“Chivalry begets the worship and glorification of death. Am I alone in finding that grotesque?”
What I like about Felix: Felix, as the second member of team Faerghus Man (see my post on Dimitri for the definition of this) , is in some ways the linking connection between all of the different aspects of Faerghus culture that we see in the game. At first he appears to be the stereotypical douchey man obsessed with fighting, but as you peel back the layers of armor that Felix has put up, you realize that he is both quite damaged and quite sympathetic.
As a character, Felix is a composite of his relationships with a few different characters. His relationship with his father is quite strained, as we see in Felix’s paralogue. He berates his ‘old man’ for being weak and foolish, but after the battle, we realize that what really bothers Felix is that his dad, as a certified Faerghus Man, prioritizes the feelings of the dead king, Lambert, over the hurt and anguish being felt by people who are still alive and exist on this planet. You realize that the ruination of their relationship stems primarily from Felix’s brother, Glenn, who was killed four/nine years ago in the Tragedy of Duscur. He accepts that his brother is dead, but does not accept that his father has turned it into this noble, glorious death, and seems to think that Glenn being dead is preferable to the disgrace of being a knight whose charges (the king and queen of Faerghus) were killed but he still lives. Felix alludes to this in his paralogue, saying “If I died, you’d say the same thing about me. ‘He died like a true knight.’” In the main plot, Felix avoids Rodrigue when he comes to the monastery, which Ingrid is aghast at. In AM, the issue is explored further when Rodrigue joins your army. Rodrigue clearly thinks that Felix is bratty and childish, which he is, but he is also largely correct about the massive, gaping issues with his country’s culture.
Felix is notoriously bad at expressing how he actually feels and prefers to be generically filled with malice, saying things such as "The thing I hate most about my old man is the crazed nonsense that comes out of his mouth." The ‘crazed nonsense’ is, of course, related to Rodrigue’s obsession with both the dead king and glorifying the death of his son Glenn, but Rodrigue dies before Felix is able to sort out his feelings with his father, assuming that would have ever happened. He has a Comment Box letter after Rodrigue dies, expressing regret that he ‘struck’ his father and is no longer able to apologize to him for it. He clearly feels very upset about his father’s death, despite their strained relationship. His A support with Dimitri elaborates on the fact that, while he is sad about his father’s death, he will not allow it to consume him.
Above all things, the obsession with death and the dead is Felix’s #1 hangup, and the hangup that causes him to isolate himself from his classmates and his friends. He sees Faerghus’s chivalrous culture as “glorifying and worshipping death”, and he doesn’t understand why people think this is a good idea. He doesn’t want to be friends with anyone who thinks that glorifying and worshipping death is a good idea. So he shuts them out. His training is merely a vector for his crafted social isolation.
Felix’s relationships with the other three friends is fraught with his tangled emotions on the culture that he lives in. His relationship with Sylvain is the best of the three, but he is still -very- irritated with Sylvain’s inattentiveness and recklessness. Felix sees Sylvain’s behavior as potentially leading to his death, and although he never says it, you can infer that Felix wants Sylvain to take his own life and death more seriously than he does. Even to the end of that support, Sylvain is flippant about his own death, to Felix’s disgust. His relationship with Ingrid is worse because of their differences in opinion regarding Glenn, who was Ingrid’s fiancé. She sees his life and death as the picture of chivalry and knighthood, whereas Felix sees his death as a waste. He ends up being condescending and misogynist toward her, telling her “You're not meant to be a knight. Go find a husband.” Ultimately, they reconcile, realizing that they both have things that they want to protect, but neither of them really relent on their core beliefs. While the two of them pairing up would be logical from the perspective of noble matchmaking, I feel like the game doesn’t really want you to go for it.
One of the most crucial relationships, and one that really defines Felix, is his extremely complex and messed up relationship with Dimitri. In Faerghus culture, there is a strong emphasis on proper address. As a result, most of the characters address Dimitri as “Your Highness”. The two exceptions are Mercedes (who doesn’t care much for convention and follows the beat of her own drum) and Felix, who addresses him as ‘the boar’. Interestingly, while this doesn’t crop up in English, since we are less into honorifics, in Japanese Felix does use proper address for other people, including Seteth, but he uses insulting terminology for Dimitri specifically. At first, I assumed that Felix’s issue with Dimitri would be related to Rodrigue, who seemed to like Dimitri quite a lot. I was expecting a typical story of a jealous rival. Instead, as we delve into both of their characters, we realize that there is something very real to Felix’s complaints about Dimitri, especially in light of the entire game’s story.
Early in the game, Felix tells Byleth that “beyond all the princely polish, he’s an animal, nothing more. He will chew you up and spit you out.” We learn that Dimitri and Felix used to be best friends, but in the C support between them, Felix talks about his surprise - terror - horror? at Dimitri’s behavior during their first fight, which was putting down a rebellion in Faerghus territory. Dimitri turns into a blood-crazed beast, killing and loving every second of it. Felix laments that “the Dimitri he knew died in Duscur, just like his brother”. This support ends up being our first glimpse into what is to come in Azure Moon. As we start to watch Dimitri unravel in the late part of White Clouds, Felix notices too, and he is worried. Worried because, even though Dimitri is blood-thirsty and mad, he is the only hope that their ravaged country has left. We also see his feelings on Dimitri spill over in his support with Dedue. He grills Dedue, asking if he would “slaughter civilians for the boar” and Dedue says that he would, and Felix is disgusted by the “rabid cur” who serves the boar. This support is tinged with uncomfortable racism that Felix never apologizes for.
Post-timeskip, Felix is unsurprised at Dimitri’s wretched behavior, having already witnessed it in their very first battle together. He bounces between privately expressing great concern for the future of Faerghus / their cause / Dimitri’s severe mental illness (to Byleth) to being a ruthless jackass to Dimitri / Rodrigue whenever he feels the need to. After trying to convince Byleth not to go along with Dimitri’s batshit plan and Dimitri answering with, let’s call it, ‘crazed nonsense’ about honoring the dead, and Felix just ragequits the whole damn conversation. It’s obvious that Felix cares deeply for Dimitri, even if he says horrible things about him, and you can see this across routes. More than any other character from Faerghus, Felix talks a lot about Dimitri and worries about him.
Ultimately, Dimitri’s behavior ends up causing the death of Felix’s father, which ends up finally helping Dimitri realize what a tool he has been. The A support between Felix and Dimitri is the final time that they interact, and it happens only after Rodrigue’s death. It might be my favorite exchange in the game:
Felix: Sometimes you have an animal's face, contorted with anger and bloodlust. At other times, a man's, with a friendly smile. Which is your true face?
Dimitri: Do not waste your breath on questions with such obvious answers. They are both the real me.
The thing I really liked about this is how fitting it is to several different characters in the game, from Edelgard to Dimitri to Hubert to Rhea, all characters who show the capacity for both great and terrible things. After that, they discuss the difference between honoring the dead and allowing death to control your life, and honestly, they don’t really reach much understanding of each other, since their worldviews are so fundamentally incompatible. Felix is inflexible in his stance against chivalry and believes that obsessing over dead people is an unacceptable way of living, and Dimitri believes that honoring the dead is the only way he can continue to live.
One of the fascinating things about Felix is how frequently he is both right and an acidic jackass. While we see his (justified) anger at the three friends and Rodrigue, he is needlessly cruel to all of them, and we also see how his behavior is a barrier to him making friends / finding romantic partners. His behavior toward Ingrid is at times misogynist (find yourself a husband!), and his pointed remarks at Dedue are hard to read as anything but racist. Sometimes he is outright rude with little cause (Dorothea, Mercedes), sometimes he is weird and condescending (Ashe), and sometimes he is just socially awkward and has trouble being friendly, even when he wants to be (Annette, Bernadetta). I think both the supports with Bernie and Annette are really humanizing for Felix; unlike most of the rest, which are tainted by his emotions toward chivalry / family / general distrust, those two supports show him trying to be a normal person and failing miserably. Felix / Annette shipper for life.
And then, at the end, I came up with all of these theories about Felix, and thought to myself “Maybe I am just reading too much into this character and he isn’t a critique of chivalry/death culture”, and then I watched Felix/Seteth, which confirms that, without a doubt, this character is exactly who we thought he was.
I think A+ supports with both Dimitri and Ingrid would have been a nice rounding to the characters’ relationships with each other, and his support with Sylvain feels a little too much like filler. Probably the single biggest thing that would have helped Felix is integrating him more firmly into the main plot rather than having him stick primarily in the periphery, with some teasing of being part of the main plot.
Felix, much like Sylvain, is a character I struggle to like on a personal level, because he is so acidic and cruel, but I think he is well done.
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