivolous jokes about poisoning people and schemes are gone, replaced with a well-polished, well-groomed leader, but we see quickly that the manipulative edge is still there. He speaks openly to Byleth about reeling in the church, and using Byleth’s newfound voice of the church to bludgeon the other members of the Alliance in line. I also lowkey love that Claude gets ‘love points’ when you ask him “Do you wish Rhea was dead?”. I enjoy his symbiotic relationship with Hilda; both have a keen sense of how to manipulate people and how to utilize people to achieve their goals. I think Hilda complements him quite well; she has more of an understanding of how people tick emotionally, whereas Claude knows how people tick intellectually. I think he doesn’t really ‘get’ people on an emotional level, but is good enough at faking it that he gets by pretty well. (Although Hilda calls him out on his fake smile.)
Claude has noble goals and is driven and focused, but struggles with humanity and empathy in the process of his pursuit of power. We see the end of his scheme in VW; he installs Byleth as the leader of Fodlan and goes to become the King of Almyra, the beginning of his new world. Despite becoming a continent leader, Byleth feels very much like a pawn in the manipulator’s game. Claude is the driver and schemer and has The Plan, and you are just one (big) part of that plan.
Ultimately, Claude’s goals are noble but feel like they only fix the problem that Claude himself has dealt with directly; discrimination against people of different nationalities. This isn’t to trivialize Claude’s point, as obviously racism is a real problem in this society, but it feels like he hasn’t really thought about what type of future he wants for the country aside from making a nation without borders. The game actually makes a point of showing how Claude doesn’t really get the problems other people go through; he is shocked when he learns that Cyril was suffering in Almyra. Yes, Claude, there are poor people in Almyra! The Crest system is shit! Faerghus is a chivalry-obsessed shithole! These are issues that plague Fodlan that don’t seem to fully come into his view. He never even mentions Duscur, which is the an instance of racism that results in genocide that happens in Fodlan in the last decade.
At the end of the day, what kind of government does he want to establish? What is the plan post-unification? (And I have to ask; is unification really a priority in this broken society?) While this might sound like a criticism of Claude, it’s more a criticism of people who seem like they want to see Claude as this good guy with great ideas, even though he doesn’t really seem to care about the problems of society aside from the establishment of a borderless world. Edelgard even makes reference to this in VW; she asks if he really understands what needs to be done to fix this broken society, implying that she doesn’t think he fully comprehends the depths of the problems of Fodlan, and based on his behaviour, I would agree with her.
(Incidentally, one critique of Edelgard is that she doesn't seem to have the race problems that plague Fodlan near the top her priority list. If you look at her inner circle, it is mostly people of her race + Petra, who is from a foreign country rather than being born in Fodlan, which obviously gives her a bit of a different perspective, although obviously she still experiences racism in Fodlan. And we've seen in our own society how 'meritocracy' can translate to its own brand of racism, so that is one of her blind spots!)
And that’s fine. Viewing things from your own lens and doing things that are supported by that lens is fine. He is a character that is simultaneously oppressed and privileged and he brings with him all that implies. He ends up feeling sympathetic and moral, but make you feel uncomfortable because he is so manipulative. And yet, he’s probably the overall most moral of the three lords! I am frustrated with the discourse about Claude boiling down to memes because it feels like a disservice to his serious character work. You might find him being 'upside down' and 'defeating the CEO of racism' to be humorous but it shouldn't replace discourse about him as a serious character, and at times I feel that it does.
I feel like there are some plot points involving Claude that the game holds for too long or sometimes doesn't elaborate on at all. It takes a while to put all of the pieces together, but we discover that he is Almyran royalty (which is only confirmed in some endings) and desires to unify Fodlan and Almyra. He uses his connections in Almyra to bring a separate military force in, loyal to him rather than loyal to the Alliance. I feel like the game does a poor job of dissecting this point; if the people of Fodlan are so xenophobic, why do they take this military takeover of their hated enemies so… easily? His supports don’t explore the relationships and philosophies of different characters that both Edelgard’s and Dimitri’s do, choosing often to go for humor, with somewhat mixed results.
I also think Lorenz is a character who should have been a good foil to Claude, but unlike Ferdinand (who is an unabashedly good person and has some really good points with respect to Edelgard) and Felix (who is pretty much on point about his criticisms of Dimitri), I feel like Lorenz’s role in the story is to be always wrong, which doesn’t make for much interesting discourse. Their A support is mostly Lorenz validating Claude and Claude going oh I guess Lorenz is okay too. It could have been a really effective support, but instead it is just kind of underwhelming, emphasizing that Lorenz is just not as qualified as Claude.
I like Claude a lot and think he is a well-done character, but I don’t feel like Claude’s route in general really went ‘all in’ with its themes of racism, unification, etc in the same way that Edelgard and Dimitri’s went into their own themes, and the character feels weaker for it. He is not helped by the weaker supporting cast. The Golden Deer characters are often shallower and don’t have as good of a connection with each other, and ironically, the second best character in Claude’s house, Lysithea (imo at least) has a stronger connection with Edelgard than Claude! Which is kind of a strange choice, honestly.
I feel like his support with Cyril was quite solid but really needed an A (or even A+) and really needed a version of Cyril who was not just 'internalized racism, the character'. I would have loved to have seen Cyril develop into someone with his own ideas, thoughts, and feelings about his identity and his country, and the support with Claude seems like a great place to explore his complicated feelings about his own identity.
Overall, I find him compelling but ultimately a bit underutilized, which is a damn shame considering that this is the series' first person of color main character and there was an excellent foundation to make him a sensational character.
But still, he is very much a Ciatokins character, manipulative and ambitious, and that's why I love Claude! (And good lord he might be the best looking character in Fire Emblem history? Those post-TS tea parties... are so.... wonderful....)
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