“You were like a bee, Ferdinand. A bee attracted to a flower in full bloom.”
What I like about Dorothea: Dorothea is our primary eyes into what commoners in the realm, particularly the Empire, live like. Inherently, this means that Dorothea is a bit less important to the overall plot of the game, with her primary character development coming from her supports. Fortunately, her supports are almost universally fantastic, offering a wide range of views and philosophies.
Dorothea’s goal for coming to the monastery is simple; fall in love with a (hopefully wealthy) suitor and have a story of happily-ever-after. She bears a great deal of shame for her mission, as we see explored in a few supports, but she also sees it as a necessary part of securing her future. Because she feels insecure about her wealth and knows that her beauty will fade, she is steadfast on this front. We are supposed to feel sympathy for her (because she feels like she –has- to do this to survive) but also we are supposed to feel that she may be doing the wrong thing.
Of course, the matter is complicated by the fact that, to be frank, she finds men, as a group, rather distasteful. She references several times that she goes on dates with men who are wealthy and “presumably have a tolerable personality”. Her casual ambivalence about the quality of man that she is going to marry is belied by the fact that she asks in the Question Box if she could possibly find a man who is both good spouse and rich. But in practice, she seems to have not found much in the way of good suitors. In her Edelgard A support, she references the fact that she’s received a present from a suitor, but she can’t remember who that suitor is.
Her most hostile interactions with men in the cast are primarily with Felix and Sylvain, two men who seem to have her pegged as a gold-digger. She verbally spars with Sylvain about each of them being these weird mirror images of each other, both chasing after people who have superficially attractive traits while hating one another for that. It ends up with them deciding to collectively tolerate one another, despite each of them feeling some malice for each other. Felix ends up just brushing her off initially and then learns that she is a good sword fighter, mostly because she had to protect herself from nobles who tried to mess with her while she was in the opera. (There is an implication that it is due to sexual assault, but the game never outright states it.) I think Dorothea has a measure of respect for Felix for doing his own thing, even while being perplexed by his antisocial behavior.
Her interactions with the male Eagles are all interesting, and each reveals a bit about Dorothea as well as the culture of Adrestia. Caspar and her discuss how searching for a potential suitor is similar to training. Dorothea scoffs at this at first, but Caspar, in his ‘dumb guy wisdom’, explains that both of them are trying to do their best to get by in a world that is unjust and does not value people based on egalitarian principles, but rather traditional rank and order. Linhardt doesn’t fully grasp what it’s like to be a common person in Adrestia, and just advised Dorothea to “just ignore people complaining about her”. While Linhardt, a man of wealth and rank, can largely follow this advise scot-free, it comes off as tone-deaf for a commoner who is deeply invested in what others think of her because of her low social station. Her support with Hubert is, as talked about before, transactional and civil, as they mutually respect each other and both understand ‘the game’.
In Ferdinand’s support, most of her hostility for men, particularly noble men, is laid bare. Dorothea talks about her experience as a street rat, begging for scraps and being spat on by the nobles of Enbarr. Once she became an opera star, though, all of this changed. She saw the nobles’ attitudes change from disdain to infatuation, but she wasn’t impressed because she saw them for what they really were: opportunists and fakes. Her hateful treatment of Ferdinand was based on that; she thought that he was just another one of them, with friendly smiles for her at the academy, but looking down his nose at her when she was an orphan. She reveals that she wants to like Ferdinand, but it’s hard for her not to see him in that light. We also learn in her Hanneman support that she was a rejected Crest-baby; born to a noble father and released onto the streets once it was found that she did not have a Crest. (She believes that her father hit on her at the opera, but she is not certain.)
Dorothea is a very natural ally for Edelgard due to her disdain for the church (“I'd hardly call myself devout. After all, it was thanks to the goddess and her noble regime that I suffered so much as a child”) and her desire to overthrow the class system. One of the interesting things about Dorothea is that, despite her keen awareness of their status, the nobility surrounding her do not intimidate her. Her support with Edelgard, for example, goes into Edelgard’s desire for reform quite quickly, even in the C support, and Dorothea seems supportive of Edelgard’s grand ambitions. As early as the B support, she tries to get into Edelgard’s pants. She seems much more comfortable and natural hitting on women than men, as shown both in this support and the Petra support. While Dorothea comes off as distant, cold, and at times rude to many male characters, she is kind and warm toward the women of the cast. (This is a bit of a contrast to her dark mirror image, Sylvain, who is especially bad to women but is generally manipulative and unpleasant to everyone he interacts with to a certain extent.)
Post-timeskip, we see that Dorothea, like many of the other characters whose backgrounds are less warlike, has a great distaste for war. In Crimson Flower, we see that while she believes in the cause and thinks it’s a necessary evil, she is not happy to participate in the horrors that this war inflicts. Much like Sylvain, we see a less happy and chipper version of Dorothea in the second half of the game; for all that she seems less devastatingly depressed than Sylvain. I think both take the war harder than most of the other characters.
Dorothea’s supports across the board are enjoyable and explore a lot of key issues that the game lies to explore: nobility, birthright, reasons for marriage, happiness, and privilege. She has absolutely fantastic English voice acting, perfectly inflecting her flirtiness, her anger, and her disgust with the perfect amount of pizzazz and charm. I think the character really benefits from the good voice acting.
One other thing I like about Dorothea is that she is sexually active before the game starts, which seems so rare for a Japanese game. Apparently that is something that some male fans complained about her in Japan, which I guess shows why games don’t do it very often. Ick. She is beautiful, she knows it, and she is willing to use her assets to further herself. I don’t think this makes her the most admirable person, but it does make her interesting, and a little more morally complex than she might have been as the underdog street rat otherwise. I think games sometimes have a tendency to make commoner characters insufferable because of some sort of weird reverse superiority complex “I know so much more about the world than nobles”. She is not always shown in the best light because of her moral complexity, although I do think the game overall sides with her more often than not, although not enough to feel like a pet character of the game.
And she teaches us to eat the rich. And that's why I love Dorothea.
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