# 2: Edelgard / Rhea (Three Houses) Part 2

One cannot discuss Edelgard without mentioning Rhea. Rhea is another great villain who deserved to be mentioned alongside Edelgard. The way I see it is that Rhea is the best written Gharnef in the series. Like most Gharnefs, she wants to bring back a deity. What's interesting about the way Three Houses does this is that Sothis is Rhea's mom, so there's a personal connection here that goes beyond resurrecting a deity to gain power. Plus we actually get to interact with Sothis. Unlike Loptyr, Sothis isn't evil. If Rhea's plan to revive Sothis were to succeed, her plan wouldn't screw Fodlan over. Another interesting tidbit about Rhea is that the reason why she went insane gives her a degree of sympathy. She saw her family get slaughtered in front of her while their remains were used to create weapons of war. 

Now to be fair, this is far from being the first time that a supernatural beings remains have been used as an explanation for how Regalia get created in Fire Emblem. But here in Three Houses it takes on a horrifying angle. We never hear this explanation from the point of view of someone who was there, and had a personal connection to the beings that got slaughtered. It's easy to see how an event like that would mess Rhea up. 

Even before the war happens, the game does a fantastic job at setting up Rhea as creepy and untrustworthy. She orders you to put down a rebellion and even tells Byleth that it will be a good lesson in teaching the students not to cross blades with the church. Another way of saying that would be "Mess with me and die." Jeralt does not trust Rhea, which puts the player on alert. It also doesn't help that RPGs traditionally portray religion in a negative light, which means that Rhea being the leader of a powerful church will most likely wind up as being evil.

To make matters worse, she's not upfront with her motives either (like why she wants Byleth to sit on the chair in the Church Tomb). She also hides the fact that she's so heavily attached to Byleth because she sees them as a host to the goddess. The end of the Crimson Flower route reinforces the idea that she really does not care about humanity, as if the revelation of her lying to everyone didn't tip the player off already.

What's interesting about Rhea, how she and Edelgard compare and contrast each other:

"Both of them share more similarities than either would probably admit. The most obvious one is that both of them are willing to do some very questionable things for the sake of their view of the world. Both of them have a lot of blood on their hands, and both of them are willing to distort the truth for the sake of preventing chaos and confusion. They also both are extremely attached to Byleth, though for very different reasons. Both are willing to let the faithful of Serios continue worshiping a god that is not there (Edelgard explicitly states in supports that she has no intent to actually destroy the Serios faith, just it’s power structure. We can debate on if Edelgard is aware of Sothis’ current state or not, though I feel like her relations with the slithers would indicate she does, but the result either way is the same). And on a somewhat more technical level, both of them turn into monsters to serve as the final boss of some routes.

 

There’s also how they treat their allies (though that should really be in quotation marks in Edelgard’s case). Edelgard actively hates those who slither and intends to have them all wiped out to a man (this also means that both of them have attempted genocide on these people which, while none of the ones we personally see are anything beyond chaotic evil, is still kind of fucked up), and while Rhea pretends to be on Dimitri’s side in CF she really couldn’t give less of a shit and sets his capital on fire once the man is dead on the off chance that it might get a couple of Imperial troops caught in the blaze.

However, they naturally have very different goals. Rhea is symbolic of the status quo, wanting to maintain the current order (that she instituted in the first place) for the sake of a possible golden age that would come about if she could bring Sothis back. Edelgard wants none of that shit and intends to tear the structure the church has instituted down, and rebuild it from the ground up.

 

More interestingly to me however, is how they themselves view themselves and their goals. Edelgard frequently questions if what she’s doing is right through CF, but she never really strays from her initial views. As much as she questions herself, it never goes very deep, and her course remains steadfast. This is true in other routes as well. Rhea is much less willing to stop and consider what she’s doing, but if she’s forced to, she goes much deeper with it and radically changes as a person as a result, either realizing that what she’s done wasn’t worth it and steps down from power, or she turns into a revenge fueled monster that throws any noble qualities she did have out the window."

(Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/dl9qs3/good_intentions_gone_bad_a_rhea_breakdown/) 

So let's bring it home. Why are Edelgard and Rhea this high up on the list?

In Edelgard's case, it's because she's a villain whose motivations and goals are extremely well fleshed out. To the credit of the game, we see that the status quo really is that bad. The crest system is awful, the Church of Seiros passes lies as historical fact about the true nature of Fodlan, and the leader of said church is batshit crazy. Why wouldn't you want to overthrow it? All peace in Fodlan costs is the lives of thousands of innocent people. This is the central debate of Three Houses, as stated eloquently by someone else:

"Does the evils of the Crest system and Church justify the actions and alliances that Edelgard takes to fix them?.... The debate comes down is do the churches evil justify a revolutionary war? That's the first hurdle that some folks debate. Then the second hurdle is does winning the war, justify using someone like the Slithers?"

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/fireemblem/comments/ebzpxm/spoilers_the_crest_system_world_is_horrible/

And this is why Edelgard is # 2 on this list. She's a complex character that forces the player to debate the merits of her actions. It's a debate that has no easy answers. I know a lot of people are tired of the debates between Edelgard, Rhea, and Dimitri, but I'm not. I find the presence of such heated debates to be a sign that Three Houses did something very right: It made a morally gray villain, gave us a morally gray conflict, and it did a fantastic job at laying down the pros and cons.

Edelgard is nuanced. The conflict that she brings is legitimately thought provoking. She has a valid point of view. Without her, Three Houses wouldn't be as excellent of a game as it currently is. What's also neat is that Edelgard kind of succeeds regardless of what route you play. The Church of Seiros at the very least get reformed, if not torn down. Crests either go away or are wiped out entirely. Rhea either dies or steps down in every route available.

Edelgard is basically a new age Arvis. In fact, it's uncanny just how similar those two are:

• Edelgard's disguise is called "The Flame Emperor" while Arvis becomes an emperor that uses fire magic.

• Both of them get to be emperors in their respective games, and both succeed at their goals.

• They're both characterized as extremists who will go to any lengths in order to achieve their perfect utopias. Their utopias are unified, and both characters are willing to conquer their respective continents to get that dream achieved.

• Both of them work with a team of shadowy cultists in order to achieve their goals.

• Both of them have dual holy bloods, one of those holy bloods is "the bad guy holy blood." Arvis has Loptyr blood while Edelgard's Crest of Flames was supposed to be last seen from Nemesis.

• The Velthomer house crest is the Fire Emblem in Genealogy. The Crest of Flames is the Fire Emblem in Three Houses. 

A big reason why Edelgard is as high up as she is, is because Rhea served as a really effective foil. Rhea's insanity, and her negative effect on Fodlan, earned her a spot on this list too. Rhea took a well worn archetype and gave it more depth and nuance. It was because of her awful actions that Edelgard could shine. 

In the end, Three Houses knocked it out of the park with two stellar villains. Edelgard (and Rhea) will definitely go down as on the greatest villains the series has ever seen.